Author / omniagallia

by omniagallia

Gratitude to Mr. Biden: ‘See, a Yielding Hero Comes.’

In our culture, the term ‘yielding hero’ may sound like a contradiction. Heroes are meant to be forceful benders of Fate to their will, often indifferent to any ethical nuance or collateral harm they cause pursuing their glorious objectives. The very opposite of the passivity of ‘yielding.’

But in Mr. Biden’s case it is no contradiction. In recusing his candidacy for re-election, he has, for the sake of our nation’s well-being, yielded his most cherished personal ambition. Instead of gambling with America’s essence as a great experiment in freedom, he has now proven his love for her and her mission, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

As I posted on Independence Day, there is often nothing heroic about stubbornly pursuing a goal that has become impossible, counter-productive or even harmful. As some politicians have been known to do, apparently feeling that causing civic uproar is preferable to admitting defeat – as any mature, dignified adult, capable of caring about something more than his own fragile ego, would do.

So to suitably praise Biden’s honor and courage, I offer the accompanying music by Handel (of ‘Messiah’), ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes.’ This version is instrumental, but the original lyrics refer to the triumph of Judas Maccabeus, a Jewish leader who led armed resistance against Greeks trying to repress the Hebrew faith.

This piece has long been used in tribute to those who have performed near super-human feats. Especially for ‘conquerors’ like Napoleon, Wellington, Grant, or Zhukov; people whose victories changed, or saved the world (though usually also making hordes of widows and orphans in the process). But it is occasionally deployed for others who perform truly epic, consequential acts, so I consider it a worthy tribute for what Mr. Biden has recently done.

If all that sounds grandiose, it is because this work is mainly played in the very grandest of contexts. That must surely include championing America as ‘a great experiment in freedom’ rather than as a bastion of ossified social privilege, with a phony self-image of virtuous equality maintained by self-deception and coercion.

So now I submit it with a title adjusted for Mr. Biden, truly a ‘yielding hero.’ He is likely too modest not to feel embarrassed at an accolade like this, but his deeds and devotion justify it. For anyone, especially one with the self-confidence and vast abilities to properly serve as U.S. President, setting aside one’s own vanity for a greater purpose is absolutely an act of Self-effacing courage that warrants admiration, and even awe. His feat may rescue our democracy from many who care about nobody’s freedom or well-being but their own, and thus it deserves to become legendary. Few would ever be called on to make so great an offering-up; fewer still would rise to the challenge.

Biden’s predecessor, unable to grasp or accept that the Presidency was not only, or mainly, about him, acted as if he saw the office largely in terms of personal advantage and self-validation. For instance: He was known to parade state secrets to foreign officials, bragging ‘I have great intel[ligence]!’ In reality, he was proving that, no matter how much ‘intel’ the CIA, NSA, etc. gave him, he lacked the brains for the most intricately sensitive job in the world. He was inexcusably obtuse about possibly putting espionage methods, output and the lives of human assets at risk by exposing them. This is but one stark example, among a great many, of how utterly unfit and dangerously out of his depth that person was.

(What must those sophisticated foreign visitors have thought of us, for electing someone so childishly fixated on flaunting his own status?)

Mr. Biden’s career has long demonstrated that he would never behave, nor think, that way. Now his withdrawal has affirmed this, showing unequivocally that he realizes there are things – like not compromising our significant progress towards recognizing the worth and autonomy of all our fellow citizens – greater than himself. That is something no Narcissist could do; and might well congratulate their own ‘character’ for being unwilling to do.

One might reasonably assume that no one could attain the Presidency without understanding that putting the nation first is one of the role’s sacrosanct duties, and being willing to act accordingly. Shockingly, recent history has shown that assumption cannot be taken for granted.

But in Joe Biden, faithfulness to those principles is manifest, and concrete. So countless thanks to him for displaying sound judgment, and a Patriotism pure and profound enough to put the peace and well-being of our Republic and her people before everything, including his own historical legacy.

Doing so may be the greatest service he ever renders his country, and that’s saying a great deal, given the COVID chaos he inherited, and how much his political skills subdued its consequences. To say nothing of sincerely upholding his oath to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,’ rather than treating it as a nuisance-obstacle to his personal affirmation.

Bravo, Joe; may history remember and esteem you as one who not only cherishes, but truly, deeply, comprehends America. And the daunting standards to which she should hold herself.

And as what an authentic ‘Winner,’ looks like; by yielding, rather than vaingloriously persisting.

by omniagallia

For Independence Day: Recognizing True Patriotism

My accompanying 2021 post, contrasting the ethics Mr. Gore showed in 2000 to those displayed on January 6, 2021, seems apt again; sadly. Because now, Mr. Biden, due to his performance in the June 27 debates (pressure on top of doing the most stressful job in the world, please remember) may confront a dilemma like Gore’s, between his own ambition and the sake of our nation, which he has served so long and so well.

As Gore did then, Biden may be facing a moment of truth: Does he love America enough to set aside his personal vanity, if necessary, to help ensure she does not revert to unfit, irresponsible governance? Enough to retire in favor of a more reliably electable nominee?

(The GOP candidate has proven he would never put America’s interests before his own. He is likelier to sneer at selflessness as the weakness of ‘suckers and losers,’ having done so before – then lied about it – upon encountering concepts like honor and patriotism. And decency.)

I am no political savant, and can’t specify where the line falls between being resolute and just stubborn; but I know there is such a line. I could wish Gore would reach out to Biden to ask (former V.P. to former V.P.) how great a sacrifice the latter would make in the interests of a greater good. No one else has as much standing, due to his own example, to ask that impudent question. That’s not going to happen, but seems appropriate.

In any case, if Biden decides to stay in the race, we can be reasonably sure it is because he has consulted, then made a clear calculation to do so, rather than a reflex never to defer to anything but his own ego.

——————————

In Honor of Al Gore:

This is an appropriate time to remember the actions of former Vice-President Al Gore late in the year 2000. As many of you will recall, he conceded that year’s election, and the Presidency, to George W. Bush, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the deadline for questioning the pivotal, feverishly contested vote in Florida had passed. Mr. Gore had good reason to believe he might have actually won Florida, but that possibility is not my subject here.

Rather, it is to hold up Gore for retrospective praise, now that we have just seen behavior in such stark contrast to his. Acting as any authentic patriot should (and would) have, he accepted personal defeat, subordinating his own ambition to the welfare of our nation. In yielding further plausible claims to victory, he sacrificed his hopes and ego for a greater good. Ironically, his decision strongly suggests he had the judgment and character to lead a superpower.

Anyone who would not have done the same is almost certainly unworthy of the crucial trust of high office.

