Best of the Weekly Bystander 2021

The Weekly Bystander will be on vacation for the month of May but hopefully will reappear in June. To tide readers and fans over, I post below a list of the top ten viewed posts since the blog first appeared on 12/16/2011 with an obituary of the deceased atheist Christopher Hitchens. Just click on the link provided to view a post. I will list them in reverse order.

Number 10. Roberto Benign's Pinocchio. This post is a review of Benigni's charming film version of the Italian classic story of a puppet boy who won't be tamed. It is in the Masterpiece section of the WB.

Number 9. Year End Top Films. This post briefly reviews eight excellent foreign films. If you missed any, they are well worth viewing. I suspect it gained a number of hits because of the image of the beautiful Fanny Ardant as opera diva Maria Callas.It was the first in a series of lists of film favorites.

Number 8. Pedophile Priests. This 2017 post examined this controversial subject and tried to put it into perspective.

Number 7. The Leopard. This post is a review of Luchino Visconti's epic telling of the Italian Risorgimento as it impacted the lives of a Sicilian aristocratic family. The film starred Burt Lancaster in his greatest role, and the young and beautiful Claudia Cardinale.

Number 6. Tax Deductions. This 2017 post examined the rationale behind some of the changes in the Republican Tax Reform bill that removed regressive and unfair tax deductions. The last four years have demonstrated that the reforms did not decrease Federal revenues. However, now the Administration of President is proposing to restore these deductions that mainly benefit the well-to-do.

Number 5.  U.S. Health Care System. This post examined the effectiveness of the health care system in the United States back in 2013, and argued that it was the best in the world.  The development of vaccines during the pandemic would seem to indicate that despite its critics, it is still the best.

Number 4. Scientific Consensus. This 2017 post questioned the consensus among scientists about the subject of global warming, as well as the validity of consensus in general. Recent studies have only bolstered its conclusions.

Number 3. The Filibuster. This 2017 post examined the controversy over President Trump's nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and included a discussion of the very concept of filibuster. Ironically, the strongest supporters of the filibuster back then were the same Democratic politicians who are today seeking to eliminate it now that they are in power.

Number 2 .Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition. This 2015 post was a review of Benzion Netanyahu's magnum opus on the Spanish Inquisition. Netanyahu, the father of Israel's current Prime Minister, overthrew all of the traditional notions of the dreaded Inquisition.

Number 1. Titian, "Sacred and Profane Love". This post is far and away the most viewed on The Weekly Bystander. It is a concise version of my own interpretation of Titian's famous masterpiece. Is it #1 because of my expertise, or because of the beautiful woman in the painting? ###

Titian: Sacred and Profane Love

National Poetry Month

Someone told me that April is National Poetry Month, so I thought I would post a trio by my younger brother, Robert. Only last year did I discover that he had been writing poetry. For years and years I have known him as a master science teacher and naturalist but recently he showed me a little collection of poems he has written, most based on his great love of nature. He claims that he wrote these poems to pass the time while proctoring classroom exams but it seems to me that they reflect a lifetime of experiencing nature at close hand. 

                                                      DREAMS

 

So

 sad it seems

so many

 have better thoughts

In dreams

I

 wish to be truly awake

for

 in reality

all dreams are

fantasy

I

 wish to flood 

my brain

with

 scintillating stimuli

to overload

 my senses

where

 sight becomes sound

odors taste

taste by touch

and

in this burst 

of

 sensory confusion

no fear

of 

delusion

 

Somewhere in Belgium 1971 upon seeing so many of my army friends getting high on drugs.  Empty lives as Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” ###

 

SLEEPING IN A CEMETERY

Slept

Out of doors in a 

cemetery

last night

no animals came by to

eat me

no aliens dropped down to 

abduct me

no corpses arose to

haunt me

but

the full moon

startled me

thought it was the

sunrise

bright enough

to read

the sadness on the

tombstones

a newborn baby died

mother died a year later

husband remarried

second wife died

during childbirth

returned to sleep

only to be wakened

by the birds

who had anticipated the

dawn

###

EXTINCTION

Thinking

of extinction

can be quite depressing

all the genomes forever lost

all the life no one will ever see

what happens a billion years from now

when all earthly creatures

are cooked by our bloated red giant of a sun

the genomes of every living thing should be saved

a DNA flash drive locked in a box

for some future space traveler to find

I would put a warning on this

genomic Pandora’s box

revive, reanimate all

except for  Homo sapiens

for this species was too wise

too clever, too devious

too loving, too good

too bad, too selfish

too generous

but

much too 

dangerous

###

Systemic Democratic Racism

Democrats from President Joe Biden on down claim that America is suffering from systematic racism. Systemic means that racism pervades the whole of American society, except for Blacks who by definition cannot be racists despite the fact that they lead the nation in assaults on Asians. Racism is all pervasive only among Whites even though many of them don’t realize it. Progressives call it "unconscious racism."

 

If that is the case, then racism must also pervade White Democratic politicians like the ones who govern most of America’s blue states and cities. Old White Joe, despite his pronouncements, must be an unconscious white supremacist at heart. 

Here are three examples of systemic racism among Democrats.

