'The Ecstasy of Owen Muir' by Ring Lardner, Jr.

A slow and often quite work and though it is undoubtedly a satire I was often in confusion as whether to take it in truth and often caught myself contemplating it in all seriousness. Frequently I was reminded of John Kennedy Toole’s ‘A Confederacy of Dunes’, yet unlike Ignatius J. Reily, Owen Muir loses his mounds of flesh and trades his own worldview for that of the Catholic Churchs. The work is a meditation on the rise fundamentalist extremes in the United States during the 60’s, with the specific example of Catholicism, socialism /nationalism and capitalism, each representing a broader social construct, namely religion, politics and economics. In our times we can see the same trends reflected in the rise of religious conservative Tony Abbott*, the debate surrounding climate change and the global financial crisis. Whilst stuck at a church the other night I came upon an article associating socialism with Christianity, it went so far as to draw similarities between the figure of Christ and Che Guevara, ‘[T]rue Christianity is not interested in mere shaping of society. It seeks nothing less than the total overthrow of all gods till Christ rules in every heart’. They proved my point for me.

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‘“You”- to Owen- “talk a lot about love of God, and you”- to Couto- “defend yourself on the grounds of love of country. But God is an abstraction that means one thing to one person and nothing at all to somebody else, and it’s only guesswork whether He gives a damn if we love Him or not. As for love of country, it always gets mixed up with love of a particular government that happens to be in power, and it can be used to justify anything from napalm bombing to making Jews into soap”’.

*when I originally wrote this Mr Abbott was not yet the elected leader of the opposition party, a current example would be the Tea Party protests or the banning of the burka in France, which also demonstrate the crossover of these extremes into one another, in both support and opposition