The Epidemic of Elitism

I wanted to reflect on a few things today.  One of my daily indulgences is listening to a conservative commentator on YouTube by the name of Mark Dice.   Mark is not what you would call a typical "journalist," and to be honest, I don't think that is his aspiration.  However, his insights on contemporary issues are insightful as well as humorous - his impressions of CNN talking-head Brian Stelter (who looks like the fictional George Costanza from Seinfeld and talks like Mickey Mouse) have me almost rolling on the floor cracking up in laughter to be honest, and I could watch those over and over.  Being I don't watch CNN (as Dice aptly calls them, the "Clown News Network"), the snippets that Mark shows on his webcasts are my way of keeping up with what goes on.  Last week, at a Trump rally in Tampa, one of their "reporters" (using that term loosely), Jim Acosta, was heckled off the stage when he was trying to cover the event with chants of "CNN Sucks!" as well as people flipping him off.  Of course, being the liberal he is, Acosta was mortified at how "dangerous" the situation was and of course cried about it all over the internet.  This, of course, got him more derision.  What happened in Tampa last week, as well as President Trump's crackdown on this whole "fake news" cabal, indicates that the "average Joe" on the street is a bit fed-up with the bias the media has.  However, the media's response is not to reflect and evaluate where it went wrong - oh no, they can't do that!  Instead, they are seeking to blame someone for tarnishing their reputation, and of course the usual suspects - President Trump, the "alt-right," and of course those pesky "Russian bots" - are all being bandied about.   However, the problem is actually staring them in the face, and they fail to see that it is themselves who must bear responsibility for the negative opinions the American public has of them.  And, what we see here is a manifestation of a bigger problem, which is the subject of my commentary today.

The real issue at stake is neither the sitting President, Russia, nor an exaggerated threat of the "alt-right," but rather it rests in one word - elitism.   Over the years, I have observed that elitism tends to be a hallmark of at least four classes of people in this nation (and even worldwide) and those four classes are as follows:

1.  Academic elites
2.  Career politicians
3.  Hollywood, musical, and sports celebrities
4.  The "Mainstream" media enterprise

A fifth - corporate moguls - could also be added, but theirs is more subtle in that they bankroll the other four.  The elitism displayed by these classes of people manifests itself in several ways, and here are a few of them:

1.  A delusion of infallibility
2.  An attitude of superiority due to status
3.  A tendency toward revisionism of narrative
4.  A demonization of anyone who disagrees with them

Regarding the fourth, the elitist typically will play the "victim" and claim that the disagreement against them somehow translates as "hate speech," and thus the one who disagrees is labeled often in defamatory ways.   Regarding the second, those of these "priveleged" classes often feel as if they have this quasi-religious and overly-patronizing "mission" to "enlighten" those they feel are inferior to them.   After all, their status (at least in their eyes) makes them "right" about everything (see #1 above) and thus they need to "correct" anything that conflicts with their narrative (see #3 above).  And, anyone who sees otherwise is thus thought of as inferior (the elitist will look down their noses at their detractors to communicate "how dare you!" to them) and if the detractor is seen as gaining too much clout with "the masses," then a propaganda campaign must be implemented to discredit them, or "damage control measures" are to be implemented.   The general attitude then of such people can be summarized as follows:  "WE know what is best for YOU, and therefore how dare YOU question US, and YOU will be destroyed!"   As can be seen though, they fail miserably in this regard due to the fact they underestimate the fact that the normal guy on the street may actually have the good common sense to know better, and that is seen as abominable to the elitist.  However, thankfully many are waking up to the deceptions of the elitist mentality, and the recent backlash against CNN and other media elitists is evidence that there is hope for America, as the "little guy" is now in a position to assert that he isn't a mindless moron and can think for himself or herself. 

I personally have seen one of these elitist classes in action in recent years, as the college where I earned my undergraduate degree in 1996 has all of a sudden become a bastion of academic elitism, and I took on the establishment back in 2014.  At that time, I was interviewed by a conservative organization, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, regarding the rise of liberal theology at my alma mater.  Once the article hit the internet, I caught some serious backlash from the elitists on the campus of that same institution, as I hit a sensitive nerve.   As a result, I was subject to some nasty and defamatory remarks from both faculty and some former classmates alike, and was called names such as "Fundamentalist nut," "archaic relic," and my own intelligence was even attacked by these people, many of whom supposedly were my "brethren" in faith.   Many of the faculty of this institution in question were also members of a certain academic society which, in recent years, has become more about political activism rather than scholarship, and in recent years they have been introducing some things that many laypeople in the religious tradition these elitists represent would find contrary to their convictions.  Yet, in response to that, and in typical elitist fashion, the offending academic elitist was defended by the president of this society, who then turned around and asserted their own "spiritual superiority" over the millions of faithful churchgoers in their own religious tradition, even defaming them as "ignorant."  The term I have for these elitists is not the most charitable, but it does embody what they are - pompous ass.  The pomposity of such individuals makes the fictional Major Charles Emerson Winchester III of the old sitcom M.A.S.H.  look humble.  And, it vividly illustrates what these elitists are capable of.  Let me now contrast another example.

In order to generate some extra income, I edit and type articles and papers for a graduate student at Catholic University in Washington, DC, by the name of Pete.  Pete is a good guy, and in typing a lot of his manuscripts over the past year, I have learned a thing or two that has enriched me personally as well as financially.  One of the major focuses of Pete's research is on the life of Edith Stein, or St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.  In his research of this great saint and martyr of the Church, Pete has extensively read about her academic background, and that is something I want to focus on here for the moment.   Edith Stein (1891-1942) was a Carmelite nun of Jewish heritage who converted to the Catholic faith when she was a young college student, and she is noted as a philosopher as well as a spiritual giant of the Church.   The type of philosophy that Edith studied was something called phenomenology, which has to do with the structures of experience and consciousness, and the major aspect of this is a reflection upon the phenomena that appear in acts of conscience.  The main proponent of this school of thought was a German-Jewish philosopher, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938).  Husserl had two main proteges who went different directions - one became a martyr, while the other an academic elitist.  Those two people, respectively, were Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).  Both of Husserl's proteges were as different as night from day, and whereas Edith Stein was a deeply religious (or would be) person of humility and piety who was eventually murdered in Auschwitz, Heidegger was a Nazi collaborator who eventually unseated Husserl at the University of Freiberg and succeeded him.   Heidegger, in contrast to Stein, was the quintessential elitist - he curried favor with the authorities to advance his own position, and he viewed even his mentors (such as Husserl) as "inferior."  Unfortunately, Heidegger would have undue and destructive influence in theology as well, being that later people such as Jurgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas would be influenced by him, as well as others such as Paul van Buren and Biblical hermeneutic "experts" such as philosopher Merrold Westphal and others.  Heidegger's influence on postmodern revisionism is so pervasive, as a matter of fact, that some people I have read even say he "Nazified" Biblical scholarship and theology.  And, in doing so, Heidegger was being a true academic elitist to the core. 

The attitudes of the elitists today are in stark contrast to the virtues in the past demanded of authorities, in particular the clergy and nobility, that are evident.  In his book Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites, the Brazilian philosopher Plinio Correa de Oliviera notes something that sort of defines what the essence of nobility embodies, and that is Christian virtue.  As he explains on page 67 of the text, Christian virtue and the Christian ideal are part of the very essence of nobility.  This virtue is driven by the cardinal virtue of charity, which means therefore the dignity of personhood is extended to all social classes, while at the same time respecting an established hierarchy.     Looking at it from that perspective, the long-discarded code of noblesse oblige would come into play, in that those in authority or having a certain status should act accordingly.  So, when media elitists promote "fake news," are they doing this?   Not at all - if anything, they embody the sin of lying and "bearing false witness" (meaning gossip and defamation on baseless grounds) and thus forfeit their respect; in short, Jim Acosta has no right to cry "foul" when a fed-up average American at a Trump rally flips him the bird and says his network "sucks."  It also means that the elitists of today are not truly elites, in that the latter understand the responsibilities of their position and should have the humility to act decently and in order.  Many academics, press people, celebrities, and politicians fail miserably when it comes to this aspect, and therefore they are mere elitists rather than elites in that they inflate their own self-importance and delusion of power rather than exercising their position and its roles responsibly.  That will therefore lead to the concluding thought to this discourse now.

