One Race, The Human Race

By Caroline Niesley

James Forten

“Free Man of Color”, Revolutionary War Veteran & POW, Prominent Philadelphia Sailmaker & Rigger Employed 40 White and Black Persons, Author and Abolitionist, Inventor – Rescued 12 Persons from Drowning.

Robert Purvis

“Free man of color”, Abolitionist, Author, Public Speaker, Businessman, Gentleman Farmer, Member of the Vigilante Committee of the Underground Railroad

Concerning the overlooked deaths of Black Americans in the violent aftermath of George Floyd’s death in police custody. Attorney General Bill Barr told Mark Levin, “I believe ALL black lives matter.”  Exactly.

CNN reported 100 people died violently as they and other networks increased ratings with inflammatory reporting of White police and Black suspects producing outrage.  In the ensuing violence Black and White children were murdered, some intentionally, some accidentally.  

Near the historic Frederick Douglass house, Cedar Hill in DC, an 11 year old killed by a stray bullet to his head fired by one of 5 arguing young men who left the scene in a sedan.  The child and the young men were Black.  A journalist asked what Douglass would have said.

What would Mr. Douglas say of our affluent, cell phone wielding society, where well shod Marxists trash poor urban neighborhoods with aplomb as Democratic politicians praise them from behind Covid masks in the narrative of fighting racism covering their party's history before a contentious election. A Black Republican, from the era of Douglass, would be furious.       

In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass, a Christian and former slave wrote of his experience with righteous anger.  After he’d achieved fame as a speaker, the daughter of his former owner wrote Douglass. 

Her father was on his deathbed and wanted to speak with him.  Douglass went.  The two men reconciled. Douglass was criticized for being merciful.  He’d seen what a lack of mercy brings.   

245 years of slavery plus one hundred years of disenfranchisement and segregation made a cancer in the Republic which won’t stay in remission.  Oceans of blood from millions who died in slavery and the war fought against it cannot cleanse us of this evil inflammatory division. 

Yet everyone of good will who heard Dr. King speak of his “dream” believed a colorblind society not only possible but around the corner.  What happened?

Booker T. Washington, whose memoir Out of Slavery is not to be missed, eloquently said, “There is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out, they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public." 

One example of Washington’s claim occurred at the funeral of civil rights activist, John Lewis.  Former President Obama raised applause and approbation at the solemn event by projecting the evils of his own Democratic Party, invoking ghosts of Bull Connor and George Wallace with the zeitgeist of Jim Crow, upon the people of the Republican Party.  What verbal ledgerdemain.

What he did not say was the Republican Party was responsible for the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th amendments to the Constitution finally granting suffrage to black Americans.  These laws were ignored in the Democrat controlled South.  Dixiecrat poll taxes, twenty page exams and the Klan made voting impossible for Black Americans for 100 years in the South. 

A 14 hour filibuster by Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, a former Klansman for whom Barack Obama gave a public eulogy fit for a king, was staged to stop the Civil Rights Act.  After, Republican Senator Everett Dirksen took the floor quoting Victor Hugo, “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come,….”  Time magazine, in their June 19, 1964 issue stated, “it is Dirksen’s bill (The Civil Rights Act of 1964), bearing his handiwork more than anyone else’s.”  No wonder no one has ever heard of Dirksen.

Politics are as complicated as human beings, take Pennsylvania.  The State Constitution of 1770 read, “All freedmen having a sufficient common interest with an attachment to the community have a right to elect officers,….”  Which meant any man with property could vote by law in PA.  67 years later, in 1837, there was a Convention to amend and insert the word “white” before the word “freedmen”!  There were a good number of nays but not enough.  In protest of this decision which had disenfranchised him, Robert Purvis wrote in 1838, “there is but one race, the human race.” 

Having the legal right to vote did not mean you could.  Revolutionary war veteran, James Forten, a “free man of color” owned a business which could rig a ship to sail around Cape Horn.  After the war, James Forten learned sail making in London, became foreman for a sailmaker in Philadelphia then bought the business with 40 Black and White employees.  Forten refused to rig slave ships even writing owners to state slavery was inhumane! 

Forten, a contemporary of Jefferson, wrote on Jefferson’s words, how it is self-evident all men are created equal and how we are all made in “GOD's” image.  He used all caps for “GOD”.  

Mr. Forten was proud of an award he received which hung on the wall of his home on the three hundred block of Lombard Street for saving the lives of 12 persons from drowning.  He insisted his employees: attend church, drink no alcohol and vote with the business in mind. 

Mr. Forten, one of the wealthiest gentlemen in Philadelphia, Black or White, was prevented from voting by threats.  His son survived an attack by white ruffians.  So Forten asked his white workmen to vote for him and so they did.   

When Forten died on March 4, 1842 Philadelphia saw the largest funeral cortege in memory.  Over a thousand Black persons plus hundreds of White persons attended to honor him.  August 1^st, 1842 The Lombard Street Riot took place.

The political situation was as densely layered as today.  Prior to the riot there was back and forth vandalism among ethnic groups.  Active abolitionists were staunch Protestants and Masons intolerant of Catholics and foreigners.  Some were Ulster men or the original Bad Orange men.  They voted Whig, Liberty and Free Soil Parties. After the Whig party self imploded; Whigs, Liberty and Free Soilers got behind Lincoln's new radical Republican Party.  Free men of color lived on the edge of a knife being unable to vote and at the mercy of those in office. 

Partisan newspapers pitted Irish Catholic immigrants against Whig Protestant Abolitionists inciting fear unskilled jobs would not go to foreigners.  Historian Thomas Sowell said free Black Americans were preferred over Irish immigrants.  Blacks were American born and Protestant.  Irish Catholics fell in with the pro slavery Democratic-Republican Party, the precursor of today’s Democratic Party. 

