Errant Thoughts
About Andrew Cusack
Writer, web designer, etc.; born in New York; educated in Argentina, Scotland, and South Africa; now based in London. read more
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Gaullist California
A friend well conversant in my ongoing crusade to remind today’s centre-droit of the utility of the Gaullist experience writes in:
The Golden State once practised a very successful form of Cal-Gaullism, developing world-class infrastructure, research universities, new industries… and much of the place was solidly conservative.
Once upon a time, parts of Southern California (including Orange County) were deemed the most conservative places in America, from which Nixon, Reagan, and others sprang.
San Francisco, though still beautiful, is certainly now well past its prime; I remember that white tie and tails were still seen there regularly as late as the ’80s.
The Polish church in Los Angeles was built to serve the large number of Polish exile families (with fathers who were aerospace engineers trained in the RAF like mine) who came from the UK and Canada to work in what was then the world centre of the aerospace and defence industry — “the Gunbelt in the Sunbelt”.
A Night Litany for London
Wanderers in central London who find themselves in the whereabouts of Piccadilly Circus or Soho of a Tuesday evening can avail themselves of the devotions offered by the Guild of Our Lady of Warwick Street.
Every week, the Rosary is said along with other prayers at this statue in Warwick Street Church. They conclude with the rather beautiful and moving ‘Night Litany for London’ imploring God’s mercy upon the many inhabitants of our capital city.
Its original form is believed to have been composed by the Rev’d H.A. Wilson, vicar of the Protestant parish of St Augustine in Haggerston. Msgr Graham Leonard — in the days when he was Anglican Bishop of London — also published a version through the Church Literature Association (a High Church body) with an introduction he wrote himself.
The version used at Warwick Street is included here:
OUR LADY of Warwick Street,
we plead before Thee
to present our prayers before the Throne of Grace
for all in this great city of London
who tonight need Thy merciful love and protection.
ON ALL who work tonight —— Lord, have mercy.
On the police, fire, and ambulance services —— Lord, have mercy.
On hospitals, doctors, and nurses —— Lord, have mercy.
On clergy and chaplains called out tonight —— Lord, have mercy.
On the homeless and destitute —— Lord, have mercy.
On all lost and vulnerable people —— Lord, have mercy.
On the lonely —— Lord, have mercy.
On the elderly —— Lord, have mercy.
On abused children —— Lord, have mercy.
On loveless marriages and broken homes —— Lord, have mercy.
On those who self-harm —— Lord, have mercy.
On the sick and suffering —— Lord, have mercy.
On the mentally ill —— Lord, have mercy.
On those undergoing operations —— Lord, have mercy.
On those who cannot sleep tonight —— Lord, have mercy.
On those who are depressed —— Lord, have mercy.
On those who misuse the internet —— Lord, have mercy.
On all prisoners and prison staff —— Lord, have mercy.
On all prostitutes and their clients —— Lord, have mercy.
On those addicted to alcohol and drugs —— Lord, have mercy.
On all immigrants feeling lonely and insecure tonight —— Lord, have mercy.
On all who live in fear —— Lord, have mercy.
On all victims of crime —— Lord, have mercy.
On those planning to commit a crime tonight —— Lord, have mercy.
On those who are driving tonight —— Lord, have mercy.
On all involved in accidents —— Lord, have mercy.
On those who are bereaved tonight —— Lord, have mercy.
On those for whom tonight will be their last on earth —— Lord, have mercy.
On those dying without the knowledge of Thy Love for them —— Lord, have mercy.
On those who are afraid to die —— Lord, have mercy.
On those tempted to suicide —— Lord, have mercy.
On the terminally ill —— Lord, have mercy.
On ourselves at our last hour —— Lord, have mercy.
ON BEHALF of all Londoners who today have said no prayers, let us say together:
Our Father …
Hail Mary …
℣. Most Sacred Heart of Jesus: ℟. Have mercy upon us. (thrice)
‘We trust no one would ever think of such a thing’
Ladies and gentlemen of ‘the left’, whether foreign or domestic, have long groaned over the earnest patriotism and lack of zeal for revolutionary destruction amongst the British working classes.
