THE NATIONAL STRATEGY THAT WASN’T

Let us now praise maligned, neglected American prophets, one of whom sat in the Oval Office not long ago and saw what we are seeing now and for which we should have been better prepared. No,no,no, not HIM. I speak of George W. Bush.

In the summer of 2005, the then-President was on vacation in Crawford, Texas and was reading an advanced copy of a new book about the 1918 pandemic.( My accounts don’t mention the name of the book, damn it. I’ll find it!) Bush was overwhelmed by what he was reading and appropriately fearful that what brought the planet to its knees early in the last century could happen again, quite easily.  He instructed members of his government to come up with a plan, prefatory to a “national strategy.” And staff members did, indeed, work on a plan for the next three years, according to reports.

“If we wait for a pandemic to appear,” Bush said in a speech, “it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we  failed to act today.”

So — what happened? To that plan?

Meanwhile, in a recent press conference, President Trump was asked if he had any interest in reaching out to former Presidents for help in dealing with the pandemic.  His response? “I don’t think I’m going to to learn much.”

Pause, think about that answer. Just think about it.

If Trump loses in November and, as a consequence, unleashes on us the rolling leftward failed strategies of the Obama years on all fronts,  it will be because of the arrogant, stupid, ignorant things he’s said and the  transparently ludicrously egotistical attitudes he’s adopted. I state the obvious.

Fact is, he’s right about many things (just ask him). But …..well, just stick with ignorant. Add a need for common sense.  And the national interest. Of course you reach out. Period.

Meanwhile, again — what happened to that Bush-suggested “national strategy”? I, for one, would like to hear from the former President on that. We’re suddenly hearing a lot from Obama. Please, G.W., balance out the ledger here.

REMEMBERING THE ROYAL EXCHANGE

In the early days of the Eighteenth Century, after many a universal cataclysm, the British essayist Joseph Addison, writing in the May 19, 1711 issue of The Spectator, offered a bit of a paean to his fellow mortals engaged in commerce. “I am wonderfully delighted to see such a body of men thriving in their own private fortunes and at the same time promoting the public stock; or in other words, raising estates for their own families by bringing into their country whatever is wanting, and carrying out of it whatever is superfluous.”  Similar sentiments run through my mind when I see 21st Century businesses “stepping up”, as we are fond of saying, to help alleviate deprivations brought on by Covid 19 as it beleaguers The Family of Man. Sounds like capitalism at its best and most generous.

Continue reading “REMEMBERING THE ROYAL EXCHANGE”

THE SACRED, PRESENT MOMENT

In the summer of 2007 — time flies — Edwin Faust, a writer, married father of three, New Jersey resident and news editor for a daily metropolitan newspaper (don’t know which one), reflected on his faith. His was and presumably remains a very traditional brand of Catholicism. I don’t know him. I know that people like him — and me — who prefer a more traditional liturgy, even in the traditional Latin, are often viewed as rigid, reactionary and spiritually hidebound. Not the case.  We simply prefer the reverent sense of sacred mystery and quiet solemnity to be found in the ages-old practice of the immemorial liturgy. Many people far younger than me feel the same way. The “new order” Mass — new since about 1968 or so — is, in most instances,  perfectly fine and valid and in recent years priests have taken pains to restore a serious sense of reverence to it.

I don’t feel any particular competence to be judging such things. It’s widely acknowledged that there have been periods of improvisation and silliness in liturgical practice and that the jejune, often trite and banal influences of pop culture have invaded the sanctuaries. This is especially true of the music. The happy-clappy, toe-tapping affective or emotional melodies and tonalities continue in many instances to win out over the spiritual and devotional in parishes still under the superficial influence of modern culture. I suspect a lot of people who don’t go to church stay away because they feel they can get more enrichment from a good Sunday morning walk in the woods. I confess I often feel the same way. A considerable degree of spiritual gravitas, not to mention a sense of divine obligation, has been lost. Some modern services can move one to tears, sort of like a Hallmark movie. But I prefer to have my soul, not my tear ducts, moved. So much for that. Just my opinion.

