IT"S ALIVE!!! (and other cries of creative exultation)

All Hallows' Even seemed a good day for such a title. And besides, it's true! My dream of owning a CD of a favorite childhood recording of delicious music has come true. It's alive!

When I first found out a couple of years ago that useful copies of this dear old record existed and were for sale, I immediately started wondering how I could get one and then have it dubbed onto a CD. It was at about that time that I found out that Rick, the delightful owner of Budget Tapes and Records in Pocatello, has a heavy, professional turntable and is willing (for a fee) to give the old record a thorough cleaning and then run the diamond needle over it, passing the sound in pure digitized form onto a compact disc. I had him do it to two other records first: Travelin' Light by Tim Weisberg and Stormy Weekend by the Mystic Moods Orchestra. I had owned a CD of the latter before, but, like so many things I've owned, it up and disappeared on me. I couldn't find another CD of it, so I had to get Rick to order in a new LP and then dub it for me to CD.

Both of these products were - and still are - wonderful. So I knew who I was going to when I finally decided to spring for the $18.50 + shipping and handling for Continental Merry-Go-Round. The record arrived very quickly. The employee at Budget Tapes and Records said it would be about a week, but Rick had the finished product for me in three days! I don't suppose the fact that I had called him a day or so after dropping off the LP and asked him to watch out for a little white bump I'd noticed on Side A, Track 6, casually mentioning how excellent his work had been in the past. You could actually hear him smiling over the phone! He said, "Thank you, thank you!" And the next day he called me with the job done and done well. We picked it up that same day, yesterday, a Friday. Only in a couple of spots were there scratches big enough to make an audible pop. I suspect that the record had been played once or twice by its original owner and then had lain fallow for half a century, during which time I passed from a young child to a man of "late middle age."

I know I said that I would put some of the music here for everyone to hear, but Sheryl says she doesn't think that can be done, at least not with the equipment we have. If one of you knows better, please contact me, because hearing these sweet old pieces has been a tonic to my sad heart and brittle brain, so I would naturally love to share them with family and friends. The arrangement and performances are even more inventive and precise than I had recalled. Of course, "the limitations of the source recording are" made very clear, too, by the digital transfer. Side A, Track 1, a vigorous piece called Aperitif (named after an alcoholic beverage supposed to sharpen the appetite just before a meal) has a sort of thick or muddy sound to it, at least for the first little while. But it was made 53 years ago, for crying out loud! What do we expect from such a technologically backward age?

I am in a particularly soft-hearted mood towards the past tonight. We finally got around to watching the Ken Burns documentary Horatio's Drive tonight. My "baby sisters," Jocelyn and Jane, loaned the DVD to us months ago. It was just as delightful as I had expected it to be. I recommend it to anyone who hasn't yet spent the 2 hours and 26 minutes required to watch it. It made me feel that I had been along with the first men (and a dog named Bud, purchased in Idaho) to drive across America in an automobile.

The long-awaited acquisitions.

Continental Merry-Go-Round

In the Days Before Compact Discs

When I was five a man named Emile Del Tour picked up his baton and conducted an orchestra in the performance of about one dozen lush, happy pieces which were joyful to the heart and soothing to the mind.

It so happened that in that same year my parents briefly owned a business called John's Record Shop. Monsieur Del Tour's album, Continental Merry-Go-Round, was one of several which they brought home from the store. I was raised on this album and lots of other 33 1/3 rpm LP (long playing) albums. I played all the albums many, many times. But I think I played Continental Merry-Go-Round more often than any other, with the possible exception of Frederic Fennel conducting the Eastman Wind Ensemble in British Band Classics, most of them by either Gustav Holst or Ralph (say "rafe") Vaughan Williams.

I've been able to get the British band classics in a couple of different performances on CD, but the Emile Del Tour album eluded me. A couple of years ago I began to see it on Ebay,. but we were broke and, besides, I didn't know how to use Ebay. Then, about two weeks ago, I found it again. It claimed that the copy was in new condition. How can that be, thought I. I'm only five years older than the record and I'm far from being in new condition!

Hannah is living with us now. She's a modern young woman and she easily made the purchase for me over the ether in about two minutes. We reimbursed her. The vendor said that the record would arrive somewhere between 24 October and 16 November." I guess they don't like to get pinned down. Anyway, it arrived today! It did appear to be in remarkably good condition. It came with a paper envelope, the original cardboard "shuck," and a plastic envelope to put around that.

