Best Films of 2022

Lists of the year's top films often appear at this time of the year. Since I am too old to understand or follow today's films with their special effects and constant cutting, I present my own list of outstanding films that I have watched from my DVD collection this year. I prefer DVDs because they often come with commentaries and other special features, In addition, they are usually closed captioned for the hearing impaired. 

            

Brief Encounter: This 1945 British film is widely regarded as one of the best films of all time. It is the story of an affair between a suburban English housewife, and a married doctor who meet accidentally at a railway terminal. Playwright Noel Coward adapted his own play for the screen, and David Lean directed. The film stars Celia Johnson, one of the UK’s greatest actresses, along with Trevor Howard.  

    Enchanted April: Stifled British wives Lottie (Josie Lawrence) and Rose       (MirandaRichardson) rent an Italian villa for a husbandless vacation. Sharing the retreat are acerbic widow Mrs. Fisher (Oscar nominee Joan Plowright) and socialite Caroline d’Este (Polly Walker). The four spend a month savoring newfound freedom and the opportunity for self-discovery. This film also features Michael Kitchen, Alfred Molina, and Jim Broadbent at the outset of their notable film careers.    

The Queen: Famed British actress Helen Mirren stars in this 2006 dramatization of the events following upon the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Mirren claimed that she had to consider herself as painting a portrait of Queen Elizabeth in order to take on such a difficult role.  Her portrayal won a well-deserved Academy award for Best Actress. 

A Foreign Field: This British film features an acclaimed international cast including Alec Guinness, Leo McKern, Jeanne Moreau, Loren Bacall, John Randolph, and Geraldine Chaplin. Two British war vets meet an American vet when all three return to Normandy on the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Old rivalries resurface, particularly when two of the men discover they are searching for the same lost love. This disparate band of survivors eventually finds common ground in the memory of what they lost on that fateful day in 1944. 

Mid-August Lunch:  Gianni Di Gregorio stars in and directs this 2008 charming tale from Italy of great food, feisty old ladies, and unlikely friendships. The setting is a largely deserted Rome on the national holiday, Ferragosto, during the dog days of summer when most Romans have fled the city’s heat for the mountains or the shore. Four elderly ladies have to spend the holiday together sharing a sweltering apartment.

The Way. Martin Sheen stars in  a powerful and inspirational 2010 film about family, friends, and the challenges we face while navigating through life. Sheen plays an American doctor who travels to France after receiving the news of the death of his estranged son. Rather than return home, he decides to embark on the historical pilgrimage, “the Way of St. James”, to honor his son’s desire to finish the journey.  Directed by Emilio Estevez, Sheen’s real life son.

Twilight Samurai:  This 2002 film, set in a changing Japan of the late nineteenth century, takes a modern look at the traditional Samurai story. Hiroyuki Sanada, one of Japan’s leading film stars, plays a low ranking, poverty stricken samurai trying to support his family. However, he is caught in the shifting turmoil of the times and ordered to confront and kill a renegade warrior. The film won twelve Japanese Film Academy Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress. 

The Son’s Room: In this 2001 Italian film Nanni Moretti plays a psychotherapist who thinks he has all the answers until an unthinkable tragedy hits home and turns his life upside down. Moretti also directed this film that won great critical acclaim as well as the Best Picture award at the Cannes Film Festival. 

The Holly and the Ivy: Celia Johnson, Ralph Richardson, and Margaret Leighton star in this 1952 British holiday film. A widowed minister is torn between the needs of his family and his parishioners. The annual Christmas reunion of the minister’s family exposes long simmering family tensions until they all rediscover the true meaning of Christmas.

 

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Holiday Film Favorites 2022

Each year the Christmas season brings back to TV all the traditional holiday classics from Miracle on 34^thStreet on Thanksgiving Day to Frank Capra’s beloved It’s a Wonderful Life, right before Christmas. It’s hard for me to watch the latter anymore because I cry too much, but here are some other favorites for holiday viewing.

