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This is dedicated to the clergy, especially those bishops who betrayed the Church, by failing to bark when wolves circled their prey and who are wolves themselves:

The Bishop of St. Pete

What the devil have we got for a Bishop
But a wee, wee slack jowled lordy?
When the killers ring round,
On the helpless set Hound
He pretends that he just doesn’t see.
He stays in his mansion and stares at the field
Envisions designs for his Shield:
“And how ‘bout my Crest
and all of the rest
of my royal accoutrements?
Oh, and my gowns…
I must get to town
to order some double-talk vests.
And I must do my nails
Some pumice, some buffing,
I’ll take a short trip while she dies.
Yes, I’ll go comfort some people who live off the coast
And then when I’m back, newly gowned, pink and browned,
I’ll go on into St. Pete
and buy boxes of satin, silk ties…
Tongue ties.
And then I’ll issue a statement ‘once again’; were there two?
Rear back my pudge head, yodel ‘woo, woo, woo’.
I’ll tell everyone
‘It is finished’, we’re done.
Be glad it didn’t happen to you.
(And that’s what counts! boo, boo.)
But I did what I couldy,
If not what I shouldy,
Life goes on, don’t you know.
Too late for her now, (so make Living Wills).
No sense dwelling on this…
(this what? I forgot….)
Remembering now:
I’m Bishop Basenji, the yodeling,
Barkless wee lordy.”

Qui tacet consentit

Since you, dear and solitary reader, found this article on the Flyter’s site, you won’t be surprised to learn I think Sec. Clinton is out of the question as President.  She is politically savvy and disciplined but is unfortunately possessed by an evil ideology: “my good may necessitate your death.” “Your life has value when I feel it does.” “Life begins when I decide it does.” Tyranny. Out of the question.

So I am looking at a one-candidate election, as are others. Catholic clerics and bloggers are demonstrating, in one way or another, that a Catholic has no other choice than to vote Republican. One way to do it is to compare the platforms of the parties. One is more Catholic-compatible than the other on the life issues.

This is true. But what if that party’s candidate is completely unfit for office?

Some are telling themselves that “he will be surrounded by better people than himself; they will keep him reined in.” “He will be a figurehead; others will make the important decisions.” And the trump card: “As bad as he is, he is better than the alternative.” Nothing I have seen or learned about him justifies any of that thinking. It is delusional, in my opinion. The party can’t rein him in now, before he has all the power of high office. How will these imaginary wisemen do it then? He’s a con man like my Uncle Irvin was, exploiting the desperation of others. We children were cautioned not to let Irvin in the house if he knocked on the door. Well, he is knocking now.

No, I think the Republican candidate is as bad as the alternative: only a different kind of bad. He has genuine demagogue potential, like Huey Long, populist governor of Louisiana, 1928-1932, that the other candidate does not have. He sows specters of violence that occasionally erupt into acts of violence. I saw film clips of armed civilians patrolling the streets of Cleveland during the RNC news coverage; automatic weapons on display. It was obvious intimidation. I believe this is a hint of things to come from a politician with comedic timing and a very dark side. Like Huey Long, he knows well his followers: devout, suggestible, hoodooed by his low caliber reality show and fourteen years of it.

The most compelling argument from pro-life people is: he will appoint pro-life judges. Being on intimate terms with lying, why would a man who does not honor contracts he has signed, honor a political promise? Much less, fight for it? And wouldn’t his nominees need to be approved? Does he have any experience in that sort of struggle? Any proven record of persistence except to get even with people who offend his vanity? And this he can indulge with greater power, if we give it to him. That’s OK if you’re not on his enemies list?

As another writer has pointed out, there are other ways to contain the activism of judges: Article Three of the Constitution. But there is no will in Congress, nor I believe, in the people to use it. The people, Catholic, pro-life and others, are waiting for a strongman to fix things for them. So I don’t hear any calls for civil disobedience like the one from  the CDF: Declaration on Procured Abortion (1974): “It must be clearly understood that whatever may be laid down by civil law in this matter, man can never obey a law which is in itself immoral, and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle the liceity of abortion.”

Religious freedom and freedom of conscience come at a price. Who wants to pay it? No single politician can fix what the will of the people is too weak to confront in the first place.  

