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The number one single today in 1968:
The number one single today in 1971:
Britain’s number one single today in 1985:
Today in 1997, Danbert Nobacon of Chumbawamba was arrested and jailed overnight in Italy for … wearing a skirt.
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Readers know that I had a fractious minute with Madison Catholic Bishop Robert Morlino, who came to give a speech at UW–Platteville, but left after five minutes because I refused to leave.
A few people concluded based on only their own biases that I am a spawn of Satan or something. (I was also outed as a Nazi on a previous blog during the Act 10 adventure.) Some were also under the mistaken impression that I was subject to the authority of the bishop even though I’m not Catholic (though I was raised Catholic).
I got to Platteville just after what Pray Tell wrote:
I still remember when I learned the word “interdict.”
It was in high school world history class (this still pretty much meant European / Western history in the 1970s) in the public school down in Franklin, Minnesota. Pope Innocent III put the entire kingdom of England under interdict for five years in 1208, our text said, which meant for the entire populace no sacraments or rites such as Christian burial.
“Wow, that’s kinda harsh,” the sixteen-year-old thought to himself.
I recall also thinking to myself that it’s kinda cool that we Catholics were still part of this church extending back to the Middle Ages, we still had a pope today, but the Methodists and Lutherans in my class couldn’t claim that. (In this world, which looks rather small in retrospect, Lutherans and Methodists were The Other.)
I suppose our history text must have said that it was because King John refused to accept the pope’s appointment of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, but I admit that I had to check Wikipedia just now to jog my memory.
And now I see that Innocent III also placed the Kingdom of France under interdict, but only for eight months so that’s no big deal. And the Kingdom of Norway, for four years. Busy pope. If you got it, use it, I guess.
Oh, and in 1955 white parishioners near New Orleans were put under interdict for refusing entry to a black priest. It’s a good, progressive cause, racial equality. I expect the more liberal readers of Pray Tell welcome such use of interdict, yes?
I never thought I’d get to use my newfound word in today’s Catholic Church.
But Bishop Morlino, over in neighboring Wisconsin, has provided.
The Wisconsin State Journal reports that the bishop has threatened parishioners in Platteville, Wisconsin with interdict if they don’t put a stop to their opposition to the conservative priests he appointed to their parish. Just as in 1208, the issue is accepting a controversial appointment.
It all started in Platteville in June 2010, not even two years ago, when Madison Bishop Robert Morlino installed three priests at St. Mary’s from the Society of Jesus Christ the Priest, a traditional Catholic society founded in Spain. They do not allow girls to be altar servers or allow parishioners to distribute communion. The parish website lists a daily Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) Latin Mass as well as a daily Vatican II Mass.
It didn’t take long for it all to blow up. Donations plummeted, and about 40 percent of the church’s 1,200 parishioners signed a petition seeking the ouster of the priests. The parish school was in danger of closing at midyear, then frantic fundraising made it possible to complete the school year, but now the bishop has accepted that the school will close when this year ends.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t the “mutual enrichment” between old and new which Pope Benedict envisioned when he issued the “motu proprio” in 2007 allowing any priest, any time, without bishop’s permission, to celebrate the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass. Pope Benedict wrote at the time to the world’s bishops:
The fear was expressed in discussions about the awaited Motu Proprio, that the possibility of a wider use of the 1962 Missal would lead to disarray or even divisions within parish communities. This fear also strikes me as quite unfounded.
It looks as if the Bishop of Madison is on solid grounds canonically. Priests have every right to use only male servers, to disallow lay eucharistic ministers, to celebrate the Tridentine Mass. Canon law is clear that parish councils are merely advisory, and authority remains vested in the priest. Bishops appoint priests, and parishioners have no right to remove them.
The pastoral disaster in Platteville brings to a point what has and has not been accomplished through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. At the level of admonition we have ringing conciliar statements about collegiality, ordained ministry as service, church as people of God, the important role of the laity in the Church, and so forth. At the level of legal reform, to large extent, power remains firmly in the hands of the clerical authorities – pastor, bishop, curial official, pope.
The clergy may and even should act with pastoral sensitivity, but they are not legally required to do so.
At the level of pastoral sensitivity, there is much to talk about in Platteville, wide range for differing opinions. The priests themselves have admitted that they have made some mistakes and moved too quickly with their reforms.
But the parishioners have no right to remove their priests, no matter how insensitive the priests are. The law is clear on this point, and so is the bishop. As he wrote in his letter to the parish, “There can be no ‘firing’ of priests by the parish community in the Diocese of Madison.” And there you have it.
