Lawrence Hall, HSG
I Demanded to be Heard
When I was young I demanded
to be heard
And I was not heard, which
turned out for the best
Because I had almost nothing
to say
And that almost-nothing was
sodden with cliché
Sunday, January 7, 2024
I Demanded to be Heard - short poem
You Have Never Voted for a President - weekly column
Lawrence Hall, HSG
You Have Never
Voted for a President
You have never voted for a president, and neither have I.
Certain plaintiffs in certain states have recently petitioned
their state courts to bar a certain candidate from standing for the presidency
based on Section 3 of the XIVth Amendment. This states that no one can be a
senator, representative, or presidential or vice-presidential elector, or hold
any public office, civil or military, federal or state, if he (the pronoun is
gender-neutral), as a member of congress, an officer in the United States, a
member of any state legislature, or an executive or judicial officer in any
state if he, having sworn loyalty to the Constitution, “shall have engaged in
insurrection against the same (the Constitution).”
The XIVth Amendment was enacted following the Civil War
and in response to it, but an amendment is not limited in time and place. It is
active law, not a museum curiosity.
But how can a state presume to bar a candidate from a
presidential ballot in that state?
That leads us back to Article II, which states clearly
that presidents are elected by electors from each state, not by a popular vote.
Further, these electors from each state are appointed by the legislature of
each state, “…in such Manner as the Legislature may direct…”
The fifty states and the too-much-indulged District of
Columbia can, as a matter of states’ rights, choose their electors in any
manner they chose. Hey, it’s in the Constitution. And do we follow our
Constitution or not? As practiced the popular vote in each state is for
electors, not for candidates, and the electors then vote for the president.
Some states do not allow their electors to vote against the will of the
electorate, but some do.
Our clumsy system of voting sounds illogical, but its
function is to ensure that sparsely-populated states and districts are not
subjected to the votes of heavily-populated cities. Without our electoral
college (they don’t have a football team, though) our presidential elections would
always be decided by the west coast axis and the east coast axis.
This protection is similar to the constitutional
requirement that while the states send a number or representatives to the House
based on population, they each send two senators to the Senate regardless of
population.
All this is a little awkward, but it means that the great
population centers cannot use the rest of us – “flyover country,” “deplorables,”
and so on – as simply a source of raw materials for their industries and recruits
for their many undeclared wars, and dumping grounds for their garbage.
Under the Constitution the citizens of a state may indeed
appeal to their state legislature for barring a candidate from the ballot in
that state only based on the XIVth Amendment in that same federal
Constitution. It is a matter of states’ rights not only in the XIVth amendment but
in the Xth.
The argument that the President is not mentioned as an
officer in the amendment is specious, even a little desperate. No one in over
two hundred years has ever denied that the office of the presidency is in fact
and function the office of the presidency. The President is not in a position
of employment or contract; he is an officer.
The argument that the amendment does not apply if the
candidate has not been convicted might carry some weight except for the fact
that the authority for granting eligibility rests with a ¾ vote of the House of
Representatives.
Where the petitioners may have gone off those
metaphorical rails is presenting their petition to their state courts instead
of to their state legislatures. The state courts under the Constitution should
bounce this to their legislatures.
So why isn’t this taught in school? Well, it is; it’s
just that no 16-year-old is in the least interested in civics class. Nor does
he (the pronoun is gender-neutral) give a rat’s rear end for Shakespeare,
sentence structure, molecular theory, physics, algebra, or the food pyramid.
Geometry is kinda fun, though.
But they’re kids. They’re learning. We adults have no
excuses, and the language of the Constitution is clear enough. We have a duty
to perceive issues rationally as adults, come to conclusions based in law, and
participate in civilization as citizens of a great republic.
There are many elementals in civilized behavior – one is
that when we vote we often don’t get our way. That’s the deal. That’s our
Constitution.
