One Moment in Time

“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?”

“Over a hell, conceivably.  There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation.  Most of them are private.”

Those words echo in my thoughts as we approach the building.  Turner School, built in 1898, is no Balgrummo Lodging, the Scottish manor house that is the setting of Russell Kirk’s Lord of the Hollow Dark, and not simply because the massive brick-and-stone structure sits right in the heart of Rockford, Illinois, about as far geographically and culturally as you can get from the suburbs of Edinburgh.

Still, as I draw near to the building for the first time, the words play over and over again in my mind.  For in Turner School, as in Balgrummo Lodging, unspeakable horrors—indeed, ritual murders—have taken place, and the closer we come, the more strongly I feel the possibility of unavenged souls trapped in the place of their bodies’ destruction—and the souls of some of their destroyers as well, returned here, years later, to the site of their sin.  If there is such a thing as a Hell on earth (and theologians as late as St. Alphonsus Ligouri have argued that Hell is, indeed, a physical place), Turner School, I can have no doubt, is one.

Over the past eight-and-a-half years, I have passed by here countless times, but always in a car.  Driving down Broadway, headed to a bookstore or restaurant, you cannot help but shudder as you pass, if you know what Turner School has become.  The moment, however, passes quickly, aided by the speed of Dr. Kirk’s “mechanical Jacobin.”  Only approaching by foot, and with the intent of being here, does the full weight of this place come to bear.

For Turner School is no longer a school but a victim, like the children it used to house, of America’s 50-year-long failed “experiment” in school desegregation.  Rockford suffered for 13 years (from 1989 to 2002) under a federal desegregation lawsuit whose educational and social effects will be felt for decades to come and which may, in fact, have destroyed this town.  And Turner School was there at the beginning, closed by the Rockford School Board in 1978 after parents, led by the courageous David Strommer (later, in the 1990’s, a school-board member and one of the fiercest opponents of desegregation, school consolidation, and judicial taxation), rose up against a plan to bus students from Turner to other schools to satisfy state “integration” guidelines.  In the end, the board decided it was simply easier to force the issue by shuttering the school and scattering the children to the wind.

In doing so, the board not only sacrificed the students then at Turner School to the gods of “progress” and “diversity” but offered up future generations to something even worse: The building now houses the Northern Illinois Women’s Clinic (N.I.W.C.), the euphemistic name attached to Rockford’s only abortuary.

Partisans of state-sanctioned murder, such as Planned Parenthood, like to portray the “procedure” as “safe” and “clinical,” performed as an “outpatient service” in “modern facilities.”  Fort Turner (as its owner, Wayne Webster, refers to the decommissioned school) gives the lie to the glowing description.

In the pro-death mythology, thousands of women died every year in back alleys across America until an “enlightened” Supreme Court, in 1973, overturned the laws of all 50 states regulating the barbaric “procedure.”  From the outside, however, Fort Turner has much in common with the alley to its east, where, as we walk down it, Aaron Wolf finds tattered porn magazines and empty liquor bottles.  The horrifying thought crosses both of our minds: Are children being conceived out here, only to be butchered inside?  At the very least, it seems likely that less “respectable” partisans of death—less respectable, that is, than politicians and doctors—may get a sick thrill from performing their own ritual acts so close to the gates of Hell, where even the mulberry trees in the fencerow refuse to bear fruit.

While the 50,000 or more children he has murdered over the past 30 years will never have names by which they can be remembered, the butcher of Fort Turner, “Dr.” Richard Ragsdale (I refuse to use his title without the inverted commas), will go down in history for his “contribution” to “a woman’s right to choose.”  Showing exquisite care for his “patients,” Ragsdale filed suit in 1988 to overturn an Illinois law that required “clinics” like N.I.W.C. to have operating rooms that meet hospital standards.  (Ragsdale was already operating out of Fort Turner by that point.)  Turnock v. Ragsdale, scheduled to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court on December 5, 1989, was expected to provide the Court with an opportunity to revisit Roe v. Wade (or at least to clarify questions raised earlier that year in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services).  On November 22, however, the case was settled out of court, when the state of Illinois agreed to create a new class of lightly regulated abortion “clinics” (that just happened to include Ragsdale’s chamber of horrors at Fort Turner) and guaranteed the “right” to an abortion with essentially no restraints through the 18th week of pregnancy.

