best observations on the Papal Death Media Orgy

Lech Walesa disagrees with you.

-- Ed (dal...), April 8th, 2005.

You know nothing about Poland.

Watching some of the funeral brought out all my latent atheism.

All I can say is, there had better not be any more slayers of the Vile Communist Kingdom waiting in the wings, ready to slide feet-first into a coffin and the arms of immortality. This mythos is getting top heavy already.

One hero is cleaner, safer and smarter - like Mr. Clean or the Cocoa Puff Cuckoo. You get much better brand identification that way.

She was the rabbit Souvarine took care of in Emile Zola's Germinal!

What broke the back of the soviet block was the disintegration of the soviet economy which was a process that dates back to Stalin

Ed couldn't be more off the money on this thread.

Yes, there was obviously dialogue between the church and the communist government -- what of it? The authorities were scared of the church's influence, and they did anything they could to combat it. This includes dialogue. It also includes propaganda, and force, as in the murder of Popieluszko.

I doubt the workers of Gdansk in 1980 were marching because of religious fervor.

Who says they were? The church was a political organization, and to deny its role in Poland's opposition would be a "nasty bout of revisionism." Solidarity couldn't have developed the kind of communication infrastructure while it was banned that the church already had in place. Churches served as safe meeting places. There were countless activist clergymen, and countless activists who were not religious in the least and yet made common cause with the church, joined religious opposition groups (my parents included). Of course, it's absolutely fair to argue that all the real work took place on the ground, and that the Pope's role in all of it was symbolic, but as far as symbols go, in Poland he was a powerful one.

As for the rest of the former Eastern Bloc, I know the clergy played some role in the Czechoslovakian opposition, though a far smaller one than in Poland. Not sure about other countries. In any case, I imagine Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, &c. are far more skeptical of all this talk at the moment, and rightly so.

ed, what you are forgetting is that the pope was a apolish worker who lived under the crumbling tolitarian states, as were the hundreds of worker priests who risked martyrdom to push away communism---they were a rather large factor.

& clinton was right--he will have a rather large legacy but it wil ltake decades to sort out what it was--esp. if the next guy in charge is a nebbishy place holder.

I've been doing it for over a decade, thanks. You hiring?

I keep forgetting we have a president who sounds like a 12-year-old.

also, that some early Church members were women, and that the first Pope, Peter, was a Jew from Galilee(and had a wife & kids).

Mortality -- the more graphic, the merrier -- is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we've feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV's top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time "CSI." To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness's cortex with Ms. Schiavo's.

As sponsors line up to buy time on "CSI," so celebrity deaths have become a marvelous opportunity for beatific self-promotion by news and political stars alike. Tim Russert showed a video of his papal encounter on a "Meet the Press" where one of the guests, unchallenged, gave John Paul an A-plus for his handling of the church's sex abuse scandal. Jesse Jackson, staking out a new career as the angel of deathotainment, hit the trifecta: in rapid succession he appeared with the Schindlers at their daughter's hospice in Florida, eulogized Johnnie Cochran on "Larry King Live" and reminisced about his own papal audience with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann.

What's disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What's unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul's vision of a "culture of life." This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. ...