Gore’s acquiescence brings to mind the Biblical judgment of Solomon, of a mother who so loved her child that she was willing to release it to a rival claimant rather than see it rent in half and killed. I doubt Gore is a saintly man; back then, he was probably seething privately at conceding. But at that pivotal moment, he was unwilling to be the cause of dangerous national divisiveness, admitting that the well-being of our Republic was more important than his own political destiny.

Some people are unwilling, or unable, to grasp ethics that high.

In light of recent events, Gore’s behavior long ago – deeply disappointed, but still accepting the authority of the law and putting the fate of America first – urgently deserves to be reflected on now.

His deed also rebuked the toxic, simian ‘Real Man’ concept of a winner as one who cares only about satisfying his pride; who thinks rules are for weaklings; who cares nothing for decency, let alone decorum; who feels entitled to victory simply for being ruthless enough to stop at nothing to achieve it; and who is brutishly indifferent to any harm he does while pursuing his Hubris.

But Real ‘winners’ Will concede; will grant that other people’s welfare is more important than their personal aspirations; will recognize that moral principle is more valuable than fleeting triumph. Gore showed honor, maturity, responsibility, and a degree of grace – even if somewhat grudgingly so. Thus he has won the right to deserve respect and gratitude forever.

So I hope those planning the 2021 Inauguration give him a prominent place there. His decision to yield in late 2000 – which has never looked more statesmanlike or wiser than now – deserves a standing ovation when he arrives.The recent counter-example to his behavior of 20 years ago should make us appreciate its value now, more than ever.

by omniagallia

Another Side of D-Day: ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’

A late Uncle of mine had been an officer serving in Britain in the U.S. Navy at the time of D-Day (code name, Operation Overlord). Though I don’t believe he was involved in the first wave of the invasion on June 6, 1944, he was there a few days later, in some support role. I never learned what he saw and experienced then, because he didn’t want to talk about it. Even the immediate aftermath of the initial landings was ghastly, and not something he cared to re-live.

The World War II Western Allies, the British, Canadians and Americans, are still rightly proud and grateful for what our countrymen began 80 years ago today. First of all, the awesome personal courage and sacrifice; most of the American troops who landed on the French beaches that day had never been in actual combat before, so their very first experience of it was being hurled against Hitler’s fearsome ‘Atlantic Wall,’ the grim fortifications built in Nazi held lands from Norway to the Pyrenees. They were faced with ‘the deep end of the pool’ – when that pool was a lake of fire.

Yet those American kids leaped into that lake, toward a storm of steel from German machine guns and artillery, because they believed they were fighting to help restore freedom to Humanity. As indeed they were, and for which France is still thankful.

And beyond that heroism, there was the epic planning for the invasion, thousands of logistical details from supplies procurement, to planning to transport troops in an orderly sequence, to ingenious deception to make the Nazis believe the invasion would come at the Pas de Calais, far from Normandy, to keep them diverting their strength there while the Allies solidified their toe-hold on the Norman beaches.

The place and timing of the landings of course, had been among the deepest secrets of the War, so the public had no idea it was coming. Thus on that day, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed America (including the anxious families of soldiers) by radio, extolling the valor and enterprise of the undertaking by America’s young men – ‘the pride of our nation’ – while asking for prayers for their deliverance and ultimate victory.

Only after acknowledging all of these facts does it seem appropriate to point out the following:

D-Day was an epic undertaking, unquestionably essential to the eventual destruction of Hitler and the Nazis. But – please forgive me, I do not use this term lightly – it was really something of a side-show to the main event. A very big and important ‘side-show,’ but still a lot smaller than the monstrous, and truly savage, War on the Eastern Front – Germany against the USSR – where Hitler, as a result of his unprovoked invasion, faced off with Stalinism; two forces of equally primitive ferocity. The statistical truth is that four out of five – Four out of Five – casualties the Nazis suffered in the course of the whole war were inflicted on the Eastern, Russian front.

So it isn’t strictly accurate to think of D-Day as the ‘turning of the tide’ against Nazi Germany’s wars of aggression, as the invasion is often now characterized from the American perspective. In hindsight, it is clear that the ‘turning’ was at Stalingrad, the titanic and hideous battle that lasted from Autumn of 1942 to well into 1943, between the German and Soviet armies. It was the first time Hitler’s Wehrmacht had been not just stopped, but definitively, undeniably thrashed. And it was stupendous.

Stalin, adamant to relieve the German pressure on his country, had been demanding a second front against Hitler in the west since 1942, and (suspicious bastard that he was), found it hard to accept the Anglo-Americans’ explanation for delaying invading western Europe until they were thoroughly prepared to do so successfully. He felt the Allies were stalling just so the Russians would sustain more losses, so as to weaken his Communist regime. And in view of how much Churchill, Britain’s Prime Minister was known to loathe Communism, such suspicions were not wildly implausible.

Operation Overlord was of course, an essential nail in Hitler’s coffin; but it was far from the first, or most pivotal one. It was, arguably the beginning of the end, the point at which it became certain Germany would eventually be overwhelmed. But the agonizing reversal of her military juggernaut was at Stalingrad, where the tide that turned was on the Volga River there, crimson with Russian blood. Awful as Anglo-Canadian-American losses on D-Day were, the deaths on both sides at Stalingrad were spectacularly greater, in the hundreds of thousands.

And Hitler’s need to deploy the bulk and best of his forces in the East – those stationed in France were not just far fewer in number, but were of lesser quality – made the Overlord landings far less bloody than they might have been.

So we Americans, in particular, ought to recognize how misinterpreting the scope of our role in crushing Nazism has – justifiably, in my view – rankled Russian sensibilities for decades. And that resentment is still playing out today, in 2024, manifest in Vladimir Putin’s festering outrage at perceived Western ingratitude – and worse, ignorance – for what his own country paid to destroy Hitler.

Thus, I have put an image here of men at arms around water. It may call to mind the American assault of Omaha Beach – ‘Bloody Omaha’ – but is actually from eight months earlier, the Battle of the Dnieper, in Eastern Europe. The Dnieper is a vast river, and the Soviet Red Army was determined to cross it, to pursue the Nazis, whom they had been steadily driving out of conquered Soviet territory. This battle – though little-known or remarked in the West – was so huge and horrendous that the Dnieper at some points turned red with the blood of Russian soldiers, killed by the Nazis as they tried to cross it. Just as the Volga had been stained, at Stalingrad.

We may rightly pause to lament their fate; certainly, their own ruler Stalin, cared very little about individual Russian lives. (Sound familiar?)