The Shop Around the Corner: This film premiered on January 12, 1940 but must be placed with the great films associated with 1939, the “annus mirabilis” of Hollywood’s Golden age. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, it received no Academy awards and appears to have been a box-office flop. Today, it has become an enduring holiday classic. The wit and subtlety of the famed “Lubitsch Touch” is clearly evident. Lubitsch turns All-American boy Jimmy Stewart, and co-star Margaret Sullavan into believable clerks in a Budapest dry-goods store who unwittingly fall in love via mail. Both actors gave unforgettable performances but neither gained even an Academy award nomination. The rest of the cast was equally fine, especially Felix Brassart as a co-worker, and William Tracy as a savvy delivery boy. The film ends fittingly as the two lovers are united on Christmas Eve as snowflakes fall on The Shop Around the Corner. 

I’ll Be Seeing You: This 1944 film is a Holiday drama with film noir trappings. Two strangers meet on a train, but she is a woman with a past and he is a soldier suffering from war wounds, both physical and mental. She is travelling home to spend the holidays with family, and he, with no particular destination in mind, gets off at her stop in hope of seeing her again . The film stars Ginger Rogers, who turned to dramatic roles after the break-up of her great dancing partnership with Fred Astaire. Rogers had won a Best Actress award in 1941 for her performance in Kitty Foyle, but I believe she is much better in this film. Joseph Cotton, fresh off his roles in Citizen Kane, and The Magnificent Ambersons, is equally fine. Director William Dieterle not only brings out the chemistry between the two stars, but also gets the most out of a fine supporting cast, including a teen-age Shirley Temple. The film’s theme song, the popular wartime melody, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” helped make it a huge hit at the box-office, but it is largely forgotten today. 

The Holly and the Ivy. Celia Johnson, Ralph Richardson, and Margaret Leighton star in this 1952 British holiday film. A widowed minister is torn between the needs of his family and his parishioners, but his three grown children must decide between their own needs and those of their aging father.  All comes to a head on Christmas Eve as the annual family reunion exposes the long simmering family tensions. Based on a hit London play, this film is not as well known as less serious holiday films.  

The Big Little Jesus: Dragnet was a hugely popular TV series that premiered in 1951. It’s film noir trappings and low key, realism made it a long-running police procedural, perhaps the most influential of all time. In its third season, it featured a Christmas special, entitled, “The Big Little Jesus.” Two police detectives, played by Jack Webb, the show’s creator and star, and Ben Alexander,  receive a call on Christmas Eve to investigate the theft of a figure of the baby Jesus from a creche in a largely Hispanic church in downtown Los Angeles. 

The half-hour episode begins with the familiar Dragnet theme over a panorama of Los Angeles, followed by the famous opening lines: “This is the city, I work here, I’m a cop.” The detectives dutifully track down the leads and interview the ordinary suspects in typical Dragnet style, but to no avail. Finally, they return to the church with the bad news that the beloved figure of the baby Jesus will not be part of the Christmas celebration.  Before every episode, it is claimed that “the story we are about to see is true.” If that is correct, this true story is far more moving than most of the other favorite fictional holiday stories. It can be seen on YouTube.

Radio Days: My favorite New Year’s film has long been Swing Time, the greatest of all the 1930s musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The beautiful dancing, the great songs, and the look at a world of class and elegance that has long disappeared makes it a wonderful way to usher in the New Year. However, I would place Woody Allen’s Radio Daysright up there as required New Year’s viewing. Allen wrote and directed this 1987 film that provides a nostalgic and often hilarious view of the world of his youth, a world that coincided with the glory days of radio back in the late 30s and early 40s.

Three Jewish sisters and their families live together with their elderly parents in a large house in the Jewish section of Rockaway, a remote beach community in New York’s borough of Queens. The story is narrated by Allen as the world in which these people live is seen through memories of his boyhood. Although the extended family and its life are far removed from glitzy Manhattan, they are connected with its life and culture through the radio which created a common culture for the extremely diverse city. 

