Saturday Night Radio Drama - Excuse Me Can You Tell Me Where Paddy Dignam is Buried?

 Excuse Me Can You Tell Me Where Paddy Dignam is Buried?

It's Bloomsday in the Hibernian Necropolis! And we’re going to catch a flavour of the folk who gather every June 16th in The Dead Centre of Dublin - Glasnevin Cemetery - the location for Episode 6 of Ulysses - Hades or Paddy Dignam's funeral. With language that some may find offensive, this is Excuse me, can you tell me where Paddy Dignam is buried?

 In Excuse me, can you tell me where Paddy Dignam is buried? you heard the voices of Daniel Eglington Carey and Conor Dodd from The Dublin Cemeteries Trust and also Fritz Senn and Gerry O’Flaherty.

The reenactment of was performed by the JoyceStagers - Peter Prior, Louis O’Byrne, Paul Maher, Tim Casey, Ian Blackmore and Val O’Donnell.

The excerpts from the 1982 RTÉ Complete recording of James Joyce’s Ulysses were performed by The RTÉ Players and full details are on the Drama On One website.

Thanks to Jeff Maguire and Siobhán Lloyd and all the good natured people at Glasnevin who participated in the programme.

The music you heard was Gabriel’s Message, Cold Song and Hurdy Gurdy Man written and performed by Sting and Penelope that Longed by William Byrd.

Sound Supervision was by Ruth Kennington

Produced by Kevin Reynolds.

I'm kind of over James Joyce but I enjoyed this.  

I'll Get To It After I Wash My Hair

THE MATHEMATICALLY ILLITERATE and just plain post-literate troll, Simps, is trying to kick up yet another of the already comprehensively answered brawls he picked with me.   Unlike him I don't care to take the easy route of wallowing in the already answered so I'm going to relegate him back to my alternative blog,  Crush Seth MacFarlane's Nuts, as seen in the sidebar.   I kind of wish I hadn't once given in to my idea of deleting him from the past of that blog by deleting the record of all the brawls we got into over there but I did, in fact, wipe the floor with him every single time he tried it.  As you can see in the latter day ones I didn't delete from there and the ones you can still read about here.  Such as the last time I dealt with his incompetence in the kind of basic set theory that they used to teach in Algebra 1 class but,  I believe, they teach to even younger kiddies, today.    I'll link to some of those brawls when I have time to search them.   The ones in which the less appealing boy from New York City,  the one who is more likely to wear the mohair to cover up his baldness than as  a suit, proved he didn't understand the most basic parts of the political structure of the city he lives in whereas I know the difference between one borough and NYC as a whole.    I won't say he's the stupidest person with college-credentials I've encountered but he is typical of the standards that fell apart during our generation.    He'd never have passed Frosh Rhetoric at my Land Grant university.   There's at least one PhD holding prep-school teacher of Physics and one college-level math instructor who hang out at the asses' athenaeum,  Eschaton who certainly understand his mathematical incompetence though I'm prepared to believe many of those who are, likewise, college-credentialed at that place who are as clueless of basic set theory as Simps.  

Come to think of it,  Duncan has a PhD in economics so he should have at least the rudiments of algebra mastered.   Of course, it's pretty clear Duncan has no interest in what gets said on his blog anymore than the Ex-Lax and Geritol generation has in what he says.   He used to write relatively interesting posts on infrastructure but that's a thing of the past.   Now he just wants to be groovy with the young-uns, clueless that he's just about to join the granddad age cohort, himself.

Mercedes Sosa - La Arenosa

Arenosa, arenosita
Mi tierra cafayateña
El que bebe de su vino
Gana sueño y pierde pena.

El agua de calchaqui
Padre de todas las siembras
Cuando uno se va y no vuelve
Canta llorando y se aleja.

Arena, arenita
Arena, tapa mi huella
Para que en las vendimias
Mi vida yo vuelva a verla.

Luna de los medanales
Lunita cafayateña
Luna de arena morena
En carnavales de ausencia.

Deja que beba en tu vino
La savia cafayateña
Y que me pierda en la cueca
Cantando antes que me muera.
 

Arena, arenita
Arena, tapa mi huella
Para que en las vendimias
Mi vida yo vuelva a verla.

Can't find a good English translation online.   I haven't listened to Mercedes Sosa enough lately.  I think I'll try to post more of her online this week.

First Night In A Month

I didn't wake up having to take an extra dose of antihistamines,  maybe the pines are done pollinating.    The pines are usually the last of the most serious aggravation to my ever-increasing allergies, at least till the fall.  So maybe writing and, especially editing will be a little more reliable.    I'm afraid to go over what I've written recently to see the editing mistakes.

"there is a necessary congruence between the character of Jesus' human life and the character of Christian discipleship"

NO CHRISTIAN WHO IS sincere in trying to live up to the example of Jesus, as is presented in the most authoritative view of the human life and teachings of Jesus, the writings of the New Testament, has to accept the burden of the history of Christianity as an historical phenomenon whenever that departs from or, especially, is in contradiction to what those writings say about Jesus.  I would not include in that any of the various, later, often dubious later gospels promoted by current pop kulcha and would-be scholars on the make these days.  I've read a number of those and see no reason to believe they are in any way comparable to the canonical books of the New Testament in either plausibility or quality.  That would include the so-called Gospel of Thomas which, far from having a core of great antiquity, seems to me to be an extravagant distortion of passages taken from the synoptic Gospels of the canon.  I am  ever more deeply skeptical of the products of the historical-critical slicing and dicing of the Scriptures, especially the books of the New Testament which have a far different and far less fraught history of editing and commentary than the books of the First Testament, those have their own history that covers centuries of such practice, whereas the Christian Gospels have a far shorter history before they became Scripture.  To treat both bodies of works to the same academic methods is inappropriate on that basis, alone, it would seem to me.

I have become more and more convinced by much of what the inappropriately designated "conservative" Luke Timothy Johnson has to say about that and less and less convinced by the claims of even the superior historical-critical practitioner most influential on me, John Dominic Crossan, in that regard.  That's not to say that I agree with Johnson on everything, I find that as I am still convinced by the points and arguments made by various liberation theologians though he is somewhat critical of that in regard to the Scriptural foundations of it.  I would guess that in that Johnson, who has pointed out that his fidelity to the New (and, I'd guess, Old) Testaments leads him to may political and social positions that are considered radically "left" might agree with the goals of many of the liberation theologians despite that.  Who could read the words of Jesus in the Gospels, the practices of the closest Apostles in Acts, Paul and James and the authors of the other Epistles and not be a radical egalitarian, especially in social and environmental justice?  I'd say it is just those kinds of "fruits" that Jesus, himself, said we were to judge those who claimed to be following him by.  

You can look at the long history of Christianity, especially in contexts and times when the established churches have had and exercised secular power, and see that most of that history is practiced in opposition to the words of Jesus and the New Testament writers, producing the scandals with which those who hate religion and Christianity have attacked Christianity with.  As I get at least once a week here.  To claim that the infidelity of church hierarchs, those who are members of clergy or other religious figures, the frequent corruption of them discredits Christianity is false in a way that you can't say about the source of other institutions because of the ultimate authoritativeness of the New Testament.  "Democracy" is often far more corrupt than much of religion, the sordid history of the various democracies in the modern period, in that every one of those is a "liberal democracy" instead of an egalitarian democracy, though the alternative to democracy is reliably worse.  The many sins of the United States government, the corruption of our politics by racism and greed doesn't mean that we should give up on democracy because we can be certain that the alternative is dependably worse.  The evils resulting from the language of the Bill of Rights, the holiest of holies in our frequently putrid civic pseudo-religiosity isn't held to totally discredit the idea of freedom of speech, assembly or religious belief or disbelief.  That Madison and the First Congress were witless enough to not distinguish between a genuine right to tell the truth and the dangerously ignored fact that there is no such thing as a right to lie doesn't mean that government censorship of the truth except in rare instances when publishing the truth.  

