Category: General

WWII pilots
All day long, after posting the item below, “their flesh . . . revives,” I’ve been thinking about WW2. I have to admit that it’s not dead to me. I actually remember it.
No, not exactly as a combatant. Even though I was in love with my two dashing and much older flyboy cousins, in the end the hunks wouldn’t let a pre-schooler sign up and fly off to the Pacific with them. And then the war ended, and so did their uniform grace and their frequent visits. Those later war years and the immediate postwar years were to be the last time I was interested in military service – except eventually as the very special friend of other soldiers and sailors.
But I do remember the war. There was the threat from Germans (strange, I don’t remember “Nazis”) and Japs (sorry). There was rationing, car fan belts constantly needing mending (rubber, like our very pampered tires), white margarine. There were paper pennies, care packages from the farms in Wisconsin, certain big news stories. We loved spam (the old kind), and plane spotting (maybe less as a serious occupation than as a hobby) and dealing with the heavy blackout curtains was very exciting (blackout curtains were going to save us from Axis bombers – yes, in Detroit!), and finally VE and VJ days. I don’t remember any atom bombs until much later, but my parents were always pretty good at keeping other bad stuff from us – like prejudice – and bless them both.
Still, one of my strongest and earliest memories is of peeing in glee and excitement on the chest of my knockout-handsome cousin Dick, while he was upright bathing the infant me during one of his frequent visits from Selfridge Field. It was very exciting. I also recall he was as genuinely sweet as he was hot.
Mother had gone out and put the big guy in charge for the afternoon. I don’t remember the baths she gave me. I also can’t remember where Dad was that day, but I do remember he and these two nephews were very close so long as he lived. They all loved each other very much. They were certainly all charmers and they made everyone around them very happy – or so I remember it.

“More Zealous than the Pope.”
He’s head of the Vatican’s “Holy Inquisition” [modern, formal name: “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith], and he’s described as personally charming.

The man who wrote last week’s Vatican document ruling out same-sex marriage is a soft-spoken Bavarian who was once a liberal but has served as Pope John Paul II’s ultra-conservative guardian of Catholic doctrine for more than 20 years.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has been at the Pope’s side as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for so long he has been nicknamed “The Enforcer” or the “Panzerkardinal”.
Cardinal Ratzinger is regarded as the second most powerful man in the Church. [oddly, his nicknames immediately suggest the next governor of California and himself soon one of the most powerful men in American]
If anything, he is even more zealous than the Pope, whom he meets every Friday evening, in laying down the law on social or sexual mores.
One joke told in the Vatican has Cardinal Ratzinger arriving in heaven with the church dissidents he has suppressed. The dissenters emerge after meeting God, crying: “How could I have been so wrong?” Then Cardinal Ratzinger goes in to meet the Almighty, there is also wailing and gnashing of teeth — and God emerges, crying: “How could I have been so wrong?”

The former Hitler Youth member and Wehrmacht draftee was shocked by the reforms of Vatican II. The Australian site [news.com.au] linked above reports that he condemns Buddhism, Hinduism and other Eastern religions as offering false hope through “auto-erotic spirituality,” that he insists the media exaggerates the extent of the American pedophilia scandals and that he’s pushing for a return to the Latin Mass.
Well-informed queers have known about Rat for over 10 years. In 1992, during a period of particularly virulent antigay violence in the U.S., he authorized a Vatican proclamation which said that that when lesbians and gay men demand civil rights, “neither the Church nor society should be surprised when … irrational and violent reactions increase”
Swell guy.
Ratzinger will preside over the Conclave which elects the next Catholic autocrat when Wojtyla kicks.
Off to the 17th century – in a hand basket!

[YOU DON’T WANT A PICTURE HERE]
Maybe she’s finally beginning to rot.
Some of the world’s media this week is carrying the story about a festival in Calcutta celebrating Mother Teresa’s imminent beatification. Calcutta, or Kolkata, as it is now known officially, is the city which made the Albanian-born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu a star. The news is that the Catholic Church was very upset that organizers had decided to include 2 films which her cult found objectionable.
“In the Name of God’s Poor,” a puff-piece dramatization, is based on a book by French author Dominique Lapierre [also wrote “City of Joy”]. It is opposed by the order, the Missionaries of Charity, for reasons not clearly explained. What we do know from a New Delhi daily is that the nuns insist Teresa, on whose life the film is based, did not approve of the script. Huh? Actually, the film sounds like it would be pretty boring for everyone.

