October 6, 2008 12:09 PM

 

The Emperor Has Clothing, Unfortunately

As I was listening to this morning's crushing stock market news, another headline picture jumped out at me. It looked like some sort of new science fiction movie, but it was just Pierre Cardin's new spring/sumer line.

I like to look for connections, and I believe there is a tie between our economic free fall and our cultural free fall. I suspect fashion designers lunge at the outrageous to get attention, and my daughters assure me that no sane woman ever wears this stuff, unless they are getting paid for it, but the very idea of even proposing it seems anti-human to me. Keep in mind, I'm posting the whimsical stuff; a lot of high fashion you couldn't post on a family friendly site, because some of it, frankly, looks as though it comes out of the leather-and-chain-and-pain tradition.

A culture that sees the body as worth mocking, worth inflating, and pinching and bruising and, yes, marking up with colored needles and covering with quilted blue space suits is a culture, at heart, saying to God, "we don't care if we are made in your image; we're going to mock and insult that image; we don't like your creation. We're making another." To be certain, there is fashion that compliments the body, but there is also a dismissive, limp-wristed hatred of the body that expresses itself in what can only be called artistic mockery.

These days, there is a vigorous anti-God movement going on, brought on, I believe, by the violent outrages of Islamic jihadists, but the anti-God movement is older than Voltaire. St. Paul saw it as an eternal expression of those who see the complexity of the creation and still reject their Creator, when he wrote, "the fool says in his heart there is no God."

That dim-witted crowd--the anti-God crowd--see any law rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition as mere superstition to be replaced with reason, but they don't seem to understand the value of the axiomatic, with or without God. One way of understanding the "axiomatic" is to simply affirm that some things are not up for a vote, or even a discussion. If a panel of "scholars" began discussing the merits of killing all five year olds, as a way of reducing long term carbon emissions, we would react with horror. The Judeo-Christian tradition has made that horror axiomatic, but pre-Christian cultures have routinely offered up innocents for slaughter to appease a cruel mother nature God. Christianity put an end to that--by defining a new axiom.

The same dim-wit, Godless crowd that wants to redefine marriage--away from the axiomatic version of man and woman--would be horror-struck at the notion of calling for sanctioned dishonesty in the financial markets. Imagine there were a group of financial consultants who said, in effect, "..it is hopelessly Victorian of you, and puritanical, to demand that we tell the truth about our financial products; we make our living by being dishonest---and what's more that dishonesty is good, because it weeds lazy investors from the market place." Just as gays have called for the recognition of a different kind of love, liars could call for a different kind of truth, which is really just the same old falsehood.

When you start playing with a culture's axioms, you start creating consequences you won't be able to predict very readily. When I was a teenager, the godless crowd was telling my generation that modern science had cured the problem of sexually-transmitted disease. All anyone had to do was avail themselves of the science. But wait! Along came the AIDS plague and the realization that man can only mock God's laws for so long, without paying the piper.

We got rid of Sunday laws years ago. We've come so far that some people even get mad at us--Riley's Farm--for closing on Sunday, but if today's financial leaders were in church on Sunday, (receiving real moral instruction as opposed to seeker-friendly pap), would we be in today's financial mess? If fashion designers were really looking to God, would Pierre Cardin have made a fortune?

And would that poor woman up top look like two slices of a blue nylon pizza?

 

More of the Farm Journal -- October 5, 2008