Christmas Tales

Christmas columns of yesteryear still light the darkness of December

It is Christmas 1996. I am working as the managing editor of The Kingston Net-Times, during the pioneering days of Canadian online journalism. From day one, we published no print edition and our local stories in that groundbreaking digital newspaper were updated on the fly throughout the day, but there were few bells and whistles, as very, very few of our online readers had cable broadband internet in 1996. Who remembers dial-up?

On Christmas Day 1996, I was called at home by a father who read us online and wondered if we could take a few minutes to put up the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” letter to the editor and the editorial response for his young daughter.

The letter and editorial had long been in the public domain. So we did. On Christmas Day.

Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote the long-ago letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.

A decade later, editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News weekly newspapers here in Northern Manitoba, I resumed publishing the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” letter to the editor from 2007 to 2013:

Dear Editor:

Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon
115 West Ninety-fifth Street
New York

In his editorial, Francis Pharcellus Church replied:

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world, which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Above the reprinted editorial I would append a bold-faced and italicized introduction, which read:

“Editor’s note: Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial. We, at the Thompson Citizen, are pleased to be part of that tradition and republishing it at Christmas has become an annual hallmark of the festive season for us here as well since Dec. 19, 2007. Merry Christmas, one and all.

John Barker.”

You can also read it in full here at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/editorial/yes-virginia-there-is-a-santa-claus-1.1367424

While at the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I also much enjoyed re-printing for a number of years Garwood Robb’s “A special gift from years ago” as a guest “Soundings” column on the editorial page around Christmas:

“My first teaching assignment was in Thompson in 1968. Mary was a student of mine. She was from an extremely poor and dysfunctional family who lived on the edge of town about a quarter mile from the town’s railway station.

“On the last day of school before Christmas holidays many of the students brought me gifts. Mary never had any money and quite often came to school without lunch. The family was so poor that she shared boots and a winter coat with her brother. One day Alvin got to wear the coat, the next day Mary. For her to bring me a gift was special. It was small wrapped in Kleenex and tied with a piece of dirty string.

“When I opened it, there was a beautiful gold tie bar with a bright red ruby in the centre. In those days men had to wear suits and ties everyday to class. I thanked her for it while reassuring the other students that Mary had not stolen it. In actual fact she had; from the principal’s desk, the previous day.

“Mary was a loveable child, 12 years old in Grade 4. Students failed in those days and she had been held back several times. She lived with her mother and her two brothers, one older, one younger in a dilapidated weather-beaten shack. Money and food were always scarce for her family. Quite often I would see Mary begging for money on the street in front of the Thompson Inn on a Saturday night. After Christmas when I returned to Thompson I brought back a doll for Mary from Eaton’s. I secretly sent it home with her so the other girls in my class wouldn’t be jealous and so they wouldn’t say anything to hurt her. Mary had never had a doll and even at 12 that was all she wanted.

“The following winter while the children were home alone, fire destroyed Mary’s home in the middle of the night. Mary and her two siblings perished in the blaze.

“Every Christmas for nearly 40 years when I decorate our Christmas tree I unpack that gold tie bar with the red ruby and hang it in a very prominent place on the tree.

“Somewhere out there on Christmas night there is a shining star of a little girl who had a heart of gold but never had enough chances to show it.”

The column was first published in the Grandview Exponent, which serves the communities of Grandview and Gilbert Plains in the Parkland region of Manitoba, on Dec. 20, 2005, and later republished in Garwood Robb’s blog, “In My Own Words,” which is no longer available online at http://garwood2009.blogspot.ca/2009/12/memory-from-long-agorevisited.html but can still be read at https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/soundings-4274851

Garwood lived on Centennial Drive East in Thompson and taught at Westwood Elementary School from September 1968 to June 1972 when he moved to Winnipeg.

Two of my other favourite columns that would find their way into print at Christmas in the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News were David J. Thompson’s “The night the lights were lit!,” which tells the story of Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and the humble origins of the modern co-operative movement:

“On Dec. 21, 1844 the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society opened a small store in England with five items and little fanfare. Thus humbly began the modern co-operative movement. Let’s step back into that time to get a sense of how co-operative history was made.

