Culture Briefs

False racism

“At the end of last week, a lot of people, smart and dumb, were losing their minds over [the cover of Vogue]. The cover captures LeBron James dribbling a basketball while holding onto Gisele Bundchen. … His face is in mid-roar. His arm is around her waist. He appears to be 10 times her width. She looks underfed but appears to be having a very good time. And yet: “It’s racist,” people cried. …

“I, for one, have racism fatigue. I’m wiped out. Between the outrage over Obama’s Jeremiah Wright problems and Bill Clinton’s unbelievable mutation from American’s first black president into Karl Rove, I don’t have the bandwidth to fight Anna Wintour. Seeing that cover as purely racist doesn’t give the people looking at it enough credit. It dates Vogue for relying on the allusion but it also dates us for going crazy over it. Racial hysteria is the old black.”

— Wesley Morris, writing on “Monkey Business” on March 31 at Slate

False games

“It is important to us that great athletes push the limits of human achievement. But it has to be human achievement. Seeing [Barry] Bonds in batting practice or on the weight machines in his pre-steroid days might have been boring, but at least these exercises would have had an internal relationship to the athletic virtues of strength, speed, and coordination that he demonstrated on the field. Performance-enhancing drugs are literally, even sickeningly, external.

“It is not as if someone other than Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs in 1998; but it is not quite as if the middle-aged McGwire did, either. … We have, in brief, a kind of reverse-Frankenstein problem: not has the monster become human, but has the human become monstrous? And are we as interested in seeing these players throw fastballs and hit home runs once we know that monsters or virtual post-humans is what they are?”

— Abraham Socher, writing on “No Game for Old Men” in the March issue of Commentary magazine

False economy

“I was reminded … of something Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1991 encyclical Centisimus Annus, a reflection on economics, theology and morality written in the aftermath of Marxism’s collapse. The pope analyzed why Marxism failed, but also warned that Western-style capitalism cannot claim final vindication, because while far better than communism, it still fell short of being fully human and true to Gospel values. This passage stands out with respect to factory farming …

” ’Man, who discovers his capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through his own work, forgets that this is always based on God’s prior and original gift of the things that are. Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.’ ”

— Rod Dreher, writing on “Pope on mankind’s ’anthropological error,’ ” on March 31 on the Dallas Morning News religion blog “The Reluctant Vegan”