Category Archives: History

Trolling For Misery

16 Monday Dec 2019

Posted by in Existential Despair, History

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It is a fundamental element of the “news” formula. Report the wars and riots, the political scandals and machinations, the celebrity sexual permutations (who did what to whom), the cute animal and/or baby story, and the disasters, natural or man made. The goal is to attract followers of the stories.

Who decides what is news? I love that bit of dialogue from A Christmas Story, where The Old Man (Darren McGavin) remarks on the “clodhopper in Griffith, Indiana who swallowed a yo-yo.” He declares, “That’s real news, not this politics slop!” I have agreed so many times,

We should think of news anchors as storytellers, like some bard in an ancient Mycaenean court, telling a story to satisfy the king. For me, the greatest of the modern news bards (storytellers) were Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

Murrow, reporting from London during The Blitz, was telling a story of epic, existential proportions. The British had to win. They were, in the Autumn of 1940, all that stood between survival and oblivion for Judaeo-Christian Civilization. That is not hyperbole.

Cronkite reported on the great human adventure of the Twentieth Century, the space program and the lunar landings. It was his signature story. The World has been searching for stories of epic dimensions ever since.

By necessity, we have to make stories melodramas, to attract and retain viewers or followers . Except the old formulas are no longer working. The ratings of the cable news channels are tanking. We don’t believe, or outright ignore, the contemporary bards. Each story demands a new sort of hook. If climate change fails to attract interest, find a new angle, a new champion. We’ve gone from Al Gore to Leonardo DiCaprio to Greta Thunberg, all in the course of a few short years. And if she fails, Pope Francis can stick his Argentinian schnozola into the story, as if anybody takes him seriously. The sex abuse and financisl malfeasance scandals in The Church have made him a symbolic castrato. Deal with those outrages, Holy Father, then circle back to deal with climate change.

So that’s enough. I am tired and satisfied with myself for presenting this post off the top of my head, as it were.

Night all. I love you.

Dutch Documentary

17 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by in History, Uncategorized

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I don’t know precisely the right word to describe what someone in The Netherlands did with their movie camera over 100 years ago. They filmed a busy port of Amsterdam, freighters, passenger ships, lighters, warehouses, quays, trams, freight trains. Now I see a lateen rigged schooner pass through the camera’s view. It is a busy harbour in a city that would escape the catastrophe of The Great War.

The women wear long skirts in the Edwardian style. The men wear suits, ties, bowler hats, flat caps. There is no litter on the street. That suggests either a cultural value of fastidiousness, or a society that did not produce items deemed unworthy of retaining. Were there no pop bottles, beer bottles, potato chip bags, cigarette packages, newspapers?

The scenes had moments that looked like a scale model train layout. Now there is ferry taking a horse and wagon across the harbour, now a ship in dry dock.

We could call it modern. Children filmed in these movies could have lived into the twenty-first century, suffered under Nazi occupation, seen the transformation of the Dutch East Indies into Indonesia, the advent of passenger automobiles, air travel, satellites, women’s emancipation, radio, television, computers, artificial hormonal contraception, antibiotics, just for starters. Oh, and nuclear weapons. Let’s not leave those out.

We have our eye on the future and whatever it may bring, but we should always remember that the old culture was not that long ago.

St Edith Stein

09 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by in Catholic Life, History

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Today is the Feast Day of St Theresa Benedicta Of The Cross, born Edith Stein. She was born in Prussia in 1891, one of eleven children in an observant Jewish family.

Possessing a keen intellect, she studied philosophy under Heidegger and Husserl. She had become atheist, but she admired the way her Catholic friends practiced their faith. Reading the autobiography of St Theresa of Avila brought about her conversion to the Catholic Faith. Later she would become a Carmelite nun and took the name Theresa Benedicta of The Cross. She became a cloistered contemplative nun, devoted to a life of prayer.

Her life paralleled the rise to power of the Nazis. Nazi anti-Semitism was based on their specious “racial theory”. So having Jewish “blood” was tantamount to a death sentence. The Carmelite order transferred her to The Netherlands, but she was ultimately taken by the Nazis from the convent, sent to Auschwitz, and murdered in the gas chamber, along with her sister Rose, also a convert and a Carmelite nun. Today is the seventy-seventh anniversary of their martyrdom.

Fittingly St Edith Stein is the Patroness of Europe. Europe today, like America, suffers a profound crisis of Faith, buffeted by Islamic immigration on the one hand and secular agnosticism on the other. The challenge for European Catholics is to witness the Faith, always with Love, for the Salvation of souls. What better Patroness to ask for intercessory prayer.

St Theresa Benedicta, pray for us.

Sleep Comes To The Old Man

03 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by in Catholic Life, Cricket, History

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I woke up at Three AM to go to Holy Hour at Four down at my church. Then I came home, started watching cricket, The first of the The Ashes Test Match series between England and Australia. I can honestly say I don’t have a dog in this fight. Both sides are great, with superb individual talents on both sides.

Then around 7:40 I left for First Saturday Mass at the Abbey. The football players at the affiliated Catholic high school were practicing. Football season is four weeks away, whether we like it, don’t like it, or just plain don’t care.

Mass was celebrated by a priest who seemed oddly “out of it”. I think he was OK. I had never been at one of his Masses before and I suspect this was just his style. He was old, in this case, about my age.

Back home for breakfast and more cricket. Then tiredness hit and I finally went to bed.

After sleeping a bit, I woke up, brewed some coffee and am now watching some film footage of Tokyo, in 1934 on YouTube. Japan was a police state, run by a military junta. It had seized Manchuria three years earlier. The Sino-Japanese War, the Asian precursor to the Second World War, would begin in 1937. Peaceful times, I suppose. There are scenes of Japanese military close order drill with young boys in samurai costume. In all likelihood, these children would be dead within eleven years. The vignette was creepy and simultaneously poignant. Wasted lives on display.

J is coming home from work. It is ex-wife #1’s birthday. I sent her a birthday text.

I feel like I have done enough today already.

Imagining The Story’s End

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in History

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I was asleep. The overheated bedroom woke me up. Then I got to thinking and my mind got …hungry. Not for food, but for images, from which spun ideas. YouTube is quite good at feeding the hunger. Every image is a banquet. In just the course of a few minutes, I saw a home movie of Germans in the Rheinland, around Easter time in 1939. They act oblivious to the cyclone forming in their midst. These good burghers in their Sunday best would be, as it would turn out, enjoying their last Easter in peacetime for seven years. How many of these men would be alive in 1946?

There were moving pictures of a society fête in Paris in 1928. There are musicians, dressed as gauchos, performing. For these partygoers, the Depression awaits, and political instability that made France oblivious to the monster awakening, East of the Maginot Line,

An English county fair in 1902 shows aristocrats enjoying the day. Downton Abbey is over a century away. The clothing in these pictures aren’t costumes. The people actually dressed this way. We must use our olfactory imaginations to get a sense of the smells. Bathing in this time was quite the impractical experience, heating the water, filling the tub. Sweat, from bodies, manure, from horses, filled the air.

I see a picture of a boy, age seven or so, at this fair in 1902. Would he later join the British Army in a pals’ regiment, dying at the Somme with his friends, members of, say, the Bradford Chums?

We can only imagine how the stories end. The camera will run out of film long before the end.