Last week,
a truly worthless hit piece on Rep. Michele Bachmann was published in the
LA Times. The average American newsreader is probably used to a certain amount of libertinism (yes, I do mean that) in order to inject sensationalism into their stories, but never have I read something so atrociously wrong as this, which made me feel as if it infected me with aliens that were about to bust through my chest.
Calling himself a "Culture Monster," Christopher Knight takes on the arrogant task of characterizing Bachmann in a way too obvious attempt to smear her in the public eye, but it is as if he protests too much. From the beginning, he accuses her of disliking the Renaissance and the art of the Renaissance greats. His article is a travesty of honest-to-goodness
honesty as he completely fabricates the animosity of Nancy Pearcy and Francis Schaeffer against figures such as Leonardo Da Vinci. In what anyone can recognize as extreme self-imposed ignorance, Knight fails to see from the video that he himself embeds into the article that Schaeffer both admires the philosophical journey of artist/philosophers like Leonardo, yet sees the journey's end, just as Leonardo himself did: life and philosophy eventually arrive at an empty void that humanity and the human mind alone cannot fill.
It's fairly obvious that Knight hasn't read even a page out of one of Schaeffer's or Pearcey's books. Are we to believe that an author who cannot even get a solitary concept correct in those he criticizes actually knows anything substantive about the Renaissance? Only with an agenda of evil would one dare to publish such naked vitriol against a woman who's simply running for the office of the President of the United States, for crying out loud. Our society has been telling little girls they can be whatever they want and dream big, but only the Antichrist forbid that any girl ever actually reach that place of dreams when she grows up. Journalists and authors should be praising Michele Bachmann for bucking the stereotypes of gritty, haughty women too coarse for prime time who must resort to screeching their way into political power for the substitution of affection they lack otherwise. Talk about irony walking backwards in the Midieval direction, Mr. Knight. Yeah, that would be
you.
Knight repeatedly frames Bachmann's supposed views on a subject she's never talked about in public with words of his own choosing:
o "artistic spawn"
o "Renaissance ruin"
o "ungodly error"
o "Hate the art, in other words, not the artist."
o "drivel"
o "kooky"
o "wicked Renaissance humanism"
o "Schaeffer's crazy train"
Also, not content to simply project his own words into her thoughts, he quotes from another journo-assassin,
Ryan Lizza from the
New Yorker, that Schaeffer (and thus Pearcy onto Bachmann) thinks Renaissance philosophy was "dangerous" and "blasphemous."
The
LA Times should be red-faced ashamed to have let this person publish such a mammoth-gagging piece with their name on it. It has all the sense and sensibility of a drive-by shooting. Not only does the author misunderstand everything that Francis Schaeffer stood for in his ministry, valuing art and teaching on the perspective of artists, but goes on to attribute the care and thoughtfulness of such a scholar like him to
insanity. The entire article is as if it is the result of what happens when garbage smokes dope and then vomits on a keyboard. The earth would be greener indeed if such energy wasting dopehead garbage were never conceived to pollute the net with its inanity. However,
hate the idiocy, "in other words,"
not the idiot.
The probability of a chimpanzee smashing its fists on a keyboard and pounding out a fairer article on Michele Bachmann is infinitely higher than Christopher Knight's inane and vacuous treatment of not one, two, but three intelligent and accomplished Americans of faith. Has Christopher Knight even cracked one of the books he's bashed? I think his response to recommended reading would be the phrase of the day:
resist we much. Knight should go write about some wet t-shirt contest somewhere on a college campus. That's the level of journalistic responsibility he appears capable of maintaining.
I join others like Doug Groothuis in calling for a Renaissance of reading. Those who claim to love the Renaissance of history should avoid absolute hypocrisy by reading Francis Schaeffer themselves. Some of Schaeffer's titles include:
The God Who Is There
He Is There and He Is Not Silent
Art and the Bible
True Spirituality
