Notre Dame Restoration

The most famous Roman Catholic cathedral in Europe outside the Vatican, Notre-Dame in Paris, has been restored to its glory five years after a destructive fire that gutted the structure and risked destruction to numerous sacred items and artifacts (many if not most of which were saved).  French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to have it restored completely by the 2024 Paris Olympics or, failing that, by the end of 2024.  The restoration crews got the job done with 24 days to spare.

The cathedral looks as grand and opulent as it did when completed in 1345, and the restoration crews cleaned and unearthed architectural details and cleaned paintings of grim and dust that had long since accumulated before the fire.  Notre-Dame has more than regained its place as a house of worship designed to make you feel like you are in heaven itself, the whole point of the grandiosity of Catholic ecclesiastical architecture.

President Macron has called Notre-Dame the soul of the French nation, and he told Bill Whittaker of CBS News that the restoration project helped unite France, a country that's as bitterly divided these days as much as the United States.  He also told Whittaker that working for a common goal and recognizing what brings a nation together can be a good way to heal the divisions.

Of course, don't expect anything like this to take place in America, where the most important building in the nation, the Capitol, was crapped in during the January 6 insurrection.  What goal could we stupid Americans set to unite the country?  Certainly not restoring a Catholic cathedral, as that would violate the separation of church and state, and besides, progressives would be incensed at any public works project that gives preference toward a faith known for its patriarchy and misogyny . . . even as these same so-called progressives demand that we respect Islam.

Build a national high-speed rail network?  No, conservatives insist that's an effort to intrude on our freedom of mobility - to go where we want, when we want in our cars.  Eradicate the measles?  No, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as the incoming Health and Human Services Secretary, won't allow the necessary vaccinations.  Get money out of politics?  Don't make me chortle.  We're not likely to get behind a common cause unless the Germans invade us.

But then, the last time the Germans invaded us . . .

. . . we welcomed them with open arms.

The truth of the matter is, for all of the bad breaks France has had economically and politically, the French people know who they are and have known for over a thousand years.  Here in the United States, after nearly a quarter of a millennium,  we still have no idea who we are.  If we have a common identity at all, it's an adherence to the Constitution, which seems quaint as Trump prepares to return to power, or maybe making lots of money.  Other than that, we can't agree on anything.  It should thus come as no surprise that the French would spare no expense to rebuild in five years a masterpiece of medieval architecture dating back to the reign of Philip VI of the House of Valois, a cathedral of stone, wood and lead that has stood for eight centuries, while in United States, took well over a decade to fill the hole in the ground left by the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a pair of buildings dating back to the 1970s that were made of steel, aluminum, drywall and spray-on fireproofing held together with spit to cut costs.

Sad.

So it seems somewhat appropriate that Trump has named the money-grubbing and crooked real estate developer and pardoned felon Charles Kushner, father of Jared, as his ambassador to France.

This country needs an enema.

Notre Dame and Civilization

The devastating fire that almost completely destroyed the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris only reminds people all over the world how tragic life can be . . . except maybe most Americans.

Yes, that was a loaded statement, so bear with me.  Notre Dame was and is a monument that encapsulates everything that signifies Western civilization.  It was built to project, truth, faith, beauty, art and culture.  It's only fitting that it stands in Paris, regarded as the most beautiful city in the West, if not the world.  But it was likely built with the understanding that something constructed and furnished with such great care and attention to quality and detail, could be easily lost.  To understand civilization is to understand that, as James Howard Kunstler (expect me to quote and paraphrase him liberally here) wrote, life is tragic, everything we love is bound to be lost, and life will go on without our own selves.

Architecture defines a civilization, and the architecture of Notre Dame defines France perfectly.  So, alas, does architecture in the United States.  While our older buildings - those that have been preserved as opposed to those that were cavalierly destroyed to make way for, say, sports arena that look like giant carburetor filters - define our past, our more recent buildings define our present.  And the buildings we've been erecting for the past seven decades mostly define our tawdriness, our disrespect for tradition, and our lack of standards (qualities commonly reflected on the record charts these days).  Kunstler wrote in his 1996 book "Home From Nowhere" that Americans defy the reality of life's tragic nature - the essential building block of any civilization - by erecting buildings not worth caring about. Virtually every tract house, highway retail strip, condominium complex, and office building amplifies that apathy.  Kunstler explains it this way:

"When a hurricane blows away sixty condo clusters along the Florida Coast, nobody outside Dade County sheds a tear for what is lost, not because other Americans are heartless but because people of even modest intelligence can tell whether places are worth caring about, though perhaps they can't say why.  In the heartland, mobile home parks are commonly referred to as 'tornado bait.'  Nobody could say that about an Italian hill town and get a laugh, not even an American."