Julie Kavner, Diane Wiest, and Rene Lippin play the three sisters. I grew up in Queens back then, and these three women reminded me of my mother’s three sisters who lived with their families in my Italian grandparent’s home. We tuned in to the same radio shows, read the same newspapers with their comics, and listened to the same melodies featured on the soundtrack of Radio Days. At the finale, the film takes us to a Manhattan night club where revelers are ushering in the year 1944 in the midst of World War II. Diane Keaton sings, “You’d Be So Nice to come Home To.”

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Chess and Basketball

 I learned to play Chess as a boy but never had much of a chance to play until I retired 15 years ago. Since then I have been an avid, if average, player, playing every Wednesday with a group of similar players at our local Senior center. Despite the common perception, I have come to believe that chess is a team sport. 

We all have the image of the solitary chess master hovering over the board and lost in thought while contemplating the next move. But to my mind the chess player is the coach and the real players are the pieces on the board. It doesn’t take much experience to realize that if these pieces don’t work together, they will not win.

It is the coach’s job first to get his players into the game. In other words, they must be placed out in the field of play as quickly as possible. In chess it is called development. The major pieces (knights, bishops, rooks) are more powerful than pawns and constitute the starting team. Not only must the coach put them into play quickly, he must place them properly so that they cooperate and defend one another. If they can’t work together, the game is inevitably lost. 

Even the Queen, the most powerful piece on the board, cannot capture the opponent’ s King by herself. She needs the support of at least one other piece to checkmate. Only the opponent’s Queen can confront her power alone, but she can be neutralized and sometimes captured by being double or even tripled teamed by less powerful pieces working together.

Team work is the key to success in most sports. Basketball, with only five players on the court, is no exception.  Despite the magnitude of the stars in the NBA, it is still a team game. Some think that Cleveland’s LeBron James is the best to ever play the game, but the LA Lakers are struggling this year as a team. The phenomenal success of  the Golden State Warriors has been due to the way in which they have integrated super-stars into their team concept. 

The NCAA collegiate season has just begun. Interestingly, the most successful college team in the past decade has been the University of Connecticut’s Women’s team. It is true that the success of the team has enabled UCONN Coach Geno Auriemma to continually recruit all-star high school athletes from all over the country. The team is usually loaded with talent and their average margin of victory often exceeds 30 points per game.

Nevertheless, Auriemma’s stature as a coach has enabled him to get his extremely talented athletes to play together as a team. I recall reading about a local high school men’s coach who urged his young studs to emulate the way the UCONN women play defense.  In other words, Auriemma has been able to get the UCONN stars to not just think of individual stats but to play defense as well as offense. A few years ago, one of the UCONN women remarked that Auriemma would find it difficult to coach men because they are so thick-headed when it comes to team play.

Even on the high school level it takes a strong coach to get young men to play together as a team. The natural desire of athletes to show their stuff is magnified these days by pressure to get college scholarships. Also, sports reporters often become star-struck and concentrate all their attention on the high scoring players and their stats. In a rare exception, an article in today's Wall Street Journal  reported on Tyler Adams, the Captain of the US Men's soccer team, who  though he scored no goals or assists in the recent victory over Iran, was the key to the team's success in making it to the final round of sixteen. "Everything this American team does in Qatar, sooner or later, runs through the heart of the midfield, Tyler Adams." 

It has often been said that legendary players like Larry Bird and Michael Jordan were able to bring out the best in their teammates. In doing so, they also won numerous championships. This is true not just in chess and basketball but in business, politics, and practically every aspect of life. It is certainly true in family life where mothers and fathers give themselves to bring out the best in their children.

