Our Sunday School Class

This morning I was up and out early for the adult Sunday school class at my church, arriving late, but not too late. We are watching N. T. Wright's DVD set, Simply Christian, and discussing the presentation afterward.

I like the talks by Bishop Wright, except for a few minor quibbles. His TV presence is quite good. Last week, the subject was justice, and when we went to the discussion, one man in the group had brought 250 pages of material which he had printed from a conservative Roman Catholic website on the glories of the free market, the form of economy most likely to produce justice and equality, soi disant. I sat there taking this in with a large dose of skepticism, and he went on and on, until the rector gently interrupted before he read all 250 pages. Thanks be to God, because I was dying in my seat. I squeezed in a few words to the effect that this was odd material coming from a Roman Catholic website, since the present pope and his predecessor both had spoken out against injustices produced by untrammeled free markets. His going on and on about free markets seemed to take the wind out of the rest of us for any kind of lively discussion. Any wonder?

This morning the subject was spirituality. After watching the good bishop's presentation, the same gentleman was the first to pipe up again to tell us that ours is a Christian nation, and yet there are people who believe nothing except what they can prove through science. Who knew? Then he proceeded to tell us that these folks are walking free among us and having meetings. They are loose on the streets and gathering together. Imagine that! He went on again at some length, and once he was done, I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "These folks really should be rounded up, don't you think?" After that we went on to have a pretty decent discussion.

I find it nearly impossible to sit still for this kind of talk and not answer back. What saved the day was the discussion after this man stopped talking. He's talking politics, and if he wants to talk politics, I can do that, but that's going totally off topic and defeating the purpose of the course.

What do I do? Talk to my rector? Continue to go with the hope that he'll stop? Continue to go and pray I won't pop off at him if he keeps it up? Stop going to the class?

Bill Richardson - Opinion

From Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico and Democratic candidate for president, in an opinion column in the Washington Post:

In the most recent debate, I asked the other candidates how many troops they would leave in Iraq and for what purposes. I got no answers. The American people need answers. If we elect a president who thinks that troops should stay in Iraq for years, they will stay for years -- a tragic mistake.

Clinton, Obama and Edwards reflect the inside-the-Beltway thinking that a complete withdrawal of all American forces somehow would be "irresponsible." On the contrary, the facts suggest that a rapid, complete withdrawal -- not a drawn-out, Vietnam-like process -- would be the most responsible and effective course of action.
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My position has been clear since I entered this race: Remove all the troops and launch energetic diplomatic efforts in Iraq and internationally to bring stability. If Congress fails to end this war, I will remove all troops without delay, and without hesitation, beginning on my first day in office.

Let's stop pretending that all Democratic plans are similar. The American people deserve precise answers from anyone who would be commander in chief. How many troops would you leave in Iraq? For how long? To do what, exactly? And the media should be asking these questions of the candidates, rather than allowing them to continue saying, "We are against the war . . . but please don't read the small print."

Bravo, Bill Richardson. I absolutely agree. He's thrown down the gauntlet. He's challenged the other candidates to state plainly what they will do about Iraq. I challenge them, too. I want details from all of the candidates, not vague statements like, "Well, it's complicated." Dennis Kucinich has stated that he will bring all of the troops home, but what about the rest of them?

I put to them the question that John Kerry asked about the Vietnam War, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Think about that, Democratic candidates, and tell us what you will do if you become president.

Please Pray - Again

The vet did exploratory surgery on my daughter's cat, Beyoncé, and her condition is hopeless. She will put her down in a few minutes.

My daughter and her three boys are distraught from grief. The cat was with them only a few months, but she had captured their hearts in a powerful way.

O Lord God bestow your love upon A, B, A, and W and heal them in spirit, mind, and body. Give them strength and courage to go on, and fill their hearts with your peace that passes understanding in Christ Jesus. Amen

Riverbend Has Left Iraq

Riverbend, the Baghdad blogger, and her family have left Iraq. They are now refugees in Syria:

Thursday, September 06, 2007
Leaving Home...
Two months ago, the suitcases were packed. My lone, large suitcase sat in my bedroom for nearly six weeks, so full of clothes and personal items, that it took me, E. and our six year old neighbor to zip it closed.

Packing that suitcase was one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do. It was Mission Impossible: Your mission, R., should you choose to accept it is to go through the items you’ve accumulated over nearly three decades and decide which ones you cannot do without. The difficulty of your mission, R., is that you must contain these items in a space totaling 1 m by 0.7 m by 0.4 m. This, of course, includes the clothes you will be wearing for the next months, as well as any personal memorabilia- photos, diaries, stuffed animals, CDs and the like.

