A Composer Reborn

There’s music that gets played all the time and shouldn’t. How many times have you heard the Moldau, the Bartered Bride, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?

There’s also music that never or almost never gets played and should. Zelenka comes to mind, as well as Reinecke—guys who languish in undeserved obscurity.

As does a guy named Hans Gal, who appeared on a recording done by a new follower on Twitter, Kenneth Woods. Well, there’s a lot I don’t know—and more and more piling up every day—so it was time to head for Wikipedia.

Which has, I was relieved to find, only a couple of paragraphs on Gal; clearly he’s not as mainstream as I had feared. Ironic, because at one point in his life he was well known and much played.

Born in a small town near Vienna, he attended the New Vienna Conservatory and went on to win an important competition, the Columbia Schubert Centenary Prize, in 1928. The conductor Furtwangler and composer Richard Strauss helped him obtain the position of director of the Mainz Conservatory. This lasted until 1933, when the Germans overtook Mainz. Gal, a Jew, was dismissed and his music, extremely popular and influential through the twenties, was banned.

Fortunately, there’s a backup. Donald Tovey invites him to Scotland, and he assumes a position at the University of Edinburgh. All is well—as far as we know—until about 1940, when, according to one source, Churchill said, “collar the lot” and Gal and other German émigrés found themselves in an internment camp. Did I mention—there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know?

It was, as you can imagine, a pretty distinguished bunch, this cultured group of German Jews who had not so much escaped the camps as found a decidedly better one—so what do they do?

Write and stage a revue, called “What a Life!”

It took, according to Wikipedia, about six months to determine who was who, and most of the Germans were released. Presumably, Gal goes back to the University and resumes his career. As well, he edits the Brahms symphonies, composes a lot of chamber music, symphonies, songs and incidental music.

He was played extensively in the ‘20’s but, by the end of his life he was forgotten. (Grammar break—the computer has just green-squiggled that last phrase and suggested “the end of his life forgot him!” Your choice, dear Reader!) His symphony number four, his last work in the genre, was premiered in 1972, and then sat on the shelf for another 30 years.

Then along came Kenneth Woods, a writer / cellist / conductor / rock guitarist, who decides to pair the Gal with another composer of four symphonies—Robert Schumann. And it’s well received, becoming a Gramophone Editor’s Choice in 2012.

Woods, in a short clip introducing the disc, makes the point that Gal never jumped on board whatever musical style was fashionable at the time—the  Second Viennese School, or twelve-tone music. The music sounds crisp, distinctive and at least in the clip below, wonderfully lyrical.

Woods also mentions that it must have been frustrating for Gal’s daughter Eva to have to wait thirty years for the rediscovery of her father’s work. She replies with understatement: “the first thirty years are the hardest.” In fact, thirty years is not too long—in the case of Bach, it was one hundred years. And the sad fact is that there are many fine composers that we will never hear.

Kenneth—I’ve just bought the Gal Symphony No. 4 and the Schumann Symphony No. 2, and downloaded them to my iPad. Now then—could I suggest another forgotten composer?

Gunnar Johansen.

The Open World of Marv Rabin

Want to see a guy go from his mid-nineties to about age fifty in thirty seconds or less?

Marvin Rabin does it, unbelievably, just by talking about music, his lifelong passion and profession.

Interesting what you know and don’t know about adults when you’re a kid. Rabin was the founder of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra; he was imported—OK, lured—to the UW from Boston. So I figured he was from a musical family, a long line of cultured, genteel, well-heeled patrician people.

Wrong, his father was a store keeper, and didn’t play an instrument. But his father, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, did realize—vaudeville kept a lot of musicians fed and shod. Remember, the talking picture hadn’t been invented, and that meant every movie house had a pit orchestra. So his father put a violin in young Marvin’s hands, which changed his life and a lot of other lives.

Mine, for example. When Rabin believed in you…

But wait…

Rabin believed in EVERY kid, which is to say that he was always looking for that special talent, or spark, or curiosity that made a kid unique. Nor was he just a music teacher, a conductor, an educator; he came to music relatively late, having gotten a Bachelor’s degree in history and political science. He wanted kids to grow up and develop and keep developing through their lives, and if that meant music—great.

