Another Day of Life in PU

UVALDE, TX - Right now, just a couple of issues that I was wondering if someone might help me clarify: 

First off: Just how is it that we got here? (Nice, modest start to the discussion.)

How is it that, in a modern US society that vaunts, parades, brandishes, even weaponizes its compassion as never before (at least in my 63-year lifetime?) - a society that boasts a never-more-laborious concern for the seeming infinitude of possible human conditions, predicaments, choices, self-creations, -revisions and -transformations (gender- and otherwise) facing young people - how is it that, in such a fiercely, strenuously loving America, school bullying is not just alive and robust as ever, but seems to be intensifying its multimedia presence and pressure on a growing number of fronts. And even if we comfortably assume, in this post-Cold War world of Pinkerian Utopia (PU)*, that the bullying of today is not only less frequent, but actually far less cruel and more humane than it was, say, a generation ago, a question remains: why does it continue to provoke such horrific extremes of compensatory reaction - whether of rash suicide or, worst of all, of carefully orchestrated suicide/mass homicide?

*I.e., a place where - to use a very broad brush - basically everything is better, because practically everyone is so much richer (or was, until Trump, Putin, Orban, etc, came along). 

In short, if today's bullying is in fact so much "milder," do its repercussions have to be so much uglier and more tragic? And even if we concede that our advanced, omnipresent media technology is the main driver, what about other, more or less buffering means of recourse and refuge for our young people? Again, in this Pinkerian best-of-all-yet-possible-worlds, there seems to be no shortage of concerned adults eager to smooth our children's bumpiest gender and other identity transitions. Do we really, then, have so few other mature grownups both trained and ready to ease the more conventional passages of adolescence?

Second of all: In a Western world never more loud and vehement in its claims of being the force for peace and stability across the globe, how is it that its principal leader - America - continues to lead the world in entertainment products more or less saturated with violence? I mean here not just horror/slasher vehicles, or the more luridly "amoral" kinds of crime/murder/suspense dramas; in particular I'm thinking of stories - often working from a rather brutally stark good-vs-evil premise - that at times seem to celebrate an especially intensive and ugly kind of violence. And even where "celebrate" is too strong a word, how often is large-scale horrendous carnage made not just one of the main problems of the storyline, but far too often (and usually in the form of a spray of firepower) the one most decisive and effective resolution? 

All of which constant barrage of images and themes has - we can safely assume - virtually NO effect on the ways our already-troubled youngsters learn to "resolve" issues of loneliness, insecurity, rejection, media manipulation, harassment and (more and more these days?) even organized persecution. 

Right, so that's settled. But I do have a third question. Is it possible that, in spite of all our state-of-the-art, customized-as-never-before Global Compassion, our children are really no happier than their counterparts of  twenty-five years ago? But if anything, rather more confused, isolated, frustrated, adrift, angry? Or even simply less happy? 

Then again - somebody else might argue - it never really was about happiness, was it?

(Meanwhile, continue to pray for the parents, siblings, schoolmates, teachers and others who are mourning the victims, and in particular for their mutual prayer, support and availability to each other.)

Demonizing Simplicity

A going-away reception. 

"Yes sir, and it's all quite simple really [me talking to myself, at least initially] . . . you just get a gift . . . oh but don't forget the card (hey, what's a gift without a CARD - but remember, it's gotta be the RIGHT card) . . . and don't forget it's a buffet, so, again, a NICE bottle of wine . . . but what's wine without dessert . . . preferably something you made yourself . . . I mean, you do CARE about this person, don't you?!! . . ."

But if that's just Neurotic Me (who's merely attending) getting all bent out of shape, imagine what it may be like for even the more or less sane hosts/organizers?

It has got to be, I think, one of the more brilliant ingenuities of that Other Spiritual Realm, to take what might otherwise be - by Divine grace - a simple, kindly, unaffected human act or event of appreciation, and somehow grind it into something grimly intense . . . and perfectionist . . . and operationalized . . .  and  even oppressive . . .

In short, to take what might easily be a light (and yet strangely deep?), joyful, unburdening occasion, and make it into something awkward, pompous, over-cluttered and miserable.

Of course, again, that's just Neurotic Me talking. Along with that more or less tiny percentage of folks just like me. Because it can't possibly have anything to do with this never-more-laid-back, graciously diplomatic, loath-to-take-offense Global Age we're living in . . .

