Archives for April 2019

Only by the sheer lassitude of his nature did Karl Marx become a poor man. He really ought not have become so. His was a voluntary and—if we’re to inspect with a touch of sobriety his mythological life—a temporary state of want. It was a self-imposed form of penury (the type toward which those born without the endowments of his intellect would feel bitter) which he could’ve easily escaped. Instead, he chose to perpetuate it. But in the end, even this popularizer of socialism and this truant of hard and continuous died a relatively financially secure man.

From the outset, which we’ll place in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in which this inchoate communist was born, there were few signs that his life would turn out as it did. All signs augured well. Nothing ill was preordained, as has been the wretched case of the impecunious masses who’ve trodden this earth. No path had him veering (as later in life he did) into the inhospitable woods of indigence. It’s often an environment through which no opening can be seen. By every account, his childhood was of a stimulating and precocious kind. He was raised in the equally historic and progressive German town of Trier by a family of relatively high-repute. The son of a liberally-inclined, capitalistically-sympathetic apostate Jew and a somewhat unlearned Dutch-German mother, young Karl had everything for which the budding erudite could ask.

As precocity defined his earliest years, audacity would come to encompass those of his early adulthood. Not only was he bold, in the more optimistic understanding of the word as it captures a boy unfettered and undaunted by risk, but he was impudent as well. Insolence, Marx proved in his own day, as “Gen Z’ers” do in ours, is in many ways a synonym for adolescence. The two, through all of time, have been considered mutually dependent, yet the former always has a way of proving itself more capable of outliving the latter. Any parent of a certain age nods in quiet agreement, and Marx’s parents were no different. Provisioning their boy with nearly every material and intellectual advantage, Marx returned their liberal paternal bounty with nothing but contempt. He spurned the pursuit of the legal profession of which his father had availed himself and deliberately wrecked his relationship with his doting mother.

Instead of becoming bookish in the libraries at the University of Bonn, as his parents had hoped he might, he became bibulous and profligate in the rowdy college streets. Instead of studious, he became pugnacious. So irascible was his behavior, so capricious his primal instinct that his desperate father cut his losses and sent him off to a new school. Marx landed at the University of Berlin—an institution in whose halls the specter of Georg Hegel still floated. As Aristotle was in the Lyceum and Plato in the Academy, Hegel was palpable in the University of Berlin. The Hegelian philosophy, inscrutable to us moderns even today, was a pedagogical giant in the instruction of man and the direction of his coming path. For years it remained the abstruse shadow under which the flower of continental metaphysical philosophy grew. Understandably enamored of it—much the way we Americans are of Locke and Jefferson and liberal democracy—Marx became a devoted follower. Not surprisingly, he aligned himself with the Hegelian Left, a younger, brasher, more irreligious, and transgressive component of the great thinker’s thought.

Acquiring his doctorate in philosophy from the liberal University of Jena, Marx proceeded in adulthood to channel his inner-Aristotle. He did so not by becoming a sagacious and exemplary philosopher, but by becoming a restless peripatetic. Bouncing from France, to Belgium, to Germany, and finally to England, Marx unsettled the soils and burned the lengths of all his bridges that had tethered him to Western Europe.

A demonic dilettante, Marx tried his hand—rather unprofitably—in various fields. Journalism, linguistics, science, and revolution were a few pastimes without incomes. That said, even when his economic condition worsened, he never put his academic credentials to work. Certainly some university would have this thrice-over university man come to hold a position as a professor. What vertiginous lectures there might’ve been! But he spurned his professional degree and decided that indulging himself was more important than supporting his family.

Married to his childhood sweetheart Jenny von Westphalen (whose very name was redolent of old money and perhaps a license to laziness), Marx proceeded to sire and neglect seven children, of whom only one lived out the entirety of her life. All malnourished from the start, the exception rather than the expectation was for a Marx child to reach adulthood alive. Instead of working, he pawned almost everything of value in their cramped Soho house. Intermittently, he was overcome by zealous bouts of enthusiastic research, which he conducted in the library of London. It’s an abiding fascination of mine to consider that—in their most mature and recognizable forms—every economic theory (of which we name Capitalism, Keynesianism, and Marxism) was born somewhere within United Kingdom.

Combining beneficiary with philosophy, Marx relied on Friedrich Engels for financial and intellectual support. More than anyone else, it was Engels who was responsible for introducing to Marx the intoxicating vision that was Communism. Hitherto, Marx had encountered the idea in the more radical circles in which he moved around Proudhon’s France, but he hadn’t received it in full. Engels was the man to serve it to him and set in motion his irascible, epistolary juice.

