“If You Don’t Learn To Love Each Other, Things are Going To Get Much Worse!”

Valiant Thor and his gorgeous entourage

Russia is killing the Ukraine, and the spirits of the rest of us. 

How often do you find the Pope quoting you? Random remarks you spout off in the kitchen or bathroom while listening to “the horror and gore report,” otherwise known as “the news?” One of my personal rants at the news that only my family gets to hear - “I thought we were done with war.” All this business of soldiers and guns and bombs and weeping and bleeding. Then, I heard the Pope say so, recently, at the beginning of Lent, the time of purification before Easter, the resurrection of Jesus Christ - “I thought we were done with war.”

But, I’m paraphrasing - here is what the Pope actually said in his own, more eloquent, words -

“The truth is that ‘never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely.’ We can no longer think of war as a solution, because its risks will probably always be greater than its supposed benefits. In view of this, it is very difficult nowadays to invoke the rational criteria elaborated in earlier centuries to speak of the possibility of a ‘just war.’ Never again war!”

 

“We are called to love everyone, without exception; at the same time, loving an oppressor does not mean allowing him to keep oppressing us, or letting him think that what he does is acceptable.” 

“On the contrary,” the pope said, “true love for an oppressor means seeking ways to make him cease his oppression; it means stripping him of a power that he does not know how to use, and that diminishes his own humanity and that of others. Forgiveness does not entail allowing oppressors to keep trampling on their own dignity and that of others, or letting criminals continue their wrongdoing.”

From Pope Francis to aliens - Yes, aliens have a stake in our survival as a planet and a species. 

First, aliens cannot write music. For music, they come to Earth. (That’s a joke. However, it could be true. We clearly have something they don’t; they have a vested interest in keeping earthlings well and functional.) Next, aliens harvest Earth’s force, usually leaving a crop circle behind as evidence. If humans were to disrupt the ki flow of Earth’s energy by nuclear annihilation, aliens might not be able to use the force. That’s a pretty simple breakdown of a process which most people have never heard of; even alien watchers have not figured out why aliens leave crop circles for us to decipher or why aliens come here at all, or if aliens are actually humans from the future. We do know that UFOs appear near nuclear power plants and nuclear weaponry. Warnings? What it all means is - Earth’s force must remain the same! We cannot destroy ourselves!

An over-simplification of Absolute Death. We are flirting with Absolute Death. I do not think our souls can survive nuclear war. If they are matter at all, physical in any way, then our souls will explode and dissipate.  

Elliot on the Red Phone

Mr. Robot, Season 2, Episode 1, final scene: An episode that was crammed full of hacker delights: bar codes to scan, Easter egg doors to open, and some choice low-tech hints that no one noticed. I was watching. This is what I saw: Eliot is in the front hallway of an old rooming house. There is a red phone on the wall. In these old rooming houses, a community phone was in the front hallway; no one had their own phone in their room. The red phone, any child of the Cold War will tell you, sat on the President’s desk and was a direct line to the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, i.e. somewhere important in the world leader vein. The phone rings. Elliot picks it up and says, “Hello?” The voice asks, “Is it really you?” (Now we know Elliot is of extreme importance.) Elliot asks, “Who’s this?” The answer: “Thor. Valiant.” 

Fade to black. I’m shaking on the sofa. Who is getting this? No one. Obviously, someone in the writing department knows their shit. (I tried to comment and tell a writer of an Easter egg article about the low-tech stuff I knew, including the meaning of “red wheelbarrow” on Elliot’s composition notebook - from a poem by William Carlos Williams, about getting back to a simple life, but she fucking hacked the shit out of me to show her appreciation of my efforts. Lucky, I know a few things and I deleted her traps. As well as my comment on her article. Taking my ball and going home, fuck you very much.)

The Red Wheelbarrow

by

William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Who was Valiant Thor?

Here is the unofficial story: 

A Visitor at the Pentagon

On March 16, 1957, a strange craft landed in a farmer’s field in Alexandria, Virginia. Local police arrived on the scene with guns drawn, expecting the worst. They were surprised to find what appeared to be an unarmed man stepping out of the craft. They were even more surprised when the man asked to speak with the President telepathically. It must have convinced them, so they immediately took him to the Pentagon. Over the next few days, the visitor would receive his meeting with the President and a fully furnished apartment deep within the Pentagon.

The Mission of Valiant Thor

According to Valiant Thor, he was sent here by a galactic council upholding the tenants of Jesus who was considered by Thor to be an intergalactic God, Savior of All Life Forms, to convince humanity to shy away from their use of nuclear weapons. Thor, and his group of alien assistants, all in the form of gorgeous human beings, hailed from the nearby planet of Venus. Thor convinced President Eisenhower to create a council against the use of nuclear weapons. However, the committee was repeatedly blocked by members of the CIA and DOD. 

Thor had to leave Earth defeated. His conclusion: Earth is more interested in making money than living in peace.