“Dr.” Ragsdale has privileges at two of the hospitals in town, SwedishAmerican and Rockford Memorial.  (St. Anthony’s does not let him in the door.)  As we walk back up the alley to Broadway and the front of Fort Turner, I wonder: Do any members of the board of either hospital ever pass by here?  If so, what do they think of the rubber chickens hanging in the gable windows, Wayne Webster’s sick slap at the pro-lifers who meet out on the sidewalk every week to pray?  Or the signs in other windows: “What the Hell You Looking Up Here For?”; “PROTECTED BY MR. SMITH & MR. WESSON”; and, just to show his concern for his tenant’s “patients,” “BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS AND WILD WOMEN”?  (Previous signs were even worse: “Jesus loves these braindead a--holes,” “These Bible-thumpers suffer from lack-o-nookie,” “Free coat hangers to picketer’s wives and mothers,” “God bless these horny old sweat-hogs.”)  Or the mocking little shrine Webster has created of items—a crucifix, a nun doll, a picture of Pope John Paul II—left behind by pro-lifers?  Do they know that Webster’s own son went to Turner School, where now 25 to 70 children are slaughtered every week?  Do they even care?

The answer is obvious.  The “pro-life” Republican candidate for mayor in 2001, Denny Johnson, sits on the board of SwedishAmerican.  When I questioned him on a radio talk show during the campaign, he gave the standard dodge—Ragsdale doesn’t perform abortions in our hospital—and dismissed my suggestion that he take a pledge that, as mayor, he would use zoning regulations to close down Fort Turner.  (The idea, he admitted, had never even crossed his mind.)

Webster and Ragsdale are both living proof that abortion is not simply a “service” that someone can “provide” while being otherwise normal and well adjusted.  Webster has confronted pro-lifers outside of Fort Turner wearing a devil costume; he once hired someone to pass out helium-filled condoms to pro-lifers’ children.  On killing days, he broadcasts loud music and other sounds from loudspeakers mounted on the outside of the building, to drown out the voices of the faithful praying the rosary.  Ragsdale and his wife, Debbie DeMars, were charged in September 1994 with four counts of producing and distributing child pornography, after they took film to a local developer that included pictures of their three-year-old foster daughter in suggestive poses, wearing a black-lace thong, with her genitals exposed.  When Ragsdale and his lawyer claimed that the charges were politically motivated, Winnebago County’s Republican “pro-life” state’s attorney, Paul Logli, quickly cut a deal in which, in exchange for the charges being dropped, DeMars signed a statement admitting that the photos “were of an inappropriate nature and could constitute a violation of state law.”  (If the photos “could constitute a violation of state law,” isn’t it the duty of the state’s attorney to prosecute?)  State child-protection services apparently regarded the situation more seriously than Logli did: The girl was removed from the home and never returned to Ragsdale and DeMars.

Walking down the sidewalk on Broadway, I understand clearly for the first time the deepest dimensions of this battle.  If they knew where the gates of Hell were, would the faithful not keep constant vigil outside, offering—as in a scene from a medieval fresco—rosaries as lifelines to those being dragged down into the pit by leering demons?  And these doors—once the girls’ entrance to Turner School—are truly a gate to Hell.

Most pro-lifers speak reflexively of abortion as “the destruction of innocent human life.”  Would that it were.  Looking at the doors, I begin to understand the frustration and the horror that must have overwhelmed Fr. John Earl when, in September 2000, he smashed his car into Fort Turner and set about destroying the inside with an ax, before Webster, who lives in his house of horrors, convinced him to stop by firing two shotgun blasts into the wall.  For Father Earl remembers the words of the Psalmist: “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”  The children sacrificed on Richard Ragsdale’s altar of progress bear no personal guilt, but they have inherited Adam’s sin.  That is why abortion is perhaps the most perfect weapon Satan has ever devised: Deprived of Baptism, the souls of these children may never find true rest.  That—more so than the death and destruction of the body—is the true horror of the act.

Father Earl, by his reception of Holy Orders, is an alter Christus, and perhaps he thought he was acting as such.  Some acts in salvation history, however, are only to be performed once, and Christ Himself descended into Hell, throwing the gates wide.  Our struggles are out in this world, not inside the doors of Fort Turner.

Some abortionists undoubtedly understand what they accomplish when they destroy an unborn child; does Richard Ragsdale understand as well?  We can only pray that he does, because then there is the possibility that his victims are, in some sense, martyrs, and that their souls may thus find rest.

In Kirk’s novel, 12 disciples gather at Balgrummo Lodging, where their leader, Apollinax, promises to grant them a “Timeless Moment”—an experience to be gained through the murder of a mother and her fatherless child.  In the midst of their act of depravity, Apollinax arranges for them, too, to die; and he knows that he will have created the only kind of Timeless Moment man can gain through his actions alone: the inverse of the Beatific Vision; an eternity in Hell.