At least “The Song of Bernadette” had moments of rapture to look back on. But “Mother Teresa” is flat. It’s as if the reverberations she set off fell on deaf ears, and the poorest of the poor were still left wanting.

The other film, “Hell’s Angel” is a documentary based on Christopher Hitchens’s book “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.” Some of us are already familiar with the reasons why such a film would be a problem for the order and for all the people and institutions that have so heavily invested in the Teresan cult. Even Australia’s Catholic News admits Hitchens is well known as a strong critic of Mother Teresa with his claims that her reputation for sanctity was a front.
The section of the NYTimes review shown on Amazon reads:

Like all good pamphlets, The Missionary Position . . . is very short, zealously overwritten, and rails wildly in defense of an almost nonsensical proposition: that Mother Teresa of Calcutta is actually not a saint but an evil and selfish old woman. And Mr. Hitchens . . . is rather convincing. His main beef is that Teresa . . . has consorted with despots and white-collar criminals and gained millions of tax-free dollars, while the residents of her famous Calcutta clinic are still forced to confront their mortality with inadequate care. Ultimately, he argues, Mother Teresa is less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs. Hitchens argues his case with consummate style.

I find it very interesting that the Archbishop of Calcutta, who saw them in a private screening in his home, is reported in the Hindustan Times article cited above to have said said he found no reason to object to the films being included.
The anti-Teresan’s arguments? I’ll offer these for a start:

The Mother promoted promoting a strain of religion reactionary even when compared to the Vatican’s most conservative parties.
She objected to artificial birth control despite the serious problems caused in India and elsewhere by overpopulation.
She constantly condemned abortion as a “the greatest destroyer of peace.”
She said it is better for women to be “handmaids of the Lord” than to become priests.
She accepted contributions from unclean sources, and without questioning them, including huge sums from Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. In 1992, she wrote to the U.S. judge presiding over the trial of Charles Keating, who had donated $1.25 million to her order, telling him that the central figure in the U.S. savings and loan scandals “has always been kind and generous to God’s poor.”
No aspirin. The [sometimes incendiary, but solid with basic Teresa facts] writer on The Konformist site, to which I owe this post’s title, contributes,

Despite this money, her missionaries were noticeably frugal… at least as far as it concerns those who needed it. When one volunteer questioned why no pain-killing drugs were supplied to those who visited, the response shot back, “This is not a treatment center. This is a place where the dying can die with dignity.” Even in a notably impoverished area as Calcutta, those who visited with any knowledge of normal treatment standards knew that Mother T’s home was seriously lacking.

We should all have been noticing for years that whenever she herself was ill, the Mother stayed in modern hospitals, not her own hovels with their racks of the sick.

Of course, when she required her own medical care, only the best would do. In public, she declined a 1984 offer for free cataract surgery from the St Francis Medical Center, worth $5,000. But the following year, she quietly received the same treatment at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. Not to mention visits to the Scripps Clinic and the Gemelli Hospital, and numerous visits for cardiac care at the Birla Heart Institute in Calcutta. At some point she got a pacemaker installed.
. . . .
In the April 1996 issue of Ladies Home Journal M.T. disclosed that she wished to finish her life in one of her own Houses of the Dying, just like those poor people she attended to. But when she died the following year, she was in her private bedroom, surrounded by modern cardiac machinery.

No bread for the unconverted. She was only concerned about stacking up “souls” in heaven, not helping bodies on earth, and it was all for her own honor and glory, here and in an imagined hereafter, and not just for the honor and glory of her god. One who saw it long ago writes:

Back in the late 1970s I recall watching a PBS documentary the Spanish language channel. It documented Mama T’s trip to Central America after the terrible earthquake that devastated either Guatemala or Nicaragua- I believe the latter. While pretty much standard doc there was 1 thing which burned itself in to my mind – scene where Mama T was in an Indian hospital. She, literally, had some pieces of plain bread that she teased the bloated bellies of starving children with. However, she did not feed all the children – only those who would recite Catholic vespers with her. Those Hindu Moslem children who refused were not given any bread. Yes, Mama T almost surreally – would not feed those children who would not prostitute the beliefs of their conscience. This was where I 1st learned – visually & viscerally – why Missionism & proselytizing were so fundamentally wrong. What is incredible, to me, was how this documentary has apparently fallen to the nether-regions of public consciousness. A few months later, Mama T won her Nobel Peace Prize.