Here is more about why I feel it is vital to point all this out:

No one is wrong all the time. Although Hitler’s response to Germany’s defeat in World War I was in every sense criminal, even he had a point, that the treaty of Versailles, dictated by the winners, had been unfair to his country. Especially in that it explicitly obliged her to accept the entire guilt for having started the war, which simply was not true, and much of the European public knew it. Prussian militarism had certainly been a crucial factor in starting ‘The Great War’ of 1914 – 1918, but was by no means the only one. Hitler’s reaction to the staggering blows of defeat followed by defamation was maniacal and monstrous, but the source of that resentment – unlike most of his others – was not entirely delusional.

And in the interest of accuracy, fairness and of redressing dangerous and harmful misunderstanding – much as I hate to admit it, as I utterly detest him – the same is true of Vladimir Putin, current faux Czar and heartless, spendthrift waster of the lives of ordinary Russians (and Ukrainians).

Putin has many false, delusional, cruel beliefs, but as noted above, he does have at least one legitimate grievance. He, and a great many Russians of his generation, feel that their erstwhile Western Allies have never fully grasped nor appreciated the unspeakable magnitude of their country’s suffering – set upon by the Nazis in a war of annihilation against the sub-human Slavs, and their noxious regime of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ (a Nazi definition) – in what the Russians refer to as ‘The Great Patriotic War,’ instead of World War II.

Also, about 2 weeks after the D-Day landings, the Soviet Red Army began ‘Operation Bagration,’ a colossal counterblow at the Germans, mostly in what is now Byelorussia. This obliged Hitler, still thrashing in Normandy, to confront an even more crucial threat in the East, which was, of course, just what was intended: to force the Nazis to fight on two fronts, in the East and West (at this time, they were also still fighting in Italy; ironically, the Americans had entered Rome on June 4, two days before D-Day).

So by all means, let us remember, honor – and learn from – the valor and sacrifice of D-Day. But Americans especially, who suffered no combat on our territory, as European Russia was barbarically ravaged, should never forget that for all we paid in money and material (much of it provided to the USSR, and critical to its war effort), the Russians paid on a Biblical scale in blood and lives.

Their losses are beyond reckoning – almost beyond imagining – but aside from the gargantuan, spiteful physical damage the Germans committed, the Russians are generally held to have had approximately 20 million dead – maybe more – military and civilians (in the occupied USSR the Nazis often killed civilians, Jewish and Gentile Russians, like rodents; Jews were explicitly targeted, but non-Jews were still subhuman Slavs, killed for the most minor infractions or even simply to reduce local food consumption).

The Soviet mortality of 1941-45 was so stupendous that it altered the demographics of the nation to this day. In the absence of millions of young men killed in the fighting, the birthrate of the USSR – and of today’s Russia – never fully recovered.

American deaths in the war were approximately 420,000. A terrible toll – one of whom was my own mother’s fiancé before she met my father, and I don’t think she ever fully got over her grief. But for context, one cemetery for the mass graves dug outside Leningrad for the dead of its horrifying siege by the Nazis holds just under 500,000 victims. There are more Russian war dead – most of them civilian residents of Leningrad – in that one cemetery than all the American losses, globally, in the entire conflict.

The Soviet Union sustained deaths (a great proportion of them non-combatants) in a ratio of more than 40 to 1, as opposed to those of the U.S. If one reflects on that, the seething anger of Putin and many of his countrymen – when they hear D-Day called the ‘turning of the tide’ for Nazism – gets easier to understand. And to acknowledge as proper.

So as you honor D-Day, please also register, and honor, the epic, heroic, and far more tragic sacrifices made then by our Russian Allies – ruled by Stalin, indifferent to spending the lives of his own citizens like pocket change, to grind Hitler’s war machine to a halt, and begin to reverse it.

Victory was paid for with a nightmarish trauma for the Russian people from which they will probably never recover, persisting in their folk memory after the last eye-witnesses are gone. They are right to expect that we, in the West, step outside our own historical reference ‘bubble’ and at the very least be aware of what they went through. And to appreciate it.

(Russians are not the only ones who notice, and abhor, the apparent American tendency to assume that anything in which we were not directly involved, cannot be very important. Our nearest neighbors, the Mexicans and Canadians, would almost certainly agree, even though their grievances are not as bitter as having a national calamity of apocalyptic proportions overlooked or disregarded. As many Russians feel we have done to them. But we are all citizens of the same world.)

Their suffering was incomparably worse than America’s, or even Britain, which endured the Blitz, but didn’t have millions of German troops rampaging on its soil, all indoctrinated to believe that the residents were essentially two-legged vermin, and acting accordingly, as they did with the Russians – Slavic and Jewish. No one in the West – not even the conquered French – had to endure anything like that at Hitler’s hands.

So today’s Russians have a right to our gratitude, and respect, for the unimaginably greater sorrows they endured and overcame.

The Nazis capitulated at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943; perhaps we should remember that date – with awestruck salutes for the resolute courage of those triumphant Russians, struggling in the jaws of Hell on Earth, as that battle surely was – just as we recall June 6, 1944. To do so might even help to calm the frenzy of East-West recriminations that still linger.

by omniagallia

Music for Easter Monday:

This song is not about Easter, but it is what Easter is about: ‘Love, sweet love.’ And always was, and should be, about.

Nothing I could say about Easter’s doctrine or metaphysics could be more moving than the pure import of these lyrics, nor than the desire of these youthful performers to offer hope and solace amid Covid. So I will only add that those feel fully in accord with Jesus’ heart of love, of which, there is indeed ‘just too little’ in our world.

When this music was new, during the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cold War, it had the same vibe shown here: Appealing especially to young people not yet hardened by adult responsibilities, nor seduced by self-interest.

Rejecting hopeful ideals is often seen as shrewd maturity, but this pop classic is a case where simplicity is more compelling than sophistication. Perhaps this song, with its message dear to the Angels, will kindle hope for you too, even if life has encumbered such for you, as it does for many who live long enough to be laden with its burdens.

As someone far pithier than me said, ‘You are as old as your fears, and as young as your hopes.‘ Idealism is easier before the duties of adulthood must be shouldered; Life’s stern realities can be rocks on which we can be wrecked, but they don’t have to be. Even for us who are no longer young, yet who still care about making this Life less awful for a dearth of sweet love (and indifference to that dearth may eventually backfire on ourselves), the promise of such an ideal can be embraced, and celebrated.

by omniagallia

Music for Good Friday, Message for All of Time:

I last posted this video several years ago, first deploying it in 2014 for the Easter after the death of my father. Then, it felt needful to me to believe that the certain, eventual loss of those we love need not affirm that life is largely meaningless. Such feelings have stirred again for me now, with the death of my best friend, Dr. Joe P. in November, as noted in recent posts.

