Something else on Ash Wednesday, admittedly two weeks late: Lutheran pastor Gregory Alms’ essay on Ash Wednesday, originally published in the Concordia Theological Quarterly. It begins:

Ash Wednesday is the story of a marriage. It is the account of an unlikely union.  Humanity and the soil are the improbable partners. The tale of these Ash Wednesday nuptials stretches back to Genesis, chapters two through eight. The earth is the silent but crucial character in these opening chapters. The key to each of these stories and the key to Ash Wednesday is the dirt.

One insight from the paper I found particularly helpful:

This narrative of the union of man and the earth is played out liturgically on Ash Wednesday. It is a quick, repetitive  moment of ritual: ashes, the motion of a cross, and a few words. Yet by it, we are placed directly into the foundational narrative of humanity. This imposition of ashes is not pedagogical. On the first day of Lent, we are not “told” about creation or taught the doctrinal import of the fall or the story of Cain. In fact, the appointed readings for the day ignore the opening chapters of the Jewish Bible. What Ash Wednesday does is place us in the story. We become actors in the narrative. The story happens to us in a visceral, tactile way.

Here, for those of  you who are interested, are his “On the Square” essays Small Towns, Santa Claus and the Christmas Wars, and On Being a Pallbearer.

A good day for devoted readers of Hadley Arkes’ work and for anyone concerned with the natural law and its expression in American public life. The Claremont Institute has launched Right Reason, a “journal dedicated to the application of natural law reasoning to past and current court cases.” It is a project of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the Jurisprudence of Natural Law, which Hadley directs.

And such a site is needed, given the intellectual dominance of a way of thinking about the law not only divorced from but hostile to any suggestion that some things are right and wrong and the law ought to express that fact. As the Center’s statement of purpose says:

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes offered the voice for the modern project in law when he expressed his hope-and his surety-that “every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether.” Holmes would raise the banner of legal “positivism”: the law did not find its ground in truths about the nature of right and wrong; it acquired its standing as law because it was “posited,” enacted by the people with the power to have their edicts treated with the force of law. In that way, Holmes would mark the radical break from the principles of the American Founding. . . .

The result: We have now brought forth a generation of lawyers and judges who explain their judgments by giving us clever spirals of theories, all safely detached from anything that would give a coherent moral account of the “wrong” they are trying to reach, and the “justice” they would render.

And these lawyers and judges include some of the most eminent of conservative legal thinkers, notably Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. Readers wanting a longer and deeper exposition of the philosophy underlying Right Reason, and one that pointedly addresses these conservatives even more than liberal legal thinkers, should read Hadley’s A Natural Law Manifesto. The American founding, he insists there,

and the second Constitution it brought forth, found its telos, its central purpose, in the securing of natural rights, the rights that had to be there even before a government came into place. That understanding of the regime could not be explained without the recognition then of moral truths, of standards of moral judgment that had to be there before we could even conceive a Constitution. . . . But that brought us back instantly to the N-word: nature. As Aristotle taught at the beginning, the defining mark of the polis was the presence of law, and law sprang from the nature of only one kind of creature. . . .

The American Founders understood that there was nothing distinctly American then about the idea of a rule of law, or the principles that barred ex post facto laws, or established the wrongness of bills of attainder. They understood that these principles would not be brought into being by the Constitution they were framing. Those principles had to be in place as guidance in our framing of a legal structure. The founders knew they could draw then on what Blackstone called the “laws of Nature and reason.”

“This is July 16, 1990,” says a recognizably midwestern voice, as the camera focuses on a thin, dour young man in clerical clothes sitting in front of an altar, “and habemus papem. We have a pope.” So begins Pope Michael, a weird, intriguing, and distressing documentary about a young man in a small town in rural eastern Kansas who, after being elected by six people, a group that included his parents and himself, claimed to be the Bishop of Rome.

The director plays it straight, telling the story of a man, his mother, and his two followers who are as he depicts them good, kind, likeable people. But that makes their story even more distressing, because the man’s claim to be the pope is just . . . just crackers. What must it be like to go through life thinking you’re the pope?

