What Al Jolson Didn't Know

The movie Cleopatra , starring Elizabeth Taylor, was banned from Egypt in 1963 because Taylor is a Jewish convert.

with thanks to The Useless Information Society of London, England.


Told ya so!!!

mean while on the other side of the marianas trench

What do you call it when Filipino teens text?

"Phone Tagalog"

"HEE LEEFTS HEVY TINGS" said of The Great Rambozo from "The Time Bandits"

I suppose I could skip this Tuesday since I am tired and I might say something I might regret later. So here goes:

First, I was musing this morning about how so many things in my life come in clusters of three. Not in my marriage thank God but lots of other things. It does eliminate the problems involved in dualisms and of course monotherapy! We choose to segment pregnancies into three phases, first trimester, second trimester, and the third. During the first phase a DNA print is chosen and put up on the wall of the uterus. Very nice and everything matches too! At least at first. During the second trimester we find the child fully formed so there are not likely to be any major birth defects coming up in the second trimester. Said occupante just gets bigger and stronger and more and more neurons find more and more synapses and thus "the net" is formed. In the third trimester there is more of the same however things change in both the mother and child as both in parallel prepare for graduation time, which then is usually full of celebration and hoopla. The mysterious thing is that one never knows when to plan the graduation. I will for the moment ignore the mania for C-sections which are certainly not necessary 40 to over 50% of the time! There are megatons of things one could say about this but frankly I am too tired and I have to save up energy for the next paragraph.

In August I will enter my third trimester of life, having duly celebrated at least personally the passage of 2009. I might add that our son Stephen will be entering into his second trimester -- he will be 31 in less than a month and of course now he can no longer be trusted, according to us hippies. In the third trimester one does not have to worry about being trusted, but one can trust that we will be dully ignored! One does wonder about one's EDC (expected date of confinement, left over from the days when postpartum women were expected to stay in bed for a month, many of them dying of blood clots and a host of other things. Ah, Science. But now we are ever so much better than those old fools, yes?)

Obviously I am not going to be able to carry this analogy very far nor do I intend to. But my form and my format were certainly determined in my first 30 years. I was 30 years old when I first started to practice medicine. It has been my hope not to grow bigger, although most of us manage to do so. Whether I've grown stronger or wiser I will have to leave to the splendid judgment of others. But as I have said in previous posts, in the first 30 years I was pretty judgmental but did so as a Sadducee. The next 30 years I continued to be equally judgmental, this time as a religious Pharisee. So by this time I have had lots and lots of practice being partial. But I hardly think my inner child should be forging a choice between these two"alternative lifestyles".

This is the beauty of their being a third phase and a third way which, by grace, exists to eliminate the wars of resentment that battle within me. It will probably take me another 30 years to get a running start at that. And this time I intend to avoid phases I and II, not in my own strength of course which has failed me for 60 years or so; yes, it is time to grow up and grow out and prepare for graduation again.(School never ended for me.) As my wife puts it, the goal may be to become," unoffensive and unoffendable."

Of course I realize to even mention such a thing or such a goal is almost universally offensive in itself. Who do I think I am? Well that remains to be seen but I can guarantee one thing and that is, come gradation time I will never be elected," Mr. Personality," no matter how small the class! All I can really say is that it is a Scriptural principle and let it go at that.

But this brings me to a possible correlation re: "Sin is universal." Now I suppose that sounds pretty judgmental but I think it is more logical, looking at it from the third point/Person of view. I would challenge anyone to say that they can't find something wrong with the next guy.

Does anyone remember the old song, "The John Birch Society"? Joyce, you may have heard it at our house-- I think it was by the Kingston Trio or The Limelighters. In one verse it portrays two members, one of them singing, "There's only thee and me you see and I'm not sure about thee!!! I have yet to meet someone who never complains about someone else and suspends the thoughts that many if not most people continue doing something "wrong". If there is no such thing as sin, why do so many materialists attribute it to their fellow materialists, not to mention to most of the rest of the human race? "Right and wrong," as Ravi Zacharias' former opponent had to agree, "does seem to keep popping up, doesn't it?" Not everything is relative we must admit -- but we are all relatives and that is often where the trouble starts.

