Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
The one person in history I'd like to talk to
This Catholic Update examines the facts and fiction about St. Mary Magdalene. Learn about the real Mary through Bible stories that portray her as a witness, disciple, partner and evangelist.
St. Mary Magdalene
Redeeming Her Gospel Reputation
by Carol Ann Morrow
The Da Vinci Code, as a best-selling novel and a heavily promoted film, has introduced many to a Mary Magdalene they hadn’t met before. But behind the scenes, there has been a renaissance of interest in this “Apostle to the Apostles” in recent decades.
Authors and theologians, such as Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., have researched what we really can say about St. Mary Magdalene, by sorting through the Bible stories and showing how she can be a saint for our times. Their serious scholarship helps us to keep the current
“buzz” about this faithful friend of Jesus rooted more realistically.
This Catholic Update, with some help from Sister Elizabeth Johnson and a multitude of others, tries to sort out the fictions, the facts and the notable qualities of St. Mary that can inspire us all to be faithful followers of Christ in this 21st century. We celebrate her feast each July 22.
Multiple personalities
Mary Magdalene is, it can be argued, the second-most important woman in the New Testament. Within the four Gospels, hints of Mary Magdalene’s importance in the early Church can be discerned. She is named 14 times, more than most of the apostles.
The assembled Gospel references describe Mary Magdalene as a courageous servant leader, brave enough to stand by Jesus in his hours of suffering, death and beyond. Scholar Mary Thompson points out that she is the only person to be listed in all four Gospels as first to realize that Jesus had risen and to testify to that central teaching of faith. This is a spectacular first indeed!
Other Gospel passages can confuse us, because other women also named Mary and some anonymous women, to boot, can seem to merge several women into one. This phenomenon—fusing several stories into one composite—is called conflation.
We saw this recently in Mel Gibson’s 2005 film, The Passion of the Christ. And we’ve seen it over the centuries from Ephraim the Syrian in the fourth century, Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth, and many artists, writers and Scripture commentators who followed their lead.
One Mary, the Mother of Jesus, retains her unique status and reputation as the number-one woman in the Gospels. But other women—Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, a woman who anoints and one identified as an adulterer—are mistakenly fused into one sensual young sinner.
Pope Gregory, who became pope in 590 A.D., clinched Mary’s mistaken reputation as sinner when he delivered a powerful homily in which he combined Luke’s anonymous sinful woman (Luke 7:36-50) with Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene. He said, “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?”
Gregory, like the much later Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) and many other famous preachers, loved to give a moral “spin” or interpretation to Scripture. How could the pope as pastor use the story of the Magdalene to encourage repentance during a time of famine and war in Rome? The seven devils morphed into the seven capital sins, and Mary Magdalene began to be condemned not only for lust but for pride and covetousness as well, just to add insult to injury.
But, the pope concluded in a sentence that rehabilitates Mary into an example of conversion, “She turned the mass of her crimes to virtues, in order to serve God entirely in penance.” Elizabeth Johnson imputes no slanderous motives to the pope, who obviously had no access to the contemporary scriptural scholarship that helps modern readers to sort such things out. The pope used the Magdalene as a “type,” a stereotype, and probably didn’t think she’d mind.
But contemporary biblical scholarship, encouraged by Vatican II and accessing resources never dreamed of in the sixth century A.D., confirms that there were several Marys. “If we go on making Mary Magdalene a prostitute when we have clear evidence to the contrary, that would be deliberate,” an intentional falsehood, says Johnson. And women in the Church and beyond might well wonder why.
Marys the Magdalene is not
What new insights lead biblical scholars to separate Mary the sinner from Mary Magdalene? Here’s some of their reasoning.
One person and one place—such as Jesus of Nazareth, Joseph of Arimathea, Simon of Cyrene, Mary of Magdala—are connected frequently in the Gospels. Mary of Magdala (a.k.a. Mary Magdalene) is actually named more often than Mary the Mother of Jesus. Scholars conclude, using this kind of analysis, that when a woman named Mary is not called the Magdalene, that’s not who is intended. According to this rationale, she is not the “woman with the alabaster jar” (Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 7), even though artists over the centuries have assigned her that identity. But Mary is more than just a pretty picture.
She no doubt sinned in her life, but she is not the forgiven sinner of Luke (caught with that alabaster jar). However inspiring that woman’s reformation may be, prostitute is still a label by which no woman cares to be remembered.
Her fortunes changed a bit in 1969, when the liturgical calendar was reworked. (This is when we “lost” some favorites, such as St. Christopher.) The pertinence of Scripture readings assigned to feasts was revisited. The Gospel proclaimed on Mary Magdalene’s feast would no longer be Luke 7:36-50 (the pardon of the sinful woman), but rather Mary’s discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb in John 20. Bad reputations, though, are hard to live down!
It’s those demons that still tempt readers to think Mary a fallen woman. In Luke 8, some Galilean women are described journeying with Jesus, together with the Twelve. They include “some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities [and] Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out.”
Famous Presbyterian scholar George Buttrick, in his 1962 Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, says Luke’s phrase doesn’t mean possession but physical sickness. “She had been cured of a serious illness,” he believes. “The number seven would accentuate the seriousness of her condition or possibly its recurrent nature.” Elizabeth Johnson adds that the demons possessing scriptural men are not associated with sin; the same principle should hold for Mary.
