Catholicpunk / A (Semi) Final Draft (#1)
I sent the first rough cut of Catholicpunk to my book editor yesterday. 580 pages of pancake batter. It sucks. So the hard work begins now.
The production schedule once a manuscript has been submitted to a publisher is twelve months. I therefore have four months to finalize the manuscript if I want to publish the book before the 2026 midterm elections (and if I’m to head off interloping scoundrels with a similar book idea who want to get there before me).
My birthday is September 1 and that date now is my deadline for this project. 123 days from today. I’m scared shitless, to be honest.
So this is what I’m going to do. When I had my company, I had to figure out how to manage a lot of risk. So I came up with the idea of risk parcelization, or centipedal risk. Which was to take on big risks and essentially securitize it by chopping it up into lots of tiny risks. Like a centipede, my company could then afford to have things blow up in small ways and lose a few legs while still moving forward on all the legs that remained.
That’s what I’m going to try to do in the next four months. My book will include an introduction, 12 chapters, and a conclusion. The book’s total word count is likely to land at about 120,000 words. My goal is to write/revise/edit approximately 2,000 words each day for 60 straight days. Which will give me an additional 63 days to fact-check, annotate, polish, update, and refresh the text into some version of a final manuscript.
Let’s imagine a centipede with 123 legs. I can probably lose up to 23 of these legs and still hobble onward. But hopefully fewer. Feel free to establish your betting lines.
Here goes.
We’re starting with Chapter One, which is titled Meet the Sopranos. This is an in media res chapter, which means “starting in the middle.” This is a method used in fiction that launches the reader straight into the narrative at some critical intermediate point in the story, so they are instantly caught up in the action, fully engaged, and curious about what happened before, which can then be exposed through flashbacks, exposition, and non-linear storytelling. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, Khaled Hosseini’s Kite Runner, and Lee Child’s first Jack Reacher novel, The Killing Floor, all open in the middle of the action, immediately establishing high stakes for the protagonist (and the reader).
Give or take, the story in Catholicpunk spans the years between 1945 and 2025. My Chapter One opens in the years between 1963 and 1965. Here are my intentions for this chapter.
Establish these three years as a critical moment in the nation’s history that shattered illusions about the “meaning of America,” cracked apart the cosmological foundations of Enlightenment liberalism, and created an opening for two new cosmologies to establish beachheads in the American mind, one based on Catholic natural law and the other emerging from post-Newtonian statistical mechanics and the second law of thermodynamics.
Use the true story of my brother’s escapade with condoms as an eight-year-old in 1964 to dramatize and personalize the emerging cultural fault lines that would fracture the nation in subsequent decades.
Place themes of innocence, youth, sexuality and reproduction at the center of the religious and political conflicts that deepened these fractures, with the Second Vatican Council providing a dramatic backdrop establishing the stakes of this family drama.
Use the idea of “Harvard as America” to establish the importance of ideas and intellectual histories in creating dominant narratives around which national identities form, and the simultaneous fragility of these ideas and histories as obfuscators of meaning and identity.
Hint at the emergence of a third cosmology, associated with post-Newtonian physics, discoveries in thermodynamics, and ideas about heat, motion, and entropy that would operate in the background of the more open conflict between Enlightenment liberal and Medieval Christian cosmologies in the remaining decades of the 20th century.
And finally, to cast Harvard American Studies professor Perry Miller, Catholic theologian and philosopher Germain Grisez, and theoretical physicist Richard Feynman as avatars of these contending cosmologies.
Please also note the inclusion of other cultural references, such as the television shows, Mad Men and The Sopranos, and the religious horror novel, The Exorcist.
Here is the first part of Chapter One, “Meet the Sopranos.” Some of you may remember this story from the 51st issue of Wikidworld back in 2022.
It’s 1964 in an unnamed mid-Atlantic state. We are in the midst of the Don Draper Mad Men era. Everything is about to go sideways. We do not yet know this. But there’s an inkling.
My older brother is 8 years old. One afternoon, he and a friend from the neighborhood decide it would be fun to slip into my parents’ bedroom and paw through their dresser. With unvarnished delight, they discover the condoms that my father hides in one of the drawers.
This might be the most fantastic moment of my brother’s young life. A hatching bird’s first poke at the eggshell of innocence. My brother and his friend are not sure what condoms are for, but whatever that function proves to be, they instinctively know that it will be far more exciting than anything they’ve so far known.
The afternoon wanes. Still aglow, the friend returns home and with unmuted excitement tells his parents about this discovery. The parents—let’s call them the Sopranos—are not amused. The father, Mr. Soprano—as far as I’m concerned, he has no first name—stalks down the street to our house in his Guinea tee and pretty much rips my father a new asshole. In the aftermath, I fear it does not go well for my brother. But the crack in the shell remains—and shall widen.
Some context. My father is of Hungarian Jewish background. He is a journalist, a public relations spinmeister, and an author of books. He has two degrees. He is an intellectual man, an indoor man, not inclined to view stepping outside as a model dispute-resolution strategy.
