Current Events – Page 12 – 19 Cent Notebook

BARBARIANS

I write, to be (somewhat) clear and in order not to be (totally) misunderstood, not of Trump, the socialist barbarians challenging him or of any particular brand of politics. Rather I reflect briefly on this Saturday morning ( 10/12/19) of the weekend on which Blessed John Henry Newman will be canonized, upon the barbarism — social, political, moral — that is always with us and within us. This has been prompted by a random re-reading of Baylor University Theology and Literature Professor Ralph C. Wood’s monograph on Flannery O’Connor (Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.)

Wood notes that O’Connor, a Georgia native and Catholic, proffered Christianity — even of the fundamentalist variety — as “a divine remedy for the perennial human malaise.” Europe, and much of the rest of the west, is in the process of weeding Christianity out of its civilization. Professor Wood notes what St. Augustine, in The City of God, had to say about that — that evil corrupts “not chiefly individuals but rather civilizations.” Rome believed its civilization to be eternal. The Visigoths put an end to that notion. But so did Rome’s economic, moral and religious corruption.

G.K. Chesterton (quoted by Wood) believed civilizations dwell alongside barbarism, contrary to our notion that the human species has risen steadily from the primordial mud . (For my part, I’d say American life and all of us who live our American lives are currently stalked by wild, ravenous beasts within and without. But I concede that one American’s barbarism is another’s idea of civilization. You have only to go to the internet or the movies to be convinced of that.)

We’ve relied heretofore on “simple majorities” to protect the received traditions and inherited wisdom that are the vanguard of civilization, Chesterton adding, “the civilization sometimes spreading to absorb the barbarians, sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost all cases possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and institutions which the barbarians possess in a ruder form.” (G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, first published in 1925 — between the barbarity of WWI and civilization’s horrific relapse into WWII.)

At the moment — or, perhaps, once again in our history — civilization is looking exhausted. I know I’m exhausted, and have no one to blame but myself. How about you?

Meanwhile, what does soon-to-be-canonized Blessed John Henry Newman have to say about this? Volumes! But all I can remember right now is his prayer, “lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom. The night is dark, and I am far from home.”

A TALE OF NORTH AND SOUTH

I was actually disappointed a few years back when the rabidly, if artfully, politically correct city of Cambridge, Mass. decided to stop dressing up its parking citations with a flowing sequence of Yoga positions, suggesting that proper parking practices assured greater urban harmony. Don’t know why they stopped that practice. Printing costs, maybe? It was worth it if at least one harried parking scofflaw, finding that dreaded flapper under his wiper, was borne from indignation toward niruddha or nirvana or wherever happy Yogis go to find tranquility. (I concede that a mere warning, a happy face and a piece of chocolate would be my ticket to serenity.)

I thought of this – though it’s an imperfect parallel – when I read that a Ford dealer in Chatom, Alabama had decided to offer a free shotgun, Bible and American flag with every purchase of a vehicle, first requiring that, in order to redeem the promotion, buyers pass all requirements for firearm ownership as well as for vehicle ownership.

In Alabama, it’s probably safe to say that many, if not most prospective buyers already have perfectly good shotguns, Bibles and flags at home, so the other dealers on ‘Bama’s auto mile probably aren’t being outsold on the strength of this campaign alone. And for many obvious reasons, Ford quickly ordered the dealer to omit the gun from the deal.

I stumbled on this serendipitous tidbit far from current troubling headline. Forgive me if I found some comfort in it – especially in the fact that we remain a diverse nation where law abiding people can follow divergent highways to satisfaction…and harmony. It’s enough to get me into the lotus position.

And the waggish author of this little item must be a Harvard grad or perhaps a frequent flier to the Bay State, because he or she is obviously familiar with life north and south of the great cultural divide. I say this because they suggested that car dealers in Cambridge consider offering a rainbow flag, a yoga mat, and a copy of Rules for Radicals with the purchase of each new Tesla.

REFLECTIONS ON 8/6/45

Gembaku Dome, Hiroshima. Photo Credit: File:HiroshimaGembakuDome6747.jpg

It happened — according to internet calculations — 74 years, sixteen hours, four minutes and seventeen seconds ago. The seconds and minutes will mount as I write this.

But time seemed to stop when it happened. The world hasn’t been the same since.

There is a park and memorial museum at the heart of Hiroshima, Japan. I visited it in September, 1970 during a break from Army duty in Korea. Somewhere in the archives I assume they’ve saved the generations of guest books left out for museum visitors to leave their comments. My comment, prosaic and probably identical to thousands of others, reads, simply, NEVER AGAIN.

Did we have to drop that thing? The debate never ends.

It seems almost coldly inappropriate to factor out, retrospectively, the pre-Hiroshima and Nagasaki options facing allied military planners who found themselves at the end of a long, bloody and calamitous world war with no endgame in sight. One is almost tempted to say – there was no “magic bullet”. Alas, it seems there was, and we discovered it and fired it, twice.

Among the many exhibits in glass cases at the Hiroshima Peace Museum – and you have to embrace that name — are objects gleaned from the city’s radioactive ruins after August 6, 1945. Most disturbingly memorable to me were the manikins depicting adults and children survivors as they appeared after the fiery detonation. The manikins display the victim’s terrible burns and their burned and tattered clothing. It’s almost like looking into a macabre department store front window in the course of a terrible nightmare. You see the dark uniforms of female school children; you see how their white blouses repelled the nuclear flash while their dark jumpers absorbed it with terrible consequences for the wearer. Also memorable in a ghastly way, among the scattering of smaller preserved objects, is a jagged metallic lump the shape of large chunk of coal. This had been some male victim’s pocket change – all melted together.

So what was the alternative to this horror, coming at the end of five years of horrors, including fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, Germany, grinding island-to-island Pacific warfare and deaths and casualties mounting into the millions?

It was called Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese mainland. It was a two-pronged assault: Operation Olympic was scheduled for November, 1945, aimed at Kyushu, followed by Operation Coronet in March, 1946, which called for landing troops on Hokkaido, targeting Tokyo and the Emperor. The Eleventh Air Force, including our B-25s, would move to Okinawa and would have abundant targets. The Japanese were fierce defensive fighters (ask any of the few surviving American veterans of the Pacific theater). They would surely defend their home islands savagely, foot by blood-soaked foot.

The Pentagon estimated the invasion would result in half a million American casualties, a million and a half Japanese. Those estimates may have been low. Many of us Americans would not be here: our fathers would have died in the prolonged fighting.

An estimated 125,000 died in minutes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Knowledge that we had the bomb probably kept the Soviets at bay until their empire could collapse generations later. But of course, they built their own bombs. Then you have Pakistan, North Korea – and the wobbly balance of terror lingering into the 21^st Century.

Everybody should visit that Peace Museum. And that, sad to say, is the only “bottom line” I can come up with here.