My family goes back to the Spanish settlers of the 18th Century.  In high school I told a foreigner I identified first and foremost with being a Californian.  Being an American was secondary.  I loved both, but my romance with California became like the ache that comes from your girl sleeping around. California's heading off to the honkytonks one more time is why I lit out.

My wife and I planned to leave after the grandchildren woke.  They were too young to think anything other than we were just going back across town.  We didn't allay the impression.

"See you soon, my sweetheart!"

"Love you, buddy boy!"

They stood on the porch and waved.  They waved until we couldn't see them any more.

We drove north on Interstate 680.  With rush hour traffic abating, we crossed the Carquinez Strait Bridge.  We caught I-80 near Vacaville (or Ca-ca-ville as a friend in Florida prefers it), and took the I-580 cutoff to Interstate 5.

 Today vs. Yesterday

I used to think that a highway's Interstate designation meant that it crossed state lines.  Not necessarily, but every Interstate is part of a 47,000-mile web of freeways that connects the whole country, touching nearly all major U.S. cities.  Construction and maintenance of the longest super highway system in the world is 90% federally funded with the states picking up the remainder of the tab.  The Interstate system benefits the lives of all Americans, regardless of whether they drive cars, because it is almost impossible to receive goods by land, sea, air, rail or dog sled without some point of the distribution requiring road transport that is facilitated and made more efficient by an Interstate.  The official title points to another incalculable benefit—the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.  For decades after President Eisenhower championed their construction, they comprised the most expensive public works project in the world, generating $6 in revenue for every tax dollar spent.  An inestimable number of jobs was created.  A slight measure is the number of jobs in roadside restaurants, an increase of 7% over the percentage of growth of the national population for the same time period.

In his first year in office President Barak Obama and his Congressional allies committed to spend more tax dollars than went into the Interstate, but don't hold your breath waiting for returns, either in revenue or lasting jobs.  President Obama quadrupled the debt he said he wanted to cut.

In the name of getting the economy back on track the President urged Congress to pass a 787 billion "economic stimulus package."  The Congressional Budget Office calculated that the package actually blew through 862 billion.  Even now the estimate is being revised upward.  Regardless of the amount, it all needs to be paid back with interest.

The tax dollars you and I sent to Washington propped up failing car companies.   The CEO of General Motors, Ed Whitacre, says GM has paid America back.  What Mr. Whitacre leaves out is that the payback is not with earnings but with public money saved for GM in a Treasury Department escrow account.  GM is still mired in debt.  An intended consequence is that loser car execs and the United Auto Workers Union have great incentive to fatten the campaign coffers of those in Congress who bestow favor upon them.

Badly managed financial institutions were also bailed out and gratefully contributed to the campaign war chests of politicians like Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who was supposed to be watching over them.  Indeed, he was.

$150 billion was thrown at a hypothesis called Global Warming.  Even if the concocted data of politically motivated scientists were remotely true, those billions won't affect infentismalbe climate change. 

Until very recently millions were granted to ACORN to perpetrate voter fraud.  ACORN has been disbanded, but the Department of Justice has joined the cause, refusing to prosecute Black Panthers “monitoring” voting stations with clubs.

Now the federal spenders have enacted a $1 trillion-and-escalating health care reform bill that no elected official has read.   Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was head cheerleader for the legislation, saying, "We have to pass the bill so that we can find out what is in it.”

She still doesn't fully know.  She used what reading time she had to broker sweetheart deals with fellow House Members to exempt special voter interests from the bill's more onerous provisions.  Over in the Senate whole states like Louisiana were given a pass on having to help fund the bill.  Questioned about the make-it-up-as-you-go-along procedures and lack of promised transparency during the reconciliation process between House and Senate versions, Pelosi's factotum, Representative Alcee Hastings, recalled Thomas Edison's experimental technique of endless trial and error.  Hastings compared scientific invention with the legalities of bill passage, dodging logical hurdles, and without a blush said, "There ain't no rules here."

Representative Hastings made an important point when he brought up the prescription drug program touted by President George W. Bush and passed through a Republican Congress with a “doughnut hole” of deficit funding that is supposed to be made up for by future generations.  Republican and Democratic Administrations in the past and their lackeys in Congress  have always wasted money.  The difference this time is the scale—the deep dark vast abysmal depth of the financial hole we're expecting our great-grandchildren to dig us out of.

During one breathless moment, Speaker Pelosi predicted millions of jobs being created by health care reform. Doubtless, the government will need lots of bureaucrats to create red tape for any new doctors and nurses who may be trained and to  provide loopholes for insurance companies that already control the health care system.  Since everyone is now required to have health insurance, the companies will use some of their windfall profits to kickback funds to friends in Congress.  Columnist Mark Steyn points out that health care reform in the U.S. brings all the inefficiencies and waste of the British and Canadian models and adds the Chicago touch of being thoroughly corrupt from the get go.

But Think Positive

To calculate jobs created or saved by the entire stimulus package, Washington's wishful thinkers combined exaggeration and guesswork, then trumpeted economic recovery in spite of rising unemployment, bankruptcies and foreclosures.  Prognostications were pinned on the 2010 stock market briefly stuttering upward, compared to the dumps of 2009, as well as in a slight increase in consumer spending that is quickly abating and in a portion of the unemployed being rehired by businesses—approximately 170,000 workers compared to a total of about three million who lost their jobs after the stimulus kicked in.

I know a guy who makes a couple of grand a week on the construction of new runways.  He benefits from federal stimulus money.  So do airlines and air travelers.  I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that some federal money will go to adding a long awaited fourth bore to the Caldecott Tunnel.  These are good things.

But they are small things.  In total about 4% of the stimulus is going to infrastructure.  The rest is thrown at studies of bugs, marijuana and the sex life of female freshmen, a bar for a steakhouse, new golf carts for a country club, etcetera and so forth, with teacher benefits shoved into a military appropriations bill.  In other words, Washington continues to work us over.  During the fanfare that opened federal money bags, President Obama claimed the support of economists, by which he meant academic theorists who never had to ply their wares in the workaday world.  About 75% of economists who work for corporations, including General Electric that received federal bailout money, say the stimulus did little or nothing to create jobs.

Among signs of failure is a very disturbing one—prices have moved upward.  It is unlikely that even the appearance of recovery will sustain itself beyond the short term or will not take us anywhere near earlier prosperity.  The dollar has lost 10% of its value against major currencies, with much sharper decline inevitable as the government keeps printing paper to cover unprecedented debt.  The head of the Congressional Budget Office made it quite clear:

The deficit is unsustainable.

My wife and I don't expect anywhere in the nation to get significantly better under present mismanagement, but California lawmakers are hell bent on speeding up the train wreck.

Fiddling Around

Public employees vote for officials who roll over when it comes time to negotiate contracts.  Few politicians fight for ordinary people; they fight to get re-elected; and that means making special interests happy.  Whether it's an Arnold Schwarzenegger or a Gray Davis in Sacramento, or any other of the midgets in charge of California's counties and cities, public employee unions back the elections of the votewhores who help them.  In consequence the salaries and benefits in the public sector outstrip comparable jobs in the private sector.  And in case you haven't noticed, government workers get longer vacations than ordinary folk.

Teachers like to say that the money that goes to education "is about kids," and a few cents out of every educational tax dollar may have some classroom benefit.  As for the rest, the California Teachers Association throws lawyers at every attempt to force disclosure of just how much teachers can expect to receive in pension and health insurance benefits during the years when they are retired.  It is contractually almost impossible to fire incompetent ones when they are working.  It is estimated that what they rake in when they're officially not working makes them millionaires.  So it is that California descends into a debt trap in which their isn't taxable productivity in the state, now or in the future, to ever pay what is owed.  IOUs are given to teachers  who have less than five years sonority or they are simply laid off.  The political hacks won't demand better performance from teachers with tenure or legislate needed cutbacks in what is paid to them.

Volunteers augment police and fire services across America, but there is no big city in California that wants to rattle emergency responders with the fact that they may be way too costly to keep on payroll.  Once the cops and firemen retire (contractually at much young ages than private sector workers), they often migrate to states where the cost of living is lower because for one thing public employees aren't paid to live like royalty.

It is the pols in Sacramento who should be leading the way by cutting their own salaries and pensions, and that of their aids.  And why not make it retroactive for retired predecessors who presided over deficit years?  Then the sanctimonious could deservedly take the high ground to ask for needed sacrifices, like a tax increase, or better yet, closing down a dozen university campuses rather than voting to subsidize the tuitions of illegal aliens.  Generally, society gains little from most students who go to college, especially those majoring in liberal arts.  Kids are there to avoid growing up.  They lose themselves in a culture that glorifies drugs, alcohol and casual sex.  I'm not here to stop them.  I just don't want to help pay for it any more.

No one who could put weight behind, "Enough is enough," can see the high ground because minds are darkened.  Leaders may have good educations, regurgitating the ideologies of Marxist professors, but there is no wisdom.  Wisdom is a moral attribute.  At root of the monetary problem is a moral crisis.  It is wrong and nonsensical to spend more money than you have.  But if you don't believe in right and wrong, if you believe sense is anyone's heartfelt opinion and morality means blind tolerance of everything, you're not going to wise up to the laws of economics.

Or you are wised up and have decided to make a devilish pact with chaos and fear.  The goal is to kill self-reliance and have more and more people needing public money, either as employees or as welfare recipients, and thus become in times of desperation more convinced that only the state can care for them, or to  plaintively call for global government to do the caring.  How this kind of caring plays out can seen in any Communist country.  Individuals have no intrinsic worth, only groups who agree with the government.   Rights to make moral choices and form free associations must be curtailed, along with private initiative and property.  All this for the sake of a common good, meaning for the good of the governing elite calling the shots.

The bureaucratic response to the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a nod in the direction of socialized arrogance and inefficiency.  Help from thirty-three countries was initially rejected by President Obama and his advisors.  Entrepreneurs with innovative solutions for clean up, many of them proven effective on a small scale, were laughed off.  The Coast Guard blockaded private simmer boats because they may or may not have had the mandated number of lifejackets for crew members.

The California equivalents of fiddling while Rome burns is requiring the use of condoms in pornographic movies and condemning Arizona for trying to turn back the tide of illegal immigrants.  Sitting in air conditioned state offices and raking in high dollar salaries blinds the fiddlers to the ugly civil war going on in Mexico between the Federales and the drug lords.  Or perhaps some drug money is being quietly funneled to the politicians who say it's OK to have an open border for criminals.

Meanwhile the California apparatchiks increase taxes on the incomes of people their constituents believe are better off.  150,000 Californians out of an adult population of 26.1 million pay 50% of the state's taxes.  For every one of them there are 100 to 150 voters eager to OK bond issues with no thought to how they will be paid.  The majority of Californians on welfare don't think there is any connection between the food on their tables and their working neighbors.  They believe it is due to the largess of a favorite Parteiführer, but that in no way makes recipients grateful.  When unemployment benefits run out, when being on welfare means more difficult access to over-extended aid programs that offer fewer services, it is doubtful that the disgruntled will wait patiently in soup lines, cloth caps in hand ala the 1930s. 

Burning and looting are more likely.