There was anti-Catholic scorn.  Robert Purvis called Democrat Chief Justice Taney who decided the Dred Scott decision, "that old Jesuit".  

This is the spooky era of the Know Nothings a "Nativist" American born, pro slavery, secret society party.  The Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia has no stained glass windows at street level due to them.  They hated Irish and German immigrants because they hated Catholics using terror and violence to prevent them from voting! 

Know Nothings carried awls to stab with.  If they saw a German coming to vote they'd put his head in a bucket of pig's blood in front of the polling place.  A prophecy of the Klan to come.  The couping era.  

 Couping meant kidnapping men, getting them drunk in a safe house, dressing them in each other’s clothes and forcing them to vote early and often for the Know Nothing Party.  There is evidence Edgar Allan Poe died of trauma and alcohol poisoning after being couped by Know Nothings in Baltimore in 1849.

Lincoln said it best, “I am not a Know-Nothing — that is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’”

To add to the perfect storm of prejudice and partisan politics there came an economic collapse.  On August 1st 1842, between 5^th and 8^th and Lombard Street a parade of a thousand free people of color celebrated West Indian Independence Day alongside a Quaker Temperance march.  Irish Catholic immigrants had a violent encounter with the Black marchers, beating them and looting Black homes. 

The Second African Presbyterian Church and Smith's Hall Abolitionist's meeting house were burned.  The riot lasts three days.  Firemen were attacked.  Constables and firemen stood down.

The rioters head to 9^th and Lombard to the fashionable three story home of the son in law of the late James Forten, the wealthy, notorious abolitionist, Robert Purvis.  The town house had a secret trap door under the children's playroom where escaped slaves hid. 

Unbeknownst to the rioters, Purvis spoke on behalf of an Irish Free State while visiting England.  His wife, their young children and servants are upstairs.  Purvis expecting the worst sat on the stairs facing the front door armed.

Meanwhile, a Catholic priest, Fr. Patrick Moriarty rebukes the Catholics in the mob to deserved shame.  The mob dispersed.  If the mob had broken down the door, they would have been surprised to see the free man of color was White.

If you look up Robert Purvis, you will see a Daguerreotype of a man worthy of a Bronte novel and a member of a singular league of truly extraordinary gentlemen, The Underground Railroad.  Purvis was the image of privilege; handsome, outspoken, rich, white and one eighth black.  He was proud of his Black, Jewish and English heritage.  He was proud of his interracial family.  He told all: friend, foe, even the administration of Andrew Jackson when he registered for the first passport for a free man of color.  And he got his passport too.

William, his father, wanted to take his family back to England but died when Purvis was 16.  One year later Purvis spoke publicly on Abolition, it became his passion. Harriet Forten and “Rob”, childhood sweethearts, were married at twenty by a White Episcopalian Bishop in the home of the bride's parents James & Charlotte Vandine Forten.  

Rob’s looks were an asset in service of the Vigilante Committee the active arm of the Underground Railroad in Southeastern Pennsylvania as he could enter any courtroom and confront any man.  He was an impetuous man of action, not averse to using a buggy whip on a man with a warrant at the Doylestown Courthouse.  Purvis’s lawyer stalled a hearing for a captured fugitive slave in his care.  The judge said get another warrant.

Purvis hurried the young man to his buggy.  A man ran out after them waiving the new warrant.  Purvis whipped the man, then the horse and off they flew.  The young man and his three brothers all were eventually freed. 

William Still, a free man of color, was known later as the President of the Underground Railroad.  He, unlike Purvis, kept his records of slave rescues hidden in a Quaker attic.  Purvis destroyed his in the fear the fugitives could be identified and sent back into slavery.  Still’s house is gone but his marble front step remains like a relic.  O the people who crossed his threshold. 

They did not cross into the South as Harriet Tubman did.  That took supernatural grace.  Most slaves who made it to the Pennsylvania border knew Philadelphia as a sanctuary, a city of brotherly love, sometimes. 

The Fugitive Slave Act however made it a crime to help or not report an escaped slave.  This is where the Vigilante Committee came in.  They hid slaves until they could get them to New England or Canada.  They met their needs and transportation. 

William Stills, would take fugitives personally in a buggy to Canada.  The members were all businessmen who could hang a sign on their door as they often had to leave town without notice. 

Harriet Tubman however went in and out of slave territory with a gun in her coat for dogs, irate slave owners and any slave who wanted to go back.  Never caught, as a poorly dressed slave woman, Harriet Tubman was as overlooked as a book in a library. 

The story of William Still and William Passmore and five Black stevedores rescuing sanctuary seeking slave Jane Johnson and her two little boys from her naive planter owner caused a sensation!  And without any violence.  Her owner did not understand the law in Pennsylvania granted slaves asylum if they asked and she did.

Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass visited William Passmore in prison.  As the only white man present, he was held responsible.  Jane, now a free woman, gave testimony at the trial and Passmore was freed.  Even the newspapers rejoiced. 

Read these true stories.  They are better than any fiction.  Why no films?  I guess it doesn’t fit their narrative.  In reality all races came together.  Or as Robert Purvis famously said “there is but one race, the human race.”   

Abolitionists used; wiles, Law, their homes, family and friends, their money and faith in God to do so.  As Thomas Garrett, a White Quaker friend of Tubman, said after being fined into penury for the crime of helping slaves, “Judge thou hast left me not a dollar, but I wish to say to thee and to all in this courtroom that if anyone knows a fugitive who wants shelter and a friend, send him to Thomas Garrett and he will befriend him.”  

