Covid-19 Talking Points

Tags

China, corona virus, Covid-19, Obamacare, pandemic, talking points, Trump, White House staff

Every day, the President’s staff prepare Talking Points — suggested remarks for his use as needed.  With many potential subjects to cover, and given the President’s propensity for directness and brevity, they have kept suggested remarks about Covid-19 pointed and short.

The first TP (Talking Point, not Toilet Paper) was produced on January 15, the most recent, on March 25.  You can feel the tone shifting subtly over time, responding to changing circumstances, alterations in the President’s mood, and, with delicacy, to staff’s own perception of the facts.

In light of all these factors, some TPs were good for days and some required change within hours.  Here is how they developed over time:    

Not Even Remotely Possible

It’s Thousands of Miles Away; Some Town in China

When the Moon Turns Blue

Not a Snowball’s Chance in Hell

Are You Kidding Me?

Nonsense

In Your Dreams

Do You Believe Everything You Hear?

Yeah, And the Pope Is Jewish!

Who Told You That?

Don’t Be A Rumor-Monger

Are You Some Kind of Anarchist?

There’s No Proof

Would I Lie to You?

It Wasn’t a Lie, It Was for Your Own Good

There’s Absolutely No Need to Panic

It’s the Fault of Obamacare

We’ve Got a Good Handle on Things

This Will Only Hurt A Little Bit For A Very Short Time

It’s Just Like a Cold: A Few Sniffles and A Day in Bed

I Had a Sniffle Yesterday.  Just An Allergy

A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Medicine Go Down

A Couple Weeks and We’ll All Be Fine

Y’know, Actually, They’re Pretty Cute, With Those Red-Fuzz-Tipped Antennas

We’re Getting the Best of Them

Cross My Heart and Hope to … Well, You Know What I Mean

Almost Everybody Will Not Die

You Might Want to Pack An Overnight Bag

Not Too Many Will Die

We’ve Got Our Best People On It

You Might Want to Update Your Will

Not Too Many Thousands Will Die

Would I Lie to You?

Most of Them Would Have Died Within Five Years Anyway

Gotta Get People Back to Work Quick.  There’ll Be Lots of Openings.

Don’t Look at Me!  The Chinks Started It!

Nursery Rhymes for Viral Times

Tags

corona virus, Covid-19, hoarding, nursery rhymes, pandemic, panic, panic buying, selfishness

Old Mother Hubbard

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard
To get her poor dog a bone.
When she got there, the cupboard was bare,
And so her poor dog had none. 

How could that be, she wondered, when, only two days ago, I bought 30 dog-bones, 400 rolls of toilet paper, 17 bottles of Purell, 98 pounds of rolled oats, 140 bottles of distilled water, and 35 Kleenex boxes?  Thieves must have broken in overnight …
Damned Hoarders!

As I Was Going to St. Ives

As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had:

 50 pounds of rice, 28 hams, 154 boxes of assorted breakfast cereals, and 45 gallons of milk to go with the breakfast cereals, along with seven lorries to haul all the stuff they couldn’t possibly have toted by themselves …
Damned Hoarders!

Jack Be Nimble

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,
Jack jump over the candlestick,

And, since you’ve got that much energy, get your nimble little tush down to Safeway and buy us 100 bars of soap, 75 pairs of rubber gloves, and 15 bottles of vinegar.
And … young man … do not look at me as if I were a
Damned Hoarder! 

Old King Cole

Old King Cole was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he.
He called for his pipe
And he called for his bowl,

 And he went on-line to order 145 face-masks from Amazon.  But, when they told him the earliest possible delivery date would be in 13 days, and even that was uncertain, he no longer was a merry old soul, but rather, a most petulant, if not yet actual,
Damned Hoarder!

Old MacDonald

Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O
And on that farm he had some cows, E-I-E-I-O.
With a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there
Here a moo, there a moo, everywhere a moo-moo,

Until 4:30, Friday morning, when, hearing no moo-moos, he discovered that rustlers had trucked them all off, undoubtedly to be slaughtered and sold, in their various parts, to fill the freezers of all those
Damned Hoarders!