For those reasons and more, my wife and I believed we needed to find relative sanctuary for the rest of our family.  The choice of sanctuary wasn't as much about physical location as about values—a place where most people most of the time  honor God and country without coercing anyone else to follow suit; where there are fewer entitlements and people who believe they deserve them; where crime is less and prisoners don't have to worry about being raped; where schools expect students to read and write; where politicians have to know constituents.  We hope we are wrong about needing sanctuary.  We can't coerce anyone to follow us.  But unless our move at least pointed to place where our grandchildren might be better protected, there was no point to leaving the joy their lives had given us.

"See you soon, my sweetheart!"

"Love you, buddy boy!"

Stopovers

Mrs. Andrus likes to keep to the main highways whereas I like to get off them.  She would have taken breakfast at one of the clumps of fast food joints along Interstate 5, but I was driving, so we took a jog into Winters, a farming town in the Vaca Mountains.  Hills really.  It stills feels as if you are surrounded by the seemingly endless hazy flat land of the great Central Valley. 

We pulled up at the Putah Creek Cafe named for nearby Putah Creek.  Thirty or more years ago my older brother Dan and I rented a canoe in Davis, fourteen miles east, and rowed a bit of the seventy-mile stream of water.  A tiny bit.  150 yards to the nearest taproom.  The creek's name is subject to debate, but if you drop the "H," you have a harlot in Spanish, reason enough to check out the cafe.  I can't remember what I ordered because one bite of my wife's bacon overwhelmed every other impression.  It was thick and meaty and apple-wood smoked.  It was the best I've had since my grandmother used to cut slices off a slab.

After taking a cholesterol hit, we headed north.  It was mid-September.  It was still hot. 

The Central Valley ends at Redding.  Beyond, the Cascades start with the abrupt rise of Mount Shasta, a volcanic mass that dominates the landscape for hours, inspiring names all around.  A snow covered representation of the mountain and the logo, "It has'ta be Shasta," were on a brand of root beer when I was a kid, the first to be sold in cans rather than in bottles.  A Maryland-based company started bottling water from Shasta Springs, and in 1931 began producing soft drinks.  Seven years later construction began on damming the Sacramento River.

We took a side trip to Shasta Dam where a campground lies below the power station on the west bank.   The road to the campground transverses the top of the dam.  An armed Pinkerton controls a retractable barrier at each end.  9/11 immediately shut down any access, and half the law enforcement in Siskiyou County, including the Sheriff, took turns on round-the-clock guard duty.  On Lake Shasta warnings remain for boaters to keep 1,000 yards from the wall in case some water skier has ill intent.

While my wife hung around the cool of the visitors center, I walked the wall to get the kinks out of my legs and brain, exchanging a hearty pleasantry with the hired gun at the start of my walk.  To the gunsole at the other end I toyed with asking if he had ever seen The Dam Busters, the 1955 film about the Royal Air Force's destruction of Ruhr Valley dams during World War II.  It was a black and white movie, so he probably hadn't seen it and therefore would not know the impossibility of a pleasure  boat's carrying enough explosives to destroy Shasta...oh, perhaps crack the top of the wall a bit...but a British Lancaster with a 6,800-pound bouncing bomb would create enough concussion lower down to breach the wall and flood 160 miles of the Central Valley.

On the way back I was thinking about how I should have done my bit for the War on Terror by keeping security forces educated, as I have done during my last eight flights when I was pulled aside to be patted down, or as now when another Pinkerton in a pickup slowly passed and gave me the once over.

Second thoughts crept in.  During the Bush Administration leftists criticized use of the term "The War on Terror."  Under President Obama the term was dropped like a woman stoned to death in Saudi Arabia.  The present head of Homeland Security...another woman whose name sounds like Neapolitan ice cream...talks about "man made disasters."  The pundits (educated but far from wise) seemed to think people such as myself would get confused by "War on Terror," assuming as it does that terrorists need killing, but begging the question, What is a terrorist?

According to our betters, terrorists are simply people who have a grievance or are misunderstood, just like the violent, run-of-the-mill criminals in our prisons.  Terrorists are not Islamic radicals who want to slaughter Americans and  Europeans,  or convert by the sword Africans and Asians.  Terrorists are not fanatics who call for jihad or fatwa.  There are, you see, many good Moslems, and people in Washington think we ordinary folk can't sort out the good from the bad, and the most grievous crime of all would be to try and therefore prove we are racists at heart.  The bottom line is: there is no evil, and that's what we the confused don't understand.  We don't see the moral equivalency between the United States and other nations, between blighting foreign lands with MacDonald's and Palestinians wiring their children to blow up Jewish pizza parlors.

I began to wonder.  Is there some super secret profiling technique that can read my mind?  Was that why the guy in the truck was giving me the fish eye?  White.  Male.  Says, "Hi," when he thinks, Sure, we've embarrassed and humiliated prisoners of war (and, yes, sometimes water boarded them), but that is nothing compared to the systematic maiming and rape of civilians who disagree with the towel-headed dictator of whatever bung hole country the U.S. supposed to be equal to.

Back on the Interstate we stopped outside of Weed (pop. 3,024) to have lunch at The Black Bear.  A couple of buddies from Weed High School started the Black Bear and now have a chain reaching into Arizona and Nevada.  I've eaten at three Black Bears, and the food is better and the atmosphere more homey than bigger chains, but the fare is just as high in fat and refined carbs.  The regulars made me look svelte as I tried to put away a club sandwich that was too big to finish.

Taking turns driving, we turned off I-5 and took U.S. 97 across the Oregon frontier.  We wanted to reach Bend by sunset.  Bend was where the future husband of Amelia Earhart did PR work, getting paid for how many mentions he could get of the town in eastern papers.  I was in the middle of my hundredth scrunching seat contortion when I realized: I'm not twenty; I don't have any dex; the goal isn't to make Acapulco in one shot.  I had matured, and so had my sorry backside.  I did not feel nostalgic when we pulled into Bend, the place I thought I might settle five years earlier.

Flashback

Five years ago we lived in L.A.'s biological sink.  Three things stood out.  One was all around us.  One was on television.  One was in impressions we each received that we believed had supernatural origin.

One evening it took two hours in traffic to go to a function six miles away.  No one had bombed a bridge.  There wasn't an accident or an earthquake.  No cops were dropping spike strips to shred the tires of a guy with no shirt.  A perfectly normal evening.

A hurricane in New Orleans isn't abnormal, but Katrina was worse than most, and one of the indelible images was that of cars with full tanks of gas running out of fuel stuck on the on-ramps to freeways.  People flock to the roads in disasters and war.  You see their bewildered faces in documentaries in which they are pushing handcarts to...well, they don't really know...but away from the Germans, the Japanese, the North Koreans.  Someday it could be from plague or a suitcase nuke or food rioting.  Whatever the madness is, if the roads are packed, you're not going to get to where you want to go.  Better to be already there.

Finally, I had a thought I sensed came from the Lord: "I don't want you in it, I don't want you of it, I want you out of it."  I believed the "it" was the entertainment industry.  With upcoming films like Machete promoting race war, garnering name actors to star in it and a mainline company like Fox to distribute, coupled with the usual standbys of  pornography, rap music and the occult indoctrination of children, I felt as though I was surrounded by angels gathering for  the last days.  Even if I were not a corruptor of the innocent (which is debatble) and even if I could escape being thrown into the sea with a millstone around my neck, I might drown in the splashing all around.

For almost a decade, every year getting worse, I had been hitting my head against rejections and excuses that seemed to have no rational basis.  People who once might have hired me were retiring because their projects weren't cutting edge enough to titillate the appetites of those in charge of financing.  A class action lawsuit filed by several writers has established a pattern of discrimination based on age.  I would add, as would others, that being a Christian and politically conservative certainly didn't help.  Liberal fascists abound in the industry, and they have messages they want to spew to the public: one of them is that people like me are dangerous fanatics.

My wife also had an impression.  She was reading the Bible when a passage suddenly grabbed her attention: The LORD our God said to us at Horeb, "You have stayed long enough at this mountain.  Break camp and advance..." (Deuteronomy 1.6, New International Version)

We ran these impression by trusted friends and believed we had confirmation to move.  We checked out Bend because it briefly looked as if our son-in-law might be transferring there.  My wife and I loved what we saw of the high desert town.  I was particularly impressed by a Goth girl.  She looked mean as a snake as she came out of a coffee bar, threw down a gum wrapper and continued for about four paces before she stopped, turned around, picked up the wrapper and put it in a trash container.  Her looks may have been inspired by the cultural sewage coming out of California, but her attitude was far from it.

Then, instead of moving to Bend, our son-in-law and daughter had babies.  We were certain God wanted us to be wherever those children were.  Aren't we always certain about what we want?

That put us in a small town in the East Bay, an easily walked mile from our grandchildren and within regular visiting distance of our son.  It had been years since I felt so happy, especially in the summer when I could swim with my grandchildren under deep warm indigo skies.  Traffic was better.  People were less edgy.  Couples had more babies than dogs.

Gradually, though, it was clear that Lord wanted us to move on.  What we want isn't always what He wants.

"Good-by, my sweetheart."

"I love you, buddy boy."

Into Oregon

It's amazing what Californians can do to a patch of high desert. The hardscrabble values of the natives don't attract Californians.  Cheaper land prices do, and the fantasy that we can change the world to fit our image, and this time it will work.  Everything will be beautiful and nothing will hurt.

We bring tolerant ways, laid back ways, feel good childish ways that are based on ideas that don't require much thought and with hardly a second thought can be transformed with a vengeance.  Thirty, forty years ago it was cool to have gay friends.  Now you're homophobic if you don't favor same sex marriage.  Once upon a time it was enlighten to march with the United Farm Workers Union.

Now it's expedient to ignore the dwindling jobs and worsening poverty of farm laborers because the more trendy cause of environmentalism dictates that agricultural irrigation be curtailed in order to save tiny fish and slimy snails.

Decades ago Californians emptied the loony bins, excusing anti-social nuttiness as free speech.  We taught self-esteem instead of the Three Rs.  We kept voting to tax and regulate productivity until it costs too much to do business.  We let litigation scare off risk taking.  We allowed mediocre politicians to entrench themselves.  We bought into politically correct media that refused to question our decline and in bizarre twists of logic preached that it was good for us.

Oregon is worse.  Values oriented voters in rural areas hardly count against the population of the urban belt between Portland and Salem which is pretty much California Cold.  Throw in emigrants from the warmer climes, and there is a majority for assisted suicide, legalized pot, and the Oregon Health Plan.  The latter is hemorrhaging money like bankrupt Commonwealth Care in Massachusetts and damn near bankrupt Tenn Care in Al Gore's home state.  Oregon has the second highest jobless rate in the nation (at 12.4% it is sandwiched between Michigan's 14.1% and South Carolina's 12.1%).  Public workers in Oregon average incomes of $83,000 a year or about 30% more than private sector counterparts.  In the last three years the state racked up a $1 billion deficit, lost 40,000 private sector jobs and added 25,000 new public employees.  The Democratic-controlled legislature gave public workers a $259 million pay raise, making sure the state thrives, as it were, as a socialist society in which citizens increasingly need the public trough to feed.