Abolitionists were considered lunatics and religious fanatics.  The precursors of Lincoln's Republicans.  The only people of our time comparable would be pro-life, anti-abortion activists, the brave ones who tell women there is an option before they enter the abortion clinic.

Many pro-lifers as the abolitionists have suffered illegal imprisonment and physical injury for bravely taking a very unpopular view while others feel abortion is unfortunate but the law.  

Many think they would be on the abolitionist side if they had lived during slavery.  Would people who are afraid now of posting a pro-life opinion on social media risk their reputations and lives as the conductors of the Underground Railroad did?  You think?

 Cardinal Newman said, "To be deep in history, is to cease to be Protestant".  Indeed, after researching the politics of slavery I can say, "To be deep in American History, is to cease to be Democrat".

 

 

Calumny Kills or Let Them Eat Ice Cream

Death of the Princess de Lamballe, by Leon Maxime Faivre 1908

    The painting of the death of the Princess de Lamballe is rather stagy.  Trust me it is the clean version.  More of her later.  For the past 5 years I've watched people encourage others to hate people they don't know.  It happens all the time on cable news and social media.  When I opened a Facebook account to contact art colleagues for a "master class", I never imagined it was not a forum for polite exchange of ideas.  I must admit, after being called "delusional" and a "sanctimonious ass" by "friends" even "relatives" because I am Catholic, I was wrong.  Those innocent days are gone as we enter the Pandemic wherein people are hoping other people die.  Not people who want to go back to work!  Not the "Boomer Remover" evil.  I mean people who want public figures to die so their political party can take over and form a one party Socialist America which will give them something for free.  Just to hype it up, the news media eager for narratives on racial injustice found the death of an unfortunate handcuffed man while being knelt upon by a policeman a cause celebre.  A cry to hit the streets with Antifa and force the man they hate into what they call a bunker, the White House.  The man who died in police custody isn't even being mentioned now.  Looting, burning businesses, stealing, even beating up small helpless women is seen as radical chic.  Moving a safe out of Wells Fargo with a front end loader is a new civil right.  Those who own storefronts are arming themselves with baseball bats like the Sikhs in the London riots because the police aren't around.  Politicians unaccustomed to dealing with Law call them vigilantes.  The press who got frantic if they saw a blue collar citizen protesting lockdown without a mask now praise mobs of youngsters throwing bottles at police without masks as peaceful protesters.  Pyramids of bricks mysteriously appear on city streets inviting the violent to break windows.  All to teach the evil police force a lesson.  A wise man said violence makes more violence.  It does.   

    The news media posts inflammatory lies in order to heighten the violence then feign surprise when things get worse.  All based on anger and defamation of character.  Which brings me to the end of Nancy Pelosi's grip on her gavel.  A movie of  Nancy showing off her well stocked supply of gourmet chocolate ice cream in a gleaming, expensive, stainless steel fridge, a chef would die for.  The clip will re elect President Trump.  Nancy has only herself to blame.  Who would do a puff piece on gourmet food while families go hungry and many world wide are dying of a painful hereto for unknown virus?  If Melania had done such a thing she would have been crucified.  She is criticized when she visits children in a hospital!   I mentioned a meme to a friend, photo of Nancy eating an ice cream which said, "Let them eat ice cream".  I said, thinking of Marie Antoinette, "quotes can kill."  My friend thought I meant people might believe Nancy Pelosi actually said it.  No, Nancy isn't literary enough even if the quote came to her.  Referring to the original, "Let them eat cake," falsely attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette.  Indeed Marie Antoinette was not averse to the poor.  She funded many charities for poor women, the hungry and marginalized.  She brought women artists into the Academie for the first time.  She would have been horrified to be forever falsely quoted as saying let poor people eat cake they do not have.  This quote was made up by revolutionaries who wanted to end the monarchy in any way possible.  They thought it would kill her and it did.

     They didn't have memes then but they did have pamphlets and more people could read or get someone to read for them than you think.  Indeed sound bites or cries were the only news many heard.  There were far worse things said about the King and Queen and relatives, friends, servants, or humble farmers.  The calumny has long been debunked.  The King and Queen it turns out were charitable, devout people who refused to let the Swiss guards fire on the violent French mobs.  They were repaid when the mobs murdered the guards and murdered them.  Marie Antoinette stumbled when led to her execution.  Her guard asked if she hurt herself and she remarked nothing could ever hurt her again.  Her husband was executed.  Her little boy was forced to say publicly at her trial his mother abused him sexually.  The little boy age died two years after,  a prisoner abused mentally and physically.  Her 17 yr. old daughter was sent to Austria.  How indeed could she ever feel joy again?  Nuns, priests aristocrats and servants were being beheaded in the city.  Her loyal Carmelite wanna be sister-in-law Princess Elisabeth who spent her time doing social work, so beloved her servants put themselves between her and the arresting officers also was executed.  Princess Elisabeth was painted by Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun.  She is a considered a Catholic martyr for the way she died.  She repeated the De Profundus and embraced her co condemned.  She was forced to watch them die first.  She had a supernatural calm.  The mob was edified by her courage, no one cheered when she died.  By comparison Jacques Herbert the man who forced the prince to accuse his mother of incest was later condemned and became hysterical as he was put under the blade.  He was an atheist who called for the de christianizing of France.  Bloodthirsty mobs of looters and ex soldiers were drowning farm families in the provinces because their Catholicity made them suspect as potential traitors.  They also provided free food, drink and goods for their executioners.   The peasants were stripped, bound and drowned enmasse in boats; men, women and children without mercy.  

