A MONDAY NIGHT NOWHERE

Just past midsummer — July 20 — living for however long in a peninsula (Florida) of  most intense  summers, I find myself dreaming of that place where summer is just among the long multi-tonal movements in the six-movement symphony (each state being a movement) that is New England. And I’m thinking of Cape Cod, a storied sand bar in that symphony of places and seasons. We always read more into places than is really there — at least the places we have tried to like or even loved once. Florida is in that category. So is the Cape.

Now, understand that I walked today amid the subtropical beauty of a Pinellas County, Florida public park. They have many beautiful parks here and much savage raw beauty. It was very hot, but there was a breeze and I looked over a lake at a line of slash pine and there were pine and palm all around me and live oak and Spanish moss and tropical and domestic and some migratory birds calling and singing and shade and moving shadows of mountains of clouds so  typical of summers here. Beautiful! I should feel at home — if I were a tropical bird. (Well, that’s a little churlish of me. And ungrateful.)

The landscape, of course, is flat — it is flat on the Cape, too. It is often flat where there is only sand and scrub pine. And it was about 92; has been 92 most days and will be close to 92 until October. One lives in air conditioning down here.

But then, I’m hearing it’s very hot up north — as hot as 98 — so when summer simmers up in extreme ways up there, down here where summer is always consistently a matter of clean 90 plus temperatures, it get’s even hotter.

But — I’m thinking of the Cape Cod of sand dunes, and cedar shingle cottages and lobster pots we hope to find when we go there,  crossing over those bridges  and trying not to think of cluttered, ordinary, traffic-ridden Hyannis, for instance– off we go over the steel at Bourne and Sagamore, and rumbling over the mental bridges that take us into memories. Like all places that we see on postcards, there is always the modern reality — that roadside, utility wired, squalid reality, social and topographical. As a reporter, I’ve covered murders and other terrible crimes on Cape Cod — and here in Florida.

What am I trying to say? I need to get that book called Going Home in a Homeless World.

I guess I’m just thinking many thoughts of home while I’m without a home now — and no, that I don’t have a home, really– home being ultimately more than the state, for better or rose, where I was born — and being, in many ways a state of mind. And I’m feeling lost, meaning away from anything that feels like home — struggling with a swarm of personal regrets and frustrations of the kind for which nostalgia is a temporary antidote. Temporary. But the search for peace, that painful, hopefully gainful search, must begin and may never end. We move through life like turtles, burdened. Hopeful.

I will go feed turtles now in a pond that swarms with turtles  about a half mile away.  A pond that is “home” to turtles. And in the old-man face of the youngest turtle looking for a pellet of food — a small turtle on whom that shell sometimes seems like a freakish misfortune and burden to be carried for life and from which the creature within might long to be freed if they only knew it  — I will try to forget this unhappy moment, this angry moment that I, frankly, am having trouble truly articulating. I’ll go see the turtles…. I’ll feed them.

TO YOUR “COY MISTRESS”…

The editors of the Associated Press Stylebook announced on Twitter that they will no longer use the “archaic and sexist” term “mistress.” They now recommend as alternatives, “companion” or “friend” or “lover.” The reason, if you consider this “reasonable” is: “mistress” isn’t “gender neutral” I guess that’s in case your husband is stepping out with a guy. You don’t want the poor guy to be offended. Second reason: “mistress” supposedly places the blame on the woman rather than the man. Well, okay. I don’t see it, but I also wouldn’t want to see the woman taking the blame. But then, the “person” your wife/husband is cheating with — given that your husband or wife pledged to be faithful to you forever —  plainly must be aware they are aiding and abetting that breach of faith.

But let’s face it: “friend” or “companion” do not imply, in my style book, the sacred and intimate sexual violation that the supposedly archaic word “mistress” seems to carry with it — dating back, as it does, to those times when the sharing of the sexual  bond was unalterably understood to be, yes, sacred and exclusive (under penalty of sin, if not civil law). Call me old fashioned, I guess.

As for “lover” — who’s to say there’s any love involved? Maybe it’s all about money. You know — “sugar daddy” — or, lest I be sexist — “sugar mommy.” In fact, the AP Stylebook had stipulated that “mistress” should apply only to those instances where there is a long-term sexual relationship with a married man from whom the woman is receiving financial support. That sounds right.

To me, there is something appropriately odious about the word — “mistress.”   But…friends, companions, lovers, countrymen…and countrypersons….let’s just quit the hanky-panky, okay? (Now there’s a phrase you probably won’t find in the AP Stylebook.)

