Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage (2)

Compared to many other subjects I write about, I don’t write about Donald Trump very often. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t watch Fox News (I cancelled my Shaw Cable TV more than three ago, back in July 2017, writing two months later on Sept. 5, 2017, “Two months post-cable television (and therefore post CNN and Donald Trump) and $150 to the good (me, not Shaw).”

Not being a complete media recluse, however, as there is still the internet, I do know The Donald – a.k.a. President Donald Trump – accepted the Republican Party’s re-nomination for president last night at the party’s national convention, promising to “rekindle new faith in our values” and rebuild the economy once more following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said, being gathered on the massive South Lawn at the White House, known as the “People’s House,” they cannot help but marvel at the “great American story.” This is a common and recurring theme in American history. Earlier this month, I completed my eleventh Hillsdale College online course, titled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” taught by Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Center for Reflective Citizenship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A little more than four years ago, as President Donald Trump was then running for president as Citizen Donald Trump, a man best known to many Americans in 2016 as the host for the first 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the American reality television program created by British-born American television producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor fame) that judged the business skills of a group of contestants, I wrote my first significant blog post about Trump on July 17, 2016 in a piece headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/). The Apprentice, which I didn’t canvass at the time, was produced at Trump Tower in New York City between 2004 and 2015. Episodes ended with Trump eliminating one contestant from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

Interestingly, while the headline, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” may appear to be contemporaneous with Trump and Trumpland today, and certainly could be, it wasn’t written that way exactly:

“Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“‘CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

“Really?

“Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

“We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”

In retrospect, I think both the headline and story have held up well over four years. I also wrote at the time:

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

“I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

“We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

“As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”

I admit over the last four years, I have reflected many times on the line, “”If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end,” and wondered if I was being too optimistic because there have been days and nights with Trump when well, Trump, is Trump. And that can indeed be a scary thing.

My friend Bernie Lunzer from back in my Newspaper Guild union days from 1997 to 2001 perhaps put it best yesterday, writing, “Central frustration – we won’t change Trumpists by laughing at them or telling them they’re stupid. I share those feelings but they don’t help. They are motivated by other things. Maybe we can’t change them because their base motivation is racism? So then they are simply enemies? We still need to do something other than acting smarter and sanctimonious. I don’t have answers. But do take this election as serious.”

This reminds me indirectly of an article Thomas Frank penned for The Guardian and published on Nov. 6, 2016 – just two days before the last presidential election (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america) headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say.” Frank, a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist, is also the founding editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? as well as Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? published in 2016.

Do better.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

To the Moon with Apollo then and back again with Artemis

Expect a rising tide of Man on the Moon stories over the next week as the calendar advances inexorably toward July 20. Next Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of mission commander Neil Armstrong descending from the ladder of Apollo 11’s Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and stepping onto the lunar surface, thus becoming the first person ever to set foot on the moon on Sunday, July 20, 1969.

I recently had the opportunity to through some old copies of the Toronto Globe and Mail for July 1969, and was struck by some of the inside section stories on the Apollo 11 mission. Well beyond the front page news stories, were all kinds of spin-off stories in the family and religion pages and other sections, on different aspects of the moon mission. There was some fascinating theological discussions in the media on what this might mean for our notions of God and the universe.

Only 12 astronauts, all male, all American – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell, David Scott, James Irwin, John Young, Charles Duke, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, and Gene Cernan – have walked on the moon to date, and the last moonwalk by Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 mission, took place Dec. 14, 1972.

What is remarkable in retrospect, I’ve written before, is to think we only travelled to the moon and back for a little less than 3½ years between July 1969 and December 1972. After burning up billions in expenses, peaking at almost $8 billion in 1966, NASA’s Apollo space program ended abruptly with the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. When it began in 1961, using Saturn A spacecraft, renamed as the Apollo program in 1963, the U.S. space schedule included 20 missions. The scope was reduced immediately after Apollo 11 in 1969. By 1972, a combination of escalating costs and NASA’s shifting interest to Skylab, meant no more trips to the moon. Skylab was the United States’ first and only space station, orbiting the Earth from 1973 to 1979, when it fell back to Earth amid huge worldwide media attention.

If you remember, the Sixties, then on most of the planet you remember those famous words, the alleged esprit de l’escalier uttered by Armstrong and stepped onto the lunar surface: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

This was not, of course, quite what Armstrong meant to say, and not what he actually said, Armstrong claimed later. “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind” was what he intended or did say. While the majority historical consensus is that Armstrong flubbed his historic line in the excitement of the moment, a minority of scholarly opinion holds otherwise, saying he may have actually got it right.

A team of researchers from Michigan State University and Ohio State University in 2103  attempted to deciphering Armstrong’s quote by studying how speakers from his native central Ohio pronounce “for” and “for a.”

Their results suggest that it is entirely possible that Armstrong actually did say it correctly tough evidence indicates that people are statistically more likely to hear “for man” instead of “for a man” on the recording.

Armstrong was raised in central Ohio, where there is typically a lot of blending between words such as “for” and “a”, according to a Michigan State University statement.

“Prior acoustic analyses of Neil Armstrong’s recording have established well that if the word ‘a’ was spoken, it was very short and was fully blended acoustically with the preceding word,” said Laura Dilley, an Michigan State University assistant professor of communicative sciences and disorders and part of the research team.

If Armstrong actually did say “a,” she said, it sounded something like “frrr(uh).” His blending of the two words, compounded with the poor sound quality of the transmission, has made it difficult for people to corroborate his claim that the “a” is there.

Dilley and her colleagues thought they might be able to figure out what Armstrong said with a statistical analysis of the duration of the “r” sound as spoken by native central Ohioans saying “for” and “for a” in natural conversation.