Here is the original short documentary. There is another one I’ve seen but can’t track down explaining the election.

Another Lent is at our throats. At least that’s the way it feels. William F. Buckley is said to have answered someone who asked if he liked writing, “I like having written,” and that is my feeling about Lent. I like having done it.

I would commend to  you the old practice of giving up something, which I wrote about a couple of years ago in Just Give It Up. The experience of your own worldliness is always, even after giving things up for decades, a bit of a shock, and a salutary one, and what small increase in self-discipline you acquire a good thing in itself.

For some reason, the comments on the article disappeared. Several were very helpful, too, but there were a few — to head them off here — who went on in that chipper post-Vatican II nun-in-stretchpants St. Louis Jesuits guitar mass Jimmy-Carter-grin accentuate the positive Mary Poppins kind of way, that Lent isn’t about giving up things but about opening ourselves to God, etc. I can’t remember the jargon, but I remember it was very trying.

So: Yes, okay, sure, go ahead, have a positive Lent. But the rest of us, self-indulgent hedonists that we are, need to start with an exercise that reminds us of who we are, and how far we fall short of our ideals, or even our usual self-appraisal, and how much we need the grace of God. As I say, Just Give It Up.

Our friends at Catholic Exchange have announced a new daily feature, starting at 6 p.m. today:  a live session called “Ask a Monk” in which a Brother Sebastian (the collective name for a group of cloistered Benedictine monks who want to remain anonymous to follow their Rule’s counsel on humility) answers peoples’ questions in a live chat mode. According to the press release from Harold Fickett, the editor-in-chief of Catholic Exchange:

“Ask A Monk” works in two ways—via live chat and email. When Brother Sebastian is not online, you can ALWAYS send him an email.  He will answer your emails just as soon as possible. You just go to the same place on the Catholic Exchange homepage, click on the “Ask A Monk” button, and fill out the form with your email message.

Monday through Friday, you can chat live with Brother Sebastian from 6:00 – 6:30 PM Easter Time. On the weekends, the hours will be extended. Live chat will be available on Saturday and Sunday from 3:00 – 5:00 PM Eastern Time.

It looks like a great opportunity and a great use of the web.

Democratic senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren “has assumed the mantle of oppressor,” Senator Scott Brown has said, The Weekly Standard‘s blog reports. In supporting the contraception mandate,

She and her allies on the left are dictating to Catholics and other people of faith that they must do as they are told when it comes to health care or face the consequences, regardless of their personal religious beliefs.

As my friend Mark Barrett notes, “It’s a very good sign that Brown is forcefully opposing this. Warren has been attacking him 24/7 on this, expecting him to run from it and he, somewhat surprisingly, has turned around and fully embraced it. Brown is a shrewd political operator, he apparently thinks this is a winning issue in Massachusetts.”

Warren has also declared that ”I am shocked that Senator Brown jumped in to support such an extreme measure.” The language of extremism is the common language of politics these days, but it’s still a fascinating charge. How exactly is supporting what had been the law of the land until a few weeks ago extreme? In what understanding of public discourse can a view move from one accepted position among many to one beyond the pale because the party in power makes an administrative decision?

I don’t think the answer is simply that Warren says whatever she needs to say to try to marginalize Brown. I think it’s both better and worse than that: it’s that the liberal of Warren’s sort really does believe that any view not held by her and her crowd is extreme, and would be so even if it is held by 97% of the American people. It’s not just that the other people are wrong, which everyone believes about many of the people who disagree with them, it’s that they’re bizarrely, absurdly, perhaps culpably wrong. Extremely wrong, so to speak.

Beginning with a quote from Philip Rieff is usually a good sign, and Thaddeus Kozinski does so in his Religious Freedom and the Triumph of the Therapeutic, published on the Center for Morality in Public Life’s Ethika Politika weblog. He argues, as have others, that opposing the Obama administration’s new contraception mandate primarily or solely as an attack on religious freedom is a mistake and perhaps a “disastrous” one for everyone, because that is to oppose Obama for being a bad Lockean liberal and to deny the Catholic Church’s claim to be who she is.