“In the summer of 1843, a 31-year-old Charles Dickens journeyed to Lancashire, to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. To feed his insatiable journalistic curiosity, he visited a workhouse in Manchester to see how the poor were surviving the “hungry forties.” Dickens was taken aback by the terrible conditions he saw in the midst of the burgeoning wealth. In the bustling heartland of the Industrial Revolution he saw the two Englands of rich and poor.

“The next day, speaking to an audience of well-to-do aristocrats and mill owners at Manchester’s prestigious Athenaeum Club, he urged the audience to overcome their ignorance which he said was “the most prolific parent of misery and crime.” Dickens asked them to take action with the workers to “share a mutual duty and responsibility” to society. On the train back to London, impacted greatly by the poverty and misery he had seen, he conceptualized A Christmas Carol. He began writing the classic Christmas story a week later and completed it in six weeks. Since the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, Christmas has never been the same.

“On the eve of revolutions throughout Europe, Dickens counselled that hearts must hear and eyes must see for society to change. In Dickens’ mind, the Bob Cratchits and Tiny Tims of the world would have to wait for the Ebenezer Scrooges to literally go through hell before heaven could be made upon Earth. Dickens later returned to the Lancashire mill towns to gather information for a later novel Hard Times. Dickens solution in much of his writing was the voluntary transformation of the rich and powerful.

“However, for Dickens, A Christmas Carol was semi-autobiographical reflecting his father having been in debtor’s prison and the suffering within his own family. It was also a social commentary on the tremendous conflicts transforming British society from top to bottom as a result of the Industrial Revolution. However, Scrooge’s peaceful transformation was not repeated enough by a self-interested industrial aristocracy. Five years later, revolutions occupied centre stage in much of Europe.

“In the summer of 1843, at the time Dickens visited Manchester a group of Bob Cratchits and their spouses were meeting regularly just 11 miles away in the nearby town of Rochdale. One of the Pioneers, John Kershaw recalled a key step in organizing the co-op,” A few days before Christmas, 1843, a circular was issued calling a delegates meeting to be held at the Weavers Arms, Cheetham Street, nearToad Toad Lane.” At that meeting, the Rochdale families decided that rather than wait for the mill owners to do something for them they just better do it for themselves. It took the determined mill workers almost two years before they had collected enough of their meagre savings to open up their small co-op. Their immediate aim was to get better quality food at decent prices and give some of them jobs. Their ultimate goal was to use the co-op’s profits to create their own community where working and living conditions would be better. Amongst the “satanic mills” they would build their “New Jerusalem.”

“The winter solstice on Dec. 21 was the longest night of the year. Under the old Gregorian calendar, Dec. 21 was also Christmas Day. The co-op opened almost one year to the day after the publication of A Christmas Carol. However for the members of the newly formed co-op called the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society the holiday season would not be one of gifts or gaiety but of consternation and caution.

“On that Saturday night at 8 p.m., a small group of the Rochdale Pioneers and their families huddled together in the shop to witness the store’s opening. The temperature was below freezing made worse by the damp in the almost empty warehouse at 31 Toad Lane (T’Owd is dialect for the old Lane) in Rochdale. Outside on the busy lane they could hear the clattering of wooden clogs on the cobbled streets. The tired mill workers were hurrying home to find warmth from the winter’s chill. As the church bells across the street struck the appointed hour, the founding members heard each chime with beating hearts. Then, James Smithies went outside and bravely took the shutters off the windows. With the final shutter removed and a few candles bravely lighting the store’s bay windows the modern cooperative movement began. This little shop in Rochdale, England would be its lowly birthplace and these humble hard working families its founders.

Thompson’s column is also available online at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/the-night-the-lights-were-lit-4279065

The other column that I quite enjoyed reprinting was “The Gold and Ivory Tablecloth” by Howard C. Schade, the pastor between 1935 and 1940 of the Second Reformed Church in Coxsackie, New York, between the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River. “The Gold and “Ivory Tablecloth, perhaps more allegorical than literally true, was originally published in the December 1954 issue of Reader’s Digest magazine. Schade wrote:

“At Christmas time men and women everywhere gather in their churches to wonder anew at the greatest miracle the world has ever known. But the story I like best to recall was not a miracle, not exactly.

“It happened to a pastor who was very young. His church was very old. Once, long ago, it had flourished. Famous men had preached from its pulpit, prayed before its altar. Rich and poor alike had worshipped there and built it beautifully. Now the good days had passed from the section of town where it stood. But the pastor and his young wife believed in their run-down church. They felt that with paint, hammer, and faith they could get it in shape. Together they went to work.