Remember “Pagan Babies“? Later the writer excerpted above offers an explanation for the perverse character of this scary nun’s life work:

“Well, the answer to that is simple, as Christopher Hitchens said, Mama T’s mission is ‘the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.'”

In her own words, “I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot . . . I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.”
I’ll close with just two of the blurbs from the back of Hitchen’s little book.

“A dirty job but someone had to do it. By the end of this elegantly written, brilliantly argued piece of polemic, it is not looking good for Mother Teresa.” – Sunday Times (London)
“Hilariously Mean” – John Waters

The 16 acres formerly occupied by the World Trade Center is not the only large lower Manhattan site whose future is being contested these days; it’s merely the most visible.
On Friday we toured some of the 172 acres which contain this landscape:

The house in its sylvan setting lies only a thousand yards from this scene:

In the mid-80’s my loft apartment was the second floor from the top of the small early-19th-century brick house in the center of the picture above.
The landscape in the first picture is on Governors Island, located just south of Manhattan. The house in the second is 105 Broad St., part of the landmarked Manhattan block which includes the Fraunces Tavern historic site next door.
In between these two views lie these dock pilings:

and water, churning, sometimes angrily, between Manhattan and Brooklyn while it tosses boats serious and gay:

including this particular ferry boat deck, which on Saturday supported a handsome, and very silent, shipmate:

During the three years I lived in the canyon of ancient Broad Street I could look out my windows to salute the Statue of Liberty’s motionless sentinel to the south or the busy little car ferry to the east. Stubbornly refusing to carry civilians, every 10 minutes the floating shuttle left its slip for its short hop to the green island just beyond FDR Drive.
Today the Coast Guard has left, and the Federal Government has handed the island over to New York. The island is ours! A limited number of people are able to visit the oasis for a limited time, apparently because of its inadequate public facilities and because of imminent survey and construction activity, before it is closed again, perhaps for years.
What happens next? Supposedly it’s entirely unresolved, but while we don’t know the answer Im sure there are many who think they already do.
The future disposition of this precious natural and historical treasure is up to us – or it should be. The reality however is that we probably won’t escape the curse of our contemporary officials’ bad taste and bad judgment. We also seem to be kept in the dark lately, probably deliberately. Add a scepticism fed by consideration of the huge amount of money and power at stake and we should not be surprised if what ends up happening on New York’s Governors Island is not in the best interest of most New Yorkers.
But even if we lose, the decisions which define that loss must not be made in unlighted rooms.
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See “Army Brat Life at its Best,” a personal and idyiosyncratic site with history and pictures and memories.

Ellen Hemings Roberts, granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson.
Sally Hemings still has to stay out of the drawing rooms – at least while the “white” folks are around.
Incredible as it may seem, even today, after all the fuss endured in ending slavery and after the happy surprises of DNA, the descendents of the union between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings are neither permitted to be part of the Monticello Association nor allowed to join in its annual reunions.
During a regular meeting of the Association, when the presiding officer was challenged by a cousin to explain a broadening of the ban, one of the other descendents

grabbed the microphone. What he said, according to [the challenger] and three other people who were in the room, was that he had no interest in associating with the Hemings descendants in this life — or in death. (The phrase “their kind” was used.) Judging by the amount of applause he is reported to have received, he blurted out what must have been on nearly everyone else’s minds.

For the complete story, see the more delightful parts of the rebelliously-inclusive Jefferson cousin Lucian K. Truscott IV’s account of the family feud in today’s NYTimes Op-Ed piece linked at the top. You’ll find Walker, the groundskeeper at Monticello, his cousins (the elderly Randolph ladies, Truscott’s great-grandmother, Mary Walker Randolph, and great aunts Aggie and Miss Moo), the neat little round windows above the house roof, and the Buick parked on the lawn on a hot July day in 1951.

Germans get 8 weeks of vacation each year, including single-day holidays. Although the figure is not much different for the rest of Europe, Germans, being Germans, are asking themselves whether lots of a good thing is not really such a good thing. The NYTimes tell us that some Germans are even asking: are the Germans lazy?
The lively discussion which follows includes a history and a lesson in comparative leisure cultures.