Mary's principal role
Today’s scholars, more and more, embrace the earlier view of St. Augustine, in the fourth century, who said, “The Holy Spirit made Magdalene the Apostle of the Apostles.”
Apostle is a title of distinct importance in the Bible. Paul prized it greatly. In 2 Corinthians 12:11-12, he seems rather annoyed not to be counted as one. Yet Mary too could say, with Paul, “I am in no way inferior to these “superapostles....” This is her entirely legitimate and scripturally based claim to fame. The word means, says Webster, “one sent on a mission” and it was Jesus himself who said to her, “Go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father…’” (Jn 20:17).
It would be easy for The Da Vinci Code readers and viewers to think that Mary Magdalene was supposed to tell these brothers, “Jesus and I were married, so now I’m taking over!” After all, its author claims on page one that his book is rooted in historical fact. He never claims theological accuracy, to his credit. And his use of the word fact simply is not factual.
Some of author Dan Brown’s “facts” are total fabrications or imaginative hypotheses, while others can be traced to sources such as the apocryphal (gnostic) gospels. One such source, the Gospel of Mary, is even named for Mary Magdalene.
In this and other gnostic texts, Mary Magdalene is featured more prominently than in the four canonical Gospels. She even seems to be pitted against Peter. You can imagine trouble brewing, I’m sure.
To oversimplify, these gnostic texts do not reveal deep secrets, nor are they “forbidden books.” They simply are not part of our canon of Scripture, our Bible.
Why not? One reason is that the apocryphal gospels were not written by people who had witnessed events as they happened—or even heard from eyewitnesses later. They were composed centuries after the New Testament’s four Gospels. Those four Gospels were chosen as “canonical” (official) by the early Church as the strongest, most authentic written representations of the Gospel story as it was being told and lived by the Christian community.
So Dan Brown isn’t making appropriate use of either history or Scriptures (canonical or otherwise) when he tells us (in about 25 pages of his thick thriller) that Mary Magdalene, of royal blood, was the wife of Jesus, that they had a child together and that Magdalene and her daughter began a dynasty that survived in France.
To top it all off, Brown asserts that the Church intentionally slandered Mary Magdalene, promoting violence and mayhem so that no one would ever honor this woman or her offspring. In Brown’s view, the Church feared that power and leadership would then be in the hands of a woman.
One thing on which we all might agree: The Church has not valued women enough, especially a woman whose greatest assignment was to tell the apostles the pivotal news that Jesus was alive. Her words, “I have seen the Lord,” are the first act of faith in the Resurrection.
Mary, first witness and faithful disciple
Does it really matter all that much which biographical details we attach to a long-ago woman? In a word, yes. In the 21st century, as in centuries before, the Church is full of sinners. We all are sinners. It’s good and instructive to be convinced that Jesus loved sinners, because that’s our human history and weakness.
But we also need the example of sanctity. Women especially need the encouragement of a Gospel role model who exercised bravery and leadership in challenging circumstances.
Perpetuating demeaning and unflattering stories about Mary Magdalene “reminds women of what has been done generally in the Church and in the world,” says Elizabeth Johnson. And that has not always been honest or affirming. Why compound the challenge when Mary Magdalene can and should inspire women and men to be full, effective and dedicated witnesses to the gospel?
Mary herself may not have cared what we 21st-century Catholics think of her, so long as we believe her testimony to the Resurrection. Indeed, as Augustine said, she was “Equal to the Apostles,” the title by which she is honored in our “other lung,” as Pope John Paul II called the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Apostle has multiple meanings and most of them apply to Mary Magdalene with ease. She is one sent on a mission. She is an authoritative person sent out to preach the Gospel. She is first to advocate an important belief. Or to put those in other terms, she points the way as disciple, partner and evangelist. Preceding all of that, of course, she is an eyewitness to the wonders of Jesus among us.
Let’s close this article by pondering a little more deeply what each of these means.
WITNESS. “If the women had not stood by and witnessed the death of Jesus on the cross, then followed his body, accompanied it to the tomb, returned on the first day of the week in the morning to anoint again and found the tomb empty, then announced to the disciples their experience of the risen Lord,” Johnson suggests that “we wouldn’t know what happened! They [the women, with Mary Magdalene always in their number] are the thread of continuity through the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.”
DISCIPLE. “Mary Magdalene is a founding mother of the Church,” says Johnson. “She ministered to Jesus during his own ministry, sharing things with him, and was one of his followers in Galilee. She was a faithful disciple during the last hours of his life.”
PARTNER. This more accurate assessment of Mary Magdalene’s role in the Easter mystery can support and strengthen women in the Church today. Professor Johnson feels that it can inspire everyone. “Those men who are desirous of partnership with women in the Church also find this a joyous rediscovery. Partnership is a different view of the beginning of our history as a Church, which then gives a different view of what our future could be as well.”
EVANGELIST. Elizabeth Johnson describes the Acts of the Apostles as Volume II of Luke’s work, telling the history of the early Church. It is Acts 1:14 that she cites: “All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.”
Biblical scholars, explains Johnson, ask who these women are. “The only logical answer is that they’re the women Luke [author of Acts] named as those present at the tomb, at the cross, at the Resurrection. Reviewing the ministry of Jesus, these would logically be the same women who had followed him earlier.
Then in Acts 2:1-4, “[T]hey were all in one place together....Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire. . . . And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.” And that would include the women? Yes, says Johnson.
