"Sarah Palin Is America," Michael Moriarty Calls It Correctly

Any people who agree that the killing of a child is choice, will also agree that two gentleman can procreate, that America can only win by losing, that up is down and round is square have been educated pretty badly.

When Washington sent Cornwallis and his redcoats out of the trenches at Yorktown, the Crown forces bandsmen played a song -"The World Turned Upside Down." The Monarchy was sent packing. The colonists fought to become Americans. The Americans fought the British again, as well as Napoleon's Navy and the Barbary Pirates to maintain a flawed but free democratic republic that eventually ironed out the slavery issues with the blood of Americans.

After two World Wars, a catastrophic economic and climate disaster in the 1930's, the America meant to be was built in the 1950's - a revolution in life style. That lifestyle brought ease and comfort to the Nation. Wars were no longer declared, but remained horrific. Korean and Vietnam war veterans returned to comments from neighbors and even family members, "Where have you been?" Bleeding.

"No matter, we have a new two-car garage, color TV, and free college tuition. Only dummies go in the Service."

Perhaps that ease gave us too much time to worry about ourselves. I know that I am about self-absorbed as one can get - well, maybe not always.

We allowed Roe v. Wade. To me that is akin to question asked of returning servicemen -"Where have you been? Out of sight; out of mind." Out of mind can mean madness.

Actor, musician, journalist and defender of the innocent unborn Michael Moriarty wrote a powerful endorsement of Sarah Palin in Big Hollywood. I agree with Mr. Moriarty.

Lincoln predicted that America would not be destroyed by a foreign power. If she dies, it will be by suicide.
Sarah is the only life raft America has right now. Any other candidate for the Republican Party, Romney in particular, will eventually be in the back room cutting deals with a virulently Progressive Democratic Party, a radically Leftist’s poison that has, with Obama, proven its own promise: “the fundamental transformation of the United States of America.”
After four years of Obama, the Dr. Jeckyll of America has already become Mr. Hyde. This radical experiment with a known Marxist in the Presidency?
Suicide.
Ms. Palin has said she will announce in the near future.
Should she even announce her withdrawal, I trust these words and those of others might help her to reconsider.
Sarah Palin is America.
America at her most beautiful, her most honest, her most simply eloquent and her most resilient.
Resilience is what America needs now.
Without Sarah Palin as President, America cannot bounce back.
Many might call a President Palin “bold medicine”.
With America on the edge of suicide, Sarah Palin is the “shock treatment” needed by the entirely moribund, self-defeated and suicidally depressed world.
The human race must either be pro-life or pro-death. Those “enlightened despots” who think otherwise and are certain we can “split hairs” into whole crops of Progressive New World Order Thinking?

Sarah Palin reminds me of the women that I admire. She is a happy person. She is happy because she is honest and unafraid. I always thought that Barack Obama was a pretty good politician, until he ran for President. He was elected to be sure. You can't take that from the man. Why he was elected will be the subject of history.


Well stated, Mr. Moriarty. I do not believe that Michael Moriarty is too much concerned about criticism. We still have the vote.

Michael Moriarty & Dennis Byrne -On Public Intellectuals and Marriage: Defense of 1st Principles

"I have concluded that to be an intellectual is to reach for an entirely different planet than the one most of us live on. Certainly to be an intellectual is to create another language of sorts.I understand the impulse, having been a lifelong, shameless dreamer." Michael Moriarty, Ottawa Life Magazine

"Few if any supporters of gay marriage demand as a matter of central concern that each gay partner be automatically recognized as the parent of any child generated by the other."  Dennis Byrne Chicago Tribune


God, in his Eternal sense of humor, has seen fit to allow me to breath and also to connect,, converse and commiserate with intellectuals fired with fierce fortitude. Fortitude is moral strength founded in a belief or faith beyond one's self that defines all subsequent actions and intellectual positions regardless of outcomes.

Murder and killing are very different.  One is an act of desperation and the other an act of necessity.  A woman and a man are very different, in most cases.  That difference is a necessity to human generation.  President Obama is not only America's First Abortionist, but also America's First Gay, because public intellectuals have said so.  I am sure that Barack Obama would wildly object to either claim made on his behalf, by the people who fund, support, worship and obey his every waking thought, as a matter of Pragmatism - saying anything, at anytime, for different reasons.  Pragmatism is the core, but very moveable, doctrine of  the American Intellectual.  Pragmatism denies 1st Principles - faith in God is the very First of 1st Principles*.  God is Inconvenient Truth.

I was told by a Jesuit of sound and sensible orthodoxy, Father Al, that any Catholic could never be admitted membership in the American Intellectual fraternity, based upon our demand for First Principles ( Ethics and Pseudo-Ethics).  Father Al let us working-stiffs know that we should swell with pride in the knowledge of this bar to the country club of parsers.

Progressives can not admit to eternal truths, because those truths block their end-runs around logic and rigor. Michael Moriarty, Chicago rooted actor, musician, composer and writer,nicely unmasks the clever masker in his recent article for Ottawa Life Magazine.

Mr. Moriarty reacts to an article by Professor Louis Menand of New York University, in The New Yorker.  This piece concerns the state of American higher education.  Prof. Menand's hobby-horse is the American public intellectual - the citizen-scholar who 'purifies' culture - Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Norman Mailer, and Pauline Kael to Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, Joan Walsh, and Alec Baldwin. 

"They (NY Intellectuals) played the role of purveying intellectual culture to a wider audience, and spoke to people outside their own fields.”

THEY made 1st Principles ( God and all of His Works) obscure enough for Ad Men and Ambulance Chasers, one step out of the cow shit in Wisconsin, want to be little Andre Malrauxs and feel the WILL to be proletarian.  Make six to seven figures selling Ban Roll-on Deodorant and write checks to the Black Panthers, SDS, and John Lindsey.  Our capitalist economy made them gentry, and the New Republic allowed them to play Atticus Finch - One Man's Murder of an Unborn Child is Another's Woman's Health Care, Scout. Who's to say? - with a self-satisfied snap of the store-bought galluses. 

Michael Moriarty picks the parsing Pragmatist's bones clean, because like most Catholic educated folks, he remembers what he has read before and applies scrutiny accordingly:

I first encountered Prof. Menand, . . . , as somewhat of an authority on the American literary and social critic Edmund Wilson, the rather intense-looking face to the left.
Louis Menand’s preface for Wilson’s To the Finland Station had the refreshing wisdom to include a very Russian warning about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Vladimir Nabokov’s remark that Lenin was “a glass of the milk of human kindness at the bottom of which was a dead rat.”
One assumes, however, that the publisher of To the Finland Station must have considered Menand a Wilson authority or at least an admirer of some sort.
In typically mystifying fashion, Menand says about his college dissertation on Edmund Wilson.
“I didn’t write about Wilson because he was an important figure for me, but because he was part of that phenomenon.”He means the “Modernist” phenomenon… or is it the “Post-Modernist” phenomenon?As a further glimpse into his dissertation, he says,

Prof. Louis Menand

“The writers who influenced me the most were Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Norman Mailer, and Pauline Kael. It wasn’t Edmund Wilson and it wasn’t Lionel Trilling, even though I certainly read them. When I was a graduate student, I thought about them as possible models, but when I look at what I have done since, they have not been particularly influential. The reason I like the writers I named is because they seem very sophisticated in seeing through issues about culture and ideas that actually is very like contemporary academic thinking. The thing about Wilson—that in the end is frustrating about him—is that he had no ability to think theoretically. In the few cases where he does, it is his least satisfactory work.”“The reason I like the writers I named is because they seem very sophisticated…“ “Sophisticated” is the seminal code word, I believe. All five of the writers achieved success, literary American triumph actually, without being necessarily branded as Communist.

Seeming is believing in Pragmatic Progressivism

In 1971, I was taught by a Jesuit priest and philosophy professor of sound and sensible orthodoxy, Father Al, that any Catholic could never be admitted membership in the American Intellectual fraternity, based upon our demand for First Principles ( Ethics and Pseudo-Ethics).  Father Al let us working-stiffs paying Loyola tuition know that we should swell with pride in the knowledge of this particular bar to the country club of Pragmatic parsers. 'Sometimes it is a gift to be refused admission,'  said the Missionary with a cold sore to boiling aboriginal stew pot. 