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Thanksgiving Memories 2022

   

                                            

 

To say I was born and raised in New York City would be a little misleading because in my memories of New York in the 40s and 50s, the city was a collection of small towns or villages. I was born in Woodside, a section of the borough of Queens, and the skyscrapers and streets of Manhattan were as remote for me as China would be to my grandchildren today.

Because of our insularity I can’t be sure if a Thanksgiving custom we had back then was unique to Woodside or whether it could have been found elsewhere throughout the great metropolis. Anyone else I’ve mentioned it to had never heard of it including my wife who was born a little bit north of the City in White Plains, the hub of Westchester county.

Anyway, on Thanksgiving morning the children in our neighborhood would dress up as bums or hobos. It didn’t take much since back then we would usually wear our clothes until they literally fell apart. We would take our most worn and tattered clothing and rip and tear them a little more. Then, we would blacken a cork over a candle and smear it over our faces to simulate dirt. I remember my grandmother giving me a little pouch with a drawstring, or was it a pillowcase, that we hobos could sling over our shoulders.

Then, we were ready to make the rounds of our neighbors to ask, “anything for thanksgiving.” Inevitably, they would answer our plea with some of the bounty from the meal they were preparing. Usually it would be apples, or walnuts, or sometimes a few pennies. Don’t laugh. Twenty pennies were enough to buy a Spalding (Spaldeen), the elite of bouncing rubber balls used by us in so many street games.

I don’t know where the “anything for thanksgiving” custom came from. We lived in a small neighborhood that seemed to have been mainly Irish with a mixture of Italians. In my nearby Catholic school the majority of the kids seemed to have Irish names. There were Ryans, Regans, Dunphys, Moylans, and Healys. However, A few blocks down busy 69^thStreet were the Napolitanos who ran the grocery store. In the other direction lived the dreaded Gallos whose kids were the toughest in the school. 

But I’m not sure that “anything for thanksgiving”  was an ethnic custom. We were a predominately Catholic neighborhood and the idea of thanksgiving was part of our religious heritage even though none of us knew that the word “Eucharist” meant “Thanksgiving.” On the other hand, it could have been a peculiarly American response to the end of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Nothing had marked the depression so much as homeless men on bread lines or riding the rails. These were the hobos that we children imitated. Even though most of us could be considered poor, at least we and our neighbors would be able to sit down that afternoon in our homes to the best meal of the year. We did have a lot to be thankful for. The Depression was over, the men had returned from the terrible war, and the NY Yankees were on the verge of recovering their past glory.

Over 70 years have passed since those childhood years but I can truly say that my wife and I have much to be thankful for. Our grandparents came to this country from Italy with nothing but their own traditions, customs, and religion. Like most children of immigrants our parent came to love America and worked hard to provide for their children and give them a standard of living that is still the envy of the world. 

Even today, after a pandemic and one of the most divisive political campaigns in U.S. history, there is more reason to hope than to fear. I would just like to end this post with George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789. Thanksgiving did not become a National holiday until after the terrible Civil War, but Washington’s words are as meaningful today as they were in 1789.  

Thanksgiving Proclamation
Issued by President George Washington, at the request of Congress, on October 3, 1789

 


Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and—Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me “to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”



Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favor, able interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.


And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally, to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.



Given under my hand at the City of New York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.


 

Go. Washington 

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The Governing Class

 

The recent mid-term elections brought to mind a post I wrote a few years ago about Alexander Solzhenitzyn's novel, The Cancer Ward in which he depicted a member of the Communist party governing class in the former Soviet Union.

Every society has its governing class. In America they don't call themselves Communists, but an increasing number describe themselves as Socialists. For the most part the governing class in America is made up of members of the Democratic party. Did you know, for example, that in the 2020 Presidential election the District of Columbia, the seat of the Federal government, gave 317323 votes to Biden and only 18586 to Trump?

Historically, the governing class never makes up more than a small minority of a country’s population. Even in countries where Socialist or Communist revolutionaries triumphed and seized power, the ruling party remained an elite group with membership severely restricted. 