-30-
Saturday, January 6, 2024
A Russian Christmas Card - poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
A Russian Christmas
Card
For Tod and Max
I allowed the time, the year, the day to slip
And so I can only imagine a card for you
A Russian Christmas card in paper and paints
Of Christmas scenes from a happy golden time:
And let there be small children in furry boots
Dragging a little fir tree over the snow
Among artistically disposed squirrels and deer
To the delight of Father Christmas and the sweet Snow Queen
And let there be Saint Michael’s at the end of the lane
Its ancient bell ringing the ancient joys
While ancient stars and humble cottage windows
Give light to the faithful on their way to Mass
And let us be among them, as God will allow
Before the Theotokos and Child, kneeling now
Happy Orthodox Christmas, dear friends!
All the President's Mob - a re-post from 2021
(a re-post from 2021)
Lawrence Hall
All the
President’s Mob
Sedition batters past the capitol police -
As Congress, sweet harmless Merovingians,
Arming from a thesaurus of pomposity
Meet the attempted coup with lofty words
While hidden far away, lurking unseen
Our Leader screams into his telescreen
Moving his dementia along the Potomac:
Glorifying himself in the highest
Our government, cowering on the floor
Maintains that it will not be intimidated
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
No Threat to the Community - very short poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
“No Threat to the
Community”
“…an isolated Incident “
-Orange (Texas) Police Department
The neighbors are in shock; news cameras peek and see -
But let the children play outside; oh, don’t be shy
Because there is “no threat to the community”
(Four dead in a house, and no one knows why)
[Police in Orange investigating deaths of four people in home
| KFDM]
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
Each Birthday is a Step in the Right Direction - poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Each Birthday is a Step in the Right Direction
The
Road goes ever on and on,
Down
from the door where it began
-Tolkien
A birthday is not the beginning of something new
But rather part of a continuing story
From its Prologue and its Chapter One
Through the dark leaves of Mirkwood and beyond
Yes, there be dragons, more than ever, it seems
But sometimes still we glimpse magic by moonlight
Or take an ale or two at a wayside inn
Then sticks and packs again, our faces set West
If this were my last hour, I still could say
With Tollers and Jack: the Road goes ever on
Monday, January 1, 2024
Colin Cloute on the First of January - poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Colin Cloute on the
First of January
And now is come thy wynters stormy state,
Thy mantle mard, wherein thou maskedst late
-Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, “Januarye,”
23-25
The calendar year is advertised as new
But the slanting, yellowing sun is old
Almost weepy-eyed, exhausted, and weak
Beyond the icy cirrhus clouds of dusk
In a few weeks I will turn over the garden soil
A mediaeval ploughman with his electric tiller
Following the ancient seasons of the English year
Anticipating Lent and Eastertide
For now, the fireside and a comforting page
And a cuppa for warming the bones of age
On the Day Papa Benedict Died - poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
On the Day Papa
Benedict Died
This day a year ago Papa Benedict died
I heard it in a post-anaesthetic mist
Was there a TV in ICU? A radio?
Did someone say it? I don’t remember now
I knew only that Papa Benedict had died
That I was alive, and didn’t know why
Little toy cowboys rode across my mind
But in my lungs the air was sweet and cold
Papa Benedict had something to do with it
And Saint Elizabeth of Thuringen
And I am thankful
Saturday, December 30, 2023
Dropping Stuff at Midnight for the Gregorian New Year - poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Dropping Stuff at
Midnight for the Gregorian New Year
(The Julian calendar is so old that it’s a Boomer
thing)
I don’t know why people drop
things at midnight:
A ball of electric lights in New York
A single light bulb as a gag somewhere else
As The People chant in unison, “WOO! WOO!”
Maybe this year they’ll drop a flaming car
Its finely-crafted batteries on fire
Torching the holy QAnon tee-shirt stand
As foretold in the House of Representatives
(Yawn)
Couldn’t all of this wait until daylight?
I don’t know why people drop things at midnight
picture of a burning tesla public domain - Search (bing.com)
Gandhi, Churchill, and Shakespeare Wrote a New Year’s Resolution (I Mean, Like, I Read it Somewhere, Okay?)
