Nonexistent Vatican documents we wish we’d dreamed up first, “translated” by Maurice F.X. McNulty in the Chicago-based Critic (Summer): “Catholic tradition has constantly taught that only the right hand may properly engage in manual activities. The left hand must remain curbed and passive or, at most, ancillary and subservient to the right hand, analogous to the function of a palette in respect to an artist, or the operation of a dustpan to a broom, or the role of a wife in relation to her husband. Hence, the use of the left hand, either principally or indiscriminately along with the right, has always been held to be…an unnatural vice…. Manual activity may be undertaken only by right-handed people within the context of a lifelong commitment to right-handedness…. Sinistrals, that is left-handed people, should always be made to feel the depth of compassion that the Church wishes to extend to all contemptible deviates.”
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The “powerful Christian right” is a paper tiger, argues David Frum in the New Republic (September 12). “Three years ago the country was riven by a controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts: Should taxpayers have to pay naked women to smear themselves with chocolate? Should a crucifix submerged in urine collect government money when no other crucifix could? The answer to both questions: Yes. All the NEA artists blackballed by the Bush administration have jumped back on the public payroll. If the Christian right couldn’t win that one, it can’t win anything.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
