Looking down Lake Street in downtown Owego, New York
[This entry was initially posted on Nov. 9, 2021. Things in Owego might be somewhat different now, but I doubt it.]
OWEGO VILLAGE, NEW YORK is a gem of a small town.
On the lovely green banks of the Susquehanna River in Tioga County, almost a four-hour drive northwest of Manhattan, it features charming nineteenth-century houses — some ornate and stately, others modest but with character, not all in pristine condition but all on tree-lined streets with sidewalks.
My husband and I recently spent a fall day in Owego, enjoying the autumn foliage and visiting with a wonderful friend who lives there.
There’s a little downtown with shops, cafes and modest office buildings in architecturally distinctive buildings, the sort of retail district that is so rare in this age of strip malls. The library, the former school building (now transformed into apartments) and the courthouse date from pre-Communist America and exude the dignity in public service that once characterized public buildings.
Here is a photo of the opening of the J.J. Newberry five and dime store in 1958 on Lake Street in Owego. Read More »
“CONTRARY to the belief that race is only skin-deep and that all persons are essentially the same, we were now to believe that all whites are essentially wicked, the whole of American history is racist and irredeemably vicious, and all ‘BIPOCs’ are noble, superior even, and worthy of a kind of veneration. In other words, everything now is quite literally black and white. Blacks only ever fail because of whites, and whites only ever succeed because of blacks. I was horrified by the 1619 Project, the epitome of all this, and horrified that every single white liberal I’d ever known seemed utterly entranced by this nonsense.
“This was when I had a stark and sudden realization: after all the help that American society has given blacks in particular, including trillions in state and federal spending, endless affirmative action, and endless groveling praise and accommodation, blacks are in worse shape, collectively and often individually, than they have ever been. And so we seem to have reached an inflection point. Either we admit that they are simply incapable of participating in our Anglo-American civilization in the productive and creative ways that whites routinely do, or we blame whites for everything. The experiment has simply gone on for too long now, and has too obviously failed. We have to come up with some answer as to why it failed, and it’s either option A (blacks are not capable of living as we do), or option B (in spite of all evidence to the contrary, all whites are somehow secretly racists and subtly, “systemically” holding them back). Mainstream America has obviously opted for option B. And believing that one, first and fundamental lie, now it’s lies and deception all the way down.”
Our cover illustration, which depicts Dutch governor Peter Minuit’s famous purchase of Manhattan Island in 1626, is a painting by the British-American illustrator Alfred Fredericks (1853–1926). Like many paintings of its day, it contains historical anachronisms that make it an easy target for modern critics, who may reflexively condemn it as a sentimental whitewashing of the genocidal theft of Indian land.
But Fredericks’ painting reveals a more nuanced story to those who look past the hype. For one thing, the painter’s brush carefully portrays the Natives’ individuality, humanity, and dignity. Respect for the Indians and their way of life was surprisingly common amongst European-Americans in the later nineteenth century. The Scouting movement was founded on the idea that Indians were role models of bravery, intelligence, honesty and other virtues. Many thousands of Americans dedicated their careers and fortunes to the betterment of Native lives.
Moreover, the focus of the painting is the purchase of Manhattan—by mutual consent. By most definitions, a sale is the opposite of theft. It would be misleading to suggest, as many critics do, that the Natives were cynically taken advantage of when they parted with the island for twenty-four dollars worth of “trinkets.” Dutch administrators studiously recognized Native land claims as a matter of policy. To the Indians themselves, the mosquito-ridden island was of little value, whereas the “trinkets” they were offered—including textiles, metal tools and weapons—were so life changing that many tribes intentionally relocated near the coast in order to trade more easily with the newcomers. They even fought wars with other tribes in order to be closer to the Europeans and their trade goods. In any case, neither party had any conception of what the island would become 200 years later, and judgments based on hindsight miss the point entirely.
Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus, Benjamin West
“TRAVEL the length and breadth of the land, cast your eyes behind and before you, devour space and time, and you shall find nothing in the dominion of men, but what is stated here — a pain which never abates, and an increasing lamentation. And this pain, voluntarily accepted, is the measure of all greatness, because there is no greatness without sacrifice, and sacrifice is merely pain voluntarily accepted. Those whom the world calls heroes, are they who, when transfixed with a sword of pain, voluntarily accepted the pain with its sword. Those whom the Church calls saints, are they who accepted all pains, those of the spirit as well as those of the flesh. The saints are those who, when beseiged by avarice, laid aside all the treasures of the world ; who, when solicited by gluttony, remained sober; who, when burned by lust, holily accepted the combat, and were chaste ; who, when entering on the battle, were assailed by filthy thoughts, and remained pure; who rose so high by humility that they conquered pride ; who, when saddened by another’s prosperity, made such an effort, as to convert their base sadness into holy joy ; who flung to earth the ambition which raised them to the stars; who changed their idleness into diligence; who, when weighed down by sadness, gave a bill of divorce to their sadness, and rose by a generous effort to spiritual joy ; who, when enamoured of themselves, renounced their self-love for love of others, and with heroic abnegation offered their hfe for them in perfect holocaust. Read More »
“PREVARICATING and fallen man was not made for the truth, nor was truth made for prevaricating and fallen man. Between truth and human reason, after the prevarication of man, God established a lasting repugnance and an invincible repulsion. Truth has in itself the titles of its sovereignty, and does not ask leave to impose its yoke; whilst man, since he rebelled against God, does not tolerate any sovereignty but his own, unless it first ask his leave and assent. Hence, when the truth comes within sight, he immediately begins to deny it, and to deny it is to affirm himself in quality of independent sovereign.
“… [B]etween human reason and the absurd there is a secret affinity and a close relationship. Sin has united them with the bond of indissoluble matrimony. The absurd triumphs over man precisely because it is devoid of all rights anterior and superior to human reason. Man accepts it precisely because it comes naked; because, being devoid of rights, it has no pretensions. His will accepts it because it is the offspring of his understanding, and his understanding takes delight in it, because it is its own offspring, its own verbum, because it is a living testimony of its creative power.”
— Juan Donoso Cortés, Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism – Considered in Their Fundamental Principles (M. H. Gill & Son, 1879)
FROM the autobiographical account of Gus Feaster, a former slave from Union County, South Carolina, included in interviews with the Federal Slave Narratives Project:
At night when the meeting done busted till next day was when the darkies really did have they freedom of spirit. As the wagon be creeping along in the late hours of moonlight, the darkies would raise a tune. Then the air be filled with the sweetest tune as us rid on home and sung all the old hymns that us loved. It was always some big black nigger with a deep bass voice like a frog that’d start up the tune. Then the other mens jine in, followed up by the fine little voices of the gals and the cracked voices of the old womens and the grannies. When us reach near the big house us soften down to a deep hum that the missus like! Sometimes she hist up the window and tell us sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” for her and the visiting guests. That all us want to hear. Us open up, and the niggers near the big house that hadn’t been to church would wake up and come out to the cabin door and jine in the refrain. From that we’d swing on into all the old spirituals that us love so well and that us knowed how to sing. Missus often ‘low that her darkies could sing with heaven’s inspiration.
PRIMITIVE tribes in centuries past sometimes traded highly valuable possessions for mere trinkets. Europeans bought lustrous mink and beaver furs from the Indians for the price of glass beads and Africans sold men, women and children for barrels of rum.
Something analogous was going on the other day when ‘Pope’ Francis invited Buddhist monks to pray over him at the Vatican.
Here, the Emperor of the New World Religion traded, as he so often has, the unspeakable grandeur of Catholicism — which he flatly rejects — for mere trinkets.
When I compare Buddhist prayers to shards of glass and barrels of intoxicating liquors imported from foreign lands, I don’t deny that Buddhism contains beauty and truth. The Buddhist understanding of detachment from earthly things and the primacy of the spiritual are glimpses of the divine. It is not surprising that seekers in the wilderness of the modern world are attracted to them. But as a whole — and theology, like water, must be drunk in its entirety — Buddhist philosophy is falsehood, deception and perdition. Buddhism is mutilated Catholicism, a weak and ultimately unsatisfying imposter. Buddhist monks are at best well-meaning imitators of the asceticism of St. Benedict and St Francis.
