The present day solemnity of Remembrance Day can be attributed to a Fleet Street journalist in London in 1919

 

People took to the streets around the world to celebrate en masse the end of the first truly global war. Any cursory search of a newspaper or library archive will produce an abundance of black-and-white scenes of jubilation when the First World War ended Nov. 18, 1918 – 105 years ago this coming Saturday.

Over by Christmas. But not.

“Late on Christmas Eve 1914,” writes Amanda Mason, senior curator-historian with the Imperial War Museum in London, “men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard Germans troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches. The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes, later described it as an “amazing spectacle.” Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht and Joyeux Noël and soccer matches in no man’s land with the impromptu Christmas Truce of 1914 in the trenches of the Western Front. But still not over.

Trench warfare. Mustard gas. Shellshock. The best-and-brightest young men and women of a generation from both the Allies, or the Entente Powers, and the Central Powers, senselessly slaughtered. A war that was supposed to be four months long but went on for more than four years. There were 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded in the First World War. The total number of deaths includes 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians.

The First World War stands as the real demarcation line between the 19th and 20th centuries and an older world and the modern era. In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book that talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sanford Fleming’s worldwide standard time. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914. Yet there were still vestiges of that older world of shared values and decency – even among enemies – and even in the barbarism of trench warfare in the early months of the First World War.

What came to be known as the “Great War” began on July 28, 1914 with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia, igniting the first truly global war. Honduras wouldn’t declare war on Germany until July 19, 1918, while Romania, which declared war with Austria-Hungary on Aug. 27, 1916, exited the war with the Treaty of Bucharest on May 7, 1918, only to re-enter it on Nov. 10, 1918, declaring war on Germany, a day before the First World War ended on what would come to be known as Armistice Day a year later in 1919.

Pte. George Lawrence Price, 25, of Falmouth Nova Scotia, is believed to be the last Canadian soldier to die in battle during the First World War. He served with the Canadian Infantry (Saskatchewan Regiment) and had enlisted in Regina on Oct. 15, 1917. Pte. Price was shot by a German sniper in Mons, Belgium at 10:58 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918 – just two minutes before the Armistice went into effect at 11 a.m. Paris Time and very close to the spot the first Allied casualty of the First World War, British Pte. John Parr, of the Middlesex Regiment, had been killed on Aug. 21, 1914. Both Parr and Price are buried at nearby St. Symphorien Military Cemetery.

The last four Allied First World War veterans died just over a decade ago. Florence Green, of King’s Lynn, the last surviving veteran, who served briefly as a mess steward at air bases in Norfolk, England in 1918, died at the age of 110 on Feb. 4, 2012. Claude Stanley Choules, who lived in Perth, Australia and was the last known combat veteran of the First World War, having been posted to the battleship HMS Revenge in 1917, where he witnessed the surrender of the German Fleet near Firth of Forth in Scotland in 1918, emigrated from Britain to Australia in 1926 and retired from the navy in 1956, died at the age of 110 on May 5, 2011. Frank Woodruff Buckles, of Gap View Farm, near Charles Town, West Virginia, lied about his age to enlist in the United States Army in 1917, and became the last known U.S. veteran of the First World War when he died on Feb. 27, 2011 at the age of 110. With the death of Buckles, the last American “doughboy,” the United States government on March 12, 2011 issued the formal announcement of “the passing of a generation,” something it hadn’t done since Sept. 10, 1992 when Nathan E. Cook, the last known U.S. veteran of the Spanish-American War of 1898, died. John Henry Foster Babcock, Canada’s last surviving veteran of the First World War, died in Spokane, Washington on Feb. 18, 2010 at the age of 109.

Now known as Remembrance Day, which commemorates Canadians who died in service to Canada from the South African War or, as it is also known, the Boer War, between 1899 and 1902, to current missions, Armistice Day, as it was known in Canada until 1931, the day the actual armistice was signed in a railway car in the Allied war zone in France’s Compiègne Forest, was anything but a solemn occasion on Nov. 11, 1918. Soldiers and civilians dancing in the streets and even riots were the order of the day. After four years of war, it would be surprising if it had been otherwise. Here in Canada, from 1923 to 1931, Armistice Day was held on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell. Thanksgiving was also celebrated on the same day. The name Armistice Day was changed to Remembrance Day in 1931 and fixed as Nov. 11. The South African War marked Canada’s first official dispatch of troops to an overseas war. Of the more than 7,000 Canadians who served in South Africa, 267 were killed.

