Meddlesome Monk

“A Rural Story” - fiction based on events - and the morally challenged Fr. Timm, c.s.c. 

 

A Rural Story

 

(click above for story) 

 

Excerpt:

 

“He [Fr. Ricardo] has a vision. He thinks the Church is the archetypal civil society, neither business nor state. He wants to spread this blessing of Christendom to other parts of the world. Voluntary associations and freedom. That’s what’s driving him.”

    “But what about our civilization? Our historical development? For fourteen hundred years we’ve had military rule.”
 

    “I’ve  [black Muslim ambassador speaking] tried to reason with him. I myself am Muslim, and I can’t accept his arguments. I have known in childhood what violence can do to people. I was one of the lucky ones. But, as I said, he has friends in Congress.”
 

    I mumbled under my breath, and I didn’t care if the ambassador was listening:
 

    “Where there is love, let me sow hatred,
    Where there is pardon, injury,
    Where there is truth, error,
    Where there is faith, doubt,
    Where there is hope, despair,
    Where there is light, darkness,
    Where there is joy, sadness....”
 

* * *.  

 

The villain of this piece based on events is Fr. Timm, who recently passed away. I said nothing negative about his memory at the time.

 

 

He and the priests at Notre Dame College valiantly fed 1,000 people daily during the man-made famine of 1974.

 

Yet, in the '90s, he appeared in the Economist pages (where he was inaccurately described as a Jesuit), boasting of having got so many women to vote! He believed in democracy.

 

​"NGOs like ASA, with support groups in 40,000 villages, are canvassing women to back the secular Awami League. “In a Muslim state,” says Father Timm, ASA's American Jesuit president, “we've managed to ensure more rural women cast their vote than men.” It is, he says, “a social revolution to combat the medievalism of the fundamentalists.”” ​

 

Apparently, he had learnt nothing from the fact that 1.5 million people had starved to death under a democratically elected​​ – and fanatically anti-Islamic -  government of the same party, run by despotic pere, now by despotic fille.

​​

 

“By the end of the year [1974], the Bangladesh government stood exposed as inept, indifferent and heartless. All its political credit had vanished. Seventy distinguished Bangladeshi economists, lawyers and writers issued a statement saying that the famine was man-made and had resulted from ‘shameless plunder, exploitation, terrorization, flattery, fraudulence and misrule.’ They added that the government was ‘clearly dominated by and…representative of smugglers and profiteers’ (Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh, (Cambridge University Press: 2009), p 181).’

​​

 

His belief in democracy - or, rather, faith - was evidence-transcendent.

 

 

How many religions does a man need?

 

 

Notre Dame College, where Fr. Timm taught and resided (I often saw him playing basketball with the boys), is famed not only for academic excellence, but for keeping students out of politics. These juveniles are routinely exploited by the political parties as thugs - Notre Dame, unlike I the infamous Dhaka College, kept parents informed if kids got into politics (students enroll at16 and leave at 18: they’re minors during their stay). 

 

Fr.Timm, therefore, was uniquely privileged to know how “democracy” and “politics” function in Bangladesh. He knew about the hartals enforced by student thugs who burnt people alive. 

 

An excerpt follows:

 

“Police and witnesses said six people were incinerated in the bus, a fire-burnt man jumped to death on the street and two others including a two-year-old child died from injuries at Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH).

 

“Three of the nine dead are identified as Meem, 2,Yasmin, 25, and Tahura, 27. Thirteen of the 15 injured admitted to the DMCH are Meem's mother Monwara, 22, Wahed, 14, Abdur Rahim, 35, Abul Kalam, 45, Rowshan Ara, 30, her son Rony, 12, Alamgir, 14, Jognu Akhter, 18, Mustafiz, 40, Saidur, 22, Babu, 8, Kabir, 40, and Rabbi, 4 (The Daily Star, June 5, 2004).”

 

 

Yet he never spoke out on the subject. 

 

(He was vocal against child labour in the garments factories, but that children were being exploited by the political parties seemed not to matter given the “greater” cause of democracy. Unsurprisingly, these boys, once criminalized, end up killing each other (see chart).)

 

 

 

[“But how is it possible that a doctrine [democracy] so patently contrary to fact should have survived to this day and continued to hold its place in the hearts of the people and in the official language of governments?" asks Joseph Schumpeter in his classic (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), pp 264 - 265).

His answer:

"The very word may become a flag, a symbol of all a man holds dear, of everything that he loves about his nation whether rationally contingent to it or not. On the one hand, the question how the various propositions implied in the democratic belief are related to the facts of politics will then become as irrelevant to him as is, to the believing Catholic, the question how the doings of Alexander VI tally with the supernatural halo surrounding the papal office. On the other hand, the democrat of this type, while accepting postulates carrying large implications about equality and brotherliness, will be in a position also to accept, in all sincerity, almost any amount of deviations from them that his own behavior or position may involve. That is not even illogical. Mere distance from fact is no argument against an ethical maxim or a mystical hope (p 266).”

