Tinsel Wing: Meta-abuse of government secrecy

If integrity is characterized by openness, what do we call Meta-abuse of government secrecy?

Words are important

My thoughts today on who's saying what about the disruption of a terrorist plot in London can be found over here. But to save you time:

Mayor Bloomberg of
New York today referred to the foiled plot to blow up multiple
airplanes as a “criminal conspiracy” and emphasized the the central
role of the NYPD (”the best police force in the world”) in keeping New
Yorkers safe from future attacks. The intelligence and the disruption
operation, resulting in the arrest of 21 at least 24 suspects, was carried out by Scotland Yard.

To the extent that terrorist acts are being prevented or pre-empted,
worldwide, it is thanks to the work of law enforcement, and the
cooperation of law enforcement agencies internationally. Plots have
been disrupted in a number of European countries, who are not at war
with anyone, as well as in Canada, in addition to (one presumes) the
US. But hizzoner was off-message; the rhetoric you will soon hear from
the US talking heads, starting with heads of government agencies and
the head of government himself, will quickly turn the conversation away
from the effectiveness of law enforcement and back to the concept of
“war.” [Edit: As predicted, George W. Bush lost no time in getting
in front of TV cameras to say that this event is a reminder that we are
at "war" with "Islamic fascists."] But it was not an act of war
that disrupted these terrorists. No armies, navies, marines, bombs,
explosives, commandos even, were involved. It was good police work.

Wars happen between nations and involve armies and air forces and
things getting blown up, and, inevitably, the deaths of many people.
Wars also have beginnings and endings that are more or less
identifiable. Police work, however, is never finished, even on days
when no one commits a crime.

But the war rhetoricians will tell you that to think of terrorism as
criminality and the efforts against them as police work is to be soft
on terror and an act of surrender. They are wrong. When even a good
nation begins to act lawlessly, then terror has already won.

On the nature of Christianity

Reposted with revisions, from early 2004:

On another journal, a friend has posted the following assertion:

Christianity is a death cult. Do good. Spread the word. Die.

He prefaces this with an insistence, which should be obvious to anyone who gives the matter more than fifteen second thought, that the call to take up the cross is an invitation to death, and not just any death, but death of a most painful, humiliating and violent kind —the kind of death suffered at the hands of the state by those who are legally deemed to deserve not only the end of their life, but to be held up as an example of the pain and punishment that goes with criminality.

It is not a new observation, of course. Just a few decades ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer zeroed in on this same point with the opening words of his book The Cost of Discipleship: "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die."

And in every generation (so I assert), there has been a conflict between people who actually GOT the message and wanted to do what Jesus had preached, and those who wanted to stabilize it into a real religion, usually one that provided them with a meal ticket in the process.

—to quote my friend again.

So let me suggest that there is a moral equivalence between (a) the proffered promise of eternal life, which translates (in popular imagination, by a process encouraged endlessly by that party which also embraced Constantine and the ascendancy of the kingdoms of this world) into dreams of a future heavenly existence, but which more properly refers to something that begins with a transformation of this present existence, and (b) the call to embrace death— one's own death, that is to say, whether understood merely as the inevitability of mortality or as the necessary beginning-point of the all-embracing transformation. Christianity sees death as the gateway to life — to this life, not just (or, perhaps, at all?) a life in an otherworldly future. Those who have died have been set free. Those who know how to die well have a message that can set others free. Those who, having died, have lost the fear of death, are free to do the good that such fear would otherwise restrain them from. Thus in those intervening decades between the writing of the New Testament and the establishment of Christianity as an acceptable religion under Constantine, Christians were known, among other things, for their willingness to care for the sick in the midst of plague, giving no regard to their own risk. Like the martyrs, their contemporaries, who faced flame and wild beasts, they took joy in such tasks, by which they bore witness to the Message they had received. Abundant life and the bold embrace of death were one and the same.

Thus letter-writers Paul, Peter and John could talk about death as already having happened, and the new life as that which was the possession only of those who had truly died. To Paul, this meant living in the power of the resurrection. To John, it meant living in love, and thus without fear. To Peter, it meant. being partakers of the divine nature and living the rest of this earthly life by the will of God.

The conflict is always between those who see such things as somehow indicative of otherworldly hopes, and those who see them as descriptions of what it means to fully embrace the instructions of that incredibly charismatic rabbi, Jesus, on how to live in this world, that is, how to embrace death — not only its inevitability, but its painful reality — while living.

It is better to die in screaming agony than never really to live. Live wholly. Do what you can. Die well.