“But late in December a severe storm whipped through the river valley, and the worst blow fell on the little church, a huge chunk of rain, soaked plaster fell out of the inside wall just behind the altar. Sorrowfully the pastor and his wife swept away the mess, but they couldn’t hide the ragged hole.

“The pastor looked at it and had to remind himself quickly. “Thy will be done!” But his wife wept, “Christmas is only two days away!”

“That afternoon the dispirited couple attended the auction held for the benefit of a youth group.

“The auctioneer opened a box and shook out of its folds a handsome gold and ivory lace tablecloth. It was a magnificent item, nearly 15 feet long, but it too, dated from a long vanished era. Who, today, had any use for such a thing? There were a few half-hearted bids. Then the pastor was seized with what he thought was a great idea.

“He bid it in for $6.50.

“Just before noon on the day of Christmas Eve, as the pastor was opening the church, he noticed a woman standing in the cold at the bus stop. “The bus won’t be here for 40 minutes!” he called, and invited her into the church to get warm.

“She told him that she had come from the city that morning to be interviewed for a job as governess to the children of one of the wealthy families in town but she had been turned down. A war refugee, her English was imperfect.

“The woman sat down in a pew and chafed her hands and rested. After a while she dropped her head and prayed. She looked up as the pastor began to adjust the great gold and ivory cloth across the hole. She rose suddenly and walked up the steps of the chancel. She looked at the tablecloth. The pastor smiled and started to tell her about the storm damage, but she didn’t seem to listen. She took up a fold of the cloth and rubbed it between her fingers.

“It is mine!” she said. “It is my banquet cloth!” She lifted up a corner and showed the surprised pastor that there were initials monogrammed on it. “My husband had the cloth made especially for me in Brussels! There could not be another like it.”

“For the next few minutes the woman and the pastor talked excitedly together. She explained that she was Viennese, that she and her husband had opposed the Nazis and decided to leave the country. They were advised to go separately. Her husband put her on a train for Switzerland. They planned that he would join her as soon as he could arrange to ship their household goods across the border. She never saw him again. Later she heard that he had died in a concentration camp.

“‘I have always felt that it was my fault, to leave without him,’ she said. “Perhaps these years of wandering have been my punishment!” The pastor tried to comfort her and urged her to take the cloth with her. She refused. Then she went away.

As the church began to fill on Christmas Eve, it was clear that the cloth was going to be a great success. It had been skillfully designed to look its best by candlelight.

After the service, the pastor stood at the doorway. Many people told him that the church looked beautiful. One gentle-faced middle-aged man, he was the local cloth and watch repairman, looked rather puzzled.

“It is strange,” he said in his soft accent. “Many years ago my wife, God rest her, and I owned such a cloth. In our home in Vienna, my wife put it on the table”, and here he smiled, “only when the bishop came to dinner.”

“The pastor suddenly became very excited. He told the jeweller about the woman who had been in church earlier that day. The started jeweller clutched the pastor’s arm. “Can it be? Does she live?”

“Together the two got in touch with the family who had interviewed her. Then, in the pastor’s car they started for the city. And as Christmas Day was born, this man and his wife, who had been separated through so many saddened Yuletides, were reunited.

“To all who hear this story, the joyful purpose of the storm that had knocked a hole in the wall of the church was now quite clear. Of course, people said it was a miracle, but I think you will agree it was the season for it!

“True love seems to find a way.”

Schade’s column is also available online at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/the-gold-and-ivory-tablecloth-4275996

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

In These Times

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity….’

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Apologies to Charles Dickens for the posthumous appropriation of the immortal opening line in his 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. There were simply no better words, surely not mine anyway, to describe our present age, an age perhaps not so different than Dickens writes about here, or similarly one 28 years after Dickens’ novel appeared, and which New York Sun editor Francis Pharcellus Church described in an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897 as being an age where even children are “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.”