Equal parts industrious and polyamorous, Engels was the heir to his father’s lucrative textile firm. Along with being a notorious womanizer, Engels was an accomplished polyglot (having mastered a dozen or so languages) and a perhaps more committed autodidact than even Marx. If not consanguineous by parentage, Engels and Marx undoubtedly shared in their blood a deep and unusual ideological bond. This allowed for one of the most fruitful of intellectual unions known to the history of philosophy—a too often a solitary sport. Indeed, the two seem to have enjoyed a nearly fraternal bond—backed, of course, by Engel’s implicit financial guarantee. It was the largesse of the Engels company (located in Germany and in England) upon which Marx was reliant for the majority of his life.

I say majority because, at the end, Marx’s fortunes made a slight turn for the better. Though he didn’t die an exceedingly wealthy man (nor popular; those in attendance at his funeral numbered fewer than a dozen), he wasn’t nearly in so wretched a state as his hagiographers have led us to believe. If not for the exigencies of his young family’s health, Marx eventually turned to invest his money in the stock market to provide him the material comfort he might’ve earlier enjoyed. Indeed, his intimate correspondence leads a modern auditor to think that Marx actually relished the pursuit. A hero to some, a hypocrite to discerning others, Marx embraced the life against which he railed for so long. Accompanying the generous subsidies paid him by Engels for his bursts of genius and lengthy dry spells (Marx was supposed to finish two subsequent volumes of his seminal work Das Kapital. Failing to make a positive case for the implementation of Communism in the first book, the task was left to Engels to take up), he now had sizable gains from the stock-market, from capitalism—the institution he so reviled.  

It’s not merely that I’m enamored of and frankly frightened by Marx as an historical figure that I point this out. Though his appeal, in this regard, is perpetual, I turned to thinking about his most unusual and hypocritical life as I thought about that of Bernie Sanders.

A perhaps mollified, innocently senescent, and beardless version of Marx, Sanders, like Karl, has spent the majority of his life outside of a productive industry. Not to diminish the value of a public servant working as a representative of a state (as has been his occupation for the last thirty-odd years), Sanders hasn’t exactly contributed an appreciable amount to the economy. As a matter of fact that cozies up to legend, on account of his disinclination toward work, Sanders was sent away from a work commune in his earlier years. From that day until this, he’s been on the public payroll, funded by you and me.

Yet this staunchest of socialists has quite an exorbitant amount of money to his name. As made evident by the release of his tax returns, in recent consecutive years, Sanders brought in over $1 million—a boon for which he’s completely unapologetic. In addition to his income as a senator, he’s earned prodigious profits from the sales of his book. Surely he has other investments and speaking arrangements that add to the number in his bank. That said, he suffered no scruple to keep all the money he made. In fact, with a slight air of de haut en bas and indignation, he defended himself for having made as much as he did. If you write a best-selling book, he preached to a group of bewildered journalists, you can be a millionaire too. A true socialist, if the term’s rightly to be understood, might feel a bit uncomfortable when reflecting upon his inordinate and admirable success. But Bernie, like Marx before him, seems completely at ease.

If this seems dissonant with the socialist’s main philosophical thrust, that’s because it is. Just as it was with Marx, who died a relatively financially comfortable man, so too is it with Sanders. An incredibly wealthy man, upon whom many of his fellow social security-receiving, coupon-counting octogenarians look in a mixture of envy and awe, instead of death this sprightly Sanders enjoys renewed political life. Just don’t mind the socialist’s rank hypocrisy that carries him along the way. It’s a well-trod path, from Marx, to Engels, to Sanders, and every other Socialist autocrat in between.

Having been immured within a house of ideas for the better part of one’s life, it’s understandably difficult to avoid being captured in ridiculous thoughts. It happens from time to time to a person so situated. Like snares or magnets intermittently placed, silly thoughts eventually come to possess us all. The origin of their attraction isn’t entirely clear: maybe it’s they who find us, perhaps it’s us who seek them, but only by dispensing with our reason can they make in our minds a permanent home. The length of their stay is our decision to make. The responsibility for their habitation is on us. We are the doormen and the landlords of our beliefs. Ultimately, it is up to our discretion to decide who comes, who stays, and who goes.