Princess de Lamballe, the Queen's Lady in Waiting Princess Maria Theresa of Savoy was arrested too.  Italian and German, she was a devout, childless widow who never remarried.  Maria Theresa wrote to Marie Antoinette their friendship was the charm of her life.  She suffered a lamentable end.  The worst I think.  Maria Theresa was called in to be interrogated and asked to praise equality and to denounce the Queen.  She happily praised equality but she could not denounce her friend, she said, "it is not in my heart."  The interrogator said take her away.  She was taken to a courtyard.  It was daylight.  She was perplexed why they were letting her go.  The door opened and she saw bodies of dead people and a large group of rough men with weapons.  She stepped back but she was pulled out.  PULLED OUT.  She was struck on the head with a pike, a sharp metal infantry spear.  Here is gets really bad.  She staggered.  It was said she was stripped, raped and literally torn to pieces.  She was beheaded.  She was known for her long blonde hair.  People on the street and in their houses recognized whose head it was and remarked, "they got Lamballe!"  One story said the mob attached her pubic hair to her chin for a beard.  Her head was taken to Madame Tussaud for a wax image then carried on a pike around Paris and brought to Marie Antoinette's cell for her to see.  We don't know if Marie Antoinette saw or was told about it but either way she fainted.  They were like sisters both foreign born rejects with tragic lives.  "Your friendship has been the charm of my life."  I got to thinking what it was like to be pulled out by a mob of sadistic men who had been taught to hate you without even knowing you.  I thought how I would feel if my best friend had been torn to pieces for not denouncing me.  Vice versa how she would feel if I was pulled out and torn to pieces for  loyalty to her.  Calumny kills it really does.  

    We appear to be entering an era of a new revolution in America, one about collective blood revenge based on ignorance of history and the unrealistic expectations of materialism by way of Marxism.  The revolution we had was about God given rights, not state given rights, set into law for the betterment of mankind.   Radical inhumane revolution must be forced whatever the consequences and requires calumny and  genocide. Considering the "preservative" English and American revolutions George Watson said in his The Lost Literature of Socialism,  "It is 1789, then, that unbinds revolution from its conservative chains, and the socialists were its heirs.  The sense of the word shifted lastingly from Right to Left after the Bastille fell."   

Scandal - Some Thoughts

Abusive clergy are apostate clergy. People who really follow Christ do not harm or dishonor others. Catholic teaching demands chastity in all vocations. I am weary of people blaming the Church for bad Catholics. Bad Catholics are the Catholics who reject what Christ taught. Bad Catholics separate themselves from Christ and His Church by rejecting moral law. Ignorance of the teachings can only be claimed by those in third world countries with no access to the internet or books. Many lay people going back to WWII failed in teaching, accepted secular ways like pornography, masturbation, fornication and encouraged the world we know now. The sexual revolution and Vatican II was the perfect storm for the fall of Catholics who demanded the Church get with the times and swing and many in the Church did. Why are we surprised at what has happened? Now Catholics want to leave the Church when now they are needed to take courage and save it. We live in times of legal abortion in all 9 months and euthanasia of children. Why are we surprised some Catholics even high in the clergy have abused and scandalized the innocent often holy young men? Abuse has been going on and hidden in our public schools, in the workplace and in entertainment for decades. The problem is the only accusations and costs for these sins is expected from Roman Catholics and not everyone else. We need to read our Catechism and know what a sin is. I met a Catholic who told me they didn't know what a sin was and therefore could not go to confession. Well there's a cure for that, please read the Catechism and know the teachings. Pray for those who reject Christ. You will save the world and many souls. God bless.

The Worthy Wedding Gown

The wedding dress at yesterday’s royal wedding was tasteful, lovely and plain.  Meghan Markle asked for an unembellished gown and Clare Waight Keller of Givenchy gave her exactly that.  Meghan is a beautiful young woman and a woman glows in a tasteful, fitted gown.  Marketers of gowns don’t seem to understand marriage is a sacrament.  They confuse the wedding ceremony with the wedding night, confusing sacramental attire and lingerie.  If the bride walks up the aisle and appears to be topless, there is a problem.  We’ve all pitied lovely buxom bridesmaids constantly adjusting straining, halter, spaghetti straps which won’t stay up on their backless, frontless cocktail dresses.  You wonder who sold them those dresses.  What were they thinking?  Indeed the world has lost all sense of the sacred seen clearly at the MET Gala recently, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”  They had bodies and fashion of a sort but the "Catholic Imagination" of beauty and purity was nowhere to be seen.

Twenty three years ago I wore a wedding dress.  It was the most beautiful thing I have ever worn.  As a mature bride, I knew exactly what I wanted.  It was very hard to find.  My Matron of Honor chose a stunning plain burgundy gown with a matching bolero jacket.  That took a lot of looking.  “We’re the plain girls,” we told an inquiring saleslady over the rhinestone covered bows.  My mother and I went to several boutiques on the Main Line with no luck.  You would think they might have a few tasteful dresses.  However, the styles they carried only differed from warehouse gowns in price.  We were told by one haughty boutique saleswoman, “we have go-juss dresses.”  She showed me dress after dress covered with rhinestones, bows, lace, and artificial flowers.  The dresses had everything but sleeves and a neckline.  I asked if they had anything which covered the bust and had long sleeves.  She was astonished.  I said my wedding is going to be in a church.  She still didn’t understand why a dress cut down to the waste which evoked "Elvira Mistress of the Dark" would not be suitable to wear in church.  And sleeves?  What kind of a bride wears sleeves?  The haughty saleslady grimaced.  I was hard to please.  My mother had an idea.  Why not have a dress made?  We had 6 months.  So we found a dressmaker and started our adventure.  The seamstress gave us directives.  We found a vintage pattern with long sleeves, high neckline and a full skirt with a train.  Similar to the pattern shown in the photo with the neckline squared off.  We chose white satin.  I was literally the satin doll.  We paid about the same or less for this tailor made dress as the fancy shops charged for the topless, plastic encrusted wedding gowns.  The only trim were white satin buttons on the sleeves.  I found a full veil in a thrift shop.  I had a dress worthy to wear to receive the Sacrament of Marriage.  

