There is a difference between the two parties, and the Koch Brothers know it.

“There's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties” was one of George Corley Wallace's mantras. In 1968, when he was the American Independent Party's candidate for President, the former Alabama governor said it over and over. And too many Americans believed him. They still believe the line, even if they don't associate it with the onetime segregationist Wallace.

But if there isn't a difference, why did the billionaire Koch Brothers spend millions on Republican Party campaigns? They know there's a difference. But so many people who would be better off with the Democrats in power stayed home. All the voter-suppression tactics of Republican legislatures, nefarious though they were, could not compare in effectiveness to the apathy of a majority of registered voters. Not a plurality—a majority. And while presidential elections usually bring out a higher turnout, voter apathy could be the GOP's greatest ally in 2016.

A November 9 article in the Elkhart Truth by Tim Vandenack made the point all too well. The voter turnout in all of Elkhart County, Indiana for the 2014 general election was only 26.63 per cent. No single precinct managed 50 per cent. But the Elkhart 19 precinct, home of the exclusive Greencroft Goshen retirement community, had the highest turnout with 46.06 per cent. You can bet the vast majority of those votes went to GOP candidates. Rural and exurban precincts dominated the “most engaged voters” list.

It's not hard to guess which areas made the “least engaged voters” list. The Concord 6 precinct, between Main Street and the St. Joseph River, and north of downtown Elkhart, topped the list, with a pathetic 5.27 per cent turnout. It includes “The Hole,” an impoverished enclave in the St. Joseph River flood plain, along with other lower-and lower-middle-class neighborhoods. People living there would have benefited by an expansion of Medicaid for people just above the poverty line, which the GOP state government refused to accept. The federally-funded pre-kindergarten program, just turned down by Republican Governor Mike Pence, would have been a great help to their children.

The next two precincts in Vandenack's “least engaged” column were east or south of downtown, including South Central Elkhart, an area that shares some of the demographics of South Central Los Angeles. The two semi-rural precincts on the low-turnout list included one with a large mobile home park and another with several low-rent apartment complexes.

It's true that there were no major statewide races in Elkhart County. The gubernatorial election follows the presidential election cycle, and there was no Senatorial race this year. Still, there was an important Congressional race, with Republican Representative Jackie Walorski, who last year voted for shutting down the government and against raising the debt ceiling. In both votes, she struck a blow against the United States economy; if her side had won the debt ceiling vote, it might very well have sent the economy into chaos. The poor and lower-middle-class would have suffered the most.

The Democratic candidate, Joe Bock, a thoughtful and compassionate man who had served in the Missouri State Legislature, lost Elkhart County by a landslide—22,873 to 9,334. He carried St. Joseph County (South Bend), normally a Democratic stronghold, by only 563 votes. He deserved better.

What the numbers say to me is that the Republican Party didn't win the 2014 election. We Democrats lost. When a reporter asked the late Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley why Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in 1968, he replied, “He didn't get enough votes.” The same line applies to Joe Bock—the Democratic operation didn't get the votes out for him. That means boots on the ground—people going door-to-door and engaging the voters. It's easier to bring out volunteers during a presidential year, when college students often take time off from their studies to support candidates. But the off-year elections are important as well, as the Tea Party victory in 2010 demonstrated. Republican control of state legislatures resulted in gerrymandered congressional and legislative districts drawn to make it even harder for Democrats to win.

So long as vulnerable Americans believe there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties, the Koch Brothers and their right-wing Republican machine will keep on rolling up victories.

Edith P. Wylder, 1925-2013

In fairy tales the stepmother is almost invariably a wicked woman. And when I first heard of Edith Wylder in the worst of circumstances, I believed she would live up to the stereotype. In the course of some 48 years, I learned differently. So it was with sadness that I learned of her death on July 4 of this year.

 In 1965 my parents divorced. Their marriage had not been a happy one for at least two years and probably longer. It was only after the divorce that I learned of my father's marriage to Edith Perry Stamm. It would be more than a year later, at Thanksgiving in 1966, that I first met my stepmother. By then, my dad and Edith were living in Fort Collins, Colorado. Edith turned out to be a kind, gracious woman, who was quite sympathetic to the situation my brother and I were in.

In the summer of 1967, when I went to stay at Fort Collins, for close to a month, I got to know Edith better, along with her sons Paul and Philip. Though she grew up in a privileged family from the Western Reserve of Ohio and had earned a doctorate in English, she always remained modest. In that summer of 1967, I remember her sitting on the sofa, knitting, and Paul came in and said, “How quaint.” She took it in good humor.

 When Kathleen and I married, Edith welcomed her into the family. Since then, we've had many enjoyable visits with my dad and Edith—first in Marshall, Minnesota, then Murray, Kentucky, and finally in New where they retired. Visiting them meant the long, scenic train ride to Albuquerque, and visits in Rio Rancho and later their little adobe cottage in Corrales, where my dad, Delbert E. “Deb” and Edith lived.

 My dad died December 14, 2005, of leukemia, and Edith told me that not a day goes by that she didn't miss him. During the past few years she had been working on a book to be titled “Talking Between the Rooms,” a study of the influence of John Keats on Emily Dickinson's poetry. She had earlier published “The Last Face,” which analyzed the use of diacritical marks in Dickinson's poetry.

Edith was an inspiration to many students in her long teaching career. But I know her more as a loving stepmother, who always took me seriously.

Edith's ashes will be interred Sunday, October 20 at 11 A.M., in Morrison, Illinois, next to those of Deb Wylder. There was to be a celebration of her life, but there will just be a small family gathering at the Family Chef Restaurant after the interment.

Rest in peace, Edith. 

"The Unraveling of America," a book for the Reagan era

Sometimes a history book can tell the reader almost as much about the time it was written as the time it was written about. Such is the case with Allen J. Matusow's The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

“It is currently the fashion to pronounce the liberal effort to improve America a failure. Reared in the liberal tradition myself, I take no pleasure in having written a book that, in the main, documents the conventional wisdom.,” writes Matusow in the introduction. (p. xiv—page numbers refer to the Harper Torchbooks edition.) “Currently” means 1983, during the so-called “Reagan Revolution,” when conservatism was triumphant in America, and liberalism was seemingly discredited. One suspects that after the Great Recession discredited the laissez-faire economics of the Ronald Reagan era, even Matusow might reconsider his conclusions.

“The liberal mood of 1960 was largely defined by elite intellectuals residing on the East Coast, principally in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts,” writes Matusow (p. 3). One hears echoes of Spiro Agnew's “effete corps of impudent snobs.”

Whether or not “elite intellectuals residing on the East Coast” defined the liberal mood of 1960 is debatable. But William O'Neill, writing in Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s (New York, Times Books, 1971), points out that while liberal intellectuals John Kenneth Galbraith, Edwin Reischauer, and Adlai Stevenson were made ambassadors in the Kennedy Administration, “ambassadors do not make policy. In Kennedy's administration the men who did were people like Theodore Sorenson, Dean Rusk, McGeorge and William Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, and Walt Whitman Rostow. They were not so much liberals as technocrats, men of power rather than passion.” (I'd make an exception for Sorenson, but I don't see him as a major policymaker, either.)

Matusow  “proves” liberalism's failure with carefully selected examples, primarily mismanaged programs in the War on Poverty. But he goes beyond analysis and into ad hominem attacks. For some reason, one figure in the Kennedy-Johnson administrations comes in for special opprobrium: “Sargent Shriver, director of the the Office of Economic Opportunity, waged fierce warfare with the Labor Department to win control of the Job Corps, hoping that it would yield instant results and cover him with quick glory. He never made a greater mistake.” (p. 237) On p. 248 Matusow refers to “Shriver's long-standing ambition to run for governor of Illinois,” yet all evidence I've found points to a brief consideration of the run in 1960—hardly long-standing.

Even in praise, Matusow manages to get a dig in at Shriver: “A devout Catholic and husband of Eunice Kennedy, Shriver had a patrician's sense of obligation so profound that he was known within the Kennedy family as the 'house Communist.” (p. 243) Yet over and over Matusow portrays Shriver as the crass opportunist.