The family's trip out of Iraq was postponed twice, once because of a nearby explosion and curfew, and again when their driver's brother was killed.

There was one point, during the final days of June, where I simply sat on my packed suitcase and cried. By early July, I was convinced we would never leave. I was sure the Iraqi border was as far away, for me, as the borders of Alaska. It had taken us well over two months to decide to leave by car instead of by plane. It had taken us yet another month to settle on Syria as opposed to Jordan. How long would it take us to reschedule leaving?

Finally the day of leave-taking was set, and Riverbend said good-bye to family they were leaving behind and to their home.

I knew then as I know now that these were all just items- people are so much more important. Still, a house is like a museum in that it tells a certain history. You look at a cup or stuffed toy and a chapter of memories opens up before your very eyes. It suddenly hit me that I wanted to leave so much less than I thought I did.

The frightening part of the trip was getting through two checkpoints manned by masked men and being in the presence of so many vehicles, wondering if one of them would blow up. They crossed the border into Syria.

The Syrian border was almost equally packed, but the environment was more relaxed. People were getting out of their cars and stretching. Some of them recognized each other and waved or shared woeful stories or comments through the windows of the cars. Most importantly, we were all equal. Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds… we were all equal in front of the Syrian border personnel.

We were all refugees- rich or poor. And refugees all look the same- there’s a unique expression you’ll find on their faces- relief, mixed with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the same.

The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life from death?

Riverbend writes English beautifully, I have been reading her posts since August, 2003. A link to her blog is there on my sidebar. In the beginning, she was a vibrant young woman, with her sense of humor intact, even though her country had been invaded. I have watched her mood gradually turn dark as, month after month, year after year, the situation in Iraq worsened. At the end of her time in Iraq, there was a dullness and dispiritedness about her posts that made my heart ache. Then she announced that she and her family were leaving Iraq. That was in April of this year, with no word since then. I worried about her when she went for long stretches without posting, fearing the worst.

What relief I felt when I read at Juan Cole's Informed Sources that she had posted again and that she and her family made it safely out of Iraq in July. So very many have not.

Cole says:

Riverbend the most well-known Sunni Arab blogger of Baghdad , is no longer a Baghdadi. Like some 2 million other Iraqis, she is now a refugee in a neighboring country (she is in Syria, where there may now be 1.5 million Iraqis; there are some 800,000 in Jordan). Her family had decided that it was just too dangerous to remain in Baghdad, where Shiite militiamen have been ethnically cleansing them. Clearly, they were afraid of a home invasion by the Mahdi Army. She is lucky to have gotten out a couple of months ago. Syria just decided to tighten up visa requirements for Iraqis trying to flee there. Al-Hayat reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had been apprised of this decision earlier.

We have caused the catastrophe in Iraq, and it seems to be the war without end. Yes, we brought down the evil dictator, but are the people of Iraq better off now? The war has lasted longer than WWII. It's time to end the American occupation of Iraq. It's time to bring the troops home.

Yes, there will likely be worse bloodshed once we leave, but there will never be a good time to leave. It is not in our power to improve the situation, so why not leave now?

Once the troops leave, we must do what we can for the Iraqis by giving humanitarian help and assisting them in reconstruction. We cannot abandon them, but we must no longer occupy their country.

R. I. P. Madeleine L'Engle

Another death.

Madeleine, may you rest in peace and rise in glory.

From the New York Times:

The family lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan; her parents had artistic friends, Madeleine an English nanny. She felt unpopular at school. She recalled that an elementary school teacher – Miss Pepper or Miss Salt, she couldn’t remember which — treated her as if she were stupid.

She had written her first story at 5 and retreated into writing. When she won a poetry contest in the fifth grade, her teacher accused her of plagiarizing. Her mother intervened to prove her innocence, lugging a stack of her stories from home.
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Her deeper thoughts on writing were deliciously mysterious. She believed that experience and knowledge are subservient to the subconscious and perhaps larger, spiritual influences.

“I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him,” she said in an interview with Horn Book magazine in 1983. “I know that is true of ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice.

“It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”

What turned out to be her masterpiece was rejected by 26 publishers. Editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux loved it enough to publish it, but told her that she should not be disappointed if it failed.