Our house is a two-story wood-frame colonial built in 1951. Not as nice as the houses of some of my friends, but pleasant enough (except when it isn’t). Our house has lots of trees surrounding it and lots of books inside it. My sisters and my brother and I attend the local public elementary school. We drive a Peugeot station wagon.
Mr. Soprano is Italian-American and Catholic. He works in the RCA television assembly factory on the highway outside of town. He has no degrees. He is not an intellectual man—also not an indoor man. Stepping outside is pretty much his default dispute-resolution strategy.
He and Mrs. Soprano have two young boys, both of whom attend the Catholic parochial school in town. Their house is a low-slung brick rambler circa 1953 with a large lawn front and back, but no trees. There are no books (save a huge Catholic Bible). The Sopranos drive a black Chevy.
My parents and the Sopranos are all Democrats. But not for long. When everything goes sideways, the Sopranos will begin to vote Republican. My parents will stay Democrats for the remainder of their lives. As for my brother and his friend, both sets of parents silently pledge they will no longer play together.
What are we looking at here? What are we looking for? Are we seeing an almost perfect miniature of an America held together by the shared bonds of children yet to learn they shouldn’t be friends? Or are we looking at an America divided by the shared conviction of parents that they will be god-damned if their children ever become friends?
This slice-of-life moment establishes the goal of Catholicpunk, to step outside the liberal paradigm and tell the history of the United States after World War II from the perspective of working-class and middle-class Catholics, such as Mr. Soprano. A story that more resembles an action-adventure, with an undertone of Exorcist-style supernatural horror. A story that starts with God and ends with Donald Trump.
The significance of this encounter between my father and Mr. Soprano was perhaps the simple fact that they lived in such close proximity to each other. After all, even in 1964, Princeton, New Jersey—for that was where we lived—was an affluent suburban community, a home for one of the most elite universities in the world.
Princeton had a surprisingly large percentage of black residents and maintained a dubious reputation as the "northernmost university town of the segregated South.” But one would not have expected to find large numbers of high-school-educated ethnic Catholics in this predominantly Protestant community. What were Mr. Soprano and his family even doing there?
Mr. Soprano was one of thirteen children and had been born and raised in in nearby Trenton—which also happened to be the birthplace of Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito, the only two Italian-Americans to serve as justices of the United States Supreme Court. Trenton is a small post-industrial city smack-dab in the middle of New Jersey, whose growth up until World War II had been fueled by Italian immigrants who could easily find work there.
At the time, Trenton was a manufacturing center for rubber, wire rope, ceramics, and cigars. Following World War II, however, with its economy tottering and racial tensions rising, Trenton experienced an exodus of Italian-Americans to outlying suburbs such as Hamilton Township, where Samuel Alito was raised, and Princeton, where Mr. Soprano moved and raised his own family in the 1950s.
This was an archetypal experience. Virtually identical post-war migration experiences—the exodus of tens of millions of ethnic European Catholics siloed in urban ghettos into suburban America during an age of growth and prosperity—are the foundation of one of the most important untold stories of our era, one of the great social sagas and economic success stories in American history.
Between 1945 and 1963, millions of American Catholics achieved levels of education, income growth, and economic security that allowed them to join the “great American middle”—to fit in, to be normal and norm-abiding—with everything that implied. However, progress never fails to leave a wound. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Catholic community in America cleaved, producing a reactionary intellectual counter-elite that had no interest in fitting in and relished every opportunity to shatter norms.
At the beginning of 1963, the United States still inhabited that state of mind that we nostalgically remember as “the Fifties.” John XXIII was pope. John F. Kennedy was president. The disturbance in Vietnam remained largely a covert “police action.” College campuses were still mostly passive institutions of instruction. Civil rights activity remained largely peaceful, with a focus on litigation. Bob Dylan was playing acoustic folk music. There was something called “the Pill,” but most people were not really sure what that was. The nation remained overwhelmingly and safely “white,” however one might want to flexibly define and apply this label.
By the end of 1965, Pope John XXIII and President Kennedy were dead. The United States had openly entered the war in Vietnam. College campuses were in turmoil. Drug use was spiking. Sexual mores were collapsing. There was rioting in the cities. Bob Dylan was playing electric rock music. Vatican II had forever shifted the identify and influence of the Catholic Church. The Fifties were definitively over. Amidst these torsions, one can only imagine the shocking symbolism for Mr. and Mrs. Soprano of the cabinet of adult desires and temptations their son discovered in my parents’ bedroom.
The remainder of the chapter remains malformed and somewhat misbegotten. One of my challenges is how to order the presentation of the “three cosmologies.”
In 1964, liberalism is the hegemonic mode of thinking and discourse in America. It is also under enormous stress. Which argues for moving directly to the section “When Harvard Was America,” particularly because of its salience for current debates and controversies as a symbol of all that Catholic radicals such as JD Vance and Elise Stefanik understand to be rotten and corrupt in liberal higher education.
On the other hand, Germain Grisez was at this moment advising the Pope in the debate about potential revisions to Catholic teachings on contraception and about to publish a culturally significant book on this topic called Contraception and Natural Law. This will be my theme for tomorrow.