It had been in the house less than an hour when I set it gently on the passenger's seat of our little SUV and drove to Budget Tapes and Records. For $20, a lot of money but small compared to the decades I've spent missing that album, the owner of the store will put it on his big, heavy, professional turntable and dub it onto a CD. The album label and cover art will also be on it! He's done this for me twice before and we got wonderful results both times. I can play my favorite music as much as I want without wearing out the record with a diamond needle!

In about a week, when we get it back, I'll photograph it and write about it again. Maybe one of the women in this house will even teach me how to attach some of the music to my blog post!

Setting the Record (or the Video Tape) Straight

The only picture I could find with a TV in it.

Dearest children, students, friends, relatives, and anyone else who tolerates this blog:

I am not anti-TV. If I were, I'd be the world's worst hypocrite. I feel that I've left some of you with the impression that I'm against practically all TV programming. Well, I am against a lot of it. Whole categories of television programming these days leave me sort of cold and utterly unimpressed.

But there are some pretty decent and well-written things on the tube these days, as well. It's not up to you to follow my TV schedule nor is it up to me to influence yours. But, the First Amendment still being in place (for the moment,) allow me to talk about what I like and don't like on the tube.

REALITY TV: So called. It began with sticking a bunch of people on an island and exposing them to various "hardships" and "dangers." If there were really any danger, they'd be catching a ride out of there with the directors and the camera crew. And where's the reality in a group of
"stranded" folks just happening to be between the ages of 20 and 34 and generally fairly attractive. Why aren't us normal looking folks even represented on these shows? A couple of years ago I walked into the room and some family members were watching a lot of professional models (some of them male!) who were all sharing the same apartment! Oh, sure! THAT's gonna happen. And they teased each other and cried and ganged up on each other and encouraged each other, and occasionally tossed someone out on the street just because the rest of them didn't like that person! What's REAL about that? If he or she has a lease and the landlord doesn't want him/her out, guess what? They're stayin'!

Sheryl has been a fan for a couple of years of Dancing With the Stars. She started out just trying to support Marie, then laid off a season, but Donnie's on this year, so our TV is tuned to it again. She votes twice, once with her phone, once with mine. OK, I guess there's some reality there. Ozzie Osbourne's little girl really seems to have to work hard to learn the dances and the former Speaker of the House broke his foot - really! But does this qualify as "reality." I mean, if they weren't contacted a year in advance and if their agents hadn't accepted the 7 figure contract for them, not one of these stars would show up to work their guts out under the tutelage of a professional dancer who thinks they're all idiots. I mean, how real is that?

One last jab at reality TV. PUT SOME CLOTHES ON! I have to leave the room whenever the family plebiscite chooses to watch something in which people are dancing or in which unbathed people are living on a beach. I mean, they remembered to bring all the sound equipment and the lights, but nobody thought they'd need some clothes? I'm 58, but I'm not dead! I openly gasped the other night when a woman did some kind of Argentine dance with her partner. My wife, being a woman and therefore quick to detract from all other women, said, "She's 48." That only made me gasp some more. She was so perfect from head to toe (all of which was clearly visible) that it sort of hurt to look at her. I mean, beauty like that never even finds its way into a museum. Time to leave the room.

COMEDY: There is not a single sit-com currently under production which doesn't embarrass me with its sheer stupidity. Nearly all gags these days are based on sex, be it of the hetero- variety or the homo- variety. They bore me. They embarrass me. I've sort of felt this way all my life. We watched the sit-coms when we were kids, because our parents watched them. But even then they embarrassed me quite a lot. Some were just trying too hard. Some were just absurd without achieving "comedy of the absurd." Lucy never appealed to me. At all.

Dick Van Dyke was a good show.

The Beverly Hillbillies was periodically good, but the best character, the bank president's secretary, wasn't on nearly often enough.

Since the Vietnam Era, I can think of only two comedy series which were truly superior: MASH and Barney Miller. MASH was really just an incredibly long protest against the Viet Nam war, set in Korea between 1950 and 1953. The writers gave the soldiers, officers, doctors, and nurses the same attitudes that Hollywood liberals had between about 1967 and 1975. They thought like them, talked like them, and even cut (or didn't cut) their hair like them. And yet I generally liked it. The writing was usually clever and the acting was always superior with one or two exceptions. Mike Farrell was great, usually, but he couldn't cry convincingly on cue. But neither could I, so I decided to cut him a little slack.

