Get Religion, Get Bizzay

Sometimes I wonder at the fact that I used to take George F. Will seriously. No kidding. He was my favorite conservative columnist back in the day. I'd eagerly read his columns, and I'd take him very seriously.

But that was before I found out that he'd helped Reagan cheat in the debates. And before he began the long slide into sophomoricism. (Hey, is that a new word???)

Today's op-ed might have been written by one of my more sophomoric sophomores. It's the end of the semester, I'm getting approximately zero hours of sleep per night, and I'm facing a towering stack of papers and exams, else I'd waste a good bit of my day putting together a careful refutation of this unmitigated piece of crap. I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but thank God for grading. This may be the only time in my life at which grading prevented me from wasting my time...

Anyway, if you want something written on this post haste, go to one of those academic blogs written by someone at Columbia or Stanford or somewhere where the profs teach a 1-2 load and have grad students to do their grading. Or Harvard. One of my colleagues who used to teach there tells me that one of the reasons Harvard students get mostly 'A's is becaues their profs and grad students don't want to waste any time grading their papers--slap an 'A' on a paper and you don't have to worry about writing comments or justifying your grade to the student. In fact, slap an 'A' on a paper and you don't even have to read it... Then you get to spend all your time on your scholarship. (And then you also get famous, if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat.) Great system. As somebody noted somewhere, in this system the teachers pretend to teach, and the students pretend to learn, and everybody is happy because they're free to do what they really want--research in the one case and drink and get laid in the other.

Oh, man, I need some sleep! Cranky Winston is trying to get out again...if he were a French superhero, he'd probably be known as Monsieur Ressentiment...

( "Monsieur Incroyable!" "Bomb Voyage!" Man, I love that movie...)

Anyway.

I might be unable to resist wasting some time on it later today, but for now, how 'bout just a:

Shorter George F. Will:

Only Christianity can enable us to complete the great task of overpopulating the planet.

Just because I can't resist, let me include my two favorite bits:

Modernity teaches that freedom is the sovereignty of the individual's will -- personal volition that is spontaneous, unconditioned, inviolable and self-legitimizing.

and

Weigel doubts it is possible to "sustain a democratic political community absent the transcendent moral reference points for ordering public life that Christianity offers the political community."

Questions left as exercises for the reader:

Isn't it cool that the moderns have all spoken with the same voice? How could I have missed that? Which ones do you think he has in mind, anyway? Do you think he intentionally expressed the "modern" view in a way that might be interpreted as being ambiguous as between (a) subjectivism and (b) Kant, or was that an accident?

And which of those "moral reference points" associated with Christianity are the indispensible ones? Do you think they're the ones that all sane moral systems--religious and non-religious--share, like the no killing part? Or the specifically Abrahamic ones like the no graven images part?

And if you had a respected national forum like the Post op-ed page, do you think you should try to write thoughtful essays that advance discussion of important issues, or would it be o.k. to crank out half-baked political crap?

Discuss.