Election Day/Month/Year

Election Day! The day (or week or month) we find out whether we’ll continue to be led by Obama and thugs or if we get a 4-year sabbatical. 

I think it says a lot when we think about who Obama has chosen or favored. Everyone he does is braindead-stupid, which suggests they would need to lean on him for his power and influence. First there was Biden as the VP pick back in ’08. In ’20 he favored Kamala in the primaries. Then this year he wanted Walz to be picked as VP over a guy who actually has an IQ above 100 (Shapiro). It can’t be accidental that he picks figureheads, “empty suits”. 

Political analyst Mark Halperin is center-left but even he can see it. Halperin is furious at his media for covering up Biden’s senility and letting Kamala be the candidate, saying it was very counterproductive. 

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We went to the polls after, we thought, the pre-work crowds but around 9:30 to 10am it was jam packed. Never seen our voting station that crowded. Usually we’re out in 2-5 minutes and this time it took over 30. Not bad, of course, compared to places like Arizona. 

Meanwhile, this news is kind of surreal. ICE agents told they can’t wear uniforms or badges to vote today, per internal email obtained by journalist Ben Bergquam.  Seems they don’t want to intimidate all the illegal aliens voting.

I suspect Trump will win the American citizen vote but that might not be enough for him. 

It's almost sort of a catch-22: if the country was healthy enough to elect Trump this time then we wouldn't need him.  

For all our famed American “rugged individualism” we are incredibly interdependent and not just with regard to economics. Our freedoms depend on other people and certainly not on the Constitution or law.  If we’ve learned nothing over the past decade or two it’s that the government feels comfortable censoring our speech and limiting freedom via either third parties or direct edicts. We’re only an executive order or two away from tyranny so the Constitution can’t save us and neither can Trump --but he can at least delay the inevitable. 

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The common thread of the past two decades can be summed up in one phrase: the weaponization of previously neutral instruments. Anything that can be weaponized/politicized has been, including the dollar, the judicial system, search engines, voting and medical systems. 

It’s hard to think of a single public-facing entity that hasn’t been weaponized. 

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Quotable: 

"A time could come when, whether we want it or not, we'll have to live without churches, just as Christians lived without them in the first three centuries. May God preserve us from living to that time! But our task right now, for modern  Christians, is to think through and work out a form of life in the Church under any conditions, even when they take our churches away from us. After all, this could happen, sooner or later."

—Archbishop Theodosius (Snigirev) 

Is President Harris God's Plan?

One issue that seems neglected in the current Church, although it might be linked to inadequate catechesis on my part, is how Christians ought deal with government tyranny. 

In a way I realize I’m rather late to recognition of injustice. Millions of babies in the womb killed over the past decades asserts to the fact. Yet many people, like myself, have believed in the goodness of America and have been thrown off-kilter by recent events that threaten freedom of speech, religion, that undermine the rule of law and our justice system. Adam Smith said, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” but how much is too much ruin? How much corruption is acceptable? 

Particularly appalling is the injustice around non-violent offenders related to January 6th. This is such a visible affront that affects the lives of over 1,180 defendants and the lack of outrage is offensive, whether it comes from Democrats or comfortable country club Republicans. 

I sometimes wonder if virtue *has* to be the loser in the short and medium run, and winner only in the long run.  Evil has the benefit of no guardrails as well as the element of surprise. The Soviet Union thrived for some 70 years before dismantling.  Plus I read in an older catechism that bad leaders are sometimes sent by God to chastise a people — in which case it’s possible that President Harris is God’s plan! 

Equally confusing are such disparate Christian approaches to recent tyrannies. St Maximilian Kolbe’s view seems to have been the polar opposite of Alexander Solzenheitzen's, based on the latter's haunting quote: "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive…?…They would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened.” Similarly there’s the example of Bonhoeffer in Germany. 

I read an interesting book called “Why All People Suffer”. The relevant and potent chapter was about non-violence and how the victims must show the victimizers what they are doing in order to provoke their conscience. God allows suffering as a third way to get sinners to change (the first two being their own conscience and the punishment that results from bad actions). Jesus was the premiere example of this. 

I think of this especially in regard to the "tale of two J6rs". One fled the country and received asylum from Belarus (to Belarus's credit, given the J6r would not have received a fair trial here) and another, named John Strand, who stayed and fought the charges and ended up getting a longer sentence by not lying and taking a plea deal.  

As much as I cheer and cherish the little guy who evaded the police state by fleeing (a David v. Goliath story, although this David was not nearly as good as David and Goliath surely not as nasty as our Goliath), I realize that in Christian terms Strand chose the better path. He *showed* the victimizers what they were doing and pricked the consciences of those who still have one. The other fellow did nothing productive in terms of the spiritual realm.

Are these two J6rs are, in a microcosm, the difference between Solzenheitzen's approach and St Maximilian Kolbe's? Or is the idea that one solution fits all wrong in itself and that different souls will discern differently but no less accurately? 