“Don’t commit closure,” he told me once, and as you can see, he’s still banging that drum.

But it’s a message that’s worth spreading, and that I may have heeded. My brothers didn’t play an instrument, went into their careers of journalism and law, stayed there, and have done well.

They haven’t, however, been a musician, a nurse, a teacher or a writer. And if I’ve had four professions and moved to a foreign (in a domestic sense—it’s like being pregnant in a virginal sense…) country and learned another language, well, to what do I attribute it?

Hours of practice at the cello.

It does something to you neurologically—something that was discovered only in the last twenty years. Musicians’ brains are different, wired differently. Significantly, the same areas of the brain that are activated in speaking and comprehension are activated when playing an instrument. Giving a kid a cello is really giving him a second language.

And like language, it can be done both singly or in a group. So every Saturday for four years in High School my father would drive me in the green Buick Skylark to the Humanities Building. For many of those Saturdays, Marvin Rabin would be charging down the halls shortly before 9AM, shouting “Sharon!”

Sharon Leventhal, now a fine musician, then a fine musician and concertmistress of WYSO. Which meant she stood up, gestured to Emily Auerbach who tweeted an A, and tuned the orchestra—winds, brass, and finally strings.

He was mercurial and temperamental. Yes, he could throw a temper tantrum, explode, rage. But it was always followed by an impassioned appeal—he knew we were great, he knew we had it in us, he couldn’t stand our not giving our best.

“HOWIE!” Rabin would shout, and the orchestra would cringe. It was Howard Metzenberg and Shostakovich Fifth, which Rabin didn’t much like but everybody else did. And Howard played the contrabassoon, for which there is a gorgeous solo in the Shostakovich.

It was almost comical, almost a personal thing going on between them. The solo was never right, the phrasing wasn’t there, the notes cracked, Howie entered at the wrong time or got the rhythm wrong. The orchestra would tense just before the solo—how would Howie screw it up this time? It was unbelievable that there was any new, fresh disaster to be found in the solo, but Howie never failed in mutilating it in new and terrible ways.

Until, of course the day that Howie—perhaps having practiced that week?—played it perfectly. The orchestra stopped spontaneously and cheered, Rabin leapt off the podium and bounded to Howie, the two embraced.

People have commented on the anti-aging effect of music, how musicians go on and on. Certainly Rabin is just the same—his voice as much a viola as he is a violist, the hands always in movement. When he talks about playing an instrument, he lifts an unseen viola under his chin—he’s playing even as he speaks.

He was one of two great musicians who had a message for me—you’re good, this can be your life if you want it, don’t give up, believe in yourself.

“That was a miracle,” he told me, after learning that I had put together the recital with Gunnar in three months, after years of not playing.

It may have been, but if so, who had performed it? Myself, of course—you don’t do that without a lot of practicing. Gunnar, who was always not flowing but flooding with encouragement.

And WYSO and Marvin Rabin. It was the one beacon in my life during those black years, those years in which I thought I fooled everybody around me, all those people who were so discerning about everybody else and so mistaken about me.

Rabin never stopped believing. Years later, I used to play music with a fine pianist who lived up the street. And for the first time, I worked out the frustration and neuroticism that had plagued me for decades about music and the cello. I dropped it all and played.

The best playing of my life.

Was it Marvin Rabin, up there, still passionate, still encouraging, still finding the unique and wonderful in all the others and me?

Maybe.

Or had just I listened at last?

Interview – Marvin Rabin from Loyola University on Vimeo.

Notes From a Non-Creative Person

I’m a bear of little brain so I listened to it twice and if I still don’t get it, well, I probably won’t.

It all started when I read an article by a model who gave a TED talk about the fact that she didn’t deserve her luck. She makes zillions of dollars because of genetics: she’s tall and willowy and white. Oh, and also symmetrical. So everybody has decided, “wow, she’s hot,” and that’s very useful because you can sell things with sex and that’s important because, well, that’s how the world works.

So now the video has been seen by more than a million people and people are approaching her with book deals and TV shows and she’ll probably end up the Mistress of the Universe and we’ll all have to bow down six times a day to her Loveliness, as well as cede all our property to her and half of our sons.