Indiscreet Confession of a Drunken (or otherwise de-inhibited) American Blobster

Well anyhow, here we are into the fourth week of Eastertide (Western calendar). With not so much as a glimmer of light at the end of the Russo-Ukrainean tunnel (assuming anyone important is actually looking, of course). So, knowing me as you do, you know I can hardly help but think: 

How brutally, dismally ironic. I mean, that our liturgical feasts of our Lord's Resurrection - both Catholic and Orthodox - should coincide with the ongoing crucifixion of Ukraine. (Or is it really more like the utter self-humiliation, and soon-to-be self-crucifixion, of Russia? It's getting a bit hard to tell these days.) 

And yet - in its own way, do you think - also fitting? Fitting, that this same overweeningly overconfident globe of the past 25 years, that somehow could not begin to muster a coherent, unified, unpolitical, rationally proportionate global response to global pandemic, should be no less cluelessly unable to preserve its own peace. But instead, and I suppose in keeping with its ever-mounting overconfidence, should insist on playing an unprecedentedly "chicken" game of brinkmanship with not just with Russia and Ukraine, but World War III. Almost as if we had learned - what, NOTHING? - from Covid? Nothing of our own - even our own Western - utter littleness, helplessness and vulnerability to vast events that, most of the time, we can only presume to control. And even then, mostly to our own immeasurable peril.

So now what? So far - and assuming I'm reading our mainstream media narrative correctly - we're using Russia's spiraling madness and moral disgrace as proof, if anything, of our own invulnerability, and impregnable moral high ground. Or maddest of all, as proof of our own unique moral fitness to rearrange and rule an increasingly un-ruleable world. Talk about breathtaking, if not suffocating, ambition. 

Golly. And here I'd imagined that, by now, our smarter-than-all-previous-history, globally-sensitive overlords would be dancing whole circles of diplomatic brilliance round everyone from Metternich and Talleyrand, to Bismarck and Salisbury, to George F Kennan and John F Kennedy. (Then again - one might argue - when you have already for a generation been managing a global economy of near-seamless just-in-time co-ordination, who needs diplomacy anymore? Who says the most hamfistedly arrogant corporation isn't ten times more clever than the subtlest, shrewdest country? And if so, then who needs the patience, much less the humility and vigilance, required to negotiate anything with anyone? In short, who needs anything but ever more flawless, seamlessly global co-ordination, technique and procedure?)

On the other hand, it just might all prove to have been worth it. Yes, even at the glowing risk of global conflagration. What's a little wind-borne radiation compared to the chance of securing, once and for all, a seriously just-in-time-commercially-integrated world empire? But now indulge me, if you can, a bit further: Suppose that the one missing centerpiece of that empire should be the once-and-for-all devolution/dissolution of Russia. For my part, I've long held the notion that the soundest cornerstone of a unified globe was a seamless, borderless Euro-Asia. Meaning, in plainer English, a greater Eurasian land-mass at least as open-bordered and well-integrated as say, the United States, Canada and Mexico. And that the surest means of securing this blithe utopia was not the renewed expansion and reconsolidation of Russia, but rather its gradual-yet-steady impoverishment/isolation/vassalization: the latter preferably at the hands of a Russia-"friendly," Russia-invested, but overall not really anti-Western China. Which would, I suspect, go a long way towards explaining our Western reluctance to try and isolate Moscow "completely." I.e., by openly teaming up with Beijing - much as we might like to. After all, in this age of still-unfolding pandemic fallout/recrimination, it is one thing to be corporately close to Covid's birthplace; quite another to be openly and politically close. And we'd be still more unwise to dilute what remains of Moscow's own residual trust, however unmerited, in Beijing. 

So what am I getting at? Well, first let's page back a few years. Suppose that, from the very start of the Sino-American "rift" (c. 2012?), our Western global elites had wanted not nearly so much to counter China as to constrain, thwart and "hem in" Russia. But in that case, surely there could be many - perhaps conceivably quite subtle - ways of achieving that result? 

What if our real Western national interests - or rather, and more precisely - our Progressive Global Interest, did not require us placing China and Russia at loggerheads at all? But something quite the reverse? What if the most intimate and trustful collaboration between Beijing and Moscow - or even an advanced degree of eventual symbiosis? - were to prove, in the long run, a far more crippling constraint upon Russian freedom of action than the West trying to effect that outcome directly?