And by the way, what happens when you change the headline BEZOS PROBE CONCLUDES MISTRESS’ BROTHER WAS ENQUIRER SOURCE to COMPANION’S BROTHER WAS ENQUIRER SOURCE. In the former, as I read it, you instantly detect a possibly malicious intent; in the latter — well, some “companion” at the party just let it slip. We all know companions — and friends — can’t keep secrets. Lovers — maybe.

Whatever. There must be something else I can waste my time writing about tonight, since, pace the poet Marvell, I do have “world enough, and time….”

THE UNENDING QUESTION

If there were no eternal conciousness in man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which, writhing with obscure passion produces everything that is great and everything that is insignificant…what then would life be but despair?

–Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him?

–Alexander Solzhenitsyn – Harvard Commencement Address, June 8, 1978

What is man that the electron should be mindful of him! Man is but a foundling in the cosmos, abandoned by the forces that created him. Unparented, unassisted and undireced by omniscient or benevolent authority, he must fend for himself, and with the aid of his own limited intelligence find his way about in an indifferent universe.

Carl Becker, describing a radical humanist point of view in The Heavenly City

But what am I?

An infant crying in the night;

An infant crying for the light

And with no language but a cry.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam”

 

 

 

 

 

A WORLD (STILL) SPLIT APART

“Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”

–“A World Split Apart”

from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s  Harvard Commencement Address, June 8, 1978

 

 

WAKE ME WHEN I’M ‘WOKE’

“I had a dream that I was awake and woke to find myself asleep.” The quote and the mordantly upended universe of which it speaks is attributed to Stan Laurel of Laurel&Hardy fame. And in light of — or, actually, in the darkness of —  the current state of American affairs, I would like to find the person most proximate to blameworthiness and say, in tribute to Stan Laurel’s comedic other half ,Oliver Hardy, “here’s another fine mess you gotten us into.”

I hope I  have that quote right. I know I don’t have “woke” right, that etymological denotation for all who are cool and socially aware in our contemporary world. It is both broad and long when it comes to being defined, but it hangs like a name plate around  many necks in the mug shots of the usual suspects in the culture wars. I’ll understand better when I wake up “woke” , though, given the state of things, I may wish I were asleep.  (Or should that be “was”. A “woke” person, knowing all things, would know.)

 

SPARE US FROM THE ‘CANCEL CULTURE’

Don’t take it from me. Imagine it coming from the bronze lips of Lincoln or Jefferson before they bite the dust. Or from Jesus, Mary or Joseph whose stained-glass images may soon be taking a rock. Here’s what I think they’d say: Some monuments and memorials could come down by public consensus, even plebiscite, not the anarchic whim of a midnight mob.
Take, for instance, Confederate Cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest — early Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard believed responsible for the massacre of 300 black soldiers. An equestrian monument to “The Wizard of the Saddle” rears up on the fringes of Nashville. I feel sorry for the horse. Nashville being The Music City, why not replace The General with a bronze likeness of Charlie Pride, trailblazing African-American country singer? Charlie, still alive, could attend the dedication. By God, I think I’ll suggest that! But, speaking of God, I’m reading that the “cancel culture” may be coming for The Holy Family. Read the following: “I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down. They are a form of white supremacy. Always have been…. All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, and his European mother, and their white friends should also come down. They are a gross form of white supremacy. Created as tools of oppression. Racist propaganda. They should all come down.” So – picture the Pieta and the windows of Chartres, broken on the pavement. Those words were written by Shaun King, civil rights activist, co-founder of the Real Justice PAC, writer-in-residence at the Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project with over a million followers on Twitter, which is where he disseminated this specimen of radical historical ignorance. The Catholic Church and all Christian churches have always encouraged local cultures to depict Jesus, Mary and Joseph in culturally relatable images, including portraying them as Black, Asian, Native American and, yes, even White. Consider that Shaun King actually founded an Atlanta church, called the Courageous Church. (I note he shares my son’s birthday and, going on 41, is a mere two years older than him, but not, from the evidence, wiser than him.) So this is where we are in this rampage of historical revisionism. Statues of Spanish Franciscan Junipero Serra, founder of nine 18th Century California missions, canonized a saint in 2015, have been toppled, decapitated or otherwise removed from the canons of purity by the marshals of the cultural revolution. In the early 19th century, nativists from Philadelphia to Boston attacked or burned Catholic churches and convents. As Bob Dylan sang, “it ain’t dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Bob, Thomas, Abe – Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Save us!