Wouldn't that be a lovely way to write, being sort of possessed as one does it?

I was once accused of plagiarizing a Spanish essay. To put careful effort into writing and then be accused of not writing it is an ugly thing. I had no stock of Spanish essays to prove that I had written the piece. The name of the nun who accused me was Sr. Mary Madeleine. May she rest in peace, also.

Thanks to the Episcopal Café for the link.

UPDATE: Tobias, who knew Madeleine, has a lovely remembrance at In A Godward Direction.

May Flights Of Angels Sing Thee To Thy Rest

Luciano, may you rest in peace and rise in glory.

I heard Pavarotti live when he was past his prime for singing entire operas but, as yet, had a sweet, sweet, marvelous voice in concert. What a pleasure! He was quite gracious in giving us two or three encores.

At that time, he was missing more than an occasional performance, and I was not confident that he would be there until he actually walked out on the stage. He was doing a benefit for some cause or other in Baton Rouge, La.

I feel privileged to have heard him. It was the sweetness of his voice that captivated me.

From Us To You

Gifts are on the way from the states of Washington, New Mexico, and California to South Carolina.

From the Seattle Times:

By H. JOSEF HEBERT

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP — The Energy Department plans to send plutonium in Washington state and at research laboratories in New Mexico and California to the Savannah River nuclear complex in South Carolina to improve security and reduce storage costs.

It's a tough problem deciding what to do with nuclear waste? Most folks say NIMBY. We need the power from nuclear plants, but no one wants the consequences of storing the waste nearby.

Aware that officials in South Carolina have expressed concerns that their state not become a permanent dump for the country's unneeded plutonium, Rispoli emphasized at a news conference that the DOE plans include getting the material out of the state.

"The intent is not only to bring the plutonium there, but dispose of it at the (Savannah) site and then have pathways for all of this material to leave the state," Rispoli said. He said a facility to store the plutonium at Savannah River is being prepared with increased security.

Department officials acknowledged that it will likely take more than a decade — and possibly much longer — before much of the plutonium will be processed and moved elsewhere.
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The plan calls for the plutonium to be either converted into a mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX, for use at commercial nuclear power plants or be encased in glass logs for eventual transfer to the Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository being planned in Nevada.

However, the MOX production facility at Savannah River won't be completed before 2017 at the earliest. And the future of the proposed Yucca Mountain underground repository is in doubt and is not expected to be completed before 2018 if it is built at all.
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Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a leading nuclear nonproliferation advocacy group, said the group supports consolidation "as long as it's done as safely and securely as possible."

I'm not saying that the Energy Department is making the wrong decision, but I see much shuffling around of nuclear materials and a good many "ifs" and uncertain time-lines involved here. It does not have the look a well-planned operation, and the long view of how all of this will come out seems to be pretty cloudy.

Let's hope and pray that the moving and storage of the materials is done safely, and good luck to South Carolina in getting it moved out - eventually. How confident can we be that all proper safety and security measures will be in place during this operation?

LapinBizarre, R U Reddy?

Am I crazy to concern myself with this?

Sir Ian McKellen

Photo from Wiki.

In the August 27, 2007 issue of The New Yorker is a delightful profile of Sir Ian McKellen, one of England's great classical actors, written by John Lahr.

Although McKellen has played characters in "King Lear," only recently has he played the part of Lear himself. In September, he will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in playing Lear. Hmmm....How can I manage to see him? I'd love it. Lear is perhaps my favorite of Shakespeare's plays, because the playwright gets the family dynamics exactly right, especially when power and money are thrown into the mix. When Lear asks his daughters to expound on how they love him, you just know that he's going to come to a bad end.

Of McKellen's performance of Lear, Lahr says:

Later, enraged by Cordelia's refusal to match her sisters' encomiums, he held up the coronet that was to have been Cordelia's crown, turning it on its side so that it formed a large zero, then shouted through it to Cordelia, "Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again."

Only the abstract of the profile is online, so I'm going to have to some typing.

Most recently McKellen played Gandalf the Grey, the wizard in "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring". He's played many of the great Shakespearean roles, but he says Lear is the one of the most difficult he's done. Along with acting the classics, he's appeared low-brow movies and even taken on "The Simpsons" and "Saturday Night Live".