For unlike my 93 year-old father, Dr. Joe’s passing seemed callous and even perverse, in that he was far younger and had done so much good in his life for others.  And as great as were the contributions (as a physician) of his extreme intelligence, in my view, his kindness and compassion were even finer gifts to the world. Truly noble and more fully human, ‘gifts’ whose value our current culture does not recognize, observe or honor enough. But the artistry in this video seemed to offer a bearable answer – which sensibility might, but reason, alone, cannot – to the ephemerality of even a life like Joe’s.

Rarely is a truly iconic image of Western Art like Michelangelo’s sublime Pieta combined with folk music like this Appalachian tune, yet in this astonishing video, this partnership is appropriately ‘wondrous.’ The force of the premise that super-human love could rescue all of us from our imperfect nature and consequent fixations may have inspired Michelangelo to create the breathtaking image of melancholy beauty here. As well as the singer who has given us this impossibly poignant interpretation of this hymn.

Though ‘wondrous love’ is especially associated with Jesus’ crucifixion, recalled on Good Friday, it would be a waste to evoke its power only once a year. It is not just available year-round; its presence, promise and succor encompass the beginning of time, to beyond its end.

We may reflect on wondrous love today as manifest in Christ’s sacrifice of His life, but can also rely on its constant ambience, like the air on which we depend, though seldom notice. Love of such scope is a dimension like time and space, background context of everyone and everything, a defining attribute of ‘Creation’ itself.

If Christmas is presented as being when incomprehensible, inexpressible hope entered the world, Easter is when that hope came full cycle  – a cycle I rejoice in now, in Joe’s memory – unveiling a death-negating tranquility. In effect, it offers us the option of ultimately joining an in-gathering of all things to God Himself, as at the ‘beginning of time.’

Sharing the Universe with such accessible bliss, we are never in this life ‘alone,’ even when we may fear or presume – or even wish – that we are. We are parts of something so inconceivably vast and pervasive that we may not even recognize that it exists, something implicitly greater than the Self alone, which Jesus surpassed, and overcame, on the cross.

And the ‘Other love’ shown on Good Friday, consummated in the Resurrection, asserts insistently that our lives have value – not always apparent even to ourselves, and not just as the instinct for self-preservation – for whose sake even crucifixion is worth suffering.

by omniagallia

Tolstoy and Navalny: ‘The more things change …‘

This is film of the funeral of the author Leo Tolstoy in 1910, posted as relevant to a grotesque tussle over the remains of Aleksei Navalny, implacable, leonine foe of Vladimir Putin. Russian authorities, not wanting a high-visibility ceremony for their greatest enemy (nor to expose evidence of what they did to him) demanded his mother agree to a private funeral before releasing his body. But Navalnaya stood her ground, refused this blackmail, and the Kremlin relented, discharging Aleksei to her.

Tolstoy’s funeral is partly parallel to this, for he too was a passionate, peerless voice against the evils that the regime of his day, Czarism, visited on the ordinary Russians it trod down. As this shows, his passing led to an outpouring of grief and love by common people for one who, implicitly, steadfastly spoke truth to power for their sake.

Note how mourners kneel as one, in gratitude and honor, when Tolstoy’s coffin appears. Masses of peasants – many of whom had not read his works (or were illiterate, still then common in Russia) realized that Count Leo, despite being an aristocrat, wrote on their behalf, often depicting their suffering under the injustices of the Imperial system.

Tolstoy was a Pacifist social critic, whereas Navalny was a fearlessly assertive agent of change, but the mass affection for a champion against oppression shown here is just the sort of spectacle (potential spark?) Putin most fears. And rightly, for while Tolstoy’s passing did not galvanize an uprising, a grand funeral for Navalny conceivably might. Or at least inspire Russians not to just let his dreams be buried with him.

Nicholas II didn’t send troops to quell this shadow rebuke to his rule but Putin, lacking an Emperor’s legitimacy, might not forbear from violent response to a populist funeral for Navalny. What latter-day ‘Cossacks’ might he call out to put down scenes like this, reproving his regime?

The whole world will be watching; or should be.  And in 2024, the record won’t be just a single piece of black and white silent film.

by omniagallia

Putin and the Death of Navalny: The Vicious and the Valiant.

Various personal distractions have kept me from focusing on the followup post I mentioned at the end of my last one, ‘Promoting Freedom by Protecting Memory,’ about the 1905 Winter Palace Massacre in Czarist Russia. But to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, death ‘concentrates the mind wonderfully.’

And the death of Aleksei Navalny, all but certainly due, directly or indirectly, to Vladimir Putin, has concentrated my mind furiously, catalyzing that promised sequel, here. It will not take the form I originally envisioned, will serve largely as a partial vent for my current writhing wrath at Putin. Although that feels inexhaustible.

Dedicated to Navalny, this post proposes suggestions of how to perceive, and what to do in response to, his death. I will not advocate for revenge; vengeance is the province of spiteful men like Putin (and Hitler, who literally spoke of a ‘goddess of revenge’). Instead, justice is what we should rightly seek, and that can best take the form of punishing Putin by helping to thwart his mania to conquer and subjugate Ukraine, an enterprise whose criminality, cruelty and reckless stupidity Navalny condemned relentlessly.

Even if Navalny’s eventual Fate was not a real surprise to those following his opposition to Kremlin tyranny and corruption, it was still a shock. He may be credibly said to have represented what is good, noble, hopeful – and truly evolved – in us, as surely as Vladimir Putin personifies all that is not. No doubt he was flawed like everyone, but also exemplified attributes we properly admire, but rarely attain, such as granite-hard determination. One needn’t be angelic to offer a stark contrast to Putin, but Lion-hearted Navalny was a more extreme opposite than most of us could ever be.  

The likes of Putin, who incarnate dark forces of human nature and history, are desperate to quell such noble impulses which they regard with cynicism and bewilderment, as obstacles to ‘realism’ in politics. But they are desperate fools if they imagine they can dissipate the loftiest acts and aspirations of Mankind with the odd well-placed assassination. Granted, the relative passivity and credulity up to now of the bulk of the Russian public to Putin’s criminal aggression against Ukraine has likely encouraged him to persevere with it. But his incomprehension of ‘principle’ makes it impossible for him to recognize that he cannot eliminate massive, rightful and reparable discontent by ‘well-placed assassination.’ Eventually, the underlying grievances will burst like a volcano’s lava dome, not manifest only in epic characters like Navalny.

