Debt

Is being out of debt (or at least working towards that with vigor) a major ideal of distributism?

It seems to me it should be. Americans are so poor at money, no savings, most of the time our savings are in the negative, consumerism is touted as being patriotic, etc. We don't learn to save, we learn how to be in debt. Then we become wage slaves to the corporations that treat you like a number, and when you turn up at the wrong end of the bottom line, umph, you're kicked out the door. There is no "treat you like family" mentality in the world of work anymore, people are commodities to be used or discarded as the competition dictates, or the stock holders.

Can we really do anything about debt, besides trying to get out and stay out ourselves?

Out playing (and working)

Today has been an absolutely gorgeous gift. We had 70 weather when it is usually about 40 this time of year. Or lower. We've already had snow, for example. I'm in the northern most part of the northern most part of the Land of Lincoln.

But today, wow. We washed windows and screens, mowed the lawn, did some gardening and misc. yard work, took a ride up to an Apple farm and bought a pumpkin and some apple treats, etc. In general, had windows wide open to sniff this kind of air. Mmmmm...what a treat.

So that's where I've been, and why I've been mysteriously silent on the subject of Chesterton today.

GKC plays The Ten Random Facts Game

Gilbert loves games, and he was recently tagged for this ten random facts game. Sent to me via Dr. Thursday.

1. Something I was told
Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.
[Autobiography CW16:21]

Read the rest of the 10 Facts

2. Something I remember
I am just old enough to remember in infancy the world before telephones. And I remember that my father and my uncle fitted up the first telephone I ever saw with their own metal and chemicals, a miniature telephone reaching from the top bedroom under the roof to the remote end of the garden. I was really impressed imaginatively by this; and I do not think I have ever been so much impressed since by any extension of it. The point is rather important in the whole theory of imagination. It did startle me that a voice should sound in the room when it was really as distant as the next street. It would hardly have startled me more if it had been as distant as the next town. It does not startle me any more if it is as distant as the next continent. The miracle is over. Thus I admired even the large scientific things most on a small scale. So I always found that I was much more attracted by the microscope than the telescope. I was not overwhelmed in childhood, by being told of remote stars which the sun never reached, any more than in manhood by being told of an empire on which the sun never set. I had no use for an empire that had no sunsets. But I was inspired and thrilled by looking through a little hole at a crystal like a pin's head; and seeing it change pattern and colour like a pigmy sunset.
[ILN February 8, 1930 CW35:252, also Autobiography CW16:108]

3. Something I like
I once smashed an ordinary tumbler at Herbert's table, and an ever-blossoming tradition sprang up that it had been a vessel of inconceivable artistic and monetary value, its price perpetually mounting into millions and its form and colour taking on the glories of the Arabian Nights. From this incident (and from the joyful manner in which Baring trampled like an elephant among the fragments of the crystal) arose a catchword used by many of us in many subsequent controversies, in defence of romantic and revolutionary things; the expression: "I like the noise of breaking glass." I made it the refrain of a ballade which began:

Prince, when I took your goblet tall
And smashed it with inebriate care,
I knew not how from Rome and Gaul
You gained it; I was unaware
It stood by Charlemagne's great chair
And served St. Peter at High Mass.
I'm sorry if the thing was rare;
I like the noise of breaking glass.

[Autobiography CW16:217]

4. Something else I like
With the mention of bleakness there comes back to me the memory of one particular chapel, lying in the last featureless wastes to the north of London, to which I actually had to make my way through a blinding snowstorm, which I enjoyed very much; because I like snowstorms. In fact, I like practically all kinds of English weather except that particular sort of weather that is called "a glorious day." So none need weep prematurely over my experience, or imagine that I am pitying myself or asking for pity. Still, it is the fact that I was exposed to the elements for nearly two hours either on foot or on top of a forlorn omnibus wandering in a wilderness; and by the time I arrived at the chapel I must have roughly resembled the Snow Man that children make in the garden. I proceeded to lecture, God knows on what, and was about to resume my wintry journey, when the worthy minister of the chapel, robustly rubbing his hands and slapping his chest and beaming at me with the rich hospitality of Father Christmas, said in a deep, hearty, fruity voice, "Come, Mr. Chesterton; it's a bitter cold night! Do let me offer you an oswego biscuit." I assured him gratefully that I felt no such craving; it was very kind of him, for there was no possible reason, in the circumstances for his offering me any refreshment at all. But I confess that the thought of returning through the snow and the freezing blast, for two more hours, with the glow of that one biscuit within me, and the oswego fire running through all my veins, struck me as a little out of proportion. I fear it was with considerable pleasure that I crossed the road and entered a public-house immediately opposite the chapel...
[Autobiography CW16:314-5]

5. A dark secret about me which may serve as a warning to others
What I may call my period of madness coincided with a period of drifting and doing nothing; in which I could not settle down to any regular work. I dabbled in a number of things; and some of them may have had something to do with the psychology of the affair. I would not for a moment suggest it as a cause, far less as an excuse, but it is a contributory fact that among these dabblings in this dubious time, I dabbled in Spiritualism without having even the decision to be a Spiritualist. Indeed I was, in a rather unusual manner, not only detached but indifferent. My brother and I used to play with planchette, or what the Americans call the ouija board; but we were among the few, I imagine, who played in a mere spirit of play. Nevertheless I would not altogether rule out the suggestion of some that we were playing with fire; or even with hell-fire. In the words that were written for us there was nothing ostensibly degrading, but any amount that was deceiving. I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify, with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lies may be larks or they may be lures to the imperilled soul or they may be a thousand other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.
[Autobiography CW16:86-7]

6. Another dark secret which led me to write detective stories
I mentioned to [Father O'Connor] in conversation that I proposed to support in print a certain proposal, it matters not what, in connection with some rather sordid social questions of vice and crime. On this particular point he thought I was in error, or rather in ignorance; as indeed I was. And, merely as a necessary duty and to prevent me from falling into a mare's nest, he told me certain facts he knew about perverted practices which I certainly shall not set down or discuss here. I have confessed on an earlier page that in my own youth I had imagined for myself any amount of iniquity; and it was a curious experience to find that this quiet and pleasant celibate had plumbed those abysses far deeper than I. I had not imagined that the world could hold such horrors. If he had been a professional novelist throwing such filth broadcast on all the bookstalls for boys and babies to pick up, of course he would have been a great creative artist and a herald of the Dawn. As he was only stating them reluctantly, in strict privacy, as a practical necessity, he was, of course, a typical Jesuit whispering poisonous secrets in my ear.
When we returned to the house, we found it was full of visitors, and fell into special conversation with two hearty and healthy young Cambridge undergraduates, who had been walking or cycling across the moors in the spirit of the stern and vigorous English holiday. They were no narrow athletes, however, but interested in various sports and in a breezy way in various arts; and they began to discuss music and landscape with my friend Father O'Connor. I never knew a man who could turn with more ease than he from one topic to another, or who had more unexpected stores of information, often purely technical information, upon all. The talk soon deepened into a discussion on matters more philosophical and moral; and when the priest had left the room, the two young men broke out into generous expressions of admiration, saying truly that he was a remarkable man, and seemed to know a great deal about Palestrina or Baroque architecture, or whatever was the point at the moment. Then there fell a curious reflective silence, at the end of which one of the undergraduates suddenly burst out, "All the same, I don't believe his sort of life is the right one. It's all very well to like religious music and so on, when you're all shut up in a sort of cloister and don't know anything about the real evil in the world. But I don't believe that's the right ideal. I believe in a fellow coming out into the world, and facing the evil that's in it, and knowing something about the dangers and all that. It's a very beautiful thing to be innocent and ignorant; but I think it's a much finer thing not to be afraid of knowledge."
To me, still almost shivering with the appallingly practical facts of which the priest had warned me, this comment came with such a colossal and crushing irony, that I nearly burst into a loud harsh laugh in the drawing-room. For I knew perfectly well that, as regards all the solid Satanism which the priest knew and warred against with all his life, these two Cambridge gentlemen (luckily for them) knew about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator.
And there sprang up in my mind the vague idea of making some artistic use of these comic yet tragic cross-purposes; and constructing a comedy in which a priest should appear to know nothing and in fact know more about crime than the criminals.
[Autobiography CW16:317-8]

7. How I nearly was arrested
The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the keeping off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing. At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree, practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances. Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something about their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what the knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name of favourite cat, and so on. They also said I was damaging the tree; which was, I am sorry to say, not true, because I could not hit it. The peculiar philosophical importance, however, of the incident was this. After some half-hour's animated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinished poem, which was read with great care, and, I trust, with some profit, and one or two other subtle detective strokes, the elder of the two knights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, that I was a journalist, that I was on the Daily News (this was the real stroke; they were shaken with a terror common to all tyrants)...
["Some Policemen and a Moral" in Tremendous Trifles]

8.My great ambition
My great ambition is to give a party at which everybody should meet everybody else and like them very much.