Little Miss Muffet

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a Tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

Upon which, the spider picked up the bowl, scraped the spilled contents back into it, took it to the town market, sold it to a desperate man whose quarantined wife lay starving at home, and pocketed his obscene, ill-gotten gains …
Damned Profiteer!

The Boss Makes a Phone Call

Tags

corruption, Giuliani, Hunter Biden, impeachment, Joe Biden, the mob, Trump, Ukraine, Zelensky

Hello.  Guido?

Yeah, this is Guido.  Who’s callin’?

It’s Vito, Guido.

Oh, Vito, yeah.  To what do I owe this honor?

Well, Guido, I gotta favor I wanna ask from you.

Sure, Vito, what’s up?

You know Zito, eh!?

Yeah, I know Zito.  So, what’s up with Zito?

Well, you know his son, Rico, eh!?

Yeah, I know Rico.  What’s up with Rico?

Well, it’s come to my attention that Rico may be runnin’ around wid  … uh … wid people he shouldn’t be  … uh … runnin’ around wid, if you get my meanin’ …

So, it’s Rico that’s the problem and, you wann us to … like … do the necessary?

No, no!  It ain’t mainly Rico we’re concerned about.  It’s Zito.  Y’see, he’s makin’ noises about leadership of the family, stirrin’ things up, if y’know what I mean, and this ain’t gonna be healthy for any of us.

Yeah, I getcha.  So, you wann us to do the necessary with Zito?

Naah!  Too dangerous.  But, if we could get the word around in the family that Rico’s got a … a … y’know, a “bad smell”  … and Zito’s protecting him … then Zito’s got a major bad-smell problem himself, and we could use that to keep a lid on things.

On things?

Y’know, on Zito!

Oh, yeah, I sorta see whatcha mean, but, y’know, “bad smell” don’t really … y’know, I mean, we all got it … so …

Yeah, but that’s only part of the whole picture.  I mean, Zito’s workin’ with other parties … if ya know what I mean … to, uhh … how can I put it? … to, uhh, deodorize the Rico thing.

Yeah, I see, so all this helps Zito make a power play!?

You got it!

So, maybe you and me should have a face-to-face to … like … discuss how we proceed?!

Naaah!  Too obvious.  Too dangerous.  I gotta keep myself above the … uhh … above the … uhh …

Law?

That goes without saying.  I mean above the … uhhh … oh yeah, above the fray, ‘cause we gotta lotta factions and, these days, ya gotta manage that, ya can’t just … uhh … how can I put it?  Let’s just say the cement-shoe-days are over … get my drift?

Yeah.  So whatta we do?

Well, I’m gonna have my consigliere … I think you know ‘im … Giulio … I’m gonna have him meet with you guys.  He knows how to deal.  He was in politics until he came over to our side …

Politics, eh?  Yeah, now that I think of it, I seen him on TV a few times.

Yeah, anyway, he knows how to handle things without the … y’know … without the rough stuff.

So, he could come over to my place and we could have a chat.

Aaah, too exposed.  We gotta be careful.  I got an idea.  Some of your guys have been to Spain, right?

Yeah.

So send somebody you trust, and they can meet Giulio there.

What?  Why not our place?  You don’t trust it.  You think maybe we’re bugged?

You can never be too careful!

Same applies to you, too, right!?  I mean, how do I know that this ain’t gonna show up on the front pages tomorrow?

Trust me.  I got this place locked up tighter than Sing Sing.

Yeah, Sing Sing.  I spent a week there one day.

I didn’t and I’m not gonna, and you’re gonna help make sure I don’t!

You’re the boss.

You got that right!

 

 

The Year of Magical Thinking

Tags

economic development, foreign policy, Israel, jews, justice, Middle East peace, Palestinians, Trump

A banquet usually comes after the hard work is done — the wedding, finally, after three years of shilly-shallying; the bar mitzvah, after hours of study and no stickball; the treaty, after twenty-four walkouts and twenty-five resets.

And the dessert always comes after the banquet’s main course.

With its 50 billion dollar economic development plan for the Palestinians, but silence on a political plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, America insults the Palestinians with the world’s biggest, most calorie-bloated, hot-fudge sundae.

