Monday Miscellany 5/1/23

A new religious holiday, recruiting gamers into the military, and Johnny Rotten as model husband.

Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday

Did you celebrate Earth Day on April 22? I didn’t think so. Paul Greenberg and Carl Safina, writing in Time Magazine, lament that the holiday proclaimed 53 years ago in 1970, does not get the observance that it deserves. They propose turning Earth Day in a bona fide religious holiday with all of the trappings–special foods, hymns, a holy book–indeed, that the day become the center of an entire “earth-reverent belief system.”

They suggest recovering “the nature-centered origins of our existing religious holidays”–Christmas and Hanukkah at the winter solstice, Easter and Passover with the arrival of Spring–and “reframe these holidays as days of thanks for what the natural world gives.” “Next, we might look at what religions do to help us form community and mark life’s important benchmarks: birth, maturity, marriage, and death,” they say. “What if we were to come to celebrate these benchmarks for what they are biologically?”

Earth Day, they say, also deserves its own Bible.

What if a book like that existed for the Earth? What if it were replete with hymns to this world of the living? What if it contained the stories of the prophets of natural earth knowledge—Darwin and Carson, Galileo and Humboldt? What if we came to mark those discoveries as the gradual opening of consciousness to the laws of nature. . . .What if we used that book not to scold our children into following commandments but rather to light a path forward that encouraged discovery and reverence, and gratitude for the relationships that are this planetary spaceship’s life-support?

Frankly, I don’t think a religion built around nature has a chance. Nature is the last concern of our contemporary belief system–with its rejection of objective reality, its insistence that the body has nothing to do with a person’s self-determined gender, its preoccupation with technology, and its attempts to separate sex from reproduction. This is true even of environmentalists, including Greenburg and Safina, who say they love nature in the sense of trees and wildlife, but exclude humans from nature. Thus, their proposed rite of marriage would be the occasion “to remind young couples to consider the burden children place upon the planet.” Don’t have children! Don’t reproduce! What would the Prophet Darwin say?

Recruiting Video Gamers for Our Military

Video games are said to offer “realistic” simulations of combat. That is said usually by people who have never experienced actual combat. But the Pentagon has been advertising on game sites to recruit gamers into the military.

Now the top brass is embarrassed that one of these recruits, Jack Teixeira, who was apparently slotted into IT work for his computer prowess, but who is still spending his time on the game sites, has been leaking top secret reports on the Ukraine war to impress his gaming buddies. It turns out, this has happened before with other gamers.

Veteran Rob Henderson has written a piece for the Free Press (behind a paywall) entitled What Your Country Can Do for You. He notes that the military is facing a crisis in its failure to meet its recruitment goals. But “by abandoning its old standards and appealing to more selfish ends, the military has exposed itself to the likes of Jack Teixeira.”

He laments the drop-off in appeals to patriotism. Though that’s understandable, since 40% of Generation Z believes as it has been taught, that the American Founders were villains rather than heroes. I would add that the Pentagon’s “woke” initiatives is putting off the young people who are patriots who used to be its best candidates.

And recruiting advertising slogans like “Be all that you can be” appeal to values that contradict the military virtues of unit cohesion and self-sacrifice. Alluding to JFK’s famous challenge, Henderson observes,

Recruitment campaigns seldom appeal to higher values, or to the history of the United States and its innumerable achievements. Rather, they appeal to the self. More and more young people are asking not what they can do for their country, but what their country can do for them.

Johnny Rotten and Other Devoted Husbands

You do know that celebrities are mostly putting on an act, don’t you? Johnny Rotten, among the most rebellious and anarchic figures of the 1980s punk rock scene, turns out to have been a devoted husband and family man. His wife of 44 years, Nora Forster, died last month at the age of 80 from Alzheimer’s. Mr. Rotten, a.k.a. John Lydon, lovingly attended to his wife throughout her disease until her death.

Steve Beard tells the story of their marriage in a moving Federalist piece entitled How A Rotten Sex Pistol And His Wife Modeled Life-Long Commitment In A Rocky World. He also cites some other hard rockers with outrageous persona who have strong, long-term marriages: “Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne have been married for 42 years, while Alice and Sheryl Cooper recently celebrated their 47th wedding anniversary.”

A quote from Beard’s story: “When I make a commitment it’s forever and I stand by that and I’m very proud to do the best I can for her.”