In Hitler’s Germany, for example, membership in the National Socialist or Nazi party never constituted more than 10% of the German people. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) members of the Communist party also were a relatively small elite group. Membership in the Party was a privilege and a sign of status. Even today in countries like China, Cuba, and Venezuela, party members make up a small ruling minority despite massive vote totals in elections. 

No one has described this class better than Alexander Solzhenitsyn, arguably the greatest and most influential author of the twentieth century. He began writing while a prisoner in Soviet labor camps for almost a decade. After serving his term in the labor camp, he was released into exile in central Asia. 

While in exile, he developed a cancerous tumor and was allowed to return to civilization for treatment. His famous novel, Cancer Ward, is a fictionalized version of his experience in the hospital. He is obviously the main character but he describes the doctors, nurses, and other patients with great sympathy and understanding. * 

However, he had little sympathy for Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, the only Communist party member in the cancer ward. Rusanov was a party official who only consented to enter this remote facility until his wife could manage to pull strings and find an opening in Moscow. “But Pavel Nikolayevich was tormented no less than by the disease itself, by having to enter the clinic as an ordinary person. He could hardly remember when last he had been in a public hospital.” Rusanov looked down on the other cancer patients as riff-raff, non-Russian Asiatics, or even criminals. 

Solzhenitsyn uses Rusanov and his wife, Kapitolivna Marveyevna, as examples of how Socialist champions of the People can morph into privileged bureaucrats.  

The Rusanovs loved the People, their great People. They served the People and were ready to give their lives for the People.

But as the years went by they found themselves less and less able to tolerate actual human beings, those obstinate creatures who were always resistant, refusing to do what they were told and, besides, demanding something for themselves.

The Rusanovs had an aversion to “teeming human beings, or jostling crowds.” They found travel on public transportation “disgusting” with loud, pushing, dirty workers struggling to get in. The worst thing was the “familiarity” of these people who would clap you on the shoulder and ask you to pass a ticket or some change along the car.

Eventually, the Rusanovs acquired an automobile of their own and avoided public transportation altogether. On railroads, they would only travel first-class on reserved compartments to avoid mixing with people “crammed in, wearing sheepskin coats and carrying buckets and sacks.”

Rusanov was a bureaucrat who had done very well in the Soviet system. He had a wife and two children, a car and a nice apartment as well as a small country place. It is true that he had never actually been a worker. He had never built anything, made anything, or designed anything. He had not even served in the military during the great patriotic war. His job had been to gather evidence and information that could be used to send enemies of the state to the labor camps.

Even though he loved Stalin, he was aware of the many shortcomings in his country. However, he blamed all Russia’s problems on speculation or what we would call private enterprise.

 

Over the years Rusanov had become more and more unshakably convinced that all our mistakes, shortcomings, imperfections and inadequacies were the result of speculation. Spring onions, radishes and flowers were sold on the street by dubious types, milk and eggs were sold by peasant women in the market, and yoghurt, woolen socks, even fried fish at the railway stations. There was large-scale speculation too. Lorries were being driven off “on the side” from State warehouses. If these two kinds of speculation could be torn up by the roots, everything in our country could be put right quickly and our successes would be even more striking. There was nothing wrong in a man strengthening his material position with the help of a good salary from the State and a good pension… Such a man had earned his car, his cottage in the country, and a small house in town to himself. But a car of the same make from the same factory, or a country-cottage of the same standard type, acquired a completely different criminal character if they had been bought through speculation. Rusanov dreamed, literally dreamed, of introducing public executions for speculators. Public executions would speedily bring complete health to our society. (162)

Socialism did not bring equality to the Soviet Union or to any other Communist country. Supporters of Socialism have always blamed others for its failures, and claimed that they could make it succeed. Progressives in our country, like Rusanov, blame capitalism and private enterprise for our problems. They want heads to roll, figuratively, or maybe literally.