Barney Miller was my all-time favorite sit-com. Every character was underplayed to just the right degree. A few nights ago I saw the guy who played the goofy kid on the squad. He was in an episode of Criminal Minds, playing a bald, grey-bearded grandfather who learns, along with his wife, that their murdered daughter had a little boy and that they will get to raise him. The Japanese guy on Barney Miller was a comedic genius. Dead-pan is an expression that must have been invented just to describe him. I'll never forget a scene in which some dumb guy looks at his Asian features and begins to speak to him in loud, slow syllables of pidgin English. After the idiot walked out, the officer was standing there being stared at by all his colleagues. He opened his hands wide and said, "I'm from Omaha." That line had me on the floor.

Another line in a pretty good series that about killed me was when the owner of WKRP in Cincinnati throws a bunch of domestic turkeys to their doom from an airplane as a publicity stunt. "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"

Stand-up comedy is practically dead. Jay Leno, David Letterman, and the Irish and Scottish guys are all reasonably good. But if you go to the dedicated "comedy" channel, all the stand-ups are foul-mouthed and mortifyingly unclever.

The Brits still do pretty good comedy shows, but you have to miss a lot of good American drama to see very much of that. Yes, we record a lot of stuff, but there simply isn't time in life to see everything. Which leads us to...

DRAMA: When I was a kid (also known as the Pleistocene Epoch) there were two types of drama on TV. Everything was either cops & robbers or a western. Variety shows once existed, but they've been gone so long that it would take another entire post just to explain what they were.) Peter Gunn was probably the first great TV detective show, although some others which had started on radio shifted with some success to the tube. Peter Gunn would always be my favorite, at least until Mannix, because Henry Mancini wrote the Gunn soundtrack and the theme, and no screen writer of music has ever bested him. It pleased me to read on the back of the Peter Gunn LP that a "new young piano player" named Johnny Williams was involved in the recording. I have suspicions but cannot prove that he's the much respected best screen music composer of today.

Mannix and Orwell and a few other police or lawyer or detective-type series through the sixties pleased me. But the sixties were dominated by MORE westerns and by SPY shows. My favorite was The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Robert Vaughan, who had just been shot to doll rags in The Magnificent Seven a year or so before, played Napoleon Solo, an agent who worked for the United Network Command for Law Enforcement. David McCallum, who today cuts up dead bodies while giving fascinating lectures on NCIS, played his very hip, totally cool partner, Ilya Kuryakin. Timing was everything here. To have a Russian be a major character on a US TV show was unheard of. But to have him be a GOOD guy was astounding! After all, the Cold War was very much under way and anything Russian had an aura of suspicion around it. I recall my father coming home from the radio station one afternoon, chuckling, and telling my mother, "Did you hear what Harry Truman said today? He said, 'You can't trust a Russian.' He didn't say 'a Communist.' He said 'a Russian!' My father was clearly delighted that "Give 'em Hell Harry" was still doing so.

McCallum's character surprised lots of adults in America. Robert Vaughan was clearly the more standard handsome guy on the show, but David McCallum seemed to rev up a lot of female teenage hormones and adults seemed both puzzled and worried about it. Several weeks ago I was watching an episode of NCIS. One of the young women in the show asked their older boss, LeRoy Jethro Gibbs, "What did Ducky (Dr. Mallard) look like when he was young?" Gibbs thought for a brief moment and smiled. "He looked like Ilya Kurakin." This, of course, meant nothing to the young woman, but it made me laugh out loud.

NCIS, CSI (all versions), Criminal Minds, Cold Case, and Without A Trace still interest me, but I usually have time to watch only a couple of them per week. Numbers is good, too, but I hate to give CBS credit for anything because of their long-standing war on the Second Amendment. Then again, they may have made Gunsmoke, a truly great western series. Rats!

Theme music for dramas is usually better than that for comedies, although not always. Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Bonanza, The High Chapparal, The Virginian, and The Rifleman all had beautiful theme music. There was once such a thing as a half-hour drama. The Rebel and Have Gun, Will Travel were two examples of such, both of them westerns. And both had superior theme music.

There is more of what dramatists call "comic relief" in today's dramas. I saw some of that in the spy show days, especially in The Avengers, a British import which depended heavily on Patrick MacNee's acting ability and Diana Rigg's tawny shape and perfect English face. Being British, it was also clever. I own the 1967 season, but haven't seen the other seasons for sale. Some dramas, over the years, have become more comic relief than drama. This hasn't bothered me unless the comic relief was badly done or seemed out of place. One show that did it a lot and did it well was Magnum, PI. Thomas Sullivan Magnum was equal to everything as long as he had his 1911 pistol, Robin Masters' Ferrari, and his moustache. And to think that Selleck got his start playing a dead body! Maybe that was appropriate, though, since he sold cigarettes as the Marlboro Man for a while.

