Narrative Icons

 

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

One of the most useful distinctions made by people who analyse art is between an image that simply presents something, and an image that tells a story. A portrait of a king, a still life of a bowl of fruit, a simple landscape, or an icon of Christ Pantocrator asks us to contemplate a single subject. They are essentially static images, like a single object in a dark room under a spotlight. Nothing is happening, and nothing is about to happen. It’s just Him and you.

But iconography is about making a visual statement about some eternal reality, even when the image itself is a story being told. We are all familiar with the single-figure icons of course, but there are narrative icons as well. The Nativity icon is a good example of this, where a single image will have several elements of a story presented as if they’re all happening at the same visual “time”1. The format here is to have the most important thing - the Nativity itself - in the centre, with all the side adventures going on around it.

This is called “continuous narrative,” in which the same characters appear multiple times within a single image to depict successive moments in a story. Time is compressed into one pictorial space. But instead of reading left-to-right like a comic strip, the viewer follows the action throughout the composition.

This technique goes back to classical Roman art (for example, Trajan’s Column) and was taken east by Byzantine artists, where it became especially common in manuscript illumination, fresco cycles, and some icons. (Read more.)

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Blame Democrats, Not ICE, for Recent Deadly Shootings

 From Chronicles:

In the wake of recent shootings in Texas and Maine, President Trump’s mass deportation campaign hit another wall. Over the past week, two men, one from Mexico and another from Colombia, were killed during encounters with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during traffic stops.

ICE says that both of the two men, Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, were in the country illegally, but that they were not the intended targets of ICE’s operations. Critics have used these cases of mistaken identity to impugn ICE and Trump’s efforts to secure the nation’s interior. In response, ICE temporarily paused vehicle stops across the country.

However, President Trump on Wednesday used TruthSocial to reverse that policy, writing, “[W]e must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

Fatal shootings by ICE, while unfortunate, are rare. Considering the scale of ICE’s operations, the number of fatalities during these inherently dangerous operations has been very low. ICE agents have been making hundreds of arrests each day across the nation for the last 18 months, and ramped up to 2,000 arrests per day in June. Despite the intensity of its operations and the fierce public backlash, there have been only 11 deaths related to ICE enforcement operations during Trump’s second term beginning January 2025. That is compared an average of 800 people killed in the U.S. every year by police and other law enforcement officers. And yet, left-wing newspapers like The Guardian quote pro-immigrant activists about “terrifying new levels” of ICE violence. (Read more.)

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Cholera in the Mid-1800's

We recall the death of Charles X from cholera as told in the novel Madame Royale. From Geri Walton:

These 22 rules were then summed up by the author:

“By timely adoption of simple means such as these, Cholera or any other epidemic will be made to lose its venom; so true is it that ‘internal sanatory arrangements, and not quarantine and sanatory lines, are the safeguards of nations.'”

While Victorians may have thought this good advice, the bacterium responsible for Cholera was not isolated until 1854 by an Italian anatomist. Even then its exact nature was still unknown. Ultimately, attempts at understanding cholera fell upon the shoulders of a German physician and pioneering microbiologist named Robert Koch. Koch determined in 1884 that the causative agent of cholera was Vibrio cholerae. Despite his discovery and despite Cholera inoculations for humans occurring in 1885 and a Cholera vaccine being developed in July of 1892, Cholera pandemics continued to exist into the early twentieth century. (Read more.)

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Isabel of Castile and Chess

From Nobility:

Today, the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board, but it was not always this way. Nor was this piece always called “Queen.” It was the King’s “adviser,” so in the Kingdom of Bengal (India), it was called the mantri (minister); in Persia, the Vazīr (vizir); in the Arabic world, Wazīr/Firz (vizier); in Turkey, vezir; but an improvement was made when chess was brought to Catholic medieval Europe. Players began referring to this piece as the “queen,” since its initial position was right next to the king, making them the royal couple. The queen was one of the weaker pieces though. She moved just one square at a time, diagonally at that, making her less powerful than today’s bishop.

All this changed with Isabella the Catholic’s dramatic intervention in the siege of Baza, in 1489, seven years into her ten-year war of reconquest of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada.

Her husband, King Ferdinand of Aragon, was one of the best generals of his time and he had excellent generals helping him in this siege, but it all seemed “a bridge too far.” The city was too powerful, defended by a strong, 20,000-man garrison, and well provisioned to withstand the longest siege. The Catholic troops and artillery seemed woefully disproportional to the task and after six months of siege warfare, the King called his generals to a council of war, and they recommended lifting the siege and withdrawing. Before striking camp, however, Ferdinand sent a messenger to Isabella who was then at Jaen, 90 miles away. She sent back word that a retreat would demoralize all Spain. They should continue the siege and she would go herself to their assistance.

The Queen’s arrival at the camp sent the Crusaders into transports of joy and enthusiasm, while inside Baza, the Muslim garrison despaired, seeing in her arrival the fatal seal of impending doom. Three weeks later they surrendered and were given all the honors of war.

