Easter in Aden

Aden, Yemen, Gulf of Aden, one week just short of Easter Sunday, 2011.

Girls always feel cheated.

Left out of things.

Ignored.

And,

Yet..

They want things to be that way.

Some years ago, Lovey felt cheated about steaks.

Lovey had never been to Morton’s, The Steakhouse and she was bitterly upset at my going there any number of times a week to luncheon.

I tried to tell Lovey that Morton’s, The Steakhouse, is a comparatively nondescript, mundane, hangout for aging businessmen at which, Carole, the waitress, poured great quantities of iced gin in my glass and brought me thick steaks, and that, all in all, it was all rather boring, but Lovey would have none of it.

Lovely felt cheated.

I took Lovey to Morton’s The Steakhouse and she couldn’t “see what all the fuss was as, you, Daddy, cook a better steak on the grille, your own self.”

And, I could have been a priest.

Of course, Lovey’s feeling cheated is a girl condition that has absolutely nothing to do with Morton’s, The Steakhouse, or any other particular place.

Girls feel cheated, left out, simply because they haven’t been someplace.

Anyplace.

It doesn’t matter where it is.

I have been, I think, to all the nations on this earth, save 5, and I can tell you here that no white American of any background would ever want to set foot in 98% of those countries on this earth.

Lovey feels cheated anyway.

She’s never been anywhere, you see.

Never mind that Lovey’s notion of having been someplace is largely down to going to have a look at Queen or maybe Paris if her blood boils high.

I try to tell Lovey that besides England and France, there is nowhere else to go look at Queen or Paris, except those two places and that they are American tourist theme gardens set up to attract American tourists who want to become… cosmopolitan.

Otherwise, neither place would even exist anymore.

Lovey feels cheated anyway. “you never take me anywhere on your exotic adventures,” she sniffs.

If Lovey and all the other girls in the curly headed world of America only knew what conditions were like in most of the world, they would stay in Spring Valley, Foxhall, at Washington, The Perfect Place, and never leave it.

Ever.

Nor would I leave neither, but that, needs must.

And needs do must.

So it was that I arrived at the port city of Aden, by the Bay of Aden, in the nation of Yemen, a week just shy of Easter Sunday, 2011.

Our voyage and mission were what, I think, was then called: RESTRICTED TO VOICE COMMAND ONLY, by which designation is meant that I carried: no identification, no documents, of:

Any kind whatsoever.

We were headed to The Saudi port city of Jeddah, past the port of Sudan on the African coast, in the Red Sea. After Jeddah, we were to go to Port Said in the north.

Our route had been consciously circuitous.

Our ship was Italian flagged. She was a decrepit merchant ship called Santa Angelina.

I was given by her Captain “the suite superior,” which is to say a small trash can of a living space with a little trash can lid at the top, which, I suppose, was intended to be a porthole.

I remember on entering my little trash can on Santa Angelina, first laughing sardonically and saying aloud “I wonder if Lovey feels cheated by not being here?”

We were not supposed to put in at the port of Aden at all, but for a wrenching noise in the early night followed by my being thrown to the other side of my trash can and almost sent flying out of the open trash can lid that was my porthole.

There was screaming on ship in absolutely ever language past English and a great deal of running about in the aisles.

The Captain, barely dressed, stuck his head in my trash can and said: “We hurt, we hurt bad, we put in at port Aden, Senor.”

I supposed that meant we were landing someplace. And I was right about that, although I soon came to wish I had been wrong about that.

The port of Aden is a horrid, wretched, place that stinks so terribly that I missed the inside of my suite superior, my little trash can of a room, on Santa Angelina.

Walking the streets of Aden, one enters another world in which, a great mass of lunatic Muhammadans, scurry about or sway to and fro mumbling passages from their Holy Book and starring wild-eyed at the American intruder.

Port of Aden, Yemen, manages to bring off the seeming impossible:

It is both hellish hot and arid and steamy sultry at one and the same time.

A fellow agent on my trip who fancied himself a writer, later wrote of our mission that:

“Young Beggs manages to bring off a look which is both placidly removed from the particularities of his surroundings and icily contemptuous of the people passing by him. This odd combination of messages Beggs gives off, somehow protects him from the savagery of the inhabitants of a place in which, most white Americans, would be violently set upon and killed instantly.”

I don’t know if any of that correctly describes my manner in foreign lands or no, but I do remember that I was primarily thinking of Jesus, Whose Sweet Passion and Death, civilized people were about to commemorate and that I was, while thinking on Jesus, fully surrounded by a lunatic mob of Muhammadans, all of whom either hate Jesus or have never heard a Word of Him.

Medecins Sans Frontieres says more than 30,000 new refugees in South Sudan need a place to go.