Robert Fulford, the noted 87-year-old Canadian journalist, magazine editor, and essayist, had an interesting piece in the National Post last March 19 (https://nationalpost.com/opinion/robert-fulford-the-worlds-a-lot-better-off-than-you-think?fbclid=IwAR1ouh4RiaSGeSe9VTzICtKe8GkzUnPcQVvlc_FBWoZMxw2ALmjQZm9ahKQ) that wound up being headlined, “The world’s a lot better off than you think.” While Fulford may or not have written the headline, I think he is right in the body of the article when he says we often don’t see this because at “the core of this difficulty is journalism’s professional obsession. We who read the papers (or write them) know that news is, more often than not, bad news. An editor I worked for used to say, ‘Every day a newspaper tells the public what went wrong in the world yesterday.’ (He wasn’t bragging.) Thousands of decisions following that pattern accrue into an attitude, which eventually becomes a reader’s habit.”

Mathematician and complexity scientist John Casti’s 2012 book, X-Events: The Collapse of Everything looked at scientific modelling and prediction computer simulation as to how social “mood” can affect future trends and extreme events, sounds a clarion warning as to how easy it would be to slip suddenly into a new Dark Ages, and how the global food supply system could collapse (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/what-if-the-22nd-century-means-staying-at-home-with-long-distance-travel-a-thing-of-the-past/). Or the “digital darkness” that would come from a widespread and prolonged failure of the internet. Or what a continent-wide electromagnetic pulse (EMG) would do to electronics, and how we may have reached peak oil in 2000, 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.

Of course, the probability of improbable events occurring in situations where one outcome is greatly favored over the other, is not necessarily a bad thing, as Malcolm Gladwell illustrated in his 2013 non-fiction book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. The book contains stories of underdogs who wind up beating the odds, the most famous, of course, being the story of David and Goliath. While I suspect someone like John Casti is also largely right that today’s advanced, overly complex societies have grown highly vulnerable to extreme events that could ultimately topple civilization like a house of cards, I don’t share his certainty they will. That perhaps sets me apart from the more apocalyptically-minded, even if it’s true I have never met a premillennial dispensational-driven Rapture movie I can resist watching. I think that Montréal-born Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, is right when he persuasively argues the modern world is driven by pessimism, but it’s actually the best moment in time to be alive.(https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-29-2018-1.4597367/why-you-should-be-happy-you-re-alive-right-now-1.4597457?fbclid=IwAR0IrFO4GE8Q-Tv0tG1vz15HsIs_J3FcFJn8ChYYrlkCC4PFHF-Y676RCUg) and (https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/hating-pinker?fbclid=IwAR2xdjk8EAAmPb2bq1BB8ulBAkWufKaFQARpUJn1wzkiuzoeb7ZxcSRPd3E)

Now I have to admit Donald Trump seriously challenges that optimism at times. Actually, pretty much all of the time. But I learned long ago as an editorial writer that prognostication is a tricky and for the most part ill-advised business. If it doesn’t make a fool of you all of the time, it will much of the time. Trump is certainly testing that thesis when it comes to my own writing. Usually, I simply write a piece and stand by it, come what may. On July 17, 2016, less than four months before he was elected president, I wrote a blog post headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage,” where I noted, “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,” which sadly still resonates some 3½ years later.

I also wrote right after the sentence above:

“But the American republic can survive this difficult historical moment. Right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.

“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 terms who served 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.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/)

While I still stand by those words, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge a Trump presidency has been far worse and more dangerous than I imagined at the time. I still believe we’ll make it through it, but it’s going to be a closer thing than I foresaw 3½ years ago. So much for prognostication. Mea culpa.

Also by way of postscript, it is perhaps also worth noting that Arnold Schwarzenegger, since he left the governor’s office almost nine years ago now, has continued rightly to grow in public stature. Writing a decade after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1978 in his book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/1968-bobby-kennedy-described-by-arthur-schlesinger-as-one-of-ralph-waldo-emersons-representative-men-for-his-times/). While Arnold Schwarzenegger is no Bobby Kennedy, I think some of what Schlesinger said about the former might be applied to the latter.

In reality, editorial writers get paid to reflect and prognosticate for posterity’s sake, especially as years, decades, centuries or millenniums come to an end or advance to new ones. As managing editor of The Independent in Brighton, Ontario, I ended my Jan. 5, 2005 editorial, headlined, “A world that is divided” with the equally cheery closing paragraph, “Disconnectedness is another word for feelings of ennui, angst, malaise and nihilism. It is corrosive and poisonous to the human spirit … a feeling of disconnectedness and marginalization – economic or otherwise – sows the seeds for despair and violence.”(http://www.eastnorthumberland.com/news/news2005/January/editorial050105.html)

“Calendars – like decades – are fairly arbitrary constructions in any event,” I wrote at the Thompson Citizen on Dec. 30, 2009. “If nothing else, Jan. 1 has the distinction of being an important psychological marker as the first day of the year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars, the former promulgated by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C., the latter by Pope Gregory XIII in A.D. 1582.