Now I am really tired! Aren't you?

the bands 'o brothers; or; love's laboors lost

THE SUNDAY(PM) PIGEON MASSACRE PART III my band's name in the 60's, for which I take partial responsibility-- the other comes from the preternatural malice towards city pigeons sported by Robert Benchley--also of TNY fame

As said earlier, malice is pretty hard to evade. Let s/he who is without malice be the critic..but then one is left without a motive. " When we are all guilty, that will be democracy," said Camus..maybe that time is now,,maybe it was always..but democracy is evanscent because it is unendurable. To all admit our guilt at once, and take equal responsibility as and with our neighbor..is not how we do compassion, and it certainly is not how we compete.

In Gogol's, "The Terrible Vengeance", the sorcerer cum (an) antichrist gets his in the Cossack tradition; he is denied the one thing he believes he needs and has exercised all his life: " This torment will be the most terrible for him: for there is no torment more terrible for a man than to desire revenge and be unable to get it." But it is not just the sorcerer who wants revenge;it is his ancestors and even his Orthodox victims.

In the previous scene, reminiscent of the encounter with the priest and the doctor in,"The Plague", Ivan, who is killed by his brother Petro to get Ivan's reward from King Stepan, is visited by God at the time of Petro's death. "Ivan! I will not easily find a punishment for him;you choose how he shall be punished!"

Only one problem: Ivan does so most imaginatively, and the old bandore player in the villages sings of his sad end; neither brother comes to Paradise; Ivan must be a kind of ghostrider in the sky in the grim Carpathians. He must stand over the sorcerer's grave/abyss to be sure he never escapes his torment--which is pretty bad, so, "There. I've said too much already" (Hobbes to the rescue)

The tale is somewhat of a Job's tale in reverse. Only at the end do we find what has happened in Paradise. But one can surely say, as with "I believe in malice," that such a tale, "Explains a lot, doesn't it?" But nothing explains everything; because even if we had all knowlege and wisdom bared in front of us, how would we get our little minds around it, even in the aggregate? A thousand thousand cultures only cloud the issue at hand, i.e. the "Tree of the knowledge of good and evil" which is also the source of many of our troubles. And plagues.

For I see, albeit dimly, that this knowledge is not a body of it; Strange as it may seem to us, morals, values, and ethics do not ever come close--exactly as Wittgenstein said, as quoted in a previous post.

Knowledge of good, and evil, is in actual point of fact, exactly what God De-scribed and Moses re-scribed: A Tree!

My recent previous post mentions a tree, so does one of my favorite Lorca poems; one tree;any tree; is an irreducible fact; even when cut down,burned, or just ignored. "YOU HAVEN'T LEARNED ANYTHING ABOUT THE PLAGUE," shouts the thief Cottard after gunning down people randomly in the street, after the quarantine is over and his plans for making money have ratted in his hands. ''IT ALWAYS COMES BACK!!!!" (But if not, we will do its task ourselves, as he demonstrates.)

"The Missing" is also about revenge, but has in common with Gogol's tale the idea that insofar as virtue may be its own reward--though I doubt that--revenge may be as well, as we see in the denoument of the book and of the Croat "family". (yes they are as bad as the name sounds)

We are quick to make judgements but never never never have sufficient knowledge to do so..if we can't even judge the worth of a tree;even after 50 years, how can we do so with human souls? The Trees too always come back only more so. Ever hear of The Ent Tribe? The plague bacillus eventually may not, however. Where is smallpox except in a lab somewhere? (But you never know)(And if it does get out, then whose fault will it be? Like Katerina the Cossack's wife, if we know what's in the cell, though it be one's own father, if we let him out in our foolish sentimental journey while knowing he is trying to kill not just her but everyone, shall we continue to blame God for what Pandora has done? Not to mention what our country cousins, Achilles and Agamemnon, have done.)

Addendum: In the movie, "The Plague" there is a woman in the cast who observes the attack of Dr. Rieux on Fr. Paneloux's doctrine, and says, "I've never watched two priests fight before!", bemusedly. Good point but I think the movie differs significantly from the novel so I will have to go back for a look. But I will say one thing; after seeing the movie, I feel dismal for those to whom medicine is now just a matter of materialism, beating the odds, politics, and law i.e. a mere commodity.This would be rather like comparing, "The Plague", with, "The Phantom Empire" starring Gene Autry the singing cowboy. Whilst thousands perish underground, his main duty is to get back to the ranch every day by 2 PM to do his radio broadcast, "or we'll lose our contract." (Please please please don't ask me how I know this)

"I BELIEVE IN MALICE"

Ah Yes! Nice to know there is at least one young person reading this stuff; and might I add, at least one relative, relatively speaking.