Those among us allegedly of the most learned type (a group to whose membership I humbly profess no claim) are too often unaware of the silliness to which they’ve been made vulnerable in the midst of all their thoughts. A surfeit of insights, etched into pages over centuries like ancient erosions and imprints on stones, ideas have upon us a gradual but noticeable effect. Usually, the effect is good. Sometimes it’s bad, and it’s the bad effects of which we must be keenly aware. Rather than illumine, they can easily mislead one’s thought. Such is the pedagogical paradox—too much learning can corrupt the mind, while too little always desiccates it. In such a case, so altered a mind becomes subjected to delusion—and delusion is the most despotic of kings.

A librarian—officious and prudish, yes, but very distant in character to a despot—is nevertheless vulnerable to the tyranny of thought. For one thing, surrounding her for all hours of all days (save those that are publicly observed) is every conceivable idea. She has before her every last word by which our culture is defined and for which so much of us live. On top of that, if so eclectically-endowed, she probably has every word by which every other culture is defined. Perhaps it’s because of the embarrassment of her literary riches, or perhaps it’s because her pedantic idleness, or perhaps it’s because of her multicultural bent that she’s led to claim, quite peremptorily yet with no great shock, that libraries are too white.

As were the Oscar’s, as is society, so too, it appears, have libraries become insufferably far too white.

There was a time when Kipling coined the phrase, “the white man’s burden” and it was taken as a moral appeal. Irrespective of the poetic brilliance with which that Indo-Anglican painted the world, the entirety of this concept was patronizing and cruel. Now, however, the white man himself is the burden. Writing for the Library Journal, a disgruntled and garrulous Sofia Leung proclaimed that “Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries…they are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives via the prison industrial complex, the spoils of war, etc.” From so prominent a librarian (Leung is employed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), it’s admittedly distressing to hear so shocking a claim.

Doubtless, there are points about which she and I could argue and I’m sure she’s a person from whom I could learn. If given the chance, I would ask her whether or not Benjamin Franklin—father not only of the American library system as we know it, but of the lighting rod, the fire brigade (perhaps a consequence of that rod) and the nation itself—secured the funding for his library at the cost of black and brown lives? Certainly, it was his indomitable curiosity as opposed to his latent and abiding racism that led to the erection of Philadelphia’s first home for books. And, so far as the limitations of my knowledge extend, it was upon his model that all subsequent libraries were built. As for the prison-industrial complex and the spoils of war, I can’t imagine how our greatest civic achievement—the public library, beautifully entrenched in every community and accessible to all—has exploited the former or benefitted from the latter.

Aside from those issues, for which Leung hopefully has crafted a thoughtful explanation for our reading pleasure, there’s the insidious idea she’s put forth that libraries are too white. Better said, it’s the works of which our libraries are composed that are in fact too white.

The idea of society as being “too white” has become the progressive’s platitude over the course of the past few years. As a self-consciously white man, it pains me not, but I’ll admit to feeling that it’s a somewhat unimaginative and tiresome appeal. That said, it’s a contention—though not yet successful in convincing me—that’s never failed to bewilder me. It should of course be noted that libraries, if properly adorned, comprise the best that has been thought in the history of the mental life of man. At the risk of sounding just a bit too proud of the culture whence I personally come, that which has been best thought is unequivocally found in the West. Yet by using that unavoidably amorphous word I don’t mean America and Europe exclusively—that much-cherished Atlantic alliance of the old world and the new—but rather every nation influenced by a shared Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman creed. By contending that libraries are “too white”, Leung is also—in so many words—regurgitating the trite idea that Western Civilization is itself “too white”. Enamored of our civilization as I am (a civilization, one might add, of which Leung is a part), this noxious idea has always irked me.

It should also be noted that Leung is maintaining as her implicit premise that whiteness is an inherently bad thing. So bad is it, in fact, that whiteness is something from which we must all run as if the mere color were itself an approaching miasma or plague. Having a dog in this fight (I’m white), this too has always struck me as a concept equally disquieting as it is odd.

White people, men in particular, haven’t a monopoly on ignominy. We’re not solely responsible for the ills of the world. I don’t mean to come off as excessively exculpatory and in need of support, but badness—however defined—is a public shame in which we all have a share. If the perpetuation of slavery in the American colonies is the rationale for your despising white men especially, your literacy as it pertains to historical facts must be open to question. Remediation rather than outrage is what’s needed in such a case.

