Happy Birds

May 29, 2020 (116 words)

You may have heard of Angry Birds, a popular entertainment which started in 2009 as a casual puzzle video game, inspired by a sketch of stylized wingless birds.

Well, out in my neck of the woods all we have are Happy Birds. They start their hymn of praise early each morning in the hour before dawn. It’s almost as if they are competing with each other to express their joy at being alive.

During the course of a day, if I am out in the yard doing something, one of them can be counted on to land on a nearby bush or tree branch, and warble a greeting at me. I always try to warble back.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
May 29, 2020

Sharing With Others

May 25, 2020 (3,429 words)

As if by design, after not watching the streaming service Netflix for a while I flipped it on again to find the movie Trumbo at the top of my queue. Turns out this 2015 theatrical release is one of four new titles it just added to the rotation.

For younger readers, Dalton Trumbo was one of the highest-paid Hollywood screenwriters of the 1940s, and maybe the most famous such screenwriter blacklisted for his communist sympathies. His punishment included being jailed for eleven months in a federal penitentiary starting in the summer of 1950, and then being prevented from working under his own by-line in Hollywood for a decade after his incarceration.

Considering that only a few days ago I commented on the “disgruntled screenwriters” portrayed to comic effect in the 2016 movie, Hail Caesar!, the decision of Netflix to add Trumbo just now seems to have been made specifically with me in mind.

Prior to this I had only a passing acquaintance with the name of Dalton Trumbo, and certainly no awareness of his career’s particulars. In fact my knowledge of the Blacklist period as a whole could be described as sketchy, at best. I knew the bare outline of the historical record, as perhaps many of us do, but was not educated enough on the subject to assign praise or blame with any degree of certainty to anyone on either side of this controversy.

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captivated by a flattering portrayal…

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So I approached Trumbo with an open mind, and found myself captivated by its flattering portrait of an irascible, though highly principled, contrarian. We learn Mr. Trumbo was a long-time supporter of Hollywood trade unions and a staunch defender of civil liberties. He was idiosyncratic, larger than life, and loved being rich. (Bryan Cranston is wonderful in the lead role, by the way.)

If there was a sinister side to his affiliation with the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), which he spends the early part of the film artfully dodging in public, the audience is given no indication what that might consist of.

In fact, Dalton Trumbo is presented to us as pretty much a garden variety New Deal Democrat. The filmmakers establish his lasting appeal and liberal bona fides straight away, in a couple of key early scenes.

KEY EARLY SCENE #1

A mere four minutes into the proceedings, our tuxedoed hero and his lovely wife attend a swanky, night-time Hollywood party. He is shown holding forth pool-side, with a drink in one hand and a cigarette-holder in the other. He is engaged in a heated exchange with a mogul-producer type on whether to cross a picket line erected by striking set-builders at the studio.

Producer: You’re a writer. What the hell does set-building have to do with writing? Trumbo: I’m a screenwriter. Builders build what I write. You shoot what they build. Now, you make the most money you possibly can, and so do I… Why shouldn’t they? Why can’t we help them?

Producer: Listen to you, the swimming pool Soviet…

KEY EARLY SCENE #2

In the next shot, still only seven minutes into the picture, we cut to a beautiful sunny day at the idyllic Trumbo family home, a ranch north of Los Angeles. Nikola, the older of two young Trumbo daughters is on horseback, sans saddle, and Dad is slowly walking the horse and rider away from the paddock, with their house in the background, stage right. The daughter inquires as to her father’s political affiliation.

Under direct questioning by his curious child, who is quoting news reports hotly debating the subject, he quietly admits to being a communist, with neither pride nor resignation. Still on horseback, she then asks about claims he is also a “dangerous radical.” He calmly owns up to the tag of “radical,” but reassures her he is not in any way “dangerous.”

Trumbo: (thoughtful, reflective) I love our country. And it’s a good government. But anything good could be better.

Nikola: Is Mom a communist?

Trumbo: No, your mother is not a communist.

Nikola: Am I?

Trumbo: Well, why don’t we give you the official test… Mom makes your favorite lunch, and at school you see there is someone with no lunch at all… What do you do?

Nikola: Share.

Trumbo: Share? You don’t tell them to just get a job? Oh, I know, you offer them a loan at 6%… Yes, that’s very clever…

Nikola: No, Dad, I wouldn’t do that.

Trumbo: Oh, you would just ignore them, then?

Nikola: No, I would just share.

Trumbo: Well, now, you little commie (and gently pinches her right check with affection).

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more of a closest Christian than a subversive Communist…

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And so the tone of the piece is thus firmly established. Dalton Trumbo is no threat to the Republic. He’s just an articulate champion of the First Amendment right to free speech and free association. Actually, he comes across as more of a closet Christian than a subversive Communist. His character is beyond reproach, and he expresses himself with economy and wit throughout, always managing to find the well-chosen word.

He seems to enjoy sparring with the Hollywood heavy-hitters who disparage him for what they are always referring to as his communist sympathies. Though we are never told or shown what those supposedly hardcore anti-American inclinations amount to.

Mr. Trumbo spends the entire movie hammering away at writing his famous screenplays on a manual typewriter, either at his desk or from his bathtub. His industriousness is unparalleled, his creativity knows no bounds. When he’s not writing, he’s meeting with his fellow dissident screenwriters to discuss legal strategies if subpoenaed by the House un-American Activities Committee.

He is eventually called before the committee, and convicted of contempt of court for not answering “that” question (“have you now or have you ever been…”). After serving jail time he is right back at it, though. His only respite from work seems to be complaining with one or another of his brethren about how they have been “blacklisted” and forced to ghost-write without screen credit or proper compensation.

SERIOUS GEO-POLITICAL ISSUES

Naturally there were many serious concerns interwoven into this issue at the time, many more than a two-hour dramatization could be expected to address, let alone do justice to. But this movie does seem to leave out a lot of important stuff.

Mostly what it leaves out is that Dalton Trumbo, in addition to being a talented screenwriter and a devoted family man, was also apparently attracted to what some have referred to as the revolutionary violence of Bolshevism. It’s also been duly noted that he seemed to oblige every twist and turn of the Moscow party line.

Before the movie begins, the following introduction appears in white lettering against a black screen:

During the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, thousands of Americans joined the Communist Party of the United States.

This sounds straightforward enough, because, well, the Great Depression was horrible, and who doesn’t think fascism is evil?