They used a collection of recordings of conversational speech from 40 people raised in Columbus, Ohio, near Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakoneta. Within this body of recordings, they found 191 cases of “for a.”

The funny thing is this. While it is true to skip the a illogically – and most ungrammatically – reduces the pronouncement to a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind as being the same thing, it still sounds OK somehow.

My July 21, 1969 copy of the Globe and Mail has a 72-point “going to war” main headline that day – in green yet, at a time when colour printing was rare in newspapers, marked one of humanity’s historic moments: “MAN ON MOON” read that main headline with a bold black second deck subhead: “‘Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed’”

I was 12. My dad was on his summer vacation that week in July 1969, so with my parents, I watched Armstrong set foot on the moon from a small portable black-and-white television set at Pioneer Park, a campground just south of Buckhorn, Ontario. In 1969, televisions were not yet ubiquitous at campgrounds and cottages. I suspect the television set we saw the moon landing on may well have been the only one in the campground that night 50 years ago. We probably picked up the somewhat fuzzy TV station signal from a rabbit ears antenna or some jerry-rigged coat hanger antenna. Certainly there was no cable or satellite TV at Pioneer Park in 1969. Campers from everywhere in the campground came out to watch the historic event, as the television was moved outside the trailer housing it, and a couple of the men hooked up an extension cord and hoisted the TV atop a makeshift scaffold, to allow everyone a chance to circle in and watch. At 12, surreal was not quite yet part of my regular vocabulary, but this was a surreal moment to be sure. I remember we all kept switching between glancing at the TV in anticipation of this historic moment, and glancing up at the starry black sky in a time before much anthropogenic light photopollution out Buckhorn way.

For a 12-year-old boy, it spoke to my imagination in a way nothing ever had before. The Sixties, which I was too young to fully appreciate, were coming to an end. But this I knew with the moon landing: This was a world, as Expo 67 in Montreal had suggested, where all things technological were truly possible.

The “lede” to the main story, as we quirkily spell lead in newspaperspeak, was elegant in its simplicity. Globe and Mail reporters David Spurgeon and Terrance Wills, in a double bylined story datelined Houston and filed from NASA’s Mission Control, wrote: “Man walked on the moon last night.”

In a “special message” delivered on May 25, 1961 to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” U.S. President John F. Kennedy had said, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”

While Armstrong’s quote or misquote is famous, who remembers the last words to date spoken on the moon? Very few, I suspect.

Just before 5:54 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, Dec. 14, 1972, Gene Cernan said for posterity: “I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I’d like to just (say) what I believe history will record. That America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the moon at Taurus- Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. ‘Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.’”

NASA had announced the cancellation of Apollo 20 in January 1970, and eight months later also scrapped the Apollo 19 mission, and a mission originally planned for Apollo 15. The mission in July 1971 was renumbered 15, continuing to Apollo 16 in April 1972, then to 17.

The Nixon administration had tightened space budgets from a peak in the mid-1960s, when NASA absorbed just under 4.5 per cent of the total US federal budget, and employed 400,000 staff and contractors. The workforce was down to 190,000, with plans to cut another 50,000 jobs, by January 1970.

In 1971, the White House had planned to cancel the Apollo program after Apollo 15, but ultimately left the last two Apollo missions in place.

NASA had also reallocated funds and expertise to the Saturn 5 launch of the Skylab orbital station in 1973, while the prospective development of a space shuttle, endorsed under a presidential task force in 1969, further diverted expertise. The final three Apollo expeditions, which may have included landings in Copernicus or Tycho craters, were scrapped.

“With the program winding down, NASA was under pressure from the National Academy of Sciences to include a scientist on one of the final missions,” reported Marea Donnelly, history writer for Sydney Australia’s The Daily Telegraph on Dec. 3, 2017 (https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/last-apollo-flight-finally-put-scientist-on-the-moon/news-story/76075ad07684b18667e60cd04f20536d. ”

Schmitt was one of the first six scientist-astronauts selected in 1965, and was in training for Apollo 18.

Under pressure from scientists, Schmitt was given a place on Apollo 17, which blasted off in the early hours of December 7, 1972. It was the first and only mission to carry a scientist.

Four days after blast-off, Schmitt became the 12th and final person, and only geologist, to set foot on the moon when he and Cernan stepped out of their lunar module, Challenger.

Gene Cernan’s, “I’m on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come,” statement has come to be something of an understatement. The year 2024 – some 52 years after Cernan’s pronouncement – is the current best bet for another moon mission.  Pursuant to Space Policy Directive 1 of Dec. 10, 2017, NASA is ordered to “lead an innovative space exploration program to send American astronauts back to the moon, and eventually Mars.” Space Policy Directive 1 was based on recommendations from the National Space Council. The council, which had been disbanded in 1992, was reconstituted in 2017.

Ken Bowersox, a 62-year-old veteran of five space shuttle flights, was named July 10 as associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate of NASA, which is responsible for man’s return to the moon in 2024 through the Artemis spaceflight program, a moon mission which is to include the first woman and the next man on the moon. When they land five years from now, the astronauts will step foot where no human has ever been before: the Moon’s South Pole. Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo and goddess of the Moon in Greek mythology.

