Time Travel

Sunday, April 27, 2014

SAINTED POPES | Two More, Video (Comment, Updated Feb. 12, 2016)

Olga receiving Communion from Pope
John Paul II in 1980. Nairobi, Kenya.

April 27, 2014–A CNN video of the canonizations of Pope John XIII and Pope John Paul II today is here. They are the 81st and 82nd sainted popes, and are #41 and #42 on the alphabetical list below.

(You may find, as I did, that the video is preceded by a bilingual advertisement, a blessedly short one, in which dogs are used to try to sell car insurance. Sorry about that.)

The 82 popes who have been canonized represent 30.8 percent of the 266 elected to date by the College of Cardinals. The 82 are heavily weighted at the front end, including all of the first 35 and 52 out of the first 54. In addition to the 82 officially proclaimed saints–after facing an advocatus diaboli (Counsel for the Devil), who presents the negative aspects of each candidate–there remain 16 popes in, as it were, the pipeline having passed the first hurdle of beatification.

Here are the certified papal saints. As an alumnus of two Benedictine schools (Ampleforth and Portsmouth Abbeys), I was disappointed to see only one of 16 popes named after Benedict on the list, although the popes named after Gregory I (540-640) did well. Gregory was the first pope to come from a monastic background, to which he was supremely devoted. In the view of French-born Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509-1564), Gregory was the last good pope.

Comment

I am always looking for a personal connection to events. In this case, it's my sister Olga. In her memoirs she is photographed with Pope John Paul II at the Papal Nuncio's residence (page 125g) in May 1980 when the Pope visited Kenya for the first time. A photo from this visit is shown at the top of this post. (She describes his visit on pp. 217-224.)

Pope John Paul II is the second person featured in her memoirs who has been canonized in her lifetime. The first was St. Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, who died in 1975 (pp. 185-189). He sent Olga to Kenya in 1960 (p. 54), just before the country became independent, when the "Mau-Mau" were calling for independence and many "Europeans" in Kenya were preparing to leave.

Olga was born in New York City in 1934. She will be 80 in November. She is a Kenyan citizen currently in Pamplona, Spain for specialized health care. Her mother (and, duh, mine), Mrs. E. R. Marlin (born in Holland, she wrote under her maiden name Hilda van Stockum), converted to Roman Catholicism in 1938, when she was in Washington, D.C. (her husband worked for FDR), following her friend Evie Hone. So Olga converted when she was four years old.

Olga spent her entire working life in Nairobi, more than half a century, creating institutions for the education of women in Kenya and other African countries. She was given an honorary doctorate in 2011 by Strathmore University in Nairobi.

(Update, Jan. 22, 2016: The Time Travel blog had 14,000 page views when I wrote it nearly two years ago. Now it has 57,000. Thank you for reading.)

Thursday, April 24, 2014

BIRTH | April 11–Marguerite of Navarre (Comment)

The Basque country, Navarre and Aragon have punched
above their weight in the Counter-Reformation.

April 11, 2014–This day was born Marguerite of Navarre in Angoulême, France in 1492, as Columbus was finalizing his exploration arrangements with Queen Isabella of Spain.

Samuel Putnam has called Marguerite "the first modern woman". Her mother, Louise, was well educated. When Marguerite's father died in Marguerite's childhood, Louise became the head of the household and homeschooled her children.

Marguerite spoke at least five languages. When she was a teenager, she was married Duke Charles IV of Alençon. After they were married for more than 15 years, Charles died and Marguerite married again, this time to Henry II of Navarre. She gave birth to a daughter; and then, when she was 38, to a son who died when he was a few months old. Marguerite was so distraught that she wrote Le miroir de l'âme pécheresse (The Mirror of the Sinful Soul, 1531). It combined her mysticism with her strong belief that the Church needed to be reformed.

