Harpers and LARPers: on the midterm elections and the death of nuance

November 23, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

The midterm elections have revealed that the reigning monarch of the entertainment industry is right in claiming that “America has a problem,” but not for the reason Beyonce thinks. America seems to be devolving into a nation of people who harp on issues that are largely disconnected from the concrete realities of our daily lives, turning our public personas into performances of live action role play. Our nation’s national allergy is, and has always been, nuance. Her national sport is... Read more

October Updates

November 2, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

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Articles published this month: The attraction of Catholic traditionalism: From the fringes to the spotlight – Catholic World Report ‘Decadent’ Young People See Beauty in Catholic Tradition — Will Truth and Goodness Follow?| National Catholic Register Ariana Grande: Unicorn Frappuccino Instagram Barbie — The Critic Magazine Review of Bros-The Spectator Australia The ‘Body Positivity’ Movement Is At Odds With Human Nature — The Federalist Looking for advice on masculinity? Try St. Joseph rather than Jordan Peterson- National Catholic Reporter Remembering the Particular:... Read more

Kanye’s Concerning Compromise

October 25, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

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on prophecy, subsidiarity, and the errors of expediency for its own sake I wrote in my article on the 20th anniversary of Lauryn Hill’s MTV Unplugged 2.0 album that Kanye West is (after Hill) the closest we’re going to get to a John the Baptist-type prophet today. What inhibits him from fully achieving prophet status is his overly friendly and naive attitude toward the Herod’s of our day: corrupt corporate and political elites. West indeed has prophetic proclivities: he is... Read more

Who gets/has to be white?: On Rick Caruso, the “latinidad” of Italians, and the feast of St. Gerard in Newark

October 19, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

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Just days after publishing an article about ethnic identity and racial identity categories, I see this news story. LA mayoral candidate Rick Caruso, an American of Italian descent, made waves for claiming not to be “white.” Moderating the debate on Tuesday night, the Telemundo journalist Dunia Elvir said: “And this question goes for the both of you. The next mayor of Los Angeles will be either an African American woman or a white man.” “I’m Italian,” Caruso said. “Italian American,”... Read more

Bad Bunny’s Big Gay Kiss: The Banality of Public Spectacles under Liquid Modernity

September 22, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

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Reactions to Bad Bunny’s same sex kiss on the 39th annual MTV Video Music Awards have been painstakingly predictable, as if being read off of a script. From those celebrating his bold statement of self-acceptance and his disavowal of machismo and homophobia, to those highlighting his white-passing and cis-male privilege and those condemning the act as “queerbaiting,” most would not be alarmed were they to find out that the proliferation of news headlines and social media posts were generated by... Read more

Notes on Trads: the latest in the trad Catholic wars

September 17, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

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The latest at Trad parishes *I’m noticing that although some attend the TLM because they find the liturgy to be spiritually transformative, for most it appears to be mainly a form of reactionary performance art or tribal signaling. Most seem to be reacting to something they don’t like which they think the Novus Ordo Mass represents: something they don’t like about the Pope, the Synodal Path, the “masonic infiltration” at Vatican II, etc. *At the parishes I’ve attended (which is... Read more

What Paglia got wrong

August 31, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

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10 things that Camille Paglia has said that I disagree with 1. She tends to brush too swiftly over the obstacles posed by structural inequalities, especially when it comes to race. She highlights cultural influence that blacks have had in the US, but insists that the racism has dramatically diminished and is largely a thing of the past, and relies too heavily on a pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality. Further, she insists that within her broadview of world... Read more

Rowe Hot Takes

May 7, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

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“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” -Oscar Wilde Scrolling through my feeds is confirming for me how much unironic polemical discourse (posturing as sincere, righteous, or virtuous) has been rendered empty by our bourgeois technocratic neoliberal paradigm. Nuance is dead. Cognitive dissonance is now (and has always been) America’s national beverage, pastime, and anthem (this statement doesn’t make sense, but neither does America). The only substantial means of discourse today is metaironic, self-deprecatory, oblique... Read more

Why is Dionysus on the cover of Cracks in Pomo?

April 12, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

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Dionysus (or Bacchus, in the Latin rendering) is the Greek god of wine, drunkenness, fertility, insanity, religious ecstasy, festivity, and theater. In his The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes the tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals in art, religion, and culture. He refers, of course, to Dionysus, who represents pleasure, the uncontrollable, unpredictable chaos of nature, and femininity, and his counterpart, Apollo, who represents man-made structure, discipline, order, and masculinity. Camille Paglia, building on Nietzsche’s dichotomy, asserts that Western... Read more

“Latinas Don’t Twerk”: Ivy Queen’s loaded comments on Afrodiasporic music

March 25, 2022 By Stephen G. Adubato

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Recently a group of friends recounted to me a scene at a party involving an argument over who got dibs on the aux cord. “I keep trying to tell hispanic girls that they have to mix up the Spanish music…you can’t play two songs in Spanish in a row,” proclaimed one girl, who wanted to play more hip hop songs in English. “If you’re going to play more than one song in Spanish in a row, at least put on... Read more