Confused and beguiled by the lies of the god of progress, the prince of this world, the women who enter the gates of this hell, if they emerge again, may, in time and through the prayers of the faithful, come to recognize and—more importantly—repent of their sin.  And, in time, Richard Ragsdale and Wayne Webster will pass on, and Fort Turner may once again lie vacant, except for those souls trapped in a Timeless Moment within its walls—and possibly those other souls who, having repented, are graciously granted the ability, after their death, to continue, in time, to work out their salvation with fear and trembling.

“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?”

“Over a hell, conceivably.  There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation.”

First published in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

For the Children

“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department.  But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High School as he had on so many other mornings.  And so Harlan Drake stopped his car, pulled a .45 out of a bag, carefully took aim, and shot Pouillon.  “He was still moving so I shot him one more time.  I aimed under the ribcage going up toward the heart.”

Alana Beamish, who had just dropped her son off at school, attempted to save Pouillon’s life, but it was too late.  The 63-year-old died on the ground.

Drake murdered another man, Mike Fuoss, that day, and went in search of a third, James Howe, intending to kill him, too.  Caught a few hours later, Drake told Detective Sergeant Shenk that “he was going to make our job very easy.”  He confessed to both murders, and from then until his trial ended in a guilty verdict on March 11, Harlan Drake expressed no remorse.

Mike Fuoss’s name was little more than a footnote in most media coverage of that fateful day in Owosso, Michigan.  It was the murder of Pouillon that captured the nation’s attention.  As Drake told Detective Sergeant Shenk, “I asked [Pouillon] over the years not to do that in front of the kids.  A little kid shouldn’t have to look at that.”

Was Pouillon a pervert, an exhibitionist?  No: Through his decades-long stakeout at Owosso High School and numerous other places throughout the city and county, Pouillon intended not to victimize children but to save them from the horrors of abortion.  Harlan Drake claimed that he had no problem with that message; it was the medium that Pouillon used that convinced Drake to put an end to Pouillon’s life: “I’m not against anti-abortion.  I’m against showing little kids those pictures.”

Those pictures were three- and four-foot-high graphic photographs of bloodied, dismembered unborn children—the “product” of abortions.  Drake wasn’t the only resident of Owosso who objected to Pouillon’s tactics.  In a community that is largely pro-life, Pouillon found few defenders.  Why?  Because, as the Associated Press reported on February 23, Pouillon “was everywhere—the farmers market, City Hall, the county courthouse, football games—with verbal taunts that were as shocking as his signs.”

As Pouillon’s barber told the AP, “I had no problem with his message.  He was just overboard with it.  He knew how to push buttons on people, but Jim didn’t deserve to be executed on the sidewalk.”  A local woman interviewed by the AP went even further: “I don’t agree with someone taking someone’s life . . . But I don’t miss the man on the corner or his foul mouth.  He would chase you, call you names.  He was evil.  His pictures were so gross.”

One does not have to draw a moral equivalence between murder and a pro-life protest, no matter how unsettling the tactics used, to see a disturbing parallel between the two men.  Their shared conviction that extreme measures are justified “for the sake of the children” left one man dead and the other in prison for life.  But what, in the end, did either man accomplish?

Those of us who oppose abortion and support pro-life measures need not give Harlan Drake a second thought, except perhaps to utter a prayer for his conversion.  But can we learn any lessons from James Pouillon’s tragic end?

The images that Pouillon used are being increasingly adopted by pro-lifers—a sign, perhaps, of desperation, as the years since Roe v. Wade continue to tick by, with only minor and occasional declines in the number of abortions in the United States, from 1.4 million to 1.2 million per year, every year, for over 37 years.

Thus the excitement in the pro-life movement in early October 2009 when the New York Times published an article on its Lens blog by reporter Damien Cave, who had covered the murder of Pouillon and attended his memorial service in Owosso.  “Behind the Scenes: Picturing Fetal Remains” is the first serious and extended examination in the mainstream media of the use of such images in pro-life protests.

Cave interviewed Monica Migliorino Miller, the director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society and a theology professor at Madonna University, a Franciscan school in Livonia, Michigan.  Mrs. Miller estimates that half of the images of aborted children that are used in pro-life protests are pictures that she took, starting in 1987.

What is most interesting about Mrs. Miller’s story is her understanding of what she hoped to accomplish.  From the beginning, she told Mr. Cave, her purpose was “journalistic”: “We felt it was very important to make a record of the reality of abortion.”

Yet “Over time,” Cave writes,

her views on which images are appropriate have evolved.  She no longer sees gory pictures showing blood or organs as acceptable.  She has tried harder to shoot younger fetuses, because that’s when most abortions take place, and she said she also believes that the most graphic images should not be deliberately directed at children because “they can’t intellectualize what they’re seeing.”