 

In the Soviet Union the only true equality was found in the cancer ward. Cancer was the great equalizer and treated rich and poor alike.

 

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*Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Cancer Ward, 1968. Penguin books, 1971.

Aaron Judge: Yankee Superstar

  

                                         

As I write, the Houston Astros and the Philadelphia Phillies are tied at one game apiece in this years World Series, but for me the season came to an end when the Astros swept the New York Yankees to win the  American League championship. As long as I can remember, I have been a Yankee fan.

 In 1946, at the age of seven, I became a baseball fan while listening on the radio as the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Boston Red Sox in a World Series marked by a pivotal run scored by hustling Cardinal Enos Slaughter.  I think baseball is the only game where plays like that remain etched in your mind over a lifetime.

Next year, living in New York  City’s borough of Queens, I became a fan of the Yankees with their great Italian triumvirate of DiMaggio, Berra, Rizzuto. Most of the games then were played during the day, and I recall sitting under the grape arbor behind my grandparents’ home next door listening to the broadcasts. My parents and my grandparents were not particularly interested in baseball, but the kids in the neighborhood and at school were rabid fans. We constantly played all kinds of ball games on the sidewalks, in the streets, and in back lots. We formed imaginary teams and even kept stats.

In 1947 the Yankees won the World Series against the hated Brooklyn Dodgers. I vividly recall, after walking home from school one day, turning on the radio to hear Yankee pitcher Bill Bevens give up a double to Cookie Lavagetto (another Italian) and lose the game as well as a no-hitter in the ninth inning. Nevertheless,  I was hooked. The Yankees were in my blood. They didn’t win the pennant in 1948 but in 1949, they began an incredible streak of five straight World Series victories under legendary manager Casey Stengel.

Now, in my eighties, I still think that baseball is the best of all spectator sports. I am not alone. If you look at today’s lineups, you will see that the World Series is a true world series. Still, I find it difficult to either watch the games on TV or listen on the radio. It’s not just the incessant commercials between innings, but also between practically every pitch: “this walk to the mound is brought to you by xyz,” or “this pitch is brought to you by abc.” More than the commercials, I find that at my age I cannot bear the tension, especially in the play-offs which have become more exciting than the World Series. Nerd that I am, I prefer to study the stats after the games are over. 

Speaking of stats, this year the Yankees’ Aaron Judge had one of the greatest years in Yankee and in baseball history. It was not only that he tied Babe Ruth’s 1927 154 game record for home runs, and beat Roger Maris’s 1961 total of 61 over 162 games, but also his other stats were phenomenal. His 62 home runs, and 131 runs batted in (rbis) led the league by wide margins. His batting average of .311 was second in the league in a year when only a handful of players hit over .300. If you add his 111 walks (many intentional) to his 177 hits, you get an incredible on-base percentage of .425.  

I don’t mean to take anything away from Ruth or Maris but Judge’s performance in 2022 exceeded theirs in 1927 and 1961. In a year when batting averages were down and pitching dominated, Judge’s numbers were way above the baseball average. Just compare his numbers with Shohei Ohtani, the LA Angels star, who is his competition for Most Valuable Player this year.

Ruth and Maris had great numbers, but they never faced the kind of pitching that Judge faced this year. In times past, it was a rare pitcher who could throw over 95 mph, much less 100 mph. If they could, they would lack control. Today, every team seems to be loaded with pitchers who consistently throw over 95 mph with control. In one playoff game, the Yankees’ Luis Severino averaged 97 mph. Moreover, a friend of mine mentioned that the ball was not as lively this year as it was just two years ago. A statistical research firm claimed that if the 2020 balls had been used this year, Judge would have hit over 80 home runs. 

It is true that he stumbled in the playoffs against an outstanding Houston pitching staff, but that should not detract from one of the greatest performances in baseball history.