Anyway, Mr. Faust counseled, “we should proclaim our faith when opportunity allows and prudence counsels it, but we should not do so angrily,  nor should we become preoccupied with politics. So much time is wasted in fruitless agitation….A man generally has his hands full earning a living, raising a family, managing a household and saving his own soul. I think he might justly exempt himself from having to formulate domestic and foreign policy for the United States of America according to Catholic principles…. I sometimes reflect on the irony that Vatican II , an avowedly pastoral counsel (i.e., not meant to alter doctrine, just improve spiritual outreach to the world) triggered a doctrinal crisis, while Traditional Catholicism, in defending doctrine, brought about a pastoral crisis.

(Note: Vatican II was the major church conference between 1962 and 65 — encompassing, as it happened, all my high school year — which inadvertently unleashed enormous confusion, squabbling, division and loss of vocations in the church, partly because if fell right into the middle of a worldwide secular cultural and sexual revolution.)

Faust continues:

And when our churchmen want to make their peace with this world of depravity, rather than oppose it, this leaves us….temporarily orphaned, but it doesn’t leave us without recourse….Every day we have an opportunity to remove from our lives all that keeps us from God, so I can say as Saint Paul said, “I live, but not I,Christ lives in me.”

Wonderful spiritual advice, chanced upon in my pile of mental and material junk this Saturday morning.

I know — but have not seen in years — a once-very devout Catholic guy who formerly manifested a good deal of evangelical fervor. He drove St. Paul’s point home to me one evening over coffee at a Dunkin Donuts. Sometime afterward I learned that he had pretty much abandoned the practice of the faith and spent his Sunday mornings flying model airplanes. That’s good clean fun but not a great substitute for religion. Our faith can be a fragile, precious possession too easily lost.  I sat listening on that Dunkin Donuts evening, myself  a person of struggling faithfulness,  suspecting that this somewhat younger companion of mine had not yet been entirely subjected to the sharp teeth of life’s buzz saw — or fully matured emotionally. St. Paul would have told him he needed to “finish the race” — and advance from a childhood faith, then adolescent faith to an adult faith. (I think we encounter that exhortation in Corinthians I.)

Yes, we must keep the faith — as busy, sin-prone, tempted adults. And I must go to any Mass I know to be valid, even if the liturgy or especially the “pretty” music, annoys me a trifle. The supernatural graces are the same. And I’m aware that I’m given sometimes to overstating the problem (though, forgive my pride, not by much.)

Mr Edwin Faust continued — actually concludes — It is only by erasing that little ‘I’, that hard nut of egotism that can taint even our noblest aspirations, that Christ will live in us and in those we want to share in the life we have found. Or, I would add, in the life for which I am still searching as I join others in the search, trying — often failing — to lead by example.

Mr. Faust’s article, by the way, from which I’ve culled these excerpts, is called: “Finding Our Place in Salvation History or How to be Happy in the Present Moment.” 

It appeared in the Summer, 2007 issue of The Latin Mass magazine.

 

 

THE PURPLE PENGUIN

Pandemic idleness can lead one into previously overlooked nooks and crannies of “the stacks,” meaning, in this case, my personal, neglected library of things published or posted, on paper and in cyberspace.

So it is that I learned, sitting here this afternoon, that late last year, the staff of a London aquarium — I don’t know which one — somehow deduced that two female penguins in their charge had come together as a couple. So they gave the pair an egg to hatch and decided that when the baby penguin was born, it would not be assigned a gender.  Instead of the  red or blue tag customarily used to indicated it as male or female, it would wear a neutral purple one.

However, according to “reports” ( one in The Washington Examiner among them) the aquarium staff admitted that future breeding of the baby penguin will be determined based on “the gender its biology determines.”

Biology determining gender? What a concept!

ISOLATION

We isolate now, reluctantly. The pandemic has plunged us into surreal global circumstances. It’s entering the history books. It is far from over.