“As for decades, they may or may not coincide with a chronological 10-year period. Few would mark the start of Sixties as Jan. 1, 1960, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president of the United States. Many historians will tell you the Sixties arrived during that brief interval between the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963 and the British Invasion of the Beatles for their first North American tour three months later in February 1964.

As for the first sign of the Sixties, many of those same historians will tell you it was the disappearance of men’s fedoras – almost overnight – with the inauguration of the bareheaded Kennedy as president in January 1961. As for the end of the Sixties, well, let’s place that between Woodstock’s peace, love and music in the mud in August 1969 and the Rolling Stones Altamont Speedway Free Festival and Hells Angels concert security violence of Dec. 6, 1969. The death of 18-year-old Meredith Hunter pretty much ended the 1960s, in this case both psychically and chronologically.”

Still, I noted that even among editorial writers who consider themselves gifted prognosticators, “the wiser ones have the good sense the following December not to look back and see how many came true.”

Much, I think, is a matter of perspective about whether things are getting better or worse. And that means weighing trade-offs, which usually means at the individual level a gain in convenience at the expense of a loss in privacy and the associated risks that come with that in an online world. We make those trade-offs every day. I grew up in a world of Monday to Friday banking where you approached a teller at a metal bar wicket with a passbook and went about your business. Long lines were not uncommon. Saturday bank hours were unheard of. John Shepherd-Barron got the idea for a cash-dispensing Automated Teller Machine in 1965 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/how-many-guys-does-it-take-to-build-an-automated-teller-machine-atm-two/) while taking a bath after finding his bank closed. It was his habit to withdraw money on a Saturday, but on this particular weekend he had arrived one minute late and found the bank doors locked. He was inspired by chocolate vending machines: “It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash,” Shepherd-Barron later said. He sold his idea to London-based Barclays Bank. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969.

Without being Pollyannish about it, none of us, short of either a John Casti-like X–event, or A Canticle for Leibowitz scenario, as envisioned in American writer Walter M. Miller Jr.’s post-apocalyptic 1959 science fiction novel, are going back to pre-ATM days. Nor are we giving up being paid electronically by our employers, paying our own bills online, shopping online, as well as booking airline tickets and hotel rooms online. It isn’t going to happen. Hence the trade-off: Hacking and identity theft will remain part of our vocabulary, and part of our reality, for the foreseeable future. That’s the bargain.

Likewise, we will continue to debate supply chains and carbon footprints, while eating an abundance of fresh foods our parents couldn’t have dreamed about much less envisioned.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” paraphrasing and quoting others before him, wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in 1958 in The Gospel Messenger, the official organ of the Church of the Brethren. I think Gene Rodenberry, the Southern Baptist-turned humanist, who died in 1991, might well have agreed. A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994, as I wrote in a Sept. 24, 2018 post headlined, “Church of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the moral arc of the universe”(https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/church-of-star-trek-the-next-generation-and-the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/)

Ensign Sito Jaxa is a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise. Two years earlier while in Starfleet Academy in 2368, she was a member of Nova Squadron, along with Wesley Crusher. Under the direction of Cadet Nicholas Locarno, Nova Squadron attempted the dangerous Kolvoord Starburst maneuver during a flight exercise – an action that resulted in a collision and death of fellow cadet Joshua Albert. Jaxa and her fellow cadets lied about their flying of the illegal maneuver to a board of inquiry.

Character, courage and redemption.

Now serving on the USS Enterprise, after being handpicked by Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Jaxa was to assist a Cardassian defector, Joret Dal, return to Cardassia Prime by posing as a Bajoran prisoner captured as part of a bounty hunt, which would allow Dal to cross the border without difficulty. She would then be returned to Federation space in an escape pod, after Dal reached Cardassian territory.