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Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, versus young earth creationist Ken Ham, with some cautionary words of advice from St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine

Phil Plait, who likes to be known as The Bad Astronomer, is a 51-year-old Boulder, Colorado writer, popular science blogger and a leading promoter of scientific skepticism. His PhD in astronomy from the University of Virginia in 1994 included a dissertation on SN 1987A, a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team and is a very bright guy. But he’s also the kind of science zealot that puzzles me, such as here on Slate May 12 in a post headlined “Ken Ham Really Doesn’t Understand Science”
(http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/05/12/creationist_ken_ham_tweeted_a_series_of_very_bad_claims_meant_to_be_scientific.html) when he takes on Ham, the young earth creationist behind the Answers in Genesis ministry, the $27-million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which opened  on May 28, 2007, and the “Ark Encounter,” which opens July 7, and bills itself as a “one-of-a-kind, historically themed attraction” and at 510 feet in length, “the largest timber-frame structure in the United States.”

Plait accuses Ham of refusing to listen to “anything science has to say” and propagating falsehoods.

Writes Plait: “And I know this for a fact. That’s because Ham took to Twitter recently, posting a series of tweets that are not just wrong, but completely wrong, again demonstrating not just a misunderstanding of the topic, but a deep – I daresay fundamental – lack of understanding of even the most basic facts about the science he’s trying to deny.”

OK.

As a Catholic, I don’t really have a dog in this race or fight, as the idiom goes.

As Pope Francis noted, speaking to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 2014, theories such as the Big Bang and evolution are not contrary to Catholic beliefs. Nothing Plait writes here is beyond the pale theologically for Catholics. But at the same time, as fashionable as it is intellectually to do so, we don’t dismiss creationism and folks like Ken Ham out of hand either. Why is that? Could have something to so with the fact professing Christians subscribe to a religion whose origin rests on accepting on faith the truth claim the founder rose from the dead after three days. The resurrection is the lynchpin of Christianity. In Chapter 15, Verses 14 to 19, of the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Church at Corinth, he writes of the resurrection of Jesus as being the central doctrine in Christianity: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” Paul observed. And if Christ has not been raised, he added, God is being misrepresented because “we testified of God that he raised Christ.” Therefore, if Christ has not been raised, “your faith is futile: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”

The entire Christian faith hinges upon the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day, and the hope for a life after our own death.

“Credo in Deum – ‘I believe in God’ the opening words of the Apostle’s Creed.” Managing director Margo Smith, and her sister-in-law, Kathie Smith, who in 1996 purchased Hull’s Family Bookstores in Winnipeg, which has been in business since 1919, from the Hull family, suggested on their website in 2014: “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! should include the fact that all two billion members of the 30,000-plus Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic denominations of the Christian church today, can agree on one statement of faith: The Apostles’ Creed. If it’s been a sufficient statement for the church for nearly 19 centuries, then it’s a sufficient statement to describe what we believe at Hull’s Family Bookstores.”

If you profess to be a Christian, with the Apostles’ Creed, this is what you are assenting to:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.   I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.

While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975.

If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection.

Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence. In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.

Catholics think in terms of cosmological evolution, biological evolution and human evolution. One’s opinion concerning one of these areas does not dictate what one believes concerning others.

People usually take three basic positions on the origins of the cosmos, life and humans: special or instantaneous creation; developmental creation or theistic evolution; and non-theistic or random forces evolution.

The first theory holds that a given thing did not develop, but was instantaneously and directly created by God. The second position holds that a given thing did develop from a previous state or form, but that this process was under God’s guidance. The third claims that a thing developed due to random forces alone.

Related to the question of how the universe, life, and man arose is the question of when they arose? Those who attribute the origin of all three to special creation often hold that they arose at about the same time, perhaps 6,000- to-10,000 years ago. Those who attribute all three to non-theistic evolution have a much longer time scale. They generally hold the universe to be 10 billion to 20 billion years old, life on earth to be about four billion years old, and modern man –homo sapiens – to be about 30,000  years old.

Those who believe in varieties of developmental creation hold dates used by either or both of the other two positions. Around 13.82 billion years is the current best estimate for the age of the universe by those in the non-theistic camp. “Until recently,” says the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “astronomers estimated that the Big Bang occurred between 12 and 14 billion years ago. To put this in perspective, the solar system is thought to be 4.5 billion years old and humans have existed as a genus for only a few million years. Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: by looking for the oldest stars; and by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang; just as crime detectives can trace the origin of a bullet from the holes in a wall.”

While there are definite parameters to the Catholic position on the origins of the cosmos, life and humans, much also concerning the belief or unbelief in evolution remains unsettled.

“Concerning cosmological evolution,” a tract from Catholic Answers, the El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating says, “the Church has infallibly defined that the universe was specially created out of nothing [ex nihlo]. Vatican I solemnly defined that everyone must ‘confess the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing’ (Canons on God the Creator of All Things, canon 5).  “The Church does not have an official position on whether the stars, nebulae, and planets we see today were created at that time or whether they developed over time (for example, in the aftermath of the Big Bang that modern cosmologists discuss). However, the Church would maintain that, if the stars and planets did develop over time, this still ultimately must be attributed to God and his plan, for scripture records: ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host [stars, nebulae, planets] by the breath of his mouth’ (Psalm 33:6).

“Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.

“Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms, under God’s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul. Pope Pius XII declared that ‘the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions … take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – [but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God’ (Pius XII, Humani Generis 36), a papal encyclical promulgated on Aug. 12, 1950. “So whether the human body was specially created or developed, we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.

“While the Church permits belief in either special creation or developmental creation on certain questions, it in no circumstances permits belief in atheistic evolution,” says Catholic Answers, which received the nihil obstat (no objection) imprimatur for setting out the position of the Church “free of doctrinal or moral errors” from Bernadeane Carr, the director of the San Diego Diocesan Institute in Chula Vista, California, and the censor librorum of the Diocese of San Diego, and the imprimatur in accord with the 1983 Code of Canon Law (CIC) 827, which is where the Church’s norms on the authorization of books and other written materials is primarily found, and where permission to publish the work by now Bishop emeritus Robert Brom of the Diocese of San Diego was given in August 2004.