Perhaps my all-time favorite scene from the Magnum series was the one in which stuffy old Higgins had built a model of the Bridge over the River Kwai from toothpicks. He and Magnum had been torturing each other more than usual. Magnum rigged up some tiny explosives, just like in the movie, but it didn't really happen in history, and, using a tiny little plunger, befitting the size of its target, blew the toothpicks all around the room. I knew it was cruel, but I couldn't stop laughing.

Another show that was probably more comedy than drama was Simon & Simon. (Great guitar work in the theme!) Delta Burke's husband, Gerald McRainey (I think) played Rick, older brother to AJ. I recall an episode in which AJ was locked in a tiny sound-proof room and assaulted with incredibly loud sound which could have destroyed his hearing with very long exposure. He pulled out a Colt Python (stainless) and blew out the speakers. At least, that's the way I remember it.

Today, I watch a few shows on the History Channel, a series called Eureka on the Sci Fi channel, and things like NCIS, Criminal Minds, etc.

There is one other show which Sheryl and I love to watch together. This may amaze you (providing that you care.) We like Ugly Betty. I was not predisposed to like it the first time we turned it on, but it turned out to be just the sort of thing I'd thought for a long time that the doctor had ordered for network TV. It is about a family of honest, kind, thoughtful people and their interactions with all the self-serving, devious, cruel blackguards in the world of fashion. For the first time in forever, we have a heroine to whom we can legitimately point and say to our daughters (not to mention our sons) "There! See? She could have been cruel like the other people, but she blew them away with kindness and thoughtfulness, instead." Somehow she has gradually learned to stand up for herself, but she's never lost her essential decency.

Ugly Betty accomplishes something that I haven't seen done successfully since the eighties when Crime Story (set in the sixties) made you have feelings for ALL the characters, even the brutal mafiosi! The character played by Vanessa Williams in Ugly Betty is about as cold, calculating, and mean-spirited as any I've ever seen. Certainly she is the coldest female character I've ever seen outside a vampire movie. And yet, when her insane sister burns up her apartment or her daughter kills a guy in self-defense, you actually find yourself rooting for her. That's the mark of good writing, not to mention pretty fine acting.

So, no. I'm not a hater of TV. But I'm pretty darned critical of what's out there. We just don't need some of the trash that's being made. We absolutely do not need shows called Cougars or Desperate Housewives. They seem to be trying to raise adultery to an art form. No, I haven't watched them. Ever! The previews tell me everything I need to know in order to make an informed decision. Fortunately, my partner agrees with me about most such moral choices. And what we watch on the tube IS a moral choice.

Honoring a Man Who Deserves It

Jocy, Mother, Papa at Miles Brown's baptism.

Last Sunday's lesson from the Joseph Smith manual was about how much he loved his own family and how we should learn from the example of Asael Smith's descendants to make our homes heavenly places. I told the brethren flat out that I'd always wanted to be more like my father. Some of them said they'd always wanted to be a little better than their fathers. I'm sorry that their experiences led them to that goal. All I know is that, for 58 years, my father has been my idea of what a man should be. I felt this way as a small child. I felt this way as I grew up. I have grown even stronger in this desire since I, myself became a father and grandfather.

Today's blog post by my daughter, Autumn Marie Mulverhill, really got to my heart. It featured photos of relatives old and new at beautiful places like upper and lower Mesa Falls. It featured photos of a son I haven't seen for years and of his wife and of their adorable baby boy. Above all, it showed my father giving his classic "treatment" to my grandson Clayton. This treatment involves enveloping a baby or small child in a big, beefy cloud of warmth and security, all the while beaming down on them a look of love and approval which I've never seen anyone beat. I've quoted Theodore Roosevelt (TR) in this blog as having said that his father was "the best man I ever knew.") I can and do unequivocally adopt that phrase as being representative of my feelings about my father.

His stories of his misadventures as a child and young man, his fights and difficulties in the navy, the amazing and sometimes likable people he has known in the navy and throughout his life, his accounts of German-speaking relatives and their hard-headed ways, and his teasing of my mother and others whom he loves with a perfect and eternal love are all elements of what makes him adorable to his family. Whether you call him "Sir," "Dad," "Daddy," "Papa," "Grand-dad," or "John," he is the most impressive person many have ever met. Years after his term as a bishop on the Ricks campus, he kept receiving calls and cards from couples and individuals who looked upon him as the angel of their youthful crossroads.