Here, perhaps, is the difference with Americans, who also like their vacations. Many Americans, who have no recent history of labor struggles or national traumas, simply see work as a good in itself; they don’t believe deep inside that they have an inalienable right to an idle August and take pride in postponing retirement, or taking on a second career. But for many Europeans, leisure time is not just a break from work; it is the goal of it.

or maybe just looking to have a good day?
If most Americans never learn why they are working, and end up botching the limited vacation opportunities available to them, a very few decide that work itself will be rewarding when the reward is generously shared. Leisure needn’t be sacrificed, nor worshipped.
Gene Estess was a New York stockbroker for 20 years. Today he runs a program that helps adults with housing, employment and drug dependence difficulties. He operates at a fraction of the cost per person required for shelters and with something like a 95% success rate in keeping clients from returning to homelessness.
But the best part of this article describing a man who admits that his Wall Street colleagues thought he was nuts when he quit, is how he made the decision.

“Please understand,” he said. “It was nothing religious. It wasn’t godlike.”
“For 20-some-odd years I really didn’t have a good day,” he continued. “I didn’t come home with any stories to tell or satisfaction or a feeling I’d done anything to help anybody except myself and my family.”

Not lazy, surely, and it doesn’t sound like leisure, but it’s definitely smart.

Bloggy has found real pride in Calcutta.
I was in this incredible city in the early nineties. There is no community like it anywhere, even in all of India, not least for its traditional culture of the arts, intellectualism and social radicalism. Pride is no beggar in Calcutta.
For a discussion of homosexuality in pre-Raj India generally, see this essay by Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik.

The term homosexuality and the laws prohibiting ‘unnatural’ sex were imposed across the world through imperial might. Though they exerted a powerful influence on subsequent attitudes, they were neither universal nor timeless. They were – it must be kept in mind – products of minds that were deeply influenced by the ‘sex is sin’ stance of the Christian Bible. With typical colonial condescension, European definitions, laws, theories and attitudes totally disregarded how similar sexual activity was perceived in other cultures.

How many strawmen?

cow·ard (kou’ erd)
n. One who shows ignoble fear in the face of danger or pain.
I’ve argued for a year and a half that the only explanation for what has become of America since September 11 is its fear. Maybe we need this kind of kick to snap out of it.

For a brief moment after 9/11, we recognized some genuine heroes in our midst, those who put their lives on the line to rescue strangers and those who put their own needs in back of the needs of others in the middle of tragedy. The celebration of this heroism may have become a little gaudy, but it was sincere.
Since then we seem to have become a nation of cowards celebrating illusions.
There is a president, who, in reaction to the devastation of 9/11, does not act with forbearance, curiosity to understand the root cause, and as a world leader. Instead he lashes out at blurry targets with more force than we were met with. This is not the act of a brave man. This is the act of a coward.
There is a senator who sees his country yawing dangerously off course and, for the first time in its history abusing its power openly and shamelessly. The senator says nothing, though he knows better, because he is afraid of an emotional backlash if he engages in rational discussion. He is afraid he will lose the next election. This is the act of a coward.
There is a citizen who is unable to think. He succumbs to fear, believes every scary story he hears, buys duct tape for his doors and windows, when a bit of thinking would tell him he is in more danger from getting into his car. This is the act of a coward.
There is a journalist who knows there are young children dying in hospitals in Iraq, with their bodies horribly disfigured as the result of our country’s doings, yet he will not show pictures of these children so that people can weigh the consequences of war for themselves. He shows pictures of massively-armed Americans and reports every “coalition” news release as gospel truth. This is the act of a coward.
. . . .

It’s also that we’ve simply become very stupid – a choice we’ve made ourselves, one which relates to an addiction to television and a general flight from reason, but I’ll stop the crankiness right there for now.

Five months ago I wrote about Zackie Achmat. The good news is that he’s still alive. The bad news is that about 100,000 other South Africans have died unnecessarily in the meantime.
Zackie is slowly dying of AIDS, but he refuses to take the drugs that would keep him alive, until South Africa’s government makes them freely available to the poor. He has become a hero and a symbol in the struggle of AIDS patients and their advocates for recognition and for public medical care, but with the continuing resistance of the administration of President Thabo Mbeki to their appeals, the issue has become more complicated.

It is clear, but seldom spoken, that he is burdened with doubts about his pledge. In interviews his closest friends said that at times they sensed that he wished he could take it back. They said that no one, especially Mr. Achmat, ever dreamed that the government would withhold ARV’s as AIDS treatment for so long. What is worse, they said, is that if Mr. Achmat dies now, there is the real chance that his death would not help his cause.
Mr. Achmat acknowledged the same, fidgeting as if uncomfortable in his own reasoning. “The government won’t care one bit if I die,” he said. “I don’t think it will make a bit of difference in their policy.”