The Palestinians, who know a thing or two about healthy Mediterranean eating, are not biting.

What good would all that money do for us, they ask, without the political status to assure its lasting benefit?  If you’re filled with ice cream, you may be good for 25 yards, but you’re dead for the marathon.

The Palestinians are not stupid.  They know when they’re being condescended to by a U.S. government that has no stomach for, and apparently no understanding of, the hard work necessary to reach a genuine, mutually-agreed, internationally-supported, durable peace.

Trump tossed away American credibility as a neutral arbiter with his blatant intervention in the Israeli election campaign on Netanyahu’s behalf, first with the move of our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, signaling that Palestinian claims to a share of the Holy City mean nothing, and then with official recognition of Israeli sovereignty over what is still juridically Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, as if American interventionism made international law.

(Netanyahu won’t show it in public, of course, but rumor suggests he still has the image of Trump’s lips on his ass, in hot-fudge.)

It’s fair to ask why one should be upset about this.  After all, America is being consistent with our fundamental moral obligation to support the protection and well-being of a people — the Jews — who have suffered the worst tragedies imaginable.

And, we should not relax our support for Israel simply because, at least for the time being, it now shares a bed with former Sunni Arab enemies, all facing a common foe in Shiite Iran.

But the Palestinian story is not without its tragedies.  And, if our commitment is to justice, they too deserve our support.

Besides being morally defensible, a balanced policy toward Israel and the Palestinians is a matter of practical importance.  The Middle East will be turbulent for decades to come.  If the Israeli-Palestinian issue (which, after all, has been a primary cause of war and discord for more than half a century) can be resolved with justice, at least we will have one fewer conflict to worry about.

At this point, since the Trump administration’s Israel-Palestine policy is still-born (and driven more by its perceived U.S. electoral advantage than its purported benefits to the adversaries themselves), probably the best we can hope for is regime change — here, at home, with ballots, not bullets.

Do the hard work now.  Let the banquet — with a hot-fudge sundae after — be the reward.

A League of Their Own

Tags

baseball, Colorado Rockies, hockey, home runs, major leagues, San Diego Padres, soccer, women athletes

In a recent four-game baseball series, the Colorado Rockies and the San Diego Padres jointly produced a record 92 runs, with 17 home runs.  

The fans were delirious.  Of course!  Who doesn’t love a carnival, with endless cotton candy and a ferris wheel and a roller coaster whirling you up and down and around and around, and hopefully only a little vertigo and nausea.   

And who doesn’t love inflation, the carnival’s political cousin, with the same wild ride and slightly wobbly ending.

If Major League Baseball were a country, it would be Venezuela, and the officials and owners would be President Maduro — myopic, clueless, stubborn.

There are things in baseball that need fixing (the time-wasting shuffle of relief pitchers; the waiting for hqs to review footage of the play at first base), but the major villain is The Home Run.

Baseball has been, and can be, a beautiful sport, but the Home Run Era starves it of its most strategically challenging and exciting moments — the bunt, the steal, the suicide squeeze, the hit-and-run and, most important, the base hit that invites the players to demonstrate these other skills.

But, realistically, why would any sensible manager rely on these stratagems when the bludgeon of a home run is available? 

Even if we wanted to cure the home run plague, there are substantial obstacles, beyond fan sentiment.  Expanding the outfield would require impossibly massive stadium renovation.  And there are the players who hit home runs because they are bigger and stronger and more skilled than ever.  They shouldn’t be arbitrarily penalized for doing what the fans love.

The only practical pressure-point is economic — provide fans with entertainment that’s better than what they’re getting, an alternative whose skill requirements, including batting skill, are as rigorous as in the major leagues, but whose physical differences limit out-and-out power, specifically the power to hit 17 (boring) home runs in 4 games.

We should support women’s professional baseball.  It can’t start at the major league equivalent, but we’re already well along, with skilled, competitive women hardball and softball players (the latter could make the transition to hardball easily, as did the players in the 1940’s All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, memorialized in the movie, A League of Their Own).