“When Catholics argue merely for their right to religious practice, that argument is necessarily heard by other Americans in Lockean terms, in which ‘every religion is orthodox to itself,’ and in which the sole power and authority over all matters pertaining to the things of this world is the secular state,” he writes.

Religion is, by this definition, strictly otherworldly, and there is no non-subjectivist way of knowing the truth of religious dogma or judging between conflicting doctrines and practices. In other words, religious relativism is the official lens through which all judgments on the proper bounds of church and state are made in America—ab initio, as William Cavanaugh, has recently argued. If religion is private, idiosyncratic, and otherworldly, not public, truth-embodying, and world-implicated, it cannot have an authoritative, public role in ordering common life.

Defined as a private cult claiming no authority over anything but its own private doctrines and practices, perhaps the Obama regime might concede the Church and its institutions the right to its rather bizarre and barbaric proscription against “responsible sexual activity,” but it would never do so for a Church defining herself as the Mystical Body of Christ and demanding from this regime and all governments the libertas ecclesiae, that is, a liberty prior to, and higher and more privileged, as Dignitatis Humanae makes clear, than the generic religious liberty accorded to persons, due to the Church’s unique divine identity and mission.

A couple additions from The Tablet on the subject of yesterday’s Limited Commemorations, pointing out that much of the worrisome statements comes from liberal organizations:

The Hitler Test, in which a Weekly Standard writer argues that

The editors of magazines and newspapers have a responsibility as gatekeepers of polite society. It turns out the gatekeepers haven’t been vigilant. We live in a culture where the social taboo against anti-black racism is so fierce that violating the taboo means certain expulsion from polite company. But the very reverse process is taking place when it comes to anti-Semitism: The taboo is being rapidly eroded, and those who ought to confront it are enabling it.

And Sounding Off, in which a Wired writer who describes himself as a Jewish leftist, argues that

Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric . . . . “Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. . . . This is tiresome to point out. Many of the writers who are fond of the Israel Firster smear are—appropriately—very good at hearing and analyzing dog-whistles when they’re used to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims. I can’t read anyone’s mind or judge anyone’s intention, but by the sound of it these writers are sending out comparable dog-whistles about Jews.

“Hatred targeting Jews and Judaism remain disproportionately high,” writes the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in an article on the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, observed every January 27th. I’m not, by the way, sure what a “proportionately high” degree of hatred would be. This is why writers need editors. In any case, Rabbi Abraham Cooper gives several examples, including

Egypt Everyone is courting the electorally victorious, supposedly “moderate” Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the group’s first move was to block Jewish prayers at the graveside of a saintly scholar and its Arabic language webpages tout Holocaust denial while a spokesmen observes that the Shoah is “a tale” exploited for politics, and that “the entire world, and Germany in particular, has become yearly scapegoats of world Zionism, and has capitulated to the greatest political extortion in history.” No western democracy has condemned the Brotherhood’s religious intolerance.

Latvia A Riga court removed the city council’s ban on “Legion Day” paving the way for a march down main street honoring 140,000 Latvians who fought in the Waffen SS during WWII.

There is a gap between lamenting the murder of  Jews back then and rejecting anti-semitism today. The latter may have costs people don’t want to pay. In my experience, people who are normally very sensitive to the slightest expression of prejudice wherever they are found are often weirdly insouciant about expressions of prejudice against Jews. Imagine if an Afrikaner group in a city in South Africa tried to organize a march celebrating the Apartheid years and the howls we’d hear. But Latvians marching in memory of the SS. I didn’t hear any squeaks, much less howls. That insouciance is good reason to be more than usually alert to such things.

One of the examples Cooper gives is from the Friends Seminary, which is just a few blocks from the First Things office. Here’s Alan Dershowitz’s article on the event and the Seminary’s response.

First Things has a long and implacable commitment to the defense of unborn life and an equally long and implacable resistance to all the philosophies that seek to justify the utilitarian treatment of such life. Here’s a selection of articles, all of the most recent ones and a selection of past articles from the magazine and the “On the Square” section of our website—but only a selection, because we’ve published so much on the subject.