With her brother, King Francis I, next door in France, Marguerite was brave in advocating religious reform, and she wrote novels on the side. The French historian Brantôme said of Marguerite:

She composed most of these novels in her litter as she traveled, for her hours of retirement were employed in affairs of importance. ... My grandmother always went with her in her litter as her lady of honor and held her ink-horn for her. Marguerite wrote the novels down quickly and readily – more so than if they had been dictated to her.

Her most famous work was the Heptameron, a collection of more than 70 short stories — stories about women and their relationships with men, and whether it was possible to be virtuous and also experience real love. They are stories of unplanned pregnancies, jealous murders, women locked up for life, corrupt monks, cheating wives, and unforgiving patriarchs. Jane Smiley wrote about The Heptameron:

It is clear from her book that freedom of conscience for women can lead anywhere — if your eternal soul is your own responsibility, and cannot be saved through reliance upon a corrupt church, then it is a short and slippery slope from there to all sorts of freedom, first of belief and thought, then of feeling, then of action.

Comment:

A few states in Spain just south of the border with France have outsized contributions to history. The Basque country, Navarre and Aragon punch above their weight in the production of fervent reformers. They are comparable with the Holy Land, Assisi and Padua in the number of sites of historic interest relating to religious reform. (And Lourdes is just north of the border.)

As we celebrate the birthday of Marguerite of Navarre, let's think of her as an antecedent of two other figures from the region – St. Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Jesuits (Society of Jesus) and St. Josemaria Escriva, who founded the (Prelature of) Opus Dei. The Jesuits and Opus Dei have taken turns being very close to the Popes of the last century and before.

April 24 - Ireland's Easter Rising (updated Aug. 22, 2016)

Patrick Pearse

On this day in 1916, the Easter Rising began in Dublin. Its aim was to end British rule and create the Irish Republic. It came to be known as the Poets' Rebellion because many of its leaders were teachers or writers.

Schoolteacher Patrick Pearse and Socialist leader James Connolly called for supporters of the Republic to gather at Dublin's General Post Office on Easter Monday, bringing whatever weapons they could find.

Members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, about 1,200 in number, turned out, but most citizens of Dublin were unprepared for, some even unaware of, the uprising.

The uprising itself was, by many conventional measures, a failure: Poorly planned and lacking solid support, it was quashed after a week.

Many leaders, like Pearse and Connolly, were hastily executed for treason. But as George Bernard Shaw wrote in The New York Times the following month:

It is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this position without making him a martyr and a hero, even though the day before the rising he may have been only a minor poet. ... The military authorities and the British Government must have known they were canonizing their prisoners.

Shaw was, of course, right. (He also remains the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1925, and an Oscar, in 1938, for Pygmalion, re-made as a musical and a movie, My Fair Lady.)

Outrage over the executions resulted in a wave of nationalism among the Irish, many of whom had previously been ambivalent about an Irish Republic, and galvanized the movement. The Republic of Ireland achieved independence from Great Britain five years later. (Thanks to Garrison Keillor for his post on this event in The Writer's Almanac.)

Comments on the Easter Rising in Ireland:

A 6-minute movie on the Easter Rising may be watched by clicking here. You will like it if you love Ireland.

The rebel song "Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week" was a rewrite of an earlier song about 1798.

As my friend Tim Sullivan sums up:

Connolly and other wounded were shot tied to chairs and the rebels were jeered by the Dublin crowd as they were marched away. Ireland was fortunate that Michael Collins was not killed but was sent to jail. Here is a song in his memory.

Comments on the Glamor of Unsuccessful Rebellions:

Unsuccessful uprisings are more memorable than successful ones. Their lack of success and the harsh reaction of the ruling party proves that the uprising was justified.

The Brazilians got their independence from Portugal because a resident Portuguese royal said: “You want independence? You GOT it!” Very unexciting. So in order to have some heroes to make a little fuss about in the history books, Brazilians go back to an earlier, unsuccessful upraising.