In all of the four groups mention who are guilty of the cardinal offense of elitism, there are distinctions to be made.  For one, if one is an academic, the focus should be on scholarship.   If one is a politician, the focus should be on responsible leadership.  If one is in the media, the focus should be on responsible and objective journalism.  And, if one is in entertainment and sports, the focus should be on using talent to entertain and also aesthetic quality, rather than cheap marketing and no-talent soapboxing.  There are those in these four classes who do exemplify the true virtues of their professions, and those people are to be commended - it is what will make them legends and ensure a place in the annals of history.  But, that caliber of professional in these classes is becoming more and more rare these days, and hence the problem.   When we get back to academic elites being actual scholars, career politicians being real leaders, celebrities being genuine artists, and media elites being true journalists, I believe society will have a surge of healing and reparation to that will correct much of its damage.  Of course, at the central core of all this is a return to faith, for in faith do we find the true transcendental properties of truth (dealing with leaders and journalists), goodness (dealing with academics), and beauty (dealing with the celebrities among us).  And, ultimately, that is centered on the proper place of God as the center of our society, but it starts first with God being at the center of our own lives - change inwardly manifests outwardly eventually.  Any rate, those are today's thoughts. 

Commemorating The Victims of a Great Tragedy - Assyrian Martyr's Day

Many of the stories I write here are reflections of my own story, as they mirror different aspects of my own life experience.   This one is more somber in tone due to the fact it deals with an issue that is close to my own heart and has been for the past 30 years - the Assyrian people and their history, which has been baptized in the blood of many innocent martyrs from among them.  Collectively, these martyrs are officially commemorated on August 7, which is Assyrian Martyr's Day, and thus I felt the need to say something about it. 

Over the past 30 or so years, I have gotten to know the Assyrians as my friends - I have many dear and close friends among them, including author/actress/activist Rosie Malek-Yonan, singer Linda George, Assyrian nationalist Sargon Dadesho, a couple of beautiful and intelligent Assyrian sisters by the name of Christmas and Rebecca Simon,  Assyrian-American pastor John Booko, and Assyrian author/activist Fred Aprim.  I will even be referencing some of the material as I write this today that they themselves have authored, and it is my hope that I can inform as many non-Assyrians as possible about these remarkable people and their great nation.  I also have another closeness to them as well - being a blood descendant of two prominent Byzantine-era Armenian families on my father's side of the family tree, I now identify as Armenian, and thus share a level of solidarity with my Assyrian friends, as in many cases they and the Armenians suffered many of the same atrocities at the same period of time.  The recognition of this tragedy needs to be made official, as it would be a great tribute to the many innocent martyrs of these atrocities over the past century.  And, that is why I make a point to commemorate Assyrian martyrs of all tragedies every year on August 7th myself. 

At this point, it is also worth mentioning (as well as I have recently learned myself) that as I write this it is Friday, August 3rd.  Another commemoration of a neighboring community is observed today, and that is of the Yezidi community.  The Yezidis are often lumped together with the Kurds, but are a religious community that pre-dates Islam by centuries.  The religion they practice has its roots in pre-Islamic Medo-Persian beliefs similar (but not quite synonymous) with the Zoroastrian religion.  Over the centuries, the Yezidis have appropriated some practices from both Christians and Muslims, but they are still a distinct religion not connected to either.  Although not Christians, the Yezidis have always lived peacefully among Armenians and Assyrians, and oftentimes suffered the same persecution with them, which has cemented a significant level of solidarity between the communities.  I have also gotten to know some Yezidis as well over the years, and the ones I have come to know as friends are wonderful people.  Therefore, today we remember their families who still are suffering under Islamic terrorism, as this day commemorates a major massacre against their community committed by the demonic hordes of ISIS in 2014. 

It is imperative that those of us who are Catholic Christians in particular always work to help communities like the Yezidis, Assyrians, and Armenians, and despite how "rosy" fake news networks such as CNN paint things (CNN is a vehicle for liberal bias as well as promoting the radical Islamist agenda, so they should not be taken seriously as actual news), much of this persecution still goes on even today - as recently as a few years ago, for instance, Armenians were targeted by Azerbaijani mobs and many were killed by those some mobs, and of course it doesn't need to be a reminder of how demonic and evil the beasts of ISIS were (and possibly still are).   Even in the US, the supposed land of "free speech," the Armenian Genocide is still denied while those who glorify it - notably a show called "The Young Turks" hosted by a Turkish-American blowhard named Cenk Uygur (whose name sounds like "Chunk Yogurt," and with his fat rear, it fits him well) as well as many of our own Congressional leadership (Steve Cohen, Sheila Jackson Lee, Eddie Bernice Johnson, and some others come to mind - they need to be voted out honestly) - have free reign to spread their anti-Armenian and anti-Christian propaganda on the "mainstream" airwaves.  That being said, let's now look at why the observance of Assyrian Martyr's Day is important, as well as what it commemorates.

Assyrian Martyr's Day is a day in which the Assyrian people commemorate the memories of all Assyrians who died as martyrs, including the Sayfo of 1915, committed by the godless Ottomans simultaneously with the massacre of a million and a half Armenians (commemorated April 24th) as well as an untold number of Anatolian Greeks (they have a commemoration day as well, although the date escapes me).   However, the date August 7th was chosen because of a specific incident that occurred 18 years later in 1933 in an Iraqi village called Simele, and it goes down in the history books as the notorious Simele Massacre.  Sargon Dadesho, in his book The Assyrian National Question (Modesto. CA:  Bet Nahrain, 1987) gives a summary description on page 134 as to what happened.  According to Dadesho's text, a Kurd who was given rank in the Iraqi forces by the name of Bakr Sidqi led a group of brigands to massacre over 3,000 Assyrians, and some of the atrocities were so heinous that those who witnessed them had to have a lot of intestinal fortitude to document them.  One such account, authored by Col. R.S. Stafford in his seminal 1935 work The Tragedy of the Assyrians (London:  George Allen and Unwin, 1935), is documented from testimonies he gleaned from female survivors.  The women he interviewed said that the Assyrians were rounded up in batches of 8-10 in trucks, driven outside the village, and then gunned down with machine guns by the "soldiers."  If the gunfire didn't work, the dead and dying were flattened by being ran over with trucks.  Although the Kurd Bakr Sidqi was the main perpetrator in this case, he had another willing accomplice in the person of Hikmet Beg Suleiman, the Iraqi Minister of the Interior who was a Turk by ethnicity, as well as being a sibling to Shevket Bey, one of the "Young Turks" who had years previous been involved in the execution of the Armenian Genocide.  Note here something else - like the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides in 1915, it is evident that the major perpetrators in the crimes were Turks and Kurds.  The assassination of the Assyrian Patriarch Mar Benyamin in 1918, as a matter of fact, was also carried out by a Kurd named Simkoo who acted as a hatchet-man for his "Young Turk" overlords.  This in no way implicates all Turks and Kurds, as many good souls among both also aided and helped victims of these genocides.  However, it is interesting that although the Simele Massacre was carried out by an Arab government, it was Turk and Kurd perpetrators who carried out the orders of their masters.  Simkoo and Bakr Sidqi were both Kurds, and both were immortalized as "heroes" by their respective regimes, yet both were also murderous and opportunistic butchers who are, I believe, burning in hell for their acts.  Simko and Sidqi are no better than Adolf Hitler, in other words.    However, the bigger issue here is also an injustice that was suffered by the Kurds as a people too - the Kurds were often used by both the Ottomans as well as successive Arab governments to do their "dirty work" for them, but those same governments would turn on the Kurds just as quickly when they had outlived their usefulness.  However, on the other side of that, you would think the Kurds would learn after all these years, and that makes an interesting question to ask on its own.   An example of this in fairly recent history was Saddam Hussein's dealings with the Kurds.  That would surely be a whole other subject at another time, as a lot of time could be spent on that. 

