Walt Kelly was born in 1913 and began a career in journalism while still in his teens. He added cartooning to his list of talents, moving to California in 1936 to work at the Disney studio as a writer and animator, contributing to such masterpieces as Pinocchio, Dumbo, Fantasia, and The Reluctant Dragon. During World War II he worked for the American army as an illustrator of manuals. During this period he introduced the world to a cartoon possum who would later become famous as Pogo.
After the war Kelly entered the realm of comics and political cartooning. While employed at the New York Star, he started a daily strip involving animals of the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. Pogo was named after the lead character, an amiable, laid-back possum who occupied the swamp with a host of anthropomorphized creatures such as the blowhard Albert the Alligator, the self-worshipping Beauregard Hound, the poetic turtle Churchy Lafemme, the coquettish skunk Miz Ma’m’selle Hepzibah, and know-it-all Howland Owl. The level of humour and wit was high, ruminations on life were plentiful, and the political satire was biting. Pogo took stands against both communism and right-wing extremism, portraying Senator Joe McCarthy as a sinister wildcat and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as a pig; Richard Nixon appeared as a spider.
Pogo was enormously popular in syndication and in collections of strips, with Kelly winning numerous prizes for his art and acknowledged as an influence on the genre. There were fitful attempts to continue the strip after Kelly’s death but none could successfully imitate the inimitable.
Startling trivia fact: Pogo’s full name was Ponce de Leon Montgomery County Alabama Georgia Beauregard Possum.
In the 1960s the movement for the independence of Quebec developed a violent wing. Among those turning to terrorism or “propaganda by deed” was the Front de libération du Québec or the FLQ, a Marxist-Leninist group that combined a desire for independence with plans for a communist revolution. The FLQ carried out bank robberies, bombings, sabotage, kidnappings and murder to advance their cause. On October 5, 1970 the Libération cell of the FLQ, composed of well-educated activists, kidnapped a British diplomat, James Cross, and held him hostage, demanding money, and the release of FLQ prisoners for his return. A few days later, the Chénier cell, a rather more thuggish bunch, kidnapped Labour Minister Pierre Laporte. These actions prompted the federal government to suspend all civil liberties in Canada under the War Measures Act.
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau won a lot of support for his hard-line stance. “Well, there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed. But it’s more important to keep law and order in this society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don’t like the looks of…” A CBC reporter asked: “At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?” Trudeau replied: “Well, just watch me.” The next day Laporte’s body was discovered in the trunk of a car; he had been strangled to death.
The Chénier cell would eventually be tracked down, tried and convicted of murder — though all would eventually be freed and continue their fight for independence in less violent ways. The Libération cell released James Cross in return for safe passage to Cuba; all would eventually return to Quebec.
John Brown (1800-59) was a radical abolitionist who hoped to spark a rebellion among the slaves of America’s southern states. His attack on a federal arsenal that was to garner weapons for this rising failed and Brown was hanged for treason.
Brown was an unsuccessful farmer and businessman who once had plans to become a Congregationalist minister. In the late 1830s he became involved with the abolitionist movement and thus with the most pressing question in American politics: would the institution of slavery be preserved and even allowed to expand in the newly-settled territories of the West? He became increasingly convinced that the end of slavery could not be achieved peacefully and after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which made it illegal to aid runaway slaves even in free states Brown began to take direct action. He formed the League of Gileadites to deter the the return of escaped slaves and support the covert escape routes to Canada.
In 1855 Brown and some of his family moved to Kansas where abolitionist and pro-slavery forces were squaring off and where violence was being used to determine whether the territory would enter the Union as slave-holding or free. This “Bleeding Kansas” era pitted “Free-Staters” versus “Border Ruffians” with both sides forming militias to intimidate officials and voters; both sides imported heavily-armed supporters from beyond the borders of Kansas.
In May 1856 Brown’s men conducted the Pottawatomie Massacre in which five pro-slavery settlers were taken from their homes and murdered. This set off a series of raids and killings that focussed the nation’s attention on Kansas and Brown, who was now convinced that only a much bolder and more violent approach would achieve abolition. Returning to Massachusetts, he began to gather money and arms to spark a rebellion of slaves throughout the South.
This rising was to begin with an attack on a government armoury at Harpers Ferry, Virginia where Brown and his men would capture tens of thousands of weapons. They would then penetrate the slave states, distributing the arms to rebellious slaves whose defection would cause the collapse of the plantation economy and the end of slavery. Though the capture of the arsenal was easily achieved, the complex was quickly surrounded by outraged locals and American federal troops under Robert E. Lee. Fourteen men died before the raid was quashed.
