Quote of the Day (Bernard Holland, on Musical Echoes)

“Creating music indoors is like throwing a number of balls around a four-sided handball court and waiting for them to come back to you. If the balls are of different sizes and thrown at different speeds, your ears, so to speak, will have their hands full.”—American music critic Bernard Holland, “How's That Again? An Echoing Refrain,” The New York Times, Dec. 20, 2025

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Stranger Than Paradise,’ As A Hungarian Teen Learns About ‘The Way We Eat in America’)

Willie [played by John Lurie]: “You're sure you don't want a TV dinner?”

Eva [played by Eszter Balint]: “Yes. I'm not hungry. Why is it called ‘TV dinner’?”

Willie: “Um... You're supposed to eat it while you watch TV. Television.”

Eva: “I know what a TV is. Where does that meat come from?”:

Willie: “What do you mean?”

Eva: “What does that meat come from?”

Willie: “I guess it comes from a cow.”

Eva: “From a cow? It doesn't even look like meat.”

Willie: “Eva, stop bugging me, will you? You know, this is the way we eat in America. I got my meat, I got my potatoes, I got my vegetables, I got my dessert, and I don't even have to wash the dishes.”— Stranger Than Paradise (1984), screenplay by Jim Jarmusch and John Lurie, directed by Jim Jarmusch

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on ‘The Situation of Our Time’)

“The situation of our time
Surrounds us like a baffling crime.
There lies the body half-undressed,
We all had reason to detest,
And all are suspects and involved
Until the mystery is solved
And under lock and key the cause
That makes a nonsense of our laws.”— British-American poet, playwright, and essayist W.H. Auden (1907-1973), “New Year Letter (January 1, 1940),” from Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (1976)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Pope Leo XIV, Warning Against ‘Other Securities’)

“Even today, there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent.  Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure."—Pope Leo XIV, in his first Mass as pontiff, May 9, 2025, quoted by Deborah Castellano Lubov, “Pope Leo XIV to Cardinals: 'We Are to Bear Witness to Our Joyful Faith in Christ,'” Vatican News, May 9, 2025

Photo of the Day: Swings at Lincoln Center

This past Wednesday, heading over to a matinee event at Lincoln Center, I was surprised to see this set of bright-red swings across the plaza. I didn’t recall ever seeing it before. Indeed, it was only just installed and is temporary.

"Mi Casa, Your Casa 2.0" is an interactive artwork, a series of open, house-shaped frames, each roughly 8 feet wide and nearly 10 feet tall. Designed by Mexico-based studio Esrawe + Cadena, it’s open to the public as part of Lincoln Center’s Big Umbrella Festival.

The piece only lasts as long as the festival, through April 26. On the warm, sunlit afternoon when I took this photo, many visitors were taking advantage of the installation while they still could at this New York entertainment and cultural mecca.

Quote of the Day (Norman Mailer, Telling JFK How He Erred at the Bay of Pigs)

“Wasn't there anyone around to give you the lecture on Cuba? Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. You listen to intelligence agents and fail to interpret the style of the prose in which they submit their reports. You, with your shrewd sense of character, neglect to see that none of your boys and men can tell you the truth about Cuba because it would flagellate them too psychically to consider the existential (that is, indescribable) quality of what they report. So they turn nuances into facts, and lose other nuances, and mangle facts into falsities. It keeps you perhaps from recognizing what all the world knows, that we have driven Cuba inch by inch into alliance with the Soviet, as deliberately and insanely as a man setting out to cuckold himself.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and essayist Norman Mailer (1923-2007), “An Open Letter to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Fidel Castro,” originally published in The Village Voice, Apr.27, 1961, reprinted in Collected Essays of the1960s (2018)

Sixty-five years ago this week, a CIA-backed brigade of exiles attempted to take back their country from Fidel Castro, landing at the Bay of Pigs on the southwestern coast of Cuba. Within two days, the invaders were overwhelmed by Castro’s army.

JFK’s authorization of the invasion (concocted in the waning days of White House predecessor Dwight Eisenhower) led Norman Mailer to reevaluate his prior appreciation for the young President as a candidate the year before in the Esquire essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”:

“I think it is not impossible he will become a great President, but I also think he could lead us into dictatorship. It is not only up to him, but to many of us, whether he becomes a good leader or a bad one. The question is whether he has a mind deep enough to comprehend the size of the disaster he has inherited here.”