Today most readers will automatically think this mention of “fascism” refers specifically to Hitler’s Germany. Eventually, it did. But before Hitler, the focus of the CPUSA was the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Due to the international political climate at the time, Spain’s internal conflict was characterized in a variety of ways: a class struggle, a war of religion, a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, and between fascism and communism.

So the “rise of fascism” meant different things to different people.

Though Mr. Trumbo did not officially join the Communist Party of the United States until 1943, he was part of the anti-fascist Popular Front coalition of communists and liberals in the late 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War.

When this group “transferred” their protest from what they saw as Spain’s version of fascism to Hitler’s, their effort was undermined in August 1939, when Russia signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. Many party members in the U.S. left the cause in disgust at this contradiction, but those that remained adapted to the revised communist party line, which was now “pro-peace.”

Dalton Trumbo was known to be a fervent isolationist at first, opposing the United States’ entry into World War II. He gave a speech in February 1940, four months before the Nazi blitzkrieg of France, in which he argued against our entering the war on the pretense of “preserving democracy.” He considered that justification “a lie, a deliberate deception to lead us to our own destruction. We will not die in order that our children may inherit a permanent military dictatorship.”

This speech was widely seen as a rebuke to New Deal liberals. The CPUSA began demonizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a war-monger, and ordered its members to be pro-peace and anti-FDR in their work and statements.

When Hitler overran France, Trumbo’s comment seemed to justify the Nazi brutality: “To the vanquished all conquerors are inhuman.”

His quirky 1941 novel “The Remarkable Andrew” charged FDR with “black treason” for seeking to aid England in its desperate battle with the Nazis.

Then in June 1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the CPUSA did an about-face and became pro-war, now supportive of FDR’s aggressive behavior toward the Germans.

So one begins to gain an appreciation of how Dalton Trumbo’s political activism on the international level could be a bit incoherent, and also somewhat prickly.

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in the marketplace of ideas, some are better than others…

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Be that as it may, we’re all supposed to be entitled to our opinions. But let’s face it, the odds are some of those opinions will be off the mark from time-to-time. This will be true even though the person formulating them is doing his or her best to figure things out in a responsible manner.

For example: Later in Mr. Trumbo’s career, after the Blacklist had been broken and he was back in the high life, he was invited to do a screenplay of William Styron’s 1967 novel, “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” about the Virginia slave who led a rampage of rape and murder in 1831.

Trumbo wrote back:

“(I)n carrying through his rebellion Turner did nothing more than accept a principle of white Christian violence which had enslaved all of Africa, and used it for the first time in American history as a weapon against white Christians.”

So then, we are to understand, it is Christianity, specifically as practiced by white people, that had been (and by implication, still is) responsible for the social inequity we see all around us?

In the movie Mr. Trumbo is seen giving a interview that is broadcast on television from his home. It takes place after the screenplay he wrote for “The Brave One” under the pseudonym Robert Rich won the 1957 Academy Award for Best Story, and rumors were swirling he was working on a screenplay for the new Stanley Kubrick movie of the Leon Uris novel “Spartacus,” starring Kirk Douglas.

It’s tagged on YouTube as the “A Hideous Waste of Life” scene, if you want to check it out.

What he is given to say in this interview about the House un-American Activities Committee investigations may well be true:

“It was convened to uncover enemy agents, expose communist conspiracies, and write anti-sedition laws.. Here we are, thousands of hours and millions of dollars later… agents uncovered, zero… conspiracies exposed, zero… laws written, zero. All they do is deny people the right to work…”

But that doesn’t mean there was never anything seditious in what Dalton Trumbo said or wrote. Only that the hysteria of the Blacklist wasn’t the appropriate way to address the situation. So this is my only problem with the movie: It can’t help making him out to be a saint.

When we reduce legitimate conflicts to fables of heroes and villains, it’s easy to miss what is really going on.

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defending or attacking the status quo, take your pick…

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There is always going to be a case to be made for either attacking or defending the status quo. Because humanity can always be said to be doing its level best at any given moment, given the built-in handicaps. Yet in all of human history we have never quite gotten it right.

What makes our disagreements so messy is how the principled defenders and the equally-principled attackers tend to get a little carried away with themselves. Both sides often go a little overboard in advocating their respective positions.

Those who were concerned back then over what they saw as subversive attempts to undermine the American way of life were not imaging things. But they needed to understand our way of life was (and still is) not without its inherent flaws and injustices, deserving of criticism and in need of repair.

On the other hand, those pointing out the flaws and injustices should have been more careful not to align themselves with political regimes or systems of thought that didn’t solve the problem under discussion, but only made things worse.

What on Earth was the appeal of Communism to an intelligent man like Dalton Trumbo? One could quickly point to his contrarian nature and his life-long concern for workers’ rights, I suppose. In our day we think of workers’ rights as being more of a “socialist” thing, rather immediately associating it with communism. That’s probably because communism has lost whatever cache it may have once had, and Bernie Sanders almost captured the Democratic nomination for President in this year’s primary race.

So maybe we should begin by asking how Communism differs from Socialism.

The answer to that question seems to be “not much.” One dictionary says Communism is both a political as well as an economic theory, while Socialism is just an economic theory. “Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the German philosophers, propounded the concept of communism whereas Robert Owen propounded Socialism.”

Maybe that’s so, but we’ve all heard of Marx and Engels, while nobody makes reference to Robert Owen these days, do they?

Another dictionary says “Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterized by the social ownership of the means of production, and workers self-management of enterprise.”

So which is it? A reasonable summary of the situation might go something like this:

The communist regime of Soviet Russia is best known for implementing a socialist economic agenda after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Vladimir Lenin seized power once the Czar and his wife (Nicholas and Alexandria) were deposed.

That “implementation of a socialist economic agenda” was accompanied by widespread violence and religious persecution. When Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin, who was no angel his own damn self, Stalin went on to become the only mass-murderer of the 20^th Century who out-did Hitler in that shameful category.

The military excesses of the Soviet Union during this period should by all means have been condemned. It’s also easy to understand how the Americans public may have become wary of that country’s ideological influence on the world stage after the close of World War II.

But those concerned Americans should have tried harder to understand what was really going on. Communism and socialism have never been anything more than a reaction to the excesses and injustices of capitalism. Why can’t we see that?

Maybe because the romantic allure of heroes and villains clouds our vision at times.

