SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
June 2005
Volume 12, Number 6
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> Money
-> Letter from the Editor
-> Papal Dogmatism
-> Making Musicals
Nuggets (plus electronic Exclusives)
List of Columns Reprinted in This Issue
FEATURES
Money
(page 1)
While watching old movies (see "Making Musicals,"
page 5), I'm constantly jolted by casual reminders of how
the value of money has changed even in my own lifetime.
In one 1948 film, for example, a chorus girl hesitates to
quit her job: it pays her a steady $15 a week.
I myself can remember when $15 bought a week's
groceries, if I could forgo steak. I can remember when a
dime bought a comic book, a Coke, a cup of coffee, or a
phone call. In 1956 my parents bought a summer cottage in
northern Michigan for $5,000. My first new car, in 1967,
cost $2,400. Old prices cause me intense nostalgia. Then
there are the ones that affect me most: the prices of
books. As a boy I bought paperback Shakespeares for 35¢
each; now they start at $3.95.
On reflection, though, the old prices also cause me
to simmer. What they really show is not how good the old
days were, but how our money has been devalued. Am I the
only one who takes inflation personally?
When the pseudo-private Federal Reserve System was
established in 1913, one of its chief announced purposes
was to prevent inflation, to stabilize the value of
money. The Fed has always baffled me, but you needn't
understand how it works in order to see that for more
than ninety years now, it has evidently had the opposite
effect.
Modern man assumes both the legitimacy of the state
and its responsibility for maintaining a more or less
sound currency. To the extent that the state devalues the
currency, directly or otherwise, it becomes a giant
counterfeiting operation, victimizing nearly all its
subjects (except those relatively few who figure out how
to benefit by the process).
The U.S. Constitution says Congress shall have power
to "coin" money and "regulate" its value; this is now
taken to authorize the printing of paper money and the
manipulation of its value. But "coin" meant making
=coins,= and "regulate" meant =regularizing.= And as the
lawyer-economist Edwin Vieira reminds us, a "dollar"
meant a fixed amount of specie: exactly 271.25 grains of
silver.
Delegating these powers to another agency, including
a "private" one, has no constitutional warrant; nor does
changing the very meaning of "dollar" and substituting
paper for silver. Unless the clever people who operate
the system have no idea what they're doing, we're talking
about an ongoing, and very successful, conspiracy to
defraud and rob the American public.
As with warfare, currency manipulation is so widely
accepted as a normal and proper function of the state
that those who bother trying to "expose" it are usually
dismissed as cranks and ignored. But it hardly needs
exposing. What needs explaining is why even the great
majority of its victims see nothing wrong with it.
Letter from the Editor
(page 2)
Dear Loyal Readers,
Those of you who are also e-mail subscribers or
subscribers to the WANDERER have heard that I have been
in the hospital twice in the past couple of months. My
first episode -- a hospital stay of nine days just after
John Paul II died -- involved an infected foot. I had
foot surgery and, even after my release from Inova
Fairfax Hospital in Virginia, had to wear a contraption
called the "Vac" to drain my wound.
About a month later, as I was still recovering, my
son Mike noticed that my speech was slurred and my facial
muscles were sagging on one side. I was also finding it
hard to concentrate and even to type. Mike suspected I'd
had a mild stroke and called my doctor who, after a quick
examination, sent me back to the hospital. There tests on
the old noggin confirmed the suspicion.
Then came the shocker. I got a phone call from my
older son, Kent, 38, who told me that he'd also had a
stroke. His was more severe than mine, paralyzing his
left side. He walks with a cane now, but he's expected to
make a full recovery.
You can accept the signs of your own mortality, but
when your children are afflicted, there are no words for
what you feel. Kent is the oldest of my four, and maybe
the most beloved among those who know him. I've always
been especially proud of him: I've often thought he grew
up before I did. Relatives, friends, and fellow workers
are eager to help him now, so I don't have to worry that
he'll be alone, though I can't visit him yet myself.