Jaxa freely volunteered for the mission, and was surgically altered to appear as if Dal had abused her in his custody Dal was shocked that she was so young, but was grateful that she risked her life in order for the mission to succeed. The Enterprise-D waited more than 32 hours for her to return before Picard orders a probe to be launched into Cardassian space, despite being warned that doing so could be considered a treaty violation, but the probe only detected debris 200,000 kilometres inside Cardassian space consistent with that of a destroyed escape pod. Eventually, a Cardassian communique was intercepted indicating that the escape pod was detected and destroyed after escaping.

And then with remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge:

“To all Starfleet personnel, this is the captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XUt1HU5H8&feature=share)

Matt Ridley, the British journalist and businessman best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics, writes in a Dec. 21 piece in The Spectator (https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/weve-just-had-the-best-decade-in-human-history-seriously/) headlined, “We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously: Little of this made the news, because good news is no news” argues:

“Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.”

Ridley goes onto write, “Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.”

He also notes, “Perhaps the most surprising statistic is that Britain is using steadily less energy. John Constable of the Global Warming Policy Forum points out that although the UK’s economy has almost trebled in size since 1970, and our population is up by 20 per cent, total primary inland energy consumption has actually fallen by almost 10 per cent. Much of that decline has happened in recent years.”

“Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010,” Ridley says, “I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.”

A New Year’s Eve toast, as the 20s are about to dawn, to the irrepressible Mr. Ridley’s optimism, and the hope he is indeed right enough on the epoch.

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Books, Catholic, Eschatology, Fatima

Blessed Pope Paul VI on the ‘tail of the devil’ and ‘Smoke of Satan’ and the disintegration of the ‘Catholic world’

“The tail of the devil is functioning in the disintegration of the Catholic world,” said Blessed Pope Paul VI on Oct. 13, 1977 in a formal address marking the 60th anniversary of the sixth and final Fatima apparition – the “Miracle of the Sun” – at Fatima, Portugal on Oct. 13, 1917. “The darkness of Satan has entered and spread throughout the Catholic Church even to its summit. Apostasy, the loss of the faith, is spreading throughout the world and into the highest levels within the Church.” Blessed Pope Paul VI’s remarks on Satan indwelling even the highest levels of the Catholic Church were reported on the following day – Oct. 14, 1977 – in the Milan-based daily Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

It was not the first time Blessed Pope Paul VI had sounded such a warning. More than five years earlier, in what is now known as his “Smoke of Satan” homily delivered on June 29, 1972 on the ninth anniversary of his coronation, the Pope gave the sermon that remains perhaps the most famous and most-argued about in terms of meaning sermons the Holy Father delivered during his 15-year-plus pontificate.

The are several difficulties in analyzing the homily, delivered by Blessed Pope Paul VI, as he celebrated the mass and the beginning of the tenth year of his pontificate as successor of Saint Peter, with 30 “porporati” (cardinals) present, including Lord Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani, dean of the sacred college; Lord Cardinal Luigi Traglia, the sub-dean; Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, substitute of the secretary of state; and Archbishop Agostino Casaroli, secretary of the council for the public affairs of the church.

The homily was delivered in Italian, so it must be faithfully translated into English for many analysts to tackle it.

The translation here was provided by Father Stephanos Pedrano, O.S.B., a Benedictine monk and priest at Prince of Peace Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1958 in Oceanside, California, near San Diego. Pedrano was educated at the International Benedictine Athenaeum of St. Anselm in Rome and is fluent in Italian and the translation was rendered in 2006 at the request of Jimmy Akin, the Texas-born self-described nominal Protestant, who converted to Catholicism in 1992, and is now the senior apologist at Catholic Answers, the El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating. You can read the English translation by Pedrano of the papal homily here from Akin’s Nov. 13, 2006 blog posting at http://jimmyakin.typepad.com/defensor_fidei/2006/11/the_smoke_of_sa.html

Aside from any translation challenges, Akin quite rightly points out the Vatican-issued Italian homily (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/homilies/1972/documents/hf_p-vi_hom_19720629_it.html) is by no means a verbatim account of Blessed Pope Paul VI’s words that day, as we might expect in such a document today, but rather for the most part a “narrative summary” of the Holy Father’s homily by an anonymous narrator, although certain statements are attributed with quotation marks as direct quotes from the Pope, the most famous being “from some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” Akin argues that even if the reporting is accurate, Blessed Pope Paul VI’s 1972 remark should not be interpreted as a literal assertion “claiming that there were Satanists in the Vatican,” but rather as symbolic representation of the “cultural crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s” and secular influences among Catholics.

