Friday, August 03, 2018

Hmm …

… The Evelyn Waugh fanatics. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

If you have ever moved in conservative intellectual circles or attended a liberal arts college with a "Great Books" program or gone to the coffee hour at a traditional Latin Mass, you will have seen him (it is almost never a her). The Waughian wears tweed jackets, often if not always ill fitting. He smokes a pipe or one of the expensive additive-free brands of cigarette. He drinks gin and, partly out of spite for craft-beer nerds, Miller Lite. He is a Catholic but has vaguely romantic feelings about English church architecture and says "Holy Ghost" instead of "Holy Spirit." He insists that the Church has been in a crisis since the Second Vatican Council and the introduction of the new liturgy. He rides a bicycle, or at least owns one, and rails against the iniquities of the automobile. He loathes democracy and longs for the restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne. Insofar as he has any opinions about contemporary American politics he loathes the GOP and has a a tendency to romanticize marginal quixotic figures in the Democratic Party — Jimmy Traficant, Bart Stupak, Bernie Sanders. 
I attended the traditional Latin Mass for quite a few years — my very own parish featured it — and I wrote about it in The Inquirer. Buy I can't say I ever met anyone who fit this description. So color me skeptical.

1 comment:

  1. The short version: anyone who describes Jimmy Traficant as quixotic has set himself up as an unreliable narrator.

    The long version: I know many nerds, many of them conservative, Catholic, or both. None that I know of long for the restoration of the Stuarts. One with a bit of squinting might meet some of the criteria, but I doubt he is a Waugh fanatic. And is it somehow Anglican or Anglophile to say "Holy Ghost"? In a fairly blue-collar suburb of Cleveland 55 years ago, we all said that.

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