Progressives can not admit to eternal truths, because those truths block their end-runs around logic and rigor.

Around the time that Father Al was teaching Ethics to me and Mike Miller, Jim Molloy, Mike Stankewicz, Jack McNamara, Mary Kay Harvey and Stanley Jurich, the Temptaions were singing Just My Imagination, Running Away With Me.

Each day through my window I watch her as she passes by
I say to myself you're such a lucky guy,
To have a girl like her is truly a dream come true
out of all the fellows in the world she belongs to me.
But it was Just my imagination,
once again runnin' away with me.
It was just my imagination runnin' away with me. Oo
Soon we'll be married and raise a family (Oh yeah)
A cozy little home out in the country with two children maybe three.
I tell you I can visualize it all
this couldn't be a dream for too real it all seems;
But it was Just my imagination once again runnin' way with me.
Tell you it was just my imagination runnin' away with me.

Rigor.  Michael Moriarty is a dreamer in the mold of Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, Billy of Occam, Moses Maimonides, and John Scotus Erigenna.  Those medieval gents were the Temptin' T's of scholastic thought - four Brits and a Jew. Like them, the Temptations - African American scholastics - cut the veil between imagination and reality to happy conclusion - marriage is between a Man and Woman.  Celebrate that diversity in Holy Wedlock!

Dennis Byrne, another Jesuit educated writer, has heroically challenged the parsing pragmatists over Marriage.  The outcome of his position will be a cavalcade of idiotically molded screeching from peanut gallery in the comment page.  I'd wager that the five star estimate by robo-writers will assess Mr. Byrne's defense of Marriage between a Man and Woman at two stars by day's end and here's why:

Research and common sense indisputably validate that heterosexual marriage is uniquely good in itself, better for the children and essential for the common good.
That's why government has seen fit to regulate this singular institution. Government doesn't regulate all human relationships; you don't need a license to form a friendship or a court decree to dump a friend. If marriage didn't serve a unique public good, government protections of all of its parties wouldn't be required; it would be regarded as little more than two people living together.
This is not to say that every marriage must produce children or that children raised in different circumstances, e.g. adoption, in separated families or by gay partners, can't do as well as or better. Nor does it deny that a same-sex partnership can't bond into a permanent, caring relationship, as good as or better than can heterosexual couples. Traditional marriage is an ideal, and like all other ideals, in practice it can fall short of its lofty goals. That doesn't negate the importance of preserving the ideal.

The ideal is not pragmatic.  Never was, no how.  Seeming is all the believing Bruce Dold and Chicago Tribune editorial board require, Mr. Byrne.  It is easier to be Eric Zorn, Carol Marin, Mary Schmich, Neil Steinberg, and Steve Chapman in this cracker-chested burg these days, because they all write the exact same thing in every column - like the citizen-scholars Michael Moriarty unmasks in his recent article - these lightweights  purvey what passes for  intellectual culture to a wider audience.

Holding to First Principles and all that goes with them requires virtue- "Hence it is necessary for us to progress, following this procedure, from the things that are less clear by nature, but clearer to us, towards things that are clearer and better known by nature. "

Michael Moriarty and Dennis Byrne offer excellent examples of intellectual discernment and courage; not

Just my Imagination, running away with me.

  

* In every systematic inquiry (methodos) where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring knowledge of these; for we think we know something just in case we acquire knowledge of the primary causes, the primary first principles, all the way to the elements. It is clear, then, that in the science of nature as elsewhere, we should try first to determine questions about the first principles. The naturally proper direction of our road is from things better known and clearer to us, to things that are clearer and better known by nature; for the things known to us are not the same as the things known unconditionally (haplôs). Hence it is necessary for us to progress, following this procedure, from the things that are less clear by nature, but clearer to us, towards things that are clearer and better known by nature. (Phys. 184a10–21) Aristotle

 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0515-byrne-20120515,0,6394836.column
http://www.ottawalife.com/2012/05/moriartys-musings-new-yorks-public-intellectuals/

Michael Moriarty Fights PC Jazz Goofs & Erroll Garner - I'll Remember April

Progressive Jazz: How the Left’s ‘Teachable Moments’ Killed Bradley’s Michael Moriarty's poignant and on-target essay on the Progressive PC poisoning of jazz focused my attention on the Great Erroll Garner Click my post title for pure genius.

Errol Garner is ignored. It seems to me that Mr. Garner is ignored because he was not angry enough - to the contrary.

Garner remains unique. Playing consistently to a very high standard, he developed certain characteristics that bear few resemblances to other pianists. Notably, these include a plangent left-hand, block-chorded pulse, a dancing pattern of seemingly random ideas played with the right hand in chords or single notes, and playful introductions, which appear as independent miniature compositions, only to sweep suddenly, with apparent spontaneity and complete logic, into an entirely different song.

Sumptuously romantic on ballads, and fleet and daring on up-tempo swingers, Garner’s range was wide. Nicknamed ‘The Elf’, more, perhaps, for his diminutive stature than for the impish good humour of those introductions, Garner was the first jazz pianist since Fats Waller to appeal to the non-jazz audience, and the first jazzman ever to achieve popular acclaim from this audience without recourse to singing or clowning. Dudley Moore acknowledges much of his style to Garner, and ‘swinging 60s piano jazz’ owes a massive debt to him. Stylistically, Garner is in a category of which he is, so far, the only true member. Since his death in January 1977, there has been no sign that any other pianist other than Keith Jarrett is following his independent path in jazz.

Michael Moriarty, a jazz pianist as well as a great American actor, wrote this

My God, the politicizing of jazz had grown to a militant exclusivity that infuriated me!
Had I not been with my director and had downed a few more drinks, I might have tipped over a few tables.
Now the atmosphere of this Nicole Henry album was inspired in one of the most jazz-addicted nations in the world, Japan.
They obviously retain a freedom within their increasingly sensitized souls more American than that most American giant of world cities, New York!!
Perhaps it was the moment the sportscaster, Dick Schapp asked me, “Michael, is there anyone in New York you haven’t offended?!”
“Yes,” I should have said, “You, Dick!”
Tighten the phones to your ears, if you’re using them to listen to the intimacy Ms. Henry maintains with herself – and that, mind you, is the first necessity of any recording … or film artist for that matter – and then let the “still, small voice” in.
Let the deep and quietly, blissfully disturbing surrender happen.
Bradley’s is no more and hasn’t lived for many years because once Bradley himself had died, his poor wife could not keep the Progressive Militants out.
That crowd of elitists, enlightened despots and intellectual supremacists had driven the regular customers like myself … had forced them out.
Eventually even they didn’t come.
Why?
They had no one to give a “teachable moment” to.
What happened to Bradley’s has now happened to all of America.
How long we will be in for this horrifyingly arrogant, “teachable endlessness” … and how long this soul-less and tragically American fascism can continue … will perhaps depend upon the depth of agony we all must feel repeatedly when the quintessentially American forms of music are fed to us as a privilege only afforded us by the Progressive dictators who claim to own it.

Big Hollywood 4/10/210

Jazz belongs to all of us. Thanks Mr. Moriarty and thank you Mr. Garner

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mmoriarty/2010/04/09/progressive-jazz-how-the-lefts-teachable-moments

http://www.oldies.com/artist-biography/Erroll-Garner.html

Happy Birthday to Bill Koloseike and Michael Moriarty

Happy Birhday to Two Great Americans  - Bill Koloseike '92 and Michael Moriarty in the neighborhood of Ageless.  These pals of mine have helped untold thousands of people.

 Bill Kay - yeah, that Bill Kay: Mr. Chrysler, Ford, Chevy and Nissan Illinois - built a school and church in Uganda that flourishes.  At the age of 78 Bill learned Spanish in order to teach ESL to hundreds of people in the Aurora area and Bill has donated Millions of Dollars to assist Leo High School families meet the cost of Catholic high school tuition.



Michael Moriarty, a gifted athete,  is not only one of America's greatest actors, but also an accomplished pianist and composer.  He has roots in Chicago's Canaryville Neighborhood and his uncle Albert Died fighting the great Chicago Stockyards Fire of 1910.  His Grandfather played for the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers and Umpired the American League all through the 1940's and 1950's



Michael is and has been fierce enemy of Abortion -The American Holocaust and has fought bigotry and small-mindedness against gays, African Americans, Jews and women.  No progressive phony, Michael Moriarty battles evil from Euclidian principles and appeals to universal truth.