What did they proclaim? Mary Magdalene was sent forth from the tomb with the message, “Jesus is risen.” Paul writes, “And if Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith”
(1 Cor 15:14).
That is the Gospel truth, first heard from the lips of a woman, a woman named Mary Magdalene. Throughout the Church year, it is Mary’s message that we are challenged to proclaim with as much boldness and integrity as she did.
Carol Ann Morrow, who interviewed Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., shortly after The Da Vinci Code hit the best-seller list, is an assistant editor of St. Anthony Messenger and managing producer of audiobooks for St. Anthony Messenger Press
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Before appeal was possible
HISTORYnet.com Live the History
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Case of George Edalji
Published Online: June 12, 2006
Savvy Londoners know that there is no such address as 221B Baker Street to be found anywhere in the city. (At least there wasn't until recently, when it was created specifically for use by the Sherlock Holmes Museum.) It requires less intimate knowledge of London to know that the famous lodger at this non-existent address, the Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes, is equally fictitious. Yet even today the Royal Post Office receives letters addressed to the literary detective at the imaginary address, sent by people claiming to have been wrongfully accused of some crime, and asking Holmes' help in solving the case.
In the early years of the 20th century, however, one such desperate man penned a more practical letter, addressing it not to Sherlock Holmes, but to his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, events would prove, shared many of Holmes' special talents.
The petitioner was George Edalji, the 27-year-old son of the vicar of Great Wyrley. Edalji's story began even before he was born, when his father, a man of Parsee ancestry, married an Englishwoman, converted to Christianity, and ultimately became the spiritual leader of his small Staffordshire community. His parishioners, perhaps thinking that the elder Edalji's Parsee heritage made him an unsuitable Christian preacher, had little liking for him, and at least one of them made he and his wife's lives miserable. In 1892, when George was 16 years old, the Edaljis began receiving threatening letters in the post. At the same time, other Staffordshire clergymen received abusive letters over Edalji's forged signature, earning him the hatred of his peers. Mocking advertisements appeared in local newspapers, also purporting to be submitted by the disliked vicar. George shared in the family's troubles, seemingly earning someone's special resentment by becoming a successful solicitor with a fine professional reputation.
The harassment directed against the Edalji family came to a head following several incidents of animal mutilation throughout Great Wyrley. In the wake of these incidents, the police received anonymous letters accusing George Edalji of the crimes. The local Chief Constable not only acted on the accusation, but also reasoned that George had written the mysterious correspondence himself. This all fitted in with his long-held belief that George had been the one responsible for the earlier threatening letters that had been sent to his father.
Acting on his suspicions, the Chief Constable assigned no less than six policemen to keep the Edalji house under surveillance. Despite this, a labourer heading to work in the early hours of a summer's day stumbled upon another mutilated animal, a pony this time, whose stomach had been sliced open.
The police, already preconditioned to believe George Edalji was the culprit, investigated the scene hastily, then returned to the vicarage to arrest the preacher's son. By this time, George had already left for work, so the investigators searched the house and confiscated a pair of muddy shoes, a pair of pants with dirt around the cuffs, and various other clothes on which they found blood and horse hair. With these items in their custody, the police then proceeded to George's Birmingham office, where they arrested their suspect.
If the evidence collected at the vicarage looked damning superficially, the police showed a remarkable lack of interest in reasoning out the facts of the case to a logical conclusion. When studied in detail, the evidence was far from convincing. George's whereabouts during the previous evening were corroborated by several witnesses who placed him far from the crime scene. George had then retired for the night at 9.30. He slept in the same room as his father, who locked the door to the bedroom each night. The elder Edalji swore that his son could never have left the room after 9.30.
Presuming, however, that he was able to slip past his father and out of the room, he would then have had to sneak undetected past all six of the policemen who were watching the house, and then repeat this feat of stealth on the return trip. This is exactly what the police alleged had happened, and George Edalji was tried on 20th October, 1903, found guilty, and sentenced to seven years in jail. In addition, the verdict effectively destroyed his law career.
The injustice of the sentence was obvious to many outside Great Wyrley. Ten thousand people signed a petition demanding that the case be retried. Newspapers carried stories upholding Edalji's innocence as well, but to no avail until the third year of his sentence, when he was released without pardon, apology, or explanation.
In an effort to clear his name, Edalji wrote his own version of the incident, which was published in The Umpire. Subsequently, he posted a clipping of the article to Arthur Conan Doyle. 'As I read,' the Sir Arthur remembered, 'the unmistakable accent of truth forced itself upon my attention, and I realized that I was in the presence of an appalling tragedy, and that I was called upon to do what I could to set it right.'
At the time, Conan Doyle was grieving over the death of his wife, and perhaps questioning whether he had done all that he might to make her last days as comfortable as possible. If so, the Edalji case came to his attention at a time when he was acutely conscious both of his own responsibilities and the consequences of taking a cavalier attitude toward someone in need. He launched himself into a personal investigation of the case with the same enthusiasm with which Holmes might shout, 'Come, Watson, the game is afoot!'