AN INVITATION
Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
requests the pleasure
Of humanity's company
to tea on Dec. 25th 1896.
Humanity Esq., The Earth, Cosmos E.
[From "The Notebook" quoted in Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 61]

8. An excerpt from a love letter I wrote
[I wrote this letter to my dear Frances, in the third person. It will explain why I like this part of the INTERNET.]
"One pleasant Saturday afternoon Lucian said to him [GKC], 'I am going to take you to see the Bloggs.' 'The what?' said the unhappy man. 'The Bloggs,' said the other, darkly. Naturally assuming that it was the name of a public-house he reluctantly followed his friend. He came to a small front-garden; if it was a public-house it was not a businesslike one. They raised the latch - they rang the bell (if the bell was not in the close time just then). No flower in the pots winked. No brick grinned. No sign in Heaven or earth warned him. The birds sang on in the trees. He went in.
He was plumped down on a sofa beside a being of whom he had a vague impression that brown hair grew at intervals all down her like a caterpillar. Once in the course of conversation she looked straight at him and he said to himself as plainly as if he had read it in a book: 'If I had anything to do with this girl I should go on my knees to her: if I spoke with her she would never deceive me: if I depended on her she would never deny me: if I loved her she would never play with me: if I trusted her she would never go back on me: if I remembered her she would never forget me. I may never see her again. Goodbye.' It was all said in a flash: but it was all said....
"Two years, as they say in the playbills, is supposed to elapse. And here is the subject of this memoir sitting on a balcony above the sea. The time, evening. He is thinking of the whole bewildering record of which the foregoing is a brief outline: he sees how far he has gone wrong and how idle and wasteful and wicked he has often been: how miserably unfitted he is for what he is called upon to be. Let him now declare it and hereafter for ever hold his peace.
"But there are four lamps of thanksgiving always before him. The first is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as you. The second is that he has not, with all his faults, 'gone after strange women.' You cannot think how a man's selfrestraint is rewarded in this. The third is that he has tried to love everything alive: a dim preparation for loving you. And the fourth is - but no words can express that. Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you."
[quoted in Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 104-5]

10. What I would really like to be doing
There are some who complain of a man for doing nothing; there are some, still more mysterious and amazing, who complain of having nothing to do. When actually presented with some beautiful blank hours or days, they will grumble at their blankness. When given the gift of loneliness, which is the gift of liberty, they will cast it away; they will destroy it deliberately with some dreadful game with cards or a little ball. I speak only for myself, I know it takes all sorts to make a world; but I cannot repress a shudder when I see them throwing away their hard-won holidays by doing something. For my own part, I never can get enough Nothing to do. I feel as if I had never had leisure to unpack a tenth part of the luggage of my life and thoughts.
[Autobiography CW16:202]

Baker's Ten!
11. How the Pope got me in trouble with the newspapers after I was dead
Both Frances [GKC's wife] and Cardinal Hinsley received telegrams from Cardinal Pacelli (now Pope Pius XII). To Cardinal Hinsley he cabled "Holy Father deeply grieved death Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton devoted son Holy Church gifted Defender of the Catholic Faith. His Holiness offers paternal sympathy people of England assures prayers dear departed, bestows Apostolic Benediction." This telegram was read to the vast crowd in the Cathedral and found an echo in the hearts of his fellow countrymen. ... Once more a Pope had bestowed upon an Englishman the title Defender of the Faith. The first man to receive it had been Henry VIII and the words are still engraved on the coins of England. The secular press would not print the telegram in full because it bestowed upon a subject a royal title.
[Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 652]


Anyone who has read this and has his own blog is invited to play along.
What are your ten random facts?

Distributism Without the Cow

In an effort to direct the conversation on distributism, I give you this fine work by John Peterson, who gave this speech to the Chicago Are Chestertonians a while back.

Distributism without the Cow

I've called the peculiar slant Gilbert! magazine takes at Distributism by the name “Urban Distributism,” a phrase Chesterton and Belloc never spoke or ever even heard. It's a peculiar name because ChesterBellocian Distributism was basically an agrarian movement, and “agrarian” is the opposite of “urban.”

Start with a basic definition or description of “Distributism,” which (as you know) was active as a political movement in England in the 20’s and 30’s before it faded from view. The fundamental idea of Distributism is economic independence and economic freedom for families, with the government in a subsidiary and supportive role. It is the concept of Democracy applied to the field of economics.

It's the question of who is in control of our work. The problem with Communism and Capitalism is that the money, property, power, and control associated with economic production tend to become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. In other words, Communism and Capitalism are economically undemocratic. Under Communistic production, a few powerful politicians or bureaucrats control the production of goods. Under Capitalist production it’s a few powerful business executives or managers. Under Distributism, the people control the production of goods. The people are in control of their own work.

Read more of the "Distributism Without the Cow" article
Distributism’s economic democracy is based on the wide distribution and ownership of productive property -- property used in the production and distribution of goods and services -- as tools, land, facilities, and machinery. The Distributist believes workers are most free when they own their own tools and are their own bosses. They are least free when they hire out for a wage and work at the command and sufferance of someone else who owns the tools, machinery, and land.

That's Distributism. Now Urban Distributism. This is a Distributist philosophy for those who do not hold out much hope for the triumph of the pure form of Distributism. Those who simply don't expect a full blown Distributist Revolution any time soon. Why this pessimism? For a good answer, we have to consider the strategies and plans of the original Distributists in England. The original Distributist program can be reconstructed -- and it appears to have had these six stages:

1. Promote Distributist ideas in print and in public debate. That was done.
2. Start a Distributist “League” to sponsor activities. That was done.
3. Provide for model Distributist experiments (e.g., self-sustaining Distributist communities). That was done.
4. Form a Distributist political party and elect Distributist candidates. That was done.
5. Influence legislation in favor of Distributist reforms and programs. That was done, at least partially.
6. Achieve majority representation in Parliament and gradually inaugurate the Distributist State. Obviously that was not done.

But five out of six isn't bad. Although this Distributist program is generally regarded to have been a practical failure, in fairness they did achieve much of their aim. Their Distributist ideas are politically influential to this day -- although not usually under the Distributist name. Even though the Distributist political party did not last even two years, they accomplished much, especially when compared to what has been accomplished here.

Compared to the efforts of the original Distributists, the American branch can barely be said to exist. At best we are at the initial phase of the beginning chapter of stage one. We haven't even convinced most of our Chestertonian friends of the worth of Distributism! That fact alone measures how little has been done.

Chesterton's Distributism was an agrarian movement. While not everyone is a farmer in the Distributist society -- there are merchants, craftsmen, doctors, teachers -- most are farmers. Now, I ask you this: how many people do you personally know who are ready and willing to move onto the land and to operate a family farm? As you meet other Chestertonians you discover that most of them have no interest in agrarianism. You discover that many find the idea utterly ridiculous. “Put me on a farm and I’ll starve to death,” they say. “I’m not milking any cow,” they say. “I’ll get my milk at the supermarket, thank you very much.”

Our idea of “The American Way of Life,” is wrapped up in the whole notion of a “Standard of Living.” The “Living Standard” is a measure of consumer spending. It is concerned with how many things we can buy, how expensively we are able to live, what luxuries we might afford. For many (perhaps most) Americans, the purpose of work is to earn a wage or salary in order to support the level of consuming that we believe is right for us and will make us happy. This is light years way from life on a farm.

Even life on the farm isn't life on the farm. The people I know who are already farmers are not Distributists. The farmers I know are all involved in something called agribusiness. They cultivate 800 acres or more of feed corn (and soybeans) using all the latest methods and machinery of mass production. They don't have kitchen gardens or keep a cow for the milk. They buy their eggs at the supermarket, just as the rest of us do.