Sense annoyance?

Dammit—I had a message I wanted to give through TED, and it was a hell of a lot more important than that. And guess what? They turned me down, in order to give a supremely entitled person a chance to be even MORE entitled. Of course beautiful people get everything, of course it’s the handsome guy who becomes the CEO or the senator or the whatever-he-wants-to-be. Remember high school? That’s what you learned there.

Now—thanks for asking—my message was this: you can organize your death just as my mother did. You don’t need to rot away from Alzheimer’s or cancer or just plain boredom. When the time comes, you stop eating and drinking. And no, it’s not a bad death—quite the opposite, really.

Well, I was storming or steaming my way through the article of Her Absolute and Obnoxious Loveliness who has, by the way, just graduated magna cum laude from Columbia (presumably Harvard and all the other Ivy League colleges were lusting to have her; she chose Columbia to be in New York, the center of the modeling world….) and watching my fists ball and hearing my nose snort when I came to a little link: Ted.com, Amy Tan on Where Creativity Hides.

Well, I have a particular debt to Amy Tan because in theory she follows me on Twitter—still think the whole thing had to have been a mistake—and I’ve never read any of her books and I feel badly about that. Come clean—I have read half of one of her books, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and loved it, absolutely loved it. So why didn’t I finish it? Because the second part is set in a foreign place and I can’t read about foreign places. But aren’t you living in a foreign place, you ask?

It’s just a thing about me and you know what? OK, I’ll stop being defensive.

OK, so I can live in a foreign place but not read about them, would my debt to Amy be cancelled if I watched her talk about creativity? And what, by the way, is the word that defines your relationship with someone following you on Twitter? A twitterite? A fellow bird? Twitty?

So here she is talking about creativity, and I am understanding only a third of it, although I’m totally enjoying the humor of the slides and also the creative elements in them and I’m in trouble because whatever Amy says about not understanding quantum mechanics is exactly what I’m feeling about her talk.

I’m lost.

Which is totally not good because (sorry about that jump there—I was screwing around with those little callouts, in case you hadn’t noticed, although really shouldn’t there be a person attached? Just a sec—let me run over to the Internet…..)

Right—what I was saying before these damn dogs walked into the post was that I didn’t get any of what Amy was saying about creativity and that’s terrible because I want to be creative and think I should be creative but guess what?

I’m not.

(Though I have discovered where the dogs live on the computer and fiddled around for ten minutes with the callouts—every time I moved the callouts, the dog moved. Oh, and also discovered the spelling of “jejune”—thought it was jejeune….)

And there’s this thing lurking in my head—I have to write a novel.

Which is absolutely awful because it will take a million years and I’ll have to figure out about character development and structure and stuff I don’t even know that I should know.

The only thing I know about creativity is that I was compelled to do it and

WHAT! Shit, that’s my father, dead these two decades, come from the grave to tell me to write a novel?

She had more of a gift than I, and when I died, I stood by her side and watched her write, and then in the evenings and nights I went into the back bedroom where she wrote and cleared away the coffee cups and put her glasses where she could find them and then I read what she had written that day. Just the way you do, at five o’clock every day. And then she died and it fell to you and your gift is greater and she knew it and who kept you from throwing yourself in the traffic that day.

Domine.

Yes.

Thank you…and I’m fucked.

Tire 'em Out! Revisited

Well, it was looking as if my father’s worst fear was about to come true. What if he woke up one day and everybody was acting normal? Nobody was looking for treasures in the sandbars of the Wisconsin River, or trying to memorize the Iliad so that he could recite it to inner city kids with the message that they too could be a hero, or teaching dance to convicts as a way to channel energy and foment creativity. So what would he write about?

This, Dear Reader, does not qualify as a sizzling newspaper story: Mary Smith woke up, took a shower, feed the kids, and headed to work.

Read that, and you instantly think—what’s gonna happen to Mary? Will someone shoot, will she see something she shouldn’t and go into hiding, are the kids all right?

Remember—this was before the electronic age. I’ve spent two hours on the Internet, trolling for anything, anything to write about. My father, in contrast, burnt up some shoe leather every day, poking around town, looking for news.