Brazil glamorizes an unsuccessful plot of a century earlier, the “Inconfidencia” led by a dentist named Tiradentes (“tooth puller”). He was turned in by a co-conspirator who was deeply in debt and was looking for compensation for being an informer. Tiradentes was hanged. The other members of the plot - except, I take it, the informer - were exiled to Angola and Mozambique. The actual independence day is less celebrated than the unsuccessful plot.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

4. Annie Jessup Woodin (Superseded)

This has been merged with Chapter 5 here:
http://nyctimetraveler.blogspot.com/2015/04/woodin-attends-woodbridge-school-and.html

This post is kept up to maintain links.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

WRITERS | Are They More Suicidal? Why? (Updated Jan. 7, 2016)

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. She took her own life in 1963.
She had tried before.

March 19, 2014–This is an exploratory post. I would be especially interested in comments, either below or by email (teppermarlin@aol.com). I'm asking a question... I don't know where it will lead me.

Many writers have committed suicide or have engaged in suicidal behavior. Both Inez Milholland and Edna St. Vincent Millay engaged in such behavior.

Is suicide brave or cowardly? Does it depend on the type of challenge? Does the ability to see life from a unique perspective also mean impatience with the world as it is? I provide a list below showing writers identified on a Wikipedia page as having taken their own lives. Many like Stephen Haggard were poets but had other careers, such as acting.

It appears that a large number of writers seem to have taken their own lives. Possibly the statistical frequency or probability is no higher than in the general population, but it does not seem so, perhaps because most people are more like cats who crawl away to be alone when they feel mortally sick or wounded whereas writers by profession make more of a to-do about staging their own death.

If writers are indeed more prone to suicide, the most satisfying explanation is that they lived on the edge, that their level of emotional intensity was so high they could not live after being rejected by the one they love, or failing in their writing-career aspirations, or not being able to accept the world as it is. But there are less uplifting interpretations.

Writer Suicides

UPDATE: Jan. 7, 2016–Today there is a poem on the Writer's Almanac site called "Suicides" by Faith Shearin. The subject is really about writers' suicides. It starts with a list of three writers who committed suicide:

one "who walked into a river with her pockets full of stones" [don't know who that was]
one "who started her car with the garage door closed" [presumably Anne Sexton] and
the youngest "went into the kitchen and placed her head where she had so often placed chickens or hams" [Sylvia Plath, whose suicide may have prompted Sexton's].

It ends with the complaint that now she had "outlived all of them." She continues:

I was sad that they could not describe the other world, that they offered no map to old age. Was it dangerous to write? I began to walk more carefully beside rivers, to eat cold food, to let someone else back the car out of the driveway. – From Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015.

Jilted Lovers

Let's look at the most famous writer suicides:

Stephen Haggard shot himself after an Egyptian woman he was seeing said she wanted to break off their adulterous relationship. His career as an actor was doing reasonably well, so a broken heart theory works here.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), author of The Bell Jar collection of poems, was married to poet Ted Hughes, who by multiple accounts was abusive toward her. Born in Jamaica Plain, Mass., she was a model for Mademoiselle magazine, won a Pulitzer and a Fulbright. Hughes was reported as having adulterous affairs. She put her head in an oven and sealed the sides. He burned her final diaries. Sample lines from her poetry:

“Never Try to Trick Me with a Kiss” – Never try to trick me with a kiss /Pretending that the birds are here to stay; /The dying man will scoff and scorn at this.
“Lady Lazarus.” Dying / Is an art, like everything else…”

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) also committed suicide via carbon monoxide. She and Plath took writing courses with each other, so it could have been a copycat suicide. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, she was a professional model, married at 18. Her psychiatrist recommended she take up writing poetry. She won a Pulitzer and a Guggenheim. The cause of her suicidal wish may have been sexual relationship with her second psychiatrist. She locked herself in the garage and turned on the engine of her car. Sample lines from her poetry:

"Wanting to Die." - …Suicides have a special language. /Like carpenters they want to know which tools. /They never ask why build.