Just FYI, current readings, and mostly recommended readings:

I just finished" The Missing" by Tim Gautreaux which is an excellent piece of Southern fiction. I also just finished watching, "The Plague," a movie with which I am sure Denis is well acquainted and brings up the same issues found in Gautreaux.

I also continue to read the short stories of Nikolai Gogol, and am currently reading, "The Terrible Vengeance," and most of these stories include a close look at folk religion which of course still dominates the world of religion.

I am also reading, "First Things," which in many ways is the anti-TNY because it makes exactly the opposite assumption about reality that one generally expects in New York even though both magazines originate from that Great Gothamite City. There are several good articles, one of which is about what I would call, "folk atheism" which has gone both commercial and evangelistic and is now a religious commodity, in contrast to the writings of Nietzsche, a prophet who actually understood what he was getting into. Leave it to scientists to not know what they're getting into, eh? Tunnel vision is actually a requirement to do bench science, after all. Our Shell gas station locally has a "word of the week" which is "Focus." Focus groups anyone?


Excuse me Kat I need to get up.
Here said Kat protests, sotto voce.

The name of the article is, "Believe It or Not" by David Hart on page 35 probably accessible at the First Things website already. Also a good piece about Eleanor Roosevelt, not critical but complimentary.

I would also recommend a good summary article just published in the last # of TNY,of the struggle between the founding fathers of Time magazine and The New Yorker. The founder of the latter pretty well summed up the difference between his magazine and Time by saying, "I believe in malice." It's pretty hard not to believe in malice these days; or in any days previous, as noted in my previous blog. The question is, is this a modus operandi? Which goes back to the writings of Albert Camus. More on this later, I hope.

The sight of one young tree grappling with the prairie winds is worth more than 50 years of the clash of cymbals and the roar of the drums....

"IF it's only a (cymbal), then to hell with it" c apologetics to Miss O'Connor.

This was my thought on returning from church last Sunday which was my last "regular" appearance on the drumset with the worship team. Yetz, I have resigned/retired from this task after at least 30 years of service. It was always my thought that I would continue this "Performance Art" only so long as it was required; i.e., if I was invited and no one else would do it. But finally, as an answer to my prayers perhaps in part, not one but two youngn's have come up from the ranks and actually want to play with and for adults: Nathan Kalita and Eric Moore, Eric being a childhood friend of Daniel's..Dan is also still playing --and preaching-- at Rock Church in the Phoenix/Gilbert AZ area.
Bless 'em, Lord!!!<

I will however be available for backup if they can't and if I am invited to participate. But..I looked online to see if there were any jazz bands in the area (there aren't--but you guessed that already) Interestingly, there were ads for drummers-- but they all specified age limits--there was not one band who wanted anyone older than 35... are we surprised?

I do not expect any callbacks!!! But I think it pure grace that I was allowed to play in public all the way up to age 61! I have found that it is a far better audience in church than elsewhere -- and much better for a morning person like myself. You might say that the level of acceptance seems to be about double what one can expect from McWorld. But it does not go on forever, thank God. There is a point at which one must retire gracefully, and that point has nothing to do with skill but has entirely to do with acceptance and invitation, not just need. In a way, I have been retired by the bad economy. We had to let go of our assistant pastor, David Lade and his wife Stephanie, and they were the ones who consistently wanted me to play with with them especially on Wednesday nights.

I do expect to spend more time now playing more quietly with my recorders. Stephen and Grace and girls will be arriving in less than a month, so I must practice, practice, practice!!!

(Incidentally, even though Dragonspeak is far less than perfect, it makes it possible to write with a purring cat on your lap and give attention to his fur her with both hands. CatFans, take note!) (You just have to keep him off the keyboard.)

Joyce, I am so glad that your church also welcomes you without looking at your birthdate-- or Social Security number, I might add. Once again, it is clear that we are strangers and aliens especially to McWorld. Alienation is then the norm, and complacency is the enemy. Just like the young poets have always said. Again I say rejoice, Bob Zimmerman et.al. und inter aliases. It is entirely possible to age and still be alienated -- the only question is, alienated from what or Whom...