The silence and solemnity that now marks Remembrance Day was proposed by an Australian journalist by the name of Edward Honey, who was working in London’s Fleet Street in 1919.

Honey, who had served briefly in the British Army during the First World War, before receiving a medical discharge, wrote a letter to the editor of The Evening News in London on May 8, 1919 under the pen name Warren Foster suggesting an appropriate commemoration for the first anniversary of the Armistice would be “five silent minutes of national remembrance.” Honey had been angered by the way in which people had celebrated with dancing in the streets on the day of the Armistice.

On the first anniversary of the Armistice in 1919 two minutes’ silence was instituted as part of the main commemorative ceremony at the new Cenotaph in London. King George V personally requested all the people of the British Empire to suspend normal activities for two minutes on the hour of the armistice “which stayed the worldwide carnage of the four preceding years and marked the victory of Right and Freedom.”

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Your best life: Life in Christian cinema is often a game of Friday night high school football

 

The problem with sports being a metaphor for life is not that the claim is inaccurate: sports truly is a metaphor for life. The problem is the terrain of what constitutes a metaphor for life is a vast landscape. Within sports, virtually everything can and is described as being a metaphor for life.

When it comes to comparing values and ideals taken from sports and applied cinematically to life, I have a fondness for golf and high school and college football movies. While I don’t play golf (at least not yet) I did play a bit of high school football some many decades ago.

There’s strong evidence that sport strongly reinforces certain personal characteristics such as responsibility, courage, teamwork, mental focus, persistence, humility, commitment and self-discipline.

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Among my favourite golf movies are Tin Cup from 1996, starring Kevin Costner and Rene Russo; The Legend of Bagger Vance, with Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, released in 2000; and Seven Days in Utopia, released in 2011, starring Robert Duvall and Lucas Black, based on the book Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia by Dr. David Lamar Cook, a psychologist who lives in the Hill Country of Texas, where the book and movie are set.

As for American high school football movies, Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

In 2006, Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, made Facing the Giants, their second Sherwood Pictures movie, about high school football and resilient faith. While the movie is admired and often still shown 11 years after it was made at Christian church movie nights, secular cinema critics have been less effusive in their praise.  Still, two scenes stand out for me, and are widely available on YouTube. The first is lineman and Shiloh Eagles team captain Brock Kelley’s 100-plus yard blindfolded “Death Crawl” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUKoKQlEC4) with his 160-pound teammate Jeremy Johnson on his back, and soccer kicker turned placekicker David Childers’ 51-yard game-winning field goal in the Eagle’s 24-23 victory over the Richmond Giants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCj5_a3nbw).

When the Game Stands Tall was released in 2014. It stars Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, here playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of what comes after the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle, a Catholic boys’ high school in Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times.  The movie was filmed in Louisiana.

Released a year later in 2015 is Woodlawn is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 98, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review in September 2015, after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham, in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

Next up for me perhaps is the college football movie from 2006, We are Marshall, which depicts the aftermath of the Nov. 14, 1970 airplane crash that killed 37 football players on the Huntington, West Virginia Marshall University Thundering Herd, along with five coaches, two athletic trainers, the athletic director, 25 boosters, and a crew of five. New coach Jack Lengye, played by Matthew McConaughey, arrives on the scene four months later in March 1971, determined to rebuild Marshall’s Thundering Herd and heal a grieving community in the process (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU4QBR-V79I).

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

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.

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.

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.

As I wrote earlier this year, “In an age-before-Trump, you need only to look back to the 1930s and the Canadian-born “Radio Priest” Father Charles Coughlin, from Hamilton, Ontario, later based at Royal Oak, Michigan in the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the anti-Communist and equally anti-Semitic Christian Front he would be the inspiration for in November 1938.” It was the age of demagoguery in American politics. And it was the year 1938.

Although he didn’t personally belong to the organization, and denied that he was anti-Semitic. Historical opinion is divided on whether, or to what extent, Coughlin was anti-Semitic, but it is an uncontested fact his weekly magazine Social Justice reprinted in weekly installments in 1938 the fraudulent and notoriously anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery first published in 1903 that purports to expose a Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world.