So he might have happened on Father Michael Pfleger in person, had Jack been loping around the South Side of Chicago these days, not as I met Pfleger—electronically on YouTube via Diane Sawyer and ABC News.

And Sawyer had this idea: get all the gang members—or as many as would come—together in a big room and talk. Set a goal: get one idea about how to end the gun violence that is plaguing Chicago.

Which has, as the NRA will tell you, some of the toughest gun laws in the country. It also has young men who can’t find jobs and lots of gang activity. So they have the meeting, and people start to talk. Then Sawyer meets Father Pfleger, who has an idea—a basketball tournament for peace.

Other things are happening: a guy is giving boxing lessons on the street corner; Sawyer dons her gloves and tries it out. People are organizing job-training programs, programs to get kids off the street.

And it may be that there is some hope—Pfleger notes that after the tournament, there hasn’t been a killing in the neighborhood. Twenty kids signed onto the training programs, the police are using new methods to focus on the killers, not the place.

Well, certainly an interesting bit of news. And what’s the deal with Pfleger? Who’s he?

Well, a guy whose natural element seems to be hot water. Which got him, as recently as 2010, suspended, which meant that he could no longer perform the sacraments, except for the Sacrament of Penance in an emergency, which even laicized or excommunicated priests can do. For a priest, that’s a big deal.

Pfleger had come out swinging for the ordination of women three weeks earlier, in a 70-minute homily in his church, St. Sabina, which has been his parish for an incredible 30 years. (Average tenure is five to ten years….) Well, the predictable happened, and the Archbishop of Chicago told him, essentially, to go to his room and not come out until he was sorry. So he apologized, and then went onto his Facebook page and recanted his apology.

Nor is it just ordination of women. The guy has adopted two kids, and is fostering a third. Cardinal Cody is apoplectic and threatens to fire him, but Pfleger goes ahead anyway. He fights against tobacco and alcohol, at one point getting up the ladder and defacing advertisement for cigarettes and booze. Then he gets into a little tussle with Hillary, during the 2008 campaign. Here’s Wikipedia again:

"I really believe that she just always thought, 'This is mine. I'm Bill's wife. I'm white, and this is mine. I just gotta get up and step into the plate.' Then out of nowhere came, 'Hey, I'm Barack Obama,' and she said, 'Oh, damn! Where did you come from? I'm white! I'm entitled! There's a black man stealing my show!'" He then pretended to wipe tears from his face, a reference to Clinton's emotional speech before the New Hampshire primary, and added, "She wasn't the only one crying. There was a whole lot of white people crying."[23]

Pfleger is German-American, the congregation is predominantly black. Right, so now it’s Obama who calls and asks him to apologize, so he does, saying slyly that his words “were inconsistent with Obama’s life and message.”

Then Pfleger invites Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor or ex-pastor who made an incendiary remark or two in the 2008 campaign, to come and speak and give a blessing when Maya Angelou comes to call. Wright, according to Pfleger, “is one of the great Biblical scholars of our country,” and has been “shamefully demonized.”

Right—Pfleger then takes on disrespectful-to-women rappers and hip-hop singers, and then turns to helping prostitutes. Oh, and did I mention that he invites Al Sharpton….

Granted, he’s had thirty years to do all this stuff, but just reading about it makes me yearn for an afternoon nap. The guy is the Schwarzenegger of muscular Christianity, a fly in the ointment of the diocese of Chicago, a straight shooter unafraid to take on anyone.

And two things strike me. First: the people, who are intelligent, articulate, and as children were filled with ambition—to be a doctor, a policeman, president. Now? They’re gang members.

Second thing: they may be sitting on a gold mine. I couldn’t see much, but you get glimpses of the neighborhood—the insanely wide streets (Chicago had all that prairie to cover, it seems—or maybe it was just a little scheme to use more concrete and up the kickback…), the mature shade trees, the architectural jewels that have fallen down, but could be wonderful again.

If they could get just one house, use it as a training lab for roofers, carpenters, electricians, turn it around and sell it, where would it lead?

Tire the young men out, says a nation builder. Give ‘em jobs and put ‘em to work and get them believing that they’re doing something right. Guys without jobs drink, pick fights, and take the guns out of their pockets and kill.