"Who is to be Master, that's all."

cleo the Jewess

You've heard of Cleopatra
who lived down along the Nile
she made a "Mark" of Anthony
And won him with her smile.

They say she was Egyptian
But I've reason to construe
She was Jewish and Hawaiian
with a dash of Irish too.

When she strolled with bold Mark Anthony
on Egypt's yellow sands
you could see that she was Jewish
by the motion of her hands.

By Al Jolson


"It will all end by killing Jews."

From: "The Thanatos Syndrome" by Walker Percy



Over lunch today I was discussing the movie "It's a Beautiful Life," (an Italian comedy about German concentration camps!) with a couple of the workers from the free clinic. And how the supposedly most civilized nation on earth that time managed to give itself completely over to "blood and iron." I think that the death wish or Thanatos is something that women generally find incomprehensible in spite of the fact that they manage to participate in their own way over the centuries in terms of bloodletting. I think that the male brain finds war very natural without any particular conditioning. This is also what Freud observed among other peculiarities of my particular half of the human race. Attempts to suppress this are all very well-intentioned but like certain weeds with underground roots, they keep popping up in other areas. Milton Caniff was sort of a artist philosopher who wrote a famous serial -a comic strip without the humor -- about war in the Pacific. It was one of the forerunners of what we would now call the graphic novel. Mad Magazine once asked him to write a strip explaining his views of humanity and he was quite upfront about it. It was his theory that cultures/civilizations required periodic bloodlettings. History certainly seems to be on his side.

Whether war is inevitable or not, the idea of requiring a blood sacrifice is extremely deep in virtually all cultures whether one looks at the Middle East, the Orient, or the various Native American cultures many of which required human sacrifice as well as constant warfare against their neighbors. I would contend that it is more biological/carnal than cultural. It can be emphasized or deemphasized but the idea that one can be too sophisticated and leave all this behind is naïve in the extreme. In fact I would assert that the more sophisticated a person is, the more he can escape the weak leadership of civil moralities or transcendent ones such as the 10 Commandments; and either rationalize that he is superior to such common stuff or suppose that a person can simply sublimate until the cows come home. (These would be the "Security Cows" who guard the privacy of Gary Larson.)

Thus we have the continuing spectacle of the battle between right and left which never resolves partly because both sides insist on the absolute necessity of the shedding of someone's blood. It seems very odd, does it not, that in either case it is young people who are put on the chopping block? Republicans seem to okay with sending young people away to war to kill and be killed; Democrats and Libertarians insist on an absolute right to abortion on demand. In either case the rights of young people are either temporarily or permanently suspended. And the older people remain safe behind their desks, books, lawyers, and entertainment media. There are at minimum two components to this: advocacy and passive permissiveness i.e. looking the other way.

What are these? Sacraments? And if so, to which god or idol or abstract ideal? We are good at recruiting. We talk a lot about "deconstructing." Try deconstructing this!

The Jews of course are no strangers to requiring blood sacrifices. Even though the Temple has long since been destroyed, it can be argued that there is still no end in sight. This of course was the point of "The Man in the Glass Booth". But there is also no way that Jews in particular can escape unreasoning passionate persecution which may wax and wane but never goes away. The danger has never been greater with the rise of Wahhabi Islam. Much of this is not explainable from any type of rational or scientific point of view. But it would certainly seem that the Jews in many countries even still in Europe will not be free of the challenges faced by Queen Esther and Mordecai. Both Hitler and Haman are dead, hoisted by their own petards: but starting in Egypt, radical Islam has vowed to carry out their juggernaughts. Then it will be too late to resort to cleverness, rationalism, intellectualism, sophism or even technology and "the bomb."

There is a strange illusion in the Western world as long as we produce entertainment, Coca-Cola, and provocative media, we will be safe; because no one wants to cut off the amusements we provide. The Jews of course, including Jolson and so many others, have used entertainment and self -- deprecating humor for centuries to defuse the bomb of anti-Semitism and to sublimate through artistic and other means what I presume would be the same impulses shared by men around the world.



It would seem that "original sin," is making a comeback; even/especially in environmental circles. However that is not all and I have alluded to the other side of the story in my previous entries. I do not have a conclusion as such since this is an ongoing nasty nest of problems but let me say this: Spring has sprung and clues are everywhere; which make the claims of foolish parties and partisans inconsequential, even our worst impulses. Dancing can be far more than entertainment, hint, hint.

miscellany

The usual practice, when our inane betrayals begin to surface, is to make everything generic.