He began by studying Edalji's own account of the case. As he did so, several questions came to mind. Painstakingly, he wrote to everyone involved in the case who might be able to shed light on some of the oddities he perceived in George's description of the evidence and the trial. His investigation turned up some very startling defects in the case against Edalji. The razor that the police claimed the defendant used to mutilate the pony had contained not a trace of blood. The mud found on Edalji's clothes was of a completely different type of soil than that found at the crime scene. Most absurdly, Conan Doyle learned that the police had wrapped a piece of the dead horse's hide, taken for evidence, in Edalji's clothes, thus accounting for the hair that had been found on them. As to the small traces of blood on the same clothes, Sir Arthur commented that 'The most adept operator who ever lived would not rip up a horse with a razor upon a dark night and have only two threepenny-bit spots of blood to show for it. The idea is beyond all argument.'
The amateur detective also shot holes in the prosecution's most weighty piece of evidence–a handwriting analysis that identified George Edalji as the one who had written the many threatening letters. Conan Doyle learned that the 'expert' the police had commissioned was a man already infamous for sending an innocent defendant to jail with an analysis that had later proved to be erroneous.
After he had convinced himself beyond any doubt that George Edalji did not committed the crime, he arranged to meet the man in person. When he did, his first impression confirmed all his previous conclusions, for it immediately became apparent that Edalji suffered from a condition that Conan Doyle had not previously suspected. 'I had been delayed,' Conan Doyle recalled later, 'and he was passing the time by reading the paper….He held the paper so close to his eyes and rather sideways, proving not only a high degree of myopia but marked astigmatism. The idea of such a man scouring fields at night and assaulting cattle while avoiding the watching police was ludicrous to anyone who can imagine what the world looks like to eyes with myopia of eight dioptres.' Edalji's eyes not only gave Sir Arthur further proof of their owner's innocence, they also provided a possible explanation why the police may have been predisposed to suspect him. His inability to focus his eyes gave him an odd distracted look that could easily be interpreted as sinister.
Conan Doyle submitted the complete results of his investigations to The Daily Telegraph on 9th January, 1907, with instructions to clearly label it as copyright free, so that other papers could pick up the story and spread the news. 'Only an appeal to the public can put an end to a course of injustice and persecution which amount, as I hope that I shall show, to a national scandal', Sir Arthur advised. The newspaper obliged, printing the entire 18,000-word summary in two parts.
With Edalji by this time freed from jail, another man may have felt that nothing further needed to be done, but Conan Doyle was outraged by the government's refusal to acknowledge any fault or to pay Edalji any compensation for having his career and three years of his life taken from him through such a careless exercise of the criminal justice system. His report was as much an indictment of the police as a vindication of Edalji, charging the authorities with race prejudice, incompetence, and deliberate deceit.
Few of Sir Arthur's more famous works of fiction could boast the impact on the British public achieved by his letter to the Telegraph. The common belief that an injustice had been perpetrated now became nearly universal, and demands for an investigation grew irresistible. Finally, the Home Secretary grudgingly decided to appoint a three-man board to review the case. Astoundingly, one of the three 'unbiased' men appointed to the committee was the second cousin of Captain Anson, the Chief Constable of Staffordshire, who had been the first one to jump to the conclusion of Edalji's guilt.
In the meantime, Conan Doyle had turned his attention to an as-yet-unasked question: If Edalji was innocent, then who had committed the crime? Sir Arthur's crusade on Edalji's behalf clearly represented a threat to the mysterious slasher, and before long Conan Doyle received one of the threatening letters that had so long plagued the vicar of Wyrley. 'Think of all the ghoulish murders that are committed,' the note read. 'Why then should you escape?' The recipient treated the letter not so much as a warning as another piece of evidence, again turning to the Telegraph and the public for help. The 29th May edition contained another letter from Sir Arthur, stating: 'Upon Monday, the 27th, I received a letter and a postcard, both unstamped, from the unknown correspondent whose writing runs right through the whole Edalji affair from 1892 onwards….A crease in both documents seems to show…that they may have been sent up under cover, or possibly in somebody's pocket–a railway guard or other–and then posted. Should this be so one might hope to follow them back to the writer; and I hereby offer a reward of L20 to anyone who will enable me to say for certain whence they came.'
In the event, Detective Doyle found the crucial clue himself in a subsequent letter sent by the anonymous correspondent. The second missive contained a scathing remark about a former headmaster of the Walsall Grammar School in Staffordshire. Conan Doyle remembered that one of the letters sent to the senior Edalji had contained a similar reference, and that a stolen key from the school had once turned up on Edalji's doorstep. Sir Arthur contacted the ex-schoolmaster and asked if he could think of anyone who had attended the school and might have reason to hold such an unfavourable opinion of him. The schoolmaster suggested a boy whom he had expelled years before for uncontrollable, destructive behavior.
Conan Doyle further learned that in the years since, the boy had become a butcher, and that a friend of his family remembered seeing him with a lancet at about the time of the animal mutilations. Once he was on the right track, Sir Arthur found many more coincidences that identified the butcher as the guilty party beyond any possible doubt.
Conan Doyle provided all this evidence to the three-man commission, which deliberated and then concluded that Edalji had not, in fact, killed the horse and should therefore be pardoned, but that he had 'to some extent brought his troubles on himself', so there would be no compensation. By this, the commission apparently referred to the threatening letters, which it still believed Edalji had written to his father.
Conan Doyle's response, again in the form of a letter to the Telegraph, was predictable. 'While the friends of Mr. George Edalji rejoice that his innocence has at last been admitted (though in the most grudging and ungracious fashion), they feel that their work is only half done so long as compensation is refused him. It is clearly stated in the report of the Committee that: 'The police commenced and carried on their investigations, not for the purpose of finding out who was the guilty party, but for the purpose of finding evidence against Edalji, who they were already sure was the guilty man.'