Matusow's chapter on the economy is entitled “War, Inflation, and Farewell to Keynes,” and asserts that Keynesian economics was thoroughly discredited during the Kennedy-Johnson years. Milton Friedman, darling of the Reagan conservatives, emerges as a prophet in Matusow's analysis. But if Keynesian economics was dead in 1968, what are we to do with Richard Nixon's 1971 proclamation that “I am now a Keynesian in economics” after taking the United States off the gold standard. (The quote is often confused with Milton Friedman's 1965 “We are all Keynesians now” statement, which Friedman later qualified.)

To me his most interesting, and for the most part, the best-written chapters are in the last half of the book. Unlike Ronald Reagan and most of his disciples, Matusow makes a distinction between the 1960s counterculture, the New Left, and the antiwar liberals. He also understands the nuanced differences within the student civil rights movement.
In “Rise and Fall of a Counterculture,” Matusow gives us the evolution of the 1960s Hippie, from the black hipsters of the 1930s, through the Beats of the post-World War II era, and into the psychedelic era pioneered by the likes of Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. Matusow uses Allen Ginsberg, author of the classic 1955 Beat poem “Howl,” as the focus of the transition from Beat to Hippie: “Ginsberg was a new kind of American hero-saint. He had penetrated far enough into the dark recesses of self to risk sanity, and he had returned purified, with reverence for all living things.” (p. 284) Yet his analysis, written from a Reaganite perspective, seems stereotypically Victorian.

“Few hippies read much, but those who did found their purpose strikingly described and anticipated in the strange books of Norman O. Brown,” writes Masutow. (p.277) His analysis of the philosophy behind the counterculture is is very well stated, but today his conclusions ring true only for the cultural conservative. Brown, a Freudian, promoted the releasing the energy of the id—the creative, sexual impulse of Eros. “Like the hippies, Brown was in revolt against civilized sex—exclusively genital, exclusively heterosexual, exclusively monogamous—affirming instead pan-sexualism...” (p. 279)

But Brown had warned of the opposing principle of Eros—Thanatos, or the death wish. (Ethologist Konrad Lorenz, in his brilliant study On Aggression, takes issue with the Freudian concept of the death wish, but in the context of the Matusow's analysis of the counterculture, Brown's warning advances his argument.) Brown proposed a “Dionysian ego” to counter Thanatos, “overflowing with love, knowing no limits, affirming life... The creation of the Dionysian ego, the ego in service of liberated Eros—this was a project project millions of mothers would soon understand and implicitly and fear with good reason.” (p. 279)

Matusow follows the 1967 “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, from the Human Be-In on January 14 to the “Death of Hippie” in October. (A more thoughtful and more sympathetic view of the counterculture in that year can be found in Derek Taylor's It Was Twenty Years Ago Today. [Fireside, 1987].) And he chronicles the slide from Eros into Thanatos, from the Dionysian revels of Monterey Pop and Woodstock to the nightmarish Altamont Festival.

“For a variety of reasons, after 1970 the counterculture faded,” Matusow writes. (p. 305) Yet he admits that it has a legacy, though he sees nothing good in it: “By the 1970s social discipline was eroding so rapidly that fashion condemned the whole of middle-class culture as 'the culture of narcissism.' Parental discipline declined, sexual promiscuity rose along with the divorce rate, worker productivity fell, ghetto obscenity insinuated itself into standard speech, marijuana became almost commonplace, sexual perversions are no longer deemed so, and traditional institutions like the army, the churches, and the government lost authority... Dionysus has been absorbed into the dominant culture and in the process routed the Protestant ethic.” Matusow's alarmist statement ignores that government lost authority as much as a result of the Reagan revolution as the Sixties. And in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, so if Matusow considers it to be a sexual perversion that is “no longer deemed so, his complaint is with a traditional institution.

Matusow has less dire conclusions about the New Left. In his chapter, “The Rise and Fall of the New Left,” he documents its rise from the beginnings of the Students for a Democratic Society to its descent into the violent Weatherman faction. By the 1981 the radical New Left had virtually disappeared—it posed no threat to the Reaganite worldview Matusow embraces. In a similar fashion he covers the Black Power movement, which had virtually disintegrated by the 1970s. Yet the end of black nationalism did not bring African American voters into the Reagan coalition; they continued to vote for liberal Democrats.

The last two chapters of his book, “War, Liberals, and Overthrow of LBJ, and “Rout of the Liberals,” focus on the election of 1968. And again, it's well-written, but seriously flawed. Of the three major (largely) white youth movements of the 1960s, the “Dump Johnson” movement led by Allard Lowenstein was liberal rather than radical, and inspired thousands of idealistic young men and women to trudge through the snows of New Hampshire and Wisconsin for the quixotic antiwar presidential candidate Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota. They were crusaders not for some neo-Marxian radicalism, but for the kind of liberalism exemplified by Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson.

What Matusow does not discuss is the break within liberalism which led to both the narrow Humphrey defeat of 1968 and the Nixon landslide of 1972. In 1968, many antiwar liberals sat on their hands or voted for a third-party candidate such as Dick Gregory rather than support Hubert Humphrey. And in 1972, George Meany of the AFL-CIO made the decision not to endorse any candidate in the McGovern-Nixon race, effectively endorsing Nixon, and driving a wedge between labor and the antiwar liberals. Meany did not live to see the fruits of his decision when rank-and-file union members deserted the Democrats in 1980 to elect Ronald Reagan, who spent two terms eviscerating the labor movement.

Because Matusow finished the book in 1981, at the very beginning of the Reagan-Bush era, he could not foresee the disastrous consequences of the laissez-faire economics that dominated those decades. “Whether Reagan's victory made permanent the trend away from the liberalism of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, whether his conservative policies could weave together the unraveled fabric of the old America, even whether the old America was something that ought to be recovered—these questions were bound to engage historians far into the nation's future.” Matusow concludes. (p. 439)

Today, as we are still recovering from the Reagan Revolution, the nation is more divided than it was in 1968. While some on the far right will agree with Matusow’s conclusions, from this writer’s perspective, he was too quick to endorse the conclusions of the Reagan Right, even though he must have understood that the neoconservative critique of 1960s was based on oversimplification. The book is worth reading, if only to view a more sophisticated critique of the decade than the one given us by most 1980s neoconservatives.






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Mary Magdalene: A Mary for our time?

Image: Mary Magdalene by Anthony Frederick Sandys

In the sixth century Pope Gregory I gave a sermon that profoundly changed the the reputation of one of the most significant figures in the New Testament. And in doing so, he may have unwittingly given us a Mary for our time:

She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven devils were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices? It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner. She had coveted with earthly eyes, but now through penitence these are consumed with tears. She displayed her hair to set off her face, but now her hair dries her tears. She had spoken proud things with her mouth, but in kissing the Lord’s feet, she now planted her mouth on the Redeemer’s feet. For every delight, therefore, she had had in herself, she now immolated herself. She turned the mass of her crimes to virtues, in order to serve God entirely in penance.

Mary of Magdala, the first person to declare the resurrection of Jesus, thus became, in Christian art and literature, a reformed prostitute and a symbol of the redeeming power of Christ. Christian writers had been conflating the unnamed sinner in Luke with Mary Magdalene since at least Ephraim the Syrian in the fourth century, but it took a Bishop of Rome, the “first among equals” of the five great metropolitan bishops to cement that connection. While Gregory also conflates the sinner with Mary of Bethany in John's Gospel, the reputation has stuck to Mary Magdalene.

Gregory's sermon also makes the case that Mary, in her earlier life, had been guilty of all seven cardinal sins, thus making her even more a symbol of Christian repentance. But the human obsession with sex was surely there in the sixth century as it is in the twenty-first, and the image of Mary Magdalene has, at least in Western Christianity, been one of a reformed prostitute.

The Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant traditions have until very recently followed Gregory's lead. Until 1969 the Gospel reading for the feast of Mary Magdalene (July 22) in the Roman Catholic Church was Luke 7:36-50 (I'm using the King James Version, though Catholics would have used the Douay Bible or another translation from the Latin Vulgate):

36 And one of the Pharisees desired him that he would eat with him. And he went into the Pharisee's house, and sat down to meat.

37 And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment,

38 And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.

39 Now when the Pharisee which had bidden him saw it, he spake within himself, saying, This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she is a sinner.
40 And Jesus answering said unto him, Simon, I have somewhat to say unto thee. And he saith, Master, say on.

41 There was a certain creditor which had two debtors: the one owed five hundred pence, and the other fifty.

42 And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most?

43 Simon answered and said, I suppose that he, to whom he forgave most. And he said unto him, Thou hast rightly judged.

44 And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head.

45 Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet.

46 My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment.

47 Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.

48 And he said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven.

49 And they that sat at meat with him began to say within themselves, Who is this that forgiveth sins also?

50 And he said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.

It's a powerful story. While the Pharisee Simon is concerned with legalities of a sinful woman touching a man, Jesus says she showed more hospitality to him than Simon. A sinful woman, perhaps a prostitute, is accorded more grace than a righteous Pharisee. And in the passage, Jesus gives hope to women and men who have sinned greatly. But Luke never gives her a name. And a figure so important in Christian theology deserves a name. She has been accorded the name Mary (Miriam) both in Eastern and Western Christianity.

In the Eastern Orthodox churches she's one of the four Marys, along with Mary the Bearer of God, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Bethany. Here in the West, she became identified with Mary Magdalene. And in much of popular culture she still is. “Bad reputations, though, are hard to live down!” writes Carol Ann Morrow in The American Catholic. Popular works on the Gospels including Franco Zeffirelli's TV minseries Jesus of Nazaraeth, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar, and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ portray her as a prostitute.

She's been given an exalted title, thanks to Dan Brown's blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code: that of Jesus' wife. Brown bases his contention on the non-canonical Gospel of Philip, discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. Ants had eaten parts of the papyrus, so there are some important gaps in the text:

And the companion of the [...] Mary Magdalene. [...] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her [...]. The rest of the disciples [...]. They said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness."

A character in Brown's book contends that the Greek word Koinōnos, translated above as “companion,” really meant “wife.” However, Biblical scholars such as Bart Ehrman say it means “companion.” Brown's book also fills in one of the gaps, saying that the text likely read “used to kiss her often on her mouth.”

If the historical Mary Magdalene was neither harlot nor literal bride of Christ, who was she? Luke 8:1-3 gives us a clue:

After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out—and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.

Most contemporary scholars believe the seven demons, or devils are not a sign of sinfulness, but physical or mental illness. Presbyterian scholar George Buttrick, in his 1962 Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, writes: “She had been cured of a serious illness... The number seven would accentuate the serious nature of her condition or possibly its recurrent nature.”

Luke's comment that the women were “helping to support them [Jesus and his disciples] out of their own means” suggests that Mary and her companions had some wealth. Rather than a reformed prostitute, she was more likely a wealthy widow.

In the words of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), “The Holy Spirit made Magdalene the Apostle of the Apostles.” She not only supported Jesus financially, she was a leader in his ministry. She stayed with with him during his crucifixion, while the men fled. (The men had good reason to flee, as their presence might very well have led to their execution.) And she was the one to proclaim the empty tomb in Mark and the Resurrection in John.

Today the Gospel for the Feast of Mary Magdalene is John 20:11-18:

Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

Yet her “bad reputation” has surely comforted many who could identify with one who has sinned greatly. At least according to the popular image, she's one who's “been there, done that,” as have most of us. The image of Mary the Mother of Jesus as “perpetually virgin,” though perhaps as undeserved as that of Mary Magdalene, is diffuclt for those of us outside Roman Catholic or very high Anglo-Catholic circles to identify with. The reformed sinner might give us a more sympathetic ear. (Maryologists would disagree; I'm suggesting this is the view of someone looking at both Marys only by their popular images.)

It will probably be futile to change the popular image of Mary Magdalene in our lifetime. But perhaps the the Western churches should make a start by taking a page from the Eastern Orthodox churches and honor the woman from Luke 7 as a saint in her own right. Perhaps Mary of the City would be appropriate.

My Dickens Challenge novel is almost here!

Back when I was a much more active blogger, I participated in The Dickens Challenge, begun by mystery writer Tim Hallinan, author of the acclaimed Poke Rafferty novels. The idea was to write a novel the way Dickens did—one chapter a week, with no going back and revising. It was a wonderful exercise, and I read some topnotch writing, including that of Tim himself. My own effort, initially titled Things Done and Left Undone, after more than several revisions, is under contract with Taylor Street Books of San Francisco, under the working title of See You in Chicago.

The idea for the book came as a result of a novel writing contest held by White Wolf Press,h was held to promote two of its popular role-playing games in the World of Darkness series. The vampire world was set in Chicago, so I came up with an idea for a novel that took place during the 1968 Democratic Convention. My novel proposal did not make the first cut, but I couldn't let go of the idea of a story set in the that time and place.

While I still wanted to do paranormal fiction, I was glad to abandon the vampires and set my book in the world of magic. And magical powers are very limited, in this world. As a journeyman mage says to the book's protagonist, “That's the trouble with magic, or maybe its saving grace. We're not gods, even though there are some in the trade who think they are. Sometimes I wish I had unlimited power, but I couldn't trust myself with it. Lord Acton was right: 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'”

The story is set in a dystopian 21st Century, in which the United States has become the fundamentalist Christian Republic of America, but through a complicated series of events, the scene shifts to Chicago, August, 1968.

The protagonist, Thomas Leirmont, an idealistic young reporter, falls in love with a beautiful and mysterious young woman, Helena McKechnie, whose mother was a Zoroastrian Parsi and a descendent of of the Persian magi. Thomas must face a test, and his enemies, aided by Asmodeus, Prince of Lust and King of the Seven Hells, are doing their best to see that he fails. But he has powerful allies in Helena, two journeyman wizards, and benevolent spirits from beyond the grave.

David Dellinger, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Dick Gregory, Hugh Hefner, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Krassner, Eugene McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Phil Ochs, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Mary Travers, and Peter Yarrow make cameo appearances.

Once I know the book's publication date, I'll post it here.

Sex on the trains: anecdotes from Henry Kisor's "Zephyr"

At the conclusion of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 film, North by Northwest, Americans were shown the romance of making love on a train. (Immediately after the scene pictured above, where Cary Grant hoists Eva Marie Saint onto the upper berth of a Pullman compartment, Hitchcock cuts to the train going through a tunnel, just to make sure the audience knew what would happen next.) In earlier days before private compartments were common, the lore of the Nights Behind the Green Curtains” enticed many young couples to book a Pullman section, where only the heavy curtains separated them from other passengers traversing the train. The Pullman honeymoon was a grand American tradition.

There are still honeymooners who ride the sleeping cars. (The Pullman Company got out of the sleeping car business in the late Sixties, though older passengers sometimes refer to “Pullmans.”) Of course, it's not just honeymooners and other married couples who make love on the train. And not just in the sleeping cars.

Sex on the train has surely been happening ever since there were trains going any distance. A friend, now in her eighties, recalled seeing a couple have sex in the coaches (under blankets) in the 1940s. I've been reading Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America by Henry Kisor (New York: Times Books, 1994), and he has a section about sex on the trains. Here are a a few choice passages:

“Each Superliner sleeper compartment fronts onto the aisle with large glass windows and doors covered by curtains not always drawn completely in the couples' eagerness to get down to business. 'You wouldn't believe the the nonchalance of some of those people!' attendants often say. Casual as they may be about the morality of consenting adults, they're fiercely protective of the sensibilities of the other passengers. To Amtrak crew, sex is not a spectator sport.”