These two gents deserve huge cakes and drifts of ice cream!

Happy Birthday Lads!

Actor Michael Moriarty on Literature, Existentialism and The Fragile Minds of American Youth

The mind of a young person is God's marvel. The more the young mind encounters the more it absorbs; however, what that supple organ makes use of what it takes in can be dangerous. Parents, priests and pedagogues are best agents to direct the and chennel the course of experiences and epiphanies taken in by young people. There are very bad ideas - drinking mercury, diving off of a water tower, or basing one's actions upon seductive principles founded on misery.

The Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard built a theology on dread as the basis for making decisions. Abraham agonizing over his pact to sacrifice Issac as the blood bond of God's covenant was the spark of existentialism - a negative philosophy that morphed Kierkegaard's sermons into a Romantic precis of Satan's wildly idiotic battle with God. Knowing full well God's omnipotence, Old Scratch never-the-less gave it the old Ivy League try - again, and again. Byron's Childe Harold in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, lines 1031-1102 whines:

I have not loved the World, nor the World me;
I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
To its idolatries a patient knee,
Nor coined my cheek to smiles,-nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such-I stood
Among them, but not of them- in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.

What teenage girl girl could not go weak in the knees ( Vampire, Matrix-caparisoned dark eyed, pale and pasty dreamy non Jock) over the sentiments of this brooding youth? J,D. Salinger's Holden Caufield - the quintessential American Teenage Male - narrates his negative world view and spits ironic scorn at the phonies of the ordered world. Young minds are attracted to the dark - death - dread and the Gothic.

The greatest generation and their Korean and Vietnam heirs had their bellies full of death and dread and created a lifestyle and standard of living that was the antithesis - a life affirming ethic and commitment to service - for their children. The American brooding generations had the luxury to hurl defiance at order and life itself with parsing nods to dim authorities found in books and spouting semiotic nonsense from the plush podiums of the Academy - whatever the hell that is.

Chicago-rooted actor, composer,essayist and anti-abortion activist Michael Moriarty wrote a sound study of the dangers of toxic doctrines ingested by young minds without the rigorous oversight of parents, priests and capable pedagogues - that's teachers. Mass murderer Jared Lochner seems to be a case study of toxic thought unchecked . . .and most likely unsupervised.

American Existentialism: Jared Loughner

By Michael Moriarty
web posted February 7, 2011

While Jared Loughner's list of favorite writings run from Hitler's Mein Kampf and Marx's Communist Manifesto to George Orwell, Hermann Hesse and Ernest Hemingway, a mysteriously missing set of fashionably well-respected names are the French Existentialists, such as Abert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre.

By the time I had finished that relentlessly compelling tale of gratuitous murder and vague redemption (Albert Camus' The Stranger which ends with the words, "all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration,") my sense of the world had been shattered into a thousand pieces.

The essentials of this quote are from Stranger In A Strange Land – The Enduring American Appeal Of Existentialism, Nick Gillespie's still startling review of George Cotkin's Existential America.

With the endearing confession I can share with Mr. Gillespie about existentialism – "I still never quite understood it" – I suddenly began to comprehend a few things I had not even dreamt of during Freshman year at Dartmouth and the existential labyrinths of Philosophy 101. The course was taught devoid of the endless examples of senseless murder available even then. Somehow the anti-hero of Albert Camus' The Stranger was held to be examined in an a-historical vacuum. The ghosts of Jack The Ripper and Lizzie Borden were just begging to attend class; but the Professor would not even utter their names.

After this past week, however, and the nightmares rolling out of Tucson, Arizona, with the massacre there, the insane slaughter handed out to all of America by one Jared Loughner?

Cotkin's most original insight is something that escaped Camus and the others: "Existentialism, American style ... jibes well with American antinomianism, that willingness of the lonely individual to rebel against entrenched authority in the name of his or her most intense beliefs. Antinomianism, like existentialism, challenges easy certitude, entrenched religion, and moribund political assumptions."

Scary?

Quite possibly.

This is Jared Loughner, as attorney pro-se, defending himself in court.

The crime in Albert Camus' The Stranger is merely a small example of the massacre in Tucson which America may never recover from. Yet the obscenely joyous anticipation within the murderer that "a huge crowd of spectators … should greet me with howls of execration"?

This, for an existentialist apparently, is not insanity.

This is classic anti-heroism.

"L'enfer est les autres!"

"Hell is other people", as a profoundly existential character proclaims in Jean Paul Sartre's No Exit. The brilliant critic, Walter Kaufmann, encapsulated existentialism as defined by the 4 D's: "death, despair, dread and dauntlessness". According to the likes of Jean Paul Sartre, Jared Loughner is the quintessentially existential anti-hero.

To a French existentialist, Jared Loughner is not insane.

He is "dauntlessly" addressing "death, despair and dread" with a defining existential act, multiple versions of that apparently liberating but cold-blooded killing in Albert Camus' The Stranger.

Is existentialism a true philosophy?

Or is it merely a rationalization for the "enlightened despots" of France, from 18th century Robespierre to the 20th century's Jean Paul Sartre, to either commit mass murder or openly relish the shameless homicides of Jared Loughner, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, et al?

I believe Existentialism is the 20th century effort of French intellectuals to rationalize their horridly bloody, 18th century revolution. Existentialism was, and still is for many Frenchmen and women, the effort of intellectual supremacistsin Paristo defend what is the heart of the French Revolution and the rationale for the French Guillotine: it was the Existentially justifiable thing to do at the time.

Death, despair, dread and dauntlessness!

This is the moment in which I must remind my readers of the true enemy of the French Revolution. The ultimate and permanent enemy of the French Revolution was not the aristocracy nor even the bourgeoisie.

It was and still is the Catholic Church.

In addition and more to the point of this article, the number one enemy of the Progressive Revolution or the Obama Nation's "Fundamental transformation of the United States" is not the Tea Party but the Catholic Church. Rome's unflinching and unwavering condemnation of abortion strikes at the very cornerstone of Progressive philosophy, strategy and visions of the future. While the very black attire of Catholic priests similarly signify the very existential themes of dread, death and despair, the antidote, however, is not a mindless or homicidal dauntlessness.

It is Life!

Life, life and more life!

Life that is even more dauntless, forceful and abandoned than the mad eyes of Jared Loughner.

Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.

The American classroom could use Michael Moriarty.

Michael Moriarty in Full - Read This Brilliant Analysis of Music, Faith and the Progressive Culture of Death

Michael Moriarty has a written an important essay. Read this.

The Haunted Heaven: Chapter Twenty Seven: Old Notes In A New WayBy Michael Moriarty
web posted December 1, 2011

Leonard Bernstein again seems to have entered my memoir as a musical guide for this most revolutionizing corner of my life. His lectures on modern music, now blocked by Koch Entertainment, this one in particular, defines "composers that have something to say". In America you increasingly pay for any education that might be offered on the internet.

With his customary brilliance, Bernstein reveals how a final diatonic, major chord, orchestrated as Stravinsky does in his Symphony of Psalms, can even sound "new".

Next, I'm watching Bernstein put Bachian muscle and balance into the execution of a Bach orchestral work.

Now, the St. Matthew Passion, as Bernstein himself says, "writing music was religion for J. S. Bach'.

"His godliness shines through all his music, first to last."

Bernstein's own divine genius as a teacher, as a composer, as a conductor?

It is beyond indisputable.

Alright.

Follow my reasoning, my deduction. If one looks at the political forces and "themes" that run and increasingly clash? Cacophony? Or modern music?

Bernstein might say, "Both!"

In that monosyllabic declaration lies Bernstein's infuriating equivocations politically. What might he be thinking now, were he alive? Would he, for one, be defending Roe v Wade?

Of course, as the only "civilized thing to do!"

Hmmm … and since Protestants, Progressive Protestants such as the Clintons and the Obamas actually promote abortion, Bach, being a Protestant child of Luther's Reformation, might agree, mightn't he?

There has always been a war between artistic genius and sanity. The confines of sanity, however, begin with "thou shalt not murder". Wander "out of that box" and you either have lunacy or just pure evil.