Most of the owners of small businesses I know aren’t Distributists either. They don’t want their businesses to stay small. They try to grow their businesses as fast as possible to become as big as possible. I have a friend who owns two Subway sandwich shops. He wants to own four -- on his way to owning fifty. I have a friend who owns a carpet-cleaning business. He has six employees and three dozen industrial customers. He wants hundreds of employees and thousands of customers. He's a small businessman but he is in no sense a Distributist.

Distributists find themselves in a frustrating situation. We have the remedy for our diseased society's ills, but nobody is buying -- because nobody is aware of the pain. We have medicine, but nobody thinks he’s sick. We have a state of ignorance so profound as to be astonishing. The whole of our society is in a state of denial that appears to be limitless.

Here are four common symptoms or side effects of our present system that we do not seem to be aware of.

Two previously divorced people tie the knot. We sit in a church and, as Chesterton pointed out, the two people make solemn vows before God while at the exact same moment they break their previous vows. In a church! We sit still in the presence of this enormous and shocking sacrilege, and smile and go to the reception. We're in denial and we feel no pain.

Second. We live in a society that has enshrined the seven deadly sins as the seven lively ideals. I don't mean that these sins are committed, I mean these sins are recommended. We turn on the television and we watch a funny show dedicated to the glorification of Lust. I don't mean the glorification of sex, because that would be a good thing. But it is Lust that is portrayed as a good thing, as a funny thing, as a healthy thing, and as the standard of good behavior. The same point can easily be made in respect to Pride or Vanity, Envy, Gluttony, Anger or Wrath, Sloth, and especially Greed. We're in denial and we feel no pain.

The third example of what we don't notice is the servility in the workplace. The average wage-paying job in this economic system offers exactly as much dignity, freedom, and creativity as that of a slave. Remember, the mark of slavery is not drudgery but the absence of freedom. The typical job in North America today is computer data entry -- wearing a phone set and sitting before a computer monitor hour after hour, mindlessly entering data. On-the-job freedom and creativity in this and in similar employment is out of the question. And because we are released from the slave compound every night at 5 o'clock, we seem to think the servility of the workplace does not exist. Or we think that servility in the workplace is proper to the condition of work.

Four. The existing economic regime or capitalist “way of life” is destroying the family before our eyes. We are seeing the effects of working moms, two-job dads, abortion to protect a paycheck or a shopping spree, preschool daycare, children brainwashed in compulsory schools, and divorce on demand. We see mindless spending, crushing personal debt, employment insecurity, and preferential turning away from the poor. We're in denial and we feel no pain.

To get off this treadmill, current wisdom offers three suggestions. They are imperfect at best.

First, we have to look very warily at the alternative of small business enterprise as the Urban Distributist ideal. If the failure rate for new businesses is eighty percent within the first five years of operation, then advising the typical wage-earner, to “start his own business” is tantamount to recommending his personal bankruptcy and financial ruin. We might endorse the current system of small business formation, which rewards only those with the entrepreneurial spirit, or boundless good luck, or unbridled ruthlessness. Rewarding the few is called Capitalism; it is the opposite of Distributism.

Second, the alternative called the “Producer's Cooperative” has had very little practical success. In fact, we have to go far afield geographically to the Bosc region of Spain to find a successful example of a worker-owned and worker-managed factory. This is not an encouraging sign.

Third and last, the employee-owned business corporation (e.g., Avis or United Air Lines) is a wonderful economic concept, but it is not a Distributist concept. These employees benefit by sharing in the growth and profitability of the company they work for. But they do not share in the management of the company they work for. They don't run things, they work as hirelings. They do as they are told or they are fired. They cannot be said to “own” the company in the real sense -- that is, the company is their own private property to direct however they choose.

None of that stuff is Distributism. But there is a way for the typical urban American family to enjoy the major benefits of Distributism without gambling everything on some high-risk venture, agricultural or not. That way is simple. We can even say it's easy. It merely requires a single-minded fanaticism about Distributist ideals and a stubborn refusal to compromise with anti-Distributist influences -- which are diabolically powerful.

This fanaticism asked for has been expressed in a ten-point program, which might be referred to as the Ten Commandments of Urban Distributism. But they are more ideals than commands.

1. Everything begins with putting the family first. The first loyalty has to be to the family.

Urban Distributist marriages should include, among the wedding vows, a mutual promise to willingly die for the welfare of this newly created family. Is there a stronger way to put it? Distributism is not about farming-economics, it's about family-integrity. The family has to have stability before it can have economic stability. Therefore, Distributism cannot be comprised of a bunch of wishy-washy, temporary, modernist marriages with spoiled-brat divorces and no-sweat annulments. That stuff is fine for Proletarians but will not do for Distributists. In every decision made by husband, in every decision made by wife, the first consideration must be, “is this good for or bad for my family?” Neither the selfish, “How will this affect me?” nor the unselfish, “How will it affect her (or him)” is Distributist. This commandment is especially true in the sphere of economics. The word “career” has no meaning for a Distributist except as it relates to the economic support of his family.

2. The Urban Distributist goal is economic independence for the family.

3. The center of Urban Distributist life is a place -- the home. The place is permanent. It can be changed for weighty family reasons, certainly, but certainly not for mere job transfers or so-called career “promotions.”

4. The Urban Distributist home is an economically productive place.

5. Urban Distributist family members hire themselves out as employees to work for a wage on behalf of the family. The Urban Distributist employees are valued employees. In justice, they give a good hour's work for an hour's pay, but they do not give their loyalty to their employer, they do not pin their hopes on job success, and they have no illusions about their employer's loyalty to them.

6. Urban Distributist families are frugal families. They accumulate savings, which they then invest to provide non-wage family income.

7. Urban Distributist families experiment with home businesses, at first as a learning experience, then as a source of non-wage income, and last as something to fall back on when the wages disappear (as they well may and very often do). Urban Distributist businesses are built around the interests, skills, and creativity of the family members, and are a source of both dignity and pleasure for them.

8. Urban Distributists have extra time. They make more of their time because they do not waste dozens of hours each week on television, computer games, the Internet or other escapist pursuits.

9. The Urban Distributist dollar goes further. Distributists avoid a consumerist life-style with its credit cards, mindless shopping, conspicuous consumption, and keeping up with Jones.

10. Urban Distributist families are hotbeds of economic education, perpetually seeking and learning new and improved job skills, sharper investment techniques, and more profitable business practices.

In summary, the Urban way to Distributism and family economic independence combines

family wages with
investments and
business income.

These economic benefits multiply with Distributist family frugality, productivity, and continuous education.

Maybe Urban Distributism can be explained in terms of the difference between rebellion and resistance. An alien enemy has conquered Christendom and we now live in occupied territory. The enemy has imposed his culture on us and is imposing his rules of law and life. When you are a conquered people, you have three alternatives. You can collaborate, you can resist, or you can rebel. To establish the Distributist State would require a rebellion. Until the Distributist Rebellion, then, we can think of ourselves as part of the resistance.

That's Urban Distributism.

February 20, 1999, Chicago Area Chestertonians
given by John Peterson

Paper and Pringles and Balls... and Saints!

Comments from our friend "Wild Goose" have brought me to mentioning such esoteric terms as "Euclidean" and "non-Euclidean" geometry in the comment-boxes of the ACS blogg. Hee hee. So I have decided to stuff the envelope even more, and explain why such things relate to the great feast of next week.

First, remember that Euclid was a great Greek mathematician who lived in the 4th century before Christ. His postulate 5 in Book I might be phrased thus: "through a point not on a line, there is exactly one line parallel to the given line". This leads to important results, such as the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is exactly 180 degrees (alluded to even by GKC!) Despite many attempts by great mathematicians over two millennia to prove this important postulate - that is, to turn it into a theorem based on other, more basic postulates - it remains a postulate.

Which means one might postulate an alternative (just as GKC hinted, as one writes a story!)

Like that there can be more than one such line - that is, more than one line can go through the point and not intersect the given line. This can happen if the "lines" are actually curves within the strange surface called a "hyperbolic paraboloid" - which any mathematical snack-food enthusiasts will recognize as the shape of a Pringle. This means that when one draws a "triangle" on a Pringle, the sum of its angles will be less than 180 degrees. This is hard to do, because the Pringle will probably break, so try it if you like, or you can just trust me on this one.