"CALL FOR PROFESSOR VAN HELSING!"

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was playing in the supermarket today. This abrupt change to classical music is an attempt to remind us to buy stuff for that scary day, no, not Voting Day but Halloween. Large bags of sweets, pumpkins, plastic skeletons, animatronic characters of restless souls which blink, howl, shake and cackle. Headstones, coffins, zombies and "dark" art shows. Halloween, the adult phenomenon and not the trick or treat for children, as we old folks knew it. There was a small pub called Huey's in Lansdale which decorated two rooms from floor to ceiling. I recall sitting there with my husband listening to the talking rat and the wailing ghouls and I said, "Do you think people really understand what all this means?" It is about the First Things; life, death and the soul in the eternal world to come.  The plastic junk will come down but the reality of eternal life remains. These days, Eternal Life could easily be a trendy new insurance company.  Once superstition in the form of occasional piety was seen as supernatural insurance.  The notorious actor John Barrymore admitted in his biography to the efficacy of praying an occasional Hail Mary.  "It worked!" he said.  His co star Conrad Veidt said, "I believe in prayer because when we pray, we always pray for something good."  To which I say, "sometimes."  Certainly, the way we pray and live now decides how we will spend eternity. Which brings me to DRACULA. 
 I read the text for the first time aloud to my ailing father. I wasn't keen on reading Dracula, as the films come off as rather silly or sacrilegious. However, the original novel was an edifying, suspenseful ride encompassing such themes as; friendship, goodness, self sacrifice, and innocence pitted against selfishness, impiety, greed and abominable evil. The story is told via journals, newspaper accounts, cylinder recordings and personal letters shared by a small group of friends all but one drawn together by romance. The steam punk technology with Kodak camera was a refreshing take on the method Mary Shelley used via letters and journals in her Romantic era Frankenstein. Mary Shelley, I believe, was searching for the Divine in a cruel material world. While Bram Stoker, I believe, made the Divine a central character who becomes materially present with the arrival of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing. Doctor, professor, father figure and literally a Dutch uncle to all.  A much needed figure of a pious man. Surprisingly, as all the English characters are Protestant, the good Dr. is a Roman Catholic!  We know little about him, he has a degree in medicine and law, married albeit his wife is institutionalized and his only child, a son, is dead. We never learn the details. Van Helsing carries a heavy cross and something profound, the Body of Christ.  More on that later.  Where did he get his extensive knowledge of Vampirology? He is described as robust and red headed,  weaker than the young friends he assists. He is fearless but has his limits especially when Lucy's mother interferes causing her daughter's doom. He uses German phrases. Was this Bram Stoker's lack of a good Dutch dictionary or could it be he had a German mother?  I know Dutch and Belgian people who live near the German border, a border that moved, who speak fluent German.  Being an academic, he would have known German and Latin and some Greek. He recalls actor Alfred Basserman, see photo.

 Van Helsing must relate the painful realities of life to the young people who in spite of their virtues don’t want to hear it.  No, the fact evil is not only found among the living but the dead is a chilling reality indeed.  The fact there is a spiritual realm across an unseen veil that exists beside us.  
Which brings us again to Dracula who is not a sympathetic figure. Mercenary, cruel, foul and evil are the words for Dracula. Nosferatu, the first film based on the novel, was set in a Caspar David Frederick German Romantic era setting. This era was the setting for Frankenstein a story dwelling on loss and the impossibility of returning to innocence.  Mary Shelley had eloped with a married man, whose young wife then committed suicide in her despair.  Then Mary and Shelley's baby miscarried.  What a horrible ordeal for a romantic young woman.  I wondered when the monster says to Frankenstein you had no right to make me, if poor Mary's grief  and guilt for her miscarried child was subconsciously pouring out.  Frankenstein is a difficult book to read for love and hope are ethereal.  Not so with Dracula.  When Dracula was remade in the thirties, Hollywood offered the part to Conrad Veidt, a rather bizarre choice, at first. Veidt had the look; tall, gaunt, pale, pointy eared with massive hands. All he would require would be the long white mustache, hairy palms, pointy teeth and fingernails.  Veidt fled to Germany instead, no doubt anticipating another A Man Who Laughs prosthesis experience.  Bela Lugosi was competent but he was not Dracula. Dracula was polite when it suited him but not suave.  Although blood made him young again, he literally stunk. 

With permission and thanks to Conrad Veidt Forever Wordpress

Personally, I would have chosen Victor Francen the Belgian character actor with his strange pale thick lashed scornful eyes.  See below. Francen usually played characters who were not happy and that was Dracula. Perhaps it was all the housework. The Count retained no servants except for Slovak and Gypsy "moving men". No household help. Working for Dracula would have been draining.  