If we include the lovers of poets, we get more people. For example, when I was in Brazil I was told firmly that the reason Elizabeth Bishop's Brazilian architect lover Lota de Macedo Soares took her own life was that Bishop wanted to end their long relationship.

Failure to Achieve Goals

Some poets and writers take their own lives, or engage in suicidal behavior, because they want to make some point through their death. Lord Byron going off to fight. Inez Milholland signing up to be an Italian war correspondent, and then charging on with a whistle-stop train campaign against Woodrow Wilson and continuing despite severe illness (one reason being that Alice Paul sent telegrams saying Inez must not let down the team).

Is there something about writing that leads to a kind of desperation? Edna St. Vincent Millay, addicted to drugs and alcohol (her death was an accident–she fell down stairs in the year after her husband died–but her addictions came from inside). Or the alcoholism of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their circle. These three writers were successful, but under the pre-eBook system of acceptance and rejection of poems, articles and books, editors could appear to be tyrants.

Were the odds against getting into print and then selling enough copies too discouraging to reassure many writers of their talent, of their own value?
Despite being considered successful by history, were the writers not up to their own expectations? Was the required effort too great?
I read once that only two poets in the 20th century made an adequate living from their poetry - Millay and W. H. Auden. In Millay's case the finances were helped by her having married a successful businessman, Eugen Boissevain, about whom I have written a lot in this space.

Chronic Illness

Does the seeming prevalence of suicides among writers reflect an unwillingness to accept life as it is? Does writing take a toll on one's health?

Arthur Davison Ficke had an adulterous relationship with Edna St. Vincent Millay that her husband condoned. Ficke took his own life, it seems, not because of rejection by her but because of his own chronic illnesses.
Seven cast members of Saturday Night Live have died. Given the youthfulness of the cast, this seems higher than one would expect (SNL has had 118 cast members, making the death rate 6 percent). Three can be said to have taken their own lives - Charles Rocket (who had been discharged from the show), plus John Belushi and Chris Farley, who both died of drug overdoses at 33. Phil Hartman was apparently killed by his wife Brynne, who then killed herself; she was said to be envious of his career success. The other three died of illnesses.

Necrology

Here's a list of writer-suicides, with a few names that I have discussed or thought about in bold face:

A
Francis Adams (writer), Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen, Jane Arden (director), José María Arguedas, May Aim
B
Shirley Barker, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Michel Bernanos, John Berryman, Konstantin Biebl, Jens Bjørneboe Barcroft Boake Joe Bolton (poet) Arturo Borja Tadeusz Borowski Karin Boye Bozhidar Herman Brood
C
Paul Celan, Ana Cristina Cesar, Nicolas Chamfort, Thomas Chatterton, Chen Mengjia, Danielle Collobert, Hart Crane, Arthur Cravan, René Crevel
D
John Davidson (poet), Deng Tuo, Deborah Digges, Thomas M. Disch, Tove Ditlevsen, Pierre Drieu, La Rochelle Yulia Drunina, Stephen Duck, Jean-Pierre Duprey
E
Daniel Evans (Welsh poet)
F
Gabriel Ferrater, Arthur Davison Ficke, Humberto Fierro, John Gould Fletcher, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, André Frédérique, Misao Fujimura
G
Francesco Gaeta, Ángel Ganivet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, José Agustín Goytisolo, Gu Cheng, Karoline von Günderrode, Vilmundur Gylfason
H
Stephen Haggard (grandnephew of author H. Rider Haggard, whose books were favorites of Will Woodin, FDR's first Treasury Secretary), Hai Zi Beatrice Hastings
I
Paolo Iashvili, Kaan İnce
J
Ingrid Jonker, Tor Jonsson, Attila József
K
Misuzu Kaneko Kostas Karyotakis Kitamura Tokoku Heinrich von Kleist Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski Velga Krile
L
Napoleon Lapathiotis Mariano José de Larra Jan Lechoń Vachel Lindsay Gherasim Luca Lucan Leopoldo Lugones
M
Vladimir Mayakovsky Charlotte Mew Veronica Micle Branko Miljković Jon Mirande Yukio Mishima
N
Henry Neele Neobule Gérard de Nerval Ernesto Noboa y Caamaño
P
Piet Paaltjens Cesare Pavese Alejandra Pizarnik, Sylvia Plath, Sophie Podolski Antonia Pozzi Dragoș Protopopescu
Q
Qu Yuan Antero de Quental
R
Rajalakshmi José Antonio Ramos Sucre Liam Rector Jacques Rigaut Amelia Rosselli Raymond Roussel
S
Mário de Sá-Carneiro Anne Sexton Eli Siegel José Asunción Silva Medardo Ángel Silva Edward Stachura Avram Steuerman-Rodion Alfonsina Storni Thomas Thackeray Swinburne
T
Galaktion Tabidze, Robert Tannahill Sara Teasdale Salvatore Toma Jaime Torres Bodet Georg Trakl Marina Tsvetaeva
U
Allen Upward
V
Jacques Vaché, Johannes Vares, Reetika Vazirani Juhan Viiding Ilarie Voronca
W
Rachel Wetzsteon Rafał Wojaczek
Y
Peyo Yavorov Sergei Yesenin Yun Hyon-seok