It prevents us from seeing that no matter how bad an opposing ideology may seem to us, or may in fact be in actual practice, that does not mean our preferred ideology is above reproach.

At this point I can only shed so much sweat over how people like Hedda Hopper or John Wayne conducted themselves in the 1950s when faced with what they viewed as the Red Scare. Even if it was unfair to jail Dalton Trumbo, and force him to spend ten years of his writing career “under cover.”

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all opinions should be heard…

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As the makers of Trumbo now tell us, the moral of their story is “all opinions should be heard.”

I agree. The problem is that every political episode down through history, including our contemporary political scenarios, is complicated – just as the Spanish Civil War was. This makes it difficult at times to clearly identify who is fighting on the side of the angels.

Often it seems no one ever escapes with their honor unscathed.

Maybe that’s because in the heat of the moment we are never able to conduct a rational exchange that explores the relative merits of ideas that appear to be in stark contrast. We retain a core susceptibility to choosing sides, and this hinders our progress.

It’s much more difficult to keep the urge toward partisanship at bay, and piece together the best of all possible worlds from the available options at our disposal.

Maybe that’s what Dalton Trumbo thought he was doing. But surely taking up with the Communist Party of the United States was not the right way to go about it.

And we are falling into a version of the same trap now, when in our own political moment such principled crusaders for economic justice as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are being dismissed out of hand as “socialists.”

Here’s the thing, folks: It doesn’t have to be all one thing or the other. We can respect the concept of private property, while still seeing there might be value in limiting the absolute private ownership of the means of production in certain situations.

Should utilities be privately owned? Should access to the internet be privately owned? Isn’t this what the anti-trust movement of the early 20^th century was all about?

Should health care really be left exposed to the vagaries of supply and demand, and the profit motive?

Isn’t the idea of workers’ self-management of enterprise worth a closer look? Wasn’t the labor movement an attempt to protect those who lack an ownership interest from being treated as no better than a piece of equipment that can be depreciated on a balance sheet? Or disposed of when it breaks down?

While it may sound hopelessly simplistic to say so, both sides in this (and every other) debate usually have a valid point buried somewhere in their contentious arguments.

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he who has the gold makes the rules….

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Since fiscal conservatives currently hold the upper hand, it is they who must concede that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are raising legitimate concerns and suggesting viable policy initiatives. Such politicians are not trying to undermine the American way of life – they are trying to improve upon it. Those who have succeeded under the current rules of economic engagement have to be willing to look past their own nose, past their own family’s success and comfort.

The fact that our founding philosophy of “every man should fend for himself in this, our glorious land of opportunity” has worked out well for respectable Republicans should not blind such fine upstanding citizens to the economic plight of so many others.

We wouldn’t need to be discussing a federally-mandated minimum wage, if successful industries would distribute a more equitable percentage of their profits to the working stiffs who help generate that profit. Instead of keeping wages down in order to enhance investor return. This is the fundamental, historic beef with capitalism: It rewards capital at the expense of labor.

We wouldn’t need to be talking about a wealth tax if our outrageously successful movers and shakers didn’t exert so much energy trying to avoid their legitimate tax burden.

And there would be no Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren on the political scene today if our captains of industry would only conduct their affairs with the Golden Rule in mind. Just as there would never have been a Karl Marx or a Friedrich Engel if the Robbers Barons hadn’t done so much plundering of the working class on the way to their outsized fortunes in the Gilded Age.

So a tip of the hat goes out in memoriam to Dalton Trumbo for his life-long concern over workers’ rights. He was barking up the right tree on that one. But it doesn’t mean some of his other ideas weren’t kind of wacky.

Too bad he couldn’t bring himself to fully embrace the Christian ethos he expressed so well at times, and make it the animating force of his life. An example of which is the 1970 speech he gave to a gathering of Hollywood screenwriters, that closes out the 2015 theatrical release Trumbo on such a transcendent note.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
May 25, 2020

Manchester By The Sea

May 20, 2020 (996 words)

It turns out we had a copy of this November 2016 theatrical release kicking around the house, so i didn’t need to rent it on Amazon Prime Video in order to watch it again recently.

It’s what the critics call a “moody drama,” which is my favorite type of movie.

For such a somber tale I’m happy to note it enjoyed its fair share of commercial success. It also received a nomination for Best Picture, and won the Academy Award for Best Actor (Casey Affleck).

One of the first things that hit you is just how well the film is scored. The classical music selections that play behind many otherwise quiet scenes with no dialogue do a remarkable job of conveying deeply felt emotion. It’s a reminder of – or perhaps an introduction to – how poignant this musical genre can be.

The popular music on the soundtrack is also evocative, especially when sung by a talented vocalist such as, say, Ella Fitzgerald. But classical music has a much richer instrumental pallet to draw upon.

The use of flashbacks in the movie lets us gain an appreciation of the tragic circumstances, and understand the inner turmoil being experienced by the protagonist (Affleck), in stages.

Early on that protagonist is asked to become the legal guardian of his 16 year-old nephew, after the early death of the boy’s father (and the protagonist’s older brother.)

The flashbacks show us the special bond that had developed between the uncle and the nephew in earlier times. This gives us a better feel for the 16 year-old version of the nephew than we might otherwise have, since he comes off as a belligerent jerk toward his uncle in the present day.

All the characters in this piece are perceptively drawn, but making an annoying 16 year-old sympathetic is a special accomplishment, I think, and a tribute to both the screenwriter and the young actor in the role (Lukas Hedges).

Casey Affleck carries the picture, of course, since he’s in just about every scene. But the actress Michelle Williams, as his wife, also makes a powerful impression with far less screen time.

The emotional heart of this emotional movie is a scene more than halfway in. The estranged couple bumps into each other on a side street in their little hometown, near the waterfront.

She is pushing a stroller with a new infant born of her post-Affleck relationship. He hasn’t had any luck yet, scrounging for seasonal work around the docks and auto repair shops.

They exchange awkward pleasantries. She is solicitous. He tries to be. She becomes profusely apologetic. He remains shell-shocked, all-but-non-responsive. She expresses regret for the things she said in the wake of their mutual loss. Tears ensure. Before long he has to walk away, still unable to access his emotions.

I don’t know how much of this dialogue was scripted, and how much was improvised. But, boy, it sure feels real. This scene remains as powerful as when I first experienced it. The entire movie is like that, but this one scene really stands out for me.