Poor Jonathan Harker wonders why he never sees anyone else in the castle until he catches the Count making up his bed. He then realizes the Count was the unsocial coachman, the cook, butler, bell hop and maid of all work. Plus he had to do the shopping, dish washing and emptying the chamber pot. I liked the unused rooms in the castle, we all have them but not with piles of gold coins blanketed with the dust bunnies of centuries, eww.  The castle was enormous.  No wonder the Count was up all night. Dracula and his harem do eat babies then sic wolves on peasant mothers who come looking for their murdered children. Dracula terrifies his neighbors, enslaves victims, molests women and in the case of poor Mina for sadistic revenge. Dracula terrorizes animals too. Horses die of fright, even a wolf ashamed by his involvement in the death of the Westenras returns to the zookeeper with his tail literally between his legs. 
 After World War II horror films changed perhaps because we could not imagine fictional horrors worse than those perpetrated during that time.  With the sexual revolution, horror films added the abuse of beautiful young women well illustrated by Hammer films. After a while a terrible trend ensued, the anti hero, and I don't mean Heathcliff.  In The Seven Year Itch Marilyn Monroe's character remarks she felt sorry for the monster in The Creature From The Black Lagoon because all he wanted was love. Tom Ewell's character replies it is an interesting concept but his expression is one of amazement at this projecting of human longing into a slimy, murderous Lovecraft monster. Monsters went from being evil to being sympathetic perhaps even to becoming the hero. Think Barnabas Collins from the popular soap opera Dark Shadows, a vampire who is a tortured victim who doesn't want to bite people but the guy can't help it. Barnabas goes from vampire to avenger fighting other "meaner" characters, walling up the witch hunting Reverend Trask, for example see photo.  No coincidence the bad guy is a "Christian".  We all know there are Christians who do not live up to the faith.  The reality is most do not live up to Christ, the Christian life is a learning process.  Still the increasingly secular Sixties and Seventies gave us so many cross wearing villians they are hard to count and continue in the film and comic book realm to this day.

The endless Dracula spin offs, lampoons, rip offs, comic books and dollar dreadfuls cannot compare with the original novel of Dracula.  In Twilight, the novel, the vampire becomes a invisible friend/high school crush who will take a self conscious depressed teenage girl into the world of the undead where she can at last attain happiness!  Really? But with the hook up scene today perhaps this makes sense.  In the funky Disco satire, Love at First Bite, Cindy Sondheim tells the Count after asking him to give her the third bite, "this isn't so bad I am going to love immortality!" Immortality being a slave to Dracula?  She is literally dying to get away from the phony affluent non-committal life she leads. You don't need to read Fifty Shades of Grey to see modern women have been talked into suffering abuse. So who needs Van Helsing? 
 Van Helsing, in recent films, is the odd ball, a violent wacko zealot who likes the job. Van Helsing goes from being cast as a Sherlock Holmes type by Peter Cushing to a Hannibal Lecter type by Anthony Hopkins. In comics, Van Helsing becomes a super stud with a long coat or his own grand daughter in a bunny girl suit. It says less about Stoker’s novel than our increasingly regressive society which rejects the father figure as unnatural and patriarchal preferring to identify with a cruel unmerciful undead being - not human, animal or spirit - the opposite of a glorified body.   http://www.newadvent.org/summa/5085.htm More like a demon than a dead man. Why would people identify with that? Unless it is a recognition of sin in us all, concupiscence original sin which we know we carry and cannot rid ourselves of when we no longer believe in God or forgiveness. So all is violence and revenge and self justification. A strong truthful and good father figure doesn’t exist in heaven and therefore not on earth. So any man pretending to be so would be a charlatan or a fool. How is that for nihilism? Lack of trust and hope? A loss of innocence and pure motives. Moral relativism. Which brings us to one of the oddest, offensive films with vampires.  This is the one which made me think Dracula was silly. The Fearless Vampire Killers, see the photo of Jack MacGowran as Prof. Abronsius a stand in Van Helsing gene spliced with Einstein photographed with the lovely and unfortunate Sharon Tate as Sarah "Shagal's daughter" in the Italian Alps on location. The cinematography and color is breathtaking as the comedy is Benny Hill objectionable jokes upon ethnicity and creed irreverent enough to embarrass man or beast. Women are objectified and homosexuality makes an entre in the horror genre 7 years before Rocky Horror. Roman Polanksi directed and played the "innocent" "childlike" Alfred in a suit modeled on the Harker character from Nosferatu. What happens to people? The scene on the parapet is unforgettable and the castle is closest to the castle in the novel. Dr. Abronsius steals the film, so relaxed in the vampire's castle drinking his coffee and reading as if he were in a fine hotel.  The dark nihilistic ending is a parody of Victorian rescues.  Ferdy Mayne's Count will live on in his stolen bride.  Evil is not vanquished but released to the wider world.  Here is a link to a French version from one of the better scenes.  It was worth seeing just for the Professor.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-HaLFgeNrQ

While Dr. Abronsius is oblivious, Dr. Van Helsing is not.  What impresses me is the dedication of the friends in the novel Dracula.  My favorite scenes from the book include Lucy's sleepwalking adventure. Mina Murray soon to wed Jonathan Harker vacations at the seaside with her best friend Lucy Westenra. I see Mina being played by Wendy Hiller and Lucy being played by Joan Greewood.  

Mina wakes to find Lucy is not in the house. She searches for her and finds her in the graveyard overlooking the sea sitting on a bench near the grave of a suicide.  Mina has trouble seeing in the half light.  A large dark figure with red eyes is holding Lucy. Does Mina run screaming? No.  Mina goes directly to help Lucy. Now that is the kind of friend I want. Or Renfield the fussy lunatic who wants to consume living things in a bizarre antithesis of Christ's Communion spurred on to madness by Dracula who has become his master. Mina hears of his sad case from Dr. Seward.  She asks to meet him and treats Renfield with respect and compassion due a man. Renfield is edified by Mina's kindess and attempts in vain to rescue Mina from the Master.  Renfield meets a lamentable end but one of self sacrifice for another person's good.  He is no longer a "lost soul" but a heroic figure, a man in good standing. Dr. Seward the man of science learns there are things science cannot explain. Lord Godalming, Lucy's fiance,  a young man of privilege loses all those closest to him but finds there are higher things than wealth or satisfaction. The American, a Texan, is a symbol of all Bram Stoker hoped Americans could be, strong, compassionate, humble.  It is he who dies for his friends in the final battle to destroy Dracula.  It had me crying.

