The Catholic Butter Battle

I feel like a kid watching a water-balloon fight. I’m tired of it. Here I go. And I’m not joking. I am being very, very serious.

Time to throw some rocks into this water-balloon fight.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Dr. Seuss’ seminal text, The Butter Battle Book, here is a quick re-cap: The Yooks and the Zooks are at war over which side to butter one’s toast: Up or down?

While the book is something of a political commentary on the Cold War—that was supposedly banned from certain libraries for some time—it also shows two sides as mirror images of each other in their discourse of martial reciprocity. In that respect, it is not hard to see how it can be read as a description of the current, raging, Catholic butter battle between the butter-side-righters and the butter-side-lefters.

The difference here is that the Yooks and Zooks had their fictional existence at stake. The cliffhanger ending has them facing mutual destruction.

Clearly, this non-fiction, Catholic blog version is not this serious. My sense of the whole affair is this:

I was at first very intrigued by Catholic Fascist and thought about writing there. My intellectual hero, William James, often wrote anonymously (under the pseudonym, ignoramus). I thought that I would too.

But I had no time. I still have very little, at least less than I am used to. As my scarcity of time took me to the sidelines, I watched things develop. Today, I viewed a slightly funny video about Vox-Nova posted at The America Catholic.

As these Catholic butter battles progress, I am beginning to find the whole thing pretty silly. Sadly, its not silly enough to sustain itself—the humor and satire is second or third—and, in some cases, fourth—rate.

(If you want to see first-class satire, (re)read Minion’s epic The Good Pope and the Bad Advisers — a Fable by George Weigel.)

Like the mindless faithful who find FOX NEWS or MSNBC regularly intriguing, the humor is (falsely) amplified by those who already share sympathies for the message, on the one hand, or it is rejected as unfunny and offensive by those who, again, already felt that way in the first place, on the other.

Like it or not—and despite the fact that this is not completely fair or true—this blog has become a partisan by its perception, even while its work as a whole is clearly not partisan. Even as we protest against liberalism time and time again, I am cannot deny that we are the token “liberal blog.”

A token. That hurts. But its true. That’s really all these sites are, for the most part.

Furthermore, all of this silliness exacerbates the serious problem that the Catholic church in the United States is beset by: indifference because those who “care”—all of us here reading and writing with guilty pleasure, in other words— are stupefyingly childish and unserious.

For instance, the butter-side-righters like to call the butter-side-lefters “sissies.” This is mostly true, in fact, many butter-side-lefters take this a compliment and a sign of piety.

At the same time, some of the toughest talking butter-side-righters out there are hardly kicking ass for Jesus or Life or whatever. In other words, if Joe Hargrave and friends are really so pissed off at how soft we have become, then, they had better be hard in the converse sense that they mean soft; they should be the opposite of a “sissy” as they whale away at their keyboard, like I am.

I have a buddy from undergrad who I think is outright crazy a lot of the time, but he goes to Washington and storms in on judicial hearings and makes security forcibly remove him. He also is a tough rugby player and a very good wrestler. He doesn’t blog though. He wouldn’t fare well here, for better and worse reasons.

(By the way: I would welcome anyone on either side to a stop bye for a rugby or wrestling match with a debate to follow, formal-like or over beer and cigarettes. I’m game for both. I would enjoy it and likely become good friends with whoever showed up. Now, my fellow butter-side-lefters might be choking on indignation considering the patriarchal implications of inviting physical confrontation. So be it. Such a reading would be simplistic and paranoid to begin with. Plus, tell me: How many women are throwing water balloons? If anything, this points to the genius of women!)

My point is this: The Catholic butter battle is not only a parody of blogs of little consequence. It is also parody of the parody that passes as discourse in an impoverished, alienated, and overstimulated anti-culture that we live in.

What are the alternatives? Probably, to do something I have put off for too long: Go on retreat.

Consequently, I will be taking some time off from Vox-Nova and the blogosphere in general, at least until this butter battle settles down.

As I have time and motivation, and as my colleagues here are willing to put up with me, I will submit some essays and information on related publications from time to time.

Maybe this is too dramatic. Maybe the joke’s on me. Maybe everyone knows that this is silly and stupid and I am the fool who took it to be authentic.

If that is the case, then, I’ll be the fool.

Peace and good.

Sam