Quote of the Day (T.S. Eliot, on Endings and Beginnings)

“Last season's fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”—T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets

Quote of the Day (John Fitz Gerald, on Housing Policy as a Source of Economic Destabilization)

“We have repeatedly warned that the government’s housing policy was extremely dangerous. You will now see unemployment going to 10 percent and we will experience a sharp drop in output.”—John Fitz Gerald, economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute

(I have to admit here a slight case of indirection in the above quote: John Fitz Gerald’s organization is based in Dublin, Ireland, not the U.S., and he’s referring to his own country’s economic policy, not ours. His quote comes from an article in The New York Times yesterday on the fizzling of Ireland’s “economic miracle.” The piece is not only instructive in showing how the same patterns of thought repeated themselves globally in the evolution of the current crisis, but also in detailing the poverty of values that, in Ireland as in the U.S., had arisen in conjunction with the go-go economy of the last two decades.

Case in point: Sean Dunne, a developer, who, while digging into a meal while being interviewed, announced, “Jealousy and begrudgery are still alive and well in Ireland, and whoever eradicates them should be prime minister for life.” This from a man utterly clueless about why anyone could object to his holding his wedding party nearly five years ago on a two-week Caribbean cruise on the yacht Christina O—the same one used for the marriage of Aristotle Onassis and Jacqueline Kennedy.

The article’s implicit foil to Dunne is Brother Shawn O’Connor, a Franciscan working with the poor in Moyross, on the northern edge of Limerick, which missed out on the economic boom enjoyed by Mr. Dunne and others. I was stunned—and pleased—by the first positive mention by the Times of a cleric in Ireland in, oh, about the last decade or so. I can only hope that it’s a reminder to people that the Church for years was about more than the sexual abuse scandal.

Back to Mr. Fitz Gerald's point, about housing. It looks as if part of the roar from "The Celtic Tiger," as in the U.S. and Britain, came from illusions about housing. Low interest rates and a bank lending spree, along with something more uniquely Irish--a wave of inward immigration from the Continent--led to the housing bubble. Just before the house of cards came tumbling down, banks in Ireland had been pushing more than 60 percent of their loans toward property. It's enough to make you shake your head.)

Quote of the Day (Hans Kung, on God Made Present in History)

“God is the living God, always the selfsame, dynamically actual and continually active in history. Precisely as the eternally perfect, he is free to seize the ‘possibility’ of becoming historical. ‘Possibility’ therefore does not mean unfulfilledness, potentiality, but powerfulness, superabundance, omni-potence. God is thus the eternal, who founds, sustains and completes history, the historical primal reason and primal meaning of the whole reality of world and man.”—Hans Kung, Does God Exist? An Answer for Today, 1980

Quote of the Day (Gilbert Highet, on Teachers Bridging the Age Gap)

“The young think their elders are dull. The elders think the young are silly. This is the basis of the mutual misunderstanding of the ages, on which scarcely anything can get done without compulsion. Yet a clever teacher, who can use his sense of humor in such a way as to show the young that not everyone over twenty-five is dead, will at the same time learn enough about his pupils to see that their silliness is only awkwardness, easy to penetrate and dissolve. Both sides will understand each other better, and work together. Togetherness is the essence of teaching.”—Gilbert Highet, The Art of Teaching (1950)

(As the second half of the school year approaches, many of us no longer poring over our books will still, if we are lucky, remember the teachers who made a difference in their lives. If you ever get a chance to tell them, I hope you’ll do so, because, from friends who have recently labored in this underpaid, grueling, often thankless profession, I can tell you how much they could sure use a word of thanks, at very least. Highet’s book, published in the middle of the last century, might not take into account the very latest in educational theory, but as the above quotation indicates, he still offers some excellent insights into what it takes to excel in leading a classroom.)

Exhibit Review: “Catholics in New York 1808-1946”

In early December, I decided to take a “staycation” in the New York metro area, catching up on necessary tasks and, for a couple of days, seeing cultural sites. One of the latter was the Museum of the City of New York.

Despite my longtime interest in history, I had stayed away from this institution because of the way it spun the controversy surrounding its mid-1990s “Gaelic Gotham” retrospective of Irish-Americans in the city into a dispute over political correctness rather than what in fact it was—an argument about scholarship and museum governance. My annoyance over this issue was so pronounced that I refused to support the institution for a long time thereafter.

Several years ago, however, the leadership of the museum underwent a transition, leaving me more disposed to see a topic there of compelling interest. Catholics in New York 1808-1946 fit the bill perfectly, dealing not just with religious, urban, and political history but also, for me, with personal history, since my mother’s side of the family were part of the New York Archdiocese for most of the first half of the 20th century.

Catholics, of course, were in New York before 1808. But that year marked the official designation of the Archdiocese of New York by the Vatican, so it serves as a useful measuring point to measure progress over the years in numbers and influence.

