The Grey Months

I note a call from friend Mark concerned over my welfare after reading last week's gloomy post. He needn't have been worried. Once the cherry blossoms bloom around the Tidal Basin, the melancholy will dissipate -- somewhat.

January through March are optimal for expending effort which bogs down in slush. I may rise sluggishly at lunch, treking next door to the Holocaust Museum, enquiring once more, about the fate of lost relatives, to no avail. Or make an appointment at St. Francis of Assissi to apply, to join, only to be stood up by the membership chairwoman. Shopping trips for a perfect pair of warm shoes prove fruitless upon discovering the next day, upon the train platform at 4:45 a.m., that my feet are still freezing.

What leads from this darkness?

Seven books from the University and another seven from the public library lie atop the shelves. Short books, mind you, since concentration is hard to maintain during the grey months. A perfect conversation, in keeping with the situation, within one, occured amongst two men deciding it would have been better for Gertrude Stein to have committed suicide in the ocean, clutching a knapsack of books, rather than weighing her pockets with rocks, in case there's time to fill in the heavenly waiting room.

On top of the pile, in easy reach, is a collection of columns by Red Smith, the classic baseball reporter. He writes of young rookies like Sam Mele, Alvin Dark and Bill Rigney, who in my time, I knew only by their grizzled faces on baseball cards, staring wistfully into the distance, as managers of mostly failed or one-hit wonder championship teams.

Friend Larry and I exchanged emails this past week describing ultimate baseball thrills. I offered hearing Mel Allen's broadcast when Mickey Mantle won game three of the 1964 World Series against the Cardinals with a home run in the bottom of the ninth, and then rushing madly into the library to tell mom, who would have been searching tranquilly amongst the shelves for her usual Tudor historical fiction.

Larry writes, "My mother let me stay home for game 7 of the 1960 World Series under the pretext of some minor Jewish holiday. However when Maz hit the homer I ran toward the school to let everyone else know."

In yet one more of an endless series of editorials by many writers attacking baby boomers, Rod Dreher says, "the culture warrior's of the previous generation were not wrong to question conformity but they went too far. They have deprived their sons of authoritative tradition, both in word and example, and with it the ability to transcend the adolescent state."

Transcend? I've never cottoned much to adulthood. As I looked around the room at a
birthday party for a 75-year old friend last weekend, I saw the old men who've transcended. They in their suits; me in jeans and what my wife contends is the shirt of the 16-year old skateboarder.

The hell with adolescent transcendence. What markedly distinguishes the grey months, and ressurects body and soul, is the traditional purchase of the first pack of baseball cards for the season (and let me tell you, the 2008 Upper Deck set, is magnificent.)

The local rag carried an article last week entitled 'Funeral Fare >> Food is Big Part of Healing,' listing easy recipes for funeral potatoes, a 'cheesy hash-brown casserole;' funeral Raisin Pie; and funeral beans with bacon bits. Marcia Armstrong writes, "For the congregants, comfort means ham biscuits and little sandwiches, brownies and tortes. Instead of just going through the motions of serving the food, we have to make sure we serve the family with compassion and a caring spirit. We are there to comfort."

There's no need for comfort minus loss. No Spring, without first enduring the grey months, in which I grasp desperately for small comforts wherever they may be found. It's invariably in small places, in the concern of friends over my well being, in possibilities of thrills to come, in a wife who adorns our home with the aroma of baking bread, and in living a life where you never grow old. Don't worry. I'll be better soon. On opening day.

Death Warmed Over

I note this week an unending winter of icy rain. I'm reminded of Ronnie, a man I knew who froze to death. In his life, he'd withstood worse than a sleeping demise in the dark woods.

Attacks on the homeless are so high, the NY Times reports legislation incorporating them as a class protected by hate-crime law has been introduced in several states and Congress. What does it connotate when abject poverty is classified the same as race or gender?

The fella in Florida, the focus of that article, incarcertated for jumping off a log onto a homeless man's ribs while he and his 15-year old friends casually beat him to death, says, "I'm not a killer, I know that. A lot of people, they see this story and call us killers. I'm not a killer. I regret what I did. I wish I could take it back." When a killer fails to recognize he's killed someone, relegating hypothermia a preferable way to die, hate-crimes protection is warranted.

Death is rarely death, in itself, by itself. Scale, for one, matters, but only sometimes. According to our local rag, this week the State Department "advised American diplomats to refer to Nuremberg if asked about the legality of capital punishment in 9/11 cases. The cable makes no link between the scale of the crimes, perpetrated by the Nazi's, which included the Holocaust that killed some 6 million European Jews, and those allegedly committed by the Guantanamo detainees, who are accused of murder and war crimes in connection with 9/11, in which nearly 3,000 died."

