I’m talking about fees, which are proliferating like fleas on a dog’s back. Latest new gimmick to fleece with fees: our bank demands depositors maintain an average $1,000 monthly balance or suffer forfeiting a three or four-buck fee. This bit of bad news is spreading through the financial business like an uncontrolled case of shingles.

Now this isn’t going to affect us personally; we maintain a better balance than that. But it’s really going to sock the poor who live from paycheck to paycheck. Most badly-educated day laborers aren’t going to read the announcement that Regions Bank mailed us warning of its latest creative bloodsucking. They probably won’t even notice their accounts are being silently tapped from month to month.

And the automatic teller machines, what a rip-off. For ages they’ve imposed a fee if you use your ATM card at a competing bank. Char and I are careful to only swipe the card at Regions to deny them this bit of booty. Now they’ve tacked on an additional card fee if you use it to buy gas, groceries, and anything else. My personal protest to this example of chiseling is to first pick up money from the bank, then pay in cash at the store.

Char long ago tamed the credit card contagion. If she pays off the Discover account by a stated deadline we avoid interest charges. The credit card companies call us freeloaders and worse names, and we laugh … all the way to the bank. Would that we could sock the banks as hard. We got free checking when we attained age 65, but that looks like the next “free” to vanish.

I realize banks have taking a licking recently by investing their depositors’ money in bad mortgages and poor credit risks. But I do protest having to pay for their whimsical management.  While I’m in an irritable mood and venting, let’s take up the subject of religion and liberalism.

When Alabama passed its recent tough-on-illegal-immigration law, there was a great squall of indignation from America’s bleeding hearts, including the American Civil Liberties Union and The Birmingham News. En masse their surrogates in Jefferson County rushed to the federal building and filed lawsuits to upset it. Among the litigious crusaders were a band of preachers and pastors whose objections, if I interpret correctly, were, a. The law was not fair, b. It was reminiscent of slavery and segregation, c. It was inhumane and irreligious, and d. They just didn’t like it.

Now I am reminded by journalists almost weekly that the judicial establishment has decreed that children praying in schools is a sore breach of the dike between church and state. It is rated a serious threat to foundations of the republic. Yet a coterie of pastors entering a suit to annul a state law is passed by with no comment by press, politicians, or litigants. It seems that the great barrier between church and state is as porous as the driven snow. If an issue benefits the liberal agenda it is declared benign and passed by in silence.

Just a week later this conclusion was underlined by a miscreant who appeared before a local court for judgment. The judge gave this sinner a choice: jail or attendance at church for a year. One would have thought hizzoner had made him choose between drawing and quartering and burning at the stake. The uproar by both the ACLU and The Birmingham News was loud, self-righteous, and sickening.

Puke-inducing would be a more accurate term.

Gold looks great, but try spending it at the store

I like gold. It is nice looking; it doesn’t rust; and people stand in awe if you have a lot of it hanging on your person.

What frosts my cupcake is having to listen to all the gold-blather on radio and  television for the past 10 years.  You’ve heard it too: the economy is crashing, the dollar is worthless, and you better buy gold or you’ll starve and die. This scare cacophony of the gold salesmen began back when their expensive metal sold for $300 an ounce; after a decade and more of panic advertising they’ve forced the price up to over $1,800. You would think they would be satisfied to sit back and rake in the dough, but their apocalyptic shrieking has only intensified.

Let’s see if I understand the logic: my dollars are now almost worthless. Their gold is rising swiftly and predicted to hit $2,000 an ounce in the near future. Yet they want me to trade my pitiful, ragged currency for their miracle metal, the only guarantee of economic salvation. Am I missing something here? It seems more sensible if they harassed me to sell them my gold wedding ring. 

The catch here is that our dollar is no longer tied to the gold standard. It was President Richard who announced the U.S. would no longer redeem its dollars in gold. Instead the buck would be backed by the full faith and credit of the nation. Gold can soar to $10,000 an ounce and it won’t affect my personal economics.

What I do worry about is government debt and the printing of money which leads to inflation. As the dollar declines in value, foreign exporters will demand more dollars for their goods — a real pain for big importers like Wal-Mart and its customers.

That brings up another point. During the recent tornado in Alabama, everything was in a chaotic flux including law and order. Thieves and robbers did not go on a gold hunt, stripping victims of their rings and chains. Instead they opted for copper such as that contained in Alabama Power Company’s transformers which had been cast down from broken power poles. Are crooks better attuned to the commodities market? Maybe I should be sneaking about raiding high lines and burglarizing empty houses of their wiring.

Silver producers have tried to copy the scare-advertising blitzkrieg of the gold lobby, to little avail. Nobody seems to care. For decades silver had steady customers in government coins and photographic film. These days Uncle Sam mints copper-clad crap for coins, and digital photography has made film as rare as congressional common sense. Silver’s other market, fancy tableware, has been usurped by less-troublesome stainless steel.

Another metal, lead, has been rising in price, not through bugaboo advertising but through simple increased demand. China’s swiftly rising hunger for automobiles carries with it a need for more car batteries which calls for more lead – and that yields higher prices. Oddly, one of the occupations pinched by this Chinese demand is amateur ammunition reloading in America. Recreational shooters are finding it vexing to fire ever more expensive lead bullets into the dirt where they disappear forever.

The two great icons of capitalism are Supply and Demand. In the case of the Chinese car batteries, prices have  risen from an honest public demand for more automobiles. When it comes to gold, demand has been artificially stimulated by many years of yelping scare ads from gold producers. True, they have received much help from idiocies of the federal government and Wall Street investment bankers. These two plagues have combined to mire us in a long-term, jobless recession replete with high commodity prices and inflation.

The government continues to print-borrow money and spend it, which creates an ever-cheaper dollar. If we can get rid of the current crop of Washington imbeciles and replace them with politicians of just average intelligence who can firm up our dollar, the  great gold bubble will pop.

And I can enjoy watching all these bullion dupes trying to sell their $1800 gold for $300.

Japanese gold worker fondles bar

Edna St. Vincent Millay among the blossoms

There it was on a book shelf, SAVAGE BEAUTY, The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford. So I bought it right away and took it home for a mid-winter reading project. I’ve had no reason since to regret it.

Milford makes a creditable investigative run at one of America’s premier poets. She fills her book with juicy Millay details gleaned from reading the poet’s personal letters,

Youthful Edna

plus interviewing a surviving sister. One awesome revelation:  Edna’s parents gave her that prestigious middle name because they admired Maine’s St. Vincent Hospital.

In this debased era – when poetry is relegated to the domain of rock musical lyrics and advertising blank verse – one is more likely to encounter an honest politician strolling the boulevards than a real poet.