The luck of the Irish was with me the day I visited the museum. As I approached, camera crews from “Gossip Girl” were all around the place. Praise be to God--admission was free! I put the nine dollars I saved toward purchasing the companion book for the exhibit—and, faithful reader, I took back (at least for 24 hours) all the negative thoughts I’d ever had about why teenagers were wasting their time with this show.

The exhibit, which opened in mid-May, ended on New Year’s Eve, and I was only sorry I didn’t see it sooner. Excerpts from interviews with several notable New York Catholics (still-practicing and lapsed) played on a small TV monitor, including with veteran journalist Pete Hamill (who noted that his own writing was influenced by Mass, “which is essentially a three-act play”) and educator Frank Macchiarola.

An unexpected source of humor came from one of the interviewees, Sister Nancy Callahan, who as a youngster startled her parents with the rather stark difference in her alternative career plans: “Well, I’m going to become a nun or an interior decorator!” (She also movingly notes that they told her that if things didn’t work out in the convent, she could always come home.)

Along the way, I learned several facts I hadn’t realized before:

* The venerable city institution St. Vincent’s Hospital was established by Archbishop John Hughes in November 1849. I guess he wanted to make sure it was run by someone he trusted, because the operation was headed by Sister Angela Hughes, the archbishop’s own sister.

* The great Olympic runner Jesse Owens came to national prominence in 1934 at races held in NewYork under the Catholic aegis.

* In 1849, the Irish “apostle of temperance,” Fr. Theobald Mathew, traveled around the city, where he administered “the pledge” of abstinence from liquor to 20,000 people.

Longtime readers of this blog know my intense fascination with the first Roman Catholic nominee of a major American party, New York Governor Al Smith, so I was glad to see material on him, including photos, clippings about his battle against bigots in his 1928 Presidential race, and even an award he won in grade school for (naturally!) elocution.

All kinds of artifacts fill the exhibition—not just the usual photographs and cartoons, but also medals, clothes, communion cards, and the like. They all serve a purpose, however: to show how the faith underlay just about every aspect of its adherents’ lives—school, the workplace, hospitals, and politics. (The imperative to look out “for the least of mine” played out in the social welfare legislation pioneered by Smith and Albany colleague Robert Wagner and later implemented on a mass scale as part of the New Deal.)

I especially enjoyed the interactive map of archdiocesan parochial schools in 1945. I had fun typing into the screen the names of parochial schools that my mother and her siblings had attended (e.g., St. Charles Borromeo in Manhattan), seeing how many students had been enrolled at the end of the war. Several older exhibit visitors enjoyed this even more, as they had attended these very schools. I can only imagine the stories that my mother and her deceased and surviving siblings might have shared had they seen this.

You cannot absorb history without noticing how much certain aspects of the past play out, in different contexts, in the present. Only a couple of days after I visited this exhibit—which noted how Catholics built up their own social institutions in the hostile New World environment—came the news that Bernard Madoff had exploited similar Jewish philanthropic activities.

Especially after viewing the “Catholic New York” exhibit, I could only read with sympathy Wall Street Journal reporter Lucette Lagnado’s piercing examination of the conundrum faced by these Jewish charities. She quotes a comparison by a Jewish-American historian, Jonathan Sarda, of the affluent Orthodox Jewish community of New York to "a kind of shtetl -- a very wealthy shtetl."

Having read similar references to “the Catholic ghetto” of parallel institutions before the election of John F. Kennedy, I understand all too well not only the desire to belong that makes one want to tear down these social enclosures, but also the nostalgia for solidarity and the longing for “the kind of more humble, more individual tzedakah, or personal charity” that informs Ms. Lagnado’s piece.

The same day, I also saw at the museum an exhibit on the photography of Southern author Eudora Welty. At some point, I may write also write about this exhibit (which is still ongoing as of this writing).

In the meantime, since I have taken the museum to task in the past, I think it only fair to commend it now for this exhibit, and, in particular, take note of those most crucially involved with it. Deborah Dependahl Waters served as curator, with Sarah Henry acting as contributing curator and the historian Terry Golway (who also edited the companion volume) acting as curatorial consultant.

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Durante, on His Distinctive Looks)

"Dere's a million good lookin' guys, but I'm a novelty.”—Jimmy Durante

This Day in Latin-American History (Castro Seizes Power)

January 1, 1959—Not long after midnight, guerrillas under the direction of lawyer-turned-revolutionary Fidel Castro sent the hated regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista running to the airport. With future legend Che Guevera and Camilo Cienfuegos leading the way, the victorious rebels marched into Havana.

Though hopes ran high for the new government, an omen appeared in Castro’s first statement upon taking the reins of power: “This time the revolution will not be frustrated! This time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will achieve its true objective. It will not be like 1898, when the Americans came and made themselves masters of the country."