Slavery, much like poverty, has been for thousands of years the natural condition of man. A horrible condition, doubtless, but one by which our species was happy to abide for most of its known history. Americans enslaved Africans, of this we’re too painfully aware, but so too did Muslims and Europeans and for far longer a time. What’s more, Muslims enslaved Europeans, Europeans enslaved Muslims, and both enslaved themselves. Often, this was the natural consequence of territorial expansion or of war (consider the fate of the poor Queen Hecuba after the fall of Troy. She was, as were her daughters, the hard-earned spoils of war—a dysphemism, I should think, for a wretched slave). And yes, Africans enslaved each other as well: those from the coasts placed in fetters those in the interior. And who’s to say we can leave out Asia? Certainly, that massive, ancient civilization can’t seek exclusion from this terrible list.

Yet while other insouciant civilizations carried on in this trade of flesh, only one civilization determined (at, mind you, a great economic cost) to put it to an end. Not surprisingly, that was the decision of Western civilization—a move that might’ve brought it approbation but has since only been ignored. While every other civilization considered only commerce, the West was burdened with ethics. Costly scrupulosity, rather than easy servility was the West’s choice. One of many to engage in the institution, the West was the first to enjoin it. All that said, however, the tired slogan continues on: if we’re to become a more enlightened, more culturally sensitive, and more humane society, whiteness must be silenced.

Yet the words of our civilization’s greatest thinkers won’t soon become mute; their voices are too resonant and too important, their contributions to knowledge and beauty too inspiring—regardless of the color of their skin. Yet even to say that the color of their skin was homogenously and therefore odiously white is to mislead the credulous reader taking to heart Leung’s statements of contempt. Cervantes was a Spaniard, Dante an Italian, while Pythagoras was something of a proto-Turk. Alexander Hamilton was technically Caribbean, Augustine was North African—his melanin dictated by the hot sun of the Maghreb—while Jesus and Moses were sons not only of God, but of the often torrid Levant. You see, if white is your bête noire, these men whose thought was germinal to the Western canon don’t quite fit the bill.

My intention isn’t to work in semantics. Though the provenance of each man mentioned above perhaps belies the fact, I know that all the aforementioned names are—at least based on the general consensus—white. The point is that they had and expressed great and powerful ideas, no matter the variegated hues of their skin. And considering that libraries are supposed to be the repositories of all that is best said and thought throughout the ages of our species’ life, they’d do well to blind themselves to childish, overly-academic questions of melanin.

It’s here that the librarian, the academician, and the progressive filled with platitudes goes a bit too far. Too deeply immersed in their own ridiculous ideas have they become to consider more sober thoughts. I would recommend that she pick up and read, as did Augustine (an African of Algerian birth) and appreciate the glories of Western thought.

Being not of a cryophilic bent, I’ve not made it a priority to visit the state of Minnesota. The environment, even at its most welcoming, seems to me wholly inhospitable. Of course, that’s no judgment of its people—gregarious and lovely as I assume them to be—but rather its weather and its weather alone.

Indeed, in the mind of an adopted and now terribly softened Floridian, there’s woefully little to recommend this great northern state to me. I say this even at this putatively vernal point of the year, when the season should be turning for the better, for the warmer. Yet as these fingers patter away in nearly ninety degrees (for what it’s worth, unseasonably sunny even for this time of year in the Sunshine State) the snowfall up there keeps accumulating. It’s the middle of April, very nearly Tax Day eve and a week before Easter, and Minnesota has been covered in over twenty inches of snow.

But at the expense of a chill, my curiosity is dauntless. It, unlike my body, knows no climate of which the latter is so afraid. Reasonably and biologically fearful, I might add as a caveat, but nevertheless, I feel a great compulsion to travel up to that wild, pine-laden state of the north and abridge myself of its famously polite and civil people. Specifically, I want to travel to the fifth district, comprising the towns of Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, and New Hope and speak with the electorate there whose choice it was to send to the United States Congress as its representative the increasingly noxious, unabashedly odious, and unfailingly vile Ilhan Omar.

In so doing, I’d hope very much to find a population whose character is far different from that of the woman in whom it placed its trust. I simply can’t imagine Omar’s radicalism on matters of policy and haughty irreverence toward the country at-large as being positions commonly held among a people of such humility and warmth.