From the magazine:

Richard John Neuhaus’s The End of Abortion and the Meanings of “Christian America”.

Nicholas Windsor’s Caesar’s Thumb.

Joseph Bottum’s The Signpost at the Crossroads.

Russell Hittinger’s Abortion Before Roe.

Richard Stith’s Her Choice, Her Problem.

Frederica Mathewes-Green’s Abortion in the Tide of Culture.

Terry Teachout’s Abortion, Set to Music.

Bernard N. Nathanson’s The Abortion Cocktail.

Killing Abortionists: A Symposium.

From On the Square:

Eve Tushnet’s Grotesquerie and Grief: Abortion in Horror Media.

Joseph W. Dellapenna’s Recycling the Myths of Abortion History.

Ryan T. Anderson’s Parsing Abortion Statistics and the Law.

Elizabeth Powers’ Slavery and Abortion.

For future planning, Fordham’s Natural Law Colloquium will be offering a lecture on The Natural Law Origins of the American Right to Privacy by Anita L. Allen of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. It will be held on Wednesday, March 28, from 6 to 8 p.m. in the McNally Amphitheatre at the niversity’s Law School.

The Colloquium’s home page has a picture of St. Thomas’s writing, which is kind of cool.

Mercedes has apologized (but only “to those who took offense”) for using Che Guevara as a symbol, which I mentioned in yesterday’s The Benz and the Psychopath. The company’s statement:

In his keynote speech at CES, Dr. Zetsche addressed the revolution in automobility enabled by new technologies, in particular those associated with connectivity. To illustrate this point, the company briefly used a photo of revolutionary Che Guevara (it was one of many images and videos in the presentation). Daimler was not condoning the life or actions of this historical figure or the political philosophy he espoused. We sincerely apologize to those who took offense.

A friend sent me the link to the grimly amusing El Che: The Crass Marketing of a Sadistic Racist by the Heritage Foundation’s Michael Gonzalez. Mercedes Benz, it turns out, just launched a new car in front of a giant picture of Che Guavara with the Mercedes Benz symbol on his beret.

They used the picture in service of announcing a new gadget that would let owners find people to share rides.  ”Some colleagues still think that car-sharing borders on communism,” declared their chairman of the board. ”But if that’s the case, viva la revolucion!”

There’s something smarmily over-dramatic about claiming the gadget to be communistic or revolutionary. But okay, smarmily over-dramatic is what the boys in the advertising department do. Rather worse is their choice of icon. Gonzalez writes:

Che Guevara, not to put too fine a point on it, was a psychopath whose sadistic lust for blood was not easily quenched. He killed for pleasure. He had, moreover, little time for youthful rebellion and none at all for individualism. Lastly, Che Guevara was a racist who specifically held blacks in contempt.

Here, with a great deal more evidence, is Alvaro Vargas Llosa on Che, in an article originally published in The New Republic.

As I’ve commented before, the people who would recoil in horror, and rightly so, from a t-shirt bearing a romanticized image of Himmler or Eichmann do not even notice the image of men who were their equal in wickedness. Especially Che Guavara. He’s cool. Maybe it’s the beret.

But there is, as others have undoubtedly said, something very pleasing in the thought that he’s now just  consumer symbol and an advertising gimmick. One hopes he knows.

My thanks to Mark Barrett for the link.

For those of you near Columbia, South Carolina: a symposium on Religion in the Civil War, to be held on Saturday, January 28th. The keynote speaker is the historian George C. Rable, author of God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the Civil War, which both won the Jefferson Davis award and was praised by the New York Review of Books.

The first speaker, Joe Long, may be familiar to readers of “While We’re At It.”

An English Catholic bishop makes what to some of us is an obvious point: Bishop asks if church should stop funding schools that are ‘Catholic in name only”. The Bishop of Lancaster, Michael Campbell, wrote in his new year’s day pastoral letter that parishes needed to “address some demanding questions that will grow larger the longer we put them off”:

Is it right or sustainable to expect our Mass-going population of 21,000 to support our schools and colleges in which often the majority of pupils, and sometimes teachers, are not practising Catholics? Is it time for us to admit that we can no longer maintain schools that are Catholic in name only?

