Musings Of An Indie Writer| « |
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Tuesday, September 28, 2004
The Beauties And The Beasts
November 29, 2002
Many things are made clear by the reactions of mediocrity to excellence, of meanness to magnanimity, of shadow to substance.
Excellence is perennially resented by the nobodies of the world. It stands above the common run, shining through the enduring shadow over the human condition: a perfect target for everything from calumny to mass murder. The al-Qaeda fanatics targeted the World Trade Center with their stolen airplanes, not a fast-food restaurant in some obscure suburb.
Generosity is equally visible, and equally anathema to those who have not the will to reach beyond the narrow confines of self. The man who gives greatly of himself will inevitably be hated by the grasping and meritless he strides past, especially if he asks nothing from them.
What is real and tangible is forever under assault by the purveyors of illusion. However seductive its form and enticing its promises, illusion cannot bear the approach of the real; it dispels at the slightest touch.
These past weeks have seen a remarkable tragedy unfold, as inevitably and inexorably as the acts of a Greek drama. There was no doubt that the placement of the Miss World contest in Nigeria, a country riven by ethnic and religious strife, rapidly undergoing conversion to yet another Islamic hellhole, would blossom in blood. And indeed, as we watched, precisely that occurred, ostensibly triggered by an innocent line in a newspaper article about the contest.
The Left’s mouthpieces in the West are beside themselves with glee. Beauty pageants are quintessentially Western events. To the leftist, the insertion of the Miss World pageant into backward, poverty-stricken Nigeria smacks of condescension and colonialism. And after two days of continuous rioting and the spilling of Christian blood by Muslim mobs, some Christians lost their self-control and responded in kind, creating the first counterclaim Muslims could lay against Christianity since World War I at least. It could only have been better if the violent Christians had been American tourists.
The New York Times’s article on the event was headlined, “Religious Violence in Nigeria Drives Out Miss World Event.” “It spoke nonspecifically of “the tinderbox of religious passions in the country.” The religious are uniformly prone to rampaging through the streets killing persons of other faiths and burning down their churches, as the Times would have it.
The Islamic world blames the entire affair on the pageant, with a smidgen left over for Isioma Daniel, the newswriter who dared suggest that the Prophet Muhammad might have chosen a Miss World contestant for his wife. According to the Muslims’ beloved hadith of his life, Muhammad ranged freely among both Muslims and their conquered subjects, taking women to his bed regardless of their age, origins, or willingness to go, so this seems a defensible statement.
Gender-war feminists have blended this poison with their inveterate hatred of female beauty, and have managed to condemn the Miss World pageant without ever mentioning the Muslims that set blood running in Nigeria’s gutters over it. To the Germaine Greers of the world, the whole thing should be laid at the door of men’s unspeakable lust and the capitalistic tendency to pander to it. All this while radical feminist Boston College professor Mary Daly, recently shorn of her tenure for refusing to allow male students in her Women’s Studies courses, has been advocating the elimination of the male gender.
All the usual suspects are in the picture, regardless of which side of the lens you’re on.
I have long held that, whatever profit it might gain, a beauty pageant is a noble and generous thing. A horde of young women put themselves through extraordinary regimens of training, diet, beautification and grooming. They present themselves to the world shorn of all protection, allowing millions to enjoy the results of their dedication, for the slenderest possible chance of fortune and fleeting fame.
Only one man in a thousand has an even-money chance of ever speaking to such a radiant creature, but for a little while we can marvel at the heights to which femininity can rise, and fantasize a little about making it our own.
But the Left, quite as much as its newest mascot, the war ideology called Islam, would never let such a thing pass unvilified. It’s too happy, too redolent of health, too whole. As acclaimed fiction writer Ursula LeGuin once wrote in describing one of the incidental victims of a socialist state,
He had been a handsome man, when they married fourteen years ago. A handsome, happy man, proud and kind, very good at his work. There had been a splendor to him, a wholeness.That was gone. There was no more room in the world for whole people, they took up too much space. What she had done to him was only a part of the general program for cutting him and people like him down to size, for chopping and paring and breaking up, so that in the texture of life nothing large, nothing hard, nothing grand should remain.
I think of claws and teeth. I think of the mindless rage of wallowing beasts who see a higher creature rise above them, perhaps from their own numbers. I think of the shock of seeing excellence and beauty, and the envy that burns in stunted souls when generosity walks among them, and their anguish at the shattering of their precept that no such thing is possible save at their expense. The urge to mass with one’s fellow mediocrities, to set upon the exceptional one, to rend and tear him until nothing but shreds remain, follows quite naturally.
The colors might vary, but all beasts in human garb, including the beasts of the Left and the beasts of Islamic rage, are “of a feather.” Beauties, beware.
Comments
Well said. The “dog in the manger” instinct is all too prevalent.
Muslim terrorists just had to use pages from the Bible as toilet paper during their hostage-taking exercise in the Church of the Nativity.
Hamas just had to turn a synagogue into a museum for weapons used against Israeli occupation forces.
Posted by Col. Bunny on 09/25/2005 at 11:02 PM
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