I grow frustrated sometimes with my inability to express to either of my parents my gratitude for the special things they have taught me which seem to have been left out of virtually everyone else's upbringing. Growing up in Papa's house, we heard phrases of Philipino language, and learned to scatter when he said "Ewass!" Being awakened in the morning by him was a sort of treat, because he would often imitate what the old chief had said each morning at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center: "Alright, you people! Reveille!") To grow up around him was to be constantly enthralled by the stories of memorable personalities he had known. The hugely fat fellow who, upon leaving ship, would go into the nearest tavern, set his stomach on the bar, and say "Fill 'er up!" The outrageous Vulyanov, the crude Russian with the impressive moustache, who almost got them all killed with his vile remark in Canada on the occasion of the death of George VI. Buster Madriaga, his little Mexican buddy, who unhesitatingly dropped his hat when the huge fellow from a carrier crew said, "I'll fight you at the drop of a hat." Papa's own accidental ventilation of the web of the hand of a fellow Shore Patrolman when the fellow tried to hail an ambulance with an upraised hand while my father signaled it with a shot in the air from his 1911 .45 Government Model pistol. "The old man really chewed us out for that one." No matter who the captain was, he was always "the old man."

From him I learned what a friendship based on the Spirit can be. He is grateful for the change the Gospel has brought into his life. Many times I've heard him say that he doesn't even want to think of what his life would have become without it.

I was riding with him once when we lived in Twin Falls. I think we were restocking vending machines, one of many jobs he took to make ends meet. The radio was on and tuned to KTFI, an NBC affiliate there in Twin. A story of the pope at that time (John XXIII) was on and he listened to it for a moment. Then he began to tap his finger with increasing impatience on the steering wheel. I knew that he was about to say something meaningful and important, something not to be forgotten. What he finally said as he pointed to the car's radio, was "I have more priesthood in my little finger than that guy has in his whole body!" Now, he wasn't bragging. Not a bit. He was testifying! He wanted me, the only kid in the car, to know what the Holy Ghost had testified to him. And I've never forgotten it. I know by the power of the same spirit Personage that his statement was true. I could want nothing more than to be as good a man as my father.

John Albert Haeberle, 2005

Babies are always comfortable with him.

Joseph with his grandparents just before his mission.

Canoeing with Papa.

Himself.

Granddaddy checks Eliza's fingers for the correct number.

Direct offspring (except John.)

Dallin's turn with Great Grand-daddy.

Reading the 80th birthday card from the gang.

A private moment after Jennifer presents the grandchildren's quilt to my father.

Andrew takes his turn at his Great-grandfather's 80th birthday observance.

Eliza poses with my father at his 80th birthday celebration.

Mathew gets squeezed properly at his Great-Grandfather's 80th birthday celebration.

This New Flu Has Well-Known Ancestors

The Lord's Way

In a little over 4 years, from 1 August 1914 to 11 November 1918, 9 million people, most of them young men, died in the shoot-out known today as the First World War. Before the survivors could even get home, they and the rest of the world were falling victim to "The Spanish Lady," a virulent form of flu which killed twice as many people as the world war had just killed. I read a book about it one time. Eery stories about the disease survive to this day. A boy steps into the batter's box, apparently healthy, hits a single, and dies before he can reach first base. Whole families are wiped out. Whole communities, as with the Black Death of 1348, simply cease to be.

We hope and pray for better results this time. Medical science is much better today than it was 91 years ago. Vaccines are being prepared. But the networks said today that the virus grows slowly so that the quantity of vaccine that is needed is not ready yet.

I submit that we can only really depend on the Lord to get us through this trial. True, we should keep working and trying and learning from the experience, but our ultimate faith should be in the God who gave us life.

Repentance has never been a very popular option with nations who are in trouble. But I suspect no nation has ever been in more need of repentance that we are now. We are given a constitution by God through inspired men whom he raised up to that very purpose. But now it seems inconvenient to people who believe they are wiser than the framers of the constitution.

In my lifetime, we have gone from TV with no swearing at all to TV with practically uncensored language. Allusions to immoral behavior could be made in the sixties. Today it is portrayed in some detail. The sacred nature of the marriage contract was still recognized by most Americans when I was a child in the fifties. Today, a major character in a show who does not have a live-in significant other is considered strange.

Then Christmas was the center of dozens of specials and episodes and this was expected and considered to be right. Today, the Grinch is as close to a convert as anyone will see on a Christmas program. I'll be interested to see how the Jim Carrey version of Scrooge deals with the Son of God. He is mentioned many times in the novel. Tiny Tim says that he loved to go to Church, because he thought it might give people pleasure to see him on his crutch and remember who made blind men see and lame beggars walk. Do you suppose that part will make it in there this time?