Are the Minnesotans of whom that district is composed as avowedly, overtly, and tenaciously anti-Semitic as is she? Though the Democratic Party as a whole has become increasingly ill-disposed toward Israel in general and the Kosher-keeping people by which its populated in particular, few contemporary congressmen on the left have equaled Omar’s unmitigated and vociferous antipathy toward the Jews. Enough to arose in me, a shameless semi-Semite, a feeling of profound disquiet, I’m struck by the fact that the anti-Jewish utterances born of Omar’s mouth have become almost banal. So regular and nearly diurnal are they that in the course of a few more months, I’m convinced that they’ll cease even making the news.

She’s borrowed from antiquity literally timeless canards, the likes of which blame Jews for their purchase and control of the intelligentsia and political elite. What’s more, her position on the state of Israel has been, to put it mildly, ungenial. To put it more accurately, it’s been unabashedly hostile. Indeed, she’s no friend to the concept of a two-state solution (however presently unfeasible so hopeful an idea might be) whereby Israel and Palestine might live as neighbors in relative peace. Instead, implicitly or expressly, she prefers rather to boycott, divest, and sanction the Israeli state and eventually to clear from its ill-acquired territory any impediment to a Palestinian sprawl. She seems to want to trade “hegemony” for hegemony—if not outright extinction of the Israeli state.

Perhaps there are Minnesotans in the district of which she’s a representative who agree with her on this point. They may see Israel as a repressive bully of Near Eastern provenance in need of corrective action. They may see that tiny, besieged Mediterranean state of which America is a fervid sponsor as an odious, incorrigible actor on the world’s stage. Reliant externally upon American subventions and internally on brutalizing and incommensurate force, Israel may be the region’s cudgel-wielding Goliath—a lavishly-funded state perpetuating the pauperization of the Arab race.

Weak though they may be, an argument or two can be made to this end. What’s indefensible, though, is what Ilhan Omar was recorded as having said about the 9/11 attacks. Speaking before the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization for which the acronym “CAIR” ironically serves, Omar referred to the Islamic terrorists responsible for planning and executing the suicidal attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in her current home of Washington D.C. as “some people” and their actions as them having done “some things”. (It might be well noted here that Omar claimed in this speech that CAIR organized itself after the attacks of 9/11. In fact, it did so in 1993 after the Oslo Accords).

So accustomed are we to the bombardment of hyperbolic speech, that we tend not to hear things that are uttered sotto voce or when they’re discreetly understated. Strung so tightly as we’ve become over the duration of these past three years, understatement appears to have become a pitch to which we’re no longer tuned. Like an elderly individual dumb to certain ringing frequencies, it almost completely escapes our detection. But this statement was much more than an understatement, and as such, was heard with the sobriety and lucidity so often lacking in our country’s ears.

It was discourteous, horrible but more importantly, loud and clear. It was entirely insensitive to the victims and the families who were on the receiving end of the terrorist’s murderous designs. To trivialize the horrendous actions that “some people” carried out is to lessen the severity of their unforgivable act. By saying what she does, Omar distorts and diminishes the single cause of nearly three thousand Americans’ deaths. 

While she easily may have rectified her tactless remark by quickly apologizing for the looseness of her speech, Omar did nothing of the sort. As is her wont, she became exceedingly indignant to learn that anyone might be offended by her remark, much less criticize her for saying what she said. It should be noted that it’s not only her who sees in this political climate the act of doubling-down as vitally de rigueur (and, as a corollary, apologizing as fatal), but had she chose to do that, she would’ve been forgiven. Whether or not she’d be deserving of such clemency is another question.

While on the subject of the issuance of mercy for someone who’s done wrong, Omar sought exactly that for two young men reared in her home state. After attempting and failing to join the terror organization ISIS, nine Somali-born men—now adopted sons of Minnesota—were looking at sentences in excess of three decades apiece. Sympathetic to their plight and therefore intervening on their behalf, Omar—then a state representative in Minnesota—supplicated the presiding judge to go easy on the boys. With a mawkish and nearly conniving tone, she explained to the judge that the best “deterrent to fanaticism is a system of compassion” and that a “long-term prison sentence for one who chose violence to combat direct marginalization is a statement that our justice system misunderstands the guilty”. The above italics are my own addition. This “direct marginalization” of which she speaks surely needs some fleshing out. Certainly, if it’s to absolve nine men from the guilty sentences they so justly deserve, she ought to explain exactly how these young me—living, one might add, in the freest, most cosmopolitan, most culturally multitudinous and unprejudiced country in the world—have been marginalized, much less marginalized to the point of seeking succor in the world’s deadliest terrorist organization. She can save her talk of “systematic alienation” as a legitimate rationale for leniency.

