Why NOR ads aim to offend

I never thought I would make many friends by defending the New Oxford Review or its editor, Dale Vree, on this blog, but I honestly did not expect quite the flood of objections that filled the comment box to my post of February 4, 2006: "Dale Vree, God's Faithful Pit Bull: Show Some Respect!" I did not call Vree "irreproachable," as one of my commentators seemed to misquote me as saying. I granted possible "indiscretions of tact." I did call him a "Pit Bull," after all. I granted that I disagreed with some of his positions, but thought it a good thing to allow myself to be challenged on those positions by Vree, especially where he (and not I) agreed with the late Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. For I grant that I could be mistaken and he could be right on, say, the Iraq War, or the Bush administration's position on abortion. I also did suggested, however, that as to intent and substance, Vree is God's faithful Pit Bull, and therein lay the bone of contention.

What particularly struck me, though, was how often the rhetoric used by Vree is rhetoric directed to a specific religious argument, whereas the rhetoric used against Vree and NOR tends to be personal ad hominem rancor and invective. Again, though the comparison itself may evoke yet further protests from not a few individuals, I can't help recalling how Socrates' own contemporaries hated him for what they mistakenly and misleadingly called his "sophistry" -- essentially, his "shtick" -- and condemned him for his "impiety," his "disrespect" for their conventions and traditions, his "corrupting" influence, his "impropriety" in civil society, and the like. Yet again, I trust you'll bear in mind my previous caveats: I do not know whether Vree, like Socrates, is great or misunderstood, though I leave open the possibility that he could well be both.

My main motivation in defending NOR is that I have consistently found its journalism of unique value over the past decades, and I have felt it (and its editor) unjustly -- I repeat UNJUSTLY -- maligned and marginalized over the last few years by people who are not regular readers of NOR, who are not familiar with its writings or with its editor's perspective or aims. In some cases, they give little impression of knowing what they are even talking about.

Let me begin my discussion of NOR ads with an analogy from abortion. What do you do when you're surrounded by the Culture of Death, and nobody seems to care? What do you do when you see in your own town or city one of those neatly manicured abortion "clinics" (better: abortuaries) that dot the country where over 4000 lives are snuffed out daily in these United States, and nobody seems to care? I wonder if any of you remember that news story -- probably over a decade ago now -- when a garbage truck was rounding a corner (was it in Boston?) and spilled out several burst bagfulls of baby parts from an abortion clinic in an intersection, leaving horrified passersby staring in nauseated disbelief, clasping their hands to their mouths, several of them vomiting on the sidewalks. When reality breaks through, it's not nice. Reality isn't pretty sometimes. Despite this -- or because of this, depending on your point of view -- some pro-lifers have taken to producing large posters of aborted and dis-membered infants to show the world the reality of abortion for what it is. Many of these signs were in evidence at the national March for Life in Washington, DC, earlier this January. There is even a group of pro-life truckers who pull rigs with large images of aborted infants on the sides of their trucks.

Now, what do you do when Catholic culture is in crisis, and society as a whole is on the greased skids and picking up momentum on its downward slide to hell? As I said in an article on the state of the Church in 2005: "The results of Catholic catechesis over the past forty years have been dismal. We Catholics, both laity and clergy, are all too often abysmally ignorant of our own Tradition. For more than two generations now, we have been robbed of the fullness of Catholicism, which is our birthright. With a few thankful exceptions, our collective acquaintance with Scripture is piecemeal, our knowledge of Tradition is pathetic, our hymns are embarrassing, our religious art is ugly, our churches look like U.N. meditation chapels, our ethics are slipshod, and our aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities are so far from being sublime that they almost look ridiculous." (Source)

There are many possible answers, just as there are with the abortion crisis. But one possible answer is that one may try a little "reality therapy," which may be ... well, shocking. This is how I understand the aim of NOR ads, and specifically why they aim to offend or shock in the way they do -- and it's NOR ads I'm limiting myself to discussing in this post. I would only ask of my readers that they follow the logic of the following simple argument through to its final conclusion. There are three steps.

Step 1. One of the most oft-cited examples of an offensive NOR ad is one that came up again in the latest issue or NOR (February 2006), which ran in the late 1990s and carried the following text:

Liberal opinion has long regarded the Catholic Church as something like the Whore of Babylon. But nowadays liberals feel compassion for whores, would love to see prostitution legalized and whores unionized from sea to shining sea, with the Department of Health and Human Services running the whorehouses. So there's a little problem: How can liberals continue to hate the Church when they themselves embrace whoredom -- indeed, would love to make every woman a whore? Consider the rest of the liberal utopia: rauncy sex ed, titillating TV shows and movies, free condoms for every teenager, free abortions in case the condoms fail, full rights and benefits for shack-ups, same-sex 'marriage' (helps devalue the currency of real marriage, you know), and adultery a matter of privacy not character. So yes, the liberal vision is: Every gal a slut.