Still, until now he has always been self-sufficient, and
it's painful to know that today he depends on others for
so many things he has always done independently. Then
again, I tearfully remembered the days when he was a
little boy who depended on me.
I seem to be bouncing back all right; my speech is
no longer slurred, and more often than not my fingers hit
the right keys when I type. My army of therapists finds
my improvement encouraging, and friends are rallying
round, God bless them.
I am grateful for the many good wishes, prayers, and
Masses that have been offered for my recovery. I am
praying for all of you, too, in gratitude for your
generosity.
Sincerely,
Joe Sobran
Editor
Papal Dogmatism
(pages 3-4)
Confined to my sickbed, I've been watching more
movies than usual. I recently watched an oddly disturbing
one from the dollar bin at Wal-Mart I'd never heard of
before: THE CONFLICT (aka CATHOLICS), a drama about a
monastery besieged by the modern world.
Released in 1973, it stars the excellent Trevor
Howard, who died in 1988, and Martin Sheen and Michael
Gambon. According to the credits, it's based on Brian
Moore's novel CATHOLICS, which I haven't read; but
another Moore novel resulted in BLACK ROBE, an
extraordinary film about a French missionary among
Indians in seventeenth-century Canada.
Howard is the abbot of an Irish monastery, where the
old Tridentine Mass is still celebrated, attracting
hundreds of worshipers and even causing a stir in the
media. Rome sends a young priest, Father James Kinsella
(Sheen), an apostle of "social change" and "liberation
theology," to deliver a rebuke to the abbot and order
that the new liturgy be adopted. But the abbot and the
monks stubbornly and eloquently refuse to abandon the old
rite. They still wear the traditional plain brown habit
of their order; Father Kinsella dresses in street clothes
and is mistaken, at first sight, for a layman. (He has to
keep explaining that he's a priest.)
During a heated argument, Father Kinsella warns the
abbot that he may be transferred from his beloved
monastery if he disobeys Rome's directives. Unity, he
points out, is necessary to the Church. Not only the old
Mass but private confession must go. And at this point we
realize that the story we're watching is set in the
future -- or what, in 1973, appeared to be the future.
The young priest reminds the old abbot that "Vatican IV"
has mandated the changes he's enforcing. Rome has even
declared that the Mass is merely a "symbolic ritual" and
revoked the doctrine of transubstantiation. (We learn
that the shrine at Lourdes has been shut down.)
Resistance now appears not only futile, but
pointless. Suddenly the abbot capitulates. Obedience is
the rule of his life and, standing on his authority, he
orders the other monks to comply too. The Catholic Church
they have known, loved, and tried to preserve has ceased
to exist. The abbot tenders his resignation and asks to
be transferred to some place where he can live as an
ordinary monk.
Father Kinsella is puzzled by the abbot's abrupt
surrender. He asks for an explanation. The abbot confides
that he has long since lost his belief in God and has
just been going through the motions for many years. He
can accept the new order, in the end, because he no
longer believes in the old one. He is tied to the Church
only by a lifetime of habit.
Father Kinsella, who has never known the old faith,
sympathizes with him now and refuses to accept his
resignation. The two men no longer have fatal
differences; both belong to an organization in which
neither believes. The young priest, his mission
accomplished, returns to Rome.
"Prayer is the only miracle," the abbot tells the
other monks at the end of the film, as he tries tearfully
to lead them in prayer. Unity has been achieved, but at
the price of faith. The Church itself has committed
apostasy.
THE CONFLICT May be regarded as a Catholic horror
film, though I suppose liberal Catholics would regard its
ending as a happy one. In any case, it now seems dated.
It represents orthodox fears and liberal hopes of a
generation ago: limitless "change," in both liturgy and
doctrine. It shows a future that never came to pass.
What has happened since then? In a nutshell, John
Paul II. His long papacy encouraged and revivified
orthodox Catholics as much as it disheartened liberals.