MUSIC | The Trapp Family Camp (Personal Comments)

Fr. Wasner conducting the original Trapp Family Singers
in 1941. They went on tour in North America in 1938.

Maria Augusta Trapp's 1949 memoir, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, which was the basis of the Sound of Music Broadway show and movie has been republished by Morrow and is #9 on the NY Times best-seller list this week (Sunday edition, March 16).

Georg von Trapp was given his title by the Austro-Hungarian empire for services in World War I. After the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the von Trapps were Italian citizens and moved to Salzburg. Maria and her seven step-children and two biological children went on tour in 1938, and lived in Merion, Pa. in 1939, when the tenth child, Johannes, was born.

The Trapp Family Music Camp started in 1946 in Vermont and the Lodge was built for it. Georg von Trapp died in 1947 and is buried at the Stowe farm. As family members got married, substitutes were recruited. The group had its last concert in 1956. Some differences between the movie and the real story are described in a 2005 report along with a description of what happened subsequently:

[After the Trapp Family Singers broke up in] 1956, Maria, Johannes, Rosmarie, and daughter Maria went to New Guinea to do missionary work. Later, Maria ran the Trapp Family Lodge for many years. Of the children, Rupert became a medical doctor; Agathe a kindergarten teacher in Maryland; Maria was a missionary in New Guinea for 30 years; Werner was a farmer; Hedwig taught music; Johanna married and eventually returned to live in Austria; Martina married and died in childbirth; Rosmarie and Eleonore both settled in Vermont; and Johannes managed the Trapp Family Lodge. Maria died in 1987 and was buried alongside Georg and Martina.

Comment (John): The book came out the year our Granny died, 1949. The book is how we heard about the camp. We went to the Trapp Family Music Camp in Stowe in its first year at the new Lodge, 1950. When we got back to Montreal, we entered, as a family, a contest to prepare an album of descriptions of musical instruments. We did one on the different types of recorders. We won second prize (we wuz robbed)...

Trapp Family on Tour in the USA in 1946. Johannes in
the middle would be seven years old. Fr. Wasner and
Georg von Trapp are in front.

When we went to Europe the first time in 1947, to visit relatives in Holland, on the boat (the Cunard RMS Ascania I think) we were called the "Lunch-Hour Marlins" because we went from 12 (Olga) to 2 (Lis). So in 1950 at the Trapp Family Camp, our ages would have been 15 to 5. The Trapp Family Camp was very important for us as a family - it was our first real introduction to choral singing and musical instruments.

We learned to sing many hymns in four parts (most of the musical repertoire was sacred music, since the neglected-by-history musicologist and conductor for the Trapp Family was Fr. Franz Wasner).

We also all started playing recorders. Olga afterwards continued teaching us and I also took recorder lessons in Montreal. Later we learned to play other instruments, but the singing was the most important takeaway.