But there was a time in this country, during a frenetic Jazz Age, when these charming versifiers proliferated. National poetry magazines printed their stanzas, while newspapers routinely reported the results of their contests and interviewed their traveling lecturers. Even some radio stations held weekly poetry readings which attracted wide audiences. And among the bards writing during the third decade of the 20^th century, one stood highest in public acclaim. I first encountered the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay as a freshman in college. It was like running into an electric shock. Here was a woman – in my eyes the undisputed poet laureate of the 1920s, a member of my parents’ generation – speaking to us rebellious youngsters of the 1940s and beyond:

Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Have given their loves, I give my love to you,
Not in a lovers’-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such a fashion, and the legend plain –
Semper fidelis, where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:
Love in the open hand, no thing but that:
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt
I bring you, calling out as children do:
“Look what I have!—And these are all for you”

Here was someone who had taken the venerable Shakespearean sonnet, brought it up to date, and made it her own personal art form. And the writing was so clear, neat, terse and learned. The sonnet is a simple vehicle. It starts with an octet of two quatrains, followed by a sestet composed of a quatrain and a couplet. Nature must have created it to permit thwarted romantics to vent – especially in those two pithy and profound lines at the end. Yet she was equally masterful in the ballad and other rhyme schemes:

In the spring of the year, in the spring of the year,
I walked the road beside my dear.
The trees were black where the bark was wet.
I see them yet, in the spring of the year.
He broke me a bough of the blossoming peach
That was out of the way and hard to reach.
In the fall of the year, in the fall of the year,
I walked the road beside my dear.
The rooks went up with a raucous trill.
I hear them still, in the fall of the year.
He laughed at all I dared to praise
And broke my heart, in little ways.
Year be springing or year be falling,
The bark will drip and the birds be calling,
There’s much that’s fine to see and hear,
In the spring of a year, in the fall of a year.
Tis not love’s going that hurts my days,
But that it went in little ways.

Edna’s past and her poetry reveal that her romantic life had been rocky, a series of emotional calamities which dominated her work. Like Shakespeare she had perfected the role of tormented lover. Can you think of any persona who would appeal quicker to a tormented teenager? The elderly and middle-aged seemed to like her, too:

Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.
This love I have known always: love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

Edna got an early start in her chosen profession. Her mother, Cora, herself an accomplished poet and musician, tutored her precocious daughter in both arts. An early Edna attempt:

I know a hundred ways to die.
I’ve often thought I’d try one:
Lie down beneath a motor truck
Some day when standing by one.

I know some poison I could drink.
I’ve often thought I’d taste it.
But mother bought it for the sink,
And drinking it would waste it.

By age 15 her works were becoming more mature and were being published in children’s magazines. One even made it into an adult poetry publication. It is fascinating to read how youngsters of Edna’s era managed to become educated though lacking student loans, federal grants, and the bountiful scholarships of today. It involved talent, hard work, home schooling and lots of luck.

At age 19 she finished her first long lyric poem “Renasance” which failed to win a prize in a poetry contest, but caught the eye of judges and the public. More importantly it attracted the attention of several wealthy women who financed her college enrollment.

Once graduated from Vassar (class of 1917), Edna took her diploma and headed straight for New York’s Greenwich Village, a flower-child habitat long before the word “hippie’ had been invented. It was a celestial playpen for poets, playwrights, painters, novelists, editors, and drunken bums.

Diving deeply into her Bohemian milieu, Edna practiced cursing until she could pass as a native. After that came constant drinking and smoking, followed by a scandalous

Edna protesting executions

number of sexual escapades. She slept with both men and women, amassing a string of infatuations the pain of which would color her verses until the end.  To begin, she became the inamorata of a literary type, Floyd Dell, writer for the radical magazine, the Masses. After him came a round of romances – editors, publishers, and poets – which lasted until she married Eugen Jan Boissevain, a Dutch businessman. She was semi-faithful to him for most of her wedded life.

One natural bodily function in any Bohemian society is the protest march. Edna became a skilled practitioner of this progressive art form, hitting the pavement with likes of Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker and Michael Gold. They demanded justice in the celebrated case of Nicola Sacco and Barttolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants tried for robbery and murder. Protests sparkled with names of the famous, but the pair was executed anyway.

Her life on the wild side occasionally peeped out coyly from her verses:

I had a little sorrow,
Born of a little Sin,
I found a room all damp with gloom
And shut us all within;
And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I,
“And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I’ve been!”

Alas for pious planning–
It mattered not a whit!
As far as gloom went in that room,
The lamp might have been lit!
My little Sorrow would not weep,
My little Sin would go to sleep–
To save my soul I could not keep
My graceless mind on it!

So up I got in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad.
And, “One thing there’s no getting by –
I’ve been a wicked girl,” said I,
“But if I can’t be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!”

But the Roaring Twenties couldn’t last forever. The decade terminated with a bang in the 1930s, igniting a smothering economic Depression and a tumble toward world war. Edna had written the era’s epitaph with her most famous quatrain, which also served as her life’s signature and as a cry for freedom to future restless generations:

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light.

Edna sailed on through the 1930s gathering acclaims and awards along the way. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was granted no fewer than five doctorate degrees from colleges and universities.
She wrote a number of plays and the libretto for one major opera. Edna also lectured on her poetry from coast to coast, wrote short stories under a pseudonym, and pioneered the reading of poetry selections over radio. But as the 1930s waned and war madness again gripped nations, she forsook love interests for a role as tocsin for freedom. Her poem, “Czecho-Slovakia,” limned the times, as that betrayed land was abandoned by its friends and ravaged by Nazis:

If there were balm in Gilead, I would go,
To Gilead for your wounds, unhappy land
Gather you balsam there, and with this hand,
Made deft by pity, cleanse and bind and sew
And drench with healing, that your strength might grow;
(Though love be outlawed, kindness contraband)
And you, O proud and felled, again might stand;
But where to look for balm, I do not know.
The oils and herbs of mercy are so few;
Honour’s for sale; allegiance has its price;
The barking of a fox has bought us all;
We save our skins a craven hour or two.—
While Peter warms him in the servants’ hall
The thorns are platted and the cock crows twice.

Years were spent manufacturing propaganda verses supporting the Allied war effort. It was as though a sleek, brilliant little pony had been condemned to hard labor pulling a

Edna and Eugen

lumber wagon. Known widely for her liberal, anti-war, anti-death penalty views, Edna was forced to shelve every belief to combat a great evil loosed on the world.  Complaining that she was writing “acres of bad poetry,” She felt the strain intensely. Even before World War II ended she suffered a nervous breakdown, becoming an alcoholic addicted to morphine and barbiturates.

Staunchly by her side during her hospitalization was husband Eugen, who early in their marriage had appointed himself Edna’s manager, keeper, bodyguard, chef, and confidant. He regulated the household to the extent that Edna had little to do all day except eat, drink, and compose poetry. If she seemed to be tiring during parties, he frequently would pick her up, carry her upstairs, and put her to bed. Then he would descend and entertain the guests the rest of the evening with jokes and stories.

So close were they, that when Edna became addicted to morphine, so did Eugen. She wrote several sonnets to him, including this one, which likened their marriage to a fortress town “builded without fault or stain.” Should it fail, Edna vowed, “No mortal roof shall shelter me again:”

Believe, if ever the bridges of this town,
Whose towers were builded without fault or stain,
Be taken and its battlements go down,
No mortal roof shall shelter me again;
I shall not prop a branch against a bough
To hide me from the whipping east or north,
Nor tease to flame a heap of sticks, who now
Am warmed by all the wonders of the earth.
Do you take ship unto some happier shore
In such event, and have no thought for me,
I shall remain;–to share the ruinous floor
With roofs that once were seen far out to sea;
To cheer a mouldering army on the march …
And beg from spectres by a broken arch.

