CHRISTMAS 2024 -- FINDING GOD IN DARK TIMES

We are always being told to remember the original message of Christmas.

It's not supposed to be about the gifts and the parties, the cards and the carolers, the tree and the lights. It's not supposed to be about the long lines, crowded airports or frenzied families traveling to and fro. It's not supposed to be about the twelve days or seven fishes or eight reindeer.

Or the stockings hung by the chimney. 

Or St. Nicholas.

It's supposed to be about a visit.

By God . . .

To this world . . .

At a Roman backwater . . .

In  a small tribe . . .

As a real man.

And when you think about that seriously, and park all the seasonal tinsel and tumult, the claim is either the most important and earth-shattering thing to have ever happened in human history . . .

Or it is completely nuts.

Each side has had its proponents.

There have been times in the last two thousand plus years when individuals actually looked back in complete shock at the importance of the event.  Upon his own death in 363 CE, Emperor Julian (the Apostate) reportedly lamented the death of paganism and early triumph of Christianity with "Galilean, you have won." Others were in awe. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. Hopkin's wrote God's Grandeur. In the former, the Galilean becomes part of a biblical world order painted on five hundred square meters of a vaulted ceiling, in the latter the light that dispels the dark as the trinitarian "Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

There have been other times -- more prevalent of late -- when individuals looked back aghast at the irrationality of the claim and the disasters created in its name. This era's so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism -- Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett -- are (or, in the now-deceased Hitchens and Dennett cases, were) contemporary spokesmen for this view. With Hitchens and Harris, the principal gripe is with organized religion; to the extent God dies in their world, it is more on account of what His followers have authored in His name. With Dawkins and Dennett, however,  whether He was there in the first place is the question (they think He was not).

Looking for evidence that God exists is, in my mind, a futile endeavor. 

Evidence of something entirely out of this world cannot really be found in this world. 

The Christian paradigm, of course, contests this claim. Its fundamental contention is "No, the real, actual first century (CE)  Jesus of Nazareth in this world is evidence that God too is here. He is the one who came, saw and conquered, albeit in ways Caesar could never have imagined". But the so-called evidence for this God-man is the Resurrection. Which its proponents admit is a miracle. And which, therefore,  more or less removes it from the realm of evidence (at least of the this-world sort).

So . . .

I look elsewhere.

In 1968, Hannah Arendt published Men In Dark Times. It is a collection of essays she wrote over twelve years about individuals who lived in the dark time of the mid-twentieth century, a time "when there was only wrong and no outrage". 

Though "there was," she wrote, "nothing secret or mysterious about" that dark time, "it was by no means visible to all" or "at all easy to perceive".  To the contrary, she explained, "until the very moment when catastrophe overtook everything and everybody, it was covered up not by realities but by the highly efficient talk and double talk of . . . official representatives who, without interruption and in many ingenious variations, explained away unpleasant facts and justified concerns." 

In this "camouflage[d] . . . public realm", she concluded, the function of which is to otherwise "throw light upon the affairs of men" to "show in word and deed, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do", darkness comes "when this light is extinguished by . . . speech that does not disclose what is but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality."

It was odd for Arendt to find my God in that time and place.

But, nevertheless, there He was.

The subject of Arendt's third essay is Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli.  Known to the world since 1958 as Pope John XXIII, Arendt titles her essay with the Pope's given name. My guess is that was intentional. Unknown and unsung at the time Catholic church elders could not agree on Pius XII's successor, they thought he would be "provisional, transitional" and "without much consequence." Throughout his life, however, Roncalli "made Christ his model".  

The "suffering" Christ.

The "gentle and humble" Christ.

"Knowing perfectly well," as Arendt, quoting the young Roncalli, explained, "that to be 'similar to the good Jesus' meant 'to be treated as a madman'".

And so . . .

The John who became a pope was simply the Roncalli who had been a real Christian. He talked (endlessly). And to everyone. He laughed (fully). And with anyone.  He cursed (mildly). But never in God's name.  "Shit" was acceptable; "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" was not. He was not patronizing. He was the fourth (and first son) of twelve children raised by farmers and molded by late 19th century Catholic Action, the church's alternative to the unstable state (from which it was then estranged) that created the cooperatives and credit banks Catholics like the Roncallis used to buy their farms. Born in 1881, he was a seminarian at 12, a priest at 22, and a Bishop at 43.  

Throughout his career, he was loyal to the institutional church.

But his loyalty never interfered with his ability to see and tell the truth about its leaders.

Or his country's . . .

Or the world's.