As this snippet from an 1848 issue of Punch shows, when the fighting power of Britain’s workers is unleashed, it’s usually channelled against the zealots and in defence of hearth of home:
Everybody knows the story of the French revolutionist lamenting the other day in Trafalgar Square the want of pluck of the British people, when a British butcher boy, taking off his coat, gave the brave républicain such a sound thrashing that its echo might have been heard half way down Charing Cross.
This treatment of a foreign Propagandist may have been a little too summary, perhaps; but at all events there can no harm in our expressing a hope that the hint will be good-humouredly followed up; and should any foreigner of any description begin to prate his revolutionary stuff, or doubt English pluck, why —
The Pale Blue Eye
Just as there aren’t enough films set in seventeenth-century Holland, we don’t get enough films set in God’s own Hudson Valley of New York. When I saw the trailer for ‘The Pale Blue Eye’, a semi-supernatural mystery set in 1830s West Point, I thought: yes, sign me up.
A cadet at the military academy is found hanged and, a day later, his heart carved out. USMA commandant Sylvanus Thayer enlists the help of Augustus Landor, a former detective from New York City — in the pre-NYPD days when crime was fought by an odd hodge-podge of the night watch, city magistrates, and a few dozen constables.
Conveniently for Thayer, the highly reputed Landor has retired to the Hudson Highlands. Thayer hopes his investigation will prevent any scandal giving impetus to the still-fledgling Academy’s enemies in Washington.
Conveniently for Landor, he is aided and abetted in this task by an eccentric bohemian amongst the “Long Gray Line” of cadets: Edgar Allan Poe. The paragon of American Gothick was indeed a cadet at West Point in 1830 under his own name, after having spent a few years in the Army as an enlisted man under a pseudonym.
It would be easy to reduce any film with Poe as a central character to a procession of campy retro-emo tropes, but the role is played by Harry Melling with surprising skill. Timothy Spall plays Sylvanus Thayer — rather unfairly, I thought — with Simon McBurney as the commandant’s sidekick Captain Hitchock.
Toby Jones is the academy doctor with Gillian Anderson as his scheming, driven wife, Lucy Boynton the beautiful daughter (apple of the eye of many a cadet) and Harry Lawtey as their smug son Artemis, also enrolled in the Academy.
It is a fundamental Cusackian principle never to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, so I won’t complain that ‘The Pale Blue Eye’ is actually filmed in western Pennsylvania rather than along the actual banks of the Hudson. Riparian overdevelopment makes it difficult to evoke the Hudson of 1830s effectively today, and the filmmakers have done well recreating the spirit of the gothic revival era in America’s Rhineland with the locations they chose and the set design. This is fiction, after all, and it needn’t be pedantically true to the time-period — so long as nothing jars.
As it proceeds, the plot is intriguing, fantastic, and absurd and it gives us a final twist in the end. Some strands develop a little two quickly — the connection between Poe and Lea — and Robert Duvall’s role as an expert in the occult is too much of a deus ex machina.
But this is simple fun, not high art, and as a gothick conjuring of a formative but under-explored time and place it is well worth a viewing. (more…)
Mexican Diplomats
Don Manuel Iturbe, envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, sits wearing the full civil uniform of an ambassador while the two attachés, Don Miguel Iturbe and Don Juan Beistegui, stand wearing lower grades of diplomatic dress.
All three wear the Order of St Stanislaus — the Polish royal order incorporated into the Romanov orders in 1832.
The records of the Mexican congress shows that Manuel Iturbe was authorised to accept Grand Cross of the order while Miguel (who I presume was Don Manuel’s son though I can’t confirm) and Juan Beistegui had to settle for the ordinary Cross of St Stanislaus.
Emblem of the Valencian Courts
A friend has just brought to my attention how “incredibly, violently, sacredly based” the logo of the Corts Valencianes is.
St George slaying the dragon and the province’s Guardian Angel flanking Our Lady Seat of Wisdom is indeed an excellent sign for a legislature.