Tired guys are home in bed.

Not a Particular Triumph

Good news, readers—however bad your day is, it can’t be worse than what Gerry Cahill is enduring.

He’s the CEO of Carnival, and he spoke—as you can see below—to the press before going on board the ship that suffered a major fire, lost power, listed dangerously to one side, and became a fourteen-story un-flushable toilet.

Well, Cahill looks the part—male, white, greying hair, craggy looks. Viewing the video, I remembered my Wal-Mart days of bumping into guys like this: guys who could work fourteen hours a day for six days a week; guys who knew the numbers; guys who always were taking seminars on servant-leadership, leading by example, coaching by walking around.

Leaders, you see, are not born but developed, which is very fortunate because that means—guess what!—you can build a nice little industry around it. Along with motivational speakers, the leadership guys routinely charged into Wal-Mart—eager to activate our sleeping potential and make us all proactive change agents, empower us, fan our self-development, and deliver added value and unexpected benefits to our associates and customers.

I wrote that sentence pretty much as fast as I could type, since I spent seven years writing the equivalent. Sometimes I wrote in Spanish, sometimes in English—in either language it was gibberish. I can report, however, that English is much more capable of gibberish than Spanish, though that could reflect my lack of prowess in Spanish.

Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on the two twin gods; motivation and leadership. Every monthly meeting had some section of it devoted to the topics. Had it had any effect whatsoever, we would have had a building full of generals.

It was as much a part of the building as the grey carpet and the blue walls.

“I’m going to the leadership seminar, so I won’t be in class,” a student would say.

“Isn’t there a leadership seminar tomorrow?” I would counter.

“Yeah.”

“So did you talk to Human Resources to reschedule?”

“Uh, no….”

“Isn’t being responsible part of being a leader?”

It was useless, and in the end I gave up and simply observed. My students were good people, all doing things that the organization deemed necessary. Some of them were in charge of selling fifty or sixty million bucks a year. Some of them were in charge of deciding whether it was Crest or Colgate that would catch your eye on the shelves. Some of them simply spent their days figuring out how the business was doing financially—whether the millions were rolling in at the necessary rate.

They were not, most of them, leaders. Actually, they were utterly content to be led, to be told what to do, to do it—often grudgingly—get paid, and leave. That was the name of the game: try not to get fired before you win the lottery.

My mother and brother took a trip out west, years ago, to visit Eric. Along the way, they came upon a group of Indians who were struggling to set up a teepee. It looked like a bit of diversion in a very flat landscape, so they stopped to watch.

Well, only Franny watched. Johnny got right into the action, and was soon directing the Indians on how to set up their teepee.

Say what? A Manhattan lawyer directing a tribe of Sioux?

Interestingly, none of the Indians complained, or suggested that Johnny take his white ass off their land, or told him to take the teepee and shove it where the sun don’t shine. They all parted the best of friends.

So Cahill—getting back to the Good Ship Norovirus—is going to go apologize for the five days of hell that 2300 vacations turned into. Typical move, a classic example of modern-day leadership. He’s taking charge, he’s owning responsibility, he’s standing in the front line.

He’s a fool.

Look, giving those cruise passengers a chance to vent is not going to do them or him any good. People are going to be filming him with their cell phones; it’s going to be all over YouTube, he’s going to look stupid.

What should he have done?

Gotten the passengers off the boat however he could have done it. Whether it was getting an aircraft carrier or another cruise ship—apparently several approached to provide food—or talking to the Navy, he should have found a way to evacuate the vessel and speed for home. A cruise ship can move quite quickly, and even if all the additional guests were stuck on the top deck for twenty-four hours—well, wouldn’t it be better than five days?

Carnival considered the idea, and decided no. Here’s a quote from an Email written by a vice president of the company:

"Regarding why we didn't use another cruise ship, we checked on this and all of our ships are in service right now, meaning that there aren't enough cabins available to accommodate more than 3,100 guests who are currently on the Triumph. Additionally, a ship-to-ship transfer at sea would be considered too risky," he said. 

Hmmm—all of their ships are in service? So you’re going to let 3,100 “guests” slosh through sewage for five days, just not to inconvenience other “guests” on your other cruises?

