War Criminals and Heroes

Looking back at it, it was a time when George Orwell took charge of the script, and we all reacted accordingly.

No one I knew thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No one I knew favored bombing the hell out of Iraq, or believed that we could do it, put a government in place, and then leave. No one I knew thought this was about anything more than oil, or possibly saving the US dollar (a report in Vanity Fair suggested that Hussein might change oil payments from dollars to the Euro, striking a crippling blow to the US currency).

Unfortunately, what we knew made no difference. Because in the months following the September 11^th attacks, a half-witted American president was cajoled / coerced / convinced to engage in a war with Iraq that was and is illegal and immoral.

And the people who did speak up against it?

Well, one was Phil Donahue, who had the highest ratings for a talk show at the time. But an internal memo from his network, MSNBC, revealed that he was fired for opposing George W. Bush—not, as the network stated, for poor ratings.

Well, we know the rest of the story. Or rather, we don’t. It’s certainly true that there were no WMDs, and we’ve learned that taking a nation from dictatorship to anarchy doesn’t do much good. We’ve also seen that putting a generation of American soldiers through the agony of war tears lives and families apart.

We haven’t seen much of what it’s done to Iraqi families, and statistics vary—is it hundreds of thousands dead, or more than a million? Nor have we seen the campus riots that we did in the Vietnam War—we have outsourced the army to our poor, and who cares about them?

In a picture that is unimaginably cynical enters one man, Tomas Young, who believes, who trusts, who takes what he sees at face value. He believes George W. Bush, and enlists two days after the September 11^th attacks. He prepares to deploy to Afghanistan.

Instead, he is sent to Iraq.

And five days later, is shot by a sniper. He’s paralyzed from the nipples down, and will never walk again.

And things go badly for him—a pulmonary embolism leaves him slurring his words, he cannot feed himself, he suffers excruciating pain in his abdomen and has to have a colostomy. Oh, and his only food is liquid nutrition, which he receives by feeding tube.

He doesn’t, however, stop speaking out. And Tomas Young spoke out last week on the tenth anniversary of the War in Iraq. He said what should be said—that Bush and Blair were and are war criminals. He also announced that he’s had enough; he will stop taking any nourishment or fluids, and fast until the end.

Young is 33 years old.

Readers of Iguanas will know: my mother made the same decision as Young. He is, however, half a century younger than she was when she decided to die.

Which made it difficult—how to get the hospice care needed to support him through this process? Ironically, it was through the same term, “failure to thrive,” that ended up on my mother’s death certificate.

I completely get Young’s decision to die. And he’s not alone in thinking that justice has not been done in the case of two leaders who violated the 1945 UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So says Michael Mansfield, a British lawyer who led the Legal Action Against War protest in 2003. Mansfield points out that the charter specifically forbids a preemptive strike on the basis of a perceived threat. Yet that’s what Blair and Bush did by manipulating flawed data.

And we, of course, let them get away with it. So now we have a new generation of vets suffering from brain disorders and shell shock. We have lives that are so much ruined that death becomes the only acceptable way out. And we have the moral responsibility to demand that the ICC—the International Criminal Court—try Bush and Blair for war crimes.

Oh, and Bush? What’s he up to, nowadays, as Tomas Young prepares to end a decade of suffering?

All of Washington is talking about it—he’s taken up painting.

Can’t tell—is it one step up or down from Ecce Mono?

El Nuevo Día Reviews the 30,000 Lives Project

Following is an excerpt, in English, of a review of my 30,000 Lives Project, by journalist Antonio Quiñones Calderón, published on Thursday, March 21 (yesterday) by the Puerto Rican daily newspaper El Nuevo Día. 

(For the full, original article in Spanish, please go here.)

(...) It is in such citizen-participatory spirit that the “30,000 Lives Project” is centered. The project was conceived and is being sponsored and performed personally by Marc Newhouse, a cellist, teacher of the English language and writer who has resided in Puerto Rico for many years; Newhouse, originally a Wisconsin native, has become another good Puerto Rican.