McKellan's family were freethinkers, but, as Lahr says:

...he never discussed his homosexuality at home. "You didn't lie in our house," he said. "That was hard for me because, in not talking about myself, I was lying. Is it any wonder that under that sort of pressure, day in day out, eventually you give in and say, 'All right, yes, I'm queer"? It's quite a small step from saying 'I am unusual' to saying 'I shouldn't be the way I am.' You invent your own homophobia. You hate yourself. And, oh, it hurts. I am still hurt by it.
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When he did come out publicly, he did so dramatically. In January, 1988, on a BBC radio show about the infamous Clause 28 - legislation that aimed to prohibit local authorities from publishing material condoning homosexuality or from referring to it in state schools as an acceptible life style - McKellen took part in a discussion with the right-wing columnist Peregrine Worsthorne, who kept referring to gays as "them." "Let's not talk in the abstract," McKellen said finally. "Let's not talk about them. Let's talk about me.

McKellen met with politicians to lobby against Clause 28, including Conservative Michael Howard, a fervid anti-gay spokesman. He got nowhere with Howard on Clause 28, but Howard asked for an autograph for his children. McKellen agreed, writing, "F**k off! I'm gay." Clause 28 passed, but was later repealed by New Labor.

McKellen was a key player in the formation of Stonewall, an organization to promote equal justice for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Not all gay activists were pleased with his prominence:

The filmmaker Derek Jarman, calling McKellen "Sir Thespian Knight", mocked his late arrival to the cause and Stonewall's intention to negotiate with what Jarman perceived as the enemy.

The profile is long, as those in The New Yorker are prone to be, and I meant to write more about the acting part of his life, but I can't copy the whole thing, can I? Here's how the post turned out. So be it.

Here are a few more morsels to chew on:

Stuck in the corner of the mirror in his dressing room at the theater, is a piece of paper with these words, "O Romeo, Romeo! Where the F**k Art Thou, Romeo?"

Early in the profile, Lahr quotes McKellen on the Queen's voyage on the Thames to celebrate the Millennium:

"One of the entertainments for the evening was going to be watching the Queen going upriver to the Millenium Dome," he recalled. "A really unattractive boat came chugging up the river. She was on City Cruises! If she hadn't been wearing lime green, one wouldn't have noticed. We wanted proper people rowing her up....I wanted her to do the job superbly."
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He recalled rushing out of the R.S.C's Aldwych Theatre to watch the Queen's Silver Jubilee parade in 1977: "No cars parked, no buses, no traffic. You're suddenly aware that the whole place is a set. You hear birds. Around the bend comes this car, unlike any other car I've ever seen. It's got glass all around. This car's going at ten miles an hour. Everything is unusual. Inside it, these two dolls clearly made up. I found myself waving. And what was I waving at? The two richest people in the country, actually. That's why it won't do when she comes up the Thames on City Cruises. Far too democratic."

McKellen's friend Armistead Maupin, tells the story of McKellen's devotion to his stepmother, Gladys, in her old age. Although, as a teen-ager, relations between McKellen and his step-mother were difficult, they became close in later years. She became senile, and McKellen visited her often, but Gladys was convinced that the only reason he visited was because he was having an affair with her maid. Finally, exasperated by his failure to convince her otherwise, he said, "Gladys, for heaven's sake, I'm gay." She said, "So they say."

Missing The Parishes

How do I know that the Democratic operative who sent me this email is ignorant about Lafourche Parish, and, indeed, about all of Louisiana?

We need your help.

Tens of thousands of Democrats are already members of PartyBuilder, a group of tools on Democrats.org that puts control of the Democratic Party in the hands of people like you in all fifty states.
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Can you sign on and join a group with other Lafourche County Democrats? We talk about a Democratic presence in every county -- now this is your chance to make that happen with PartyBuilder.
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And if there's not already a group in Lafourche County, you can create one right here in less than a minute:

Louisiana is the only state in the US which calls its counties "parishes", because the early political divisions were originally based on the Roman Catholic Church parish divisions.

Note the names: St. Charles, St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Mary, St. Helena, St. Martin, St. Tammany (who I'm asssured is a real person), St. Landry (never heard of him), and St. Bernard.

You'd think the DNC could make the necessary adjustment to the mass emailing to reflect that they have a clue. Come on, folks; you can do better than this.

Why?

Why am I getting over 300 visits yesterday and well over 200 today to this page on my blog about my trip to Mexico 50 years ago, which I posted on 8-11-07? It seems to have to do with the Mexican flag posted on the page. It's driving my stats way up, but the number is not realistic, because I doubt that folks are finding what they're want.