Predictably, men as heartless and crude as Putin regard valor as folly, and likely felt Navalny was a fool for returning to Russia from Berlin, where he received medical treatment for a near-fatal poisoning (that was surely Putin’s doing). But authentic heroism is very different from folly.

Someone like Navalny – as he showed in deeds, as did the journalist Anna Politkovskaya – grasps a truth invisible to anyone like Putin: To a soaring soul, there can be values more precious than his own interests, or even his very life. And for Aleksei, the happiness of his country and her people was one such value. The Putins of this world – wherever they are – are blind to such concepts, cannot comprehend flights of the human spirit or seemingly anything but the coarse, transient rewards of ‘What’s in it for me?’ (As an American admirer of Putin once mocked American soldiers – who had died for their country in World War I France – buried ‘over there.’) Any ethical vision they may have ever possessed is occluded by the moral muck of unabashed self-dealing and indifference to collateral harm which they inhabit.

If you also are outraged by Navalny’s suspicious death, there can be no better response to it than to justify his courage by calling for immediate, greatly enhanced Western support for arming and aiding Ukraine against Putin’s militarist fantasies there. And by furthering – in any way you can imagine – Putin’s worst nightmare (and partial reason for his terror at the westernization of Ukraine): Creation of true, irreversible civil society, and the valuing of individuals, in Russia herself.

Because the inertia and indifference of Western public opinion are as vital as oxygen to Putin. His invasion assumed the Democracies, in their affluence and security, would do nothing meaningful in response to it, and let him go on heedlessly spending Russian and Ukrainian lives in pursuit of his delusional 19th Century style Chauvinism.

But using Navalny’s demise as a spur to frustrate the dark powers he struggled against is surely as effective a memorial, to his life and his death, as there could be. If I could somehow speak to the Russian nation, I would assure them that there are foreigners who hail their forefathers’ bravery in their country’s defense. I might then point out that Navalny faced huge, avoidable, risks for their sake, and in gratitude and inspiration, they might be willing to face lesser ones to validate his sacrifice.

The Russian people have never been more formidable than when their patriotism was inflamed, as Napoleon and Hitler learned; for their Motherland, they can, and will, fight like dragons. Given the extraordinary deeds that the great-grandparents of today’s Russians performed – rolling back Hitler’s barbarous rampage in their land all the way to his lair beneath Berlin – perhaps an appeal to their love for their country (rather than loyalty to its despicable leadership) and to their own dormant lion-hearted courage, is the best way to lead to the final destruction of autocracy in their midst:

For Autocracy continues to hold back their already splendid nation from attaining its full greatness which is to be found in its vast contributions to the arts and sciences; not in Mongol-style territorial expansion.

The World’s Democracies’ stalwart devotion to (and enlightened self-interest in) helping to sustain Ukraine may stoke the slumbering patriotism of the Russians by confronting them with just how utterly indifferent their current Czar is to the lives of their sons, husbands and brothers he will continue to waste in Ukraine; how totally focused he is on realizing his own fantasies of glory, and his horrifying concept of national honor.

I realize all of that is easy for me to say, far from Putin’s fierce police, tear gas, stun guns, and rubber batons. But Russians will face such forever if they don’t liberate themselves; as they did in 1917.

Speaking of 1917, there may be a grim but intriguing irony developing here. The rule of the last Czar, Nicholas II, was corrupt, incompetent and unsuited to modernity, but Nicholas was ultimately brought down by continuing to fight a conflict he had rashly helped provoke, but could not win – World War I – whose grave sufferings for his people he was too stubborn, prideful and oblivious to take seriously. In 1917, those people had finally had enough of him, his war, the feckless social order he represented, and they ousted him and his whole rotten misrule.

Perhaps Navalny’s murder will ultimately put a similar flame in today’s Russians, suffering due to a war Putin is too proud and indifferent to his people’s wishes and welfare, to recognize as utterly not worth the cost. Perhaps they will echo 1917, accept that they must take their destiny into their own hands, and repeat history by overthrowing him and his kleptocracy. Putin, as I have noted in other posts, suppressed official observance of the 2017 centennial of the fall of the Romanov dynasty, so it would be tragicomic if he comes to share their Fate due to his own myopic megalomania.  In stifling public memories of 1917’s regime change, he himself may have lost sight of its crucial lesson: Rulers dare not take their subjects’ patience, obedience and timidity for granted.

Thus, he might provoke the very sort of popular uprising he wanted his subjugated public to forget, because he himself neglected its warning, and overestimated the feasibility of eternal repression. And his own eventual Fate might prove messier than the Romanovs’, who got gunned down in a Siberian cellar.

If so, let him face the dreadful destiny of Nicholas II to which his own cruelty consigns him, of obstinately clinging to a path that is as obviously unwise as it is repugnant (and in this, I don’t just mean the invasion of Ukraine, but his whole corruption-protecting police state apparatus), until his own people tear him from power. Or worse.

It will serve Putin right (and be a valuable warning for other tyrants) if he is devoured by the very forces that he has been arrogant, brutish and obtuse enough to disregard, or hubristically suppose he can control forever.

An intriguing premise, that: a self-isolating despot’s inability to recognize that he has slipped into a ‘reality’ at odds with the actual one, leading to the downfall of which he is no doubt petrified. Such self-destruction would prove there can be justice in this world.

And to my fellow Americans, I would warn that we must recognize the peril of letting someone like Putin, insensate of his people’s blood and sorrow, outlast our resolve to stop his current, terrible enterprise. Thus, we should demand more vigorous U.S. aid to frustrate his faith in brute force, and contempt for any moderate exercise of power.

But even more important, Americans must think Very carefully about abandoning our image – to ourselves, and to the world – as friends and defenders of human liberty and progress (the accompanying image was chosen as a reminder of exactly that) by supporting any U.S. movement or politician that considers Vladimir Putin’s savagery ‘irrelevant’ to American interests. Or worse, admirable in itself.

Or supporting any person or party that doesn’t issue a full-throated, unreserved condemnation of the murder of Navalny, as well as all other Kremlin efforts to cradle-strangle individual freedom. Remember: Silence Gives Consent.

(Admittedly, America has its own ‘lava domes’ of justice denied, but they do not include overtly larcenous looting of the national economy, nor domestic political assassination as statecraft. And they are subjects for another time.)

May Navalny’s example flourish in death, even as Putin’s putrefies while he is still alive. To close with a sentiment that could well have inspired Navalny himself, ‘Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.’