Marc was highly disturbed by a fact he had recently encountered: 30,000 people, on average, are killed every year in the US and its territories—including Puerto Rico—as a direct consequence of gun shots. He was specifically disturbed by the fact that approximately one in every 30 murders by gun shot—within the whole US jurisdiction—occurs in Puerto Rico alone, even when our island's population amounts to a mere 1.19 percent of the total national population. When his brain fully grasped this troubling fact, Marc was instantly convinced that nothing will be instrumental in halting such tragedies until, as he explained, “all of us who favor a strong gun control policy are vigorous and passionate enough as gun advocates are.”

A quote by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin came to his mind then; Stalin said—cynically and cruelly: “One death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic.” This encouraged Marc to produce his project, hoping that those 30,000 deaths by gun shots in 2011 in the US would not end up becoming just one more statistic.

So he decided to compile a randomly-generated list of 30,000 names symbolizing those lost lives. For this, he used an 8 1/2” x 11” sheet format for a single-spaced list, one name per line, written with normal font at 12 points. He ended up with 474 pages [sic.]. “Everyone who sees the printed document—tells us Marc Newhouse—has the same reaction: ‘Wow! Those are a lot of lives....”

The list will be read out loud on Saturday afternoons in public squares in the metro area of San Juan until next December. Marc, his friends, and citizens who find out about the project and recognize its merit meet each Saturday to read 100 names out loud and publicly. They then engage in a dialog to tackle the importance of finding ways to confront the violence that has taken large control of our society. This initiative, akin to that on Agenda Ciudadana, is, without a doubt, a valuable example of individual contribution to society. (For more information, please visit: http://lifedeathandiguanas.blogspot.com/) 

UPDATE: Please note this weekend's reading has been postponed for Sunday, March 24 at 1:00 PM (instead of the usual Saturdays) at Plaza de Armas, Old San Juan. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Only Lacking One Thing

Well, I nearly fell into the trap—and shame on me. For a fleeting moment, I thought about calling this post on Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister, “The Other Mendelssohn.”

The problem being that, in a sense, she was. Not in talent, nor in creative power, nor as a pianist. She had all the goods her brother had, absolutely everything except for one thing.

He had a Y chromosome; she had none.

For all the culture in the Mendelssohn family, the highbrowed German Jewish cultural and intellectual firepower wasn’t enough to free Fanny from what was “most important.” And that would be running the household.

Here’s Fanny’s father, writing in 1820, when she was fifteen:

Music will perhaps become his [i.e. Felix's] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.

Here’s Fanny brother, Felix:

From my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.

Ouch—all the velvet gloves in the world can’t take the sting away from that slap in the face.

She made only one appearance in public at the piano, and that was to premiere her brother’s piano concerto. And yes, her music was played at family gatherings, but when it came time to publish, Felix thought it really would be better if her work appeared under his name. And so it was a bit thorny, the problem that arose when Queen Victoria proposed to sing her favorite of Mendelssohn’s songs, Italien. But he confessed—it really was his sister’s song.

She was free until age 24, when she married an artist, William Hensel, and then had a child. At the end of her life, in 1846, she decided to publish her single opus, a group of songs. Tragically, she died at age 42 of a stroke; her brother, grief stricken, wrote his last string quartet, dedicated it to her memory, and then suffered the same fate six months later.

She was the granddaughter of a famous philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. She in turn was the grandmother of a philosopher, Paul Hensel, and a mathematician, Kurt Hensel.

And no, apparently her husband wasn’t musical; he couldn’t sing the single note in a performance the family mounted. His talents were in the graphic arts; he became the royal court painter. Here is his sketch of Fanny.

I look at it and wonder—are we seeing Fanny, or the Fanny that her soon-to-be husband wanted to see? Was she really that demure, that conventionally pretty?

Sadly, unlike Clara Schumann, who had to get out there and work, Fanny had the comfortable life of a prosperous hausfrau. But she was by no means unproductive—she left over 460 compositions.

Most of which are songs, or small pieces for the piano. Yes, she has several sonatas, a couple of quartets, the piano trio, which you can hear below. But unlike Clara Schumann, no piano concerto, no larger works. One wonders—was the sexism so ingrained that a lady composer could write songs—the equivalent of embroidery or speaking a bit of French—but not symphonies? Or was it practical—who would perform a symphony by a woman composer?

