Martin Crane [played
by John Mahoney]: “Just ignore him.”
Frasier: “I'm trying to!”
Martin: “I'm talking to
the dog!”— Frasier, Season 1, Episode 2, “Space Quest,” original
air date Sept. 23, 1993, teleplay by Sy Dukane and Denise Moss, directed by James
Burrows
In some ways, I was delighted to read Ms. Cavendish’s
headline, along with her speculation that “the hold of aggressive atheism may
be weakening.” After all, I read her piece in the same week as philosopher Firmin
DeBrabander’s far more devastating itemization, in the Fall 2024 issue of The
Hedgehog Review, on “dechurching”— “a process involving entire populations,
not just intellectuals, radicals, or other members of the so-called secular
elite.”
What troubles me, I suppose, is that Ms. Cavendish’s
argument boils down to demography being destiny. It’s the same kind of claim
that Democratic strategists have made for a coming, decisive realignment for
their party over the last two decades, and we now see what has happened to
those hopes.
The basis for such hopes lies in the belief that
current trends will continue unabated, but so often that does not happen in
lives affected by social cataclysms.
How many demographers, for instance, would have
predicted three decades ago that the 2007-09 global financial crisis and NAFTA
would have combined to corrode Democrats’ one-time “blue wall” in the Rust Belt
states, or that the sex abuse scandal would deliver the most devastating blow
to Roman Catholicism since the Reformation?
True, Professor DeBrander cites demographic data
similar to Ms. Cavendish’s in holding that obituaries for Christianity are
premature. But I would like the data to be supplemented by counter evangelizing
for the kind of belief promoted by Pope Francis, in a Church that fosters
what he calls “theological hope” and “a change that promotes the dignity of
individuals.”
I guess I am looking for the modern equivalent of
Saints Francis, Dominic, and Ignatius Loyola—figures who rose, when the Church
seemed overwhelmed by challenges to its moral authority, to offer reminders of
the power of humility and community in teaching, by word and deed, the original
core values of the Gospels.
(The image accompanying this post, the official
portrait of Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice, was taken Apr. 23, 2024, by Roger
Harris.)
It would take that most prolific of movie actors, Willem Dafoe, to present the most passionate defense possible of cinema as a different style of storytelling—a primarily visual one.
Some screenwriters might be annoyed at one word conspicuously absent from his description of cinema—dialogue. But “light,” “space,” “tone,” and “color” are certainly defining characteristics of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent vampire classic Nosferatu.
Now audiences will decide
if variations on these traits are worth seeing in that film’s remake, in which
Dafoe (pictured) has a key supporting role as a vampire-hunter.
The loss to the world when Albert Camus died in an automobile accident 65 years ago today is incalculable. At only 46 years old, he was still in the prime of his career.
His death came at a tricky time for the novelist: France’s divisive, debilitating attempt to crush the independence movement of the colony where Camus was born and spent his formative years, Algeria. As a pacifist, he was so anguished by the Algerian War that he said it affected him “as others feel pain in their legs.”
Like his counterpart across the English Channel, George Orwell, Camus issued a clarion call for liberal democracy when it was threatened by totalitarian regimes of both the left and the right. The successors of these two writers are issuing their own warnings about similar perils that confront our age, but so far they are going unheeded.
Maybe it’s time to re-read
Camus, to understand, as he demonstrated in his postwar novel The Plague
(much discussed at the outbreak of COVID-19), that withstanding pestilences, whether
the medical or political kind, requires eternal vigilance lest they return, but
ordinary people must maintain their resistance, no matter how great their
weariness.
(For a more extended
overview of how Camus balanced political activism with engaging with time “on
the smallest and most personal scale,” see Maria Popova’s June 2024 post from her blog “The Marginalian.”)
New York Times
columnist James Reston once wrote, “The U.S. will do anything for Latin
America, except read about it.” It has certainly been the case that, until—well,
just the last week or so—this country had largely forgotten about Panama for
the last 34 years, not paying much attention when Noriega died, still in
captivity, in 2017.
The event that brought that nation back into our
consciousness was a tweet by—well, You Know Who—about how Chinese soldiers were
operating the Panama Canal, and that we were being overcharged for passage
through it.
It’s hard to figure out what brought on this outburst,
except that: 1) You Know Who likes to pick fights who allies with leaders who
have been democratically elected, and 2) he might be, as former Congressman
David Jolley suggests, jealous that Baby Jesus was receiving more attention on
Christmas than he was.
Noriega seems like just the type of person he would
have enjoyed. Actually, there is precedent for Republican Presidents keeping on
good terms while he was in power—except that they did so while keeping as far
away from him as possible, so as to avoid his ineradicable moral stench.
The path to power for Noriega ran through his hard-drinking,
corrupt predecessor, Omar Torrijos, who seized power in a coup d’etat in
1968. From humble origins, Noriega became so indispensable to the dictator—first
as an army colonel, then as his intelligence chief—that Torrijos called him “my
gangster.”
Upon taking over Panama after Torrijos died in a 1981
plane crash, Noriega leveraged a comparatively small arms-and-drug trade into
what journalists R.M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez Borbon called, in their
account In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968-1990, called a "narcomilitary
state."
Many of his countrymen would have privately agreed
with the nickname bestowed on Noriega by his future American jailers to signify
his pockmarked skin: “Pineapple Face.”
But they also would have been terrified that any one-liner—even
a slight hint of a smirk—would have been noticed by the ruthless leader who, New
Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson commented in a 2017 podcast interview,
possessed the frightening ability to observe the slightest thing out of the
corner of his eyes even while seemingly focusing on someone else.
Though denying to Anderson that he was involved in
drug trafficking with the Medellin drag cartel, Noriega did admit that he
allowed money laundering for this crime in his country’s banks at the behest of
the CIA, which wanted a means of monitoring this activity. Anderson judged this
a half-truth.
Both Democratic and Republican Presidents chose to
look the other way through two decades of the Torrijos-Noriega regime: Jimmy
Carter needed Torrijos to take the Shah of Iran off his hands when the latter’s
admission to a U.S. hospital sparked the hostage crisis, and Ronald Reagan and George
Bush wanted to counter Communist influence in Cuba and Nicaragua.
As in the Philippines, a dictator’s heinous murder of
a prominent dissident (in this case, Dr. Hugo Spadafora) caused such
international revulsion that his American handlers felt compelled to act. When
a call for him to step down went unheeded and Noriega voided the 1989
Presidential election, plans went into motion on how to remove him.
Noriega’s rash declaration of war on the U.S. and a
subsequent killing of a U.S. Marine provided the Bush administration with the
pretext needed to remove him in its “Operation Just Cause” December 1989
invasion.
The American casualties— 23 troops killed in action
and over 300 wounded—may have seemed minimal compared to the Vietnam War, the
largest previous U.S. military action. But, considering American complicity in
the regime it ended up overthrowing, it was all so unnecessary.
This post is for a friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS
WHO HE IS!!!) who is quite an admirer of Ms. Poehler.