“Much less has been defined as to when the universe, life, and man appeared,” notes Catholic Answers. “The Church has infallibly determined that the universe is of finite age – that it has not existed from all eternity – but it has not infallibly defined whether the world was created only a few thousand years ago or whether it was created several billion years ago.

“Catholics should weigh the evidence for the universe’s age by examining biblical and scientific evidence. “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth (Catechism of the Catholic Church 159).

“The contribution made by the physical sciences to examining these questions is stressed by the Catechism, which states, ‘The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers (CCC 283).

“It is outside the scope of this tract to look at the scientific evidence, but a few words need to be said about the interpretation of Genesis and its six days of creation. While there are many interpretations of these six days, they can be grouped into two basic methods of reading the account – a chronological reading and a topical reading.

“According to the chronological reading, the six days of creation should be understood to have followed each other in strict chronological order. This view is often coupled with the claim that the six days were standard 24-hour days.

“Some have denied that they were standard days on the basis that the Hebrew word used in this passage for day (yom) can sometimes mean a longer-than-24-hour period (as it does in Genesis 2:4). However, it seems clear that Genesis 1 presents the days to us as standard days. At the end of each one is a formula like, ‘And there was evening and there was morning, one day’ (Genesis. 1:5). Evening and morning are, of course, the transition points between day and night (this is the meaning of the Hebrew terms here), but periods of time longer than 24 hours are not composed of a day and a night. Genesis is presenting these days to us as 24-hour, solar days. If we are not meant to understand them as 24-hour days, it would most likely be because Genesis 1 is not meant to be understood as a literal chronological account.

“That is a possibility.” Pope Pius XII warned us, ’What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East’ (Divino Afflante Spiritu 35–36).

“This leads us to the possibility that Genesis 1 is to be given a non-chronological, topical reading. Advocates of this view point out that, in ancient literature, it was common to sequence historical material by topic, rather than in strict chronological order.

“The argument for a topical ordering notes that at the time the world was created, it had two problems – it was “formless and empty’ (Genesis 1:2). In the first three days of creation, God solves the formlessness problem by structuring different aspects of the environment.

“On day one he separates day from night; on day two he separates the waters below (oceans) from the waters above (clouds), with the sky in between; and on day three he separates the waters below from each other, creating dry land. Thus the world has been given form.

“But it is still empty, so on the second three days God solves the world’s emptiness problem by giving occupants to each of the three realms he ordered on the previous three days. Thus, having solved the problems of formlessness and emptiness, the task he set for himself, God’s work is complete and he rests on the seventh day.

“The argument is that all of this is real history, it is simply ordered topically rather than chronologically, and the ancient audience of Genesis, it is argued, would have understood it as such.

“Even if Genesis 1 records God’s work in a topical fashion, it still records God’s work – things God really did.

“The Catechism explains that “scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day” (CCC 337), but “nothing exists that does not owe its existence to God the Creator. The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history is rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun (CCC 338).

“It is impossible to dismiss the events of Genesis 1 as a mere legend. They are accounts of real history, even if they are told in a style of historical writing that Westerners do not typically use.

“It is equally impermissible to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve and the fall (Genesis. 2–3) as a fiction. A question often raised in this context is whether the human race descended from an original pair of two human beings (a teaching known as monogenism) or a pool of early human couples (a teaching known as polygenism).

“In this regard, Pope Pius XII stated: ‘When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own’ (Humani Generis 37).

“The story of the creation and fall of man is a true one, even if not written entirely according to modern literary techniques. The Catechism states ‘The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents” (CCC 390).

“The Catholic Church has always taught that ‘no real disagreement can exist between the theologian and the scientist provided each keeps within his own limits … If nevertheless there is a disagreement … it should be remembered that the sacred writers, or more truly ‘the Spirit of God who spoke through them, did not wish to teach men such truths (as the inner structure of visible objects) which do not help anyone to salvation’; and that, for this reason, rather than trying to provide a scientific exposition of nature, they sometimes describe and treat these matters either in a somewhat figurative language or as the common manner of speech those times required, and indeed still requires nowadays in everyday life, even amongst most learned people’ (Providentissimus Deus 18), Pope Leo XIII’s papal encyclical on the study of holy scripture, promulgated on Nov. 18, 1893.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church, approved in June 1992 by now St. Pope John Paul II puts it, “Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things the of the faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are” (CCC 159). The Catholic Church has no fear of science or scientific discovery.”

So while I have no problem with Plait’s criticism of Ham here, I think his promotion of scientific skepticism unfortunately shades into stereotypically characterizing creationists such as Ham as nothing more than no-nothing, redneck Hillbillies. Ham, 64, a former high school science teacher, who lives in Kentucky, was born in Australia, and first rejected what he termed “molecules-to-man evolution” during high school, and became influenced by American young earth creationists John Clement Whitcomb, Jr. and Henry Madison Morris’ 1961 book The Genesis Flood, while studying in college in 1974. Ham holds a Bachelor of Applied Science undergraduate degree from Queensland Institute of Technology, and a diploma in education from the University of Queensland, which allowed him to teach high school science for five years in Australia during the mid-to-late 1970s. He left his position in 1979 and co-founded what was to be later known as the Creation Science Foundation (CSF).

