During Covid-19, I promised to say a rosary every day until we were over the crisis. When the pandemic finally ended, I continued with the daily prayer because it was now a part of my routine. There were days which I forgot and others where I was just too tired. By my count I have missed not more than 35 days out of more than four years.
I sometimes say the rosary while walking to the local B&N bookstore. I alternate between the four different mysteries honored in the rosary, even St. John Paul II’s addition of the Luminous Mysteries. Today I said the Joyful Mysteries. As I thought about each one, for the first time I realized that there was a consistent theme other than joy. Taken as a whole, the Joyful Mysteries are about family, starting with the announcement of the most important pregnancy in salvation history, followed by birth and parenthood.
The Democratic Party has been exulting in a kind of purely secular joy and even euphoria for the past few weeks. It was only a month ago that they were mired in a very cloudy political forecast. Their incumbent president Joe Biden had publicly exhibited serious symptoms of dementia. The real story was the blatant cover-up which probably dates to before his election in 2020. Everyone in his inner circle had to know about this as well as anyone who had frequent contact with the president. I believe there was an unwritten agreement, not to expose it. Especially, most blatantly deceptive about his mental fitness was his vice-president, Kamala Harris, who deliberately heralded his strength and fitness for the job, right up until his virtual removal from the Oval Office.
President Biden’s downfall was precipitated after his ill-fated debate with former president and personal rival Donald Trump. The debate included at least twenty minutes of the president staring into space, unable to talk and appearing as if he had no awareness of where he was and what he was doing. Though he eventually did recover a modicum of composure, the damage was irretrievably done.
From that moment, Democratic leaders knew that he would be unable to defeat Donald Trump in the coming election. Consistent with the president’s fighting spirit, he claimed that it would take a message from God Himself to get him to give up his position as their 2024 candidate.
A few weeks later that message arrived in what his wife Jill called an epiphany. In truth this moment in clarity was provided by party leaders, such as former president, Barack Obama, former speaker, Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer. While Biden still wanted to fight till the end, in what essentially was a palace coup, the Party leadership must have made him an offer he could not refuse. Reluctantly, the defeated president removed his name from the ticket. Harris was quickly and undemocratically chosen to replace him as their presidential candidate. This was a throw-back to the old smoke-filled rooms where candidates were often chosen.
Harris quickly put on her track shoes and demonstrated an energy and an optimism, which were seriously lacking in the 81 year-old Biden. After she announced Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Democratic Party politics appeared more like a dance party than a political one. Walz exhibited the face of a happy warrior as he raced back and forth on the political stage, waving his arms frantically. He looked more like a dancing bear, due to his girth and at some point, I expected him to appear like Clarabell, from the old Howdy Doody show from the fifties, all covered in grease paint and his zany costume, replete with honking horns on his belt.
The Democratic convention is the first one to offer free Planned Parenthood abortions and vasectomies while at the convention. Re-establishing abortion on demand remains their key issue, which dominates the Party Platform. The voters must wonder why this issue trumps their main concerns about the economy, inflation, illegal immigration, housing, rising unemployment, a declining military and violent crime in their city streets.
Their convention in Chicago reverberated with joyful singing and dancing, reminiscent of the Peanuts character, Snoopy (See my The Joyous Dance of Life, 11/13/22) Contrast this kind of optimistic human emotion in the Politics of Joy and anticipation of a future victory, with that of pure Christian Joy, which revolves around the risen Christ and his presence in our daily lives.
The Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Joseph Cupich, gave the invocation to begin the convention. He received a good deal of criticism from traditional Catholics for allegedly scandalizing the faithful by bringing the Church into a celebration in the shadows of a Planned Parenthood facility. In his defense, I can say that the Church goes where sinners are and I will bet the United Center was filled with them.
The Cardinal’s invocation began with the words: We praise you, O God of all creation. Quicken in us a resolve to protect your handiwork. I have to hand it to the Cardinal for his political savvy and absolute neutrality. While his mention of God was probably the only time our Deity was mentioned with respect at this convention, the Cardinal’s amorphous use of creation, included, not just the unborn, whom Democrats threaten but the environment which they believe is in severe peril. I would have praised him if he had challenged his audience to protect the most innocent members of God’s creation but he chose the road of polite pragmatism instead of virtue.
As slavery was to the Democratic Party of the 19th and early 20th century, abortion has dominated its agenda since the late 1960s. In the name of saving the planet, the Left has dedicated itself to lowering our birth rate to less than zero population growth by any means possible. Kamala Harris was quoted as saying on X as saying she wanted to eliminate 50% of the poverty rate among children. She never explains the cost or how she will accomplish this. I posted in reply that it was easy, just eliminate 50% of poor children.
I also see euthanasia becoming a hot topic in the next decade because the elderly will eventually outgrow the young as has already been happening in China. Let’s face it, the elderly are a drain on our limited governmental and medical resources. Perhaps that’s why Harris wants to do away with private health care. Their new slogan to anyone over 60 will be death with dignity, the standard euphemism for assisted suicide or euthanasia.
While the Democratic Left dances away at their Chicago love fest, they blatantly ignore or are sadly ignorant of their own political history. While the original Happy Warrior comes from a William Wordswoth poem (1806), it was New York Governor, Al Smith, who was the first politician to adopt the name. Democrats need to remember while Smith was a popular governor, as a presidential candidate and the first Catholic to win a nomination for the presidency, he lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover in 1928.
The idea of the Politics of Joy also does not resonate well in their political history. As historian James B. Stewart’s title in his book Blood Sport implies, politics are a take no prisoners game because the stakes in power and money are so high. Who can forget Hillary Clinton’s Politics of Personal Destruction? Joy usually comes after the votes are counted.
Political historians credit the late Hubert Humphrey as the creator of the Politics of Joy. The late vice-president and former governor of Minnesota was a particularly good and decent man but was caught up in the cauldron of the Vietnam War, which forced the abdication of President Lyndon Johnson who decided not to defend his presidency in the 1968 election. This was strictly Johnson’s decision and lacked the veiled implications of a coup. Johnson, who had serious heart issues, read the tea leaves better than the defiant Biden had.
All these problems fell into Humphrey’s lap. The same thing has happened to Harris. She will have to defend an agenda, which, unlike Humphrey’s, was as much hers as it was Biden’s. People were not happy during the sixties and Humphrey’s joyous spirit had to take a back seat to the bloody realities of politics. But an unpopular war is more difficult to defend than a bad economy. Like Smith, Humphrey lost the election but Richard Nixon’s margin was razor thin.
The DNC Convention sense of joy was disturbed by the appearance of President Biden on the first night of the Convention. It was a pretentious love fest, sodden with some serious flaws. For months, we have been dealt a steady dose of how Biden works better and is more alert before eight o’clock. Because of the DNC’s serious incompetence, or a dark malice, Biden did not start his speech until 11:30 Eastern Time, when a good part of the projected audience had gone to bed or had left the United Center.
While his speech was much better than his debate, it still was a jumbled collection of angry, near hostile attacks on Trump, and promises of a future no one can create. Biden’s Irish ancestry reminds me of a joke that seems relevant here. When an Irishman has dementia, the last thing he forgets is his grudges.
As soon as he finished, he immediately left the building and went to California, even though he is still the sitting president of the United States. Biden’s appearance was as far away from Harris’ and Walz’s speeches as time and space would allow. But at least he had an invitation.
In 1968 Lyndon Johnson was nowhere near Chicago and its serious riots and protests. In a recent interview with historian Doris Godwin on Fox News, she revealed her conversation with LBJ during that convention. She said he had been deeply hurt and felt ostracized from his Party. I have to believe Biden feels very much like one of his Democratic forbears.
I did not watch the Vice-President’s speech but from what I have read, it was well-received for its powerful enthusiasm, surrounded by the usual Democratic exaggerations and blatant lies. But after the applause had faded, American voters were left with a sweet taste in their mouths, which dissipated as quickly as cotton candy. As Gertrude Stein said fittingly of Harris’s San Francisco, There is no there there. Her speech lacked substance or what pundits used to call gravitas.
Harris promise of A New Way Forward, raises the question of away from whom? For nearly a week the Democrats sounded as if they were running against the incumbent. The truth is Donald Trump has not been president since 2021 when things were relatively good. Nearly four years later, the nation is in an economic and political quagmire. It was Biden and Harris’ failed policies which have mired the country in a slough of despondency on many fronts. The Democrats cannot run against themselves and get away with it! At least I hope not.
This is all just prologue. With about 60 days still to go, no one knows what will happen. There are just too many hypotheticals to calculate. I do know that this is the most important election in our history to date. Neither candidate can heal the divisions in this country. It has been inexorably broken since the Obama presidency and maybe even before that.
The United States is nearly equally divided into, not a Northern and a Southern culture but is split along religious, moral and environmental issues, the role of the Federal government, the separation of powers, the Electoral College and the interpretation of the Constitution. Neither side is about to surrender. For the right, it is the choice between freedom and slavery. For the Democrats, their most important planks are to protect abortion and increase the power the Executive Branch has over its 346 million people.
While there was tangible joy in Chicago, it will not extend to the country at large. The Democrats’ persistent use of the word joy reminded me of the most famous baseball poem in our history, according to the Baseball Almanac. I am referring to Ernest Thayer’s Casey at the Bat. Published in 1888, it was intended to be a bit of comic verse but grew to legendary proportions. It features a dramatic narrative about a baseball game between a team from the fictional town of Mudville and an unnamed opponent.
I stand with most of the country, that part of us that clings to our guns, hugs our Bibles and are deplorable to most Democratic leaders. This is the country that I now know and love as Mudville. Like our baseball team, the people of Mudville are facing a very tough team. It is the bottom of the ninth and we are down to our last three outs. Our hero waits impatiently on the bench as our first two batters make out. But by the grace of God, Flynn drove a single…and Blake…tore the cover off the ball. When the fans looked up, There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third. The fans saw that…mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat…
After letting two pitches go by, Casey had two strikes on him. Ever confident, Casey’s visage assured the fretful fans that he had this one. The pitcher lets it fly and the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow…Ernest Thayer’s dramatic verse concludes with its final lines:
Somewhere men are laughing and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—-mighty Casey has struck out.
I do not think the stakes could be any higher. While I see Donald Trump as our Casey, my hope is that unlike his alter ego, he will launch a three-run homer and defeat the Democratic nine in dramatic fashion. Whatever the case, this is a reality where a swing and miss will stay with us for at least a generation. From His heavenly vantage point, God is waiting and watching.
