Feb. 4, 1995— Patricia Highsmith, whose psychological thrillers achieved greater sales, critical acclaim, and understanding in Europe than in her native United States, died at age 74 of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland.

Since her death 30 years ago, however, a virtual cottage industry about her work has sprung up in the U.S., with at least three biographies, and numerous reprints of her books, appearing.

Whatever fame Highsmith gained at home derived from two novels adapted into classic films by Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train, 1951) and Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999). Her pigeonholing as a “crime writer” annoyed her because it said nothing about her profound probing of the human heart.

Beneath the placid surface of American life, discontents, even demons, lurked in her fiction. Many of her intimates agree that Highsmith shared many of these—indeed, if she didn’t have writing as an outlet where she could vent these, she feared that she might go insane.

Outsiders, misfits, manipulators, sociopaths—an entire psychological spectrum can be described in Highsmith’s work. On a podcast I listened to today, one of her later friends said she didn’t doubt that Highsmith herself existed on the autistic spectrum.

More specifically, some see the writer as being a high-functioning case of Asperger’s Syndrome. She possessed many unusual traits, including a terrible sense of direction, hypersensitivity to sound and touching, clumsiness, and depression.

Even before she struggled with alcoholism for much of her adult life, Highsmith had to cope with the revelation that her mother tried unsuccessfully to abort her when she was only four years old.

Even though her collected fiction is considerable—22 novels and eight short-story collections—it’s remarkable how certain themes and motifs reappear obsessively:

*fractured or swapped entities;

*murder;

*madness;

*pairs who bring out depths of evil in each other;

*malignant mothers; and

*guilt.

Just as her characters traffic in aliases, Highsmith resorted to pseudonyms. The most famous, “Claire Morgan,” was adopted for the initial publication of her 1952 celebration of lesbian love, The Price of Salt.  

She used others in letters to the editor that were printed in the Herald-Tribune, where she fulminated against Catholics, neighbors, Frenchmen in general and their bureaucrats in particular—and, most problematically, Jews.

Her characters are frequently doubles and alter egos. More chillingly, her narratives feature complicit characters and readers.

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, With a Terrifying Churchyard Scene)

“ ‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!’

“A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Great Expectations (1861)

The other day, while in a coffee shop, I picked up a copy of the Dickens classic and opened it to its second page, with the above passage. Wow!

The description grabs you by the scruff of the neck, not unlike the convict who appears out of nowhere and terrifies young Pip. You can imagine the terror of this orphan who just wants to mourn the family members buried here.

You’re fully expecting a crime story, but this is a novel in which things are not what they seem, and so it is here. Right after the threat in the dialogue, and that sentence about the “fearful man,” we are bombarded with verbs that suggest the vulnerability of this convict named Magwitch: “soaked,” “smothered,” “lamed,” “cut,” “stung,” and “torn.”

It’s no wonder that so much of Dickens’ work has been adapted for film and TV: any director worth his salt has an unforgettable picture to work with here.

(The image accompanying this post comes from David Lean’s magnificent 1946 adaptation of the Dickens novel, with Finlay Currie as Magwitch and Tony Wager as young Pip.)

Quote of the Day (Carl Safina, on February, ‘The Deepest, Sparest Part of Winter’)

“To animals whose food stopped breeding last summer, February makes no promises. For those of us accustomed to supermarket shelves that endlessly get restocked, it may seem like news to remind ourselves that winter is a race against time in a season getting hungrier. February becomes the deepest, sparest part of winter.

“But lengthening days mean the sky is about to draw a deep breath.”—American ecologist, nature writer—and MacArthur “genius” Fellow—Dr. Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (2011)

I took the accompanying image four years ago this month in Overpeck County Park, a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on Why Its Very Rich Family Is Different From You and Me)

Shiv Roy [played by Sarah Snook] [to a threatening ATN anchor Mark Ravenhead]: “The thing about us [is] we don't get embarrassed.” —Succession, Season 3, Episode 4, “Lion in the Meadow,” original air date Nov 7, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong, Jon Brown, and Jamie Carragher, directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

That is the key to the oligarchy, folks. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of their "vast carelessness," but he might just as well have added, "and shamelessness."