A Shocking Stat

Today I think I heard the most shocking statistic I’ve heard in my lifetime.  At my own parish no less. In his homily Fr. J mentioned they had a diocesan meeting for all priests yesterday and that Bishop Fernandes says that the number of Catholics in the Columbus diocese since he became bishop in 2022 has gone up 60%. Sixty percent. 

It has nothing to do with conversions of course but to Biden’s mass immigration policy.  Per Fr J, the bishop is desperately seeking foreign priests to serve the new populations, and indeed he just got one from Cameroon to serve the burgeoning Cameroon population in the diocese. 

Back of envelope math while walking the dogs: that would mean the diocese went from around 250k Catholics to 400k, a 150k influx. If there are 3 million people total pop of diocese (including non-Catholics), that means about 6% migrants added (assuming 80% are Catholic). If Biden has let in 21 million in 2 years that is about 6% of US population so it tracks. Wow. 

So welcome to Mexico! We may end up making America a more nominally  “Catholic” (or Muslim) country at the expense of our freedoms, rule of law, and safeguards we traditionally enjoyed. (Although admittedly white Democrats in power and our “educators” are doing a good job on their own with that.)

Catholic author John Zmirak says not to count on these Catholics to stay. “Virtually all the sheep our shepherds steal from other flocks leave after a few years of vapid sermons by lavender priests. The only bright side? When Catholic immigrants leave the Church, they often become conservative evangelicals and vote pro-life finally.”

History may look back and say that the stolen 2020 election was far more impactful than 2024 election because of the Biden admin's goal of making the US less a country and more a global village. For good or ill we’re different now. 

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Trump’s election in 2016 so enraged and emboldened the Deep State and Democrats that you have to wonder if MAGA was a net positive good, that maybe we shouldn’t have riled up the hornet’s nest. But who could possibly have known in 2016 that the true powers in this country are the CIA/DHS/DOJ, or that the Dems would react so strongly they would become lawless?

Hiring Trump in '16 was like giving the finger to somebody in traffic and that driver goes into road rage creates a 50-car pileup and closes the highway. You can blame the driver for the middle finger but really the other driver is at fault. 

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The amazing thing about Obama is how quickly he understood where the power centers were in the US government (I assume due to mentoring by his endorser Ted Kennedy?). Obama was as unknown and new as Jimmy Carter but turned out to be the opposite of the naive Carter by understanding the rules: the president feeds the hand of the military and intel agencies and they let him stay in power.  Thus Obama pissed a lot of liberals off when he began the drone program and killing people in foreign lands.  I recall it being pretty controversial at the time but it was surely a crucial step in securing the neocons in the agencies. He later did the coup in Ukraine and got involved in Syria and Libya. Obama also was smart about putting his generals (like the infamous Gen Milley) in power. 

If the four most charismatic presidents since JFK are Reagan, Clinton, Obama, and Trump, then the problem is that Reagan was “handicapped” by his own virtue, Trump by his enemies, and Clinton and Obama were mostly free to do as they please, unaffected by conscience or guardrail.  

Which actually is the way it has to be. Virtue has to be the loser in the short run and winner only in the long run since vice has not only the element of surprise (like Pearl Harbor) but the lack of conscience needed to do wrong. You have to have the cross before the resurrection, so evil thrives before virtue triumphs. The Soviet Union thrived for some 70 years before dismantling. Similarly the Democrats will certainly thrive before they fall. 

The Long Wait for People to Wake Up

A big part of the reason for our country's decline is that good people are actively voting for decline. My brother-in-law comes to mind, but also a second cousin who was a longtime union rep and devout Catholic.  I looked for a glimmer of hope today to see if maybe he's been able to see that what used to be called Republican (endless wars, Wall Street worship, selling out to China, etc...) is now Democratic, and what used to be Democrat (pro-American worker, anti-open border, pro speech & civil liberties) is now Republican. There’s been a pretty dramatic shift, which is why folks like RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Naomi Wolf and others have jumped on the Trump train while folks like Dick and Liz Cheney and Bush intel officials have endorsed Kamala. 

It’s not until good people figure things out that times will change and maybe it’s donning on Don, who used to be a prolific donor to the Democrat party but slowed down during the Trump era. He was an enthusiastic donor from 2006-2012 but then his wallet went silent from 2016 till his last donation in 2020 to a local county hack.  But maybe something happened over the past four years to change his mind. We’ve certainly had a lot of “new data” in the form of the Biden administration. 

It’s been an agonizingly slow process, this realignment, this period of folks calculating “are things bad enough for me to at least look at MAGA?”. It feels like it’s a race to see if America can be destroyed before good people wake up in time to keep that from happening. Given the giant increase in illegals who have no culture around rule of law or civil liberties it seems that it’s already too late by all natural appearances. And the destruction would certainly be merited. No one could possibly fault God for not saving America given how blind we’ve become, though we can always hope!  

In the end I suppose all the looking for causes of this or that, of when and how things went astray, are a waste of time. This quote from USSR dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn says it all: 

“I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”

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There's a local priest on Facebook who still hasn't got the message. 