It is not a pretty thing to watch Catholic clerics join the conga line behind a man who turns the Golden Rule upside down. Who treats others like dirt. Anti-life Catholic politicians have had a free pass from Catholic bishops for nearly fifty years. Recall the funeral of Edward Kennedy. It was a coronation in appearance and in tone. No wonder we are in this fix now.

At this late hour, the choice is: vote for the unfit or don’t vote.  Nowhere in the Catechism does it say Catholics are obligated to vote, especially when we think both candidates are liabilities for the common good. Liabilities, mind you. Dangerous. Both.

“He who is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and he who is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.” Luke 16: 10. So now I must vote for a man who is demonstrably dishonest in much already, before he obtains the immense power he seeks?

I’m listening to my little, tiny Catholic-informed conscience, my own “miserable littleness”, to use a phrase of C. S. Pierce’s. I listened to it when the clerics were undercutting my pro-life efforts at the Kennedy funeral and I’ll listen to it now. There is conscience rightly invoked and wrongly invoked and a very narrow path between them, as the Catechism says. Yes, I could be wrong. And so could they.

For Charlotte who always pulled for the underdog.

Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder was born in Steubenville, Ohio (Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos) in 1918. Exposed to gambling from childhood, he quit school in the tenth grade when he got too busy running errands for the gambling establishments in that blue-collar town. He lived the adage “scared money doesn’t win” and he won and lost many fortunes without whining about it. He had a complex heart and a colorful mouth. He became a TV NFL football personality and made himself into a product called “the Greek”, bringing gambling into the middle class living rooms of America without being too overt about it. But just overt enough to make the ratings soar. Just naughty enough.

In the past, his guardian angel pulled him out of death traps at least three times: twice he was a “no show” on planes that crashed, killing everyone on board. And once, as a child, he pleaded with his mother to let him stay behind at a playmate’s house, while she returned home without him. At home, his deranged uncle “stepped from behind a tree” and shot his mother and his aunt. Tragedy left a mark on his soul and it wasn’t the only time. As an adult, Jimmy and his wife suffered the tragedies of seeing three children die of cystic fibrosis. He kept his grief  hidden as well as he could and sometimes his emotions seemed blunted, warped. Traumatic overload can produce a numbing effect. Good gambler that he was, he kept his cards “close to the chest,” as a friend said. But he could lash out with a mean remark now and then; Jimmy had a dark side, too.

Was his angel a “no show” that MLK day in 1988 when someone put a camera in his smiling face at a dinner honoring civil rights leaders and asked him to opine about the athletic power of black athletes and the lack of black coaches? He made remarks referencing the eugenic practices of slaveholders and being a day of sensitivity like Martin Luther King Day, the remarks were especially egregious. He spoke in what seemed like a morally neutral way, and no stranger to emotional pain, I doubt he meant it that way. But I suspect that was what people found so offensive. He was quickly fired, though his co-panelist on the NFL show, Irv Cross, and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson spoke up for him and vouched that he was not a racist. Roy Innis of CORE defended him, saying Malcolm X, a man not given to the minced word, said the same thing about being bred like chattel by slaveholders. But of course, no one could accuse Malcolm X of saying anything in a flat-footed morally neutral tone. One of the things I like about him. But the network was tired of providing “the Greek” the long limos he enjoyed and they took the opportunity get rid of him. As Dan Rather says in the film, “The Legend of Jimmy the Greek,” it was a no-brainer as a business decision.

Heart problems started a few days after these events. Lost, sick, and finished as a TV personality, he wandered around Las Vegas after a period of seclusion in Durham, NC and spent a lot of time at the horse track. At some point he started a public relations business and did a little of this and that. Over time he descended into the world of the greasy sport jacket and unkempt grey hair, like Howard Hughes, for whom he did a little publicity work of some sort or another; he helped bring championship poker to television. After a long decline in health and spirit, he died and was buried in Steubenville where he began, attended by a few family members, a few bookies, perhaps, and his guardian angel, without doubt. A friend, Fishman, slipped a racing ticket into his casket and lo! Jimmy went out a winner.

Jimmy Snyder

And perhaps the silent guardian angel did him a favor; it’s not good to become a product even if you do it to yourself. He fixed that. “The Greek” as a brand vanished overnight.

What would Jimmy think about the reality of human engineering, designer babies, and the business of human breeding today now that animal husbandry is practiced on humanity via sperm banks and fertility clinics, services in demand by clients wealthy enough to pay?

