Memorial Day: Two Favorites

This Monday is Memorial Day in the USA, a day when Americans pay tribute to those who gave their lives defending their country. It was originally called Decoration Day as towns and communities gathered together to decorate the graves of their sons who had died during the American Civil War. Civil War memorials still grace the center of many towns and villages today. In my home town of Fairfield there is a Memorial Day parade every year where thousands turn out to enjoy, celebrate, pay tribute, and perhaps remember.

To my mind the best description of Decoration Day can be found in Emily of Deep Valley, Maud Hart Lovelace's charming and moving coming of age story. On one level this book is a light novel for teen-age girls. On another level it explores the psychology of an individual whose life seems to be going nowhere until she finds a way to pull herself up with her own bootstraps. But it also provides an insight into the life of a small mid-western town at the beginning of the twentieth century that few histories can match. 

Decoration Day was a big event in Deep Valley at the time. In the morning residents would go to the town cemetery to decorate the graves. Later. they would participate in the parade that honored all those who fought in the Civil War. Emily, an orphan, lived with her elderly grandfather who had fought in the war, and was proud to march in the parade in uniform. 

My favorite film of the Civil War is The Red Badge of Courage. 

Stephen Crane’s realistic portrayal of ordinary soldiers before and during a single Civil War battle was originally published in 1894. It has become the model for all subsequent novels about warfare. It was brought to the screen in 1951 by director John Huston, who had a great interest in American history. True to the novel, the film sees the Civil War through the minds and eyes of the ordinary men who fought. Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of WW II, stars along with a fine supporting cast, including Bill Mauldin, the famous WWII cartoonist. The film is narrated by actor James Whitmore, a Marine Corps veteran. 

Unfortunately, the studio cut the original film from 120 minutes to 70 because of unfavorable preview reactions. Huston believed that this film was the best he ever made in his long and distinguished career, but the cut footage has been lost. Nevertheless, the remnant is a powerful and moving depiction of ordinary men at war. The final charge, capped as it is by the American flag bearer taking the Confederate from a fallen rebel is extremely moving.  The ensuing conversation between victorious Union soldiers and their defeated captives demonstrates that it was indeed a war between brothers.

When you get right down to it, every war is a civil war.

The film is available on DVD and streaming services. Click on this link for the final seven minutes. 

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Review. Shellenberger: Apocalypse Never

 

 

Michael Schellenberger, a committed environmentalist, described how billionaires have profited from climate change activism in his 2020 book, Apocalypse Never.  Subtitled, “Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” the book offers a balanced assessment on climate change and how to deal with it. However, he also details how well connected politicians and venture capitalists have profited from government environmental spending.  

 

Shellenberger quotes John Doerr, a venture capitalist, who found an upside in climate change.“Green technology—going green—is bigger than the Internet,” Doerr said. “It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century.”

 

During the administration of President Obama, Shellenberger admits that he was involved in an environmental program that could be regarded as a forerunner of the Green New Deal. But things did not work out as he expected. He writes:

 

Between 2009 and 2015, the U.S. government spent about $150 billion on our Green New Deal, $90 billion of it in stimulus money.

 

Stimulus money wasn’t evenly distributed but rather clustered around donors to President Obama and the Democratic Party. At least ten members of Obama’s finance committee and more than twelve of his fundraising bundlers, who raised a minimum of $100,000 for Obamo, benefitted from $16.4 of the $20.5 billion in stimulus loans.

 

Fisker, which produced some of the world’s first luxury hybrid vehicles, received $529 million in federal loans; Doerr was one of Fisker’s major investors. It eventually went bankrupt, costing taxpayers 132 million. … (217-218)

 

But the loans were just one program among many others that funneled money to well-connected Obama donors without creating many jobs. The most famous of the green investments was when DOE gave $575 million to a solar company called Solyndra, 35 percent of which was owned by a billionaire donor and fundraising bundler for Obama, George Kaiser.

 

Nobody wanted to invest in Solyndra because its panels were too expensive, which independently minded DOE staffers pointed out. They were overruled, however, and the loan was approved.

 

The people who benefitted most from the green stimulus were billionaires, including Musk, Doerr, Kaiser, Khosla, Ted Turner, Pat Stryker, and Paul Tudor Jones. Vinod Khosla led Obama’s “India Policy team” during the 2008 election and was a major financial contributor to Democrats. His companies received more than $399 million.

 

However, few Democratic Party donors outperformed Doerr when it came to receiving federal stimulus loans. More than half of the companies in his Genentech portfolio… received loans or outright grants from the government. “Considering that the acceptance rate in most of the Department of Energy programs was often 10 percent or less, this is a stunning record,” wrote an investigative reporter. (218)

 

Shellenberger’s research led him to conclude that nuclear power is the answer not only to creating a cleaner environment but also to providing for the world’s expanding energy needs. But he documents the efforts of pseudo-scientific activists and self- interested politicians like former Governor Jerry Brown of California to shut down nuclear power in California. Brown and his family were heavily invested in fossil fuels like oil and natural gas.