He's still in the Jonah Goldberg wing of the Republican Party and it's a bit befuddling. Catholics who are well-informed politically and still don't get it are fascinating, like unicorns. I might attribute it to ignorance or classism (he's a polyglot and composer and Trump's is an imperfect vessel to put it mildly) but ultimately only experience teaches, and he's got a day job and he will be won over only if things get bad enough. 

No good can come except through suffering. Isn't that the message of the cross? 

The most amazing part is how devout, smart people don’t care about their own countrymen who are suffering from unjust political persecution. I feel like I’m missing something bigly. I feel like there needs to be interviews with respectable conservative journos - honest, non-aggressive interviews - so we can understand where they’re coming from.  I joke that Jonah Goldberg would be leading the charge for the defense of the J6rs if they were protesting for free trade rather than on their perception of a stolen election. Specifically be great to sit down with the National Review gang. They've been awol. 

People just don’t seem to care about J6 and government overreach. Given my own sinfulness, it doesn’t make sense that I could be more sympathetic to their plight given that such a relatively small number of Americans care about them. I suppose part of the problem is that most of us are one-eye’d people now - we don’t read anything besides our own side. I can’t stomach reading the New York Times nor can folks who read The NY Times stomach a Tucker Carlson or Julie Kelly. 

Ultimately I suppose it comes down to the mainstream media. I understood intuitively that as America forgot God it would greatly affect the quality of politicians (as well as the quality of the voters). But for some reason I never anticipated it would kill the journalism profession.

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Heard a riveting podcast about the HB6 Ohio House scandal. Householder needed money not for yachts or personal use, but in order to collect power. One of the more discouraging elements in politics is the success of money (ads, endorsements) in the majority of political races. At least in George Washington's day votes were bought by something of actual value (whiskey). Nowadays politicians spend that money on silly commercials and the voters get nothing but empty promises. Let's go back to providing free whiskey! 

OSU, Notre Dame, the Debate

My tendency to reflexively root for the underdog is undermining my ability to be a fan of OSU and Notre Dame!  When OSU beat some patsy last week by a lopsided score I was found myself accidentally cheering when the other team made yardage.  Similarly the Northern Illinois v ND game was inspiring and so memorable, especially when the coach for Northern Illinois started crying during the interview. 

I think it’s in the American psyche to root for the underdog which is why to some extent Trump is so popular. He has everything going against him - including himself given some of his tendencies! - and yet somehow won the biggest upset of all time in 2016. But I didn't root for him then. 

Say what you will about Trump’s flaws but It's interesting that all the worldly powers of our time: the wealthy, the powerful, the government intel agents who lied about the Biden laptop, the principalities & powers like the New York Times and Washington Posts, all approve of the Jonah Goldbergs and the David Frenchs and the establishment Republicans.  Sometimes the anawim are right.

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Watched the debate the other night, ninety minutes I’ll never get back. Harris acquitted herself well enough but that isn’t too surprising given she’s a lawyer and lacks dementia.  The debate wasn’t for me or the average Americans since the average American has made up his/her mind who they will vote for. This was only about reaching that sliver of undecided in 6-7 states, approximately 250,000 people.  Hence Trump going for the Haitians eating cat in Springfield angle. This was the touchy-feely issue he needed to reach low information voters. He got rapped on the knuckles by the hall monitor but it was interesting to hear the moderator appeal to authority, saying “we reached out to the city manager about that..”.  In other words, journalists uncritically accept what a politician says. That minor thing, in a nutshell, is the problem today, the death of journalism combined with authority figures having proved themselves untrustworthy. 

Living in SoCal

I can now say I've lived in Southern California. 

Because that's what it's been like here in Central Ohio for past 2-3 months. No rain, no clouds, just stellar day after stellar day. 

I did a glorious rural run along Creek Rd at the Madison County line. Beautiful area that would be great to bike sometime. The landscape color here reminds me of San Simeon with sand-colored grasslands and golden corn stalks. It's desert country of late, the air dry and cracklin', the creeks low. The only clouds are contrails and the sycamore limbs are white as white caps, as stark as elk horns. 

The water is calm, like Walden Pond, and I slide effortlessly over the shiny surface.  It reminds me of the cover of the Thoreau classic that I treasured in grade school. I see some turkey vultures overhead and think, "Ask not for whom the turkey vultures circle, they circle for you."

Not long ago we rented a cabin outside Hocking Hills. That morning under the speckled sun I read Scripture and felt like Billy Graham on his North Carolina front porch. 

Glancing blows of sunlight 

Trunk'd pillars cathedral our path...

We started out in the family room reading amid the light knotty pine boards. Is there something evolutionary or atavistic about wood and stone in housing? Calming and natural. It feels almost western out here, like you’re transported to pony express times with ranches in the middle of nowhere. 