Elie Wiesel rejects branding all Holocaustian murder by one label, insisting otherwise, on a unique crime of Jewish genocide, not only by scale, but upon the inherent terribleness of the crime itself.

What about this? The AP reports, "when twin blasts ravaged crowded pet markets earlier this month, Iraqi authorities offered a chilling account: Mentally disabled women carried the hidden explosives perhaps as unwitting bombers for al-Qaida." Here, the perpetators murdered both unwitting bomb-carriers and victims. What charge, scale, or classification best captures the outrage?

There are ways to distance one's self from questions of this nature. 60 Minutes broadcast a piece last week where no one, execept one lonely anti-corporate crusader, pronounced it murder, after a drug company continued to manufacture pharmeceuticals which even their own suppressed studies disclosed killed thousands. The chairman of the Government commission responsible for licensing the drug recused his conscience by identifying himself as just a scientist.

Bureaucrats, like supply clerks who worked in concentration camps, are able to routinely compartmentalize responsbility. Here's a study released last week which provides five neat exculpatory reasons why no one was at fault for not purchasing bomb-proof vehicles for soldiers in Iraq, an inaction costing thousands of lives: 1) "budget and procurement managers failed to recognize the damage; 2) an urgent request got lost in the bureaucracy; 3) acquisitions staff didn't give top leaders correct information; 4) the purchase was treated as an expensive obstacle to long-range plans; 5) some managers are retired Marines who lack adequate technical credentials."

Churches, whose primary business it is to theologize on death, aren't immune to confusion. The AP reports "The beatification cause of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the outspoken Salvadoran church leader who was killed in 1980 as he celebrated Mass, remains at a standstill while officials study whether his death made him a martyr for the faith, a senior Vatican official said Monday. To be a martyr, the Catholic Church must first determine if the Archbishop of San Salvador was killed for religious reasons or other motives."

The Archbishop of San Salvador was murdered in his cathedral as he preached upon the responsibility of the Church to act upon a preferential option for the poor. If that option is not considered religious, then, indeed, the Archbishop was not killed for religious reasons.

Naming eight martyrs, every Sunday during the Prayers of the People, commemorating the souls of Kevin and Mike who were murdered, Bobby and Ronnie who froze, Terry who overdosed, and Lescek, Agnes and Randy who were run over by cars, absolves no one of collective responsibility.

Afraid of the Dark

I note this week a trip to the mall, after dinner, by the wife and I, to buy a birthday present for her sister. I don't venture out much after dark. I'd read in the local rag of numerous muggings in this very parking lot. Half way to the car, after Mrs. heard a startling noise, we raced to gain safety behind locked car doors and sped away into the night upon screeching tires.

There's something about the darkness which stimulates a primal hightened awareness beyond being frightened outside Sears. The ancients wrote Psalms of the terrors of night. In Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Gregor Von Razzori writes "In the middle of an uncanny procession, in blocks that in their disciplined compactness seemed made of cast iron, people marched by the thousands, men only, in total silence, the morbid rhythmic stamping of their feet hung like a gigantic cord in the silence that had fallen on Vienna."

I'll admit I wouldn't have been surprised to hear the rhythmic marching footsteps of such a mob rounding the corner of Dick's Sporting Goods bearing down upon us in the mall parking lot. Yet it's not always easy to imagine the difference between light and darkness.

According to the NY Times, Turkish lawyer Fatma Benli devotes her profession to fighting domestic violence, honor killings and gender discrimination while simultaneously insisting "on wearing an Islamic head scarf which goes against enforcement of official Government secularism." She says, not "wearing the scarf seems like a denial of freedom; medical students can get diplomas, housewives can't take driving lessons, a civil servant takes another woman, uncovered, to official ceremonies as his wife." When that which we in the West consider an ultimate symbol of the denial of freedom - headscarves - is itself prohibited by law, the right to wear a scarf transforms into a struggle for freedom.

Neil Young was quoted recently, "I know that the time when music could change the world is past. I really doubt that a single song can make a difference. It is a reality."

Good old sour Neil Young always can be counted upon to ruin the party. I must respectfully disagree with the man who creates music which stirs the pot even if he denies it. Perhaps what he writes today doesn't carry the magnitude of impact his curmudgeonly ego demands, but let me play 'Ohio,' off the well-worn, ash-smudged, scratchy LP, on the rickety faithful record player, and I'll still sally forth to change the world.

