Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Bringing Down the (White) House

(Reprinted from the issue of May 12, 2005)

Washington has been buzzing for days about the first lady’s stand-up comic monologue at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 30. Laura Bush likened herself to the frustrated women of the hit TV show Desperate Housewives and did even bluer material about the president.

It would be a slight stretch to say it was the sort of thing Lenny Bruce used to get arrested for; on the other hand, you can hardly imagine Mamie Eisenhower making similar jokes about her love life with Ike.

Part of the gag at these events is that presidents and their wives make light of their own dignity; which means that they are expected to act undignified, which Mrs. Bush did manage to do, to the great delight of those in attendance.

One reason for her performance, it seems, was to show that although the Bushes are churchgoing Texans, they are not prudes. That’s the important thing: Don’t be a prude! Anything for a laugh.

Maybe you had to be there. Humor is infectious, and I’m not saying Mrs. Bush’s delivery wasn’t funny. I’ve only heard a few taped snippets, so this isn’t a review. I’m just commenting on a general trend about which I think we should all have reservations. Whether this or that particular performance was amusing is irrelevant. Ladies, especially first ladies, shouldn’t tell off-color jokes about their marriages.
 
Missing Person

What on earth has happened to the America we recently knew? It’s getting so a body can’t keep up with the Michael Jackson trial anymore. You turn on your radio to catch the hourly news, and all you hear about is Jennifer Wilbanks, the runaway bride.

With a war still raging in Iraq, Miss Wilbanks’s disappearance days before her scheduled wedding became the top national news story for the better part of a week. The police were looking everywhere for her; rivers were being dredged for her remains; all her acquaintances were grilled by the authorities and the media. When it transpired that she was alive and well in Albuquerque with nothing worse than a pair of cold feet, the furor only increased.

Talk radio was flooded with calls demanding that she be prosecuted, sued, or ostracized from polite society; her fiancé was roundly abused as a dolt for forgiving her and saying he still hoped to marry her. What should have been a minor local news story aroused startling passions from coast to coast. Only the Vatican refrained from commenting on the matter.

So will I, except to say that I’m willing to let the couple settle this between themselves. The news media these days encourage us to assume that everything is everybody’s business, from which it’s only a short step to the assumption that everything is the government’s business. It’s an ominous sign of our times that the Cookie Monster has become a vegetarian, for fear that he has been promoting obesity in children all these years, and obesity is now a concern of the government.

As C.S. Lewis said, it’s no use telling our rulers to mind their own business; our whole lives are their business. And when we all get into the habit of prying into each other’s lives, instead of keeping our distance, respecting privacy, and reserving judgment, we’re asking for trouble.
 
The Pope and his Enemies

Few Popes have begun their papacies with as many enemies lying in wait for them as Benedict XVI. Obviously his “progressive” enemies hate him for being a firm defender of the faith, though they don’t put it that way. Yet they don’t specify anything he has actually said or done to justify their rancor against him; they merely repeat epithets and labels that have been thrown at him in the past. They don’t even quote anything provocative or controversial he has said during his long career as theologian, churchman, and cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

It’s not as if he has concealed his views. On the contrary, in 1985 was published The Ratzinger Report, based on a long interview he gave to the journalist Vittorio Messori. They reveal then-Cardinal Ratzinger as candid, precise, moderate, urbane, and of course entirely orthodox. I can find nothing in the book to warrant, in the slightest degree, the hostile names he has been called.

He speaks with such tact that even his most unscrupulous enemies would find it hard to wrench his words out of context to damaging effect. No wonder they don’t quote him.

He insists, for example, on the necessity and value of the Second Vatican Council he is falsely accused of wanting to reverse. Though he is well aware of the abuses that have claimed the council’s reforms as their pretext, he also holds that those reforms, properly understood, are irreversible. He still hopes for reunion with the Orthodox churches, but he also says that, “humanly speaking,” this is at best a remote prospect. And while he speaks of Protestants with respect and charity, he also insists that the Scriptures can’t be understood apart from the Catholic Church; even in the New Testament, “there is already the idea of a living Church to which the Lord has entrusted His living word.”

One of his passions is liturgical reform — or what might be called the reform of false “reforms” that have made the liturgy merely functional and even ugly. A lover of Mozart, as has been widely reported, he believes that good taste has its place in the service of God, lamenting that young people’s “musical sense has been stunted since the beginning of the Sixties by rock music and related forms.” He reveres the Tridentine Mass and reminds us that silence itself can be a form of participation in the holy rite, “allowing us to listen inwardly to the Lord’s word. Many liturgies now lack all trace of this silence.”

In short, Benedict has been, through no fault of his own, a mere lightning rod for anti-Catholicism since he was Cardinal Ratzinger. But anyone who reads his own words will encounter a deeply reflective man whose thoughts would be well worth pondering even if he weren’t an official spokesman of the Church.


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Joseph Sobran