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Therese of Lisieux, on ‘The God of Peace and of Love’)

“Remember…that this sweet Jesus is there in the Tabernacle expressly for you and you alone. Remember that He burns with the desire to enter your heart. Do not listen to Satan. Laugh him to scorn, and go without fear to receive Jesus, the God of peace and of love.”— French Carmelite nun St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux (1898)

Quote of the Day (‘Sully’ Sullenberger, on What We Overlook About Flying)

“We have gotten so used to the convenience and safety of flying that we tend to overlook two things. First, flying is a relatively new human endeavor. Second, people forget that what we’re really doing, ultimately, is pushing an aluminum or a composite tube through the upper reaches of the troposphere or the lower regions of the stratosphere at 80 percent of the speed of sound in a hostile environment—and we must return it safely to the surface every single time. If it were easy, anybody—everybody—could do it.”—Retired Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, hero pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, interviewed by Megan Gambino, “Q and A: Capt. Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger,” Smithsonian, November 2010

Captain Sullenberger’s comment over 14 years ago is useful to keep in mind following the terrible airline collision near Ronald Reagan Airport this past Wednesday. Piloting, as he notes, is not easy. 

What is easy, evidently, is for someone in a high government position to speculate on the causes of the disaster (i.e., DEI and the prior Presidential administration) not only before an investigation began, but even before the black boxes had been recovered to that point.

“Premature” is the most polite adjective to apply to that speculation. I will leave it to others to supply a more blunt, and accurate, one.

(The image accompanying this post of “Sully” was taken on Jan. 24, 2009, a few days after he successfully ditched Flight 1549 into the Hudson River with no loss of life.)

Quote of the Day (Washington Irving, With a Colonial New Yorker Anticipating the Presidential Executive Order)

“No sooner had this bustling little man [Governor Wilhelmus Kieft, or “William the Testy”] been blown by a whiff of fortune into the seat of government, than he called together his council, and delivered a very animated speech on the affairs of the province…. [E]verybody knows what a glorious opportunity a governor, a president, or even an emperor has of drubbing his enemies in his speeches, messages, and bulletins, where he has the talk all on his own side…[H]e at length came to the less important part of his speech, the situation of the province; and here he soon worked himself into a fearful rage against the Yankees, whom he compared to the Gauls who desolated Rome, and the Goths and Vandals who overran the fairest plains of Europe—nor did he forget to mention, in terms of adequate opprobrium, the insolence with which they had encroached upon the territories of New Netherlands, and the unparalleled audacity with which they had commenced the town of New-Plymouth, and planted the onion patches of Weathersfield under the very walls of Fort Good Hope. Having thus artfully wrought up his tale of terror to a climax, he assumed a self-satisfied look, and declared, with a nod of knowing import, that he had taken measures to put a final stop to these encroachments—that he had been obliged to have recourse to a dreadful engine of warfare, lately invented, awful in its effects, but authorized by direful necessity. In a word, he was resolved to conquer the Yankees—by proclamation.”— American fiction writer, biographer and diplomat Washington Irving (1783-1859), A Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Minister,’ on ‘A Basic Rule of Government’)

Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Nigel Hawthorne]: “A basic rule of government is never look into anything you don't have to and never set up an inquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be.”—Yes, Minister, Season 3, Episode 6, “The Whisky Priest,” original air date Dec. 16, 1982, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Peter Whitmore

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Maria Faustina Kowalska, on Mercy)

“All grace flows from mercy, and the last hour abounds with mercy for us. Let no one doubt concerning the goodness of God; even if a person's sins were as dark as night, God's mercy is stronger than our misery. One thing alone is necessary: that the sinner set ajar the door of his heart, be it ever so little, to let in a ray of God's merciful grace, and then God will do the rest.”— Polish Catholic religious sister and mystic St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), Divine Mercy in My Soul: The Diary of St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1981)

It's funny, how the Gospels talk continually of mercy, and the men and women that Christianity has honored over the years do likewise. Yet so many who hear the words on Sunday refuse to apply it in any way in their lives the rest of the week.

Case in point: The leader whom The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde urged, in the Washington Prayer Service at the inaugural events, to display compassion for undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ showed not mercy but his own thin skin. It was a ghastly sight.

Look at this YouTube clip of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC last week. Does her dulcet, pleading tone seem remotely “nasty”?