Faced with fewer priests and smaller congregations, where should our parishes and schools of the future be located? Where should we consolidate and merge others?

Granted, the schools can be organs of evangelization — one of the arguments for reducing their overt presentation of the Catholic faith — but they are also, as schools, primarily ways of passing an intellectual and cultural heritage and therefore a way of maintaining an identity through generations. Only when do they do this well can they be effective ways of evangelizing others. As the Bishop of Nottingham who chairs the Catholic Education Service of England and Wales, Malcolm McMahon, said  (more…)

Dr. Margaret Barker will be giving the 2012 Fr. Alexander Schmemann Lecture at St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary in Yonkers on Sunday, January 29th at 4:00 p.m. The lecture will be titled “Our Great High Priest: The Church as the New Temple.” Barker, according to the seminary’s announcement,

has received wide recognition for her fascinating scholarship, based on the premise that early Christian theology matured so quickly because it was a return to a far older faith. Dr. Barker believes that those who preserved the ancient tradition rejected the second temple and longed for the restoration of the original true temple and the faith of Abraham, and of Melchizedek, the first priest-king. In her writings, she refutes the scholarly assumption that crucial Christian concepts such as the Trinity, the earth as a reflection of heaven, and the cosmic structure of the atonement, are informed by Greek culture. Rather, she argues, they are drawn from the eclipsed faith of the first temple.

The public is invited. The seminary is a short walk from the Crestwood Station on the Metro North line. Commuter train and driving directions can be found here.

To balance yesterday’s rather optimistic “On the Square” article The Potomac and the Tiber—I don’t myself see much reason to believe that Gingrich has been affected by Catholic social teaching—here is a different view of Gingrich’s character, Newt the Destroyer.

Thirteen years later [after Gingrich resigned as Speaker of the House rather than face angry Republican colleagues he'd managed to tick off yet again], it was tough for Newt-watchers to feel any sympathy, when he whined about the incoming attacks mounted by a Romney-supporting super-PAC. His bleating about negative campaigning was, given this historical perspective, farcical. His claim that Romney was a “liar” carried little heft—after all, Gingrich himself had recently displayed his penchant for prevarication, such as when he claimed he had been paid by Freddie Mac for performing duties as a “historian.”

But a presidential candidate scorned can be a dangerous thing. Gingrich has never had a self-esteem problem. His ego is supersized. And with his late-autumn jump in the polls, he, no doubt, was measuring himself for a crown. (Tiffany’s?) He all but declared his ascendancy was inevitable. Yet then that nasty super-PAC came along and…told the truth about Gingrich, in killer attack ads, behaving much as Gingrich had always counseled GOPers to act. In a 1978 address to College Republicans, before he was elected to the House, Gingrich declared, “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” Well, if his goal back then was to nastify the GOP, he can proudly proclaim, “Mission Accomplished.”

It’s from a lefty magazine, admittedly, but it’s at least as plausible as the idea of Gingrich as an exponent of Catholic social teaching. Here and here are Mother Jones‘ take on Santorum’s chances. They’re fairly fair, except for the stupid summary of Santorum’s views in the third to last paragraph of the second.

By the way, readers interested in Catholic social teaching (which you’ll sometimes see referred to as “CST”) will want to read The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, also available as a book. It’s a very good summary of the subject, though at times a little quick or abstract in its explanations, and readers pursuing the subject will want to read the major encyclicals as well, starting with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (here is a useful summary).

“If the Occupiers were right about one thing, it was that there is a growing inequality in American life,” writes David Paul Deavel in One Percent or 33: America’s Real Inequality Problem in the Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty. But to the extent they articulate any explanation, they leave out a very important one, one he thinks explained in great and persuasive detail by Mitch Pearlstein in From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation. Pearlstein, writes Deavel,

focuses on the 33 percent. This is the percent of children living with one parent rather than two. These children, victims of what many call “family fragmentation,” start out with tremendous social and educational deficits that are hard to narrow, nevermind close. These are most often the children for whom upward mobility has stalled. Their economic well-being has led to decline in American competitiveness and also the deeper cleavages of inequality that have been so widely noted.