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Armageddon: the Big, Big Issue

  

                                

Recently, at a political fundraiser, President Biden warned that the war in Ukraine has brought us closer to nuclear Armageddon than we have been since the Cuban Missile crisis of over 60 years ago. Younger readers may not know that shortly after the Communist revolution in Cuba, the then Soviet Union placed nuclear weapons in Cuba during the administration of President Kennedy. Although young and inexperienced, Kennedy was vigorous and surrounded by capable advisors. Fortunately, both sides stepped back and a nuclear Armageddon was avoided.

Now, President Biden claims that Armageddon again threatens because of the war in Ukraine. We have reached this situation under his watch. He has been President for almost two years and can no longer blame ex-President Trump. Neither can he blame the Republican party since they control neither House of Congress. He does blame President Putin of Russia, but Biden is leader of the free world. Any war represents a failure of diplomacy. Even without a nuclear exchange, the death and destruction on both sides in Ukraine is a colossal diplomatic failure on the part of the Biden administration.

No matter what you think about Donald Trump, we did have four years of peace during his term. It is true that we had the pandemic but we had peace. It is a disgrace that he did not get the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Abraham accords in the Middle East. Although the claims of Democrats that Trump colluded with Russia have now been proven to be a hoax, what President Trump actually did seemed to do the job. During his administration there was no Russian invasion of Ukraine.

You may remember that during the previous Obama/ Biden administration, Russia invaded and took over part of Ukraine with virtually no opposition. During that administration Vice-President Biden had been put in charge of Ukrainian affairs.  Among other things he threatened to withhold all aid to Ukraine unless the government dismissed an official investigating corruption. At the same time, his son, Hunter Biden, got a very lucrative sinecure with a Ukrainian energy firm.

Now fast-forward to today’s Biden administration. I still believe that the Biden administration must bear much of the blame for the war in Ukraine. About this time last year President Biden publicly announced that he saw no reason why Ukraine should not be considered for membership in NATO. These words were a provocation to Russia. We were threatening to place NATO forces and weapons smack up against the Russian border. Moreover, the entrance of Ukraine into NATO would have committed US forces to the defense of that country.

Just months after President Biden’s announcement, President Putin responded with a massive invasion of Ukraine, something that he had declined to do during the four years of the Trump administration. If you think that peace was maintained during the Trump era by collusion with Russia, then let’s have more collusion. 

Since the inception of the bloody conflict that now even threatens a catastrophic nuclear exchange, what has the Biden administration done? Has the President emerged as a passionate voice for peace? Has he called for negotiations to end the conflict? No, he has taken sides and step by step has participated in the escalation of the conflict to the point where he now raises the specter of Armageddon. 

During the Cuban Missile Crisis we were on the brink of nuclear war when Russian nuclear missiles were placed in Cuba 90 miles away from our border. Now, we are shipping potent missiles to Ukraine right on the Russian border. Back then, a young President Kennedy negotiated a settlement to bring us back from the brink. Now that our aged President has raised the specter of Armageddon, it is time for him to also step back from the brink, and stop escalating the conflict. 

The conflict in Ukraine is the big, big issue facing us today. It is such more serious than climate change, crime, inflation, the border, or abortion. A recent alarming news item indicated that we have just sent almost 5000 American soldiers to the Ukrainian border. What's next?

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Columbus Day 2022

 

As Columbus Day morphs into Indigenous Peoples Day in parts of the USA, it is ironic that many of the people calling for the removal of statues of Columbus, or for his elimination from our school history books are people that now call themselves Hispanics.*

 

Who do these people think were on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria back in 1492? Other than Columbus, they were all from what is now called Spain. Columbus, the leader of the expedition, came from Genoa which is now part of Italy. The Spanish crew, especially the Pinzon brothers who captained the Nina and the Pinta, disliked and distrusted Columbus despite his obvious seamanship and great experience on the high seas. 