Nor do I know how difficult a ship-to-ship transfer would be. I’m suspicious, grammatically speaking, of any sentence that has this shaky, waffling construction—“would be considered too risky.” Is it risky or not?

It was all about the bottom line, of course. But I think it was about something more. All of our talk about leadership and core values and corporate culture has fogged our minds, blinded our vision, turned us into worse yes-men than we ever were before. Nobody had the guts to tell Citibank or Bank of America or Merrill Lynch, “hey, these subprime loans are gonna backfire!”

No one told Cahill, “hey, we gotta do whatever to get these people off the boat!”

Requiem for a Pope

There are, in fact, some things to like about him. He’s fond of cats—he fed them around the neighborhood, and was lent a grey tabby when he went to a festival in Australia. He’s also a good pianist, whose favorite composer is Mozart. True, he didn’t say what his predecessor said after a performance by the Chicago Symphony, but that’s a pretty funny line to beat.*

Right—so we’ve gotten that out of the way, we’ve stated the little good that can be said of him. Though there might be one other good thing for lesbians and gay men to say about Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger: he wasn’t on our side.

Look, would you want a friend like that?

“It was a failed papacy,” said a student, who attends mass every Sunday, who is on the editorial board of the biggest newspaper in Puerto Rico, and who reads The New York Times every day. That’s why he could tell me the remark of a cardinal speaking—of course—anonymously. “The single beneficial thing that this pope ever did for his church was resign.”

Ouch.

And now that he has put himself out of the way of doing more harm, my feelings may be turning a bit.

He was and wasn’t a Nazi. Yes, he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, but that was mandatory. He also served in the German army during World War. Here's what one source has to say:

Joseph Ratzinger was a member of an anti-aircraft unit protecting a BMW factory that used slave labor from the Dachau concentration camp to make aircraft engines, but he was drafted into the military and didn’t have any choice in the matter. In fact, Ratzinger also says that he never fired a shot and never participated in any combat. Later he was transferred to a unit in Hungary where he set up tank traps and watched as Jews were rounded up for transport to death camps. Eventually he deserted and became a prisoner of war.

Right—so we have a pope capable of watching Jews being rounded up for transport to a death camp. I’ll be honest: one question that has haunted me for most of my life is what I would have done had I been, as Ratzinger was, confronted with the question of acquiescing or challenging the evil that was Nazism.

Ratzinger took the middle path. Serving in the military was obligatory, so he served. Others didn’t, though that came at a great cost. A few hundred yards from Ratzinger’s childhood home, a family was hiding a young soldier and member of the German resistance, Hans Braxenthaler. The SS regularly searched homes, so it was no secret that the resistance existed. As well, a neighbor whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector had this to say:

“It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others. The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.”

Even more chilling, however, is that in 1941—when Ratzinger would have been 14 or 15—a cousin of his afflicted with Down’s Syndrome was seized and murdered by the Nazis under their eugenics program.

So we have a pope who confronts evil by joining in tepidly and then deserting the army in April of 1945. Did anyone notice? The army was in tatters at that point. 

After this, he resumes his studies in the seminary, and then becomes an academic. There, he excelled, earning praise from his students—he was diligent, committed, and always well prepared.

He should have stayed there, and probably wishes he had. But in 1977, he’s appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising. And it’s then that the first mud stain on the white robe appears. Ratzinger approves the transfer of a sex predator to another parish, barely days after the priest begins “treatment.”

Ratzinger then gets sent to Rome, where his is appointed Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is current Vatican lingo for the inquisition, and Ratzinger is up for the job. Part of which is to stamp down on any whiff of liberalism that might injudiciously drift across his gaze. The Jesuits get kicked, as do liberal priests everywhere. The other part of the job was to enforce a document called Crimen Sollicitationis—a document from 1962 that declared that all investigations in the Catholic Church were confidential.

Yeah?

It’s true, Ratzinger didn’t actually say “don’t go to the cops if you’ve got a predator priest,” but did he have to? Given the culture and history, just saying “these investigations are confidential” is more than enough.

Worse, somebody did call him on it. In Milwaukee, the church had a real problem with a priest named Lawrence Murphy, who took time out from his loving care of deaf kids to molest some 200 of them. The Cardinal wants to defrock him, but guess what? The church statute of limitations had run out. What to do?