Edna miraculously fought through her addictions and was beginning to write again when she received a final blow. On August 29, 1949, Eugen died of lung cancer. One year and one month later she followed him in a fatal fall down the stairs in her home, Steepletop, at the town of Austerlitz, New York State.

Could any verse of hers bare the mystic nature of a true poet? Perhaps only this:

I had forgotten how the songs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

Mona Lisa: a big bust

Ernesto “Che” Guevara of the art set, a nasty rebel amongst aesthetes of the wine and cheese brigade.  I’ve banished the drab opinions of ” experts” and now accept only art that I personally prefer.  And like my alter ego, Che,  I intend to make ceaseless war on the fat sacred cows of painting.

This urge to topple fat-headedness is so heretical that I don’t even like Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” that hymn to Renaissance mediocrity which has been hyped for centuries as a world masterpiece beyond price. Oh, it is okay, a nice piece of drawing, but that’s all. I might hang it on the wall if someone gave me Leonardo’s artwork for free. But in no alternate universe fantasy would I waste millions of dollars buying it. A great place to display it would be the bathroom, where visitors are in a hurry and in no mood to linger over the painting’s deficiencies.

First off, “Mona Lisa” is insipid as a painting. It is monochromatic, a study in black and shades of brown, with a faint touches of green in the background. Folks who prefer color in their paintings should definitely find it lacking. Its composition is satisfactory but nothing to bark at the moon about. As for the subject, one observes simply a slightly over-weight Italian matron calmly sitting with her hands crossed, staring at the artist. Any group of professional photographers has wrought better arrangements (and models).

And she is smiling … or maybe not. Aye, there’s the rub: generations of art critics have wasted cubic volumes of hot air dissecting that smile. But is she smiling or smirking? Is she getting ready to break into a belly laugh? A snortle or a chortle? Who cares? Maybe Leonardo dribbled paint down his smock to inspire that suppressed giggle.

Franz Hals' gleeful Malle Babbe

Franz Hals and other masters have produced the likenesses of women with far more evocatively humorous facial expressions. Some are literally howling with glee. But Mona Lisa gets all the notoriety for a limp grin.

Part of the problem is that Leonardo created such a tremendous reputation as a universal Renaissance genius (artist, engineer, scientist, architect, etc.) that anything he produced had to be superb. Truth is, in 1496 he painted a portrait far superior to “Mona Lisa” which has gone relatively unnoticed. It is popularly called “Lady with an Ermine.” His subject was a really good-looking babe, Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Duke Ludovico “Il Moro” Sforza of Milan, who entered the duke’s aristocratic harem at age 16 and bore him a son. Leonardo was Sforza’s employee at the time and was given the job of creating her likeness.

Cecilia: Leonardo's best portrait

The resulting portrait has every thing “Mona Lisa” lacks. The strong reds and greens of Cecilia’s dress complement perfectly the russet freckles of her complexion and the deep auburn of her hair. With exquisitely shaped fingers she is caressing a small white ermine or ferret which serves as a symbol for the duke. Sforza’s personal emblem was “L’Ermellino.”

Cecilias’s facial expression is thoughtful, with just a touch of sadness. Perhaps she is reviewing her future. When Sforza finally settled down he married an aristocrat like himself, Isabella D’Este, and commoner Cecilia was banished. But the duke was no ingrate tightwad. She got a dowry and a castle which she parlayed into marriage with a lesser aristocrat, Count Pergamino.

Let’s be frank: I think “Mona Lisa” got so many props because she has been hanging many years in the famous Paris Louvre. “Lady with an Ermine” has been languishing in a relatively obscure Polish museum. It is all art politics.

While we are on the subject of Great Art Scams Through the Ages, let us pause a moment over one Pablo Picasso, the Bernie Madoff of slash and splash modern art. Pablo didn’t descend to the ridiculous depths of so many drip and drizzle modernists. But he produced a far greater quantity of scam art than any painter living or dead.

To understand Picasso and his cohorts and copyists, one must go back in time to the 1840s and 1850s when photography was being invented. Prior to the arrival of cameras and film, a rich man went to great trouble and expense to get his portrait painted. For big bucks he hired a painter, then he sat for days and weeks while the artist transferred his likeness to canvas. Enter photography. Suddenly any average citizen could pose in front of a camera for a few minutes and receive a portrait far more accurate than any painter could hope to deliver. Photography also began making inroads into traditional artistic venues such as landscapes.

Artists, feeling the hot breath of unbeatable competition, created “modern art,” a mélange of cabalistic schools each with its own style and vocabulary: impressionism, cubism, minimalism, non-objectivism, surrealism, pop. Like Egyptian priests of old, each school laid claim to ultimate truth and spoke in unknown tongues to the bewildered public. A flood of modern art – a real inundation of grotesquerie – filled museums throughout the land. Each painting eerily resembled its neighbors hanging nearby. And few of them seemed to have the slightest connection to reality.

The success of this strategy should be measured by the insane amounts of money art purchasers pay for the least scribble by Pablo Picasso. The numbers of modern artists elevated to fame by the various schools should be labeled another sign of achievement.

I don’t begrudge old Pablo and his cohorts their success with the modern art scam. If

Picasso creates a rape scene

auction houses can continue to fleece millions from buyers in Picasso’s name, I say go to it. Just don’t include me among the gulled.

One of my favorite Picasso creations (because it is so funny) is “Rape of the Sabine Women” in which the painter attempts to cope with an old Roman legend, ending up with a politically correct froth of propaganda.

Trouble is, although Picasso produced a stirring social rant, he got his facts all wrong. I consulted Roman historians Livy and Plutarch, our main sources for the Sabine legend, and they told a somewhat different tale. There were no horses nor cavalry involved. And no women got trampled in the event — no flashing swords either.

The story begins after the founding of Rome, home to a bunch of randy males comprising an influx of adventurers and fortune-seekers. It occurred to city fathers — as it did to the rabbits of Watership Down — that without females the young town would not long endure. So they decided to steal some skirts from a band of hillbillies, the Sabines, who lived nearby. They invited a crowd of these outlanders to a festival, and at the height of the hoopla certain young Romans each grabbed an unmarried woman and made off with her.

The Sabines were either very good guests or profoundly slow-witted, because they did not kick up much of a fuss at first. They tried negotiating, but got no farther than the U.S. gets with Iran. It took them about two years to get a really good mad on and organize an army.  Back in Rome, all the young bucks who had captured a female were sternly cautioned by city fathers to treat their captives gently and to woo or seduce them. This apparently was a successful tactic because it produced a fine crop of babies.