Bakr Sidqi (1890-1937)

The justice in this though was that in 1937, four years after he perpetrated the atrocities on the Assyrians of Simele, Sidqi was assassinated by Arab nationalists who seized power while he was standing in the garden of an air force base near Mosul.  As Sidqi had sown, so did he reap - he sowed violence and destruction, but was also taken down by it by his own "allies," who themselves were radical Arab nationalists who couldn't bear the thought of an "inferior" Kurd holding such power in their state.   Again, it proves my earlier premise - the Kurds were useful until they were arbitrarily deemed unuseful, and then they were disposed of.  Such was the case with Bakr Sidqi.  

As Fred Aprim notes in his book, Assyrians:  From Badr Khan to Saddam Hussein (Verdugo City, CA:  Pearlida Publishing, 2006) on page 166, Simele was premeditated, and he noted that the massacre that evolved at Simele was stage-set on three fronts, which were as follows:

1.  A flood of negative press sanctioned by the Iraqi government against Assyrians.

2.  A marginalization of prominent Assyrian nationalists such as the Patriarch Mar Eshai Shimun, Malik Yacu, and others.  Some years ago, I saw some of this nonsense (not unlike the way the American "fake news" paints conservatives today) in a book where the prominent Assyrian legend Agha Petros was demonized by a pro-Arabist author. 

3.  The manipulation and deception of certain Assyrian leaders (Aprim points out Malik Khoshaba in particular) to buy into the agenda they had - in other words, the old "divide and conquer" strategy of fragmenting a community.  

As Aprim also points out later, this also had the British diplomatic enterprise puppet-stringing in the background (it still happens with US diplomacy today too - Bill Clinton is a glaring example of that), in that Britain sought to denigrate and immobilize the Assyrian Levies (their militia at the time) in favor of the Arab armies of the Iraqi state.  However, the British were also quick to use the Assyrians where it benefitted British ambitions, such as several years later when the Levies were re-deployed to defend against Axis meddling among Arab nationalists (of which the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Husseini, was instrumental - he was a radical Islamist and a Hitler ally).  In looking at how both the Brits and Americans (and to a lesser degree the French) have handled international relations over the years, a lot of culpability needs to be assigned to Western governments for aiding and abetting oppressive regimes to commit genocides.  We still see it today in the way Washington kisses Ankara's butt by refusing to recognize the Armenian Genocide.  We also see it even among noted conservative authorities in the US, who think that the Kurds are our best chance for alliances against ISIS and other groups - one conservative authority who is a noted author and commentator, and whom I know personally having once gone to the same church with him, even said the Assyrians were not worth considering and that the Kurds should be given priority in negotiations.  However, while US policy is cowtowing to the Kurds, Kurdish brigands are still terrorizing Armenian and Assyrian villages and homes in the region.  This fact has not gone unnoticed in my conversations with Assyrian and Armenian friends - they are dumbfounded at how stupid our leadership in the West really is, and they also feel like they have been betrayed, and rightly so.   Of course, given the secularist (and increasingly anti-Christian) direction much of the West has been heading, this should come as no surprise;  like in Sudan for instance, the racism of "mainstream" American secularists is evident in a quote from South Sudanese activist Dr. Dominic Mohammed, who rightly observed this Western bias with the following question he posed in 1999:  "Are White Muslims of more value than Black Christians?"  Good question to ask, and it does get to the point.  It is the reason, I believe, that the US and Britain fail in recognizing the Armenian Genocide, as Turkey has a lot of money and the Armenians don't, so to the American politician Armenians mean little, even when they are being harassed and even killed by Islamic extremists.  And, the Kurds have more power, so why worry about the Assyrians - after all, my conservative acquaintance actually said that the Assyrians were "too fractured" to take seriously (he is wrong, of course) and that the Kurds may be a "better option" for alliances.  What my friend didn't say is that the Kurds have more access to certain resources the US finds valuable, so that is why our leadership kisses their butts.  Any rate, enough about that.  

Getting back to the Simele Massacre, the events are marked as beginning on August 7, 1933, but the worst atrocities actually took place four days later, starting on the 11th, which is the general consensus of most of the writers I have referenced.  Some of these atrocities are so vile, and so disgusting, that it is a challenge to even mention them.  For instance, priests were savagely mutilated even after they had been murdered, and some Iraqi "soldiers" even ripped open the wombs of pregnant Assyrian women with bayonet points (William Warda, Assyrians Beyond the Fall of Nineveh.  self-published, 2013. p. 272), effectively aborting the babies in a way that would make Margaret Sanger proud.  For their "efforts," Warda notes, the butchers were made heroes and even had monuments erected in their honor in Baghdad and Mosul, and the decapitated heads of slain Assyrians were put on display as trophies.  Sick, wretched, and horrid, and I imagine for some it was like living the nightmare of the 1915 Sayfo, which many of them had survived, all over again.  Ironically, at around the same time some 2000 miles away, a maniac named Hitler had assumed power in Germany, and was enacting the Nuremburg Laws which would culminate in the death camps of Auschwitz, where many of the Assyrians' cousins the Jews would be slaughtered in similar fashion.  Ironically, Hitler also used the same tactics and fronts that Aprim noted earlier that the Iraqi regime used against the Assyrians to desensitize the German people against the Jews, and it is believed that the Ottomans and their "Young Turk" successors used similar tactics to villify Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians many years earlier.  And, that leads to a discussion on that subject.

The main ingredient in cooking up a genocide against a group of people is dehumanization.  Spreading propaganda against a community is a sure way to stir up hatred against that community, and the worst perpetrators of genocide in history (the Young Turks, the Nazis, the 1930's Arab nationalists who ruled Iraq, and the Sudanese government in recent times) all utilized the same tactics.  By stripping people of the dignity of their God-endowed personhood, it makes the job of exterminating them easier.  Many former Nazis who operated the gas chambers at places like Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen have testified that to them, killing Jews was like exterminating rats or cockroaches, which resulted by the conditioning and constant propaganda the Nazis pumped on a continual basis at the German people.  In other words, genocide becomes a moral imperative and nothing is seen about it that is bad.  When a society reaches that level of callousness, it is doomed for destruction.  It is one reason why today the Islamic world is still so backward, and also why Germany was pretty much destroyed during the Second World War.  We have people in the US today (Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and others) who spout similar rhetoric - they paint their opponents as "evil" and encourage violence to silence or even destroy those who oppose their agendas.  Antifa in the US is, therefore, no different than murderers like Bakr Sidqi or Adolf Hitler, and this is why we as a nation need to be vigilant.  It is also why we should really take seriously what happened to many innocent Assyrians at Simele, or Armenians during the Genocide, or Jews in the Holocaust, because if we don't watch and learn from such events, they could end up happening outside our own door.  As Christians, it is even more of an imperative, in that we believe that humanity is the pinnacle of God's creation and therefore the sanctity of human life is a cardinal virtue we must uphold.  I have preached enough for today, so now let's have some concluding thoughts.

The burning of Assyrian bodies after the massacres

Decapitated heads of murdered Assyrians on display as trophies in Mosul in 1933.

The carnage of Simele, 1933.

