Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-28-16

I was a young boy in 1961 when I heard on my transistor radio that a Russian “cosmonaut,” Yuri Gagarin, had orbited the earth. A few years after the Soviets had launched Sputnik – the first man-made satellite – into earth orbit I remember being amazed at these scientific developments, as I was aware that the American government was scrambling to keep pace.

I was aware because 1957 had been declared the International Geophysical Year, and that all sorts of school programs and textbooks had begun posing the challenge to nervous 12-year-olds like me the rhetorical question: “You don’t want us to fall behind the Communists, do you?” So kids seriously thought of doing their physics and chemistry homework, and dreamed of being astronauts instead of cowboys or G-Men.

In my naiveté, after hearing that radio news bulletin, I scrambled for pencil and paper, as if this moment would be lost to history if I didn’t write the name of Yuri Gagarin. I recall that I could only phonetically scrawl, “Eeuree Gaggarin.”

Ironically, many people have forgotten Gagarin and Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Gus Grissom, Gene Cernan, and many others, including astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders, who read from the Bible to earthlings during a lunar mission. Even President Obama seems to have forgotten a lot of the mission of space exploration, as he transferred many American capabilities to Russia.

There is no more Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Twenty-five years ago many nations of Eastern Europe and the “Warsaw Pact” foreswore Communism, with hardly a drop of blood shed. Other nations have discovered freedom – sometimes with steps forward and back along the way – and the very latest movements are toward nationalist pride, and the rejection of centralized control.

Winds of liberty blow across the globe. Except in spots like North Korea and Cuba.

These memories returned this week when Fidel Castro died, aged 90. He was 90 in human years – some would say “inhuman years.” He kept alive ancient strains of selfish totalitarianism, a regime built on hate and resentments rather than love and constructive fellowship. Democracy might not be the panacea for every society, but you can be suspicious of the leader who cloaks his tyranny in mantles like “peoples’ republic” and “democracy” when self-determination is forbidden.

I was 10 when a TV in the local bowling alley was turned to the news, and the anchor warned parents against letting their children see the disturbing footage… so of course I gazed intently. Black and white movies of Havana streets with dead bodies and pools of blood. “Batista flees” was a headline I remember in the New York Daily News about the dictator, scarcely less brutal or corrupt than Castro would be, whom Fidel routed. My father quoted the New York Times description of Castro as an “agrarian reformer.”

A year or two later Castro declared himself a Soviet-style Socialist and visited a United Nations General Assembly session in New York. He famously stayed in a shabby hotel uptown; trashed his rooms; and embraced Soviet leader Khrushchev. I attempted one of my first caricatures and political cartoons as a budding artist – it was a natural subject because Castro dominated the news in those days. The bay of Pigs invasion. The Cuban Missile Crisis.

Through the years he settled in as the hemisphere’s resident dictator, often shunned on the world stage and frequently accommodated by neighboring and worldwide economies.

My wife, as a girl, had neighbors who fled Castro and had their sugar lands confiscated. I worked summers in college at a factory manned almost exclusively by Cuban émigrés. Many of them – some, doctors and lawyers whose credentials were not yet recognized in the US – told me with tears in their eyes of murders they witnessed at the hands of Castro’s police; and telling me earnestly how they appreciated freedom and loved America probably more than I did. I eventually met Fidel’s sister Juanita, whose shame and abhorrence of Cuban Communism was not matched by the other sibling Raul.

Cuba remained grindingly poor during Castro’s term. He would bleat, and international leftists continue to maintain, that the US embargo was the cause. This was palpable nonsense. It was a policy not to engage in trade: not a blockade. Canada, other Latin countries, all of Europe, and of course the Soviets traded all they could; and provided aid to Cuba.

Three points are dispositive, especially as the media now will be awash in rosy nostalgia for the eccentric guy with the beard.

First, Cuba was, and remained, poor for precisely the same reason that the citizens of Socialist economies in Latin America, in Africa, and around the world, suffer poverty. Stifled initiative, inherent corruption, and artificial allocation of resources.