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Gandhi, Churchill, and Shakespeare Wrote a New Year’s
Resolution
(I Mean, Like, I Read it Somewhere, Okay?)
Be the cliché-sodden, inaccurate,
and unsourced quote you always wanted to be
Tuesday, December 26, 2023
On This Feast of St. Stephen - poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
On This Feast of
St. Stephen
If Good King Wenceslaus looked down today
He might well ask in irony if we
Have adequate food for these Twelve Days
With our leftover hams and yams and rolls
Coffee and tea, chocolates from Italy
Bread loaves so yeasty they incense the air
Potatoes and puddings and plates of cheese –
Our cry is, “I couldn’t eat another bite!”
So are the gifts we left on the Jesse Tree
For some poor man are all that they might be?
Do Vladimir Putin and His Office Staff Play Secret Santa?
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Do Vladimir Putin and
His Office Staff Play Secret Santa?
Some speak of an after-Christmas letdown. And perhaps it is
true that all the weeks of expectations and demands and sometimes forced
merriment crash down into a silence on the 26th.
But Christmas truly begins at midnight on the 24th
of December and ends with the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6th of
January. In the northern hemisphere our
ancestors took those twelve winter days in feasting and celebration after the
liturgies of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
The first Monday after Epiphany was Plough / Plow Monday, beginning the
new agricultural year with farmers breaking up and turning over the soil in
anticipation of spring.
This year Christmas Day fell on Wednesday, so most Americans
return to their metaphorical plows / ploughs dark and early on Thursday
morning, but maybe while wearing a nice, new coat against the cold.
More practically, the car or pickup might be wearing a new
battery which will crank the engine without the need for jumper cables.
Most decorations remain up until Epiphany, which is exactly
right, honoring the Infant Jesus and serving as a counterpoint against the
cold, dark weather. The letdown comes when, at last, the tree and decorative angels
and wise men and Disney princesses and plastic ivy and the lights, all those
wonderful little lights, must be taken down and packed away until next year.
After the floor is vacuumed of pine needles (real or made in
China of weird chemicals) and the furniture re-arranged, the low, grey skies
outside the window remind us that winter has settled in for a long visit.
If the house is blessed with children parents are advised to
wear slippers upon arising in the mornings lest their bare feet fall upon Barbie’s
scepter or Ken’s sports car.
Christmas toys once engaged children – girls played with
their dolls (pardon me while I dodge hashtags of outrage), boys played with
their cap pistols (eeeeeek!), and living room floors and front yards were adventure
lands of cars, airplanes, push-scooters, books about Robin Hood and Gene Autry and
space cadets and Annette and her adventures, dump trucks, Barbie’s Dream Missouri
Pacific train set, trikes, bikes, wagons, footballs, basketballs, kickballs, little
green army men, little plastic cowboys and Indians, games formed up and won and
lost, and occasional tears.
Christmas toys now seem to be a matter of silent, earphoned Children
of the Corn staring dully and obediently into little glowing screens. What are
The Voices telling your children?
The season of Christmas, now mostly known as
after-Christmas, is good in its own quiet ways – social demands are fewer, the
house is quieter, there are hidden resources of chocolate to be explored, and a
good cuppa and a book by the fire is possible, where we can also meditate on
the eternal verities, such as whether bloody tyrants and their office staffs
play Secret Santa.
Peace.
-30-
Monday, December 25, 2023
Within the Octave of Christmas - poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.comm
(from several years ago)
Within the Octave of Christmas
For Eldon, Patron of Christmas Bonfires
The wan, weak winter sun has long since set
And on the edge of stars a merry fire
Sends sparks to play among the tinseled frost
That decorates the fields for Christmas-time.
Within this holy octave, happy men
Concelebrate with hops, cigars, and jokes,
This liturgy of needful merriment.