Everyone used to be taught flag etiquette. Practically everyone knew what half-mast meant. They also knew tht the flag upside down was a cry for help. Those who flew the flag treated it with respect. It was not allowed to become soiled or torn. Today, I often see it displayed but in a damaged, dirty, way. Sometimes I've even seen it touch the ground, something that was unheard of in my youth.

Populations on THIS CONTINENT who have become worldly, casual about spiritual things, and even openly rebellious towards God and godly things, have been wiped out by wars (Jaredites and Nephites) or allowed to be scattered and disinherited (Lamanites.)

So, the disease has ancestors, but so do its victims. We've been promised plagues, calamities, wars, famines, droughts if we didn't turn back to the Lord and live his commandments. I, for one, think it's time we do precisely that. We need God. Everyone needs Him. Even if they don't know it yet.

How I Spent the Seventh of October

I did NOT hit the gong at 525 yards with my H&R Buffalo Classic in .45-70. But it was a joy to try and I had a great time. I came within a foot of it a couple of times. Of course, since the sights only adjust up far enough for the 500 grain bullet to strike dead-on at about 150 yards, shooting at 500 was sort of a joke. I used the same juniper tree that we'd used before with our .22s, but they had scopes and I could usually tell almost exactly where I was holding. In this case, I'd try to SEE the gong through the peep sights, then TRY to lift the front sight in a straight line up to the top of the juniper behind the gong. Then, going by what Aric had said about the last shot, I'd make additional adjustments in both elevation and windage. Then, I'd squeeze off the shot, usually only looking at the corner of the juniper's topmost branches at the moment of discharge.

If that sounds ridiculous to you, you're right! As the day wore on, those 500 grain slugs began to wear me down with their "equal and opposite reaction." Because I held the rifle exactly the same way from shot to shot, my bruise was a fearsome one by the end of the day, and was riding on a tall bulge which had never been part of my anatomy before. But it had to be done. Accuracy is everything and consistency of behavior yields accuracy.

The same rifle had hit the same gong earlier in the afternoon a bunch of times, but that was only from 156 yards according to Aric's laser range finder. The gong produced very loud rings and got dented seriously by both the 500 grain flat points and the 305 grain round nosed flat points.

My shoulder is almost healed now. That's a good thing, because the rifle has been singing to me from the closet for days now.

Reaching out 525 yards with 500 grain flat point bullets.

Aric Armell scored several hits on the 525 yard gong with his Ruger Mini-14. The mil-dot scope may have helped a little. Still, hitting anything at 525 yards is an accomplishment.

Mild Consternation

Did anyone besides Johanna manage to get through my last blog post? Perhaps it was just too serious. Or maybe it was just too darned verbose. Anyway, Johanna was the only one who responded to it which left me with the feeling that a limited number of things had occurred:

1) No one else could get to the end.
2) Others reached the end, disagreed with me, but were too polite to say so.
3) Many saw that it was a political subject and decided not to bother with it.
4) Many did read it and even felt some sympathy with my positions, but would rather not encourage the old guy by responding to his bleak view of the world.

I have waited a few extra days to give folks time to read it and respond to it, but nothing has been forthcoming. Let me simply say that I wrote that last post prayerfully and with very serious thought. I really was moved by the things which the people in John's email were saying in their London demonstration. I already know what John thinks. Johanna has responded. I think I'll give it a couple more days before I switch to another, more cheerful subject.

I Dare You to Have an Opinion!

The Angel Moroni proclaims the restoration of revealed religion to the earth.

A common American practices his marksmanship.

I received an upsetting email today. Many of you may already have seen it. My brother John sent it out. It shows angry Moslems demonstrating in the streets of London, crying for the death of all their hosts in England and mainland Europe. In one photograph I even saw an English "Bobby" (named for Sir Robert Peale, the father of Britain's high standard of police work) standing near a demonstrator, protecting that person's freedom of expression. Other signs demanded the beheading of all who "insult" Islam. Still others threatened Europe with a 9/11 of its own.

I suppose the one that bothered me the most, because it's what I've been fearing the most, was a well-printed, professional-looking sign which stated simply that Islam will take over the world. It is not an Islamic take-over that I fear. I don't think they can do it. But I do fear that they'll try it and many people will die before freedom of expression and religion are re-established and reaffirmed in Europe and in our own land.

As I was saying to John today, I believe that a short-term solution will involve violence, possibly even on the part of regular citizens. It will be a fight for survival as a Christian culture which is exactly what the United States of America is and always has been. It was not established as a Jewish culture which tolerated Christianity. It was not established as a Sikh, Buddhist, Moslem, Hindu, Zoroastrian, or animist society which also tolerated Christianity.