Step 2. One could imagine the palpable gasps emanating from the readership of say, the New York Times, or at least that part of it that shared the presuppositions of those who write that parish magazine of affluent and self-congratulatory liberal enlightenment, had they read such language (pace Alasdair MacIntyre). Good respectable liberal folk just don't say such things. But these ads were not carried by the New York Times. These ads were carried, among other journals, by First Things in its November 1998 issue. In the subsequent (December) issue, First Things editor, Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus, wrote:

The [NOR] ad that ran in our November [1998] issue was simply beyond the pale. Whatever the derelictions of liberalism, and they are many, it is simply not true, as the ad claimed, that 'liberals ... would make every woman a whore' and embrace the goal of 'Every gal a slut.' I did not see the ad in advance and I apologize for its appearance.

Now my bet is that many of my readers -- if previous comment boxes are any indication -- feel the same way as Neuhaus about the NOR ad -- that it's simply "beyond the pale." Yet again, in the November 2005 issues of First Things, Neuhaus says that NOR ads are "repugnant," and that "those advertisements, like much that appears in the magazine [the NOR], are mean-spirited, malicious, in violation of good taste, and seriously false." (p. 75) Now, hold your applause. We're not done yet.

Step 3. Neuhaus's remarks in the December 1998 issue of First Things elicited two letters of protest in the March 1999 issue. Cherie J. Guelker of Arnold, Maryland, writes:

I make a point of reading the New Oxford Review ads because I find them entertaining and enjoy their deliberate outrageousness.... Even so, I too was taken aback at first by the statements to which he [Neuhaus] objects so strenuously -- 'liberals ... would love to make every woman a whore' and embrace the goal of 'Every gal a slut.' However, upon consideration, I decided that this shocking language reflected a reality that needs to be confronted. Father Neuhaus' pained reaction can eve be considered a symptom of the disease the New Oxford Review is attacking in its ad.... The point the New Oxford Review is making in the ad is that liberals have consistently and successfully pressed for changes in our society that transform conduct that once caused women to be condemned as 'whores' and 'sluts' into behavior to be accepted and even encouraged as healthy. Poisonous liberal maxims permeate our culture: ... 'Women must be free to explore their sexuality' offers women unbounded sexual license.... Armed with sex education, contraception, and abortion, liberals have encouraged women not only to be 'sluts' and 'whores,' but baby-killers as well.... Virgins must defend their virginity against accusations of being sexual freaks. The assumption is that healthy adolescents and adults will be sexually active. Homosexuals ask why they should be chaste when no one else is expected to be. These are the fruits of the liberal agenda.... The rest of us are to be understanding and not 'judgmental,' much less condemnatory. So much so that the very use of the terms 'slut' and 'whore,' even in hyperbolic advertisement, is [considered by Neuhaus to be] 'mean-spirited, malicious,' and 'violative of good taste.' ... But to accuse it [the ad] of being 'seriously false' is to fail to come to terms with the very real truth behind its hyperbole and, innocently or not, to pander to the liberal sensiblities.

The second letter was from Leland D. Peterson from Norfolk, Virginia, who writes:

Is there no place for hyperbole in advertising copy? I was led to subscribe to the New Oxford Review by the wit and hyperbole of the ads, which I thought was amusing. I still find them so. Truth through exaggeration is a time-hallowed rhetorical device.

So ... why does Vree have to call prostitutes "whores"? Well, perhaps because that's what they really are? I know in The Netherlands they're trying to make a respectable career of prostitution, where it's not only legalized but state regulated and controlled by the department of public health. I've heard stories of husbands dropping off their wives in Amsterdam's red light district and kissing them goodbye before they begin their day's work. But how does that change the fact that a woman who sells her body for money is a "whore"? Why should we want to dress up the profession as something dignified and respectable. It's not. It goes without saying this is raunchy language. But go back and read what the NOR ad says. It describes the world we've come to inhabit -- a world, indeed, of "rauncy sex ed, titillating TV shows and movies, free condoms for every teenager, free abortions in case the condoms fail, full rights and benefits for shack-ups, same-sex 'marriage,' and adultery a matter of privacy, not character." Have we grown so complacent with the illusion that these things are acceptable that we find it offensive and shocking when someone calls a thing by its proper name?

As Tony Campolo once said, "I have three things I'd like to say ... First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night." (Source)