'The result has proved that he was not the guilty man, and this inversion of all sane methods upon the part of the police has given untold mental agony to himself and to his family, has caused him to undergo the ordeal of the double trial, three years of incarceration, and an extra year of police supervision. Apart from the misery which has been unjustly inflicted upon him, he has been unable to exercise his profession during that time, and has been put to many heavy expenses, which only the self-sacrifice of his relations has enabled him to meet. And now, though all these results have been brought about by the extraordinary conduct of the police, and the stupidity of a Court of Quarter Sessions, the unfortunate victim is told that no compensation will be made him.'
As to the implication, still, that George Edalji had written the many outrageous letters received by his father, Sir Arthur insisted 'I will undertake in half an hour…to convince any reasonable and impartial man, that George Edalji did not write, and could not possibly have written, those letters. Of that I am absolutely certain, and there is no room for doubt whatever.' Conan Doyle did just as he promised, not through his own efforts, but in a much more convincing manner by seeking out the opinion of Dr. Lindsey Johnson, a handwriting analyst who had helped to prove that the famous treasonable letter attributed to the Frenchman Alfred Dreyfus was a forgery. This internationally renowned expert confirmed Conan Doyle's own assertion, providing many detailed specifics to substantiate his findings, and concluding his comparison of the anonymous letters with Edalji's own handwriting with the words, 'Further examples are unnecessary, as, look where you will, you will find no points in common between them.' Lindsey was equally as adamant that the letters were, in fact, written by the butcher Sir Arthur had already identified.
All of this evidence, however, was of interest only to the news press. The Home Office replied simply that a decision had already been reached, and that was that. No action was ever taken against the man Sir Arthur had convincingly proven was responsible for both the threatening letters and the animal mutilations–as well as for stealing the key to the local grammar school. The Law Society, showing markedly better judgment than either the police or the government, permitted George Edalji to resume his legal practice, but Sir Arthur's great investigative success ended on a bitter note. The government bureaucracy, he concluded in disgust, is motivated by 'a determination to admit nothing which inculpates another official, and as to the idea of punishing another official for offenses which have caused misery to helpless victims, it never comes within their horizon.'
A later biographer of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rendered an even harsher verdict: 'Doyle thought that the Home Office was insane to ignore the evidence he had placed in their hands; but in expecting reason and justice from bureaucrats his own sanity was open to doubt.' Certainly, it was not the kind of ending a Sherlock Holmes fan would have expected.
This article was written by Bruce Heydt and originally appeared in the June/July 1998 issue of British Heritage.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Something to live for
Franklin D. Roosevelt, June 27, 1936
An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.
For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people's property, other people's money, other people's labor—other people's lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness.
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
The kitten was alarmingly aware
The Parachutist
By D’Arcy Niland
The hurricane came down from Capricorn, and for two days and a night it rained.
In the darkness of the second night, softening away to dawn, there was silence. There was only the gurgle and drip of the wet world, and the creatures that lived on the earth began to appear, freed from the tyranny of the elements.
The hawk, ruffled in misery, brooding in ferocity, came forth in hunger and hate. It struck off into the abyss of space, scouring the earth for some booty of the storm-the sheep lying like a heap of wet wool in the sodden paddocks, the bull like a dark bladder carried down on the swollen stream and washing against a tree on the river flats, the rabbit, driven from its flooded warren and squeezed dead against a log.
With practiced eye it scrutinized the floating islands of rubble and the wracks of twigs lying askew on the banks for sign of lizard or snake, dead or alive. But there was nothing. Once, in the time before, there had been a rooster, draggled, forlorn, derelict riding a raft of flotsam: too weak to fight and too sick to care about dying or the way it died.
The hawk rested on a crag of the gorge and conned the terrain with a fierce and frowning eye. The lice worried its body with the sting of nettles. Savagely it plucked with its beak under the fold of its wings, first on one side, then on the other. It rasped its bill on the jagged stone, and dropped over the lip. It climbed in a gliding circle, widening its field of vision.
The earth was yellow and green. On the flats were chains of lagoons as if the sky had broken and fallen in sheets of blue glass. The sun was hot and the air heavy and humid.
Swinging south, the hawk dropped over a vast graveyard of dead timber. The hurricane had ravaged the gaunt trees, splitting them, felling them, tearing off their naked arms and strewing the ground with pieces, like a battlefield of bones, gray with exposure and decay.
A rabbit sprang twenty yards like a bobbing wheel, and the sight drew the hawk like a plummet, but the rabbit vanished in a hollow log, and stayed there, and there was no other life.
Desperate, weak, the hawk alighted on a bleak limb and glared in hate. The sun was a fire on its famished body. Logs smoked with steam and the brightness of water on the earth reflected like mirrors. The telescopic eye inched over the ground-crawled infallibly over the ground, and stopped. And then suddenly the hawk swooped to the ground and tore at the body of a dead field mouse-its belly bloated and a thin vapor drifting from the gray, plastered pelt.
The hawk did not sup as it supped on the hot running blood of the rabbit in the trap-squealing in eyeless terror; it did not feast in stealthy leisure as it did on the sheep paralyzed in the drought, tearing out bit by bit its steaming entrails. Voraciously it ripped at the mouse, swallowing fast and finishing the meal in a few seconds.