Small signs of hope

Lebanese and Israeli Bloggers Empathize Online reveals a slightly hopeful trend that is going on under the radar. On both sides of an active conflict, there are people who respond to one another as human beings. I'm not sure that governments, or even leaders of political movements, will ever get the "love your enemy" thing, but people on the ground may provide another narrative than that given by either side.

Pullquote:

More generally speaking, what comes out of these conversations—through blogs or interspersed commentaries between Israelis and Lebanese—is a feeling of powerlessness and sadness regarding this conflict over the civilian losses it has caused, and over the policymakers of their respective countries and their international allies who have subjected them to this fait accompli. Hope is also present in these conversations, for while many Lebanese bloggers today feel hate toward Israel and will now refuse any contact with Israelis, most of those who communicate online do not consider themselves as “enemies” but as “neighbours”.

Perhaps the will toward reconciliation will outlast the will toward annihilation, as life trumps death. All that the purveyors of death can do is kill, themselves or others, or (more often) both. But creative striving toward peace does not have death as its endpoint, but new life, a hope and a future.

Unfortunately, each side in a conflict can also envision peace — what is now being called, by some, a "sustainable" cease-fire; sustainable if and only if by the time it is proclaimed one side has clearly won, and the other clearly lost. Every empire and every dictatorship imposes such a peace upon the territory it has subdued: a peace built on terror, not on opposition to terror. But this kind of false peace is actually what is not sustainable. It is of this kind of peace that the seeds of new conflict are sown, as could be shown by many historical examples.

For my own part, I would say that any nation which for any reason belittles, discounts, repudiates, eschews or diminishes talk of forgiveness or reconciliation and all that goes with it, has forfeited, indeed explicitly repudiated, any meaningful association with the values that would truly be necessary for it to be called — as some would like to do — a "Christian" nation. In the New Testament, reconciliation, forgiveness and restoration are the means by which God is made known in the world, by which it proclaims that the Kingdom of God has already arrived: that peaceable kingdom in which every man is free to invite his neighbor to sit with him under his own vine and under his own fig tree. If Israelis and Lebanese are still seeking, while missiles and bombs are falling, to call each other neighbor, not enemy, we can yet pray with hope: "Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on Earth..."

Quote for the day

Lest we forget....

MODERATOR: New question. How would you go about as president deciding when it was in the national interest to use U.S. force, generally?

BUSH: Well, if it's in our vital national interest, and that means whether our territory is threatened or people could be harmed, whether or not the alliances are -- our defense alliances are threatened, whether or not our friends in the Middle East are threatened. That would be a time to seriously consider the use of force. Secondly, whether or not the mission was clear. Whether or not it was a clear understanding as to what the mission would be. Thirdly, whether or not we were prepared and trained to win. Whether or not our forces were of high morale and high standing and well-equipped. And finally, whether or not there was an exit strategy. I would take the use of force very seriously. I would be guarded in my approach. I don't think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we've got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. . .

And one more:

[BUSH:] If we don't have a clear vision of the military, if we don't stop extending our troops all around the world and nation building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road, and I'm going to prevent that.

—The First Presidential Debate, October 3, 2000.

Birth Pangs

For those who are paying attention, this week's comment by Condoleeza Rice, on the occasion of her holding out from what would have been a consensus about a call for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon, containing the cryptic phrase "birth pangs of a new Middle East," sends a coded signal to a huge number of American evangelicals that the United States is seeking to become a midwife to the onset of the Great Tribulation.

Disclaimer: "Rapture" is an evangelical technical term, and the entire dispensatonal-millenial belief system that promotes it is a latecomer to Christian theology. Suffice to say here that while I have an insider's understanding of what all that is about, neither I nor the faith tradition that has nurtured me find reason to make use of it. I'll leave for another day all the ins and outs of interpretation involved. However: even though this is rather an intramural discussion among Christians, it has huge implications for how people think about the course of world events.

Some of us would actually like to follow Jesus, and some want a ringside seat at fulfillment of prophecy. Many, no doubt, think the two are the same thing. And since biblical prophecies are replete with predictions of calamity, we have the bizarre sight of followers of the Prince of Peace acting as cheerleaders for more calamity. I wonder if this is what the Master wishes, when he comes, to find his servants so doing.

The Stealth Veto

The New York Times reported this morning that the American Bar Association is issuing a report strongly denouncing the current president's practice of issuing "signing statements" after putting his signature on bills passed by Congress.

In a comprehensive report, a bipartisan 11-member panel of the bar association said Mr. Bush had used such “signing statements” far more than his predecessors, raising constitutional objections to more than 800 provisions in more than 100 laws on the ground that they infringed on his prerogatives.