When tempers finally reached a boiling point, the Sabine men roared into town and began belaboring the Romans with rustic gusto. There were plenty of flashing swords

Henri Matisse design: mediocre at best

then, and probably horses and spears, too. The battered Romans retreated to their citadel to make a last stand. At that moment the Sabine Women poured out of their houses and ran between the two armies holding their infants high, yelling for both sides to cool it. They dressed down their fathers and brothers royally for a tardy squabble which was upsetting the women’s domestic tranquility. When all the fuss and feathers subsided everyone agreed the Roman solution was probably a good arrangement after all, and the Sabines were incorporated into the new Rome.

Nicholas Poussin's "Abduction of the Sabine Women" still a little too violent

Jacques-Louis David depicts Sabine women stopping the fight

I don’t mean to imply all modern art is a work of the devil. Impressionists, for example, turned out some top-flight pieces the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Those artists creating flat pattern designs have contributed much to the beautification of floor tiles, draperies, wallpaper and clothing. Controversy ensues when their works tend to leave the realm of decoration and pretend to be much more than they are. Here I have in mind toilers such as Henri Matisse whose fuzzy impressionistic designs have been elevated to an undeserved level.

Modern art became a therapeutic agent during my enrollment at the Memphis Academy of Arts in 1948. We had a former faculty member, Dorothy Sturm, who left the academy for several years to work as an illustrator of medical textbooks. Upon return to her old job, Dorothy found herself so uptight and inhibited that she was unable to paint or teach with any degree of freedom or comfort. Several faculty members suggested she take a fling at non-objective art, which included slopping paint on canvas with a knife, then crushing ashes and feathers into the goo. The resulting work was hideous, but the cure was effective. She went right back to oil painting as well as in the good, old days.

There you have it: even the worst of modern art can serve as first aid for the mind.

The classic wetback maneuver: floating on inflated bags

Illegal immigration – there’s a thought-provoking subject. And the Gulf oil spill, even more so.

Both provoke me to think that the federal government – as it is haphazardly stitched together – would have trouble organizing and policing a two-car funeral.

Concerning immigration, it has been apparent for decades (except perhaps for the most deeply brain-damaged among us) that the federal bureau of that name, and its policies, are one of history’s great disasters. Ten to 12 million illegal aliens among us stand as proof.  Despite this, the Obama administration still insists on command of the problem, threatening lawsuits to states like Arizona which organize minimal defenses against the horde of Mexicans flooding across its borders.

It is cosmic foul-ups like this which have caused me to desert our daily newspaper’s comic pages and seek my biggest laughs from the news columns. And it gets even better.

Even when Obama latches onto a good idea he manages to screw it up through the complexity, dogma, and idiocy of his own administrators. One such bright idea is the current crackdown on businesses and farms hiring illegal aliens. Fair enough. It is considerably more than George Bush did in office, and if pursued with the requisite vigor it might solve the problem once and for all.

Enter the Department of Homeland Security which has begun auditing records of companies suspected of hiring wetbacks. This agency, which was founded to protect us from Islamic madmen, is turning its artillery on industrious Catholics hailing from south of the border. Its legal underpinning is the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 which prohibits employers from hiring illegal immigrants. Key part of the law compels employers to demand documents from prospective workers to establish their identities and nationalities. Documents might be driver’s licenses, social security cards, birth certificates, voter registration cards, passports, state and local IDs, school card with photo, or cards issued by federal, state and local entities.

Cartoon takes poke at George Bush

Enter the Department of Justice, operating under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which guarantees that “all individuals authorized to work in the U.S. have the right to seek employment without the added burden of special rules or document demands based on their citizenship status or national origin.” That’s cute, isn’t it? That part of the law might have been written by the illegals themselves. If employers ask applicants for too many documents they risk the wrath of Justice.

And this is no moot or theoretical legal point. Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for civil rights, says his department is gearing up to enforce the INA provisions. In fact Justice Department has gone on a hiring spree aimed at increasing by 25 percent the number of lawyers and investigators to probe INA violations.

Companies face a maximum civil penalty of $1,100 for each person compelled to produce “too many” documents. Garland Sales Inc., a rug manufacturer in Dalton, Ga., decided an applicant needed more than a driver’s license and a social security card to be hired. One is easily procured and the other often counterfeited.  The applicant had suspiciously limited language skills, so when he could not produce a green card they cancelled his job offer. Down comes the Justice Department and Garland Sales is locked in a lawsuit.

The Portland, Ore., outlet of Morton’s Restaurant Group, Inc. made a serious mistake when it asked two non-citizen applicants for more documentation than their social security cards. After working a time both were fired until the company could review their documentation. To the rescue comes the Justice Department, which ruled that Morton’s had hired other workers on the strength of their social security cards.

Girl smuggled in behind car dashboard

In a settlement Morton’s agreed to provide back pay of $2,880 and $5,715.62, plus a civil penalty of $2,200, and to train its workers in “federal protections for workers against citizenship-status and national-origin discrimination.”

I had to laugh. It was too delicious. When Justice finally gets the social security card established as the only needful employment document, coyote flesh-smugglers will be in paradise. They will set up a big printing operation grinding out fake cards, and poof! There goes the Obama immigration crackdown. Of course, that might be the president’s real objective: make the yokels believe in your illegal alien reform, while admitting more millions of wetbacks to vote for you in future elections.

Let’s see: If you ask for no documents from a suspicious applicant, Homeland Security cracks down on you. If you ask for too many (and how much is too many?) then Justice Department is on your tail. Suppose the employer wants to chuck the whole business and not hire anyone remotely resembling an illegal alien. Well, that’s a fast track to suicide. There are all sorts of equal opportunity bureaucrats infesting the federal government, armed with platoons of attack lawyers.

Is this “Mission Impossible” scenario beginning to remind you of the famous novel, Catch-22, which celebrated paradoxical military logic thusly:  The bomber pilot is flying regular combat missions, which proves he is crazy. But if he asks to be relieved, this proves he is sane. So, he will have to keep flying missions.

Stars of the BP Gulf oil eruption were two eminent bureaucracies, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. The F&WS claims suzerainty over all the nation’s non-human life forms outside of zoos, homes, and pet shops. EPA demands obeisance in the matter of substances which might enter our ears, eyes, mouths, and noses, or assault us via temperature, sound, radiation, and vibration. One fancies their bureaucratic fiefdom may someday expand until they are in charge of all perilous particles entering from outer space, including asteroids.

As the British Petroleum crisis droned on, workers fighting the eruption began using chemical dispersants to scatter oil sheens above and below the Gulf’s surface. Stop, demanded the EPA:  dispersants used weren’t up to agency safety standards. Work had to be halted until better chemicals were found. In Louisiana the Fish and Wildlife commandos blew the whistle on workers pumping sand from a wetlands to form a berm blocking oncoming oil. It might endanger swamp creatures, ruled the F&WS.

Another victim of federal fumbling was Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama who had been promised a blocking boom to secure the mouth of Mobile Bay. It was shipped instead to Louisiana where great minds judged the danger to be more dire.

President Kennedy and Jackie in Dallas

“Where were you when?…” It’s a fascinating memory game. Where were you when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated? When World War II began?  When those planes hit the Twin Towers on 9/11?