Like Sheila (see below), I remember Agathe being especially patient. She became a teacher of young children. She died in 2010 at 97, leaving just four of the Trapp children left.

When we were at the Camp in 1950 the breakup of the Trapp Family Singers was already imminent. Some of the step-daughters wanted to become regular Americans and date/marry young men in the area. For as long as she could, Mrs. Trapp told them they were required to dress up in Austrian outfits to perform and make a success of the Singers and the Camp. Brigid’s story about Hedwig fits with the general stress that my older sisters observed among the step-daughters, who were doubtless watching the biological clock.

The Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway show with Mary Martin opened in 1959. The movie with Julie Andrews opened in 1965.

Olga: The original book that came out in 1949 is what brought us to the camp. Mother bought it and afterwards took us to a concert in Montreal where she learned about the Trapp Family summer camp in Stowe, Vermont. The Marlin Family descended on it in 1950, when Dad was settled in his new job with ICAO. Mother found out that that Maria was not altogether pleased to have another big Catholic family there headed by a forceful woman. For the five eldest children, it was an unforgettable experience - total immersion in music.

Monsignor Wasner with Pope John
Paul II.

Brigid: I was 14 in 1950. My strongest memories are of the saintliness of Fr. Wasner, and the slight clash between Mother and Mrs. Trapp. For example, Maria Trapp was telling the story about her struggle with her daughter Lorli (Eleonore), when Lorli was a little girl. She wanted Lorli to clean up her mess. They had a big argument with Lorli saying "No!" until finally Lorli said, “Yes”. So Mrs Trapp hugged her and put her to bed. But Mother pointed out that Lorli had never cleaned up the mess! In 1950, Lorli was grown up–about 18, and very pretty. Mrs. Trapp seemed to prefer her biological children to her stepchildren, but she did save them all by bringing them out to America in 1938. However, when Hedwig wanted to marry a local farmer, Mrs. Trapp forbade her to, because she was their only soprano! She even locked Hedwig in her bedroom. But Hedwig was headstrong, tore up bedsheets and let herself out of the window, where her lover was waiting. They eloped. Mrs Trapp never forgave her. They got someone else, but it was the beginning of the end for the group. We heard this story later.

Sheila: I have memories of Agatha teaching me the recorder. I really liked her and she was very kind and patient. I also was very fond of Father Wasner. I remember mother thinking that Maria was in competition with her over who was the holiest. For example, If mother knelt in church, Maria would also kneel.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Toward Peace in Ukraine

When the Soviet Union broke up between 1989 and 1991, I was involved in several initiatives to encourage economic conversion of military resources to civilian use. Ultimately, the cost of orderly transition was too great, and the conversion happened in a disorderly way - cold turkey.

During one of my visits to Moscow during that period, I remember spending an afternoon on a boat ride on the Volga River, much of time listening to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was calmly and knowledgeably talking to a group of Americans and Russians, tracking events marking the end of the Soviet Union.

On another occasion around that time I went to Kharkiv under USIA auspices to make some suggestions for economic conversion to a group of the city's planners. Kharkiv then ranked second only to St. Petersburg in the former Soviet Union as a center for military training. I said that the city's three airports and its tank factory would make it a good location for distributing high-value goods, as in Memphis, Tenn., and they needed to bring in a developer. The city fathers asked me: "Chto eto, devyeloper?" ("What's a developer?") The city has since become a major regional book distribution center for Bertelsmann, a huge German publisher, with the capacity to ship 20 million books per year.

Fast-forward to 2014. Although his signals change from day to day, Vladimir V. Putin has clearly been engaging in risky behavior by massing troops on Ukraine's border and engaging in language provoking the West. His underlying motivation seems to be to restore some of what was lost in the breakup of the Soviet Union. This improved his popularity in 2008 when he invaded Georgia and it seems to be working again:

His ratings are rising fast as Russians who have been polled seem to be buying the propaganda that Russian nationals need protection from Ukrainian protesters he labels "fascist".
Putin's peak popularity in 2008, when he invaded Georgia, was achieved without much resistance from Europe or even the United States under President George W. Bush.