Pope Innocent appointed Stephen Langton, and Bishop Morlino appointed the priests of the Society of Jesus Christ the Priest.
I’m trying to conceptualize how an interdict might look in pastoral practice.
“Dear friends, we regret to inform you that our wedding celebration has been postponed during this time our parish is under interdict.”
Or at the end of an obituary: “Funeral services will be held at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Platteville as soon as the interdict is lifted.”
I predict it won’t come to that. Watch this space.
Indeed, it did not come to that, but that’s because those who objected the most to the more conservative direction of the parish left. The church’s school closed, although it reopened earlier this year.
I bring all this up because Morlino died Saturday night. The outstanding weekly newspaper linked in this paragraph chronicles all of Morlino’s interesting interactions with the local Roman Catholic parish.
I came to cover Morlino’s speech. I suppose I could have sneaked into the Catholic Newman Center and covered his speech, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to put them (though they were not exactly welcoming) in the position of having to eject me, possibly loudly, because I was never the point of the story; Morlino was.
Sometime after this I got an email from the diocese acknowledging that Morlino may have been legally incorrect in his seeking to have the speech out of public eyes. I also got an invitation to meet with the bishop, which I never followed up on. I wish I had.
The truth then and now is that the Catholic Church is not now, has never been, and most likely will never be, a democracy. (My adopted Episcopal Church is to some extent, though it has certainly demonstrated the flaws of democracy over the years.) Indeed, since the bishop assigns priests, members of a Catholic church basically have no say in the operation of “their” church, beyond voting with their feet.
What will be most interesting is who replaces Morlino, who was appointed by Pope John Paul II. Pope Francis seems likely to appoint a much less conservative bishop than Morlino, which will probably be popular in Madison (to the extent anything religious is popular in the officially atheist People’s Republic of Madison). That will mean, however, no more counterpoint to those who think their church should adhere to their own beliefs, whether those beliefs are based on sound theology.
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The number one single today in 1969 reached number one because of both sides:
The number one album today in 1986 was Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Live/1975–85”:
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David French:
I knew it. I knew the instant I saw Twitter erupt in outrage at the use of tear gas to disperse a crowd of people charging our southern border that someone would find an example of the Obama administration doing the same thing. And sure enough, there it was, shared far and wide within minutes, a San Diego Union-Tribune story from November 25, 2013:
A group of about 100 people trying to illegally cross the border Sunday near the San Ysidro port of entry threw rocks and bottles at U.S. Border Patrol agents, who responded by using pepper spray and other means to force the crowd back into Mexico, federal officials said.
Twitter existed in 2013. I was on it, and I certainly don’t recall an eruption of outrage, followed by days of think-pieces explaining the horrors of pepper spray and the deep betrayal of American values.
In fact, that November incident was hardly unique. As the Washington Times reports, “the same tear-gas agent that the Trump administration is taking heat for deploying against a border mob this weekend is actually used fairly frequently — including more than once a month during the later years of President Barack Obama’s administration.”
But that was then. Sensible people understood that you can’t just let a mob rush the border, and Border Patrol agents can and should use non-lethal means to protect themselves from rocks and bottles. And the pictures of kids in cages in the Obama era?
Well, there was an “enormous spike” in kids crossing the border, and we “didn’t have enough shelter facilities.” So kids had to be put in Border Patrol lock-ups. But that was temporary. The Obama administration took good care of kids after they left the lock-up, right? Well, not exactly. Some children faced a terrible nightmare. Here’s a paragraph from a 2016 Senate report:
Over a period of four months in 2014, however, HHS allegedly placed a number of UACs [Unaccompanied Alien Children] in the hands of a ring of human traffickers who forced them to work on egg farms in and around Marion, Ohio, leading to a federal criminal indictment. According to the indictment, the minor victims were forced to work six or seven days a week, twelve hours per day. The traffickers repeatedly threatened the victims and their families with physical harm, and even death, if they did not work or surrender their entire paychecks. The indictment alleges that the defendants “used a combination of threats, humiliation, deprivation, financial coercion, debt manipulation, and monitoring to create a climate of fear and helplessness that would compel [the victims’] compliance.” [Emphasis added.]
One of the more frustrating aspects of our current political debate is the extent to which differences from administration to administration are exaggerated and distorted. Let’s take, for example, media coverage of the Obama administration. To this day, the inaccurate picture of his presidency haunts American discourse. While there are obvious differences with the Trump administration, Obama was not exactly the man who many millions of Americans think he was.