Science, as corrupt an institution these days as any epoch in the history of the Catholic papacy or the shorter one of radio hallelujah peddlers, TV mega-"churches" etc, doesn't negate the validity of honestly done and honest science honestly done and reported.  The fact that much of modern day mega-evil was committed with the full and enthusiastic participation of scientists, indeed, often at the instigation of scientists, doesn't negate the validity of scientific method.  The greatest defect of science is that, by the agreed to rules, it doesn't have anything like a firm relationship to any morality.  Not even the moral positions most important to the reliability of scientific method, that scientists must be honest and tell the truth, must keep their own prejudices and hatreds and greed out of the practice of science.  That is responsible for the moral atrocity that much of science produces, much of that relying on the illegitimate repute that anyone holding academic credentials given as "science" is held to have, in much the same way the naive often hold that those with similar religious credentialing used to be given in the West and those held to be in some way religious authorities (often with ties to the local secular powers)  are given in other places.  Though the diversity of religions show that nothing like the universally monolithic structure of science has ever been universally in place.  Making bad science potentially far more dangerous today than any bad religion ever has been.  No religious figure ever produced weapons that have the potential of wiping out life on Earth, even the most powerful religion has never done that.  I can guarantee you those who planned and carried out the Holocaust believed in science, many if not most of them were hostile to Christianity as it was and is, they certainly rejected the identity of Jesus and his teachings.  

Which gets me back to Luke Timothy Johnson.  In his excellent book, "Living Jesus,"  he points this out in regard to the New Testament:  

In none of these writings is Jesus' humanity ever subsumed by a process of divinization or forgotten.  In all of them, his humanity stands as the measure of Christian life and identity.  His words are commandments that the church not only preserves but seeks to obey. His acts anticipate and express the power that the church recognizes as still active in the community of faith.  Above all however, it is the character of the human person Jesus that remains normative for believers.  It is not the incidentals of his unique historical existence, his Jewishness, maleness, and habits of speech - that are transferable to others, but the pattern of his life, the way in which he disposed of his freedom;  this "mind of Christ' is replicable in the freedom of other human beings trough the power of the Holy Spirit.

I will break in here to note that especially on the question of the Jewishness of Jesus (and of Paul and almost certainly of every other writer of the New Testament) any faithful Christianity is incompatible with antisemitism. It isn't only in the very first words said about Jesus in the New Testament that he is specifically noted as being born a Jew, in the first recorded instance of a figure in Christianity to be killed by state authority, Jesus, he was designated by the Romans who crucified him as "The King of the Jews."  That was the predicament for the collaborating clergy of, especially, the Lutheran Church in Nazi Germany.  There was no honest way to separate Jesus and, in fact, the entire corpus of the ultimate authority for Christianity from their Jewish identity.  That was a central aspect of modern antisemitism, especially in Germany.  I have documented here that the very inventor of the term "antisemitism" to describe his ideology,  Wilhelm Marr, detested Christianity BECAUSE OF ITS JEWISH ORIGIN.  That wasn't unique to him but was a central part of Nazism.  When collaborationist Lutherans sought to expunge what was explicitly Jewish from the New Testament, they reportedly had to cut sixty percent of it out.  If they'd been honest about it, they'd almost certainly have had to cut 100% of it out due to the identity of Jesus, Paul, James, the author of Hebrews, Peter, John, Jude (the author of the Epistle of) and almost certainly John The Divine from it because it is a virtual certainty that the authors of ever one of the books in the Christian Bible were Jews.   

It is positively known that if the Nazis had won the war the quick dissolution of the Christian churches was high on their list of things to do, the temporary ruse of "Positive Christianity" as a stop gap to gull the ignorant population of Germany would have replaced the Bible with Mein Kampf and the cross with the swastika.  

There was no way to claim that Jesus and the earliest Christians were separable from THEIR Jewishness by virtue of what they did in their lives, especially for Nazis, just as Edith Stein's conversion to Catholicism and becoming a nun and, in fact, a rather significant Catholic theologian didn't change her Jewishness for the biologically minded Nazis.  Natural selection and the naive conception of genetics that still held sway in biology well into my lifetime rejects the significance of any choices or actions of human beings.   There were many Christians murdered by the Nazis because of their biological identity as Jews just as there were, undoubtedly, many atheists murdered by them for the same reason.  

It was a matter of science for the Nazis, as Hitler's #2, Rudolf Hess said in the early 1930s, Nazism was nothing but applied biology." In the then developing neo-Darwinian synthesis of natural selection with the naive view of genetics in the early to late 20th century, it was all a matter of genetics.  As I pointed out YET AGAIN in a recent post, that has reemerged, as it always will with Darwinism, in overt science through what Stephen Jay Gould rightly called "ultra-Darwinism," Sociobiology and, especially, "evolutionary psychology" which could include the scientific antisemitism of the man who was David Irving's sole witness in his dishonestly brought libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt, Kevin MacDonald, someone who was credentialed and promoted as a figure of genuine science, a professor of such science at a credentialed university, published in peer reviewed journals, in fact made an editor of such journals within his specialty.  Indeed such science is so accepted that one of the biggest names in science, the high priest of ultra-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins, cited some such scientific antisemitism in his attack on religion and, especially Christianity, The God Delusion to little objection from Christianities cultured despisers.  He did so to try to negate the virtue of some of Jesus' most admirable sayings of universal love.  He had to lie about what Jesus said to make it fit his purpose.*  

For current "trad-Catholics" and, I'm sad to say, even the good Pope Francis who they despise, the maleness of Jesus and the named disciples, is dispositive in the matter of maintaining an all-male clergy, despite the distortions and corruptions built into such an institution.  But I won't go into that right now.

Johnson said:

Given such a strong sense of Jesus as Lord, the attention paid to Jesus' humanity in the New Testament is the  more impressive.  We find it not only in the narratives about his past but equally in letters emphasizing his present divine power.  In none of these writings is Jesus' humanity either subsumed by the process of divinization or forgotten.  In all of them, his humanity stands as the measure of Christian life and identity. . .

He develops what that ultimate modeling FOR Christian life and identity entails.

The diversity of images of Jesus in the New Testament is indeed dazzling.  What multiple associations are generated by each of the disparate titles given to Jesus in these writings, teacher, Messiah, king, prophet, priest, Lord, Son of man, Son of God, First-born of the dead, amen, Savior, redeemer, servant, Righteous One, Son of David, Word, overseer, judge, advocate, witness, friend.  And how much more complex those associations become when put into a variety of combinations of each composition.  There are also the many metaphors and metonymies applied to Jesus - lamb, shepherd, door, vine, light, bread, water, blood, temple, spirit, anchor, stone, builder - which are also combined in intricate ways.  It is impossible to select one of these titles or metaphors as more central than the others.  They are all put in play by the compositions themselves for our learning of Jesus.  None of them captures all of Jesus, none is without some truth concerning Jesus.  We are incredibly enriched precisely by their abundance and diversity, and we would be impoverished by the loss of any of them.  