Suffice it to say that in his short tenure in the White House, Kennedy, no matter his faults, showed no signs of leading America into a dictatorship.

But it is doubtful that Mailer—within a few years, and certainly by the end of his long life—could still labor under the illusion, as he put it in his post-invasion “Open Letter” to the caudillo, that the Cuban leader evinced “some sense that there were heroes left in the world.” 

Like other intellectuals who were part of the “Fair Play for Cuba Committee,” he could only cling to the belief that American foreign policy had driven Castro towards Communism. (Documents released in 2022 show that, as early as July 1960, Raul Castro told Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev that his brother was "discreetly" placing Communist sympathizers in key government positions.)

Dennis Wrong’s February 1962 Commentary post-mortem on Castro’s December 1961 announcement that he was, in fact, a “Marxist-Leninist” predictably took to task Mailer, other members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and the burgeoning “New Left” movement in general for naivete.

That pronouncement was not without justice, especially in the case of Mailer, who, in addition to his still somewhat starry-eyed view of Castro in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, urged him to invite Ernest Hemingway—who had just left Cuba and was in precarious physical and psychological health—to come back to the island, meet with the new leader, and write about what he saw.

But Mailer was right about one thing: JFK’s “boys and men”—i.e., the CIA—had planned a scheme with little to no chance of success, even if Kennedy had authorized more than the limited air support provided. 

The exile brigade totaled 1,500 against Castro’s regular army of 25,000; there was no real groundswell of support within the island; and the Castro regime was aware in advance that an operation would be coming.

To JFK’s astonishment, his assumption of responsibility for this fiasco only three months into his administration boosted rather than lowered his approval ratings. 

But the shadow of that operation’s failure haunted the rest of his thousand days in office—most dramatically, in the Cuban missile crisis a year later—as well as, to an only somewhat lesser degree, those of the 11 men who succeeded him in the Oval Office.

In her 1987 impressionistic portrait Miami, Joan Didion noted that embittered Cuban exiles—conspicuously missing from the chorus of approval for JFK, because of his late refusal for additional support for the landing force—had been involved in multiple foreign and domestic misadventures, including assassination plots against Castro, the Watergate burglary, Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, and Iran-contra. 

In no small measure, they have also anchored GOP support as Florida migrated from being a purple to a red state at election time.

Though even Kennedy court historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. acknowledged early on that the exiles had been forgotten in the crush of events, I doubt that any policymakers at the time could have imagined that Cuba would remain a Marxist regime today.

Both Cuban exiles and those still living on the island used to joke that even Castro was mortal. Yet even after his death, control of the government remained in the hands of his aging brother Raul, and now his designated successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel.

But how much longer that continues is very much a live question.

Late last year, as New Yorker contributor Jon Lee Anderson noted in late March,

“[T]he island had faced daily electricity blackouts owing to a lack of fuel, along with severe shortages of food, water, and medicine. Economic activity had all but stopped, and the government, which was essentially broke and unable to secure new loans, had been incapable of providing solutions. Even garbage collection was virtually nonexistent, with huge mounds of refuse piling up on street corners.”

Starting in January, encouraged by the successful extraction of the Cuban regime’s post-Soviet benefactor, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump Administration decided to exert maximum pressure on the government of Diaz-Canel, issuing an executive order that declared it a national security threat in terms not even used by Dwight Eisenhower and JFK at the height of the Cold War. The administration also authorized tariffs on goods from third countries that sell or provide oil to the island.

Even if the Trump administration succeeds in destabilizing the government of Diaz-Canel, it has operated under wishful thinking reminiscent of both Mailer’s and the JFK-era CIA, an amnesia about history that brings to mind the legendary remark about the benighted Bourbon restoration in France: “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

A change in regime will not by itself bring political freedom or economic opportunity, especially considering the lack of clearly defined goals for Trump’s military operations against Venezuela and Iran. Indeed, new leaders under American aegis may only revive for a new generation resentment towards yanqui exploitation.

In the Reagan administration, as Iran-contra came to light, Didion harked back to the post-Bay of Pigs atmosphere of the Kennedy administration, believing that again it was “time to talk about runaway agencies, arrogance in the executive branch, about constitutional crises and the nature of the presidency, about faults in the structure, flaws in the process." 