Let two singing cowgirls order a baby like a couple of cattlemen through the services of a sperm bank and our neo-pagan nation is not above lauding them as pioneers of the new American family. America has never come to terms with the moral and mental horrors of slavery and our idolatry of technology is leading us deeper and deeper into the slaveholding mentality. The slaveholding mentality is: some people are products for the purchase, use and abuse of other people who are not products themselves but who profit emotionally or monetarily from treating other people like talking, walking commodities. That is the basic proposition and it is alive and visible in the business of reproduction:  sex selection, artificial insemination and the evil of discarding human embryos like extra seed corn, selling eggs for profit, surrogate mothers, etc. It’s ugly but no one is supposed to say so in public, though the parallels to crop and animal husbandry are standing right on top of our feet.

No wonder the network freaked out when Jimmy touched the hidden rail of the darkest side of America’s economic and national life and brought it up like a bad meal on the rugs of television America. Slavery is still swept under the rug as far as the nitty gritty fact that it was torture and it was torture in the service of economics, wealth, and power. It was legalized sadism; the law couldn’t touch a slaveholder who tortured or killed his “property.” Read the first person testimony of slaves who escaped to the free states and say it wasn’t sadism.

Roy Innis, one of the few leaders to defend Jimmy the Greek, said: “We were bred like chattel. It’s wrong that they did that to us—but it’s not wrong to talk about history.”

Well, I guess we’ll find out.

See: The Legend of Jimmy the Greek: YouTube (Fritz Mitchell)

New book by a Durham native on slavery and the economic ascent of America: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and The Making Of American Capitalism. Edward E. Baptist, Basic Books, 2014. An anonymous reviewer in The Economist lashed out at the book as too empathetic (not scholarly) toward the plight of the slave (i.e. a work of “advocacy.”) The review was later withdrawn and a lame apology issued. Those who want to believe that the market is necessarily a force for moral good are having a hard time with this well researched book that demonstrates the opposite.

A mash made of Items from the local newspaper, May 18, 2014:

Breaking news showered thieves and guerillas

from mostly cloudy skies.

They shortfell along Biscuit Boulevard.

Forgoing the Truck Race, scheduled that day at the Biscuit Bake-off,

Miss Biscuit and Mr. Biscuit baked the thieves and guerillas into

Hot treats to the delight of those malingering on Market Square.

All this is and was outside the traditional business model; however,

the crowd filled many biscuits with leftover thieves and bushwhackers,

some dating back to the Civil War!

Mr. and Mrs. Biscuit Stroll Home Under a Self-rising Moon

The Other Dickens:  A Life of Catherine Hogarth. Nayder, Lillian. Cornell University Press, 2011.

When Charles Dickens kicked his wife of twenty-two years and the mother of his ten children out of the house, he tried out various narratives of events on several correspondents. Most of his biographers have played the dummy to his ventriloquism from the grave, in the words of Lillian Nayder, when it comes to the subject of Catherine. If Dickens biographers see her as a person at all, it is only in terms of her relevance to him.

Catherine Hogarth Dickens by Samuel Lawrence, 1838.

But Dr. Nayder, a professor of British literature at Bates College in Maine, has written about Catherine Hogarth (Dickens) as a subject in her own right. She has refuted the usual portrait of her as dull, mentally incompetent and a burden to The Inimitable, as Dickens was dubbed in his day. Using primary sources, household bills and legal documents, financial statements and correspondence among friends and family, she has cast light on the distortions of Catherine that Dickens created in order to justify his own reprehensible behavior in the matter of his marriage. Now that Lillian Nayder has been through the wastebaskets, it won’t be so easy for future biographers to accept his narrative without question.

Sinking into a mid-life quaking bog, Dickens decided sometime between the years 1856 and 1858 that he had never loved Catherine after all. In 1857, he had a dressing room walled off from the master bedroom and took it as his own. Yes, after ten children, numerous dinner parties, trips abroad, dramatic entertainments and family circles, it was all a tragic mistake. This new plotline was even more compelling to him after he met the very slightly talented actress, Ellen Ternan. She was about the same age as his daughter Kate and became his mistress with Mrs. Ternan’s approval. He housed her in the environs of London and lived a “sometimes” life with Ellen under the name of Trigham.