We have seen as well that the image of Jesus is affected by the purpose and genre of each composition;  in the epistolary literature of the New Testament (including Revelation),  it is the living presence of Jesus as Lord that is most explicit, with attention to his human ministry left largely implicit in the Gospels, Jesus' human ministry is obviously the explicit focus, with the prescriptives and concerns of the post-resurrection church largely implicit.   Yet each of the Gospel narratives shapes its image differently.  Marks emphasis on Jesus as the suffering Son of man is not the same as Matthew's emphasis on Jesus as teacher of the church or Luke's emphasis on Jesus as the prophet like Moses or John's emphasis on Jesus as the revealer of the father.  

The diversity of witness and interpretation is real.  There truly is a "different" Jesus in each of the New Testament writings. . .

Is it any wonder, then, that those of us coming to our own interpretations of Jesus, out of our own contexts, for what seems the most compelling reasons we experience, come to radically different views of Jesus and how to live in light of the consequences of Jesus.  I think that Johnson's own statements about "living Jesus" as well as the "Living Jesus" produces a context wide enough to include the various liberation theologies that have arisen out of different life experiences, lives lived in different contexts and with different exigencies impinging on those images.  His controversial embrace of the possible holiness of faithful same-sex unions admittedly comes from having a daughter who is a Lesbian in such a faithful relationship and, as some of his own students started coming out, him knowing them and their lives.  So does Ernesto Cardinal's view of Jesus, that of Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, Leonardo Boff, Desmond Tutu, and myriads of others come out of their life experience.   That is even more obviously true in the case of Womanist and Feminist and Queer theology.

But if that's true, how does Jesus not dissolve into an ever growing and often contradictory number of images and idols to be rejected?  How can such a practice avoid the "supply-side, MAGA "Jesus" of Republican-fascism?  The macho-Hollywood John Wayne-Clint Eastwood "Jesus" of those who object to the actual, Gospel presented Jesus?  The fascist Second-Amendment "Jesus"?   

Johnson points out that there is a unity in the diversity of the views of Jesus presented in the books of the New Testament, on which any valid basis for a view of the real, Living Jesus has to rest.  And that unified view of the Living Jesus is the most coherent picture of him that we have.  

It is on this point, in fact, that we find the most consistent testimony in the writings of the New Testament - namely, that there is a necessary congruence between the character of Jesus' human life and the character of Christian discipleship.

Nowhere in the New Testament is there an image of the human Jesus that is compatible with attitudes of hubris, hedonism, envy, arrogance, acquisitiveness, self-aggrandizement, hostility, or violence.  Jesus is everywhere associated with faithful obedience to God and meek, compassionate, self-emptying service toward other people.

Jesus' character reveals him to be someone who hopes in the power of God rather than in human manipulation, who faithfully obeys God rather than is own project, and who loves with a self-giving of time and energy and presence to the needs of others in preference to his own.

That is why the cross of Jesus stands as the central symbol for his entire life, his death was in faithful obedience to God even when he wanted to live, his death was an act of love to overcome alienation between humans;  his death was the ultimate expression of hope in a God who can call into being that which does not exist and therefore give life to the dead.

Similarly, we find nowhere in the New Testament an understanding of Christian discipleship compatible with a life devoted to one's own success, pleasure, comfort, freedom from suffering, or power at the expense of others.  Everywhere we find the qualities that are found in Jesus advanced as essential to the following of Jesus;  the same faith, the same love, the same hope.  The basic pattern of faithful obedience to God and loving service to others is the image of Christ that the Spirit replicates in the freedom of those who belong to Christ.

The American old-line, main-line Church Jesus does the modeling backwards, taking an idealized model "Christian" as a middle-class, white, Christian, businessman, who I might stereotype as the Billy Graham kind of Christian and reimagine Jesus as being supportive of that.  I take that as a development of such idols as the Jesus of "muscular Christianity" from the 19th century and the genocide-friendly Jesus of Cotton Mather, itself a combination of Jesus with the genocidal Moses of late in Exodus and finding its conclusion in the career of his successor, Joshua.  (similar latter-day creations, I suspect).  That's what happens when the Jesus of the New Testament collides with one's own success, pleasure, comfort, freedom from suffering and, especially, power at the expense of others, as it has throughout human history.  That "Jesus" is more distorted than the worst of science done for personal profit and ideology over honesty and truth and admitting limits because Jesus certainly held that it's a sin to lie and bear false witness, science and, in fact, secularism doesn't hold that as a moral absolute.  They have to import the idea of right and wrong from outside because they can't provide it internally.  

The real Jesus was disreputable in the extreme, to the established powers and even the aspirations of the modern affluent population in liberal democracies, intact and crumbling.  The real Jesus was well described by Terry Eagleton, as given by Walter Brueggeman in one of his lectures on Jeremiah:

It turns out that the life of the Crucified One exhibits the counterpoint to the great seduction of Jerusalem. He is the embodiment of weakness as he stood vulnerable before imperial authority.  He is the embodiment of foolishness.  Terry Eagleton describes him this way:

 "Unlike most responsible American citizens, Jesus appears to do no work, is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard.  He is presented as homeless, property-less, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful, The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over the top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents. Forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow."

So far Eagleton.

He is the embodiment of poverty with nowhere to lay his head or even healthcare.  The remembered Jesus sits amid our posturing, it reminds us that the great imperial triad of might, wisdom and wealth never delivers the security or the happiness that it promises.

But I will not linger over that [Christian] counter-triad of weakness, foolishness and poverty that waits silently for us, because that triad is too outrageous and too remote from our business at hand. 

I'd add only that it is exactly in the extent to which professed Christians are willing to keep the real Jesus remote from their business at hand that will determine how Christian such a Christian is.  

*  I can't find my copy of Dawkins but here is how that passage was quoted by Marilynne Robinson in her review of God Delusion:

“I need to call attention to one particularly unpalatable aspect of its [the Bible’s] ethical teaching. Christians seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy neighbor’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love another Jew.” As for the New Testament interpretation of the text, “Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.” Pigs being, of course, gentiles.

Before that she noted:

Dawkins dwells particularly on Christianity, since he is most familiar with it, and because its influence is and has been very great. On the one hand, he professes a lingering fondness for the Church of England and regrets that familiarity with the Bible, a great Literature, is in decline. On the other hand, he finds the Old Testament barbarous and abhorrent and the New Testament mawkish and fairly abhorrent as well. His treatment of these texts depends to a striking degree on a “remarkable paper” by John Hartung, an associate professor of anesthesiology and an anthropologist. The paper, titled “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In- Group Morality,” originally published in 1995, is available on the Web. Dawkins and his wife are thanked in the acknowledgments. Curious readers can form their own impression of its character. A sympathetic review by Hartung of Kevin MacDonald’s A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples is also of interest. These are murky waters, the kind toward which Darwinism has often tended to migrate.

Not to mention materialist-atheist-scientism. 

OK, I'll Use Up My Once A Month Posting On The Topic Now - An Impomptu Post

LIKE SO MANY COLLEGE CREDENTIALED, ILLITERATES,  Simps has a very limited repertoire of tropes he goes over again and again and again, for decades and scores of years.   It's why he continually goes over the pop kulcha drivel that he made the center of his so-called work life,  rehashing the same old overplayed pop music and pop movies and pop TV shows over and over and over again, saying what others said a half century and more ago, probably where he got those tropes from originally.  There's an episode of the very entertaining radio drama style online series Black Jack Justice that has that practice of the "critics" as a central part of its plot, which you might find amusing. 

Hammer of Justice

 

But enough of that,  this is serious because it deals with serious things that shouldn't be the subject of humor or light banter.  

One of the things that Simps is always saying is that I slighted the apparently the only book on the topic he claims to have read I (I don't think he ever did read it)  Berlin Diary by William Shirer because he doesn't note that Darwinism was the primary motive behind the Holocaust.  What I prefer to call the Shoah because there was nothing religious about the Nazi murder of millions of Jews or their murders of many others targeted for murder.    