Does she strike you as “not compelling or smart” (unlike, presumably, her annoyed listener, who once bragged about being “a very stable genius”)? Me neither.

It is rich, this demand that she apologize coming from Donald Trump—who, in his 50 years in the spotlight, has been known to say he was sorry only once, and that when he was in danger of losing the 2016 election following his gleeful comments about groping women on the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape.

Contrast Trump with Mike Pence when a cast member of the Broadway musical Hamilton read a statement saying "We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us."

What, you don’t remember what Pence said? Neither did I, so I had to look it up. The then-Veep said he wasn’t offended by the message and that even the boos he endured from audience members didn’t bother him, because they were “what freedom sounds like.”

On the other hand, Trump’s digital thermonuclear thunderclap has set off predictable responses from his followers. 

Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia has even tweeted that Bishop Budde “should be added to the deportation list.” 

On Facebook, an “I’m with her” meme got people I’ve known for years acting most unsocially with each other on the social media platform. 

And Budde has been bombarded with death wishes from people who call themselves Christians.

Judging from the President’s response after he withdrew a security detail from Dr. Anthony Fauci (“Certainly I would not take responsibility”), I don’t anticipate pangs of remorse to fill Trump’s heart about the bishop’s well-being.

I also didn’t presume Trump would act like anything but a kindergarten crybaby when Budde implored him to treat with mercy America’s new marginalized. But I expected more from the nation’s other religious leaders, including, I’m sorry to say, so many in my own Roman Catholic Church.

I’m looking at you, Timothy Cardinal Dolan. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, by your lack of moral backbone.

At the inauguration, the head of New York’s archdiocese asked God to “give our leader wisdom, for he is your servant aware of his own weakness and brevity of life.”

Sorry, but there has been nothing in “our leader,” before his inauguration or in the week and a half since, that remotely suggests he’s “aware of his own weakness.” In fact, one of his favorite putdowns of opponents is that they’re “weak.”

More comically, Cardinal Dolan told Maria Bartiromo before the inauguration that he had talks with Trump “in the past where he’s pretty blunt about, you know, he can’t say that he was raised as a, as a very zealous Christian, but he takes his Christian faith seriously.”

This mealy-mouthed, selective see-no-evil act reached its nadir twice since 2016, involving the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Midtown Manhattan, a charity event once notable for Presidential candidates in both parties taking a break from political warfare to make comically self-deprecating remarks.

Until Trump, as he so often does, made a shambles of the dinner in his first election bid with a cascade of insults that provoked boos from many in the audience, then delivered another disgraceful performance last autumn.

Nobody could have blamed Cardinal Dolan if he had pulled the tablecloth out from under Trump either time. Instead, he uttered not the slightest word of disapproval, not even an earnest request to leave any spiteful remarks at the door.

The fallout was bad enough to make you wonder if the Smith Dinner had outlived its purpose by devolving into an irredeemable fat-cat forum.

Cardinal Dolan was never shy about criticizing Joe Biden about abortion or the influx of migrants, to name a few issues. But when has he disagreed with Trump about anything?

What is the Cardinal afraid of? The fury of Trump, or the cooled ardor of well-heeled conservative Catholics in the archdiocese?

Silence about Trump’s bullying, of both Budde and those she championed, is by no means universal in the Catholic Church. In fact, a local parish priest, in a sermon I heard earlier this week, indicated, correctly, that there was nothing contrary to Catholic teaching in what she said.

But it matters enormously when the leading Catholic cleric in the world’s media capital fails to defend a fellow person of the cloth who is guilty of nothing but reminding the new President and his followers of the biblical admonition, “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)

Leave aside (though you shouldn’t) the verse noting that “as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40)

By resorting to another one of his social media tantrums, against a cleric that the mass of Americans hadn’t even heard of before this, Trump was engaging in the same sort of dangerous petulance shown when King Henry II of England screamed, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!” (Or, as shortened by posterity: “Will someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?”)

That didn’t end well in Canterbury Cathedral for St. Thomas Becket.

What President before Trump has ever demanded an apology from a religious leader? What President before him has ever misbehaved in the way that led biblical prophets like Daniel, Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah to risk the wrath of their rulers by calling them to account?