In fact it inspired some Catholics to hope for a fuller
return to the Church as she was before Vatican II. But at
least it's now clear that there won't be a "Vatican IV."
As I watched John Paul's funeral from a hospital
bed, I felt joy at the tremendous warmth he'd inspired
all over the world. In spite of my own sins and faults,
which had never been more painfully obvious to me than at
that moment, I sensed something even greater than his
personal greatness: the wholeness and unity of the
Universal Church, saying good-bye to its beloved old
pastor. It was as if my soul were being carried like a
little raft on the surge of an ocean of grace.
Over the 26 years of his papacy, John Paul had
become one of the best-loved men who ever lived. He was,
in the words of Jonathan Kwitny's biography, MAN OF THE
CENTURY. Contrary to the standard charge of his liberal
critics, he never tried to "reverse" the changes of
Vatican II; he always celebrated the Council and
continued its work. But he refused to allow it to be
hijacked for the purpose of indiscriminate "reform." The
accusation that he was "reversing" it came from people
who pretended that the Council itself had reversed 2,000
years of Catholicism. John Paul always insisted that it
had continued and strengthened orthodox tradition.
When he died, many of the eulogies managed to avoid
any mention of Jesus Christ. These included those of
neoconservatives, who praised him as a Cold Warrior
(which he wasn't) and likened him to Ronald Reagan, as if
there could be no higher compliment to a successor of
Peter than to place him in the company of the Gipper.
True, he had done much to bring about the collapse of the
Soviet empire, but his anti-Communism didn't make him a
blind partisan of the West. He was also critical of
Western materialism, capitalism, militarism, and sexual
licentiousness; he opposed both American wars on Iraq.
His authorized biographer, George Weigel, an American
Catholic neocon, even tried to "correct" his opposition
to the latest Iraq war.
In different ways, praise of the Polish pope implied
that he was to be judged by political standards. The
question, however, was whether he had led the Catholic
Church faithfully and well. Most Catholics had found him
an inspiring leader; whether he had been a successful
disciplinarian was another matter. His own evident love
of orthodoxy did little to curb disorder and even active
heresy at lower levels of the Church.
But when THE CONFLICT was made, it was still
possible to see the Vatican as destabilizing
Catholicism's customary ways. After the papacy of John
Paul II that is no longer true. And the election of
Benedict XVI as his successor -- long hated by liberals
as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger -- underlines this. In fact,
liberals hate Benedict so much that they have already
forgotten how much they hated John Paul! Typical is Jane
Mayer of THE NEW YORKER, who attacks the new pope for his
"dogmatism"; she seems to be unaware that "dogma" isn't a
term of opprobrium in the Catholic Church. She doesn't
say what his dogmatism consists in, but it sounds vaguely
menacing, akin perhaps to the fanaticism of Osama bin
Laden.
The man who is now Pope Benedict laid his cards on
the table in a series of interviews 20 years ago,
published as THE RATZINGER REPORT (Ignatius), whose
precision and moderation must be frustrating to anyone
searching for scary quotations. Cardinal Ratzinger has
always been an urbane but uncompromising Catholic as well
as a sophisticated theologian. Like John Paul, he defends
Vatican II without being blind to the abuses committed in
its name. These interviews show him as especially
sensitive to liturgical corruption, including the
banality of the music now used in many churches. (He
himself is said to be an accomplished pianist, devoted to
Mozart.)
Precision might be said to be the chief
characteristic of Benedict's mind. He insists on clear
definitions; and as James Hitchcock has written, "Modern
culture is at its very root hostile to the act of
definition and prefers an endlessly fluid reality,
capable of being endlessly manipulated to serve the
purposes of history." What do liberals really want?
What, for example, would the Apostles' Creed look like
when they got through with it? Would there be anything
left of it? They are usually as vague about this as about
everything else.