The need for that “talk” is certainly even more urgent now.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Duck Soup,’ on Forgetting Faces)

Rufus T. Firefly [played by Groucho Marx]: “I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.”— Duck Soup (1933), story by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, with additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, directed by Leo McCarey

Photo of the Day: Better the Sax Man Than the Tax Man

Yesterday, having paid my debt to Uncle Sam, I happened to be in New York’s Duffy Square when I came upon the fellow you see here.

In contrast to the costumed characters that have come to populate (or, if you prefer, litter) this center of the Manhattan entertainment world, this musician was intent not on sight but on sound, blowing sweet notes into the rapidly warming air. 

It felt like such a blessing and relief, amid the high temperatures and the annual presence of the IRS, that I just had to take his photo.

Quote of the Day (Barbara De Angelis, on Love and Kindness)

“Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.”— American personal growth adviser, lecturer and author Barbara De Angelis, Are You the One for Me?: Knowing Who's Right and Avoiding Who's Wrong Real Moments (1992)

Quote of the Day (Margaret Mitchell, on Taxes and Other Inconveniences)

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them.”—American novelist Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), Gone With the Wind (1936)

Pope, Pentagon, and Imperial Impiety

So much chaos erupted on multiple fronts with the Trump Administration in the last 10 days that it’s easy to lose sight of the astonishing Free Press report that in January, Pentagon officials issued a veiled threat to the former papal nuncio that the Vatican had better side with the President on foreign-policy issues—or else.

This news item should concern all Americans, but especially Roman Catholics, one of the key electoral swing groups of the Trump era. (An estimated 56% of American Catholics voted for the President in 2024.)

Although it can be problematic to ascribe a single motive to a demographically diverse group like Catholics, GOP officials have surely been pleased that the church’s hierarchy emphasized so-called cultural issues like abortion and LBGTQ.

It encouraged voters to put in the background matters of relatively secondary interest to the archbishops, such as the rights of labor, economic justice, international peace, and humane treatment of immigrants—to say nothing of a return to power by the lone Presidential candidate since the Civil War to contest election results and foment a domestic insurrection.

I wish but don’t expect that archbishops and parish priests will use their sermons to address the disquieting report about the Pentagon meeting with the papal nuncio (a permanent diplomatic representative of the Holy See, in effect an ambassador).

Administration officials and voters still in their thrall have predictably dismissed it as—take your pick—“fake news,” “uncorroborated” or “highly exaggerated.”

Those terms cannot be applied to what has happened since Sunday, however, including:

*Trump’s remarks to a reporter that he was “not a big fan” of Pope Leo XIV, adding “He likes crime, I guess”;

*The President’s lengthy, deranged—and, of course, spectacularly self-centered—Truth Social post claiming, among other things, that Leo “wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump”;

*A later Truth Social post—equally demented, but this time blasphemous—depicting Trump as Jesus ministering to the sick (the image accompanying this post);

* A subsequent news conference in which the President ludicrously declared that this latter AI-generated meme didn’t show him as Jesus but as a doctor.

A confession here: I have never voted for Trump, and it would not be hard to find posts of mine that have criticized him. 

At the same time, accepting at face value any report that confirms one’s biases—including those that, like this one, cited anonymous sources— damages a writer’s credibility and persuasiveness. 

So, when I first heard the Pentagon meeting news in fragmentary form, I wanted to know how much, if any, of it could be validated.

My conclusion, after reading the initial Free Press story, follow-up accounts, and other reports on the principals involved, is that, while not all details are demonstrably true, enough are verifiable that they should prompt soul-searching among past and present Trump-leaning members of the American hierarchy and the faithful who followed their electoral cues.

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni has issued a formal statement declaring that “the narrative offered by some media outlets about this meeting is completely untrue.”

“Completely untrue”? Not so fast. 

Possibly, despite what the Free Press article claimed, Pope Leo XIV had other reasons for not visiting America on July 4 than anger or fear over the threat. Even if he might now be reluctant to come while Trump is still President, he could be persuaded otherwise eventually.

In addition, the provenance of the publication may, in this case if few others, underscore the report’s credibility. 

The Free Press cannot be dismissed as a progressive news outlet like MS-NOW or CNN, given that it remains true to the editorial philosophy of co-founder Bari Weiss, who now runs CBS News. It has no motive for publishing a story in which the Trump administration appears bullying.

