I saved the best for second: Mark Steyn's obituary in The Atlantic Monthly. It's the best regular feature in the magazine, and in the December issue he has cranked out his best one: funny, anecdote-filled, disconcerting, with a Catholic kicker at the end. It's about journalist, secularist, leftist, Muslim hater Orianna Fallaci, who said shortly before she died, "Go f*** yourself. I say what I want." The whole piece is good, but I'm just going to cut-and-paste four parts:
First, one from the funny category:
Oriana Fallaci was, on the one hand, an unlikely crusader. Petite physically if in no other sense, she was a feminist, a secularist, a leftist. On the other hand, who has most to lose? At a time when uncovered women are jeered at and intimidated when they walk through certain suburbs of Continental cities, La Fallaci might have expected the other divas to rally to the cause. Instead, such feminist warhorses as Germaine Greer managed to give the impression that they found Islam a bit of a turn-on: here's the patriarchal society they've been pining for all along.
One of the anecdotes:
After traveling to Qom and cooling her heels for ten days waiting for [Ayatollah Khomeini] to agree to see her, she was ushered–barefoot and wearing a chador–into his presence–and found what she subsequently described as the most handsome old man she'd ever met. In his own way, Khomeini must have dug the crazy Italian chick. The meeting was terminated when she tore off “this stupid medieval rag” and hurled her chador to the floor, but he agreed to finish the interview a day or two later.
The disconcerting:
What would not have surprised her was the weirdly masochistic pleasure the European judiciary derived from facilitating their attempts to silence her. The Federal Office of Justice in Berne asked the Italian government to extradite her so she could be charged under Article 261b of the Swiss Criminal Code–or, as she called it, the “He-didn't-chase-me-because-I'm-a-thief-but-because-I'm-a-Muslim” clause. She was sued in France, where suits against writers are routine now. An Italian magistrate indicted her and, because of the European Arrest Warrant, which includes charges of “xenophobia” as grounds for extradition from one EU nation to another, most of the Continent became unsafe for her to set foot in.
The Catholic kicker:
La Fallaci, a lifelong atheist, had come to the conclusion that secular humanism was an insufficient rallying cry, that it had in some sense led to the gaping nullity of contemporary European identity, which Islam had simply steamrollered. By the end, she was, if not a Christian, then (as she formulated it) a “Christian atheist.” In 2005 she was granted a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI on the understanding that she would never divulge what was discussed. It would be interesting to know, but it's safe to say that for once it wasn't, “Go f*** yourself. I say what I want.”
I always like it when atheists concede that religion, especially Christianity, is good for something. If it's good for something, it must have an element of truth and beauty in it. Truth, goodness, and beauty, after all, are intertwined. You can't have one without the other two.
Of course, many deny goodness to Christianity: "Behind the political divide in America, there is also a religious divide. The split is not just between people who believe and people who do not; it is between those who see religious faith as society's foundation and those who see it as society's bane."
If you want to clear your head a bit from all that prose, check out this funny story: A US thief was arrested after he repeatedly stopped during a police pursuit to smoke crack. The poor dear obviously has an addiction. He needs help, not incarceration. I wonder La Fallaci would say about that bleeding sentiment?