War and Reparation are BIG BUSINESS! Bigger than any other business. First, government contracts to kill, then government contracts to re-build. Until we break it, humanity is trapped by its leaders in this destructive and meaningless pattern. 

Remember, we always become friends again with our enemies - think Japan. The stupidest exchange ever had to be Hiroshima for Pearl Harbor. Isn’t it so much better to exchange sushi, sake, and technology instead of bombs, death and destruction?

Makes war obsolete.

I haven’t even touched on the constant African wars - the Congo, Nigeria - where men use more low tech weaponry, not any less deadly, to destroy. 

The Pope says we should not allow the oppressor to oppress us, but rather share some other options for him to achieve his goals. Negotiation. Talk. Friendship. There is no need to kill. No need to destroy. 

Or is it simply the desire to show the world one’s POWER? Who will be left to read history? Who will witness your power when the world is gone? Is there any power without a witness?

Virgin Mary

wearing her blue mantel of Peace

One more warning:

Came from Jesus's Mother, the Virgin Mary. Fatima, Portugal, 1917. Three young shepherds, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto witnessed a vision of the Virgin Mary that spoke to them and gave them predictions of our fate. She showed the children a terrifying vision of hell.

“You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out...When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine... (World War II) and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.” 

On 25 January 1938, The New York Times reported "Aurora Borealis Startles Europe; People Flee in Fear, Call Firemen." The celestial display was seen from Canada to Bermuda to Austria to Scotland, and short-wave radio transmissions were shut down for almost 12 hours in Canada.

As a result of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pope Francis announced he would consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It didn’t make the news. God has become a dirty word on network TV.

Jesus’s mother warned us: “If you don’t learn to love each other, things are going to get much worse!”

The blue of Mary’s mantel has always represented Peace. 

Let us take up that blue mantel for purely practical reasons.

Peace is Life.

Yes, they killed John Lennon, but they did not kill his message.

©Patricia Goodwin, 2022

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her latest novel is Low Flying, about two women suffering psychologically abusive marriages who find and nurture each other. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Within this blog, Patricia writes often about non-fiction subjects that inspire or disturb her, hopefully informing and inspiring people to be happy, healthy and free.

August 5, 1962 HOLY DAY

Marilyn Monroe, 1962

On August 5, 1962, 55 years ago, we lost her. 

Some of us were there. Though only a child, I remember my feelings vividly. So powerful an impact did her death have on me, so powerful an impact did her life have on me, that the following chapter of my novel Holy Days is the first chapter of the novel that I wrote. 

(Excerpted from the novel, Holy Days by Patricia Goodwin, all rights reserved.)

AUGUST 5, 1962
HOLY DAY

Daddy walked on to the porch where his brother, Jake, and some other men were working. Daddy dipped his love curl to light a cigarette - he was already my husband by then - rolling the remains of a pack of Luckies and matches up into his T-shirt sleeve.

        “Jake. Did ya hear about the great loss to womanhood?” Daddy asked, speaking into his hands as he lighted his cigarette.

       The porch wrapped around one side of the house and cupped its hand around the front where I’d sat on its broad rail at the age of ten and wrote my first story, “The Bright Red Color,” now immortalized in the little book with the star on it given by Mr. Mario Lanza. I loved to sit barefoot on the wooden porch rail with a book or a paper and pencil, feeling paper in my hands, holding the pencil, feeling wood warm on my bare soles. I loved to nest there as much as in a tree, its branches open like a hand to hold me.

          The afternoon sun lighted the sawdust round the workmen so they seemed the haloed angels of workmen. I stood at the front screen door, where Daddy had just passed through, watching their hard, white T-shirts aglow with the setting sun. Their cigarette tips burned fiery red; pencils were stuck behind their ears; their belts looped with tools, hammers, T-squares, wrenches. Ma was making them re-do the porch; under Ma’s command, the men were screening in the porch, killing the broad wooden rail with a screen right down the middle, right between my legs where they’d go on the flat railing, my summer home, no more.

      Uncle Jake, Paul, Daddy. Also, Uncles Salvi and Sonny, who were good carpenters and good men: out of their league here like priests helping to reform criminals, they lent a hand.

         I loved to watch them, softened by the lighted sawdust. In the world of men, I was invisible at the screen door, though I could be seen clearly enough. I was a fat, blonde child bursting her shorts, sticky with sweat, sticky with the black drips of watermelon and popsicle on her unshaved legs, her lumpy, mosquito scabbed legs.

         Uncle Jake, reaching for a board, turned his licking mouth grin to Daddy, who sucked on his cigarette, mysteriously holding in his secret a moment longer.

           “So, what’s this great loss to womanhood?”

         “Marilyn Monroe committed suicide.”

         “Ya shittin’ me!”

         “Get outta here!”

         “I just heard it on the radio.”

         Jake wiped his face with his handkerchief.

         “Jesus Christ.”

         “Jesus - ya sure?”

         “It wuz just on the radio.”

         “Well, wa’ happened?”