“Very late at night, when the entire train is sleeping except for the conductors huddled in their table far up in the dorm-coach, youngsters for whom nocturnal groping is too tame will tiptoe down to the lower level of their coaches and disport themselves inside the tiny bathrooms. To do so requires an athleticism sometimes defeating to those for whom the bloom of youth has disappeared. A favorite place of assignation therefore is the much larger handicapped bathroom—much to the irritation of wheelchair passengers who need to relieve themselves in the middle of the night.”

(Rather than occupy the accessible restroom, amorous couples could take advantage of the larger dressing room in the lower level of the Superliner coach. It has quite a bit more room than the little cubicle toilet compartments, though not the floor space of the accessible room.--SCW)

“...the Starlight had stopped one evening in Sacramento, and [Conductor Glen] Sullivan was offloading passengers from a Superliner coach with a large baggage room on the lower level, separated from the vestibule by a sliding door with a large window. As he helped passengers down onto the stepbox, he said, 'I hear this familiar murmur. People are saying, as they always do when they get off, “Where's my bag, Martha?” and “Joe, have you seen the grip?” But there's a funny gasping in the middle of the murmuring. I didn't think about it at first, but after we got the detraining passengers and we're getting the new ones on, the gasping starts up again. I realize there's something going on here, and look through that window to the baggage room. There they are, completely nude, just having a ball in front of everybody. They were just totally oblivious to what's going on the other side of the door. And I said, “Oh my God.”

'After we hustled everybody upstairs, I went back downstairs and opened the door, and said, “C'mon, folks. You know everyone's been watching you!” The girl said, real enthusiastically and with a big smile, “Yeah.” So I said, “Are you going to be long?” She said, “All night.” I said, “Oh, Jesus.” I went and got one of our plastic trash can liners and taped it over the window on the inside. I don't care what people do so long as nobody sees them. And they said, “Thank you very much.” 'Nice folks,' he added with heavy irony.”

Kisor has several more anecdotes about sex on the trains, and I suspect conductors, trainmen, and on board service personnel on Amtrak and its predecessor railroads can recall thousands more. But such stories surely do not compare with the mystery of Nights Behind the Green Curtains, or the romance of the Pullman honeymoon.

Kisor's book is available as an e-book through Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, and as a used book in hardback and paperback editions.

Zephyr

Naked City revisited

Of the several hundred posts in this blog, I've received the most comments on one called “The Dark Sideof Naked City.” I wrote it during my exile years from late 2003 to the summer of 2009, when I lived and worked apart from my family. At the time I wrote it, I was working in Normal, Illinois, had an efficiency apartment in nearby Bloomington, and would drive back to Elkhart on my Wednesday-Thursday “weekend.” The route I often used took me past the Sun Aura Resort, an adults-only, clothing-optional resort. I never drove into it, as the resort was some distance from the highway, I was curious. It seemed strange that such a place would exist in northern Indiana. There was even a second nudist resort, the Ponderosa Sun Club, across the highway.

But it was the Sun Aura Resort that piqued my curiosity, with its numerous signs. So I looked it up on Google, and learned that it had a long and varied history, beginning in 1933, when Chicago lawyer Alois Knapp, “the father of nudism in America,” founded the Zoro Nature Park, or Club Zoro. I don't know the meaning of the word Zoro, but is was also used in a San Diego nudist park. Knapp was the proprietor until the mid-1960s, after which it was taken over by Albin and Mary Drost, who, in 1968, passed it on to their son Dick, who renamed it Naked City.

Nudist colonies have a reputation for being prudish—almost puritanical—about sex. But Naked City celebrated sexuality, with its Miss Nude Universe and Miss Nude Teeny-Bopper contests, and the Erin-Go-Bra-less dance on St. Patrick's Day.

 

One commenter, writing under the name of Westflyer, said, “In the 1970s and '80s Dick Drost's Naked City, actually a small tacky surreal collection of plywood and tin-foil structures, represented a cross between a blue collar strip joint and a beer chugging stop for long distance truckers. During the summer months strippers turned nudists paraded around a crude stage while men howled their approval as they quaffed liquid courage and added to their already exploding stomachs.”

Obviously the place appealed mainly to men, though some women seem to have enjoyed working and visiting there. But, as I wrote five years ago, the place had a dark side. Dick Drost had a thing for teenaged girls, and in 1985 he was charged with molesting a 13-year-old girl and showing obscene materials to minors. He pled guilty to ten sex-related misdemeanors and avoided prison by agreeing to stay out of Indiana for ten years. He moved west and promptly created Naked City Los Angeles, or NCLA, in Homeland, California. And according to one of the commenters, that was destroyed in a brush fire, and he relocated to Palm Springs. One anonymous writer said he died in a California state nursing home.

Drost was a bizarre character—a quadriplegic from muscular dystrophy who apparently had a group of female admires who tended to his every need, including the sexual ones. (As one commenter wrote, “His equipment worked just fine, the ladies just had to do all the work.”) In a clip from the 1976 movie “Miss Nude America,” he speculates about becoming President, or head of the Soviet Union or China, though he made it clear he wasn't interested in becoming mayor of Roselawn. According to the lawsuit Naked City, Inc. v. Aregood, Drost ran for Governor of Indiana in 1975 (the election was in 1976, so he may have filed for his candidacy in 1975 or the statement was in error).

The lawsuit, which went nowhere, alleges numerous raids against the property and illegal wiretapping and filming, along with illegal seizure of property. It also alleges that the charges Drost pled guilty to were without merit, and that his guilty plea was made only “because of the severe oppression against him...” Nonetheless, he did plead guilty.

And it seems almost certain he was. One woman wrote, “I, unfortunately, worked for Dick for a couple of days before I realized I had to get out of there.” Another woman, who, at the age of 16 was at the Roselawn Naked City with her recently-divorced mother, wrote, “after he figured i was comfortable working nude it moved on [to] being a personal assistant and helping Diane take care of him and eventually working the front counter checking in people and being up front with the 'adults' pretending I was 18 they knew how old i was, end of summer it moved on to sleep with me or you get to be on the street. needless to say that wasnt EVER going to happen.”

Her comment reads like a stream-of-consciousness narrative and ends with, “its too bad i was too young to realize what was happening till it was too late. it wasnt all bad i made some good friends there. My interactions with that man and his sick girlfriend ruined a perfectly good time in my life and today if that bastard was alive id sue him for everything he he has. im not sorry to hear hes dead but i def know know if theres a hell hes getting what he deserves for what he did.”

I don't know where Dick Drost's soul has gone. He surely had personal demons of his own. But I hope the woman who, at 16, had to deal with Drost's unwelcome advances, has found some peace and happiness.

 

St. Martin still speaks to us

In the United States, today is Veterans' Day.  Europeans still celebrate it as Armistice Day, to mark the end of the Great War--"the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month, 1918."  But it is also the feast day of St. Martin of Tours, patron of soldiers, the poor, innkeepers, and drunkards. I wrote the following piece for "The Winged Ox," the newsletter of St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, back in 2004, when the United States was at war in both Iran and Afghanistan. But while America's wars seem to be winding down, the fourth-century saint still speaks to us.

Peace,

Steve


"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," wrote British historian Lord Acton.  The feast day of St. Martin of Tours, November 11, celebrates a man who fought the corruption of power in the church.
 
Until the fourth century, the Christian church had little or no power.
When the emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion in
314, this struggling church was endowed with great, if not absolute
power.

Martin was born in 316, in Pannonia (modern-day Hungary), of pagan
parents.  At the age of 15, he was conscripted into the Roman army,
where he was eventually stationed at Amiens, in Gaul (modern France).  By this time he
had become a catechumen, or inquirer into the Christian faith.  One
winter day, according to legend, he met a half-naked beggar outside the
city gates.  Moved with compassion, he cut his military cloak in two and
gave half to the beggar.  In a dream that night, Christ appeared to him
wearing the half cloak.