Adolf Hitler

It illustrates the fact that most of our days are not significant enough to recall. Memories have to be jogged by some event, a war, disaster, or a murder. But just recalling the event isn’t enough.  Our event has to be so stunning, horrifying, or thrilling that  you can remember where you were at the time and often what you said or thought.

I can’t answer for anyone else, but the moment President  Kennedy was shot I was in my basement, sitting on the floor.  I had stepped through the basement door into the dark interior, and my foot landed on the tines of a carelessly placed rake whose handle rose swiftly and smacked me smartly between the eyes. I collapsed and assumed the sitting lotus position for what seemed like ages, counting the comets and stars shooting before my eyes.

Suddenly there was Charlotte in the doorway, looking terribly dramatic as she does when there’s an announcement in the offing.

“Jerry,” she said, “the president’s been shot.”

“Big deal,” I replied. It was the only comment I could muster at the moment.

Not all my historical recollections were that violent. The news of the shooting of former Alabama Governor and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972 came as I was leafing through books in a library branch. Someone had left a radio on in a nearby office and it broke the news.

When man landed on the moon I was watching television like everyone else.

When Jonas Salk announced his invention of the polio vaccine, I was reading an Associated Press teletype machine and caught the first AP flash.

Massive explosion during Pearl Harbor attack

The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King in 1968 was a tad more interesting. I had been teaching two of my young sons how to build a crystal radio set, a device popular in the 1920s which requires no batteries or electrical connections. We had finished the work and I was tuning in stations when I heard the bulletin of King’s death from Memphis. The kids got to listen to the story as it developed on a replica of the earliest radio receiver.

The start of World War II in 1939 was not thunderous enough to impact my 10-year-old intellect. The fact that Adolf Hitler had invaded Poland I learned later from overhearing adult conversations. But when Hitler went roaring into France in 1940, ah, that was different. Our teacher had studied in France and was definitely pro-Allies. Her stirring speech informed us the French were in mortal danger and we must send them “thousands and thousands of airplanes.”

All that proffered aircraft didn’t seem to help much. The Germans just kept invading and finally the French surrendered, which caused great indignation among us school kids. We had been reared on heroic tales of World War I, the gallant fight against the Huns which the Allies waged until final victory. It seemed this younger generation that Britain and France fielded wasn’t up to the standard of its fathers.

But for sheer assault on the memory lobes, nothing can top Pearl Harbor. Even after all the years that have passed between today and December 7, 1941, the sights, colors, tensions, smells and tactile sensations of that Sunday are still with me. I had come home from church, and lay my 12-year-old frame down on my mother’s red velveteen couch to listen to radio. The really entertaining programs like Jack Benny and Fred Allen didn’t come on until later on the day. Meanwhile, I had to be satisfied with big band music from the Hit Parade. Mother was cooking up Sunday dinner; the delectable odors of pork chops, mashed potatoes, field peas, and banana pudding wafted through the house.

George Wallace

Then came a break in the program and a news bulletin which carried shock, awe, and confusion. Where was Pearl Harbor and why should the Japanese want to bomb it? I let out a whoop which brought the rest of the family running. Throughout the rest of that day and into the night we listened to news from Hawaii plus analysis and background from Washington and New York.  And as we listened we grew more angry, fighting angry. So when President Franklin D. Roosevelt went before Congress the next day with his “Day of Infamy” speech, the Proctor family had already voted for war with Japan.

Strangely enough, I can’t recall what I was doing when hearing of President Roosevelt’s death . The shock to my nervous system must have been too great. He was the only president we kids had ever known; I remember discussing it later with friends who were as sad and confused as me. What were we going to do? What would happen to the country? It took days and weeks for the black miasma of despair to lift. It helped that we had a new president in office and that we were winning the war like gangbusters.

Dr. King

The day the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan is an easy one to recall. I was sitting on a park bench in New Orleans trying to not look like a bum. On a teen whim I had hitchhiked from Wynne, Arkansas, to The Big Easy with only $50 in my wallet (yes, you could do that back then even with wartime inflation).  But the enticements of New Orleans had quickly left me flat broke.

While waiting for the family to wire me enough money to return home, I made the acquaintance of a soldier who had a few bucks in his pocket and was willing to share. After a breakfast of hard French bread and coffee we headed for the only free entertainment in town, a park bench. Uncomfortably we noticed police were drifting through the park, arresting sleeping transients and hauling them off to the drunk tank.

I grabbed a discarded newspaper from a trash bin and we began learnedly perusing the front page. My ruse worked; the cops passed us by. Then I noticed the huge main headline on page 1 informing us that the U.S. had dropped an “atomic bomb” on a Japanese city that I had never heard of – Hiroshima. What was an “atomic bomb?” The soldier confessed himself at a total loss. I guessed it must have been a frightfully small bomb, because atoms are unbelievably tiny.

Normandy Invasion, one of my favorite jolts

We gave up speculating and went to the Western Union office where I picked up my wired money and paid the soldier back. After a few more days of vacationing I caught a train to Memphis which offered an unexpected luxury – a seat for the entire ride. I arrived of all times on VJ Day, just as the city went totally mad. Drunken mobs were roaming the streets whooping that the war was over; Japan had surrendered. There wasn’t a hotel or a boarding house room to rent for any amount of money. I spent the night sleeping under a bush in Riverside Park before catching a train home the next day.

All in all, my favorite “where were you when” episode occurred on June 6, 1944, D-Day, the invasion of Nazi Europe. The government had built a small prisoner of war camp in my home town to incarcerate German soldiers. We kids were fond of dropping by the camp to chat with American guards and those Germans who spoke English.

Anxiety had been rising among Wynne’s citizens the past few months with anticipation of D-Day. One of my teachers, whose husband was with the Army in Britain, grew so tense as the great date approached that she broke out in a rash from head to foot. Everywhere one went there was only one topic of conversation: when is it going to happen? It was certainly weighing on my mind that day as I stood in the camp guard house, swapping tales with the GIs as the radio played soft tunes in the background.

`Suddenly there was a station break on the radio and we heard the long-awaited announcement: the largest invasion in world history was on. I was stunned for a moment, unable to think or move. Then details began gushing from the radio, and the thought hit me: ‘I’ve got to get the news to Dad.’ I loped out of the guard house, through the gate, and ran the whole mile back to downtown. Covered with sweat and heaving for breath I burst into Dad’s store roaring the good news.

He looked at me calmly and said, “You know, I’ve got a radio here, too.”

It was my introduction to the omnipotent efficacy of modern electronic communication.

The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press – the right and left of

Sarah Palin

American journalism – both agree: our BP leak transcends by far the fabled Exxon ship disaster of March 24, 1989 which knocked Alaska on its financial keister.

Well, it is, and it isn’t. On paper it should be the worst man-made damage to the ecology ever inflicted. The Exxon Valdez was only one ship with a paltry 53 million gallons of petroleum, only 11 million of which leaked onto Alaska’s shoreline, while the BP imbroglio features a hole in the ocean bottom spewing up unlimited quantities of oil.