Or, on the other hand, there can be less than one such line - that is, every line through the point intersects the given line. This happens when the "lines" are curves (actually called "great circles") on an even more unusual surface called a sphere, for which some people use the term "ball". Now, in this case, triangles can have more than 180 degrees. This is easily seen from the terrestrial globe, and it's lots of fun, so get out your flying saucer or broom or aircraft, get a GPS or other locating device and try it:

1. Start on the Equator on the Greenwich meridian. This point is in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa, south of Ghana, west of Gabon.
2. Go west along the equator until you reach the 90 degree west meridian, and turn right, or north. You will be in the eastern end of the Pacific Ocean, just about where the Galapagos Islands are.
3. Go north, passing over Guatemala, New Orleans and Memphis, Ontario and Hudson Bay, finally reaching the Arctic Circle and Santa! (Ahem) I mean the North Pole, which is at 90 degrees North.
4. Again turn right, and go south. You will pass over England, France, Spain, and Algeria, finally coming to the Equator and the point at which you started.

Thus you will have made a triangle of three right angles, totalling 270 degrees, you non-Euclidean globe-trotter! What fun.

Ahem. Now I have lectured for quite some space about a rather esoteric idea in mathematics, and not connected it at all with the last term in my equation, er I mean title. What does the idea of Euclid and postulates and ways of drawing triangles have to do with saints?

Clearly, there is something fundamental about sainthood. It is as indescribable, and as inarguable, as a postulate, and as everlasting - and yet there are many ways of getting to be a saint. And yet there is something common to all saints: their love of God, and love of neighbor. And, like mathematics, there is an order to this love - according to St. Augustine, the term for order in love is virtue. I can think of no better exemplification of this order than the "Paradiso" of Dante's Divine Comedy, where (by the "math" of St. Thomas Aquinas) he arranges the Choirs of Saints into orders by virtue. (For the life of me, I can never understand why people seem to be so much more interested in the orders of punishment in "Inferno" or of correction in "Purgatorio".) Rather than attempt some mathematical study of this order, I will turn to GKC and see how his writing suggests the same idea, even if (like the Mathemagician) I start with a number.

There are hundreds of appearances of "saint" and "St." in the GKC collection I have. Here is just an attempt to collect GKC's mentions of the various saints:

Larger works:
1. Mary, Queen of Saints (Queen of Seven Swords, a book of poems; she is mentioned in many books)
2. St. Francis of Assisi (biography; an early poem)
3. St. Thomas Aquinas (biography)
4. St. Anthony the Hermit (play in CW11:207 et seq)
5. St. George (in the play "The Turkey and the Turk" CW11:216 et seq; patron of England)
6. St. Barbara ("The Ballad of St. Barbara" in Collected Poems; the patroness of artillery)
7. St. Pius X (obituary in ILN Aug 29 1914)
8. St. Joseph (fragments of a play "Dialogue Between Our Lord and St. Joseph" in CW11:33 et seq)

Chance mentions:
Sts. Agatha, Agnes, Albert, Andrew, Anselm, Anthony of Padua, Athanasius, Augustine; Sts. Bartholomew, Benedict, Bernard, Bonaventure, Boniface, Brandon; Sts. Catherine (martyr), Catherine of Siena, Charles Borromeo, Clare, Cecilia, Crispin, Cuthbert; Sts. Denys, Dominic, Dorothy, Dunstan, Edmund, Edward the Confessor, Etheldreda; Sts. Faith, Francis de Sales, Francis Xavier, George of Cappadocia, Giles, Helena, Hilarion, Hugh; Sts. James, Januarius, Jerome, Joan of Arc, John, John the Baptist, John Chrysostom, John of the Cross; Sts. Julian, Lawrence, Louis, Matthew, Mark, Mary Magdalen, Michael; St. Mungo (yes; this is not in Harry Potter but in Father Brown!); Sts. Nicholas, Patrick, Paul, Perpetua, Peter, Philip, Sebastian, Sernin (Saturninus) of Toulouse; Sts. Simeon Stylites, Stephen, Telemachus, Teresa (of Avila), Theresa (of Lisieux), Thomas; Sts. Thomas Becket, Thomas More, Urban, Valentine, Veronica, Vincent de Paul.

(He also mentions St. Pancras, a real saint, but also a railroad station in London; other saints also appear as location-names.)

I will conclude with two quotes. The first is one of GKC's earliest ponderings on the idea of sainthood. It is profound because, though it seems to apply only to martyrs, it actually applies to every kind of saint, because it is the artistic expression of this idea of order, virtue, and love. And though his comments are actually just an "aside" from another discussion, they are by no means a passing thought, as you shall see:

...those figures of virgin martyrs that may be seen in the old illuminations - virgin martyrs each of whom carries a gigantic axe or a portable rack or a gridiron on which she has been grilled at a previous stage of her career. But in that case the saint carries the weapon of her enemies. It was certainly one of the boldest and most picturesque of the revolutions made by Christianity, this idea that the things used against a man became a part of him; that he could not only kiss the rod, but use it as a walking-stick. It was felt, I suppose, that when a red-hot spear had been driven clean through a gentleman's body - it became in some sense his property. Torture itself was turned into a decoration; as if we were to make an artistic wall-paper pattern out of gibbets and cats-o'-nine-tails. [GKC, ILN Oct 21, 1905 CW27:40]

The second is was written 24 years later: again almost an aside in an argument about the "monkey trial lawyer" Clarence Darrow. It will show his consistency in what might be called "GKC's formula of sainthood for the Common Man":

One of [Darrow's] arguments against immortality is that people do not really believe in it. And one of his arguments for that is that if they did believe in certain happiness beyond the grave, they would all kill themselves. He says that nobody would endure the martyrdom of cancer, for instance, if he really believed (as he apparently assumes all Christians to believe) that in any case the mere fact of death would instantly introduce the soul to perfect felicity and the society of all its best friends. A Catholic will certainly know what answer he has to give. But Mr. Clarence Darrow does not really in the least know what question he has asked. ... A Catholic does not kill himself because he does not take it for granted that he will deserve heaven in any case, or that it will not matter at all whether he deserves it at all. He does not profess to know exactly what danger he would run; but he does know what loyalty he would violate and what command or condition he would disregard. He actually thinks that a man might be fitter for heaven because he endured like a man; and that a hero could be a martyr to cancer as St. Lawrence or St. Cecilia were martyrs to cauldrons or gridirons. The faith in a future life, the hope of a future happiness, the belief that God is Love and that loyalty is eternal life, these things do not produce lunacy and anarchy, if they are taken along with the other Catholic doctrines about duty and vigilance and watchfulness against the powers of hell. They might produce lunacy and anarchy, if they were taken alone. [GKC The Thing CW3:306-8]

You do not have to be a martyr - you don't even have to know about triangles! - but you still can be a saint. Make sure YOUR story ends correctly!

Was Chesterton Mysteriously Quiet on the Subject of.....

coffee?

I was just reading Ben Hatke's interesting article in the latest (Sept. 2006) Gilbert magazine on beverage drinking in Italy. Ben was telling us that he had recently been introduced to a new beverage: coffee. And he seemed to think that Chesterton didn't have much to say about the subject.

And yet, in my mind, I picture Chesterton lingering over meals, having long conversations, whilst sipping coffee late into the night.

Or maybe I associate Chesterton with coffee because of the mug I own, from the Chesterton Society, which helps me get up each morning with a Chesterton quote on the outside, and a cup o' the strong stuff on the inside.

But Ben's article got me thinking: Is Chesterton really silent on the subject of coffee?

Kinda makes me wish I lived in Omaha

From The Book Den:

“Whatever the word ‘great’ means, Dickens was what it means.”

G.K. Chesterton made this observation of the profoundly gifted English storyteller/novelist in his esteemed work of literary criticism, Charles Dickens, published in 1906.

The book was one of Chesterton’s earliest but in many ways, one of his most important. For not only was this work an intensely personal one, reflecting his deep respect and affection for Dickens but it was a work that effectively launched a new appreciation of Dickens among English readers. Furthermore, it was a work that would also launch an appreciation among English readers of a new and very present literary giant, Gilbert Keith Chesterton himself.

It is not all that far-fetched to surmise that without Chesterton’s Charles Dickens, we might not see the modern popularity of either.

Therefore, this provocative little book (its less than 150 pages) serves, even now, as a splendid introduction to both writers. It has been for decades extremely popular among Dickensians as the "primary primer" written about their man while Chestertonians value it as an insightful tribute to the writer that GKC most loved, was most influenced by, and whose work most resembled his own.

Connecting Chesterton, CSI and Waugh

Unions & Guilds & Distributism & Chesterton

This in from John Peterson, Chestertonian Extraordinaire. Thanks John. Dedicated to Tom and all other Union workers: for your reading pleasure.