These broad assertions of presidential power amount to a “line-item veto” and improperly deprive Congress of the opportunity to override the veto, the panel said.

The issue now being revealed has to do with the linkage between the proliferation of these signing statements (more than 800 so far) and the paucity of vetoes (one) in the Bush presidency. It's very simple: If the president doesn't veto a bill, Congress has no way, short of impeachment on grounds of violation of the "faithfully execute" clause, to directly address his refusal to comply with portions of it.

And since Congress wouldn't give him the line-item veto, he just went ahead and took it, on the sly. With no opportunity for Cogress to override. Sweet. When the King finally dissolves Parliament, will anyone even notice?

For further reading: Fellow blogger Tinsel Wing has provided a "top ten" list, first published early this month by the Boston Globe.

Till Death Do Us Part?

Cross-posted.

I’ve seen a lot of people get divorced, some after decades of marriage. I’ve been one of those old-fashioned folks who really would like for the marriage vows “until death do us part” to mean something. Lately I’ve decided that really, they do.

One of the last few conversations I had with the mother of a large family before she died had to do with this topic. She had seen numerous family members go through this painful process of separation from their spouses. She said this to me:

“You know, sometimes I think in the church [meaning, our little congregation] we’ve made a mistake, because we’ve been so anxious not to judge people or condemn them who have been divorced, that we’ve not really talked about what a terrible thing it is.”

I agreed that divorce is a tragedy in every case, even when it seems like it was the right thing to do, even if there’s no blame to be placed on the divorced person, even if later on the parties experience growth and change for the better in their (now separate) lives. We should never pretend that something heartwrenchingly painful and soul-destroying has not occurred.

So I got to thinking again about the wedding vows, and whether or not they mean something that is somehow true even in those cases that end in this tragedy of divorce. And I realized, that divorce itself involves a kind of a death, and that makes the marriage vow true “until death do us part” even in those cases. No one gets a divorce without something dying, or having died. You hear it in the language: “I felt like I had died inside.” “It seemed that there was no life in our relationship anymore.” “I knew it was over.” People in this process go through deep mourning, just as real and severe as when one mourns a loved one’s passing. All the stages of grief apply: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and at the very last, acceptance. The tragedy is real, incontrovertible. The difference is that what has died is not a person, but a relationship: something as real, in the realm of the spirit, as anything can be.

For the believer in the living God, however, it is necessary to go through that mourning, and receive the promise: blessed are they that mourn. It is possible to acknowledge the depth of the tragedy, without imposing a rigid requirement that the person live the rest of their lives in its shadow. We bury our dead; we say goodbye, and turn to the next task of life. We don’t pretend there has been no loss, but neither do we devote our existence to building monuments to that loss. We look for new life, new joy, beyond this death a resurrection. We comfort one another, and are comforted. We remember the good. We create new relationships. We live again.

The Calculus of Death

News reports at the hour of this writing indicate that the attacks by Hezbollah rockets on Haifa and the towns of northern Israel have resulted in 24 Israeli deaths, while the retaliatory barrage of Israeli airpower on targets in Lebanon have killed at least 170 human beings. What I see no one asking is this:

In the deadly calculus of war, are we prepared to accept that a lethality ratio of a little better than 7 to 1 deaths, in the name of a right to self-defense, is acceptably proportional, so long as the seven are somehow associated with the bad guys?

By that calculus, America should be perfectly happy to kill about 21,000 Saudis and Yemenis and whatnot in retaliation for 9/11. Except, oh, wait: we substituted Iraqis, didn't we, and raised the ratio by another order of magnitude.

Remember, it's the bad guys who have no respect for human life. That's why we have to kill so many more of them, than they ever do of us.

Or maybe I just never was that good at math.

Lies, damn lies and FUD

This is SOOOOOOOOO evil!

An outfit calling itself "Hands Off the Internet" has just fielded a television spot opposing Net Neutrality. In 30 seconds it makes a series of utterly false claims and even more twisted buzzwords, designed to have the following effect:

1. Convince the viewers that some nutcases out here are trying to get congress to ENACT something called "Net Neutrality" thus preventing "progress" and "competition" on the internet.

2. Pretend that when a major newswpaper such as the Washington Post editiorializes that Congress should "stay out of cyberspace," this supports the goals of the backers of the ad, when in fact it does just the opposite by supporting the status quo, which has been assigned this label of "Net Neutrality."

Thereby,

3. Stirring the emotions of an unthinking public to bring an outcry that in fact is contrary to the interests of that public's actual opinion, which is generally that, yes indeed, rules governing how internet access is distributed SHOULD NOT CHANGE.

