Author Rick Bragg’s “Southern Journey” a hymn to food, people, memories

By SARAH SACHA DOLLACKER
http://www.artsatl.com/
September 23, 2015

Rick Bragg’s collection of essays My Southern Journey is a love song to the South. Collected from years of writing — some pieces appeared in Southern Living, Smithsonian, and Bon Appetit magazines – the articles portray and investigate the nuances of Bragg’s home region.

Born in the Appalachian foothills in northern Alabama, Bragg was reared on cracklins and stories. His love of food and memories from childhood fuel his writing. He won the James Beard Award for Distinguished Writing and the Pulitzer Prize for his work at The New York Times, but he is perhaps best known for All Over But the Shoutin’, a New York Times-bestselling memoir about his mother and his youth.

This focus on personal memory and life in the South permeate his latest collection, too. In these essays, Bragg, who will speak at the Jimmy Carter Library at 7 p.m. September 28, probes the South and his relationship to it, creating a tapestry of images and insights that illustrate the idiosyncrasies and vibrancy of a place he loves.

Divided into five sections – Home, Place, Table, Craft, Spirit — My Southern Journey is a contemplative and geographic adventure through the South. Bragg has lived all over the region, but the articles are primarily set in Louisiana, Florida and Alabama, where he now resides. The subjects of the essays are broad, too. Bragg is equally at home discussing oysters in New Orleans, explaining his mother’s preference for hand-me-down kitchen utensils, telling a story about the time he inadvertently glued his fingers to a wall or investigating the South’s obsession with football.

Whatever the subject, Bragg’s facility with language coupled with his ability to find the perfect example to illustrate his point create intimate and immediate essays, pieces that draw the reader in like compelling fiction.

This talent for description and capturing the exemplary moment to explore a deeper thought is best highlighted by his exquisite descriptions of food. A short essay eliding the enjoyment of deviled eggs with memories of his beloved grandmother, Ava, prove, as he says in “Honor Thy Matriarch,”  “things stand for things.” Much like Proust’s madeleine, Bragg’s deviled eggs transport him from the present to the past.

Nostalgia is a prevailing emotion in the articles, as Bragg remembers life before cell phones, community-destroying storms and oil spills in the Gulf. “Requiem for a Fish Sandwich” is an ode to the grouper sandwich of years gone by, but it also explores the diminishment of plenitude. The real grouper sandwiches have dwindled due to overfishing and oil pollution in the Gulf. Thus, Bragg’s meditation on a sandwich suggests a larger loss and the passage of time.

Despite this diminishment, Bragg’s essays portray an abundance of things that matter. There will always be neighbors offering aid after a storm and tables brimming with holiday dishes. The South’s focus on neighbors, food and family glues the place to its culture, Bragg suggests, because this is how it knows itself. The same stories are told, the same utensils used, the same family members remembered because this is the way Southern identity holds together.

My Southern Journey becomes more than a love song to the South, it becomes an examination of its soul and a memory book. These images and vignettes, so personal to Bragg, allow us to see the South through his eyes: a place imperfect and challenged, but a place to be loved.

- See more at: http://www.artsatl.com/2015/09/rick-bragg-my-southern-journey/#sthash.yGLmw2HU.dpuf

The Two Sides of Pope Francis

His speech to Congress was spiritual and not pointedly political, which came as a relief.

By Peggy Noonan

http://www.wsj.com/

September 25, 2015

Pope Francis addresses Congress, Sept. 24. PHOTO: JIM LO SCALZO/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

The pope I love embraces the hideously deformed man. He sees the modern world for what it is, “a field hospital after battle.” We’re in triage: “The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds.” This pope calls the woman who wrote him that her lover had left but she was having the baby. He tracked her down on her cellphone. “It’s Francis!” She said he told her he’d baptize the baby. This pope fills my eyes with tears. He loves the poor. He pays his own hotel bill. He had a return ticket home from the conclave because it wouldn’t be him. When he was elected he came out on the balcony and stood awkwardly, like Alec Guinness playing the part of a humble cardinal who, to his shock, had been chosen to lead the greatest institution in history. He stood there blank-faced, not equal to the moment, then saved the moment not by giving his prayer but by asking for prayers.

The pope I love tells comfortable cardinals that they are suffering from “spiritual Alzheimer’s.” Of those working within the church whose orientation is homosexual, he says: “Who am I to judge them if they’re seeking the Lord in good faith?” He instructs priests and bishops to give absolution through confession to the contrite and remorseful who have had abortions. Like most American Catholics I didn’t think he was saying anything new here. But he wanted to make it clear. Good, these things should be made clear.

The Francis I love is against materialism because he knows it is hollow and soul-crushing. He knows wealth and power are a moral hazard. He does not want man reduced to a commodity. He is for the little guy. He opposes the throwaway culture in which the old and the vulnerable are expendable. He wants you to be a saint, not a Scrooge.