The empathy Ms. Williams conveys for her ex-husband and father of their three dead children is truly heart-rending. The humanity she is able to capture in this moment is the mark of a true artist.

And while I haven’t been keeping up with Michelle Williams’ career since her role in “Manchester”, I was nevertheless dismayed to hear she earned the wrath of the pro-life community in January of this year, upon receiving an award for a different role in a more recent movie.

There is a YouTube video of the acceptance speech in question, and watching it I found her presentation to be very thoughtful, delivered in a serious and conscientious manner.

In my opinion her pro-life critics went way overboard. Which does not mean I agree with everything Ms. Williams said that night – but then I don’t agree with everything that anybody has to say.

This latest dust-up is just one more reason why we need to re-think our notion of how best to conduct cultural warfare. Take abortion, for instance. In accepting her award Ms. Williams seemed to imply that she has had an abortion. If she has, I grieve for her dead child and her confused conscience.

But making a mistake – no matter how serious that mistake may be – is not supposed to automatically condemn any of us to eternal damnation. We all have access to forgiveness and mercy, if we are willing to admit fault and make an honest attempt to mend the error of our ways.

And every single one of us is involved in this very same project: owning up to our mistakes and trying to mend our ways. It’s not our place to pass judgment on where someone else happens to be on that “acknowledging fault” continuum.

There is nothing wrong with letting Michelle Williams know that abortion should not factor into how one approaches the reproductive act. Indeed, we have an obligation to do so. It’s another thing to deride her as a callous monster – which is how she was characterized in certain pro-life publications and media outlets.

All for falling prey to the spirit of the age.

Isn’t that exactly what so many of us are also doing, in one way or another, in direct opposition to the dictates of our faith?

Leading by example is the best correction any of us can offer, even if it takes the message a while to get through in our noisy world. Showing charity to those who falter is usually the better part of valor. Turning the other cheek when we are wronged is what we have been instructed to do.

These are among the underlying messages of my favorite movies. It’s the sort of thing I take away from the lives of the troubled souls whose stories are brought to life so vividly in the magnificent Manchester By The Sea.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
May 20, 2020

Finding Something to Watch

May 18, 2020 (1,433 words)

After two months of trying to flatten the curve, medical personnel are probably pretty stressed out. Those not employed in an “essential” industry, or not able to work from home, are no doubt feeling the financial strain.

Given the prevalence of such hardships, it seems indelicate to point out that for some of us this pandemic has so far only registered as a mild inconvenience.

My biggest problem, it feels a little awkward to report, has been finding something decent to watch. I’ve made my way through our family library of old VHS classics and my personal stash of newer DVD releases. After recently memorizing every frame of two movies I originally saw in theaters, Hell or High Water and Hostiles, by virtue of their current availability on Netflix, the search for the next “moody drama” – or a truly funny comedy – is well under way.

There are lots of movies made every year. And there seems to be no end of “Netflix Originals,” either. But surprisingly few of these productions are worth the time. I can’t tell you how many things I have turned off after the first twenty minutes.

Which brings me to a discussion of Hail, Caesar!, a 2016 theatrical release which I only just saw recently, when it popped up on my Netflix queue. It’s an entertaining look at Hollywood’s studio system of the early 1950s, focusing on the head of physical production who keeps things together despite no end of personal drama in the off-screen lives of the actors and actresses employed by his studio.

Written and directed by the clever Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, the movie weaves several plot lines together in their trademark style, which I guess can be described as part send-up, part homage. (They did a remake of True Grit about a decade ago in this same vein, which is another movie I’ve watched several times over the years and have happily memorized every frame of.)

Their story this time centers on the fictional character of Eddie Mannix, employed at the fictional Capitol Pictures. It’s based on an actual Hollywood “fixer” by the same name. That colorful real-life career is detailed in a salacious “dual” biography published in 2004, The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickland, and the MGM Publicity Machine.

The Coens wisely keep thing light, and their movie skips over the more troubling things the real one-time mob-related New Jersey construction laborer did to cover up some of the most notorious crimes in Hollywood history.

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a dim-witted star goes missing…

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The thorniest problem the fictional Mannix has to contend with is the disappearance of a dim-witted actor who is starring in the now-being-filmed-biblical epic, “Hail, Caesar! A Tale of the Christ.”

This dim-witted star, it turns out, has been kidnapped by a group of disgruntled (and predominantly Jewish, we are given to believe) screenwriters, who gather in a “study group” to complain about how they are not receiving their fair share of the profits their stories generate for the film studious.

These writers are holding the dim-wit for a ransom of $100,000.00 which Mannix, our hero, is able to procure from his studio’s coffers out of petty cash.

The star is released by the screenwriters upon delivery of the ransom. He shows up at Mannix’s office early the next morning in full Roman centurion regalia, relaxes in a chair and starts to chat amiably about how those wacky screenwriters do make a lot of sense when it comes to the subject of inequitable compensation.

Mannix responds to this unexpected economic discourse as follows: He gets up and steps out from behind his desk, grabs the dim-wit by the collar, stands him up and slaps him a few times, then barks at him to snap out of it and get back to work – all done to great comic effect.

The entire action of this movie takes place in the span of about a day and a half, by the way.

The film is a series of movies-within-movies. As Mannix walks the studio back lot he visits the various sound stages where a variety of stories are being shot. The production values of each genre-picture being filmed are here lovingly recreated for us.

Hail Caesar! is also a fun hodge-podge of ideas that play off conventional wisdom everybody knows. Or that we think we know.

The disgruntled screenwriters are, of course, the communist infiltrators we all heard so much about in the soon-to-be held McCarthy hearings, which led to the infamous “blacklist” period when such “sympathizers” were denied the ability to ply their trade in Hollywood, and only received credit for writing or producing by using an alias.

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Karl Marx, or Leo XIII?…

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I really appreciate that we get to see the “study group” of disgruntled screenwriters in action, so to speak. Watching them sit around a posh Malibu beach house kvetching over “control of the means of production” made me immediately think of how Catholic Popes have been talking about the very same issue, using the very same language, in a series of detailed encyclicals dating back to 1891.

These screenwriters naturally reference Karl Marx and his book Das Kapital (1867) as their intellectual starting point. While not up to speed on the subject myself, I have heard Marx referred to in certain Catholic circles as “having a point in his criticism of capitalism.”