Because
The Holy Child is safe in Mary’s arms,
Saint Joseph leans upon his staff and smiles,
The shepherds now have gone to watch their sheep,
And all are safe from Herod for a time.
Our Christmas duty now is to delight
In Him who gives us joy this happy night.
Sunday, December 24, 2023
For Our Mothers on Christmas Eve - poem
(ca 2015)
Lawrence Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
For our Mothers on Christmas Eve
Beyond all other nights, on this strange Night,
A strangers’ Star, a silent, seeking Star,
Helps set the wreckage of our souls aright:
It leads us to a stable door ajar
And we are not alone in peeking in:
An ox, an ass, a lamb, some shepherds, too -
Bright Star without; a brighter Light within
We children see the Truth three Wise Men knew
For we are children there in Bethlehem
Soft-shivering in that winter long ago
We watch and listen there, in star-light dim,
In cold Judea, in a soft, soft snow
The Stable and the Star, yes, we believe:
Our mothers sing us there each Christmas Eve
Saturday, December 23, 2023
The Stable is Wherever You Are on Christmas - poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
In the Stable on
Christmas Eve
For Tod and Max
My friend prays at the Stable each Christmas Eve
In statio at St. Michael’s, waiting for the Light
(But indolent half-pagan that I am
I want an early bed on any night)
This year the Stable must be a room at home
A candle, a
creche, a plastic ox and lamb
A very real
dog who might speak at midnight
And coffee and
quiet remembrances with Max
Wherever we must wait for Jesus to be born
There is the Stable, and then the happiest morn
The Rural Electric Co-Op's Giant Christmas Tree
(from 2020)
Lawrence Hall
The Rural Electric Co-Op’s Giant Christmas Tree
Christmas trees are a delight to a child, and when a man is old and can be a child again, even more delightful.
Our family’s farm was about three miles from town. We lived in what would now be called situational poverty, but most folks in the county were worse off. Some kids got bicycles for Christmas, for us it was socks and cap pistols and little tinplate toy trucks, and for many there was almost nothing. The post-war prosperity boom bypassed most of East Texas.
A few weeks before Christmas each year Father took us boys into the woods next to our land for the adventure of cutting the Christmas tree. In our informal squirrel hunts in the autumn we had scouted out likely trees, and now returned for the best of them, almost always a pine. Finding it, cutting it down with the hatchet, and dragging it back to the house through the chill was a great adventure to be savored then and savored now in the remembrance.
Father stood the tree in a bucket of wet sand and anchored it with fishing line. He and Mother strung the big Noma™ lights and hung the precious glass ornaments, and then we children were at last given a box of tinsel each and permitted to fling the bright strands any way we wanted. What a mess! I realize now that after we went to bed Mother discreetly arranged the tinsel a little more artistically.
Farms in our school readers and in the movies were always bright and cheerful places, with happy cows and happy pigs living peaceful lives of prelapsarian fellowship. In reality a farm, especially in the winter, is brown and grey and mucky and smelly, and after their years of loyal service cows are prodded into a trailer, bellowing in fear, to be driven away to the slaughterhouse. Good ol’ Bessie, whom you raised from a calf, is now lunch.
Life on a farm is often grim.
Thus, a little pine strung with multi-colored lights and little figures and globes brought out once a year was magic.
Another magic Christmas tree was the huge one the local electric co-op built each year by stringing lights on their tall radio mast – tall enough to have red lights all year round lest the town doctor fly his airplane into it.
For weeks the far-away tree shone across the dark, frosty fields. A child imagined it to be a magic place, maybe even the North Pole itself.
Now the tower is gone, replaced by cell ‘phones and more modern radios, and the co-op decorates only a little tree out in front of the drive-by window. Still, it’s a Christmas tree, and good enough.
For Christmas the co-op gives employees, retirees, trustees, and others ham for Christmas. Because I serve on the scholarship committee I get a ham, which is not a Christmas tree but then you can’t eat a Christmas tree.