Martin then appealed to be released from the army.  He was accused of
cowardice, but offered to face the enemy armed only with the cross of
Christ.  Before the battle began, the enemy sued for peace, and Martin
was allowed to leave the army.  He might be considered the first
conscientious objector.

Martin eventually made his way to Poitiers, in southern Gaul, to become
a disciple of Bishop Hilary.  He lived as a hermit, but attracted so
many followers that he had to establish a monastery.  Legend says that
he did not want to become the Bishop of Tours in 371, but was persuaded
to visit the city to give last rites to a dying woman, and was there
made bishop by acclamation.  As bishop, Martin had no qualms about
destroying pagan shrines.  But he would not accede to the taking of
human life.

Priscillian, bishop of Avila, preached asceticism: vegetarianism,
teetotalism, and celibacy.  His call for the renunciation of marriage
brought him the censure of Church authorities.  The Council of Saragossa
condemned his teachings in 380.  After unsuccessfully appealing to Pope
Damasus I and Ambrose of Milan, Priscillian and six of his followers
appealed to Emperor Magnus Maximus at Treveris (modern-day Trier,
Germany). It wasn't a good move.  The emperor, at the urging of Bishop
Ithacius of Ossanova, had Priscillian and his disciples condemned to death.

For Martin, excommunication, not execution, was the proper punishment
for heresy.  He made the long journey to Trier, where he persuaded the
emperor to remove Priscillian and his companions from imperial
jurisdiction.  But soon after Martin left Trier, Ithacius prevailed on
the emperor to have the men beheaded.  They were the first, though sadly
not the last religious dissenters to be executed at the behest of church
authorities.

Martin refused to communicate with Ithacius after learning of his
treachery.  But later, when Martin returned to Trier to plead for the
release two rebels held by the emperor, Maximus would agree to the
pardon only if Martin would make peace with Ithacius.  Martin did so to
save the lives of the men, though he later reproached himself for his
weakness.  For me, Martin's compassion was his greatest strength.

Martin is the patron of soldiers and beggars.  Because his feast day
coincided with the pagan feast of Bacchus, he is also the patron of
drunkards and innkeepers.  But he also needs to be remembered as a man
of Christlike love, who stood against the abuse of power by church and
imperial authorities.

Illustration: La charité de saint Martin from Heures d'Étienne Chevalier,
illuminated by Jean Fouquet (1420-1480)

Junior L. Crews, 1922-2012

Last month we had to temporarily remove part of a chain-link fence in our backyard so a tree removal service could come in. As I was undoing the wire ties, I realized how expertly that fence had been put together. It wasn't done by a professional, but by my father-in-law, Junior L. Crews, who died September 8. For him, it was a labor of love.
 

He wasn't supposed to be named Junior, but James Lee Crews, Junior, when he was born July 11, 1922, on a farm just outside Ravanna, in north central Missouri, just south of the Iowa line. His parents never completed his birth certificate—he was Baby Boy Crews, according to legal records. When it came time to get a proper birth certificate in order to receive Social Security, he had been going by Junior for so long that he made it his legal name.

 

 

He didn't have an easy boyhood growing up on a hardscrabble farm in the 1920s and '30s, and a father with a drinking problem didn't help. When he was a teenager, he had worked all summer to buy an air rifle. His father took Junior's prize possession and hocked it to buy whiskey. And one of his regular chores on the farm was to kill and pluck the chickens. He rarely ate chicken for the rest of his life. When Kathleen and I visited and cooked chicken, we tried to disguise it as much as possible. He'd eat a little bit to please us, but he never really liked it.
 

Like most young men of his generation, he was eager to join up and fight after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He tried more than once, but a farm accident had left him with no feeling in parts of his right hand, including his trigger finger. The Army wouldn't take him. But the war had affected him. His father had moved his family to Davenport, Iowa, to work in the factories. And for Junior, the move to the city meant he could complete high school. For someone with nerve damage in his right hand, he had quite a bit of artistic talent,from the drawings I've seen. He was older than many in his graduating class because he had to skip a lot of school to work on the farm.
 

It was at Davenport High School that he met the love of his life, a big-city girl from Milwaukee whose family had also come to Davenport for war work. Marilyn Margaret Moon, a lovely brown-eyed brunette, also had a parent with a drinking problem. Both wanted the stability of church and family. After attending several churches in Davenport, they settled on the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). One fellow parishioner was so impressed with this bright young man from Missouri that he offered to send him to Drake University, a Disciples school, to study for the ministry. But more practical things intervened, especially after Junior and Marilyn were married in the church on October 8, 1944. He got a job with the City of Davenport and worked for the municipality until he retired at the age of 62. But he stayed with his church, and became a deacon.

 

 

Junior and Marilyn's first child, Constance Carol Crews (Jackson) was born August 4, 1946. Six and a half years later, Kathleen June Crews (Wylder) came into the world on December 30, 1952. Junior and Marilyn loved the outdoors, and took their girls on extended camping trips to many of the National Parks and Monuments, including Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Wind Cave, Mount Rushmore, the Great Smokies, and Mammoth Cave.

 

 

Junior set his own pace. One legendary story happened on the trip to Mammoth Cave, when, fascinated by all the cave formations, he lagged so far behind the tour group that the lights were being turned off just behind him.
 

Junior wasn't perfect. He had a temper, as well as a streak of stubbornness. That stubborn streak may have kept him alive for many years longer than anyone expected him to live. Decades of working in Davenport's sewer system had given him a case of emphysema. But he lived to be ninety, and was physically strong into his eighties.
 

I didn't get to know Junior until 1972, when he was fifty, and I was courting his daughter Kathleen. He seemed a bit scary at first—he was protective of his little girl--but when it was clear my intentions were honorable he helped Kathleen and me immensely. During the summer of 1973, before Kathleen and I were married, he took her to estate sales and secondhand shops to get furniture and tools for us. We still have the table he found, along with some tools that will last for generations longer. And when he learned I loved trains, he found two Milwaukee Road railroad lanterns and a switch lock from the Davenport, Rock Island and Northwestern (the DRI Line) for me. I worried a bit about the switch lock, but so far as I know, there weren't any derailments on the line.

 

 

After he retired, he remained active. He and Marilyn spent many summers at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, where they kept a trailer and Junior fished on the Mississippi. We enjoyed the bass and Northern Pike he caught in abundance. When our children were born he made child-size furniture, as well as doll beds for the girls. And when we moved to Indiana he came up and put up that fence in our backyard.
 

He was deeply in love with Marilyn right up to the end. In early August, when both of them were in the Good Samaritan Rehabilitation Center, they were able to eat together in the dining room. It was wonderful to see them together, for even in poor health they treasured each other's company.

 

 

When I posted a brief notice of Junior's passing on Facebook, a friend of ours wrote, “I enjoyed meeting him and will always remember Kathleen calling him an 'old coot' with fondness in her voice.”
 

He loved and supported his wife and family, and was generous to all. I was privileged to be his son-in-law.

A day for us of little faith

The second Sunday of Easter has been a special day for me since my conversion to Christianity more than thirty years ago. And it isn't just because of the beautiful hymn, “O Sons and Daughters Let Us Sing,” though that certainly adds to the experience. But for me, who came to the faith after years of questioning and doubt, St. Thomas's Sunday is something to look forward to. It's called that because the Gospel reading for Roman Catholic, Anglican,and most mainline Protestant churches is John 20:24-29:

24But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, [the Twin] was not with them when Jesus came.
25The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the LORD. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
26And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.
27Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
28And Thomas answered and said unto him, My LORD and my God.
29Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. (KJV)

Too often, Thomas gets a bad rap from preachers because of his unwillingness to believe instantly in the resurrected Jesus. Thomas had not been present when Jesus first appeared to the rest of the disciples in the upper room, where Jesus showed them his pierced hands and wounded side. They had the advantage Thomas lacked. Had one of the others been in the same situation as Thomas, he might have done the same thing. His honesty in not believing blindly has always impressed me. He is the patron saint of those of us who don't always have the mustard seed's worth of faith that Jesus asks of his followers.