This makes me mourn how Catholic social teaching on economics has lost all traction in the culture. It’s too bad the Jewish screenwriters couldn’t bring themselves to consider the Catholic perspective on how to fix capitalism, before settling on Karl Marx’s.

It’s also too bad the Catholic perspective on economics has been ignored by Catholics themselves, as they were taken in by the resurgence of “conservatism” that began after those contentious McCarthy hearings, a resurgence inaugurated in the 1950s by a young Catholic intellectual (William F. Buckley, Jr.)

And speaking of Catholicism, the Coens portray their Eddie Mannix as a devout Catholic who prays the rosary at his desk when having to make a difficult decision on whether to accept a lucrative job offer from Lockheed Martin. They also have him going to confession every few hours. This, of course, is meant to poke fun at the sacrament of confession.

But we needn’t hold this gentle ridicule against Joel and Ethan Coen since, after all, who goes to confession any more, right?

This aspect of their movie may be a bit of an amalgamation. There was a serious Catholic who played a prominent role in Hollywood during the same period when the real Eddie Mannix was operating. But the name of that Catholic was Joseph Breen.

Unlike Mannix, however, Breen was not employed by a big studio to cover up murders or studio-directed drug addictions or illicit abortions. He did not have a complex web of contacts in every arena, from reporters and doctors to corrupt police and district attorneys.

Joseph Breen enforced the Production Code from its inception in 1934 to his retirement in 1954. In that role he interacted with the heads of all the major studious, blue-penciling every script that went before the cameras.

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helping us all avoid temptation…

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Some now call what he did the epitome of censorship. To allow someone to decide what all other adults should and should not see is inimical to the foundational ideals of a liberal democracy, as we all know.

Yet Breen was awarded an honorary Academy Award by the Hollywood community upon his retirement, in recognition of his work to rein in the more lascivious tendencies of the film industry during what has come to be known as its Golden Age.

(An even-handed overview of Breen’s Hollywood years can be found in a 2005 piece entitled “Joe Breen’s Oscar” written by Stephen Weinberger of Dickinson College. It appears in that year’s Dickinson Scholar, a faculty and staff publication of the College.)

With Hail Caesar! the Coen brothers have given us a “scintillating, uproarious comedy,” that is “filled with fast and light touches of exquisite incongruity in scenes that have the expansiveness of relaxed precision, performed and timed with the spontaneous authority of jazz,” as The New Yorker’s reviewer so eloquently wrote upon its February 2016 release.

On the other hand, the tensions of a Catholic in the Jewish-run film industry are not “themselves among the mainsprings of the movie’s comedy as well as its drama,” which the same New Yorker review claims they are.

That, my friends, is a subject for an entirely different movie than what the Coens have delivered to us this time around.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr May 18, 2020

Rich People Things

April 20, 2020 (1,384 words)

Here we are, just a few weeks into the coronavirus stay-at-home order, and already I’ve started the once every ten years, clear-out-the-attic, no holds barred, major life re-organization.

In going through and throwing out all sort of files, originally clipped and set aside as potential research material, but long since made largely redundant by easy internet access, I came across a blurb for a 2010 book of social commentary by Chris Lehmann, Rich People Things: Real Life Secrets of the Predator Class.

It sounded as interesting as the day I first filed the promotional piece away, so I made a mental note to order it online sometime soon.

A few days later, with the file cabinets suitably purged, I turned my attention to the raft of books that have accumulated over the last forty-five years. Many of which I purchased in my twenties, which now looking back may have been of form of overcompensation for my failure to get a college degree, and for earning my living at the time through manual labor.

As I made my way through shelf after shelf, arranged like any good library by category and then by author, determined to winnow things down to a reasonable collection of can’t-live-without, I came across my very own trade paperback copy of Rich People Things.

Apparently I had picked it up in a secondhand bookshop somewhere, judging from the penciled-in price on the top of the first page, but had never gotten around to actually reading it.

Until now.

I’m also doing all the related things one does these days when one reads a book: check out a couple of YouTube interviews from ten years ago with Mr. Lehmann discussing the book. And a 2016 talk he gave at the legendary Prose & Politics bookstore in Washington, D.C., to promote his then just-released newer book, The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream.

A quick internet search also reveals that last April (2019) Mr. Lehmann was named the full-time editor of The New Republic. This has got to represent a plum assignment for a guy who spent the past decade editing at fringe outlets such as The Baffler. The New Republic, of course, is well-known for its liberal political journalism, and its thought-provoking cultural commentary, though it has experienced a bumpy editorial ride in recent years.

It will take me awhile to catch up to Lehmann’s 2016 book and his current editor gig. For now I am contenting myself with enjoying and learning from Rich People Things.

For instance, only three pages into the Introduction we read:

“Nevertheless, it’s been striking to observe just how little the present crisis (the 2008 meltdown) has altered the basic terms of political engagement on all sides. When the US economy veered toward cataclysm in the 1890s and the 1930s, mass political movements registered a new national distemper.

“The People’s Party of the late nineteenth century went so far as to advocate an alternate production-based system of currency and exchange, known as Subtreasury, a reform that eventually got watered down into the Free Silverite attack on the gold standard when the party fused with the Democrats in 1896.”

(This anecdote puts a little meat on the bone of an historical event many of a certain age might be familiar with – William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold Speech” – doesn’t it?)

Mr. Lehmann then continues:

“And the thirties, of course, witnessed the enactment of many of the core reforms first advanced during the populist and Progressive eras – public ownership of utilities, federally funded income support and retirement plans, enormous national public works projects, and the like.

“One might reasonably ask what it would take for the basic truths of class division to sink in on today’s American scene, after the reckless expansion of our paper economy has consigned entire productive sectors of business enterprise into the dustbin of history…

“Instead, we remain in thrall to an unserious liberalism that continues to entrust most major economic policy decisions to career investment bankers, and to a conservative movement rhetoric that equates “populism” with heartland approved consumption habits and evangelical culture-wars posturing.”

Whew. And he’s just getting warmed up.

In his Chapter Six, “The Free Market,” Mr. Lehmann starts out by describing a condition many of us are already familiar with:

“The notion of a self-regulated market, magically governed by the invisible hand of self-interest, dates back, of course, to Adam Smith’s famed eighteenth century treatise, On the Wealth of Nations.

“Smith’s Scottish Enlightenment vision of economic enterprise as a mystical haven of uncoerced social relations has always been catnip to the ownership class in the resource-rich and labor-stunted New World.