If we need examples, they’re right in front of us:

As the Home Run Derby was taking place, the American women’s World Cup soccer team was starting its run.  The first match was no test, but the second, against Chile, was better-balanced and demonstrated that, when teams are close in skill and style, the fact that the women may not run quite as fast as the men, nor kick quite as hard, is irrelevant.  Given a high-enough level of mastery, it’s the comparative skill level of the two teams that makes the game exciting.

Women’s hockey is another example.  The best men and women hockey players are exceptionally skilled.  But the flow of the men’s game is regularly impeded by physical intimidation that ties players up on the boards, slows them or knocks them down, sometimes injures them, and, not coincidentally, prompts fights that are the game’s greatest stain.

Women hockey players are not exactly pansies, but the difference in size and brute strength produces a game that flows better, is less encumbered by skirmishes, and actually ends up being speedier, more graceful, and more interesting than the men’s game.     

Yeah but, you might object, where are these women going to play?  Nobody’s going to build new stadiums for them.

During the season, every professional baseball stadium, major and minor, is vacant as often as it is filled (every home game for one team is an away game for the other).  That’s a lot of real estate standing idle, begging its owner to be used profitably.

So, let the wild rumpus begin.  May the better (not necessarily bigger or stronger) side win.

Criminal Negligence

Tags

climate change, Columbine High School, crime, Democrats, genocide, gun violence, Nazis, NRA, Republicans, Trump

(Note: I am writing this the day before the 20th anniversary of the killings at Columbine High School, and two days after a credible threat of gun violence, likely prompted by that anniversary, forced all Denver-area schools to close and 400,000 students to stay home.  The perpetrator killed herself with the very gun it was feared she might use against others.  Approximately 2,000,000 instructional hours also died.

In that short span, the world’s glaciers lost some of their volume and the seas rose commensurately.  

One tragedy is sporadic, predictably unpredictable, and swift.  The other is persistent, predictably predictable, and slow.  Neither is inevitable.) 

The motto, If You See Something, Say Something, popularizes a principle — if you know of a criminal act, whether planned or perpetrated, failure to inform the authorities what you know is, itself, a criminal act.

Mere suspicion may not be as formally demanding, but the level of our responsibility to say something rises with the seriousness of the possible crime.

Genocide is the greatest crime that humans can commit.  Failure to say what we know, or even suspect, about it must be nearly as serious.

Complicity in global warming is global genocide.  In America, gun violence may not rise to that level of universal significance, but it is our own home-made mini-genocide.

The day is past when anyone, whatever their level of education or current-events awareness, can legitimately claim ignorance of our two genocides.

And the day is past when anyone can legitimately claim that there is not enough information to support the scientific assertions of global warming and its potentially lethal effects.

Genocide-by-guns is a bit different.  We know accurately how many lives guns take each year.  But we are less predictable than the Earth in our response to life-altering forces.  Still, it is reasonable to assume that, if gun deaths increase, more of us will look to guns for protection, the supply will rise, and deaths will increase all the more.

Thinking about these two trends, we might take the experience of World War II as a sobering lesson.  Perhaps the world outside Germany could not have been certain enough of the genocide of the Jews to justify early intervention.  

But the price of that hesitation — whether or not it was defensible — was the death of millions.

In the face of global warming and gun violence, there is no doubt about the need to act, and there can be no justification for hesitating.  If we fail to respond, will we be morally any different than Hitler and the Nazis?

Responsibility to take action is shared broadly, but it would be mealy-mouthed not to identify the guilty.  The Republican Party, or at least those it harbors who blindly support the most globally harmful activities and bow before the might of the NRA, and pushed even further into denial and obstruction by the Trump Administration, bear the greatest burden of guilt.

This does not exonerate the Democratic Party, which must act forcefully against the two genocides.  Politics requires compromise, but that must proceed from honest Seeing and Saying.

Inaction is criminal negligence, punishable — eventually but inevitably — by death.

School for Scandal

Tags

admissions scandal, bribery, college, Columbia, ethics, morality, New York City, SATs

I want to be clear at the outset.  I cheated to get my son into a prestigious university.  This was years ago, so you might say I was a pioneer in that game, though instigator may be more accurate.  I certainly don’t boast about what I did.