The Assyrians are a fascinating and ancient people with a rich past, but it is also a past which has been stained with a lot of the blood of their people.  It is important to commemorate the memories of those innocent victims of injustice, and to remember that these are also our brethren - Assyrians are fellow Christians, and as part of the extended Christian family they need us too.  Policies of bureaucracies like the US be damned - we need to start acting on a higher law rather than being so damned pragmatic about what "we can benefit," and it is time we stop promoting our selfish interests in the international arena and instead stand up for the common good, which is the preservation and protection of those who are oppressed as Assyrians and others are in the Middle East.  As August 7th approaches this coming Tuesday, let us please keep that in mind.  By standing up for the Assyrians and others, we do ultimately do what is best for us as well, because those who oppress and persecute Assyrians today may become our oppressors tomorrow, and then what will we do?  May we remember all those martyrs - Assyrian, Armenian, Yezidi, and others - and may their rest be eternal and may Light Perpetual shine upon them.  Thank you, and will see you again soon. 

"The rest of the story is pointless. I said so long to the young Assyrian and left the shop. I walked across town, four miles, to my room on Carl Street. I thought about the whole business: Assyria and this Assyrian, Theodore Badal, learning to be a barber, the sadness of his voice, the hopelessness of his attitude. This was months ago, in August, but ever since I have been thinking about Assyria, and I have been wanting to say something about Theodore Badal, a son of an ancient race, himself youthful and alert, yet hopeless. Seventy thousand Assyrians, a mere seventy thousand of that great people, and all the others quiet in death and all the greatness crumbled and ignored, and a young man in America learning to be a barber, and a young man lamenting bitterly the course of history."  - William Saroyan, "Seventy Thousand Assyrians"

Lingering the Summer Months

Hello everyone - it has been a while, hasn't it?   So far, it has been a busy summer, and with work and other activities I haven't had the time to write, although that has changed.  I want to first catch everyone up with the summer, and then I have a few random thoughts to share.

Our summer - which, based on 27 years in Florida prior to moving back home! - started in May with a graduation and a trip to the emergency room for me.  On May 6th, I ended up with a nasty series of profuse nosebleeds that necessitated a couple of visits, first to an outpatient clinic and then to the hospital emergency room the same day.  Besides having a "RhinoRocket" (a small thing that resembles a tampon) shot up my nose to control the bleeding (which did not work), I also had to have a cauterization in my nasal cavity to stop the bloodflow.  If you have never had one of those done, here is essentially what it is - a doctor essentially takes a soldering iron consisting of heated silver nitrate and applies it to the lesion to cauterize the blood vessel; in essence, my nose was welded.  It is not an experience I would recommend, as it was extremely unpleasant, but it did what it was supposed to do and I stopped bleeding, thanks be to God.  And, thankfully, no nosebleeds since, although that particular episode of nosebleeds cost me about $2,000 in medical expenses.  All of this, naturally, happening just days before my Master's graduation in Steubenville - fun way to start a week.  But, the graduation went well, and I am very happy to have accomplished finishing my graduate degree.

This summer has proven one thing - our family has become acquainted with the local hospital for sure!  A month or so after my visit, my mother was hospitalized for both an afib attack and double pneumonia.  That episode happened one morning last month, when we were getting ready for work and had to call an ambulance for Mom to go to the hospital.  Luckily, she recovered too, and even now is getting on my nerves as I write this - due to the fact she smokes a lot and also eats crap, she needs to learn to maybe make some lifestyle changes if she wants to live to see 75. 

But, it was not over there - Barb ended up in the hospital this past weekend.  On Saturday, she was doing some things around the house, and over-exerted herself.  This led to her blacking-out while sitting on a kitchen chair, and then pitching face-forward to the floor.  Other than some damage to her ulnar nerves in both arms that will heal within time, she is doing better.  Meritus Hospital has definitely made a thorough acquaintance of the Thrower household to be sure. 

Aside from medical emergencies, I am also now a Knight of Columbus officially - I received my 2nd Degree a couple of weeks ago, and it is nice to be part of such a wonderful organization that is faithful to Catholic teaching as well as committed to traditional morality.  I hope to be part of the Knights for many years to come.   Oh yes - we also have two adorable bunnies now too - Trixie and Bella.  Trixie is a black Mini-Rex bunny, and Bella a fluffy white Lionhead.  They are both adorable, although Trixie is a bit mischievious and tends to escape, but that adds to her cute personality.  Here are some pictures of them:

Bella

Trixie

Other than a trip to Smoke Hole Caverns (which will be inspiring a nice article for my Sacramental Present Truths blog in a couple of weeks), that has essentially been our summer.  Now that I have updated all of our summertime activities to this point, I want to spend some time reflecting on some thoughts I have been pondering, as there has been a lot on my mind that I need to talk about.

As I am doing some reorganization of my personal memorabilia, I am also printing out and cataloging obituaries of many people we knew from years ago.   As I do this, I am getting a realization of the fact I am not young myself anymore - being a year and a half shy of a half-century, it makes one think about certain things.  I am in shock at realizing just how many people I knew from years ago are now gone onto their eternal rewards, and to give you an idea of that scale, let's look at the town where I spent a lot of my childhood - Kirby, WV.   About 60% or better of the neighbors we had there years ago are now passed on, and that is sobering when you think about it.  I just got word Sunday of another one who had passed.   That, compounded with the medical issues Barbara and I both experienced over the past couple of months, really makes one ask some important questions.  In my research, I often look to a former professor of mine by the name of Dr. Kenneth J. Archer and a discussion he had in one of his books about what are called "Central Narrative Convictions."  Archer is not one of my favorite people - he is actually very theologically liberal, somewhat arrogant as a person, and ambivalent to certain long-held convictions even in his own religious tradition.  But, on this, I have to appreciate what he says, as his analysis of CNC's is actually quite insightful.  Basing his premise on the suggestions of J. Richard Middleton and Brian Walsh, Archer notes that CNC's address the following questions and attempt to answer them in the worldview of the person holding them, and those questions are as follows:

1.  Where are we?
2.  Who are we?
3.  What's wrong?
4.  What's the remedy?

The attempt to find meaningful answers to these types of questions is what produces the "story" of a community or even of an individual (Kenneth J. Archer, The Gospel Revisited {Eugene, OR:  Pickwick Publications, 2011} p. 39).  Taking this into the realm of the philosophical, those aspects of the "story" that are shared with a wider group are known as having communicability or universality, whereas the individual expressions of the same are unique to the person and have incommunicability.  Archer's analysis of the CNC's is a pretty basic and workable outline, but a more detailed one is proposed by eminent Appalachian religious scholar Dr. Loyal Jones in his book Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1999).  On page 51 of that text, Dr. Jones seems to rephrase the questions as he presents them this way:

1.   How did we and all around us come to be?
2.   Is there a God who created us and everything?
3.   If so, what is His nature?
4.   Why did He make us as we are, and what is His purpose for our lives?
5.   Is there something beyond this life, and if so, what is it like?
6.   How is God related to us and all around us in this day and time?

Archer's four and Jones's six questions deal with the same issue - questions in life essentially.  CNC's are formed when those questions are given answers based on a worldview (philosophy + faith working together).  As Christians, we have a worldview rooted in Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, and it is also summarized in the way we as Catholic Christians especially approach Scripture, noted as the "Four-Fold Hermeneutic:"

1.  Literal reading (what it is)
2.  Allegorical meaning (what we believe about it)
3.  Moral meaning (what it calls us to do)
4.  Anagogical meaning (hope in the future - where are we going?)

In essence then, the Four-Fold Hermeneutic attempts to answer these questions based on God's revelation of Himself, and thus it forms the CNC's that make up the Christian worldview (or should, anyway!).  I notice as we get older though these questions tend to be pondered on a little more frequently - those of you my age or older will affirm that.  A trip to the doctor, a major life change - those events tend to provoke pondering these things.  Or, even when you feel that ache in your back or notice that you have to strain to see a stop sign on the way to the store.  More morbidly, it can evoke thoughts when you find yourself checking obituaries online every week (as I do) to see if anyone you know has died.  Add to that a gander in the mirror - you see the saggy belly, grey hair, and baggy eyes looking back at you in the mirror, and you start asking yourself, "who on earth is that old geezer in the mirror??"  It does tend to provoke these questions, and in some cases one may be compelled to rethink long-held CNC's too.  The truth of the CNC's that define a community or an individual are unchanging - we don't seem to think so because we are too busy focusing on what we see in front of us too often instead of seeing the bigger picture.  CNC's, therefore, are good things - they represent continuity, tradition, and security.  When something challenges them, it tends to make us defensive, and with good reason - it threatens the very identity of who we are.  Let's take that to today's world.