And yet an increasing number of pro-lifers who use such images justify deliberately targeting children by arguing that it is too late for adults (we have already made up our minds about abortion), while children are (as one put it) “not yet in that horrible fog.”  And some even defend the use of such images by attacking the moral character of teenagers en masse.  Because some teenagers engage in premarital sex, and some portion of those who do have sex get pregnant, and some portion of those who do get pregnant have abortions, all children—including those who would not have an abortion if they were to get pregnant from the sex that they are not having—should be exposed to these terrifying sights.

As parents, we have an obligation to protect our children from the violence of abortion.  But confronting them with such images accomplishes exactly the opposite: It draws them into the reality of abortion in a way that can do great damage to developing minds and souls.

For her second thoughts, Mrs. Miller is now being criticized by some of those who have used her pictures the longest.  Flip Benham, director of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America, told Cave that Mrs. Miller’s current stance is “a nice sentimental argument.  What’s important is truth to us; that this is the truth.”

There is something to be learned from the difference in the language that Mrs. Miller and Mr. Benham use.  Perhaps it can be ascribed to Mrs. Miller’s training in theology, but her description of her photos as a “record of the reality of abortion” is accurate, while Mr. Benham’s claim that “this is the truth” is not.

This is not a mere semantic quibble.  In the modern world, we often use the word truth as if it were synonymous with reality, but in Christian theology, as in classical philosophy, truth has a more limited, and more elevated, meaning.  Abortion, by definition, is untruth; it is the destruction of the truth of human nature and of the created order.  It is a direct assault not only on the child who is being torn apart, limb from limb, but on the God Who declared to the prophet Jeremiah, in that verse so familiar to pro-lifers, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5, RSV).

What happens when we dwell on untruth, when we constantly expose ourselves and others to it, even with the best of intentions?  We become inured to the reality of that untruth.  The shock and the horror that we experienced when first confronted with pictures of aborted children dissipate; we need even more graphic images in order to excite the same feelings of revulsion.

We can see this in an anecdotal way in a picture that the New York Times ran alongside a front-page story, also by Mr. Cave, in the October 9, 2009, print edition.  At a prayer vigil for Mr. Pouillon in Owosso in September, in front of a camper plastered with signs that read “Mommy, why do they want to kill me?” and “Abortion=Murder: The same by any name,” several young girls stand talking.  One, a pretty blond-haired girl perhaps 10 or 12 years old, has a broad smile on her face—while a foot or so behind her hangs a four- or five-foot image of a bloodied, mangled baby on a white sheet stained with more blood.

Mrs. Miller is right: “[T]hey can’t intellectualize what they’re seeing.”  What they can do, what they will do, is compartmentalize it, become desensitized, confuse the reality of evil with truth.

That very confusion today afflicts the broader pro-life movement—even those who would never dream of using these graphic photos.  Abortion has become a moral “issue”; a political “question”; a cultural “problem” to be solved.  It has taken on a life of its own, separate from Christian teaching.  Indeed, when pro-abortion zealots claim that opposition to abortion is simply an attempt to impose Christian morality, the usual response of Christian pro-lifers today is to point to Jewish and Muslim and even atheist pro-lifers, to declare that abortion is a matter of “civil rights” or “human rights,” to compare it to slavery and point out that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s niece is a pro-lifer, to decry the unequal impact that abortion for sex selection has on unborn baby girls and to argue that any true feminist must, for that reason alone, be pro-life.

What few will do is simply say, “Yes.  And what of it?”  At the time of Christ, both chemical and mechanical abortion were practiced in the Roman world; by the time that Constantine the Great issued the Edict of Milan, and for well over a millennium afterward in the Western world, such practices were shunned.  How did that change come about?  Through graphic representations of Flip Benham’s “truth” of abortion?  By petitioning the Roman Senate to outlaw such practices?  No: It occurred through the widespread conversion of Romans to Christianity.

The Didache, the first-century document known to early Christians as the teaching of the Twelve Apostles, declared that “There are two Ways, one of Life and one of Death”; those who would follow the Way of Life that Christian converts had embraced “shall not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide.”  Why?  Because such practices violate “universal human rights”?  Because they are akin to the slavery that was commonplace in the ancient world?  Because they make women no more than sex objects for men?

No.  Such actions were to be avoided because they are the Way of Death, not of Life; they are untruth, and thus opposed to the Truth that will set us free.

Some may object that the civil-rights and human-rights and slavery and feminism arguments carry weight today, while Christianity does not.  How can we expect to win the fight against abortion if we cannot even get people to listen to us?

But what exactly is it that we are fighting against?  Better yet, what exactly is it that we are fighting for?  Abortion is not simply a cause of our civilizational decline, though it is that; more importantly, it is a symptom—a symptom, first and foremost, of the increasing destruction of Christianity from within.