Then there is a guy like Jim Mason, a Lakefield, Ontario area retired nuclear physicist, who lectures on the evangelical church circuit as a young earth creationist with Creation Ministries International (CMI)-Canada. I’ve written a couple of newspaper stories and bog posts about Mason since April 2012, including most recently “Bear witness: The faith journey of electronic warfare experimental nuclear physicist Jim Mason to born-again Christian and young earth creationist” in April 2015 at: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/04/18/bear-witness-the-faith-journey-of-electronic-warfare-experimental-nuclear-physicist-jim-mason-to-born-again-christian-and-young-earth-creationist/

I’ve heard Mason, who has a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and who spent 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems, speak twice in the last several years, and he just doesn’t fit the no-nothing country bumpkin rube stereotype Plait seems so ready to buy into when it comes to young earth creationists. For the first 20 years of his career, Mason developed passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.

Mason grew up in a mainline Protestant church but left Christianity behind after taking Geology 101 in the first year of his bachelor of science engineering physics undergraduate program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He resumed his faith journey in mainstream Protestantism in his late 30s, mainly because he and his wife, Rosemary, thought it would be good for their two young girls.

He was almost 40 when he attended an evangelical church in response to the invitation of a friend and neighbour and subsequently became a born-again Christian.

Interestingly, even as an evangelical at first, Mason continued to believe in the theory of evolution, including the evolutionary account of origins and the Big Bang theory, the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution, which posits that the universe was in a very high density state and then expanded. If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond where they are valid there is a singularity, the theory’s proponents argue, with modern measurements placing this moment at approximately 13.82 billion years ago, which they thus consider the age of the universe.

It wasn’t until he attended a weekend seminar conducted by young earth creation scientists that Mason came to believe that science and scripture were completely coherent and soon became concerned about how evolution is used as a means to avoid confronting the claims of Jesus, he said.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection. Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence.

Mason’s field of expertise, according to a July 2011 interview he did for Creation Ministries International with Jonathan Sarfati, an Australian physical chemist and spectroscopist, who is a fellow CMI scientist and co-editor of the quarterly Creation magazine, which can be found online at http://creation.com/jim-mason-nuclear-physicist, includes radiometric dating techniques, which measure the ratio of the radioactive parent element to the stable daughter element in, say, a sample of rock today, inferring the age through calculations that typically give wildly erroneous ages, Mason argues, saying carbon dating, properly understood, supports young earth creationism.

After completing his PhD studies at McMaster University, Mason spent a year teaching in the faculty of the physics department at the University of Windsor in southwestern Ontario.

He then spent the next 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems. The first 20 years he spent developing passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.

Mason argues for a literal interpretation of the 50-chapter Book of Genesis, saying the first 11 chapters are “foundational.” According to Mason, the so-called “long ages” and Big Bang theory, which explains the origin and evolution of the universe using the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmological concordance model, estimating the age of the universe as being 12 to 14 billion years old, cannot be reconciled with the Bible as “Adam and Eve disappear, original sin disappears, death through sin disappears, the need for a Saviour disappears and indeed, in the end, salvation and eternal life disappear.”

As I said earlier, as a Catholic, I don’t really have a dog in this race or fight. Much concerning the belief or unbelief in evolution remains unsettled. Catholics are free to believe in creationism and a young earth; they are also equally free to believe in an old earth, keeping in mind, one would hope, the centuries-old cautions of two doctors of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine.

“One should not try to defend the Christian faith with arguments that are so patently opposed to reason that the faith is made to look ridiculous… irrisio infidelium [which translates to the mockery of the infidels], the scorn of the unbelievers,“ said St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century. Likewise, in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote in A Commentary on Genesis: Two Books against the Manichees, unfinished works he wrote between 388 and 418 Anno Domini (AD):

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

“The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men … Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by these who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

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What if the 22nd century means staying at home with long-distance travel a thing of the past?

A child born next year will have a reasonable chance of living to see the dawn of the 22^nd century should they make it to the age of about 85. While that’s not quite the statistical life expectancy yet in most of the developed world, it’s pretty close especially for women. So while it’s no sure thing, it’s not an unreasonable bet either.

The thing is this though. When we think of the future we tend to see it in a sort of sci-fi world of limitless technological progress when it comes to the general shape of things to come. We may not see the specifics, but we think we know the trend lines. After all, all we have to do is look back on our own past to see how far we’ve come. I was born in 1957. That’s only 58 years ago. Yet the world I live in today little resembles the world I was born into. A glance at the front page of any old newspaper (remember newspapers?) or photograph of any cityscape will quickly confirm that. So imagine being born in 2016 and what the year 2101 might look like, as the 22^nd century dawns on Jan. 1, 2101?

Perhaps there is a bit of Buckminster Fuller, the noted American futurist who died in 1983 at the age of 87, after a lifetime spent designing things like Dymaxion houses, cars and maps ™ for his Dymaxion Corporation in Bridgeport, Connecticut, geodesic domes for his Geodesics, Inc., Forest Hills, New York, as well as being the architect between 1965 and 1967 of the United States Pavilion for Expo ’67, the Montreal World’s Fair, in most of my generation.

I still have my cherished copy of The Globe and Mail from Monday, July 21, 1969. I’ve been lugging that paper around – Oshawa, Peterborough, Boston, Durham, North Carolina, Kingston, Ottawa, Yellowknife, Halifax, Sackville, New Brunswick, Thompson, and no doubt a few places I’ve overlooked, for some 46 years now.

The 72-point “going to war” main headline that day – in green yet, at a time when colour printing was rare in newspapers, marked one of humanity’s historic moments: “MAN ON MOON” read that main headline with a bold black second deck subhead: “‘Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.’”