But the food was only a tantalization, serving to make the hawk's appetite more fierce, more lusty. It flew into a tree, rapaciously scanning the countryside. It swerved into space and climbed higher and higher in a vigilant circle, searching the vast expanse below, even to its uttermost limits.
Hard to the west something moved on the earth, a speck: and the hawk watched it: and the speck came up to a walnut, and up to a plum, and up to a ball striped with white and gray.
The hawk did not strike at once. Obedient to instinct, it continued to circle, peering down at the farmhouse and the outbuildings, suspicious; seeing the draught horses in the yard and the fowls in the hen coop, the pigs in the sty, and the windmill twirling, and watching for human life in their precincts.
Away from them all, a hundred yards or more, down on the margin of the fallowed field, the kitten played, leaping and running and tumbling, pawing at a feather and rolling on its back biting at the feather between its forepaws.
Frenzied with hunger, yet ever cautious, the hawk came down in a spiral, set itself, and swooped. The kitten propped and froze with its head cocked on one side, unaware of danger but startled by this new and untried sport. It was no more than if a piece of paper had blown past it in a giant brustle of sound. But in the next moment the hawk fastened its talons in the fur and the fat belly of the kitten, and the kitten spat and twisted, struggling against the power that was lifting it.
Its great wings beating, paddling with the rhythm of oars, the hawk went up a slope of space with its cargo, and the kitten, airborne for the first time in its life, the earth running under it in a blur, wailed in shrill terror. It squirmed frantically as the world fell away in the distance, but the hawk's talons were like the grabs of an iceman.
The air poured like water into the kitten's eyes and broke against its triangular face, streaming back against its rippling furry sides. It howled in infinite fear, and gave a sudden desperate twist, so that the hawk was jolted in its course and dropped to another level, a few feet below the first.
Riding higher and higher on the wind, the hawk went west by the dam like a button of silver far below. The kitten cried now with a new note. Its stomach was churning. The air gushing into its mouth and nostrils set up a humming in its ears and an aching dizziness in its head. As the hawk turned on its soundless orbit, the sun blazed like flame in the kitten's eyes, leaving its sight to emerge from a blinding grayness.
The kitten knew that it had no place here in the heart of space, and its terrified instincts told it that its only contact with solidity and safety was the thing that held it.
Then the hawk was ready to drop its prey. It was well practiced. Down had gone the rabbit, a whistle in space, to crash in a quiver of death on the ruthless earth. And the hawk had followed to its gluttonous repast.
Now there at two thousand feet the bird hovered. The kitten was alarmingly aware of the change, blinking at the pulsations of beaten air as the wings flapped, hearing only that sound. Unexpectedly, it stopped, and the wings were still out-stretched, but rigid, tilting slightly with the poised body, only the fanned tail lifting and lowering with the flow of the currents.
The kitten felt the talons relax slightly, and that was its warning. The talons opened, but in the first flashing shock of the movement the kitten completed its twist and slashed at the hawk's legs and buried its claws in the flesh like fishhooks. In the next fraction of a second the kitten had consolidated its position, securing its hold, jabbing in every claw except those on one foot which thrust out in space, pushing against insupportable air. And then the claws on this foot were dug in the breast of the hawk.
With a cry of pain and alarm the bird swooped crazily, losing a hundred feet like a dropping stone. And then it righted itself, flying in a drunken sway that diminished as it circled.
Blood from its breast beaded and trickled down the paw of the kitten and spilled into one eye. The kitten blinked, but the blood came and congealed, warm and sticky. The kitten could not turn its head. It was frightened to risk a change of position. The blood slowly built over its eye a blinding pellicle.
The hawk felt a spasm of weakness, and out of it came an accentuation of its hunger and a lust to kill at all costs the victim it had claimed and carried to this place of execution. Given an excess of power by its ferocity, it started to climb again, desperately trying to dislodge the kitten. But the weight was too much and it could not ascend. A great tiredness came in its dragging body, an ache all along the frames of its wings. The kitten clung tenaciously, staring down at the winding earth and mewling in terror.
For ten minutes the hawk gyrated on a level, defeated and bewildered. All it wanted to do now was to get rid of the burden fastened to its legs and body. It craved respite, a spell on the tallest trees, but it only flew high over these trees, knowing it was unable to perch. Its beak gaped under the harsh ruptures of its breath. It descended three hundred feet. The kitten, with the wisdom of instinct, never altered its position, but rode down like some fantastic parachutist.
In one mighty burst the hawk with striking beak and a terrible flapping of its wings tried finally to cast off its passenger-and nearly succeeded. The kitten meowed in a frenzy of fear at the violence of the sound and the agitation. Its back legs dangled in space, treading air, and like that it went around on the curves of the flight for two minutes. Then it secured a foothold again, even firmer than the first. In a hysterical rage, the hawk tried once more to lift itself, and almost instantly began to sweep down in great, slow, gliding eddies that became narrower and narrower.
The kitten was the pilot now and the hawk no longer the assassin of the void, the lord of the sky, and the master of the wind. The ache coiled and throbbed in its breast. It fought against the erratic disposition of its wings and the terror of its waning strength. Its heart bursting with the strain, its eyes dilated wild and yellow, it came down until the earth skimmed under it; and the kitten cried at the silver glare of the roofs not far off, and the expanding earth, and the brush of the grass.