In Casti connubii, his 1930 encyclical on Christian marriage, Pope Pius XI speaks of the proper role of the state in upholding the teachings of the Church, but he never loses sight of the fact that “the family is more sacred than the State and that men are begotten not for the earth and for time, but for Heaven and eternity.”  That is why there can never be a purely political solution to a cultural problem; if we put our trust in princes who have forgotten that God is the source of their authority, then our trust is likely to be betrayed when the teachings of the Faith threaten to bridle their passion for political power.

The solution is for the Church to play the role that She played in the conversion of the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages.  As Pius XI writes,

For the preservation of the moral order neither the laws and sanctions of the temporal power are sufficient, nor is the beauty of virtue and the expounding of its necessity.  Religious authority must enter in to enlighten the mind, to direct the will, and to strengthen human frailty by the assistance of divine grace.  Such an authority is found nowhere save in the Church instituted by Christ the Lord.

But surely the hour is too late; the day is too dark; we cannot spare the time necessary to convert the masses.  Every year, 1.3 million children are murdered; are we simply to throw them to the wolves?

Of course not.  But our time and attention are necessarily limited, and we need to focus on preventing abortions where they actually occur—not in the halls of Congress, or the Oval Office, or the chamber of the Supreme Court, but in the abortuaries and hospitals of our hometowns.

The unabashedly Christian 40 Days for Life campaign, held in towns and cities across the United States the past three Lenten seasons, is a perfect example of the kind of pro-life action that can and does make a difference.  Volunteers take turns holding vigil, praying the rosary and offering other prayers of intercession for the women entering the abortuaries, the men who brought them there, the children whose lives are being snuffed out before they even see the light of day, and even the “doctors” and “nurses” who perform and assist in the act of murder.  The faithful offer sidewalk counseling, directing women who have doubts about their actions to crisis-pregnancy centers and even, in some cases, opening their own homes to frightened women and girls who thought they had nowhere else to turn.

Political measures can be undone, but every child whom we save becomes a living witness—an icon—of the love of God and a testimony that we Christians live what we preach.  Focusing on what we can accomplish, rather than on what we have failed to accomplish over the course of 37 years, will allow us to begin to turn the debate around.

Remembering that our opposition to abortion is not separate from our belief in Christ is but the first step.  Simply urging mothers to “Choose Life” will not end abortion on the mass scale that we see it practiced today; bringing them to the One Who is the Way and the Truth and the Life will.  Rome wasn’t converted in a day, and the United States will not be, either.  But she will never be converted as long as our actions lead others to believe that we value the cause of life more than the Way of Life.

On the last day of His earthly life, Christ stood before Pontius Pilate and declared, “For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.  Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.”  Beholding the Creator of the world and the Savior of mankind, His body bruised by the blows of the servants of the high priest and His face covered with their spittle, Pilate responded, “What is truth?”

The bruises and the spittle were reality, but they obscured the truth that Pilate sought.  And in the end, he sent that Truth away to be crucified—the same Truth Who, through His Resurrection, wrought the conversion of the Roman Empire and even, some traditions say, of Pontius Pilate himself.

We can end abortion in the United States in the same way that Christians ended abortion in the Roman Empire: by finding our hope in the Truth of the Gospel, rather than despairing in the reality of evil.

First published in the May 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Meet Rod Blago

As the former governor of Illinois crisscrossed the country on his farewell tour, I kept imagining him lying back in his seat, scalp being massaged by his personal hairstylist (it takes work to keep that Serbian gangster hairdo in pristine shape), while an old Mac Davis song played on an endless loop on his iPod:

O Lord, it’s hard to be humble

When you’re perfect in every way

I can’t wait to look in the mirror

’cause I get better looking each day

“Here, Bobby, hold that mirror up.  I gotta work on my smile.  Those gals on The View are gonna fall for my eyes.”

And fall they did.  Once Hot Rod’s hand was on her knee, Whoopi Goldberg could feel his pain.  A colored man just can’t get a break in the white man’s world.

In the end, though, it was Blagojevich who fell the hardest, but that wasn’t his fault, either.  Turns out that federal district attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is a regular Mr. Potter, trying to keep Milorad Bailey from helping the people of Illinois live a wonderful life.  On January 23, he explained it all to WLS’s Don Wade and Roma:

You know those old black and white movies from the 30’s and the 40’s with Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper? Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It Happened One Night and Meet John Doe and the other one is Mr. Deeds Goes to Town? How the good guy was up against the establishment, and yet they tried to make him look like he had violated rules, but he stood firm for the people because he was trying to help people in all of those movies. . . .

That’s what my story is.  It’s a Frank Capra movie.