But so far, thanks to preventative techniques such as blocking booms and dispersant chemicals, damage to the Louisiana shoreline can’t yet compare to the misery Alaska suffered. Missing are those myriad of photographs of Alaskan birds and animals covered with tar, or herds of panicked ecological volunteers scrubbing beaches with rags and tissues. This doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of misery ahead. With an unlimited amount of oil shooting up from a hole in the ocean floor, the possibility of unfunny events is endless.

What is not missing are the gangs of treasure-hunting lawyers who rush in after every disaster looking for someone to sue. As of this posting, 130 suits have been filed against BP and its contractor. A word search of the internet reveals law-firm blogs assuring the public that: “Individuals and businesses impacted by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill resulting from the BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion are entitled to collect damages for loss of income and profits and our oil spill lawyers can help. Such damage claims are allowed under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.” And all this legal frenzy comes before anyone knows what, if anything, caused the disaster.

Completely unexpected and with few defenses available, the Exxon spill of 1989 quickly inundated Prince William Sound, then spread to cover 10,000 square miles of sea and 1,500 miles of Alaska shoreline. In her book, Going Rogue, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin described the result:

“…the effects rippled through the state like aftershocks. Todd (husband) knew immediately that it would have an effect on all wild Alaska fish products, which today make up an $8 billion industry and produce more than 62 percent of all the United States’ wild seafood.

“‘There will be a taint on our fish, too, Sarah,’ he told me, referring to the harvest from Bristol Bay, as well as fisheries farther north. ‘Buyers will assume all Alaska salmon is oiled. Watch prices drop this summer.’

“He was right, fishermen watched helplessly as fish processors posted the price they ‘d pay for our wild salmon caught that season; it plummeted by 65 percent, from $2.35 to 80 cents a pound. The fish still fetched ten times that much more once it hit markets in the Lower 48 and overseas, but processors insisted they could pay the fishermen only minimal prices for a product perceived as ‘tainted.’

Exxon oil spill meets oily Alaskan rocks

“With the polluted Sound un-fishable and incomes dried up, banks repossessed scores of commercial fishing vessels, leaving hundreds of people jobless, unable to pay their mortgages and other bills. Entire commercial salmon and herring fisheries closed after the disaster. And fallout yielded more fallout – not only bankruptcies and foreclosures, but (due to poor choices sometimes made in the face of adverse circumstances) divorces, alcohol abuse, and even suicides.”

And that was just for openers. Eventually the spiraling waves of economic disaster impacted nearly every Alaskan in greater or lesser degree. Ahead were years and decades of court fights in an attempt to get Exxon-Mobil to pay for the mess it had created. Five days after the disaster Exxon publicly vowed to make all damage claims good. Twenty years later they still hadn’t made that promise good. Sarah described Big Oil opponents in these battles thusly:

“When you deal with oil executives you have to remember that they are used to winning. They also spend a lot of time in foreign countries dealing with leaders who carry pistols and whose bodyguards carry AK-47s. Meanwhile, the executives themselves are armed with bottomless bank accounts and highly trained platoons of fire-breathing lawyers. …A $20 million fine? Pocket change.”

Despite their dedication to winning, the macho oil moguls finally tasted defeat after 20 years of litigation. Sarah, who had been a young mother-to-be when the Exxon Valdez ran aground, grew up in those decades; as governor she got to deliver the coup de grace to Exxon. Alaska’s attorney general took the case to the U.S. Supreme court and won. Alaskans got some of their losses back.

Some of Sarah’s most intense battles as governor were against Big Oil, and, co-incidentally enough, British Petroleum. “Prior to the election,” she wrote, “it had been revealed that BP had been trying to save money for years by cutting corners on oil pipeline maintenance on the North Slope. This was very serious: leaks and spills from corroded pipelines were all too common and harmed the environment plus led to production slowdowns.

“So, one of my first priorities was to establish the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office (PSIO). With creation of the PSIO, Alaska became the first state to require industry operators to document their compliance with maintenance and quality assurance standards, and to share that information with the state.” (Seems Sarah and Alaska were somewhat ahead of the federal government in that regard.)

I have to admit, my attitude toward British Petroleum has been a real love-hate thingy. They do make suspicious and stingy moves, like the oil pipeline leaks and the alleged cost-cutting caper on their drilling rig which exploded and created the current international hoorah. But at the same time, they ransack the world for crude oil, pack it on tankers and bring it to this country at a reasonable price for the laudable purpose of keeping my Ford truck humming.

No one else – environmentalists, politicians, journalists, Congress, or Barrack Obama – have offered for love or money to take over this job. And until someone does, I’ll have to get along with BP and its fellow oily moguls. My heap won’t operate on sunshine, wind power, hydrogen or electricity. Methane is nice, but I’m not equipped for it, and there aren’t many natural gas stations around. Alcohol might make it move in slow, herky-jerky fashion – the same way it makes me function.

Don’t talk to me about Buck Rogers when I’m stuck with 20^th century technology.

Bast cat goddess

My favorite historian has always been Herodotus, that 5^th century BC teller of old wives tales, collector of legends (urban and otherwise), belittler of the patently bogus, organizer of amazing twaddle, and story-relater beyond compare. This enterprising Greek traveled the known world of his time collecting stories and tales, sifting them and ruling on their veracity or lack thereof.

He solved a cat mystery for me just this past week – more like a cat slander, because it related to the alleged domestic deficiency of tomcats. I have countless times been told with great assurance that female cats will not let male cats near their litters because toms will kill their kittens. They do this, my informants say, to bring the female back into heat, so the males can commit more whoopee.

I have never seen this happen in all my time on this planet. Male cats that I have introduced to small kittens have invariably hissed in fright and run away. When it comes to a choice between a legend and the evidence of my own eyes, then the legend has to sit in a corner wearing a dunce cap. Although the tale is as false as an Al Gore climate change fantasy, still the question remains: where did it originate? I had always assumed it was a product of the Middle Ages, you know, cats as familiars of witches. “Bad cats; they probably eat their young.”

But Herodotus set me straight. It originated in ancient Egypt of all places, cat-lover central. As our Greek scholar relates it:

Alleged Herodotus bust

“Of all the animals that live with men there are great numbers, and would be many more but for accidents which befall the cats. For when the females have produced young they are no longer in the habit of going to the males, and these seeking to be united with them are not able.

“To this end then they contrive as follows — they either take away by force or remove secretly the young from the females and kill  them (but after killing they do not eat them), and the females being deprived of their young and desiring more, therefore come to the males, for it is a creature that is fond of its young.”

It is possible some Egyptian jokesters got together and decided to have a little fun with the visiting Greek, who seemed to write down everything he was told as gospel. So they fed him this tall yarn, plus another cat whopper:

“Moreover when a fire occurs,” Herodotus writes, “the cats seem to be divinely possessed; for while the Egyptians stand at intervals and look after the cats, not taking any care to extinguish the fire, the cats slipping through or leaping over the men, jump into the fire; and when this happens, great mourning comes upon the Egyptians.”

That part about the mourning is perfectly plausible. Egypt was the one nation in history where felines held a status never achieved before or since. It is possible that cats joined the human family between five and six thousand years ago when Egyptian life hinged on the yearly grain supply which could be ravaged by rats and mice. The feline’s anti-rodent capability probably was the foundation of its popularity.