What happened was telegraphed with telling force in a 1982 Travis McGee novel, Cinnamon Skin, by John D. MacDonald.  McGee is in Utica, New York, with his friend, an economist named Meyer.  They're trying to track down a man who is a serial killer.  They're having dinner in a restaurant, and McGee studies the patrons.

Politicos, many of them young.  Lawyers and elected officials and appointees.  Some with their wives or girls.  It looked to me as if a lot of city and county business might be transacted here.  They had a lot of energy, those Italianate young men, a feverish gregariousness.  I wondered why they seemed so frantic about having a good time.

Meyer studied the question and finally said, "It's energy without a productive outlet, I think.  Most of these Mohawk Valley cities are dying, have been for years: Albany, Troy, Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rome.  And so they make an industry out of government.  State office buildings in the decaying downtowns.  A proliferation of committees, surveys, advisory boards, commissions, legal actions, grants, welfare, zoning boards, road departments, health care programs...thousands upon thousands of people making a reasonably good living working for city, county, state and federal governments in these dwindling cities, passing the same tax dollar back and forth.  I think that man, by instinct, is productive.  He wants to make something, a stone ax, a bigger cave, better arrows, whatever.  But these bright and energetic men know in their hearts that they are not making anything.  They use every connection, every contact, every device, to stay within reach of public monies.  Working within an abstraction is just not a  totally honest way of life.  Hence the air of jumpy joy, the backslaps ringing too loudly, compliments too extravagant, toasts too ornate, marriages too brief, lawsuits too long-drawn, obligatory forms too complex and too long.  Their city has gone stale.  As the light wanes, they dance."

Dancing through Bend

In Bend I couldn't find what first had attracted me—a barn-like store advertising guns and tobacco in ten-foot letters.  Five years later there seemed to be more boutiques and bigger homes, everything overbuilt because the tech-and-leverage barons thought they were clever enough to keep boom times going forever.  The wife pulled into a Seven-Eleven so that I could jump out to buy a map to re-orient ourselves to the town.  At an intersection as I was turning the map this way and that, a woman stepped off the sidewalk and knocked on my window.

"Are you folks looking to buy a home?"

That was as close as I got to a panhandler with a "I'll work for food" sign.  Score one for Bend.  Another good thing was that the hotel where we initially wanted to stay was booked solid with National Guardsmen.

The third good thing—motorists cannot fill their own gas tanks.  The task is reserved for service station attendants, assuring them minimum wage jobs.  This is the kind of make-work legislation that actually helps people directly and doesn't require a lot of bureaucrats to administer.  The additional cost to consumers is still less than what motorists endure in California where nozzles are fitted with vapor condoms.  These are mainly produced by a single company forever lobbying for more refined environmental devices, and paying legislators a pretty penny to save our air.  Environmentalism has its idealists, but on the legal and political end it is a racket through and through.

There was a thirty-minute wait to get a seat in The Deschutes Brewery Pub where bunches of young people held up the walls having no idea that time is always running out.  My wife doesn't mind waiting because she has been hospitalized only once with a serious condition whereas I've flat lined three times.  Not that I'm counting, but rather than argue, I simply headed across the street.

Mrs. Andrus followed.  Some day she may not.  I've been married to different women with the same name for forty-one years.  They try to fool me that they're really one person, but this trip was bringing out a whole new woman.  Exciting in some ways.

The fourth good thing about Bend is the High Tides Seafood Grill.  The two starters we ordered—cup-sized portions of clam chowder and oyster stew—were creamy, delicately seasoned and soothed the appetite for anything more to eat.  My oyster stew was so good, I had flashes of tolerance as the Californian at the next table gushingly described all the wine tours she had been on.

On the Road Again

The next morning we reached the Dalles, that section of the Oregon Trail that forced pioneers to barge the rest of the way down the Columbia River.  Basalt and granite blocks stick out of sedimentary formations that line the gorge.  Nowadays good highways rim the Oregon and Washington sides, and the air currents whipping in between draw wind surfers from all over.

We bridged the river at Kennewick, Washington.  We still had another night and hundreds of miles to go before we reached our destination, but here is where I want to pause.

Kennewick is the site of an archeological find discovered by two college students watching a hydroplane race in 1996.  Their accident became serious business for Native American activists, federal judges and scientist from all over.  The controversy was twofold.  According to relatively recent law, ancient remains are supposed to turned over to Indian authorities who can give their ancestors dignified burials.  Bone collectors at museums and colleges are not to stand in the way of cultural respect, and in many cases have had to give up ancient finds.  But Kennewick Man had Caucasoid characteristics, and although claimed by the areas five Indian Nations, the DNA of those Native Americans was Asiatic in origin, while this boy, along with about nine other finds like him scattered across America, definitely is not.

Speculation puts Kennewick Man's origins all over the map—from Europe to the southernmost Islands of Japan.  What's clear is that some 9,000-plus years ago Caucasoid people were among the so-called First Americans.  Given a tell-tale arrow wound, their neighbors weren't exactly friendly.

Some commentators use Kennewick Man to propose that racial distinctions are arbitrary, hardly definitive in spite of anatomy that tends toward some groups but not to others.  Historically, race has been used by one culture to build walls against another.  Or shoot arrows.  I happen to agree, which is why I find such things as hate crime legislation and hiring goals to be intrinsically racist and therefore repugnant.

But ideals like that out me in a minority.  In way I am Kennewick Man.  An oddity.  A relic.  I may end up no more than a fossil frozen in the past.  Or I may turn out to be part of a remnant of something that survives of better days and better people.  There is no guarantee for the future, only the ache for what has been left behind.

"See you soon, my sweetheart."

"Love you, buddy boy."

Last fall just before I hightailed it from California, a Catholic lady gave me a photocopy of an article with the above title. It appeared a decade earlier in the San Francisco Chronicle under the byline Stephanie Salter. She echoed criticism of the Catholic Church hurled long before and still being trotted out today. With a slightly different vocabulary, the carping could splash over onto evangelical churches.

Ms. Salter champions the cause "a courageous Jesuit priest" who holds up the banner of a "more inclusive, Christ-like faith." That sounds like a Good Idea until she gets to the courageous priest's specifics. Among the not-so-Christ-like things Father Black Robe rails against is the Church's 2,000-year misunderstanding of the role of women. The ladies are treated like "second class citizens."

The article continues to set up boogie men and blow them away, provoking emotions in the way of discussions in a high school civics class. This makes me the perfect sophomoric thinker to answer back.

First, I'm tardy. Second, I've not done the homework. I've not even asked the cutie pie in the next aisle to give me the rundown on the chapter everyone else read. Finally, I have no intention of looking things up or going to original sources. We just don't do that in high school. Or much in college. Come to think of it, it's not the way of post-modern journalism, either.

As reported by Ms. Salter, Father Black Robe is a member of the Chicago-based dissident group Call to Action. At a Call to Action convention on the West Coast, he delivered the homily in the closing Mass, in which he imagined Jesus arriving at SFX, then going on to challenge the smug ideas of the conservative powers that be.

I admit to some confusion about whether Black Robe is talking about San Francisco, a town hardly known for its conservative leaders, or another planet. But I am used to this and with low cunning act as if I'm on the same page.

In Black Robe's homily Jesus responds to "Deepack Shupra"s charging $25,000 a head to hear the guru speak on "Peace of Mind." I'm pretty sure Black Robe is making a play on the name Chupra. Being an inclusive kind of priest, he doesn't want to knock snake charmers or whatever it is the real Chupra does to get the big bucks. Jesus simply tells him what to do with the money: "Go and disperse it among the poor and homeless in the street."

Verily, that sounds almost like an update on what Jesus said to the rich young man who kept all the commandments and wanted to know what else he had to do to inherit eternal life. As recorded someplace to the right of Malachi, Jesus ascertained that the young man hadn't committed adultery or borne false witness or broken whatever the other Commandments are. Then Jesus said, "One thing you lack. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

The phrases "eternal life," "treasure in heaven" and "follow me" may have been cut from Black Robe's parallel because he was delivering a homily, not a full-blown sermon. It could be that Ms. Salter did some editing on her own. If I were a gambler, I'd bet that the fuller biblical story was simply inconvenient. Nevertheless, we are invited to imagine, so we might assume that "Shupra" upholds the Ten Commandments, doesn't want to go to Hell, and is willing to become a disciple of Jesus so that he can have eternal life in Heaven. Otherwise sticking the money up his backside would do as much good for his soul as a tax exempt charitable donation to the homeless. Jesus real message is: to get saved you need him, and in him comes the grace to let go of the piggy bank or anything else you think is more important than God.

Black Robe's Jesus then refuses an invitation to attend a dinner with all Frisco's religious leaders. Instead, he rocks up at a Castro District bistro to be "with some friends from the gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgender community." When he invites the religious leaders to join him, they refuse.

There Black Robe goes again, saying we're on Earth when he's really talking of Uranius. I mean, there have been at least three decades of San Francisco clergy supporting gay life styles and/or living them, campaigning for gay officials and officiating over same sex weddings. Black Robe's Castro café would have been chock full of clergy on the prowl to show their solidarity.

Again, it is possible that the shorthand of a homily necessitated Black Robe's leaving out what he must know of Jesus: he was always up for a party—either with winos and corrupt tax collectors or with his mom and the disciples— but never was he satisfied with a quick glad hand and hearty, "Hey, slick, you're ace in my book. "

On the contrary, Jesus' mission was to reconcile man with God. Since God doesn't change, Jesus reminded sinful men and women that they needed to. The God Jesus preached is quick to accept everyone as they are, to show mercy, to forgive them...but now the unpopular part...to help us change our wicked ways. Dealing with the woman caught in adultery, Jesus drove off her accusers, then told her, "I do not condemn you. Now go and sin no more."

That is quite a bit different than it's OK to go whatever you want with your genitals. It is the exact opposite of what media and public schools tell us. The likeliest scenario at the café is that Jesus would ask his fellow revelers to repent whereupon most would call for his crucifixion.

Some, though, would recognize that their lives are in disorder and would ask to be healed. Some would be healed immediately. Some might take years or decades. Some might never get rid of slavish desires. And some of those would either backslide and need to repent repeatedly, or would courageously carry their burden and not act on their impulses.

Jesus would never tell them that change is easy. But he does promise to stand with them.

Black Robe's Jesus continues his Bay Area odyssey by visiting prisoners at San Quentin. There he talks about the sanctity of human life "from the unborn child in the womb to my humble friends on Death Row." There are inmates, I suppose, who are humble.   Whether against them or violent narcissists, the Church teaches that capital punishment should be used only in the most exceptional cases. I don't agree with that teaching, but I suspect both the real Jesus and Black Robe's would want execution abolished. Just speculation. What I'm more sure of is this: the real Jesus wouldn't do today what he didn't do during his crucifixion. Namely, he did not deny the right of the state to execute prisoners.

As the homily grinds on, we go back to women. The most faithful of Jesus dwindling followers are a group of women. The scripture, "In Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, male or female," is used to bitchslap those in the Vatican who contend that Jesus is really calling women to the priesthood. It's the Pope and his cronies who are holding them down from their true calling.