Unlike Simps, who claims to have read the book,  I knew that the book only covered the period before the United States entered the war, even before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.  It was published on June 20, 1941, and covers a period even earlier than that.   The Holocaust as it is generally designated hadn't started by end of the period the book covers, though, as I pointed out in one of two answers to that accusation, the Nazi mass murders, including its trial run of murdering the disabled, started in 1939 in the T-4 murder campaign.   That mass murder was explicitly Darwinist in that it was done under the umbrella of eugenics - I have proven, definitively that eugenics was born out of both Francis Galton's and Wilhelm Schallmeyer's reading of On the Origin of Species,  no less an expert than the inventor of eugenics, Galton said that was his inspiration in his memoir (publishing the glowing letter that Charles Darwin sent him on the publication of his first book length treatment of eugenics, Hereditary Genius.  [Note: you can search those posts in my archive, this entire text would be red if I provided links for all of the posts I've written on the topic.]  

In April 1939, no less an expert on eugenics, Galton's successor as the head of the Eugenics Society in Britain and probably the world's leading expert on the thinking of Charles Darwin at that time,  his son Leonard Darwin attributed the start of German eugenics to Schallmeyer, stating that it was his independent reading of On The Origin of Species which led to his independent conclusions in eugenics.   I also showed, conclusively, that Schallmeyer's predecessor in German eugenic thinking and advocacy of just such mass murder, Ernst Haeckel, was also inspired in his thinking directly by his reading of Darwin and Darwin repeatedly IN WORK INTENDED TO BE TAKEN AS HARD SCIENCE, praised the relevant publications by both Galton and Haeckel, INCLUDING HAECKEL'S CONTENTION THAT MURDERING THOSE DEEMED INFERIOR WAS BENEFICIAL FOR THE SURVIVING (AND MURDERING) POPULATION.   

Here are links to the two posts I made on September 19 and 20, 2017, refuting the same claim about Berlin Diaray.  

Since from time to time I look farther into the matter of eugenics and its relation to attempted genocides and mass murders I recently read G. K. Chesterton's book Eugenics And Other Evils and was struck by his stated motive in publishing the book in 1922:

Though most of the conclusions, especially towards the end, are conceived with reference to recent events, the actual bulk of preliminary notes about the science of Eugenics were written before the war. It was a time when this theme was the topic of the hour; when eugenic babies (not visibly very distinguishable from other babies) sprawled all over the illustrated papers; when the evolutionary fancy of Nietzsche was the new cry among the intellectuals; and when Mr. Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain that higher civilisation, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart-horses. It may therefore appear that I took the opinion too controversially, and it seems to me that I sometimes took it too seriously. But the criticism of Eugenics soon expanded of itself into a more general criticism of a modern craze for scientific officialism and strict social organisation.

And then the hour came when I felt, not without relief, that I might well fling all my notes into the fire. The fire was a very big one, and was burning up bigger things than such pedantic quackeries. And, anyhow, the issue itself was being settled in a very different style. Scientific officialism and organisation in the State which had specialised in them, had gone to war with the older culture of Christendom. Either Prussianism would win and the protest would be hopeless, or Prussianism would lose and the protest would be needless. As the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals, it grew more and more plain that the scientifically organised State was not increasing in popularity. Whatever happened, no Englishmen would ever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory. So I thought all I had written irrelevant, and put it out of my mind.

I am greatly grieved to say that it is not irrelevant. It has gradually grown apparent, to my astounded gaze, that the ruling classes in England are still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia is a pattern for the whole world. If parts of my book are nearly nine years old, most of their principles and proceedings are a great deal older. They can offer us nothing but the same stuffy science, the same bullying bureaucracy and the same terrorism by tenth-rate professors that have led the German Empire to its recent conspicuous triumph. For that reason, three years after the war with Prussia, I collect and publish these papers.

You could read my posts dealing with the reporting of the eminent American biologist - and through Darwinist - Vernon Kellogg to read that his interviews with German officers with scientific training, some of whom he knew from his college days, supports Chesterton's association of eugenics with "Prussianism,"  of course neither of them knew that many of those same officers would go on to form and become members of the Nazi Party. 

There was a lot of that kind of stuff in the intellectual and literary atmosphere as Darwinism became popular in those circles. I had noted in previous posts on the subject that George Bernard Shaw had been advocating the mass murder by gas chamber of the many millions of human beings he held to be biologically unfit to live since at least 1910, shocking and thrilling the Fabians with such statements at their meetings.*   He shared that idea with that other popular writer,  H. G. Wells, undoubtedly a Darwinist who had been a student of Karl Pearson, the student of Francis Galton and perhaps the greatest advocate of Darwinist elimination of people from the future in the late 19th century.   As I've also pointed out here,  Pearson wrote a scientific paper alleging that having Russian and Polish Jews in Britain would lead to a  biological catastrophe of exactly the kind that the Nazis claimed they were for Germany.   His research for that paper was done in collaboration with one of the major Nazi eugenicists, Eugen Fischer, someone who we know Hitler and is inner circle had read as they were developing Nazism.  

* Shaw had a bizarre relationship with Darwin, claiming to reject Darwinism because it removed his rather flaky concept of "the will" from the scheme of things while retaining and expanding exactly the worst consequence of the theory of natural selection, genocidal eugenics.   George Bernard Shaw was, before anything else, a real shithead as well as a total piece of shit.   I wonder, other than the one good comedy he wrote, how many times a year his plays are produced these days.  I wonder how many of those anyone has ever really liked instead of feeling some kind of twisted sense of conventional morality that they should pretend to like them.

Everbody Talking 'Bout Heaven Ain't Going To Heaven

IN A RECENT COMMENT  I used the term "real Christians" as opposed to the hoard of what the media has been training Americans to mean when they say "Christians,"  the Republican-fascist, white-supremacist, "white evangelicals" and the exotica allied with them, the "traditional Catholics."   As far as the "trad-caths" go,  I agree with what the theological writer, classicist, Orthodox writer David Bentley Hart said about them,  they don't like Pope Francis because Pope Francis is trying to be a Christian.   There is little to nothing of Jesus and, in fact, the entire New Testament in "traditional Catholicism."  There isn't even a lot of Catholicism in them apart from their disapproval of a few sexual issues WHEN IT'S OTHER PEOPLE WHO ARE DOING IT, decidedly not themselves doing it,  keeping Women from ownership of their own bodies and a few other of the more regressive feature that have indisputably figured into the history of Catholicism, though not necessarily in its future*.   

First and foremost in the program of the pseud-Christians is breaking the commandments given by Jesus, to treat others as they would like to be treated, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, attend the sick and those  imprisoned, to treat aliens among them as themselves and those they count as among themselves.  They certainly don't take the message of the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man seriously - frankly, I'm not aware of any of the "Christian" churches who take that path to perdition seriously as compared to things that Jesus didn't mention in that context,  same-sex sex the top of the current hit parade of the pseudo-Christians.  

Anyone who claims that the United States is founded on Christianity is either entirely ignorant of the New Testament or they are lying RAT bastards (That's as in Roberts Alito Thomas, etc.) because it is obviously not based on the Gospel of Jesus the Epistles of Paul, James et al or, in fact, on The Law and the Prophets except as those are lied about by pseudo-Christians and others who lie about what those say.  If the United States were founded on the morality of the Bible the infamous Fugitive Slave Laws and other features of the Constitution and the early years of the country could never have been law here because many if not all of those are forbidden in The Law and against the explicit commandments of Jesus.   