She seems an enigma, does Fanny—much more difficult to read than Clara Schumann. Both were gifted pianists, gifted composers. Clara was the breadwinner, and toured Europe while taking care of Robert. Yet she stopped composing at age 36, before half her life had passed (she died at age 76). And yes, Robert might—and note that word “might”—have been the greater talent in composition.

Not being an artist, I’m in no position to say who was the more talented—Fanny Mendelssohn or her husband. But here’s the deal.

I also can’t say who was more talented—Fanny Mendelssohn or her brother. 

Mendelssohn

Susan wrote me an email—did I know of any recording of the complete 12 fugues for string quartet by Mendelssohn?

Actually, I had never heard of the work, so I did what anyone—including Susan, I’m sure—would do. And yes, the clip below from YouTube is what I found.

Also yes, four of the fugues were recorded by the Vogler Quartet. But the other eight? Yet to be recorded, it seems.

It’s both surprising and unsurprising that Mendelssohn wrote these fugues when he was 12 years old. Surprising because they are very complex and very mature—far from what you would imagine even the most talented 12 year old could do. Unsurprising because Mendelssohn was a child prodigy who went on to champion the work of another composer, also of fugues as well as much else—Johann Sebastian Bach.

Susan knew of these works because of the remarkable work of Stephen Somary and his Mendelssohn Project, which has located some 270 pieces of music hitherto unpublished and unknown.

And it’s total justice that Mendelssohn has this champion, since he got a completely bad rap for years. Yes, his music was played—we’ve all heard the violin concerto, the Italian Symphony, Fingal’s Cave. But the critical judgment was that Mendelssohn was conservative, a little light—not the heavyweight that Brahms, Schumann, Schubert were. George Bernard Shaw, in fact, came out and said it: Mendelssohn "was not in the foremost rank of great composers," he wrote in 1898.

There are a number of reasons for this. Paradoxically, Mendelssohn was wildly popular in his time, and that has always cast a bit a suspicion—can a composer be that popular and still be any good? Was he catering to the crowd?

The second strike against him—he was Queen Victoria’s favorite composer, and the two in fact met and made music together (she was a passable singer). More support for the theory that there’s something a bit sentimental about the music.

But the most important factor might simply be racist. Mendelssohn was Jewish, though in fact he was baptized and raised as a Christian. But he pointedly refused to hide his Jewish origins, despite his father’s wish that he use the name Bartholdy, instead of Mendelssohn.

And three years after Mendelssohn’s death at 38, Richard Wagner published a savage attack on the Jews in general and Mendelssohn in particular. The essay, entitled Jewishness in Music, used Mendelssohn as the best example of why “there is no place for the Jew in music.” Yes, he was skilled, he was facile, but he “has shown us that a Jew can possess the richest measure of specific talents, the most refined and varied culture ... without even once through all these advantages being able to bring forth in us that profound, heart-and-soul searching effect we expect from music".

We’ve rejected the racism—but have we kept, wittingly or not, the critical judgment of Mendelssohn? Isn’t it time to rethink, and to rehear?

I’ve always thought so, and have been happy that others do as well. What I didn’t know was the tremendous amount of music that was unpublished. Why? Because Mendelssohn was well off, under no pressure to publish. He also died quite young; he may have been too busy composing to worry much about publishing.

So he was prolific, and left scores of manuscripts unpublished. What happened to them?

Here, racism strikes again. In 1936, the Nazis forbade Mendelssohn to be played publicly, and most of the manuscripts, located in the state library in Berlin, were taken secretly to Warsaw or Krakow. When these cities fell, says Somary, the compositions were dispersed in any way possible, and ended up throughout the world.

Right—so is it any good?

Well, Somary says yes. Frequently, an unpublished piece has a reason to be unpublished, but not in the case of Mendelssohn. In fact, the version of the Italian Symphony that we all know is the wrong version, not the revised version that Mendelssohn wanted published.

It might be time as well to start hearing some of the chamber music besides the famous octet. I listened recently to five minutes of the 6^th String Quartet, and it was enough to send me straight to Amazon—I needed that music.