The key, as I see it, was for the US to appear to be as far at odds as possible with China, without seeming to want to get closer to Russia (which latter move, after all, might suggest our wise global elites were really in earnest about getting tough with China).

The real question, so far as I can tell, is how far the Western establishment has been actually welcoming the growing closeness of Beijing and Moscow all along, while seeming to oppose it. And mostly on the not illegitimate assumption that, the closer and more inseparable the intimacy, the more deadly the inequality of power and advantage between them: it being only a matter of time before Dragon entwines, slowly constricts, and (perhaps assisted by the careful ministrations of a "neo-Ottomanist" Sunni pan-Islamica*) eventually crushes Bear. In short, there might be technically no limit to how far the right powers should be encouraged to embrace and one day engulf Russia, so long as the US and Europe continued to maintain their own proper outrage and "principled" opposition to Putinist autocracy. Not to mention the ever-popular economic pressure. Or, as some might call it, strangulation.

*E.g., Erdogan's Turkey, ISI's Pakistan, etc. 

Which brings me back to the otherwise inexplicable title of this little exercise. Another confession, as I indicated. Not mine this time, of course, but rather that of my hypothetical and highly-placed American Blobster, over a period of, say, the past five-to- ten years leading up to Putin's criminally insane invasion. 

And what sort of confession? I wish I could be sure. But maybe something on the order of:

"By all means let the Russians get as close as they like to China - and even to countries like Turkey and Pakistan. In fact, provided we ourselves maintain the most co-operative ties with both Ankara and Beijing (cautiously friendly in the case of Turkey, as covert as possible regarding China), why not gladly drive Moscow into the waiting arms of both? I mean, what's the worst that can happen? Think what rapid progress these two can make with those stupidly trusting Muscovites. And then when you factor in good old Islamabad . . . maybe even Riyadh . . . why, between the three or four of them, lodged as they are in Eurasia, don't they have a much better chance in the long run of making a clean, graceful, efficient 'short work' of Russia?  Or surely, at any rate, better than us Yanks, based as we are in North America?"

The Sheer Excitingness of Obsessive and Indiscriminate Competition (in this Russo-Ukrainean Globe)

Why not take a moment (if you can) just to imagine you, yourself, as you are. And as you might be.

Imagine yourself becoming something very different from what most of us want to be, in our striving grasping hustling, self-promoting everyday lives. Or think we want to be, at all events.

Imagine you could be that rare sort of humble, rich, heedfully attentive Soil - that quietly compos(t)ing, undemanding, unpresuming, pinprick-silent Presence - in which every human soul within the perimeter of your routine life could flourish and thrive, as never before. Could thrive so unprecedentedly, in fact - and so completely, in its assurance of its own nature, giftedness, grace, inmost self - that it had almost no further wish to compete, almost no desire to compare itself to any other human souls, whether "superior" or "inferior." No wish, in short, to be anything but itself. Even as it experienced, too, an all-but-irresistible longing to know just Who it was who was engracing and empowering him or her - or (it may be) you or me - to be ourselves in so strange a Way. A way of being oneself, on the one hand, so utterly and deliciously satisfying: yet one that also draws, entreats, entices, even goads this creature onwards, to become all the real fulness of itself, so to speak (hope I'm making sense). 

Again, all its real fulness, as only its Maker can know and make it. Or yours, or mine. Almost as if this same God knew this creature's inmost soul unsearchable oceans of time before it knew it even had a soul. Even to the point where this human individual - of whom you are the soil, mind you - felt practically no need, no compulsion, either to be co-diminishing ("competitive") of others, or to feel diminished, or threatened. Or even defensive and "insecure"?

Imagine yourself, then - just as you are - becoming that same strange soil, in which this strange God can take root, and in which your neighbor can flourish. 

I know. How boring. Not to mention how deplorably inefficient. In contrast to this most excitingly competitive, murderously efficient Russo-Ukrainean globe of ours.

Magdalene at the Tomb (in the wee small hours . . .)

"Whom seek you here, sweet Mistress Fell?"

"One who loved me passing well.

Dark his eye, wild his face -

Stranger, if in this lonely place

Bide such an one, then, prythee, say

I am come here to-day."

"Many his like, Mistress Fell?"

"I did not look, so cannot tell.

Only this I surely know,

When his voice called me, I must go;

Touched me his fingers, and my heart

Leapt at the sweet pain's smart."

"Why did he leave you, Mistress Fell?"