He was a peace president who ordered ten times more drone strikes than George W. Bush. He was the peace president who left office with American boots on the ground in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, and scattered across North Africa. His administration refueled Saudi jets to enable the indiscriminate Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen. Oh, and he droned American citizens abroad without even a nod to due process.
He was the environmentalist president so hostile to fossil fuels that he presided over an extraordinary boom in domestic oil production:
He was the compassionate president who admitted a grand total of fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees in the first five years of the Syrian civil war. He was the compassionate president whose deportations peaked at an average of 34,000 people in fiscal year 2012.
I share these facts not to argue that there aren’t distinct and important differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump. There are. And those differences manifest themselves in each of the policy categories outlined above. But when discussing differences, gravity and proportion matter. And they matter greatly.
Indeed, I’d argue that both conservative and liberal media outlets had an interest in amplifying Obama’s progressive credentials and advancing a fundamentally flawed narrative about the nature and character of his presidency. Exaggerating his progressive virtue (or vice) kept partisans engaged. It kept ramping up the stakes of our political conflicts, and it contributed immensely to the Flight 93 mentality that dominates politics today.
How much time did conservative media spend debating Obama’s willingness to use the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” even while he was droning, bombing, and shelling terrorists from Afghanistan to Libya? How much time did the liberal media spend amplifying Obama’s desire for peace with Iran even as he helped Saudi Arabia wage its proxy war against Iran in Yemen, at a simply enormous toll in innocent human life?
By failing to provide perspective, the media creates a sense of outrage when none is justified and inoculates the public against injustice when injustice is real. The Left looks at the tear gas on the border and believes norms are being violated when they’re not. The Right looks at critical reporting about Trump and starts to presume that it’s illegitimate, even if the facts are egregious.
All too often, we act as if the immense American ship of state lurches from right to left with each new election, when the reality is often that the turns in crucial areas are gradual. Partisans who forget this fact find themselves condemning their opponents for behavior their own side engaged in when confronted by similar challenges. Reality has a way of constraining a government’s options, even when very different people occupy the Oval Office. Comments
Again, I’m not arguing there aren’t important differences in the presidents. There are, and in some areas those differences are quite profound. It’s worth exposing those differences, and it’s worth debating those differences. At the same time, we cannot abandon historical perspective, a perspective that can and should grant a degree of humility.
The lesson? Before you express outrage at any politician for his egregious violation of “norms” or his “radical” departure from the rule of law, check recent history. You might be surprised by what you find.
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The number one single today in 1960:
The number one (for the second time) single today in 1963:
The number one single today in 1964:
The number one British single today in 1970:
Today in 1991, Nirvana did perhaps the worst lip-synching effort of all time of its “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the BBC’s “Top of the Pops”:
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Readers of my previous blog may hazily remember that 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney had the Secret Service handle of “Javelin,” after his father, George Romney, who ran American Motors Corp. before he was elected governor of Michigan.
(I’d say here that we owned a Javelin, but you knew that.)
On Monday, GM reported plant closings and layoffs, which prompts the Goldwater Institute (whose namesake, Sen. Barry Goldwater, owned both an AMC AMX and a Chevrolet Corvette, so he was the man) to observe:
“Let Detroit go bankrupt,” former presidential candidate Mitt Romney wrote in 2008, arguing that the federal government should not bail out the failing domestic auto industry for their poor management decisions. Vilified for turning his back on America’s autoworkers, Romney lost the argument, Barack Obama won the election, General Motors got its way, and U.S. taxpayers got stuck with an $11.2 billion bill to keep the company alive.
Today’s announcement from General Motors that it will close two plants in Metro Detroit and lay off 14,700 workers helps prove Romney right, albeit ten years later. Romney wrote that with a bailout, the American automotive industry’s demise “will be virtually guaranteed” because it would not be forced to undergo radical restructuring to be competitive in the marketplace. By subsidizing failure, the federal government would be gambling with taxpayer dollars and forestalling the inevitable.
This wasn’t the first time the government had bet heavily on General Motors at citizens’ expense. In a story much like recent efforts by state and local governments to give away billions of dollars to win a new Amazon headquarters, the cities of Detroit and neighboring Hamtramck teamed up in the early 1980s to win a new General Motors factory, chasing the promise of jobs and renewal of depressed and blighted neighborhoods. The Detroit News reports:
General Motors and Detroit Mayor Coleman Young hatched a plan: If the city would get the land, the auto company would build a state-of-the-art plant, crossing the border with Hamtramck, employing 6,000 people and providing a glittering example of what the auto companies and their suppliers could do in the city of their birth.