For years Bach was unplayed, almost unknown, until Mendelssohn came along. How fitting that Mendelssohn, unfairly treated, should have found a champion himself.

A Quiet Christmas

He’s a guy I don’t know anything about, this Rob Portman, an Ohioan and congressman and signer of the Defense of Marriage Act as well as backer of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman. Oh, and he’s Republican, as well.

And as you probably know, he completely reversed his stand yesterday and came out for marriage equality. Why? Because his son told him, two years ago, that he was gay. (The son, that is, not the congressman….)

So? Big deal—isn’t that how it gets done?

It did in my case—over about thirty years I dragged everybody out of the closet in my family. Some came out easily; an elder brother came around very late. A cousin’s wife, who speaks to the Lord every morning—they have a brisk, efficient relationship—was trading garden lore with Rafael two years ago, completely nonplussed to have an “admitted homosexual” in her face.

Some of the party, however, are arguing that just because a son is gay shouldn’t make any difference at all. Presumably, the principled reaction would be along the lines of “you and your relationship are unnatural and I cannot countenance either. You are welcome in the family but your partner is not. And don’t for God’s sake talk about it.”

That was what I was facing, those years when I contemplated telling my parents. It was a given—they wouldn’t reject me entirely. I wouldn’t be told, as people I knew had been told, “you’re sick and disgusting. Go, and don’t come back until you’ve changed.”

Yes, there were parents who said that.

But there were many more parents who said ‘leave your homosexuality at the door when you walk in this house,’ or words to that effect. You went to your family, your lover to his. You did the Thanksgiving / Christmas / Easter thing and watched football for the afternoon. Then you reconnected with your lover and hung out at the gay bar for the evening.

The problem coming, of course, when the lover had no family nearby, or a family nearby that had rejected him.

“Go,” I said to Raf, those decades ago when I had just landed in Puerto Rico. “Christmas Eve means nothing to me. Why not go and celebrate with your family? I’ll be fine.”

It was logical, and he went.

I was alone in the apartment, and also the building—the people in the apartment next door were off on the island with their families, and Pablo, the gay landlord who lives upstairs was out as well. I settled with a book in a chair next to the indoor patio, filled with plants that Raf had brought.

Also filled with moonlight, since Christmas had coincided with a full moon that year.

Also filled with a rare, quite heavy fog.

It wasn’t a night for reading. I put down the book and wondered—what the hell had I done? I knew no Spanish, I dreaded going out into the streets—I was an outsider, I felt the distance acutely. I did stupid things, just to avoid the language issue. I once walked four or five miles home carrying my cello from a rehearsal. I was dying of thirst, virtually hallucinating for Coca-Cola, but couldn’t enter a store to buy one. Yes, I had the money. But I didn’t want to see the clerk’s eyes dilate with fear—‘A gringo. What if he speaks to me? No hablo inglés…’ she will be thinking.

And I didn’t have a job. The one job I thought I could have vanished in five minutes, after I choked and blew the Dvorak concerto in an audition for the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra. It left me with a lot of time, time I didn’t know how to fill.

Which didn’t do the relationship any good, and we had had a fight, a couple weeks ago, and things were better but not good. It was tense—should I stay? But what about all the stuff I had moved, which included a cat that was really more Raf’s than mine. So just leave everything, cat included, and take off, cello in hand?

It was utterly quiet, utterly still, that evening of fog infused with moonlight. I looked out at the plants, moistened by the fog, lit by the moonlight. Time had slowed.

And then music, a guitar, people singing. It was a parranda, a group of friends out singing gentle Christmas carols to their friends. Later at night, it can be rowdy—“ASALTO” people will shout, “ASSAULT!” and you get out of bed and start the asopao. Oh, and get ready—no one leaves until the last drop is drunk. But this was a quiet group of five or six people singing the traditional aguinaldos, the gentle, lilting music from the mountains.

I stood at the window, listening. I wanted to go out, join them, but….

The gate clicked—Pablo had come home. I heard him bound up the steps to his apartment, saw the light in his bedroom and heard the sound of his TV. A moment later he was shouting, “hey, gorgeous, come up here!”

