8/10/23

 Thursday, August 10, 2023

In bed at 9:00, awake at 3:39, with back pain, and moved to brr till 4:10, thoughts of Ukraine, Vietnam, and Smedley Butler''s War is a Racket.  65℉, high of 82℉, partly cloudy, AQI=67, Moderate, wind WNW at 8 mph, 3-9/18.  Sunrise at 5:51, sunset at 8:01, 14+10

Time marching on.  The sun rises at 68 degrees East Northeast, 12 degrees further south from its rise at the solstice.  The days are losing a little less than 2 and 1/2 minutes of sunlight each day, but the decrease increases a bit as we approach the equinox next month and then continues to decrease approaching the winter solstice when increases in sunlight begin.  On the 13th, the sun will rise at 69 degrees for 2 days, and then drop a degree every 2 days for some time as the days grow shorter.  Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December / But the days grow short when you reach September.  / When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame / One hasn't got time for the waiting game . . .

Does Anger Drive Populism? is the title of a new study by 3 sociologists studying extensive multi-year polling data from Gallup.  The answer, according to Charles Lane's op-ed in this morning's WaPo is yes, but.  The 'but' is that populism is also driven by the rise in populism is also driven by sadness, stress, and worry, but dismay and disenchantment.  "[A] more complex sense of malaise and gloom, rather than anger per se, drives the rise in populism."

"The social scientists . .   found that a county’s average anger level correlated positively with higher vote shares for Trump and for socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the 2016 GOP and Democratic primaries, respectively.  (Interestingly, and consistent with the “Bernie Bro” stereotype, the study found that very liberal independents were the most likely voters to report being angry, ahead of very conservative independents and Republicans.)"

Sadness, stress, worry, malaise and gloom.  Was he describing me?  For years I have been Denny the Downer, bemoaning what has been happening in the United States, certainly since Donald Trump politically came on the scene in 2015, certainly the many years Kitty and I started each day with early morning text conversations.  I always wonder 'What's wrong with me?'  being so pessimistic, so negative.  This study suggests I may be the norm in America.  If that is the case, the country is indeed as much in trouble as I have been fearing.  Mayday, mayday, mayday.

LTMW at a busy morning at the Clausen feeding station.  To the "regulars" - finches, sparrows, chickadees, nuthatches, et al. - have been added several boat-tailed grackles and starlings.