Catherine’s marital crime seems to have been weight gain after childbearing as well as natural aging. And like a good baby daddy, he blamed Catherine for the ten children. One of the richest authors in England but oh, what a burden they were. Separate from her he would, but Dickens needed to shore up his reputation with the public. Dickens adored being adored by the adoring public and new literary tours were in the works. So he wrote a public letter to newspapers in London and New York in the best Jerry Springer low-life style of sordid sensationalism, accusing Catherine of mental disturbance, unnatural character and lack of affection toward her children. Twisting the knife further, he told a correspondent the children did not love her, either. But people in the literary world knew better, as did many in the public at large.

To quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “What a dreadful letter that last was!” “And what a crime, for a man to use his genius as a cudgel…against the woman he promised to protect tenderly with life and heart—taking advantage of his hold with the public to turn public opinion against her. I call it dreadful.” (p. 269-70.)

The most compelling proof that Catherine had her wits all along and kept them during the outrages committed against her is her own triumph over the enormous cruelty of being exiled from her home and children. She held her tongue and had the good sense not to challenge the Inimitable in print. She maintained a silent dignity throughout and continued to use the name Mrs. Dickens when sending out copies of her husband’s latest books. Poor “Mrs. Trigham” could not come out into the daylight as Catherine could. Better an ill-used wife with new address cards than an ill-used mistress with no cards.

Catherine understood that Dickens was a talented conjurer and mesmerist, literally and figuratively. He had mesmerized her as well as the wives of willing dinner guests for demonstrations of his so-called hypnotic powers. He loved putting people under his spell. So she waited for those family members still under his spell to shake off the mesmerism. And most did during the twelve years of her exile.

Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière

Mrs. Dickens outlived Mr. Dickens by almost a decade; a decade Dickens biographers ignore, for the most part, as if she died with him. In a coup worthy of a Dickens novel, Charles, Jr. surprised his siblings at the auction of the family home after the death of Charles Dickens in 1870 and out bid all challengers. And with that he ended the twelve-year exile of his beloved mother from her own home. She entered Gad’s Hill once again for family visits.

And even though Mrs. Dickens would not appreciate it, I’m glad Oscar Wilde took a swing at the Inimitable when he said: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

Abuse of Language–Abuse of Power. Josef Pieper, 1974. Kosel-Verlag, Munich. (Ignatius Press, 1992.)

Josef Pieper, German Catholic philosopher, wrote a small and concentrated book of two essays called Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power. Issued first in Germany in 1974, he says that language has been turned from an instrument of searching for the truth into an instrument of deception and the manipulation of people.

Of course, we know this false language is “propaganda” but the strange thing is that people are not very offended by knowing that this or that is propaganda. Everyone has his favorite propaganda.  Karl Jaspers, German psychiatrist and philosopher, said that he feared that the truth could no longer get a hearing unless it was presented first as propaganda to seduce the audience into listening. And what’s more, some people foolishly assert that there is no such thing as truth or reality at all.  Yet, as someone pointed out elsewhere, the same people never fail to open the door before walking through it.

We are swimming in so much pseudo-reality brought to us by the communications and entertainment industries that it is fitting that Pieper concentrates on Plato’s concern with the “entertainers” of his day. Sophists are with us in every age.  In one of Plato’s last dialogues (Sophist) the definition of the sophist evolves:  “The sophists fabricate a fictitious reality”. And they are most destructive because they corrupt the meanings of words in refined and sophisticated ways so that we are left with pseudo-information and paltry knowledge.

Pieper says on page 34:  “That the existential realm of man could be taken over by pseudo-realities whose fictitious nature threatens to become indiscernible is truly a depressing thought. And yet this Platonic nightmare, I hold, possesses an alarming contemporary relevance. For the general public is being reduced to a state where people are not only unable to find out about the truth but also become unable to even search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language.”

Quoting Pieper on page 32:  “Karl Jaspers counted among the forms of ‘modern sophistry’, as he calls it, the ‘lingo of revolution’, which, ‘intent on fomenting rebellion through agitation, singles out one isolated instance, and focusing its spotlight on this, makes everyone blind to all the rest.’