I have noted in many places over the years how iconoclastic the postmodern culture has gotten.  Never have I seen such an effort on the part of some to radically redefine even some very basic concepts - a boy wants to be called a girl, marriage is being redefined as joining oneself to anything that we "love" (the "marriage" of a woman to an amusement park Ferris wheel, for instance, is a case in point), and a White girl thinks she is Black (Rachel Dolezal) while a fat, middle-aged man decides he is going to be a six-year-old Filipino girl.  This iconoclasm is an assault on long-held convictions that have kept human nature and society in check for centuries, and by removing boundaries from fundamental things that should be obvious, we open the door to the erosion and decay of civilization as we know it.  I know this will not endear me well to some out there (oh well - can't please everyone!) and it definitely doesn't sound "politically-correct" (again, ask me if I care!), but fact is fact - take away boundaries, and the stampede will run over everything.  As we get older, many of us notice this deterioration, and therefore we have to find ways to cope with the culture outside our front door while preserving those things we know should be preserved.  For instance, when "Star Trek" all of a sudden goes "gay" and promotes agendas instead of entertaining, I would prefer to watch old re-runs of Hogan's Heroes and The Carol Burnett Show on an alternative channel.  When overpaid, spoiled athletes who make more in one week than many of us see in a lifetime decide to make political statements at football games by "taking a knee" and disrespecting our flag and those who died to defend it, then I feel more at ease playing Yahtzee with Barbara and my mother on a Sunday afternoon.  In other words, it is the CNC's that give us motivation with how to cope with the negative postmodernism out there, and it may be what keeps many people sane in the midst of insanity in the world.  So, instead of seeing the weekly obituaries as a death sentence for yourself, remember those people who died that you knew from years ago, and you will honor them and immortalize them with your memories of them.  Any rate, that is enough soapboxing for now.

My post here sounds more like something for Sacramental Present Truths than it does here, but in this case it is my own convictions as they relate to life experience, and therefore why I share it here.  I hope everyone who reads this - especially those in my age bracket - will maybe take away some encouragement and inspiration.   Any rate, so long until next visit.

From Stuart Hill to Steubenville - An Educational Legacy

As I write this, I am approaching the day when I walk the aisle to get a major educational achievement - I will be receiving my long-awaited Master's degree.   This is happening about 43 years after I stepped into a kindergarten class at the age of five in Baltimore, and both of these events inspired my title of this piece.

If you go into downtown Baltimore at the corner of Gilmor and Lombard Streets, there is a massive brick building with white trim called Stuart Hill Academy.   In 1975, I was a kindergartener at Stuart Hill, as at the time we lived nearby on Stafford Street where my mother was helping out my great-aunt Ruth.  Back in those days, that section of western Baltimore had a lot of West Virginians who had settled in the area, including a large number of our family.  The move to Baltimore started for many West Virginians shortly after World War II, when many of the small towns back home started to decline - businesses that once thrived were moving elsewhere, and as a result people needed incomes.  Being many West Virginian young men had went through Baltimore on the way to the theatres of war they were sent to fight in as they enlisted in the Army, Marines, and Navy, many saw the glamour of city life for the first time.  When they came home from Europe and the Pacific in 1945, many of these young men were able to buy homes with the GI Bill, and they moved their families to the cities where they found work.  If you happened to be from northern or eastern West Virginia in those days, you more than likely ended up in Baltimore.  And, many of our family ended up there as a result.  At the time I had arrived there, it was late 1974, and Mom and Dad had recently divorced and Mom was essentially wanting to bunk at relatives' houses.  So, that is what we did, and it was our Aunt Ruth's house.  With our arrival, Aunt Ruth (or Pip as we called her) had quite the full house.  Aunt Ruth was bedridden from multiple sclerosis at the time, and in return for staying there Mom helped our young cousins, Greg and Gayle, out with her.  It was at this point I also started my first year of school at Stuart Hill Academy. 

I don't recall much what my actual first day was like when I started kindergarten, because frankly I was too young.  However, I quickly adjusted to the elderly teacher, Mrs. Doughty, who was very longsuffering of a precocious five-year-old.  I remember though the walk to school, often with my cousin Gayle, and that was interesting.  I also remember Mom coming up there to get me, and when she'd get paid on Fridays, we would go downtown and Mom would get me an orange soda at a store owned by a Jewish grocer.  Anyway, that was how my academic saga started. 

Let's move ahead 43 years - I am living back in Maryland again, interesting enough, but I have finished another aspect of my academic saga at a very different institution.  Franciscan University of Steubenville is in Ohio, and is an institution that is over 70 years old and also one of the most dynamic Roman Catholic institutions of higher learning in the country.  However, unlike Stuart Hill in Baltimore, which was a few blocks walking from where we lived then, Franciscan University is two states away from us, and my first visit to that campus will happen on my graduation on May 12th.  Due to the miracle of cybercommunication, I was able to do my entire degree online over the course of four years, and have never had to be on campus.  So, this will not only be my first time visiting the campus, but actually my first time visiting Steubenville itself.  I am actually anticipating the experience.

There is a lot to do in the next two weeks before taking off.  I have to get a cap and gown (and my Master's hood) and I also have to schedule a visit with the barber, as well as buying a new outfit for the occasion.  I am actually, on Barbara's advice, going to coordinate school colors into my outfit - I am thinking mint-green dress shirt and gold tie?  That of course is subject to revision, but that is the line of thought.  And pictures - many pictures!  I plan on getting professional pictures done there, as well as getting a picture with Fr. Sheridan, our university President, and additionally a lot of pictures we will be taking ourselves.  The amount of planning that goes into something like this can be a bit overwhelming, but given the accomplishment, this is also a time of celebrating my achievement.  So, a lot to do.

Another thing too - Steubenville is not where it ends either, as I also plan on pursuing my doctorate, and plan on starting that in September 2019.  There are preparations to be made for that too - I have to schedule a GRE exam, take a French class as an unofficial prerequisite, and fill out lots of paperwork.  Ironically, when I finish that, I will be 55 years old, and it will be approximately 50 years at that point since I first stepped into that kindergarten classroom in Baltimore.  And, another kicker - my doctorate will be done at Catholic University of America (provided everything falls into place) which is in our nation's capital.  So, my final academic achievement will be earned in about 6 years from a university that is only 30 miles from where I went to kindergarten.  A lot of interesting parallels with things to be sure.

Good Lord - when I earn my doctorate, I will have been in school (off and on) for over 50 years!!  I think starting school at 5 years old and finishing up at 55 years old will be a legacy in itself.  But, as we quickly find out, education is a lifelong process for the inquisitive, and the active mind never starts learning.  However, the learning will transition to daily life rather than a formal classroom.  Just some insights I have had going on over the past several days I thought I would share.   At the risk of sounding cliche, for younger readers my encouragement to you is "stay in school," and perhaps you can write your own legacy some day. 