As former prefect of the Holy Office, Cardinal
Ratzinger had the specific duty of fighting heresy. He
was admittedly responsible for the dismissal of such
theologians as Hans Kung and Charles Curran from teaching
positions at Catholic institutions, on grounds that what
they were teaching was at odds with Catholic teaching.
Now most organizations may, without incurring obloquy,
fire paid spokesmen who misrepresent their corporate
positions; but when the Catholic Church does this, it's
condemned as intolerance and persecution, and the
"victims" are regarded (not least by themselves) as if
they'd been burned at the stake, or subjected to
thumbscrews, merely for uttering innocent personal
opinions.
Liberal Catholics now constitute an aging "lost
generation," who are taking very hard the slow
realization that they are no longer the Church's Wave of
the Future. They sense that any clear definition of
Catholic doctrine threatens to define them right out of
the Church. But it's because of this very aversion to
clarifying their terms that they can't specify just what
makes the new Pope so sinister in their eyes. We have a
good idea what Benedict wants; but we can only guess at
what his "progressive" enemies want, except more
"progress."
By electing this close friend and partner of John
Paul II, the College of Cardinals has served notice that
it hopes to end a long period of chaos in the Church. Of
course letting the genie out of the bottle is a lot
easier than putting it back in. That is the challenge
facing Benedict XVI -- and maybe his successors too.
Making Musicals
(pages 5-6)
Anyone who complains about government security
measures, onerous as they are, has probably never tried
to open a DVD. During my recent confinement I've risked
fingernails, as well as a nail file, in attempts to do
so. All this in order to fight off boredom while barely
able to leave my room, let alone my house.
On the infrequent occasions when I could get to the
local Borders, I found myself buying more movies than
books. After watching SINGIN' IN THE RAIN and Laurence
Olivier's Shakespeare films a few times, I realized that
light musicals wear better than serious drama, however
great. So on my next excursion to Borders, I bought a
stack of famous musicals, which included lengthy and
fascinating documentaries on how these films were made.
The documentaries gave me enormous respect for one
figure in Hollywood history. Consider the following two
dozen old MGM movie hits, most of them recognized
classics: CABIN IN THE SKY, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, THE
CLOCK, THE HARVEY GIRLS, ZIEGFELD FOLLIES, TILL THE
CLOUDS ROLL BY, THE PIRATE, EASTER PARADE, TAKE ME OUT TO
THE BALL GAME, THE BARKLEYS OF BROADWAY, ON THE TOWN,
ANNIE GET YOUR GUN, ROYAL WEDDING, SHOW BOAT, AN AMERICAN
IN PARIS, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, THE BAND WAGON, BRIGADOON,
IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER, KISMET, INVITATION TO THE
DANCE, SILK STOCKINGS, GIGI, and BELLS ARE RINGING. Apart
from the studio, what do they all have in common?
They were all produced by Arthur Freed, once a huge
name in the movie industry. Freed (1894-1973), born
Arthur Grossman in South Carolina, was a noted lyricist
(SINGIN' IN THE RAIN used many of the hits he'd written
decades earlier with tunesmith Nacio Herb Brown) and had
appeared in vaudeville with the Marx Brothers before
joining MGM in 1929, when Irving Thalberg ran it; he was
assistant producer of THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), whose huge
success led to his elevation to producer.
In the movies, producers get little of the glory
that goes to actors, singers, dancers, and sometimes
directors. Even film buffs give them little attention.