         “She took a bottle a’ pills.”

         “Jeez’!”

         “Why the hell’d she do a thing like that?”

         Silence.

       The men looked down at their feet; they poked the sawdust with their work boots. Jake scratched the board he was holding with his black thumbnail. Uncle Salvi frowned his disapproval of suicide; Uncle Sonny looked impressed. Daddy smoked thoughtfully, mingling grey smoke with clouds of golden sawdust. Perhaps, he considered the magnificence of his message.

         “She wuz naked when they found her. Sprawled naked on the bed.”

         “Naked?”

         “Naked?”

         “Yeah.”

         “Who found her?”

         “The maid.”

         “Christ.”

         They were silent. Deep lines instantly creased on their foreheads and held there, till Jake broke the silence with his three-toothed grin.

         “Wish I wuz on that reconnaissance,” he joked.

      The others agreed with a low murmur and a shuffling back to work, which continued in a silent tribute to her made by the concentration of the hammer slowly banging against the nail, the patient saw, the meditative sandpapering of board. I watched their tribute, their hard muscles flexing under their straining shirts, the square asses of men, broad across, leaning into a job, Daddy’s love curl bouncing vigorously as he worked thinking about - her.

         They knew her in a way I didn’t. To me, she was flat as a television screen, painted like a doll, sparkling with color and diamonds, which she said, “were a girl’s best friend.”

        They were thinking about her white skin, about the heat caught under her heavy white breasts, about the dewy moisture that grew there - and in the other place, like under arms, inside her thighs, wet, warm pockets to slide their hands in and that hard, dry thing always seeking - always - the warm, wet putting place. How they knew her.

         But, they did not know her painted red lips; those were less real than the rest. Less real: her white blonde hair. Her bottomless eyes, far less real than her very bottom, their fingertips, their penis tip, quivered every time she turned around.

      If I were Daddy, I would have carved her name, MARILYN, into one of the boards and, turning the board inward, secreted her name into the porch forever. But, I wasn’t him and he was not so much like me - reverent. Maybe he wasn’t even thinking about her anymore. Maybe he was thinking about the hot sun burning on his back, about the dry sawdust in his throat, maybe he was thinking about his next ice cold, throat-burning beer.

         But, I was thinking about her. Thinking there was more to find out about her, more I didn’t know, but would, soon.

          I would think men made her do things. “Put your leg up, Miss Monroe, there, that’s it.” “Smile, Marilyn!” “Yeah!” But, maybe, she didn’t need to be told. Maybe she knew what to do and the men just thought they were in control. She knew how to lift her leg, how to roll in the surf, and bend, pleadingly, from the waist, how to stand over a blasting hot grate so that her skirt filled famously with the wind of trains, so that trains blasted through the crotches of every man who saw her, always smiling.

         I would learn she wished she was a housewife, but she wasn’t a housewife. She wished to lean, sleepy-eyed and barefaced out the sunny morning window. She wanted to be on the cover of Good Housekeeping where she said she never would be. She told a serious actress, “Oh, no! Don’t wish you were like me! People respect you!”

        As I watched the work of men, I saw much to admire. Their dirty, used tools, black with oil, powdered with wood dust and curly chips, tools that worked so often, they were never cleaned by the kind of men who quit at quitting time. I saw their muscles work and grow big and wet so that their T-shirts melted to the skin of their backs making wide, sacramental rings under their arms and ceremonial wet spots dead center of their hard breasts and between the wings of their shoulder blades. My father’s neck was written with black rings. Black hair came from his nostrils and his red brow dripped black lines down his pockmarked cheek. Jake grinned every grin lasciviously, whether he meant or felt lascivious or not, with only the three, blackened yellow spikes that remained. Paul was there, foolishly lapping up the atmosphere like a little brother tagging along. When Daddy or Jake lit a cigarette (Paul couldn’t light a cigarette worth a damn, he wasn’t bad enough.), and hushed their hands over their mouths in deep communion with the wrapped tobacco bitterly burning their lips, burning a wet hole right through the cool, white paper, I smelled the quick, startled pungency as the cigarette caught fire and Daddy’s head went back pulling smoke like lava into his lungs, letting it pour round his lungs, breathing it out his nose and mouth like a dragon breathing fire and smoke, then, no one had ever lit a cigarette before, no, not James Dean or Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando - no one.

         Sawdust and the slanting, orange sun and smoke filled the porch, now getting smaller and tighter with screen, losing more and more the sweet, green air of trees.

         I looked down at my nubs of breasts that were the tiniest tips of icebergs, the very topmost points of pyramids buried in a thousand years of sands, and my fat stomach, as though I had swallowed a balloon that would carry me aloft to wondrous lands, which I saw, at that moment, as my inadequacy and my gluttony and my cushion against the onslaught of the world, and I thought, I couldn’t help thinking, “What a poor substitute I am for Marilyn Monroe in my Daddy’s life.”

©PatriciaGoodwin, 2015

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest book is Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author.