The hawk lobbed and flung over, and the kitten rolled with it. And the hawk lay sprawled in exhaustion, its eyes fiercely aware of the danger of its forced and alien position.
The kitten staggered giddily, unhurt, toward the silver roofs, wailing loudly as if in answer to the voice of a child.
answers to his questions?
A Story About the Body
Robert Hass
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
“We need the dues”.
The Relationship Between Tax Rates & Job Growth
So I decided to do some research… on the Internet. I am of part of that lost generation that still thinks the Internet is cool. I never cease to be amazed by what I can look up online. My kids on the other had think of the Internet as just another appliance, like the TV or the refrigerator. In any event, I entered “top marginal tax rates” into Google and up came a plethora of sites. The best one was “TruthAndPolitics.org.” They provided a table of both the top marginal tax rate year-by-year and income level where the top rate kicked in. I have to admit, I was fascinated by what I discovered. First, as many of you probably know, there was no income tax in this country before 1913. What you probably don’t know was that when the Federal Government first established an income tax, the top rate was only 7% and applied only to income over $500,000 – in 1913 dollars. In today’s dollars that would be $11.4 million. Clearly income tax was not something the man in the street needed to concern himself with in 1913.
As it turned out, however, income tax was like heroin – once you start you keep needing more. By 1918 the top rate had jumped to 77% but applied only to people making more than $1.0 million a year ($16 million in 2011 dollars). Then in 1922 the rates started to fall getting as low as 25% by 1925 where they essentially stayed until 1932 when they were raised to 63%. It is interesting to note that the lowest rates in our history preceded the greatest economic depression of all time. Rates were raised again in 1936 to 79% and again in 1942 to 88%. Then from 1942 to 1963, 21 years, the top rate stayed between 88% and 94%. The top tax bracket, however, from 1948 to 1964 was $400,000. While this was quite a bit lower than the $1.0 million of 1918, it was still between $2.9 million and $3.75 million in today’s dollars. In 1964 the top rate was lowered to 77% and by 1971 had fallen to 70% where it stayed until Ronald Reagan reduced the top rate to 50% in 1982. Then in 1987, things really started to get fun as Ronald Reagan and the George Bush (the first) lowered the top rate to 28%. This turned out to be too much fun, however, and George (“Read my lips”) Bush was forced to raise rate back up to 31%, which as we all know, cost him the election. This set the stage for Bill Clinton, who raised the top rate to 39.6% where it stayed for all eight years of his presidency. Then in 2003 that self proclaimed “decider” George Bush (number two) lowered the top rate to 35% to spur the economy. Go get ‘em Tex. And that is where we are today.
So what effect did these vastly different top marginal rates have on job creation and economic growth? Once again, back to the Internet (it is so cool!). I looked up “GDP by year” and was able to find not only the actual GDP numbers but also the federal deficit was as a percentage of GDP from 1900 through today. Job growth numbers were a little harder to find but I came across a site that had taken the raw data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and provided job growth numbers by presidential term starting with Harding / Coolidge in 1921. This actually worked quite well for my purposes as it smoothed out the more volatile annual numbers.
Here is what I discovered. First, since the inception of an individual income tax, the average top marginal rate has been 58.7%. It makes you wonder why some of our esteemed Senators and Representatives start to foam at the mouth at the thought of a 39.6% top rate. That is still 19.1% below the historical average. Second, over the last 110 years, GDP growth has averaged 6.4%. Third, since 1921 when the Federal government started tracking “total nonfarm payroll employment” numbers, annual job growth has averaged 1.8%. Finally, while over the last decade we have come to accept federal budget deficits as an inevitable fact of life, it has not always been so. In fact, the federal government has run surpluses in 24 of the last 97 years (since the income tax was instituted). Moreover, while we ran large deficits during WWII averaging 19.1% of GDP (a simply staggering number), once the war was over the country embraced fiscal responsibility, running surpluses in 7 of the next 11 years. In fact, from the end of WWII through 1979, our federal deficit as a percentage of GDP averaged only 0.6% and we actually ran surpluses in 9 of the 33 years. Since then our average deficit as a percentage of GDP has been running at 3.0%. There was a bright spot during the Clinton years where we ran sizable surpluses for 4 years in a row. Since then, however, things have gone from bad to worse.
Armed with all of this data, I then wanted to see what happened to job growth and GDP growth in both high top marginal tax rate periods and low top marginal tax rate periods. To do this I looked at those years when the top rate was 70% or above (48 out of the last 97 years) and those years when the top marginal tax rate was 40% or below (37 out of the last 97 years). Together, these two periods accounted for 88% of the time since the imposition of a federal income tax in 1913. It seems that the pendulum swings back and forth, rarely stopping in the middle. The results were surprising to say the least. In those years where the top tax rate was 70% or above, GDP growth averaged 9.0% and job growth averaged 2.6%. Conversely, in those years where the tax rate was 40% or below, GDP growth was an anemic 4.4% and job growth was… well actually there was no job growth. The average for the 37 years where top tax rates were the lowest, job growth averaged zero!
I am not statistician, but I think that based on the historical data, if there is any correlation at all between lower top marginal tax rates and economic growth, the correlation is negative. As a result, politicians need to stop fear mongering and tell the truth. Raising the top marginal tax rates will not kill job growth. Higher oil prices, the fallout from the tsunami in Japan and a moribund housing market may kill job growth – but not a higher marginal tax rate.