This brings me to the best of all the characters in Dracula, Jesus Christ.  Now what you may wonder am I saying?  Isn't the Blessed Sacrament being used as a literary device as the magic ring in The Hobbit?  How can I call the Professor's use of the Holy Eucharist as a door sealer, soil purifier and what appears as one more Vampire Be Gone tool with the Crucifixes and large fresh garlic arrangements shipped in daily from the greenhouse in Holland?  Isn't crushing the Holy Eucharist a sacrilege?  Even to use a mortar to fight this diabolic undead fiend?  The Professor says he has a special dispensation but we as Catholics know this isn't right.  The Vatican may have spies but it never had vampire hunters.  Bram Stoker had a friend who became a Catholic but his knowledge of the Eucharist was clearly limited.  What is charming about the use of the Host, even to me as an Extraordinary Minister of the Eucharist who believes this is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, is Bram Stoker makes the Eucharist a REALITY.  A wafer has no power over demons but Jesus Christ does.  Dracula has demonic powers and strength the mortals do not.  Jesus gives the helpless human beings the power they lack.  It is the Eucharist who keeps Dracula off them in the house search, who prevents Lucy from preying on more little children and permits her soul to go on to eternal life with Him.  Strong stuff here.  When Lord Godalming is given the job of putting the stake into his fiancé's heart he has an emotional melt down.  When the professor explains the reality, Lucy spending eternity as a vampire in an earthly hell of perpetual abuse, he does the unthinkable and agrees to the operation. Not mercy killing at all as Lucy is already dead.  No this is self sacrificing his comfort to release the woman he loves into eternal hope and joy.  Can we not recall something we did out of our own comfort zone to help someone?  Feeding a homeless person, praying outside an abortion clinic, speaking out on a moral issue knowing we would be mocked or praying continually the Rosary for someone we love who is in trouble even for what seems a hopeless case?  Conversions come out of those prayers and so do miracles sometimes more bizarre than fiction.  So read Dracula some misty fall evening.  You will enjoy it.  Here is some good information on Halloween, All Saints Day and All Souls Day as the three get mixed up sometimes.   http://www.catholic.org/saints/allsaints/

Unpleasant but Factual - Hillary's America: The Secrets of the Democratic Party

There was a time in the sixties when the words of a man from Mumbai would be considered groovy.  But this is 2016 and progressive critics have dubbed Dinesh D’Souza’s film “dumb” and "evil" without portfolio.  It is a documentary giving the filmmaker’s vision of an issue.  Michael Moore’s vision in Bowling for Columbine indicted the NRA, gun owners and Charlton Heston, in person, for the Columbine killings and all crimes done with a firearm.  Moore was given an Oscar. Bill Maher made a documentary about his own Religulous prejudices.  Ebert gave three and a half stars. 

Does anyone in a relativistic society care about truth?  The historical record is not only ignored but recreated to suit the current pathology of those in power to justify immorality by creating a mythology, choosing who is good and who is evil, even if it makes no sense.  They project their own sins upon their enemies.  Just keep repeating the mythology in school and media, silence those who disagree, shame the innocent and soon everyone really will love Big Brother. 

Dinesh D'Souza, our man from Mumbai who admits to being a bit disappointed in his adopted country, recounts the time he did in a Federal detention center for in a moment of wild enthusiasm he donated over the limit to a friend who was running for public office.  This after making another documentary which was critical of the current administration, the Feds threw the book at him.  While serving his time D'Souza spoke to gang members, one of whom bragged about an insurance scam upon vulnerable urban poor, wherein the gang paid for their life insurance and then murdered their victims to collect.  "All crime is about stealing.  The big criminals are still at large.  The system doesn't go after them because they run the system," said D'Souza.  Gang members may do time but criminal political agendas in power go unpunished, even unnoticed. 

So favoring the current party in power and with tongue firmly planted in cheek D'Souza presents a series of re enactments, a cinematic flowchart of inhumanity starting with the first Democratic President, the redoubtable Andrew Jackson.  To quote Alexis de Tocqueville on the Trail of Tears, “One couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung.”  I knew the history but I cried and I am not a Democrat.  Yes, the Trail of Tears was how the Democratic party handled what they termed, “Indian Removal”.  Genocide.  Those who survived were put on desert reservations far from the forests and fields they farmed and hunted in.  If all crime is stealing, look upon the theft of the lives of the First Nations and African Americans.  In the trailer, there is an worn artifact on a table.  Leather and silver, like a dog collar, it reads, "Property of A. Jackson" and a number.  We see a woman being lashed and around her neck is that collar.  She was not a number, she was a person.  Her name was Betty.  Andrew Jackson, in writing, ordered an overseer to give a slave named Betty 50 lashes.  Mr. D’Souza never said why but, I will tell you.  Betty got 50 lashes for doing extra laundry for someone without Mrs. Jackson’s permission.  Laundry was brutally hard work then.  I will never forget poor Betty.  I could find no DNA testing or documents to corroborate President Jackson’s scene beckoning his unwilling slave into his bed but as far as I am concerned, his term on the $20 bill is over.  Jackson The Musical probably won't be on Broadway anytime soon, but if you read about him you will see people can change.