As the news of Baza’s fall was carried everywhere, the Crusaders’ enthusiasm at Isabella’s arrival at their camp reverberated throughout Spain, and among the manifestations of joy, the rules of chess were changed, with the Queen becoming a most powerful piece, sweeping and majestic in her moves. A few years later, Luis Ramírez de Lucena enshrined the new rules in Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez, the oldest printed book on chess we have today, and the new rules were here to stay. (Read more.)

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Persecution: Dems Target Christians Again

 From The Western Journal:

Roman Catholic nuns are engaged in a legal battle with New York over a state law encouraging terminally ill patients to end their lives. Becket, a law firm that tackles cases of religious freedom, filed suit last Friday. The group is asking a federal court to block the law before it goes into effect Aug. 5. Just The News said the groups represented in the suit are numerous: Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, Little Sisters of the Poor, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, Diocese of Rockville Centre and its Bishop John Barres, and other orders.

The outlet noted the law in question is the New York Medical Aid in Dying Act.

A short description of the law describes it as a way for “a terminally ill, mentally capable adult with a prognosis of 6 months or less to live to have the option to request, obtain and decide to ingest medication to die peacefully in their sleep if suffering is unbearable.”

Becket said the groups it represents cannot prescribe suicide drugs in accordance with their faith, nor can they direct patients in how to obtain them or facilitate a suicide in any way. Becket argued the law will require them to do so.

“Beginning August 5, any healthcare provider who declines to prescribe suicide pills could still have to tell terminally ill patients about their ‘right’ to kill themselves, help them meet the requirements for obtaining suicide pills, and direct them to a provider willing to prescribe the lethal drugs. Refusal invites significant fines, license revocation, or even time behind bars. (Read more.)

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The Sin of Cultural Misrepresentation Does Not Apply to Western Culture

 From Chronicles:

If any proof is needed to show that the entire progressive edifice is nothing but a strategically deployed façade designed to subvert Western culture, one needn’t look very far to find it. Still, a recent article published in Variety goes out of its way to demonstrate it. 

The piece focuses on Disney’s new live-action version of the children’s story Moana. The original 2016 animated film is a classic hero’s journey—and notably, it’s one of the few modern Disney movies that didn’t give in to the prevailing trope of treating its female lead like a girl boss to demonstrate that she is, thereby, worthy of the audience’s respect. But instead of just letting a great Polynesian story remain a compelling adventure on its own terms, Disney treats the culture the original film depicted like it’s too fragile to exist in a live-action version without the intervention of DEI box-ticking commissars. 

Instead of art, we now get identitarian policing. Experts like Dr. Grant Muãgututi’a were brought in to micromanage every piece of minutiae—from the scenery, communication, and dance moves to Moana’s specific mannerisms and traditional Mãori tribal tattoos. Everything had to be vetted—in Muãgututi’a’s words—“to ensure the tradition of respect within the culture was accurately reflected.”

Now, I have no problem with minority actors being cast in roles that authentically represent their backgrounds. We’ve come a long way, and I think we can all agree that it was ridiculous—and, admittedly, pretty hilarious—it was to see Sean Connery “Japanified” in his James Bond role or Fisher Stevens affect an exaggerated Indian accent in Short Circuit. 

But for the past decade, the Western canon has been at the mercy of revisionists and ideologues who would rather shoehorn identity politics into these stories than create anything original. This has led to the relentless race-swapping of established historical and mythological characters—yet this progressive obsession with “representation” only ever seems to flow in one direction. (Read more.)

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King Vidor and 'Duel in the Sun'

 It seems Duel is based on a novel in which Laura Belle is an alcoholic. That explains a lot. My main criticism of the film is that Laura Belle does not protect Pearl from Lewt. From SteynOnline:

The film's reputation as a (doubtless unintended) camp classic led to Paul Bartel making a loose parody of it in 1985 using Vidor's film's mocking nickname as his title, with the transvestite Divine starring alongside onetime matinee idol Tab Hunter. And yet Bartel's movie never manages to be more outlandish than Vidor's original, no matter how hard it tries.

From the outside Duel in the Sun looks like a western: there are cowboys and railroads and cattle barons and saloons and six-shooters and ranches and gunfights under the blistering sun. But there's so much more going on under the hood – a Rube Goldberg contraption of genre and style built of lurid Technicolor that makes most of John Ford (My Darling Clementine was released the same year) look like Samuel Beckett. (Read more.)