Staying on the topic of terrorism, when speaking with the host of an Islamic television program a few years ago, Omar intimated that America and England were basically, categorially the same as Al-Qaeda. The thrust of her point was that we Anglo-Americans have ugly and often violent and exploitative pasts about which we ought to feel sorry. Doubtless, each country has had its share of unprepossessing moments through its past on which it’d rather not reflect, but to place the sins of America and England in the same league as those of Al-Qaeda, or the base, is to slander the former in hopes of legitimizing the latter. Such egregiously baseless attempts at moral equivalence mustn’t be accepted without a word in response.

Yet her antipathy toward America didn’t stop there. In response to an article published for Time magazine, Omar expressed the idea that America was founded on genocide, that our current foreign policy is redolent of “neo-colonialism”, and that our infatuation with Islamic terrorism abroad is a tactic used to avoid thinking about our own domestic terror regime at home—by another name she might call the U.S. government. Not only is this concept of America historically inane, it’s supremely offensive in the here and now as well.

For one, America—at least as we once knew it—was founded on an idea. Nothing more, nothing less, but so much is caught up in the recognition of this simply profound fact. The American idea was, in that time as well as in ours, the apotheosis of man’s political thought. It was the efflorescence of a deep-rooted plant—one whose growth sprouted from the shared earth of Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and the British Isles. And of course, I can only presume that by “America” she means the America of the seventeenth rather than the fifteenth century. It was of course in the second of those two centuries when the Spanish first arrived to this Edenic “New World” and the Columbian exchange made possible civilization in the West. Is she criticizing that age, or that of our Founding Fathers?

It’s this question among many others that I would pose to my Minnesota friends in seeking an explanation of their congresswoman. Their best defense may be distance (with Omar now having settled in the capitol and on media platforms across the nation), but that only counts for geography. What is the ideological distance between the two? The former is reasonable, genial, and inviting to all people and religions. The latter is jaundiced, angry, and steeped in anti-Semitism, invective, and hate. How does one represent the other?

Having listened to many of the opinions voiced in the wake of the fire in which part of the Notre Dame Cathedral was consumed, I’m reminded of an old line by Alexander Pope. Written in the earliest days of the eighteenth century, at the very dawn of the Enlightenment (or, as the French with superior flourish and euphony would call it, le siècle des Lumieres) Pope’s words impart upon me a lasting relevance. They reverberate in my head still. Such is the talent of the poet-sage, a man whose eloquence is timeless and whose prescience is felt every single day. Only he can capture in a moment the entirety of the life of man and write it down so that you’ll never forget.

Classically trained (his translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were of eminently high repute, both in his day and in our own) but always Catholically devoted, Pope said in his satirical Essay on Criticism, “Some to church repair, not for the doctrine, but for the music there”. Forgetting for the moment the loveliness and simplicity of his rhyme, this line, as do so many brilliantly conceived by Pope’s mind and etched into my own, greeted me this past Monday with an acute and peculiar resonance. Indeed, it leapt into my thoughts as I watched the harrowing image of the roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral fall down after having been set (hopefully accidentally) ablaze. On every mounted and mourning television set in the lobby through which I passed, I saw this beautifully historic cathedral crumble into a heap. I saw the smoke of the burning wood rise to the heavens, as if it were in supplication of the Lord himself. As if some kind of bygone Pagan sacrifice, one almost expected God to sniff it and respond, the desperate message wafting to his nose.

But the sky was silent. The desperate plea dissipated in the air. From one moment to the next, very nearly instantaneously, what was once religious became fuliginous. Before the world’s eyes and presumably beneath the Lord’s gaze, some eight centuries of an otherwise resilient edifice toppled over into ember and dust.

As was I, every son and daughter of Western civilization ought to have been deeply pained by the image of the cathedral’s burning spire and the praying masses and awe-struck onlookers before whom it fell. It’s a scene, not unlike that of the ravages of Palmyra by the hand of ISIS or the attacks of 9/11 by that of al-Qaida that will remain with us for all time. Of course, that’s not to impugn the religion of Islam as the typecast culprit, but to point out two commensurately memorable events. To borrow a term once strictly possessed by the religious lexicon, the sadness we in the West feel upon realizing this immense cultural and religious loss is ecumenical. The sorrow, from France to the United States, Australia to Argentina and every intervening country whose Cimmerian status quo was helped by the West’s light, is universal. The grief and the feeling of loss is thoroughly engulfing and like the sea, it circles the world.