The graphic design studio of Pepe Gimeno was given the difficult job of taking a fifteenth-century engraving and somehow translating it into a modern scaleable image that could be reduced to a small size without losing clarity.
Originally they decided to focus on keeping just the Guardian Angel who bears the heraldic shield with the coat of arms of the province (technically an “autonomous community”).
When they did the work, they found the result was convincing enough to do likewise for the other figures in the engraving and include them together, preserving the historical integrity of the emblem.
The end result is an admirable modern reworking of something old. Well done.
Advent Missa Cantata at St George’s
St George’s Cathedral
Lambeth Road, Southwark, London SE1 6HR
LAMBETH NORTH (Bakerloo)
ELEPHANT & CASTLE (Northern, Bakerloo)
Buses: C10, 360, 12, 453, 138, 53
A collection will be taken to defray the costs.
The Lady Chapel is to the right at the end of the north aisle of the Cathedral (on your right as you enter).
Earlier in the morning, as every Saturday at St George’s Cathedral, there will be Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament from 10:00 to 11:00 am, during which time Confessions will be heard.
St Margaret Relic Heads to St Andrews
Students from St Andrews University have accompanied their Catholic chaplain to receive a relic of St Margaret of Scotland from the Archbishop of St Andrews & Edinburgh, Dr Leo Cushley.
The relic was put in the care of Canmore, the Catholic chaplaincy at St Andrews, whose chapel is dedicated to the Hungary-born English princess who became Scotland’s saintly queen.
When the relic in St Margaret’s Church in Dunfermline — the country’s royal centre in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — were being removed from their reliquary the piece of bone fragmented.
The Archdiocese decided to make this an opportunity for the relics of the royal saint to be distributed further.
This relic of St Margaret will remain in Canmore where it will be available for veneration by students and other visitors.
SAINT MARGARET
QUEEN OF SCOTLAND
pray for us
Decline at The Villager
Though constantly mourning the never-ending decline in the quality of newspaper design, I hope everyone can agree that a vast depreciation has taken place at The Villager of Greenwich Village, New York.
Whereas the Village Voice was always the pretentiously showy alternative beat-turned-hippie-turned-bobo upstart of Village publications, The Villager has played the role of the actual neighbourhood sheet that gave you the local news.
Absurdly, the otherwise magisterial and much-loved Encyclopedia of New York City doesn’t even have an entry for The Villager — not even in its second edition! — despite the paper being founded back in 1933. (The Voice was 1955.)
Behold — witness the decline:
An issue from this past week in October 1959. The nameplate features distinct lettering, flanked by the supporters of a town crier (or perhaps we should say village crier) on one side and an image of the Washington Arch on the other.
No fewer than nine stories on the front page. (It’s a standard Cusackian rule of newspaper design that the more stories on the front page the better off you are.)
There is also a helpful reminder of the upcoming election so Village denizens can do their civic duty. (more…)
Lafayette at the Seventh
For the first century or so in the history of the United States, there was no more popular Frenchman in America than the Marquis de Lafayette. This nobleman of the Auvergne was an officer in the King’s Musketeers aged 14 and was purchased a captaincy in the Dragoons as a wedding present aged 18 in 1775. Within a year the rebel faction in North America had sent Silas Deane of Groton to Paris as an agent to negotiate support from the French sovereign, but Paris acted cautiously at first.
Lafayette — a young aristocratic freemason and liberal with a head full of Enlightenment ideas — escaped to America in secret and was commissioned a major-general on George Washington’s staff in the last of his teenage years.
Given his relative youth, Lafayette inevitably turned out to be the final survivor of the generals of the Continental Army, and his 1824 trip to the United States solidified his popularity. He visited each of the twenty-four states in the Union at the time, including New York where the predecessor of the Seventh Regiment named itself the National Guards in honour of the Garde nationale Lafayette commanded in France.
This was the first instance of an American militia unit taking the name National Guard, which in 1903 was extended to all of state militia units which could be called upon for federal service.