It is a rare privilege to witness souls as great as his, who hunger and thirst thus; especially when their goals seem futile. Surely, it behooves us, thus privileged, to help if we can, to ensure his quest was not ‘futile.’

by omniagallia

Promoting Freedom by Protecting Memory:

2017 should have been a proud year for the people of Russia, the 100th Anniversary of their forebears’ epic overthrow of Czar Nicholas II, his Romanov dynasty, and their nation’s longstanding Imperial system in 1917. It was a liberation movement with the potential for progress like the French Revolution of 1789.

But in Russia in 2017, the Revolution’s centennial passed with almost no official observation. This was no oversight; it was a bitter irony, because in 2017 – as in 1917 – the nation was being ruled by a coarse, hardhearted mentality, indifferent, even hostile, to the welfare and wishes of its common people. And that regime didn’t want those ‘common people’ to be reminded that Revolutions can be good, even splendid, things, dislodging seemingly immovable injustices that benefit those in power. So they strove to erase this episode from the national consciousness.

The rulers of Russia today, saturated in Soviet cynicism, used the typical USSR tactic of meddling with the historical record by choosing to downplay a truly ‘Glorious Revolution,’ one of the most thrilling mass liberations ever, the end of the most oppressive and hidebound monarchy in Europe. They did so lest honoring that event raise thoughts among the masses of overthrowing their contemporary tyranny.

But to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, ‘Those who make peaceful reformation impossible may make violent revolution inevitable.’

To try to demonstrate this and to redress concealment of 1917’s marvelous gust of deliverance, here, I draw attention to another major, but infamous, date in Russian history: January 22, 2024 (Gregorian calendar), is the 119th Anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday,’ or the ‘Winter Palace Massacre.’ On that date in 1905, throngs of Czar Nicholas’ loyal, loving subjects, suffering privations in the aftermath of Russia’s recent disastrous defeat in the war with Japan – largely the result of military fecklessness and endemic official mismanagement – approached the Palace (at the right of this image, with troops with smoking guns before it; now the Hermitage Museum). They wished to present a petition to the Czar, asking him as their supreme ruler and ‘Little Father’, to redress the many grievances of their condition, and trusting him to do so.

(In fact by this time, the Imperial family did not actually reside in the Winter Palace in the then-capital, Saint Petersburg. They lived at a huge villa on the outskirts of the city, and so were not in the Palace that day. But the general public was unaware of this.)

The crowd of petitioners entered the vast open space in front of the Palace, singing ‘God Save the Czar,’ and carrying Holy Orthodox Icons, to affirm that they were not rebels, but loyal subjects with faith that their Emperor would help them if only he knew the depths of their suffering.

Instead, through a baleful brew of ineptitude, miscommunication, panic and a default to over-reactive repression, Imperial troops in front of the Palace opened fire on the peaceful crowd, followed by the charge of sabre-wielding Cossacks shown here. The number of ‘loyal subjects’ killed – shot, hacked, or trampled to death by the horses or terrified people – has never been definitively established. But it was surely in the dozens, possibly the hundreds.

So this date in 2025 will mark 120 years since ‘Bloody Sunday,’ a pivotal catalyst for setting off the abortive 1905 Revolution in Russia, born of seething discontent from the recent military humiliation, and causing many other long-stifled resentments to finally boil over. This recourse – seemingly by reflex – to hideous violence more compatible with Asian Despotism than European governance, showed how the Czarist system was unable, or unwilling, to redress even respectfully presented wrongs. The shock and terror those patriotic petitioners must have felt as their adored Emperor’s henchmen set upon them fearsomely as they came, singing for God to protect him and meekly seeking his help, must have been unimaginable.

One might never recover from such disillusionment; indeed, a whole nation might not.  Bloody Sunday was by no means the first, or only time the Czarist government had used excessive force, but this showed unmistakably what it was capable of. The unique savagery of this bloodbath helped rend any semblance of a social contract between ruled and rulers forever; ever after, it had to be assumed that the state’s potential reaction to voicing ‘wrongs,’ even glaring ones, might well be ghastly, murderous brutality.

The Imperial regime deserved no benefit of the doubt that it regarded, dismissively, the ruled as slaves in need of iron discipline. This realization festered, thereafter, in the national consciousness. The upheavals of 1905 didn’t bring down the Romanovs – it would take a later, far greater war to accomplish that. And outrage then forced some grudging, semi-effectual political reforms. But the masses’ recognition that their Emperor and his government had contempt for their best interests which it was willing to express in blood, though slow to grow, was irreversible. Is it really any surprise that an abominable deed like the Winter Palace Massacre might ultimately help lead to regime-changing rebellion?

However much the current ‘regime’ tries to downplay such scenarios? So, because the rulers of Russia in 2017 (and today) tried to hide the implications of 1917 from a public that would have benefited from the freedom it should have led to, I point out Bloody Sunday, 12 years earlier, one of the principle atrocities that made the downfall of the monarchy all but inevitable by 1917 (amid its irresponsible provocation and horrendous conduct of the Great War, World War I, then raging). Revolutions are never desirable, if only for the injustices that usually provoke them; but sometimes, they are necessary, when deep-rooted societal problems can be rectified no other way. Vested interests rarely compliantly move aside; they must usually be thrust aside.

The ‘bitter irony’ mentioned near the beginning is that the Putin Regime’s official silence about 1917 was a reverberation of the event several months after Nicholas’ downfall, the Communist Coup d’etat that seized power from the ineffectual interim government of Alexander Kerensky. For whereas the Fall of the Bastille to the workers of Paris is 1789 ultimately led to the right of common people in France and other Western societies to personal autonomy and a high degree of individual liberty, the Capture of the Winter Palace, serving as a headquarters for Kerensky, in Autumn 1917 (despite its heroic portrayal in later Soviet propaganda) effectively saw a Medieval expression of inflexible Autocratic monarchy rematerialize as an updated expression of the same forces.

Marxism, imposed by the Bolsheviks after 1917, was presented as a rational, deliberate redesign of society, following scientific principles. But as the development of the Soviet Union would show, especially at the nadir of Stalinist paranoia, inflexible devotees of Marxism could not accept that its many obvious failings could happen except due to sabotage or other malicious intent. Such had to be ruthlessly annihilated, so that the one, true doctrine of Worldwide Communist Revolution could triumph.

(Beware of anyone willing to drag humanity through Hell to supposedly bring it to Heaven, as Soviet Communism, with its patron Anti-Christ Stalin, postured. Validating their own fanaticism will usually be their actual priority, whether they realize it or not. )

I have elided a good deal of nuance and detail here for relative brevity’s sake (such as the rumored presence of Marxist provocateurs in the crowd in 1905 at the Winter Palace), but do not want to portray this hugely complex dynamic as some black and white assertion of the inherent malevolence or inferiority of Russian culture. That would be simplistic, and besides: There is far too much counter-evidence of what the Russian people can do at their best, and what they fully deserve (as my previous posts have asserted).