Crime and sin for the sake of crime and sin … until, of course, the thrill of crime and sin for the sake of crime and sin is gone.\ Then crime and sin would continue for no other joy than the pure abandon of evil. That is not lunacy, that is Evil. Evil's pure and conscious intent is the utter destruction of Good. That, of course, would mean the end of God.

Progressive "Reason" would inevitably necessitate the end of religion.

The end of God.

Eventually.

Not that the Progressives like the Clintons wouldn't lie to the faithful. They would lie and already have lied, as they say, "Big Time!" The Devil's Lobby, I call it.

C. S. Lewis, an Anglican of all things, wrote a great deal about The Devil in The Screwtape Letters and was later re-immortalized in the 1993 film, Shadowlands.

Catholic writers, of which I consider James Joyce, of course, one of, if not the greatest – the greatest, that is, if you don't consider Shakespeare a Catholic (many do) – have a profoundly more complex and subtler relationship with The Devil. The Church has truly split hairs about the depth of Hell involved with each transgression.

Forgiveness, of course, for any of the sinners is always possible, depending, of course, upon the sincerity of the sinner.

How did I get here in a chapter entitled "Old Notes In A New Way"?

There are few existing and major "old notes" that are older than the Catholic Church. The preceding Greek and Latin cultures, of course, haunt us in the same way they haunt the Catholic Church. The Catholic church, however, will be known eventually as the creation that saved the human race by her unswerving stand against abortion.

What is haunting me now is why a video accompanying a January, 2011 article, The Ox-Bow Generation, didn't work for quite some time. Yet it works now, months later. The Hanging of an innocent man is, indeed, an abortion.

The Fierce Faction For Abortion, and that is the only name I could label it with at this point, has massive influence obviously.

At the same time, this is the second day of the Arizona shooting in Tucson and Sarah Palin is still being targeted, ostensibly for her "target" symbolism.

No. It is for her stand against abortion. No one more fully represents pro-life than Sarah Palin.

Now, with Palin out of the 2012 Presidential race, it is Herman Cain who has been "forced out", not, as the press say, because of his marital past, but because of his unmitigated stand against abortion. Such a position is an assault against all "modern women"!

This is an example of The Bipartisan Progressives using gossip and marital secrets as propaganda in an "old way".

"Using old propaganda tools in an old way."

Michelle Malkin's article The progressive "climate of hate:" An illustrated primer, 2000-2010 lists, with her column's telescopic memory, the ten years of hate engendered by the fallaciously "hate-hating" Left.

The Left is well-known for serving up its vengeance cold.

Proud of it.

Glenn Beck, while on television, was doing his best to warn the Right against violence of any kind but righteous indignation can be tranquilized just so long. Perhaps that is why he avoided the issue of abortion as best he could. He was rather pushed into one episode dealing with the horrors of infanticide. Though Beck eventually proved too inflammatory and expensive for Fox Network, even he knew the hot potato that abortion has always proven to be. I don't follow his radio show so I have no idea how concerned he's been about Roe v Wade's spiritual destruction of the American soul.

However, 37 years of legalized murder could very well amount to 89 years of legalized slavery. We know how America and Americans could endure such inhumanity for just so long and then …

Ending legalized slavery is an "old note" for America.

Ending legalized abortion, with the hindsight we have about slavery, can be handled legislatively and at a much slower pace than the five years of Civil War.

Something, however, must be done now!

Why?

The American soul and her "inalienable right to life" have been destroyed by Roe v Wade.

As I have said one thousand times, the Golden Rule does not read, "Do unto gestating infants what you would not have wanted done unto your own gestating infancy."

Devoid of the Golden Rule, the American people's silence before the murder of Roe v Wade seems to be begging for an even colder indifference to human life out of the present, Far Left American government.

How does one resist a one hundred year-old Progressive Movement with profoundly international support and resources?

The Catholic Church.

An old note to be played in a new way.

Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.

Firefighter/ Writer Matt Drew's " Shadows of Chicago" is a Read as Tall as Its Subject

Matt Drew Firefighter and author. (DNAinfo.com)


The Devil in White City the Chicago history we usually get in WTTW specials was made sexy and marketable by posting the core narrative with a sex criminal.  The historical packaging was pretty much standard Studs Terkel approved history.   That best-selling book is being made into a film.

Chicago Fireman and writer Matthew Drew writes a Chicago saga worthy of Cinerama at the Old Michael Theatre on Dearborn. Within the acute angles of his three subjects, Charlie Comiskey, Big Jim Horan and Mayor Fred Busse,  swirl events and personalities with real Chicago spark. No agenda stuffed frauds - Shoeless Joe Jackson was a working-class hero who only stuffed his bibs  with Hundos, because the Old Roman was a cheapskate - the Studs Terkel meme.

A few years back serious Chicago scholars like former Fire Commissioner Jim Joyce and former DEA agent Rick Barrett snapped knuckles on the noggins of dozing Chicago's smart set with events, books and press opportunities focused on the valor of Chicago first respond-ers with interest in horrific Stockyard Fire of  1910 and the murder of Police Constable Jeremiah Sullivan.   Scholarship on Chicago's actual history seems to be best found in the hands of working men, like Barrett and Joyce. Pretend history is handled very nicely by  politicians political columnists and academics - Jane Addams invented the eight hour day, the Baby Ruth candy bar and the can-can.

This summer another working class scholar, Matt Drew published Shadows of Chicago: The True Story of Three Men and the Crimes That Shocked America. Matthew Drew is a Chicago firefighter who teaches firefighting tactics at University of Illinois.  The book looks at the lives of three men, a baseball player-mogul.a fireman and a mayor.

The sweep and force of the book comes from the cast of personalities who weave through the lives of these interesting men - Dever, Powers, Powderly, Swift, Capone, Rothstein, Cobb, Harrison, Armour, Dunne, and Buck Weaver.  One character that sparks a fire in my little brain-pan was fireman Albert Moriarty ( pp.131-32) the brother of professional baseball players George and William. George, Matt Drew tells his reader, played for Ty Cobb's Detroit Tigers.

George Moriarty is the grandfather of my pal the famed actor, composer, musician and writer Michael Moriarty. 

Every Chicago reader, unencumbered by historical miasma that fogs our fabricated Chicago history, will find a connection like the one that I mentioned and breath in fresh ideas.  Real history, from Herodatus to Drew, manages to do just that.

Here is fine review of Matthew Drew's fine book.
http://www.forestparkreview.com/News/Articles/9-10-2013/1910-Stockyard-fire-tale-told-in-firefighter's-new-book/

Catholics v. Communists - Abortion is the Da Vinci Key: Brilliant Essay By Michael Moriarty

I guarantee you, if the Catholic Church condones abortion, we won’t hear any complaints about priests and child abuse in the mainstream press, not while the Obama’s public schools are handing out condoms to five year olds without parental consent. Michael Moriarty - Big Hollywood

Opposition to Abortion is the key to the riddle of Hegalian Progressive -Communist/Progressive World War on the Catholics. Emmy and Tony Award-winning Actor, musician and journalist Michael Moriarty presents a brilliant essay. Click my post title for the full text.

It is basically the Catholic Church versus the World.

Not even America is an ally of either Israel or the Catholic Church.

America is no longer, as the President has repeatedly declared by word and deed, a Judeo-Christian Civilization.

It is clearly and merely a part of the Progressive New World Order.

As I’ve said before, America gave up any substantive resistance to the very Marxist New World Order when her Supreme Court passed the Roe v Wade decision 37 years ago.

In Europe, however, the Catholic Church has refused to condone abortion or euthanasia.

America’s collapse to the first stage of Communism, which is Socialism, was insured when the Nixon/Kissinger Presidency not only collapsed before Vietnamese Communists in Paris but when its Supreme Court – bipartisan, mind you – instituted legalized abortion.

America not only gave up the territorial fight, it surrendered in the spiritual war as well.

Michael Moriarty's " Big Town Boy" - Big Time Jazz

My expatriate pal, a son of Canaryville himself, Michael Moriarty is one talented gent.  A captain of the stage and screen, Mr. Moriarty sails the keyboards and brings in boadloads of musical compositions that recall the best in jazz -America's greatest art form.

Not only that the the tall athletic Mick has a more than decent set of pipes.