"Magic laid its dreary spell. -

Stranger, he was fast asleep;

Into his dream I tried to creep;

Called his name, soft was my cry;

He answered - not one sigh.

"The flower and the thorn are here;

Falleth the night-dew, cold and clear;

Out of her bower the bird replies,

Mocking the dark with ecstasies,

See how the earth's green grass doth grow,

Praising what sleeps below!

"Thus have they told me. And I come,

As flies the wounded wild-bird home.

Not tears I give; but all that he

Clasped in his arms, sweet charity;

All that he loved - to him I bring

For a close whispering."

 -  Walter de la Mare

A Confession

Ughhhh. So this "graduated" Russian invasion is turning out to be the bear hug from Hell. Big surprise that, and God help us all, starting with Ukraine, of course. And in the name of everything holy, pray as you've never prayed for anything in your whole life. 

Mind you, as psychologically prepared as I tried to be for all-out war, I wound up stumbling on a discovery that actually surprised me. I never thought I'd find myself feeling seriously, wistfully nostalgic for much of anything about the Cold War Soviet Union. As distinct from our exciting post-Cold War Russia.

Except that, come to remember it, I did feel very much that way, and was very nostalgic. Especially for the post-Khrushchev Soviet Union. 

Not too many years ago, I laid it all out very explicitly in a single post: how much I missed the - for want of a better word - predictability(?) of the later Cold War era. Along with the seemingly more measured, cautious rationality of its principal actors and operatives. Though, looking back on it, a better phrasing might have been the greater political secularity of the era.* And in particular one highly secular assumption, that seemed to be widely shared among both East and West: 

Namely, that there is NO place on earth, and in time, that is so holy, so utterly joined to heaven and eternity, as to be worth risking nuclear war in "defense" of.  Or worse yet, in order to possess it exclusively. Perhaps not even Jerusalem? But certainly not Kyiv. (At all events - as I've posted elsewhere [last 4 paragraphs] - one really has to ask what kind of love is it anyway? that loves most fervently by hovering, clutching, choking, destroying.)

*As opposed to the greater political religiosity of our era, actors, operatives, etc.

My point, in sum, being that Heaven is Heaven, and earth is earth, and it's not that the twain shall never meet; however, that fruitful consummation must always be understood as being in the hands and at the discretion of God, never of Man.

Again, a post-Khrushchev Soviet Union. Neither did I envision it as continuing indefinitely in that pitiful-yet-toxic Brezhnev-through-Gorbachev state. Rather, what I imagined was a Russia "duly de-Communized and de-toxified," as I wrote in the same post (par. 4). In other words, no longer even remotely or aspirationally Marxist; yet still hardheaded, pedestrian and secular enough to grasp that, in this exciting, excitable globalized world of ours, no country can afford to be too sentimental - much less hysterical and confrontational - about some holy ancestral hearthland like Ukraine (Russia's Kosovo?). 

Anyhow, what I felt most nostalgic about was the (best I recall) relative simplicity, clarity and straightforwardness of a bipolar world in which, in any case, nuclear proliferation was certainly far less easy than today. Or so it was made to be, on one of the two sides - the Soviet - if not both?

Still, and however much I'd prefer it otherwise, the fact is that today we live in self-anointedly apocalyptic times (par. 9). Ours is a Great Global World in which, as often as not, the most secular differences of opinion can take on an epically religious, or even sacredly end-time, "heaven-and-hell" solemnity and ferocity. And then we wonder why it's so cussedly hard to control the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

So of course even now we have those who, whether they love or hate it, regard Putin's Russia as an almost Biblically-fated tool of Babylonian chastisement of a wayward - or at least feckless? - Modern West. And you know, in all fairness to them I can think of no time in history, like the present, when we in the West have been more Biblically wayward. If not apostate in the Christian sense. At the same time, it would be hard to imagine a modern Nebuchadnezzar more brutally blundering than Vladimir Putin, or one more likely to teach the exact opposite of what we Westerners are supposed to learn. Or a despot better designed, if anything, to reinforce and confirm the stubborn waywardness, smugness and sense of moral superiority of the "Israel" - aka America - in question.

In any case, assuming it really is a steadily tightening, and deadly, ring of encirclement that Putin sees himself as breaking out of, he could hardly have chosen a method of breakout more conducive to the self-vindication - if not self-righteousness - of his encirclers. Or a means of "escape" more horrifically dangerous to the peace and security of his own country (to say nothing of the rest of us). In fact I suppose I couldn't have done better myself, if my intention had been to "blacken permanently" the name of Russia in the eyes of the world.