With an eye to these polls, Putin is enjoying a challenge to the temporary regime in Kiev. One pretext is that the change in Ukraine's government was not based on elections. The other is that the new government in Kiev threatens Russian minorities in Crimea (and - who knows? - elsewhere in Ukraine). But:

The temporary regime in Kiev, a Ukrainian living in the United States recently assured me, is less corrupt than the one that was forced out.
The more important difference is that it is friendlier to Europe, and the European Union would surely clamp down on corruption once an Association Agreement was signed.
Most important, elections will be held in May. Democratic elections will determine a permanent government.

The dangers created by Putin's behavior are huge. U.S. and European leaders have been talking only about political and economic sanctions, but these could be catastrophic for Russia, which is under pressure economically. This is in no way parallel to the Falklands crisis, where the opponents were two countries of unequal power and the stakes were small.

The more worrisome parallel is Europe in 1939. The United States and its European Allies looked weak to Hitler and some in the United States blame Britain's Prime Minister Chamber for attempting to appease Hitler. A thoughtful article in this week's New Yorker on Hollywood's involvement in U.S. propaganda in World War II describes Frank Capra's horror at the appeal of Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda movie for the Nazi party. His first reaction was: "We can't win this war."

But public opinion turned and the Allies produced the leadership, technology and materiel they needed.

Britain replaced Chamberlain with Churchill and again, as in the First World War, young men fought heroically.
When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, no one on the west believed his claim that Poland provoked the invasion. He had been massing the Wehrmacht on the Polish border and looked for a pretext to invade.
A photo of a Polish "urchin" playing amidst bombed-out rubble was motivation enough for a soldier.
The United States produced its own leader in FDR, and within a year of D-Day, Hitler was dead and the war in Europe was won.
Capra's years-later answer to his own fears about his country's survival was "It's a Wonderful Life", showing the strength of small-town America.

If Putin thinks that the only polls he needs to look at are within Russia, or in the Crimea, he should think again:

The CNN/ORC International Poll released today shows Putin's unfavorability rating in the United States jumped to 68 percent, from 54 percent just before the Sochi Winter Olympics opened last month.
It shows 69 percent of Americans surveyed thinking Russia is a serious threat to the United States, an increase of 25 percentage points since 2012 - the highest number since the Soviet Union broke up.
More than 70 percent of U.S. respondents see no justification for Russia's actions in Ukraine.
Nearly half believe a new Cold War is likely in the next few years.

In this environment, Senator McCain's opportunistic call for Obama to raise the threats against Putin is worrisomely political. He calls for NATO expansion and restoration of missiles in Eastern Europe. He refers to cuts in the defense budget as an Obama initiative instead of what it was, a Congressional bi-partisan agreement to reduce the deficit. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served both Bush and Obama, is bravely taking the right path by calling for a de-escalation of military tension.

In the middle of a major international crisis, ... domestic criticism of the president ought to be toned down, while he's trying to handle this crisis.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's stern warnings to Putin speak of severe economic and political sanctions, but not military ones. Her defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Monday:

Sanctions hurt both sides, that’s quite clear. But if you look at the numbers, Russia has 15 percent of its GDP depending on trade with Europe, Europe only 1 percent [dependent on Russia]. That means that the reliance on a functioning business relationship with Europe is much, much bigger in Russia.

Putin's popularity sank quickly after his invasion of Georgia was followed by economic difficulties in Russia. It could happen again. The world has changed since 1939 and U.S.-European combined action could cause unacceptable disruptions in Russia without firing a shot. Meanwhile, Europe has taken the brunt of two world wars and is not about to rush into another one. Neither should Russia, which lost more lives than any other country. Neither should we respond with escalated military threats in the face of Putin's saber-rattling. As Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."

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