That repute grew over the centuries until Egypt assigned god-like qualities to their house pets and created a special goddess, Bast, to look over them. Bast took the form of a fine lady with a cat’s head. She was also the patron goddess of firefighters, because of an ancient belief that if a cat ran through a burning building it would draw the flames after it. Not content with this divine protection, Egyptians passed secular laws to guard these animals, making the killing of a cat punishable by death.

The death of a cat was a family tragedy. Everyone in the house would shave his eyebrows as a sign of deep mourning, and the cat was often mummified and buried with both honors and expensive treasures. Egypt’s belief in an afterlife carried over in such burials – mummified rats and mice have been found in cat tombs.

Bast’s center of worship was in Bubastis in the eastern Delta. Her chief festivals were celebrated in April and May. Herodotus describes them:

“When the Egyptians travel to Bubastis, they do so in this manner: men and women sail together, and in each boat there are many persons of both sexes. Some of the women shake their rattles and some of the men blow their pipes during the whole journey, while others sing and clap their hands. If they pass a town on the way, some of the women land and shout and jeer at the local women, while others dance and create a disturbance. They do this at every town on the Nile. When they arrive at Bubastis, they begin the festival with great sacrifices, and on this occasion, more wine is consumed than during the whole of the rest of the year.”

Herodotus seems a little too credulous when recording many of the tall tales told by Egyptians. He swallowed a report of the winged snakes of Arabia, which flapped into Egypt every year. They were met at the border by the national bird, the Ibis, and slaughtered. Our scholar fell for this shaggy snake story because the locals showed him a pile of serpent bones as proof.

I guess sometimes you can’t trust the evidence of your own eyes.

"For God, Gold and Glory" depicts Columbus and crew

Strangest thing, America gets much better press from its immigrants than from all its over-educated bookworms, its news and entertainment media, or its alleged academics. Often these tired-and-poor newcomers sing our praises louder than even our most privileged native fauna – the billionaires.

Just follow a crowd of Mexican illegals around any Wal-Mart super center. They radiate an aura of Sir Galahad finding the Holy Grail, Orphan Annie regaining Daddy Warbucks, or a thirsty camel falling into the Nile River.

They don’t wander, like our acquisitive native zombies, through the merchandise, eyes fixed on a shopping list, or blinded by desire for that one big bargain. Nope, it’s fiesta time for Latinos. Everything from frozen foods, to new wave clothes to the bakery is a brand new miracle — a treasure to savor and celebrate.

Igor Babailov

A much different new citizen is Igor V. Babailov, who did not arrive in typical immigrant fashion penniless aboard a tramp steamer while devouring stale burritos. Quite the contrary.  A child prodigy, Babailov attended Russia’s Surikov Academy of Fine Arts for gifted children where he was graduated with honors. Later he was graduated from the Surikov Academy of Fine Arts which has produced such international masters as James McNeill Whistler, Ilya Repin, and Valentin Serov.

Igor had already amassed an international reputation as a portrait painter before he ever departed Russia. For reasons unknown he first chose to settle in Canada. Then, perhaps spurred by the Canadian penchant for the quiet blah life, he pulled up stakes and moved his studio to New York City, where he has been making big artistic waves ever since.

In return, Babailov has sent this country a thank-you note in the form of a painting. Titled For God, Gold and Glory, it depicts Columbus and his crew, aboard their flagship, Santa Maria, at the moment they first sighted the New World. The work’s intense spirit of high jubilation, vast relief, and sense of having accomplished a feat whose importance is beyond imagination, is apparent on most every celebratory face.  One crewman reaches high as though thanking heaven; another weeps; a third appears stricken dumb.

Oh, there are a few dissenting expressions: a suspicious monk turns aside; beside him a soldier glowers, as though sensing danger in that green shoreline. At the center of this emotional melee stands Christopher Columbus, the admiral who gambled everything and came up one of history’s big winners. His expression is one of quiet assurance: he knew he had been right all along, but it’s nice to have it demonstrated right before one’s own erstwhile doubting and grumbling crew.

None of the later nattering, cheese-paring criticism of the voyage is present. It is true Columbus was aiming for Asia and instead hit the New World. Equally true is the fact he misnamed the natives “Indians,” then made some of them slaves. Nothing unusual about that. It’s what one did with savages in 1492.  Some have striven to lessen Columbus’ achievement by asserting Vikings may have landed here first. So what? The Norse visitation — if it did occur — had no more impact on world history than if a flock of sea gulls had dropped in for a weekend visit, then returned home. Columbus’ trip was the only one that counted. And at  that supremely effervescent moment caught in Babailov’s painting, the only thing that mattered was the cosmic joy gamblers experience when they hit the biggest of long-shot jackpots.

My first view of For God, Gold and Glory touched a long-forgotten memory of my tour through the nation’s capitol building back in the 1970s.  This huge edifice contains many arcane and little-frequented hallways and crannies lined with paintings and statuaries, presumably donated by politicians, because most of the “artwork” deals with members of that tribe. The one memorable piece I encountered was a statue of the late Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo (D-Miss.) standing straight in suit and tie, one hand extended palm up, as though accepting a bribe (or perhaps about to give someone a “low five”). Admittedly, the sculptor had captured the essence of Bilbo, but one wonders if all that stone chiseling was worth the effort.

I couldn’t help speculating whether Babailov’s patriotic creation might not add a figurative explosion of spirit to the capitol building’s dark capillaries, although For God, Gold and Glory deserves to be displayed under the dome.

In the past 20 years Babailov has painted portraits of some of the world’s business, social and political elites. His commissions include U.S. President George W. Bush, Russian President V.V. Putin, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. In 1996, he organized the first official delegation of North American artists to Russia in conjunction with the Russian Duma and the Union of Artists.

Babailov hews strictly to the traditions laid down by famous artists of the Renaissance through the 19^th century, classical realism. There are no scrambled Picasso-like portraits here, no paint orgies, no splashes or splotches of non-objectivism.  Instead one observes respect for creation, appreciation for the world’s beauty without alterations or disfigurement, plus mastery of anatomy, perspective, composition, and brushwork coupled with a superb drawing skill.

“I love the life that surrounds me,” Babailov says. “I respect its history and I admire its future. To preserve it for our descendants the way it is, in its truth and beauty, is my duty and my goal as an artist.”

Potato Famine Memorial in Dublin, Ireland

For the great Gaels of Ireland

Are the men that God made mad.

For all their wars are merry,

And all their songs are sad.

—G.K. Chesterton

Leave it to Chesterton to trumpet the English party line, stereotyping those capricious Irish drunkards as half barbarian, half poet and completely mad. Like most Englishmen he omits to mention it was primarily his nation which turned Ireland into a melodramatic funny farm.

Now Irish author Thomas Cahill fires back at the British in his riveting book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. Chesterton wrote flippantly when describing the Irish, Cahill observes, but he was downright kind when compared with other opinions.