Except for the odd heretic, never in the first Nineteen centuries of Catholic history did anyone in the Church think woman should be priests. None of the Popes. None of the Saints from Mother Teresa and Elizabeth Seton, to Catherine of Sienna, that magnificent warrior Joan of Arc and Mary, the mother of God herself. The plain fact is, no Pope or College of Cardinals can ordain women to the priesthood because it goes against Cannon Law and ecclesiastical tradition, both of which are based on what Catholics have for centuries believed is the proper biblical understanding.

In recent times Protestants have allowed women to go from ministries like evangelism, healing and prophesy to take over as heads of churches and at times of full denominations. Obviously, some churches do modify themselves to fit into more modern views of what should and should not be. I would suggest that Black Robe and Call to Action look into joining those churches, rather than wasting time complaining about the Pope's unwillingness to be trendy.

Tom Hanks—actor, producer, featherweight thinker—has made some very silly comments regarding his understanding of World War II in order to flack The Pacific War, a miniseries he produced for HBO.

"...it really represents a war that was of racism and terror and it seemed as though the only way to complete one of these battles on these small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere was to-- I'm sorry-- kill them all,” Hanks told MSNBC. “And does that sound familiar to what we might be going through today? So it's-- is there anything new under the sun? It seems as if history keeps repeating itself.”

The most cursory reading of the subject matter that Hanks pretends to know something about would contradict him on every point.

Culturally, the Japanese believed that all foreigners were sub-human. They didn't think any better of Koreans and Chinese than they did of Americans and Australians. The Japanese hated without prejudice, and some today still believe that foreigners are just a cut above monkeys. The word for foreigner requires a facial contortion similar to the reaction of stepping in dog you-know-what. When Imperial Japan was spreading its "Greater Asia Co-prosperity Sphere" in the 1930s and early 40s, political and military strategy included the wholesale rape and murder of civilians, and the draconian occupation of cities like Nanking and Shanghai, Singapore and Seoul.

Americans called them Japs and Nips and little yellow bastards, and undoubtedly harbored prejudices, but we did not go to war because of racism. We were forced into hostilities because of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

"Those small specks of rock in the middle of nowhere" referred to by Hanks had names ennobled by American blood—Midway, Guadacanal, Bougainville, Tarawa, Guam, Tinian, Peleliu, The Philippines, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. We didn't "seem' to kill all our enemies on those places. We came pretty close to doing it and weren't sorry because the Japanese had been ordered to fight to the last man. Only a few dishonored themselves, their ancestors and their Emperor by surrendering to the American dogs. They expected the same treatment they had dished out to Allied prisoners, treatment that made the Nazi SS in charge of POWs in Germany look like choir boys. On 22 April 1943 Japan made reality official, announcing that Allied pilots would be given "one way tickets to hell." Months after the atomic bombing of Japan forced her warlords to do the unthinkable and surrender, camp commanders were ordering prisoners to be beheaded or burned alive. After the war Lord Mountbatten who served in the Royal Navy and knew Japanese atrocities all too well had a codicil in his will: when he died, no Japanese official should be allowed to attend his funeral.

Tom Hanks feels (I almost used the word "thinks") that what happened in the Pacific is similar to the War on Terror. Kind of. But not in any way that someone so politicalyl correct and historically ignorant can imagine. Islamic fascists started the current war. They think all infidels are dogs, and make no distinction between killing soldiers and civilians. They are hell bent on converting us, by the sword or otherwise, and then expanding Sharia law so that...

...Well, the star of Philadelphia Story wouldn't be given long to finally grow up.

In 1999 Hitler's Pope  by John Cornwell attacked the Vatican's role in World War II, especially the inaction of Pope Pius XII. Within eighteen months of the hardcover publication of Hitler's Pope, Papal Sin by Garry Wills, Under His Very Windows by Susan Zuccotti and Constantine's Sword by James Caroll entered the fray to discredit Pius XII.

None of them were in time for John Cornwell's retraction quoted December 9, 2004 issue of the Economist.

"Devil's advocates were supposed to be fair-minded, and in the past Mr Cornwell, a prolific writer on Catholic matters, has at times been anything but. As he admits, Hitler's Pope (1999), his biography of Pope Pius XII, lacked balance. 'I would now argue,' he says, 'in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler's Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by the Germans.'"

Like Cornewll, the three authors who followed him are lapsed Catholics or dissenting ones. To them, Pius XII was either a moral coward or assented to Hitler's policies, but more that that, they see a parallel with the unbending defense of dogma made by Pius' successors. Dogma covers a gamut of post-modern concerns touted by Catholics who are variously described as conciliators, modernists or progressives. The usual suspects for them are an all male priesthood, viewing Satan as being not as a symbol, and refusal to bend on calling abortion a mortal sin.

Daniel Goldhagen is a Jew who may not care about any of those issue, only that the Pope turned on Jews when they most needed Christian allies. His book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, published in 2002, portrays Pius XII as part of a wider Roman Catholic anti-Semitic tradition integral to the very "genesis of the Holocaust."

Ironically, knowledgeable Jews of a generation ago, especially survivors of the Holocaust, would have metaphorically tarred and feathered Goldhagen.

Dr. Panchas E. Lapide was an Israeli diplomat who became an Orthodox rabbi and one of the more renown historians of the Holocaust. His book, Three Popes and the Jews, published in 1967, describes the Pope's state of mind when he was merely Cardinal Eugeno Pacelli, the Vatican's envoy in Germany.

"Of the forty-four speeches which the Nuncio Pacelli had made on German soil between 1917 and 1929, at least forty contained attacks on Nazism or condemnations of Hitler’s doctrines. . . . Pacelli, who never met the Führer, called (National Socialism) 'neo-Paganism.'"

Pacelli's anti-Nazi stance was based in part on the theological understanding that Christians, claiming to be spiritual children of Abraham, are therefore spiritual Semites. Pacelli's stance was the primary reason Pius XI elevated him to office of Vatican Secretary of State.

Dr. Joseph Lichten, a Jewish academician and former Polish refugee from the Nazis, wrote a lengthy 1963 essay called "A Question of Judgment: Pius XII and the Jews." Dr. Lichten documented the assistance Pacelli provided Jews both before and after he became Pope. Assistance included a rescue mission in 1936 in reaction to the Nuremberg Laws stripping besieged German Jews of any remaining rights. German bishops requested that Cardinal Pacelli urge the Vatican to start an emigrant organization, to which Pius XI readily agreed and on behalf of which his Secretary of State wrote to all American bishops asking for their support. From those beginnings sprang more intensive rescue efforts once World War II began.

Shortly before Pacelli became head of the Roman Catholic Church world wide, he appealed to the world's governments to throw open their borders to persecuted Jews. Switzerland not only closed her borders but also deported those who managed to cross. The United States and Great Britain continued policies of turning refugees away.

Nevertheless, Pius XII's first encyclical after war broke out--a plea for peace--was used as a propaganda weapon by the Allies. More than 80,000 copies were dropped by the Royal and French air forces over Germany. The New York Times greeted the encyclical with a front-page headline on October 28, 1939: "Pope Condemns Dictators, Treaty Violators, Racism."

Hitler attempted to prevent the new Pope from maintaining his anti-Nazi stance. According to Dr. Lichten, Von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister, was granted a papal audience on March 11, 1940. After a harangue about the inevitability of a Nazi victory and the futility of papal alignment with the enemies of the Third Reich, "Pius XII opened an enormous ledger on his desk and, in his perfect German, began to recite a catalogue of the persecutions inflicted by the Third Reich in Poland, listing...precise details of each crime. The audience was terminated; the Pope’s position was clearly unshakable."

After the war, Von Ribbonthorpe testified at Nuremberg that he had a desk full of the Pontiff's complaints on behalf of Jews. During the war, Adolph Eichman wrote in his diary that efforts to exterminate Jews were being thwarted by the Pope, and he wished he could prove Vatican involvement.

The proof wanted was hard evidence that the Pope was inciting subordinates in Occupied Europe to thwart the round up and deportation of undesirables; was behind the procurement of valid and forged passports, of medical clearances and post-dated Baptismal certificates; and used the Vatican treasury to finance much of the enormous cost of these endeavors, including bribes to officials and payoffs to extortionists. Documentation of the fraud would release the Axis from lip service to the Vatican's status as a neutral state. Mussolini's foreign minister complained that Pius was "ready to let himself be deported to a concentration camp, rather than do anything against his conscience." Hitler wanted to enter the Vatican to "pack up that whole whoring rabble." Several plans were considered for kidnapping the Pope; others, for assassinating him. Looting art treasures would be an added bonus to the Reich.

The lack of proof that aggravated the Axis is the so-called silence that all anti-Catholic writers today use as their core argument that Pius XII was morally corrupt. In the November 25, 2008 internet edition of the The Jewish Ledger, Cindy Mindell describes efforts of Jewish leaders to re-think their biases. One convert is Rabbi Eric Silver of Temple Beth David in Cheshire, Connecticut.

Silver understands the horns of a dilemma, the sharp horns ready to gore the Pope's domain of 110 acres, the smallest state in the world, that could field an army of twenty-two spear-chucking Swiss guards. Just one goosestep outside the walls were Mussolini's Fascist soldiers then S.S. troops called in to prop up the dictator. Silver asks rhetorically, "People say, 'Why didn't the pope speak out? Dutch clergy ran up a trial balloon by speaking out, and immediately, 40,000 Dutch Jews were rounded up, including Edith Stein."

Rabbi Silver continues, "With no records, it's easy to point to what he didn't do. But my question is this: Does it take a rocket scientist to figure out why there is no paper trail? Rome was occupied by the Nazis, there were German spies in the Vatican, so what would have happened if they had found physical evidence of the pope's actions? There is not a paper trail linking the Final Solution to Hitler. If you don't want to give credit to the pope because there was no paper trail, you can't blame Hitler for the Final Solution, because there was no paper trail there either."

Orthodox Rabbi Dr. David Dalin is a Professor of History and Political science at Ave Maria University in Florida. His book The Myth of Hitler's Pope was published 2005. Although it sold 150,000 more hardcover copies than John Cornwell's book, it hasn't received nearly the attention. Pope-bashing got Cornwell a spot on 60 Minutes. Dennis Prager invited Dalin to be interviewed on radio. Vanity Fair published an abridged version of Hitler's Pope, leaving it to smaller periodicals like The American Spectator and The Weekly Standard to publish contrarian articles by Rabbi Dalin. The following is from the Rabbi's article, "Pius XII and the Jews," published in the February 26, 2001 issue of The Weekly Standard:

"One might ask, of course, what could have been worse than the mass murder of six million Jews? The answer is the slaughter of hundreds of thousands more. And it was toward saving those it could that the Vatican worked. The fate of Italian Jews has become a major topic of Pius's critics, the failure of Catholicism at its home supposedly demonstrating the hypocrisy of any modern papal claim to moral authority. (Notice, for example, Zuccotti's title: Under His Very Windows.)

"But the fact remains that while approximately 80 percent of European Jews perished during World War II, 80 percent of Italian Jews were saved.

