Hillary Clinton’s sniper tale is a good example of the postmodernist mindset at work: She constructed a narrative to advance her power agenda. This is legitimate, according to postmodernists, since the objectivity of truth is an illusion and, as her campaign aide put it, everyone’s perceptions are different.

My question to you is, what are some other outbreaks of the postmodernist mentality during this presidential campaign? You can draw from Mrs. Clinton, but also Barack Obama, John McCain, and any of the losing candidates from either party. (I’m thinking of doing an article on the subject, so I’m asking you to help me out.)

The California appeals court that outlawed homeschooling has decided to vacate the ruling. That doesn’t mean overturning it. Rather it means the court will reconsider the case. See here for details.

In case you missed it, Tickletext, in his comment on Grunewald’s Easter painting, posted this poem by John Updike, who is one of our most distinguished and critically acclaimed contemporary authors and a Christian (brought up Lutheran, now an Episcopalian), and yet hardly any Christians read him because his novels have so much sex in them! But treasure this:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter”

A Touchstone article criticizes children’s Bible story books that take out the scariness that is in the Bible, looking particularly at the treatments of Jonah and the whale. The author, Ronald F. Marshall, argues that the scary parts are necessary for the child to realize the Gospel in those stories. See Eaten Alive.

First David Mamet, now Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, turns away in revulsion from 1960’s-era radicalism to find his inner conservative. Read 1968: The year of the posturing rebel.