And what are we to make of the recent tornadoes that hit the American Southeast and the Midwest?  Many of the houses destroyed were poorly, shoddily built, and it could be easy to shrug off a rural shack in Mississippi or a tract house in Ohio as no big loss.  But the news reports remind us that people died in these structures, and it only serves to remind us that no matter how hard we try to deny life's tragic nature, life reminds us of how tragic it can be.

The weather system that affected the Southeast and the Midwest, by the way, produced severe thunderstorms in the Northeast, and one struck the new World Trade Center with lightning, as if to mock the idea of such a building reaching to the sky.  It only reminded me of the karma of 9/11 in that, before the Twin Towers were destroyed and before the Pentagon was hit, these buildings were derided for their inhuman gigantism and their banal architecture, yet the U.S. Capitol - one of the most beautiful buildings in the United States - survived 9/11 when passengers on another jet airliner foiled the attempt terrorist mission to destroy that building.  Imagine the even greater tragedy that would have unfolded had al-Qaeda succeeded in destroying that temple of democracy.

And Americans do get it, even if they don't know it.  Case in point: In 1989, Mead Hall, the 1836 mansion on the campus of Drew University, my alma mater, in Madison, New Jersey, was in the middle of renovations when a fire gutted the building.  Students were sad for the mansion . . . while making wisecracks about how it was too bad the fire didn't happen to the University Center, a loathed brick and cinder-block box built in 1958.  Mead Hall is still standing, the renovation having been completed in 1992.  The University Center was replaced by a new building that, likely, will sooner or later inspire the same derision that its predecessor did.  To say that it's nicer than the old building may not be saying much.  But that is the difference between buildings worth caring about and buildings not worth caring about.  We mourn what is lost when we recognize its value we laugh at the loss of what we know has no value.

And then there is what our unwillingness to deal with tragedy has done to whole places.  Our efforts to build a civilization that contradicted reality by replacing real places with perfect, sanitized simulacra of authentic human settlements - namely, cities - only led to the devaluation and destruction of most of our great urban centers.  I once mentioned the fall of Detroit, once thought of as the Paris of the Midwest, as well as the current state of Newark, outside which I live.  Our clownish efforts to deny life's tragic nature is evident in the fact that, while no one could ever make jokes about a great loss in Paris, Newark, like Detroit, is a punch line.  Notre Dame may be gone - temporarily - but Paris is still there.  In Newark, the Catholic archdiocese's Sacred Heart Cathedral is still there.  It's the city that's gone.  When Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders said the same thing about her hometown of Akron, Ohio in one of her songs, she could have been referring to virtually any city in America.     

The fire in Paris came at a sadly ironic time - the beginning of Holy Week, which celebrates Christ's martyrdom and resurrection for the redemption of humankind so that the Gates of Heaven could be reopened.  The fact that the French plan to rebuild Notre Dame is a testament to their faith not just in the promise of redemption but also their faith in culture and history, two ideas Americans are increasingly divorced from these days.  We are increasingly one of the least happy peoples in the West, looking for real connections and real life in our everyday existence but not finding it, except maybe only a simulation of it online or on TV, but our failure or unwillingness to understand the realities of life undermine that.  "All our efforts to nullify life's tragic nature have paradoxically led us into deeper unhappiness," Kunstler wrote in 1996.  "What we have done to the physical fabric of our country finally is not an illusion but a genuine tragedy.  We have come close to making civilized life impossible in the United States."

And we completed the job at the ballot box twenty years after Kunstler wrote this.

More Abortion Debate

President Obama delivered the commencement speech at the Catholic Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, yesterday, and because of his pro-choice stand on abortion and his support for stem cell research, several people opposed to the idea of him at Notre Dame acted as if the Vatican had been destroyed.

Obama delfected the criticsm, addressing the abortion issue head-on and urging people on both sides of the debate to work together on reducing unwanted pregnancies and promoting adoption. Fat chance. Both pro-choicers and pro-lifers have every reason to dig in to their respective, reflexive positions. Pro-lifers - who want to outlaw the practice of abortion in most, if not all, circumstances - can now point to a Gallup poll showing that 51 percent of all adult Americans identify themselves as pro-life for the first time since Gallup started asking that question in 1995. Right-to-lifers are, in a word, feeling their oats.

Abortion rights activists have been quick to insist that the wording of the questions encouraged such results and misinterprets them as meaning that more Americans want to criminalize abortion than keep it legal, but they can't help but feel under siege these days. After all, social liberals haven't been doing to well in courting public opinion these days. Support for gun rights is growing, too.

The abortion debate has obscured far more important debates - debates over energy policy, the solvnecy of Social Security, health care - for so long, that it's an embarrassment to this nation. Someone from Japan was once on Jim Lehrer's PBS show and pointed out that Americans wasted too much time on debating abortion - and when he did so, he was laughing. Obama can't get Americans to settle the issue once and for all, and that's no laughing matter.

By the way, there's a name for people on this continent who have chosen to settle the abortion issue and move on.

Canadians.

Happy Victoria Day. :-D