Dealing with Antisemitism and Conspiracy Theories Among Fellow Traditionalists

I make no apologies about being a Traditionalist in the truest sense - those who know me will attest to that.  I have the following credo I subscribe to in regard to my personal worldview:

Politically Monarchist

Philosophically Thomist

Economically Distributist

Religiously Catholic

Morally Traditionalist

As all of this, I am also culturally American and that necessitates realizing that a diversity of ethnicities and cultures makes up not only America, but also the Church - the Church is an institution that embraces all ethnicities and cultures, and thus this means there is only one race - HUMAN!!  Therefore, it has always been inconsciable to me for someone who claims to be a Catholic Traditionalist engaging in behavior that contradicts the mission of the Church.  Recently, I have seen this behavior displayed on certain social media outlets where Traditionalists have pages and groups, and the behavior I have seen has been shocking.   I have heard some of these people actually make derisive comments about Jews in particular as "big-nosed power grabbers" and other derogatory terms, language that is more suitable to a follower of Hitler than for a follower of Christ.  I have also heard expressions of the "Two-Percent Control" conspiracy - the same old "Zionist conspiracy" theory that asserts that because 2% of the most powerful echelon of humanity control 98% of the wealth and power are somehow culturally Jewish (which is also a myth), that implicates the whole Jewish nation as being somehow "evil" and thus an object of hatred.  The people who advance this myth are functional idiots honestly, despite how "Catholic" they sound, and for them to actually believe this garbage means that their Catholic faith is to be called into question.   I also feel the same way about some who advance the "Vatican control" conspiracies too.  Anti-Catholicism and antisemitism are both evil, immoral, and sinful, and no professing Christian of any confession needs to be giving these myths any credibility.   After watching a documentary series about the "inner circle" of Hitler's henchmen, I also have reaffirmed that antisemitism is at its root satanic and pagan, and thus has no place in traditional Catholic worldview.  For professed Catholics therefore to embrace such nonsense calls into question the sincerity of their Christianity.  That is why I feel compelled to address this issue. 

Christianity - and Catholic Christianity in particular - owes much to the Jewish people.  After all, it was the Jewish nation that gave us the Savior we worship, and it also has given us a lot of the patrimony of our own Tradition.   That being said, Judaism and Christianity both have contributed to the betterment of Western civilization, although Christianity has the fullness of Revelation which perfects civilization.  Therefore, the Church has historically maintained that God has not forgotten the Jewish people, and indeed we as the Church are to love them and pray for their conversion.  It is the Church who then, in true Traditionalist understanding, becomes the protector and preserver of the Jewish nation, in that God's plan is to have a future "ingrafting" of natural Israel (the Jews) into spiritual Israel (the Church).  This means therefore that antisemitism from a traditional Catholic viewpoint is pointless, illogical, and at its core anti-Christian.  And, this is why it must be rejected by those professing Christianity. 

Now, love and respect for the Jewish nation does not equate with Christian Zionism, nor does it mean that there is some antinomian grace that Jews have by their status, as some misguided Protestant Evangelicals have wrongly proposed.  Jews, like the rest of humanity, are prone to sin and some do sin.  The person who subscribes to ridiculous conspiracy theories has to, however, understand two important things  First the sin of the individual does not implicate the nation.  Secondly, many people who possess Jewish heritage (George Soros comes to mind) yet engage in anti-Christian activities with great influence actually do so in spite of their heritage and not because of it.  Freud, Marx, and Spinoza may have been ethnically Jewish, but what they did was based on individual choice and was not in part due to their heritage.   Every ethnicity has good and bad people - not every German, for instance, is Hitler, and not every Black person is Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan.   That same consideration equally applies to the Jewish people as well.   And, not every Traditionalist is an anti-semite either - as a matter of fact, a self-professed Traditionalist who embraces antisemitism does so in spite of his or her faith, and not because of it.   It is time we start to accept that fact. 

That leads to my final point.  The modern nation of Israel exists because God allowed it to, and it I believe exists for the purpose of the "ingrafting," the great conversion of the Jewish people to the fullness of Christian truth.  That then means that we cannot sanction everything the state of Israel does as "good" (despite what some Evangelicals think) because Israel is led by fallible human beings just as any other nation is, and thus they will get things wrong.  Therefore, you can support Israel without endorsing everything Israel does as a nation.   That is a fresh perspective you won't hear a lot either.  

This also means that a self-professed Traditionalist Catholic needs to do some self-examination as well.  Many of these people are sticklers for doing things "liturgically correct" - they think it is "blasphemy," for instance, to receive Communion in the hand rather than on the tongue, and many outside this community do not realize what a big issue of debate this really is.  Yet, those who decry Communion received in the hand as somehow "blasphemous" often commit the greater blasphemy of receiving Communion properly in external action without allowing Christ to utilize supernatural grace to transform them within.  They are dutifully taking Communion while their minds are far from Christ, and that is a serious problem.   Given that is theological in scope, more will be said on that at some future point on my other blog site.  However, Traditionalists need to exercise care to not be inconsistent. 

I have said my piece for today, and will see you again soon. 

Parkland and the Pigg-let - Some Perspectives

This weekend, some things have been troubling me about the recent Parkland shootings in Florida, in particular regarding this kid, David Hogg (whom I will be referring to as the Pigg-let), and his arrogant, nasty, and disrespectful demeanor.   I was also able to read up on some things about the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, and much about what I have seen is revealing.  But, before I get into all of that, I want to just share a little bit of my own experience when I was in middle school.

Honestly, my 7th and 8th-grade years were one of the most hellish experiences I believe I have had to ever experience, and I literally hated that time in my life.  Although things would dramatically turn around for the better by the time I got into my freshman year of high school, middle school is a part of my life at times I just want to forget.   Kids who are in their early teens tend to be cliquish, and they also tend to be some of the cruelest and hateful individuals in general that walk the earth - many of you know exactly what I am talking about.  For some, that continues into high school.  In my case, I went to middle school in the mid-1980's, and at that time there was a very identifiable materialistic attitude among most of American society, but middle-school kids often took that to extremes.  Let me tell you a little of what I was like at that awkward time between the ages of 13 and 15.  I was from what is often called "the wrong side of the tracks," in that I was from a broken home (my parents divorced when I was very young) and my mother, who raised me, also was not what you'd call a model parent - we were poor, she had a serious drinking problem, and she was often detached from me when I was a kid.   This happened when I was in elementary school, but it became more pronounced as I got older and I was often forced to sort of fend for myself a lot of times because my mother was not all that involved in my life unless she had to be.  We were also extremely poor - at that time, our household subsisted on food stamps and about $100 in child support per month we got from Dad.   This meant that I didn't get my clothes from trendy stores either.  Most of what I wore was purchased from the local second-hand store, and at times the sizes were disproportionate and they wore out quickly - I went to school a lot with missing buttons and well-concealed holes in my pants.  That fact alone set me up to basically be singled out for derision by classmates.  Also, I had my own unique interests and personality traits that didn't exactly mirror my classmates then either - for instance, whereas many of my classmates in those years listened to Michael Jackson or Madonna, I was collecting and listening to Guy Lombardo, Glenn Miller, and Lawrence Welk.  I also didn't wear jeans (still don't) or tennis shoes, or any other faddish clothing of the time.  Naturally, all of this together got me singled out and slapped with the reputation of a "geek," and that too often invited persecution from others, the more popular kids.  Let me elaborate on that a moment.

For those who lived through the experience of middle school, you know often that if a kid is made fun of for being "different" or a "geek," there are two ways this happens.  First is outright bullying - the "tough" kids will often do vulgar things, or they will even get abusive - they pick on those they see as weaker than they are based on their own insecurities a lot of times but also because they know they can.  And, in the mid-1980's, the emphasis on preventing bullying didn't exist, and I have actually witnessed even teachers allowing it to happen and laughing at kids who were being treated in such a way.  The other way this happens is from the other extreme - the "popular" kids will do this sort of patronizing snobbery of kids that don't "make the cut," and although they are not physically abusive (in most cases anyway), they get a sadistic joy in belittling and acting condescendingly of those they feel are "geeks" or just not as "popular" as they are.  These "popular" kids are the ones who sport their designer clothes, have the latest this or that, and they are often the ones who are the big shots in sports or student organizations - your star football players, head cheerleaders, and the like.  Also, the mid-1980's were a time when this "political correctness" we see so prominently today didn't exist, and these two groups (the "toughs" and the "popular kids") would often employ pejorative terminology to label and deride those of their classmates they thought of as "undesirable" - terms such as "retard," or even pejorative homosexual references, were common.  Any way you look at it, the "popular kids" and the "toughs" were both bullies.   I witnessed a lot of this behavior in my junior high years, and was also on the receiving end of way too much of it, and therefore today it is more important than ever that kids be taught how bad and destructive such behavior is, and looking at the Parkland tragedy and other issues, bullying can lead to this easily.

