Author Archive: Bill Black
I'm a baby boomer, lefty Democrat, Boston Irish Catholic, born in 1953. I work as a public affairs consultant in Washington.
Good Friday
The front page of the Washington Post today has a picture of the pastor of my local parish kneeling in prayer. The story discusses his struggle over whether to reference the scandal rocking Europe of priestly sexual abuse. Honestly, I barely glanced at the piece and didn’t even know it was Father Enzler until my daughter called it to my attention. Like all Catholics, I’m disgusted by the scandal and I don’t need to know all the details. I’m from Boston, so I’ve seen this movie before. My standard response is that the Church, while divinely inspired, is a human institution with all of humanity’s flaws.
At noon, I went up to St. Matthews Cathedral a few blocks from my office to attend Good Friday Services. Since it is such an important day in the liturgical calendar, I feel like I should do something to get into the spirit of the day. It’s a long service and does provide some spiritual sustenance as you contemplate the events of that day. Nothing says “melancholy” like a choir singing the Passion Chorale from St. Matthews Passion.
As I approached the Cathedral, I notice a crowd gathered across the street. It was on behalf of abuse victims and was a very calm, peaceful and respectful vigil. I learned later that Archbishop Weurl, who presided over the Good Friday services, stopped by the vigil and prayed with the group. Good move.
During the service, the sex abuse scandal was brought up twice. Once by a priest who was providing brief commentary on the famous “Last Words of Jesus.” They are phrases that Jesus uttered on the cross before he died. One phrase was, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” The priest discussed various ways people feel forsaken by God. At the end, he mentioned people abused by priest. Importantly, he acknowledged that they were forsaken both by the priests they trusted, but hat they were also forsaken be the Church as an institution. Archbishop Wuerl also mentioned the scandal in his big homily, but he included ringing support of the Pope and was somewhat more vague on the responsibility of the Church as an institution.
So, I had to admire, to some degree, the effort to confront the issue. Then, as I drove home, I heard about homily delivered by the Pope’s personal preacher in his Good Friday sermon. He compared the criticism of the Pope to anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust. Big sigh! Makes my speechless. I guess I’m pleased that the Vatican had the good sense to reject the comparison. And the comments of Rev. Thomas Reese in the story about Fr. Enzler also gives some hope:
But not all Catholics have leapt to the church’s defense. The Rev. Thomas Reese, a scholar at Georgetown University, said the suffering-Jesus metaphor might be more fittingly applied to the victims of abuse. Reese, who spent the week analyzing the church’s crisis and preparing a Good Friday message for his chapel, said he asked himself, “Who among us has experienced the betrayal, suffering and torture Jesus felt more than the victims?
I doubt the Vatican will ever get it. The layers upon layers that provide an impenetrable bubble around the Pope deny him any sense of what’s really happening. They are in total institution protection mode. But they are so misguided. Rather than protecting the institution, they are destroying it from within.
Explain this
Oh yeah? Explain this.
Economic catastrophe
Republicans have predicted economic catastrophe as a result of the passage of the the Health Reform legislation. It is reminiscent of the predictions of disaster after the Clinton budget of 1993. That budget led to the best economy in a generation and, for the first time in decades, a federal budget surplus.
Their predictive powers are apparently undiminished as the stock market cast its judgment on health reform with a triple digit rally today.
If I were a Republican today, I would feel a cold chill. Some, like David Frum, can see the future and it’s not pretty for them.
Obama is Doomed!
The press purports to explain the problems. “Why The President’s Men Stumble,” a New York Times headline promised to explain.
Another lede concluded that the president’s “once-dazzling political momentum … has stalled.”
A noted columnist captured the pack’s mood: “the Washington press corps is suddenly in hot pursuit of ‘an administration in disarray,’ which is coming apart at the seams under … a ‘detached President.’ ”
The distinguished dean of Washington columnists opined, “it is becoming increasingly clear” that the president’s marvel “was a one-year phenomenon … what has been occurring since is an accelerating retreat … a process in which he is more spectator than leader.”
These quotes are from 1982 and are about the collapsing Reagan Administration. We all know how that ended, right?
I just hope the Democrats in Congress realize that their only hope is to “PASS. THE. DAMN BILL.” with apologies to Andrew Sullivan.
Coolest Video Ever
Someone took a movie on a trolley in San Francisco traveling down Market Street four days before the earthquake of 1906. The resolution is amazing and it’s got a nice music track behind it. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people are shown walking nonchalantly along the street and skipping past the tracks..
Play it full screen with good sound to get the full effect.
Sad to think what became of these people four days later.
Mexico City
I’m finishing up a business trip to Mexico City, my first visit to a Latin American country. Most of the visit was spent in my hotel, my company’s local office and a meeting at the Mexican “White House,” called Los Pinos, with the Mexican Foreign Minister. One of my Mexican colleagues pointed out that Los Pinos is very near the site that inspired the line the Marine Corps hymn that says, “From the halls of Montezuma…”
Mexico City is not at all what I expected. My image was of a hot, dirty city, teaming with people. In fact, the weather was delightful, 75 degrees, dry and crystal clear skies. The city is very clean. It is, however, teaming with people. Traffic seems heavy 24/7. I knew that was going to be a problem as we flew in. We arrived at 10 pm and, looking out the window of the plane, every highway seemed gridlocked.
Speaking of the flight, it was among the more interesting I’ve had. We flew over thunderstorms, which normally would have made me pretty nervous. However, the flight was perfectly smooth during this period and the flashing lights from the lightening in the clouds below was spectacular. Oddly, as we approached Mexico City, it got very bumpy under clear skies. Go figure.