Scholarships for graduating seniors, Christmas hams for some, electricity for all, a giving opportunity for helping with the bills of the poor, and a pretty good Christmas tree out front. What a wonderful institution our Rural Electric Co-Op is!
-30-
Friday, December 22, 2023
Toy Trains, Grandmother's Good China, and Children - Christmas
(From 2019)
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Toy Trains, Grandmother’s Good China, and Children
As Inspector Barnaby says in one of the Midsomer Mysteries, we can’t recover the past; that’s why it’s the past.
Childhood Christmases are often the metaphorical benchmark for our present Christmases, and that won’t do. The magic of opening a package under the tree on Christmas morning is for little children; it won’t work for us and it’s not meant to. And that’s okay. Besides, at some point in all the visiting we’re going to be privileged to watch children open their presents, and we’ll get to share a little of their magic, like a puff of pixie dust.
In the run-up to Christmas there was for over a century a little commercial magic in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, but that disappeared long ago and after this Christmas the few remaining Sears stores are going away too. Where, then, can little boys go to see the magic of toy trains running on multiple levels through a cotton-wool winter landscape? Where did they go, the tiny little people forever waiting at a rural railway station and the others walking, sawing wood, sitting by a window? Where are all the little houses and stores and barns lit by miniature grain-of-wheat light bulbs?
Young adults don’t remember walking and shopping along streets lined with shops, and their children won’t remember shopping malls.
Ordering by electrical mail is certainly efficient, but you can’t fit Santa Claus or a junior high choir into a UPS truck.
Artificial Christmas trees – bah, humbug!
One good thing about a modern Christmas is that no one seems to stage Charles Dickens’ tedious A Christmas Carol much anymore. When I was a child I always hoped someone would kick Tiny Tim’s little crutch out from under him. And maybe someone did.
I wonder when someone first said, “Christmas has become too commercialized!” Probably about 34 or 35 A.D.
How remarkable that the appearance on the dinner table of Meemaw’s “good” china, probably from Sears or Montgomery Ward, brought out only twice a year, can bring back all sorts of those childhood memories I just now cautioned you against.
On Sunday morning after Mass the teenagers assembled the Stable, and then some little children knelt before it to arrange the hay just so, and then place almost every figure – the Infant Jesus is brought on Christmas Eve – just so: Mary, Joseph, the crib, camels, oxen, shepherds, wise men first in this place and then in that, talking to each one of them about how when Christmas comes they must keep the Baby Jesus warm.
Magic.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
-30-
Thursday, December 21, 2023
Christmas Without a Tree? - very short poem
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Christmas Without
a Tree?
Not minding my own business I urged a tree
Yes, their children are gone
Yes, their children are grown
But the Christ-Child
is here
And This the Happy Morn
(from 2022)
Lawrence Hall, HSG
And This the Happy Morn
This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring
-From “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” John Milton
The Bee Lady and her helper visited the other day, bringing jars of honey to help us celebrate Advent, Christmas, and breakfast. We host some of her hives, and it is a joy to see those bees working the seasons of flowering plants and trees and sipping from the pools of fresh water we keep for them. Bees are essential for our lives, for without their industry in pollinating crops we would not eat. Flowers and honey are a happy bonus.
No one has yet messed up Advent (aka “The Christmas Season,” which it is not), and so we are spared Advent sales and Advent gifts and Advent movies and news stories babbling about The True Meaning of Advent. Advent is a season that points to the Nativity, not to itself.
But this liturgical season of quiet anticipation is blessed with quiet joys anyway: gifts of local honey, for instance, and folks sending each other homemade cookies and homemade pies and homemade rum cake. A neighbor gave us a bundle of lightered-pine kindling, now relatively rare. I’m not going to start a fire with it anytime soon; simply to smell the scent, the East Texas incense of lightered-pine is to be taken back to childhood on the farm.