Moreover, the meeting did take place. While not characterizing the encounter’s tone, the Vatican Embassy, or apostolic nunciature, in Washington told Catholic news and information service OSV News, that the meeting occurred. In addition, there’s a picture of the then-nuncio, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, with Defense Undersecretary Elbridge Colby, issued by the Religion News Service, a credible outlet.

The Financial Times has an article about what seems to have happened:

An American present—not Colby—alluded to the Avignon papacy, infamous in European history as the site of a “Great Schism” between pontiffs who had returned to Rome and “anti-popes” who remained in France, subject to state pressure and corruption.

Other Americans at the meeting, who had hoped to smooth-talk Cardinal Pierre and the pope into taking a gentler tone toward the “Dunroe Doctrine” towards Latin America, were aghast over the effect of the remark. 

That’s why an initial anonymous Pentagon source, while deriding the report as “just absurd,” did admit the meeting included “a frank exchange of views”—a diplomatic euphemism for a tense or even storm encounter.

At this point the Vatican doesn’t want a nasty fight with Trump; hence, Bruni’s disclaimer that offers no further details about what did happen.

While the Vatican Embassy termed meetings with government officials as “standard practice” for the nuncio, neither it nor the Pentagon explained why the meeting occurred in the Defense rather than State Department.

Was it an accommodation to Colby, whose grandfather William, as CIA head and a Catholic, interacted with Rome extensively in the Cold War? Or was the venue an attempt at intimidation?

If the latter, it should come as no surprise. Trump has sought to bully the press, large law firms, universities, corporations, and other non-governmental institutions. 

Why should a major religion fall outside his reach—particularly since Trump whisperer Laura Loomer has derided Leo as a “woke Marxist” for interfering with Trump’s mass deportation program?

If the allusion to the Avignon papacy is true, it would conform to a pattern in authoritarian regimes: the thuggish initiatives taken by a midlevel flunky, sure that his bosses would approve his move or, if not, cover it up.

Though MAGA influencers expressed shock about Trump’s vile actions and language over the Easter weekend, there is little sign yet of a re-evaluation among his base. There should be.

In particular, when his Catholic supporters consider Pope Leo’s increasingly sharp, direct criticisms of the President’s trigger-happy tendencies, they should bear in mind that he is merely conveying the consensus of the 1965 Vatican II document, “The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”:

“Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation.”

In an Atlantic Monthly essay published after remarks by Pope Leo last week, Francis X. Rocca confessed that, like many observers, he had mistakenly thought that, in comparison with Trump and even Pope Francis, Leo would be a “quiet” pontiff. But I’m not sure that Leo has stopped being “quiet” even now.

A ruthless authoritarian may prompt stances previously unthinkable under ordinary circumstances, as Thomas More, a government official who loved life, found no alternative to opposing Henry VIII. Extreme situations lead some to cowardice but others to courage.

What unites the Tudor-era saint and the American-born pontiff is an inner strength that seems confounding in a time of toadies.

More’s silent refusal to assent to Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn contrasted dramatically with courtiers and counselors who meekly went along, just as Leo’s steadfast opposition to Trump positions on immigration and national security diverges from the President’s allies within the American hierarchy (whose complicity with administration outrages I discussed in this post from last Christmas).

More of that is needed as the President breaches new moral boundaries. Will his followers take the lead of Leo, or follow Trump into ignominy?

The President’s actions over the last 10 days is forcing Catholic allies, within the administration and the American Church hierarchy, to choose sides.

J.D. Vance said the pope should stick to “morality” and not involve himself with “politics”—without explaining why a pontiff denouncing abortion is "moral" but one calling for peace is “political.”

On the other hand, Bishop Robert Barron, such an administration favorite that he’s a member of the Religious Liberty Commission established by the President, called the anti-Leo comments “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful” and urged him to apologize—a move that Trump predictably refused.

Before long, we may well find that whatever happened at the Pentagon in January is a mere dust-up compared with the unholy war that Trump now appears set on mounting against the Vatican.