“Smith’s thesis – a heady world-historical expansion of how he saw the division of labor unfold in a Scottish pin factory – seemed intuitively true in an early American Republic long on frontier expansionism and short on fixed class division and institutions of social welfare. If anywhere could be the natural home of a free market, why, this certainly must be the place.”

But then he adds a detail that most of us probably didn’t previously know:

“Meanwhile, Smith’s British compatriots took a far more dour view of his achievements. As economic historian Michael Perelman recounts, Francis Horner, the editor of the Edinburgh Review and chairman of the Bullion Committee in the British parliament, declined an invitation to contribute an introduction to an 1803 reissue of Smith’s book with the candid assessment:

‘I should be reluctant to expose S’s errors before his work has operated its full effect. We owe much at present to the superstitious worship of S’s name; and we must not impair that feeling, till the victory is more complete…. (U)ntil we can give a correct and concise theory of the origins of wealth, his popular, plausible, and loose hypothesis is as good for the vulgar as any,’”

But the “superstitious worship” has endured, and glows ever brighter.

“Smith has largely been enshrined as a post hoc prophet of market sovereignty for the modern right, which has made an industry of reviling the New Deal and the notion of government intervention in the economy….

“And in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis those efforts have not abated; unlike the New Deal’s battery of efforts to deconcentrate finance and industry, and thereby stimulate consumer demand and job growth in public-backed enterprise, today’s economic regulators have doubled-down on the cartelized finance sector with lavish, too-big-too-fail bailouts….

“…in the face of such grievous gaming of the finance dole, public discourse has doubled down on free-market dogma. University of Chicago behavioral economist Steven Levitt has leveraged classical market-speak into an all-purpose pop explanation of virtually everything in his ‘Freakanomics’ franchise.

“The result is virtually a photographic negative of free market theory, with federal income support going straight into the coffers of finance capital.”

And how’s this for a tidy summation:

“In reality, the market has no organic existence at all. It has always been a contrivance of contract law, interlocking trusts, and trade protocols – and its putative freedom is primarily a function of who is best positioned to benefit from this or that set of advantageous relationships.”

Culminating in this observation:

“Likewise, the free market in health care that conservative activists are now so hot to preserve from the federal government’s meddlesome regulating hand is in fact an elaborate patchwork of gamed Medicare contracts, erratically enforced state regulatory codes that are still the only government curbs on the excesses of most major insurers, and the lobbying wish list of a pharmaceutical Leviathan that seeks to secure patent rights on its most lucrative products, like the next generation of microbionic cancer drugs, into perpetuity,”

“But the myth of the free market remains a powerful intellectual opiate, and its pushers are legion, from Malcolm Gladwell to Steve Forbes to Sarah Palin.”

This is one book I will be reading start-to-finish. As a writer, Chis Lehmann is not only smart and snappy, he also possesses the enviable quality of knowing how to make his point concisely. In this book at least, he is the master of the short chapter.

I have twenty-four of those short chapters left to go, the last of which is entitled “The Language Problem.” I can hardly wait.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr
April 20, 2020

Just Trying to Help (part two)

April 15, 2020 (3,352 words)

My ire has often been directed at prominent conservative Catholics, many of whom are highly-compensated commentators working for lavishly funded private foundations, who I believe avoid or willfully misinterpret the Church’s social doctrine on economic justice.

Now the time has come for me to acknowledge there is yet another more humble group of Catholics who also identify as conservative, but who are not prominent spokespeople with big reputations or big paychecks.

This latter group is indeed aware of the Church’s reservations about capitalism. They are up to speed on what the pertinent papal encyclicals have to say on the subject of economic justice, and are not in denial about it.

To their credit, they continue to grapple with the breadth of the teaching. Especially with what someone like John Paul II, for instance, is clearly telling us in Centesimus Annus (CA), his big, important encyclical of 1991.

They just don’t know what to do about it, how to integrate what they are reading into their everyday lives.

JPII is as good a reference as any to use in this discussion, since after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 it was generally assumed he would clear up any confusion over the Church’s position on the heated subject of “capitalism versus socialism.”

Here in the West we took for granted he would enthusiastically endorse capitalism as the preferred economic model for countries to follow.

Then along came CA, strategically promulgated on the hundredth anniversary of Leo XIII’s ground-breaking encyclical on social justice, Rerum Novarum (1891).

While JPII did unequivocally restate the Church’s long-standing condemnation of socialism, he threw us all a curve when what he had to say regarding capitalism was conditional and highly guarded, at best.

The first thing he did, in his characteristically erudite and scholarly manner, was to define what he meant by the term “capitalism.”

He makes an important distinction, describing the requisite characteristics of any morally acceptable form of capitalism.

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a morally acceptable form of capitalism…

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His name for this morally acceptable capitalism is a “market economy” (CA, n.42), and he goes on to articulate how it fundamentally differs from a morally unacceptable economic ideology, which he calls “liberal capitalism.”

At this point the casual reader might understandably draw the conclusion we here in the United States are in the clear, since what we practice is “free market capitalism,” which sounds an awful lot like John Paul II’s “market economy.”

And besides, what on Earth is “liberal capitalism,” anyway?

Ah my friends, this is where we confront a simple truth: to be considered even a run-of-the-mill practicing Catholic, one has to be a willing student of history.

An earlier Pope, Paul VI, already went to the trouble of defining “liberal capitalism” as the product of “unbridled (classical) liberalism.” In his 1967 encyclical Populorium Progressio (PP), he describes “liberal capitalism” this way:

“It has profit has its only motive, puts no limits on the absolute private ownership of the means of production, and holds that unhindered free competition must guide the economic system”. (PP, n. 26)

Paul VI says materialism pervades the basic philosophy of liberal capitalism, in the way temporal goods such as wealth and power take precedence over – or even deny – spiritual goods such as friendship and wisdom.

Getting back to JPII and Centesimus Annus, we read that liberal capitalism is no less materialistic than socialism, which of course is the very reason the Church has always bitterly opposed socialism. Liberal capitalism, he tells us, is materialistic:

“insofar as it denies an autonomous existence and value to morality, law, culture, and religion… in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs” (CA, n. 18)

Liberal capitalism fails to understand that man, by his very nature, cannot be fulfilled outside “his final destiny, which is God.” (CA, n. 41)

To boil this down for those of us who are not scholars, JPII is saying that while the basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, shelter, etc., are certainly components of man’s happiness on Earth, they are secondary in importance when compared to his transcendental spiritual needs.