It was established as a Christian nation which tolerates other religions. Those other religions had their rights enshrined in the First Amendment along with ours. The idea was that everyone would tolerate everyone else so long as no group used its freedoms to attack or thwart those of others.

We have not always maintained a perfect record in following this ideal, but we keep coming back to it after every foolish or cruel deviation from it. Jews, who had endured many centuries of mistreatment in Europe, did not immediately find things much better here. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan hated them as much as they did the former slaves who now went by the title "freedmen." Poor Irish and Italian immigrants experienced persecution and hostility as they settled in the big cities and stayed in public view while practicing their Catholic beliefs. Wealthier Germans and Scandinavians who only passed through the cities and spent money on farm equipment en route to the plains states were treated as welcome guests. No one was offended by those who were Lutherans nor much by those Germans who were Catholics, because they were just passing through, they were spending money in our stores, and then they were going away! Far away! And when they got out west they established clean, thrifty, productive farms and communities which didn't bother anybody.

No, our record is not perfect. But it's about as good as you'll find anywhere in the world. Tolerance has certainly been practiced here as a typical American tradition. But in recent years the definition of tolerance seems to have undergone a marked change. People in increasing numbers have begun to believe that a truly tolerant person never finds fault with anything somebody believes or preaches. They seem afraid to argue or preach an opposing point of view. Those who do such arguing or preaching are labeled as intolerant, even when they haven't lifted a finger to remove from society those groups with which they find fault. In other words, for having an opinion and openly expressing it, they are called intolerant! For fear of being thus labeled, many have joined the band wagon which preaches that, above all else, we must avoid offending anyone by expressing an honest opinion.

This is both stupid and cowardly. It allows an extremist from any group to bully his way into rights which are not only equal but even superior. For centuries, political cartoonists could lampoon anybody they thought was being foolish, inconsistent, or just plain wrong-headed. But then, just a few years ago, some cartoons about the "prophet" Mohammed were published in a newspaper in Denmark. The Moslems, who had been slowly filling up the major cities of Europe for many years as immigrants seeking better work and housing, suddenly began calling for the death of the cartoonist and the outlawry of all such humorous commentary. Their numbers made their voice a very loud and somewhat frightening one. A few Europeans have essentially told the militant Moslems where to get off. But many editors and national legislators have chosen to give the intolerant minorities what they want - gag orders on certain topics. Freedom of speech and the press, along with free religious and political thought, have begun to disappear from that Europe which, in the middle ages, boldly carried the cross directly into the heart of Moslem lands.

Am I defending the Crusaders? Not particularly, although some of them showed genuine religious devotion and faith. But let's face it. Many of them only went along on the journey because we Europeans were a society with an economy based on the possession and control of land and all the good bits had been grabbed by 1095. Many poor guys were able to kill their way into possession of large parcels of land and build German-style or Italian-style or French-style or English-style castles on them, even though they looked a bit out of place surrounded by all that sand. In the First Crusade, which was attended by such noteworthy folks as Richard Lionheart of England and Louis IX (Saint Louis) of France, the city of Jerusalem was laid siege to, its wall breached, and its inhabitants nearly all exterminated. The blood was ankle deep on every floor of Herod's temple. That's about as intolerant as you can get.

Later Crusades were just as mad but less successful. Constantinople was sacked during one of them. It was a Christian capital, albeit Eastern Orthodox, so this seemed like breaking the rules to the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire. Grudges have been held all these centuries.

The broadsword missionary approach had only limited success for the Christians, as the scimitar missionary approach had enjoyed for the Moslems beginning about the seventh century (600s.) Once the guys with the big knives get tired, gather up all their stolen gold, and go home, lots of folks spring right back to whatever they'd really believed before the shootout had started.

So today many Moslems want to get militant again. They want to spread their religion by the sword. Literally. Some people think we can smile and appease them as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler by giving away things he didn't own such as Czechoslovakia. But most people who've really thought it out know that, when you give a bully some of what he wants, he'll only push harder until he gets it all. So that's one major problem with our reaction to this threat. Too many of us are cowardly appeasers.

To me, though, the MAJOR PROBLEM with us (the predominantly Christian European and American nation-states) is that our religions don't matter to us any more. We stopped caring gradually, probably beginning with the free love and free thinking and non-thinking of the sixties. It is no longer fashionable to believe too strongly in God. Today it is common for people to declare themselves to be "not very religious." This means not religious at all. It means there are no religious principles or beliefs for which they would fight if those things were under an attack which literally threatened their continued existence. And the problem with that is that those who want to destroy our Christian religion really do believe in their own religion and really are willing to kill us in order to accomplish their goals.