There's light, yet, in darkness, even death, framed in the obituaries of lives played out in the surrounding countryside - "she grew up on a farm in Dogue; she attended a one-room schoolhouse, riding a horse; she graduated from Mary Washington Teacher's college; she was a member of the Altar Guild, taught Sunday School, a member of the Historical Society; she was preceded in death by her husband of 66 years.

It's harder to see light now; it's dim these days, yet still glows stubbornly, perhaps, less dramatically, in simpler things, than rock festivals or protest marches. Rather than an unthinkable incandescence of books burning in the night on the cobblestone streets of an ancient city like old Vienna, we have a bookmobile. Once in a long while a hooligan breaks a window as it sits parked behind the library downtown but it's back on the road every day, carrying the lights of literature and history, to 7000 people a year, three dozen stops, at senior citizen homes, post offices, along the rural routes of small towns, and at preschools, serving children "who are checking out a book for the first time."

There are always those in positions of authority, who intentionally, or with reckless disregard, choose to play upon the darkness. A consequence of the recent restoration of the beautiful Latin Mass, is the re-promulgation of Good Friday language, which beckons the faithful to "pray for the Jews. May the Lord Our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men."

Prior to Vatican II, Good Friday prayers were even more blatant, calling for outright conversion, to lift the veil of blindess from Jewish hearts. The new-old version, however, isn't any more pleasing or considerate to contemporary Jewish sensibilities. One Vatican spokesman, seeks to mitigate the offense by offering most Catholics will still worship employing the vernacular, not Latin Mass, anyway. I think he's missing the point.

The finest notion of darkness, cast as sin, I've come across, is St. Augustine's simple definition of sin as falling back into bad habits. It's why the dark is so appealing, comforting and painful at the same time. We want to be good; it's just too hard, or as Augustine originally wrote, 'we want to be good, not just yet.'

We can draw upon community and books to try and move to higher consistent levels of conduct while still believing there is a grace abound that allows for an occasional falling back into bad habits. If you respect the original sin that lies within, aware of its dark compelling power, and counter by striving towards the light of good intentions, I'm hopeful that what counts in the end, salvation-wise, is the desire, and the attempt, not any self-proclaimed attainment, or posting of rules for same, intended for others presumed less enlightened than self.

How PDO Correlates to RM-DUI

I note this week a drawing in the local rag portraying the future development of 3.5 million square feet of military-industrial office, residential and commercial space. The problem from my perspective is it appears the 3 acres constituting the boundaries of my living space are subsumed underneath the eastern edge.

It's a tradition within our household, the morning my blood is drawn at the lab, to take breakfast at a cafe across the street from a Confederate cemetery. It's a smoke-ful establishment frequented mostly by good-ole-boys and a few bewildered tourists. As the wife and I searched for markers of our home on the sketch, the fella at the next table allowed he owned 12 acres in the path of the proposed progress. After pontificating upon the potential for millions to be made, he said, "I've lived here all my life, but I'm not wedded to it."

I've been here before. I'm of PDO (Pre-Disney Orlando) lineage. As David Brooks writes in On Paradise Drive - How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, "what happens when people accumulated in these sprawling suburban zones are given the power through the firms they are now starting admist the Fudruckers to re-make human nature? What values will guide them?"

A mid-1960's PDO could still glimpse, here and there, faded painted letters of 'White and Colored,' on exterior walls of recreational lakeside restrooms. My dad, a classic Hubert Humphrey liberal by nature, yet ever on the hunt for a $7 haircut, patronized a barber shop that transformed itself into greater Orlando George Wallace for President headquarters during the 1972 primary. Even as post-P.O.D. loomed large on the horizon, George won the precinct and state handily.

In a recent editorial entitled, If there's really a 'South,' Lee is the Key to It, Paul Greenberg wrote "It's not clear just when the general left history and entered myth, but it is clear that he represents something more than the sum total of his battles or even his life - it is what he was, and still is - at least to some of us, the few of us left. You know who you are."

Let's take that a step further. Over the land on which I'm writing now, another Southern general mightily strode the earth, upon Sorrel, his gallant steed. His headquarters for the battle of Fredericksburg was 5 miles to the southeast, the battle, 10 miles to the northwest. He died eight miles south at a place called the Stonewall Jackson Shrine minus the arm that's buried 20 miles to the west at a smaller shrine of its own.