I think the old rule of etiquette to not talk about politics and religion in polite society has deprived us of something we need very badly and that's to have a huge and continual brawl over Christianity,  STARTING WITH EXPLICITLY STATING THE TRUTH THAT VERY LARGE NUMBERS OF CHURCHES AND INDIVIDUALS ARE THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF CHRISTIANS.   That's true of anyone who is supporting Trump and Republican-fascism,  including a very large number if not the majority of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the leadership of a number of pseudo-churches and virtually every member of Congress who most often spout the word "Christian."    When the "freedom caucus" are the ones saying it the loudest, you know they are lying because lying is the first and most often prohibition in the Bible they violate constantly.   That is if it's not the Commandment against taking the Lord's Name in vain.  Or the first, all of them have put Mammon above the God of Moses and Jesus.  

So, no, I have no regrets about having used the term "real Christians" meaning those who try, sometimes fail, and try again to live by the teachings of Jesus as handed down in the Epistles and Gospels and Acts, arguably in Revelations, too.  I think we need to have an aggressive reassertion of that within Christianity and throughout the culture because, frankly,  I don't think anything but divine guidance is going to save us. 

*  Trad-Catholics are largely idiots who have watched some movies and TV shows that show Latin mass era Catholicism as seen by Hollywood and fall for it.   Being of the fading generation who actually remembers pre-Vatican II Catholicism,  it was pretty awful in a lot of ways.  Good Pope John XXIII is among the greatest of the Popes for calling the Second Vatican Council, there is nothing more important in its documents than the reform of the liturgy and Nostra Aetate.   That jerk football kicker who shot off his ignorant mouth last month attacked the reform that finally said that Jews were not responsible for the execution of Jesus,  apparently he and his ilk want to go back to the worst of medieval and pre-Hitler antisemitism.  That is something that I heard almost no one comment on until last weekend,  it should have been one of the first things noticed about him. 

Maybe This Is Why So Many Of Us Are So Unhappy

 41 Happy are those who are concerned for the poor;
    the Lord will help them when they are in trouble.
2
The Lord will protect them and preserve their lives;
    he will make them happy in the land;
    he will not abandon them to the power of their enemies.
3
The Lord will help them when they are sick
    and will restore them to health.

4
I said, “I have sinned against you, Lord;
    be merciful to me and heal me.”
5
My enemies say cruel things about me.
    They want me to die and be forgotten.
6
Those who come to see me are not sincere;
    they gather bad news about me
    and then go out and tell it everywhere.
7
All who hate me whisper to each other about me,
    they imagine the worst about[b] me.
8
They say, “He is fatally ill;
    he will never leave his bed again.”
9
Even my best friend, the one I trusted most,
    the one who shared my food,
    has turned against me.

10
Be merciful to me, Lord, and restore my health,
    and I will pay my enemies back.
11
They will not triumph over me,
    and I will know that you are pleased with me.
12
You will help me, because I do what is right;
    you will keep me in your presence forever.

13
Praise the Lord, the God of Israel!
Praise him now and forever!

Amen! Amen!

Happened to read this yesterday and it seemed especially relevant to the danger the United States is in under threat from the Trumpian Republican-fascists and, especially the threats from the Roberts Court.   Maybe I should post a Psalm every week.  Especially when my one-a-day reading comes across one that seems relevant. 

So, I turn on my computer this morning

and find out that Simps has lied about what I said at Duncan's again.   Not only him but one of the codgers there who is stupid enough to believe what he says.    They seldom bother to find out if he's lying or not so  who cares?   

Duncan's blog hit its summit c. 2005 when someone made a reference to it on the last season of the political fairy-tale show, The West Wing.   It's primarily a place for him to make some money, provide a place for a bunch of elderly guys and gals a couple of decades older than him to try to get some attention by exercising their knowledge of other peoples' wit and to grump and grouse.   Pretty much every adult who used to have the bad habit had left it before Obama was president.   I briefly went back in 2012 and decided it would never be more than that.

You can break a bad habit, though it takes character to do it and those who still go there don't seem to have much of that.   To me they are the play-left,  the eejits of Eschaton, Duncan's idea of an Athenaeum.   What in the college credentialed post-literates passes as a "brain trust" [they've called themselves one, I didn't make that up] in late stage, thoroughly eutrophic,  media-addled America.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Arthur Miller - The Hook

 The Hook 

The world broadcast premiere of Arthur Miller’s unproduced screenplay tells the story of a 1950s Brooklyn longshoreman who is fired for standing up to his corrupt union boss, but decides to fight back by standing for union president.

1951. The Brooklyn Docks. Dawn. Hundreds of longshoreman queue in line to see if they’re going to be given a counter and picked for work in that day’s gang. It’s dangerous work, but with a hierarchy of corrupt union bosses all taking backhanders above them, they have no option but to accept.

The Hook is part of a season of radio adaptions of unproduced screenplays by the major authors of the 20th century - including Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, Orson Welles and Ernest Lehman.
Arthur Miller developed the script for The Hook with Elia Kazan and it was on the trip to LA to pitch it to Harry Cohn at Columbia Studios that he met Marilyn Monroe for the first time. Cohn asked Miller to change the script and turn the corrupt union bosses into communists. Miller refused and the screenplay was shelved. He and Kazan then fell out over Kazan's testimony to McCarthy's House of Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan went on to make On The Waterfront and Miller wrote A View From The Bridge, essentially reworkings of The Hook.

This radio adaptation is directed by Adrian Noble. During his career Adrian has received over 20 Olivier Award nominations both as artistic director of the RSC and as a freelance theatre director.

Cast:
Narrator - David Suchet
Marty - Elliot Cowan
Louis - Nigel Lindsay
Rocky - Michael Feast
Farragut - Tim Pigott-Smith
Piggy - Nathan Wiley
Enzo - Jonathan Guy Lewis
Sleeper - Kerry Shale
Therese - Joanne Pearce
Old Dominic - Vincent Riotta
Mama - Lorelei King
Irene - Hollie Burgess
Pete - Leo Heller

Screenplay written by Arthur Miller
Adapted for radio by Laurence Bowen

Remembering All The Dead In Shadows And Light

THE WANTS OF BUSINESSMEN being what rules in this, our vaunted liberal democracy,  the sacred act of remembering the dead was bound to be reduced to a meaningless Monday holiday, a long weekend, the unofficial start of summer three weeks before summer actually starts.   It would be better if they'd kept it as it was,  a day that could come on any of the days of the week, a fixed holiday despite the inconvenience to the engines of making the rich richer,  those who wanted to spend it drinking in front of screens or anything other than remembering all of the dead.  

Making it into yet one more occasion of nationalism, concentrating only on those who died in wars was less bad but it still diminished the day as I remember it still being, a day when you were to remember all of those who died.   If those who make the decisions such as for Monday holidays instead of real ones can be depended on doing, it's even making the solemn occasion for reflection that should be the only reason to memorialize those who died in wars to cheapen it into a tawdry opportunity for exactly what the dead don't have any use for, nationalism and political posturing and blathering.   

Silence would be better than a parade or concert or speech.  A day of silence, maybe some of it at the sides of graves, graves for those who died in war, many of those civilians, graves for those who never were in wars, those who opposed wars, those who just lived their lives out in their communities or in many communities, in their families.   It should be a day of shadows in light, the shadow of death, the light of the hope of heaven and the way to get there.   

My Memorial Day morning started by a really disturbing elaborate nightmare of hell as being an enormous, up-scale department store I got trapped in while being dragged along to shop for Christmas and couldn't get out of.   Not until I asked for help and remembered that I could force myself to wake up from it.    The longer I think about it the more appropriate I think it was as a warning to me - what I was being warned against, I'm not ready to say.   Several of my dead and about to die relatives were in the dream, what that means I can only guess at and I'm not ready to do that.  I can say that was the shadow for me, today.   I'm going to spend some time at the cemetery but I'll do that tomorrow.  Too many People there today.  Maybe I'll wait till the 30th to do that.  I'm not big on the Monday holiday thing, except for Labor Day.