Charles Carroll - Catholic Founding Father & Signer of Declaration of Independence

Catholics helped make America. There were not a whole hell of a lot of Catholics in the thirteen original colonies, except for Maryland. One Catholic, Charles Carroll of Carrolton, was a patriot and stuck his Fish-on-Friday neck out as far as Sam Adams, John Adams, Ben Franklin and the lads of Virginia. In fact, Charles Carroll signed the Declaration of Independence.

These days Catholics are under constant assault from Academics, politicians including supposed Catholics, and the hacks of secular media and Hollywood. The Catholic Church is rock solid in its defense of Life, Marriage, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Being alive precludes what secularist call Liberty or Libertine-ism and any man or woman who takes Life Vows of Love knows that the Liberty to do whatever one feels like doing is not in the cards.

Yesterday, I posted a beautifully written essay by Emmy/Tony Award winning actor and jazz musician Michael Moriarty. Mr. Moriarty said this,

All is politics these days … and all will be used to further the political game.
However, considering the Catholic Church’s major hand in overturning the Polish Communist State, the “game” is decidedly beyond politics.
The increasingly deadly Game has been a not-so-Cold War for quite some time.
Unfortunately, it is now not only Catholics versus Communists.
It is the Catholic Church versus the entire Progressive New World Order.
Versus the European Union’s Socialism.
Versus Russia’s neo-Soviet allegiance with Red China.
It is basically the Catholic Church versus the World.
Not even America is an ally of either Israel or the Catholic Church.
America is no longer, as the President has repeatedly declared by word and deed, a Judeo-Christian Civilization.
It is clearly and merely a part of the Progressive New World Order.

Catholics in America are being tested. Too many are failing that test handsomely and going along to get along - University of Notre Dame parse to weasel acceptance of abortion from our President who is abortions best friend; politicians Senators Kerry, Durbin, Dodd and Congressmen Pelosi, Stupak and Kennedy all play ball in Planned Parenthood's yard. If Catholics abandon their beliefs - life begins at conception and marriage is a sacrament between a Man and a Woman for Life -they will be praised and petted. If not, Catholics are bludgeoned as pedophile co-conspirators and worse.

That does not seem to be Original Intent of the Founding Fathers. Let's celebrate one -Charles Carroll!

"Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time;
they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion,
whose morality is so sublime and pure
(and) which insures to the good eternal happiness,
are undermining the solid foundation of morals,
the best security for the duration of free governments." Maryland member of the Continental Congress, the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, US Senator for Maryland (1789-1792)

Now, that seems like Original Intent.


“To what purpose was the threat thrown out of enforcing the penal statutes [against Catholics]
by proclamation? Why am I told that my conduct is very inconsistent with the situation of one
who owes even the toleration he enjoys to the favor of government? If by instilling prejudices
into the Governor, and by every mean and wicked artifice, you can rouse the popular resentment
against certain religionists, and thus bring on a persecution of them, it will then be known
whether the toleration I enjoy be due to the favor of government or not….”

Mr. Carroll you nailed it and you never once heard MSNBC! Happy Fourth of July, America!

Born: September 19, 1737 in Annapolis, Anne Arundel County1
Father: Charles Carroll2
Mother: Elizabeth (Brooke) Carroll3
Education: attended Academy of Jesuits at Bohemia Manor, Cecil County, 1747; College of St. Omer, France, 1749-53; College of French Jesuits, Rheims, France, 1754; College of Louis-le-Grand, paris, France, 1755-57; studied law in Bourges, Paris, and London, 1757-644
Religious Affiliation: Catholic5
Marriage: June 5, 1768 to Mary (Molly) Darnall6
Children: Elizabeth, Mary, Louisa Rachel, Charles, Anne Brooke, Catherine, Elizabeth7
Private Occupations:
Planter; managed his estate "Doughoregan"
Subscriber, Potomac Company, ca. 1772
Partner, Baltimore Ironworks Company
Proprietor, Susquehanna Canal, 1783
Member, Board of Directors, Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company
Landlord; money lender8
Public Service:
Conventions, Anne Arundel County, 1774-76
Maryland Senate, Western Shore, 1777-1800; Maryland Senate President 1783
Committee of Correspondence, 1774
1st Council of Safety, Western Shore, 1775
Committee of Observations, Annapolis and Anne Arundel County, 1774-75
Delegate, Continental Congress, 1776, 1777-1778, 1780
Signer, Declaration of Independence, 1776
U.S. Senator, 1st, 2nd Congresses, 1789-92
Common Councilman, Annapolis, 1780-83, 1785 (resigned)9
Died: November 14, 1832 in Baltimore10
Buried: Doughoregan Manor, Anne Arundel (now Howard) County11

1774 – became a member of the Committee of Correspondence for Anne Arundel and
Annapolis (November)
1774 – elected to the 2nd Maryland Convention
1775 – served on the Maryland Committee of Correspondence and Council of Safety
(summer)
1776 – participated in a Continental Congress mission seeking Canada’s support for the
American cause (February)
1776 – chosen as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress (June)
1776 – signed the Declaration of Independence document (August)
1776 – appointed as a delegate to the convention to write Maryland’s first State Constitution
and Declaration of Rights
1776 – elected member of the first Maryland Senate
1777 – appointed delegate to Congress
1783 – elected President of the Maryland Senate
1789 – served as one of Maryland’s first two U.S. Senators

When his turn came to sign the document on that hot August day in Philadelphia in 1776, Charles Carroll stepped forward briskly, signed Charles Carroll, started back to his seat and then abruptly returned to the document and, picking up the quill pen again, added of Carrollton.

Like his fellow delegates to the Second Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, signing his name to the document was an act of courage. Today, we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence as the beginning of our country as an independent nation. But, if the fortunes of war had gone the other way and George Washington and his ill equipped Continental Army had lost, this document would have been a death warrant for Charles Carroll and the other fifty-five delegates who joined him in signing.

God Bless Michael Moriarty! God Bless America!

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/mmoriarty/2010/06/30/catholics-vs-communists/

Eugene "Spud" Moriarty - Chicago Mount Carmel Man at Yale 1967

The Prep Bowl was started in 1934 by then-Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly as a fundraiser to help needy kids around Thanksgiving time. As it has always been, the champions of the Chicago Public and Chicago Catholic High School Football Leagues collide at Soldier Field on the Friday after Thanksgiving. At one time, this event attracted 125,000 fans, making it the most well-attended event in amateur sports history, even surpassing today's big-college stadium records.

The Kelly Bowl later became the Prep Bowl and The Caravan of Mount Carmel won the title a record 13 times. The 1967 Championship Game at storied Soldier Field yielded a score of Mount Carmel 37 over DUNBAR 0. That game sealed the deal for Eugene "Spud" Moriarty of St. Walter's Parish. Spud was a talented tackle who played both ways all season for the Caravan and excelled in English with both Father Bob Lee and Father Gavin Quinn, O.Carm.

His test scores were as solid as his biceps and soul as pure as Canfields Ginger Ale. He was an exacting scholar who raised questions out of a genuine and pure empirical sense and became loudly annoyed, when his questions posed were deflected, or, worse, neglected.

Spud went to Yale University on a full ride. Spud leaped from Carmel Brown to Ely Blue! He could not wait for fall term.

Upon arrival at his freshman dorm, he was greeted with a cold nod, by seventh generation Yale Man - C. Dexter Vander-Swell of Fremont-Stokes, East Egg Long Island, New York.

Spud shrugged and smiled broadly

Spud: “Where are you from?”
Yale scion: “I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions.”
Spud: “Okay – where are you from, jagoff?”

Four Years later, C. Dexter went to Columbia Law.

At the end of September 1967, Spud quit Yale, joined the Army and went to Vietnam, came home, went to DePaul and Loyola Law on the G.I.Bill, went to work for Justice Department and indicted and convicted Vanderswell for running a Ponzi Scheme in 1983. The rest is history.

It's possible.

USMC v. ACLU

This was sent to me by Two-time Emmy Winner, Jazz Pianist, Journalist, Essayist and Implacable Foe of Abortion and Progressive Nonsense, Michael Moriarty.

If you look closely at the picture above, you will note that all the Marines pictured are bowing their heads. That's because they're praying. This incident took place at a recent ceremony honoring the birthday of the corps, and it has the ACLU up in arms. "These are federal employees," says Lucius Traveler, a spokesman for the ACLU, "on federal property and on federal time.. For them to pray is clearly an establishment of religion, and we must nip this in the bud immediately."