E-biked over hill and dale (and even the battery couldn't conquer some of those hollers). Beautiful country and really the only way to see it given it’s un-hikeable unless you’re young. Lovely to ride in the dappled shade on our “private” fifteen mile mountain road (I saw two cars the whole ninety minutes).  Even went off on an unmarked road which led to three or four houses spread out over the next half-mile. Half-surprised I didn’t get chased by a dog or a gun-owner. Again the feel was so “ranch-y’ that it felt like Ronald Reagan on his Rancho del Cielo. 

It’s a jungle out there, literally. The brush behind the house is so heavy and the climb so arduous that I assume little of this surrounding area has been hiked whatsoever either now or in previous generations when Indians and pioneers stuck to the game trails. 

There are trees so straight here that they seem to defy the laws of nature, as if they were made by machine. They silently mock the other twisted trunks, or perhaps they simply piously bear witness, ala the saints. 

It feels so oddly restorative, being in this forest womb with absolute quiet. As a retiree, how would I really notice the difference?  And yet I do...Picturesque dog walks without the need to pick up the poop or cross busy streets or force the leash over mailboxes. No need to drive the car.  It’s kind of like a beach vacation in some ways, but much less crowded. I can see why monks like the Trappists in Kentucky chose wilderness areas. You feel closer to God and have fewer distractions and attractions. You can get in a meditative mood and just sit and let whatever thoughts present themselves. 

We had fire-cooked hotdogs for dinner along with a broccoli salad that Steph made yesterday, Put gouda cheese on the dogs and declared it good! 

I took another half-mile at dusk with one of the dogs. Good to see the path in all its diurnal incarnations. Back home I notice the fire smoke rising like incense and wonder why I appreciate this sight more than the incense rising at Mass. Anyhow it's nice to make the world a better place, i.e. warmer one, by burning carbons. Longer growing seasons and all. 

My Drinking History

College professors with tenure have god-like abilities to do what they will.  At my college in the ‘80s, it was hit or miss on whether a given teacher would be particularly interested in teaching on a given day. 

An example was our English composition prof in which at least three classes were devoted to the delicacies of exotic foods. We didn’t ask why since we were freshman. On our last day he even brought in sushi for us to try. 

Being of Irish heritage my sensibilities have always reflexively been against elitism and snobbishness so I took it upon myself to teach our teacher. I wrote my first essay about the delights of McDonald’s quarterpounder with cheese, saying that it was on par with the tenderest filet mignon. Embarrassing in retrospect but the professor inadvertently taught me that you need to write for your audience, in this case him: he gave me a C-. The next paper I wrote on a neutral topic and got an A. He said my writing had markedly improved. I bet. 

So naturally I was similarly skeptical about any expensive beers or liquors. Just the tried and trued Budweiser lager, the McDonald’s quarter pounder of the beer world. Even trying a Miller Light felt  ‘daring’. It was about 8 years into my drinking career before a friend had me try something he called ‘Guinness with training wheels’, which was half Guinness and half Budweiser. Guinness is hardly that risky since it’s not any more bitter than Budweiser and probably has less calories. The fear factor was simply due to the color being black!  Rank prejudice. 

I was content with adding Guinness to my drinking repertoire and liquor never tempted, especially after having too much tequila during the ’89 Bengal Super Bowl appearance. It would be about a quarter century before I’d try that again. 

Budweiser and Guinness were my happy mainstays for about thirty years until the craft beer boom started. It was around 2011 when out of curiosity tried a pale ale, nothing too wild or hoppy like an IPA. And I liked it well enough, it had a lot of flavor and was a bit “spicy”. For the next couple decades I left pilsners behind for the most part.  

And then, not out of snobbishness but for weight control mostly, I experimented with bourbon as a supplement to beer. More bang, fewer calories. And I found I liked the taste and the different interesting varieties...

In short, I fear I’ve become my old professor.

Why Harris Will Probably Win

It’s very unscientific, but I won’t believe Trump can win unless some of the people I know change their minds about him and there’s no evidence of that. There’s a lot of talk about people “waking up” but I’ve seen little real world evidence of that. I don’t think things got nearly bad enough to wake anybody up.  The invasion across the border doesn’t impact most people’s daily lives. The financial crisis is nothing so far, nothing compared to what it could be (inflation is under control and unemployment rate within historical levels). We’re not at war (except a sissy proxy war in which we hide behind the skirt of dying Ukrainians). The two-tier justice system doesn’t affect most people because other people are paying that price. 

The only things that tend to concentrate minds are the economy and war, and both of those are under control so the advantage has to go to the incumbent (which is Harris).

I’m not sure how a divided Republican Party can win anyway (it’s two parties now, MAGA and establishment Republicans).  A house divided against itself cannot stand. I’m sure I’m not alone in no longer considering myself a Republican. I wouldn’t vote for Nikki Haley so I can’t blame Nikki Haley fans for not voting for Trump in November. 

Naomi Wolf, a leftist who has “woken up” said recently: 

“Half the country wanted to get rid of Pres Trump in 2020 in spite of peace and prosperity because they could not take the frenzied emotional tenor. You may not know these people but I do and some of them need to vote for Trump if he is to win.”

I have a sense that things have to get worse before they’ll get better but they have to get worse fast in order to get Trump across the finish line. 

Somebody joked, “how long before we start saying 2028 is the most impactful election in our lifetime?” I replied that we already had the most impactful (2020) so we’re pretty much doomed.  As important as this upcoming election seems there’s a case to be made that it’s too little, too late. It’s pretty hard to recover from a period of truly wretched leadership, from 2003 when Bush went into Iraq to 2016, and then again 2016-2020. That’s 18 of the past 22 years and most of Trump’s years were spent on defensive due to Russiagate and impeachments. Trump lived on a knife’s edge since if he did anything unpopular with a few key GOP senators he would’ve been removed from office because the Senate would’ve impeached him as well. And Obama remade the military and the federal judiciary into his image over his eight years (twelve if including Biden years). 

My stepson was right back in ’16 when he said that Trump’s only job is to throw monkey-wrenches into the machine. That’s still his role so everything is just a delay tactic at this point. 

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True: 

“If the US had to raise taxes monthly to pay for Ukraine every month, the war would’ve been been over 2+ years ago. Imagine how fast Iraq and Afghanistan would’ve been over. How good would our roads & grid be if we would’ve spent that $8T on infrastructure?”

**

Also true: 

“The problem with addressing mass immigration through the democratic mechanism is one of collapsing decision space. The conservative party is captured, so you need an alternative but that takes a decade to build and the left is importing votes faster than you can convert citizens. It's a race, and the left knows this....Citizens are only converted in the first place by seeing too many imported voters, by which point it is too late to vote against it.”

I think some of it comes down to whether one think humans are “interchangeable robots”. That was what we used to cynically say given how my workplace would lay off large numbers of people and replace with contractors. (This backfired when they had to re-hire a bunch of them back.)

Similarly, we think we can import a ton of people from other countries to cover for our diminishing birthrate but we’re finding out too late that it doesn’t work that way. Different countries have much different educational systems, beliefs, cultural memories, backgrounds and we no longer even try to assimilate them via our education system. They assimilate us in fact. 

The bad thing is I'm too young given the pace of change not to be deeply affected by all this. I had thought, circa 2017, that we didn’t have to worry about the collapse of most of our systems and I might have been right but for not realizing the government had censorship tools and that that would alter the results of the 2020 election (which, in turn, greatly accelerated our national decline). In a sense, the government was far more potent than I’d given it credit for, especially with a compliant media not holding it to account. 

The more religious of the Founding Fathers, like Washington and Adams, said that religion would be crucial to keeping America free. The less religious, like Jefferson, said our liberty depends on the freedom of the press.  In the end I guess they were both right, although since they happened at more or less simultaneously it’s hard to tell which aspect dealt the death blow. 

Changes to the Mass and Society

I’m always intrigued by looking for the boundary line between the “good ‘60s’ and “the bad ‘60s”. 

Romans 1:18-32 says there is a pattern to sexual degeneracy, and a society that rejects belief in God will inevitably follow it. It spirals downward in three stages:

Worship of nature (vv. 21-23)

Homosexuality (vv. 26-27)

“A debased mind” (v. 28)

Is "worship of nature” a proxy for “bad worship’, or pagan worship? Did the Church do anything in the ‘60s that might've disrupted the proper worship of God, i.e. the worship that God wanted rather than what man wanted? Perhaps so. 

A deep dive in the ‘60s: 

What if we paralleled secular events with the changes to the Mass given that the Mass is the hinge on which all things depend.  Exorcists claim that the devil fears Latin more than the vernacular (Protestants hated our Latin so we had to change for them apparently). Could the spread of the vernacular in liturgy and less reverential worship have aided the devil? 

The ancient saying is “Lex orandi, lex credendi (Latin for “the law of what is prayed [is] what is believed [is] the law of what is lived”). It means "prayer and belief are integral to each other and that liturgy determines theology" according to wikipedia. 

So in December of 1964 came the first of the dramatic changes to the Mass. And it feels like the sea change in the culture happened right after that. While I wasn’t old enough to observe the cultural change of the ‘60s I think that 1964 was still sort of “normal”. Maybe I’m wrong; certainly by then prayer was already banned from U.S. public schools and llinois had repealed its sodomy laws, becoming the first U.S. state to do so. 

What if I looked at the ads and articles in a 1964 newspaper versus one just two years later in 1966? Would I see much difference? Obviously this is very anecdotal but it’s interesting to speculate on. 

Cleveland’s largest newspaper, The Plain Dealer, on a randomly chosen day from Dec of 1964: 

The front page has two very large headlines:  “local tax valuations okay’d over objection” and “Rome roars welcome to pilgrim pope”. Below the fold there’s an article on how even little gifts at Christmas are “conveyors of great love.” There is a single paragraph piece on Vietnam. And there’s an article on Cleveland’s fight in the “war on poverty”. The article begins with the optimism of the era: “Recognized at last, after centuries of existence, is the crime of poverty. Everyone is against it. The nation is committed to a war on poverty that could last a generation or more.” 

Everything in it seems pretty normal, even pious. Breezy and friendly. Not exactly “tense”. 

Another random page has advertisements for men’s hats, shoes, and stylish raincoats. On another there are ads for housewares and a jeweler’s. Very few of the ads depict human models but one that does shows a woman in a modest dress, below the knees and not titillating. If sex sells, it wasn’t being used in this 1964 edition of the Plain Dealer. 

Okay, now a random issue from Dec 1966: 

Headlines include one on the Cincinnati Strangler, another on Jack Ruby being seriously ill, Gov George Romney hinted as a candidate for president, an article on Zambia’s conflict with Britain, and Germany’s lack of accord on trade. 

The tone is certainly different. More serious, more international news, more political. The optimism isn't present. 

Page two of the edition immediately presents drawings of girls in bikinis. Well that’s different! One has her legs spread and her hand on hip. There’s also an article on an actor who claims that the “English language itself is racist”. Hey, we’re not in Kansas anymore!

I randomly turned to another page with criticism of the stiff-necked conservatives in the Methodist ruling body. Later more bra advertisements. Conflict and sex seem to be the new major themes. Division and fornication. 

So what happened between those two years? I’m not sure but a few include: the Supreme Court allows contraception, the first Roman Polanski film “Repulsion” is released. There’s a Time magazine cover story "Is God Dead?”.. The Church of Satan formed in San Francisco... “Valley of Dolls” published...Black Panthers founded... Likely I’m missing a lot of other things. 

But the other big faultline is the end of 1967 when the Mass goes fully vernacular. Bad things continue. NYC violent crime rises 20% annually starting ‘67 thru ‘71...The first X-rated movie is produced..Divorce rate goes straight line up until 1979.

Then comes the full monty, the 1969 “new mass” on April 3rd, 1969. We had the Stonewall riots two months later that are universally recognized as the start of the gay rights movement. The Manson murders occur in August... Deaths at Altamont in Dec... No-fault divorce established in CA. Per capita alcohol use up 50% from 1960... Church attendance begins to fall in 1970...Four states -- Alaska, Hawaii, New York and Washington -- legalize abortion. In ’72 the first Playboy with full frontal nudity... “Deep Throat” & “Joy of Sex” are released and in ’73 Supreme Court legalizes abortion.

Driver's License and State Power

I looked up the history of driver’s license as a window into creeping government power, one that would of course grow exorbitantly (most recently shown by the powers exercised due to covid). 

Not surprisingly it all started in Prussia, the “worst” part of Germany historically (the area of the most enthusiastic Hitler supporters, birthplace of militarism and Lutheranism, of a compulsory school system with structured days, and a hotbed of scriptural scholar critics):

On September 29, 1903, Prussia, then a monarchy within the German Empire, introduced mandatory licensing. A mechanical aptitude exam was required, administered by the Dampfkesselüberwachungsverein (“steam boiler organization”).

Germany is in some ways the “California of the world”. It’s where bad ideas start and spread, and it is where permission of the government to drive a car started. This was followed soon by New York (which was then the “California of the U.S.”).

States requiring driver’s licenses came slowly. The length of time between the first state to require and the last was over 50 years; in 1903 it was New York and in 1954 South Dakota. Additionally, a handful of states didn’t impose driver’s tests until the mid-1950s, including big states like Illinois and Wisconsin. 

It feels like back then states had more power.  Nowadays the federal government could simply threaten to withdraw funds for roads and get the states to comply quickly. The covid lockdown was more rigorous in some states (New York) compared to others (Florida), but my impression is that states were far more similar than different.  Not sending children to schools was a huge deal and was countrywide. If the states had more power, at least one of them would’ve bucked this absurd idea given how kids are not at risk from the virus. 

Trump and St King Henry

I’m a sucker for coincidences in dates. So on a whim I looked up the saint of the day on Trump’s assassination attempt, July 13th. Turns out it’s the patron saints of kings and leaders. St Henry is the only Holy Roman emperor who was ever canonized and he died 1,000 years to the day of the attempt. Maybe he interceded for Trump? From website on St Henry: 

“As German king and Holy Roman Emperor, Henry was a practical man of affairs. He was energetic in consolidating his rule. On all sides he had to deal with drawn-out disputes so as to protect his frontiers. This involved him in a number of battles, especially in the south in Italy; he also helped Pope Benedict VIII quell disturbances in Rome. Always his ultimate purpose was to establish a stable peace in Europe....Saint Henry is an ideal model for all those who govern or are entrusted with wealth or power."

It’s ironic that most of our leaders speak peacefully (i.e. no “mean tweets”) but are very keen on physical war, while the one leader who speaks roughly is keen on peace. 

I noticed a Fr David Nix wrote a couple weeks ago:

"I had Trump set as a major Mass intention for today even before I realized it was the feast of St. Henry, Holy Roman Emperor. There's some obvious differences but today's Gospel in honor of St. Henry is strangely reflective of the vigilance required by this weekend's events: "And if He shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and find them so, blessed are those servants. But this know ye, that if the householder did know at what hour the thief would come, he would surely watch, and would not suffer his house to be broken open. Be you then also ready: for at what hour you think not, the Son of man will come."—Lk 12:38-40"

Trump and Obama Idol Worship?

Comparisons are made between the fawning of Trump people for their guy and Obama people for theirs. But we might recall that Obama came out of the gate smooth and “flawless”, a preternaturally cool guy who affected an airy above-it-all mien as if the petty debates of Republicans and Democrats were beneath him. He gave the 2004 Democratic Convention debate in those terms precisely and, if you think of it, that’s a common conception of divinity: that God is cool and above it all. 

Trump came in the opposite, as a street brawler. No one could compare him to God except perhaps Trump himself, but we are all in on that joke. It feels providential that he is so obviously flawed because with him no one can seriously mistake him as the messiah. It's sort of God's way of built-in idol protection. 

Our tendency to make idols of leaders goes back to the very beginning of the country. George Washington was seen in those terms such that some wanted to make him king.  A huge painting in the Capitol Rotunda is called “The Apotheosis of Washington” which depicts him “rising to the heavens in glory, flanked by female figures representing Liberty and Victory/Fame and surrounded by six groups of figures.”  


I think there is value in God making killers (literally!) like Moses and King David into key figures in his kingdom building. No matter how much the Jews revered Moses and David, they still retained the knowledge that both had feet of clay in some instances in their past.The apostles similarly showed themselves often enough to have feet of clay as well. That’s a salutary thing given that humans tend to worship anything even slightly above them.

Explaining Pope Francis

Provocative piece that presents a theory on how to explain  Pope Francis here. Excerpts: 

If one takes the Pope’s statements seriously, the conclusion is unavoidable that in his spiritual cosmos there is no longer that supernatural being-in-Christ for which the martyrs went to their deaths; for which the missionaries, starting with Paul, traveled the world under the harshest privations; for and by which the hermits turned their backs on the world and founded the contemplative religious life; that supernatural being-in-Christ that brought forth the sacramental priestly ministry as well as the liturgies and magnificent church architecture in which the supernatural context of life is communicated and celebrated. However, this also inevitably means that for Jorge Bergoglio, not only does the Church no longer exist as the mystical body of Christ, but fundamentally Christ himself no longer exists.

Eugenio Scalfari claimed after one of his interviews with Francis – nor was it denied by the Vatican—that the Pope did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. In the context of Jorge Bergoglio’s actually verifiable statements, I consider it highly plausible that Scalfari is reporting correctly here. How could Francis believe in the divinity of Jesus if it is precisely this theological predicate that decisively makes the theology of universal natural brotherhood beyond secondary religious traditions impossible?

It is an obvious fact that Pope Francis is an authoritarian man of power. However, my thesis is that his rule is exercised far less irrationally than is claimed in many descriptions of this pontificate. Pope Francis has a basic agenda, and it is the one I have described, which he is implementing in the Church with remarkable consistency. Francis is primarily neither a pragmatist nor a politician; in his own words, he is above all a “dreamer”. To put it less romantically: Jorge Bergoglio is primarily an ideologue.

From the perspective of the original Church, Francis should never elevate the natural fraternity category above the tradition of the Church, because in doing so he would only perpetuate a context that Paul calls—explicitly also with regard to questions of interpersonality—the “schemata tou kosmou toutou” (1 Cor 7:31). However, these forms of the old world are destined by God to become in Christ that supernatural context of brotherhood, that is, that new creation which the Catholic Church mediates in its sacramental acts and is already itself in intenso. Only She is the “promised land”. The work of a pope should be directed with all his strength precisely towards this dimension. While God himself is concerned with divinizing man in supernatural grace and bringing forth a new heaven and a new earth, the narrow-minded papal view focuses on the old world and degrades the new world—which has been the subject of Church tradition for two millennia—to a matter of secondary relevance. This is truly grotesque.

At the same time, the Church must draw the Pope’s attention to the fact that the deconstruction of Her mission, which the Pope places under the suspicious term of “proselytism,” fixates man on the old world, thus inhumanely depriving him of that supernatural sphere towards which he is precisely ordered in order to fulfil his humanity. Natural fraternity theology does not satisfy the aforementioned “appetitus innatus,” i.e. the actual hunger that is proper to man as man. This is why only the classical mission of the Church truly loves man.

How the Miami Redskins Lost Their Name

Miami always had the reputation as the most conservative college in Ohio. A symbolic test case (if relatively trivial) came in whether it could resist the ludicrous calls to change the school moniker. Honoring the Miami tribe was the original reason for the name, continued to be the reason while I was there, and was so after I left. Could the Left turn it into a slur? Yes. They are, of course, the language police. Behold the awesome power of the Left!

It took awhile though. It started with colleges and then moved to pro teams which makes sense given colleges are lib factories and they stand to lose less money than pro teams. 