The popes he most admired in his lifetime were Leo XIII (1878-1903) and Benedict XV (1914-1922). These two were sandwiched between all the Piuses, Leo between Pius IX and X and Benedict between the latter and Pius XI (and then XII).  Leo and Benedict became famous, respectively, as the worker's pope and as a peacemaker. 

The Piuses IX and X were either reactionary or paranoid.  Pius IX became a prisoner of the Vatican after the Italian revolution and the fall of the papal states and forbade Italian Catholics from participating in politics; he was also the pope who shepherded the specious doctrine of infallibility though Vatican I, the council he more or less rigged to vote his way. Pius X manufactured the so-called "modernist heresy" designed to insulate Catholicism from religion not aligned with papal dictate or science and history not the product of medieval scholasticism.

Fortunately for the later church, however, Roncalli grew up under Leo and, upon ordination, became secretary to a modernist bishop -- Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi -- who Pius X had sidelined to Angelo's hometown.  

Radini-Tedeschi was the anti-pope.  

He was a fan of Catholic Action (which Pius X despised), supported striking workers, introduced science labs to the educations of future priests, and thought "authority" (papal and otherwise) had to be "harmonized" with "freedom" rather than deny it. 

The young Roncalli became an ardent supporter.

He found his own historic models in the Counter-Reformation's Charles Borromeo and Cesare Baronius. Through the sacrifice, service and scholarship of the first (a rich nobleman who gave it all up and reformed a debauched church) and the rational historic analysis of the second (who told Galileo, before the latter's trial, that "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go"), he avoided the intellectual poverty of anti-modernism without succumbing to the moral poverty of scientific positivism.

By the time he became a Bishop, he was fully formed. 

And so formed, he spoke truth to power in his dark time. 

He did not let the Vatican's efforts in negotiating and securing its own state (in the Lateran Accords) stop or limit his condemnation of Mussolini's fascism. And when he did it from the pulpit, he was given a one-way ticket out of Italy and exiled to Bulgaria as an apostolic visitor. He spent ten years there. Nor did he let the Vatican's later hesitancy with Hitler get in the way of his own honesty with German diplomats. During World War II, he was the Vatican's Apostolic Delegate to Turkey; Franz von Papen was Germany's Ambassador to Turkey at the same time. When von Papen sought his help in securing Vatican support for Germany once it  was at war with communist (and therefore anti-Catholic) Russia, Roncalli bluntly asked "And what shall I say about the millions of Jews your countrymen are murdering in Poland and Germany?" 

His opposition was also more than just talk.

Throughout World War II, his "baptisms of convenience"; "immigration certificates to Palestine"; refugees list from Istanbul Rabbi Markus; and personal interventions on behalf of Bulgarian Jews, Romanian Jews, Hungarian Jews, Italian Jews, orphaned Transnistrian children on a refugee ship, and those held in the Jasenovac and the Sered concentration camps, literally saved thousands from the final solution.

And later . . .

As Pope . . .

Long after it was over and just before he died . . .

He begged for forgiveness. 

Invoking the last words of the Jesus he imitated, he wrote a prayer to be delivered in Catholic churches throughout the world :

"We are conscious today that many, many centuries of blindness have cloaked our eyes so that we can no longer see the beauty of Thy chosen people nor recognize in their faces the features of our privileged brethren.  We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads.  Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, or shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we know not what we did."

Roncalli's courage and witness to the truth in his time did not make him God or establish that there is one. It was evidence, however, of the power that imitation -- in his case, of Christ -- can have, the good it can do, the barriers it can break, the evil it can block, even the (just) wars it can win. 

It is, unfortunately, taken seriously by the world as a whole only (or mostly) after the fact.  Before the moment "catastrophe over[takes] everything and everybody", when the imitator is being "treated as a madman", the world's default position is to ignore the witness, soften and even deny the truth.  In Roncalli's time, it meant sending him to Bulgaria lest he get in the way of "normalizing" the Vatican's relationship with Mussolini's fascist Italy. In ours, it means bowing to Donald Trump, pretending (illegal) immigrants are inhuman, pretending truths about him are defamatory, ignoring or accepting his pathological lying and misogyny, prosecuting his enemies, attacking the free press, killing critical stories or editorials, abandoning Ukraine and rubber-stamping appointments to high positions of those whose first (and in some cases only) qualification is a sycophantic obedience to Trump himself. 

So much of this is exactly what happened in Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s. Fascism was immoral long before the Holocaust.

And it also could have been stopped long before then.