We gave the world our children. (This may be a large part of "enough.")

What the world does with our children is another matter. But at the last, our children will have more choices than the world can see, know, acknowledge, or honor. And so it will be up to them, not to the world as pertains to the fruits borne.

Milledgeville Revisited

"Obscurity is common to human intelligence, because intelligence can only perceive what has taken place in its own experience, not that which makes it what it is."

-- Oswald Chambers

To answer the riddle about the visitor to Milledgeville, the visitor was the quarterback for the world champion Pit Bull Stealers, Ben Roethlisberger. I don't think he came to this largely girls college town to deliver a message, although a strong message was certainly delivered by his actions. He was in fact accused of sexual assault on a college student. Of course, the presumed stature of the assailant will probably protect him well from any consequences. In fact, it is one of the privileges of power that one can call forth only the best lawyers to basically turn back any counter- assault in court. We have already seen what happens to famous football players when accused, which results in a show trial in which murder is basically gotten away with -- not wishing to end with a preposition of course! How good a lawyer, do you think, this girl's parents can afford?

The same of course is true of the kings of the earth, and the multitudes who consider themselves kings in their own little bubble. Certainly however this subject would have been worthy of treatment by Flannery O'Connor who was a student at the same college. We had the privilege of walking around the campus and picking up the student newspaper, "The Colonnade," in which the subject above was covered. Until very recently this was a women's college only and still the vast majority of students walking around seem to be female. I had the privilege also of being able to view copies of all the cartoons Miss O'Connor did for this paper for three years running, all linoleum cuts and some of them quite funny but generally not as sardonic as her writing would later be.

Over the past month or so I have had some time to look further into the nature and prominence of evil. While it is difficult to get anyone to agree about what is evil and what is not, there are some things in what CS Lewis called the Tao, that tend toward universality. Probably because of the universality of crude raw human impulses. Not too many people will aver that sexual assault without consent is anything but evil; but the continued common occurrence of this in "civilized society," does suggest that these impulses have to be dealt with, but dealing with them from some kind of hypothetical neutrality does stretch probably even beyond the absurd. Of course, there is no wrong action or attitude in the human world that does not have its proponents; many of these in secret of course but more among what the songwriter called, "A Small Circle of Friends." Also much of the obscurity of the mind noted by Mr. Chambers is self -designed and self-induced and really deliberate in spite of being kept subconscious or unconscious.

Of course there IS the matter of brain size. Perhaps it does matter! It does weigh only about 3 pounds. While it is, according to Isaac Asimov, the most complex thing that we have discovered in the known universe; it is still much more limited in scope than we imagine. In the latest issue of The New Yorker there is a cartoon of a physician looking into a patient's ear with an otoscope while commenting, "I'm always amazed at how small brains are." (I continually wonder at the mythology that doctors can look at the brain through the ear ha ha) This of course poses a universe of difficulties for the scientist and even for Mr. Darwin, who had a nagging doubt that a human brain -- coming so biologically recently from a monkey -- would possess the competence to be in charge of, much less come up with, a theory so all-encompassing as his own. And still have have a one-to-one correspondence with objective reality.

(Scope in the morning, anyone? Scope plural?)

I suppose my point is that, yes, Virginia, we do have a choice or should I say choices. And yes, I am in that sense, "pro-choice." How many people do you think are antichoice? Certainly God and Christ say to us, "Choose this day whom you will serve..." but the other inherently good phrase is, "pro-life." So God is "both/and", not "either/or". As so often is the case making it humanly impossible to comprehend His overwhelmingly universal point/s of view about almost anything or anyone.

Existence/life is certainly pointless if the word "choice" is meaningless, which most certainly it is in a purely materialistic universe which of course is a completely hypothetical construct. There are a few "honest atheists," who do say that we have no meaningful choices, no free will, etc. However the vertical and empirical evidences certainly do suggest that we have way too little information or mental capacity to rule out any possibility of things well beyond our five senses and logical abilities. Issac Asimov himself admitted that, but then said that he did not have enough interest to pursue it. Certainly none of us have, or can, pursue metaphysics to the nth degree but we still come up with Absolutes no matter who we are or how much we protest against them. Postmodernism is another variant of denial which goes back to the Greeks and has always been with us in one form or another. As one other commentator said, "Man does not live by bread alone."