Bishop Budde would have been well within her rights to quote Nathan’s denunciation of King David to Trump: “Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes?” (2 Samuel 12: 9)

Yet she never said a word about how he has broken his marriage vows multiple times, stiffed his company’s creditors, ruined investors, steered government meetings and business to his own properties, ridiculed a reporter with disabilities, mocked the looks of an opposing candidate’s wife, used sensitive information for blackmail and for charitable donations for his own purposes, excused dictators responsible for the deaths of thousands, and promised retribution (now in progress) for anyone who opposed him.

She only asked him to use what he saw as God’s providential rescue of his life after last year’s assassination attempt on behalf of the people who need mercy the most.

Contrary to the charge in his post-sermon tweet that she had “brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way," it was he who meanly dragged the “world of politics” into the church with the opportunistic adoption of right-to-life beliefs he had never held before entering the GOP primaries nine years ago, and by entangling so many in the Christian Nationalism movement in his January 6 plotting.

And it was not Budde who promoted division in a nation that one of Trump’s GOP predecessors, Ronald Reagan, likened to the biblical “city on a hill. 

Look, I get that people, whatever their leanings, don’t want to hear continually about politics from the pulpit. Neither do I, if for no other reason than that there’s no spiritual component to ensuring basic government functions like picking up garbage and delivering the mail.

But this week’s 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz reminds us that some political issues are inherently moral; that lasting dishonor accrues to any nation that stigmatizes outsiders; and that the road to the death camps began with seeing others as less than human before proceeding to seizing them in their homes.

I fear that, by not protesting the President’s attempt at winning through intimidation against another spiritual leader, Cardinal Dolan is doing more than simply encouraging an already rampant cynicism among the young about organized religion that, as New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose recently noted, is “contributing to a more disconnected, careless and cruel society.”

I worry that the Cardinal is silently consenting to outright religious intolerance spurred on by a capricious, vindictive leader who recognizes no limits on his impulses or appetites.

 Already, Trump has taken heart from Dolan’s muted trumpet on behalf of the threatened. A mild statement from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemning some of the President’s executive orders relating to immigration elicited a faux-sorrowful insinuation from Vice President J.D. Vance that the Church was more concerned about “their bottom line” than humanitarian concerns. 

The smear—surely cleared in advance with Trump—was so weaselly and egregious that it couldn’t by shrugged off by Dolan, who rightly called the remarks “nasty” and “scurrilous.” (Even in this instance, the Cardinal couldn’t bring himself to blame the truculent corner man who directed the hit below the belt.)

The prelate could have justifiably applied the same adjectives to Trump’s diatribe against Budde.

History will relegate him to the shadows reserved for the timid and temporizing, while it will hail Bishop Budde as following the example of St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons:

“If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us saintly. But since we see that avarice, anger, pride, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond charity, modesty, justice, and thought, perhaps we must stand fast a little—even at the risk of being heroes.”

Quote of the Day (Peter Wehner, on ‘When Civility is Stripped Away’)

“When civility is stripped away, everything in life becomes a battlefield, an arena for conflict, an excuse for invective. Families, communities, our conversations and our institutions break apart when basic civility is absent.”— Peter Wehner, American writer and former speechwriter for the administrations of three Republican U.S. presidents, in The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump (2019) 

Quote of the Day (Ray Bradbury, on ‘Good Medicine’)

“A good night sleep, or a ten-minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.”—Science-fiction novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), Dandelion Wine (1957)

Quote of the Day (Edith Wharton, on Discovering Happiness Amid Winter)

“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.” — Pulitzer Prize-winning American fiction writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937), Ethan Frome (1909)

The image accompanying this post shows Ruth Gordon and Raymond Massey as the desperate lovers grabbing for a moment of happiness in a desolate Berkshire village (appropriately named Starkfield) in the 1936 Broadway adaptation of Ethan Frome.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,’ on ‘A Little Nonsense’)

Willy Wonka [played by Gene Wilder]: “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”— Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), screenplay by Roald Dahl, adapted by Dahl and the uncredited writers Robert Kaufman and David Seltzer from Dahl’s 1964 children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, directed by Mel Stuart

Quote of the Day (Adam Haslett, on Subjects He Wishes More Authors Would Write About)