John Brown’s trial was a media sensation. Though he and six others were hanged for their crimes, the raid was successful in polarizing the United States and convincing many in the North and South that only war would resolve the problem of slavery. Brown’s speech at the end of his trail reveals the religious underpinnings of his actions:
[H]ad I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to “remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.” I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!”
A year later southern states embarked on the path of secession and civil war which led to the death of 620,000 Americans and the end of slavery.
Future historians may well note this date as the beginning of the end of Western Civilization. Keeping Up With the Kardashians, a “reality” television show of a particularly inane and sordid nature, aired for the first time on the E! Cable network.
At the end of the 20th century the name Kardashian meant very little in the public mind, except for those who remembered that one Robert Kardashian had been among the legal team that secured O.J. Simpson his acquittal for murder. It seems, however, that in 1978 Mr. Kardashian had married flight attendant Kris Houghton and spawned a number of daughters whose names began with the letter “K” — Kourtney (b. 1979), Kim (b. 1980), and Khloé (b. 1984) — and a son, Rob (b. 1987), for whom, apparently, no suitable “K” name could be found. The parents divorced in 1991 and a month later Kim married Olympic decathlete hero, Bruce Jenner. From his loins sprang two more “K” kids, Kendall (b. 1995) and Kylie (b. 1997) before he, through the miracle of surgery, transitioned to Caitlin Jenner, for some reason declining an opportunity to become “Kaitlyn”.
This blended family lived lives of little distinction: Kris opened a kids’ store; Kim was a stylist and personal shopper; she and her sisters ran a clothing store. Fortunately, Kim, in a moment of girlish innocence, had made a sex tape in 2007 with someone named Ray J and this tape (oops) was released to the public. Kim was now famous, or — even better — notorious. And she was rich, having made $5,000,000 from the tape’s distributor. All this whetted the public appetite for all things Kardashian and some genius decided that a television crew recording the family’s every move and utterance would prove to be gripping broadcast fare. And so it proved. Despite the sound of critics slashing their own wrists, Keeping Up With the Kardashians has become a staple of American popular culture making millionaires of its subjects. Of their failed marriages, breast enhancements, sex-changes, overdoses, spats, divorces, 325-page book of selfies, and all-encompassing family values, we shall say no more.
The big four sports organizations in North America are Major League Baseball, The National Football League, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association. Rival leagues have come — the WFL, the XFL, the WHA, the ABL, etc. — and gone, but only one plucky challenger has had any real effect on their sport: the American Basketball Association which played its first game on this date in 1967, a contest between the Anaheim Amigos and the Oakland Oaks. (Oakland won 134-129).
As is usual with these upstart leagues, ownership was often shaky and fan support was sparse. Despite the presence of star players like Rick Barry, Julius Irving, and George “the Iceman” Gervin, changes of team names and locations were frequent. The Anaheim Amigos became the Los Angeles Stars and then the Utah Stars; the Oakland Oaks morphed into the Washington Capitals and then the Virginia Squires. The most extreme case of instability was the case of the New Orleans Buccaneers/Louisiana Buccaneers/Memphis Pros/Memphis Tams/Memphis Sounds/Baltimore Hustlers/Baltimore Claws.
The plan of franchise owners was to force a merger with the NBA which was feeling the influence of the higher salaries that the arrival of the ABA had produced. Only a few teams endured to reap the benefits of this plan. In 1976 the ABA folded with four teams — the Indiana Pacers, New York Nets, San Antonio Spurs, and Denver Nuggets — joining their older competitor. Though the league had died, a few of their innovations were attractive enough to be adopted by the NBA: the 3-point arc, the slam-dunk contest, and market penetration into states that had hitherto been college basketball hothouses.
Born a pagan, Edwin (585-633) became a Christian saint, the father of two saints, and the great-uncle and grandfather of two more saints.
The political life of early medieval Britain was brutal, resembling in many ways A Game of Thrones, though with, perhaps, slightly less sex and no dragons. A number of minor, pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdoms continually struggled against each other, against native Christian enclaves and against raiders from Ireland and Caledonia. These statelets rose and fell, occasionally producing a ruler who was strong enough to dominate his neighbours for a time and earn the title of Bretwalda or High King. One of these was a northern prince named Edwin of Northumbria.