In honour of this connection and on the centenary of Lafayette’s 1834 death, the French Republic presented the Seventh Regiment with a copy of Joseph-Désiré Court’s portrait of the general that hangs in the 1792 Room of the Palace of Versailles. The Seventh set this in the wall of the Colonel’s Reception Room in their Armory, facing a copy of Peale’s portrait of General Washington.
The privilege of unveiling the portrait went to André Lefebvre de Laboulaye, the French Ambassador to the United States, who was given the honour of a full dress review of the Seventh Regiment on Friday 12 April 1935 before a crowd of three thousand in the Amory’s expansive massive drill hall.
Also present at the occasion was his son François, who eventually in 1977 stepped into his late father’s former role as French Ambassador to the United States. His Beirut-born grandson Stanislas served as French Ambassador to Russia 2006-2008 before being appointed to the Holy See until 2012. In April 2019, Stanislas de Laboulaye was put in charge of raising funds for the rebuilding of Notre-Dame following the fire that devastated the cathedral.
Harlem Reformed Dutch Church
For much of Manhattan’s early colonial history, the island was home to two primary settlements: the port of New Amsterdam (later, from 1664, New York) way down at the southern tip and the town of Harlem up where the East River meets the Harlem River.
Christened after the Dutch city, Harlem is one of Manhattan’s most visible links to the Netherlands. The local newspaper is even called the New York Amsterdam News, once a prominent voice in Black America given this neighbourhood became predominantly African-American in the early twentieth century, and Amsterdam Avenue runs up as the spine of West Harlem.
Harlem was founded in 1658, thirty-four years after New Amsterdam was founded and thirty-two since Peter Minuit bought the whole island of Mannahatta off the Indians for sixty guilders.
The town’s first church was founded in 1660 but didn’t have its own dedicated building for a few years. The Harlem Reformed Dutch Church, or Collegiate Church of Harlem, was built in 1665-67 right on the banks of the Harlem River, around the site of East 127th Street and First Avenue today.
Both the building and site was abandoned twenty years later when the congregation moved to its second building, completed 1687, just a little bit further south — near where East 125th meets First Avenue, or where the entrance ramp to the Triborough Bridge meets 125th.
It is this second building, which is depicted in the view above of Harlem village from Morissania across the river in the Bronx in 1765 (below).
Mistranslating Apostates
ONE OF THE historical anecdotes I enjoyed being taught at school was the death of the Emperor Julian the Apostate — as relayed by our much-esteemed teacher Dr Nathaniel Kernell. This was in the Christian era with the capital at Constantinople rather than the Eternal City itself — Julian had (as betokened by his moniker) abandoned Christianity aged 20 and sought to frustrate its spread.
He wanted to promote the old Greek gods, dabbled in vegetarianism, and even tried to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. Mysterious fires consumed the workers tasked with that final project and it is presumed many Jews didn’t want to be dragged into the Emperor’s political project the animus of which was opposition to Christianity rather than promotion of Judaism.
Anyhow, none of Julian’s projects came to much fruition and as he lay dying from an injury in battle, the apostate emperor realised the futility of his life’s work with his final words: νενίκηκάς με, Γαλιλαῖε, or ‘Thou hast defeated me, Galilean!’
At the moment I am reading a book by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and stumbled across a mistranslation from the Spanish that would have been avoided if only the translator had enjoyed the privilege of being taught by Dr Kernell.
It turns out that the Spanish word for ‘Galilean’ is ‘Galileo’. Pérez-Reverte’s translator, alas, failed to understand one of the characters reference to Julian’s final words and mistook Christ our Saviour for an Italian astronomer, mistranslating the phrase as “You have defeated me, Galileo”.
Worth a wry smile, given the solid 1,200-year gap between the death of Julian the Apostate and the birth of Galileo Galilei.
The Dumas Club is a delightfully weird and intriguing tale, though, and I look forward to reading more by Pérez-Reverte — no matter who the translator is.