The Democratic party was the party of slavery.  The Republican party was the party of abolition.  We think political rhetoric can't get any worse than in our era but the savage caning of Republican Senator Charles Sumner by Democratic Congressman Preston Brooks on the floor of the Senate chamber over a speech using sexual imagery to mock pro slavery Democrats publicly divided the two parties nationwide.  D'Souza goes so far as to say the Civil War was between Democrats and Republicans.  Lincoln, the great emancipator was a Republican and free African Americans began to take their places so long denied by running for public office on the Republican ticket in the South.  It wasn't long before the Klan rode out.  Jim Crow and disenfranchisement lasted for decades.
Ida B. Wells, beautifully played in the film by Gidget Taylor, said every black household in the South should have a Winchester rifle for protection.  Wells was a courageous African American teacher turned journalist, a one woman anti lynching campaign after a friend and two companions were lynched.  Their crime?  Opening a successful general store.  Ida refused to give up her seat and was put off a train, reminiscent of Ghandi.  She was a founder of the NAACP and devout Republican.  She never lived to see an anti lynch law passed.  FDR would not because he needed Southern Democrats to support his New Deal, so murder continued.

Margaret Sanger, Hillary Clinton's self proclaimed "hero" and racist eugenicist is chillingly portrayed by Andrea Cohen speaking to KKK wives and drifting ghostly through a women's clinic. Sanger was no advocate for women.  The women who won us suffrage, a Republican cause, considered abortion a crime against women and of course children.  Suffragettes called President Wilson, who did screen Birth of a Nation in the White House, "Kaiser Wilson".  Sanger wanted people she looked down upon like non-whites, Jews and Catholics to disappear.  Sanger even wanted people who suffered from mental illness, addiction, cancer or heart disease to be sterilized.  Sterilization was the order of the day and Hitler got ideas from both the Soviets and the Americans.  Soon we hear the racist quote by Lyndon B. Johnson who figures you have to give African Americans "something" to win them back.  The party gets a face lift, the all new Democratic Party; tolerant, liberal, champions of civil rights but the control is still there behind the curtain with the Wizard of Oz.  Barack Obama called this "plantation politics".  He and Hillary would know, as they were taught "community organizing" by Saul Alinsky   Saul Alinsky, a mercenary man with a pathology about power, crime and shaming your opponents, staged "fart-ins" and "piss-ins".  Urban neighborhoods became politicized but the standard of living didn’t change.  Strange, decades of Democratic control, in return for social programs, did not eliminate urban poverty or improve education and opportunity.  The urban poor had become as dependent on government aid as the First Nations did on those arid reservations.  It didn't change the high proportion of African American young men living in jails when they should have been living the American dream with their wives and children.  Alinsky said he wanted to take our country back but he never said back to what.  Alinsky was so slick he gave kudos to Satan in his book yet worked with church ministries, Catholic and Methodist which was how he met Hillary.

So what did I take home?  Dinesh D’Souza said,  “Crime is about stealing.”  Genocide, slavery, euthanasia, abortion are all the theft of a person’s life.  What about government rationing of health care?  What about forbidding the free exercise of religion?  What about forbidding free speech?  What about the bio technocracy of denying children born of surrogates knowledge of their biological parents?  Yes, the theft of a person’s life.  A large controlling government is not the answer.  So why do a majority of Americans now embrace it?  They've been carefully taught they can't live without government control because the "progressive" Democrats own our institutions of learning, entertainment and news media.  The zeitgeist of "plantation politics" is still very much with us and with the support of so many of our fellow Americans who do not care to know American history but prefer a virtual fantasy under Big Brother or Big Mother, the zeitgeist of plantation politics is here to stay. 

Obama's HHS Mandate Forces Us to Violate Our Religion

Obama administration to federal judge: We can force your wife to violate her religion

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/obama-administration-to-federal-judge-we-can-force-your-wife-to-violate-her?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed

Benjamin Berwick: “Well, your honor, I think, I think there are two distinct ideas here: One is: Is the corporation itself religious such that it can exercise religion? And my, our argument is that it is not. Although again, we admit that it is a closer case than for a lot of other companies. And then the second question is, can the owners–is it a substantial burden on the owners when the requirement falls on the company that is a separate legal entity? I think for that question precisely what their beliefs are doesn’t really matter. I mean, they allege that their religious beliefs are being violated. We don’t question that. And we don’t question that that is the belief.
Judge Reggie Walton: But considering the closeness of the relationship that the individual owners have to the corporation to require them to fund what they believe amounts to the taking of a life, I don’t know what could be more contrary to one’s religious belief than that.
Berwick: Well, I don’t think the fact this is a closely-held corporation is particularly relevant, your honor. I mean, Mars, for example–
Judge Walton: Well, I mean, my wife has a medical practice. She has a corporation, but she’s the sole owner and sole stock owner. If she had strongly-held religious belief and she made that known that she operated her medical practice from that perspective, could she be required to pay for these types of items if she felt that that was causing her to violate her religious beliefs?
Berwick: Well, Your Honor, I think what it comes down to is whether there is a legal separation between the company and—
Judge Walton: It’s a legal separation. I mean, she obviously has created the corporation to limit her potential individual liability, but she’s the sole owner and everybody associates that medical practice with her as an individual. And if, you know, she was very active in her church and her church had these same type of strong religious-held beliefs, and members of the church and the community became aware of the fact that she is funding something that is totally contrary to what she professes as her belief, why should she have to do that?
Berwick: Well, your honor, again, I think it comes down to the fact that the corporation and the owner truly are separate. They are separate legal entities.
Judge Walton: So, she’d have to give up the limitation that conceivably would befall on her regarding liability in order to exercise her religion? So, she’d have to go as an individual proprietor with no corporation protection in order to assert her religious right? Isn’t that as significant burden?

http://krestaintheafternoon.blogspot.com/

Official Court Transcript  http://www.adfmedia.org/files/TyndaleTranscript.pdf