Reprinted from The Distributist, 5-1, September, 1995

Distributism and Labor Unions

John Peterson


“Trade Unions are confederations of men without property, seeking to balance its absence by numbers and the necessary character of their Labor.”
~ G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England.


Two of today’s economic-political movements are unconditionally dedicated, at least conceptually, to the welfare of workers: Distributism and Organized Labor. And yet, with the exception of this shared purpose, the two movements signify almost nothing in the way of common theories and practices.

What may seem a paradox is, however, very easily explained. Distributism’s solution to the plight of workers is based on the natural affinity between the ideas of business ownership and work. Unionism’s solution is based on the natural antipathy between business ownership and work.

The purpose of the following discussion will be to suggest that Unionism would be strengthened, and its prospects brightened, if it would abandon its traditional belief in the incompatibility and unavoidable antagonism toward business ownership and work, or—to use a traditional phrase—between Capital and Labor.


Read more of JP's article
The Anti-Ownership Posture of Unions

Organized Labor exists because wage-employees are easily replaceable components in a fractionated production process. As individuals they have no bargaining power, and are subject to the whims of business owners and to cyclical swings in the demand for Labor. As a matter of simple justice, integral to the right of self-defense, workers can and must protect themselves from the inequities of the employment system: deficient wages, unjust dismissal, abuse from supervisors, job insecurity, and inadequate opportunity for occupational advancement. Under the right of assembly (and the right of self-defense), hired workers can and must band together for Collective Bargaining and other types of mutual support. Because Work Stoppage is the single effective threat a hired worker has, the Right to Strike is as fundamental as the Right to Organize. None of this can be denied, given the overwhelming predominance of wage-employment, and the attendant lack of business-ownership for workers in our society.

The main problem of Organized Labor has always been that in order to address the problems inherent in wage-employment, Unions have accepted the idea that workers and owners are natural enemies. Unions have accepted as normal or inevitable the state of affairs in which Capital and Labor are at opposite poles—with divided interests, conflicting motives, and antagonistic aims.

In the era of Robber Barons and Sweat Shops, the classic model of Capital-versus-Labor undoubtedly helped workers put a stop to unconscionable practices of exploitation and injustice by rapacious Owners. It was impossible for workers to own the means of industrial production, and the Owners knew it and took full advantage of the fact. But there are fundamental problems with the continuing use of that adversarial model today. First, it presupposes the idea that human work is a commodity and is subject to the same supply-and-demand analysis that is applied to the purchase of lumber, steel, or phosphates. In so far as workers and their Unions are immersed in this zero-sum struggle, they will be forced to justify their demands to the Capitalist-Owners on a competitive basis against the cost of raw materials, leases, equipment, overhead, marketing, and profits. In bargaining with owners for benefits, even with the coercive threat of the Strike, Labor tacitly admits that the value of work is defined by what can be won at the bargaining table. This degrades and dehumanizes Labor.
It must also be said the Labor-versus-Capital model is sanctioned by a discredited Marxism and the notion that class conflict is an inescapable historical process leading to the inevitable Workers’ Utopia. The historical affinity of Trade Unionism for Communism and Socialism cannot be denied, and may have served a useful purpose at one time—that can be argued pro and con. What is important to acknowledge now is the failure of Marxism as a convincing economic theory and as a viable economic system. The collapse of the Soviet Union has called into question not only the practical applications of Communism, but, as well, the atheistic-materialistic-deterministic philosophy on which it was based. Those who would continue to tie Organized Labor to the Marxist notions of class warfare or to the demonization of private property, are merely recommending exploded theories and failed policies that lead nowhere.

The second problem of the Capital-versus-Labor model has to do with the emergence of what might be called an “Ownership Vacuum” in the modern business corporation. Today’s typical large business is owned by an army of anonymous shareholders: holding companies, pension accounts, mutual funds, insurance trusts, individual investors, other corporations, and foreign interests. A modern manufacturing and service company like IBM, for example, lists over 700,000 different owners of common stock. These “owners” do not manage the firm and have no voice in setting policy. Fewer than five percent of formal stockholder initiatives ever succeed. And while owners of large blocks of shares may have a representative on the Board of Directors, command of the enterprise is really in the hands of the Chief Executive and his cronies who control the board. The ascendancy of this elite class of all-powerful professional managers, who have taken the mantle of business power from the old-style Capitalist-Tycoon-Entrepreneur, makes any talk of Capital-versus-Labor irrelevant. The Capitalists (that is to say the shareholders) do not come to the table.

Because the business executives do not own the corporations that employ them, but do exercise total control over the policies and resources of these corporations, the motives and aims of these men must be considered apart from the business goals of the enterprise. In brief, the personal aggrandizement and self-promotion of the manager who is not an owner boils down to:
A) Short term thinking, which jeopardizes the long term business health of the enterprise (example: siphoning money from employee pension funds to improve short term profits).
B) Cronyism, which robs the enterprise of the best leadership and which institutionalizes incompetence.
C) Self-awarded privileges and payoffs beyond the dreams of rapacity: multi-million dollar paychecks, golden parachutes, perks that would make any self-respecting emperor blush.
D) Merger mania in the quest for expanding personal power (as opposed to the quest for sound business results).

The dispersion of Ownership has permitted this self-indulgent management style to flourish unopposed. But this “Ownership Vacuum” should suggest an unprecedented opportunity for Organized Labor. All that is required is that Unions consider a view of the business corporation in other terms than the old Capital-versus-Labor model.

The Pro-Ownership Posture for Unions

The Labor Movement’s vaunted power in the political and economic fronts has uses that can never surface so long as Labor continues to demonize Ownership. We all know that Labor Unions have fought Employee Ownership Stock Plans (ESOPs), Capital Credit, and other forms of worker ownership with the excuse that workers should not have divided loyalties. We also live with the mentality of government legislators and regulators who feel worker ownership of the businesses for which they work is a conflict of interest. (As an aside, this writer was once offered stock in a privately-held company where he was employed, until the IRS voided the offer with the warning that too high a percentage of the employees were becoming shareholders in the firm.)

We are dealing with a pervasive mind-set that that Capital and Labor are incompatible. This may well be because of the history of merciless exploitation to which Owners subjected Labor in the early stages of Industrialization, and it may also be because of the fashionable Marxist theory of an inevitable class struggle. But clearly, and regardless of mind-sets, once the idea of worker-ownership is examined, it becomes extremely suggestive for Organized Labor both tactically and strategically. Consider just the fact that it is the shareholders and the workers who are most united in purpose—to assure a healthy, prospering business enterprise for growing profits and expanding employment. This goal is not the first priority of the professional managers or government regulators who may come to the bargaining table. Therefore ownership and Labor have natural affinities, and the time for taking advantage of them is long over due.

Here are a baker’s dozen of ideas.

1. A Union should aspire to the largest possible holdings in common stock in the corporations for which its workers are employed. Union pension trust-accounts should be so invested. Large minority owners of common shares in today’s corporations have an entree into the board room where key policies are formulated, including key policies affecting Labor.
2. As well, the Union should aggressively seek control over any employee benefit accounts (pension funds, for example) for the purpose of accumulating and controlling large blocks of shares in that corporation.
3. Labor should aspire to permanent membership on the Board of Directors, preferably not as a negotiated concession, but as the right of a major stock-ownership group.
4. Unions should get behind every manner of employee-ownership program, whether formal ESOP programs, Capital Credits, Leveraged Buyouts, negotiated profit sharing, subsidized IRAs or whatnot.
5. Union sponsored and employee owned (and risk-insured) stock-buying cooperatives or mutual funds should be originated.
6. To the extent that Union ownership of shares is impeded by laws and regulations, the political power of Unions should be brought to bear. Unions should sue for changes in business charters and lobby against laws and regulations that restrict Union ownership of common stock and the control that goes with it.
7. Unions should form alliances with other share-holder groups to pursue common goals.
8. It should go without saying that individual Union members should own at least a few shares in the company that employs them, for even individual investors have ownership rights that go beyond the monetary value of the shares, and large numbers of individual investors can mount a serious challenge to management under certain conditions.
9. Union lobbyists should work for business-friendly and Labor-friendly government regulation, rejecting the Democrats’ anti-Business politics and the Republican’s anti-Labor politics. Union lobbyists should not be permitted to reflect the Marxist doctrine of class struggle and Capital-vs.-Labor warfare, but should promote in every possible way the ownership of business corporations by Labor.
10. Union workers should return to the ancient ideal of the sanctity of work, entreating their members to Labor with pride, to work well, and to earn their pay with honesty and dignity. Unions should foster the pride of ownership that lends stature and purpose to Labor, increases productivity, and can serve Labor by invigorating feeble enterprises headed for oblivion and unemployment.
11. Unions should sponsor business education for their memberships, stressing how businesses create wealth and explaining the benefits and risks of ownership.
12. Unions should approach management from the point of view that the Union is an owner of the business, and that the executives bargaining with the Union are employees of the business. Today’s professional executives typically own very little stock in the firm, and what they own they were awarded by the Executive Board, which they control, in the form of very favorable stock options. No, these men are not Capitalists, not tycoons, and definitely not entrepreneurs. They have merely been sufficiently more clever or more ruthless than other professional managers at climbing the corporate ladder. They are essentially bureaucrats, and their sole concern is preserving their personal fiefdoms and expanding their empires. As such, they are the natural enemies of both Capital (the shareholders) and Labor. Without being crude about it, suffice it to say that wresting the perks from today’s executive team is a far more intimidating threat to them than the smaller menace of a Work Stoppage.
13. Unions should demand, at one and the same the same time, Labor concessions that are fair and business practices that are sound. This approach will benefit workers and shareholders more than conventional Union bargaining strategies (Wages versus Profits), and this is especially true if the workers and shareholders are to a significant extent the same people.