In a January 5th book review of Still Standing: The Stonewall Jackson Story, also published in the local rag, Michael Aubrecht writes, "Most often neglected are his charitable efforts on behalf of local blacks, including the rarely discussed establishment of the first black Sunday school in Lexington. Truly Jackson was more than just a military commander. He was a paternal deliverer of black literacy and was instrumental in aiding those seeking the teachings of the Christian doctrine."

The word 'paternal,' is rather pregnant, don't you think? How is it that a man could lend his brilliant tactical leadership to a cause devoted to enslaving a people to whom he was simultaneously delivering the precious gift of literacy?

That very point was discussed last month at the annual Council of the Episcopal Church of Mississippi. According to Charles Reagan Wilson, Professor of History at the Univesity of Mississippi, while the Bishop of the day, William Mercer Green, "was glad to educate slaves and bring them into the church believing that faith in Christ would ultimately save them from their savage ways - his work blurs the line between hero and villian," since, "it was not (the slaves) choice what religion they were converted to," and the "work lent an air of legitmacy to slavery."

The NY Times reported an incident in January where vandals broke in and trashed Robert Frost's farmhouse in Vermont. A few days ago, it was reported in Massachusetts that two men are accused of burining down the birthplace of 'Mary had a Little Lamb' nursery rhyme author, Mary Elizabeth Sawyer. While no one in Virginia is about to dig up Stonewall's arm, we might find in another five years, it's buried under a 7-11. The South where I live blurs lines between a dedication to the preservation of a mythic symbolism and a willingness to be swamped by riches generated from the relentless march of development.

Spurred on by this paradox, I've researched other enduring symbols of Southern culture. One such is the frequency of Riding Lawnmower DUI (RL-DUI), a sub-culture where country singer George Jones is both pioneer and gold standard, and against whom all subsequent contenders must be measured. Recent RL-DUI stat's, I've exhaustively unearthed, and verified, utilizing a painstakingly scholarly methodology, reveal, of 38 incidents, reported over the past year, 34.21%, or fully one third of all RL-DUI, still occur in the South. The two highest competitors, the Midwest, and multiple countries overseas (mostly European), tie at precisely 21.05%; the North comes in at 13.16%; the West trailing, at 10.53%.

The only two Horse-borne RL-DUI, reminiscent of glory days past, are exclusive to the South, as well as being the home of more Golf Cart DUI's then anywhere else. (Surpisingly, none of the three slower-paced electric scooter RL-DUI were Southern, where as you might have expected post-PDO Floridians to contribute at least one case.)

Thus, the South lives on, in our hearts and minds, as exemplified by the gentleman I spotted the other day wearing post-operative hospital booties as sandals. There's a spirit here which can never be extinguished even while our landscape undergoes massive upheaveal.

When I drive the beloved backroads of the Virginia countryside, I often wonder if I could have fought compartmentally, in terms of naming it a 'home-state invasion, to preserve this beautiful landscape which enriches my soul, knowing I was also contributing to the preservation of that Southern 'peculiar' institution. Looking back, upon the past few weeks, when we discussed Vichy; examining the photographs of the leading French generals, even in their grandest uniformed finery; they look sheepish, as if they knew all along what they were doing was wrong even as they justified doing it in the name of national post-country preservation. They couldn't evade the rotten smell as much as they endeavored to disguise it.

If we skate on the surface, without noticing what lies under the ice, try as we might, the smell of fish will always rise.

Only Three Choices

I note this week an article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books where he writes, "in 1945, in one of her first essays following the end of the war in Europe, Hannah Arendt wrote, the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe - as death became the fundamental problem after the last war."

During the aforementioned Diocesan Council, last weekend, one fella spoke upon a resolution (it might have been Payday lending or immigration), demanding as much
anger about these issues as there is about sexuality.

On September 2, 2007, the Bishop of Uyo, Nigeria, the Rt. Reverend Isaac Orama said, "Homosexuality and lesbianism are inhuman. Those who practice them are insane, satanic and are not fit to live because they are rebels to God's purpose for men."

In the 1940's, the kind of language employed by Bishop Uyo, drew upon ideas lodged in the hearts and minds of future genocidal perpetuators and ushered them to fruition through otherwise unimaginable practices of fulfilling them. Judt makes the point, though, that by equating the Holocaust to all levels of inerrant behaviors today, we grow numb to the real possibilities. Predatory payday lending practices, and inhumane treatment of immigrants represent unaccepatble assaults upon the dignity of victims; there are casualties, along the way, but universal declarations that usurers, debtors or illegal aliens are not fit to live, are rare.