The truth of this latter quote from Jaspers is too often evidenced in the nightly news, especially cable and partisan Internet news sources in which a manic game of “gotcha” is dished daily into everyone’s nosebag.  The lingo of revolution operates in current social re-engineering movements, especially the gender revolution. Plato taught that the truth is found in dialogue, and dialogue upholds the dignity of the person. When language is policed for right or wrong usage, or even more Maoist-like, language is scanned for “right feeling” and “right attitude,” dialogue is aborted from the get-go.

The gender revolutionaries have loaded all the pronouns with a narrative you must not question.  You may not speak from your own perspective, only theirs. Silenced.

When you refuse to use the false word on the evidence of your own reasoning eyes, (i.e. refuse to say “she” when referring to a male attempting to pass as a female and thus refuse to collaborate in deception) or when you use the appropriate word (say “him” based on your conviction that though a male may suffer from feeling he is a woman, he isn’t one in reality), you will come under ad hominem coercive pressure to jump up on the hobby horse of re-gendering and ride behind the tyrant down the king’s highway.

The gender preoccupied oppressor insists you jettison (across the hobby horses’ rump) what intellectual integrity you possess, your faith, your reason, your common sense, and not least, your gut instinct.  The Lie in every age always has about it the hubristic attempt to make man a god, to remake man in his own image, and the god-like won’t take “No” for an answer.

Violence is an implicit threat in sophistry, as Pieper explains in the second essay,  the Abuse of Power. Violence begins with the abuse of language, and those who have eyes to see and ears to hear can contemplate that truth guided by the literary wisdom of Genesis. Sophistry, like the Male and the Female, is from the beginning. The sophist in the garden is, of course, the snake—the creature with no legs to stand on.  Jesus told and still tells his listeners:  “The Father of Lies was a murderer from the first.”

Language Police Accost Travelers Along the King’s Highway

I’ve had nothing to say for a long time; just no will whatsoever to put any thoughts on paper. I lost hearing in my right ear on July 17. Frizzle, pop, gurgle and it was gone. It’s called “Sudden Hearing Loss” and that’s what it is. Had the tests and thankfully, nothing worse showed up.  I live with a little gurgling sound that seems to be located just behind the right ear, at the base of the skull. It is like a drain clearing a last bit of water. Odd but not devastating. The world has taken on a more ominous quality, however, as sounds are harder to identify or locate. So I am in a state of startle more than before, but again, not particularly devastating.

There are a number of one-sided deafness people writing on the Internet; one man said it never occurred to him to pray for healing for his deafness. That’s true in my case, also; I’m grateful that I have perfect hearing in the left ear and it seems greedy to worry too much about the right ear. Is nothing ever enough? (Like those outsider artists that never have enough room on the canvas and paint onto the frame, the wall, etc.)

That’s one kind of sudden silence. Another kind is more dismaying, when people who speak the truth come to a violent end. I was sorry to learn about the death of Michael Hastings on June 18, the Rolling Stone journalist whose book I wrote about on this blog. (The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan) He spoke the truth as he knew it and he riled powerful and too often, pathological, people. Though the Los Angeles PD ruled the automobile crash that killed him an accident, there are oddities surrounding the crash that keep suspicions of foul play alive over the Internet.  As Tricia Nixon said in the Watergate era, “you can’t underestimate the power of fear.”  She said that like it’s a good thing; a tool for keeping people docile and un-curious. That’s how it sounded at the time.  Daddy’s girl.

Art Young. World of Creepers, from Life, 1907.

Hastings irritated most of his fellow journalists.  His manner was too direct and abrasive for many and he thought a lot of them were cowards.  I imagine he may have been in a hurry to say what he saw because he was aware that he walked a dangerous path. And might not live to be an old man. He was only 33 when he died.

We live in a world that rationalizes and sanctions all kinds of killing. Direct assassinations as well as annihilation by other means, as Pope Francis discussed in this first Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium.  I don’t think Michael Hastings liked the professional killing world he witnessed and he did what he could to expose it and the anonymous powers that drive it. Mr. Hastings wrote like an honest man and an earnest man. Clear and direct. God bless him for his pursuit of the truth.

I’m tuned in like never before to the artificiality of so much of the sound that surrounds us:  shopping mall Muzak, coercive advertising, and social propaganda. It is much more grating to me now than it was with two ears. Maybe it’s harder to filter out lies with one ear; it seems to me that it is.