Without my son’s knowledge, I paid someone to take his SAT exam.  Whether it was, or is, a violation of the law I’m not certain, but I do know it was a violation of the most fundamental principles of honesty and fair-dealing. 

Lest you think I am about to throw myself at the mercy of the legal system or public opinion, I am not.  I believe that my misdeed (or crime, if you wish) is now beyond the statute of limitations.  But, even if it weren’t, it has, by chance, produced some good that I would not wish to destroy.  I’ll try to explain:

My son was an amiable, but feckless, kid.  He slid through junior high and high school with grades just good enough to keep him from being held back.  His real passion was sports, but as a fan, not an athlete (you could say this assured he would escape at least that particular college admissions scandal).

It was clear he was not headed for college, and I wasn’t going to push him.  But I didn’t want him hanging uselessly around the house or the town.  A chance to live in a different environment might be the spur he needed.

We talked about it, and he admitted that his dream was to go, every day if possible, to a game — baseball, hockey, basketball, football, it didn’t matter.  I didn’t see any particular benefit, but I didn’t see any harm, and we considered how, and where, he could do that.

He was unequivocal:  New York City, with the Yankees and the Mets, the Rangers and the Islanders, the Knicks, the Giants.

I didn’t disagree, but, when I looked at New York housing costs, it was quite a bite, even for a rich man.  But more serious was the thought of his being alone in what could be a pretty tough, unforgiving city.

As I wondered what arrangement would give him social contacts, it hit me: Columbia University!  If he could stay in a dorm, he’d have a roommate and scores of dorm-mates, even a Resident Assistant or two to check on him, plus a college cafeteria (nutritious if not exactly tasty) and an infirmary.  I didn’t rule out the possibility that he’d notice there was a library there that might have biographies of Gehrig or Ruth or Jackie Robinson.

I didn’t mention my idea to him, but went ahead and made the SAT arrangements (make it solid, I instructed, but not so brilliant they’ll smell a rat).  I did the application, including the essay (same principle), and sent it in.  A few months and, voila! he was accepted.

It wasn’t easy explaining all this to my son, but I managed, without giving anything away.  I persuaded him that Columbia was big, and nobody would notice he wasn’t going to classes.  The prospect of going to a game every day made it easy to gloss over questions like tests and papers or, more serious, what if offcialdom found out.  We both understood that, at most, this would be a one-year proposition.

In late August, off he went.  He dutifully reported on baseball and football games, and the beginning of basketball and hockey seasons.  At first, he was rapturous, but around November, and then especially after Christmas break, there was a change.  It was a game every other day, then every third day, and he no longer seemed quite as excited about home runs and hat-tricks.

Worried, I phoned him.  He said he was great.  It was just that his roommate and his new friends had gotten him interested in a few classes and, the more he went to, the more he wanted to go to.

I think you see where this is headed.  He finished the year with reasonable grades, did better each successive year, graduated with honors, went to law school and, in time, became a successful, respected, and quite well-known judge.  And, by the way, he still loves sports.

I have never told him what I did.  

I know two wrongs don’t make a right.  But what if it’s only one rather insignificant wrong?  I ask myself what are the odds that the person who might have been in his place at Columbia would have produced the good he has.  I ask what his life would have been like if he had continued to bumble around and hadn’t had that fire lit under him or how he would have responded if I’d pushed him to do what he seemed unprepared for.

Does a very positive end justify a negative (but not so terribly negative) means?

All I can conclude is that the results of my misdeed are probably more positive than the results of my inaction would have been.  But then, no matter what the outcome, I violated a sensible code that would be destroyed if everybody did what I did.

Oy, what a muddle that I guess I’ll have to leave to others to sort out.

A Guide for the Perplexed

Tags

ethics, goodness, guidance, kindness, maxims, morality, personal choice, slogans, wisdom

We live in uneasy times.  Our media are controversial, our heroes tainted, our leaders besmirched, our religions tarnished, and our sciences doubted.  So, where can we turn for guidance?

I first thought our popular slogans might help, but, except for a few oldies that still raise a smile (Levy’s Rye Bread: You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s; Smuckers: With a name like “Smuckers,” it has to be good), I couldn’t get past the flip egotism of most, summed up smugly in Nike’s Just do it!  (How about Nancy Reagan’s Just say no!)