"All this is settled for us by the plan of the Creator whose purpose defines and sanctions everything. What seemed indefinite or unmotivated before is suddenly quite definite and convincing. The voice of the people that is the voice of God for instance. Or take Equality. Its very meaning is in doubt, and there is hardly any rational warrant for exalting it into a postulate, so long as we move in the sphere of empirical analysis. But Christianity harbors a strong equalitarian element. The Redeemer died for all: He did not differentiate between individuals of different social status. In doing so, He testified to the intrinsic value of the individual soul, a value that admits of no gradations. Is not this a sanction—and, as it seems to me, the only possible sanction —of “everyone to count for one, no one to count for more than one”—a sanction that pours super-mundane meaning into articles of the democratic creed for which it is not easy to find any other (p 265)?”]

 

 

Fr. Timm had both an other-worldly and this-worldly religion – both directed, in his mind, against Islam.

 

Democracy, civic enemies and the pandemic

The last chapter of Jason Brennan’s book Against Democracy has the title 'Civic Enemies'. “Politics tends to make us hate each other, even when it shouldn’t. We tend to divide the world into good and bad guys. We tend to view political debate not as reasonable disputes about how best to achieve our shared aims but rather as a battle between the forces of light and darkness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, pp 231-232).”

Even in a peaceful democracy  – invariably held up as a model for the world, ‘the city on the hill’ – democracy creates civic or situational enemies. Even before the election of Donald Trump, more than half of Democrats told pollsters that they were afraid of Republicans and almost half of Republicans said the same about Democrats.

Today, democratic civic enmity has cost the lives of American citizens. In The New Statesman story How America built the best pandemic response system in history – and threw it away:  The Trump administration destroyed an infrastructure, built over two decades, that may have been humanity’s most powerful weapon against new diseases is the story as told by Laurie Garrett, who had been at the Council on Foreign Relations for less than a year when, in 2005, she was told that a “mutational event” had occurred on Qinghai Lake in north-western China. A type of avian influenza was infecting bar-headed geese, a species that migrates thousands of kilometres, crossing the Himalayas from the Tibetan plateau to reach as far as southern India. It was the H5N1 influenza virus. 

She immediately went to George W. Bush’s security council and was heard eagerly by officialdom. Bush ordered the creation of a pandemic preparedness plan, the first to be formulated by the US government. 

 

In 2009, less than three months after Barack Obama’s inauguration, the H1N9 influenza – or swine flu - began to spread around the world. In the event, the CDC estimate that it killed somewhere between 152,000 and 575,000. “Swine flu really shook him up.”

By 2013, the US had a health security proposal that Garrett describes as “a scheme to train governments in poor countries in how to do surveillance and response to new diseases”. Disease-monitoring in other countries was to be shared by the CDC and the US aid agency, USAID. Domestically, “thinking exercises… training exercises… outbreak training exercises, [were] in almost every hospital in America”. And still, the US was not prepared. 

In 2014, Ebola emerged in West Africa. The Obama administration “watched in shock… we’d never before seen Ebola in more than one country at a time, we’d never before seen it at international airports, and we’d never run the risk that it would get to some huge hub.” When a case did appear at a hospital in Dallas, Texas, a co-ordinated domestic response meant that “it went no further than that, largely because they mobilised swiftly and responded correctly”.

The Ebola outbreak alerted the administration to the need for  a health security infrastructure that extended far beyond its own borders. By 2016, America had coordinated “an all-of-government response” to the next epidemic, in the knowledge that “if it hit America, every agency would be taxed, from US Treasury Department to Commerce to USDA. It wouldn’t just be the health agencies”.

Garrett describes this response as a “special elite corps inside of the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services and CDC, amongst others… an emergency capacity for surge drug approval at FDA… a lot of coordination with the states… a whole division that was doing nothing but training hospitals in infection control and appropriate epidemic responses… and a lot of study on how to surge hospital beds, how to surge physicians out of retirement, and so on.” 

On 8 May 2018, Donald Trump signed Rescission Proposal R18-1, asking the US government to take back $15bn in spending.The cuts covered the Children’s Health Insurance Program ($7b), for International Disaster Assistance that had been committed in 2015 as part of the Ebola response ($252m) and the State Department’s $30m Complex Crises Fund. On that very day, the WHO announced a new outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Two days later, newly appointed National Security Advisor, John Bolton, dissolved the Global Health Security team within the NSC. Timothy Ziemer, the most senior White House official in charge of responses to pandemics or bioterrorism, left that day and was not replaced.

It wasn’t that these programs were expensive: the $282m saved on pandemic preparedness by R18-1 represents less than 0.007 percent of US government spending in 2018. The nub was that they were connected to the health security agenda, which had been an Obama project. 

“Whether this is based on a real personal animosity, or the knowledge that it appeals to his base, the removal of America’s ability to protect itself and the wider world from pandemics of infectious disease appears to have been driven by this impulse.” 

“It was really,” says Garrett, “just about getting rid of things that had Obama’s name on them.”

Cass Sunstein observes that in 1960, only about 4 to 5 percent of Republicans and Democrats would be ‘displeased’ if their children married members of the opposite party; now, about 43% of Republicans and 33% of Democrats admit they would be displeased (Brennan, p 234). We can see why, and with what consequences.