“How people experience the jobs they do; how, where, when and why people experience wonder and awe; and also politics, not in the electoral sense but in the lived sense. It’s so hard to do, particularly now, but so needed. We fight politically in two dimensions, but live in at least four.”—American fiction writer and journalist Adam Haslett, interviewed by Scott Heller, “By the Book: Adam Haslett,” The New York Times Book Review, Jan. 19, 2025

Quote of the Day (C. Day Lewis, on Poetry and the Past)

“Poetry, reminding us of the past, puts us in touch with countless dead generations.” —Anglo-Irish poet (and British Poet Laureate) C(ecil) Day Lewis (1904-1972), Compton Lecture, Jan. 17, 1968, quoted in Peter Stanford, C. Day Lewis: A Life (2007)

TV Quote of the Day (Alfred Hitchcock, on Why You Should ‘Treat Your Neighbor More Kindly’)

Alfred Hitchcock: “Thus ends tonight's story. After seeing it, I think you'll treat your neighbor more kindly. After all, he may be a former ax murderer. Of course, there's nothing to worry about. He's probably out of practice.”—Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 2, Episode 33, “A Man Greatly Beloved,” original air date May 12, 1957, teleplay by Sarett Tobias and A.A. Milne, directed by James Neilson

Quote of the Day (Nick Bowlin, on ‘Contemporary Company Towns’)

“In my county in Colorado, a financier named Mark Walter has purchased seemingly half of Crested Butte’s main street. In Aspen, a Russian billionaire sued a local newspaper for describing him as an oligarch. At lower altitudes, there are plenty of strange new examples of powerful private financial interests operating in unusual jurisdictions: legislation that allowed Walt Disney World to be an essentially self-governing territory in Florida; Amazon’s soliciting enormous concessions from cities across the country in its search for a second headquarters; Elon Musk’s purchasing thousands of acres of land outside Austin, Texas, where he intends to incorporate a new town. Brian Highsmith, a fellow at Harvard Law School who studies corporate power and local government…describe[ed] these examples to me as contemporary company towns—now often achieved via extreme concentrations of property ownership that allow for private interests to gradually take hold of local democratic processes.”—High Country News journalist Nick Bowlin, “Letter From Big Sky: Slippery Slope: How Private Equity Shapes a Ski Town,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2024

Quote of the Day (Cynthia Ozick, on Letters as Literary Plot Devices)

“Letters, in our common understanding, are not meant to be fiction, or jokes, or games, or tricks. They are not meant to compete with storytelling, and if they do, if they are dragooned into real life, they become conflated with conspiracy. Yet without letters, what would become of the crux of so many novels and plays? Of literature itself? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sets out with a series of letters; more letters fever it forward. Had Mr. Darcy not hand-delivered his letter to Elizabeth Bennet, she—who could brook neither fools nor snobs—might have lived unwed. If Romeo had read Friar Laurence’s letter, he and Juliet would have averted their misconstrued deaths. Acclaimed eighteenth-century epistolary novels—Pamela, Fanny Hill, Clarissa—could not have come into being, at least not in their chosen form; nor could Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, or Bellow’s Herzog. If not for a letter to his aunt, Marlow, the protagonist of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, would have been obliged to discover another contrivance to introduce his journey up the Congo. And what of the mute and final revelation of Melville’s Bartleby: his origin in the Dead Letter Office?”— American short story writer, novelist, and essayist Cynthia Ozick, “Voices from the Dead Letter Office: On the Epistolary Life,” Harper’s Magazine, January 2025

Quote of the Day (Pope Gregory VII, ‘Oppressed’ by Multiple Challenges)

“The Eastern Church fallen from the faith, and attacked by the infidels from without. In the West, South, or North, scarcely any bishops who have obtained their office regularly, or whose life and conduct correspond to their calling, and who are actuated by the love of Christ instead of worldly ambition. Nowhere princes who prefer God’s honor to their own, and justice to gain…. And when I look to myself, I feel oppressed by such a burden of sin that no other hope of salvation is left me but in the mercy of Christ alone.”— Hildebrand of Sovana, later Pope Gregory VII (1020-1085), in a letter to his friend, Abbot Hugo of Cluny, Jan. 22, 1075, quoted by Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (1907)

The new film adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel Conclave spotlights, amid the election of a new pope, deeply unholy political infighting, corruption, and clerical disobedience of vows of chastity.