The slogans did, however, remind me of their more sober, older cousins, the ageless maxims that offer to guide us along life’s difficult path.

I studied various sources, hoping to find wisdom that would help, but it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped.

The first hurdle was the apparent mutual contradiction of some maxims, like Might makes right vs. The meek shall inherit the earth (GIVE ME YOUR WALLET OR I’LL SHOOT YOU! … pretty please?!!)

Then, there were the mildly feather-headed, like:  A soft answer turneth away wrath (have you ever tried reasoning with a drunken bully?) …

The ambiguous:  A little learning is a dangerous thing (well, maybe, if you give a toddler a chemistry set) …

The out-of-date:  Don’t take any wooden nickels (wood I know, but what’s a nickel?) …

The cringe-makingly out-of-date:  A woman’s place is in the home (yes, and a fool and his testicles are soon parted) …

The puzzlingly illogical:  Cold hands, warm heart (has anyone with cold hands ever been anything but a miserable whiner?) …

And the merely stupid (that, inexplicably, seem to focus on horses), like:  Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth (DO!  If it’s sick or old, you’ll be saddled with medical bills that would make open-heart-surgery look cheap) and Don’t close the barn door after the horse has fled (if there are other horses in the barn, CLOSE IT IMMEDIATELY, for ’Tis better to lose one horse’s ass than to be one).

There were some that made sense, but the task of making a consistent To Do life-list on my own was daunting.  I decided to consult trusted sources that had already done comprehensive evaluations (a sort of Consumers’ Report Approved Aphorisms List).  The results were not encouraging.  A few examples from a multitude:

The Grass is Always Greener on the Other side of the Fence: There are two sides of every fence.  If one is greener, the other must be less-green.  Therefore, The grass is greener on the other side of the fence half the time.

A Barking Dog Never Bites: It may be impossible for a dog to both bark and bite at the same time, but, once he’s done with that, he can, and may, bite and certainly more frequently than a dog that doesn’t bark, especially one that wags its tail and rolls over.

He Who Fights and Runs Away Lives to Fight Another Day:  Perhaps sometimes, but certainly not regularly.  He who runs away is probably losing.  The chance that he can outrun his presumably-less-battered opponent is close to nil, and then his punishment will be much worse.  Perhaps, He Who Fights Deserves the Beating He Gets.  

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere:  Utter nonsense.  It will get you everywhere.  And it doesn’t even have to be plausible.  Just ask any politician who has ever been elected to any public office.

It Takes a Thief to Catch a Thief:  Whether this is true or not is irrelevant.  It’s simply bad policing policy, especially if it means relying on another thief to catch that thief, and then another to catch the second thief, ad infinitum.

With that, I gave up my search for a personalized handbook of what to do.  Instead, every day, in the paper, I read the police blotter, the pleas for help in the personal advice columns, and the news from Washington.  I systematically do not do whatever has been reported.  I never would have guessed that being so negative could be so positive.

Small Kindesses

Tags

Alan Paton, america, books, Cry the Beloved Country, human kindess, Jim Harrison, libraries, South Africa, Willa Cather

I’m a wanderer.  A library-stack-wanderer.  Though, occasionally, I’ve rambled around the non-fiction section — seeking guidance from ethicists or insight from astrophysicists, or revisiting the wonderful John McPhee — I am habitually a fiction-section-library-stack-wanderer.

I go without preconception and let impulse decide where in the alphabet to start.  I do try to give every author a fair look, though I’m pretty cursory with the bottom shelf (bad back).  Name-recognition can sway me (I was once in a fairly long-term relationship with Willa Cather), but I favor experiment.

That’s how I happened on Jim Harrison, a brilliant writer I had inexcusably never encountered before.  I read The English Major, then Legends of the Fall, and went eagerly back for more.

There weren’t any more.

My stacks are in a small branch library, part of a big system where a book borrowed at one branch can be returned to any other.  What may once have been a Harrison trove at my branch is probably now wandering separately, randomly, branch-to-branch (though, who’s to say that the two I brought home were not the first of his family to live at my branch?).