Second, there are thousands and thousands of Cubans who had their property confiscated or their businesses shuttered. My wife’s neighbors were sugar growers before they fled the island. Neither Cuban citizens nor American investors ever received compensation, even almost 60 year later. THAT is why Washington refused to “normalize” relations – that, and the righteous rage of hundreds of thousands who emigrated to the US with nothing their lives.

Finally, Castro summarily executed many opponents; imprisoned many more; set criminals and mental defects on boats alongside multitudes who braved the open sea in flimsy boats. His defenders in Noo Yawk and the media point to universal health care and free college in Cuba as glories of Castro’s regime, but have been unmoved for decades by closed churches, spying on Cuban citizens, and the denial of political activity.

Stooges like Jimmy Carter and John Kerry weep tears for Castro; popes like John Paul II and Benedict, surprisingly, visited him, and the current wearer of the Shoes of the Fisherman admired the dedicated Cuban atheist. Other people, the usual gang of leftists, love Castro for reasons of their own (romantic?) but more likely, and frankly, would be in favor of closing Christian churches in America, too; and suppressing political dissent, as in that promised land.

In a sense, Castro had more integrity than his apologists in America: you can trust a Communist to be a Communist. Liberals will excuse any offense if there is lip-service paid to “education,” “health,” or redistribution of someone else’s property (except their own). Castro was a wolf in wolf’s clothing, worse than Jesus’ memorable warning in Matthew 7:15.

And as Kipling wrote,
“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.”

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Click: Komm, Susser Tod

10-17-16

Once upon a time there was a president named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. No… I will start this story earlier, and in another way.

Once upon a time there was a different America. Different than we know now. Not only different presidents and candidates, but different manners and morals. Different standards. You and I could go back in time and might recognize places and relate to interactions. But it is possible that Americans of earlier times, if they could materialize in our midst today, would be lost and bewildered.

U. S. Grant, the superior general and inferior president, was known to like his cigars and whisky. After a dinner with a group of generals or politicians – those details are lost; but a group of men who enjoyed after-dinner cigars and whisky – one man rose and proposed to tell a story or two. He signaled that the humor would be bawdy (“purple,” in the day’s parlance, meaning naughty) by announcing, “I see there are no ladies present.”

Grant reportedly said, “No, but there are gentlemen present”; and told the man to leave. The good old days. Can you imagine?

Theodore Roosevelt, exuberant hunter and woodsman and cowboy, was sometimes photographed and frequently caricatured in informal attire, however was respectful of the dignity of the presidency. He chose frock coats and top hats. He hated newsreel cameras.

But almost every day the weather allowed, he played tennis on White House courts. Other presidents had “kitchen cabinets” – unofficial advisers and confidants who met in friendship or for policy brainstorming. TR’s was on the tennis court. Yet not one photograph exists of TR playing in his tennis whites.

At the end of his term the Tennis Cabinet met for one last time, and TR was presented with a gift from the assembled friends. Finally they were photographed as a group… in formal attire. Dignity (even if readers from 2016 think it was irrelevant) was important.

Now I will mention TR’s distant cousin, FDR. The nation knew that Franklin Roosevelt suffered from polio; that he was in braces, unable to walk, barely able to stand. He had run – sometimes literally – for vice president in 1920, hale, hearty, handsome. But then polio struck.

Common knowledge it was, but he seldom was photographed struggling with crutches or arm-braces. Occasionally a news photo showed him tightly, and awkwardly, gripping a podium. Or when sitting with Churchill and Stalin at a wartime conference, his leg-braces could be seen peeking between his pants-cuffs and his shoes.

Dignity on his part; respect on the part of photographers and newsreel cameramen.

Fast-forward to 1976. I covered a George Wallace rally in suburban Chicago during the Democrat primaries. “The Fighting Judge” was the victim of an assassin’s bullet four years previous. Paralyzed from the waist down, he was dependent upon wheelchairs and assistants.