"In the months Rome was under German occupation, Pius XII instructed Italy's clergy to save lives by all means. (A neglected source for Pius' actions during this time is the 1965 memoir But for the Grace of God, by Monsignor J. Patrick Carroll-Abbing, who worked under Pius as a rescuer.) Beginning in October 1943, Pius asked churches and convents throughout Italy to shelter Jews. As a result--and despite the fact that Mussolini and the Fascists yielded to Hitler's demand for deportations-- many Italian Catholics defied the German orders.

"In Rome, 155 convents and monasteries sheltered some five thousand Jews. At least three thousand found refuge at the pope's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. Sixty Jews lived for nine months at the Gregorian University, and many were sheltered in the cellar of the pontifical biblical institute. Hundreds found sanctuary within the Vatican itself. Following Pius' directive individual Italian priests, monks, nuns, cardinals, and bishops were instrumental in preserving thousands of Jewish lives. Cardinal Boetto of Genoa saved at least eight hundred. The bishop of Assisi hid three hundred Jews for over two years. The bishop of Campagna and two of his relatives saved 961 more in Fiume.

"Cardinal Pietro Palazzini, then assistant vice rector of the Seminario Romano, hid Michael Tagliacozzo and other Italian Jews at the seminary (which was Vatican property) for several months in 1943 and 1944. In 1985, Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial, honored the cardinal as a righteous gentile -- and, in accepting the honor, Palazzini stressed that 'the merit is entirely Pius XII's, who ordered us to do whatever we could to save the Jews from persecution.' Some of the laity helped as well, and, in their testimony afterwards, consistently attributed their inspiration to the pope.

"Again, the most eloquent testimony is the Nazis' own. Fascist documents published in 1998...speak of a German plan, dubbed 'Rabat-Fohn,' to be executed in January 1944. The plan called for the eighth division of the S cavalry, disguised as Italians, to seize St. Peter's and 'massacre Pius XII with the entire Vatican' -- and specifically names 'the papal protest in favor of the Jews' as the cause."

In Three Popes and the Jews, Dr. Lapide estimated that the number of all Jews spared in Europe by Pius XII's throwing the Church's weight into the struggle was "at least 700,000 souls, but in all probability it is much closer to...860,000." Lapide calculated that Pius XII and the Church he headed constituted the most successful Jewish aid organization in all of Europe during the war, dwarfing the Red Cross and all other aid societies.

But that was long ago. And just as long ago is a yellowing clipping from page 6 of The Palestine Post, now The Jerusalem Post, brought to light last year. The dateline is April 28, 1944. Wartime. Thirty-nine days before the invasion of Normandy, thirteen months before the fall of the Third Reich. Approximately twelve million people were yet to be killed on battlefields, in air raids, in camps, by disease. The Post story recounts a papal audience during a sunny Wednesday morning even earlier, in the autumn of 1941. The byline is simply "Refugee." He is described as a person who arrived in Palestine aboard the refugee ship Nyassa.

"...The Pope speaks to everybody--asking the soldiers in fluent German from which part of the Reich they come and whether they have a special wish. And he speaks so naturally and so simply that one cannot but feel his benevolent influence. Afterwards the Holy Father gives his benediction and hands over the petitions to his retinue: cardinals, bishops and other high dignitaries of Mother Church, officials of the Vatican Government, secretaries and diplomats. They stand respectfully in the background behind the audience chair, dressed in richly colored garments of mediaeval style.

"At last it is my turn. I step forward, feeling very uneasy and shy. Then I kneel down on a velvet cushion, bow over the Papal hand, and breathe a kiss on the ring.

"Then I look up and address him, stammering some Italian phrases.

"But the Pope interrupts me. 'My son, you can speak your own language with me; you are German, too, aren't you?'

"'No, your Holiness, I was only born in Germany. But I am not a German any longer. I am a Jew.'

"'So you are a Jew, what can I do for you? Tell me, my son!'

"....I report about the shipwrecked Jewish refugees, saved by Italian warships in the Aegean Sea and now starving in a prisoner of war camp on one of the islands. The Pope listens carefully to my explanations of how to help these poor people either by taking them to Palestine or by bringing them back to Italy to avoid epidemics and further starvation. Then Pius XII says:

"'You have done well to come to me and tell me this. I have heard about it before. Come back tomorrow with a written report and give it to the Secretary of State who is dealing with the question. But now for you, my son. You are a young Jew. I know what that means and I hope you will always be proud to be a Jew!' And the Pope raises his voice that everybody in the hall can here it clearly, 'My son, whether you are worthier than others only the Lord knows, but believe me, you are at least as worthy as every other human being that lives on our earth!

"'And now, my Jewish friend, go with the protection of the Lord, and never forget, you must always be proud to be a Jew!'"

After Pius XII died on October 9, 1958, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations asked for silence to mark his passing, then Golda Meir said: "We share the grief of the world over the death of His Holiness Pius XII.... During the ten years of Nazi terror, when our people passed through the horrors of martyrdom, the Pope raised his voice to condemn the persecutors and to commiserate with their victims."

Similar testimonials were so numerous The New York Times stopped printing them and gave only names for three days. Synagogue throughout the Western world conducted memorial services, echoing the sentiments of Nahum Goldmann, President of the World Jewish Congress:

"With special gratitude we remember all he has done for the persecuted Jews during one of the darkest periods in their entire history."

Remembrance, though, seems to have become a faded virtue. In the July/August 2006 issue of The American Spectator, Sir Martin Gilbert, another Jewish historian, Winston Churchill's official biographer and author of ten books on the Holocaust, kicks off a favorable review of Rabbi Dalin's book with these words:

"...I frequently receive requests from Jewish educators, seeking support for grant applications for their Holocaust programs. Almost all these applications include a sentence about how the new program will inform students that the Pope, and the Vatican, 'did nothing' during the Holocaust to help Jews."

Sir Gilbert goes on to say that this is a false portrayal. It is soundly debunked in Rabbi Dalin's book, which gives the genesis of the distortion, an eight-hour German stage play called The Deputy.

I was a junior in high school when The New York Times, Time magazine and others gushed praise over the 1964 debut of the shorter English language version. Rolf Hochhuth, the playwright, has said since then that he thought the Pope was timid for not speaking out, but he does not doubt that Pius' actions materially helped the rescue of Jews. And oh yes, his play is merely fiction.

What the playwright doesn't say is that his work was conceived in the Kremlin, and require the theft  of Vatican documents then editing with a  dull axe to create the impression that Pius was a vicious anti-Semite.

For more information, check what former Romanian Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepas reveals about The Deputy in his essay "Moscow's Assault on the Vatican" published in the January 25, 2007 on line issue of National Review.

Nikita Khrushchev approved the deception, code name Seat 12, and the KGB, whose motto was, "Dead men can't defend themselves," carried it out. Why hard-headed dialectal materialists would want to smear a man who believed the kingdom of God is not of this world is probably similar to the reason liberal-minded Western secularists need to believe the lie.

Attributed to Goebbles and others in the Third Reich are versions of the statement, "If you repeat a big lie often enough, people will believe it." Even earlier is Lenin's version: "A lie told often enough becomes truth."

That is what we must never forget.
______

I read the above with some modifications to a group of people who meet to deliver papers on religion, politics and history, and from time to time whatever else rings their chimes. After I read my paper, I was questioned about the concordat that Cardinal Eugeno Pacelli negotiated with the Third Reich in 1933. Critics characterize the future Pope's involvement as a greedy and self-serving way to preserve Church hierarchy in Germany at the expense of denying the legitimacy of any group, Catholic or non-Catholic, that opposed Hitler. A few go so far as to say the concordant thrust Hitler into power. Cornwell in Hitler's Pope foams with the assertion that Pacelli's Faustian impulses were honed by his work on the Vatican's concordat with Serbia when he was a young diplomat. Thus he personally helped touch off World Wart I. Exposing "Hitler's Pope and Its Author" by William Doino, Jr. is a lengthy but intriguing analysis of the these and other matters. Shorter and more to the point of the question is "Moral Accords?" by Professor Jose M. Sanchez of Saint Louis University, edited by Frank J. Coppa. These are good Catholic boys, but if you want to read the usual bull, it's all over the internet.

Carl Djerassi fled with his mother from Nazi persecution in Austria and flourished in the United States as a chemist and a writer, an entrepreneur and a teacher. In early 1950s he was one of three scientists whose work on synthetic progestagen laid the foundation for the first oral contraceptive pill, which the Federal Drug Administration approved for use in in 1960. Forty-nine years later, the 85-year-old professor emeritus from Stanford University wrote of his achievement for the Austrian newspaper, Der Standard.

The Pill is partially responsible for the population decline in Europe that Prof. Djerassi characterized as a “horror scenario” and a “catastrophe.”

"(There is now) no connection at all between sexuality and reproduction." Focusing on the land of his birth, he continuted, "This divide in Catholic Austria, a country which has on average 1.4 children per family, is now complete." Prof. Djerassi described families choosing against reproduction as “wanting to enjoy their schnitzels while leaving the rest of the world to get on with it,” and predicted national suicide because young Austrians refuse to have children.

To be partially responsible implies there must be other factors to blame. I'd like to be the first to point my finger at good will.

Imagine living in almost any 19th Century European city--Victorian London for example--or in New World counterparts.

Big families are the norm. In the landed, merchant and artisan classes, the overwhelming majority of household breadwinners are men who can support their issue. At the advantaged end of familial life, there is often an inheritance. At the poorer end, there is just enough left from wages to provide a modicum of education for the children.

But among the lowest classes, life yo-yos between a tenuous grasp on barest necessities and a Dickensian nightmare. Children are forced into sweatshops, into the streets, and into theft and prostitution. Many of their parents can't afford weddings, making illegitimacy a fact of survival.

In the better parts of town, sexual propriety is stricter. Girls who get pregnant out of wedlock are made to feel ashamed. They are expected to isolate themselves from the reproving eyes of their neighbors. At times they are cast from the affection of their families.

It is easy looking at all this to make two assumptions. One is that poverty is either the root cause of- or contributes greatly to- the misery seen round about. Hence people of good will support laws to abolish child labor, curtail working hours, mandate wages and improved working conditions. They donate to foundling homes, do volunteer work for aid societies and involve themselves in political reform.

The other assumption is connected to the first. The unbridled production of children contributes greatly to poverty. A readily available means of effective birth control would result in fewer children and thereby free household income from mere subsistence.

Equally important, girls of all classes who succumb to temptation could be saved from the consequences. How beneficial this would be when a applied to a poor girl! She is far more useful to society cleaning someone's house than taking care of a little bast__d.

As we know from our perspective today, political and labor reform advanced to the point where people of good will largely gave up private beneficence and let government take over, allowing more good to be done for more people, and for good people to have more time to kick back and enjoy themselves. To some degree, every country in the West is a welfare state that assures a minimal standard of living for all citizens, or at the very least, attempts to make sure that the poorest of the poor don't starve and that addicts have clean needles when they want to curl up in the parks.

The notion of birth control was a trickier proposition to sell to the public and then turn over to government. For the first half of the 20th Century, voters in the western democracies didn't think government should interfere with the consequences of sexual behavior. Nowadays, of course, it is taken for granted that tax money is set aside to fund abortions, to pass out condoms and to support unwed mothers so that the state, in effect, becomes an old fashioned, bread-winning papa.