The archbishop of Milwaukee writes to Rome, to Ratzinger directly.

Twice.

And never gets a response. Here’s Wikipedia quoting Archbishop Weakland:

"The evidence was so complete and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state," and complained that Vatican tribunals moved too slowly.[2]

Reduced? Your word, archbishop, not mine….

The ironic thing is that Ratzinger did it all right. He met with the victims, he prayed with them, he shared their sorrow. He apologized and apologized and then apologized some more. He did far more than his previous boss.

It wasn’t enough, and it didn’t go away. In the end, it will be the first thing one remembers about Ratzinger. His obituary will start, “Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, whose papacy was marred by the sex abuse scandal, died…”

For all his love of Mozart and cats, I wonder if in some way the guy had a chance. He grew up in a toxic environment. Here’s Ratzinger’s biographer on the subject:

John L. Allen, Jr. says that anti-Semitic violence, displacement, deportation, death, and even resistance turned the town into “an over-populated lunatic asylum of hopeless inhabitants.”

For all his hard-lined theological views, he appears morally weak, if not terminally ill or dead. All his life, he saw evil…

…and went along with it.

*Pope John Paul II left a Chicago church, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had just played Bruckner. A deafening roar rises from the crowd. The pope lifts his arms and silences them, remarking, “Please, I’m just the pope, not the Chicago Symphony.”     

Out There

She’s a nice kid, and she’s very good to me, as they all are. I give her two dollars and she gives me change and excellent coffee, which is a fair deal. Or I give her more money and she brings me food, and I sit and munch and feel that there are people around me. I need that—an empty house can be menacing when the husband leaves for work, and you remember a life that got shredded on a Friday morning two years ago.

So I like Nicole, and Nicole, it turns out, likes guns. I know this because I had printed a copy of the list of 33,050 randomly generated names and was showing it to her and Sebastián, her coworker. Sebastián is in my camp, Nicole is not.

Her father is an armed guard, and there are guns all over the house. Well, no—she says that her father keeps his guns in a safe at all times, except for the gun he keeps in his bedside table. And he taught her gun safety from an early age, even before she got a gun license at age thirteen. Keep your safety on at all times, he told her. Point your gun at the ground always, he advised.

The problem, said Nicole, is irresponsible people, not guns. She and her father are responsible people. And her father tells her repeatedly, “I hope you never have to use a gun, but I want you to know how in case you do.”

I told her—your dad’s a responsible guy. And at some point I began to see the difference between the gun people and the gun control people. I think I see it now, why there’s this gulf between us. Simply put, the gun people are living in and with fear, with the possibility of danger and violence. The rest of us are not.

Even on an island where crime is rampant and violent crime no less, it never occurs to me to be afraid. I did the trot this morning, greeting my neighbors, walking briskly towards a stranger. Did I think for a moment that he was anyone else but a guy getting exercise like me? Did it cross my mind—it’s just him and me. What if he’s packing?

Nah, I was too busy listening to Bach. 

But for some people, the possibility of danger and violence is real—so real that these people literally and figuratively arm themselves. And they regard the rest of us with a mix of incredulity and derision—can we really be so stupid about the world around us? Hey, it’s not always pretty, the stuff that goes down….

No, it’s not. But I have lived over half a century—more than half my life—and never been in a situation where I needed a gun.

I have been, however, in many situations or more precisely states where it would have hugely inadvisable to have a gun. There’s a reason for the term “murderous rage,” and I might not have seen dawn, those days when I was deeply depressed, if there had been a pistol in the nightstand as I rolled sleeplessly around in bed.

Taí writes an E-mail with some advice her friend gave to her. Get a bulletproof vest and wear it visibly, she says. And goes on to say—she’s a little uneasy too. There are a lot of nuts out there, as well as a lot of guns. And if a murder can happen at a public square at midnight—as it did a month ago, and no one has yet been arrested—it can just as easily happen in broad daylight.

The logic of this goes by me, since anyone who wanted to kill me could simply shoot me between the eyes. Or better, from behind me, at the base of my cerebral cavity. But that’s not my real fear.