When asked about the ACLU's charges, Colonel Jack Fessender, speaking for the Commandant of the Corps said (cleaned up a bit), "Screw the ACLU." GOD Bless Our Warriors. Send the ACLU to France !

Please send this to people you know, so everyone will know how stupid the ACLU is getting in trying to remove GOD from everything and every place in America May God Bless America , One Nation Under GOD!

click my post title for a fine essay by Michael Moriarty!

If Personal PAC Says So, Vote For Aurelia Pucinski for Illinois Supreme Court Justice

I'm not even an active Catholic but I do know that abortion is murder. That doesn't make me a Catholic. It makes me a sane human being. Michael Moriarty

We all know that Personal PAC, Planned Parenthood's Illinois Political Money Muscle, and Boss Terry Cosgrove give Governor Pat Quinn his marching orders.

Governor Quinn quakes before the power and majesty of Abortion's Bishop Terry, while he dismisses the Catholic Bishops of the faith into which he was baptized with a toss of the head and a boast of his Christianity. That is a matter of very public record.

Personal Pac is the most powerful political machine in Illinois. A federal District Judge appointed by President Jimmy Carter, Marvin Aspen, ruled that Personal PAC could use more power. Abortion is not a health initiative, it is home-plate for political power.

Personal PAC targets Aurelia Pucinski as dangerous to Abortion. Abortion provides the money and political muscle that gave Illinois the Religious Liberty and Civil Union Act and is now boiling up bucks for the Gay Marriage Law that the ever compliant Governor Quinn will sign. Abortion lends support to the power of the Teachers Unions, to SEIU and other tax-dollar-dependent grass roots shouters. Abortion helps International Solidarity Movement find aid and comfort for Hamas.

If Aurelia Pucinski is dangerous to Abortion, vote for Aurelia Pucinski to replace the vacancy of Chief Justice Thomas Fitzgerald.

I did.


Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies.

Vietnam Statistics from the Wall - Michael Moriarty Forwarded This On The Other Greatest Generation

A Vietnam Marine, Bill Pfeifer sent this to Michael Moriarty and Michael sent this along to me.

Tom Brokaw should take a look at another Greatest Generation.

Interesting Veterans Statistics off the Vietnam Memorial Wall

"Carved on these walls is the story of America , of a continuing quest to preserve both Democracy and decency, and to protect a national treasure that we call the American dream." ~President George Bush

SOMETHING to think about - Most of the surviving Parents are now Deceased.

There are 58,267 names now listed on that polished black wall, including those added in 2010.

The names are arranged in the order in which they were taken from us by date and within each date the names are alphabetized. It is hard to believe it is 36 years since the last casualties.

Beginning at the apex on panel 1E and going out to the end of the East wall, appearing to recede into the earth (numbered 70E - May 25, 1968), then resuming at the end of the West wall, as the wall emerges from the earth (numbered 70W - continuing May 25, 1968) and ending with a date

in 1975. Thus the war's beginning and end meet. The war is complete, coming full circle, yet broken by the earth that bounds the angle's open side and contained within the earth itself.

The first known casualty was Richard B. Fitzgibbon, of North Weymouth , Mass. Listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as having been killed on June 8, 1956. His name is listed on the Wall with that of his son, Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Richard B. Fitzgibbon III, who was killed on Sept. 7, 1965.

There are three sets of fathers and sons on the Wall.
39,996 on the Wall were just 22 or younger.
8,283 were just 19 years old.
The largest age group, 33,103 were 18 years old.
12 soldiers on the Wall were 17 years old
5 soldiers on the Wall were 16 years old.
One soldier, PFC Dan Bullock was 15 years old.

997 soldiers were killed on their first day in Vietnam .
1,448 soldiers were killed on their last day in Vietnam .

31 sets of brothers are on the Wall.
Thirty one sets of parents lost two of their sons.
54 soldiers on attended Thomas Edison High School in Philadelphia . I wonder why so many from one school.
8 Women are on the Wall. Nursing the wounded.
244 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War; 153 of them are on the Wall.

Beallsville, Ohio with a population of 475 lost 6 of her sons.
West Virginia had the highest casualty rate percapita in the nation. There are 711 West Virginians on the Wall.

The Marines of Morenci - They led some of the scrappiest high school football and basketball teams that the little Arizona copper town of Morenci (pop. 5,058) had ever known and cheered. They enjoyed roaring beer busts. In quieter moments, they rode horses along the Coronado Trail, stalked deer in the Apache National Forest . And in the patriotic camaraderie typical of Morenci's mining families, the nine graduates of Morenci High enlisted as a group in the Marine Corps. Their service began on Independence Day, 1966. Only 3 returned home.

The Buddies of Midvale - LeRoy Tafoya, Jimmy Martinez, Tom Gonzales were all boyhood friends and lived on three consecutive streets in Midvale, Utah on Fifth, Sixth and Seventh avenues. They lived only a few yards apart. They played ball at the adjacent sandlot ball field. And they all went to Vietnam . In a span of 16 dark days in late 1967, all three would be killed. LeRoy was killed on Wednesday, Nov. 22, the fourth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Jimmy died less than 24 hours later on Thanksgiving Day. Tom was shot dead assaulting the enemy on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.

The most casualty deaths for a single day was on January 31, 1968 ~ 245 deaths.
The most casualty deaths for a single month was May 1968 - 2,415 casualties were incurred.

For most Americans who read this they will only see the numbers that the Vietnam War created. To those of us who survived the war, and to the families of those who did not, we see the faces, we feel the pain that these numbers created. We are, until we too pass away, haunted with these numbers, because they were our friends, fathers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters. There are no noble wars, just noble warriors. (emphasis my own)

Please pass this on to those who served during this time, and those who DO Care.

Not as lean; not as mean; but still a MARINE

The Feast of Corpus Christi - The Body of Christ

I had a perfectly lovely day with Miss Terry Sullivan. Together, we searched for hardware to fix her blinds and picked up another useful household item at Sears on 111th Street in Worth. One of the parts needed could only be found at Mount Greenwood True Value and so we hooked around back east.

After, finding the requiste blind fitting, we light- lunched at a new restaurant Joseph's* on 111th Street, The soup, salad and red pepper Italian sausage with garlic flecked bread was just the ticket.

I took a long stroll through Mount Olivet Cemetery** with the lady I love yesterday afternoon. Mount Olivet is a history lesson on the south side. It is one of the oldest Catholic burial sites in Chicago.

Mount Olivet brings together families and history. It contains the tombs of Chicago giants, like Monsignor Maurice Dorney, the King of the Chicago Stockyards; Michael Cassius McDonald, the founder of not only Chicago organized crime, but as historian Richard Lindberg reminds us, the Cook County Democratic Organization; the victims of the Chicago Fire and numerous Lake Michigan sailing wrecks, the bodies of strikers who fought for the eight hour day in Pullman and the Stockyard Strikes of 1904, 1912 and 1919; Captain Francis O'Neill, the Chicago Police Superintendent who meticulously preserved centuries of Irish music. There are gangsters and Carmelites buried close to one another, but the striking feature for me is the litany of familiar south side Chicago family names - Stanton, Parker, Sheehan, O'Donnell, Bransfield, Enright, Blakey, McAullife, McGrath, Dowling, Brackin, Nash, Burke, Cullen, Ahern, Capriotti, McNamara, Capangna, Casto, Gurgone, Pilon, Gately, Foster, Arneberg, Jennings, Donahue, Moriarty, Testa, Angone, Antonelli, Morganelli, . . . at one time Capone.

They are all brought together - living and the buried - at Mount Olivet,on sacred ground and our precious history. There are rolling hills and trees. Mount Olivet is a great meditation.

Today, is the Feast of Corpus Christi - The Body of Christ. We celebrate the union of God and Man in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Calvary and especially in the transformation, consecration and communion of His Body and Blood in the Mass.
John 6: 51 - 58

I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh."
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you;
he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.
For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.
As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.
This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever."

There is much to remind us of others. I generally need a whack with a two by four between the eyes to snap me out of my contemplation of my navel. A stroll with one I love through Mount Olivet had a much more salubrious effect.