The enigmatic Malachi Martin had a more literal take, suggesting the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurred exactly nine years to the day earlier – on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived.

In The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, the novel for children published in October 1950, the Anglican writer C.S. Lewis, one of the leading Christian apologists of the 20th century wrote, “There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.” Catholic writer Robert Hugh Benson, author of the 1907 apocalyptic and dystopian novel Lord of the World, (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/spiritual-warfare/) , who has been quoted approvingly by Pope Francis, would have agreed with Lewis.

There is perhaps no more mysterious figure in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century than Malachi Brendan Martin, born on July 23, 1921 in Ballylongford in County Kerry, Ireland, who we remember today mainly as a best-selling New York City writer of fiction and non-fiction, where in typical Martin style, the two genres were separated, if at all, by a very blurred line at times.

He was ordained a priest for the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1954. Was he an insider at the Second Vatican Council from 1962, as peritus (expert advisor) for German Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, or more accurately a somewhat lesser figure, albeit a highly skilled linguist, translator and Semitic paleographer? Did he act as a shadowy agent or advocate for certain Jewish interests during the council? Did he read the Third Secret of Fatima? Was he a liberal or a conservative? An agent provocateur? A double agent? Was he a valid exorcist? Secretly ordained a bishop by Pope Pius XII? Was he laicized at his own request by Blessed Pope Paul VI in 1965, or just given dispensation from his vows of poverty and obedience, but not chastity? Was he chaste or a serial womanizer who seduced a string of women, including Susan Kaiser in 1964, as alleged by former TIME magazine Vatican correspondent Robert Blair Kaiser in his 2002 book Clerical Error: A True Story, published three years after Martin’s death? And speaking of Martin’s death, even that is somewhat shrouded in mystery. Martin died of a cerebral hemorrhage on July 27, 1999 due to a fall in his apartment in Manhattan, four days after his 78th birthday. More than one conspiracy theorist has argued Martin was pushed by an unseen hand.

Martin first made his claim about the Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer occurring on the day Blessed Pope Paul VI was coronated on June 29, 1963 – on the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, as the Availing Time arrived – in his 1990 purportedly non-fiction work, The Keys of This Blood: Pope John Paul II Versus Russia and the West for Control of the New World Order, where he wrote St. Pope John Paul II came “up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops’ chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the ‘superforce.’ Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of [Blessed] Pope Paul VI’s reign in 1963. Indeed Paul had alluded somberly to ‘the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary’. . . an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican.”

He revisited the theme in his 1996 blockbuster fictional novel, Wind Swept House, where Martin wrote at length near the opening of the book about it:

“The Enthronement of the Fallen Archangel Lucifer was effected within the Roman Catholic Citadel on June 29, 1963; a fitting date for the historic promise about to be fulfilled. As the principal agents of this Ceremonial well knew, Satanist tradition had long predicted that the Time of the Prince would be ushered in at the moment when a Pope would take the name of the Apostle Paul. That requirement – the signal that the Availing Time had begun – had been accomplished just eight days before with the election of the latest Peter-in-the-Line.

“There had barely been time since the papal conclave had ended for the complex arrangements to be readied; but the Supreme Tribunal had decided there could be no more perfect date for the Enthronement of the Prince than this feast day of rhe twin princes of the Citadel, SS. Peter and Paul. And there could be no more perfect place than the Chapel of St. Paul itself, situated as it was so near to the Apostolic Palace.

“The complexity of the arrangements were dictated mainly by the nature of the Ceremonial Event to be enacted. Security was so tight in the grouping of Vatican buildings within which this gem of a Chapel lay that the full panoply of the Ceremonial could not possibly escape detection here. If the aim was to be achieved – if the Ascent of the Prince was actually to be accomplished in the Availing Time – then every element of the Celebration of the Calvary Sacrifice must be turned on its head by the other and opposite Celebration. The sacred must be profaned. The profane must be adored. The unbloody representation of the Sacrifice of the Nameless Weakling on the Cross must be replaced by the supreme and bloody violation of the dignity of the Nameless One. Guilt must be accepted as innocence. Pain must give joy. Grace, repentance, pardon must all be drowned in an orgy of opposites. And it must all be done without mistakes. The sequence of events, the meaning of the words, the significance of the actions must all comprise the perfect enactment of sacrilege, the ultimate ritual of treachery. ”

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