Like the Tienanmmen Square Massacre in China in 1989, regime crimes of the magnitude of Bloody Sunday simply do not – Cannot – happen in places where government is assumed to exist as the public’s servant and protector, not its enemy and exploiter, willing to use its legal monopoly on lethal force to protect its own interests and survival, as well as those of some ruling class. Repression of this scale and savagery could only happen in states that ‘make peaceful reformation impossible,’ like ‘Communist’ China, theocratic Iran, Crime-Family run North Korea, etc.

And possibly including Vladimir Putin’s Russia too, trying to destroy memory and opposition. Nicholas II was not personally guilty of the Massacre, but he personified a sclerotic regime that had no mechanism for peaceful redress or transition. Any regime that had such would never have implemented, even by incompetent happenstance, a Bloody Sunday; or needed to. Such a tragedy – outside the very gates of a locus of national pride, values and dignity – was only going to happen where the will of the governed is considered an impudent nuisance by a hostile authority, whose main objective is self-preservation.

In a followup essay, I will explain why this anniversary is not just a gruesome curiosity, but how the cultural forces it represented – including the suppression of the memory of the full 1917 Revolution it precursed – still reverberate today, but now may play a far greater role in the peace and security of the world. A role that reflective people should be aware of – with considerable alarm.

The Soviet Union, and Soviet outlook of most of Russia’s current rulers is not dignified with the jeweled regalia, Court apparatus or semi-divine status of the Czars. However, their lethargy in the public welfare, primacy of self-interest, tolerance for corruption in exchange for loyalty, and bull-ox-like reaction to unwelcome stimuli (attributes that Hitler said proved Russians were ‘subhuman; on that basis alone, one might assume Russians would avoid such behavior) seems to still be stubbornly present.

A recent New York Times article about Russian politics said that in the past, when life in their environment of frozen steppes was so hard, rights for individuals were viewed negatively, as possibly coming at the expense of collective security. That may have been appropriate when there were literally wolves at the gates, needing surveillance taken in turn, but today, this vast nation will never be ‘modern’ till it grasps that this outlook has long outlived its usefulness.

And so has the premise that a good ruler must be ruthless enough to crush any obstacle or opposition; and that any ruler who does so is, by definition, ‘good.’ No regime that treats its people like this will, in the long run, survive, or deserve to do so.

So let the countdown begin, January 22, 2025 will be 120 years since Bloody Sunday, but its spirits continue to lurk, unrepentant and aggressive, in the Kremlin. Mr. Putin might shy away from the visuals of using sabre-wielding Cossacks and Army rifles to attack peaceful protestors against the war in Ukraine, but he has certainly shown willingness to use force against any brave souls who have demonstrated, rather than allowing them to do so peacefully. And there is little doubt he’d be willing, if he felt trapped, to kill such protestors just as he has tried to murder the memory of the Glorious Revolution of 1917. But his power – unlike the Czars’ – makes his mindset a potential menace for the whole planet, not just for his own people.

by omniagallia

Bach at Christmas: Let Nature and Heaven Sing.

This is dedicated to my best friend, Joe Piszczor, who died November 21, 2023. Physician and musician, his kindness, humor and wisdom ‘disbursed the gloomy clouds of night’ for me, more than once.

Please bear with me, as I labor to elicit in words inferences that are beyond facile verbal expression:

I try to accompany my posts for Christmas with music; generally something composed for the Season. But this time, I hope to address the jubilant premise of the event – benevolent Divinity coming into the world as love and hope incarnate – with music not written for the occasion, but whose ineffable beauty is parallel, in scope, to that premise.

Below is a performance of Bach’s crystalline Gavotte en Rondeau – a dance rhythm – from his Third Violin Partita, which I perceive as a melodic complement to the spirit of Christmas as respite against the sorrows and troubles of life as we so often experience it. Those can engulf hope like a chasm from whose dark clutches not even light can escape, but opposing such a suffocating vision, the Gavotte’s delight, merry yet arresting, conveys resurgent joy as did the promise of Christ’s coming. This music erupts with grace which we may reflect back, to illuminate the dark recesses we must face.

Including whatever hardship, or cross, each of us bears in their own lives, for Bach’s genius here shows how there is light beyond any darkness. Like the outlandish presentation of Jesus as hope beyond hope and joy beyond joy, the Gavotte offers something to displace the transient fray of our mortal spans: Impossible beauty. ‘Impossible,’ yet there it is, an echo of Paradise, beckoning us to yield to its intimations.

The hardest thing to believe about Christmas may be its aspect that squares least with our lived reality: Too often, compelling evidence is that Life is a blind, callous juggernaut in which savage beings and indifferent Nature prey on vulnerable flesh, and for many if not most of us, the best we can plausibly hope for is to avoid too much suffering before it ends in our being obliterated; each and all. 

On the contrary, Christmas asserts, in the same way Bach’s ecstatic Gavotte does, that there is such positivity – grace – to be found in our world as to offset all the evil, sorrow and misfortune that confront us daily and perpetually. That the world and Existence itself are fundamentally ‘good’ phenomena, wherein the value and justification of the Self, as part of a splendid and greater Whole, may be found and fully revealed.  

For most of us, that proposition seems even more personally counterfactual than the Christmas story’s deviations from our world’s ordinary processes. We may focus too much on its unlikely dogma and details; divine incarnation, virgin birth, debatable timeline, etc., rather than on its radically extra-intuitive aspect. The import of that story should be taken deeply seriously, but not necessarily literally.

For it is not invariably necessary to believe that something is literally, factually true, in every detail, in order to place faith in it. Such an assertion cannot cure cancer, find us a life partner, secure us a career, etc. But ‘faith’ and hope in the presence and power of things forever beyond our grasp can center us, giving us space to believe that our time on this Earth is not at the mercy of that fearsome ‘juggernaut’ alone, and that our lives have intrinsic meaning and value that are otherwise not apparent. They are parts of the on-going, wondrous dynamic of an interconnected, interdependent Creation, vibrant with the Gavotte’s irrepressible energy.

Opening ourselves to such reflections can help us endure when the struggles of life seem unendurable. Bach was a devout Christian, but though he presumably didn’t compose this piece with any specific religious intent, I invoke it now because it conveys a vaulting sensation brimming with the same ardent bliss as the promise of love being born, personified, into the human realm. That – like this lucent, infectious melody – offers us a means to outrace shadows which seemingly must overtake us all eventually.