Whether or not most of these suggestions are feasible, or can be made feasible, has never been tested—and should be tested.

In the end, what may prevent the revolution may well be a dreadful and pervasive complacency. What is the recent record of Trade Unionism here in the United States? In 1960, one-third of the private-sector work force was organized. Today, the percentage is one in ten and declining. What there is of radical Labor activity goes unheralded today, except in small and exceptional pockets of geography like Decatur, Illinois, or in the worker-owner squabbles which frequently and meaninglessly erupt in the surrealistic world of Professional Sports. Otherwise, the Union movement seems to have slumped into a comfortable and nearly invisible limbo. Workers, to use the phrase of entrepreneur Jack Stark, are “the Living Dead”—submissive, alienated, and hopeless. Meanwhile, the Labor News is dominated by action on the Union-Merger front, an ominous sign that Organized Labor is taking on the coloration of the Professional Business Management Elite.

Just now the “Ownership Vacuum” in large corporations is a gaping opportunity for energizing the Trade Union movement. It is even conceivable that Organized Labor could bring a just, equitable, and final solution to the inequities seemingly inherent in industrialization. Labor could do so along revolutionary lines never envisioned by the great theorists of Distributism and through means those men would have thought impossible. We can now only dream of such a settlement in which the workers will own the great corporate enterprises for which they toil, will have their grievances redressed through Democratic processes, and will reap their share of the rewards of business success.

Perhaps the best that this kind of a brief paper can do is to suggest to all workers and Union members this simple but potent slogan: “Ownership Is Good!”

Math, GKC, and an Ignatian Asylum

Today the "North American Martyrs" are recalled, which brings up some very interesting mathematics.

Now, the connection between these two must seem very strange, but - as Bunny Watson explains in "Desk Set", a hilarious Tracey/Hepburn movie, "I associate many things with many things". The Chesterton translation of this exalted dictum of computer and also library science is simply "I never can really feel that there is such a thing as a different subject." Perhaps I ought to give the next verses, which will help you understand a bit more:

There is no such thing as an irrelevant thing in the universe; for all things in the universe are at least relevant to the universe. It is my psychological disease (since one must have a psychological disease of some sort nowadays, and this is the best I can do), it is my psychological disease that I never can see disconnected things without connecting them together in a train of thought.
[GKC, ILN Feb 7, 1906 CW27:126]

So - as I was saying, today is the feast of the North American Martyrs, one of whom was St. Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit priest.

Now, I live in southeastern Pennsylvania, in a little town which was once a larger city. And to its west is an even smaller town called... but let me reserve that for a moment. You see, when I say the name of that town, or hear it said, I have a completely different sense of its meaning than just about anyone else from this area of Pennsylvania. For whenever I hear that town named, I think of the (former) Jesuit Novitiate of St. Isaac Jogues, where one can find the grave of Father Walter Ciszek, who had been a prisoner in Siberia for many years, and whose Cause is now being considered in Rome... So this is what I think whenever I hear someone mention "Wernersville". But for everyone else it has a very different meaning.

For New Yorkers, it would be like saying "Bellevue" (remember in "Miracle on 34th Street"?) - or for Londoners, "Bedlam" which degenerated from "the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem"; GKC often speaks of "Hanwell" in the same fashion. You know: asylums, or mental wards... Remember, in Dickens' A Christmas Carol:

"There's another fellow," muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: "my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam."

Even our Lord took advantage of such word-play when He used the old name for the Jerusalem "town dump" - Gehenna - to suggest a more horrifying terminus for ontological waste.

Jesus, Dickens, and Chesterton often took advantage of such extended terms, in which the words mean something more than their literal sense - we call such things figures of speech:

The phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition. Phrases like "put out" or "off colour" might have been coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of verbal precision. And there is no more subtle truth than that of the everyday phrase about a man having "his heart in the right place." It involves the idea of normal proportion; not only does a certain function exist, but it is rightly related to other functions. Indeed, the negation of this phrase would describe with peculiar accuracy the somewhat morbid mercy and perverse tenderness of the most representative moderns. If, for instance, I had to describe with fairness the character of Mr. Bernard Shaw, I could not express myself more exactly than by saying that he has a heroically large and generous heart; but not a heart in the right place. And this is so of the typical society of our time.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:233]

Quoting this so soon after a mention of Scrooge cannot help but recall the Grinch, upon whose conversion his heart "grew three sizes"... but let me proceed.

I have, on my "ready reference" shelves, a book called Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P.J. Corbett, which spends some 20 pages defining and exemplifying some figures of speech: the simile, metaphor, oxymoron, hyperbole, periphrasis, synecdoche, metonymy, and (horror!) the pun. Perhaps it seems strange to find that puns are formal things, and have their place - just as jokes and good humor do! (If you don't believe me, you can look it up in the Summa, it's II-II Q168 A4 Resp.)

The pun for us today, you will find, is technically an antanaclesis, that is a "repetition of a word in two different senses".

Just as Wernersville means to me both the Jesuits and a mental ward, "figure" means both a structure of words, but also a structure of numbers. And few will think of Chesterton as being a math wizard, but don't forget my first quote! Hence I will conclude with some examples of powerful Chestertonian mathematics:

If two sides of a triangle are always greater than the third side (and all this I steadfastly believe) it can be proved from three-cornered hats or three-cornered tarts. I object to that fastidious mathematician who refuses to prove it except from the two secret triangles of the pentacle. [ILN Sep 17, 1910 CW28:60]

People talk about priest-craft, but there is no proof that the most priest-ridden people believe what a priest wrote on a parchment more than what a priest said with his own lips. Many people argue nowadays about whether education itself is not too arrogant an assumption of superiority by one generation over another. They suggest that it is an abuse of strength to teach a child anything so controversial as the multiplication table, or to prejudice and poison his mind with anything so narrow and sectarian as the A B C. But there is no proof that any children in the past could disbelieve what a schoolmaster stated in class viva voce [spoken aloud], but were bound to believe whatever he wrote on the blackboard. This strange idea of the infallibility of the written or printed word will have rather remarkable results in the immediate future, unless I am very much mistaken... [ILN Sep 18 1926 CW34:166-7]

Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our next." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment. But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free will. You cannot finish a sum how you like. But you can finish a story how you like. When somebody [Newton] discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one Differential Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to Juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined. And Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted on the theological free will. [Orthodoxy CW1:341-2]

For [the imagination] has laws of its own, which man has never been able to turn into a code. Only anybody who understands poetry knows when poetry has fulfilled those laws; as certainly as a mathematician knows when a mathematical calculation is correct. Only the mathematician can explain, more or less, why the answer is exactly right; and the lover of poetry can never explain why the word or the image is exactly right. [ILN Aug 4 1934, collected in As I Was Saying]

I do not set myself up here as a judge of the judgment or taste that Mr. Wells shows in these curious, intermittent outcries against the Christian mysteries. But I am quite certain that I should not like to talk in that way about the Buddhist mysteries or the Moslem mysteries. I should hold myself free to reason respectfully against the negative or quietist quality expressed in the image of Buddha in a trance. But it would give me no particular satisfaction to say that a fly might settle on his nose. I should hold myself free to make any fair and decent case against a fanatical simplification in the mind of the Moslem fakir when he rushes on the knives or flings himself on the sand. But I should not think it adequate to say that, after lying prone in the desert dust, with his face towards Mecca, his face would probably want washing. It is not appropriate, because it is not commensurate; it is not on the scale of the things with which his spirit is concerned. It consists, as I have said, in winking the other eye and not seeing the other half of the picture; or even the other half of the equation. All philosophers, sceptical or mystical or both, are working at that immense algebraic equation, and trying to find the exact relation indicated by saying that x = y. For one school, x may be only the unknown quantity; and y, by a sort of pun, may appear as a sort of question. For another, there may be an answer as well as a question, and the x may have a meaning, as it has in the shorter form of Xmas. But both mathematicians are bound to deal with both signs. Neither has found even a negative solution if it does not cover both sides of the equation. And to think about the relation of life and lice by thinking about the lice and not about the life is really to refuse to think about either. [ILN Nov 10, 1934]

I LOVE it!!!