But lately I've wondered whether we “of little faith” have had ours strengthened by the fashionable trend of atheism. I'm not talking about people whose atheism comes from honest inquiry, but those who have declared themselves atheists because it's now the popular thing to do.

I first recognized the new reality four years ago, when I was in Chicago for Amtrak block training. It's a two-day training session, so as an out-of-towner, I had a hotel room at the Holiday Inn for two nights. And since I don't have cable TV at home, I was watching MSNBC. Bill Maher's show came on, and I was interested in one of the guests: Reza Azlan, a brilliant Iranian-American writer who has done so much for our understanding of Islam and the Middle East. But first I had to sit through Maher's conversation with the two men behind the cartoon South Park. As usual, I was impressed with Azlan.

It was an intelligent discussion until Maher brought up his atheism. The two South Park guys chimed in that they were atheists, too, and Maher said to Azlan something to the effect of “But you're not an atheist. You're a Muslim.”

Azlan asserted that he was.

And Maher asked him why he didn't join the atheists. I don't remember the exact words, but it had an “everybody's doing it” sound to it.

I realized I had more in common with the Muslim Azlan, a man of faith, than with Maher or the two South Park guys. I do not know how any of the three men arrived at their atheism, but they did not try to persuade Azlan with logic or reason, but with fashion. I do know that Azlan's God is the same compassionate God most Christians and Jews worship. The details—the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, etc.--are far less important than the compassion.

Something is not necessarily wrong because it's fashionable. But it's always best to question anything in the current vogue. And I fear that too many people are embracing atheism without a great deal of thought or introspection.

As for us of little faith, we have the example of Thomas, who had the courage to declare his doubt among an audience of believers. I pray to have the courage to maintain my faith in a popular culture of unbelief.

My ancestors at Shiloh

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, as it was known in the North. Two of my ancestors, James Robert Melton Wylder, my great-great grandfather (pictured), and his father-in-law, John H. Reddish, (add another 'great" there), were officers in the 61st Illinois Regiment. Leander Stillwell, in his classic work The Story of a Common Soldier, includes vignettes about both of them. Reddish had fought in the Black Hawk War, which explains his comments.

Not everyone can say his ancestor was jumping up and down "like a hen on a hot griddle, as Stillwell describes Lieutenenant Wylder:

"Stillwell! shoot! shoot! Why don’t you shoot?" I looked around and saw that this command was being given by Bob Wylder, our second lieutenant, who was in his place, just a few steps to the rear. He was a young man, about twenty-five years old, and was fairly wild with excitement, jumping up and down "like a hen on a hot griddle." "Why, lieutenant," said I, "I can’t see anything to shoot at." "Shoot, shoot, anyhow!" "All right," I responded, "if you say shoot. shoot it is;" and bringing my gun to my shoulder, I aimed low in the direction of the enemy, and blazed away through the smoke. I have always doubted if this, my first shot. did any execution --- but there’s no telling. However, the lieutenant was clearly right Our adversaries were in our front, in easy range, and it was our duty to aim low, fire in their general direction, and let fate do the rest.

And here's Stillwell's account of Captain Reddish:



When we "went in" on the above mentioned position old Capt. Reddish took his place in the ranks, and fought like a common soldier. He had picked up the musket of some dead or wounded man, and filled his pockets with cartridges and gun caps, and so was well provided with ammunition. He unbuckled his sword from the belt, and laid it in the scabbard at his feet, and proceeded to give his undivided attention to the enemy. I can now see the old man in my mind’s eye, as he stood in ranks, loading and firing, his blue-gray eyes flashing, and his face lighted up with the flame of battle. Col. Fry happened to be near us at one time, and I heard old Capt. John yell at him: "Injun fightin,’ Colonel! Jest like Injun fightin’!" When we finally retired, the Captain shouldered his musket and trotted off with the rest of us, oblivious of his "cheese-knife," as he called it, left it lying on the ground, and never saw it again.

Stillwell's book is in the public domain, and is available through Project Gutenberg.

Why I've used my full legal name on Facebook and for publication, or I'm not into kinky, thank you

It all started some time in the 1990s, when I got a call from my father, who was living in New Mexico. He had received a call from a collection agency, which was trying to find the whereabouts of one Stephen Wylder. My dad knew I wasn't the one the agency was looking for, as the the said Stephen Wylder had lived in New Mexico as an adult. I lived in Albuquerque from 1958, when I was six, until 1965, when I was all of 13. He wisely didn't tell the representative any information about me, because the agency probably probably would have gone after me anyway.

It was a bit unsettling to know there was somebody else out there with my name—especially somebody with a credit problem. There just aren't that many Wylders in the United States. Most are descended from Wiley Wylder, son of Moses Wilder. There are different stories about why Wiley changed the spelling of his name. One tale is that it was a dispute over some land. My wife thinks Wiley just couldn't spell. In any case, Wiley changed the spelling to “Wylder” and moved from North Carolina to Illinois. In 1861 his son, James Robert Melton Wylder, the grandson of a Virginia slaveholder, was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 61st Illinois Infantry Regiment. It's possible I'm a distant relative of Douglas Wilder, the first (and so far the only) African American governor of Virginia, but that's another story.

It must have been around 2000 when I found Stephen Wylder again, thanks to the Internet. I “Googled” my name, though I suspect I used Alta Vista or Dogpile back then, and found there was a Stephen Wylder in California, who claimed to be a priest in the “Preterite (Anglican) Church” in California. While I know nothing about the Preterite Church, I am an Anglican (Episcopal Church—not one of those sects that broke away over the ordination of women and/or gays). There was also a Stephen Wylder in the San Diego area who posted on a message board for men who were in search of a dominatrix. (I kid you not.)

Given the possibilities for confusion, I began using my full name, Stephen Crews Wylder, when I wrote for publication. I also used it on for my Facebook page. The trouble is, it looks as though there should be a should be a Roman numeral and perhaps a title of nobility after it, though my wife, Kathleen Crews Wylder (I changed my middle name to her maiden name a la John Ono Lennon.) is the one who can trace her lineage to nobility. She's a descendant of John, Lord of the Isles, of Scotland.

Recently I learned that a Stephen Wylder had died in California. He was the same age as I, and whether or not he was the same Stephen Wylder who had me worried in the past I haven't seen any references to the Preterite Church or dominatrices attached to my first and last name in many years.

So I'm going back to plain Steve Wylder on Facebook, if I can figure out how to change it, but I'll stick to Stephen Crews Wylder for publication.

Meanwhile, if I'm ever in North Bay, Ontario (and the only reason I can think of going there is to ride the Polar Bear Express up to Moosonee), I can stop in at Wylder's Bar and Grill. Maybe I'll get a free drink.

My bizarre employment history, or how On the slow train became Home in the railroad earth

In April of 2005 I was living in an efficiency apartment in Northeast Philadelphia, while my wife and son were in Elkhart, Indiana. It was the fourth phase in my career with Amtrak, which began in Chicago in 1984, and contiunes today in South Bend. I started at the Chicago Reservation Sales Office in February, after working for the Franch National Railroads' Chicago office and then for CIT Tours, the agency representing the Italian State Railways.

Kathleen and I lived in Oak Park, Illinois at the time. Our two daughters were born there, and by 1989 we had a third chid on the way. Rents were high in Oak Park, and inexpensive places to live in the Chicago area often came with second-rate schools. So we were looking for a smaller city, where the cost of living was lower. We were hoping for something near Iowa, where we both grew up. I had put in for a voluntary transfer to work as a ticket agent in numerous cities in the upper Midwest. Elkhart, Indiana wasn't one of them.

But Frank Stoy, the station supervisor in Toledo needed an agent in Elkhart. We looked at the town, liked it, and I made the transfer. We bought a house and moved while Kathleen was eight months pregnant. Our son Jim was born October 10, 1989--a little over a month after we moved.
Four years later, after Amtrak closed the station in Fort Wayne, I lost my Elkhart ticket agent job. But because I hadn't yet worked five years under the voluntary transfer, I still had seniority in Chicago.

