And Explosions on Easter

Holy Week began with fires atop the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris and ended with terror and murder in Sri Lanka. Predictably and almost on cue, people on the leftist/socialist/statist end of the spectrum, notably our most recent ex-president and his hench-woman, the most recent big loser of a presidential election, weighed in, less predictably referring to the murdered as "Easter worshippers" and their murderers not at all.

"Easter worshippers."

As if the murdered were members of some strange cult that reveres colored eggs and fluffy white bunny rabbits. As if they worshipped a holiday rather than a Supreme Being.

As someone on social media wrote, "If only there was a single word for 'Easter Worshippers'." There is in fact a word for them. There is also a word for people who so obviously and laboriously avoid using that word, but this is a family-oriented blog, and we can't use words like that here.

The word for the murdered is "Christians," Mr. Ex-President.

"Christians," Ms. Never-President.

Say it with me, both of you: "They were Christians."

(Thank God, thank God, I thank God every day that she wasn't inflicted upon us.)

And not only were they Christians, they were also Christian martyrs, murdered for their faith by people who will be called martyrs by the worst of their co-religionists. (Or else the religion/ideology of the murderers will be brushed aside with words like these, spoken by a Democratic member of Congress: "Some people did something"--a phrase that leaves off its most logical conclusion, "And some other people became dead because of it.")

I wrote last week about the anti-Christian stance of our current culture and its élite, especially its governmental élite. But I'm not sure that I or anyone else could have come up with a more telling example of that stance than the bizarre locution "Easter worshippers." And yet here we have it. Even some Muslims have called it as they have seen it and referred to the murdered as Christians. They have also condemned the attacks and the terrorists who committed them. In this they and many millions of others have shown courage, while from our mealy-mouthed élite we have words of what exactly? Cowardice? Or conviction? Haven't they really just shown themselves to be what they are, that is, hostile towards Christians, Christianity, and any religious belief that lies outside that of and in and for the State? They have in fact done that for anyone who cares to hear it.

I would rather write here about genre fiction, its authors, artists, themes, and stories, but if the subject of the more conservative genres of weird fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance is the past, and the subject of the more forward-looking or progressive genres of science fiction, utopia/dystopia, and the post-apocalypse* is the future, and the subjects of the past and the future have become and are now so thoroughly politicized, then we can't avoid politics in talking about genre fiction. As much as we as readers and fans would like to escape from the concerns of the day, we are continually thrown back into them by its events. Maybe all of that is just an excuse for me to write about these things now. Then, too, if I were to leave them alone, I would be leaving unfinished what I began the other day. I made a halfway prediction on Wednesday last week. Now that the other shoe has dropped, or, to use another metaphor, now that we have bookends to Holy Week 2019, I write again. Predictions or projections for the future lie within the province of genre fiction. Knowing what we know now (and what conservatives have known for centuries), what might we say about things to come? What predictions or projections might we make? What horrors might we foresee in the great and glorious future?

*Stories of dystopia and the post-apocalypse are actually better written by conservatives, who have a better understanding of human nature and a more healthy skepticism of the idea of "progress" than do their more liberal counterparts. 

Copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley