`The Orgy is On'

On Friday in Houston, a 5-year-old boy was shot in the face and killed in the house where he lived. Earlier this month in Galveston, a 19-year-old was charged with burning his 2-month-old daughter in a microwave oven. Around the same time, an 11-year-old Houston boy was killed by a shotgun blast fired by a friend of his father. The city saw 377 homicides last year and we’re on course to match or exceed that number in 2007. Murders in Houston, unless carried out in an especially lurid manner, are relegated to briefs on the inside pages of the newspaper.

In 1938, Evelyn Waugh visited Mexico for two months, and the following year he published his findings in Robbery Under Law. The Roman Catholic Church was officially outlawed at the time in Mexico, and practicing priests were subject to execution. Waugh subtitled his book The Mexican Object-Lesson, meaning we might learn something from the chaos and butchery in that country. Of course, the real slaughter was just getting underway in Europe and Asia. Here’s what Waugh wrote on the final page of the book:

“Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given it from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilised man to keep going at all. There are criminal ideas and a criminal class in every nation and the first action of every revolution, figuratively and literally, is to open the prisons. Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come from merely habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on.”

Waugh’s moral vision here is unwavering and consistent. He includes himself and the rest of us among the “potential recruits for anarchy.” In Cultural Amnesia, Clive James calls Waugh “the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century, even though so many of the wrong people said so.” I think he’s probably right. He says of Waugh:

“Nobody ever wrote more unaffectedly elegant English; he stands at the height of English prose; its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.”

A fire-and-brimstone rant about man’s fallen nature earns a pew’s worth of listeners. In Waugh, we have a supernally accomplished writer, among the funniest in the language, addressing our propensity for “every conceivable atrocity.” The wife of the man accused of microwaving their daughter told a reporter that the devil made her husband do it. In a line worthy of Flannery O’Connor, another savagely funny Catholic writer, the reporter quoted the mother as saying:

“My husband quit running from God and decided he wanted to become a minister.”