In this 21st-century remake of It’s a Wonderful Life, the score, of course, is also by Mac Davis.

Some folks say that I’m egotistical.

Hell, I don’t even know what that means.

I guess it has something to do with the way that I

fill out my skin-tight blue jeans.

With his leather bomber jacket, those blue jeans were Governor Blagojevich’s business suit.  (Business casual was sweats and running shoes.)  Some might find that a bit down-market for the governor of the sixth-largest state in the Union, but those jeans are the uniform of the working man, and Rod Blagojevich is nothing if not true to his roots.

That’s why he voted for Ronald Reagan (twice!), he told Chicago’s morning commuters, but as a working-class Democrat

I like to see myself more as a Teddy Roosevelt kind of Republican than Richard Nixon. The guy who’s fightin’ for the average guy. And willing to, you know, be in the arena and have his face marred by dust and sweat and blood—strive valiantly and err and come short again and again. Because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who actually strives to do the deed.

With such a mastery of syntax, is it any wonder that, in conversations taped by federal investigators just days before his arrest and indictment, Governor Blagojevich still thought he might one day rise to the office then occupied by George W. Bush?

And who knows?  He might have, if not for the treacherous Potter—er, Patrick—Fitzgerald.  But once the arrest and the indictment came down, the Illinois House finally did the right thing and impeached the governor.  At that point, he had only two choices: Return to his ancestral homeland and get lost in the mountains of Montenegro, or go down fighting.

He chose to fight, but in his own special way.  Where a lesser man might actually have shown up for his impeachment trial and attempted to mount a credible defense, this son of an immigrant steel-mill worker went on every TV and radio talk show that would have him and defended himself against charges no one had leveled.

Democrats hated him because they wanted to raise taxes, and he wouldn’t let them; Republicans hated him because they wanted the Democrats to raise taxes so they could campaign on the issue.  Everybody hated him because he, like Mother Teresa, cared for the sick and the poor, especially children.  But they were all so corrupt that they would hate Mother Teresa, too, as he revealed on the Today Show: “You can conceivably bring in 15 angels and 20 saints led by Mother Teresa to come in to testify to my good character, to my integrity and all the rest.  It wouldn’t matter.”  (Why a Serb would want to be defended by an Albanian was a question that, sadly, nobody asked.)

When he finally arrived in Springfield (a rare event in his two terms as governor) and deigned to make an appearance at his own impeachment trial, his long-winded defense could be summed up in two lines: “To know me is to love me. / I must be a hell of a man.”

Well, he was half right.  So long, Hot Rod, and thanks for the nine-billion-dollar deficit. 

First published in the April 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Everything in Its Place

On December 9, 2008, as I read through the federal criminal complaint against the latest Illinois governor to be indicted for the merest portion of his crimes, I could not help but feel uneasy.  Sure, it was great fun to imagine Governor Hot Rod sweating it out in his holding cell, awaiting arraignment later in the day.  Even the most casual observer of Illinois politics knew that Milorad Blagojevich, our S.O.B., had to be corrupt.  After all, you don’t get elected governor of Illinois as a reformer if you actually are one.

The unease did not abate as Aaron Wolf and I watched a webcast later that morning of the press conference held by U.S. District Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.  The assembled reporters danced around the obvious questions, and Fitzgerald followed their lead.  What is the actual federal crime of which Blagojevich is accused?  Is there one?  Aren’t Blagojevich’s transgressions, both those named in the criminal complaint and those for which he will probably never be indicted, state matters?  Isn’t this a bit like prosecuting Al Capone for income-tax evasion, the main difference being that income-tax evasion was a federal crime, and Capone was guilty of it?

If there were an actual federal crime involved, that might be one thing; but the two counts leveled against Blagojevich stretch federal law so far as to make it meaningless.  Or, rather, they stretch it so far as to make it absolute—any crime committed by an elected official of a state, and virtually any crime committed by a mere citizen, could be covered under their penumbra.

The first count alleges that Blagojevich and John Harris, his chief of staff, “did, [sic] conspire with each other and with others to devise and participate in a scheme to defraud the State of Illinois and the people of the State of Illinois, of the honest services” of Blagojevich and Harris.  It is easy to see how this could be a state matter, but it only becomes a federal crime through a subordinate clause: “in furtherance of which the mails and interstate wire communications would be used,” in violation of various sections of Title 18 of the United States Code.

The second count alleges that the governor and his chief of staff “corruptly solicited and demanded a thing of value, namely, the firing of certain Chicago Tribune editorial members responsible for widely-circulated editorials critical of” the governor, in exchange for which they allegedly intended to provide

millions of dollars in financial assistance by the State of Illinois, including through the Illinois Finance Authority, an agency of the State of Illinois, to the Tribune Company involving the Wrigley Field baseball stadium.