Moral turpitude, character defects, criminality, and Confession.  When I was 7 years old and in second grade at St. Leo Grammar School I 'made' my First Holy Communion with all my second-grade classmates.  Before we could make our First Holy Communion we had to make our First Confession, acknowledging our sins to one of our parish priests assigned to St. Leo the Great parish by Cardinal Samuel Stritch.  I have only the faintest memory of these events as I approach my 82nd birthday but I am wondering whether these first encounters with sacraments #2 and #3 (following baptism as #1) were also my first 'grievous sins', to wit, sacrileges.  As a 7-year-old, the priests and sisters taught me that I had reached "the age of reason" and thus was capable of committing sins for which God would punish me by burning in Purgatory or Hell unless my soul was shriven by a worthy Confession to Msgr. Malloy, or Father Burke, or Schmidt, or Devereaux.  The problem was I was already a young sinner at age 7, a thief.  I was reminded of this by another op-ed in the WaPo today, "My Abusive Father Built My ‘Barbie Dreamhouse’ Out Of A Dresser Drawer" by Bobbi Dempsey.  She refers to the 'dime stores' of her (and my) youth, Woolworth's and S. S. Kresge, which reminded me that as a very young boy I engaged in some dime store shoplifting, small cheap plastic junk but for sale, not for stealing.  I believe that by this time I had already committed a bigger sin, i.e., taking a $20 bill from my mother's purse and using it to buy candy or maybe a creamsicle.  $20 was worth many multiples of 20 in that period at the end of World War II and my mother soon knew the bill was missing and asked me if I had taken it.  I still remember my First Real Confession, which was admitting to her what I had done and crying, indeed sobbing because I knew it was wrong.  I remember her not punishing me, but comforting me, and not because she was tolerant of what I had done, but because she loved me and, as I now understand, our little home in the basement of 7303 S. Emerald Avenue was a terrible place to live in in those days.  My father was cold distant and unloving from his PTSD after the war and my mother was enduring her own PTSD from the sexual assault by 'Jimmy' Hartmann on September 30, 1947.  Hartmann was armed with a knife and threatened to kill Kitty and me if my mother didn't submit to what the investigating detective called "sexual torture."  My mother, my father, my little sister and I were all 'damaged goods', badly in need of counseling, therapy, and help of all kinds, but precious little was available in those days.  Those days left lasting effects on each of us, and certainly on Kitty and me.  In any case, it was in those days that I learned that I was capable of sinning and vulnerable to divine punishment for my sins, specifically burning in Purgatory or Hell.  I wonder now to what sins I pleaded guilty in the confessional.  It started with the rote  'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.  This is my first confession.  I have . . " and ended with the rote "O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins, because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace to confess my sins, to do penance, and to amend my life. Amen. "  I suspect that I wasn't candid or forthcoming in that confession, but perhaps I am mistaken and the real problem with bad confessions came as I approached and entered puberty and had to deal with the biggies - impure thoughts and deeds.  In any event, the biggest problem was that I took all that Irish Catholic religious stuff seriously, very seriously.  Samuel Johnson famously observed "“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”  The same may be said of knowing, and believing, that you are in danger of burning😧😱😰 in Purgatory or Hell.  I feel some anger and some embarrassment as I think back on those days.  I remember Tom St. John picking me up for a golf outing at St. Francis of Assisi Church after I had completed my church van driving duties.  "Do you really believe that shit?" he asked me.  (As a 'lapsed Catholic', he knew whereof he spoke.)  And of course, I did not and said so.  To the next question, why continue to be a part of it, I did not have a ready answer and I still don't.  It mainly had to do with being a part of the community, which is what I still miss.   It's funny the kinds of thoughts that swirl around an old man's mind, incoherently, just from reading an op-ed about a Barbie dollhouse in the morning newspaper.  (And I didn't even get into Nanci Griffith's Love at the Five and Dime.💗)

After writing the above thoughts this morning, I looked back to the memoir I wrote for my children many years ago, knowing I had devoted many pages to my experiences growing up in the Roman Catholic (which is to say, Irish) Church in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly in a chapter I titled "Raised in the Bosom of the Church."  Rereading it, and what I wrote this morning reminds me that I still carry a lot of anger in me about those experiences.  What follows is just a portion of "Raised in the Bosom of the Church":

"Growing up Irish American Catholic in the 1940s and 1950s in Chicago was a schizophrenic experience.  While we received occasional infusions of “God so loved the world . . .” the main teaching of the Church, which is to say the professional God-guys, was fear of eternal damnation.  The Church touted the Little Flower and St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds when it needed a little romanticism and sentimentalism, but its regular indoctrination came right from the same Calvinistic hellhole that Jonathan Edwards drew from when he wrote his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon.  The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. There was precious little difference between 16th and 17th century Puritan moral theology and the Irish Catholic moral theology of the mid-20th century.  Damn near every sin more grievous than disobeying your mother was a mortal sin and if you died with one mortal sin on your soul, the eternal fires of Hell awaited you.  Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls?  Imagine holding a lighted match under your finger for one second.  For ten seconds.  For ten minutes!  Ten hours!! TEN THOUSAND MILLION GAZILLION YEARS!!!!!   And that’s not one one trillionth of one one trillionth of ETERNITY!    And, to make growing up more interesting, any boy or girl could get into this kind of trouble as soon as they reach “the age of reason” which the God-guys decided was 7 years old.  This teaching was enough to keep a pubescent boy awake at night praying for no wet dreams, especially before he fell asleep.