Before these matters became politically normative, there were people who didn't want you to fool around under any circumstances, making condoms a moot point and in some localities illegal to buy. In progressive folklore these people were Christians mainly of the Catholic persuasion. Although there were (and continue to be) nutters of that persuasion, it is more precise to say that the Church taught reverence:

Sexual intercourse is to the glory of God. It must be restricted to heterosexuals bound in holy matrimony. Its primary purpose is procreation, fulfilling God's first command to mankind, "Go forth and multiply." God bless you if you find the process pleasurable, but engage in the pleasure only with a willing spouse and the knowledge that children could result.

The Church still teaches those precepts. But as Prof. Djerassi indicated, Catholics aren't listening.

Protestants, having spent approximately 500 years as Catholics, brought some of those precepts with them when they split off. My-mother-in law, a devout Protestant who bore six children, gave my wife a book of sexual advice before we were married. A member of the Church of England authored it, offering to the public council given to young Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of her marriage. The basic message was enjoy sex and let children come as they may.

It was an old book.

By the time Protestants got to the part of the 20th Century when I came of age, they increasingly bought condoms, diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, the Pill and abortion to remove the chanciness of will power, sudden withdrawal and the rhythm method. Today the most successful aspect of ecumenicalism is between nominal Catholics and secular Protestants on sexual matters. They don't follow the bible or care what the Pope says. They are encouraged by scores of priests and ministers seduced by modernity and/or someone in the choir. Liberal Jews love them, and they all zealously believe they are motivated by good will.

So did the founder of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Margret Sanger advocated birth control in order to clean up the population. She was convinced cleansing could be done by weeding out Negroes. By her lights, it would be a good thing to prevent them from producing "human waste."

"We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population."

Just as everyone else, Planned Parenthood evolved from its beginnings, becoming something quite different than what was intended. These days it doesn't pretend to make a religious appeal to any segment of the population.

Nor do politicians who hop aboard the bandwagon of reproductive freedom.

This lack of moral influence is the crux of the matter. If good will is not founded on absolutes, it is subject to the whims of fashion and ultimately succumbs to what anyone feels at any give moment. Moral relativism always means chaos. Tolerance becomes tyranny. History doesn't matter. Self-absorption is the national pastime. Pleasure is the highest virtue.

The Pill could never contribute to reproductive suicide without a tidal shift in values. The teen angel longed for plaintively in Mark Dinning's 1960 song had to become a promiscuous tramp. Religion had to be mocked. Marriage had to become like divorce, just another piece of paper. Children had to become disposable. They had to become optional. They had to become inconvenient.

They had to be thought of as human waste.

 The bodies floated.

They were part of the aftermath of last month's Cyclone Nargis that cut across the Irrawdy Delta of Myanmar. The sawing vortex of wind and rain, and the storm surge that followed killed 23,000 people and left a million homeless. Nature's worst is child's play compared to the atrocities committed by the government.

Myanmar used to be called Burma when it was a British colony. Independence came in 1947. A leftist military coup in 1962 instigated "The Burmese Way of Socialism," kicking off more than 40 years of steady economic decline and periodic outbursts of ethnic cleansing. In 1989 the ruling generals changed the name of their killing fields to Myanmar. The current strong man is General Than Shwe.

After refusing foreign aid to victims of Cyclone Nargis, Shwe's State Peace and Development Council allowed show displays of humanitarianism. Among them was a tent city put up and supplied by the United Nations. When the reporters left with their sound bites and footage, the refuges were sent packing and the food distributed to Shwe's soldiers.

I know two people whose names I can't mention because they are returning to Myammar to continue whatever they can do. In the past they set up home churches and brought money to buy food and medical supplies from the regional thugs. Bringing material directly into the country is vorboten because there is less chance for profiteering.

The churches they help shepherd no longer exist. The people fled to a town above water. There the military conscripted males over the age 12, and put the elderly, women and children into boats. They boats, they were told, would take them to a refugee center.

None arrived. 

I'm a Christian fundamentalist sadly aware the label makes many people think I'm anti-science, condemn them to Hell, want to police what goes on their bedrooms, and am filled with prejudicial hatred that come out in jokes like, You know why Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad don't eat with their left hands?  Because they're afraid of licking off their brains.  

The list of negatives goes on and on.  In the interest of understanding and brotherhood, I would like to clear up the grosser of these misunderstandings and so offer this irregular series to give Bible-based, Spirit-filled insights of what it means to have God smile on me and not you. 

Let's examine the most important issue.  I do not want to be in your bedroom.  Honest to God, unless you lead with a 36 double D rack, own a chain of liquor stores, can yodel and have invited me with a fetching jingle of your handcuffs, I don't even want to be in your house.  

I'm not asking what you do in your bedroom, so please don't tell me.  Don't tell my children.  Don't bring a cucumber to elementary school as part of the syllabus for an anti-pregnancy prevention program.  In case you haven't notice, in spite of increasingly detailed sex education, illegitimate babies are on the rise while the age of unwed mothers is spiraling downward. 

I'm sorry.  I take that back.  There are no illegitimate children in God's eyes.  But I think that fathers who abandon their children and girls who keep having babies to get more welfare are on the road to Hell. 

In fact, I think most people I know are on a superhighway to Hell.  H-80 I call it, and good riddance I say.  If you had my neighbors, friends and family members, the point would not have to be discussed.  As it is...and here's the rub...if I get the chance, I'm supposed to talk them out of it.   I'm not supposed to nudge them there in any way. 

For some people there is confusion on this point.  Christian fundamentalists are lumped in with Islamic fundamentalists. Islamists think most people are going to Hell too, and if you lived in their countries, you could understand it.  But the worst you'll get from a Christian is some foamer on a street corner giving you a little comic book.  For the Moslem, it's strap explosives to a kid and send him into the local pizza parlor.

For you seekers after Truth, look here again for when I give more apologies.   My wife says that should be apologetics, but what does she know?  She's Catholic.    

Confession: I have not seen al gore's movie, an inconvenient truth. people say I shouldn't have an opinion about the environmental issues raised until I have. their logic suggests I cannot have knowledge of syphilis until I catch it in a whorehouse. in both cases, I would rather avoid the spirochetes.

Contention: there are people who want you to be afraid. they will hold a gun or some such to your head.  In your fear, you are apt to believe you will survive only because of their good pleasure.  That's the power they want over you.

We call them extortionists, kidnappers, armed robbers, rapists. they are schoolyard bullies.  They are certain politicians.

Never for a moment think they are aware of being wicked or bad. to their minds their good is everyone's good. your undoing is hardly the issue.

For example, yesterday Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) kicked off a senate debate on global warming. He believes greenhouse gasses will fry us all. Mr. reid says science backs him up. so do famous actors.  A former vice president says we're goners too.

So, we the people need to be punitively taxed on energy use, and in some instances prosecuted and jailed.

This will boost the cost of everything, will kill a lot of jobs and force you, if you haven't already, to use mass transit. Then there will be pressure on government to fix food prices, extend jobless benefits, and expand public transportation and continue to subsidize traveling graffiti shows. That's the short list. all of these cost money, and will require increasing taxation and very tight bureaucratic controls to bring about.

The restrictions, however, will be for our own good.  We won't survive without them.

But suppose we can't do anything about the gun at our heads. Two weeks ago I saw an astronomer with a telescope and heard him tiredly explain to concerned civilian who was passing by: "Yes. climate change.  Cause by the sun. Comes in cycles."

Or suppose the gun isn't loaded. Or what if there isn't a gun at all?

A large body of expertise on global warming is contrary to the consensus Mr. reid so comfortably assumes.  In a may 19th WorldNnetDaily story, reporter Bob Unruh takes on one of the more famous greenies for being full of the ol' Shinola. I have excerpted the article below, but it deserves full read.

More than 31,000 scientists across the united states, including more than 9,000 ph.d.s in fields including atmospheric science, climatology, earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties, have signed a petition rejecting the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging earth's climate.

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate," the petition states. "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth."

The petition project actually was launched nearly ten years ago, when the first few thousand signatures were assembled. Then between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign. now a new effort has been conducted because of an "escalation of the claims of consensus."

Project spokesman and founder Art Robinson petition explained, "Mr. gore's movie asserting 'settled science' conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary movie goers and to public school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. unfortunately, mr. gore's movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse."

WND submitted a request to al gore's office for comment, but did not get a response.

Robinson said the dire warnings about "global warming" have gone far beyond semantics or scientific discussion to the point they are actually endangering people.

Tthe campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded," he said. "In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries," said robinson.

The late professor Frederick Seitz, the past president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and winner of the National Medal of Science, wrote in a letter promoting the petition, "The united states is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds."

"This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful," he wrote.

Accompanying the letter sent to scientists was a 12-page summary and review of research on "global warming."
Steitz wrote, "the proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries."

Robinson said the project targets scientists because, "it is especially important for America to hear from its citizens who have the training necessary to evaluate the relevant data and offer sound advice."

But you can bet not one of them will be invited by senator reid to testify before his congressional cronies.

 

 

 

Poor George Bush.   Betrayal doesn't count unless it comes from someone you believe is your friend.  

No doubt, the President is isolated, as is claimed in the tell-all of his former Press Secretary Scott McClellan.  Not many since Lincoln have chosen rivals as advisers.  

Equally certain is McClellan's oh-so-delicate ego.  When he voiced doubts about the Iraq War, they were pooh-poohed.  How crushing!

Then there is his present courage in irrevocably expressing his concerns.  He no longer has to asscreep for a paycheck.    He can wag his finger at an Administration that isn't well liked.  He doesn't have to engage in the cross fire of debate.

Although his betrayal won't change any of the people McClellan wishes would come to their senses, his opinions do have affect in other quarters.   

They embolden our country's enemies.  They ennoble those within who would have liked to let it all slide, the terror and subjugation of Iraqis by Saddam and his gang of thugs. 

Of course, there were citizens who had conscionable objections to the war from the beginning.  They have  been doing all they can to end or ameliorate the conflict.  But unlike them, McClellan's criticisms of the policies of his former boss won't come across as clean and clear if they ever have to be explained on Judgment Day.  

Poor poor Scott McClellan.

 

MoveForwardAmerica.com displays a couple of video segments of- and about- the City Council of Berkeley, California, discussing the demand of the anti-war group, Code Pink, to kick out the Marine Corps Recruiting Center from the city.  The councilmen unanimously believe that the Marines are “unwanted, unwelcome intruders;” a private citizen claims the military perpetrates “mass murderer;” and one elected official  proudly pronounces his work with Code Pink. Perhaps he helped to raise the $600,000 that CP has donated to the families of terrorists in Iraq.

What we see behind the earnest bombast are products of Berkeley schools.  From kindergarten to post-graduate level, Berkeley educators are dedicated to propagating leftist dogma.  When they make small efforts to be objective they teach a very narcissistic brand of political correctness. Thus their students come to hate the country so much, they give aid and comfort to our enemies.

         It is wrong, therefore, to contribute to their ease and safety with Federal tax dollars.  I want to kill subsidies for fire, police, sanitation and schools.  Especially schools.  Given the evidence of its parents, Berkeley is a place where every child needs to be left behind.

