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On the soundtrack this week, "Chain of Fools." Pick your own favorite version. Please note that—in every version I've heard—the speaker, whether male or female, is testifying as one of the fools. I want to emphasize this, since after last week's column, when I mentioned the passage in 2 Timothy that instructs us to "avoid stupid arguments," at least one respondent—David Congdon over at The Fire and the Rose—took me to be saying that people who disagreed with me about "the political captivity of the gospel" were employing "stupid arguments." That may in fact be the case, in some instances at least, but it wasn't what I was saying, not at all. Rather I took our pastor's reading of this passage as an occasion first for self–examination. Paul's injunction applies to all of us who enter the public square. We must "avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers"—and ourselves too, leaving a sour aftertaste.
Needless to say (I hope), this isn't a recipe for quietism. It doesn't mean we shouldn't express disagreement, sometimes fiercely. It does say that some arguments are unproductive. About this particular conversation I'm not entirely sure.
On to other things. We have to maintain our cover, you know—talking about all kinds of books and ideas as if we cared, when what really matters to us is the agenda of the Religious Right, the "Christo–fascists," as Chris Hedges says. But wait a minute. What is the agenda for today? Maybe Hedges or some equally acute observer can let me know what it is I'm actually doing when I think I am doing something else.
Books are pouring in, as usual. If you are interested in the Kerouac phenomenon, there are three from Viking, on sale August 20. First, for the casual reader who wants a hardcover, there's the 50th anniversary edition of On the Road (which includes Gilbert Millstein's review of the novel from The New York Times, September, 5, 1957). For devotees, there's On the Road: The Original Scroll, edited by Howard Cannell, in which the text—Kerouac's first draft of 1951, typed as one long paragraph on sheets of paper that he then taped together—is prefaced by about 100 pages of essays by various hands. Finally, there's John Leland's book Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think). Myself, I think of a piece I read decades ago (could it have been in National Review?) by a writer who visited Kerouac near the end of his life (he died in 1969 at the age of forty–seven from the effects of alcoholism). Memory says he was still alive when the piece appeared, but memory is often unreliable, and I haven't checked it out. At that time Kerouac was evidently a political conservative and a devout but rather unorthodox Catholic. Truth is stranger than fiction yet again.
Among the books that arrive every day are many unsolicited items, most of them quickly discarded. But some demand attention. One such recent arrival was a bound galley of a little book due to be published in November, Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau, by Jean Bernard (Zaccheus Press). I'm telling you about it now because I don't want it to get lost in the shuffle. Write the title down in your pda or (if you are like me) in a little old–fashioned notebook you keep for just such purposes. Born in Luxembourg in 1907, Bernard was educated at the University of Louvain in Belgium and at a Catholic seminary in Luxembourg. He was ordained as a priest and quickly rose to become general secretary of the International Catholic Cinema Office, headquartered in Brussels. After the German blitzkrieg and the occupation of France and the Low Countries, he was arrested and sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where more than 3,000 clergy (mostly Catholic priests) were incarcerated. He was mysteriously released in 1942. Twenty–five years later, his memoir appeared in book form for the first time. He died in 1994.
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