So I spend a lot more time outside away from “communications”, working in the yard, listening to natural sounds, especially birds.  The butterflies are real buddies; they make no sounds I could hear with two ears, anyway. Butterflies are suddenly “here”, like snakes, but much nicer to come upon than the equally quiet snakes who can strike out of nowhere.

Jeremy Bentham, utilitarian nincompoop philosopher, got a bee in his bonnet when he visited his brother Samuel, employed by Prince Potemkin in Russia.   Samuel cooked up the idea for a new kind of prison that would be efficient, above all…a circular prison, like a wheel with a guard at the center where the hub would be.  One guard watches many prisoners in this model of penal genius. Samuel thought of it, but Jeremy was truly bitten by it. What a cost saving to the nation! He was so excited about it he wrote home to his father to discuss it further.  A family of sinister interest, I suppose.

The prisoners wouldn’t know for sure when the guard was watching them, but they should  behave as if they were being watched at all times. That’s the controlling idea:  the “Panopticon effect” alters behavior as the watched become the watchers of themselves. He worked for years to have his prison built in England but England never did. Cuba did in 1926.

Cuban Prison: Presidio Modelo

However, JB had other interests besides the Panopticon. Like dissection.  Determined to have his body  dissected after his death ( to be useful beyond the end), his helpful friend, Southwood Smith, tried to preserve Bentham’s head with some amateur mummification experiments that didn’t turn out too well.

Eventually, his hay-stuffed and clothed skeleton was acquired by University College London and resides there  in a structure called the Auto-icon. The college commissioned a new wax head and stored the shriveled one under lock and key away from student pranksters. In honor of the 100^th and 150^th anniversaries of the college, those old so-and-so’s  on the College Council wheeled Jeremy in and recorded him as “Present but not voting.”

http://theflytersdebut.com/Round2/ch4_ethicist.html

Mr. Bentham was a bitter man before he died but took consolation in his conviction that the Panopticon was “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”^[1]

Before this, maybe:

NSA, Fort Meade, MD

The recent news confirming our suspicions that the intelligence agencies are sucking up our electronic data like anteaters at a picnic affirms we are living in a global Panopticon today. Privacy is a concern of and for the Person and the dignity due the Person. Why be shocked that a government that promotes aggression against the Person at his most innocent and helpless should violate mere privacy?  Why wouldn’t a government that engages in targeted killing of people born and unborn violate privacy as a matter of course? Those who don’t care what happens to others won’t care what happens to themselves, either; a process of steady demoralization.

What will come of it?  I think the talkers will “process” talk it to death. I suspect they will talk process until it seems normal.  Acceptable.  A fair trade off between the illusion of security and the illusion of privacy.  Yak yak yak. Meanwhile the Panopticon effect goes into higher gear and people grow more apathetic:  “Voting but not present” as we’re data-mined every four years in a broadcast display of “democracy” in action.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  The Truth is still the Truth.  The technology is new, but not the guiding principles. Why don’t I use Facebook?  Because it was born as a means to rate and demean women on campus; it was an offensive tool from the beginning.  And I don’t share the boy king’s shallow vision of glass catfish transparency for everyone but himself.  Nothing new here. Tyrants always think that way.

Party Time at Facebook Headquarters

(1)  Bentham, Jeremy. Panopticon (Preface). In Bozovic 1995.

Dorothy Day, a Catholic social activist and writer, was born into a carnival of social activism and mass movements. Her father was a newspaperman who loved horse racing and co-founded the Hialeah racetrack in Florida.  Dorothy, always conscious of the poor and the downtrodden, set out to be a free-lance writer on their behalf.  She wrote for the Masses and ran with a radical crowd; she knew the New York intellectuals, activists, suffragettes, and labor leaders of her day. Eugene O’Neill and Dorothy walked the waterfronts. She picketed for labor rights and for peace; she never voted or paid taxes for pacifist reasons she discussed regularly with the Revenuers. (And when drones start picking us off by intent or mistake, tax resistance and pacifism are going to look like the far side of common sense.)

March 1913 cover art by John Sloan.

It didn’t escape Dorothy’s notice that the church people were content to do nothing for the worker, the laborer, or the poor. Even the Pope said at the time it seemed the church had lost the worker (but John Paul II and the Solidarity movement brought them back.) The Communists and Socialists of her day did lift a finger for social justice, but lent support to dictatorships and built totalitarianism in social experiments that killed many.