I continue to read in Julian Roy's, "Trial of Marshall Petain," how the French confronted the evils of Nazism. Prosecution and defense witness debate, from self-serving viewpoints, since very few had clean hands, what they apprehend as the crux of the matter - whether the honor of the nation was best preserved by taking one of three choices: a ceasefire; an armistice; or capitulation.

The honorable crux devolved upon the shoulders of vainglorious military men, who'd reluctantly, sacrificially, in their minds, assumed power in June 1940, as the German blitzkreig rolled south; men whose pre-existing monarchial, clerical and authoritarian predilections did not contrast greatly with their Nazi conquerors.

Nowhere else in Europe was a defeated country offered an armistice that preserved half the country as a nominally free land. As one prosecution witness said, 'if we'd capitulated, they'd have installed a gauleiter, and we would've known where we stood.' Vichy, instead, created a moral wasteland, subject to gradually magnifying diabolical compromises.

Wikipedia reports, "Petain immediately used his new powers to order harsh measures, including the dismissal of republican civil servants, the installation of exceptional jurisdictions, the proclamation of anti-semetic laws, and the imprisonment of his opponents and foreign refugees." After General Weygand, a defense witness, had been appointed by Petain as Delegate-General to the North African colonies, "he applied Vichy's racist laws against Jews very harshly, driving out from the colleges and from the primary schools most of the Jewish pupils, including small children aged 5 to 11 - Weygand did this without any decree of Marshall Petain's, [but] by analogy," he said, "to the law about Higher Education."

Perhaps later in the book, charges of genocidal complicity will be raised; so far, it's not the fate of victims that forms the crux of the matter; only the honor of old men is at stake.

In Helmuth Von Moltke's, "Letters to Freya," which we reviewed earlier, there was a passing reference to sanitoriums where SS men were taken who'd broken down after performing genocidal duties. I've attempted to research that intriguing tidbit further, yet, to no avail. While moving in that direction, however, I stumbled upon Nuremburg testimony that refutes the 'only-following-orders' defence. Prosecution researchers were unable to find few, if any, cases, where SS officers who'd refused to kill were they themselves killed - almost all received minor punishment.

Even if the French generals only had three choices in the immediate wake of German conquest, what choices did they face; what actions did they take, post-Armistice?

No one is clean. Jules Roy, the author, himself, of The Trial of Marshall Petain, according to the NY Times, is alleged to have exhibited early Vichy sympathies (which, detected between the lines, he doesn't deny) before joining the Royal Air Force, and later, becoming famed, for "resigning his commission in 1953 to protest French involvement in the war in Indochina, and expressing fierce opposition to French efforts to smother Algeria's late 1950's fight for independence."

When it comes to Vichy, lest we think our country much cleaner than France, we need look no further than the story of Varian Fry, as reported by Marc Leepson, in World War II magazine, who as a volunteer for the American Rescue Center from "August 1940 until early September 1941, was able to spirit some two thousand refugees, nearly all of them artists and intellectuals, and many of them Jews, out of the city and away from the clutches of the Gestapo and their French Vichy collaborators."

Who were Fry's greatest antagnonists? The Gestapo? Vichy officials?

"The U.S. Consul general in Marseilles, Hugh S. Fullerton, vehemently opposed Fry's efforts." William Peck, Vice-Consul, a man who "was anti-Jew and anti-Fry, seemed to delight in making autocratic decisions and refusing as many visas as he could."

Finally, "In the summer of 1941, the State Department brought Fry's work in Marseilles to an end by refusing to renew his passport unless he agreed to leave France. Fry refused to budge -- only to be expelled by the Vichy French in September 1941. His colleagues kept his refugee escape operation going until June 1942, when French authorities shut it down."

Ironically, according to the International Herald Tribune, as "This Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party taking power in Germany, [it's] prompted yet a new round of soul-searching." Avi Primor, former Israeli ambassador to Germany, said, "Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame? Only the Germans had the bravery and humility." The Herald further reports "the experience of Nazism is actively alive in contemporary public debates over everything from the country's troops in Afghanistan to the low birth rate to the country's dealing with foreigners."

The experience isn't actively alive here. The deeper problems of evil aren't fundamental to our public debates, whether at Diocesan Council, or in our daily lives. After 9/11, it was, for a little while. Unless the problems continue to touch us, directly, they don't linger in our thoughts. When we narrow our choices to the few immediate options in front of us, as did the French generals, we block out the real lurking dangers. When we go to trial, will any of us have clean hands?