 

Once they landed on an island off what Columbus  thought was Asia, he had an extremely difficult time controlling the cruelty and rapacity of his crew in their dealing with the natives they found there. 

 

 

The indigenous islanders themselves were not much better. Modern feminists might be surprised to discover that native men freely shared their women with the new arrivals. After all, what was a woman for, except work, sex, and childbearing? Indeed, indigenous people from other islands often took women captive to breed them so they could feed on their infants.

 

Anyway, in subsequent voyages thousands of Hispanics, the ancestors of today’s protestors, came to the New World and increased the level of cruelty and brutality. It is true that Columbus, participated in this ill-treatment, especially after he found that the settlers he had left behind on his first voyage had all died in suspicious circumstances. Eventually, Columbus lost control over the situation and on one trip was even arrested by the Spanish governor and sent back to Spain in chains.

 

Despite the efforts of Queen Isabella who insisted that the natives of the islands were her subjects, and therefore could not be slaves, the practice of slavery and colonial brutality grew worse. The story was told long ago  by Bartolomeo del las Casas, an early settler who became a priest, gave up his own slaves, and worked for the rest of his life to protect the natives from the ravages of the colonizers. 

 

The efforts of Las Casas were mirrored a couple of centuries later when Junipero Serra, another Franciscan friar, built a mission system in California in the eighteenth century to protect the  natives from the brutality and rapacity of Hispanic colonizers. Only after the Mexican government shut down the missions in the nineteenth century were the natives thrown to the wolves. For his efforts, the Catholic church has canonized Fr. Serra, but protestors now vandalize and tear down commemorative memorials. 

 

The ancestors of these Hispanic colonizers can still be seen today as they brandish AK 47s, and brutally herd thousands of immigrants from Central American through Mexico to the American border. 

 

Although I am dismayed by the hypocrisy of modern Hispanic protestors, I do not want to single Hispanics out as particularly evil. Slavery has been practiced all over the world by all kinds of people. Before African slaves could be sent to the New World, they had to be captured and chained by black tribal leaders and Moslem slave traders. Only then could European slave traders transport them to the Americas. Even indigenous American Indian tribes owned black slaves. 

 

Where did this evil come from? In the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers wrote that all men were created equal, but they did not believe that all men wound up equal. They meant that all humans had the same nature. We are all human despite our gender, or the color of our skin. 

 

In the eighteenth century there was a great debate among intellectuals about human nature. A few novel thinkers rejected the time-honored idea that all humans are imperfect; that we could be capable of great things but that there was a flaw in our nature that could lead us to do wrong or evil. Christian theologians called it original sin and believed we had all inherited it from our first parents.

 

The new thinking of the so-called Enlightenment rejected the notion of original sin and claimed that we are all created perfect or good. The evil in the world could then be traced somehow to corrupt social norms or traditions. The cure for evils like slavery would then lie not in perfecting human weakness, but in reforming society and ridding it of its various ills. 

 

Along with this new theory came a new myth, the myth of the “Noble Savage,” that believed that the indigenous peoples of the New World lived in a state of nature where all was happiness, peace, and serenity. Only when Europeans brought their civilization to America with all its social ills, including religion, was the paradise of the noble savage corrupted and destroyed in the same way that the serpent corrupted Adam and Eve in the biblical story.

 

The myth of the noble savage was not based on any real historical evidence. The proponents of the idea despised and ridiculed the primitive peasants of their own countries but praised the primitive indigenous people of the New World whom they had never seen.

 

Nevertheless, the myth of the noble savage has become pervasive in our own time. So, instead of a human being, capable of good and evil like the rest of us, Columbus has become an evil agent of white supremacy, the man who destroyed the pristine paradise of the New World.

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*Note: I do not understand why I, a descendant of immigrants from Italy, am considered "white" and inherently a "white supremacist," while the descendants of immigrants from Spain are not considered "white" and therefore free of any taint of white supremacy.