I did. We watched a stupid Mexican posada and ate popcorn on his bed. Raf came home and joined us.

So should Portman have acted on principle? Was it wrong to flip on an issue just because his son is gay?

I only know this.

You’re not much of a parent if you banish your child, force him or her into solitude and loneliness, force the choice—your lover or your family.

We learned, Raf’s family learned, Portman learned.

And very soon, pretty much everybody will learn.

An Effin' Hero

How much money was there in the room?

Well, every guest was coughing up $50,000 a plate, and there were—from what you can see in the video—at least twenty people in the room. And if there were thirty, or forty?

Right—so Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, was going to walk away from the fundraiser with a million or two bucks in his pocket. And that night he decides to let his guard down—he’s among friends, after all, people who think like him, dress like him and act like him. You know, guys you see on the golf course.

The bartender, of course, or the waitresses or the other people that serve and cook and clean—well, they can be ignored because they don’t have the 50,000 bucks that the rest of us do to spend on a dinner and to meet the next president of the United States, and press the flesh, and get the picture taken. The bartender, the wait staff—they don’t count.

Well, it was a fatal mistake for Mitt Romney. Because the bartender, a husky late-thirties middle class guy from Boston named Scott Prouty, had brought a camera in, and was videotaping the whole thing.

What Mitt said created a firestorm. Mitt wasn’t going concern himself with the 47% of Americans who are always going to vote for Obama because there’s no way to get their votes. They’re victims who think they’re entitled to food and clothes and health care. And on the word “entitled” Mitt’s voice jumps a third (in musical terms) and resonates with all the petulance, the entitlement, the astonished horror of a socialite confronted with a maid asking for a raise.

Especially because those victims, those leeches, don’t know how the rest of the world works, but Mitt does. He’s been to China to see the factory with the attached dormitories, and he’s even been inside one of the dormitories to see the one bathroom for ten rooms, and each bedroom has twelve girls in it, and they’re all saving money, those girls, hoping to get married. Here, he breaks off, and asks his audience—“well, you’ve all seen it, haven’t you?”

Murmurs of assent.

And what about that gate, with the barbed wire fence? How can they imprison those girls?

A good story-teller, he puts in the conflict, the moral uncertainty.

Ahh, but the gate isn’t to keep the girls in, but to keep other girls, girls with no jobs, from trying to sneak in and start to work, hoping to get paid.

This, of course, is familiar ground for liberals. We decry Nike for producing tennis shoes half a world away for $2.75 and then selling them to us at the mall for 85 bucks. Nike, in turn, releases a photo of hundreds of Indonesians thronging in front of a new factory, eager to make 60 cents an hour in a country where the norm is 20 cents.

My answer to this argument?

Buy your shoes at Marshalls. And try not to buy until you really need something—we can’t keep consuming like this.

Well, Mitt had been over there looking at a company then called Global Tech, which made small appliances, and sought customers who were looking to outsource their production.

OK, it’s been two years now since Wal-Mart decided to send me on my way, so I was a little rusty. But what that means, I recalled, is that the Sunbeam toaster you hold in your hands at Wal-Mart is no longer made in Georgia, or wherever it domestically was. Now it’s made in China. But what do you care, because it’s cheap and that’s great because the only job you can get is a waitress / a maid / child care because there are no manufacturing jobs because they’re all over in China and so you’re broke so you gotta buy the product.

That’s our world, now—see?

Well, not everybody’s world, of course. Mitt, when he was CEO of Bain—and also that little holding company in the tax haven of Bermuda, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors LTD—owned over 10% of Global Tech. And when you put that money down, you’ll want to go over and see how things are run, right?

So Mitt’s gone over to see the company, and to see how the rest of the world works—how Chinese girls will work 10 hours a day for a pittance while Mitt’s own countrymen, well, just about half of them are victims who think the world, or at least the United States government, owes them a living! Hah!

The guy behind the bar doesn’t see it that way. He grew up in Boston, he knows about the rich, the guys with the prep school that leads into Harvard that leads everywhere. He sees a rich guy who decides he wants to be president, so we all better stand back and let him.

