Who’s Afraid of G. K. Chesterton?

Mr Davis responds to a typically incoherent and unhinged hit piece in the National Catholic Distorter on GKC and the Chesterton Society.

From The Common Man

By Michael Warren Davis

A response to the Fishwrap. 

If you ever find yourself at a CPAC afterparty and want to clear the room, just mention G. K. Chesterton.  Half the people there will roll their eyes and walk away.  The other half will have no clue who you’re talking about; when you explain, they’ll roll their eyes and walk away.

For the well-heeled conservative, Chesterton is an embarrassment.  He’s too fat and jolly to be taken seriously.  His writing is shot through with this naïve optimism.  It’s like Halloween candy.  When you’re a kid, you can’t get enough of it.  But once you get older, the very thought of it makes you a little queasy. 

So, go ahead and read him while you’re still young and innocent and your stomach is made of iron.  At some point, though, it comes time to put away childish things.  If you’re still quoting Chesterton into your thirties, you may as well admit you still believe in Santa Claus.

Yet, despite their betters, Chesterton remains hugely popular among the folks he lovingly referred to as “the common man.”  No writer alive today is so deeply loved.  According to Amazon and Goodreads, Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday is more popular than Mark Levin’s American Marxism and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Antiracist. 

That’s not a knock against Mr. Levin, or even Mr. Kendi.  But they’ve each got half the media peddling their books.  What kind of machine has Chesterton got?  Just a fan club. 

In 1996, my friend Dale Ahlquist founded the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, known simply as the Chesterton Society.  Earlier this week, it was subject to a hit-piece in the National Catholic Reporter, known simply as the Fishwrap.

As one has come to expect from the Fishwrap, the article is barely coherent.  Their reporter [sic] accuses the Society of downplaying Chesterton’s commitment to social justice while, in the same breath, accusing Chesterton himself of being a right-wing hate-monger.  So, is the Fishwrap trying to defend Chesterton’s honor, or to sully it?  The answer is neither.  This isn’t about Mr. Ahlquist, or the Society, or even G. K. Chesterton.  As always, this is about politics—specifically, the Orange Bad Man.

Dear reader, you won’t be surprised to learn the name “Trump” appears eighteen times in the Fishwrap’s exposé. 

The reporter [sic] pays special attention to an email penned in 2021 by an actor named Kevin O’Brien.  The Society used to pay Mr. O’Brien to impersonate characters from Chesterton’s novels at their annual conference.  Two years ago, however, Mr. O’Brien disowned his comrades.  According to the Fishwrap,

Ahlquist refused to listen to his pleas to publish an editorial in Gilbert [the Society’s magazine] condemning the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building.  In a May 2021 email that O’Brien wrote to Ahlquist and other society members, O’Brien expressed his concerns about what he saw as the society’s deafening silence on January 6 and complicity with COVID-19 misinformation.

 

If you read Mr. O’Brien’s email, you’ll get a sense of why Mr. Alquist declined.  He has the worst case of Trump Derangement Syndrome I’ve ever seen.  Karine Jean-Pierre couldn’t fit so many DNC talking-points into a single rant.  Here’s just a sample:

On January 6, President Trump staged a coup, fomented a violent Insurrection that killed five people, an insurrection whose members intended to murder the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House, a coup which, if successful, would have ended democracy in America and installed a petty tyrant as dictator.  And Catholics and Chestertonians have cheered this on—despite the fact that there is no doubt that Biden won the election, whether we like it or not. 

 

Trump’s lawyers had no evidence of significant vote fraud, which is why they lost their 63 court cases.  Even Devout Catholic Attorney General Barr insisted that there had been no voter fraud and that the election was won by Biden, and then resigned because he wanted no part of the Big Lie, a Big Lie which Right Wing Catholics and Evangelicals continue to endorse and spread.  (Trump is not out of the picture; his legacy of “two plus two equals five” continues—see the attempts to crush Liz Cheney for speaking the truth.)

 

This is what Mr. O’Brien wanted Gilbert to say in its editorial.  Remember, we’re talking about the in-house journal of a literary society.  Chesterton died the year Franklin Roosevelt won his second term as president, beating Alf Landon in 46 of the 48 states.  What GKC would make of January 6 is anyone’s guess.  Only a fanatic would expect the Chesterton Society to take a stand one way or the other. 

Yet that’s precisely what we are.  We’re a nation of fanatics.

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Look, I get it.  Nobody cares about Chestertonians’ internecine feuds.  Still, this is a powerful example of how everything—everything—is being totally subsumed by politics.  We must have total mobilization in the service of ideology. No one is exempt. No one is safe. Not even literary societies devoted to Catholic apologists from the Victorian Era.

For men like Mr. O’Brien, it isn’t about whether January 6 is relevant to G. K. Chesterton.  It’s about whether G. K. Chesterton is relevant to January 6.  If not, too bad.  He’ll have to step aside.  Politics must come first.  Then, maybe, if there’s time, Gilbert can talk about Gilbert. 

This political myopia is found in great abundance on both sides of the aisle.  It’s barbaric.  It’s unhealthy.  Mostly, though, it’s boring as sin. 

Don’t take my word for it.  As usual, Chesterton saw this coming miles and miles away. 

“At present we all tend to one mistake,” he warned:

We tend to make politics too important.  We tend to forget how huge a part of a man’s life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under Nero or St. Louis.  Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won’t, to the end of the last evening.  And the worst peril is that in our just modern revolt against intolerable accidents we may have unsettled those things that alone make daily life tolerable. . . .

 

There is danger that the social reformer may silently and occultly develop some of the madness of the millionaire whom he denounces.  He may find that he has learnt how to build playgrounds but forgotten how to play.  He may agitate for peace and quiet, but only propagate his own mental agitation.  In his long fight to get a slave a half-holiday he may angrily deny those ancient and natural things, the zest of being, the divinity of man, the sacredness of simple things, the health and humour of the earth, which alone make a half-holiday even half a holiday or a slave even half a man.

 

That’s from “What Is Right With the World” (his finest essay, in my humble opinion).  It shows why Chesterton will be read and re-read long after the rest of us are dead and forgotten.

It also shows why political types, on both the Left and the Right, are so eager to bury him. 

If you’re unhappy, it’s easy to (A) adopt an opinion and (B) blame your unhappiness on people who don’t share that opinion.  It’s so easy to pin your own misery on Trump, or Biden, or January 6, or COVID, or Russia, or China, or… 

The truth is that happiness is hard.  It is hard to get up early and enjoy the sunrise.  It is hard to make good food and find good friends to share it with.  It is hard to find peace and quiet, and even harder to enjoy it.  It is hard to see the divinity in your fellow man—and to find that divine spark within yourself. 

The good news is that, in G. K. Chesterton, we have an ideal teacher.  Maybe someday we’ll hear him out.

“I doubt whether the best men ever devote themselves to politics,” as our man once said.  “The best men devote themselves to pigs and babies and things like that.”  Try that one at CPAC.