Today Is the Day

For Democrats in Georgia and throughout the U.S., this is a day of historic change and the real possibility of a functioning, legislating, Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate,  the greatest gift Georgians could have given to the incoming Biden Administration. Meanwhile in Washington, this is the day the electoral votes are finally counted, and Congress declares, once and for all, that Joe Biden has been elected President, normally a ritual celebration of how government is constituted in a democratic society, where citizens choose their leaders (albeit in the American case via the circuitous mechanism of an electoral college). In most years, it would be just that and no more. In some - 1961 and 2001 for example - there has been the added personal drama that the one announcing the results was also the losing candidate, which if anything further reinforced the underlying message about how the constitution and democracy are supposed to work.

This year, however, while the actual votes are not in any serious doubt, the process itself is, because of the anticipated antics of over 100 Republicans in the House and 12 Republican Senators. It is not unheard of for an individual member to grandstand on this occasion, but it is unprecedented in modern times for so many, following the lead of a recalcitrant defeated president, to challenge the results in such a coordinate effort. 

"These are people," Anne Applebaum wrote in The Atlantic, "who have consciously, deliberately abandoned our political system of nearly two and a half centuries in order to declare that Congress, not the Electoral College and not the voters, has the right to choose the president; that conspiracy theories invented and promoted by the president deserve to be heard and repeated; that rules can be changed at the last minute to accommodate the whims of the White House."

It is possible that the anti-democracy faction will find ways to prolong the counting session for hours or even days - to their eternal discredit, but also to the long-term humiliation and shame of the United States in the eyes of the rest of the world.

The only comparable event in our history was the disputed election of 1876, resolved only two days before the inauguration. That election was awarded finally to the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes. But it was the country that lost decisively, because Hayes then removed federal troops from the south, thus ending Reconstruction and leading to the era of Jim Crow, undoing much of what the Civil War had accomplished. Then the "lost cause" lie prevailed in the South, just as now Trump's lie about the election prevails among his recalcitrant supporters.

As Isabel Sawhill recently wrote in Foreign Affairs: "Americans have a new president but not a new country." Just as the "lost cause" lie lasted a long time and did irreparable damage to our country, the Republicans' lie about the election and the Republicans' apparent belief that only their minority of 74 million votes are legitimate and that the votes of the majority of 81 million Americans shouldn't count will continue to do damage to our nation for a long time to come.

Georgia On All Our Minds

In a New Year's Day tweet, President Trump proclaimed tomorrow's Georgia Senate runoff election both “illegal and invalid.” Might that dissuade some of his supporters from voting in the election, which is already on its way to set a record for participation in a runoff election? If so, then the Democrats' chances of capturing control of the Senate from the lamentable Mitch McConnell might increase. It was a long time ago when all politics was local. This election is almost entirely about the U.S. Senate and whether or not any meaningful legislation will be passed in the next two years! 

Given the party polarization of the electorate, it seems unlikely that one seat will go one way and the other another way. So the outcome will almost certainly be a Senate with a majority of 52 Republicans or a 50-50 division with the Democrats having the controlling "majority" because of Vice President Harris's role as tie-breaker. If this were a "persuasion" election, then the two Republican incumbents' experience as rich businesspeople and the allegations regarding their stock-sales in the early days of the pandemic should certainly count against them. But fewer and fewer elections are "persuasion" elections anymore. Most likely, this will be a "turnout" election. Whichever party can get the most of its supporters to bother to vote will be the party most likely to win. The Democrats seem to have their base energized and voting. It remains to be seen whether Republicans will turn out in sufficient numbers on Election Day to overcome that. Under normal conditions in Georgia, a Republican win would be the more likely outcome. The wild card in this case, of course, is the President's own erratic attack on the electoral process and the apparent schism he may be creating among Georgia Republicans - unlikely to keep too many Republican voters away but maybe sufficient to keep just enough of them away!

“Republicans in Georgia must be careful of the political corruption in Fulton County, which is rampant,” Trump tweeted yesterday. “The Governor, @BrianKempGA, and his puppet Lt. Governor, @GeoffDuncanGA, have done less than nothing. They are a disgrace to the great people of Georgia!” And then came the infamous phone call, which ought to disgust all Americans and which could well be grounds for yet another (highly unlikely) impeachment.

If the Democrats can successfully win these two Senate seats, they will have Stacey Abrams to thank, for sure, but they may also have President Trump to thank. Trump only became a Republican when it suited his purposes, and he has never shown that much concern for that party's long-term well being. Four years ago, there was the thought that maybe Trump might steer the party in a more economically "populist" direction, but the only "populism" the party has produced is opposition to scientific and medical expertise and a rejection of traditional constitutional and democratic norms. The former is vividly on display every time you encounter someone without a mask. The latter will be on display when Congress meets to count the electoral votes on Wednesday.

The GOP's obituary has already been written too many times in my lifetime to warrant confidence in the party's imminent demise. But the divisions within the party, which will likely be on view on Wednesday, the schism between its "populist" base and whatever is left of traditional Republican conservatism may yet portend a further breakup of the party.