Quote of the Day (Gillian Tett, on Investors and ‘Once-Unimaginable Disasters’)

“Investors need to get better at imagining — and pricing — once-unimaginable disasters. This is hard. No business school teaches students how to model something like a presidential threat to wipe out a civilisation. And the success of the recent TACO trade will undoubtedly make many even more reluctant to do this. But the grim reality is that even if a ceasefire holds in Iran—a big ‘if’—peace looks elusive.”—British columnist and editor Gillian Tett, “Finance: Six Lessons for Investors on Pricing Disaster,” The Financial Times, Apr. 11-12, 2025

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Astronaut Wives Club,’ on How Prior Couples Came Back Down to Earth)

“Honey, you have orbited the earth. I’m pretty sure you can handle carpooling, meatloaf, and laundry.”— Trudy Cooper (played by Odette Annable, pictured right), to Mercury 7 astronaut Gordon Cooper (played by Bret Harrison, left), in The Astronaut Wives Club, Season 1, Episode 7, “Rendezvous,” original air date July 30, 2015, teleplay by Becky Hartman Edwards based upon the book by Lily Koppel, directed by Elodie Keene

Spiritual Quote of the Day (William James, on Why We Pray)

“The reason why we do pray…is simply that we cannot help praying. It seems probable that, in spite of all that ‘science’ may do to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time, unless their mental nature changes in a manner which nothing we know should lead us to expect.”—American philosopher William James (1842-1910), The Principles of Psychology (1890)

Song Lyric of the Day (Don Henley, on ‘Armchair Warriors’)

“Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales.”—“The End of the Innocence” (1989), written by Don Henley and Bruce Hornsby, performed by Henley from his CD of the same name

TV Quote of the Day (‘Maude,’ Interfering With Her Daughter’s Life)

[Unable to find a job, frustrated about being a single mom living in her mother's house, Carol decides to accept a marriage proposal from a man she doesn’t love. A chagrined Maude knocks on the door of her room.]

Maude Findlay [played by Bea Arthur]: "Honey, do you mind if I come in? If I promise…."

Carol Traynor [played by Adrienne Barbeau]: "Promise what?"

Maude: "If I promise not to talk like a mother?"

Carol: "All right."

Maude [striding over to Carol]: "If I promise not to talk about the way you're wrecking your life."— Maude, Season 1, Episode 7, “Love and Marriage,” original air date Oct 24, 1972, teleplay by Ralph Goodman, Budd Grossman and Frank Tarloff, directed by Bill Hobin

Photo of the Day: “Reading Together” Sculpture, Teaneck Public Library, NJ

I’m a sucker for statues of kids falling in love with books, maybe because I was like that so long ago.

A few weeks ago, with winter still holding Bergen County in its icy grip, I wrote a post about such a sculpture in front of the Maywood Public Library.

Then, in late March, I came across one with the same idea, which I’ve photographed here: “Reading Together,” in the Children’s Reading Garden in the lawn outside the Teaneck Public Library.

This bronze sculpture was created by New Jersey artist Judith Peck. It’s a charming centerpiece of the garden, which was dedicated 30 years ago this coming July.

Quote of the Day (Isak Dinesen, on Flamingoes)

“The flamingoes are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherche curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were making all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.” —Danish novelist Karen Blixen, a.k.a. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), Out of Africa (1937)

The image accompanying this post, of flamingoes in West Coast National Park, South Africa, was taken on Jan. 1, 2000, by flowcomm.

This Day in Senate History (Randolph, Clay Meet in Duel)

Apr. 7, 1826—In a dense forest above a bridge in Arlington, Va., across the Potomac where they had carved out reputations as among America’s most eloquent and brilliant politicians, Secretary of State Henry Clay (pictured) and Senator John Randolph of Virginia met in an “affair of honor”—i.e., a formal, prearranged duel. After an exchange of ineffectual gunfire, the two stopped, smiled, and shook hands, their lives luckily preserved.

That outcome—shot at without result—was more common than the lethal kind. But not everyone was so fortunate as Randolph and Clay in those early days of the republic. The practice continued, despite laws forbidding it, the opposition of prominent Americans like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and high-profile fatalities that horrified an increasing portion of the country, including:

*Alexander Hamilton, shot by Vice-President Aaron Burr in Weehawken, NJ, in 1804;

*Naval war hero Stephen Decatur, killed by another commodore, James Barron, in 1820;

*Charles Dickinson, mortally wounded in 1806 by Andrew Jackson for having committed an especially unpardonable sin in the rising politician’s mind: insulting his wife Rachel;

*Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, dying in 1777 three days after being shot by political rival Lachlan McIntosh.