Advent and Christmas are seasons in the liturgical calendar, of course, but culturally they are also seasons of remembrance. This part can go wrong because of the unreasonable expectations in our cargo-cult sub-culture. Things are nice (I’m open to a Rolex, a Leica, and a new car, okay?), but as an old saying goes, God is not at the end going to ask any of us how much our car cost. I’m a sentimentalist – I think that years from now a man or woman will remember happily a childhood doll, train, Christmas dress, fire truck, or first purse much more than expensive, look-at-how-much-I-spent, battery-powered gimcrackery that was outdated even as it was manufactured.
I have such a happy Christmas remembrance of my Uncle Bob giving us boys lengths of small, kid-size rope which he had worked into real cowboy lassos. I was never good at lassoing anything other than fence posts and my father’s deer-dog (and I got into trouble for that), but that bit of hand-worked line is the sort of memory that stays with a man in a way that expensive, plastic, made-in-Shanghai landfill cannot.
And then there was Aunt Lola’s divinity candy. And Grandmama’s teacakes. And a Christmas tree from our own patch of woods. Bing Crosby on the pickup truck radio. The Rug-Rat playing with her new Barbie in a sunlit window. Sigh.
As Mr. Milton says, the center of Christmas is “the happy morn,” but all the other joys are wonderful too.
Merry Christmas.
-30-
Mr. Krueger's Christmas
(from 2019)
Mack Hall, HSG
Mr. Krueger’s Christmas
A friend referred y’r ‘umble scrivener to a James Stewart film until now unknown to him, Mr. Krueger’s Christmas, a gift of the Mormons in 1980. Although the little movie is only 25 minutes long, it is a joy, a gift indeed.
Set in a vaguely 1950’s that perhaps never was, the story is about Willy Krueger, an elderly widower who is the custodian of an apartment building. As with the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks in the fields, Mr. Krueger’s work is humble and not much appreciated: immediately after he has swept the lobby clean for the night a tenant comes through to the elevators dragging a large Christmas tree that drops debris all over the floor.
Yeah, Merry Christmas, Mr. Krueger.
After his work is done Mr. Krueger settles in with his cat George (an allusion to It’s a Wonderful Life) to keep Christmas alone. He sets a record album of Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas music on the hi-fi.
And then, like Scrooge, he begins having dreams; unlike Scrooge, Mr. Krueger’s dreams are happy ones.
He finds himself, in his shabby old clothes, directing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and it is great fun for all, especially the choir themselves.
In another scene Mr. Krueger imagines himself in a fashionable gentlemen’s clothier being fitted for the kind of suit he could never afford for real.
And in yet another scene he follows carolers through the snowy streets, which includes a lovely set piece complete with dancers.
The carolers are real, though, and he retrieves the mittens a little girl has lost. When mother and daughter later come for the mittens, the little girl, Clarissa (an echo of Tchaikovsky’s Clara?), says to Mr. Krueger, “You hung them on the Christmas tree?”
Mr. Krueger replies, “Well, you remind me of everything good about Christmas so I just couldn't think of a better place…here you are.”
The most moving scene is when Mr. Krueger finds himself in the Stable – yes, that Stable – on the first Christmas. Of all the beings, humans and angels and animals, the only one aware of his presence is the Infant Jesus.
Mr. Krueger approaches the Child in awe and with slow steps, and hesitantly begins to speak. Mr. Krueger, through James Stewart one of the best monologues he ever filmed, thanks Jesus. Although Mr. Krueger is widowed and alone, and lives in a small basement apartment that comes with his cleaning job, he is grateful to God for everything: “As long as I can remember You've been right by my side.”
And the Child smiles at him.
Mr. Kreuger awakens back in the apartment, George the cat meows, and Mr. Krueger says, “Yeah, I guess you're right George; we better trim that tree. If we don't hurry, we'll be too late!”
The narrator concludes the film with: “‘I love you.’ That's what Christmas is all about... Clarissa said it to Mr. Krueger; Mr. Krueger said it to Jesus; and Jesus in so many ways said it to all of us.”
-30-
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