In those days the press’s role had changed – on a track toward today’s blatant partisanship. Wallace was viewed with opprobrium by most of the liberal media for his earlier segregationist stands, as was the incumbent president, Nixon, for a variety of excuses and justifications.

At that rally, a few photos were snapped during the speech. And then reporters and news photographers gathered at the hall’s exit, where a car would meet Wallace, who waited in his wheelchair. When the car pulled up and opened its door, Wallace’s aides did what was necessary and routine. Nowadays these maneuvers can be effected differently, but that night, two men joined arms to raise Gov. Wallace like a bundle of bones, from underneath, and awkwardly trundled him into the seat of the car.

It was inelegant. Embarrassing, clearly, to Wallace. Which is why the assembled photographers of the press corps instantly snapped their flash photos for every nano-second of that clumsy scene. I never did see any such photos on front pages… but the reporters seemed intent on making Wallace uncomfortable.

My point is not so much about presidential dignity, itself (remember that Lyndon Johnson surprisingly lifted his shirt to show a gall-bladder scar; and Jimmy Carter chatted about his hemorrhoids), but more about society, that it has changed. Our culture is cheapened; we have lower standards; manners and morals are endangered species.

“F Bombs” are dropped with total-war intensity. Movies are replete with filthy language and filthier behavior. Young girls in malls are heard talking in ways that once would have embarrassed stevedores. Plotlines of TV shows deal in topics once too “delicate” to raise in family or social circles; that is, in private. Athletes who denigrate the flag are stoutly defended; athletes who affix slogans to their shoes, supporting the police, are threatened with suspension. An upside-down world.

In politics, which, traditionally, closely follows and carefully leads the normative values and aspirations of society, cutting-edge outrages now are indulged. Onetime taboos – for instance, allowing men into any public restroom where little girls might be – is suddenly decreed to be a Constitutional Right. And, as with monarchs or tyrants of old, is allowed with a stroke the pen, a punishable crime if violated.

In this year’s politics we have a candidate who is endorsed by “Evangelical” leaders and immediately salts his speeches with hells and damns. Instead of issues, we hear discussions of sex allegations about him, and about a former president. The latter’s wife, a current candidate herself, is cast as an enabler, almost a harridan persecuting the putative victims. Whether true or half-true, these become part of the evening news, press conferences, dinner-table conversations.

That other candidate continues the march toward re-defining customarily deviant behavior. Discovering “rights” in the same manner as the incumbent president, her new discoveries routinely offend traditions, always under fraudulent banners. Inventing “rights” for sexual deviants or criminal aliens is to dishonor those who fought for racial justice, female suffrage, and other civil rights.

So Hillary would enshrine privileges for “women” with male accessories, and pedophiles, into the Constitution. She would continue her predecessor’s crusade to denigrate Christians at home and abroad. She frequently boasts of her early, and continuing, passion for vulnerable children, yet evinces no second thoughts about the killing of viable children sucked from wombs in their ninth months, and murdered by a blade to the bases of their skulls. Suddenly, in Hillaryland, these children are “formerly vulnerable.”

Debates and speeches seem to be ghost-written, now, by headline-writers of supermarket tabloids. What, in 2020? Spitballs and water-balloons at 20 paces?

Our current level of discourse has been cheapened, I believe irretrievably. All these things I have mentioned – and myriad others – are, none of them, splotches of toothpaste that possibly can be put back in their tubes.

Are we on a slippery slope?

Rather, a vortex in the unfortunate toilet-bowl of contemporary life, almost flushed away completely. And deserving of it.

Anyone who teaches something different is arrogant and lacks understanding. Such a person has an unhealthy desire to quibble over the meaning of words. This stirs up arguments ending in jealousy, division, slander, and evil suspicions. These people always cause trouble. Their minds are corrupt, and they have turned their backs on the truth.
I Timothy 6: 4,5a NLT

They prove the truth of this Proverb: “A dog returns to its vomit.” And another says, “A washed pig returns to the mud.”
II Peter 2: 22 NLT

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Click: Sin City