As The Who sings: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution is an occasion for grief and condemnation:

* grief, because an island that could have been an oasis of democracy turned into just one more Latin American nation led by a caudillo;

* condemnation, because to this day so much of the intelligentsia—including, shamefully, members of the international media and Hollywood celebrities—wears blinders concerning a regime that continues to perpetrate human rights abuses—including, according to Amnesty International, “restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association and movement; arbitrary arrests, detention without charge or trial, and unfair trials; intimidation of dissidents; the death penalty; [and] restrictions on human rights monitoring.” (Let it be noted that this report was issued after Raul Castro took control from his ailing older brother.)

The day after Batista’s overthrow, a New York Times editorial hailed his conqueror as “an extraordinary young man” and bid him good luck. The editorial followed regular news coverage of the guerrilla leader by editorial writer-correspondent Herbert Matthews that might charitably be characterized as benign and that not-so-charitably might be viewed as being in Castro’s hip pocket.

A later Times correspondent, Anthony DePalma, examined Matthews’ case in his biography The Man Who Invented Fidel. Unlike Walter Duranty, the Times Moscow correspondent who won a Pulitzer for dispatches that softpedaled Stalin’s terror famine, Matthews appeared to believe honestly that Castro would bring “a new deal for Cuba.” That initial assessment was shared by many—not just Cubans, but even the Eisenhower administration, which recognized Castro’s government on the same day he entered Havana.

Moreover, the Castro claim that hung like an albatross around the correspondent’s neck—i.e., that the rebel leader, at a low point, had his 18 remaining men walk in circles to fool Matthews—really did not hold water, believed DePalma, who thinks this was mischievous boasting on the part of a leader who had become annoyed at a newspaperman’s claim to having made him.

What remains incontrovertible, however, is that Matthews never reconsidered his comparisons of Castro to Oliver Cromwell and John Brown, long after the “Maximum Leader” had not only ordered 600 summary executions in the immediate aftermath of his triumph but after he had backed away from ever holding democratic elections.

For years, Western intellectuals were gulled by Castro’s manipulations and artful anti-U.S. rhetoric into overlooking his abuses. The late Harold Pinter, for instance, supported the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, which not only calls for an end to the U.S. embargo but airily dismisses concerns that the Castro regime is a dictatorship.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, another Nobel Prize laureate, has praised the dictator as “a man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, old-fashioned bearing, cautious words and fine manners whose ideas can't be less than extraordinary”—missing the irony that his longtime friend most resembles the protagonist of his second novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch, a Caribbean tyrant loath to retire because he’s come to enjoy the perquisites of power.

Perhaps worse than writers, however, have been screenwriters, directors and stars who have treated the Castro regime with kid gloves:

* Havana, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, reached its apotheosis with the accession of Castro. Yet the Casablanca-influenced film never showed whether “Cuba Libre” ever turned out to be a reality—because it didn’t.

* Publicity materials for The Motorcycle Diaries describe this look at the young Che Guevara as “an inspiring and thrilling adventure that traces the youthful origins of a revolutionary spirit.” Left unmentioned was the fact that Guevara approved the summary executions of hundred of political prisoners at La Cabana prison in the first half of 1959, and that his ideal of revolution involved “hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”

* Oliver Stone produced a documentary about Castro, El Comandante, that HBO gagged on. His second try, Looking for Fidel, was not much of an improvement. Asked by a reporter for Slate about whether one scene, in which eight prisoners are brought before Castro, might involve those men having “hell to pay” afterward if they were honest, the director answered: “I must say, you're really picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn't feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America.” (In a follow-up that does not inspire confidence, he admits that he has never visited a prison in any other Latin American country.)

In fact, the first Hollywood film to tackle in any way Castro’s brutalitarian regime was Before Night Falls, which took him to task for his mistreatment of gays. The film was right to bring these abuses to light, but gays and lesbians were only one small part of the groups herded into prisons: dissidents, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Afro-Cuban priests.

(Incidentally, even after presumably being sensitized to the plight of gays and lesbians by his starring turn in Milk, Sean Penn seems to have overlooked Castro's human rights abuses toward this group. In an interview with Raul Castro that formed part of a recent cover story in The Nation about his trip to Venezuela and Cuba, the Oscar-winning actor somehow neglected to ask Fidel's brother about the suffering of gays. Once again, Penn demonstrates that he should stick to acting instead of exposing his political naivete and awkwardly phrased writing submissions that would not be tolerated by most editors of any political stripe.)

One last group that has disappointed me profoundly is the American Library Association (ALA). Nat Hentoff, the recently fired Village Voice writer who has persistently flogged the Bush administration for its violations of human rights in the war on terror, wrote a powerful column several years ago in which he described how the ALA denied 10 independent Cuban librarians speaking spots on their program while allowing Cuban government-backed librarians nearly three hours to do so. As a librarian, I find the ALA stance one that will be impossible to justify to posterity—anymore than so many in the West will be able to explain how they let Castro’s smoke get into their eyes.