And he has it on tape. So is he gonna erase the tape, or put it out there? And if it’s out there, he’d better get ready for some serious flak, because the Republican right is not gonna forgive him.

He checks out the Chinese angle, and comes across David Corn’s article on Global Tech in Mother Jones Magazine. Prouty realizes—Mitt has been lying all throughout the campaign, demanding a retraction from the Washington Post when they said that Bain had bought equity of firms that were devoted to outsourcing production.

Prouty starts losing sleep—hey, why should he stick his neck out, run the risk of losing his job or getting slapped with a law suit, or just having right wing crazies track him down and make his life miserable.

Well, he looks into the mirror one night, and doesn’t like the guy peering back at him. “You’re a coward,” he says, and then goes off resignedly to bed. Between coward and hero there’s an intermediate persona—the reluctant hero.

He contacts Corn, who properly checks it out and at last tells him, he can’t go forward with the story without knowing Prouty’s name. Silence on the line, and then Prouty reveals himself.

As he revealed himself two nights ago, when the rest of the world was looking at a new pope. And sure enough, even as he was speaking, people had found out where he lived, they were milling in front of the house. Prouty has received threats, and has set up a defense fund—he’s had to consult several lawyers.

Hey, let him tell the story, as reported in a Mother Jones article “Scott Prouty 47% Legal Assistance Fund….

After going public, I've received a flood of physical and legal threats in emails and tweets. People have found my address and have shown up at my door. It's possible I may have to move. And I've had to contact several lawyers and have incurred legal expenses. I might incur more going forward. I always knew that if I talked about this, I could become a target, and I don't want to be melodramatic, but some of the threats I've received do cause me to be concerned for my safety and that of my loved ones.

I appreciate all the support I've received from the beginning—and especially now. Many people have asked how they could help. This is one way. I've also said in interviews that if they would like to show their support they can send donations to the ASPCA and the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights. These are both groups that I care about.

I'm hoping that I don't need to spend a lot of money on lawyers and security. If people are generous and there are any funds left over after these costs are covered, I would use the remaining money to pay for going back to school. I've been bartending for eight years and I'd like to move forward with a job that lets me help others. If I end up not using these funds for education, I will donate them to the SPCA and IGLHR.

Ummm—Scott?

Scott, honey, you need to face something. You cannot be giving this message about the ASPCA and the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.

The right wing crazies are gonna go after you. The guy who organized the fundrasier, according to Mother Jones, is a billionaire who can easily afford the lawyers’ fees that will have you twisting in the wind for years to come. You’re gonna have to come out with a message—simple, clean and direct. Here it is:

They’re after me. They know I helped keep their rich kid out of the White House and they’re furious. And I don’t have any money—what bartender does? So dig into your pockets because the fight didn’t stop, it’s still going on. I need your help.

I know, Scott, you don’t want to say it. You’d rather not say it, but you will, Scott, you will, because you know what, Scott?

You’re a fuckin’ hero. 

Notes from a Machination of the Father of Lies

It may be that I’ve lived in Latin culture too long, that our love of conspiracy theory has seeped into my pores, but I think the whole thing was set up.

We have an ex-pope—the Spanish newspaper El País calls him Papa Interruptus—who, according to the paper just mentioned, was virtually isolated in the Vatican. So who was in charge?

The Curia.

Which has always had a sinister reputation—popes come and go, but the Curia stays. So that means that if you are youngish—30 or 40, you don’t get too close to any one pope, a mistake Ratzinger made with John Paul II. The reason is obvious—when the pope dies, where will you be?

And the Curia, I remember reading, has an interesting history. If it’s byzantine—and it is, there are nine congregations, three courts, 12 pontifical councils, three pontifical commissions, five pontifical academies, plus the Labor Office, and let’s not forget those Swiss Guards!—there’s a reason. The Vatican, you remember, had lots of states for centuries; there had to be a body to administer them. Well, the states are gone, but in the nature of organizations everywhere, the Curia, with all its labyrinthine structure, lives on.