It is not simply at Port of Aden, Yemen that I have made note that great mobs of Muhammadans never seen to be doing anything specific, not to mention what we in the West call, productive, they simply mill and sway about and mumble, what I take to be prayers from their little book.

The smell of the place was beyond my powers of description. The filth likewise, left best to dark imagination. The looks on the faces of the people horrible and diseased.

The Muhammadans eat with their hands, a meat that appears to the American, raw, altogether uncooked, from a communal bowl. Their hands are unwashed and they tend, on brief observation, to use their left hands only to eat.

As Easter, the Holiest of Days in the civilized calendar, fast approached, I thought mainly of Jesus, His Passion and Death for us and His opening the Gates of Heaven to us, ensuring by His Death, our Possible Salvation with Him later on.

Looking about at the mob, I wondered: As Muhammadans are not Catholic and hence, will never see Heaven, and as they appear to live a life so manifestly wretched here on earth, will they they feel the pains of Hell? That is, in a physical sense, how could Hell possibly be worse than Port of Aden, Yemen?

The answer of course is that it can’t be worse, but for this: Hell is not a place of physical deprivation. Hell is the absence of the Sight and Presence of God. As Mohammedans do not know of God or of Jesus, how can they miss Heaven?

They can’t.

I concluded that this area of the world, as well as many others, unknown to Lovey and all the other American girls who complain that they are never taken anywhere, must indeed be Hell Herself.

As, Lovey was cheated out of a visit here, she will never know Hell Herself, for Lovey and the Americans will go to Catholic Heaven and be in God’s Presence for evermore times and never know Port of Aden, Yemen.

Back in the Port of Aden, on hearing the Captain call all clear, my shipmates and I went back aboard, cast off, shortly took a hard right into the Red Sea and set sights for Port of Sudan, East Africa and, after that, over to Jeddah and finally, The Port Said, further to the North, these last two mentioned, property of The Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia.

In the solitude of my trash can on the Santa Angelina, with my dirty little trash can lid that served as a porthole, I tried to picture Lovey and all the other American girls feeling left out of this voyage into a very dark place.

Would American girls feel cheated at not being here in Aden for Easter Holy Week?

Yes, they would.

Girls always feel they are being, somehow, cheated.

Cheated and left out.

Always.

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The rich man ought not be taxed at all~~he ought be compelled to employ and train the poor man~~directly~~
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The principal need in America today is~~financial and industrial De-Globalization~~to facilitate the promotion of the possibility for the average man to get and keep a good job with good benefits paid by the employer~~as was done not very long ago.~~

~~Bene Nati, Bene Vestiti, Et Mediocriter Docti~~

~

~~La crema y nata~~

~

~~Artista de la conquista~

~~In sunshine and in shadow~~I hold tight to the Republican view of time and money~~I write night and day~~yet~~while impecunious~~I am vastly overpaid~~in that taking pay to do what I love is unfair~~to my employer~~in a fair system~~under such circumstances~~I should pay him~~not he me~~I am far, far too old a man to be sexually confused~~praise Jesus~~but I am yet young enough to be politically confused~~is anyone not~~in an absolute sense~~I am a Catholic Royalist~~in a practical sense~~I am a Classical Liberal~~a Gaullist~~a Bonapartist~~an American Nationalist Republican~~in either sense~~my head is soon for the chopping block~~to hasten my interlude with Madame La Guillotine~~I write without fear~and without favor of~any man~~

~
Saint Jane Frances de Chantal Catholic parochial school, called, by anyone of any background, simply: “Chan~al,” a place where, of an autumn day in 1957, school, for me, began and ended in the first convening of the first grade in which a tiny nun, one Sister Dom Bosco, appeared before me, just behind the window appearing at far left of this photograph, and piped out this: “I may be small, but so then, is the Atom Bomb.”

~~

My determination to escape school commenced immediately on hearing about this Atom Bomb business and took 16 dicey and arduous years to finally accomplish.~~

~~

Non Sibi

The Cathedral Latin School, 1966.

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The escape continues..

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Finis Origine Pendet~

~~Κύριε ἐλέησον~~

Rejoice and Glad!!

Amen~~
~The Original Angry Bird~~The Catholic University of America Screaming Red Cardinal Mascot~~

~~EX LIBRIS~~

~~THEOS EK MĒCHANĒS~~
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Friday, 7th November,~Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi, 2014

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"Jean-Marie Le Pen is a friend. He is dangerous for the political set because he's the only one who's sincere. He says out loud what many people think deep down, and what the politicians refrain from saying because they are either too demagogic or too chicken. Le Pen, with all his faults and qualities, is probably the only one who thinks about the interests of France before his own."~~
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Motto~~Deus Lux Mea Est~~
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