I Still Won't Be Fair To Fascists, Nice To Nazis or Stand By Stalinists

ANYONE WHO READS the few comments I choose to post and sometimes answer, will know that the guy who most often trolls me pulled out the ol' "you can't judge people in the past by the standards of now" ruse in defense of America's Stalinists such as the Hollywood 10 and others who fell under  the HUAC inquisition and its associated manifestations during the red scare of the late 40s through early 50s.  To which I pointed out that we should have no problem judging their contemporaries in support of foreign mass murdering dictators, such as the German American Bund and others who supported the Nazi regime in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain and the Japanese Imperial regime in Japan.  If we can't judge Lester Cole and Lillian Hellman for their support of Stalin, there must be something wrong with our holding Charles Lindbergh or Henry Luce or the executives of IBM who did business with Hitler for condemnation.  I refuse to believe that for a second.

That period of American Communism shouldn't be forgotten because it proved how dangerous Marxism is in practice, instantly changing some of Hitler's, Mussolini's, Franco's biggest enemies into Republican business types who wanted to do business with Hitler on orders from Moscow.  And, yes, the stupidly sainted Dalton Trumbo, who briefly, following orders from the Stalinists during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, let his book Johnny Got His Gun act as a piece of American isolationist propaganda, more dangerous for keeping America out of WWII because he was, in fact, an effective popular style writer.  If he wrote it with that in mind I can't tell but he, in fact, allowed the Communist Party to use it to put out the same pro-Hitler message that Lindbergh was pushing.  Later, Trumbo also, on behalf of the 10, perhaps including those who may not have wanted to be so identified, admitted that all of them had been members of the Communist Party at one time or another. Which would have been during the dictatorship of Stalin as his crimes were being accurately reported, in case anyone was wondering if any of them were unjustly accused of being Stalinists.  If you want a good example of exactly why we should criticize them on the basis of the morality of today, Marjorie Taylor Greene and the majority of Republican-fascists of the Trump era are doing exactly the same thing for Stalin's ideological grandson, Putin.  I have no doubt that his attack on Ukraine was motivated through his knowledge that the Republican-fascists would aid him in his first step of forced reforming of the Soviet Union through conquering the newly democratic Ukraine. 

I have no problem judging the People who embodied America's fascist tradition, white supremacy, from every point in its history, colonial up to right now, I have no more of a problem judging the universal fascism of male supremacy for the entire
history of its existence. Why shouldn't I?  The very same guys who pull the "you can't judge those from the past are hypocrites because they pick and choose those instances when they will do exactly that.  In the case of Simels, he has no problem  judging the American Bund Nazis even as he demands that the Stalinists get a pass because Hollywood, Broadway and pop novelists say they were innocent martyrs to the vulgar anti-democrats who conducted the Red Scare.  That, in itself, makes a much more complex situation into a simplistic cartoon of it because there were plenty of actual democrats and Democrats who were involved with the red scare along with the Republican goons and media scumbags like Walter Winchell and the Hollywood moguls.  I like to taunt him that his great hero Bobby Kennedy worked for the drunken Senator Joseph McCarthy and dearly wanted the job that he gave to Roy Cohn.  I could point out that Harry Truman had more than a slight hand in setting off the red scare, though I think he was mistaken to believe they would ever have any chance of gaining power in the United States.  What was a real danger were exactly those who made common cause with the Republican red baiters and scarers, America's indigenous fascists of white supremacy.  They not only had power in a large number of the states, they had exercised enormous power over the country for its entire period, accounting for the American genocide and land theft that the country was built on and the kidnapping and enslavement, rape, murder and degredation of Black People here.  Though the political reality that Truman faced was dependent on the traditional membership in the Democratic Party of many of those fascists in the South.  Since Truman was responsible for what Thurgood Marshall once said was the most significant step towards racial equality in American history, the integration of the American military, it's clear politics makes the strangest bedfellows.  I said the entire thing was more simplistic than all of the Hollywood movies and Broadway message plays put together could cover.  Make believe as imagined by story tellers is one of the least efficient and generally most inaccurate means of learning about history, which is why the likes of Simps have such a stupid and distorted idea of it.

I remember hearing the slogan about not judging those in the past in relation to the conduct of many of the late medieval and so-called Renaissance Popes and I didn't buy it then, either.  In that case the moral standards for judging them were to be found in the Gospels and Epistles, Acts and the Book of the Apocolypse.  They claimed to be followers of Jesus so it's entirely appropriate to judge them by that  moral yard stick.  I use the same yard stick to judge the Integralist Catholic members of the Republican-fascist coalition of the morally depraved, and they can hardly complain when I do that because they claim to follow Jesus.  Alito does even as about every time he makes a decision on the Supreme Court he does exactly what Jesus would never have done.  Not to mention his frequent lying and corruption.  I have no problem judging the Southern Baptist members of Congress on the same standard, a standard from a far different time than the one we live in now. Nor the Catho-fascist neo-integralists who support Republican-fascism and Trump. 

For any contemporary Marxist to complain about judging those from a different time period by moral standards not of their time, they do so every time they read the Communist Manifesto and feel fire in their blood over the outrages of injustice - it was probably Marx's best writing before he got all sciency and impossible to read.  The morality that Marx tacitly invokes, the feeling of injustice was certainly a borrowed standard of moral judgement since his materialist-atheist-scientism couldn't provide that.  He had no problem judging those who also practiced amoral materialism, capitalism, by a standard not of 1848.  And he was right to do so, his critique of capitalism is the only really good thing about him, that and his support of the North in the American Civil War. His ideological basis provided no means of support for constructing anything but what was bound to turn very bad and very ugly, murderous and enslaving.  No loud-mouthed atheist of the past quarter of a century who makes a moral criticism of anything has to borrow moral standards, most commonly in the West, from the Jewish tradition from Moses and the Prophets to Jesus, Paul, James, etc.  They judge all kinds of people by moral standards not current in current society, otherwise they've got nothing. 

In my response to Simels I pointed out that his stand that I was wrong to judge the Hollywood Stalinists by what can be shorthanded to "the standards of today" that under the Nazis their standard was set up at the exact same time that Stalin and the movie industry Stalinists were active made their crimes and mass murders legal.  If anyone thinks that secular law is an effective replacement for revealed morality, I pointed to the example I've used before, the one Bobby Kennedy's brother Jack chose as a "Profile in Courage," the morally depraved Robert Taft who opposed the Nuremberg trials on that basis, that what the Nazis did was perfectly legal under the civil law so there was no tidy basis for bringing them to a court to face justice.  Going to Harvard Law School was apparently as likely to make you morally obtuse then as it is today, both Taft and JFK are products of that training ground for servants of oligarchy.  

I have no problem with saying the Nazis had it coming to them, though, of course, I'd never have imposed the death penalty on them - though I have to admit, it got rid of a lot of potentially very dangerous People who had proven to be capable of gaining and wielding power.  I've got no idea if any of them, released later, may not have been very dangerous to post-WWII, Europe.   That's one thing that is extremely dangerous, forgetting that any amoral or immoral ideology that has succeeded in gaining and holding power has proven it can do that and to allow it to be propagated is to help ensure that history will repeat itself, which I've pointed out in relation to our current First Amendment induced idiocy of doing just that.