For a 12-year-old boy, it spoke to my imagination in a way nothing ever had before. The Sixties, which I was too young to fully appreciate, were coming to an end. But this I knew with the moon landing: This was a world, as Expo 67 in Montreal had suggested, where all things technological were truly possible.

The “lede” to the main story, as we quirkly spell lead in newspaperspeak, was elegant in its simplicity. Globe and Mail reporters David Spurgeon and Terrance Wills, in a double bylined story datelined Houston and filed from NASA’s Mission Control, wrote: “Man walked on the moon last night.”

In a “special message” delivered on May 25, 1961 to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” U.S. President John F. Kennedy had said, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”

Ah, 1969.

To put in perspective just how remarkable the achievement was, the world of 1969 was largely a world without ATMs (they wouldn’t become commonplace until the early 1980s, although the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969, just 4½ months after the Apollo 11 moon mission.

The quartz watch was introduced in 1969 and was considered a revolutionary improvement in watch technology because instead of a balance wheel, which oscillated at five beats per second, it used a quartz crystal resonator which vibrated at 8,192 Hz, driven by a battery powered oscillator circuit.

And, of course, the first message transmitted over the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the military forerunner to today’s civilian Internet, was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline from an SDS Sigma 7– a computer the size of a one-bedroom apartment – to Bill Duvall, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California on Oct. 29, 1969.

The website FutureTimeline.net, found at http://www.futuretimeline.net predicts that by 2100 “human intelligence is being vastly amplified by AI (Artificial Intelligence), “while Nomadic floating cities are roaming the oceans” and “Emperor penguins face extinction.”

Says FutureTimeline.net: “Ubiquitous, large-scale automation has led to vast swathes of human employees being replaced by virtual or robotic counterparts. Strong AI now occupies almost every level of business, government, the military, manufacturing and service sectors.

“Rather than being separate entities, these AI programs are often merged with human minds, greatly extending the latter’s capability. For instance, knowledge and skills on any subject can now be downloaded and stored directly within the brain. As well as basic information and data, this includes physical abilities. A person can learn self-defence, for example, become an expert in any sport, or be taught to operate a new vehicle, all within a matter of seconds.

“At the dawn of the 22nd century, many of the world’s cities lie partially submerged due to rising sea levels. Despite some attempts to build flood defences, even famous locations – such as New York, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Sydney – have been effected. With over 10 per cent of the world’s population living on coastlines, hundreds of millions have been forced to migrate.

“While many citizens have abandoned their homelands, a growing number have adopted a new means of living which does away with national boundaries altogether. This comes in the form of floating, artificial islands – entirely self-sufficient and able to cruise around the world indefinitely.

“These ships provide comfort, safety and security, in stark contrast to the upheaval and chaos experienced by many land dwellers. In addition to a continuous supply of food and freshwater, various facilities are available including virtual reality suites, state-of-the-art android servants/companions, swimming pools, landing pads for anti-grav vehicles and much more. Carefully maintained arboretums with real trees can also be found on board (flora which is becoming increasingly rare these days).

“The world has been transformed by this fusion of people and machines. The vastly greater power of AI means that it has become, at the same time, both master and servant to the human race.

“The benefits of this human-AI merger require the extensive use of implants, however – something which a significant minority of the population still refuses to accept. Compared to transhumans, these non-upgraded humans are becoming like cavemen – thousands of years behind in intellectual development. Unable to comprehend the latest technology, the world around them appears “fast” and “strange” from their increasingly limited perspective. This is creating a major division in society.”

This is a technological but also in some ways disturbingly dystopian view of the not-so-distant future.

But what about if the trip to 2101 and the 22nd century turns out to be not so much like the 20th century and those magnificent men in their flying machines but more like the Dark Ages in Western Europe with the eclipse of civilization that began with the sacking of Rome on Aug. 24, 410 by Alaric and the Visigoths and ending on Nov. 27, 1095 with Pope Urban II’s call of Deus vult!, or “God wills it!”, summoning Christians in Europe to a war against Islamic Saracens in order to reclaim Jerusalem and the Holy Land, as he launched the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont at the Church of Notre-Dame du Port in Auvergne, France?

At the moment, I am in the midst of reading (well actually listening in one case) to two books, one fictional, the other speculative, that point to just how quickly we could be making such a trip back to a modern-day equivalent to the Dark Ages of the 5^th to 11^th centuries.

New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, her fourth novel, published last year, is centered around the fictional but not so implausible in the-world-after-SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 and the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 “Georgia Flu,” a flu pandemic so lethal and named after the former Soviet republic that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed. Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year for the British Columbia-born writer. It all begins when the character of 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack while on stage performing the role of King Lear at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.

As the novel picks up some 20 years later, “there is no more Toronto,” Sigrid Nunezsept noted in the Sept. 12, 2104 New York Times book review “Shakespeare for Survivors.” In fact, “There is no Canada, no United States. All countries and borders have vanished. There remain only scattered small towns.”

Airplanes are permanently grounded and used as cold storage facilities. There are no hospitals or clinics.

But there is the “Travelling Symphony” made up of “20 or so musicians and actors in horse-drawn wagons who roam from town to town in an area around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan,” Nunezsept writes. “At each stop the Symphony entertains the public with concerts and theatrical performances – mostly Shakespeare because, as the troupe has learned, this is what audiences prefer.”

While mathematician and complexity scientist John Casti suffered his own self-inflicted plague of plagiarism problems elsewhere more than a decade ago, his 2012 book, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything, which looks at scientific modelling and prediction computer simulation as to how social “mood” can affect future trends and extreme events, is nonetheless a clarion warning as to how easy it would be to slip suddenly into a new Dark Ages.