Residents who had lived in the targeted neighborhood would be given offers to sell their homes and move to make way for “progress,” but as the Detroit News reports, not everyone wanted to sell. In the face of protests and a legal challenge, the city moved forward with the plan, and a Michigan Supreme Court decision upheld the city’s decision to raze the site for General Motors. The factory was built, and decades later the court decision was overturned, but today, some 37 years later, that factory will be closed as General Motors fights to save costs.
One Detroit-area politician is feeling particularly burned by the decision. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat who was elected to Congress in November, decried the decision on Facebook:
“[M]ake no mistake, this is a perfect lesson illustrating that corporations are not your friend, and handing them tax breaks and incentives is a losing game. Taxpayers bailed GM out with billions just a few short years ago – and now they cut jobs to make bigger profits?
“What’s worse, Detroit tore down the vibrant Poletown neighborhood for GM, destroying a community, displacing hundreds of families, and a couple decades later this is how we’re rewarded.”
Hoping for rewards in exchange for corporate welfare can come with a high cost, and General Motors’ story should be a cautionary tale about government picking winners and losers with taxpayer dollars—and in taking private property for a supposed “public purpose.”
In a paper for the Goldwater Institute, economics professor Shirley Svorny wrote about the high costs of government subsidization of private businesses—and who pays the cost when if those companies fail:
There are limited, specific situations where local government can improve on private-sector outcomes. A political decision to redirect tax dollars so that benefits accrue to individual firms is not one of those situations…The company bears none of the costs if it fails in its effort or chooses to move elsewhere. That burden falls on taxpayers.
The thousands of autoworkers who lost their jobs today—and the homeowners who lost their property to General Motors decades ago—know that lesson all too well.
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The number one album today in 1965 was Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’ “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”:
The number one single today in 1966 was this one-hit wonder:
The number one British album today in 1976 was Glen Campbell’s “20 Golden Greats”:
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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel interviews Gov. Scott Walker:
Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday returned to the public eye since losing an expensive and hard-fought bid for a third term — telling reporters he doesn’t know what’s next but doesn’t see his loss as a “rejection.”
“It was without a doubt a big election — bigger turnout than ever before — but the numbers we received a week ago Tuesday would have won the election four years ago, would have won the election eight years ago,” Walker said in a 25-minute, wide-ranging interview. “In no way do I see it as a rejection, but rather just a larger electorate than we’ve ever seen in the past.”
Following Walker’s defeat, some Republicans have questioned the City of Milwaukee’s late counting of more than 47,000 absentee ballots, which propelled Gov.-elect Tony Evers to a win. Walker said Thursday he had a team of lawyers look into it, but said it came down to “incompetence as opposed to corruption.”
Walker, 51, said he isn’t sure what he will do after leaving public office in January for the first time in two decades, but said he isn’t planning to join President Donald Trump’s administration.
He said instead of taking a trip to decompress after the Nov. 6 defeat, he spent the time helping his mother move into a new apartment following his father’s death in October.
“More important than getting away from it all is getting into it,” he said of spending time with his mother after the election loss. “I really don’t have much of an interest at this point in going to Washington.”
Walker said he would consider proposals from Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) to approve in his remaining days as governor, but suggested none of the measures would be major.
“What have we not done?” Walker said, referring to major legislation altering the state’s landscape for manufacturers, public employees and residents on welfare. “We’ve been such a reformer, I may have reformed myself out of a job.”
Walker again pushed for lawmakers to pass a $70 million incentive package for papermaker Kimberly-Clark Corp. and said if the Legislature doesn’t act by the end of November, “those jobs will be gone.” …
On the prospect of Evers rolling back measures Walker championed, including possibly eliminating the state’s job agency Walker created or altering the contract with Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn Technology Group, Walker downplayed the idea of significant change.
“The state of Wisconsin is not going to go backward,” he said. “If I just chose not to run and decided to serve out my term without an election, I’d be very proud of what we’ve done in this state.”
Perhaps we should revisit this in four years, when the state will be infinitely worse off and Evers’ incompetence as an administrator (based not on my opinion, but on what people whose jobs include working with Evers and DPI have said) becomes apparent even to Democrats. -
Today in 1967, the Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye” promotional film (now called a “video”) was shown on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show. It was not shown in Britain because of a musicians’ union ban on miming:
One death of odd note, today in 1973: John Rostill, former bass player with the Shadows (with which Cliff Richard got his start), was electrocuted in his home recording studio. A newspaper headline read: “Pop musician dies; guitar apparent cause.”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 