Coughlin’s radio show was phenomenally popular. His office received up to 80,000 letters per week from listeners at its peak in the early to mid-1930s. By 1934, Coughlin was the most prominent Roman Catholic speaker on political and financial issues in the United States, with a far broader base of popular support than any bishop or cardinal at the time, with a radio audience that reached tens of millions of people every week. Historian Alan Brinkley wrote in his 1982 book Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression that by 1934 Coughlin  was receiving more than 10,000 letters every day” and that “his clerical staff at times numbered more than a hundred.”  Coughlin foreshadowed modern talk radio and televangelism.

In addition to his anti-Communist stance, and leaving himself open rightly or wrongly to accusations of antisemitism, Coughlin wasn’t the only clergyman to at least also flirt and even dance at times with Spanish fascism, German National Socialism and demagoguery in the United States in the late 1930s. American Protestant clergyman Frank Buchman founded Moral Re-Armament (MRA) in 1938, as an international moral and spiritual movement with Europe rearming militarily on the brink of the Second World War. “The crisis is fundamentally a moral one,” he said. “The nations must rearm morally,” Buchman said in London on May 29, 1938. “Moral recovery is essentially the forerunner of economic recovery. Moral recovery creates not crisis but confidence and unity in every phase of life.”

Buchman had earlier also founded the Oxford Group, in some important ways the predecessor to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Both the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, under Buchman’s leadership, faced similar charges to what Coughlin did at times; and again, like in the case of Coughlin, historical opinion is divided, but on the evidence it is clear the German Nazi leadership was wary of Buchman and denounced Moral Re-Armament, which went onto do significant post-war reconstruction work in West Germany in the late 1940s, after the Second World War ended.

Only historical amnesia prevents us from remembering 1938. We barely know their names today, yet Coughlin had tens of millions of radio listeners in the United States, while Buchman influenced political elites worldwide.

And the legacy of Moral Re-Armament, close to home here in Northern Manitoba, is not insignificant. Just largely invisible.

Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas Archbishop emeritus Sylvain Lavoie, whose archdiocese includes Thompson, toured during university for seven months with “Up with People,” founded by American J. Blanton Belk in 1965, as a conservative counterweight to attract young people during the turbulent Sixties.

Belk was expected to be the heir apparent to Peter D. Howard, a British journalist, who succeeded Buchman as leader of Moral Re-Armament in 1961, but Belk broke away to incorporate Up With People as a non-profit at the encouragement of then Republican U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, who urged Belk to distance himself from Moral Re-Armament.

And Winnipeg-born Bob Lowery, for years the Winnipeg Free Press’ Thompson-based correspondent, in a life before journalism and living in Northern Manitoba, and immediately after the Second World War ended in 1945, had joined the Moral Re-Armament crusade to help rebuild war-torn Germany, staying there for more than 20 years until 1969.

During the Second World War he had served with the Royal Canadian Voluntary Reserve. Lowery had earned a philosophy undergraduate degree from the University of Manitoba in 1937.

Robert Newton Lowery was inducted by then governor general Roméo LeBlanc as a Member of the Order of Canada in 1996. In the citation accompanying the honour, LeBlanc noted Lowery was “known for his love of the North and has demonstrated genuine concern for the residents of northern Manitoba, working to redress social, economic and cultural differences through his involvement in all aspects of community life.”

In 1997 he was recognized with a Silver Eagle Outstanding Citizen Award from the Indigenous Women’s Collective of Manitoba. A park is also named after him here in Thompson.

He had moved to northern Manitoba in 1969, the same year he left Moral Re-Armament in West Germany, and become a correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, based here in Thompson.

In 1982 Lowery published the book The Unbeatable Breed: People and Events of Northern Manitoba in collaboration with photographer Murray McKenzie.

Lowery retired in 1997. He died at Norway House on Dec. 17, 2000.

As Mitchell Kalpakgian noted in a July 6 essay headlined “Fanatical Ideas and Reasonable Convictions” in Crisis Magazine, a self-described “voice for the faithful Catholic laity” published in Manchester, New Hampshire, “A fanatic is a person obsessed with one idea, a monomaniac ruled by one dominant compulsion that governs all his thoughts and actions. He is enslaved by one predominant passion that dictates all his motives and decisions.”

While their ideas might differ, it is that fanaticism not Fascism that rules this American historical moment.

Quoting G.K. Chesterton, the Catholic convert and apologist, Kalpakgian notes in a chapter entitled “The Maniac” from Orthodoxy, Chesterton explained that the fanatic’s thinking is too “rational” in the sense that he ‘overlooks many other considerations and ignores other evidence that surrounds him.