Casti’s book looks at how the global food supply system could collapse, the “digital darkness” that would come from a widespread and prolonged failure of the Internet, what a continent-wide electromagnetic pulse (EMG) would do to electronics, and how we may have reached peak oil in 2000 (although not immediately apparent perhaps with West Texas Intermediate crude oil at the benchmark price of about US$35 per barrel, a seven-year low) and how any of those scenarios leave us vulnerable in overly complex technological societies to an “X-event” that would send us back to a pre-modern world – and again, a world without air or other long-distance travel – virtually overnight.

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Bajrangi Bhaijaan plays to packed house at Strand Theatre July 18: Eid al-Fitr holiday marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan for Muslims and is celebrated by Hindi Bollywood cinema’s Salman Khan

Several thousand Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs from India and Pakistan call Thompson, Manitoba home, with hundreds more arriving each year, yet the scale of their collective and growing presence is perhaps best appreciated through the lens of their religious and festive holidays, such as Eid al-Fitr, which began for the world’s almost 1.57 billion Muslims July 17, with the arrival of the  astronomical new moon on the Islamic Hijri lunar calendar, with the crescent first visible over Chile July 16.

The Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan for Muslims is also traditionally celebrated by Hindi Bollywood cinema from Salman Khan and Thompson loves Bollywood and Salman Khan. Surprised? Well, mull on this for a minute. Statistics Canada’s  voluntary National Household Survey (NHS) from the May 2011 census, the first results from which were released May 8, 2013, enumerated by way of example, that adherents of Hinduism outnumbered Pentecostals by 300 to 290 in Thompson, but they also outnumbered many other Christian denominations as well. Their growth in numbers has been and continues to be explosive.

There were 50 self-identified Hindus here as recently as 12 years ago. There were also more Hindus in Thompson in 2011 than there were self-identified Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians and Christian Orthodox. That, of course, may not be so much of a surprise to anyone who has been to Hindu Prathna Samaj of Thompson’s Navratri festivities in the fall.

There were also 130 Muslims and 80 Sikhs in Thompson enumerated, during that last voluntary Statistics Canada National Household Survey (NHS) four years ago, and their numbers, too, have surely increased since the 2011 census.

So, yes, Bollywood, a word used since the early 1970s to describe the Hindi-language film industry, based in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, in India, is a big deal in Thompson. The Strand Theatre, they city’s only movie theatre, and one of Thompson’s oldest entertainment spots, having opened at 111 Churchill Dr. in 1960, was packed Saturday night for the highly-emotive Bajrangi Bhaijaan, released worldwide only a day earlier for Eid al-Fitr, and starring Salman Khan, one of Bollywood’s biggest stars.

The narrative has the Indian character Pawan, played by 49-year-old Khan, portraying a devotee of the monkey deity Bajrang Bali, guiding home to her Himalayan village in Pakistan, Shahida, a lost and mute six-year-old Kashmiri girl, played by Harshaali Malhotra, who in real life just turned seven last month, and who becomes separated in the movie near the border frontier in India from her mother during a Lahore-Delhi train crossing  from Pakistan to India.  Given that Shahida doesn’t speak, Pawan must interpret the clues she inadvertently provides, such as feeling more comfortable around mosques than temples, and her elation when she sees Pakistan defeat its arch-rival India (both republics joined the Commonwealth in 1947) in cricket on television, to discover where exactly he is supposed to be returning her. The North American analogy would be looking for a needle in a haystack. And the perilous journey, of course, also plays out in an area fraught with international geo-political tensions and potential worldwide nuclear ramifications in any dispute on the sub-continent between India and Pakistan should it involve the Kashmir Valley, under Indian control behind the Line of Control, the de facto border established as the military control line between India and Pakistan in 1971.

While some of Bajrangi Bhaijaan was shot in New Delhi, Mandawa in the Jhunjhunu district and Shekhawati region of Rajasthan State in northern India, with its grand havelis, or private mansions, and maze-like bylanes, stood in for Pakistan, and much of the movie was shot in the Kashmir Valley, which has no cinemas of its own, in places like Pahalgam and nearby Aru, noted for its scenic meadows and located in the Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir State; atop the 11,700-foot Zoji La mountain pass at Srinagar, where it was a below freezing -2°C in mid-May during near final shooting; and the climax shot at the 10,000-foot level at the base of the Thajiwas glacier outside Sonamarg.

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Shrived by the confessor: Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday arrive for penitents as the liturgical season of Lent is upon us, but not before one last rich feast of pancakes Feb. 17 as shrovetide ends

Fat Tuesday. Mardi Gras.  Máirt Inide. Dydd Mawrth Ynyd.  Fastnacht. Fastelavn. Sprengidagur.  Güdisdienstag. Vastlapäev.  Užgavėnės.  Fettisdagen. Laskiainen. Shrove Tuesday. Call it what you will, but make sure you eat – and eat big and eat rich – on this moveable feast, based on the lunar cycles of the moon, and celebrated around the world, falling this year on Feb. 17 – next Tuesday – the last day of shrovetide before the penitential season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is its colloquial name.  Dating to the A.D. 900s, the official name is the Day of Ashes.

“Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return,” will be said by Catholic priests in churches around the world Wednesday, as they make the distinctive of signing the foreheads of the faithful with the sign of the cross in ashes, blessed by a priest and made from burning palm fronds which have been saved from last year’s Palm Sunday masses.  Blessed ashes having been used in such religious  rituals since the time of Moses.

