SOUTH EUCLID, Ohio – Normally, when you think about Notre Dame, two things come to mind: hunchbacks and college football.
The reason for this strong dual association with the school’s name, of course, is Notre Dame’s legendary placekicker/quarterback Rudy Quasimodo, who of course led the Falcons to the national championship back in 1831.
A recent editorial published in The Observer, the school’s campus newspaper, may add “limb-walking journalists” to the list of things for which Notre Dame is known.
What did the young student journalist in question do to put himself on the vanguard of opinion columnists? He made what is bound to become one of the most controversial statements regarding porn viewers ever made in the history of college students making comments about porn viewers, that’s what.
He suggested – as hard as this is to hear without laughing out loud – habitual porn viewers might be “a kind of person.”
I know; pretty outrageous, right?
To be fair, we should look at the writer’s comments in their full context.
In writing about how porn viewers might become non-porn-viewers, Christopher Damian (side note: that’s a pretty demonic last name for a Notre Dame student, no?) suggests an act of “Aristotelian virtue”: By using their sheer willpower, they can choose not to watch porn and thereby transform themselves into something better than they were.
“If you want to become the kind of person who doesn’t do something, part of what you’ll need to do is to choose not to do that thing, over and over again,” Damian writes, possibly with an chorus chanting something ominous in the background. “And once that choice becomes a habit, you won’t simply be the same person who doesn’t do something. According to Aristotle, you’ll become a different kind of person.”
So far, this all sounds pretty reasonable to me. After all, any ‘recovering alcoholic’ will tell you if you just stop drinking long enough, you’re no longer an alcoholic, you’re a different kind of person – mostly the less-drunk kind.
Where Damian’s rhetoric gets radical, however, is the thought with which he follows up the above paragraph: “Perhaps the person who habitually looks at pornography is a kind of person.”
Beyond the circularity of his reasoning (isn’t any person a “kind of person”?), Damian offers no evidence or proof for his claim of habitual porn viewers’ humanity.
Damian just wants us to accept on faith (Catholic faith, one assumes, given the context) the clearly revolutionary notion that habitual porn-watchers are people.
On the one hand, based on my website’s Google Analytics, it’s pretty clear the vast majority of my website’s traffic comes from places which are, technically, inhabited by people – like Spain, the Middle East, New York City, etc.
On the other hand, the Google stats also show a lot of traffic from places where I refuse to believe any actual human could possibly survive, like beneath the ice of Antarctica, on the surface of Venus and over 200 different IP addresses associated with the U.S. Congress.
I can’t really blame Damian for his assumption — IF it’s really merely a naïve misconception on his part. But what about the other possibility, the one connected to his last name, augmented by his infiltration to an academic institution strongly associated with Godliness?
In other words, what if DamiAn is really DamiEn, the Anti-Football-Jesus of lore, come to deceive the world and usher in 1000 years of Satan’s (presumably highly pornographic) dominion over the Earth?
Personally, I find it hard to believe a student capable of winning entry to a college with the rigorous standards for entry required by Norte Dame would be naïve enough to believe habitual porn-lookers are “people.”
This leaves us only with the more nefarious possibility – and no Kate Reynolds in sight to plunge a dagger into Sam Neill’s back to save the day.
It’s possible I’m reading too much into this, possible DamiAn isn’t really DamiEn, possible there’s just a word or two missing from a sentence in an otherwise inconsequential Catholic college’s newspaper opinion piece. But do we really want to take that chance?
I’m not suggesting we should all pick up torches, fill up a bunch of buckets with melted tar and raid our down pillows for feathers; that can all wait until after the 2016 election.
What I am suggesting, though, is we keep a very close eye on future writings from this Damian kid – and keep our ears open for even faintest strains of Ave Satani.