This is why John Paul II refuses (refuses!) to endorse a capitalist system “in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong judicial framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality” (CA, n. 42).

Ah yes, human freedom in its totality. Which means our revered concept of “economic freedom” is not automatically synonymous with human freedom.

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government as an important counterbalance…

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As upwardly mobile Americans, committed to pluralism and liberal democracy, I’m afraid even Catholics have forgotten that society must be ordered and grounded in “the Christian vision of the human person.” (CA, n. 13).

The economic implications of all this are not hard to grasp: To be morally acceptable a “market economy” must serve human freedom in its entirety. It can only do that when it functions within the confines of a strong institutional, jurisdictional, or political framework. (CA, n. 48)

In other words, a morally acceptable version of capitalism cannot exist without a governmental entity capable of enforcing some rules. This contingency runs counter to the inbred notion of “individual liberty” and “rugged individualism” we Americans take such pride in.

According to Catholic social doctrine, the presence of “free market mechanisms” is but one necessary element required in a morally just and economically thriving society. (CA, n. 19)

This is where things really get complicated for conservative Catholics who pay attention to papal encyclicals.

Ever since Roe v. Wade, this group has been assured by their prominent spokespeople the “limited government” version of liberal capitalism promoted by the Republican Party is morally acceptable, despite all evidence to the contrary.

What is needed at this juncture is no less than a major reconsideration of recent political history, which is admittedly a lot to ask of people who are pre-occupied with paying the mortgage and getting their kids through school.

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we are stuck with limited political options…

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We are stuck with only two political options, and the first thing Catholics should do is acknowledge loud and clear the neither of these options embody the fullness of Church teaching.

The second thing I propose Catholics do is admit Roe v. Wade does not represent a betrayal of our Christian founding, but is rather a natural by-product of our Enlightenment founding.

When our Popes talk of “liberal capitalism” and “unbridled liberalism” they are making a broad reference to “classical liberalism,” an ideology that defines the modern era. This “liberalism” celebrates individual emancipation at the expense of the common good, by rejecting all previously held authority, custom, and tradition.

It started with the Renaissance, helped fuel the Protestant Reformation, and then formed the basis of the Enlightenment philosophy that animated the thoughts of our most influential Founders.

Sadly, rank-and-file Catholics are not savvy enough to see how this overarching “liberalism” expresses itself in what passes for “conservative” economic theory. And conservative Catholic commentators are oblivious to the heterodox origins of their preferred economic stratagems.

The institutional Church, on the other hand, has been hip to the problem from the start. Our Popes have been wrestling with this radical ideology for centuries now, even if their stellar work hasn’t yet filtered down to street level and received mainstream acceptance.

Then along came the infamous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which took all the guesswork out of who faithful Catholics could vote for.

Any prelate who challenged the new Catholic-Republican alliance, by promoting a “seamless garment” argument that placed abortion in a broader context with other social justice issues, was condemned by conservative Catholics as failing to properly defend the sanctity of life in the womb.

Which is pretty much where things stand now: if you vote for a Democrat, you are guilty of a mortal sin.

This leaves the small minority of conservative Catholics who are aware of the Church’s reservations about capitalism in the lurch. Those few who are up-to-speed on what the pertinent papal encyclicals have to say on the subject of economic justice, and are not in denial about it.

But they are at a loss as to how to implement what they read when it comes time to vote.

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seeing abortion and economic justice as intertwined….

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While there is no such thing as a moral equivalency between abortion and economic justice, I think anyone interested in eliminating the former and promoting the latter should be willing to entertain a discussion on how best to achieve both objectives.

What’s more, I believe the only way to reorder our society and restore the “Christian vision of the human person,” as John Paul II would have it, is to realize that abortion and economics are inextricably linked.

In order to see this connection, conservative Catholics must embark on an intellectual journey, the first step of which is to dis-engage from the popular libertarian notion that government is nothing but the despised enemy of the individual liberty and personal freedom we in this country hold so dear.

According to JPII: Government can rein in “selfishness and the desire for excessive profit and power.” (Sollicitudo ReI Socialis, 1987, n. 47)

While a government consisting of flawed human beings will never be immune to grave inefficiencies and potential corruption among its officials and administrators, such an imperfect institution can nevertheless:

…serve to combat the spread of improper sources of growing rich, and of easy profits deriving from illegal or purely speculative activities, “as these constitute one of the chief obstacles to (human) development, and to the economic order.” (CA, n. 48)

This means, in practical terms, that what Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are talking about when it comes to economics should have great resonance for any Catholic with even a passing awareness of the Church’s teaching on this subject.

The obvious conundrum is that these two politicians openly affirm the Democratic Party’s well-known support of “reproductive rights.”

And every Pope I can cite in support of economic justice is clear in his condemnation of abortion. While we have been instructed that economics falls under the heading of prudential matters we can have different opinions about, abortion is non-negotiable.

THE NEED FOR A NEW POLITCAL PARADIGM

The current pro-life paradigm has very familiar contours. It used to cast its critical eye on “blue-collar Catholics,” who maintained a visceral loyalty to the Democratic Party that was seen as “obscuring the demands of their faith.”

To that group has been added a breed of “bad Catholic” who considers the Church’s stance on things like women’s ordination and artificial contraception as being hopelessly “behind the times.”

What I am calling for is a different way of assessing one’s political options, apart from the usual categories we have all grown so comfortable with. This new strategy should not be dismissed as a misapplication of prudential judgement in matters of fundamental moral doctrine.

I am not suggesting a compromise in moral absolutes. I am recommending conservative Catholics extend their definition of morality to include economics.

A Catholic who considers supporting a Democratic politician because of that Democrat’s promotion of economically just policies is not living in a fog of moral ambiguity, or inadvertently endorsing heresy.

Critics should review the political calculus in which they condemn these voters for allowing “party loyalty” to take precedence over “moral duty.”

Conservative Catholics who still see the answer as “straight talk from the pulpit” on abortion should sharpen their political IQ. Of course we need straight talk from the pulpit. It’s how we apply that straight talk to the political process that needs a major re-think.

Voting for a Republican who “stands for life” may make some of us feel better, but our elections are not up-or-down votes on abortion. Wouldn’t it be grand if fixing this mess were that simple? Voting for a culture of life, instead of a culture of death – what a no-brainer that would be.