*

Joseph's Restaurant and Bar
3123 W. 111th Street, Chicago, IL 60655
Google Map
(773) 445-5637

Phone : (773) 445-5637
Email : josephsrestaurantchicago@gmail.com

We are located on 111th street just east of Kedzie Avenue in Chicago - Mount Greenwood, IL

**

Mount Olivet Cemetery, 2901 West 111th Street
Opened 1885

Mount Olivet Cemetery was the first Catholic diocesan cemetery to serve Chicago’s southland. Established in 1885, the burial ground is one of the city’s most picturesque and was once located outside of the city limits. Catholics in Chicago were immigrants, and not surprisingly, city cemeteries reflect ethnicity. While there were German and Polish National cemeteries, the Irish tended to be buried in diocesan cemeteries. Mount Olivet Cemetery buried mainly Irish, reflected in its family plots and monuments of Celtic crosses and Irish names. Not surprisingly, a statue of St. Patrick is found amongst the graves.

Irish Nationalists of Chicago Obelisk at Mount Olivet Cemetery

Dedicated September 30, 1888

Rising 81 feet above Mount Olivet Cemetery is the first monument in America erected by the Irish Nationalists Society. In 1888, this Egyptian obelisk of Barry gray granite features a seven foot pedestal. At each angle are four Corinthian columns. The obelisk was erected in honor of those Irish patriot heroes who died in Chicago, yet had no family in their new country.

The face of the monument reads:

“Erected August 20, 1888 to the memory of departed brethren. God Save Ireland.”

A Visit to Casa Hickey

Not Chaos like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But as the world, harmoniously confus'd:
Where order in variety we see,
And where, tho' all things differ, all agree.
Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest, ll.12-16

Friday night, the woman I love and I paid a visit on two new parents and their beautiful child; after I got in my baby fix for the weekend, we had a late light supper at the fabulous KODA Bistro in West Beverly. Before we headed north and west to return the elegant and beautiful woman to her home in the immediate west suburbs, I stopped by the house.

My Daughter Clare and her troop of pals, expanded from the St. Cajetan pre-school line-up, to include teen beauties and scholars at Mother McAuley, Marist and St. Iggy from every parish urban and south sub-urban, were thronged and polishing off post-Halloween Fun Size Milky Ways, Three Musketeers and Kit Kats, Capri Sun Juices, slices of Doreen's pizza, between the back door ( the only entrance employed on the south side) and front room ( pronounced Frunchroom hereabouts) AKA living room.




The fair dame's reaction went viral.

A dolor sit hominis castrum suum, vel alterius palude!

N.B. This Sunday morning's pre-Mass offering was inspired by Michael Moriarty's wonderful article on Bette Davis. Click my post title.

To Help End Abortion:Leave the Gore on The Cutting Room Floor

There is nothing so horrible as America's love affair with abortion.

It is not something for children - despite the Democrats push to allow babies to kill their own babies without the approval of parents like Illinois' idiotic "Third Reich Imitators of the Legislature - Senator Heather Steans and Representative Kelly Cassidy.

I read Cardinal Cupich's tepid and perfunctory Statement in the St. Cajetan Parish Bulletin

As citizens of a state and people of faith who care about the common good, I urge you to join me and my brother bishops in an effort to defeat this radical departure from current law and practice in our state. Please reach out your State Representative and Senator to urge defeat of these bills. 

This milquetoast in a mitre waited far too late ( March 23, 2109) to say something about the state of Illinois legislating an open season on the innocent and then said nothing.

Real hearts have been broken by these evil bills long ago and thousands of people have taken action and packed the Illinois Legislative Building in Springfield to try and halt this evil long before the Ordinary of America's largest Catholic population opened his thin lips.

House Bill 2495 and Senate Bill 1942 seek to terminate any consideration of human being in the womb, as well as give the green light to Planned Parenthood's abortion mills.

House Bill 2467 and its identical Senate Bill 1594, repeals the Illinois Parental Notice of Abortion Act sand strips parents of the right to prtect their daughters from the probes, scalpels and forceps of Planned Parenthood.

Blase Cupich, a feral political animal with a Pallium, plays coyly with politicians who take Mammon's coin like the Daleys, Durbins, Quigleys, Cunninghams, Burkes and Hurleys of Illinois and their Republican go-along mates.  Abortion is money. Money for Campaigns. Money for Ads and Money for continued self-service.

Abortion is joined at the hip with LGBTQ and Women's Issues.  "Hate abortion and  you hate gays and haughty women," runs its effective nonsequitur. Nonsense works in a non- Euclidian world.

Abortion owns the Media, as well as the politicians.

Abortion owns organized labor and union websites tout the glories of women and wonder of diversity.  Union people with large families vote for politicians who support the American genocide.

My large Catholic extended family does so every election.

I am not in a union.

I hate abortion.

Abortion owns the Arts, as well.  I know too many musicians, thespians and graphic artists who mouth Planned Parenthood platitudes, even though they are kind and generous people.

I know three actors who are fierce defenders of the unborn Mary Carney-Houlihan, her husband Mike and Michael Moriarty. The have dedicated their art and their lives to fighting for the lives of unborn children and often at the expense of lucrative opportunities.  They have been 'woke' for decades.

Pro-Life film makers are rare and generally awkward artists.  Like Pro-Life activists, they tend to be too over the top.

Pro-Life does not mean one needs to be Pro-goof, or Pro-Dilettante. A new film "Unplanned" has made something of a tiny ripple in the debate.

I have seen some scenes and decided that it will fail to help end abortion. Un Planned is the  true story of a Planned Parenthood renegade and abortion survivor, Abby Johnson, who woke to the fact that abortion is, in fact, a dollar drive House of Blood.



Hollywood panned the film and I must go along with the review - bad film, but good propaganda for the people who already understand abortion's intrinsic evil.

The gore and the horror of abortion clinic will not turn hearts and minds.  America is immune to the sight of blood and only too readily relishes hours of down-time viewing dedicated to the dining habits of werewolves, zombies and HBO ingenues and comics.

Aristotle, a dead white man, but an active member of the LGBTQ community of Athens and the court of Macedon, rightly argues in his Poetics, that violence must happen out of sight of the audience in order to effect a genuine catharthis of horror and pity.

That is why we do not SEE Oedipus put out his own eyes, or witness Medea's murder of her sons.

True horror allows the mind to work out the details.  No drama, or actual film of the Holocaust was as chilling as the sober and dreadful luncheon and meeting of Eichmann, Rheinhardt and the other architects of the Final Solution for World Jewry, as HBO's Conspiracy.

The minutes of The Wannsee Protocols was the script of the most terrifying movie  I have ever watched.



Would that a Pro-Life version of this brilliant movie get produced and abortion become understood for what it truly happens to be - the American Holocaust.

In the mean time, we must make Abortion's friends, like Cardinal Cupich, Democrat and GOP politicians who take Planned Parenthood's coin  feel very uncomfortable and ridicule - in the most loud of horse-laughs - the blood-soaked hypocrisy of Planned Parenthood.  Until then America will never be great again. 

I Have Absolutely Nothing to Complain About . . . But, This Gent Just Might!

Michael Moriarty reminded me this morning that it is the small blessings that mean everything.

Five people have been injured in the first day of the San Fermin festival, in the race known as the running of the bullsA Spanish Red Cross spokesman said that a total of four people needed treatment by medical staff and one was hospitalised after falling.
Tens of thousands of people packed into Pamplona's main square on Wednesday for the start of the annual event... Sky News London.

Kevin Myers - Why One Writes, Yet Sales Stink Out Loud

I have written two books, articles, reviews, rants, confessions, obfuscations, grants, proposals, love notes and many, many apologies. I am blessed to have received payment for the books, articles and reviews. Go figure.

Those payments went immediately to debtors - Peoples Gas, ATT, ComEd, Cook County, The City of Chicago, and the great folks at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. Some spare shillings and shekels went to entertainment and my snappy habiliments.

Great writers practice the art. I too practice the craft with the love of the game of a fourth-stringer. There are so many wonderful writers. Some of my favorite writers practicing today are not the best-selling political pundits and hacks, nor the plugged-in lawyers, let alone the socialite dabblers who pen less than meaty bestsellers, and columns. In my helot's opinion the very best writers are:

Joseph Epstein - America's Montaigne: Joe Epstein is to Pat Hickey as Tartar of Kobe beef with Imperial Beluga caviar and Belons oyster is to a Slim Jim.