 

 

TRUTH, AND THE ‘POPULAR NARRATIVE’

Speak truth to power. It is the phrase, apparently Quaker in origin, written on our hearts, scrawled on placards in our contemporary world – the battle cry, if you will, of the non-violent as they battle the forces of mendacity, especially, it seems, on matters of race and racism. Question, probe, pray, speak quietly or forcefully in its face, but never be cowed by that power that oppresses you when truth is at stake. But, sorry, there seems to be an exception here. NEVER, ever, question, or even seem to waffle on repeating or reporting the received narrative of sensitive contemporary events, especially regarding alleged racism, as handed down on marble tablets from the government, the media, the culture at large – and especially, at this tender moment, on such terribly sensitive matters as the violent death of George Floyd at the hands of a cop. I made a point of treading lightly as a news reporter in such areas – both out of sensitivity and, yes, because I didn’t want to stray from that “received popular narrative.” You think I’m crazy? But former MIT Chaplain Dan Maloney lost his job last week for straying, almost certainly inadvertently, from the popular narrative. Though I don’t know him, Fr. Maloney strikes me as a man of the lightest tread – non-violent and non-political in every respect. Just a quiet shepherd of souls at an institution where brilliant future scientists and engineers nonetheless go looking for eternal gospel truth. And Fr. Maloney is passionately convinced of God’s mercy and has written a book on the subject. Separated from his MIT flock by the pandemic, he therefore, expressed his anguished reaction to events in Minneapolis in an email to that flock, gob-smacked, no doubt, to find that he’d offended powers in the university, certain students who reported him to MIT’s Anti-Bias Response Team, even his own Boston Catholic Archdiocese which promptly fired him from his chaplaincy. Here is part of what he had to say in his email: “The police officer who knelt on (George Floyd’s) neck until he died acted wrongly. I do not know what he was thinking. The charges filed against him allege dangerous negligence, but say nothing about his state of mind. He might have killed George Floyd intentionally, or not. He hasn’t told us. But he showed disregard for his life, and we cannot accept that in our law enforcement officers. It is right that he has been arrested and will be prosecuted.” Anything controversial there? (I’d like to link you to his entire statement, which I’ve read, but which I can’t seem to re-locate again. Please search on-line and evaluate it yourself.) Frankly, where Fr. Maloney probably got into deepest water was where, at another point, he noted that Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” and that police “deal with dangerous and bad people all the time, and that often hardens them.” But he did not suggest that Floyd was irredeemable or guilty or his drug-involvement exculpatory of the cop’s actions – only that George wasn’t perfect, like you or me. Good priests have a tendency to point out things like that and humbly include themselves among the sinful. On the matter of racism, Phil Lawler of Catholic Culture. Org has noted, “The chaplain didn’t say that Floyd’s death was NOT prompted by racism. He simply remarked that the evidence is not conclusive. For that he was banished from campus. For that he was given a public reprimand by his own archdiocese, which announced to the world that his statements ‘were wrong.’” I, like Phil, found statements that were debatable, some with which you may disagree, some that are not well-explained – but nothing truly wrong, offensive or, most especially, in conflict with the teachings of the Catholic Church. (For my part, it’s occurred to me – and perhaps to you – that this “bad” cop didn’t care about Floyd’s race, that he was a bad, violent cop to all, regardless of race, creed or place of national origin. It might even have been a personal vendetta. But, you see, none of that would fit the “popular narrative” of systemic racism, though it would be telling the whole truth, if it were true. There is much we don’t know yet.) I have an image of Fr Maloney as a priest eager to understand how one man could do this to another, conscious of God’s mercy as it touches on the sins of racism, prejudice, injustice and on judgement, redemption, crime, punishment and salvation – a man who acts “in persona Christi” (in the person of Christ), gently going about administering the Sacraments, including the Sacrament of Reconciliation, to us sinners. But now he’s out of a job. Where are you, Fr. Maloney. I think I’d like to go to Confession.

