A Cathedral Not Built

I'll bet I'm the last Episcopalian in the galaxy to see "The Bishop's Wife," Henry Koster's affectionate 1947 portrait of a bishop in New York whose family is crumbling around him while he builds his cathedral. All hail Netflex, which delivered this quintessential Christmas movie to our house just in time for the Sixth Sunday in Epiphany.

Cathedrals are great metaphors. In Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, a diligent monk's medieval cathedral project stands for civilization and and a just social order. When Cardinal Roger Mahoney opened his Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles in 2002, as glorious as it was in many respects, it was hard not to view it as an extravagant distraction in the light of the burgeoning scandal in the LA archdiocese over the cover-up of priests' sexual misconduct. Other Los Angelenos would have agreed with arch doyen Mrs. Hamilton in "The Bishop's Wife," who finally decides to give her $1 million to the poor.

By that time, the fictional New York cathedral is history, which means that the work of Dudley the angel (Cary Grant, who lobbied hard to get the part) is nearly done. That's Dudley above, in one of the movie's last scenes. He's effected a reconciliation between Bishop Henry Brougham (David Niven) and his wife, Julia (Loretta Young). He's inspired radical Professor Wutheridge (Monty Woolley) to start writing his history of the Roman Empire and go back to church. In a beautiful scene, Dudley conducts a boy's choir in a rough part of town with an expression of absolute transcendence on his face. Most of the boys were late showing up, but there's something about Dudley, and by the time they're done, they're singing like angels (which the young actors really did, as the Mitchell Boys Choir out of St. Brendan's Parish in LA; see their performance below).

Dudley even helped with my vicar's book corner at St. John's tomorrow morning. We're reading Rabbi Harold Kushner's The Lord Is My Shepherd, about the 23rd Psalm. In the movie, Dudley tells the Broughams' daughter Debby (Karolyn Grimes) the story of David, a young shepherd and poet whom an angel showed how to find a lost sheep and defeat a ravenous lion. So inspired was the future king by his busy and productive day, Dudley tells Debby, that he wrote a new song beginning, "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want." Not exactly the way the Oxford Bible Commentary tells the story, but a great way to start a Sunday morning class nonetheless.

Perfect Songs: "Easy From Now On" (1978)

Emmylou Harris; song by Susanna Clark and Carlene (Carter) Routh

Take Our Money -- Please

The London Times gets it:

Kindle seems to have found absolution for what US newspaper guru Alan Mutter calls news media’s “original sin” of giving content away. At a time when newspapers are suffering from falling readerships and a depressed ad market, Kindle readers are signing up to pay for newspapers and magazines to be sent wirelessly to their e-book readers.

One Night They All Look Happy

Go here for a nice selection of photos of recent Presidents and First Ladies at their inaugurations, including the Nixons in 1973.

Same Issue, Different Denomination

Presbyterians in Charlotte, North Carolina meet to decide whether gay and lesbian people should be ministers.

Nowhere To Hide: 50 Million Jobless Worldwide?

New York Times:

Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency. The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs.

High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.

Last month, the government of Iceland, whose economy is expected to contract 10 percent this year, collapsed and the prime minister moved up national elections after weeks of protests by Icelanders angered by soaring unemployment and rising prices.

Just last week, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism.

One Person's Myth Is Another's Mission

If you have iTunes, download this conversation between "Fresh Air" host Terry Gross and Will Bunch, who argues in a new book, Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, that Reagan's tax cuts didn't end the 1981-83 recession and that his tough policies vis a vis the Soviet Union didn't end the Cold War.

On the tax cuts, scholars and politicians differ. As for bringing down the Soviets without a nuclear war, a long line of postwar Presidents share the credit, with Richard Nixon perhaps due more than most. But Reagan's hard line just as Moscow was going broke didn't hurt. I won't pre-judge Bunch's arguments, because I haven't read them. Nor did I hear about them on "Fresh Air," because Gross, usually a pretty penetrating interviewer, accepted them as axioms and spent most of her time asking how today's GOP politicians use their manufactured view of the Reagan legacy to further their nefarious goals. For the high crime of wanting to cut our income taxes, Gross and Bunch single out Grover Norquist for special opprobrium as an example of "a new, aggressive breed of conservative." Somebody get out the Lysol!

Ever the pro, Gross rectified the imbalance by inviting historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited the Reagan diaries and thinks 40 was one of the top Presidents of the 20th century, to address Bunch's theories. Said Brinkley:

I don't think it's so much as a myth. I think Presidents have legacies, and they get advocates. There's people that believe Theodore Roosevelt was great, or FDR was great, or Kennedy, or Reagan. And it's...reasonable to think that people want to admire Ronald Reagan. I think the distortion comes when people leave the history books and try to create saints out of people. Ronald Reagan was not a saint. He was a good President for his times. He was good because there was a kind of malaise in the country due to double-digit inflation, due to the hostages in Iran, due to the excesses of the Great Society, or at least the misappropriation of funds going on for government programs. Taxes were being raised left and right. So we were naturally going to find a force in this country to try to bring us back in the right direction. Reagan was that. Even Barack Obama, during the campaign trail, had nice things to say about Ronald Reagan....

Brinkley went on to advise Obama, whom he characterized as a TR-style progressive, to resist the lure of the middle way and live out his destiny, just as Reagan lived out his.

Just The One Job Now -- And An Amazing One

The Orange County Register covers my departure from the Nixon Foundation. Thanks for the cake, Cheryl!

From My Valentine's Day Present

My wife Kathy has an 1886 prayer book that belonged to her mother's father, Thomas Gorman. It contains this prayer attributed to St. Teresa of Avila in the 16th century:

Let nothing trouble you.
Let nothing frighten you.
All things pass away.
God only is immutable.
Patience overcomes all difficulties.
Those who possess God want nothing.
God alone suffices.

Tending Towards Statism

During the Oct. 15 Presidential debate, moderator Bob Schieffer confronted Sens. McCain and Obama with a harsh reality. At least to him, it didn't look like the snowballing financial crisis would permit any big spending. Here's how I liveblogged the exchange:

Question on deficits; aren’t both sides ignoring reality? What from your $200 billion+ proposals will you cut back? Obama doesn’t answer. McCain doesn’t either, at first. Pushes mortgage plan and energy independence. Then: Across-the-board spending freeze. Will cut subsidies for ethanol as well as tariffs on sugar-cane imports. Finally an answer, followed by an attack on Obama as a pork-barrel beneficiary. Prof. Obama explains why across-the-board freezes don’t work (Washington insiders don’t let them work is why; he doesn’t say this, however). Ritualistic attack on McCain for voting for four out of five Bush budgets.

Perhap when Obama wasn't answering, he was thinking, "Cut back $200 billion? Heck, Bob, I'll spend four times that by President's Day, and even then my progressive friends will be heaping hot coals on Republicans for nickel-and-dimeing me out of the last $100 billion. Within four months of tonight, the House appropriations committee will have dusted off a generation's worth of its Democratic members' thwarted dreams, and I will have stuffed the whole package down the country's throat by promising catastrophe if they don't go along with me. Not only will I not pare back my promises, Bob, I'm going to use this crisis to devise a structural increase in the size of the federal budget to the tune of 15-20% with even less debate than the last round of salary increases for federal judges."

Schieffer's question was a naive, Herbert Hoover kind of thing, suggesting that fiscal discipline would be the main way out of our troubles. The candidates played along, McCain by endorsing spending freezes and Obama by criticizing George W. Bush's deficits. How times have changed. Obama's deficits will dwarf Bush's, and liberals once again reckon deficits as righteousness, just as Bush did (and critics didn't) when they were undertaken in the name of national security and the Iraq war.

If Obama had offered a glimpse of his plans, then today I'd agree with all those who say that he had a mandate for the stimulus package and the massive increase in the size and role of government it portends. I might even agree with critics of the GOP such as Andrew Sullivan who say that refusing to give the measure bipartisan support was irresponsible during such a severe crisis.

But Obama didn't, and so I don't. Since McCain was probably doomed after the Lehman Bros. collapse in mid-September, Obama's victory wasn't a mandate dramatically to re-envision the role of government in the name of recession recovery. To be fair and balanced, Ronald Reagan's critics said the same about his 1981 tax increases. Some economists argue that the tax cuts didn't drive the mid-1980s recovery, just as Obama's critics will say that the business cycle had more to do with the recovery (assuming it comes) than the stimulus.

Since historians and journalists still debate the effectiveness of the New Deal, one assumes these partisan and ideological debates about the relative merits of tax cuts, social spending, public works projects, and frugality will persist forever. As President Nixon once told me, it's always about right vs. left. Perhaps there's even some comfort in that, especially for those of us who think the right answer is usually somewhere in the middle. But Reagan was right as well: The federal budget never shrinks. The arc of the fiscal universe is long, and it tends toward statism.