Beachwood Reporter Publisher/Editor and moral titan Steve Rhodes who has more integrity than Gates has nickels

Actor/journalist/musician Michael Moriarty - God did overtime pumping talent, grace and courage in this fierce defender of honesty

Literary critic/activist Camille Paglia - The Total Woman

Lawyer/journalist Christine Flowers of Philadelphia - A Superb Person

Sports writer and Leo HS President Dan McGrath the King of the Declarative Sentence

Chicago historian Richard Lindberg If it happened Richard reports on it without varnish

Chicago attorney/journalist/historian Dan Kelley who is exact and poetic in presenting his prose

Jazz critic/journalist Stanley Crouch he writes with the soul of a sailor

Bloggers John Ruberry and Anne Leahy who keep Illinois wide awake to common sense

Novelist/historian Kevin Baker - read Baker's historical novels and understand America: Paradise Alley, Dreamland and Strivers Row better than Dos Passos.

Tribune columnist John Kass - Royko couldn't carry John's jockstrap, nor would care to

Sun Times Reporters Natasha Korecki and Mark Konkol Hope for Journalism

Second City Cop - The Flat-foot can sling prose

Humorist/actor/Film Maker Mike Houlihan: The Man is Pure Gold

18th Century Chicago Genius the late Tom Roeser

Journalist Dennis Byrne a reminder of Ray Coffey's honest prose

Demographer/journalist Joel Kotkin

Political Pundit Don Rose - Maybe the only Progressive who parts with a nickel

Crime Biographer/historian Rose Keefe - tougher than Smash McKenna after a full meal

Priest/Homilist -Father Tony Mazurkiewicz,O.Carm. & Father Gallagher of Sacred Heart Church

At the top of this talented tree, is Irish Independent columnist Kevin Myers. The man can line up words like Napoleon lined up Tirailleurs, Grenadiers, and Chasseurs at Austerlitz. Today, Kevin Myers presents a golden insight to writers in the face of reality.

Spilling ink does not portend a bankable pot of gold.

Wednesday June 08 2011
Few things so thoroughly test the will to live of Writers of Unsuccessful Books (such as this columnist) as the inexcusable success of others, and why they are so favoured.

Any tour of a bookshop by us WUBs reveals slain pine trees groaning beneath the weight of the pink-covered works by authors who may simply be described: TOP: Twenties, Ovaried, Photogenic. And if they're not T or P, but are still O, then there's always the Orange prize for women writers only (which is announced today: imagine the outcry from those well-known literary feminists Fallopia Whynge and Ovaria Fume over a man-only literary award).

The 'Daily Telegraph' last week gave a half-page splash to the first novel of a TOP named Georgina Bloomberg. The author is 28 and already famous, being the very successful show-jumping daughter of the even more famous Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street billionaire and mayor of New York. Moreover, no doubt emboldened by family success, her sister nurtures serious political ambitions. Georgina Bloomberg's debut work of fiction is about -- well whaddya know -- a successful show-jumping daughter of a Wall Street billionaire, with a politically ambitious older sister. The fair Miss Bloomberg has even been interviewed at length about her "writing" by the 'New York Times', dear God almighty. So how was this possible? All was revealed in the 'Telegraph' story: "Bloomsbury, the publisher, said the idea for the book came from an agent."

Of course it bloody did. (Pause to vomit).

Traditional publishing is dying, and the market-driven, agent-led TOPification of books is one reason why. However, market distortions are not just at the TOP level of pulp fiction. It is now the norm for established writers to gushingly review one another's books: in Ireland, it is Colm/Sebastian/Joseph/ Anne, in Britain it is Julian/ Ian/Sebastian/Martin, interlocking literary torcs upon whose burnished gold the sun of mutually warm critiques never sets.

Which is why at this time of year, I almost welcome the annual outbursts of toxin from VS Naipaul, at whatever festival he is attending. Last week he announced at Hay that no woman writer would ever be as good as him -- to an entirely predictable fury. He is a quite refreshingly horrible man. He doesn't write to be successful or to be popular. He has no eye for a market, or an idea of what a market is. This is not a touching and beguiling naivety, so much as ignorance about the real world, which in scale is probably every bit the equal of the ignorance of the delightful Miss Bloomberg. But presumably unlike her, Naipaul exults in his ignorance as proof of his superiority, where in reality it is simply a pathological disorder.

Naipaul is a monster. His monstrousness is not made in any way more charming by his lack of guilt or shame. By his own account he repeatedly betrayed his young and vulnerable wife with prostitutes.

He is the kind of vile man who is murdered in the opening pages of a whodunit, and at the end we find that every single character we have met in the book, including the investigating police officers, plus Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Roger Ackroyd and Sherlock Holmes, have all entered the general and thoroughly deserved conspiracy to kill him.

Yet Naipaul is a sublime writer. No living novelist comes near him. It is an inexplicable paradox. The only other "modern" novelist who was so unpleasant was also perhaps the only English writer over the past century who was his match: Evelyn Waugh. He too was a monster: a posturing snob, a sneering bully and -- like Naipaul today -- an alpha male whom no one could ever best in social interaction, merely because of his status in the human hierarchy. This is a fact of life that confirms our condition as exalted chimpanzees: it is always impossible for lower status animals to defeat higher status animals in social conflict. No one left Bismarck's or Hitler's or Stalin's or Churchill's or Cheney's or Rumsfeld's offices slapping their thighs and chuckling triumphantly: "By God, I got the better of that dormouse."

WAugh's misanthropic life came to an end just as Naipaul's literary career was beginning, almost like a transmigration of abominable souls. Nonetheless, wise observers ought to judge the literary merits of both men solely for their written words, whereas their spoken utterances, full of hatred, bigotry and snobbery, should be treated with contempt.

But of course, the world is not wise, which is why Naipaul's recent and very silly boast, that no woman writer would ever be as good as him, has been making predictably loud headlines, with a drearily predictable indignation from Fallopia Whynge and Ovaria Fume. This is stupid: his opinions are neither worth repeating, rejecting nor reacting to, in any way. They should, like Miss Bloomberg's literary ambitions, and those of all her fellow TOPs, be totally ignored. Alas, that is not the way life on this planet works, which is what we poor weeping WUBs know all too well, as we watch Bloomberg make No 1 in Tesco, while Naipaul is the overall bestseller in Hodges Figgis, and Writers With Ovaries enjoy the Orange.

Irish Independent

Ain't it true though.

Former Alaska Governor Palin Did Nothing to Keep Chicago's City Hall Open Yesterday

Yesterday was opening day for freshmen at Leo High School and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin could not be bothered to drop by and give the African American young men attending this venerable Catholic inner city high school a Howdy! Not only that Chicago City Hall was closed for business and Palin lifted not one finger to help.

Sarah Palin is the cause of all the problems President Obama has had since his historic election.

In Afghanistan, American troops face the Taliban, with whom we should be dialoging, but nowhere is Palin to be found.

When the late Michael Jackson was gulping down white gloved handfuls of crazy pills, did Palin intervene? 'Zounds - she did not!

Did she save Vick's Dogs? Nope.

MSNBC Chris "Milky" Matthews suggests with every breath in his thigh that Palin is ordering folks to strap on the shooting irons and attend Townhalls.

Sarah Palin is goading Americans to attend Townhalls in order that they may be infected by the H1N1 - Pig Puker Virus.

Every voice in electronic media devotes every level of volume in damning Palin, but her pernicious influence on the lives of all Americans continues unabated - like the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, Professor James Moriarty The Napoleon of Crime, Sarah Palin is La jeune fille à l'agneau.

Yet, considered unlettered and unwholesome to Salonitas and their lap-dogs like David Brooks and Kathleen Parker, Palin weaves a web of calumny and intrigue with the dexterity of Kali -Palin's tawny and sinew-ed Diana-like arms snake in and out of every aspect of the Life American!

Woe unto this Land! Unscrubbed of Palin.

Only this morning, I counted the bills in the silver clip inscribed with the honorific -#1. Dad ( Father's Day 1999) and was shocked to see that I had ten dollars fewer than the previous morning.

Palin is Afoot in this Land of the Free! The Game's Afoot!

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/17/palin_called_a_spade_a_spade_97916.html