Getting back to impressions of Mexico City, I was struck by how little English is displayed around the country. When I’m in China or Europe, I’m always surprised with the amount of English signage. In Mexico, there’s none. Similarly, the English TV options in the hotel room are very few, far fewer than in countries much further away. I guess I admire the Mexicans’ refusal to concede their culture to the Gringos from the North.
Of course, the most fascinating part of the trip was the meeting with the foreign minister. It was an important meeting dealing with some very significant issues. Unfortunately for me, most of the meeting was in Spanish. Of the approximately 20 people in the room, I was the only “mono-lingual” one there. A sad example of the failure of the American education system. Still the meeting was very successful and my team is hopeful of a continuing business relationship.
Hope I get to come back. If I do, I will spend more time investigating the rich history of Mexico, of which I only observed snatches traveling from one meeting to another.
The Economist Gets It Wrong
It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours. If, instead of handing over health care to his party’s left wing, he had lived up to his promise to be a bipartisan president and courted conservatives by offering, say, reform of the tort system, he might have got health care through; by giving ground on nuclear power, he may now stand a chance of getting a climate bill.
Wrong! Obama did offer to negotiate over tort reform and was rebuffed by the Republicans. And what of the three months was given over to Finance Chair Sen. Max Baucus to come up with a bipartisan healthcare reform bill? The strategy of the Republicans, which Sen. Grassley, minority leader of the committee, explicitly gave away, was to slow the process down and hope that lighten would strike and kill the bill. Sure enough, lighten struck in Massachusetts, but didn’t quite kill it.
But for the Economist to totally absolve the Republicans for any responsibility for the gridlock in Washington is laughable. They are tacitly portrayed as this poor, ignored collection of principled conservatives. When, in fact, they are a wrecking crew, bent on the destruction of the Obama presidency.
As Obama has learned, it is very hard to find common ground with people whose fondest wish is your utter failure.
Bye, Bye Bayh
The harsh reality is that Bayh has been wrong about virtually everything. And the country suffers not because partisanship blocked action, but because the establishment consensus got too much of his agenda enacted.
Bayh supported the catastrophic invasion of Iraq. He joined the bipartisan celebration of banking deregulation. He favors more military spending. He favored tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in an age of Gilded Age inequality. He was an advocate of corporate free trade policies that encouraged multinationals to ship jobs to a mercantilist China willing to subsidize them. He’s a champion of bipartisanship — bipartisan folly.
Even in his departing, he got it wrong. Bayh announced on CBS’s Early Show that he was looking for a job in the private sector because “If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months,” This echoes the Republican assault on the recovery plan as summarized by newly elected Senate Scott Brown of Massachusetts, that the stimulus plan “didn’t create one new job.”
These moderates are so damned frustrating. They build their identity around the fact that the best policy lies somewhere between what Democrats want and what Republicans want. If all sides were operating good faith, this might work some of the time. But when what one party wants is for the other party to fail, the concept breaks down. Then, all the moderates do is facilitate a nihilistic approach to government by creating gridlock.
So, here we are the Republicans, who handed Obama two unfinished wars and an economy heading into another depression, have had some success painting Democrats as either incompetent failures who can’t get anything done or successful socialists who are taking the country into the dictatorship of the proletariat. And the result, if achieve their goal, will be to hand the government back to them to do it all again.
Grrrr!
Avatar
I saw the movie Avatar and liked it a lot. Of course, it is visually dazzling. Despite the hype, it lives up to expectations in the 3D viewing. You very quickly forget you’re watch 3D and just become immersed in the movie or, more specifically, in the planet Pandora.
I haven’t read a lot of reviews of Avatar, but, just through scanning, I have some familiarity with various issues and controversies surrounding the film. So, I’ll just touch upon my view on a couple of them.
The plot, while very satisfying, is also very familiar. If you go to the effort, you can pretty much figure out everything that’s going to happen in the movie after the first few minutes. My advice is, don’t go to the effort. It’s more fun. Let your “willing suspension of disbelief” take over.
The religious overtones of the movie are interesting. I’ve heard some Christians have criticized the movie as a paean to pantheism, which, in their minds, is barely one step up from atheism. I disagree. Pantheism is the believe that everything is God and God is impersonal and inscrutable. In this movie, the deity, while inscrutable, does actually seems to intervene in nature when asked to do so by the Na’Vi, much like Christians believe their God does. If anything, contrary to the Hollywood stereotype, I thought the movie showed a great respect for religion.
One aspect of the movie, however, confirms the Hollywood stereotype of the “self-hating American.” The movie clearly depicts American-type characters as the bad guys. It’s no mystery why this movie is so popular in China. People wait for hours there to get in to see it. It can really be seen as an allegory on Western imperialism. The top military bad guy is a caricature of the ugly American. And the civilian businessman is even worse, since he clearly knows what they are doing is wrong and is too timid to stop it. Of course, even Director James Cameron succumbs to American movie stereotypes, since the hero is also a white American male who saves the seemingly powerless natives. And, while the religion does not contradict Christianity, in my view, it does seem more Eastern than Western, which would also appeal to Chinese sensibilities.
So, the plot, while predictable, is deep enough to generate controversy and discussion. That’s good. But it’s not about the plot. It’s about the visuals, which are stunning. You can truly understand why this movie took ten years to make. While I didn’t even know it was in the making until it came out, it was worth the wait.
Sid Ceasar Does Beethoven