 

Apocalypse Never does offer solutions to serious environmental problems but it is also a sad story when it details how many have profited by alarming people all over the globe. He cites his own example as typical of many:

 

I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago. I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate change reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the environment.

 

Nothing is sadder that the plight of now-famous teenager Greta Thunberg who, like many other children, has been traumatized by climate alarmists. She claims that her childhood was taken from her by these fears, and truly believes that the human race will be extinct in 15 years. Who taught her that?

 

In Apocalypse Never Michael Shellenberger concludes that there is much more reason for optimism than pessimism. 

 

Conventional air pollution peaked fifty years ago in developed nations and carbon emissions have peaked or will soon peak in most others.

 

The amount of land we use for meat production is declining. Forests are growing back and wildlife is returning.

 

There is no reason poor nations can’t develop and adapt to climate change. Deaths from extreme events should keep declining….

 

None of this means there isn’t work to do. There is plenty. But much if not most of it has to do with accelerating those existing, positive trends, not trying to reverse them in a bid to return to low-energy agrarian societies.

 

Now the Biden Administration is pushing Green energy programs and subsidies that far exceed those of the Obama administration. Why is the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) not concerned about  massive solar farms that destroy desert environments, or windmill complexes that kill thousands of birds each year, or the disposal problems related to toxic lithium automobile batteries? The people who use the threat of climate change to make fortunes or gain votes should be ashamed of themselves. 

 

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Mis-directed Protests

                                           

 

In 2020 George Floyd, a career criminal, was killed by a policeman while resisting arrest for a minor offense. Almost immediately protests sprang up all over the country primarily in big cities. Parts of these cities were occupied by tent encampments, cars and building were set on fire, and gangs of protestors called for the immediate punishment of the offending police officer. Moreover, they attacked police in general and insisted that police departments be defunded. At the time no one suggested that the police officer's action be put into context.

Fast forward to the present where we find thousands of protestors occupying colleges and universities all over the country in response to the war in Gaza. What are they protesting? On October 7, 2023, a gang of heavily armed young men on motorized vehicles attacked a small town in Israel and murdered over 1200 civilians. Forget for the moment that the victims of this assault were Jewish and forget for a moment the anti-Semitism of the attackers since, more than anything else, this was a crime against humanity, a true hate crime if there ever was one. 

Actually, it was worse than a crime against humanity. The young men who attacked the Israeli civilians were worse than animals. They did not kill in self-defense. They did not kill because they were starving and needed food. It is obvious from their own videos that they killed not just out of hatred, but for the sheer fun of it. Before killing, they tortured their victims, and raped women.

However, at the time there were no protests against the killers or Hamas, their parent organization. Instead we heard voices claiming that the attack must be put into context, that one should consider the slaughter in the light of 80 years of Israeli occupation of Palestine. Even former President Obama joined in the chorus and suggested that in some way all of us were guilty.

I recall saying to my wife last October that we ought to leave the response to Israel, and not get involved in events thousands of miles away. I believed that the Israelis had the intelligence, the will, and the resources to deal with the terrorist attack. They are in close proximity to the attackers, they know their language, their tactics, and their capabilities. They would know best how to respond to this unprovoked attack. 

Sure enough, Israel decided that a military response was necessary not only to punish the attackers, but also to destroy Hamas completely. Incredibly, as the military response succeeded, protests began to grow in this country against Israel. The protests have been directed not at the killers but at the victims. The protests include Hamas flags and slogans like “Death to Israel,” and “From the river to the sea.”, slogans that apparently mean the slaughter of every Israeli civilian. Protestors bemoaning the fate of Palestinian civilians fail to mention that these same civilians have been brutalized and terrorized by Hamas gangs for decades. If Palestinians today live in terror and want, it is because of gun toting Hamas gangs. There is no freedom of speech in Palestine. Do Palestinian women have any rights? Aid shipments to Palestine are routinely taken by Hamas gangs for themselves.

Coincidentally, a furor has just erupted in this country over an admission by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem in her recent book that she had shot one of her dogs. True, it was a stupid thing to put in her book since the 98% of the population that has never lived on a farm or ranch would never understand. But Noem is an experienced animal handler. When someone gave her a dog that was hard to control, she tried to train it, but it was too late. The dog had become a vicious killer. It had plenty of food and was not in danger. Like the Hamas gunmen, it just attacked and killed for the fun of it. It had attacked other animals and Noem’s own children. Anyone experienced with animals would know that there was only one thing to do.

