T he New Yorker magazine recently got into all sorts of trouble for its satirical front cover cartoon depicting Barack Obama as an orthodox Muslim and his wife, Michelle, as a terrorist. Some people, it seems, simply can't take a joke. G. K. Chesterton could. Which is a good thing in that the British writer was the subject of a long and critical essay in the preceding issue of The New Yorker, in which the great man was accused of anti-Semitism and his Catholic religion painted with a strong, dull coat of condemnation.Read the whole article, it's pretty good.
It goes to Chesterton's reputation and influence that he's still being vilified even though he died in 1936. The dead only matter if they once spoke the truth.
H/T: David Z.
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A good article, even though he waffles a bit towards the end on the anti-Semitism charges.
ReplyDeleteAt least somebody is standing up for G.K.C.
ReplyDelete+JMJ+
ReplyDeleteI heard someone say that before the Second World War, you'd be hard pressed to find people who weren't "anti-semitic" by today's standards.
How ironic that Uncle Gilbert should be posthumously judged by an ideal that was changed long after his death--for didn't he warn us about how progress doesn't mean the changing of the ideal?