Bullying of any sort is something that those who are on the receiving end of it can find it difficult to deal.  And, despite a greater awareness of the negativity of bullying as well as the proliferation of "political correctness," not much has changed since the mid-1980's when I was in middle school.  When a kid is subjected to this type of treatment by his or her classmates, it is important to understand how that kid feels sometimes.  If you are in that position, you want to escape it fairly quickly, so you are going to try to keep a low profile to avoid attracting unwanted attention.  However, kids can be cruel, and they will often hone in on one of their own like buzzards on a gut wagon and then they pick, and pick, and pick - emotionally, it causes a lot of difficulty for the one on the receiving end of this treatment, and that person wants to just be left alone.  This happens at lunch, often during classes, and then if that isn't enough, they are subjected to it on the ride home on a bus, sometimes for over an hour at a time.  The kid's home and the solitude of his room is his only sanctuary, and at least he can have some respite until the next day.  However, in this day and age of technological convenience, now there are "smart phones," social media, and computer access 24/7, and as if getting bullied in person is not enough, now such a person is subject to being trolled, bullied, and slandered on social media too.   There are limitations to the human experience, and there is a point where a person breaks from all this abuse and mistreatment, and if pushed far enough, when that breaking point comes it can be tragic not only for the kid subjected to such treatment, but also to society as whole.  And, that brings me to Parkland.

The young man who was implicated in the Parkland shootings was a 19-year-old former student of the school by the name of Nikolas Cruz.  I was able to read up a little about his life, and as it turns out he didn't have it too easy at all.  He was adopted at a young age, and also had a form of autism, and he was a loner.  Although he seemed to excel in his studies (he was a B-average student by some accounts and also in the JROTC program), he was nonetheless treated as a social pariah by his peers, who would often make fun of him and cause him problems.  This type of treatment led him to also become very racist, as minority students were some of the perpetrators of his bullying, and his interest in firearms also added to this volatile mix.  It is my guess that after a while Cruz just snapped - he got to a breaking point where he couldn't handle all this nonsense anymore, and given his own state of mind (a developing racism, interest in firearms, and his emotional/psychological condition) it was going to lead to some action on his part.  And, he did act on all that by shooting up a school of innocent kids.   This in no way excuses what Cruz did - this is a heinous act regardless, and he does need to account for that.  But, it leads to some other questions too.  Here we enter "Mr. Activist" himself, David Hogg, the Pigg-let.

I was able to read up a little on the Pigg-let too, and as it turns out he was originally from California, where his parents worked with both the FBI (his father) and CNN (his mother) - his mother was directly tied to the whole Podesta incident too.  For those unfamiliar, the Podesta incident entailed a lobbying scheme around 2009 where extravagant amounts of money were received and thus aroused suspicion, leading to investigations that are currently being conducted.  Podesta is a lobbying and public affairs firm based in DC, and is reported to have close ties to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration ("Podesta Group," at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podesta_Group, last edited 1/5/2018 - Accessed 3/26/2018).  By all accounts, the Pigg-let was the popular kid in school, and his apparent arrogance he displays when he is on TV indicates he had the potential for bullying people himself.  In monitoring the Facebook discussions about this on various pages, some people have even insinuated that the Pigg-let and Cruz knew each other, and they were not the best of friends.  It was even insinuated by some that the Pigg-let may have been directly responsible for the emotional breakdown Cruz had that caused him to shoot up the Parkland school, but this is all speculation although not outside the realmrea; of possibility.  One person on one of the pages actually brought up a profound point in relation to this - if the Pigg-let perhaps knew Cruz, why didn't he reach out to him and at least try to befriend him, or was he too busy making Cruz's life hell?  Many, many questions, in other words.  The bottom line is though that Cruz did snap, shot up a school, and now is in custody probably for the rest of his life, while the Pigg-let is enjoying seeing his name in lights and 15 minutes of fame demonizing innocent members of the NRA, who had absolutely nothing to do with the incident.  Many have rightly discerned that an agenda is afoot, and the Pigg-let, as the newest "golden boy" of the political Left, is playing his role well.   But, those questions lead to some closing observations.

Cruz did a very heinous and evil thing, but let's look at this from the whole panoramic view, shall we?  The cops refused to act when Cruz went on his rampage - maybe lives could have been saved had the cops did their job and neutralized the threat.  But, that leads to another issue, and that road leads right back to Ferguson, MO.  Cops are often so demonized in the media that it could be that many of them feel it is not worth the effort to do their job just to lose it, so in essence the cops may have had some justification - however, it doesn't excuse their lack of action.  Then, let's look at "instant activist" Pigg-let and his role in this, as well as those popular cliques of kids in many schools who often ostracize and ridicule mercilessly other kids they classify as "geeks."  What was true in the mid-1980's when I was in school is still true now, but maybe even worse today - popular kids and strong-arm bullies still like to prey on other kids who don't fit into their definition of "cool" or "popular," and while there is a greater awareness of bullying, often that emphasis is driven by ulterior motives - it is often used as a tool of the "gay agenda" or those who cowtow to Islamism rather than helping real victims of bullying, such as the poor kid who maybe has the alcoholic mother or the kid with a learning disability who has a hard time in English class.  Those types of kids are still marginalized and bullied by the supposed "inclusive" and "politically correct" elite.  And, as we know, kids can be very cruel, as their natural immaturity doesn't often realize the negative long-term consequences of their actions.  However, that bullying, marginalization, and cruelty on the part of "jocks" and "popular kids" can have catastrophic consequences, as the kid they are picking on may be the next Nikolas Cruz or Columbine shooter.  This means that a "popular kid" like David Hogg the Pigg-let may be ultimately as culpable for the Parkland tragedy as is Nikolas Cruz.  That is something the so-called "mainstream media" won't tell you, because they themselves often act like the popular kids in a middle school when it comes to pushing agendas, and thus it makes the environment they generated as big of a factor as anything.  In other words, look at the underlying cause of what made Cruz snap, as there is enough culpability to go around.  That being said, I will add further that the NRA, President Trump, and conservatives in general have little to do with it - they are now the ones being bullied by the "popular kids" of the liberal/progressive establishment.

I could say more, but I think for now this warrants enough.  People will disagree for sure - go right ahead, but if you do, I want to just say "wait and see," and when the real truth comes out, many of you who are detractors have a big "I told you so" coming your way!   The root cause of all of this ultimately is an imperfect society - the more we shut out God and traditional values, the more corrupt and dangerous society gets.  That should be sobering food for thought as well.  Have a good week everyone. 

Perspectives on Dance Bands - the Ethnic Melting-Pot

The idea of America as a "melting pot" is often expressed in two areas - music and cuisine.   Cuisine is a whole different area of discussion, because we want to discuss music, in particular our ongoing discussion of big dance bands.  In the earliest years of the recording industry, it was not coincidental that one of the greatest waves of immigration also happened.  A lot of the traffic that came through Ellis Island would in time end up on an Edison disc, and so it was in the case of some of America's most successful popular music for 50 years.