A Union Request

Tom, a union worker, requested that I post something about distributism and guilds for the "union guys" (meant in the fullest, and most universal sense of "men and women") out there.
Here is a little something to chew on and discuss:

ILN September 4, 1920" "The Bad and the Good Old Days"

I see that Mr. Robert Blatchford, whose comments generally contain at the best sagacity, and at the worst sanity, has been considering the question of the disparagement of the present in comparison with the past, in an article called "The Bad Old Days." The period chosen for praise by the writer he criticises was apparently about fifty years ago [meaning 1870-ed.]; and he has no difficulty in suggesting particular and definite advantages in connection with that particular and definite date. But
when he seems to imply, in his concluding paragraphs, that the present period is better than any other, and that by some natural progress we shall arrive at a period that is better still, he raises a very different question.

To begin with, of course, it is equally irrational to talk of the "Bad Old Days" and of the "Good Old Days" for the reason with which we are all familiar in daily life: that no two days are alike. Even if we take some modern commercial type, whose
days are far too much alike, the fallacy is obvious. If we ask a clerk sitting on an office stool whether he prefers his present to his past, he will very rightly regard the question as absurd. He will want to know whether he is to compare that particular moment, of moderate though monotonous work in an office, with the time when he had toothache in the east wind at Margate; or the time when he won ten pounds in a newspaper competition; or with twenty other conditions that were either much better or much worse. Our present civilization is far too much a civilisation of clerks and office stools; but certainly there were many past civilizations that were much better and much worse. He might be much worse off if he were a slave in a half-barbaric Byzantine decadence; he might be better off if he were a guildsman in the brief but promising golden age of mediaevalism. But I agree that the average poor man was in many ways worse off at the particular time Mr. Blatchford was considering.

Of course, there is another fallacy also involved, when Mr. Blatchford says, for instance, that there were once no trades unions for the protection of labour. In the Middle Ages there were far stronger trades unions; but that is not the fallacy I mean. It should also be realised that if trades unions have grown stronger, trusts have also grown stronger. A thing may be a good thing because it is a good medicine; but medicine implies a disease. Trades unions arose to combat a theory of competition more cruel than any that had ever been preached in the world before. It is as if we were to say that ten years ago, before the War, our soldiers had not such miracles of surgery as their mechanical legs. They had not; before the War they had real legs. And before the modern capitalist corruption they had real land and real guilds and real rights and religion.

But whether or no people will accept this praise of the past, there is surely no doubt of their doubt about the present. It is surely extraordinary that men should be so optimistic about the future when they are so pessimistic about the present. For my part, I wonder how long we are going on with the double process of cursing the position we are in and blessing everything that has brought us to it. It is considered realistic to say that we are in the ditch, but is considered merely reactionary to say that we fell into the ditch, and still more reactionary to hint that it would have been better if we had continued to walk along the road.

As it is, I repeat, we are at once lamenting that all our affairs have gone wrong, and yet still explaining how it is that they have always gone right. We are talking about the danger of commercial bankruptcy; but we are still talking of the secret of our commercial supremacy. We are complaining of mismanagement, and even of misrule, in every part of our Empire; but we are still arguing from the universal peace of our dominions and the general acceptability of our rule. We are already in practice taking the corruption of our politics for granted; but we are still in theory explaining why our politics are free from corruption. Most of us are every day accusing half our countrymen of raving insanity; but most of us are still making appeals
to the well-known sanity and solidity of our country. We show our great manufacturing towns to everybody else as a boast, while we are ourselves treating them as a problem; and we tell the foolish foreign peasant that he may well wish he were living in London, while we ourselves go and live in the country. We represent the English gentleman and public school-boy as a Paladin and perfect ruler of men, until he begins to do real work at the Foreign Office or the Colonial Office; and then we represent him (often very unjustly) as a worthless noodle and slacker, doing no work at all. We are by this time talking in terms of sheer panic about the power of the Jews when they erect a tyranny in Russia, or force our hand perilously in
Palestine; but we still sneer at the mediaeval superstitions and benighted racial bigotry of the most exasperated peasants rising against the most execrable usurers. I myself, for one, have been twice in my life rebuked for being a Zionist; originally, because it was a disparagement of the Jews, and recently because it is a defence of the Jews. As a fact, it is neither, but merely a recognition of the Jews, or a desire to recognise them, if not in Palestine, then somewhere else. But the point here is that people are now talking anti-Semitism in the present, while they are still claiming a superiority to the anti-Semitism of the past. And while they are already crying out about the Jewish peril, it never occurs to them that it may be their own fault for having refused to discuss the Jewish problem. But this is only one of a long list of examples such as I have already given. Men are actually denouncing the fact of degeneration, while they are still dogmatically affirming the faith in progress; and
while they themselves clamorously declare that we have come to the wrong place, they still obstinately insist that we have come by the right road.

Now, I not only deny that we have come by the right road, but I deny that we have come by a road at all. At any rate, we have come by a road that had so zigzag a direction that it would be truer to say it had no direction. Whatever else is true, it is certainly not true that the history of our thought for the last three hundred years has been a steady progress, or even a slow evolution. It has not only been a series of experiments, but a series of extremes. The thought of the seventeenth century was more pessimistic than the thought of the thirteenth. The thought of the eighteenth century was more optimistic than the thought of the thirteenth. Grey cannot turn white by turning black; and London cannot be on the way from York to Edinburgh.

The truth is that the world first tried being more Puritan than the Christian tradition, and then tried being more Pagan than the Christian tradition. This may be a change, or even a lark; but it cannot possibly be a progress, or even an evolution. The same is true, of course, of the more modern morals which are concerned rather with ethics and economics than with religion and theology. The competition of Herbert Spencer and the collectivism of Bernard Shaw cannot by any possibility be represented as successive steps, either in a Spencerian evolution or in a Shavian progress. They are flatly contrary, moving
in opposite directions, away from the more normal thing which existed before, and which (I take leave to hope) will exist afterwards.

To that more normal thing I hope we shall return: in philosophy to a real recognition of the struggle of good and evil, instead of insane simplifications of optimism and pessimism; in politics to a redistribution of personal property and liberty, instead of the further concentration of Trusts into a Servile State. But a reform will be a return; and in that sense reform will be the very reverse of progress.

So far from linking up all our late movements in one long series of improvements, it must recognise them as a tangle of cross-purposes that has to be cut away. For our reform is not only a reform, but a repentance, and the point of all repentance is beginning afresh. The only fresh beginning is that which starts from first principles; and that will always be fresh when all novelties are stale.

It's kind of long, but worth reading.


Well, what do you think? Is thinking about a "return" to the "good old days" of guilds a nice daydream for those union workers who struggle, or is it something to work towards in the future? Does that mean (if we succeed in re-creating guilds) that we've made progress--or regress? [Does it matter what we call it?] Will the modern world be for it or against it?

Congratulations ACS

Yesterday, a historic event took place on the American Chesterton Society (ACS) web site.

We had our 1/2 millionth visitor. Yep, 500,000 visitors.

According to Dale Ahlquist, "It took us from 1997 to 2003 to get our 200,000th visitor. We've gotten 300,000 visitors in less than three years since then." Cool

In contrast, the ACS Blog here is at 23,000 hits, with about 4,000 unique visitors (since I started keeping track). But we've only been around since December 2005.