Meanwhile, it appears we Global Moderns have well-nigh reached the limits of a certain nothing-if-not-ambitious, post-secular, post-Cold War project of our own: one we've been engrossed in, if memory serves, for roughly the past generation. I mean the project of trying to bring Heaven down to earth, as it were, by forcibly anchoring it to some place, people, ideology, or Idea-masquerading-as-country of our own idolizing (whether the idol be Washington, Beijing, Mecca, Jerusalem, Brussels, Moscow, etc). But is it really too late, do you think, to do something quite the opposite? 

What if we fervently prayerful Catholics, and countless other Christians, were to turn a decidedly different page in our devotional lives. Suppose that we were to become rather less heavy and solemn, less full of our own hard-won importance, less weighted down by our own works, achievements and sacrifices. Such that, like any child, we almost seemed to have no past at all? (3rd, 4th and 5th pars. from bottom) 

What if we were to become so light and buoyant, so humble and childlike and unselfconscious - yes, even of our great and good deeds - as to be able to float right up, as it were, to Heaven? So that our own feeble prayers might at last be joined inseparably with those wisest and most potent of all human intercessions - those of Jesus' own Mother, and ours? That same Mother of the Church who pleaded with us, in Portugal more than a century ago, to pray - not for the humiliation, devastation and judgment of Russia, however "deserved" - but for its complete consecration to her Immaculate Heart. And therewith its full conversion to her Son. And likewise to believe her, and to trust in Him, for the "period of peace" that would surely follow. Our persistent Catholic disregard of that appeal over these past 100+ years - can we honestly say we've been satisfied with the results? Is not the present spiraling disaster more or less exactly what she foretold? And are we so sure that this same Mary, who so accurately prophesied the conclusion of one war (1918) and the conditional-but-likely onset of another still worse (1939), is utterly powerless to mitigate and defuse, to subdue and cleanse and heal both Russia's present madness, and our own folly?

All I Can Say Is

Well, it's begun to happen. Russia is now officially invested in the full separation of the Donbass region from the rest of loving, caring, supportive Ukraine (talk about wrenching a child from the arms of its mother). And mostly,  from what I gather, at the instigation not of Putin himself but of a majority of that beastly, dastardly Russian Duma. And here I was thinking he was the globe's most absolute autocrat outside of North Korea.

And yet . . . I continue to hope, pray and even fast - however foolishly (wouldn't be the first time) - for . . 

What? 

I pray - you guessed it - that poor beleaguered, besotted, befuddled Vladimir doesn't take the real bait. I mean, of course, the bait of launching a full-scale invasion of non-separatist Ukraine.

"And why pray, idiot?" you ask. Because I also continue to suspect that - whatever may be Putin's real impulses, fears, ambitions, hysterias - there are some Seriously Progressive and Enlightened Folks here out West, too, who don't just want him to launch all-out war (any moment now?), but so badly, they can all but smell and taste it. Which is to say, at least as much as he (supposedly) does. 

I'm thinking of venerable foreign-affairs icons like Chatham House, the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and God knows how many other hand-wringing, pearl-clutching congregations of souls who no doubt would howl in outrage at the mildest imputation of being Russophobic. And yet who still, from everything I can determine, really believe that not just Putin but Russia herself is beyond redemption. At least for the foreseeable future. I.e., so long as she remains recognizably Russian.* And who further reason that, Moscow being the last geopolitically serious holdout of barbarism in our Gloriously Unfolding Sino-Western Corporatopia, why not goad her into "finishing the job" by doing something really stupid and nasty? Thereby confirming both our worst "we-knew-it-all-along" expectations of Muscovy, and our noblest vindications of ourselves? To say nothing of further hardening, solidifying, but above all ideologizing NATO. And in particular its most devoutly anti-Russian elements.

*As opposed to her becoming Progressively more and more Chinese, or Islamic, or Germanocentric (depending on the Russian region in question).

After all, can a truly Progress-Infatuated Globe (PIG) ever have enough reasons for loathing, despising, frustrating, isolating, anathematizing such a wicked old vestige of empire (Long live the POST-imperial West!) as Russia?

And who knows? The eagerly-awaited invasion may be taking place even now, as I write. 

More on this later . . . possibly even within the same post . . .