 

Georgia Election Reform:

 

The reaction to the election reform bill recently passed by the Georgia Legislature  is a good case in point. President Biden led the charge by calling the election reforms a revival of the old Jim Crow laws that effectively kept blacks from the polls over 50 years ago. However, even the liberal Washington Post admitted that the President lied about the provisions of the bill.

 

 CEOs from Atlanta based Delta Airlines, and Coca Cola were quick to jump on the bandwagon and denounce the reform legislation. Also, the Commissioner of Major League baseball decided to move the All-Star game from Atlanta to Colorado apparently unaware that Colorado’s election laws were more restrictive than Georgia’s reform measures. 

 

Why are these responses not just foolish but racist? Democrats object strenuously to any attempt to require identification cards at polling places. Why is opposition to ID cards racist?

 

In effect, Democrats are buying into the old racial stereotypes. They must think that blacks are too ignorant to apply for ID cards. Or do they think they are too lazy, or shiftless? Do they think Blacks have no sense of civic pride and duty? Practically everyone in the country already has some kind of government issued identity card. You can’t even get on a Delta plane without one.

 

Gun Control:

Some recent shootings have led President Joe Biden to propose more gun control regulations. I won’t say laws because he is just planning to do it by executive orders. 

 

Everyone knows that Democratic controlled states and cities already have the most stringent gun control laws in the country. However, these laws have never prevented criminal gang members from possessing and using all sorts of firearms. Shootings in cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit have always been high, and have only increased with the lawlessness tolerated by Democratic politicians last year.

 

Democrat controlled cities lead the nation in shooting deaths and the great majority of the shooters and victims have been young black men. In the past year more that 500 young black men have been gunned down in Chicago. Shootings have increased during the protests and violence of the past summer, but the death toll has been high for decades.

 

Why can’t the Democratic politicians in those cities stop it? Are they just ignorant, or unconcerned, or are they racists who believe those black lives don’t matter? Where there is a will, there’s a way. But it appears that there is no will or desire to stop it. Maybe the lives of these black victims only matter when they are killed by a white policeman and fit a racist narrative. 

 

Actually, Democratic politicians have led the campaign to abolish the “stop and frisk” policy that has kept guns off the streets, saved thousands of lives, and made crime infested neighborhoods safe. Even former Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York City admitted as much before his political ambitions led him to abjectly apologize last year.

 

Disparate Abortion Results:

 

As part of his sweeping new economic proposals, President Biden plans to insist on Federal funding of abortions. No matter how you feel about abortion, you have to admit that for years the abortion rate among Blacks has been significantly higher than among Whites. Blacks make up less than 15% of the population but statistics show that the number of abortions among Blacks equals that among Whites.

 

Protestors complain of a disparate proportion of Blacks in prison, but never point to the disparate proportion of Blacks aborted. Given the figures you would think that White Supremacists are the strongest advocates of Federal abortion funding. But no, it is the Democratic party.

 

Some day in the future historians or sociologists might look back and conclude that the USA during our time was involved in genocide given the number  of Black abortions since Roe v. Wade. After all, the stated intention of Margaret Sanger, the founder and patron saint of Planned Parenthood was to keep down the population of what she considered to be inferior and undesirable  races.

 

###

Easter Signs

I was born and raised a Catholic and have remained so for 81  years. Frankly, I have to say that I still like being a Catholic. One of the many reasons is the great feast of Easter. At Mass the other day, we heard the story of a woman who was about to be stoned to death for adultery by an angry crowd of accusers who had apparently caught her in the act. They brought her to Jesus to get his opinion before proceeding. His reply still resounds through the ages. "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone." 

Hearing those words, the crowd melted away, and the woman was left alone with Jesus. He said that since no one would condemn her, neither would he. But he just told her to sin mo more. He had in effect raised her from the brink of death and then showed her the way to live thereafter. Her resurrection is a sign of his own resurrection that we celebrate on Easter. 

There are many other signs that remind us of Easter. Some have become secularized and commercialized but I still like them. The Easter egg is a symbol that refers to the tomb from which Jesus arose on Easter Sunday. The Easter bunny itself is a a sign of the risen Christ seen by believers in the Eucharistic host. The great Renaissance artist Titian featured it in a painting that is usually called the Madonna of the Rabbit.

More often the risen Christ is depicted as the Lamb of God from the Book of Revelation. More than 500 years ago, Jan van Eyck painted the most famous version of the Mystical Lamb in the Ghent altarpiece. In my own parish church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Fairfield, Connecticut, the Lamb is shown in the center of a beautiful Rose window at the back of the Church. The Lamb reclines on the Book of the Seven Seals with a triumphal cross and banner.

 The word "Easter" comes from a Germanic goddess of spring. Latin peoples use the word pasqua from the Jewish pasch or passover. When the Germanic peoples were converted the Church wisely associated the word for Springtime with the feast of the Risen Lord. All around us new life is springing from the dead of winter. 

One of the many traditions associated with Easter was the famous Easter Parade, especially on New York's 5th Avenue. Here is a link to the ending of the film Easter Parade that featured Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. He was a little old but she was never lovelier than when she sings the title song. Or view the brief video below.

Happy Easter.