This was surely not Bach’s intention for the exquisite Gavotte, but he might have approved my depiction of his inspiration this way. It is three minutes of all-encompassing loveliness which, structured as theme and variations, allegorizes Eternity: An enduring essence, endless change, yet unfailing renewal. This compact marvel supports my notion that the hardest thing for us to accept about the story of Jesus’ birth may not be its factual unlikeliness, but its underlying murmur: life is essentially good, a medium for contentment and happiness, just as valid as the dispiriting, omnipresent evidence of its sorrow and misfortunes.

One of my routine objections to an exclusively rational perception of life is that its mechanisms are not its actual meaning. They explain how life happens and continues, but not what it is for. Its ‘meaning’ must be something grander than our transient ‘Selves’ – though not grander than ‘Ourselves’ – in which we can place hope, and extract gladness. We tend to give the mechanisms preponderance because they are things our minds can grasp to the point of quantification; hugely useful – but must they be the entire reality? Why must we infer that such transcendent loveliness as the Gavotte can be nothing but the result of pulsating brain tissue and firing nerve endings? If it can, then it is not so much splendid, dynamic ‘Life’ as a mere haphazard, meaningless alchemy of anatomical gadgetry.

Arguably more important, even if that mechanistic interpretation were accurate, how wise would it be for us to embrace such an outlook, exclusively? Through this music, we can be revealed, to ourselves, to be far more than mere devices for Self-preservation; we can resonate to an energy that can deliver our own existences from the apparent pointlessness that mortality intones.

As Jesus did, by Christian doctrine, in the eventual consummation of Easter: Love made flesh, love of the Other that may transcend Death itself. I realize this observation may seem insensitive, even ludicrous to those whose lives have been laden with true hardship or riven with real tragedy. But artistry like Bach’s may enable human constraints – even human suffering – to dissolve and merge with splendor that is usually inaccessible, a summit that, theoretically, should be beyond our vision, let alone, our reach.

Yet here it is, manifest through the near-miraculous ingenuity of a supremely great artist. Listen to this music again, let it suffuse you and reflect on whether ‘Divinity,’ however defined, can only be an irrelevant anachronism, as suggested by the barren seductions of rational comprehension alone. It intimates, at the very least, some superhuman presence and intent. Let it flow through you, and you too may feel that humanity is worth saving; even suffering for. If we are all indirectly stained by evil, like Stalin’s, can we not also be indirectly validated by the glories summoned by Bach?

All credit to Bach as the diligent instrument, but such expressiveness is only possible by surpassing ordinary human constraints. Personal talent and industry alone can hardly explain grandeur at this level; it is a reflection – an exposure – of the force of Creation itself.  Personally I cannot hear this multi-faceted effusion of shimmering loveliness and exclude the possibility of a tender deity, hinting to us of its presence (if not its consistent intervention), only because it doesn’t seem to comport with the rest of perceptible, measurable, predictable reality.

It may not be proof, but surely, it is credible evidence.

The premise of Christmas is not proof either, yet we should let ourselves wonder if a plain of being in which such sublimity could be generated and contained could be, in the final analysis, merely a venue of ugliness and misery. Utmost creativity, like Bach’s, are sparkling, standalone expressions of the glory – expressed here as artistry, but for all of us, accessible as love for the Other – that may manifest when the potential of the human spirit is fully invoked, and then exceeded. It reminds us, with galvanic iridescence, how our Nature may have heights we so rarely get to sense that we may understandably despair of their even existing. Like thin air at high altitudes, where we cannot function as we ordinarily do.

Protecting and enhancing our physical well-being is one of our intellect’s main tasks, but it is a false sense of empowerment to believe intellect can have no worthy purpose but to untangle the operations of the world around us.  This music conveys the resurgent joy I allow myself to feel (with no endorphin frisson) – not to ‘understand’ but to feel – that there is a positive Creative Force with affection and purpose for me, as for every one of us. A Force replete enough with Agapé to summon the Universe from a meaningless vacuum, and even to cyclically rescue its only conscious beings – us – from ourselves.

The very existence of art like this suggests that premise cannot be dismissed out of hand. To me, the Gavotte echoes that sense, lifting me out of my self-regard and into a dimension immaculate of the concerns of this one. Granted, such a sense cannot be defined by logic, but perhaps that suggests that not all in Life that is valuable to discover and experience can be ‘defined by logic.’ Perhaps so many of us respond to this work because it satisfies a void within us we may not even have been conscious or mindful of, till we feel it being filled by some burst of joy. Of which Bach’s inspiration is but one awesome example.

The random scattering of talents, even at the level of Bach’s, among us – just as genetic burdens are also randomly scattered – implies, to me, that our promise as a species lies as much in our each being parts of the great human enterprise, as in our individuality. It is only ‘we,’ not ‘I,’ who may plausibly go on forever, and there may be comfort in accepting such continuity. Most of us will not leave expressions like Bach’s – or like any other epic personality – to mark our lives for posterity to recall; but any of us may be able to contribute to the life-giving love that Jesus embodied, that unfolding, elemental ‘force of Creation itself.’

Thus, if you ever need hope beyond what it is rational to believe, this dance of exultation will be there for you, inviting you to join it, bounding over the sordidness of life around you. Or of super-rational hope, like the premise that Love may, in the ways that matter most to us all, ‘overcome’ Death by furthering the positive energy of the Universe – that is, the presence of love within it – an energy we may recognize as more powerful and actualizing than the presumed finality of non-being.

by omniagallia

The Sustaining of the Light: Christmas Consolation.

A major life event has, up to now, distracted me from writing any posts for this Christmas season; my best friend Dr. Joseph Piszczor, died in November.

It was sudden, unexpected, and pummeling; yet it is exactly at such tribulation that the pull of faith that there must be more to life than ‘tribulation,’ that the vitalizing implications of Christmas may offer the most invaluable re-assurance and solace.

Today, the third Sunday of Advent, is called Gaudete – Rejoice – Sunday, a departure from contemplating Jesus’ approach, to yielding to its transforming joy. Thus, I post the venerable Christmas music, ‘Gaudete,’ whose breathless, urgent tone is more than encouragement, though less than command: It is exhortation.

And I have chosen to submit to its intensity; and to look upon the kindness of those around me, aware of my sorrow, as evidence of how we are all in this together. And that a desire to not be consumed by despair – for some hope beyond logical hope – is valid, beneficial, possibly even essential, by making it easier to bear the eventual loss of those we love, a de-emphasis of the Self – by embracing faith that it is but one part of a greater and glorious continuum – which makes us more fully alive and human.

My main post for Christmas is still being written, and will be dedicated to Joe, especially fitting, as he was a lover of great music. And in his memory and honor, I do, and shall rejoice.