For ten years--from December 1993 until December 2003--I was back at the Chicago call center, commuting from Elkhart on Amtrak and/or the South Shore (the latter involved a drive to South Bend or Michigan City). In the last few years I had enough seniority to work a four-day, ten-hour shift.
That all came to an end when Amtrak management decided to close the Chicago call center. I still believe that was a mistake, but upper management had made the decision. Even Richard M. Daley's offer of giving us a rent-free lease in an upper floor of the Carson's building did not sway the top brass. I had the choice of staying in Chicago or transferring to one of the remaining call centers.

Given the unstable situation in Chicago, I went to Philly. The girls were both in college by this time, but Jim was still in high school. The original plan was for all of us to move to Philly, but it's not easy to sell a house and Jim really wanted to graduate from Elkhart Memorial. So I ended up commuting back and forth, usually riding down to Washington on the Northeast Regional and switching to the Capitol Limited back to Elkhart. Because the Capitol winds its way along the river valleys of Maryland and Pennsylvania, it was very much the slow train. I had a recording of the King's Singers performing the Flanders and Swann's song, "Slow Train, and I remembered Bob Dylan's rambling poem on the album cover of Highway 61 Revisited beginning, "On the slow train time does not interfere." "On the slow train" seemed an apt name for my blog.

I kept it after I transferred to Bloomington-Normal. Illinois, and began driving every week between there and Elkhart. In the spring of 2009 we were in the process of moving to Bloomington when, after getting indigestion from eating a toasted tortilla with Pace 3 Pepper Salsa, I went to the computer and checked the Amtrak job website and saw a job opening in South Bend. I was supposed to have been notified of the job, as I had a transfer application in. Once I got hold of the station supervisor, the job was mine. Since July of 2009, I've been living in Elkhart and working in South Bend, some 15 miles away. So I haven't been "on the slow train" for some time. I also haven't been blogging much, as other things have taken precedence. Still, I'd like to blog more, and changing the name to "Home in the Railroad Earth seems appropriate. It's a variation of lines from Jack Kerouac's prose poem, "October in the Railroad Earth," which has been a favorite of mine ever since I first heard it, with Kerouac reading the poem to Steve Allen's piano accompaniment.

Elkhart, a railroad town for more than a century, and still the home to one of the Norfolk Southern's biggest rail yards, is surely of the Railroad Earth.

Of course, the Republican Congress would like me to be unemployed. Not personally, of course, but because I work for Amtrak. And while it doesn't look as though it will succeed in killing my employer, it may very well force Amtrak to cut its long-distance service. I still have seniority in Philadelphia, so I could end up moving back. But Kathleen would be going with me. And with no slow train to ride, I'd have to come up with a new name for the blog.

To Althea, who rode the train

Checking a passenger list recently, I came across the name Althea. It's not a common name, and it brought to mind Richard Lovelace's poem, “To Althea, from Prison.” And it prompted me to revisit the poem and to look up Richard Lovelace on Wikipedia. The poem is a familiar one, if only for the first few lines of the last stanza. It was well-worth rereading, especially after learning that Lovelace actually did spend time in prison:

When Love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my Gates;
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the Grates:
When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fetter'd to her eye;
The Gods that wanton in the Air,
Know no such Liberty.

When flowing Cups run swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with Roses bound,
Our hearts with Loyal Flames;
When thirsty grief in Wine we steep,
When Healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the Deep,
Know no such Liberty.

When (like committed Linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, Mercy, Majesty,
And glories of my KING;
When I shall voice aloud how Good
He is, how Great should be;
Inlarged Winds that curl the Flood,
Know no such Liberty.

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron Bars a Cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage;
If I have freedom in my Love,
And in my soul am free;
Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

Lovelace, born in 1618 into a well-to-do family, was the son of Sir William Lovelace, a member of the Virginia Company, and Anne Barnes Lovelace, daughter of Sir William Barne and a granddaughter of a Lord Mayor of London and an Archbishop of York. Given his circumstances, he grew to be a strong defender of the King Charles I and the Royalists in the conflict between King and Parliament.

He fought on the Royalist side in the 1640 Bishops' War, after Charles imposed bishops on the Church of Scotland. It was a precursor to the English Civil Wars. In 1641 he led a group of men to seize and destroy a petition for the abolition of episcopal rule in the Scottish church. The following year he presented the House of Commons with a pro-Royalist petition, which was supposed to have been burned. These actions landed him in Gatehouse Prison on April 30, 1642, but he was released on bail on June 21 of the same year on that condition that he avoid communication with Parliament.

Yet that brief incarceration inspired one of the most well-known poems in the English language. For Lovelace, the power of human love transcends the confinement of the stone walls and iron bars. The sublime eroticism of the first stanza: “When I lie tangled in her hair,/And fetter'd to her eye;/The Gods that wanton in the Air,/Know no such Liberty.” ought to be as well-remembered as the first lines of the last stanza. His use of the “fetter'd” “bound” reminds us that there can be freedom in the bonds between lovers.

Was there really an Althea who visited Lovelace in prison? There is no evidence for it, but I'd like to think there was. While Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Reginald Frampton paints her as a redhead (with what would later be called a Princess Leia hairdo), I imagine her as having long, dark hair and sparkling brown eyes, and looking very much like the woman I married.

And for the Althea who rode the train, my thanks for reminding me of this beautiful poem.

Tenebrae

WEDNESDAY OF HOLY WEEK, 1940


Out of the east window a storm
Blooms spasmodically across the moonrise;
In the west, in the haze, the planets
Pulsate like standing meteors.
We listen in the darkness to the service of Tenebrae,
Music older than the Resurrection,
The voice of the ruinous, disorderly Levant:
“Why doth the city sit solitary
That was full of people?”
The voices of the Benedictines are massive, impersonal;
They never fear this agony nor are ashamed of it.
Think...six hours ago in Europe,
Thousands were singing these words,
Putting out candles psalm by psalm...
Albi like a fort in the cold dark,
Aachen, the voices fluttering in the ancient vaulting,
The light of the last candle
In Munich on the gnarled carving.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
Return ye unto the Lord thy God.”
Thousands kneeling in the dark,
Saying, “Have mercy upon me, O God.”
We listen appreciatively, smoking, talking quietly,
The voices are coming to us from three thousand miles.
On the white garden wall the shadows
Of the date palm thresh wildly;
The full moon of the spring is up,
And a gale with it.

--Kenneth Rexroth


Tenebrae is Latin for “darkness” or “shadows.” Fifteen candles are lighted in a stand called a hearse. At the end of each reading one candle is extinguished, until all but one candle is left burning. And that candle is hidden behind the altar, putting the church sanctuary in total darkness. A loud noise (Latin streptius) is made, usually by slamming a book shut or stomping on the floor, to symbolize the earthquake after Jesus' death. After the great noise, the single lighted candle is returned to the hearse, signifying the light of Christ's resurrection.

Kenneth Rexroth, who spent his early childhood in Elkhart, was an Anglo-Catholic or High Church Episcopalian, and he deeply appreciated the service of Tenebrae. In 1943, depressed about the war and uncertain of whether his conscientious objector status would be approved, tried to persuade an Episcopal or Roman Catholic church in San Francisco to offer the service, but without luck.

But three years earlier, Rexroth and his second wife Marie listened to Tenebrae broadcast on the radio from a Benedictine monastery somewhere on the east coast. The early spring of 1940 was the time of the “Phoney War,” when the Germans and their Soviet allies were busy consolidating their conquest of Poland while the Western Front was relatively quiet. In fact, French troops had penetrated a few miles into Germany but then withdrew behind the Maginot Line.

Everyone knew a German attack on France was coming—the question was when, and Rexroth juxtaposes the dark service of Tenebrae with the tensions in Europe and the approaching storm outside his window. Rexroth mentions three European cities in the poem.