A NIGHTMARE, NOT AN AWAKENING

My former colleague Garry Gillis upbraided me over the weekend for reimagining our post-Minneapolis morass as a nightmare of drunken debauchery supplanting MLK’s halcyon dream of racial justice and harmony. (Thanks for commenting, Garry.) His salient points were: the protests were mostly peaceful; the whole bash was “an awakening,” not a nightmare; MLK reminded us justice delayed is justice denied. “Shall we ask people,” Garry said, “to wait so you can sleep better?” Ouch! A little rebuke there. Well, Garry “the delirium of the brave” of which Yeats sweetly sang, can, in its lower avatars, become the dementia of thugs and vandals. It was a work of kindness, therefore, to make believe this horror was the work of innocent drunks busting up a saloon. Surely there were silver threads among the burlap. Peaceful protester don’t kill, loot, burn and vandalizes. Mobs will be mobs, of course. A small facsimile of a riot breaks out every time the Sox win the Pennant. But “As for the destruction and looting,” Garry went on,” you are no doubt aware that a portion of that violence and destruction and looting was fomented by individuals and groups on the far right.” I confess I wasn’t aware of that. I must have slacked off channel surfing as the news grew unbearable. (Keep in mind Garry said a “portion” – and the far-right, like the poor, we will always have with us. Like the far-left). Garry sent me video and news copy as purported evidence of alleged mischief. I found it persuasive enough of alt-right small ball. Could this, then, explain the defacing of – of all things — the world famous Augustus St. Gauden’s bronze relief across from the Mass State House? It honors the Civil War heroic sacrifice of Robert Gould Shaw and the all-black Mass 54th Regiment and its deadly 1863 storming of Fort Wagner in South Carolina. It is among the greatest African American monuments on the planet. Scrawled over the Common side was BLACK LIVES MATTER, KILL THE POLICE PIGS, NO JUSTICE NO PEACE and a couple of “F*CKs for good measure. Was this the work of Right-wing pretenders? Of ANTIFA, those anti-fascist fascists? Or punk philistines with spray paint? Who knows? In all, nineteen Boston Common and Public Garden monuments, including the 911 memorial, were defaced during a Sunday, May 31st peaceful march and protest that was followed by a night rampage. The jerks stick around or come out at night? I have no doubt somewhere in that maelstrom were those Garry identifies as “taking a stand against oppression.” (Too often, we’ll remember a kid with an armful of pilfered merchandise stepping gleefully out a broken store window and have trouble imagining him or her or any of that rabble as “oppressed.” But, no, they’re not the whole story. )
Among the newly “oppressed” — pity poor Liz Vizza, director of Friends of the Public Garden (and, incidentally) among those who believe there are too many “dead white men” in Boston parks. (I was relieved to learn she was talking about statues.) This very “woke” individual woke June 1st to find her Beacon Street office windows shattered even as she was learning of the rest of the monumental destruction. Ironically, just two weeks ago, nearly $3 million was designated to restore the St. Gaudens bronze treasure. The night mob claiming to defend human dignity did its dirty work on the 123 anniversary of its dedication.
So — what’s next? I was chagrined to read that Garry is among those who believe the French, Russian and American Revolutions, without distinction, “were all responses to taxation without representation.” Leaving aside for a minute our raucous but just revolt against British tyranny that shouldn’t be mentioned on the same breath with the execrable French Reign of Terror, the vermin spawned by the revolutionaries of 1917 are nesting in the American House now. The torrid conditions are right for them to thrive – fierce agitation being stirred up among social classes, renewed tension between races, plenty of hustlers to keep those tensions high, an ultra- tormented election season and therefore– in my estimate — fear and loathing in the land, possibly to be augured by a migration to a neighborhood near you of the late Hunter Thompson’s hallucinatory desert bats. That’s not an “awakening”. That’s a nightmare.

FANTASIA ON A TROUBLED TIME

What a week! What a month! MLK had a dream. We had a nightmare. We went on a bender. Nations can go on benders, too. France, 1789, Russia, 1917. Revolution, after all, is basically mass inebriation. In my particular nightmare, we’re in a flea bag hotel, hung over. The night started okay. Moonlight, hors d’oeuvres, Chinese lanterns, nice social distancing. Then we’re in the pool and in the tank. The pool’s blood red. Christopher Columbus is headless and horizontal. Folks are yelling “black lives matter” and getting cheers. Other folks are yelling, “ALL lives matter” and getting beat up. Liz Warren is downing boiler-makers and re-naming Army forts for flowers. (Fort Begonia for Fort Benning. Whatever!) Trump and Biden are wrestling on top of the peanut shells, giving each other beer shampoos. Chairs and bottle are flying. Some guy jumps up and says “Columbus delivered the natives from human sacrifice, cannibalism and ritual castration.” I say, “Sush! Don’t give these savage drunks any ideas.” The cops show up. They’ve got a new policy for barroom brawls and riots. Wait until it’s over, then arrest the losers. (The big loser, I’m thinking, will be American civilization.) The joint goes up in smoke. Then we’re crashed in that Roach Resort, still brawling. I wake up and pick up the Blue & Gray Bedside Guide for Recovering Civil Warriors. It reads, “we must not regret the past or wish to shut the door on it.” Perfect! Past- present, good-bad, black-white, blue-gray — it’s all us. All American. Can’t we sober up and get along, people? (Where’s Rodney King when we need him?) I think I’m still dreaming.