All four of those deaths resulted from gunfire—like most duels on American soil. Though challenged parties, as part of the so-called Code Duello rules informally regulating the practice, had the choice of weapons, these tended to be smooth-bore pistols, unlike the swords often used in Europe.

Attorneys and journalists were among the challenged parties. (Indeed, nearly four decades later, the young journalist Mark Twain had to be hustled out of Nevada for having written a satirical hoax—an experience he would memorialize several years later in “How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel": “I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me now, I would... take him kindly... by the hand and lead him to a quiet... spot, and kill him")

More often, politicians were in the line of fire, despite congressional rules on decorum in debate. That had seldom if ever stopped Randolph, who, as historian Henry Adams observed, had acted for the last 20 years like “the bully of a race course, was on the floor “ready at any sudden impulse to spring at his enemies, gouging, biting, tearing, and rending his victims with the ferocity of a rough-and-tumble fight.”

But Clay should have known better. Though normally cordial and ready to disregard slights, he’d already been involved with one duel 17 years before, with a fellow member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, Humphrey Marshall. An exchange of invective between the two had climaxed in a spitting match, then Clay’s challenge.

Three rounds of gunfire left both men slightly wounded before it was terminated. Nine years later, Clay gave signs that he’d learned his lesson about escalating quarrels when, as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, he introduced a resolution banning dueling.

What brought on Clay’s appointment with Randolph was the Virginian’s claim that the relationship between President John Quincy Adams and Clay amounted to a “puritan with the blackleg.” 

(There were two possibilities for the meaning of “blackleg,” neither complimentary: 1) a fatal disease affecting livestock; 2) an idiom carried over from Great Britain, signifying a cheating gambler or swindling—a reference to Clay’s penchant for wagering.)

Once again, Clay took offense enough to issue a challenge. This time, the duel was shorter—and with less contact to the body—than the one with Marshall. Both men’s first shots went awry. Clay’s second bullet went through Randolph’s coat near the hip, and the Virginian, after firing into the air, announced he would not continue.

“You owe me a coat, Mr. Clay,” Randolph joked, prompting Clay to reply, ‘I am glad the debt is no greater.”

Altogether the affair was, according to Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri (who had seen and even participated in his share), the “highest toned” duel he had ever witnessed. Matters became so cordial between Randolph and Clay that, when the Virginian was dying, he insisted on being carried into the Senate to shake his old adversary’s hand before he expired.

Inevitably, a “what-if” scenario comes to mind about this duel: If Clay’s shot had found its mark against Randolph, would it have haunted the rest of his career, as Jackson’s had after meeting Dickinson? On the other hand, if Randolph hadn’t been wearing thick gloves that caused his pistol to discharge accidentally and then go wide, what might have happened to Clay?

The more important question might have been what would have happened to the United States. In Clay’s single term as Secretary of State, the department settled 12 commercial treaties—more than all five prior Presidential administrations combined—and built strong ties with the newly independent Latin American republics.

With his service to John Quincy Adams over, he ran unsuccessfully for President two more times, and arguably was more qualified for the office than any of its other occupants through the rest of his life. Back in the Senate, his advocacy for internal improvements and devotion to the Union (demonstrated in compromises that temporarily averted civil war) influenced the young Abraham Lincoln, who regarded him as his “beau ideal of a statesman.”

All of that would have been lost if Clay had fallen in his all-but-forgotten encounters with Humphrey Marshall and John Randolph.

Song Lyric of the Day (The Grateful Dead, on ‘Easy Street’)

“When life looks like Easy Street, there is danger at your door.”—American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriters Robert Hunter (1941-2019) and Jerry Garcia (1942-1995), “Uncle John’s Band,” performed by the Grateful Dead on their Workingman's Dead LP (1970)

A thought that applies just as much to nations as to individuals.

Quote of the Day (Jessamyn West, on Faces Ruined by ‘Double-Dealing’)

“Nothing ruins a face so fast as double-dealing. Your face telling one story to the world. Your heart yanking your face to pieces, trying to let the truth be known. One eyelid'll hang down lower than the other, one side of your mouth'll stay stiff while the other smiles. I know a dozen cases like that.” —American novelist Jessamyn West (1902-1984), The Life I Really Lived (1979)

Flashback, April 1966: Ulster Unionist Bigot Ian Paisley Starts Political Ascent

Within a week of his 40^th birthday, Rev. Ian Paisley moved decisively from fire-and-brimstone pulpit pounding in Northern Ireland to incendiary political partisanship in April 1966.