Sensible people will ask why I didn’t log-in and order delivery of other Harrisons, but why spoil an exciting adventure?  He’ll be back, I’m certain, and, in the meantime, I’m free to explore in different directions.

Just last week, I was at my local branch.  I decided to start near the end of the alphabet.  Working back from S, I got to P (don’t expect a facile joke here), and gave the bottom shelf my usual passing glance.  There, in the middle, was Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country.

I hesitated.  Reading a work that had been famous and influential for over half a century didn’t seem to qualify as adventure.  Alan Paton was not a new name, even to me.  

But my smaller, sensible part reminded me of the power of famous books I had once neglected — O Pioneers; Madame Bovary; War and Peace.

I picked up Paton.  I knew the book was a passionate indictment of South
African apartheid.  But I didn’t anticipate how understated and persuasive that passion actually is — unpreachy in its tone, measured in its narrative, and subdued, even, at times, monotone and repetitive, in its dialogue, as if the country and its people — black and white — were being worn away one slow, inexorable drop after another.

It made me weep.

What we know of the evils of South Africa at the time Paton wrote, and what we know of the changes the book helped advance, are emotional enough.

But we can’t help reading through the lens of our own era and experience.

I was weeping at least as much for my own beloved country, reminded of the crassness and stupidity and outright evils we endure, one slow, inexorable drop after another, but also of the ultimate power of human reason and compassion and kindness.

I can’t think of a better way to start exploring what we’re about, and where we’re headed, than wandering through the library stacks for something good to read.  It doesn’t have to be limited to the fiction section.  Every book, just by being itself, is a small kindness.

 

Altered Boys

Tags

altar boys, Catholic Church, choir boys, pedophiles, Pope Francis, predators, priests

I escaped the predators.  Others may not have.

The sports I played as a kid, mainly baseball and hockey, didn’t lend themselves to closed-door conferences with coaches.  And dads were ever-present.

I gave Boy Scouts a try, but our leaders were idiots and I quit.     

Most important, I wasn’t an altar- or choir-boy.  Unitarians didn’t qualify.

But I wasn’t completely oblivious.  In our neighborhood-kids’ grapevine, vague allusions to priests and the boys who served them occasionally circulated.  We laughed unknowingly knowingly.

There were also rumors about what might happen if you rubbed a certain organ in a certain way.  But that was premature.  The possibility that, God forbid, someone else might help with the rubbing, or that you might help someone else, didn’t arise.

Whatever dark secrets were floating about, I was too busy to care.  There was too much else to do.  The neighborhood was filled with kids and we lived outdoors, in the cornfields across the street, in the creek up the street, in the swamp near the creek, in the woods up the hill, in the abandoned quarry at the top of the hill.

Some of us were Catholic, some were not.  We all knew who was what.  It didn’t make any difference when we were bashing through our pagan Eden, with its occasional perils (especially the quarry walls), but, at least, no predators.

It wouldn’t have occurred to us that some of our mates might be safer there than a mile away, at St. James, in God’s anointed sanctuary, in the hands of the priests.

This isn’t an attack on St. James.  I have no idea if anything bad happened there.  It’s not a call to substitute organized religion with some kind of youthful paganism (keep Lord of the Flies in mind).

And it’s not an attack on the Catholic Church.  It’s simply an appeal to human decency and common sense.

The Church is as capable of good as it is of evil.  It has the history and the horsepower to make a difference in human lives.  It also, now, has a Pope who seems genuinely to care as much about people’s physical and psychic needs as their spiritual well-being.

Please, Francis, be sensible.  Open the priesthood to married men and to women!  The notion of a celibate priesthood is a sick joke.  In a battle between Sex and God, Sex will usually win.

The change wouldn’t guarantee an end to scandals, but at least it might warn aspirants that the church is not their personal pick-up bar, and allow a growing number of priests to satisfy their urges within the bounds of church doctrine, the law, and sensible morality.

Perhaps, then, the Church might, with an easy conscience, allow its priests to lead its children among the fields, the swamps, the woods, and the hills where godliness also lives.