Yet the producer is usually the man who, in Hollywood,
actually conceives the whole project, then has to
assemble and coordinate all the elements. During the
Freed era, MGM featured such stars as Clark Gable, Judy
Garland, Greta Garbo, Greer Garson, and Cary Grant, just
to start with the G's (and omitting Spencer Tracy,
Katherine Hepburn, James Stewart, Myrna Loy, Elizabeth
Taylor, and countless others). Other huge box-office
draws of the day, though their fame has faded, were
Mickey Rooney, William Powell, Nelson Eddy, Jeannette
MacDonald, and Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller. For musicals,
MGM's forte until 1960, Freed could choose among Garland,
Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby,
Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, Mario Lanza, Cyd Charisse,
Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connor, Betty Hutton, and
Esther Williams (the mermaid who was Hollywood's top
female draw for five straight years). The studio's noted
directors included King Vidor, Erich von Stroheim, Fritz
Lang, George Cukor, Victor Fleming, and the peerless
Vincente Minnelli; late in his career, Busby Berkeley
moved to MGM too. Freed put all of them to good use.
One of the myriad talents he hired, the prodigiously
talented Andre Previn, has called the secret of Freed's
success "mediocrity." By this he meant not an absence of
artistry, but a positive quality: a wisely modest
ambition to entertain, without aiming too high. Freed had
an almost infallible sense of what would work in a
movie. And his performers recalled, long after his death,
that they'd always found him encouraging; bringing out
their best was one of his crowning gifts. The words
"producer" and "executive" don't begin to suggest his
real contribution to a delightful popular art form, which
he brought to its perfection as an invisible presiding
genius. It's a pity that he remains largely unknown to
the moviegoing public.
As a temporary invalid, I've been watching the old
musicals with an interest and appreciation I've never had
before. It may be a bit late in life for me to launch a
new career as a dance critic, especially one plagued with
chronically sore feet; but I always feel entitled to
sound off on popular entertainment, of which I remain a
greedy consumer.
As they say, they don't make 'em like that anymore.
Entertainers no longer exist; everyone is an artist now.
A mere entertainer smiles; he wants to please. His credo
was expressed in Dr. Johnson's famous words, "For we who
live to please must please to live." The artist, on the
other hand, doesn't smile; he broods. He is preoccupied
with deeper things, and he affects not to care whether he
pleases anyone or not, though he may still count the
receipts and haggle about his contract, Give me the
entertainer any day.
As Dr. Johnson also observed, "No man is a hypocrite
in his pleasures." When you're being entertained, you
don't have to put on airs and pretend you're engaged in a
form of anything that might be called edification or
self-improvement. By a certain age, which I've long
passed, you're probably edified to capacity already, and
you may as well just enjoy yourself.
That's the nice thing about the genial old American
musical, on both stage and screen. Without insulting your
intelligence, and while displaying an unpretentious
intelligence of its own, it asks only that you enjoy
yourself, and it assumes full responsibility for pleasing
you. You don't have to be as smart as Cole Porter to
enjoy Cole Porter.
The Italian Renaissance prized a quality it called
"sprezzatura" -- a seemingly casual attitude toward one's
own accomplishments: "Oh, that?" it shrugs. "It was
nothing, really." A gentleman wasn't supposed to have
worked hard at anything, especially if he had. Fencing,
dancing, singing were supposed to have come naturally to
him.
We see this aristocratic quality superbly in Fred
Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz in Omaha, by the way).
His dancing has an offhand elegance that, as the cliche
has it, looks effortless. You'd never guess, from
watching him, how much hard work actually went into it;
he'd rehearse until his feet bled. His most famous
partner, Ginger Rogers, let it be known (after they'd
parted company) that she deserved credit for doing
everything he did, only "I had to do it backward and in
high heels." That was a fair point, but claiming credit
for it wasn't in the code of "sprezzatura." (I was
unpleasantly surprised to learn recently that the
Astaire-Rogers films, long available on video, aren't yet
on DVD.)
"Sprezzatura" is subtly absent from the dancing of
Gene Kelly. He may have been, technically, Astaire's
equal, but to me, at least, he makes dancing look like
the hard work it really is. I find him more exhausting
than exhilarating to watch, without the angelic levity
that makes you feel that Astaire might have gone on
dancing forever. Even Kelly's geniality looks slightly
forced; I admire his teeth, but when he grins he seems to
have too many of them.