The ostensible cause of his agitation was Ulster Prime Minister Terence O’Neill’s commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the Easter Rising, a well-meaning but toothless gesture that Paisley interpreted as a dangerous concession to the province’s Roman Catholic minority.

Protests planned by Paisley led O’Neill to restrict the Easter rising commemoration parades on April 17^th. Those security measures, without equal countervailing measures against Protestant marchers, reduced Catholic support for a Prime Minister perceived as timorous and condescending while emboldening Paisley and his associates.

Through size and the passion of a true believer, Paisley dominated the groups he founded or transformed in adulthood. In 1951, at age 25—only five years after ordination—he set up his own fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

By 1966 he organized opposition more aggressively against O’Neill, by:

*founding the Ulster Constitutional Defence Committee;

*establishing the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, who would use the motto “For God and Ulster,” formerly associated with the notorious Ulster Defence Force;

*co-founding The Protestant Telegraph, an answer to the more mainstream unionist newspaper, the Belfast Telegraph (sample headline from late October 1966: “Were the Reformers Right in Separating From the Church of Rome at Reformation?”; and

*street protests and rallies, often proceeding through Catholic neighborhoods as provocative gestures.

What came to be known as “The Troubles”—the three-decade sectarian conflict that cost 3,000 lives in Ulster—did not arise in a vacuum, nor even solely through social, economic, or political differences. Their destructive heat derived from rhetorical tropes that gave currency to ancient grievances and prejudices.

Paisley was not the sole purveyor of this bombast, but as an increasingly visible minister—and, ultimately, the politician with the most formidable base—he bore the heaviest responsibility for its use.

In journalist Tim Pat Coogan’s memorable summary from The I.R.A., Paisley possessed “a doctorate from Bob Jones’s Bible Belt University, lungs like the Bull of Bashan and a theology from the Apocalypse…In terms of bigotry he would stand, were he a Muslim, 359 degrees to the right of the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Belfast includes a brief scene with a screaming Protestant minister who is more than a little reminiscent of Paisley. Many YouTube viewers reacted with amusement at the over-the-top deliver y of this bilious rhetoric, but there was nothing remotely humorous about it at the time.

Denunciations of Vatican II’s ecumenical statements, including on an October 1962 visit to Rome where he intended to distribute pamphlets, led to him being detained for questioning when he and other clerics arrived at the Eternal City. 

He viewed O’Neill’s outreach to the Catholic minority as a political counterpart to this, even having gone so far as to lead a 1965 march by 1,000 loyalists to Ulster’s government seat, Stormont, to protest the historic first official visit to Northern Ireland by an Irish taoiseach (prime minister), Sean Lemass.

(Two years later, when Lemass’s successor Jack Lynch arrived in Ulster, Paisley pelted his car with snowballs.)

With pressure groups that could quickly be turned into mobs at his disposal, Paisley ramped up his anti-O’Neill, anti-Catholic campaign. In June 1966, he led members of his Free Presbyterian Church to picket and harass delegates to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland for its openness to ecumenism.

Instead of curtailing his fanaticism, his arrest and subsequent three-month imprisonment only conferred martyrdom status on him within the loyalist movement. 

His vehement opposition to the Catholic civil-rights marches of 1968 and early 1969 lifted his visibility, and when he finally plunged into the political arena in the latter year, his better-than-expected polling results in O’Neill’s own Bannside constituency helped trigger the Prime Minister’s resignation.

At this point, he began the modus operandi to which he would adhere for most of the rest of his life: whip followers up into a murderous frenzy, while vanishing before violence inevitably occurred.

In 1971, Paisley formed the Democratic Unionist Party, with considerable overlap from adherents to his own Free Presbyterian church. He now held a seat in Westminster as a Member of Parliament and by decade’s end would also start a quarter-century stint in the European Parliament. 

Many of his colleagues may have grown chary of his antics (e.g., denouncing Pope John Paul II as the Antichrist when the pontiff visited the European Parliament in 1988). But there was seemingly little they could, or would, do about them.

