Pope, Gods of Olympus, Drop a Deuce on the Elfen King

Europe’s George Washington, speaking at Berlin’s once-Commie-run Pergamon museum tried to sum up European values. George Weigel tried to sum up Van Rompuy:

Here is the post-modern theory of the triumph of “narrative” run so far amok that it becomes self-parody. Putting aside the question of whether, on present demographic trends, there will be all that many “children and grandchildren” to whom to tell stories of Attic courage, or the figure-skating gold medals of Sonja Henie, or the fall of the Bastille, or the breaching of the Berlin Wall, Van Rompuy’s European Story Hour is just that: a disconnected conglomeration of “narratives” telling no one compelling tale.

That’s because he was prattling on about “diversity” as if one could celebrate a stationary object, something that just IS, invoked Homer, yadda, yadda, yadda, thus as newly redefined virtues:

Courage, respect, responsibility, tolerance, a sense of the common good.

Evidence of which are hard to find.

The simpler question still is asked by Weigel:

What, in fact, is “Europe”?

The irony is that one cannot even begin to hint at an answer to this question without receiving a raft of complaints that one might alienate someone.

Coming on the heels of another notable address, the Pope appears to retort Herman’s drivel:

But Europe must also reclaim the fullness of the riches of her civilizational patrimony: “not only the Biblical . . . but also the classical, the medieval, and the modern, the matrix from which the great philosophical, literary, cultural, and social masterpieces of Europe were born.” Thus “the Europe of science and technology, the Europe of civilization and culture, must be at the same time a Europe open to transcendence and fraternity with other continents, and open to the living and true God, starting with the living and true man.”

By “true, living man”, I don’t think he meant “the animation you feel when your welfare payment clears at the bank.