Dorothy witnessed it all, she knew what she knew and she acted on her search for the truth. “I came into the world to bear witness to the truth and those who love the truth listen to my voice.” Dorothy Day heard the voice and never pretended she was deaf.

She had formed a common law marriage in her late twenties with a man whom she knew she would have to renounce to convert to Catholicism, as she was undeniably drawn to do. He, an anarchist, despised organized religion. Once she baptized their daughter, Tamara, into the Catholic Church the die was cast. She asked for baptism for herself, and then lived the long loneliness of the convert. Dorothy’s political friends thought she had betrayed all her social justice principles by joining the tool of the capitalist imperialists, the Catholic Church. And local parishioners thought she was a Communist coming in to undermine the Church. Day said once that if you feed the poor, you’re a saint, but if you ask why they are poor, you’re a Communist. She did both, fed them and asked “why?”

The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day, 1952. Harper&Row.

Dorothy and Peter Maurin, a former Christian Brother, co-founded the Catholic Worker movement. It still exists. The CW runs hospitality houses for people needing shelter but not like the shelters run by Holy Mother the City, as Day called it. Catholic Workers live with the people they extend hospitality to; it is hospitality born in the Christian commandment to “love one another as I have loved you.” Not easy. It’s personalism; it’s anarchy, as Peter Maurin taught in round table discussions called “Clarification of Thought.” He meant that an anarchist doesn’t need a policeman to tell him what to do, or a government to show him how to offer shelter and food to the poor. Nor does the Catholic need to wait for the Bishop to permit him or her to do the corporal and spiritual works of mercy; anyone can extend hospitality.

It’s going to be quite an education untangling all the misconceptions about her now that she is on the road to scrutiny for possible canonization. Did I mention she had an abortion in her libertine years? Watch the Catholics for Choice try to make an argument that if a post-abortive woman can be a saint, then abortion is not that bad, is it? Others will say no woman who has had an abortion can ever be a saint. Dorothy repented of her own abortion and suffered reminders of her bohemian years every time she or other Workers did anything controversial (like peace movement work or boycotts).  People are dredging her past up again in the Comment Boxes but either you believe in repentance, forgiveness and redemption or you don’t. And a lot of people don’t. No second acts in Christian life?

But what a hope she is and will be for all people trapped in the grief of sin of any kind. And what a challenge it will be to squeeze her onto a holy card. No, she won’t be a saccharine saint. And St. Theresa of Lisieux, one of Dorothy’s favorites, wasn’t a goody-goody either. Though Theresa’s own order tried to monkey with her writings and photos to make her out to be a little bon-bon. Somehow these warrior souls survive all these shenanigans of the faint-hearted and I suspect Dorothy Day will too. Put a bet on her at Hialeah for Pop, maybe.

Dread Winter spreads his latest glooms,

And reigns, tremendous, o’er the conquer’d Year.

How dead the vegetable kingdom  lies!

How dumb the tuneful! Horror wide extends

His desolate domain.

James Thomson, The Seasons, Winter (1726), line 229

James Thomson (1700-1748), poet from Scotland, was encouraged to write poetry by a countryman farmer. Not everything he wrote survives because he burned most of the year’s work every New Year’s Day. Burn, Baby, Burn. Cicero would approve. Cicero said a poet should never make poems public until they were at least seven years old.  Most notably, James Thomson wrote the words to “Rule, Britannia!”

Charles Bevill Richardson and I used to sing “Rule” at the top of our voices while driving in his convertible. “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!” Charles did a great Ethel Merman, too. “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” an excellent song to sing on a summer day in a car with the top down. This was the Triangle Theatre summer of 1965. We were banned from going anywhere near the props backstage after someone put a picture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the picture frame Anna (The King and I) gazed upon as she sang “ Hello, Young Lovers.”

Well, let the empire have its day of inaugural theatre and its dances, too; let the kingdom’s king place both hands and two feet on four Bibles and proclaim:  “a great nation must care for the vulnerable.”  Ask the 56 Million what kind of care he means. Twice now the tuneful tweeters  assisted this mockery. Dread Winter spreads his latest glooms in January 2013.

Here is Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter;” it begins in the bleak cold grey but the sweetness of the tune and the simplicity of the words save it.  And us, if we would listen as children do.

http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/in_the_bleak_midwinter.htm