The historical reason that pancakes are associated with the day preceding Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent is that the 40 days of Lent form a period of liturgical fasting, during which only the plainest foodstuffs are eaten by the devout. Therefore, rich ingredients such as eggs, milk, and sugar are disposed of immediately prior to the commencement of the fast.

Pancakes and doughnuts are an efficient way of using up these perishable goods. The word shrove is a past tense of the English verb “shrive,” which means to obtain absolution for one’s sins by confessing and doing penance.

Shrove Tuesday gets its name from the shriving or confession that Anglo-Saxon Christians made immediately before Lent, a season of soul-searching and repentance.

For Roman Catholics, Lent runs from Ash Wednesday on Feb. 18 up to but excluding the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday on April 2. The evening of Holy Thursday is already part of the Good Friday liturgical day, the first of the three days of the paschal triduum, so it is not liturgically a part of Lent in the Roman Catholic Church, although it is still reckoned as part of the “40 days of Lent,” because the paschal triduum begins the evening of Holy Thursday and concludes with the evening vespers of Easter. The triduum includes Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and reaches it high point at the Great Easter Vigil. The name “Maundy” comes from the Latin antiphon Mandatum Novum, meaning “a new mandate.” The new mandate from Jesus is taken from John 13:34: “Love one another as I have loved you.”

In many mainline Protestant churches, Maundy Thursday is still liturgically part of Lent since many do not recognize the triduum as distinct from Lent.

In regards to fasting and abstinence for Roman Catholics during Lent, particular regulations vary in each country according to the norms established by national episcopal conferences and approved by the Holy See, so it is not always easy to know what regulations are in force. The Ottawa-based Canadian Conference of Catholics Bishops (CCCB) says, “Fasting means cutting down on the amount and richness of our food and drink. Done as a penance for sin, it helps us to pray better: an empty stomach can lead to more attentive prayer. The money we save on food should be given to others in alms, In reference to abstinence, the Canadian bishops go onto say, “This form of penance needs to be seen as a near cousin of fasting. We may give up meat or other desirable foods on one or two days a week during Lent, especially on Friday, the day of Christ’s saving death on the cross. Our abstinence is another way of sharing in Christ’s work of saving the world.”

The norms for Canada are based on the Canadian Conference of Catholics Bishops’ Order of Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours and Celebration of the Eucharist, known more commonly and simply as the Ordo, which is essentially a guide for clergy in Canada, updated from time to time, to aid in preparation of the liturgy. The Ordo dates back to the Middle Ages:

•  All Fridays are days of abstinence from meat, but Catholics may substitute special acts of charity
  or piety on this day;
•  The paschal fast is observed on Good Friday and, where possible, continued through Holy
  Saturday;
•  Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are days of fasting and abstinence from meat;
•  The law of abstinence from meat binds those who are 14 and older; the law of fasting binds
  those from 18 to 59 years of age.

While Canadian bishops have placed particular insistence on Fridays of Lent as days of penance, the “manner of fulfilling this duty is left to the discretion of the faithful.” (National Bulletin on Liturgy, 42 – from the 1966 statement of the CCCB on Penance).

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Referendums and historic newspapers … ‘we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969’

One of the benefits of being something of a collector of old newspapers is that it gives one the opportunity to do some shuffling and sorting in seldom opened bankers boxes when spurred on by some historic event such as today’s referendum on the 307-year-old union between Scotland and England. The fact none of my stored newspapers likely have anything to do with earlier Scottish news is largely beside the point. After all, surely there might be something on the first Quebec Referendum  of May 20, 1980 or the photo-finish second Quebec Referendum on Oct. 30, 1995 to take another look at today?

Or not.

But the search was by no means time wasted. It lead to me uncovering a cherished copy of The Globe and Mail from Monday, July 21, 1969. I’ve been lugging that paper around – Oshawa, Peterborough, Boston, Durham, North Carolina, Kingston, Ottawa, Yellowknife, Halifax, Sackville, New Brunswick, Thompson, and no doubt a few places I’ve overlooked, for 45 years now.

The 72-point “going to war” main headline that day– in green yet, at a time when colour printing was rare in newspapers, marked one of humanity’s historic moments: “MAN ON MOON” read that main headline with a bold black second deck subhead: “‘Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed'”

For a 12-year-old boy, it spoke to my imagination in a way nothing ever had before. The Sixties, which I was too young to fully appreciate, were coming to an end. But this I knew with the moon landing: This was a world, as Expo 67 in Montreal had suggested, where all things technological were truly possible.

The “lede” to the main story, as we quirkily spell lead in newspaperspeak, was elegant in its simplicity. Globe and Mail reporters David Spurgeon and Terrance Wills, in a double bylined story datelined Houston and filed from NASA’s Mission Control, wrote: “Man walked on the moon last night.”

In a “special message” delivered on May 25, 1961 to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” U.S. President John F. Kennedy had said, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”

Ah, 1969.

To put in perspective just how remarkable the achievement was, the world of 1969 was largely a world without ATMs (they wouldn’t become commonplace until the early 1980s, although the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969, just 4½ months after the Apollo 11 moon mission.

The quartz watch was introduced in 1969 and was considered a revolutionary improvement in watch technology because instead of a balance wheel, which oscillated at five beats per second, it used a quartz crystal resonator which vibrated at 8,192 Hz, driven by a battery powered oscillator circuit.

And, of course, the first message transmitted over the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the military forerunner to today’s civilian Internet, was sent by UCLA student programer Charley Kline from an SDS Sigma 7– a computer the size of a one-bedroom apartment – to Bill Duvall, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California Oct. 29, 1969.

It was quite a year, 1969. Or as the Eagles noted in their 1976 seemingly ubiquitous title track from the album, Hotel California …we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.”