My thoughts on the film are here:

Perhaps too much of Selznick's personal life, namely his affair with the leading lady, spilled over into the production, heightening the melodrama. Yes, the film was initially banned by the Catholic Church and in several Midwestern towns. However, compared to what is now shown on prime time television, commercials included, Duel in the Sun seems wholesome and almost pristine. Since it is often shown on TCM, I thought it would be worth revisiting, especially in terms of the family dysfunction which creates an atmosphere conducive to disaster. Pearl's father Scott Chavez and Lewt and Jesse's mother Laura Belle had been in love in their youth but had been unable to marry each other. It was after the War Between the States and southerners were reduced to poverty so Laura Belle had to marry money. Both Scott and Laura Belle end up in unhappy marriages but each are too gentle to stand up to spouses who were either negligent or abusive. Unable to control his slutty wife, Scott should have at least sent Pearl to be educated at a convent or a school rather than let her run about in the streets. Laura Belle married the wealthy Yankee senator Jackson McCanles, who never got over the fact that Laura Belle deep down always loved Scott. The Senator takes Laura Belle away to his ranch, where he proceeds to torment her with sneers and reproaches. It seems they worked out their relationship problems by each taking over one of the boys. While Laura Belle raised Jesse to be a gentleman, the Senator spoiled Lewt, taking pleasure in his wild ways, almost as a way to get back at Laura Belle. As the film opens, the McCanles household is a veritable tinderbox of angers, resentments and passions, just waiting for a spark like Pearl Chavez to walk in and make it explode. One aspect of the story which irks me more and more as I grow older is how Laura Belle fails to protect Pearl from Lewt. Pearl is a conflicted child, as anyone can see at first glance. She is torn between her wanton mother and her noble father; she is torn between trying to be a lady like Laura Belle and being a floozy like her mother; she is torn between love for upright Jesse and her lust for no-good Lewt. She is obviously the type of teen age girl that a mother keeps an eye on. Laura Belle should have kept Pearl right at her side rather than let her loose on the ranch. Pearl was her own cousin and had been entrusted to her care. Since predatory Lewt made it clear that he was interested in Pearl without respecting her, Laura Belle should have taken Pearl upstairs to live. Instead, Laura Belle allows Pearl to sleep downstairs with the cowboys where it is easy for Lewt to ravish her. How can any woman be so simple-minded? But to give Laura Belle some slack, she was raised not to think ill of others and, as time went on, she taught herself to ignore the ugly side of life. She tried not to see what Lewt was becoming, and would not acknowledge that he was a reprobate until blood had already been shed. Such blindness on the part of a mother can be costly indeed. (Read more.)

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House Passes Bill to Ban Congressional Stock Trading and Require Voter ID

 From Big League Politics:

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed legislation that would prohibit members of Congress and their immediate families from trading individual stocks while also requiring photo identification for voting in federal elections.

The bill passed by a vote of 232-198, with 13 Democrats joining Republicans in support.

The legislation combines two major Republican priorities: cracking down on congressional stock trading and implementing a nationwide voter ID requirement for federal elections.

The measure, known as the Stop Insider Trading Act, was introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) and seeks to prevent lawmakers from personally profiting from information obtained through their positions in Congress.

Under the bill:

• Members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children would be prohibited from purchasing publicly traded stocks.

• Lawmakers would be required to publicly disclose planned stock sales at least seven days before they occur.

• Violations would carry penalties of $2,000 or 10% of the transaction’s value, whichever is greater, along with forfeiture of any profits earned from the trade.

Steil argued the legislation would help restore public confidence by ensuring elected officials cannot use nonpublic information for personal financial gain. (Read more.)

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Awaiting the Birth of the Silicon Antichrist

 From Chronicles:

“Technology,” we are often told, “is neither good nor bad, but merely what we make of it.” But what if technology is taking advantage of our complacency to make something of us?

What if, in fact, there really is a “ghost in the machine”? The phrase was coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949 as part of a critique of Cartesian dualism. While Ryle would no doubt have scoffed at the notion that our increasingly complex machines might come to embody autonomous minds, the idea has begun to proliferate in the age of AI and is frequently embraced by our Silicon Valley savants.

Already in the 1960s, media guru Marshall McLuhan popularized the idea that electronic technology was quickly becoming an extension of human consciousness, radically realigning our self-awareness and reshaping the social order. If McLuhan sometimes expressed mild reservations about the long-term implications of electronic media, the French thinker Jacques Ellul, a contemporary of McLuhan, was a trenchant critic of what he called “the technological illusion.” As Ellul wrote in The Technological Society (1954), “Technique has become autonomous, it has its own laws, its own evolution, and its own demands.”

Paul Kingsnorth’s latest book explores the implications of Ellul’s assertion, especially in light of the emergence of a world in which the internet has become the dominant political and social reality. In Kingsnorth’s analysis, the “Machine” (always capitalized) becomes an all-encompassing term describing the malign evolution of modernity under the influence of technological change. Artificial Intelligence, in his view, is simply the endgame in a development that began with the Industrial Revolution, though its roots in Western thought date back to Duns Scotus and the late Middle Ages. The era of the great revolutions, the rise of Progressivism, the emergence of the nation-state, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, the sexual revolution—Kingsnorth believes all of these and more are profoundly implicated as carriers of, or as products of, the tyranny of the Machine. In short, technology, which has been with us since the invention of the wheel, has in the modern era become what philosopher Eric Voegelin might have termed a “second reality” that threatens to devour our very humanity. (Read more.)

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