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it’s always been about changing hearts and minds…

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While it grieves me that our country has made infanticide legal, and deems Planned Parenthood worthy of boatloads in federal funding, I have also come to realize that legislative measures will not really solve the problem.

Neither will continuing to denigrate prominent politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden as “bad Catholics,” since a politician’s stated support for a woman’s right to choose does not translate into making abortion a mandatory medical procedure.

Pro-choice Democrats are not roaming the streets, kidnapping pregnant women and delivering them to the nearest abortion clinic, forcing them to terminate their pregnancy.

Women are choosing to have abortions of their own free will. Sometimes it seems this obvious fact gets lost amid all the earnest hand-wringing and elaborate strategizing of the pro-life community.

There is nothing more righteous than the pro-life cause. But its advocates don’t seem to appreciate that even after access is restricted, and God-willing the noxious laws are reversed, until they are able to affect a fundamental change in the hearts and minds of women who are electing to abort, the ultimate objective will not be achieved.

Why do pregnant women choose abortion?

CAUSE #1: Dire economic conditions that prompt so many financially-strapped women (and their families) to feel they simply cannot afford to carry a pregnancy to term.

CAUSE #2: A “me-first” mindset on the part of privileged women who decide a pregnancy should not interfere with their pursuit of happiness.

CONCLUSION: It is the “liberal capitalism” and the “unbridled (classical) liberalism” the Popes have continued to warn us about that is responsible for both “types” of abortion – even if no Pope has quite gotten around to connecting these particular dots.

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liberal capitalism is at the root of our cultural malaise…

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Seeking an end to abortion will require our society to turn away from the “liberal capitalism” that is currently in play, and adopt the morally acceptable ideology of a “market economy.”

In the present political context, that means faithful Catholics who are pro-life should not continue to automatically vote Republican, in hopes of favorable Supreme Court nominees and the appointment of federal judges across the country who will chip away at abortion access, and one day claim the big prize – the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

At least not until those Republicans stop passing huge tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest strata of society, justified by their unshakable belief in trickle-down economics.

Or refuse to enact carbon taxes on the fossil fuel industry, and ignore the need for stricter anti-trust legislation on our tech giants. To say nothing of consistently opposing universal healthcare, and failing to address the exorbitant prices we pay for prescription medication.

Because without a serious tilt of the scales in the direction of a more economically just society, the legal remedies currently being sought will not do the trick. They will not eliminate the scourge of abortion from our midst.

In fact, if by some magic twist of fate abortion were to be severely restricted or suddenly outlawed, without an overhaul of the economic order, all we would be left with is civil war.

OUR SOLEMN OBLIGATION TO DEFEND THE UNBORN

Okay, fine. But in the final analysis how can a pro-life Catholic with a conscience properly attuned to the economic question be expected to endorse a principled crusader for economic justice like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, when such people unabashedly claim support for abortion “is an absolutely essential part of being a Democrat”?

When every priest and bishop one respects continues to say we must recognize our solemn obligation to defend the unborn when approaching the voting booth? That we must carry out our civic duty in accord with our Catholic faith.

These consecrated men are known not to mince words:

“You can never vote for someone who favors the right of a woman to destroy human life in the womb, the right to a procured abortion.”

No question, this is a tough nut to crack folks, and I’m not making light of that fact.

These same upstanding clerics are highly dismissive of Catholics who offer support to a known pro-abort politician on the basis of other agenda items like “the environment” or “immigration reform.”

A pro-abort Catholic politician is derided as someone who has “betrayed their Catholic faith,” and willingly “creates scandal,” which is defined by our clergy as “doing or omitting to do something that leads others into confusion about the moral good.”

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making myself crystal clear…

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I hope I am making myself clear: Abortion is not okay. Catholic politicians who support access to abortion are, indeed, betraying their faith.

But I don’t get the “potential for confusion” tag that so many of our earnest priests and bishops charge such politicians with. There is no way anyone’s support for abortion should confuse the rest of us into thinking it is ever okay, regardless of the circumstance.

I also hope I have made myself equally clear that “economic justice” is not a silly little sidebar policy issue, to be waived off and given short shrift.

It’s just our bad luck that for the time being the only political alternative favoring economically just policies also happens to believe abortion is a vital human right. We Catholics who seek economic justice have to work on converting such politicians, and show them the error of their ways when it comes to “reproductive choice.”

Having said that, it’s important to remember a politician who agrees to abortion access has no authority to force a woman to procure such a procedure.

As previously noted, that happens as a matter of free will. The choice takes place in the heart and mind of each pregnant woman, not in any building where politicians gather to conduct their business, or at any podium where they instinctively appease and seek approval.

In short, making real headway comes down to faithful priests and bishops also needing to deepen their understanding of the problem, right along with the rest of us. They, too, need to extend their definition of morality to include economics.

Our Popes have been saying all the right things on the subject. But they are not responsible for crafting public policy, as we all know.

It is lay men and women who must make prudential decisions in the social realm to achieve temporal solutions. This is where the new political paradigm I am talking about comes into play. There are people much smarter than I am who should be able to figure out how to make this new paradigm work.

Here are a few starter ideas, though, off the top of my head:

STARTER IDEA #1: Let these politicians know all their new-found Catholic supporters do not cotton to the approval of abortion. Catholic women should make it plain they don’t intend to have an abortion despite their Democratic vote, and express the view that no woman should find herself in a position to choose that option.

STARTER IDEA #2: Bring a sign to a Democratic rally that reads “Morality Demands Economic Justice,” by way of explaining one’s support of a particular candidate’s economic agenda. The thought being that injecting the concept of morality into the economic discussion would be a good place to start.

STARTER IDEA #3: And then there’s this: All through the recently-completed primary season we were treated to TV presentations of countless folksy town hall meetings which featured questions from the audience, followed by intimate one-on-one selfie sessions with the candidate.

What’s wrong with telling the person to his or her face: “I am a Catholic who agrees with your economic policies, and I hope one day you will reconsider your position on abortion.”

Keeping in mind how so many of these pro-choice Democrats were once pro-life, and not that long ago, either.

You are certainly welcome to try doing the same thing in reverse with your favorite Republican candidate, but I doubt you will make a dent. Because Republicans are convinced their economic agenda – which so obviously contradicts Church teaching – is the perfect embodiment of Christian principles.

Robert J. Cavanaugh, Jr April 15, 2020