         I would urge everyone to sign the petition at Move America Forward for cutting off some Federal spending.  The cuts are not nearly as deep as I would wish.  I say this as a former bleeding heart. 

         Six years ago I vowed to no longer do business with the Berkeley. Then I broke the vow for a friend who wanted me to pick up some cupcakes at a bakery.  That may be interpreted as an act of charity, but charity can’t be stretched to cover my stopping to have an egg omelet down the street.  Brown eggs from range free chickens served, God help me, by a hottie in a Che Guevara T-shirt.  The economic effect of my boycott has proved to be about as effective as passing wind in the general direction of the Cuban monument for Julies and Ethel Rosenberg.

         My animosity, strong in spirit but weak in the flesh, had come from the fact that Moslems had attacked us.  We hadn't yet fought back.  Still, Berkeley’s self-righteous city council refused to allow fire trucks to fly the American Flag and show solidarity with New York City's 9/11 firefighters.  At the time I wrote an essay that wished Osama and Berkeley a cold winter. I believe that essay has relevance to more recent events, so I offer it here.

 

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOMEFRONT

       My wife and I were staying in Contra Costa County, making final preparation for our daughter’s wedding.  She has chosen to live in sunny, hilly country where narrow roads wind through groves of trees and open to wide vistas of mountain-fringed sky. At 4 AM there is no traffic, and you can roll into San Francisco off the Oakland-Bay Bridge within twenty minutes.  Even with lots of traffic, it is no longer than that to Berkeley, the university town that lies on the foggy side of the hills that separate Contra Costa County from San Francisco Bay. 

         On September 11th the quiet suburban communities east of Berkeley looked and felt planets away from what I saw on television that Tuesday morning in late summer.  Terrorists attacked New York City and Washington, DC. They massacred nationals from 66 foreign countries and slaughtered almost as many Americans in one hour than the number who died in our eight-year War of Independence against Britain more than two centuries ago. 

         Then almost everywhere I looked in the Bay Area, the connection was made with our countrymen a continent away.  American Flags sprouted from the front porches of homes, waved from cars and trucks and appeared in full page renditions in The Contra Costa Times and in the two dailies from San Francisco, suitable for taping to an apartment window or in an office cubicle.  Those flags said we sympathized with the families of people who were murdered going about their daily work. They said we loved our country and agonized over her wounds.  They spoke of quiet awe and pride in the all-American firemen and cops who had laid down their lives trying to save others.   

         The exception was Berkeley where the city council banned fire trucks from flying the National Colors.

Winter for Osama and Berkeley

         Berkeley is frozen in its past, the Vietnam War never ending its protests, so it offers perpetual sanctuary to privileged revolutionaries attending the University of California from overseas.  They are embraced by homegrown radicals tenured in university departments, in residence throughout the city and in control of the municipal government.  These citizens think they are politically enlightened and morally superior to the rest of us.  Therefore anything they want justifies any means they choose to get it. 

         Ironically, they are radicals in name only.  They are in fact reactionaries, frightened of change taking place all around them.  This results in self-centered or infantile behavior.  With Free Love they were like children discovering their genitals and playing with them in public.  With its Sixties companion, the Free Speech Movement, they wanted everyone to listen to their tantrums.  No fair if you had an opposing point of view; they’d throw a rock at you.   Unable to adapt (or grow up), they have had to expand their enemies’ list.  Presidents Johnson and Nixon can no longer top it, but big oil, big tobacco, the military and the National Rifle Association are still up there, with newer suspects ranging from meat eaters and white heterosexual males to anyone who believes that a few values are absolute   

         Berkeleyites are not heartless.  Few children are.  They were as repelled as any by what terrorists had been planning to do to for ten years and finally carried off—namely, the killing of Republicans, Democrats, Independents, socialists, communists, pacifists, soldiers, atheists, gays, radical feminists, pro-lifers, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Zionists, members of the Christian right, left and center, and any person of color who was in the vicinity of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.  

         But as of yet, Berkeleyites cannot shake the belief that Osama bin Ladin and his cohorts throughout the Islamic world have been somehow forced into committing atrocities by the United States.  Wanting to see a lot more us dead, the terrorists actively pursue plans for more destruction while the people of Berkeley murmur that we should have listened to their grievances.  We should not have taken positions that irritated them.  And we should not wave flags lest their sympathizers round about think we are intolerant.  

         This kind of thinking gives Berkeleyites a warm feeling of gratitude because it allows them to hold onto what amounts to a religious conviction: the United States is was, is and always will be the greatest threat to peace the world has ever known.  The people of Berkeley represent a small minority of Americans, but they are not alone, and their influence is far wider than their numbers.   America-haters are among the elite in college towns across the land.  They fill the National Educational Association, and have flooded into secondary and primary classrooms where American History, if it is taught at all, is given less important than teaching kids how to use condoms.  They own the National Council of Churches.  They are politicians and bureaucrats at all levels of government who could not remain in power without a clientele of perpetual victims and malcontents.  They control much of the mainstream media and include Hollywood celebrities who, until September 11th, have been quick to express their anti-American sentiments.

         Thank God, many of these people are experiencing the angst of getting their heads screwed on right.   They intuitively understand the terrorists’ point of view: one dead New Yorker at Ground Zero is just the start for dancing in the blood of some New Age relativist enjoying a joint in Malibu.  It has been said how remarkably focused the mind becomes when you’re being shot at.  I heard it put another way by a wonderful black woman stopped in a Manhattan street a day or so after the attacks. 

         “What would you tell people in Islamic countries who sympathize with the terrorists?” she was asked.

         “Nothing,” she said.  “They believe one thing.  And I now I know what I believe.  We have nothing to say to each other.”

Hallelujah!  A Just War 

         I drove back to Los Angeles heartened by remarks like that, as well as by Billy Graham’s in the National Cathedral and of President George Bush to the Congress, the nation and the enemies of the United States.  I was saddened too by all the wanton death and destruction.  And I was very, very angry.   

         I’m angry at the terrorists and those who harbor them.  I want to go to war against the peoples and the countries that want to kill my neighbors and me.  I want to do whatever it takes to win the war so that America’s enemies cannot destroy my country and trample on her ideals.   I do not want to waste my anger on places like Berkeley, where the people must feel so ashamed of their unearned rights and creature comforts that they loath themselves.   How else can I explain why they hate our country so?

         Jesus tells me that I must turn the other cheek to hate so that I may love my neighbor as myself.  He also tells me to carry a sword and be ready to use it.   In the first instance the context is about irksome family members, overbearing bosses, back stabbing co-workers and strangers who cut you off in traffic or demand a buck for a pint of wine.  Refraining from acting in kind doesn’t require that you let everyone get away with nonsense.  Love demands that you tell the truth, correct when you can and always want the good for people even if they have no idea what good means. So I’m turning my cheeks to the citizens of Berkeley, and they can kiss my butt as I walk away and never do business there until they wake up the second instance of Jesus’ teaching.

         It is about God’s wider, all-inclusive love. The kind that will not turn its back on evil.  Christians aren’t supposed to sit around and pray when they see someone climbing over the balcony to rape the neighbor lady.  Love in this instance wants the best for the most.   It shoots to kill.  If it can’t do that, it calls the cops.  If it can’t do that, it supports politicians and judges who understand executing a criminal will make sure that he can’t hurt anyone ever again, including fellow prisoners.   It underlies the concept of a just war that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about under the heading of Charity.  At Pearl Harbor it said, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”  It reduced nearly every city in Third Reich to rubble so that whoever crawled out of the ashes was saved from the evil of Nazism.  Its atomic bomb killed 100,000 civilians in Nagasaki so that a million American men-at-arms would not have to die trying to invade Imperial Japan.  Thus it made sure Japan’s Greater Asia Co-prosperity Sphere did no more harm.

         This kind of love is about the severe mercy of God.  Applied through human instruments, it is fraught with human failing.  Until the Second Coming of Christ, evil is here to stay, and good guys will sometimes do horrific things.  But it would be far, far worse, if the good guys sat around and did nothing. 

Judgment

         I’m disconcerted by the outcry against Jerry Fallwell’s suggesting that the United States is under God’s judgment.  Of course we’re under judgment.  If we weren’t, thousands more people would have died at Ground Zero and more targets hit.  That’s the good side of having a sovereign God looking after us.  The bad side is that, if we’re going to act stupid and tie ourselves up in knots about things that never mattered, like banning law abiding citizens from owning firearms, we’ll get distracted from the important things, like foreigners who are deadly serious with their box cutters.   

         God seldom takes by force what He has given by grace.  That means we have to live with the consequences of our free will.  There are plenty of instructions in the Bible and lessons from our secular history about how to exercise our will responsibly.  There are also warnings about giving into momentary fads and fashion, and having our ears tickled with crises that aren’t real, from agar on apples to disturbing the habitats of garter snakes and snail darters.  Fill your mind with those things, and you won't be thinking much about national security.

         Most Americans have an intuitive understanding of judgment although we get twitchy when religion is brought in.  In our daily lives we hope for judgment when are qualified for a job and want to be hired.  Every time we vote, we cast judgments for or against candidates running for office.  We exercise judgment when we look to see what was lacking in our national security and intelligence, and seek to improve them.  We stand as judges when we laud the heroics of firemen, police and passengers.  We even bring the Lord into it when we stand in the middle of a bombed out square--a neo natal intensive care unit three blocks down, an abortion clinic two streets over--and cry out,  “God bless America!”

         But which America?

 

For three decades Bob Christiansen and Rick Rosenberg produced award-winning television. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, Red Earth White Earth and Gore Vidal’s Lincoln tip an iceberg of prestigious credits.

Then there was an early piece of flotsam called Gargoyles.

In ancient times gargoyles, sometime called chimera, served as drainage spouts for Egyptian and Greek temples built by pagans who apparently had never seen a rain gutter. After the rise of Christianity in Europe, gargoyles evolved from carved animal heads to more grotesque creatures.

Originating in idol worship was not good for their reputation, but the 7th Century Bishop of Rouen, later canonized as St. Romaine, reputedly believed that there is some good in every one of God’s creatures, including a forest dragon that terrorized folks who wandered too far beyond the city walls. Beguiled by the Bishop’s tenderness, the dragon turned to helping the citizens of Rouen, and in honor of him they carved the dragon’s likeness to adorn the cathedral and let water off the roof.

That’s the horse whisperer version.

The one I like has the Bishop hooking up with a condemned prisoner to subdue the monster. It was called Gargouille, a derivative of the French word for gullet and progenitor of our modern word gargoyle. Gargouille thrashed around in the Sien, was part human, part demon, and had a tendency to spew water all over the countryside, causing vast flooding.

That’s why the aforesaid mentioned Bishop and his faithful convicted companion went after him. The Bishop used the con as bait to lure Gargouille out of the river. That was not so cold blooded as you might think. It was like the Lone Ranger’s sending Tonto into town to scout out the situation. Tonto always come back to camp, sometimes blooded, once with rope burns around his neck, but with vital signs almost as good as Kimosabe’s and full useful intel.

So, as the felon showed himself to be as quick on the get away as Tonto would have to be, the Bishop formed his fingers in the sign of the Cross. Gargouille cowered like Christopher Lee in Dracula. Or like Christopher Lee in Dracula: Prince of Darkness and again in Dracula Has Risen From The Grave. Ditto for Scars Of Dracula, Taste The Blood of Dracula and Dracula A.D. 1972.