Albi, in southern France, was once the center of the Cathar Christians, deemed heretical by the Catholic Church and all but wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) under Pope Innocent III. (Like other crusades this one had as much to do with temporal affairs as theological ones. The French monarchy gained control of southern France by participating in the crusade.) In any case, Albi brings to mind we now call genocide.

Aachen, or Aix-la-Chapelle in French, was the seat of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, and represents the triumph of Christianity over paganism. Many Nazi leaders wanted to exchange Christianity for a kind of neo-paganism. (I wonder whether the pre-Christian Germanic tribes would have recognized it as their religion.)

Munich, the principal city of Catholic southern Germany and Hitler's base of operations during the 1920s, was also the home of Cardinal Archbishop Michael Von Faulhaber, who spoke out against the Nazis' persecution of the Jews. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return ye unto the Lord thy God,” Rexroth pleads, quoting from the liturgy.

The service of Tenebrae gives us an opportunity to reflect on the dark side of history and to take solace in the Light of Christ.

Image: Tenebrae hearse from Mainz Cathedral: Wikimedia Commons

"A Reagan Book for his 100th"

Thank you, Mark Souder. I'm not in the habit of thanking the former representative from the Third District of Indiana, but because of a column he wrote in the Elkhart Truth (“Pick up a Reagan Book for his 100th,” 5 February 2011), I have reason to thank him.

Souder, some of you may remember, was the Christian Right congressman who resigned after the public learned of his affair with a married woman on his staff. He resurfaced last month to urge Elkhartans to read a book about Ronald Reagan to celebrate the centennial of his birth.

Clearly, Souder idolizes Reagan: nearly all of the books he recommends are either hagiographies or extremely sympathetic to their subject. To give Souder credit, he does mention books by Lou Cannon, with the warning, “He does not share Reagan's worldview.”

Had Souder not published his list, I probably would not have reread Reagan's America: Innocents at Home by Garry Wills (Doubleday, 1987). It isn't on Souder's list; not only does Wills not share Reagan's worldview, he argues that it it is not based in reality: “A visit to his past is always a pleasant experience. Visiting Reaganland is is very much like taking children to Disneyland, where they can deal with a New Orleans cut to their measure. It is a safe past, with no sharp edges to stumble against. The more visits one makes to such a past, the better one is any troubling incursions of a real New Orleans, a real racetrack, the real American West.” (p387)
Wills calls the book's first section “Huck Finn's World.” In his autobiography, Reagan calls his childhood “one of those rare Huck Finn-Tom Sawyer idylls.” But Wills reminds us that “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in particular, takes place almost entirely at night, as a series of panicky escapes from one horror to another.” (p7)

Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois, just a few miles from my father's hometown of Morrison. While Reagan's family moved many times during his childhood, he regards Dixon—one county over from Morrison—as his boyhood home. Reagan's first regular job was at WOC Radio in Davenport, Iowa. And while I grew up in Iowa City, I married a Davenport girl. So in a sense, Reagan's background parallels my own, though it's separated by some forty years. And while my father, who grew up in the same region as Reagan, voted for Dewey in 1944, but became a liberal Democrat not long afterward. Reagan supported Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but took a sharp right turn sometime after 1948.

Wills shows how the white settlement of the American Midwest, along with the West, was made possible largely by government: the Hennepin Canal, which benefited Tampico, was a government project. He goes on to remind us that Reagan's father and brother both through the Depression as a result of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

In Davenport, and later in Des Moines, Reagan worked as a sportscaster, transforming telegraphed signals from Chicago Cubs games into play-by-play coverage. And Wills points out that Reagan had spent his entire career as one of the “symbol specialists” Jeane Kirkpatrick attacked in her 1976 book, The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National Politics. Reagan went from sportscaster to actor to General Electric spokesman to politician.

“There is nothing wrong with any of these activities,” Wills writes. But it is strange that they should make up the sole background of a hero cheered by critics of mere 'symbol skills.'” (p101)

Wills follows Reagan's Hollywood career from his arrival to his 1942 triumph in Kings Row, to his transition from a movie to a television actor. As president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan helped engineer an agreement with MCA which allowed the corporation to act both as union representative of television actors an television producer—an obvious conflict of interest.

Reagan, according to Wills, came close to being indicted. Wills believes Reagan just didn't see it as a conflict of interest, but “was always always prepared to think the best of his own bosses.” (p278)

The main premise of Wills's book, though, is that Reagan's America is one of myth—a myth that millions of Americans hold as truth. In his chapter, “Greenfield Village on the Potomac,” Wills writes of Henry Ford's high schools, where students learned from McGuffey's Readers: “Ford kept creating new models of his cars to replace the old, but he would not allow his schools to admit new readers to replace McGuffey's... He could not take his old world with him as he whizzed off in his automobile time machine, which carried him in the wrong direction, forward to the future.” (p374, italics in original)

Reagan's America is one very much defined by Hollywood. Wills points out that the “Wild West” of movies and television is at odds with the real American West of the post-Civil War era:
“...Robert Dykstra, investigating the period of legendary drives through the towns of Kansas, found that places like Dodge City and Abilene averaged only one and a half murders per year, often having nothing to do with cowboys, and usually unconnected with 'shootouts.'” (p89)

In his 1976 primary campaign against Gerald Ford, Reagan repeated a story about a black Navy cook who was stationed at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed: “'He cradled a machine gun in his arms, which is not an easy thing to do, and stood on the end of the pier blazing away at the Japanese airplanes and strafing him and that [segregation] was all changed.'

“Reporters pointed out that segregation [in the military] persisted until Truman abolished it in 1948, three years after the war, but Reagan shook his head and said he did not believe them.” (p165) Wills surmises that he remembered the scene from a movie.

In a movie Wills does not mention, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the old newspaper editor says, “When legend becomes fact, print the legend.” For Reagan, the legend has become fact. And because the legends are the same ones that Americans have learned from television and the movies, he was able to key into the American psyche in a way that few politicians have: “He is a durable daylight 'bundle of meanings,' as Roland Barthes called myth. Reagan does not not argue for American values, he embodies them.” (p4)

And perhaps the central American value he embodies is one that it is at odds with traditional Christianity: that of original sinlessness:

At one time a woman of unsavory enough experience was delicately but cruelly referred to as “having a past.” The doctrine of original sin states that humankind, in exactly that sense, “has a past.” And much of American thinking has been intended to exempt this country from that stigma. (p384)

Wills contrasts “the doctrine of the Fall” with “the doctrine of the Market:”

Modern capitalism lives by a counter-myth to the Fall of Man—one where benign nature makes everything go, miraculously, right... Individual greeds add up to general gain... Eden was lost by free choice in the Fall of Man. It rises, unbidden, by the automatic engineerings of the Market.

The earlier myth called for a repenting awareness of sin. The later one called for a dutiful innocence and optimism. (p384)

Jimmy Carter, though a far more devout and orthodox Christian than Reagan, lost the evangelical Christian vote because he believed in the Fall of Man: “religious voters found that Carter lacked the higher confidence in man, man's products, and America. He talked of limits and self-denial, of tendencies toward aggression even in a sacred or 'saved' nation like America. He believed in original sin.”

Reagan's ability to identify himself with that American counter-myth, Wills argues, is the reason Americans twice elected him to the nation's highest office. More recently, Tea Party activists have accused President Obama of not believing in American exceptionalism. It seems to be a myth that, however untrue, all American politicians must subscribe to. And Reagan articulated the myth better than anyone else.

Reagan, who misquoted John Winthrop's 1630 “city upon a hill” sermon, by adding the adjective “shining” to it, distorted Winthrop's message of caution and turned it into an optimistic declaration of a new Eden. Winthrop uses the line from from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:14): “...for we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world...,” as a warning to his Puritan followers that their colony would be watched and judged by the world. Reagan's “shining city on a hill” had no such cautionary message; only the shallow optimism of “Morning in America.”

Mark Souder, who, I hope, has repented of his sins, ought to read Reagan's America. And I pray that he and his former lover can repair their respective marriages.