Flannery O’Connor and the False Glamour of Asama al-Assad and Wendy Davis

The other day, while browsing in my school’s bookstore, I observed another student reading an article about the Texan pro-abort diva, Wendy Davis. My classmate was reading from Vogue (wait, isn’t that a fashion magazine?) a paean to Wendy Davis as a role model and heroine for young women because of her cleverness and chic style.

This contrived idealization of the Texas politician, however, is far from surprising. In 2012, Joan Buck of Vogue wrote an even more horrifying piece praising the Syrian dictator’s wife. Buck lauds Assad as, “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies … breezy, conspiratorial, and fun … a thin long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement.”

Given the civil war and mass killings in Syria, the piece titled “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert,” seems particularly naive and amoral. We think of Assad and his wife as the evil dictators of Syria, but we think of Vogue, at worst, as harmless advertisements of expensive clothes. The association of a popular fashion magazine with such evil seems crazy, even radical.

That evil can be alluring is obvious; however, this truism has been forgotten in our time. In a world zapped of transcendence, glamour has taken new significance once reserved for beauty. Glamour, in the old Scottish sense of the word, held strong connections with deceit, spells, and magic.The witch in Hansel and Gretel sprinkled glamour on her house to make it appear like candy instead of a cobwebbed prison for children. Our culture is also deceived by a glamour which can hide evil actions of abortion, as in the case of Wendy Davis, or the killing of innocents, as in the case of the Assads.

Perhaps we all need a good dose of the Southern Catholic writer, Flannery O Conner. In a time when most aspects of culture brazenly bask in an insular wasteland of synthetic beauty, O’Connor’s sometimes bizarre stories jolt us out of a vacuous stupor. They force us to recognize our own deficiencies as well as the trivialities heralded by these popular magazines.

O’Connor does not present ‘ glamorous’ characters, as these magazines do. Instead, she depicts the ‘ordinary’ human being, flawed and sometimes deformed. The covert redemption of the repulsive criminal in ‘The Misfit’ points toward the beauty of grace and redemption in Christ. O’Connor shows us there is still much beauty in the world when the false glamour is stripped away.