Opinion Journal Video

Acton Institute Co-Founder Father Robert Sirico on Pope Francis’s speech to Congress and comments on immigration. Photo credit: Getty Images.

He wades into the great spiritual questions.

That pope has captured the imagination of the world.

Is what he does merely symbolic? Nothing at his level is merely symbolic. He is acting in a Christlike way: His actions are lessons, reminders, intimations. Inspirations.

The less lovable pope is—well, and I say this still with love, Uncle Frank in the attic. This is the one who endorses secular political agendas, who castigates capitalism in language that is both imprecise and heavily loaded. He doesn’t, actually, seem to know a lot about capitalism or markets, or even what economic freedom has given—and is giving—his own church.

For one small example, the other day Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Groupgave $40 million to the Catholic schools of New York, meaning he is giving his personal wealth to pay for the education of children, many of whom are recent immigrants and some of whom sleep in cars. Last I looked Mr. Schwarzman was not a monk or a mystic but a businessman in private equity. This is not abusing, ignoring or dehumanizing the poor. This is lifting them up, helping them in a concrete way that will change their lives.

Political Francis seems not spiritual but strangely earthbound, like the pontiff of the Church of What’s Happening Now, a super-groovy pope acting on some antique ideological biases and assumptions.

On Thursday in the Capitol, as Francis made the first-ever speech by a pope to the U.S. Congress, the nature of the historic moment was sharpened by this question: Which Francis would show up—the one who makes me think of Heaven, or the earthbound one?

The speech was spiritual and not pointedly political, which came as a relief. He spoke of America with a certain reserved warmth, but a warmth nonetheless. As rhetoric it was high-class boilerplate, but its messages were useful. I wondered if the recent criticism of his secular political stands had led him to soften or refigure his speech. I wondered: Having just met America for the first time, and experienced all its variety and affection, how is he feeling about America now? I bet it has nothing to do with the cartoon, comic-book, dumbed-down Marxist stereotypes some of his friends and followers peddle.

Highlights of the speech:

The job of lawmakers “is to enable this country, by your legislative activity, to grow as a nation.” The “chief aim of all politics” is “the pursuit of the common good.” The four American lives that have most touched him, that most embody the nation’s “dreams,” are Abraham Lincoln, who stood for “liberty”; Martin Luther King, who stood for “liberty . . . and nonexclusion”; Dorothy Day, the activist, who stood for “social justice”; andThomas Merton, the monk and writer, who stood for “dialogue and openness to God.” These were four interesting choices, especially the last two, who don’t occupy a large place in the public imagination. But Day should be considered for sainthood, and one guesses that under Francis she may be. Merton wrote a spiritual masterpiece, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” that is important to many who experience Catholic conversions.

Democracy is “deeply rooted in the mind of the American people.” Politics is “an expression of our compelling need to live as one.” Americans should not be “fearful of foreigners,” because “most of us were once foreigners.” We must respond to immigrants in a way that is “humane, just and fraternal.” We must remember the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

He delightfully took a moment to nod to the creation of wealth: “Business is a noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving the world.” (That may have been his way of saying, “Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Schwarzman!”) “It can be a fruitful source of prosperity for the area in which it operates, especially if it sees the creation of jobs as an essential part of its service. . . . The fight against poverty and hunger must be fought constantly and on many fronts.”

You can believe there are two Francises and still feel an integrated affection and admiration for this man who stands for so much that is good, and tries to encourage the good. Who is in many ways great. Who has filled the world with more than his portion of sweetness, and who has drawn the affection and regard of non-Catholics around the world. He has even made left-wing American Catholics, a grumpy lot, happy. For at least 30 years they were frustrated and depressed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. I guess it’s their turn.

They were sometimes graceless and grudging toward past popes. I don’t see what conservatives gain by playing that part now. When a much-loved pope comes to visit there’s a kind of moral imperative to good cheer.

I close with the words of a New York businessman, a capitalist and Catholic. I asked him Wednesday how he was feeling about Francis. “If he lives he’ll change the world,” he said.

For the better? “I think so, hopefully in an aspirational way. Don’t tax me to death helping the less fortunate. Urge me to do good. And I will. And many will. For him.”

OBAMA FREES 20TH 9/11 HIJACKER

Today it's Osama bin Laden's aide; tomorrow it could very well be the Blind Sheikh.

Matthew Vadum

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

September 28, 2015

Abdul Shalabi

The Obama administration quietly shipped Osama bin Laden's bodyguard back to the Wahhabist Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last week despite warnings that the Muslim terrorist remains a serious threat to the United States.

The newly released terrorist detainee is Abdul Shalabi, 39, who trained to be the 20th hijacker for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Shalabi was set free even though military officials deemed him too dangerous to be unleashed on the world and too valuable as an intelligence asset to be released from U.S. custody.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said last week that the liberation of Shalabi, whom he referred to as a "dangerous detainee," is "another example of President Obama playing politics with national security and putting campaign promises ahead of U.S. national security interests." Shuttering the terrorist detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has long been a goal of President Obama, going back at least to the campaign trail in 2008.

Shalabi's unshackling should have Americans wondering which bloodthirsty jihadist is next to be released by the soft-on-Islamism president of the United States. Could it be the "Blind Sheikh," a.k.a. Omar Abdel-Rahman, who orchestrated the deadly bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993? News reports that the Obama administration is working on releasing the deadly fatwa-issuing cleric linked to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat go back years. The sheikh is a hero to his followers, including deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, and a spiritual leader of al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

At home President Obama could win kudos from his allies in the increasingly violent Black Lives Matter cult by pardoning unrepentant cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur, a fugitive granted political asylum by Communist Cuba. Obama could boost the burgeoning anti-incarceration movement by making history with a sweeping prisoner amnesty, framing it as harmlessly setting free "all non-violent offenders" in federal custody.

Barack Hussein Obama knows he won't have to face the voters in another election so the sky's the limit.

The process by which Shalabi won his freedom offers disturbing insights into the system that determines if a terrorist detainee should be held indefinitely in wartime as allowed under the laws of war.

In May 2008 when George W. Bush was president, Rear Admiral David M. Thomas Jr., then the commander of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo, recommended in a since-unclassified memo that Shalabi's detention be continued.

Spelling the word high in block capitals and boldfacing it for emphasis, Thomas warned that Shalabi was "[a] HIGHrisk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies[,]" "[a] HIGH threat from a detention perspective[,]" and "[o]f HIGH intelligence value."

Born Dec. 4, 1975 in the Muslim holy city of Medina, Saudi Arabia, Shalabi is a man of many aliases. He has also been known as Abdul Rahman Shalabi, Abdul Rahman, Abd al Rahman Shalbi Isa Uwaydah, Abdul Haq Rahman, Saqr al-Madani, and Mahmud Abd Aziz al-Mujahid.

Shalabi, who had been on a hunger strike for years at Guantanamo, is a member of al-Qaeda who began working as one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards in 1999, the memo stated. Shalabi "received advanced training at multiple al-Qaida camps" and "received specialized close combat training for his role as a suicide operative in an aborted component of the 11 September 2001 al-Qaida attacks."

"Detainee attended an elite commando course run by al-Qaida operative Salah al-Din Abd al-Halim Zaydan aka (Sayf al-Adl) at the Mes Aynak Training Camp in 1999," Thomas wrote. "This course was offered to select trainees who had already received al-Qaida's basic training."

Shalabi was involved in "hostilities against U.S. and Coalition forces and was captured with a group referred to as the Dirty 30, which included UBL [Osama bin Laden] bodyguards and an assessed 20th 11 September 2001 hijacker." Shalabi, who has "familial ties" to bin Laden, "will likely reestablish ties to al-Qaida and other extremist elements if released."

Thomas argued that Shalabi was far from rehabilitated (assuming rehabilitation is even possible for a jihadist). His behavior while confined was atrocious. 

Thomas reported:

His overall behavior has been mostly noncompliant and hostile to the guard force and staff. He currently has 95 Reports of Disciplinary Infraction listed in DIMS with the most recent occurring on 27 February 2008, when he was reported spitting on the guard force. Detainee has 11 Reports of Disciplinary Infraction for assault with the most recent occurring on 27 February 2008, when he was reported spitting on the guard force. Other incidents for which he has been disciplined include inciting and participating in mass disturbances, failure to follow guard instructions and camp rules, inappropriate use of bodily fluids, unauthorized communications, damage to government property, attempted assaults, assaults, provoking words and gestures, and possession of food and nonweapon type contraband. On 7 August 2005, detainee was reported to be in possession of broken glass (shank).

"Does that sound like someone who is going to be rehabilitated in Saudi Arabia?" Investor's Business Dailyeditorialized. "Or someone who will be returning to the terrorist battlefield to wage jihad against America?"

Even if Shalabi does not return to terrorism, his release provides a morale boost for those who support the jihadist cause, the newspaper opined. "He was also on a partial hunger strike for nine years at Gitmo, and will undoubtedly be used in Islamist propaganda against U.S. detention policies once he returns to his home."

Some commentators accused the Obama administration of releasing Shalabi suddenly and without warning on Sept. 22 while the public and the media were distracted by the first-ever visit of Pope Francis to the United States. 

While the timing of Shalabi's deinstitutionalization may be suspect, the process that led to his repatriation began at least two years ago. 

Following the great American journalistic tradition of undermining U.S. national security to sell newspapers, theMiami Herald set in motion the events that led to Shalabi's low-key exfiltration from U.S.-held territory.

In June 2013, the U.S. Department of Defense released a list of detainees held at Guantanamo in response to a lawsuit filed by the newspaper. The media outlet then reported that Shalabi was one of 48 Guantanamo detainees "deemed too dangerous to release but ineligible for trial."

An unclassified transcript of an April 21 hearing of an Obama administration-controlled detention review board indicated its unnamed "presiding member" said Shalabi behaved badly in detention and "has refused to respond to substantive questions." That board, established under Executive Order 13567 (issued March 7, 2011 by President Obama), convened to hear evidence about whether Shalabi's continued detention at Guantanamo "remains necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States." The panel, according to the U.S. military, "consists of one senior official from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and State; the Joint Staff, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence."

In a little-noticed development, the board determined June 15 that "continued law of war detention of the detainee is no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States." The board recommended Shalabi be returned to his native Saudi Arabia.

At the April hearing, Shalabi's private counsel, Julia Tarver Mason-Wood, told the board that she had "represented Mr. Shalabi on a pro bono basis for almost a decade." She said her client "wants to make clear that he harbors no ill will to the United States, the American people, and non-Muslims."

The ethically challenged Mason-Wood told the board:

As he will explain to you, Mr. Shalabi is a teacher of Islam, which he believes is a religion of peace, not war. Mr. Shalabi will tell you that he does not support terrorism or the killing of innocent people; he steadfastly believes that such acts are contrary to the Quran and to the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.  

Manhattan-based Mason-Wood is a partner in the Paul, Weiss law firm, which represents many Muslim terrorist detainees. She clerked for leftist U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor when the jurist sat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Richard Pollock previously reported at PJ Media that Mason-Wood was banned from the Guantanamo facility by the base commander and the U.S. Department of Justice in 2006 "for secretly passing on anti-American propaganda and operational detention details to her 'client.'"

The detainee was Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi, a Saudi who belonged to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In 2004 a status review tribunal heard that he was “was captured with al-Qaeda surveillance evasion reports and after-action reports.”

Pollock continued:

The anti-American propaganda Mason secretly passed on to Mr. Al Joudi was a slick, inflammatory 18-page color brochure — written entirely in Arabic — that slammed American detention policy as “that of anti-Arab, anti-Islamic, and other racist abuse.” It was filled with pictures of masked, bound, and kneeling prisoners, and according to the Wall Street Journal, “included pictures of what appeared to be detainee operations in Iraq.”

Mason-Wood had been surreptitiously forwarding "incendiary materials to her client through a system called 'legal mail,' which is supposed to be strictly legal correspondence between a lawyer and the enemy combatant." This appears to contravene "a 2004 protective order by federal Judge Joyce Hens Green [that] forbids the lawyers to give out any information on political news, current events, or the names of U.S. government personnel."

Mason-Wood brings to mind Lynne Stewart, the since-disbarred radical lawyer who was briefly imprisoned for providing material support for terrorism by illegally passing on a message from her client, Omar Abdel-Rahman. The communiqué was “the blessing of a return to violence from a terrorist leader,” prosecutor Anthony Barkow said during Stewart’s 2006 trial. In it, the sheikh urged disciples to abandon a ceasefire with the government of Egypt and resume terrorist operations.

According to Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn, Mason-Wood is one of several legal counsel to Guantanamo detainees who "went far beyond vigorous representation of their clients." (Burlingame, a former attorney, is the sister of the late Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)

Mason-Wood, Burlingame and Joscelyn wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

inflamed tensions with the hunger strikers during a visit to Guantanamo in October 2005. She told one of the detainees, Yousef Al Sherhri, that the U.S. Government had no court authority to feed him using a nasal tube, according to Justice Department documents. As a result Al Sherhri pulled out his feeding tube, persuaded detainees in his cell block to do the same and exhorted them to physically resist. [Department of Justice] lawyers would later argue that Ms. Mason’s advocacy “resulted in a disruption of camp security and a potential threat to the health of eight hunger-striker detainees.”

After being banned from Guantanamo for breaking the rules, attorneys sued the government to regain access to detainees. The ban on Paul, Weiss lawyers that was enforced for part of 2006, was later rescinded "as part of a private settlement containing a variety of stipulations." 

Mason-Wood's client, Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi, was sent back to Saudi Arabia in February 2007. In 2009 the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed Joudi had “reengaged in terrorism.”

Freeing Omar Abdel-Rahman would be a logical enough choice for the Obama administration which has shown a willingness to release the worst of the worst among Muslim terrorists. 

Remember that Obama freed five Islamist generals in exchange for Taliban collaborator U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. 

Releasing the Blind Sheikh, whose list of U.S. targets overlapped with the targets Obama pal Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground Organization bombed or plotted to bomb in the 1970s, would delight the president's Islamist allies.

From the time since-overthrown Egyptian President Morsi took office, he promised to pressure the U.S. government to free the sheikh, the Washington Post reported in early 2013

In October 2012 al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri called on Egyptians to kidnap Americans to force the sheikh's release. Muslim terrorist Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who attacked U.S. and European oil workers in January 2013, put the sheikh's freedom on his list of political demands.

The sheikh "was the godfather of all Islamic movements," Zawahiri's younger brother, Mohamed al-Zawahiri has said. "Maybe if he was not going through such injustice, 9/11 would not have happened. [The sheikh's imprisonment] was one of the reasons that the people felt so strongly about the American offenses against the Islamic people."

The sheikh has long been a revered figure is Islamism but after Hosni Mubarak, who kept Egypt's Islamist problem under control, was ousted as the Arab republic's president, demands for the sheikh to be returned to Egypt have grown progressively louder.

In 2001 before the 9/11 attacks Osama bin Laden himself reportedly demanded the sheikh's release from U.S. custody. Author Peter Bergen described the sheikh as the "spiritual guide of 9/11" because he wrote an edict in prisons requiring Muslims to take up arms against their enemies and "kill them in the sea, on land and in the air."

The sheikh is reportedly very popular among Egyptian Salafists who view him as a legitimate religious and political leader railroaded by the U.S. justice system. Some call him the “Emir of Jihad."

Militants who attacked the In Amenas gas facility in southeastern Algeria offered to swap American hostages for the sheikh. Algerian authorities didn't pursue the offer and instead conducted a raid that left at least 29 terrorists and 37 captives dead.

A Libyan group known as the Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman Brigade took responsibility for  assaults on Western targets in Libya in 2012, including the Sept. 11 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi that left four Americans dead including Ambassador Chris Stevens. The sheikh's son, Abdallah, said the killers "were acting in the name of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman."

In a video message earlier this month, al-Qaeda's Zawahiri reminded his followers that the sheikh and his brethren remain in custody and, according to MEMRI, "urged all groups to include them in their deals when negotiating for the release of any of their hostages."

In recent years media outlets have reported that the U.S. Department of State “is actively considering negotiations with the Egyptian government for the transfer of custody of Omar Abdel-Rahman, also known as ‘the Blind Sheikh,’ for humanitarian and health reasons.” Obama administration officials deny that there have been any such negotiations but the administration isn't exactly known for its honesty.

The Arabic language newspaper al-Arabiya reported previously that the Obama administration offered to send Abdel-Rahman to Egypt as part a prisoner swap. Now well into his seventies, Abdel-Rahman was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” in 1995 in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Abdel-Rahman’s terrorist organization, Jamaa Islamiya (Islamic Group), is a “radical offshoot” of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Jamaa Islamiya also tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995. To try to force the release of Abdel-Rahman from the U.S., Jamaa Islamiya murdered 62 people in Luxor, Egypt, in 1997.

Shalabi's lawyer, Julia Tarver Mason-Wood, should be getting a telephone call from the Blind Sheikh's people any day now.

 Tags: 9/11, Gitmo, islamic jihad, osama bin laden, prison

Another President, Another Pope

Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II set the standard for presidential-papal collaboration.

By Craig Shirley

http://www.usnews.com/

September 24, 2015

The statue in Gdańsk depicting Pope John Paul II with US president Ronald Reagan. Photo: PAP/Piotr Pędziszewski

Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II were men of the same moment. They were both horrified by nuclear war, they both hated communism and the Soviet Union, they both had been shot but survived and they both forgave their assailants. They had also both been superior high school athletes and, curiously, both were actors before becoming the most important players on a world stage.

John Paul II was almost an afterthought after his predecessor, John Paul I, died unexpectedly after less than a month in office. Reagan of course had been a long shot all of his life. Both the president and the pope grew up poor, with no connections, but ended up being two of the greatest men of the 20 thcentury. They both had winning smiles and indomitable personalities. At his first remarks from the balcony of St. Peter's, the pope made clear what he thought of the Soviets. Reagan of course had been railing against communism for years.

As Washington this week celebrates the visit of Pope Francis, it's worth remember the first time a pontiff and a president worked together. Together with the daughter of a grocer, John Paul and Reagan defeated the greatest enemy to human freedom and dignity which ever existed.

John Paul II who had lost his mother early in life and his father and brother to the ravages of a war torn Poland, was an unexpected successor to Peter. Like Reagan, John Paul II had an optimism and a deep-seated hope that the world could be a better place and that leadership quality was undeniable.

And, most importantly, they both believed they were called by God to do great things for world freedom. Indeed, John Paul II said in 1982 that America was "called, above all, to fulfill its mission in the service ... those indispensable conditions of justice and freedom, of truth and love that are the foundations of lasting peace."

Thomas Carlyle said history is but the biographies of great men and he may have had the likes of Reagan and John Paul II in mind when he uttered that phrase a century before. John Paul II was canonized in 2014 but curiously, while he had two miracles cited , neither was his greatest: the defeat of an "Evil Empire" and the restoration of freedom to millions imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, including his own native and beloved Poland.

They met many times and Reagan wrote often in his diaries of meeting with the pope to discuss world affairs. The pope, meantime, wrote in his first encyclical that religious freedom was the most important human right, a direct shot across the bow of the Soviets. He also immediately began to demote or ease out church officials who wanted to "accommodate" the Soviets.

Not all presidents and popes get along so well, nor alter history so dramatically. When President John Kennedy visited Pope Paul VI in 1963, he simply shook his hand rather than kissing the ring of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. JFK, the first Catholic president, was hypersensitive to the false charge that he put his loyalty to the church above his loyalty to the Constitution.

When Lyndon Johnson visited Paul in New York City in 1965 – during the first papal visit to the United States – he gave the pontiff a silver framed autographed photo of himself. Later, he gave the pope a bust of himself. Even Obama has never gone that far.

The first president to meet with a pope was Woodrow Wilson, who had an audience with Benedict XV, but it wasn't until the Grand Alliance between John Paul II, Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, that a global strategy to defeat Soviet Communism was enacted which so alter and change the world.

Even during World War II, the concordat signed by Adolph Hitler and the Vatican which simply protected the rights of the church in Germany, opened up the false charge that the Vatican was pro-Nazi. Hence, the Allies and the church never effected a joint agreement against the Axis powers. The concordat was a narrow, self-protecting measure, but was seen by some as limiting the effectiveness of the church in fighting Nazism. The church never got the credit it deserved for being an early critic of Nazi Germany's anti-Semitism.

Though the United States had some sort of relations with the Vatican going back to Washington's time, it was Reagan who formalized diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Reagan sent an ambassador, a move which sparked criticism in some quarters, pleased American Catholics and the head of the Catholic Church, and, more importantly, helped sharpen the alliance.

For Reagan, there was nothing more important that the defeat of the Soviet Union and when it became clear the Vatican was joining in the fight against "Godless Communism," it must have sent shivers up the spines of the old collectivists in the Politburo. Reagan was mounting a counteroffensive against the Kremlin and the addition of the Vatican was crucial.

Karol Wojtyla, as John Paul II was born, may have been more anticommunist than Reagan. He'd grown up in Poland, under the mailed fist of Soviet hegemony. Once he became pope, his first foreign visits was to his homeland, a way of sticking a log in the eye of the Kremlin. He also boosted the strength of Vatican radio so as to overcome Moscow's attempts to jam his broadcasts. His trip to Warsaw was seen by many as the first, renewed shot fired in the war on communism and indeed, renowned historian John Lewis Gaddis said that "when John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland – and ultimately everywhere – would come to an end." Maybe. There was still much do be done but no one can doubt the lift in the West's morale from the pope's trip to communist-occupied, but not dominated, Poland.

After the rise of Thatcher in 1979, the rise of John Paul II, also in 1979 and the rise of Reagan in 1980, the economic, moral and military alliance against Soviet communism was complete. Reagan was arming freedom fighters, the Vatican was sending food and medical supplies and Thatcher was firming up European support, calling on them to act like men. Each understood permanent offense. Each understood the psychological advantage of beating an idea with a better idea. Each understood the bully pulpit and each used it to berate and humiliate the threadbare arguments for collectivism.

Eleven years later, a wall fell and the Soviets were consigned to the ash-heap of history.

TAGS:

Pope John Paul II

Pope Francis

Reagan, Ronald

Catholic Church

Soviet Union

Cold War

The FBI’s Homemade Mobster

A ghoulish Johnny Depp channels Whitey Bulger's malice in a story of literal "gangster government."

By GENE HEALY • September 24, 2015

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/

Looking back at the last couple of hundred years of European history—on paper at least—you wouldn’t expect Italians, of all peoples, to have a major advantage over the Irish in terms of organizational acumen or systematic brutality. And yet, when it comes to organized crime in 20th-century America, the Mafia ran the table on the Irish mob, driving them all but out of business by the end of Prohibition.

Gangland historian T.J. English tells the tale in Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish-American Gangster—a book the feds found on James “Whitey” Bulger’s shelves in his Santa Monica hideout in 2011, when they finally captured the last Irish Godfather after his 16 years on the lam. “Over the three-year period from 1931 to 1933,” English writes, “virtually every high-ranking Irish American bootlegger in the Northeastern United States was systematically eliminated, gangland-style.” As they went up against the wall, the great American genre of the mob movie was just being born, in films like “Public Enemy” and “Angels with Dirty Faces.” “The irony, of course,” English observes, is that “just as Jimmy Cagney emerged as the avatar of a new kind of street-wise Irish American style, the mobsters who inspired that style were dropping at an expeditious rate.” By the late 20th century, the old-school variety survived only in a few ethnic enclaves, like New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, or Boston’s Southie.

Adding insult to injury, the Mafia beat the Irish clans twice: once in the Prohibition-era turf wars over black markets, and again, more lastingly, in the American imagination. “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas,” and “The Sopranos” loom large; except for the occasional gem like 1973’s “Friends of Eddie Coyle,” the Irish Mob can’t catch a cinematic break.

That’s not for lack of rich material. The Whitey Bulger story is the most lurid, noirishly fascinating tale in mob history, one in which it’s hard to tell the gangsters from the G-men. The basic facts have been known since at least 1999, when, after 10 months of hearings, Massachusetts federal judge Mark Wolf issued a mammoth,661-page opinion outlining the devil’s bargain between the Boston FBI and its “Top Echelon Informants” Bulger and Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi.

But “Black Mass,” which opened last weekend, is the first big-screen attempt to tell the story straight. You can hardly count Martin Scorsese’s criminally overrated “The Departed,” a bloated, Hollywood star vehicle that’s as phony as a Shamrock Shake. The Southie mob boss of “The Departed,” played in scenery-chewing, self-parodic fashion by Jack Nicholson, is clearly based on Whitey, though for some reason the Bulger character takes his name from an actual Italian mobster, “Frank Costello,” né Francesco Castiglia, who adopted an Irish surname.

In “Goodfellas,” Scorsese stuck close to his source material, the life of New York mob associate Henry Hill, to eke high drama out of lowlife hoods. In the “The Departed,” he mashed up the Bulger case with the sensationalist plot of the Hong Kong crime thriller “Infernal Affairs.” The result was as ridiculous as “Goodfellas” was realistic.

Unlike Costello in “The Departed,” the real Whitey Bulger didn’t sell missile parts to the Chinese. Whitey made his money by shaking down bookies and drug dealers—and, in one weird episode briefly depicted in “Black Mass”—“winning” the Massachusetts state lottery. “After a winning ticket was sold at his Rotary Variety Store,” Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill explain in their 2000 book Black Mass: the True Story of an Unholy Alliance between the FBI and the Irish Mob, “Bulger informed the $14.3 million jackpot winner that it would be in his best interests to acquire a new partner.”

And unlike Costello, the real Whitey Bulger didn’t have scads of double agents and on-call assassins honeycombed throughout state and federal law enforcement, ready to kill other cops on command. He had two FBI agents in his pocket, most of the Boston FBI office criminally compromised, and a brother, Billy, who was president of the state senate and one of the most powerful figures in Massachusetts politics. That was more than enough.

“Black Mass,” based on Lehr and O’Neill’s book, sticks much closer to reality. There’s far too much in the underlying story to fit into a film that runs just over two hours. So, the fair questions to ask are: (1) Is the movie good? And (2) is it reasonably accurate? On both counts, the answer is a qualified yes.

Humanizing Whitey?

It’s a qualified yes on the first count because “Black Mass” has problems, starting with the casting. The great mob dramas take pains to put the viewer in an actual time and place; The “Sopranos” bolstered its authenticity by picking actual Bridge and Tunnel Italians to play North Jersey mobsters. And the “Godfather” would have been a very different movie with—as Francis Ford Coppola apparently contemplated—Laurence Olivier as Don Corleone and Dustin Hoffman or Martin Sheen as Michael.

So you have to wonder, did Scott Cooper hang a “No Irish Need Apply” sign outside the “Black Mass” casting call? The leading roles went mainly to actors who’d qualify only under St. Patrick’s Day rules. In Jesse Plemons from “Breaking Bad”, they actually got a guy who’s uglier than Kevin Weeks to play the feared Bulger crew enforcer, and Plemons can’t even fake-punch convincingly. Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Billy Bulger, is practically British royalty. Come on!

What’s more, if you want to clue the viewer into the fact that it’s Boston in the 1980s, there have to be subtler ways to go about it than having a character say, “hey, Wade Boggs is hitting pretty good.” Too much of the dialogue comes from the “tell, don’t show” school of screenwriting, as in the early exchange between Billy and Connolly: “Look at you, big FBI agent now”; Connolly: “Yeah, but I haven’t forgotten where I come from!” Later on, Billy and Connolly reminisce about working on the state senator’s first campaign, with Billy waxing melancholy: “Oh Jesus, we were just kids, now look at us.” Real people don’t talk like this.

And yet, somehow, the whole thing works. For all its faults, the film gets a lot of things right, principally the Bulger-Connolly relationship. Whitey’s chief enabler in the Boston FBI grew up around the corner from the much-admired local tough, and seems never to have lost the toxic man-crush he developed on Whitey as a kid. The Australian Joel Edgerton does an admirable job as the insecure, blustery Connolly, and Depp is nearly perfect as Whitey.

The director, Scott Cooper, has said that he wanted “to humanize Whitey Bulger,” a bizarre aspiration when you’re talking about a guy who strangled young women with his bare hands. Stranger still is Cooper’s search for what he’s called Bulger’s “tender and humorous side.” The evidence that Whitey ever had a sense of humor is sparse. The “jokes” he told were the sort designed to provoke nervous laughter. Weeks and Flemmi both testified that when they passed Tenean Beach, where Bulger had buried mob rival Paul McGonagle, Bulger liked to crack, “Drink up Paulie, the tide’s coming in.” His idea of ribbing a pal was to nickname Flemmi “Dr. Mengele,” because Flemmi “kind of enjoyed” pulling victims’ teeth out with pliers so their bodies couldn’t be identified from dental records.

Luckily, Cooper’s intentions were utterly undone by Johnny Depp’s ghoulish performance. From a distance, with his popped-collar leather jacket, Depp-as-Bulger looks a bit fey, and ’80s New Wave. In every close camera shot, however, Depp radiates menace. Throughout, he conveys what Bulger biographers Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy called the gangster’s “strange and complex amalgam of the depraved and the blandly conventional.” Why try to “humanize”? Sociopaths can be fascinating.

“This Thing of Ours”

If anything, though, “Black Mass” is too soft on the FBI. Bulger “was a small time player” Plemons’ Weeks says in the movie, “the next thing you know, he’s a damn kingpin. You know why? Because the FBI let it happen.” The verb is wrong: the FBI made it happen.

As Judge Wolf noted in 1999, “at the urging of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in the mid-1960’s a previously reluctant FBI became committed to combatting the LCN. FBI Special Agent H. Paul Rico recruited Flemmi to serve as an asset in that effort.“ Moreover, “the FBI played a pivotal role in forging a formidable, enduring partnership between Flemmi and Bulger, who had in 1975 also become an FBI informant. The FBI made Bulger and Flemmi, who were previously acquainted but not close, a perfect match.” From 1975 to 1990, in its quest to bring down the Italian mob, the Bureau became partner in crime to Bulger and Flemmi’s Winter Hill gang, frustrating state police and DEA investigations of the crew, and tipping them off to potential informants, who were promptly killed. Nor was the FBI’s corruption limited to “a few ‘bad apples,’” Wolf identified more than a dozen FBI officials who broke the law in attempts to protect their “assets.” It’s telling that when Flemmi was finally arrested in early 1995, a Boston FBI agent told him, apologetically, “This thing of ours, it is no more.”

The great libertarian economist Murray Rothbard was a fan of the mob-movie genre. But for my money, the craziest thing he ever wrote was his 1990 review of“Goodfellas“, which he condemned on ideological grounds for failing to romanticize the Mafia as an alternative to the state. “Organized crime is essentially anarcho-capitalist,” Rothbard explained, “a productive industry struggling to govern itself; apart from attempts to monopolize and injure competitors, it is productive and non-aggressive.”

“Goodfellas,” with its depiction of mobsters as “psychotic punks,” was “repellent and loathsome,” he charged. In contrast, “Godfather” I and II “were perfection,” because they recognized “that the Mafia, although leading a life outside the law, is, at its best, simply entrepreneurs and businessmen supplying the consumers with goods and services of which they have been unaccountably deprived by a Puritan WASP culture.”

But of the two, “Goodfellas” was the true-crime story, and the “Godfather” was the fairy tale. The grisly genuine article is tougher to romanticize. But if you want to draw libertarian lessons from a mob movie, you could do worse than “Black Mass,” which shows that “gangster government” isn’t just a metaphor.

The Irish immigrants who pioneered organized crime in America were never as organized as their successors, one reason why they lost. In another sense, though, they departed the field, having recognized early on that the biggest gang going was the government. By the 1960s, the term “Irish Mafia” had a somewhat different connotation. From the cops, to the city council, to the federal government, the upwardly mobile Irish went “legit.”

Maybe that’s what Whitey was getting at earlier this year in his handwritten reply to three high-school girls who wrote to him for a history project. “Advice is a cheap commodity,” Bulger wrote from his cell in Sumpterville, Florida, “some seek it from me about crime—I know only thing for sure—If you want to make crime pay—‘Go to Law School.’”

Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and author of The Cult of the Presidency.