. . . . 

I can now half-laugh at the absurdities that were beaten into my head and my heart as a child under the spiritual authority of Pope Pius XII, Cardinal Stritch, Monsignor Malloy, and the Sisters of Providence, but of course it wasn’t one bit humorous as I lived through it.  Along with the horrors of living each day in this world with my father’s abysmal unhappiness and alcoholism, I had the Church doing all in its power to convince me that there was no hope for me (or my family) even in the next world.  I cannot think of all that hellfire and damnation brainwashing that we went though other than as, at best, the sick visions of some deeply neurotic people and, at worst, as willful child abuse by  those who knew they were speaking untruths.   The deeply neurotics included many of the priests and nuns as is evidenced in Karen Armstrong’s wonderful biography about her life in a convent Through the Narrow Gate, Andrew Greeley’s Uncertain Trumpet, and by other writings about life within the clerical and religious castes.  The child abusers included many others, popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, nuns and brothers, who were willing to toe the party line of the official Church for career reasons and/or for social control reasons knowing that what they said was pure bullshit.   

In Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit, he wrote:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.  Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.  A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.  When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false.  For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.  His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.  He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly.  He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Whose purpose was served by having children believe that the ground they walked on was a moral minefield and that at any moment they could stumble into eternal perdition?  When the disciples saw the people bringing little children to him, they sternly ordered them not to do it.  What was accomplished other than the creating of more neurotics whose lives were driven by fear rather than love?  Those who benefited from the Moral Reign of Terror, of course, were those in the clerical or priestly caste.  Those of us in mortal fear of eternal damnation had one practical way out, and that was to repair to the confessional to be shriven by a priest.  Absolution was the ticket to Heaven and the priestly caste had monopoly power over the tickets.  The popes and the bishops, for their part, owned the railroad.

Woe indeed.  Stumbling blocks indeed.  What anguish we suffered if we believed, and believe I did.  What threats we endured if we couldn’t believe, a sin against Faith.  Repression, suppression, oppression were the hallmarks of the Irish Catholic Church and the American Church was an Irish Church.  Wonderment about matters religious that might deviate from the Teachings of the Church?  Sinful.  Normal maturing through emerging sexuality in childhood and adolescence?  Sinful.   Failing to toe the line with all the laws of the Church, like “making your Easter duty?”  Sinful.

As I look back on those days, what strikes me more than the spiritual and emotional pain the Church put us through is what the Church didn’t do.  It didn’t help us.  It didn’t help us grow up.  Not emotionally, not spiritually, not religiously.  It was in great measure negative and life-denying.  Having grown up in that cold Irish spiritual environment, William Blake’s church poems immediately appealed to me, poems like The Garden of Love and The Little Vagabond:

                        I went to the Garden of Love, 

And saw what I never had seen; 

A Chapel was built in the midst, 

Where I used to play on the green. 

And the gates of this Chapel were shut 

And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door; 

So I turned to the Garden of Love 

That so many sweet flowers bore. 

And I saw it was filled with graves, 

And tombstones where flowers should be; 

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, 

And binding with briars my joys and desires. 

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold, 

But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm; 

Besides I can tell where I am used well, 

Such usage in Heaven will never do well. 

But if at the Church they would give us some Ale, 

And a pleasant fire our souls to regale, 

We'd sing and we'd pray all the live-long day, 

Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray. 

Then the Parson might preach, & drink, & sing, 

And we'd be as happy as birds in the spring; 

And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at Church, 

Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch. 

And God, like a father rejoicing to see 

His children as pleasant and happy as he, 

Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel, 

But kiss him, & give him both drink and apparel. 

In the Irish American Church of my youth, however, there was no “God like a father rejoicing to see His children as pleasant and happy as he.”  It was a Church of little joy, little delight, little peace, little awe, but no lack of dogmas, doctrines, rituals and rules, sins and sufferings.