Edwin appeared at a time when Christian missions were penetrating these pagan Germanic territories from the north, where Irish-trained monks brought a Celtic Christianity and from the south, where missionaries had been sent from Catholic Rome. In 627, under the influence of Catholic bishop Paulinus, Edwin agreed to convert from his pagan upbringing. Bede’s history tells us that the king and his nobles debated the opportunity of becoming Christians, with the speech of one of his men being decisive:
The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately out another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.
Edwin’s conversion and his domination of northern England aroused enemies, particularly the very able and aggressive Penda, the pagan king of Mercia. In 633 Penda defeated Edwin, killing him and his two sons. His Christian wife and Paulinus fled south and the Christian project in northern England suffered a temporary set-back.
A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammed.
This was the judgement of Charles Gibbons in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when he considered the importance of the battle of Tours (aka Battle of Poitier) in 732, a battle that pitted the army of semi-civilized Christian Franks against the undefeated forces of Muslim Spain. The victory of warlord Charles “the Hammer” Martel repelled an Islamic incursion and marked the rollback of Muslim penetration into France and back over the Pyrenees.
Muslim armies had crossed over the Straits of Gibraltar in 711 and rapidly conquered the Visigothic kingdom in Spain, leaving only a remnant of Christian rule in the mountains of the northwest of the Iberian peninsula. They surged across the mountains and invaded the old Roman province of Aquitaine in southern Gaul where they occupied a number of cities and raided north into Burgundy. In 732 a large army, probably over 30,000 cavalrymen, led by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi struck out toward the rich shrine of St Gregory at Tours. Their plan was plunder and destruction of the Frankish kingdom, then under the weak Merovingian dynasty.
The Frankish “mayor of the palace” (the brains behind the weak kings) was Charles Martel who gathered an army of Frankish fighters, spear, axe and shield men, who would meet the enemy on foot. The two armies clashed somewhere between what are now the cities of Tours and Poitiers. Charles arranged his men on high ground in an impregnable shield wall, impervious to cavalry, and waited for the Muslims, or Moors, to become impatient and charge too impetuously. That break came after at least three (perhaps seven) days of stand-off when the Moors launched their attack and were beaten with their general falling in battle. They fled south toward Spain, leaving their loot behind. In the following years Charles moved his army south and drove the Muslims back across the mountains in Spain.
Historians have debated the significance of the battle; many are not as sure as Gibbon that the 732 encounter was all that important. It is clear, however, that Charles’s victory led to his family’s ascending the throne of the Franks and the reign of his grandson Charlemagne who took the fight against the Moors into Spain itself.
The painting above is a massive (4.6 m [15.2 ft] x 5.4 m [17.7 ft]) 1837 depiction, less accurate than allegorical — note the stone cross, and the imperilled woman and child.
We expect saints to perform miracles. These days, proof of a miraculous cure or two is one of the ways the Catholic Church decides that an individual has exhibited saintly prowess. We do not routinely expect, however, that saints go about lugging their severed heads, but hagiographies abound in cephalophores (head-carriers) and today we celebrate the first of them: St Denis.
St Denis seems to have been sent from Italy to evangelize Roman-occupied Gaul in the third century. He converted so many in the region of what is now Paris that the authorities were alerted to his presence and he, with two companions, was beheaded on the city’s highest point, Montmartre. This execution does not seem to have deterred Denis from picking up his severed sense-organ cluster and walking six miles to his burial site, with the detached head preaching a sermon of repentance all the way.
Other cephalophoric saints include Nicasius of Rheims who was reading a psalm when he was decapitated — his head finished reciting the verse he was on — and St Gemolo who, after his execution, picked up his head mounted a horse and rode off to meet his uncle. St Paul’s head was separated from his body by a sword but, nevertheless, was reputed to have cried out “Jesus Christus” fifty times.
Denis is not to be confused (though he was for centuries) with Dionysius the Areopagite who was converted by Paul in Athens. And of the latter’s imposter, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, we shall remain silent.
Since the 1370s the Ottoman Turks had been making themselves the dominant power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, rolling back Christian and other Muslim opponents. In 1453 they took the last remnant of the Roman Empire when they smashed in the walls of Constantinople; in 1517 they seized Egypt and Arabia and claimed the Sunni Caliphate; in 1522 they drove the Knights of St John out of their fortress in Rhodes; 1527 they reached the gates of Vienna. Turkish fleets, including those of their North African pirate underlings, threatened every mile of the Christian Mediterranean coastline. From his Topkapi Palace their Emperor ruled territory from the Atlantic to the Euphrates.
