Memorial Day: Pericles' Funeral Oration

I won't try to add to this masterpiece of remembrance. A little excerpt:

'We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.'

Photo of the Meuse-Argonne American Military Cemetery as maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission.

"Was It Something I Wrote?"

Being a journalist in Russia is not easy and is sometimes dangerous. I'm just a blogger in a free country who wishes he could have about two extra waking hours each day.

What's really happening on the River south of Natchez

Can we control the Mississippi River? Only if we can control millions of gallons of water per second carrying millions of tons of sediment using structures built not on bedrock but on 5,000 or more feet of alluvial soil.

The New Yorker had a great article about the Atchafalaya Basin in 1987. Nothing has changed. The article mixes geology, geography, hydrology, history, ethnicity, and politics. In the end, the River will change its course and bypass New Orleans and probably Baton Rouge. Because of great soil, abundant water, warm climate, oil, gas, and seafood, there will always be more people in Louisiana than can be protected from floods. This is a human drama unfolding in front of us. During my lifetime, the River is likely to change its course.

List of those killed in Alabama by tornadoes

I found this list on an Alabama news site and am thankful that my good friend in Phil Campbell, Alabama is not on it. Nonetheless, is quite stark that small towns where everyone knows everyone lost sometimes dozens of citizens. Ora pro nobis.

Santo Subito!

Peggy Noonan:

'On June 2, 1979, he arrived at an airport outside Warsaw, walked down the steps of the plane, and kissed the tarmac. The government feared tens of thousands would line the streets for the motorcade into town. More than a million came.

'In a mass in the Old City, John Paul gave a great sermon. Why, he asked, had God lifted a Pole to the papacy? Why had Poland suffered for centuries under political oppression? Perhaps because Poland is “the land of a particularly responsible witness.” The Poles had been chosen to give witness, with humility, to the cross and the Resurrection. He asked the crowd if they accepted such an obligation.

'“We want God,” they roared. “We want God!” This from a nation occupied by an atheist state.

'John Paul said the great work of God is man, and the great redeemer of man is Christ. Therefore, “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude. . . . The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man!”'

George Weigel:

'John Paul II’s radical Christian discipleship, and his remarkable capacity to let that commitment shine through his words and actions, made Christianity interesting and compelling in a world that thought it had outgrown its “need” for religious faith. He was a man of extraordinary courage, the kind of courage that comes from a faith forged in reflection on Calvary and the murder of the Son of God. He demonstrated, against the cultural conventions of his time, that young people want to be challenged to live lives of heroism. He lifted up the dignity of the human person at a moment when the West was tempted to traipse blithely down the path to Huxley’s brave new world of manufactured and stunted humanity. And he proclaimed the universality of human rights in a way that helped bring down the greatest tyranny in human history.'

Praises to President Obama, the armed services, and Seal Team 6

Peggy Noonan:

'It was Mr. Obama who decided—rightly—to stiff Pakistan, not to tell them of the operation but to allow them to be exposed and humiliated in front of the world. Which they richly deserve. They accept our aid and hide our enemies. Every day they frighten the world with their chronic instability, their Wild West ways, their infiltrated military, their nuclear weapons. At a certain point you have to say “Enough.” Mr. Obama said it very nicely. And by the way, that silence you hear from the U.N. on charges of violating Pakistan’s sovereignty? That’s the silence of the civilized world thinking, “Good. They had it coming.”'

"Paul Wolfowitz on the death of Osama, the pro-democracy Arab Spring, and the importance of U.S. leadership..."

My ties are largely to the Russell Kirk wing of conservative thought, not to the neo-conservatives. Nonetheless, the term "neo-conservative" has became an epithet in certain quarters for everything dislikeable about America. Wolfowitz has been called an ideologue, a tool, and much worse, but he is more than the box he is often stuffed into.

Here is interviewed by James Taranto.

Still hard to blog.

I have had to make radical changes recently. I have new work in a new city so I can be near my family. A few weeks ago I reread Margaret Craven's I Heard the Owl Call My Name. One of her chapter titles describes the past weeks: "The Depth of Sadness." (The book is much better than anything written about it.) I am doing well under the circumstances; I am taking care of people I hold dear. But sometimes I wish I could just stop and do nothing for a few weeks in some pleasant place, perhaps a mountain cottage.

Beatification of John Paul the Great

Pope Benedict's homily this morning is here. An excerpt:

'John Paul II presented during his first solemn Mass in Saint Peter’s Square in the unforgettable words: “Do not be afraid! Open, open wide the doors to Christ!” What the newly-elected Pope asked of everyone, he was himself the first to do: society, culture, political and economic systems he opened up to Christ, turning back with the strength of a titan – a strength which came to him from God – a tide which appeared irreversible. By his witness of faith, love and apostolic courage, accompanied by great human charisma, this exemplary son of Poland helped believers throughout the world not to be afraid to be called Christian, to belong to the Church, to speak of the Gospel. In a word: he helped us not to fear the truth, because truth is the guarantee of liberty. To put it even more succinctly: he gave us the strength to believe in Christ, because Christ is Redemptor hominis, the Redeemer of man. This was the theme of his first encyclical, and the thread which runs though all the others.'

Jan Tyranowski (1900-1947)

Read about him. He introduced Karol Wojtyla to the writings of Saint John of the Cross. Without him, Karol Wojtyla would not have become a priest, much less Pope John Paul II.