It all started with North Dakota’s little Dickinson State University in 1972 dropped their mascot.

It continued with (where else?) the Ivy League when in 1974, Dartmouth College football team discontinued its old mascot the Indians — which dated back to the 1920s — and now go by the The Big Green.

The Eastern Michigan Hurons also changed its name to the Eagles in 1991 after the Michigan Department of Civil Rights released a report suggesting that all state schools discontinue racially-insensitive logos.

In 1992 Oxford’s mayor said that it’s not if Miami will change its mascot but when. One could probably see the effect of lawsuit in Michigan and the potential of biting Ohio teams. Lawyers rule the world.

In 1994, St. John’s University in New York City changed its team name from the Redmen to The Red Storm, sporting a new horse logo. Other college teams followed. 

In 1997 Miami caved. 

And of course George Floyd died in 2020 and that meant the Cleveland Indians and Washington Redskins had to change their names.

Russia From a 2008 Perspective

“I have long said that if you want to hate the United States, study the history of our foreign policy; but if you wish to love us, take a long road trip through our country.” --historian Charles Coulombe

I went to the library looking for a pre-Ukraine war book on post-soviet Russia to get outside our completely unreliable media. I seemed to have found it: a Western author without an ox to gore who became friends with a group of Russians and followed their stories from 1992 to 2008. The author is no Putin fan nor a fan of the Bush or Obama administrations. 

It's kind of heartbreaking to see how our pledge not to expand NATO turns out to be of a piece with our treaties with the American Indian tribes in the 1800s. 

And it's pretty instructive in seeing how long this issue has been percolating such that a book published in 2008 (!) already showed dire foreign policy issues that would surface in a major way thirteen years later.

Some excerpts from "Lost and Found in Russia: Lives in the Post-Soviet Landscape" by Susan Richards tell the story: 

Once hopes that the West would launch a great postcommunist Marshall Plan died, an anti-Western mood began to set in among Russia’s elites. The decision by the Western powers not to dismantle NATO fed this mood, and NATO’s air strikes against Serbia in 1999 stoked the flames. Russia’s new sense of isolation was increased between 1999 and 2004 by the choice of three former Soviet republics and four former satellites to join both NATO and the EU. Their admission directly contravened the agreement between Gorbachev and US Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990 not to 'expand the zone of NATO.'

Putin’s decision to support George W. Bush’s war on terror after the attacks on New York in September 2001 defied this new anti-Western mood. However, the overture was poorly reciprocated by the new Republican administration: US aid to Russia was cut back. America withdrew from its thirty-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. Congress confirmed the old Cold War Jackson-Vanik amendment, which linked its trade relations with Russia to levels of Jewish emigration. The United States also failed to throw its weight behind Russia’s bid to join the World Trade Organization despite doing so with respect to China.                

Most ominously from the leadership’s point of view, when two former Soviet republics (Georgia in 2003, Ukraine at the end of 2004) turned their faces westward in “color revolutions,” the hand of the United States was deemed to have played a critical role. Fears of this happening in Russia would become a governing political factor from now on.

Years later, the West played its propaganda well, and the sight of Russian tanks entering Georgia raised old Cold War ghosts. While Europe dithered, caught between distaste and self-interest, America’s press exploded in Russophobia. All this served only to add a strong sense of grievance to the triumphalist mood back in Russia.

**

“You want to know what I think? They’re all wantonly irresponsible—Georgians, Russians, Americans. I’d rather be governed by nine-year-olds.”

Yes, they said, the only people who benefited by the war were the leaders, and yes, this was only the beginning, it was going to get worse

I was still a long way off finding an answer to my key riddle: how long were the Russian people going to endorse the idea that Putin’s “sovereign democracy” was in their national interest?

 **                   

Misha had become genuinely emotional on the subject of Russia’s war with Georgia. “You know how critical I can be of this country,” he burst out. “But on this one I’m right behind Medvedev and Putin. There’s a lot this country can learn from the West about how to run itself. I know that. But surely we’ve got the right to defend our own borders from attack! What’s Russia done to the West to deserve being provoked in that way? You tell me that. 

“As you know, my family’s from Ukraine. So all this is very close to my heart. Half Ukraine’s population is Russian, or almost. Our language, our culture, it’s practically the same. Whatever that puppet Yushchenko says, there’s no way we’d stand for Ukraine being taken into NATO. It’s rubbish! What’s more, if push comes to shove, the West’s got a lot more to lose from such a conflict than we do. Europe depends on Russian oil and gas! We may not be in great shape domestically. But we’ve got what it takes. We don’t need the West! It’s going to take us a generation or two to sort ourselves out, but we’re smart people—we’re on our way now!”

America’s days of unchallenged global supremacy were over, he said. A new, multipolar world would emerge sooner or later, one in which Russia was destined to play a major role.

**

I would like to have had more confidence that an incumbent President Obama would steer clear of stirring up trouble there. But the worse the US domestic economy became, the more attractive it might seem to keep pressing on with the crazy policy of expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders, to include Ukraine and Georgia.