The Situation in the Far East
A century-old geopolitical cartoon is updated for today
Tse Tsan-tai — or 謝纘泰 if you fancy — was by any standard a remarkable man. Born in New South Wales, this Chinese-Australian Christian was a colonial bureaucrat, nationalist revolutionary, constitutional monarchist, pioneer of airship theory, and co-founded the South China Morning Post — still one of the most prominent newspapers in the Orient.
Tse’s most important visual contribution was a widely distributed political cartoon usually known in English as ‘The Situation in the Far East’ or in Chinese as the ‘Picture of Current Times’ (below).
Crafted as a propaganda measure to warn his fellow Chinese of the designs of foreign powers, the cartoon depicts the perils facing the Middle Kingdom.
Japan, with its expanding navy, proclaims it will watch the seas with its ally, Great Britain. The Russian bear looms from Siberia, crossing the border into China. A British lion sprawls over the land, its tail tied up by the “German Sausage Ambitions” at Tsingtao. The French frog guards Indochina while the American eagle lurks from the Philippines.
Meanwhile, the Chinese figures show sleeping bureaucrats and carousing intelligentsia unresponsive to the external threats.
Now the exiled Hong Kong artist Ah To (阿塗) has updated ‘Situation’ to reflect the realities of 2022. (more…)
The death of The Monarch
The revered Sovereign’s death was announced in the evening. The daily anxieties of the people and the press’s usual reporting on quotidian political strife temporarily evaporated on contact with the momentous royal bereavement. Though long anticipated, the loss was profound, raw.
To many it felt like a moment of overdue reckoning. As if the frail body of the elderly monarch had somehow been holding the great, ancient, long-weakening and precariously multinational state together. The world of the previous century had finally, almost imperceptibly, slipped away. Franz Joseph was dead. …
In the October 2022 number of The Critic, Dr John Ritzema explores the parallels between the recent demise of our late sovereign with the death of the Emperor Franz Joseph over a hundred years earlier — and wonders whether there are any lessons for the reign of King Charles III: Rebuilding a Monarchy and a Nation.
One of those minor curiosities that both Franz Joseph and Elizabeth II were succeeded by Charleses — the latter by her son, and the former by his grand-nephew Blessed Charles of Austria.
Cypher Shift
Out with the old, in with the new: the King has released his new royal cypher, with a stylised CR III replacing the familiar EIIR. As with so many things, I am sure we will get used to it with time.
Given the longevity of the late Queen’s reign it will be some time before we see it appearing on pillarboxes, but it will enter our lives more quickly via postal franking, stamps, currency, and uniforms.
Many are trying to come up with complex, almost mystical, explanations for why St Edward’s Crown has been replaced with the Tudor crown atop the cypher. More likely, I suspect, is that it is a useful means of giving the new reign a respectful visual differentiation from its preceding one.
I’ve always been rather fond of the Tudor crown, and the Caledonian version of the new cypher rightly includes the Crown of Scotland — the oldest amidst the Crown Jewels of this realm as (unlike England) Scotland was spared the iconoclastic destruction of Cromwell’s republic.
The new royal cypher, left, and its Scottish variant, right.
LMS Quarterly Mass at St George’s
the regular quarterly Extraordinary Form Mass organised by the Latin Mass Society of England & Wales
will take place at
The Lady Chapel is to the right at the end of the north aisle of the Cathedral (on your right as you enter).
Earlier in the morning, as every Saturday at St George’s Cathedral, there will be Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament from 10:00 to 11:00 am, during which time Confessions will be heard.
The Accident of Birth
A king is a king, not because he is rich and powerful, not because he is a successful politician, not because he belongs to a particular creed or to a national group. He is king because he is born.
And in choosing to leave the selection of their head of state to this most common denominator in the world — the accident of birth — Canadians implicitly proclaim their faith in human equality, their hope for the triumph of nature over political manoeuvre, over social and financial interest; for the victory of the human person.
— Fr Jacques Monet SJ FRSC
A Few Quick Questions
Here are my answers from today, republished with the kind permission of the editor.