This is certainly worthy of state prosecution, but why should it be considered a federal crime?  Because Blagojevich and Harris are

agents of the State of Illinois, a State government which during a one-year period, beginning January 1, 2008 and continuing to the present, received federal benefits in excess of $10,000.

In a line sure to send a chill down the spines of evangelical dispensationalists and rad-trad Catholics, this second count notes that these actions violate “Title 18, United States Code, Sections 666(a)(1)(B) and 2.”

In the end, though, the Blagojevich arrest and indictment present a more mundane, yet perhaps more far-reaching, concern than the coming of the end times and the rise of the Antichrist.  As contributing editor Clyde Wilson noted on the Chronicles website, “the idea of the FBI arresting a governor is disturbing” and “a very bad precedent.”  The U.S. Constitution has long been a dead letter; federalism exists today in name only; yet it is hard not to sense that a broader principle even than the traditions of the American political system has been violated here.

In the Catholic tradition, we call that principle subsidiarity—the idea that a larger, higher, or more centralized authority should not usurp the rightful duties and responsibilities of a smaller, lower, or decentralized one.  The framers of both the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution did not use the term, but the systems of federalism established under both documents adhered to the principle, each in its own way.

Subsidiarity is poorly understood.  Many Catholics who claim to support the principle characterize it as the idea that higher authorities should never step in unless lower authorities fail to fulfill their responsibilities.  I once had a debate with a Catholic traditionalist who argued that, under subsidiarity, overturning Roe v. Wade was not good enough, because some states would fail to protect the unborn.  Therefore, nothing short of a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution was acceptable.  Similarly, leaving the regulation of marriage to the states was out of the question, now that some states have legalized “gay marriage.”  Their failure to exercise their responsibilities in accordance with Christian teaching on marriage meant that the federal government not only could step in, but must step in.

Since vocal Catholic “defenders” of subsidiarity make such arguments, it is not surprising that another common misconception, especially among those who are skeptical of the influence of the Catholic Church on politics, is that (in the recent words of one European journalist) subsidiarity means “that the power rests at the top . . . but the power at the top will let some of it trickle down as it sees fit.”

Both sides are wrong.  The most cogent summary of the principle of subsidiarity is found in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 social encyclical, Quadragesimo anno.  Building on the work of his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, in Rerum novarum (1891), Pope Pius writes (paragraph 79):

As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations. Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.

Phrases such as “fixed and unshaken,” “gravely wrong,” “injustice,” “grave evil,” and “disturbance of right order” do not allow for a whole lot of wiggle room.  Even more important, however, is the Holy Father’s choice of verb to describe the responsibilities of subsidiary organizations: He speaks of what they “can do,” without qualification.  He does not go on to say that if they deliberately fail to do that which they can do, it is no longer “a grave evil and disturbance of right order” for a larger, higher, or more centralized authority to usurp the power that rightly belongs to a smaller, lower, or decentralized one.

This isn’t sloppiness on Pius XI’s part, nor is it a deliberate attempt to hide some dark Catholic belief that power flows from the center and is held by families and local governments and other intermediary institutions only at the whim of the centralized state, which owes its power to the Supreme Pontiff.  Rather, it is a classic statement of the traditional Christian understanding of moral and social order: There is a place for everything, and everything in its place.

The proper authorities in the state of Illinois could have handled the Blagojevich problem, as the impeachment proceedings in the Illinois General Assembly prove.  They chose not to.  And the citizens of Illinois, who could have demanded that their elected officials fulfill their sworn responsibilities to uphold the Illinois constitution, chose to look the other way, too.  Neither failure represents an inability to carry out their responsibilities, and thus neither justifies the “grave evil and disturbance of right order” of a federal intervention.

Pius XI wrote Quadragesimo anno at a time of unprecedented centralization and destruction of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” that are “the first principle . . . of public affections . . . the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind.”  Today, to quote the typically pithy assessment of Burke’s latter-day disciple Russell Kirk, the situation is “much worse.”  Subsidiarity, Pius XI saw, was the key to the return to right order, which would mean the limitation rather than the expansion of the centralized state:

When we speak of the reform of institutions, the State comes chiefly to mind, not as if universal well-being were to be expected from its activity, but because things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed “individualism” that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State. This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked associations once bore, the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.

Should Governor Hot Rod be convicted on federal charges, I won’t shed a tear for him—he deserves far worse than a few years lounging around a federal country club, with a weekly “Get Out of Jail Free” card to meet his family and political cronies on Saturday morning at a local restaurant for breakfast.  But the successful prosecution of a governor who was indicted while still in office would set, as Dr. Wilson rightly stated, a very bad precedent.