My fear is of having to deal with the anger and scorn of people who feel threatened, who see me as an enemy, and who are in the mood and mindset to fight, not take flight. By good luck, I’m a tall guy, which has served me well. Nobody pushes me around.

Be honest—I hate fights. I hate raised voices and widened eyes and the chin thrust belligerently out. Even now, my stomach churns a bit, thinking about it. There are people who thrive on conflict—I do not.

So why do it? Why not sit home and write the letters and make the calls and post on Facebook? Why put myself out there, when I am so much not an “out there” kind of guy?

Maybe the answer is somewhere in the document below.

The bound copy of the list of 33,050 names

Plus ça change...

Well, well—time to dust off the high school French, which I did by consulting, as always, Wikipedia. So here it is: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Or I suppose I could tax my brains a bit and figure out who said—in Latin—that there is nothing new under the sun.

Certainly not the Caribbean sun, shining so brightly on tourists and dropping conveniently away when it’s time to do what we do very well down here.

Smuggling.

Here’s how it works. We send up the drugs. You send down the guns.

That white powder that isn’t talc but is occasionally mixed with it has to come through somewhere. It used to be Mexico, but then things got a little hot up there. So the game changed to Puerto Rico, which famously, in the words of an early 20^th century US Supreme Court decision, is not the United States but “pertains” to the United States. (Anybody up there who can explain that, please give me a call. Been wondering for years….) In other words, no customs. If you can get the drugs in, you can send them in any aircraft, cargo container, or package through the US mail or FedEx.

So the drug traffickers have recreated the Middle Passage, though in this case it’s South America to the Caribbean, not Africa, and now it drugs, not slaves. But don’t imagine that it was Sam Walton who dreamed up logistics, though he did further it a bit. Nobody loves an empty ship.

And here, I take a deep breath and concede—maybe—a point to the NRA. “Outlaw guns and then only the outlaws will have guns!” they cry. (Nice turn of phrase, hunh? Great little marketing slogan….) Because Puerto Rico has probably the strictest laws in the nation about guns.

For one thing, they’re not considered a right. But let the Orlando Sentinel tell the story:

Buying a gun legally in Puerto Rico takes six to 18 months to complete paperwork and convince a police board that the applicant needs a gun. Puerto Rico does not consider gun ownership a right, said Edgardo Nieves, Rossello's spokesman.

By comparison, Florida residents only need to turn to a flea market, gun show or their newspaper's classified advertising section to buy without restriction.

And happily for everyone but the victims, it’s quite profitable. You buy a gun from Craig’s List for three hundred bucks, and you can sell it for three or four times as much on the streets of San Juan.

Well, with a deal like that, everybody wants in, right? So you’ve got your own little business started and established—a punto that is selling cocaine and heroin and god knows whatever else. And then some punk decides to move in on your territory. You gonna let that happen?

Fortunately, there are people who can help you. Sure, it costs, but money is not a problem. This is a business expense.

Now there used to be a little honor—the hit man killed in the punto, not stores or restaurants, or anywhere they could find the intended victim. So if you weren’t suicidal, you stayed away from the puntos. Now, if you’re not suicidal you stay home.

Two points. I may not be ready to concede the logic of “only the outlaws will have guns” to the NRA. It may be if the rest of the nation had our strict gun laws, there wouldn’t be the price difference that makes trafficking them into Puerto Rico so attractive. It might also be that there would be far fewer guns in the fifty states.

Second point—I read yesterday about the Mayors Against Illegal Guns. They are a significant group of 800 mayors; the mayors of Clairon, Clarks Summit, and Felton—to name three towns in Pennsylvania—have all signed a pledge. They’re gonna fight illegal guns, which make up the vast majority of weapons in Puerto Rico.

Well, we have a new mayor in San Juan, a lady who is busy trying to come up with the 800 million dollars that she needs to run the city. That’s daunting.

But what about the old mayor? The guy that put up all the signs announcing the projects that never got the money to get done? He’d been around for 12 years; in that time, why hadn’t he signed on? The group, by the way, is headed by the mayors of New York City and Boston. So they found the time…..

I’ve written about two of the three ingredients in this explosive stew. Here’s the third…

…money.