I was going to write that readers and filmgoers—with attention spans shortened to a TikTok clip and little if any historical background—may be surprised to learn that the same problems besieged the Vatican nearly a millennium ago.

But now I read that German Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, and—ahem!—TV commentator Megyn Kelly have blasted the thriller for depicting such issues in a manner that Cardinal Muller has termed “anti-Christian propaganda,” according to Edward Pentin’s January 20 blog post for National Catholic Register.

Clearly, these outraged worthies haven’t read one of the greatest of medieval popes, Gregory VII, on the same subjects.

According to legend, the reforming Benedictine monk Hildebrand, on a wave of popular acclamation, was carried into the church in St. Peter’s in Vincoli (an easy task to perform, as he was dwarfish), and elected people in 1073, protesting all the while his unworthiness for the office.

Maybe the anguish that Hildebrand (who took the name Gregory) felt before and while serving as the successor of St. Peter was the kind that the intensely pious exhibit in measuring how far they fall from the injunction in Matthew 5:48 to “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Or maybe he dreaded the enormous problems that had plagued his mentor, Pope Gregory VI—including exile into Germany forced at the behest of Emperor Henry III.

From the first, Gregory VII denounced the growing practice of simony, the sale of church offices or ecclesiastical preferments, and soon he also banned lay investiture, or bestowal of a church office by a member of the secular nobility rather than by church officials, and clerical marriage.

His actions sparked an epic clash with Emperor Henry IV that weakened both. Like his successors to this day, Gregory had to keep church objectives in mind even as he dealt with secular rulers. The problem was that he and Henry IV could not—or chose not—to move beyond non-negotiable positions.

Medieval monarchs like Henry saw, in appointing bishops to their offices, the opportunity to break the hereditary rule of lords, with bishops becoming vassals of kings. Countering the notion that Henry advocated of the divine right of kings, Gregory proclaimed a spiritual authority higher than a temporary power.

Though never using the word “infallible,” Gregory laid the groundwork for the doctrine by positing that the Holy See “did not err.” Pure and ascetic himself, the pope could never imagine that the supreme power he pronounced over spiritual and secular affairs in the name of removing clerical corruption might ever be used to conceal it.

Like so many reformers in all walks of life, Gregory exhibited a zeal and anger that upset his targets. (German bishops, for instance, complained that he treated them like bailiffs on an estate.) At his best, however, he was as fearless as he was fierce, overcoming his initial self-doubt, and even surviving a kidnapping and imprisonment before being liberated by many of the faithful at the end of 1075.

Henry IV could never forget his humiliating winter journey to the castle of Canossa in 1077 to beg the pope’s forgiveness as the first step in lifting his excommunication. Three years later, he invaded Rome, replacing Gregory with an “anti-pope.”

"I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore, I die in exile,” Gregory remarked sadly on his deathbed in 1085.

Church historian Eamon Duffy has rendered the most judicious assessment of the pontiff in Ten Popes Who Shook the World:

“To 19th-century Protestant politicians like Bismarck, it embodied the overweening claims of a power-mad Church, a humiliating defeat for the autonomy of the secular world that must never be repeated….

“Gregory was defeated in the short term, but he changed the world all the same. Other popes would avoid such all-out confrontation, but never again would the Church accept the right of kings and rulers to determine spiritual matters. Whatever Gregory’s intentions, a lasting line had been drawn between the claims of conscience and the claims of state power. And under this overbearing autocratic pope, human freedom took one small, uncertain step forward.”

Nevertheless, spiritual leaders who dare to openly confront wayward politicians continue to encounter peril, as Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde is experiencing now following her inauguration day sermon directed to President Trump at Washington Cathedral. (I doubt that anyone would want to read the kind of messages she must be receiving from MAGA followers following their leader’s whining, abusive tweet.)

(For original source material on the escalating clash between the "City of God" and the "City of Man" in the Middle Ages, see a volume edited by Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300.)

‘Golden Age’? How About ‘Gilded Age II’?

Humorist Calvin Trillin, taking note of the fashionably attired friends of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, referred to the festivities surrounding the 1981 Presidential inauguration as “The Night of the Minks.”

Considering the attendees who helped Donald Trump plan his attempted coup four years ago, allowed him to escape legal and political punishment for it, or financed his return to the Oval Office, the parties after this week’s transfer of power might have been termed “The Night of the Finks.”