"'Do not obey in advance' is the main lesson of the twentieth century," says Tim Snyder. In his book On Tyranny, it is also "the first lesson". "Most of the power of authoritarianism,"  he explains, "is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what is more repressive, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."

Roncalli wouldn't do that in his time.

But his time did not listen until it was too late.

Nor are many, perhaps most, in ours.

And that, in a strange but not un-Biblical way, may be even more "evidence" for my God.

Because . . .

In His time . . .

The Galilean was ignored too.

Merry Christmas.

THE PARDON

In a political world that these days mixes Kafkaesque nightmares with Orwellian lies in almost equal measure, comes now the pardon of Hunter Biden by his father, the President.

The president's pardon power is plenary.  

He can issue one for any reason or no reason.

Nevertheless, the Department of Justice has a whole unit --  the Office of the Pardon Attorney -- whose job it is to evaluate the sea of requests sent to the Oval Office. 

To do so, it has created -- and create is the operative word here -- a set of standards it applies to those requests. 

Thus . . .

In the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an applicant has to wait five years from the point of conviction to apply.  The Pardon Attorney evaluates  the post-conviction conduct, character and reputation of the applicant. He considers the seriousness of his crime, the impact a pardon might have on others, and the extent to which the applicant has accepted responsibility for his criminal conduct. 

None of those standards matter legally.

Yet they exist.

The apparent ultimate goal is to determine whether one who petitions for a pardon is worthy of one.

So . . .

Was Hunter Biden worthy?

As one might expect in today's polarized political world, opinions on that question are divided. As far as I can tell, they fall into the following five categories:

1. Absolutely not;

2. Absolutely f---ing not;

3. No, but understandable;

4. Absolutely, on the merits; and

5.  Absolutely, given the next president.

I fall into Category 5, despise 2, am sympathetic to 1 and 3 and (therefore) less so to 4.  

Category 1 is occupied by purists in the Democratic party who think the President has sacrificed principle. It includes the we-can-never-act-like-them crowd who consider such sacrifices fatal. Category 3 is occupied by those same Democrats but stifles the outrage by conceding any father in the President's situation might have done the same thing.  Category 4 is the ground upon which the Biden himself has for the most part chosen to stand.

Category 2 is peopled by the GOP's MAGA hypocrites who applauded Trump's own unparalleled abuse of the pardon power in his first term.  

In that first term, Trump gave pardons or commutations to friends, relatives and assorted hangers on, most if not all of whom had committed crimes far more serious than Hunter Biden's. Trump's recipients included political henchman Roger Stone (convicted of false statements, witness tampering, and obstruction), campaign manager and Russian-colluder Paul Manafort (guilty of tax fraud, bank fraud, failure to disclose hidden foreign accounts, and sentenced to 47 months imprisonment), former National Security Adviser General Flynn (originally pled guilty to false statements), the loud mouth architect of MAGA authoritarianism, Steve Bannon (charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering), seven criminally convicted Republican Congressman (for crimes that included bribery, securities fraud, tax evasion and campaign violations), and his relative, Charles Kushner (convicted of tax evasion and witness tampering; Kushner is daughter Ivanka's father-in-law and Trump's now-proposed Ambassador to France). 

Category 2 folks deserve no sympathy. 

In fact, because their hypocrisy knows no bounds, irritating them is an advantage.

The best defense of the pardon is what awaited Hunter Biden going forward, not a watering-down of what he did in the past. 

President Biden, however, is being pummeled now because he is focusing more on what occurred in the past than on what awaited his son in the future. 

In that vein, the President's argument is that the gun and tax charges to which Hunter either pled or on which he was found guilty were overkill. In the case of the former,  the younger Biden lied on a form by saying he was not a drug addict at the time he purchased the gun. Because he only had the gun for a week (his sister-in-law wisely threw it away) and never committed any crimes with it, the general practice, had it been followed, would have been to not file a charge, especially given the fact that the would-be defendant was in recovery and years sober by the time the conduct was investigated.  In the case of the latter, the taxes Hunter owed were paid in their entirety, as was the interest and all the penalties, and these types of cases are often if not typically resolved administratively with civil penalties.

This overkill boat, however, is leaky.  

Apart from the fact that both crimes are often tried and not resolved administratively, addiction is not a defense to years-long tax evasion and honest answers on background questions are among the little we have left in what remains of any effort to keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them. There's a reason addicts and guns are a bad mix. Guns are dangerous and addicts are unstable. 

And there's no "I love my son" exception to those facts.

The justification for the pardon, therefore, cannot be found in US Attorney (and Special Counsel)  David Weiss's prosecution. That prosecution may have been aggressive.  But it was not selective. 