Always begin with Mass – I dislike leaving it to the evening. Usually at the Brompton Oratory, or at St George’s Cathedral right across the street from me in Southwark.
Following the news or taking it easy this August?
Picked up Le canard enchainé this week, which I do from time to time. Good to add words to my lexicon (flache-baque) and try and keep up with things the other side of la Manche.
Other than that, avoiding the news like the plague.
Breakfast plans?
Cappuccino and pain au chocolat. Boring but reliable.
What’s on the soundtrack lately?
‘Albi Ya Albi’ by Nancy Ajram and some beautiful Stradella arias.
And the bookshelf?
Just finished another Maigret, some Robertson Davies, and Seb Faulkes’ Bond novel. Now on Tom Gallagher’s bio of Salazar, Jan Morris’s Venice, and one of the Zen detective novels.
Been reading a lot of Leonardo Sciascia lately – his name is such a pleasure to pronounce – and I’ve got some John B. Keane and Anthony Levi’s biography of Richelieu on the way. Jaan Kross is sitting on the pile. And Juan Gabriel Vasquez, who I’ve enjoyed greatly.
A glass of something?
A good cold glass of white Burgundy outdoors, although in this heat a gin-and-tonic is always a welcome relief.
Lemon or lime?
Lemon, always – unless it’s Archangel, a delicious gin a mate of mine makes in Norfolk. Always a slice of orange with Archangel.
Sunday evening routine?
I usually try to have a night in on Sunday, but yesterday ended up in Hampstead meeting Isaac and Joe for a pint before Tijmen got us round for a Scotch (or “uno Scotch-ito” as he confusingly calls it) on the terrace as the sun went down.
The NW3 crew usually refuse to ever leave their postcode, but I drop in often and I can see why.
What’s on the menu lately?
A friend came round Saturday night for a quick dinner pre-pub session. I made some pappardelle, chopped up the leftover sausage I’d had at lunch and threw it in a pot with some sun-dried tomatoes, rosemary, thyme, lots of butter, pinch of dried Italian peppers, red pesto, mixed it all up and served with some ripped leaves of basil. Went down pretty well.
What’s the week ahead hold?
Two dinner parties – one Hungarian-Jewish/French in Putney, the other Welsh/German/French in Soho – and hoping to make it to ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ at the Prince Charles Cinema this Wednesday.
Other than that, a fair bit of work and writing and I hope a lot of reading in the garden.
Enjoy!
Thank you!
A Desk in Sweden
(In honour of his descendant coming to London for a coffee last month.)
Mrs Evelyn Pelosi
I’ve only just heard of the death of Mrs Evelyn Pelosi, who departed this life at the end of last month.
Evelyn was piously devoted to the traditional liturgy of the Church and was a stalwart of the SSPX’s Edinburgh congregation — but she never stood in the way of houseguests attending the FSSP (or even the Novus Ordo!).
Her mischievous deadpan sense of humour was deployed to excellent effect in her occasional role as gypsy fortuneteller at festive events organised by the South Edinburgh Conservatives in the 1990s.
Another hat she wore was Convenor of the Monarchist League of Scotland (an entity whose events attracted a curious clientele) and from an early age she had a great devotion to South Africa where she visited me in Stellenbosch and introduced me to friends in the pro-life movement in Cape Town.
In the Seventies and Eighties, whenever she thought journalists in the Caledonian dailies were too forgiving of occasional terrorist outrages by the ANC their editorial offices frequently found themselves in receipt of a letter signed by Mrs E. Pelosi, Friends of Christian South Africa.
Mangosutho Buthelezi was among the many well-wishers whose cards could be found overflowing on the chimneypiece of her home in the Mayfield Road.
I remember watching the premier of the television version of Alexander McCall Smith’s “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” at her’s there on Easter Sunday evening in 2008 — an Edinburgh/Southern Africa crossover event if ever there was one.
She was amused but dignified when another woman of her marital surname (but radically different views) ascended the political scene across the Atlantic, but for anyone who knew her Evelyn will always be the only Mrs Pelosi.
May she rest in peace.
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