Viewers were informed, at noon on Monday, that “a golden age for America begins right now.”

Well, the newly inaugurated President got the letter “g” right in the key word in that sentence, but that’s about it. The correct word was “Gilded.”

You might recall “The Gilded Age” as the title of an HBO series about the filthy rich in New York following the Civil War. It took its name from an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized greed, political corruption, and conspicuous consumption in that period.

Alas, the book’s subtitle has a lasting significance that its collaborators could never have imagined: “A Tale of Today.”

Much like our time, the innovations in technology and finance introduced 150 years ago gave rise to fortunes of staggering proportions and equally vast inequality. The possessors of these riches, memorably dubbed “robber barons,” were—and are—not shy about crushing union and safety activism, buying legislators, and subverting attempts to regulate their businesses even while flaunting their wealth and influence.

Taking note of the assembly of the well-heeled on hand after the oath of office—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault, Alphabet Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—one person on LinkedIn hailed “businesses and government [that] run their companies or departments like sports teams who put the best on the field.”

So much depends on the eye of the beholder. He saw business all-stars; I saw successors to the 1933 Weimar businessmen determined but unable to control the twitchy guy who’d taken over their country.

Some of them proceeded cheerfully, others nervously, but all optimistically to congratulate a fellow billionaire who, unlike most of them, was born into wealth, then saved by his father from falling off several financial cliffs in the early 1990s.

If they felt any jealousy over his inherited fortune, they gave no sign of it as they greeted the newly sworn-in President and recently convicted felon. It was more important that he help them maintain their privileged perch—the tax cut that has disproportionately benefited them, the government regulations from which they beg relief.

What they all share is, in the apt phrase of The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, “a playbook for exploiting public office for private gain.”

Somehow, they all managed to stifle their guffaws over the new President’s hobbyhorse about renaming the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.” Maybe they didn’t realize that the true “Gulf of America” was what now separated them from the poorest, most desperate citizens of their country.

They wouldn’t have found that out from the wall-to-wall, breathless media coverage surrounding the inaugural, which did not constitute political journalism or even fashion reporting so much as plutography—an obscene depiction of the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Stepping to the front of the line to make the most of their relationship with Trump have been Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, until recently the co-heads of the President-elect’s new Department of Government Efficiency—an advisory commission that, Musk blithely assured the public in November, could find $2 trillion in federal spending cuts.

With Musk more recently suggesting that $1 trillion might be more feasible, that hope didn’t make it to the inauguration.

Neither, as it happened, did Ramaswamy, the biotech and finance entrepreneur who auditioned as Trump’s most shameless Mini-Me in the GOP primaries, a candidate utterly unable to articulate a single point of difference with the eventual nominee.

Late last week, having already royally ticked off transition team members with his arrogance, Ramaswamy gave his rapidly growing army of enemies the only weapon they needed with his X post on H 1-B visas. Tech companies, he claimed, hire foreign workers in part because of a mindset in the country that has “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”

With immigration-conscious MAGA believers suitably inflamed, that was all Musk needed to elbow him out of co-leading the commission, according to a Politico report. 

Now, Mini-Me is consoling himself by contemplating a campaign for governor of Ohio, a state that has already inexplicably propelled another former tech finance guy, J.D. Vance, into the political stratosphere.

Not that Musk didn’t cause some head-scratching himself. On Monday night, exuberant over his newly exalted position, the X-Man pushed his arms upward and outward from his chest in a way that the Anti-Defamation League charitably characterized as an “awkward gesture” but that more than a few saw as a Nazi or Fascist salute.

Given Musk’s full-throated support for the far right in Europe (“Only AfD can save Germany, end of story"), his straight-arm gesture the other night looks a lot like Dr. Strangelove’s impulsive “Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!"

Throughout the day and night on Monday, you couldn’t help noticing Melania Trump’s navy blue boater-style toque. The past and present First Lady adored it so much that she kept it on even after she stepped inside the Capitol and watched her husband take the oath of office again.

The hat was really expansive. Could she have been concealing the expression in her eyes from a curious public? Moreover, the President’s niece Mary spoke for many in saying that the headgear was Melania’s ingeniously convenient device for preventing her husband from kissing her.