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My Grandfather

                                             

My younger brother Joe just reminded me that today, May 3, is the birthday of our paternal grandfather, Joseph or Giuseppe DeStefano (Baba). Every March 19 the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. Joseph, the stepfather or surrogate father of Jesus, but Joe's reminder made me recall a post I had written some years ago. I think it might be of interest to some of my own grandchildren.

Surprisingly, St. Joseph was largely neglected during the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity. He played an important role in Scripture during the early days of Jesus but was completely absent during the adult or public life of Jesus. If you just page through Dante’s Divine Comedy, you will be hard pressed to find any sinners or saints called Joseph or Giuseppe. It is obvious that in the year 1300 Italians did not name their children after the husband of Mary. 

For a variety of reasons St. Joseph only entered the spotlight in the fifteenth century after the Black Death had devastated Europe. He was finally given a feast day in 1479 by Pope Sixtus IV, a former head of the Franciscan order. After that St. Joseph became more and more popular and he was eventually named patron saint of the entire Church, not just of one country or city.

At the same time, artists of the Renaissance began to depict him in a different manner. Previously, he had been depicted as a sleepy old man off to the side or in the background in depictions of the Holy Family. In the gospel of Matthew angels bring messages to Joseph while he is sleeping. However, during the Renaissance artists like Raphael depicted him as a younger man, virile and muscular enough to protect not only his family, but also the entire Church.

Eventually, Joseph, Giuseppe, or Jose would go to the top of the list of popular names for children. Both of my paternal grandparents were named after St. Joseph. Although we called them Baba and Nana, he was Giuseppe or Joseph DeStefano, and she was christened Josephina Maria Naclerio. I don’t want to neglect my grandmother, a great saint in her own right, but I would like to spend the rest of this post writing about my grandfather. 

Joseph DeStefano was born in 1880 in the town of Agerola, a little town up the hills from the city of Amalfi on the famed Amalfi coast of southern Italy. His father died when he was young and he came to this country with his stepfather when he was only a teenager. He had hardly any schooling and must have immediately gone to work with relatives in the fruit and vegetable business. He was the kind of immigrant that no one wants today. He was not an engineer or a physicist but he was one of the wisest men I have ever known. 

He must have been a hard worker for he soon had his own stand in a kind of supermarket. My grandmother, who was twelve years younger than him, told me that he would not consider marrying a woman who was not from his own village of Agerola. She was born in 1892 in Agerola and came to this country in 1906 to work in her uncle’s sewing factory. She was the oldest child and left home never to return. I suspect that there were too many mouths to feed back home, but she claimed that she came to find a husband because she didn’t like the young men in Agerola.

Of course, she lived with her uncle’s family and one day Joseph DeStefano was visiting after dinner. When he saw this beautiful and hard-working young woman from his hometown, it was love at first sight for him. She was not so sure but he persisted and, according to her, he made sure that other suitors kept their distance.

They soon married and she worked the store with him even after she began to have children. Eventually, they moved out of Manhattan to the borough of Queens where they bought a three family house to live in as well as provide rental income. They opened a new store in Jamaica, where they served the well to do nearby community of Jamaica Estates.

They quickly had four children, one of whom died in infancy. In true American immigrant fashion, they all were upwardly mobile. Their eldest daughter married an engineer whose parents had emigrated from Italy to open a restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee. Eventually, they came to New York and opened a restaurant on the East side of Manhattan coincidentally called, “The Original Joe’s”. Their son, also named Joseph, studied engineering at Manhattan College. The younger daughter married a New York City policeman of Irish German ancestry. Their only son, my father, worked in the store until the outbreak of World War II when he left to work in the defense department of the Bulova Watch company.

My grandparents had to close the store on the departure of my father. They never learned how to drive a car or truck and without my father they could not go to market or make deliveries.  My grandfather retired at the age of 60 and spent most of his retirement caring for a garden that included a cherry tree, a prized fig tree, a grape arbor, and a large vegetable garden. He thought that grass was a waste of good ground. 

Like most Italian men, my grandfather never went to church except perhaps for special events like weddings and funerals. Also, like many Italian men he did not like priests. I went to Catholic school and he warned me to do what the priests say, but not what they do. Nevertheless, I believe that he was one of those millions of un-canonized saints in the true selfless tradition of his namesake. 

My mother died in 1950 when I was only eleven years old. My father was forced to move me and my two younger brothers next door to live with my grandparents in their modest ground floor apartment. My grandfather was 70 years old at the time and my grandmother 58. Only after I had children of my own did I realize how hard that must have been for them. Never, ever did I feel unwelcomed or unloved. Like St. Joseph my grandfather became a foster father to me. We made wine together. We built a coop for the chickens together. I helped him with the constant work in the garden but I never could match his inborn skill and knowledge. He could barely read English and I never learned Italian but now I realize that both Baba and Nana taught me what it meant to give up one’s life for others.

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