One (this is me, not Deavel) doesn’t have to discount the wickedness of bankers to see that a dysfunctional family will severely reduce most children’s ability to live successfully in a world in which bankers are wicked. One might, as Chesterton did, suggest a connection between the bankers’ self-interest and their promotion of programs that destabilize and undermine the family. (Who invests in this stuff, after all?) This would seem to be a n0-brainer for the Occupiers. But the sexual revolution and its effects on the formation of children is one of those aspects of the contemporary establishment of which those earnest critics of the establishment are oblivious.  Judging from Deavel’s review, Mitch Pearlstein sees it clearly.

An fyi, though I can find no information on the web about it: On February 27th, the G. K. Chesterton Institute (publisher of The Chesterton Review, on whose board I sit) and the American Bible Society will be sponsoring a conference on  Chesterton and the Bible. It will be held at the ABS’s headquarters in Manhattan. More information when I have it.

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation for Catholics. Here, for those who might find it helpful, is something I wrote last year giving a hit-and-run introduction to the dogma: Delivered From All Stain.

For those of you interested in the changes in the new Mass, beyond those explained by Anthony Esolen in Restoring the Words (November), my friend Mike Aquilina has written a popular article on “And with your spirit”, just published by The Priest. The experts have picked out the restoration of “spirit” as a significant change, he notes:

The U.S. bishop most intensely involved with the promotion of the new translation, Cardinal Francis George, has singled out this response as somehow illustrative of the whole project. But that’s not all. The American hierarch who has been most critical of the new translation, Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, has tagged this particular change as problematic — and illustrative of the problems he had with the entire project.

That one additional word, Mike argues, for example, conveys a more developed and explicit understanding of what the priest is doing and the role of the laity in the Mass.

(more…)

A great story about a man who felt himself lucky in circumstances many of us would have felt unfortunate if not cursed: the story of Hugh Mulcahy, who played in the majors for a terrible team and lost twice as many games as he won, and then spent five years fighting in World War II, and never really got a chance to pitch for a good team. And yet, as I say, felt himself a lucky man.

Thanks to Mark Barrett for the link.

In my Occupy Wall Street’s Empty Anger on Monday, I wrote about the group — for whom “movement” would be too binding a term — and its lack of any end or purpose that would make their anger effective — to the extent that anger isn’t part of an inner personal drama projected onto public life. Which I think, let me stress, a bad thing. Along the same lines, Rod Dreher calls them “decadent, in the sense of unserious, narcissistic, and sometimes flat-out ridiculous.” Which he thinks, let me stress, a bad thing.

Following a link from a friend dealing with an entirely unrelated matter, I came across An Exchange on the Left between the socialist writers Irving Howe and Philip Rahv, published in a late 1967 issue of The New York Review of Books. (And their remarks are similar to those of George Orwell, which I posted in Socialism’s Magnetic Force.)

It bears upon the matter at hand. Howe begins his response to an essay of Rahv’s:

Radicalism is again becoming chic in the intellectual world, a fate not even its worst enemies could suppose it to deserve. This is not, to be sure, the radicalism of desperate Negroes and disaffected youth which, for all its political failings, is at least grounded in urgent experience. (more…)

When writing yesterday’s “On the Square” column, Occupy Wall Street’s Empty Anger, I reread parts of George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. The crowd at Zuccotti Park reminds me of the famous lines from the book in which Orwell describes the developed form of socialism as “a theory confined entirely to the middle classes.” After describing such socialists, and not kindly, he remarks on

the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

He then describes riding on a bus when

two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple.

Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured “Socialists,” as who should say, “Red Indians.”

Not a cheery view of socialism, but then Orwell was himself a socialist. Seventy years later, we can feel his pain (I don’t mean that sarcastically). He would write similarly, I think, of Occupy Wall Street, and for the same reason.

You can find the chapter in which these lines appear here.