The justification, however, can be found in what awaited Hunter Biden.

The world changed on November 5. 

America elected Donald Trump and Trump has pledged to take revenge on his perceived enemies.  

Among those perceived enemies are the Bidens in general and Hunter Biden in particular. 

Trump has been gunning for Hunter for years and has never let up on his claim that Hunter and/or his father were taking bribes from Ukraine or were otherwise engaged in illegal conduct in connection with Hunter's (obviously) nepotistic seat on the board of Burisma.  Though these charges have been investigated by the GOP for years, no evidence whatsoever has been found to sustain them. In fact, the very evidence the GOP relied upon for the charge -- a statement from FBI informant Alexander Smirnov -- has been deemed false by Weiss, who -- apart from indicting Hunter --  has also indicted Smirnov for lying to investigators and making false claims that the Bidens had accepted bribes from Burisma.

Trump also blames Joe Biden for the two federal indictments levelled against him in connection with the attempted coup on January 6, 2021 and his subsequent theft and illegal storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. All of this is also baseless. President Biden had nothing to do with those indictments.  They were brought by a Special Counsel who Biden did not appoint. So fastidious was the due process given Trump that he was able to delay the cases until after the election. Given the DOJ's policy against prosecuting sitting presidents, they have now been dismissed. 

Nor, contrary to the GOP's amen-chorus of Trump enablers, were the indictments the product of "lawfare" or "weaponization" of the Department of Justice. There was more than enough evidence to indict the former President on both charges, and though we will not know for a while (and maybe never) whether there was enough to convict him, that was the way to bet. Trump endorsed a scheme to deem fake electors legitimate. On January 6, 2021, he watched his supporters assault police and ransack the Capitol for hours before telling them to leave (which they did upon his order). Back in Florida after his administration ended, he lied about classified and highly sensitive documents he had taken and failed to return, and then tried to over-up his crimes and destroy evidence with the help of idiot-loyalists.

He is now committed to appointing sycophants to run the Justice Department and the FBI.  

His first nominee for Attorney General -- former Rep. Matt Gaetz -- spent years repeating Trump's "weaponization" lie and his second -- Florida's ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi -- is a 2020 election denier who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial and has promised to "prosecute the prosecutors" who indicted Trump during the Biden administration.  

His putative FBI Director -- Kash Patel --  has pledged to "find the conspirators -- not just in government, but in the media . . . who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections." As Patel put it, "We're going to come after you. Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out."  In his 2022 book Government Gangsters, Patel actually named the sixty people he intends to "come after".  The list is a Who's Who of Trump opponents and critics. It includes President Biden, Vice President Harris, Attorney General Merrick Garland, former President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Robert Mueller, and witnesses who testified against Trump, some before the US House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, others in Trump's two impeachment trials.

These are not people who can be counted on to uphold the rule of law and they are not people Joe Biden is obliged to assume will proceed in good faith.  The far greater likelihood is that they will turn the Justice Department and the FBI into a today's version of McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Wisconsin's then-junior Senator said he had lists of "known communists" working in the US State Department. He didn't but numerous lives were ruined as he pretended otherwise. Today's McCarthyism pretends Trump won an election he lost and wants to prosecute the very people who tried to hold him accountable for his attempted coup. To insure this occurs, Trump is appointing fellow travelers at DOJ (Bondi)  and the FBI (Patel).

For them . . .

Hunter Biden was a target in waiting.  

It wasn't going to end with guns and taxes. 

Regardless of the facts.

Consider this possibility:

Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced this month. Assume, for purposes of argument, that he was able to avoid serving time in jail and was given an extended probationary sentence and fines, neither of which would be uncommon given the victim-less nature of the gun crime and the full payments (back tax, interest and penalties) on the tax charge.

How do you think Trump, Bondi, Patel and the beholden-GOP would have reacted? 

What do you think Trump would have ordered Bondi and Patel to do on the afternoon of January 20, 2025?

For starters . . .

Fire Weiss, who obviously does not think Hunter or the President were bribed by Burisma?

Joe Biden was not obliged to find out.

Viewed as a life raft for a guy who did not deserve one, the pardon of Hunter Biden is an abuse of the rule of law.

But . . .

Viewed as a barrier that stops a fascist and his loyalists from turning the law into a machine that fulfills his own asinined grievances, pathological narcissism, and baseless conspiracy theories . . .

It is an act of statesmanship.

In light of the lethal possibilities that flow from Trump's inherent narcissism, Bondi's loyalty and Patel's hit list . . .

I hope there are many more.