Congratulations, ACS web site!

Did you see that picture?

In the latest Gilbert magazine, the conference issue, there was a neat double picture, one of the first Chesterton conference, with as many people identified as possible, and the second one had a picture of the 25th conference, with an auditorium full of people.

Well, two of the people pictured in the original picture are parents of a friend of mine. When I first met her, she was a homeschooling mother of five, and somehow, we got onto the topic of Chesterton (I don't know how these things happen) and found out we had this mutual interest. She is a PhD Philosopher. Anyway, turns out her dad was a philosopher at Marquette U., my alma mater, and then it turned out he was involved in the Midwest Chesterton group. I didn't realize her mother was involved till I saw the picture with captions.

Rebel writing about our Rebel

If you aren't reading Dawn Eden, you should be. You need to be prepared for ChesterCon07. Hint-hint.

Interesting what you find on other people's blogs

Please give if you are able.

Seeing things in black and white

One of the things I've been dealing with lately, is issues where there's black and white, and then shades of grey--or at least, so it first appears.

For example, in Socrates Cafe, which I run for the homeschooling teens in our area, our last discussion was "Is it ever OK to lie, and is it ever wrong to tell the truth?"

Now the black and white reaction is, "Of course, it is always wrong to tell a lie, and right to tell the truth."

But then you start thinking of cases where it isn't that clear. For example: You are hiding a runaway from a prison guard, a person who is innocent. Jailed because of their race or religious beliefs or something like that. The guard is ordered to shoot to kill. He comes to your door and asks if you've seen the prisoner. What do you say?

The Catechism says, "Truthfulness keeps to the just mean between what ought to be expressed and what ought to be kept secret." This is actually a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas.

So, we can see that there are times when the truth ought to be kept hidden, and prudence is the virtue that helps us to know when to tell the truth, and when to withhold it.

But it is hard for we humans to have these "exceptions to the rules" as it were...a sort of "You shall not lie....except...." situation is hard for many adults to handle. They liked it better when, as children, we just learned the rules and obeyed them in all cases.

But even with these exceptions, we adults must figure out if the exception puts us on the side of right or wrong. So there is still that black and white thing.

Chesterton said something profound on his deathbed:
"The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and
every one must choose his side." Ward, GKC, 650

So when we must use prudence to decide what to do, let's still choose the light.

Fr. Schall's new book

James Schall is a columnist for Gilbert magazine, and he has a new book out.

From ISI:
In The Life of the Mind, Georgetown University’s James V. Schall takes up the task of reminding us that, as human beings, we naturally take a special delight and pleasure in simply knowing. Because we have not only bodies but also minds, we are built to know what is. In this volume, Schall, author of On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs among many other volumes of philosophical and political reflection, discusses the various ways of approaching the delight of thinking and the way that this delight begins in seeing and hearing and even in making and walking. We must be attentive to and cultivate the needs of the mind, argues Schall, for it is through our intellect that all that is not ourselves is finally returned to us, allowing us to live in the light of truth.

The Logical Chestertonian

The Logical Chestertonian
[cf CW10:451-2 and The Flying Inn]

You will find me reading books
In the oddest kind of nooks,
All from a far-off age some call Devonian;
Each one penned by GKC
He's the author fit for me!
Because I am a rigid Chestertonian.

Once I did not like to read
Full of boredom, sloth and greed
Yet I moaned a cry for help quite Macedonian. [See Acts 16:9]
Then I found a book by Dale -
Now I feast on beef and ale
While reading all the books called Chestertonian.

From the darkness into light [See GKC 650]
All the Heretics I fight
From the modern "Darwin" age to Babylonian:
This "Common Man" is Orthodox
Father Brown - yeah! "Thursday" rocks!
For I "lightly" call myself a Chestertonian. [See CW1:325]

Thus I fled from all the fog
And I got myself a blogg
And wrote - like St. Paul to the Thessalonians...
And then, I must confess
I did find the ACS
And a lot of very jolly Chestertonians!

So I went to ChesterCon,
Laughed at Belloc's "To a Don",
Heard talks - some provoking, some halcyonian;
Buying books and eating cheese,
Petta wine is sure to please
The ChesterCon-attending Chestertonian!

So come join us one and all
(Yes, the Universe is small [See CW1:267]
Though you measure it like Einstein, or Newtonian)
Join the ever-growing clan -
Be like us, a GK fan
It's great to be a G-K-Chestertonian!

[Finished Oct 11 2006. From Poems in the Key of "G", an uncollected collection by Dr. Thursday.]

Gilbert Magazine Conference Issue

My conference issue arrived yesterday, so I read it cover to cover last night. Shew! What fun it was to relive the memories of ChesterCon2006!

One of the highlights of the '06 conference was getting to meet and talk with Geir Hasnes, a warm and wonderful guy from Norway who, among other things, is creating a bibliography of all of Chesterton's work. The picture in the Gilbert issue, "Was Chesterton fat?" reminded me of that point in Geir's talk, where we didn't really quite know if he was joking or not. Geir had made quite a few jokes in his talk, and he is a funny guy, but there is a slight language barrier, with English not being his first language, and so for a few moments, I wasn't sure if he was serious about wanting to dispute the fact that Chesterton was fat. However, he was serious!--and convinced me that Chesterton really was not fat!

Apostle of Common Sense III

I recently had the opportunity to view some episodes of Apostle of Common Sense III (and when I get some time, I'll watch them all).

One thing that caught my eye, was right in the introductory material. I caught a little glimpse of a movie of G.K.Chesterton. It was the first time in my life that I had seen him actually move, and, well, it was cool. He seemed more alive somehow, then ever before. I'd heard his voice on a tape recording, but never seen a magical moving picture of him.

I thought how cool that would be to find it on the web somewhere, but I don't think it's available. If the person who owns it could, they could post it on You Tube, a sort of self-publishing video place.

Now, I'm sure there are bad things on You Tube, so use your best judgement. But I did find some funny Chestertonian stuff on it.

For example:
Here is a home video of someone who visited G.K.Chesterton's gravesite, and talks about it in another language.

Here (or just click on the play button above) is a familiar voice, of a guy who recites By the Babe Unborn, while we mesmerizingly watch a little baby swinging back and forth in a baby swing. Highly unusual.

Here is a theater company that puts on a play about Chesterton,and would like the world to know about it.

So, use caution, and enjoy. Oh, and if anybody wants to put up some video of Chesterton himself, I would watch.

That Great Poem: Lasagna

For some unknown reason, one of my daughters thought, when she first saw the word "Lepanto" that it was "Lasagna" and now, the family joke about my Lepanto t-shirt is that it is my lasagna t-shirt.

The kids sometimes also call me "Tony". Why's that--you ask? Because I am a "Ches-ter-tony-an".

Lepanto

Today is the anniversary. Your assignment: Read it. Extra Credit: Memorize One Verse. Do the Hermione thing: Memorize it all.

Lepanto

by G.K.Chesterton

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain--hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,--
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces--four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still--hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michaels on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,--
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed--
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign--
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

G.K.Chesterton On-Line Books Reference Guide

Excellent links.

Frances (Blogg) Chesterton Responds to Geography Meme

Frances didn't want Gilbert and all the other friends over at Map Guys having all the fun, so she sent in her responses, again, via Dr. Thursday, who seems to have a special friendship with her or something. (I noticed his blog's address is "francesblogg" after all.)

So, Frances's responses:
1. A Place You've Visited and Your Favorite Thing there
Top Meadow; our living room, with my husband in the chair, and a fire buring, and we just sit quietly with each other

2. A Country You'd Like to Visit and Why
South Africa. Because of what Father Martindale wrote to me:

Recently a boy in a kraal here was found cutting pious pictures from a newspaper that he had somehow got hold of (he was a good little Catholic!). "Why are you cutting out that one;" "Because this is a Great Mukuru in the Catholic Church." (Mukuru is Potentate and will
serve from St. Joseph right along to the Pope, not to mention the Little Flower....) The Great Mukuru in this case was yourself! So there!

3. A Place From History You'd Like to Visit and Why
Bethelem (because I wrote a poem about the Nativity)

4. A Place You Know a Lot About
London

5. A Place You'd Like to Learn More About
England

6. A Fictional Place You'd Like to Visit
Wherever it was that Gilbert's "Magic" play happens.