While the American constitutional order may have all but crumbled into dust, subsidiarity, as a broader principle, still stands—for the moment.  Defending it, even in—or perhaps, especially in—distasteful situations such as the strange case of Milorad Blagojevich, is the first step toward restoring a sane political order in the United States.

And think of the delicious irony if a reinvigorated federal system were to spring forth from the Land of Lincoln. 

First published in the March 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Hot Rod Lincoln

He knew that he was destined for greatness.  The son of uneducated manual laborers, immigrants to Illinois, he was never much of a student, but he would become a successful lawyer.  From a young age, though, his sights were set on political power.  Through his political connections, he got himself elected to the Illinois House of Representatives and, later, to the U.S. Congress from Illinois.  Gregarious when he wanted to be, he was known to all by his monosyllabic three-letter nickname, not his trisyllabic given name.

He was well liked by some, but despised by others.  Very few people had a neutral opinion, and even some of those who liked him and supported him in his rise to power were disturbed by his odd, self-centered behavior.  He seemed unable to show much human emotion for those around him.

Whatever else anyone might have thought of him, he was a masterful politician, attacking corruption while engaging in inside deals that helped him both politically and personally.  Unhappy with the location of the Illinois capitol, he essentially moved it to where he was living.  But his ambitions extended beyond Illinois, and he needed money and backing to fulfill his dream of rising from his modest roots to the highest office in the land.  Washington beckoned, and nothing would stand in his way.

Or, at least, that is what Gov. Milorad “Rod” Blagojevich thought right up until the phone rang at 6 A.M. on December 9, 2008, waking him at his home on Chicago’s North Side, which he had transformed into the de facto capitol of the state of Illinois.  That same phone had been his undoing, and at a press conference later that morning, federal investigators outlined a 76-page indictment filed in U.S. district court, which detailed numerous calls made to and from that phone.

In selections from the transcripts of those calls, Governor Blagojevich repeatedly instructed aides to hold up $8 million in state funds for a children’s hospital until the head of the hospital coughed up a $50,000 donation to Friends of Blagojevich; discussed using $1.8 billion in state funds as a reward to a public contractor, a road builder, if only he would raise a half-million dollars for the governor’s war chest by the end of 2008, when new campaign-finance rules would go into effect; and tried to tie state assistance to the struggling Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs, to the firing of a writer for the Tribune who had penned editorials critical of Blagojevich’s conduct as governor.

The press conference was conducted by Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who had successfully prosecuted Blagojevich’s predecessor, Republican Gov. George Ryan, on 18 counts of racketeering and fraud.  Ryan had had the good sense to decline to run for reelection as the feds closed the net about him, and so he, like felonious former Democratic governors Dan Walker and Otto Kerner, avoided indictment while still in office.

Blagojevich not only ran for reelection in 2006 knowing that he was being investigated but as late as the day before his arrest declared to reporters that investigators were free to listen to his conversations because he had nothing to hide.  Still, the transcripts showed that he was looking for a way out of the governor’s office so that he could rehabilitate his reputation—for a run for the presidency in 2016.

Milorad was probably too busy getting his trademark Serbian gangster hairdo coiffed for court that afternoon, but if he had a chance to listen to Fitzgerald’s press conference, the man who had consciously modeled himself on Honest Abe was likely cut to the bone when Fitzgerald declared, “The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.”  Of course, Rod shares more with Abe than the Brooklyn-born Fitzgerald would like to think.  The railmen who bankrolled Lincoln could teach today’s blacktop bosses of Illinois a thing or two.  And as President, Lincoln didn’t need to use financial persuasion to halt criticisms of his conduct; he could—and did—simply sign an executive order for the arrest and imprisonment of “the editors, proprietors, and publishers” of newspapers and prohibit “any further publication therefrom.”

No, if Lincoln was doing anything in his grave on December 9, 2008, he was probably thanking the God he didn’t believe in that Alexander Graham Bell hadn’t invented the telephone until 12 years after his last Good Friday.

Most of Governor Blagojevich’s transgressions were politics as usual here in the Land of Lincoln, but Fitzgerald was compelled to act when it became clear that Blago was attempting to sell Barack Obama’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder.  But what about our new President himself?  Time will tell, but some of us in Illinois could not help but chuckle when the President-elect—another politician who modeled himself on Honest Abe—announced that the centerpiece of his New New Deal would be the biggest load of asphalt since the construction of the Interstate Highway System.  One thing is certain: The appointment of outgoing Illinois congressman Ray LaHood (R-Blacktop) as transportation secretary had little to do with bipartisanship.

You can take the boy out of Illinois, but you can’t take Illinois out of the boy. 

First published in the February 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.