But for now all the country can do is wait for whatever Georgia decides to do!

By Another Way

In 2005, I attended World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany. The Cologne Cathedral, a beautiful masterpiece of Gothic style cathedral architecture (which served as the model for New York's Saint Patrick's Cathedral) is the famous shrine for the purported relics of the Magi, originally brought to Milan in 314 and then from there to Cologne in 1164 by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. One of the World Youth Day activities for pilgrims was a pilgrimage to the cathedral and to its Dreikönigenschrein.

Epiphany is one of the oldest feasts in the Christian calendar, older than Christmas, which has long come to overshadow it. The contemporary Roman calendar detaches Epiphany from its traditional date in countries where January 6 is not a holiday (as it still is in places like Italy). So this year, Epiphany is being celebrated 3 days early in the U.S., on what ought instead to be the 10th Day of Christmas. (The traditional "12 Days of Christmas" properly go from Christmas, December 25, to Epiphany Eve, January 5.) Such are the times we live in!

Historically, many interesting, if ultimately unanswerable questions have been asked about the Magi. Because they were observing the movements of a star, our ancestors imagined them as astronomers or astrologers - probably Persian Zoroastrian scholars. According to one 4th-century story, generations of such scholars had been watching on some mythical Persian mountain - starting with Adam himself, who had gone there in his old age with gold, frankincense, and myrrh he had somehow salvaged from the Garden of Eden!

In the Middle Ages, the image of them as kings took over, suggested by today's familiar Isaiah reading and the psalm which serves now as the responsorial psalm. The Gospel doesn't say how many they were, but, based on the three gifts, three seemed a logical inference. They also acquired their now familiar names, Caspar. Melchior, and Balthasar. The three also came to represent the three ages of humanity - Melchior an old man of 60, Balthasar a middle-aged 40, and Caspar a young 20-year old.

All that is just speculation of course. Interestingly however, when the shrine of the Magi in the Cologne Cathedral was opened in 1864, it revealed the bones of three men - one young one older, one old. these are the bones, wrapped in white silk, presently in the famous shrine.

Whatever one wants to make of all that, almost everything that has been speculated about the Magi remains just that, speculation. The Gospel tells us neither their names, nor their number, nor their ages, nor their social status, but it does tell us what it is really important for us to know about them.

First of all, it tells us they were foreigners - Gentiles, pagans. As such they represent the majority of the human race - past and present. As pagans the Magi relied only on "natural" knowledge, what we would call "scientific" knowledge today. They sought for signs of God in his created world, hoping to find in the phenomena of nature some clues about God and God's plans for us.

Scientific knowledge is good. Indeed, as the apparently successful effort to develop an anti-covid vaccine illustrates, scientific knowledge is necessary for civilization. And our national leaders' failures to respond adequately to the threat of the virus likewise have illustrated the perils of disdaining authentic scientific knowledge.

But, when it comes to God and and God's plans for us, scientific knowledge can take us only so far. The Gospel tells us that, whatever varied paths different people may start out on, our paths ought in the end to converge on Jesus, God's revelation of himself in human history - specifically in the history of the Jewish people. So it was to Jerusalem, that the star led the pagan Magi for them to learn the star's fuller significance as revealed in the Jewish scriptures.

One of the fashionable sillinesses much in vogue these days is to describe the Magi as "lost." They weren't lost. They followed the star where it led them - to Jerusalem, to the jewish capital, to get further directions from the scriptures.

By way of warning, however, the story also illustrates how easy it is to get it all wrong. When Herod heard the Magi, he was deeply troubled and all Jerusalem with him. Instead of being overjoyed like the Magi, they were troubled. What made what seemed to the Magi to be such good news seem to them to be bad news? That same Christmas star that had filled the Magi with so much hope instead induced anxiety in those who sensed the threatening challenge it posed to their power and priorities. It is a vivid lesson in just how easily we can all misplace our priorities and so turn the good news of the Gospel into bad news. We saw something similar during and after our recent election in the ostensibly religious but actually political stances of some religious figures.

Herod was bad enough, but look at the religious figures who were consulted precisely because of their greater religious knowledge. Yet, for all their real knowledge of the subject, they seemed to lack the wisdom they needed. So none of them did the obvious thing. None of them went to Bethlehem. Only the pagan Magi did that. Talk about missing the opportunity of a lifetime!

But the Magi, the Gospel tells us, were overjoyed, not troubled.They went as true pilgrims to Bethlehem, as the less politically prominent shepherds had already done before them. There they prostrated themselves and did homage to Jesus. In the old liturgy, when those words were read or sung, everyone was directed to genuflect. The old liturgy was much more in touch with the physical world. This was one way of dramatically bringing the point of the story home, helping each of us to identify personally with the pilgrim Magi, to experience what they experienced, and to do homage here and now in our own lives.

After this, we hear nothing more about the Magi.We know only what the songwriter James Taylor later chose as the title for a song about them, that they departed for their country by another way.