“The fanatic’s extreme mental concentration on one thing leads to madness at the expense of openness to larger universal truths that lead to wisdom … To think with rabid intensity on one subject consumes the mind to an unhealthy degree of concentration.

“It warps a person’s mind, making him pay undue attention to one matter and ignore objects of larger importance. The fanatic makes himself the center of the universe as only his passions count.”

Wrote Chesterton: “Are there no other stories in the world except yours, and are all men busy with your business?”

Kalpakgian writes that to be “haunted, obsessed, and enslaved by one rigid idea ultimately distorts a person’s humanity. A fanatic lives and dies for one thing only, whether it is revenge, money, work, pleasure, or fame. To think like a monomaniac eventually leads to thinking only with the head and without the conscience or the heart. Ironically, the overworking of the mind on one narrow subject breeds some degree of insanity.

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason,” writes Chesterton.

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Under the gun: Pennsylvania to Massachusetts about to be hammered by epic winter storm, weather forecasters predict

New York City, Great Blizzard of Dec. 26, 1947

New York City, Jan. 26, 2015

I admit it. It is kind of hard to get too cranked up about bad winter weather elsewhere when you live pretty much at the dead centre of the North American continent here in Northern Manitoba, like I do. The normal daytime high temperature here on Jan. 26 is 0°F with an overnight low dropping to -22°F.

So when I read morning headlines such as, “Historic storm to slam northeast,” I quickly recall earlier similar headlines for Mid-Atlantic stories such as the “snowmageddon” of Feb. 5-6, 2010 that blanketed the Washington, D.C. region under 18-32 inches of snow. Really.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service defines a blizzard as a winter storm where sustained wind or frequent gusts to 35 miles an hour or greater, with considerable falling and/or blowing snow, reducing visibility frequently to less than a quarter of a mile, are expected to prevail for a period of three hours or longer. NOAA’s National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center at College Park, Maryland predicted this morning at 9:20 a.m. CST that a surface low pressure center near the Outer Banks of North Carolina is expected to intensify rapidly and develop into a major winter storm, heading north from the Northern Mid-Atlantic for New England. It is expected to be a nor’easter just south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts tomorrow morning.

I live in Northern Manitoba now, but I grew up in Oshawa, Ontario, east of Toronto, not so far from Buffalo where lake-effect snow, created when cold low-level wind coming in a direction parallel to the long axis of Lake Erie can maximize the “fetch”, or the time and distance the cold air travels over the warmer body of water – in this case, Lake Erie, of which Buffalo is at the eastern end of. Late autumn and early winter brings the most frequent lake-effect snows off Lake Erie, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, before it ices over and reduces the exposed water surface.  Last Nov. 17, the water surface temperature of Lake Erie was almost 43°F. The air temperature above it was less than 9°F. Over the next three days, some areas around Buffalo were blasted with six feet of snow. Now, that’s what I call “snowmageddon.”

I used to live in Boston in the 1980s and in the 1990s drove by car on at least one return trip every February for three consecutive winters from Trent University in Peterborough in Southern Ontario to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, south of Washington, D.C., so  I “get it” why the winter storm bearing down today from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts is a big deal. It is part of the Boston-Washington Corridor (also known simply as the BosWash or Bosnywash sometimes, the former coined by futurist George Fieraru in 1967) and the most heavily urbanized region of the United States and stretches on a map almost as a straight line from the northern suburbs of Boston to the southern suburbs of Washington, D.C. in northern Virginia. It includes Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, along with their metropolitan areas and suburbs, as well as many smaller urban centers. With a population of close to 52 million people, the Boston-Washington Corridor comprises about 17 per cent of the U.S. population on less than two per cent the nation’s land area.

About 58 million people are in the storm’s path, which also includes portions of the Ohio Valley, Southern Appalachians and panhandles of West Virginia and Maryland.

Up to three feet of snow is predicted for New York City. The city’s biggest snowstorm was on Feb. 11-12, 2006, when 26.9 inches of snow fell, according to the city’s Office of Emergency Management. The second biggest snowstorm to date in New York City occurred on Dec. 26, 1947, when 25.8-inches of snow fell during what is known now as the Great Blizzard of 1947.

Atlanta-based CNN, well south of the storm track and looking at mainly sunny skies and temperatures of 48°F to 55°F Tuesday through Thursday, had the pithy and perhaps prescient lede this morning that would be hard to top: “Go home. Stay there. Seriously.”