I once had a friend who was a Darwinist, dogmatically and fervently so. Later in life, he apparently grasped the spiritual void in his supposedly scientific beliefs, but he didn’t abandon Darwinism and its superstitions. He added Buddhism to them. Every day, he placed his fanny on a cushion on the floor and worshiped nothingness. This embrace of the absolute had the appearance of humility. But how proud it was! After all, it wasn’t that his scientific friends would reject him for being “religious.” Buddhism is cool and acceptable among the fashionably scientific, those who want to sip from the cup of the divine, partly because it asks so little. Its sparkling shards of glass and refreshing, intoxicating highs will not impose or discomfort. The darkness of sin is overlooked.
I’ve always wondered — what do Buddhists do if an earthquake or something similar happens? I mean, you can’t meditate at that critical moment, can you? But you can’t pray either. Buddhists have traded God for nothingness. They have abandoned true conversation with the divine. How terribly lonely that must be, especially in an emergency. What will they do when with a glorious onrush Christ appears on his throne of cherubim and seraphim? Will they close their eyes and meditate? All Buddhist countries are dying. There is no compelling reason to reproduce when nothingness reigns.
I once met an older couple, born and raised as Catholics before the Revolution, who spoke glowingly of their son’s travels to the East to further his studies in “mindfulness.” They were similar in their gullibility to the Lenni Lenape or the Yoruba when they gaped with fascination at the exotic trinkets of the White Man.
Francis, himself the hobbling emperor of a false utopian dream, seeks Buddhist prayers, as if there is such a thing. His act has the appearance of charity and open-heartedness. But it is cold, calculating and even mercenary. He has always been more the salesman than the shepherd. The Buddhists of the world will not be drawn any closer to the heights of truth by Francis’s odd sales pitch. They will be confirmed in their multiple errors and absolute madness. They have been abandoned in the wilderness by the supposed Vicar of Christ without food or drink. Francis, ever uncharitable to stray souls, encounters them in the desert and, as if vast gifts and life-giving nourishment were not readily at his disposal, passes them by.
Luke 1. 41: “When Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary,
the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost.”
Take not your eyes from the light of this star if you would not be overwhelmed by the waves; if the storms of temptation arise, if you are thrown upon the rocks of affliction, look to the star, invoke Mary. Are you confounded at the enormity of your sins, are you ashamed at the defilement of your conscience, are you terrified on account of the dreadful judgment, so that you begin to be overpowered by sadness, or even to sink into the abyss of despair, then turn your thoughts to Mary.
In dangers, in distress, in doubt, call on Mary. She will not be far from your mouth, or your heart; and that you may obtain her intercession omit not to imitate her conduct. When you follow her, you will not go astray; when you invoke her, you will no longer be in doubt; when she supports you, you will not fall; when she leads you, you will surely come to eternal life, and will find by your own experience that she is justly called Maria-that is, Star of the Sea.”
J.W. FOWLER in Coahoma County, Mississippi recorded the following instructions to overseers on his cotton plantation, where he employed about 80 slaves in the mid-19th century (Annals of America, Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 8; pp. 478-479):
The health, happiness, good discipline and obedience; good, sufficient, and comfortable clothing; a sufficiency of food being indispensably necessary to successful planting, as well as reasonable dividends for the amount of capital invested, without saying anything about the master’s duty to his dependents, to himself and his God, I do hereby establish the following rules and regulations for the management of my plantation:
Punishment must never be cruel or abusive, for it is absolutely mean and unmanly to whip a Negro from mere passion or malice, and any man who can do this is entirely unworthy and unfit to have control of either man or beast.
My Negroes are permitted to come to me with their complaints and grievances, and in no instance shall they be punished for so doing. On examination, should I find they have been cruelly treated, it shall be considered a good and sufficient cause for the immediate discharge of the overseer.