And I say this not as a Catholic (though I once did, much to the horror of my chagrined Jewish mother, swallow unwittingly at the age of eleven the holy Eucharist. What’s to be expected of an ingenuous, perhaps slightly rebellious little boy when offered bread as a mid-Sunday morning snack?). Nor do I say this as a Christian. However profound my appreciation for the scrupulosity and the messianic verve by which the Galilean carpenter Jesus conducted himself, his resuscitation and ascension are a bit too farfetched. They require of me a leap whose distance I can’t quite judge. I can’t yet jettison empiricism and rationalism for the unabashed supernatural. Nor, for that matter—expanding outward to capture any other potential and tenuous religious links to which I might have a claim—am I an explicitly faithful person in any traditional sense.

It’s for this reason, for the absence of my fidelity to any newfangled or ancient creed, that Pope’s line sticks with me ever more. It jingles in my head like a clever Enlightenment earworm. Of those repairing to the church, some as stated for doctrine and some for music, I’d be included in the second of these two groups. Yet as such, I’d still line up at the altar as an artistically-infatuated devotee. The first might be more solemn, the second more aesthetic, but both of us as doctrinaires and dilettantes are seeking rejuvenation through the numinous wonder, the healing powers, and the ineffable nourishment of the Church.

Yet what we aesthetes hardly notice is that the object of our affection would be impossible without the doctrine upon which it’s built. The Synoptic Gospels, the enduring epistles, the commentaries, the confessions, the summas and the like—music, art, and architecture would be disquietingly hollow vessels without them. That, of course, is taking only into account the more recent of the two Bibles—that one whose authorship is by the Christians, an originally millennial fringe-Judaic sect; the Hebrew version in which theirs is inextricably steeped offers yet more sustenance and harmony for a chaotic world.

Yes, we mourn the partial collapse of Notre Dame for its cultural and artistic significance, but we mustn’t forget about its theological side. We must remember always that it was ultimately for the sake of the cathedrals—of which, at least in their extant Gothic forms, we still number in France Chartres, Reims, Amiens, and the remnants of Notre Dame—for which polyphonic music was produced and art was given life. So too was this the case for the church constructed in the fashion of the Romanesque. It was for the adoration and the ornamentation of these buildings, of which most were built in Italy, that Michelangelo and Raphael were put to work. Because of them, the sensations of man and the visual splendors of the world would never be the same.

But always were the cathedrals the multitudinous houses of God. I suppose omnipresence necessarily requires such endless fixtures of habitation, even if He were only passing by. Music for our reparation (as a means by which we repair ourselves) is but an indirect way of accessing the divine. And so, even the staunchest secularists among us must admit, there was something spiritually and divinely moving in seeing Notre Dame fall. We may not believe in the creed, but we feel its profundity. Pope, purposefully or not, makes it clear: we aren’t merely musical beings—Homo sapiens smitten with sounds. We hear something sublime through the conflagration, namely that Notre Dame isn’t a building merely.

Assuming the two are mutually exclusive, which with disquieting frequency has proven not always to be the case, the Democratic Party will have to decide the following about Joe Biden: is he, in its delayed recognition that his tendency is to be, how shall we put it, exceedingly friendly with the females around whom he passes his time, hoary or horny?

Personally, I cringe at having to put the terms in so blunt a way. I don’t mean to be loose, nor do I fancy myself characteristically irreverent or ribald, but we’re living in an admittedly blunt and cringeworthy age.

And so, the question must be asked. Are the Democrats to regard Biden’s rediscovered demonstrations of affection as the benign and easy cordialities of a career politician or the evil and insidious advances of a predator? Are they idiosyncrasies or indiscretions? Is his way of conducting himself in public consistent with the innocent habits of an elder statesman, one born and reared in the warmth and intimacy of a bygone tactile political age (as the Washington Post put it), or is his way not at all political, but exploitatively sexual? Is Biden, a former Senator who was for years lauded for his distinctively personal touch, to be considered senescent or prurient? Is he ham-handed with his gratuitous hugs or malicious with his intent? Is he harmless or destructive? Is he merely intimate or profligate? Ultimately, the question is whether he’s innocent or guilty of having perpetrated the most inexcusable of sins: being a physically-touchy, publicly-scrutinized old white man.