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When the Armistice ending First World War hostilities along the Western Front was signed on Nov. 11, 1918 in a railway car in France’s Compiègne Forest it ignited a worldwide celebration and epic party: The solemnity only came a year later because of Australian journalist Edward Honey who had disapproved of the public merriment

Canadian troops in Boer War, left and armistice signatories in front railway car  in the Allied war zone in France’s Compiègne Forest on Nov. 11, 1918, right

This year marks the centenary of what came to be known as the “Great War,” which began on July 28, 1914 with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia, igniting the first truly global war. Honduras wouldn’t declare war on Germany until July 19, 1918, while Romania, which declared war with Austria-Hungary on Aug. 27, 1916, exited the war with the Treaty of Bucharest on May 7, 1918, only to re-enter it on Nov. 10, 1918, declaring war on Germany, a day before the First World War ended on what would come to be known as Armistice Day a year later in 1919.

Now known as Remembrance Day, which commemorates Canadians who died in service to Canada from the South African War or, as it is also known, the Boer War, between 1899 and 1902, to current missions, Armistice Day, as it was known in Canada until 1931, the day the actual armistice was signed in a railway car  in the Allied war zone in France’s Compiègne Forest, was anything but a solemn occasion on Nov. 11, 1918. Soldiers and civilians dancing in the streets and even riots were the order of the day. After four years of war, it would be surprising if it had been otherwise. Here in Canada, from 1923 to 1931, Armistice Day was held on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell. Thanksgiving was also celebrated on the same day. The name Armistice Day was changed to Remembrance Day in 1931 and fixed as Nov. 11. The South African War marked Canada’s first official dispatch of troops to an overseas war. Of the more than 7,000 Canadians who served in South Africa, 267 were killed.

The silence and solemnity that now marks Remembrance Day was proposed by an Australian journalist by the name of Edward Honey, who was working in London’s Fleet Street in 1919.

Honey, who had served briefly in the British Army during the First World War, before receiving a medical discharge, wrote a letter to the editor of The Evening News in London on May 8, 1919 under the pen name Warren Foster suggesting an appropriate commemoration for the first anniversary of the Armistice would be “five silent minutes of national remembrance.” Honey had been angered by the way in which people had celebrated with dancing in the streets on the day of the Armistice.

On the first anniversary of the Armistice in 1919 two minutes’ silence was instituted as part of the main commemorative ceremony at the new Cenotaph in London. King George V personally requested all the people of the British Empire to suspend normal activities for two minutes on the hour of the armistice “which stayed the worldwide carnage of the four preceding years and marked the victory of Right and Freedom.”

Pte. George Lawrence Price

One of the most fascinating but saddest stories of the First World War is that of Nova Scotia Pte. George Lawrence Price, the last casualty of the Great War, shot by a German sniper in the village of Havre in Belgium at 10:58 a.m. on Nov. 11, 1918 – just two minutes before the Armistice went into effect at 11 a.m. Paris Time and very close to the spot the first Allied casualty of the First World War, British Pte. John Parr, of the Middlesex Regiment, had been killed on Aug. 21, 1914. Both Parr and Price are buried at nearby St. Symphorien Military Cemetery.

Florence Green

Today there are no surviving First World War veteran on the 100th anniversary of the armistice. Florence Green, of King’s Lynn, the last surviving veteran, who served briefly as a mess steward at air bases in Norfolk, England in 1918, died at the age of 110 on Feb. 4, 2012.

Claude Stanley Choules

Claude Stanley Choules, who lived in Perth, Australia and was the last known combat veteran of the First World War, having been posted to the battleship HMS Revenge in 1917, where he witnessed the surrender of the German Fleet near Firth of Forth in Scotland in 1918, emigrated from Britain to Australia in 1926 and retired from the navy in 1956, also died at the age of 110 on May 5, 2011.

Frank Woodruff Buckles

Frank Woodruff Buckles, of Gap View Farm, near Charles Town, West Virginia, lied about his age to enlist in the United States Army in 1917, and became the last known U.S. veteran of the First World War when he died on Feb. 27, 2011 at the age of 110. With the death of Buckles, the last American “doughboy,” the United States government on March 12, 2011 issued the formal announcement of “the passing of a generation,” something it hadn’t done since Sept. 10, 1992 when Nathan E. Cook, the last known U.S. veteran of the Spanish-American War of 1898, died.

John Henry Foster Babcock

John Henry Foster Babcock, Canada’s last surviving veteran of the First World War, died in Spokane, Washington on Feb. 18, 2010 at the age of 109.

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