And the pope has always been, well, just a pope. They come and go. So suppose a pope gives an order that you, or your superior, deem not in either the church’s or the Curia’s or your congregation’s best interest? What do you do?

You say yes, of course.

And then you begin the twin processes of doing nothing and inventing reasons for doing nothing. Which apparently was what happened with Ratzinger—whatever he wished to do was instantly agreed to and then ignored.

What flourished was secrecy and espionage, and according to El País, the superstar was Tarcisio Bertone, who headed the Secretary of State. Ironically, it’s his office that is meant to coordinate between all the fiefdoms of the Curia. Instead, rather than uniting, he’s been a divisive force.

Ratzinger’s nature, I suspect, is passive—he’s an introvert, a scholar, a pianist—he’s not an aggressive, take-charge kind of guy. His legacy, according again to El País, will be as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, not his seven-year papacy. Why? Because he needed a more dominant force—that would be John Paul II—above and behind him. He could administer, but not lead.

Things spiraled down, as things tend to do. Scandal after scandal hit, and Ratzinger retreated more and more. At last, his butler could take it no more and began leaking to the press. The world was reading the dirty secrets, and finally Ratzinger had to tear himself away from the piano and act.

He planned it well. He commissioned the report—the famous secret report that he will hand over to his successor—detailing the problems in the Curia. He knew the only way to cure the Curia—sorry, couldn’t help it—was to resign. By doing so, he would force the entire “cabinet” to resign.

He doesn’t—and no one but me finds this strange—hike back to his native land, to play piano four-hands with his brother. Instead, he is staying in the Vatican with his valet / personal secretary, a man improbably more handsome than George Clooney. Is it the emotional attachment to the secretary, who will spend evenings and nights with the Ratzinger, and then cross the street to work for Francis?

Or is it that Ratzinger can’t leave—he has to stay and clean up his church? Alternatively, he has to stay and protect his back.

I started this post by saying it was a set up—the election after only two days of a pope whom nobody thought, this time around, was in the running. I think word got down—we gotta get somebody new, somebody from the outside, somebody who doesn’t have a checkered past. And that man is the new Pope Francis.

“The word got down” implies that Ratzinger said it. It might be, however, that the word got around, meaning that someone under Ratzinger has been speaking.

And what are we left with? A relatively old, theologically conservative man who knows little about the Curia. Also a man who seems able to be in front of people without radiating chills of disapproval, as Ratzinger did (and paradoxically, even more so when he smiled).

And we’re left as well with a mystery. Did the cardinals act to reform the Curia or to re-entrench the Curia?

Speaking as a gay man, I think Ratzinger was a wonderful pope to have. If you wanted an enemy, wouldn’t you want a weak, non-charismatic, isolated pope? John Paul II, in contrast, was a real threat, but Ratzinger?

Whatever Pope Francis might do about cleaning up the Curia and the Vatican Bank, re-filling the pews, reaching out to other religions, and dealing with abusive priests, there’s one thing you can be sure he won’t do.

And that is?

Budge on theological issues. Here’s Wikipedia on his views of homosexuality:

Bergoglio has affirmed church teaching on homosexuality, maintaining that homosexual actions are immoral.[59][60]

He opposes same-sex marriage,[61] and unsuccessfully opposed legislation introduced in 2010 to legalize same-sex marriage in Argentina, calling it a "real and dire anthropological throwback".[62] In a letter to the monasteries of Buenos Aires, he wrote:

"Let's not be naïve, we're not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God. We are not talking about a mere bill, but rather a machination of the Father of Lies[63] that seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God."[64]

In this context, Bergoglio is also opposed to adoption by same-sex couples, arguing that it threatened the "identity [...] and the survival of the family: father, mother and children". He stated that "children [...] are discriminated against in advance depriving them of human growth that God would be given to a father and a mother".[65][66]

Ouch….

In an hour’s time I will take some food that Raf has cooked to his mother, who will kiss me, call me m’hijo and then rush to warm the food up. Mamina in turn will show up at the Plaza on Saturday to read more names. My name is on the telephone list on her refrigerator door.

Would she characterize my marriage to her son in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2008 as “a machination of the Father of Lies?”

I’ll ask her, and let you know….