I would have had no problem bringing those who conducted the genocidal arranged starvation of Ukraine, the many thousands of murders to enforce atheism, ethnic mass murders, terror murders to keep the entire Soviet population terrified and in line, etc. to the same kind of justice if that had become possible.  Some of those sentenced by the Nuremberg process never directly killed anyone but were involved in producing Nazi propaganda, propaganda of the kind that Dalton Trumbo, the Almanac Singers and others produced on behalf of keeping America out of the fight against Hitler on orders from Moscow until Hitler did what any sane person would realize he would do and he attacked the Soviet Union.  Why shouldn't I judge those who produced Stalinist propaganda here on the same basis that Alfred Rosenberg, the publisher of the Völkischer Beobachter,  was sentenced on?  Stalin's crimes were exactly of the same kind that Hitler committed.  Why shouldn't I judge his supporters on the same basis that I condemn the German American Bund or  Mussolini's fascism or the KKK or the various other organs of America's indigenous fascism and lynch law?*  Or, for that matter, those who committed rank injustice during the red scare?  There were entirely innocent People who were wrongly accused and who suffered greatly for it, some may have died as a result.   Accusations of that kind were made against The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. virtually every liberal and are being hurled by the Trumpzis today. Are we to cut the white supremacists and segregationists and, yes, red-scare mongers "moral standards of today" slack?  I'm not going to.

Immorality doesn't change its nature over decades and centuries and millennia.  The suffering is the same.  Social acceptance of immorality might change but that doesn't change people being enslaved, raped, harmed, oppressed and murdered. I have no doubt that those who were the objects of all of those had no problem with identifying their oppressors as wrong.  "Official morality" was set by their oppressors in the dominating class, they got to set the official moral guidelines that we might mistake as the universal opinion of what was right and wrong, then. On that basis, things that are entirely innocuous are wrongly classified as taboos, often with serious legal consequences but I'm talking about enslaving, oppressing. . . murdering, not minor taboos misidentified with morals.  I've got no patience with those who want to, sometimes, selectively,  claim that those obvious wrongs are matters of contingent morality set by those dominating in any culture.  If the same were done to those in the dominating class, THEY would be the first to proclaim themselves to be the victims of moral atrocities.  Equality is among the most important and primary requirements for a moral society, any real democracy. I'm in favor of a single standard for that. 

* It shouldn't be forgotten that during the abolitionist struggle and after, many of the abolitionists were, rightly, as outraged at wage-slavery, economic injustice to those who were paid a pittance and who were, therefore, not officially classed as slaves.  During the conventions that adopted both the Aricles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution, the representatives of slave-power brought up those in the North who worked under wage-slave conditions - ignoring that there were plenty of whites in the South who also worked under wage-slave conditions, so that's rightly considered as covered under moral judgment of the kind discussed here.  It's certainly nothing that the white-collar American Communists could ignore because it was the very stuff of how they aspired to get power here, while, of course, ignoring the slave-labor and wage slavery under the "workers paradise" of every Marxist government there ever has been.  Reportedly those enslaved in Stalinist North Korea are sold to the oligarchs of Putin's neo-Stalinism and the Chinese Communist oligarchs, to the profit of the totalitarian military dictators of the Kim dynasty.  Occasionally, here and among white-collar, often university-based Marxists will claim that North Korea is slandered by Western imperialists.  I don't know why they should bother, the Communists seem to be much better at imperial oppression and enslavement than the Western powers are. 

I have absolutely no tolerance for Marxist supporting the terrorist enslavement and murder of Asians or others while they live the good life in the U.S. or Canada,  Britain, Sweden, etc.  I loathe university based Marxists every much as I loathe Ivy League law-school, Arlington VA style stink tank Capitalists and libertarians and for exactly the same reasons.  I don't think the apologists for Korean or Chinese communism are any less racist than those who figure those mass murdered in Europe count for more than those murdered who aren't killed while white.  Or those who don't much care what color or which language group those enslaved and killed are as long as money is being made from it

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Arthur Miller - Juarez: Thunder From The Mountains

 Thunder From The Mountains 

In 1867 on June 19th as the light of dawn broke over the peak of mount Popocatépetl death by rifle fire was administered to Ferdinand Maximilian last emperor of Mexico. With it came liberty to a nation. More than any other, one man was responsible. He was Benito Juárez and it is his ever glorious story told here.

Having been going through nostalgia for playwrights of you youth,  I've gotten to Arthur Miller.   Instead of looking for radio versions of his most famous plays I've been looking for the ones he actually wrote for radio.   I'm not a huge fan of the "golden age of radio" production style or the acting style but I know a lot of people like it.   Orson Welles has the title role.   

I'd like to hear a more updated production of it.  The hokey music doesn't add much to it except distraction.   

Update:  Here's another one

Mayer Island And Back 

 

How Come "Trad-Catholic" Men Aren't Told They Should Follow Joseph's Example?

LONG TERM READERS of what I write will know that I detest American football because of the inherent violence of the game when it is played according to the rules.  It goes in a category with boxing and a few other sports in that, also hockey as played in the North American style, which isn't inherently violent but in which violence is routinely allowed, encouraged and which has become a major feature of the, um, "game."   So I'd never heard of this Harrison Butker jerk until he made that speech at the little right-wing Catholic college a few days back.   When I found out he was a kicker, a guy who got paid millions of dollars to, every once in a while, strut onto the field to kick a ball once - and that's all - everything else he said was no surprise to me.  While I'm aware there are a few nice guys who play football (one of my favorite in-laws did) and even professional football, and a lot who are like most of us, more morally ambivalent,  there are an unusually large number of conceited, spoiled, assholes in the game (like one of my less likable ex-in-laws), especially at the professional level.   That he is obviously a right-wing game-playing white, rich boy whose own family didn't follow his dictates for how a good Catholic is supposed to live,  someone whose own career choice is definitely not in line with the Gospels and Epistles,  it didn't surprise me that he's a jerk.

But along with his dictates for how Women are supposed to live, in line with the growing cult of the "trad-catholics"  and especially "trad-catholic wives"   "trads" being big on the cult of the Virgin,  I was wondering if his own trad-wife might not want to consider this letter that appeared in today's National Catholic Reporter. 

Trad wives traditional?

I found the article about the "trad wives" both interesting and horrifying. I do have a question though about the supposed devotion to Mary. If I recall correctly, Mary (according to Catholic tradition) is a perpetual Virgin.

If these women are so devoted to Mary, surely they should be following that path, with their husbands also following Joseph's example of chastity?

I find it interesting that this hard core devotion to motherhood is modeled after a woman that had ONE child and never had sex.

DALE CEBULA
Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

You've got to wonder if his wife read that letter and took it to heart, how eager would this Butker boy be for taking the role of Joseph?   My guess is, not so much. 

If you have to wonder as to why Joseph isn't considered as a role model for "trad-husbands" you should try thinking less hard about that.  

Semper Idem, Semper Simps

I KNEW SIMPS would go to tired old Dalton Trumbo and the script he wrote for Sparticus.  It's one of the very few very worn tricks he's got in his little bag of them.  Another one is Phil Spector being a murderer.  I can reliably get him to repeat that and several others, too.  Maybe next time I write something I know will set off Simps I should embed a coded prediction into it of which of his predictable moves he'll make will be so I can point that out afterwards.  

The last time he pulled that on me I got the pleasure of pointing out what the old commie said complementing Christianity in the very part Simps tried to goad me with.

Lazare-Lévy plays Claude Debussy, La Soirée dans Grenade

 

 

Lazare Levy was one of the most convincing Debussy players I've ever heard live or, in his case, through his far too few recordings.   Nearly perfect technique and totally convincing musicality.  