Much remains to be seen for Trump’s return to power, but in terms of the First Lady’s hat, one can already conclude: Mission Accomplished.

“The robber barons probably looked in the mirror and thought they were God too,” noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in an interview with The Financial Times this past weekend.

As they look in the mirror, how many of these contemporary fat cats must wonder, “If a know-nothing like Trump can get to the White House, why can’t I?”

Just imagine: Even now, as one billionaire after another waltzed around the inaugural ball, at least one—not unlike Yeats’ “rough beast, its hour come round at last” in “The Second Coming”—might have imagined fitting into the MAGA mold of a White House plutocrat in populist’s clothing.

(The image accompanying this post shows the new-money Gladys, George, and Bertha Russell of New York in the Season 2 premiere of The Gilded Age.)

Quote of the Day (Carl Hiaasen, on the Growing Necessity for Reporters)

“People can’t get outraged [at the political arena] without rapid access to solid, useful information—what we used to call journalism. There’s so much garbage being disguised as fact and so many gasbags posing as sages; somebody has to cut through the crap. That’s the job of reporters, and their job will be more important than at any time in history. There’s been this great lamentation about the end of newspapers as we know them, the end of the era of the paper hitting your doorstep in the morning, but I don’t think the language or the craft of writing is dying. In the next 40 years, there’s going to be a larger demand than ever for people who can communicate with the written word, whatever format it takes.”—American crime novelist and retired Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, “Slipping Backward” (part of a “40 Things To Know” article cluster), interviewed by T. A. Frail, Smithsonian, July-August 2010

Fifteen years ago today, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court opened the floodgates for unlimited campaign spending to corporations and other outside groups by ruling that any restrictions constituted a violation of freedom of speech.

In his Smithsonian Q&A, Hiaasen denounced the decision as “toxic to the whole democratic process,” and correctly predicted that “From now on, it’s basically going to be all the free speech that money can buy.”

Besides the communication skill that Hiaasen identified, more will be needed for the journalism of the present and future to affect the political process, however: the fearlessness of its practitioners and the open-mindedness of its readers. The portents for both these factors are deeply troubling right now.

While the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has twisted freedom of speech beyond recognition, it has permitted a lack of legal accountability for a President’s misdeeds and signaled, through Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, that its landmark New York Times v. Sullivan freedom of the press ruling might be up for reconsideration.

Even with an unfettered press, there’s no guarantee that, in the present digital environment dominated by what Hiaasen calls “gasbags posing as sages,” their revelations will be acted upon. 

“Confirmation bias”—the tendency to seek out and accept anything supporting our beliefs and ignoring anything contradicting them—has only solidified in the current polarized environment.

I’m not sure that I am any more hopeful than Hiaasen was 15 years ago. I only know that not to push back against these troubling trends constitutes preemptive, unconditional surrender that will haunt the democratic process now and into the foreseeable future. 

(For more information on the baleful effects of Citizen United—including the influx of secret “dark money” into elections—and what can be done to bring about campaign finance reform, I urge you to read Tim Lau’s December 2019 report for the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.)

Quote of the Day (Erasmus, on Leaders, Flatterers and the Truth)

“Yet in the midst of all their prosperity, princes in this respect seem to me most unfortunate, because, having no one to tell them truth, they are forced to receive flatterers for friends.” — Dutch monk and scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), In Praise of Folly (1509)

Quote of the Day (Isaac Bashevis Singer, on a Creator’s ‘Inner Vision and Its Ultimate Expression’)

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.”— Polish-born Jewish-American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, essayist, and translator—and Nobel Literature laureate— Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), quoted in Aspects of I. B. Singer, edited by Joseph Landis (1986)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Book of Exodus, With Laws of Justice)

“You shall not utter a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man, to be a malicious witness. You shall not follow a multitude to do evil; nor shall you bear witness in a suit, turning aside after a multitude, so as to pervert justice; nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his suit….

“You shall not pervert the justice due to your poor in his suit. Keep far from a false charge, and do not slay the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked. And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the officials, and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.

“You shall not oppress a stranger; you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”—Exodus 23: 1-3, 6-9 (Revised Standard Version)

Moses, the prototypical Judeo-Christian lawgiver, is depicted in the image accompanying this post, Moses With the Ten Commandments. It was created in 1659 by the Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, AKA Rembrandt (1606-1669).