To be continued....

Ste. Peter, arriving in the Old Nick of time...

Rat: So do I get into heaven?

St. Peter: No.

Rat: why not?

St. Peter: You were bad.

Rat: Hooey.

I include the above since it is about the level of discourse I have come to expect, whether it pertains to basic human relationships or to God (Jehovah --Elohim). To go beyond this is to encounter extremely stiff resistance which usually takes the form of premeditated ignorance and complete avoidance of taking the matter to any other level no matter how superficial. Metaphysics for Dummies, indeed! Yet this is so ingrained that it is found in virtually everyone regardless of culture, religion, education, and so forth -- which would account for its persistence in the face of facts to the contrary and even contrary to other basic human needs. People indeed will sacrifice almost anything and anyone to maintain their own self perception of being something vaguely designated as, "good."

Please note that in these St. Peter jokes, Jesus never makes an appearance, and he is never referred to even peripherally. For one thing, it would probably cease to be a joke.
Also note that when called, "good teacher," Jesus asked, "Why do you call me good?" How often do we dare ask ourselves this question? No, we are content to put our own "goodness" neatly into the category of assumables along with our basic basket 'o axioms 'o life.

Accompanying this assumption of, "I'm basically a good person!", Is the corollary that we can live without forgiveness because there's nothing to forgive. This allows us to self-justify pretty much all of our lives. When we think about that, however, one must admit that such thinking is not only out of touch with reality but is frankly infantile. This is what the baby assumes. Because he is by nature completely self-centered. By the way this certainly does describe the persona of Rat. A baby quickly gets over his idea that the world is a basically a good place; but he also quickly performs ego defense mechanisms that are basically just like everyone else's, in order to preserve our egotism but we practice our id-isms.

Apparently we think that we can live an entire lifetime with no need to be forgiven. Much less to forgive. When we are forgiven, we are superficially happy because we got out of some immediate predicament; but we do not accept responsibility and do not accept the fact that we actually needed forgiveness. Ask almost anyone in prison if he or she deserves to be there. This is what makes Camus' novel, "The Fall," so striking in that it strips away our pretenses that we are being good and kind and thoughtful for the sake of virtue being its own reward . Virtue properly defined is the result of judgment, not of self -- conceit. Virtue subjectively defined is probably oxymoronic. And besides, psychologically speaking, unless we can get at least one other person to agree with us about our being virtuous, what's the point?

Einstein once said that if he wanted real answers to real questions he generally turned to Dostoyevsky, not to scientists or science itself. Whether Einstein actually understood the essence of Dostoyevsky is another matter entirely; but there's no question that Dostoyevsky portrayed sin wearing its true colors. And was not afraid to call it by its real name. (Ironically, I had to train the Dragonspeak to type the word, "sin." It apparently is not included in its otherwise extensive vocabulary. Please see the book by Carl Menninger, "Whatever Happened to Sin?")

Rationalism and intellectualism, identified by Dr. Freud as defense mechanisms and little else, seem to be ever more popular and ever more irrational and anti-intellectual by stressing reductionism and erasing all moral distinctions, so that we may more comfortably live, as in, "Brave New World." Our chosen dystopia/anti--universe has arrived and it is a far cry from, "1984"!

I am in the middle of reading, "The Missing", by Tim Gautreaux, the closest thing I can find to Flannery O'Connor among living authors. Like most Dostoyevsky works it concentrates on guilt, grief, and the matter of forgiveness. So I will probably continue to explore this and the reader is as always welcome to contribute from their own reading and/or experiences.

THE MISSING PEACE

"Waiters found two brawlers unconscious under the piano and propped them against a bulkhead near four women who were sitting drunk and weeping at their tables. Sam told a waiter to bring them sodas and then surveyed the room, walking from bow to stern scanning the floor for broken glass and dropped cigarettes, wondering how much time was spent in the world protecting people from one another, folks who had no reason to fight, no reason at all."

from, "The Missing" by Tim Gatreaux

Beast, slouching

Quiz Question:

Flo and I made our first visit to Milledgeville GA, home of Flannery O'Connor, on March 18. What famous personage visited this "village" the prior weekend and made national news? What was his "mission"?

And why is this relevant to Good Friday through Easter?