Unfiltered Rant - Started out as a response, but continued as I was listening to the news

I SUPPOSE I'LL ALWAYS have to point out that in rejecting "modernism" I am not any kind of advocate of the daffy idea of returning to some imagined past.  And every idea of the past is the product of imagination. I doubt there is any past period of human history which the majority of those who experienced it didn't want to get to a better future, fast.  You can't return to the past and I don't believe you're supposed to try to return to it.  It can't be done, for a start, and yearning for it is silly romance based on a fantasy of the past.   It is a foolish kind of imagining up stuff.  I remember back when supposed "channeling" of imagined past lives was popular with Hollywood types inclined to that that there were an extraordinary number of those who had been royalty or nobles or aristocrats in their past lives.  Probably a lot more of those than had ever existed in the real human past.  People didn't seem to much remember being slaves in their past lives, or oppressed Women or babies left to die of exposure because they weren't wanted.  The hankering after the Constitutional status quo of the 1790s or before the 1930s or before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are exactly the same kind of stupidity with a generally far more evil motive, and such bull shit dominates the Supreme Court and much of the legal orthodoxy of our day.  Not that I buy for a second that any of them actually believe it,  such "originalism" or "textualism" is a mere pretense of them reinforcing the oligarchy of the rich, the white, the Republican-fascist, as overtly partisan and self-interested as the actions of the slave holders on the Supreme Court before the emancipation proclamation and the dominant coalition of white-supremacists and financier-class servants for almost all of the rest of that court's sordid history.  A history that has been covered up with blatantly dishonest public relations and romantic bull shit of a related kind.  

No, I don't want to return to any past because not only is it impossible to do that, I don't think we're supposed to want to do that.  I think if we were meant to hold any part of the human past as a steady state, that would have happened.  I think God intends for history to go forward because life is change and that change is for a reason.  I think our and every other state of being has been contingent and a product of choices we have made, that we are always given a choice between what is right and what is wrong to the extent we can know that and that, as well, is a part of the working of history.  It is clear from the terrible history of the 20th century we went through, a prelude to the perils of the 21st century, that we are allowed to make the wrong choices and suffer the consequences.  That not a little of that evil was a result of the romantic notions of glorious national and racial pasts accounts for much of the worst of the past and the present.  Nazism was a mixture of the theory of natural selection mixed with daffy, romantic period notions of linguistics and the snobbery of vainglorious ethnic identity, the cheap self-esteem of nationalism and parochial patriotism.  Communism was a mixture of similar things under the guises of patriotism and nationalism, sometimes minus the Darwinist content.  Personally, I never knew a Marxist who wasn't a conceited snob and either rather stupid or amoral.  Other fascisms and the more criminal behaviors of the so-called "liberal democracies" trafficked in the same kinds of romantic notions of pasts, often overt and transparent lies sold through show-biz and PR, two of the greatest venues of lying in the history of our common species.  I think that, as well as learing the evils of facism, Nazism, Communism and Marxism, we are supposed to learn the evils inherent in "classical liberlism" the libertarian liberalism of "liberal democracy" the kind of democracy that, in the American context had both genocidal land stealing and slavery and male supremacy as integral parts of it, parts that were not extingushed in the altered liberal-democracy from the Warren Court years.  Indeed, some of those rulings considered the greatest boons such as the permission given to the mass media to lie with impunity, has been the major engine in the resurgence of our own overt form of fascism, white-supremacy and its allies in the billionair-millionaire financed and mass media promoted benefit for the richest among us.  

I have always been a leveler, favoring total human equality on every basis, sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, bodily condition, . . .  and, most radically of all, since it encompasses all of those, economic justice based on economic leveling.  Concentrations of wealth are one of the greatest dangers to equality, democracy and a decent life for all.  So, you see, I'm not only a radical, I'm the most extreme kind of radical there is.  One who believes all People are not only metaphysically equal but rightly made equal at the highest material, economic and spiritual level of equality that we can attain, leveling billionaires and millionaires out of existence and treating People as equal, protecting egalitarian democracy from all dangers, including the ideas of those who would destroy equality and democracy.  

The ACLU, Holmes-Roberts Court notions of protecting ideas while leaving People and their lives at risk from fascists, Nazis, white supremacists and those who have no real chance of gaining power in the United States, Marxists, out of the daffiest notions of "justice" and "fairness" only enables the rich to destroy equality and democracy, the goal of the Roberts Court which will have the rote acquiescence of the "liberals" on that court out of some of the stupidest orthodoxy in human history.   I can be both an anti-communist and an anti-anti-communist, basing the later on their anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic intent.  So, I am consistent in that.  That's a lot better reason for opposing them than the vulgarity and sleaziness of those who mounted the red-scare campaign and that Hollywood movies tell you the old white-collar commies who scribbled for the movies were some kind of heroes.  Since just about every one of them supported Hitler's rival and perhaps  record-holder of most People killed, Stalin, as his crimes were being accurately reported, they were no heroes.  They were in many cases, the exact moral equivalents of the American Nazis.  The old-line anti-communists were really the precursors of today's Trumpian Republican-fascists a few old-line Democratic dupes of that thrown in to that mix.   I am very much over the Kennedy mystique, not least of which on the basis of their anti-communism but for other reasons, as well.  

Arthur Berger - Suite for Piano 4-Hands

 

 

David Kopp & Rodney Lister, piano

I realized I forgot his birthday this year so here's this suite.  I miss him.   Apparently I'm not  alone in that. 

In Lieu Of A Radio Drama This Week

I had a busy week so I didn't get to find any new radio or audio dramas to post.  I did listen to this talk by Rupert Sheldrake which was posted earlier this morning,  he says a lot of things related to what I've written recently.   He's always worth listening to.

Anatheism: Rediscovering God In A Secular Age

 

CLEAN THE FILTHY SUPREME COURT UP AND STRIP IT OF ITS SELF-USURPED POWERS AND EXEMPTIONS

IF THE NEXT CONGRESS isn't in the hands of the facists, they must conduct a full investigation into the corruption on the Supreme Court.  Now that we know that Alito was displaying the flag upside down, a sign of support for the attempted insurrection against the Constitution, he must be the subject of a full investigation into him as a member of the Supreme Court and, especially, into his connection to insurrectionary activities.   That he, as well as the known insurrection connected Clarence Thomas, have been actively hearing and giving opinions and decisions related to cases in the insurrection of Trump and the Republican-fascist party,  the Congress has the power, the right and the obligation to investigate ALL OF THE "justices" IN REGARD TO THEIR POLITICAL ACTIVITIES AS MEMBERS OF THE MOST OVERTLY POLITICAL COURT, EVEN MORE OVERTLY POLITICAL THAN THE BUSH V GORE COURT.

The Supreme Court under Roberts is the most corrupt branch of the government and that's not apart from the Trump regime and the current Republican-fascist House.   Alito and Thomas are legitimately suspected of political corruption in their official capacity as members of that court and who knows what else we don't know due to the self-protection racket that that court runs and which traditional Supreme Court reporting, valuing access more than finding the truth has helped them. 

The thing which is handled by the media as if it were a mystical repository of morality and wisdom is a sordid, rigged engine to grab more wealth for the wealthy, protect rich criminals,  enforce our traditional form of fascism, white supremacy and that other, universal form of it, male supremacy.  Straight white, rich, male supremacy.  

If the courts won't clean up the corruption at the top, as the Judicial Conference obviously hasn't much tried, then it is to the political branches to do it, STRIPPING THE SUPREME COURT OF ITS SELF-CREATED VETO POWER OVER LEGISLATIVE REMEDIES TO CLEAN THE FILTHY THING UP.