I see two solutions for this. The short term solution is that we get humble, prayerful, and more united. We proclaim openly that we really do believe in God the Father and in his Son, Jesus Christ. We proclaim that we will stop, with armed force if necessary, any attempt to stamp us out as a religion or as a culture. Many have feared this before. A Japanese general once said that he would never invade the United States, because there would be a rifleman "behind every blade of grass." Well, maybe at his time. Today we might have enough riflemen to have one behind every other sage brush. But that would make a real difference to a group hoping to supplant us as the inhabitants of this land. Does our God condone this? Check out Alma Chapter 48 in the Book of Mormon and tell me what you think.

The ultimate or long-term solution, of course, is the preaching of the restored Gospel of Jesus Christ as it was revealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith. We have been told that it will visit every nation and clime. That must include the Moslems. Can they be converted? Why not? The Lamanites also had a centuries old tradition of hating the Christian Nephites, but they were nearly all converted in the first century AD.

Mr. Lincoln was chastised by a cabinet member for being too soft towards some of his political enemies. "You should destroy your enemies," he was told. His response was, "If I befriend an enemy, have I not destroyed him?"

In summary, then, I opine that Islam is a false religion, established by a false prophet. I believe that its adherents are, by and large, good people who have been misled. I also believe that, if and when they physically attack us, we should fight back vigorously to defend family and home. I believe that we all share in this responsibility. Ultimately, I hope that the growth of the Lord's restored Church will obviate any rift between us and other religionists. Surely in the Millennium this will become the case.

What is your opinion?

The Unillustrated Post

Why are there no pictures in this post? After all, the old coot who writes it has always overwhelmed us with pictures before. What's wrong with this guy?

Ignorance.

That's it and there's no way to whitewash the fact.

According to the instructions which come with this blog stuff, you can take illustrations either from your own albums on the computer or from other sources on the net. Great. I tried that. I wanted to write the touching story of the friendship between Victor Hartmann and Modest Mussorgsky. I wanted to wring tears from all of you with the famous quotation from Mussorgsky when his friend died, thus inspiring the writing of one of his most famous compositions, Pictures at An Exhibition. I was going to talk about how the piece had originally been written for piano and later scored for orchestra by Maurice Ravel, he of Bolero fame.

Yes, this was going to be a real killer of a blog post. I was going to describe several of the parts in Pictures, especially the Promenade, Bydlo, The Hut on Fowl's Legs, and The Great Gate at Kiev. For that last, I was going to tell the story of how the city of Kiev (formerly the capital city of ancient Russia before it got into the habit of being invaded all the time) had invited artists and architects to submit drawings and designs for a proposed triumphal arch to be built in that city. It would have been something like the one Napoleon had built in Paris or the one which honored The Grand Army of the Republic in New York City after the "unpleasantness" from 1861-1865. In other words, it was to have been something like the triumphal arches the Romans used to build all the time to celebrate military success in far-away places like Egypt, Persia, Greece, Spain, and Gaul.

But, rather like the fellow in the Bible who was made fun of for beginning to build a tower and then running out of funds before it was finished, Kiev decided to abandon the project after all these guys had submitted drawings and plans. As Modest' Mussorgsky shuffled through his dead friend's paintings and sketches, he came across the drawing of the triumphal arch that never was. So he decided to build it himself. While repetitive, the piece is truly glorious and could send shivers down the spine of a brass monkey. That's the piece with which he ended Pictures.

I wanted to use three portraits of Modest' Petrovich Mussorgsky. They are right there in several places, complete with statements that they are now in the public domain, because the guy has been dead since before there was hair. I was going to use the one of him in a cadet uniform in his teens. Then I would have used one of the early middle age portraits, actual photographs, which show him in a suit with shoulder length hair well combed and a well-trimmed beard. Finally, to show how life and death had eroded him away from a brilliant composer to just another Russian drunk, I was going to use the painting which shows him all disheveled and with a bulbous nose the color of a turnip.

But no. I couldn't do any of that. Why? I didn't know how. I tried several approaches and couldn't get any of the pictures to move from where they were to my blog. If I'd been able to do it, I might have thrown in a portrait of the decedent, himself, Victor Hartmann. He must have been quite a guy. Mussorgsky's friendship for him caused him terrible grief when Hartmann died. What he said was, "Why does a dog, a cat, a rat live on, and creatures like Hartmann must die?"