Paisley continued to obstruct the peace process, including by opposing the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that effectively ended 30 years of The Troubles. When he assumed power in 2007, it was as part of a power-sharing agreement with Sinn Fein –the same kind of pace he had denounced and torpedoed in the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement.

Longtime Ulster observers couldn’t get over the jovial relationship he now enjoyed with the Deputy First Minister in the government, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness. But the realities of power can only be denied for so long.

In the same sense that only Cold Warrior Richard Nixon could have gone to Red China, only an incendiary bigot like Paisley could have agreed to peace negotiations with the IRA.

Upon his death, many Paisley admirers hailed what he had done for peace. They overlooked the irony that he had, in effect, engaged in the same reconciliation process with Catholics that provoked his outrage against Captain O’Neill—and that he had to detoxify the very environment he had inflamed with his rhetoric three decades earlier.

Paisley’s damage to the province was not only heinous but also injurious to the Unionist cause he espoused.

When he took umbrage at Captain O’Neill’s tentative attempt to ameliorate tensions between Ulster’s two faith communities, the Irish Republican Army stood at its lowest point since the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster were partitioned from the 26 counties of the republic to the south. Its 1956-62 offensive was so disastrous that the paramilitary organization’s acronym was spelled out to spawn a derisive nickname: “I Ran Away.”

Though gerrymandering and discrimination raged on, growing educational opportunities and the generous social welfare programs of Great Britain led many Catholics to accept control by the crown.

This month’s centenary of Paisley’s birth should lead to reflection, but hardly celebration, about his legacy. His career holds implications beyond the British Isles, to an entire political world with similar personalities.

Like demagogues across the globe and ages, he stirred atavistic prejudices into current socioeconomic grievances to advance his political interests. With such people, decades of peace and civil rights advances are provisional, always vulnerable to bigotry and backlash.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Simpsons,’ As Lisa Sees a World Turned Upside Down)

[To everyone’s astonishment, after attending a football game with the next-door neighbor he once scorned, Homer Simpson has become pals with kind, generous Ned Flanders.]

Lisa Simpson [voice of Yeardley Smith]: “Dad and Flanders friends? What’s next—A’s on Bart’s report card?”— The Simpsons, Season 5, Episode 16, “Homer Loves Flanders,” original air date Mar. 17, 1994, teleplay by David Richardson, directed by Wes Archer

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Karl Rahner, on Easter, ‘Our True and Eternal Life’)

“The Holy Saturday of our life must be the preparation for Easter, the persistent hope for the final glory of God. If we live the Holy Saturday of our existence properly, this will not be a merely ideological addition to this common life as the mean between its contraries. It is realized in what makes our everyday life specifically human: in the patience that can wait, in the sense of humor which does not take things too seriously, in being prepared to let others be first, in the courage which always seeks for a way out of the difficulties. The virtue of our daily life is the hope which does what is possible and expects God to do the impossible. To express it somewhat paradoxically, but nevertheless seriously: the worst has actually already happened; we exist, and even death cannot deprive us of this. Now is the Holy Saturday of our ordinary life, but there will also be Easter, our true and eternal life.”—German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984), Grace in Freedom (1969)

The image accompanying this post, The Resurrection, was painted by the Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510) around 1490.

Quote of the Day (Francis Petrarch, on How ‘Books Give Utter Delight’)

“I cannot have a sufficiency of books. Indeed, I have more than I should... Books give utter delight: they talk with us... and are bound to us by lively and witty intimacy, and do not just insinuate themselves alone on their readers but present the names of others, and each one creates a longing for another.”—Italian Renaissance poet and humanities scholar Francesco di Petracco, aka Francis Petrarch (1304-1374), Selected Letters, Volume 1, translated by Elaine Fantham (2017)

Photo of the Day: Stations of the Cross, St. Cecilia R.C. Church, Englewood NJ

This Good Friday, my longtime parish, St. Cecilia, conducted a bilingual “Living Stations of the Cross.”

A couple of hundred people followed the solemn procession through the streets surrounding the church.

I took this picture on the steps of the church, where this recent tradition of the Passion narrative began with Pontius Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus and the scourging of this man of peace at the hands of Roman soldiers.

It took much preparation involving multiple people for this devotional practice of pageantry and pathos to occur. Congratulations to all the organizers.