Most of you know about Thoreau and his cabin. More of you might not know of Henry Beston who built a little cabin — a little house, actually –on the dunes of outer Cape Cod in the Twenties. It’s worth exploring and sharing his account of that nature-filled isolation in that twenty-by-sixteen dune dwelling not far from the pounding surf. He called it the Fo-castle. His book on his time in that house on the dunes is called, The Outer Most House. 

I recall the sadness when that little house that had withstood many storms was washed out to sea during the cataclysmic Blizzard of ’78. But a replica was built in its place, and a society of nature lovers and preservationists have sprang up long ago in Beston’s memory.

Bottom line here: we mortals have been known to seek out isolation and to have benefitted memorably from it. Just a thought. No, you don’t have to build a cabin. Just recall the diagnosis of Pascal, that many of our problems come from an inability to sit alone quietly in a room.

THE “INEQUALITY” DANCE

Round and round it goes, the insistent tub-thumping chorus masses of folks now and then have been dancing to for decades– the claims of rising wealth inequality in the U.S.. Well, I find much that is said on this score persuasive, since I’m often feeling unequal in wealth, though also knowing I have no one to blame, really, but moi. This might be different — indeed, I suspect it is — for millions in a different, less malleable social and, therefore, economic situation. The Democratic Party’s sharp dance to the left has undeniably been fueled by this obsession. Hence, we have proposals for Medicare for All and various supposedly playing-field-leveling wealth taxes.

It’s a complex question. I admit that…

But prominent economist Thomas Piketty has, I’m told, been among those defining wealth as the value of all assets held by households minus their debt.  He and others  leave out future Social Security payments, which, according to what I’ve read, account for 58 per cent of wealth for the bottom 90 percent of wealth distribution. I live in that broad bottom, among the 90 per cent.  I’m not doing great, but, having paid into the SS system over a lifetime, I’m afloat — and, of course, am free, thank God, to improve my lot and move farther away from the bottom. My prospects for doing that, as with everyone else, waxes and wanes. So it goes.

And now I read that a new paper — new to me, at least, and other sources I consult — from the University of Pennsylvania finds that when Social Security wealth is accounted for, inequality has remained constant over the past three decades.

So, could the sharps and flats of the music score for this whole “inequality dance” amount to a mere accounting error?

I personally think the drum majors for the inequality parade — excuse the mixing metaphors here — are marching to the tune the Marx and Engels band struck up a Century ago. No, no, no, I’m not saying the Democrats are Marxist. But they damn well have begun to look and sound like Socialists. I’ll not try to draw out the distinction here. It would seem tiresome, pedantic and, given my knowledge, might be inaccurate. If you’re reading this and feeling either pro OR con, kindly weigh in with your own distinctions.

I’d simply say that socialism is Marxism lite. It is, ultimately, an ideology whose tenets exist independent of mere numbers. It asserts a view of human nature and economics supportive of the notion that we can all be radically made equal in our aspirations and abilities — and bank accounts. It has always and everywhere produced  dubious and, ironically, unequal results or, as in the case of China or the old USSR and the flash over murderous insanity of Pol Pot and Cambodia,  a river of blood, not to mention gross — INequality.

But I’m sure the dance will go on. And on and on…especially this election year.

IT’S QUARTER TO FOUR, THERE’S NO ONE IN THE PLACE EXCEPT YOU AND ME…

And, in silence, spending the night by choice on the hard laminate floor of my study, unsoftened by a reasonably thick carpet, without much comfort from a comforter, some facts of one’s life — hard, uncomforting facts — become manifest in the darkness. So you sit up to write about them — and they vanish. Isn’t it always the way? But they are worth pursuing, as best you can remember them, by the dawn’s coming light — on this First of May.

BAD MOMENTS IN BLACK ROCK

Hate to pile on. Hate all the hate. But, let’s see — beyond hate, there were some seeming facts to be sorted out in this pandemic crisis after it came ashore in the U.S.

