Decline Should Be No Surprise--It's Been Happening for Decades

I felt a peculiar pain this morning in reading one of the middle chapters of Jules Romains’s La Douceur de la Vie, the eighteenth in a long series of novels about World War I and its surrounding years titled Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté. The footloose intellectual Jallez has discovered a charming girl of the working class who sells him his daily newspaper while he winters in Nice. He invites her occasionally to his apartment, where they sip tea and converse. The pages which particularly grieved me describe Jallez’s idealistic confidence that he may have opened certain vistas to the girl by showing her that she is fit to be treated like a lady—that other kinds of man than the one her friends whisper about DO exist. Of course, Jallez ruminates, most of those same friends would never interpret his honorable intentions as Antonia does. In her place, one of them would reach the conclusion “either that she’s not to your taste—that you think her dirty or perhaps diseased; or that you aren’t quite made like other men—that you are a weakling, an impotent.”

I recall the second job I ever had—teaching Latin at a Catholic high school in Dallas, Texas. A female instructor would often join me for tea in my apartment after we had both finished an exhausting day. The gossip that circulated probably ruined my reputation among that swarm of pious-seeming piranhas, though my fuming rebuke of the administrator who alone of them all had the guts to confront me with a charge was one of my life’s finest hours. I learned much later that the “lady” in question (who was married at the time) herself wanted something more to happen. Who knows? Maybe she started the rumors.

No audience deserves to be bored by the similar stories I might tell of graduate school in Austin. The one or two truly Christian men I ever knew in those unpromising circumstances had very similar tales of being thought either “gay” or closet-sadist à la Jack the Ripper. No DECENT man would refuse sex to The New Woman when she wanted it… and what man but a pervert or a complete idiot couldn’t tell that she wanted it whenever she consented to be alone with him on a couch or large chair or faintly sheltered lawn? (Of course, in the unlikely event that she DIDN’T want it—an ever more likely event as the libertine eighties “sobered” into the lesbian nineties—this same slimy amant became a sexual predator, a rapist in various stages of carrying out his evil design.)

Romains’s pages pained me, in short, because they reminded me so well of the coarseness I lived through as a youth—of the finer side of life which my generation was never allowed to see. We were “liberated” to root for truffles in the mold like wild pigs. Those of us who attempted a nobler gesture were derided or reviled or, most often of all, simply ignored in blistering indifference. WE were the swine, the animals, the dethroned despots seeking to invoke the supremacy we had enjoyed under a brutal patriarchy.

Now the world has coarsened to the point that we few who loved civilization can scarcely stagger from one day to the next. Our society is supposed to wear sackcloth because its hordes of consumers are not out wasting billions this “holiday season” on tinsel and dross. The alcoholic needs to keep boozing—a week’s abstention will surely kill him with its rigor! We are supposed to tear our hair because millions of auto-workers may lose jobs whose pay approaches that of a doctor in general practice. Our government must bail these people out—and also the poor wretches who bought homes for almost two hundred grand with no money down, two car payments, and a job with a shaky future. I once witnessed a group of such people siphoning cash from a Little League concession stand to indemnify themselves for the valuable time they lost playing with the neighborhood kids—and this was BEFORE times got hard. We are also supposed to celebrate the election to our presidency of a highly enigmatic man for no better reason than that his skin looks darker than a Caucasian’s.

In my mind, it’s all clearly related. Life is just here-and-now, so it can only be about material and carnal pleasure. God is about happiness, and happiness is about pleasure, so… so we worship God by surrounding ourselves with material pleasures over “holidays”. Naturally, since here-and-now is all there will ever be, we desperately want a piece of the pie roughly equal to what our society’s fattest get to eat—and we want it right this minute, and we want it for ourselves. Naturally enough, too, when we vote for a person these days, our examination doesn’t stray beyond noting whether said candidate has breasts and grading his/her skin tone on a scale where pale earns zero points, black earns five, and something in between approaches ten.

I am mortified that I cannot write columns like this in tones pealing with optimism. Instead, I ask my very, very few readers to recognize a hope in my merely continuing to write. It would be a vile lie to claim that things are good—to claim, even, that they are clearly better than they once were. Simply to abstain from telling lies, however, is balm for the soul, and possibly a lifeline for the mind back to general sanity. So let us cling to truth and sense with every ounce of life we have left.