Prove and show by your conduct toward the Negroes that you feel a kind and considerate regard for them. Never cruelly punish or overwork them, never require them to do what they cannot reasonably accomplish or otherwise abuse them, but seek to render their situation as comfortable as possible.
See that their necessities are supplied, that their food and clothing be good and sufficient, their houses comfortable, and be kind and attentive to them in sickness and old age. See that the Negroes are regularly fed and that their food be wholesome, nutritious, and well-cooked. See to it that you attend to everything that conduces to their health and happiness.
The other day I chanced to meet
An angry man upon the street —
A man of wrath, a man of war,
A man who truculently bore
Over his shoulder, like a lance,
A banner labeled “Tolerance.”
And when I asked him why he strode
Thus scowling down the human road,
Scowling, he answered, “I am he
Who champions total liberty —
Intolerance being, ma’am, a state
No tolerant man can tolerate.
“When I meet rogues,” he cried, “who choose
To cherish oppositional views,
Lady, like this, and in this manner,
I lay about me with my banner
Till they cry mercy, ma’am.” His blows
Rained proudly on prospective foes.
Fearful, I turned and left him there
Still muttering, as he thrashed the air,
“Let the Intolerant beware!”
“THE slave trade, although it has been somewhat diminished, is still carried on by numerous Christians. Therefore, desiring to remove such a great shame from all Christian peoples . . . and walking in the footsteps of Our Predecessors, We, by apostolic authority, warn and strongly exhort in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to bother unjustly, despoil of their possessions, or reduce to slavery (in servitutem redigere) Indians, Blacks or other such peoples. Nor are they to lend aid and favor to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not humans but rather mere animals, having been brought into slavery in no matter what way, are, without any distinction and contrary to the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold and sometimes given over to the hardest labor.”
— In Supremo Apostolatus, Apostolic Letter of Pope Gregory XVI, promulgated on December 3, 1839
“AT THE period of Jesus’ coming upon this earth, man had forgotten how to love, for he had forgotten what true beauty was. His heart of flesh seemed to him as a sort of excuse for his false love of false goods: his heart was but an outlet, whereby his soul could stray from heavenly things to the husks of earth, there to waste his power and his substance. To this material world, which the soul of man was intended to make subserve its Maker’s glory,— to this world, which, by a sad perversion, kept man’s soul a slave to his senses and passions, —the Holy Ghost sent a marvelous power, which, like a resistless lever, would replace the world in its right position:—it was the sacred Heart of Jesus; a Heart of flesh, like that of other human beings, from whose created throbbings there would ascend to the eternal Father an expression of love, which would be an homage infinitely pleasing to the infinite Majesty, because there was in that love of that human Heart the dignity of its union with the Word. It is a harp of sweetest melody, that is ever vibrating under the touch of the Spirit of Love; it gathers up into its own music the music of all creation, whose imperfections it corrects, and supplies its deficiencies, and tunes all discordant voices into unity, and so offers to the glorious Trinity a hymn of perfect praise. The Trinity finds its delight in this Heart. It is the one only organum, as St. Gertrude calls it (Legatus divinæ pietatis; lib. ii. c. 23; lib. iii. c. 25.), the one only instrument which finds acceptance with the Most High. Through it must pass all the inflamed praises of the burning Seraphim, just as must do the humble homage paid to its God by inanimate creation. By it alone are to come upon this world the favors of heaven. It is the mystic ladder between man and God, the channel of all graces, the way whereby man ascends to God and God descends to man.”
But as your worke is woven all above,/with woodbynd flowers and fragrant Eglantine:/so sweet your prison you in time shall prove,/with many deare delights bedecked fine.
- Edmund Spenser, Amoretti (71.9-12)
“We must remember that if all the manifestly good men were on one side and all the manifestly bad men on the other, there would be no danger of anyone, least of all the elect, being deceived by lying wonders. It is the good men, good once, we must hope good still, who are to do the work of Anti-Christ and so sadly to crucify the Lord afresh…. Bear in mind this feature of the last days, that this deceitfulness arises from good men being on the wrong side.”
----Fr. Frederick Faber, 1861