To wit:

The CDC messed  up  its initial testing kit, then the FDA likely put obstacles in the way of a deployment regimen. The President, sensitive to the slightest criticism, failed to own the problem. The “news” networks, salivating over this morsel of Trumpian non-acknowledgement ( the phrase “I don’t take responsiblity” will echo down the long re-election corridor to November) eat it up. Perhaps no politician would totally own it and would try to defer blame, but less obviously than DT. He will never let himself be on the defensive, and that’s probably somewhere in the celestial book of political rules of engagement — or disengagement. He should clean up the mess by seeing who messed up. That will look, as usual, like he’s deferring blame or executing the surfs, but, truly, somebody messed up and I doubt it was him. God knows, he has no problem with firing people. I gather that’s what he did every week on The Apprentice.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s former staffer Tara Reade is claiming Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. Her first complaint came a year ago, described only as “inappropriate touching.” Well, will the media that ran Judge Kavanaugh and his family to ground react similarly to this allegation?  What do you think? Reade’s isn’t the first such suggestion that Biden has had wandering hands and words back when this hollow, chuckling fool had strands of real hair and maybe felt he deserved a little more female attention than he was getting. Pity this poor Galahad, finally in striking distance of his Grail and some woman comes along to remind him he’s just a rank groper.

THE GLORIES OF ISOLATION

Fr. George Rutler is an author and a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, pastor of St. Michael’s Church in the neighborhood still known to many as Hell’s Kitchen, though I’m told it has undergone significant gentrification from its bad old days. I’ve copied and pasted here his weekly message for Sunday, April 26, 2002 setting out the potential blessings — and, yes, glories and glorious spiritual opportunities — afforded us by our current isolation, which at time might seem more a bane than a blessing.

Read and enjoy and, perhaps, benefit.

Among logical fallacies, the argument from authority, “argumentum ad verecundiam,” means accepting a proposition because its source is authoritative, even though the matter is outside that source’s competence. Such a fallacy, for instance, might approve Einstein’s view on politics or religion because he was such an important physicist. However, precisely because of his inventiveness, it is not fallacious to accept as valid his assertion: “The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulate the creative mind.”
   Einstein was a remote disciple of the quirkily brilliant early nineteenth-century philosopher Schopenhauer: “A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
   There is some consolation in that at present, when “cabin fever” is an ancillary affliction of the coronavirus. One does not have to be a physicist or philosopher to know that while “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18), there is a difference between cursed loneliness and benevolent solitude. The integrity of one’s spiritual life can be measured by understanding the difference. Thus Pascal, who was a Christian mystic and a mathematical scientist, famously said: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a room alone.”
   The Nazis locked the Dominican nun, Blessed Julia Rodzinska, in a cement closet for a year, and witnesses remarked on the radiance of her face. The Venerable Cardinal Nguyen van Thuan spent thirteen years in a Vietnamese prison, nine of them in isolation. I can attest to the serenity of three men I met who never were lonely in solitude. One was Bishop Dominic Tang of Canton, who spent seven of his twenty-two years in prison in solitary confinement. Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei of Shanghai was thirty years in prison, much of that time in solitary confinement. Father Walter Ciszek died in New York after five years in isolation in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison and fifteen years in the Gulag.
   These names came to mind when I read of a CNN commentator, who has shown condescension for the Church and promoted an article calling for the abolition of the Catholic priesthood. He tweeted that, after some weeks in lockdown, during which he kept his lucrative job, he “crawled in bed and cried.”
   Saints in solitude often did not have a bed to crawl into, but they were with God, and would have been embarrassed for the Governor of New York, who said of the pandemic: “The number is down because we brought the number down. God did not do that. Faith did not do that.”
   Another governor, the fifth of the Roman province of Judaea, was told: “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above” (John 19:11). We know who said that.
Faithfully yours in Christ,
Father George W. Rutler

 

READING “DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL”

Anne Frank’s story of a fearful isolation in war-time Holland — at a time when so many of us are in isolation — long ago crossed the Globe and became among the most tragically iconic stories of WWII and the Holocaust. Therefore, it is with a bit of shame that I say I am reading it for the first time. You know how it goes; this was one of those books — and movies and plays — you’d heard so much about, it never occurred to you that it should be compulsory reading. Continue reading “READING “DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL””