EDIT: So, I’m an idiot. I had this thing about *Memorial Day*. My bad.

So it’s Veteran’s Day, and I feel the need to stir up the pot even at this late day. I’m sure many of you will hate me after this.

I posted the famous Wilfred Owen poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” instead of something like John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” because I think Owen has it right. The McCrae poem is hostile and violent in its memorializing the dead, demanding apocalyptic revenge, perpetuating violence for violence and blood for blood, lest the dead have died in vain. The key, though, is that in war, to die in vain means to die on the wrong side; therefore, of course, at some point, soldiers’ have died in vain. We can avoid this all we want by saying they died for a movement or an ideal or simply that the fact that they died makes them heroes who by definition didn’t.

McCrae wrote:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

To me, that’s….vile. Dreadful. Let us go to war simply on the grounds that people have died in the war we’re in. What a way to thank our soldiers, by sending them into combat.  That’s the desperate glory that Owen talks about. As I’ve written before, we all want to be heroes. We all want to be worth a damn. We all want to matter. And the old call goes out — “It is sweet and proper to die for your country.” And rather than heeding the call of the Gospel to moral greatness, to the abandonment of self into the hands of God in the service of others, we grab our guns and march into righteous combat.

I know, I know, that there are times when war is necessary. But I’m so often struck by how many people find it desirable, something in which we should find glory, rather than something we should mourn and wretch at.

But that’s me.

Night.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen, 1918

In the latest scientific discovery, it seems God works in mysterious ways.

Last night, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection. Muhammad, you might remember, is the infamous Beltway Sniper, who terrorized a large swath of Virginia, DC, and Maryland in 2002. I remember it very well, living in Richmond at the time, because he came as far south as Ashland, about fifteen minutes from where I was living, and school was closed for two days in absolute terror of kids being picked off at their bus stops. After our “sniper days” ended, I still walked nervously in the dark to await the bus, afraid the bullets could come at any moment. That’s a pretty weird goddamn feeling, and I will never, ever forget it. But at least I lived; others were not half as lucky.

And so he was caught, tried, sentenced, and executed. He died without remorse, maintaining his innocence, and went silently to his death. It was almost defiant. Remarked one witness, “They both [Muhammad and teenage accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, who was a minor and thus will not be executed] committed the same crimes. No, I don’t feel any closure. I mean, it’s … it … nothing changes.”

Nothing changes.

If I may adhere to my blog’s tagline a moment, and find God in the geekiest place, this reminds me of an exchange from — you guessed it! — Deep Space Nine, the episode “Duet”. Major Kira has captured a Cardassian war criminal, the infamous Gul Darhe’el, who ran a brutal labor camp during Cardassia’s occupation of Bajor, renowned as it were for the murders committed under his watch and per his orders. Intent on seeing the man die for his crimes, he waits in his cell and mocks her. “Let them kill me. Don’t you see? It doesn’t change anything! Kill me. Torture me… it doesn’t matter. You’ve already lost, Major. You can never undo what I’ve accomplished. The dead will still be dead!” And it’s as true as anything he says. The dead will still be dead.

That’s the  sad reality. It would be damned nice if killing the guilty could undo what they’ve done. It’d be damn nice if we could bring back every murder victim, undo every rape, resuscitate the bodies found under Gacy’s floorboards using the drops of life wrung from them. But we can’t. The past is done, and cannot be undoable. It lives in our memories and stalks us in our sleep and makes us fear for the future. We can’t fix things like that. So we settle. We settle for revenge. They hurt us, and now we’re going to hurt them. It is, in its way, justice.

But Bishop Loverde of Arlington — no heady liberal — responded to the upcoming execution in a characteristically pastoral way.

Because each person is created in God’s image and likeness, each person retains an intrinsic human dignity — even someone convicted of a heinous crime. This dignity is what leads the Church — while acknowledging the legitimate defense of individuals and society — to teach that the death penalty cannot be justified when a government has other ways to protect its people adequately against an unjust aggressor:

If non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm — without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2267; Evangelium Vitae, 56).

In solidarity with this teaching and with the consistent appeals made by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for an end to capital punishment in modern society, we are called to choose hope — hope in the redemption of an immortal soul – over the despair embedded in the death penalty. If the woman had been stoned, she would not have had the opportunity to “not sin anymore.” And so, despite the initial reactions we might have in seeking revenge, we must not opt for the death penalty.

And that’s true, too. I spent some of yesterday praying for Mr. Muhammad, that he’d admit and seek forgiveness for his crimes, that he’d be shown the mercy none of us deserve, but that all of us have been offered: freedom from death and entry into life.  Because nobody is irredeemable, and we are called to choose hope. And hope can have no place in a death penalty regime, where we make the decisions Christ alone can make. Life and death are not and should not be in our hands.

Today’s the day! Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall fell.

Well, “fell” is the wrong word. It didn’t come toppling down on November 9, 1989. No, it was simply the culmination of a process in which what the wall signified — the restricted passage of East Germans into the West — ended. Really a chaotic process, too; the wall didn’t come down because the people tore it down. It was fraught with confusion, miscommunication, and soldiers unwilling to fire on the crowds. It was strangely peaceful, a Blue Jeans Revolution.

Now, I know I’ve written before about the history of the twentieth century and my abject fascination with the cultural processes of the Cold War. But this is a seminal event that needed to be marked, here of all places. The Fall of the Wall meant the beginning of the end for the Soviet bloc, the crumbling of their external empire very soon followed by the crumbling of their internal one, and the beginning of the painful process of reintegration and rapprochement with the NATO nations, a process that, no, isn’t wholly complete, and probably won’t be until there is no one left alive who remembers Gorbachev.

It always strikes me that the seminal moment of triumph came in Germany. Everything over the next two years would smack of anticlimax: the slow collapse of Soviet instruments of power, the violent overthrow of Ceauşescu in Romania, the attempted hardline putsch of 1991 in Russia, all of that seemed merely the process of historical inevitability following the dramatic events in Berlin, that joyous crossing of Checkpoint Charlie. The war that began in the German invasion of Poland ended with the Germany invasion of Germany.

I could wax theological for a while on the origins of this in John Paul’s papacy, but let’s not right now. Let’s just remember that it happened at all. Because that’s pretty cool, too.

Last time we looked briefly at a particularly Italian issue in the quest for European identity. But what about France? Is such an issue even possible there? After all, Franco-German rapprochement is the cornerstone of L’Union européenne, and if any country has been central in defining what it means to be European, it’s been France. France, after all, can be considered as having given birth to modern Europe, or at least to the idea of modern Europe, after the 1789 Revolution with its cries of “Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood.” It’s had the firmest notions of itself as a country, and those are notions that have been challenged in the last few decades as immigration recasts the entire notion — potentially — of what it means to be French.

And so, France is undergoing a national debate: what does it mean to be French? What is the proper place and significance of its national symbols? Where do immigrants fit into this matrix, of a people that have long been defined more by ethnicity than anything else?

It’s a question, like the religion issue I wrote about a couple of days ago, that has vexed us here in the United States as well. Like in France, serious debate has taken place about what the proper proficiency in English, for example, should be before someone is admitted into this country, to what extent assimilation is desirable and necessary, if this is a process the government should help along or hinder. How, people wonder here, can immigrants ever be a part of the United States if they won’t learn the goddamn language?

That is, of course, ultimately the same question the French are dealing with, the meaning of American-ness, of the intangible parts that define a community, and how membership should be restricted, if at all. Some want to turn everyone away, others want to welcome all comers. It really all sounds startling familiar:

The discussions are to take place during hundreds of locally organized town-hall meetings involving education, union and cultural officials and ordinary people concerned about the state of French identity. Among the questions Besson has suggested for the debates: Should France implement “integration contracts,” which would set minimal levels of language and cultural knowledge for citizenship; and should students be required to sing the national anthem “La Marseillaise” at least once a year?

Some fear that these types of questions — even the debates themselves — invite assumptions that generations of immigrants have already undermined France’s identity and may provoke nationalist sentiments long championed by Le Pen. “When you put immigration and national identity side by side, it creates the notion that immigration poses a threat to national identity — which can inspire racism,” Mouloud Aounit, president of the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, told the daily l’Humanité on Nov. 2. “But this debate also reveals an identity crisis of a part of French society … and the failure of its model of integration, which doesn’t allow people to do just that.”

Substitute “The Marseillaise” with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Le Pen” with “Limbaugh,” and “l’Humanité” with “The New York Times” and its pretty much the same thing. And in France as well as the United States, none of these questions are easily answered. For all its multi-ethnic origins, the United States considers itself as much a nation-state as any other country. We speak of our national culture, our national history, our national identity, and even of, well, our nation, which means our common birth. The struggle to make sense of that in the midst of the early twenty-first century is necessarily difficult. We live in a time of diffusion.

Communities are real and vital things. God made us for community. They have ontological purpose, and John Paul even proposed they may have a particular eschatology to them as well, a part of Memory and Identity I won’t begin to pretend to understand. But communities are both defined by us and themselves define us, a give-and-take process in which the interaction of individuals gives rise to something so contradictory but still in its essentials good: the community from which people derive their self-identification, find purpose in the world, opportunities to love and to serve and to give, a place for the ego to be displaced, if just for a time.

When the community is something as primal as your country, though, the issues seem to get much larger. Yeah, I’m a Yankees fan. I’m a comic book fan. I’m a Trekkie. But none of those are as fundamentally defining as American. So a challenge to what makes up American-ness stirs no small amount of passion. I daresay the only thing that can bridge the gap between the self-definition of French or American and the striving of others to join that community is in recognizing that the community isn’t indelible, isn’t eternal, and in the end has less weight for us than the call to love our neighbors and serve the widow and orphan.

If that seemed like a pat ending, it’s because I have to get ready for work right now.

It’s an interesting angle, to be sure, to be an American and read this story, but there it is: the European Court of Human Rights has declared that the public display of the crucifix in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. This is a touchy issue in the United States, too, to be sure; we’ve struggled ourselves for some time know to understand what the proper balance is between public religion and personal rights; is freedom to be understood as freedom from offense? At what point does a private distaste by a minority honestly become something that the majority need not only respect but take as a guiding principle? Such occasions do exist, and they need to be thoughtfully worked through. But I’m not here primarily to discuss that borderland. Of much more interest to me is a remark by Italian education minister Mariastella Gelmini  that “it is not by eliminating the traditions of individual countries that a united Europe is built.”

Hmm.

A united Europe is not built by abandoning culture.

As much as a good chunk of the continent might wish it were otherwise, Europe is unassailably the place most intensely formed by Christian thought and belief. The cross appears on the national flags of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Slovakia, Georgia, Finland Switzerland, Northern Ireland, Greece, Malta, and, until 1945, Italy. Christian culture to permeates European architecture, informs European philosophy, and straddles European toponymy. Christianity is the principal that defines Europeperiod as a distinct grouping, as a world unto itself, and as Pope Benedict has said time and again, Europe without the faith isn’t really Europe. It’s frankly something else entirely.

This issue strikes at a major fault line in the quest to build a federal Europe, a real European Union: what, exactly, makes Europe? How is Europe to be defined? And, more to the point, how is Europe to be united? It’s striking that a largely post-Christian Europe is striving to build a union without a real positive sense of Europe’s identity. The continent isn’t defined by its empires. It’s not defined by its ethnicities. Its not defined by political and civic culture, like the United States is; in one union you’ve got monarchies like Spain and the UK alongside fiercely secular republics like France and Germany, and in between places like Italy that have never been able to divest themselves of their religion no matter how hard they’ve tried, and frankly no longer really see the point.

So: to remove or not to remove i crocefissi becomes an icon (haha) of a massive split in the understanding of what Europe is and what it’s supposed to be. Gelmini sums it up very honestly; if the price of Union is the neutering of Europe and its heritage, there’d be nothing European about it. As has been pointed out time and again here at Saint Superman and elsewhere, the driving force of politics is culture, and a culture steeped even in vaguely Christian notions of justice, charity, and sacrifice is better than one that worships at the Unassailable Altar of Me. Europe is in flux; does it embrace the good in its past or cast everything off, crucifixes and all, until the empty churches themselves are torn down?

By George Lucas

Hey! My little comic got a fantastic writeup on Examiner.com!

The story seems destined to head into interesting territory as is progresses.   Again from the blog: “it’s about meaning and identity in the heart of conflict, the nature and significance of belief, and man’s place in the universe.”

The artwork is absolutely stop-you-in-your-tracks stunning, and the script – while a little more obscure than necessary- shows the sort of love for the written word that promises to ripen into a uniquely poetic prose.  On the whole, it looks pretty darn cool.  I can’t wait to see what happens next!

So, one of the things that’s been keeping me from you, oh faithful readers, is Stronghold, my webcomic. It’s required a lot of my attention, not just in the administrative aspect of things (as much as that’s a giant headache), but as I start to think more and more about story.

You see, today we went ahead and launched issue 3. This is the last bit of backlog we’re uploading; everything from issue 4 onward will be new material created specifically for the web version. The original issue, didn’t escape criticism; one crit I received a lot for the last two issues is that “the fight scene just went on forever.” Well, it’s true. It did. It did because that was my first full-length comic script and I had felt like writing a big fight scene, some big splashy entrance that would attract attention, and it got a tad out of hand. That’s on me. When we put that book together in 2006, the vision of what the comic, then called Sanctuary, would be was very different; the intention was for an ongoing serialized story. Part of that — most of that — was due to my love for those sort of epic sci-fi serials, particular Battlestar Galactica and Lost, in which individual episodes blend together to an extent, dominated as they are by the ongoing narrative. But quite a bit of it was laziness on my part.

You see, writing stories is hard. Writing concise, thirty-page tales with beginnings, middles, and ends isn’t particularly easy when compared to endless To Be Continued’s and eternally-hanging plot threads that can be resolved at the writer’s leisure. That first story — issues 1 and 2 — were made, though, over three years ago, and in the intervening time, I’ve come to appreciate episodic storytelling, and to understand the weaknesses such a format would impose upon the comic: it would devolve into either endless fight scenes or a relationshippy soap opera, and while both of these are valid ways to tell a story, I think both of them are to an extent weaker. As I’ve spent the last few months doing the Great Deep Space Nine Run-Through, I’ve realized that there is a profound strength to the single episode story.

The writer in such stories is freer. It becomes possible to craft your tale around a specific theme instead of vague overtones. It lets you derive your drama from the tension created by thirty pages, and forces creativity. I think back on the best episodes of Deep Space Nine, and they’re the most self-contained. As much as the arc-driven episodes like the six-episode suite that opens season six can be brilliant, they never achieve the elegant simplicity of “The Visitor,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Children of Time,” or “Duet.” Each of them factors in in some way to the larger narrative, but each of them is best when considered separate. “Duet” doesn’t rely on the historical experience of Bajor and Cardassia, but you could tell that story about any war criminal. “The Visitor” is ultimately, for all its technobabble, about the unconquerable love of a son for his father. The power hangs there because it’s universal.

I’ve been paying a lot of attention to folk tales lately, too, from the classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (which is oddly scholarly for a series of campfire tales for kids) to Italo Calvino’s Fiabe italiane, and the beautiful thing about them is that they’re short, concise, and entirely within themselves, and yet still pack some sort of emotional punch, even if it’s just a sudden, startled fright. They’re almost schools of storytelling in themselves; a status quo is established, subverted, and the consequences dealt with. A butcher likes to make sausage for his wife. When he accidentally kills a man in his shop, he disposes of the body by putting it in the grinder and then feeding his wife the sausage. So she’s merrily kicking along, full to the teeth with manslaughter sausage. And then, of course, the poor man’s ghost comes to torment the unfortunate wife, killing her for that consumption. It’s simple, really.

That’s the direction I want to take this series in. Not the horror angle, but in treating each issue as a single, coherent story. I’m honestly not sure if I’m up to the task, but I hope the exercise of writing helps make me a better writer. This issue takes the first tentative steps in that direction, and issue 4, “The Professional,” and issue 5, (tentatively “The Flower of Carnage”) will begin that process in earnest. Till then, issue 3 is a great story that draws the previous two issues to, I hope, a satisfying conclusion and completing our bloated introduction to our heroine.