The divine Cyd Charisse danced on the screen with
both men; with Kelly in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, BRIGADOON,
IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER, and INVITATION TO THE DANCE and
with Astaire in THE BAND WAGON and SILK STOCKINGS. If her
awesomely versatile dancing has any shortcomings, I'm the
wrong man to point them out, unless having only two legs
can be called a shortcoming. Even if you hold no
particular brief for bipeds, she makes two seem exactly
the right number somehow; and if she were one-legged, men
would still whistle at that one. But her great beauty is
less remarkable than her utter grace in motion.
Because Charisse, now in her eighties, looks so tall
on film, I was startled to learn that she stood only
5'6", an inch shorter than Kelly and three inches shorter
than Astaire, who once jokingly threatened her, "If
you're going to wear high heels, I'm wearing a hat!"
It saddens me to note that Charisse made her film
debut in the infamous Roosevelt-Stalin propaganda movie
MISSION TO MOSCOW (for Warner Brothers, not MGM), though
I hadn't noticed her in it when I watched it a few years
back. Obviously hers couldn't have been a dancing role,
or the world would have remembered. (Even more
distressingly I've read that lovely Lena Horne's career
suffered because of her "close association" with that old
Stalinist Paul Robeson.)
The less we know about great entertainers' private
lives, the better; but sometimes they insist on drawing
us into their misery. None illustrates this better than
Judy Garland, whose marriage to Vincente Minnelli ended
when she found him in bed with a boy; after that her
personal unhappiness seemed to become the theme of her
public career, the cloyingly naive "Over the Rainbow"
yielding to the throbbing bathos of "The Man Who Got
Away."
By 1960 the movie musical was a dying genre. Though
the biggest-grossing musical of all time, THE SOUND OF
MUSIC, was still to come in 1964, this was actually a
Broadway hit adapted to film rather than a movie musical
proper. Public taste in music as well as cinema was
changing, as witness the success of Elvis Presley's
movies; rock 'n' roll had little use for either melodies
or lyrics like those of Freed's heyday. The medium no
longer catered to adults, and the full irony of the
change may be gathered from what "adult entertainment"
has come to mean since then.
NUGGETS
SO SORRY: The U.S. Senate has apologized for its failure,
many moons ago, to pass anti-lynching legislation. But
you have to remember that in that atavistic era, laws
against murder were still generally left to the states.
The Senate is actually repenting for having respected the
Tenth Amendment. We can be sure it won't happen again.
(page 9)
ANOTHER ONE WALKS: Michael Jackson now joins O.J. Simpson
and Robert Blake in the honor roll of California's most
famous acquitted entertainers. The system works -- at
least if you're a celebrity. (page 10)
AT LAST: Well, well. The mysterious "Deep Throat" of the
Woodward-Bernstein Watergate investigation has finally
stepped forth from the shadows: Mark Felt, now 91, but in
those days a high-ranking FBI official whom Richard Nixon
had passed over for promotion. If you're too young to
remember what all the fuss was about, relax. More on this
next month. (page 11)
BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE: Hillary Clinton, it already
appears probable to certain, will be the Democrats'
presidential nominee in 2008. But Bill insists she hasn't
decided yet whether to run. The husband is always the
last to know. (page 12)
Exclusive to electronic media:
JUST WONDERING: Is it my imagination, or is Saddam
Hussein starting to look like Abraham Lincoln? It may
just be the beard; we have no Matthew Brady photos of
Honest Abe in his jockey shorts.
REPRINTED COLUMNS
(pages 7-12)
* It's Still the Same Old Story (May 5, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050505.shtml
* The News and the Good News (May 10, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050510.shtml
* Kyd Stuff (May 12, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050512.shtml
* The Press and Patriotism (May 17, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050517.shtml
* Movies as History (May 19, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050519.shtml
* The Gray Lady Shows Her Colors (June 9, 2005)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050609.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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