One of the greatest contributors by far to American entertainment was the Jewish community - whether in vaudeville, music, movie production, etc., the Jewish contributions were epic.  The majority of the composers of the "Great American Songbook," for instance, were all of Jewish heritage (Gershwin, Kern, Berlin, etc.).  Also, the earliest movie production companies were all the brainchildren of Jewish entrepreneurs (MGM comes to mind in particular).   Music, likewise, was a great center of Jewish culture, and the dance bands were definitely well-represented when it came to Jewish maestros in the early days - pioneering bandleaders such as Ted Lewis, Sam Lanin, Ben Selvin, Boyd Senter, and later younger talents such as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Irving Fazola, and Mel Torme (among MANY others!) were all of Jewish heritage.  For Jewish musicians, dance orchestras were a natural transition, as many of them came from generations of musicians called klezmorim, and represented a great Jewish music tradition called klezmer.  The klezmer contribution to American big bands cannot be underestimated as well, and it even shows up in popular songs of the 1930's such as "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" and "And the Angels Sing" (the later was an adaptation of a klezmer dance called the freilach, and made jazz history around 1937 when a young Jewish-American trumpeter with Benny Goodman's orchestra, Ziggy Elman, made it famous and a standard).  It is at this point I want to discuss klezmer in particular and go into some history.

Seth Rogovoy points out in his book, The Essential Klezmer (Chapel Hill, NC:  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2000), that contemporary klezmer as we know it today originated with 19th-century Jewish (and Gypsy - more on that momentarily) musicians from Eastern Europe.  These musicians played all sorts of dances, weddings, and other functions, and when they came to the US, they also adopted popular styles of the time (jazz and ragtime) to their repertoire, and that is also how so many of them ended up integrating into the early jazz and dance band culture in the US.  Klezmer's tradition goes back as far as the 14th century with the Jewish Diaspora, and these musicians formed active guilds of musicians as far back as the 16th century (Rogovoy, p. 23).   What is really interesting is that the standard instrumentation one sees in dance bands and jazz groups of the 1920's through the 1940's was already utilized by klezmorim in Europe centuries earlier, which indicates a proto-dance band tradition being in existence well before the era of recorded sound.  I mentioned Gypsies, and indeed, Gypsies were often employed for their own musical talent in klezmer ensembles, and some of them rose in prominence on their own, notably Russian Gypsy accordionist Mishka Ziganoff (1889-1967).  Gypsies would later make a huge impact of their own on jazz and big band music when Django Reinhardt would pioneer the genre known as "Gypsy jazz," but that merits a story of its own.  For now, the contribution of Gypsies to klezmer (and subsequently, dance bands) is what is pivotal at this stage.

Russian Gypsy klezmer accordionist Mishka Ziganoff

An early klezmer orchestra

In time, klezmer and big band musicians really began to overlap, and from the jazz end was Ziggy Elman (1914-1968), who turned the klezmer dance into a jazz standard with a 1937 recording by Benny Goodman's orchestra of the pop standard "And the Angels Sing."  The subtitle of this was interesting enough "Freilach in Swing," and was also based on a much earlier klezmer recording called "Der Shteiller Bulgar" by pioneering American klezmer recording artist and bandleader Abe Schwartz in 1918.  Other klezmer techniques - notably Boyd Senter's "laughing clarinet," which was also noted on Sydney Bechet recordings as well - began to find their way into jazz and big band arrangements, and a musical legacy was born.  

Noted big band and jazz trumpeter Harry "Ziggy" Elman

Another personality worth discussing here is a more purely klezmer figure named Dave Tarras (1895-1989).   Tarras was a Russian-born Jewish immigrant who personified American klezmer, but he also integrated the best of American popular music into his own repertoire.  Tarras played with many pioneering klezmer orchestras, and even led for a short time a klezmer big band in the early 1940's  that played some fairly good swing arrangements as well.  In the mid-1950's, Tarras teamed up with his son-in-law Sam Musiker (a jazz/klezmer clarinetist who was also a sideman with Gene Krupa's orchestra in the 1940's) to produce a phenomenal LP for Columbia called Tanz!  Any discussion of klezmer must essentially reference Tarras at some juncture, as his legacy is extremely important to the genre as a whole. 

Klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras

In addition to klezmer, it is also important to mention another genre of music which impacted the big bands that also came from Eastern Europe.  In this case though, the custodians of the music were ethnic Slavs instead of Jewish musicians, and the music we speak of is polka.  Polka is much-aligned in American society, often being dismissed as "corny" and such, but in reality it had a tremendous impact on American popular music.   Perhaps the greatest polka musician who also made a mark on the big bands is Lawrence Welk (1902-1992), whose famous TV program was on for over 30 years,  although Welk himself had been leading orchestras since 1927.  Welk, however, was not a polka purist, as that designation would go to one of his older contemporaries, the late "Whoopie John" Wilfahrt (1893-1961) of Minnesota.  "Whoopie John" was the earliest person we could safely call a "Polka King," and his Swiss/German roots are also reflected in the "Dutchman-style" polkas he recorded that are characteristic of the upper Midwest.  However, much like Dave Tarras, "Whoopie John" was not afraid of incorporating popular music of the day into his repertoire, and this resulted in a prolific catalog of recordings beginning in the 1920's and continuing well until his death.  Although "Whoopie John" could be said to be the most popular of polka bands of his time, polka itself also dates back many centuries.

Polka legend and bandleader "Whoopie John" Wilfahrt

Polka's influence on popular music is often overlooked, but it is still integral in particular to dance bands, but in one unlikely area - Western Swing.  Western Swing was a style of music that had its origins in an adaptation of jazz technique into the traditional cowboy string band music of the Southwest.  What is less-known though about that development is that in the late 1800's. Texas became the focus of a great immigration of Czech and German immigrants, particularly in the south-central "Hill Country" area adjacent to San Antonio (Victor Green, A Passion for Polka. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1992. p. 23).  Many of the immigrants assimilated into Texas culture, and their native polkas and waltzes also influenced the local music.  We see that in the fact that many of the best-known Western Swing bands of the 1930's through the 1950's - Adolph Hofner, Milton Bruner, Hank Thompson, and Pee Wee King - were led by guys who were of either German or Slavic heritage.  Even country legend Willie Nelson cut his professional teeth in one of those Tex-Czech polka bands then.  Even today, central Texas remains a cultural hub for polka music as a result. 

The other area of influence regarding polka music came from its beginnings.  Polka is primarily a dance music, and it was played originally in the Old Country by orchestras that were remarkably similar in instrumentation to jazz and dance bands in the US.  Also, many Jewish klezmorim in the Old Country also incorporated polkas as part of their catalog of arrangements.  The first polka bands to record in the US were largely local, from areas such as around Denver (the Volga German "Dutch Hop" style), Chicago (the more "Honkey" Polish small-band style), New England (the Polish big-band style), and Cleveland (small-group Slovenian polkas).  A more Russian/Eastern European polka tradition also sprung up in Canada's Great Plains, where a large population of Ukrainians settled.  There were also some overseas polka pioneers, namely Will Glahe (1902-1989), who actually started in the 1930's with a society-style tipica orchestra similar to the Argentine and Uruguayan tango orchestras (this is also why Mantovani, who is noted more for light classical "elevator music," is included as part of the dance band legacy, as he too had a similar tipica orchestra at around the same time).  Glahe later recorded more polkas, and is considered today to be a polka legend.  Other than perhaps Bernie Witkowski, an early polka pioneer in New England, and the Baca family in Texas, there is little information about these early polka bands that precede 1920, but they do have recordings that can be found if one knows where to look.  In time, with Dick Rodgers, Larry Chesky, and Jimmy Sturr, the polka would be fully integrated into the big band format.  

There are other ethnic influences that could be noted as well - the Cuban danzon orquestras, Argentine tango orchestras, and others.  Also, individuals who played a role should be noted, in particular Russian-Jewish mandolinist Dave Apollon (1898-1972) as well as Italian-American accordionist Charles Magnante (1905-1986), both of whom made an amazing impact on popular music for decades to come.  As I conclude this overview, it is important to know that the American dance band tradition exemplifies the "melting pot" in the truest sense - it represents a lot of ethnic contributions to what would be a uniquely American art form.  And, this also establishes as well that it was not only Blacks who helped create jazz, but a number of cultures made their contribution.  Hopefully, those reading this will gain a greater appreciation for the dance bands of the 1920's-1950's, and will see that they didn't just appear out of a vacuum.  So long until next time.