It’s clear that a crucifix couldn’t kill Dracula, but in the Bishop’s day there was no profit to be made from a sequel. Besides, no one knew what a sequel was. Thus Gargouille sheepishly followed the Bishop back to town where the monster was summarily burned to death. Gargouille then inspired likenesses that were sweat hog ugly, carved in stone and stuck on the roofs of medieval cathedrals to show evil spirits what fate would befall them if they wandered too close.

In modern times sleeker gargoyles in stainless steel were placed atop the Chrysler Building in New York City to ward off Ford motorcars.

Mix the gargoyles of yesteryear with New Age thinking, and in their post-modern stories they become misunderstood, sort of like King Kong, or downright heroic, like Mighty Joe Young. Disney produced a kids’ animation series followed by a knock-off, direct-to-video movie in the mid-Nineties that made gargoyles superheroes lazing about an ancient Scottish castle. An American tycoon buys the castle and has it moved to New York City. Feeling needed again, the gargoyles ward of “modern threats to humanity”— judges who let murderers walk free, black pimps who beat up their ho’s, greasy white tweakers, a couple of U.S. Senators.

Don’t you wish? Don’t you wish Disney could imagine some real and present evil, like media companies that flirt with the occult and then sell it to the kiddies?

The gargoyles Bob and Rick introduced to television a quarter of century earlier just wanted to be left alone. But when they were disturbed, it was like stepping on green mambas. Makeup artists Del Armstrong, Ellis Burman Jr. and Stan Watson won the Emmy for making them look as gruesome as Gargouille. The monsters lived in the desert, so there wasn’t much water spewing; but they were badass when that used to mean something.

I saw Gargoyles when it first aired in November 1972. It starred Cornell Wilde as a Dr. Somebody and his scientist daughter played by Jennifer Salt. They investigate a huge, just discovered skeleton displayed at a curio shop. As they pack it up for further investigation, they unwittingly disturbed the gargoyle equivalent of an Indian burial ground, and if you ever saw Jeremiah Johnson, you know what that means. They are driving back to a university when monsters dive down off the rocks and give them a bad time, denting their car and such, and clearly wanting to tear the occupants limb from limb before they retrieve the ancestral bones.

I don’t remember what happens after that. A long day at Wolper, a couple of scotches, a pretty good warmed over dinner and I was ready for bed, or more correctly, the snoring nap you take before the wife yells, “Turn off the TV and come to bed!”

But I was impressed by what I saw. I just never associated it with the Bob and Rick I met two years later and worked with off and on for the next fifteen.

The reason is threefold. Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet yet, which meant no International Movie Data Base. Further, although entertainment professionals incorporate socialization in their dealings, and that may include chitchat about past projects or past lives, the work at hand always hangs over them like a Sword of Damocles. Whether there is a lull, a meal or a party, the talk always comes back to the present work. Or to gossip. Finally, when I am socializing, I’d rather fill my mouth with food and drink than my head with the details of other people’s lives. Unless the info is really juicy and destroys a reputation.

The problem is, you just never know what you’re going to get. When I’m in a Greyhound Bus Depot and people find out I’m a famous Hollywood writer, I’m swamped with stories of murder, extramarital affairs, Jesus saved me from drugs, let me show you something in the alley, and you should write the screenplay

No thanks.

OK, let me spend the next hundred miles explaining how I live off coupons from the newspaper.

Neither Bob nor Rick struck me as the kind who cared whether you could get half off on a can of Spaghetti-Os, but you never know when eccentricity will come screaming forth, so its best to keep one’s guard up.

Superficially, I knew Bob and Rick as well-spoken men and well read, both with senses of humor. Bob’s wit was more in your face; Rick’s, more droll. Bob came out of the Marine Corps, and then, I don’t know, he sold space ads for The Hollywood Reporter or Variety. He did something afterwards, that I’m sure.

Meanwhile Rick was the assistant to Jerry Bresler, producer of Major Dundee, a 1965 film starring Charlton Heston and directed by Sam Peckenpa. By 1969 Rick was an associate producer on The Reivers, a film that put Steve McQueen in an adaptation of a William Faulkner novel. McQueen introduced Rick to Bob, or it could have been the other way around. Regardless, secretaries and development assistants over the years led me to believe that Chris-Rose Productions was the result of Steve McQueen suggesting the two should get together and put on their own shows.

Whether that’s true or not, it brings us back to the early piece called Gargoyles. I was at a party at Bob’s house a dozen years after its making. There was either another writer or a director present who knew one of the best inside stories I have ever heard.

First some background.

At the time of Gargoyles making in 1972 the slogan “Black Is Beautiful” had become “Black Power” with a clenched fist. California appellate courts overturned murder and assault conviction against the Maoist leadership of the Black Panther Party, freeing the leaders to fight off kidnapping, embezzlement and more murder charges. For reasons that are an enigma to me, intellectual and media elites began to accept the Panthers in the romantic revolutionary light in which radical leftists bathed them. Co-founder of the Party Huey Newton was in prison for killing a prostitute and addicted to drugs when the University of California, Santa Cruz, awarded him a doctorate. Eldridge Cleaved, the self-confessed rapist of white women who said he practiced on ghetto girls, was lionized for jumping bail and fleeing to Algeria. Angela Davis, a middle class woman turned Communist, feminist, university darling, Panther and owner of the shotgun used to blow off the face of a judge, inspired a worshipful song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

In this climate the hero of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., was called an Uncle Tom for his non-violent policies. Few challenged Islamic fascism’s inroads into America in the form of the Black Muslims. Maluena Karenga’s whole cloth invention of Kwanza as a uniquely black holiday, with pseudo roots in African animism, gained wider and wider unquestioning acceptance.

This was not a time for reason, the one thing that has remained constant since. The term “political correctness” wasn’t in usage but “consciousness raising” was. A person who needed his consciousness raised was a racist, patriarchal, probably a Republican or a Christian fundamentalist, in some way spiritually and mentally deformed. Generally speaking, he was white. Blacks on the other hand had “soul” due to centuries of oppression. Therefore they already knew that The Man was the problem and did not need their consciousnesses raised. Except when they held a traditional value or two, went to church or were old-fashioned Democrats. Hence when faced with a radical spewing hate or just a misguided fool spouting nonsense, most blacks and whites kept their opinions to themselves.

Bob wasn’t most people. He and Rick had a movie to get and only twenty-one days to do it. On the second or third day of shooting the lead gargoyle stepped out of a scene and took Bob aside.

“Some of the bros are saying that my dialogue makes me sound like an Uncle Tom.”

“Some of the bros?”

The man nodded solemnly.

“But, Bernie, you are supposed to be a great big f___ing green gargoyle.”

I didn’t recognize the sender’s name, didn’t see mine in the Send To list, and had no idea who the email’s other recipients were, so presumed my copy was like crossed wires. You know, when you pick up the phone and before you can dial, you hear two strangers plotting a murder, but you can’t get either one to, “Hang up! I’m trying to order pizza!”

The subject line, “Help!” stoked my curiosity to read more, and usually I’m a sucker for a woman, which was what writer was if the sign off, “Wish I had stayed with acting, xoxo, Jasmine,” meant anything. Apparently she was a financial analyst who had an important decision to make for some Daddy Warbucks, and was asking friends, presumably in the money game too, if they would reply to four questions.

1. Should I go short or long on Countrywide Mortgage?
2. When do you think the Fed will decrease interest rates?
3. Is this distressed market a giant opportunity, or am I delusional?
4. Any opinion on small caps?

As I brooded on how unfairly I’d been graded in economics and other college classes, causing my dad to cut off tuition and me to go to work to pay off gambling debts, one thing led to another, and after a cocktail or two, I fired off a reply.

Madame:

I have a unified set theory of the universe that might be helpful to you. I call it “The Krumline Pancake Theory of Knowledge” after W.S. Krumline, Head Hasher 7AM shift, Troy Hall, University of Southern California, 1967.

First, recall all the courses you took in college, and don't worry that most were probably unrelated to each other and had nothing to do with your present career.

Second, think of them as pancakes, some doughy, some overcooked, all plopped willy-nilly onto a cold plate by an individual who resents the fact that you are going through the food line of life while he's stuck behind the counter working for minimum wage.

Third, drop the plate on the sticky linoleum floor of your imagination. Step back because it won't be neat. Some pancakes will be touching; others will not.

Regardless, go to the fourth step, in which you imagine a large turkey baster that you ram through as many pancakes as you can. Squeeze the bulb. Release the pressure. Whatever is sucked up into the baster is the wondrously interrelated core knowledge of everything you learned. That core can be then applied to anything...well, almost anything...that goes on in your life.

You might think that a bit of anthro, econ and chem have nothing to do with each other, but suddenly you're up for some R & R in Bangcock, and it's a big Greek Eureka moment when your loose change comes together with a girl named Suzy and some Tai Stick.

Or Boyle's Law, you say, what's that got to do with Ricardo's Theory of Rent, much less Spanish? Well, if you have ever been freezing cold in a bed-sitter in Earl's Court, the Pakistani landlord is going to explain exactly what that has to do with London power authority, and you’ll undoubtedly find yourself saying, “Hey, Cisco, how about trying that again in español?” Remarkable, really.

I can't tell you how many times I have used the Krumline Pancake Theory of Knowledge to bring grace and order to my life. Your email asking for investment predictions had the turkey baster in my mind gushing forth like Krakatoa on Pompeii, namely—

Should you be long or short on Countrywide? Everybody needs a roof over his head, right? But defaults are at record high, right? Well, two rights don’t make a wrong. I don’t know what that tells you about buying a particular stock, but Krumline told me that his theory can’t cover everything, depending as it does on a single vector unique to etc., etc. Look, I was asleep a lot. Why can't you settle for a little mystery in your life?

When will the Fed decrease rates? When Alan Greenspan wants to. Or is he retired? I know he’s married to Andrea... Wait! It’s Ben Somebody. Ben Stein, Ben Cartwright, who cares? Just picture the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank putting pantyhose on one leg at a time, making him as human as you or I, and that’s how I can offer the second part of my answer. Gold. If nothing else, it’s a great conductor of electricity.

Is the distressed market a giant opportunity or are you delusional? Well, that's easy.

Finally, I know this for sure: small caps don't grab the eye like BIG CAPS. Check it out with The Wall Street Journal. And watch for Mr.Murdoch putting in a Page 3 Investment Vixen feature. There’s going to be nothing small about her assets, believe you me.

Respectfully, etc.

I got a reply just this morning. Miss Jasmine thinks my serendipitous response was as sound as any from her experts, and wants to know where I hang my hat on Wall Street. Maybe we can have lunch.

Far be it from me to burst a lady’s or the market’s bubble, so I won’t explain that I’m “between pictures” as we say here in sunny southern California, and usually don’t offer financial advice unless I’m swearing at my creditors. But it does feel good, knowing I can change careers any time I feel like it, and the sun will still go weaving round the earth just like Gallo said it would.

I met them over a long Saturday barbecue, parents quietly proud of their boy.  It took nearly the whole evening for it to come out.