According to yet another legend, they were eventually baptized in India by Saint Thomas. That's just more speculation, but it fits the narrative nicely. The Magi went back to wherever they had been before and to whatever they were doing before, but they had been changed by their experience and would never be the same again. And, thanks to Christ's coming into our world, we must never be the same again either.

Like the Magi, we are being challenged to journey like perpetual pilgrims through this world but by another way, because, as Pope Francis has reminded us, "it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him" [Evangelii Gaudium, 266].

So even as I sit here in my (now former) Knoxville home in quarantine awaiting clearance to move on to and uncertain future, even as we all navigate our way through this uncertain and challenging new year, the Christmas star continues to invite us to travel with the Magi - on pilgrimage to Bethlehem and then back again - confident, that whatever else may be the case, the Christmas star will precede us to illuminate every new day of 2021, and so will guide onto that alternate way, which, like the Magi, we are, all of us together, being challenged to find and follow.

(Photo: Shrine of the Three Kings, Cologne Cathedral)

The Trümperdämmerung

If only I had been creative enough to come up with Trümperdämmerung. A clever take-off on Wagner's Götterdämmerung  (the closing opera of the "Ring" cycle), which literally means "twilight of the gods," and which has come to refer to situations of apocalyptic-like destruction marked by widespread chaos. And while, of course, we will all likely survive this Trümperdämmerung, its apocalyptic-like character and attendant chaos - and the longterm consequences thereof - should not be minimized.

"Is there anyone left," Glasser asks, "who is surprised that the President is careening through the last days of his Administration with a reckless disdain that simply has no precedent in American public life? Still, the hardest thing to accept is that 2020 is not merely the year that Donald Trump’s luck ran out but that with it the country’s did, too. Sadly and yet inevitably, this terrible, wretchedly toxic year of pandemic death and economic distress, of partisan hatred and national protest, is the culmination of all that Trump has wrought and all that he is."

So here we are now, at the start of 2021, with Trump's sycophants (aka the Republican Party) still undermining the democratic process as we approach the final act in the electoral drama - the normally staid and perfunctory congressional counting of the electoral votes on January 6. What do Senator Josh Hawley and his accomplices actually expect to accomplish by their intended stunt, other than demonstrating their complete subservience to their Dear Leader? What does it say about the GOP's contempt for simple facts that congressmen have no problem (obviously) acknowledging the honesty of their own elections, while willing to call into question the same voters' votes for president?

But, more important, what will be the long-term effects of this undermining of a significant segment of the population's faith in elections? Will we ever be able to go back to elections as usual? Certainly we haven't ever been able to go back to the less polarized, more bi-partisan, more functional congressional politics of the pre-Gingrich era. Once the norms and values that traditionally undergirded political civility have been undermined, can they ever be recovered?

That is the long-term national Dämmerung of this Trümperdämmerung,

Happy New Year!

 

Happy New Year!

In a famous New Year’s Day sermon, fittingly titled “How to Be Happy,” the founder of the Paulist Fathers, Isaac Hecker, said: It is the common custom in meeting of friends at this season, to greet each other with a Happy New Year! This is a praiseworthy and pleasant custom, and in accordance with it, I greet you all, my dear brethren, with a Happy New Year! Happy New Year to all our friends and the inhabitants of this city, and to all our countrymen, whether dwelling north or south, east or west, in this our native land. Happy New Year to all men of whatever race or clime; for God is our common Creator, and in Christ we are all sons of God, and therefore brethren.

In the unhappy year that has just ended, the pandemic overshadowed everything. The pandemic upended all formerly taken-for-granted normal social interaction, both ordinary and extraordinary. An "ordinary" example, the last time I ate in a restaurant was March 7, 2020! When, if ever, will I have the pleasure of eating in one again? Much more importantly, an "extraordinary" (if this year all too common) occurrence, the pandemic prevented a proper funeral for my mother. When, one wonders, will her interment take place, and who will be there to remember and mourn? 

Meanwhile, as the new year begins, my life is in almost complete disorder, as I and my confreres are all in quarantine, my move to NY on hold until probably mid-January. So far, I hsve tested negative. If I stay this way, it will, I hope, just be a matter of waiting this out until I am able to move. If nothing else this is a useful lesson in detachment!

As the new year begins, the country is not quite in such chaos, of course; but it certainly seems to be, as the Republican party seems poised for one more assault against constitutionalism and democracy when the electoral votes are counted next Wednesday, having displayed (Scrooge-like, over Christmas) its indifference to the desperate need of so many American citizens for substantive material relief.

But there are at least some signs of hope - notably the possibility of widespread vaccination in this new year and the certainty of a new president in just 20 more days. And, God willing, I will make it safe and sound to New York and somehow begin this next phase of my life.

On this feast of the Motherhood of Mary, we are reminded of the implications of the incarnation. In Jesus, God has become one of us and entered into our world of chaotic human experience. And so in Christ we are all sons of God, and therefore brethren.

Happy New Year! May this new year be a happier, healthier, and safer year for all!

O God, who are without beginning or end, the source of all creation, grant us so to live this new year, whose beginning we dedicate to you, that we may abound in good things and be resplendent with works of holiness. (Roman Missal)