Saturday, April 11, 2009

Strange Days

Here's Joseph Bottum from latest issue of First Things:

The circus came to town yesterday. At midnight on March 23, ten elephants walked through the Midtown Tunnel and along 34 Street, on their to way to Madison Square Garden: the 139th Animal Walk of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey's Circus. The great gray legs of the pachyderms, their swinging trunks, that strangely rapid shuffle that they do: a simple pleasure to see. Except that the animal-rights activists were out in protest at the entrance to the tunnel. There are no simple pleasures in our puritanical times; each human pleasure is run through the great fires of human guilt, where it must be consumed. What strange days: The complex pleasures of human sexuality are declared simple and guilt-free, while the simple pleasures of a circus parade are rendered complex and guilty.

Sad to think that perversion has become more palatable than pachyderms.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Strange Days

Here's Joseph Bottum from latest issue of First Things:

The circus came to town yesterday. At midnight on March 23, ten elephants walked through the Midtown Tunnel and along 34 Street, on their to way to Madison Square Garden: the 139th Animal Walk of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey's Circus. The great gray legs of the pachyderms, their swinging trunks, that strangely rapid shuffle that they do: a simple pleasure to see. Except that the animal-rights activists were out in protest at the entrance to the tunnel. There are no simple pleasures in our puritanical times; each human pleasure is run through the great fires of human guilt, where it must be consumed. What strange days: The complex pleasures of human sexuality are declared simple and guilt-free, while the simple pleasures of a circus parade are rendered complex and guilty.

Sad to think that perversion has become more palatable than pachyderms.