Victorian English Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli put it more energetically and in a way with which the average Briton of that time would agree:

“This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain, and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their idea of human felicity is an alteration of clannish broils and coarse idolatry (Catholicism). Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.”

“Dear old Dizzy,” as  Queen Victoria called him, might well have been describing an Ireland before the fall of the Roman Empire. It was certainly a rough place then, a land ruled by  some 51 “kings,” a mystical nation without cities and ministered to spiritually by Celtic Druids. Human and animal sacrifice were in vogue, and there wasn’t a single god or goddess in the Celtic pantheon who would not give a child nightmares. War and raiding were two of the Island’s more enjoyable pastimes. Irish freebooters in boats combed the English coast for slaves. Ireland’s national hero was a mythical super-warrior named Cuchulainn (pronounced koo-hool-n), a fighter in the mold of Achilles, Hector, David and Lancelot, all rolled into one mighty lump of muscle  — but with a more earthy, randy personality.

Saint Patrick

All this began to change with remarkable speed on 401 A.D. when an Irish raiding party captured a Romanized Briton named Patricius and brought him back to serve as a shepherd slave under a local “king” named Miliucc. In the cold and hunger of the rugged Antrim hills, the 16-year-old Patricius forsook the tepid faith of his parents, prayed fervently and became a religious visionary. Six years later when he escaped to England he found himself unable to forget his experiences. A dream compelled him to return to Ireland, which he did after brushing up his education and getting himself ordained a bishop.

The time and place were indeed opportune. On the continent, the Roman Empire was imploding. Vast swarms of barbarians ravaged the land, destroying libraries, palaces, homes and monasteries, the very foundations of civilization. England was under siege from the Germanized Angles and Saxons. Only Ireland stood safely out of time and space like the mythical Scottish town of Brigadoon, ripe for civilizing. But even with this advantage, it wasn’t an easy job. In old age Patricius admitted: “every day I am ready to be murdered, betrayed, enslaved — whatever may come my way.”

Fortunately he possessed not only an impossible mission but also a message tailor-made for the Irish, one quite different from the ascetic, doctrinaire philosophy of Roman Catholicism. Not surprisingly Patrick, as the Irish called him, thundered against slavery, centuries before Western nations followed suit. He stood up for the rights of women, declaring: “But it is the women kept in slavery who suffer the most — and who keep their spirits up despite the menacing and terrorizing they must endure. The Lord gives grace to his many handmaids; and though they are forbidden to do so, they follow him with backbone.”

He inveighed against violence in all its forms. He cleverly avoided trying to reform Ireland’s free-wheeling sexual mores, instead setting himself, his priests and his nuns up as examples of abstinence. Like Jesus, he had an affinity for society’s misfits and outcasts, which suited Irishmen right down to the ground. They had more than their share of ascetics and Mad Hatters. Patrick also endeared himself to his countrymen as a fighter, skirmishing verbally with Druidic priests, murderous warlords, or insufferable English and Roman Christians. Most importantly, he preached education and scholarship to a nation of illiterates.

“In his last years,” writes Cahill, “he could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central and eastern Ireland.” Lacking cities as a base, Patrick placed his bishoprics next door to local kings, for he hoped to keep an eye on the most powerful raiders and rustlers to limit their depredations. Within his lifetime, or shortly after his death, the Irish slave trade halted. Murder and tribal warfare declined.

Within a single generation Ireland went from illiteracy to scholarship and its monasteries became centers of learning outstripping anything on the devastated continent. Unlike orthodox Christian clerics, Irish monks eagerly soaked up pagan science and classics, unaware that many of their continental churchly brethren believed a reading of Cicero could condemn one to Hell. In time Irish missionary monks traveled to the continent, establishing a great swath of monastic learning centers from Ghent in Belgium to Taranto south of Rome. They penetrated eastward as far as Kiev. Worthy successors to Patrick were found in men such as Columcille, poet and warrior-monk, who converted the rugged Scots and scary Picts to Christianity. Another was Columbanus, who in 25 years established no fewer than 60 monasteries across a territory which would become in time, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

In that benighted era,  each monastery established became another light for civilization, as monks strove to preserve the literature, history, and science of the dying ancient world.

The Irish influence on Europe’s royal courts was no better typified than on Christmas Day 800 A.D. when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. His imperial majesty, unable to write though he could read a tad, was puzzled by the mystery of solar eclipses. Dungal, an Irish recluse at St. Denis, instructed the emperor in this abstruse matter. Another resident at the Frankish court was the Irishman Dicuil, the first medieval geographer, who kept Charlemagne posted on the world about him. Still another Irish courtier was Sedulius Scotus, who advised the emperor on statecraft.

“Europe would have hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down,” Cahill writes. “Beyond that, there would have perished in the west not only literacy, but all the habits of mind that encourage thought. And when Islam began its medieval expansion, it would have encountered scant resistance to its plans — just scattered tribes of animists, ready for a new identity.”

And that is how the Irish saved civilization.

But by the time Charlemagne’s successor, Charles the Bald, was being instructed by yet another Irishman, John Scotus Eriugena, Ireland itself was under siege. Viking raiders were striking all along the Emerald Isle’s coasts, attacking monasteries which had by now waxed rich and were staffed by monks grown sleek and too civilized to fight back. On the Ides of June, 793 A.D., Vikings swarmed into the crown jewel of Patrick’s education empire, the monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumberland.  Monks were stripped and tortured; and the raiders came again in 801 to set the buildings afire. In 806 they killed scores of clerics, and in 867 they burned the rebuilt abbey. By 875 the survivors had had enough; they departed the premises for good.

One by one the great centers of learning dissolved into ashes. Viking conquerors did give Ireland its first real cities, places like Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Wexford and Waterford. But in the process they destroyed Irish cultural leadership of Europe forever.

When the Norsemen were finally ousted, Ireland experienced a relatively benevolent invasion of Normans, followed by a more severe incursion of Elizabethan English in the 16^th century. These soldiers of Elizabeth I cut down the forests to get at Irishmen fighting them guerrilla-style,  and in frustration contemplated inflicting genocide on the locals. The Calvinist troopers of Oliver Cromwell almost achieved that goal when they ravished the land in the 17^th century.

In the 18^th century the English struck again with the spirit-crushing Penal Laws which denied Catholics the rights of citizens. But it took the famines of the 19^th century, the Great Hunger, to finish Ireland off. The Penal Laws had driven out the last remnant of the country’s nobility. Now it was the common people’s turn. As Her Majesty’s government sat on its hands, one million died of hunger and another million started a great migration to America and Australia. By 1914 another four million had fled the country, reducing Ireland’s population by a third.

Cahill notes “It would take the Irish cultural and political movements of the 20^th century to give back to this devastated population a semblance of its self-respect.”

And that, Chesterton, is why “all their songs are sad.”

Cahill has an amusing and thoughtful writing style which is a pleasure to read but is the very devil to review. He wanders the glens and heaths of European history like an Irish piper, sure in his art, scattering a melody of hilarious anecdotes, unpronounceable Gaelic names and factual history in his wake, oblivious of us drudges fighting to keep up and make sense of his journey. Nevertheless, we’re glad we came along for the ride.