October 14, 2012

Just thinking about MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and THE TEMPEST, along with attendant contemporary criticism, and it struck me that Post-Colonialism is really a red herring of a term, a canard.  It insists on a distinction that doesn't exist.  Native Asian American colonized the Americas, either killed or made vassals out of the defeated.  There is nothing new here.  It's the Amalekites all over again.  No, the new slant is a shot across the Caucasian Christian bow, it seems to me.  And we, like everyone, do deserve it in large part.  But only because we are newest version of the conqueror.  I love the above plays because they seem to acknowledge this, both the patriarchal order and the feminist and "post-colonial" threats to that.  That's where the tension is in these plays.  That's where the great art is.

But those threats are not intrinsic; they are due to sin.  The ugly father, the portrait and treatment of Caliban (who could be a conscious exaggeration, a challenge to the play-going audience).  Neither play upsets the good order created by the excesses of those who are part of the patriarchy--this contemporary disdain all goes back to the the fact that the Holy Father and all priests are male, to the male Jesus and to God the Father.  Heck, even the Holy Spirit gets a male pronoun in the Gospels.  And all are good, the last three God.  (I think we should have a parade for the patriarchy!  It would be fun.  Can't you picture it?  Down the Geraldine Arts Festival road, complete with big bobbing masks!)

But our new age-y critics, so keen on either-ors, would not have the truth so.  They are fundamentally, at their hearts, anti-Christ.  That is the driving urge behind what they are up to.  To be rid of Jesus and His Church because it claims the Authority that gave it rise.  This is what's behind liberalism as well.  Obama and both Clintons loathe real Christianity, praise Islam whenever they can, no matter how brutal its fundamentalist followers become, because the former has created a good and mostly life-giving world without them (sin aside), because it existed before the did and has accurately delineated the good and bad.  Christianity has created what we have of a tolerant world.  But the people against don't want that.  They want to decide, who lives and eats (them), and who dies (brown babies, courtesy of Margaret Sanger).

This is why liberal want the demise of America.  It's THE RAINBOW FISH with a gun--or a health mandate.

And because American was built by Puritans, the right offers its own death: unrestrained capitalism.  (See JP II sermons when he returned to Poland after the fall of Communism.)

But how sweet would it be to see young Shakespearean Catholic scholars rise up and delicately redirect the "discourse!"

Christ is risen.  Have no fears.  This is His world and He will have His way.