So based on this research what do I think we should do? Raise the top marginal tax rate of course. In the immortal words of that famed Animal House sage and philosopher John “Blutto” Blutarsky – “We need the dues”. Moreover, we should raise the top marginal tax rate above the 39.6% currently being discussed in Washington. At the same time, however, we should add more brackets, substantially raising the income level where the top tax bracket kicks in. I am no class warrior, however, as Willie Sutton famously said when asked why he robbed banks – “That’s where the money is.” Raising taxes on individuals earning more than $5.0, million, $10 million or even $25 million a year may not in and of itself solve the problem, but it would surely help. Moreover, it would start to chip away at a growing income inequality problem which is a going to become an increasingly important issue for America in the years to come. For those who would say that raising the top rate would destroy the innovation and creativity that has come to define America, my only response is that America was a pretty great country for the 50 years from 1936 through 1986 when the top marginal tax rate was between 50% and 94%. We would do well to regain a little of that greatness.
_________________________________________
Bryan Ganz is the CEO and Managing Partner of Scudder Bay Capital. Mr. Ganz has decades of experience in business and management, including ten years as a founding principal of Paramount Capital Group, an investment advisory firm that managed money for a broad array of blue chip clients; and fifteen years leading and growing Galaxy Tire, a specialty tire manufacturer. Mr. Ganz has served on the Board of Governors of Citizens Against Government Waste, a watchdog organization dedicated to promoting fiscal responsibility within Congress.
Mr. Ganz graduated with honors from Georgetown University’s Business School with a BSBA in accounting in 1980. He received his JD from Columbia Law School in 1983, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.
Friday, July 29, 2011
We don't have a budget crisis. We have a jobs and growth crisis.
Debt ceiling debate distortion - this is a jobs crisis, not a budget crisis
Friday, July 29, 2011
A friend who's been watching the absurd machinations in Congress asked me "What happens if we don't solve the budget crisis and we run out of money to pay the nation's bills?"It was only then I realized how effective Republican lies have been. That we're calling it a "budget crisis," and worrying that if we don't "solve" it we can't pay our nation's bills, is testament to how successful Republicans have been distorting the truth.
The federal budget deficit has no economic relationship to the debt limit. Republicans have linked the two, and the Obama administration has played along, but they are entirely separate. Republicans are using what would otherwise be a routine, legally technical vote to raise the debt limit as a means of holding the nation hostage to their own political goal of shrinking the size of the federal government.
In economic terms, we will not "run out of money" next week. We're still the richest nation in the world, and the Federal Reserve has unlimited capacity to print money.
Nor is there any economic imperative to reach an agreement on how to fix the budget deficit by Tuesday. It's not even clear the federal budget needs that much fixing anyway.
Yes, the ratio of the national debt to the total economy is 71 percent - high relative to what it's been. But it's not nearly as high as it was after World War II - when it reached 120 percent of the economy's total output.
If and when the economy begins to grow faster - if more Americans get jobs, and we move toward a full recovery - the debt/GDP ratio will fall, as it did in the 1950s, and as it does in every solid recovery. Revenues will pour into the Treasury, and much of the current "budget crisis" will be evaporate.
We're in a "jobs and growth" crisis - not a budget crisis.
And the best way to get jobs and growth back is for the federal government to spend more right now, not less - for example, by exempting the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes this year and next, recreating a Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, creating an infrastructure bank, providing tax incentives for small businesses to hire, expanding the earned income tax credit, and so on.
But what happens next week if Congress can't or won't deliver the president a bill to raise the debt ceiling? Remember: This is all politics, mixed in with legal technicalities. Economics has nothing to do with it.
One possibility, therefore, is for the Treasury to keep paying the nation's bills regardless. It would continue to issue Treasury bills, which are our nation's IOUs. When those IOUs are cashed at the Federal Reserve Board, the Fed would do what it has always done: Honor them.
How long could this go on without the debt ceiling being lifted? That's a legal question.
Republicans in Congress could mount a legal challenge, but no court in its right mind would stop the Fed from honoring the full faith and credit of the United States.
The wild card is what the three big credit-rating agencies will do. As long as the Fed keeps honoring the nation's IOUs, America's credit should be deemed sound. We're not Greece or Portugal, after all. We'll still be the richest nation in the world, whose currency is the basis for most business transactions in the world.
Standard & Poor's has warned it will downgrade the nation's debt from a triple-A to a double-A rating, if we don't tend to the long-term deficit. But, as I've noted, S&P has no business meddling in American politics - especially because its own non-feasance was partly responsible for the size of the federal debt (had it done its job, the debt and housing bubbles wouldn't have precipitated the terrible recession, and the federal outlays it required).
As long as we pay our debts on time, our global creditors should be satisfied. And if they're satisfied, S&P, Moody's, and Fitch should be, too.
Repeat after me: The federal deficit is not the nation's biggest problem. The anemic recovery, huge unemployment, falling wages and declining home prices are bigger problems. We don't have a budget crisis. We have a jobs and growth crisis.
The GOP has manufactured a budget crisis out of the Republicans' extortionate demands over raising the debt limit. They have succeeded in hoodwinking the public, including my friend.
© 2011 Robert Reich
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