Confronting this uniquely American albatross (few other Western nations hold in contempt so large a segment of their population), Biden is burdened with these questions and more. At the time of this writing, at least a half dozen women—of whom a few have serious, a few others have dubious, and most have scurrilous qualms to raise—have made public their “intimate” experiences with the former Vice President. I enclose the word, “intimate” in marks of quotation because most of these experiences seem to have happened in the presence of hundreds or thousands of people. The bridge between intimacy and publicity seems not to have been crossed, but it could be that my perception isn’t adequately sensitive to these sensitive matters. How intimate really could it have been to have been hugged or nuzzled by the Vice President in front of multitudinous cameras, constituents, and fans?

Nevertheless, their shared memories are consistent and therefore warrant our consideration. They demand, at the very least, our attention, deliberation, and our judgement. Consistently uncomfortable, each experience described was extraordinarily awkward, particularly those captured on film of Biden embracing children and adolescents on C-SPAN. Yet because they’re on that very network—what I’ve come to regard as the last bastion of the bored and underemployed—these episodes of Biden are seemingly innocuous and for that reason completely mundane.

In each case so far presented, Biden seems to have approached the woman by whom he’s now accused with what seems to have been an innocent intent. A man of profound sentimental depth (as was displayed grippingly after the premature loss of his son Bo), Biden throughout his career has tended to exude rather empathy than venery. Many women, including the wife of the former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and the conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, have openly made this point. Both say that Biden, during their respective interactions with the man, conducted himself with the utmost gentility and adroitness—even if he was a little bit more “handsy” than is to be expected of most other men. But this, at the time, was of no concern to them, just as it was of no concern to the women who are now alleging indecency on Biden’s part.

The latter of these women seem to be under the Cimmerian influence of ill-motive. Political machinations seemingly abound. Lucy Flores, the Nevada politician for whom Biden has to thank for starting this slow-rolling cause célèbre, was the first to raise an objection to the tactility of Biden’s brand of politics. After writing a sensational op-ed in New York Magazine’s “The Cut”, Flores was featured as an evocative and special guest on all the mainstream networks. On air, she alleged that then Vice President Biden had “inappropriately kissed and touched her” at an event in Las Vegas after offering his assistance for her 2014 campaign. Similarly, a Connecticut politician by the name of Amy Lappos described her experience with Biden that occurred in 2009. In the case of Lappos, instead of the posterior approach with a kiss on the back of the head (as was used on Flores), Biden opted to advance from the front where he proceeded to rub noses with the startled aide.  

It’s not unusual for there to be a delayed reaction between the time of a woman’s harassment, maltreatment, or assault and that of the public declaration of her chilling experience. One can only imagine (and hope never to feel) the anguish and uncertainty with which so unfortunate a woman might struggle for that duration of time. Nevertheless, during the entirety of the Obama tenure, of which Biden was obviously an essential piece, neither of their stories (nor those of purportedly countless other women) broke through into the media’s consciousness. A peep was never uttered. Indeed, one woman named Sofie Karasek—who’s currently joining her indignant sisters in pointing an accusatorial finger at Biden—had in her office during that time a framed picture of herself and the Vice President. Sure enough, the two are involved in what we’d now prudishly come to declare as being an intimate embrace. Apparently a highly-valued memento of inspiration and pride, Karasek’s photo with Biden caused in her disquiet only after the passage of three years. Only now, when the gates were opened on Biden, has it become an image of impropriety and a reason for her to speak out. Previously, while framed in her room, if it wasn’t merely a strong testament to the success of her cause (she’s an advocate for the rights of sexual abuse survivors), it was an entirely innocuous piece of her history.

One mustn’t hasten to judgment, but these accusations carry the foul scent of ginned-up machinations. It’s been shown to be the case that a few of these women accusing Joe Biden of loutish behavior are dedicated supporters of other Democratic presidential candidates (namely of Bernie Sanders and Beto O’Rourke). The smell of manufactured outrage for the purpose of chopping down Biden’s candidacy is redolent—and he’s not even yet formally to have declared.

And so, between this moment and the moment when he finally does, the Democratic Party will have to make its decision. More than that, it’s a decision by which it’ll have to live unanimously and forcefully if it’s to coalesce behind a man in an effort to defeat Donald Trump. Joe Biden, in the final tally, is either avuncular or amorous. What’s certain is that he can’t be both. For him, the former means the presidency. The latter, lechery. It’s now for the Democrats to decide and a fate for Biden to accept.