Turkish success owed much to Christian disunity. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Constantinople, surveyed the situation in the 1550s and declared:
On their side is the vast wealth of their empire, unimpaired resources, experience and practice in arms, a veteran soldiery, an uninterrupted series of victories, readiness to endure hardships, union, order, discipline, thrift and watchfulness. On ours are found an empty exchequer, luxurious habits, exhausted resources, broken spirits, a raw and insubordinate soldiery, and greedy quarrels; there is no regard for discipline, license runs riot, the men indulge in drunkenness and debauchery, and worst of all, the enemy are accustomed to victory, we to defeat. Can we doubt what the result must be?
Though previous attempts at a Christian alliance against the Turks had failed, Pope Pius V laboured to put together a coalition to save Cyprus in 1571. The resulting “Holy League” included ships from Spain, Venice, Genoa, the Knights of St John, the Papal States and Florence. Keeping order in this fragile alliance was the job of Don John of Austria, the bastard brother of the Spanish King, who had to hang a few troublesome captains to assert the necessary unity.
The combined Christian fleet numbered 212 ships, almost all oar-propelled galleys, 40,000 sailors and 28,000 infantry. They faced a Turkish force of 251 ships, 50,000 oarsmen and 31,000 soldiers in the Gulf of Patras off the coast of southwestern Greece. The key to the battle was the deployment, in front of the Holy League’s ships, of four galleasses, large, clumsy, heavily-armed vessels bristling with cannons which blew up 70 Muslim galleys before they could reach the Christian line. The Turkish galleys carried crack Janissary troops, the elite fighting force of the Ottomans, but they were outgunned by their opponents. The day ended in a near-complete Christian victory; they sunk or captured over 150 enemy ships, killing or capturing 20,000 men and liberating 12,000 Christian slaves from the Turkish galleys.
The Turks would soon rebuild their fleet and continue to dominate the eastern Mediterranean but their defeat at Lepanto cost them dearly in experienced sailors and fighters. The Holy League would soon dissolve but Christian fleets would never face a serious naval threat again in the central or western Mediterranean. The boost to morale was incalculable and Lepanto still figures prominently in the civic mythology of Venice and Spain.
Pope Pius V atributed the triumph to the intercession of the Virgin Mary and created a new festival for Our Lady of Victory. Two years later Pope Gregory XIII changed the name to the “Feast of the Holy Rosary” and in 1960 Pope Paul VI renamed it again to the “Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary”
There are numerous churches dedicated to either Our Lady of Victory or Our Lady of the Rosary Maria del Rosario is a common Spanish girl’s name while Rosario is a popular name for boys in the Catholic world.
1793 The French Revolution dechristianizes the calendar
Since its beginning in 1789, forces of the French Revolution had been hostile to Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church. The monastic system had been abolished and all church lands seized by the government. The Catholic church was severed from its allegiance to the Pope and its clergy became civil servants, forced to swear loyalty to the state; priests who refused were subject to imprisonment, exile, or death. All church bells were seized and melted down to make artillery; church silver and precious objects were stolen; crosses were torn down, tombs were desecrated, and buildings turned over to secular uses. In place of Christianity, supporters of the Revolution offered the near-atheist Cult of Reason or the deist Cult of the Supreme Being.
On October 5, 1703 the traditional calendar with its Anno Domini dating from the birth of Christ, its seven-day week and names drawn from mythology was abolished and replaced by a revolutionary calendar. All months now had 30 days, divided into 3 ten-day décades, with a 5-day year-end holiday. Saints’ days were abolished and instead of a day of rest every 7 days, there was now one every 10 days — revolutionaries despised the idleness encouraged by the old church calendar and its many holidays. Dating was to take place from the beginning of the French Republic, months were named after climatic conditions and days were named after tools or common objects. Thus, Christmas Day 1793 was officially V nivôse II, le jour de chien — Year II, the fifth day of the snowy month, the day of the dog. (It could have been worse, December 28 was “the day of manure.”) There was even a short-lived attempt to decimalize the clock: a ten-hour day, each hour with 100 minutes.
Such efforts were made to remove every-day religion from the minds of the common people but ordinary folk did not fail to notice that they now had to work more days in the year. Though governments tried to enforce the reforms, they never truly caught on and Napoleon ended the experiment on XIII frimaire XIII, January 1, 1806.