I am about willing to pay a hundred bucks cold cash* to anyone who can demonstrate that this "Hands Off the Internet" organization is not a wholly-owned or fully-funded creature of the telecommunications giants, whose goal is to get congress to ACT by enacting NEW arrangements that would allow those companies to impose control of bandwidth based on content, and control of content based on the payment of big money. This corporate control of the flow of information is what is referred to in Orwellian style, in the ad, as "competition." Make no mistake: The opponents of so-called net neutrality want to make it less likely that the average surfer will ever see what YOU post to the internet.

Expose them. Please.

(a public service rant.)

* [edit: I get to keep my cash. See the page listing supporters of handsoff.org, including AT&T, Cingular, Bell South, etc... According to Sourcewatch.org,

The bulk of HOTI's financial support comes from the newly re-formed AT&T, which has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into HOTI ad campaigns, including extensive advertising buys across the blogosphere and in mainstream and beltway press. Nowhere throughout these ads is it disclosed that the effort is funded by the nation's largest telecommunications companies and lobbyists. Instead, HOTI ads are fashioned to look and feel like genuine grassroots efforts, backed by broad popular suport.

]

[EDIT as of August 1, 2006]: There is a slashdot discussion today rehashing the arguments, and buried deep within is a link to an excellent summary of the issues involved.

A quote for today

[War] is instinctive.  But the instinct can be fought.  We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands!  But we can stop it.  We can admit that we're killers ... but we're not going to kill today.  That's all it takes!  Knowing that we're not going to kill today!

                -- Kirk, "A Taste of Armageddon", stardate 3193.0

Nine Dollar Gasoline

Had a dream last night.  It seems the federal government had finally decided to get serious about the dependence on fossil fuels, and announced a program for alternative energy transportation to be put on the fast track.  I don't remember the details of that program, but in conjunction with that came another announcement:

Effective immediately, the retail price of gasoline, nationwide, would be set and frozen at nine dollars ($9.00) a gallon.  

Presumably this would serve as consumer protection on the high side (to keep the price from going to, say, twelve).  But in the immediate effect, there would be two consequences:  

1.  Short-term decrease in demand, some of it permanent as people adjust to different ways and schedules of getting from place to place.

2.  An immediate revenue stream to fund the change to alternative energy sources, presuming that the difference between this madated price and what the market would bear is forfeit to the government for that purpose.

Good thing I woke up when I did, eh?

Infallible presidency?

We know that the claims for papal infallibility extend to formal occasions only, when the senior pastor of the world's Roman Catholics speaks "ex cathedra." Apparently our Chief executive is on more sure footing than that, at least according to this lawyer whose salary is paid by your taxes:

The President Is Always Right

A real slogan to fight for?

What if people started upholding the values espoused by Jesus and his apostles? Check this link to the One Commanment campaign.

economic musings (a fragment)

Been thinking about economics.

The current prevailing economic/political paradigm is one of growth/surplus. The equations go something like this. Economically, sustained growth is the Holy Grail. A healthy economy is a growing economy. You know you’re doing well if you have a higher level of economic activity, productivity, profit, and so on, this year or this month than in the previous period. This idea drives all the talk that we hear about the markets, stock prices, employment, goods and services, international trade, the whole ball of wax.

Now, if you overlay this underlying presumption about the virtue of growth, which is really a corollary of the notion that profit is good, therefore a lot of profit must be very good, with another basic economic assumption that has driven Western thinking since at least the days of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, namely that the economy as a whole is also a zero-sum game, then something else comes into play. The pursuit of a surplus economy against a backdrop of limited resources leads to the virtue of deficits. Simple accounting: where there is a profit, somewhere there must be a loss. So the vision of sustained surpluses cannot be extrapolated to a global economy, because somewhere there has to be a loser: other nations, the working class, future taxpayers. You can only keep this thing going as long as all the balls stay in the air. It all crashes down the day the last payment comes due. So the name of the game becomes to put off that day of reckoning, or see that it falls on someone else. This drives trade policy, and inevitably, military policy. One of the great benefits of a huge military in the service of unlimited expansion is that the military is a great way to generate a huge amount of totally non-productive economic activity. That keeps the balls in the air, and also keeps those in the game that might get tired and want to get out.

But what I’m interested in is whether there might be other possible models for an economy. When a surplus economy collides with limited resources, you get a zero-sum situation with all the attendant evils: wars and rumours of wars, a widening gap between rich and poor. Profit is good, living wages diminish profits and are therefore bad. Is there another way?

Historically, other ways have occurred. What I’d like to explore is what I want to call a sufficiency economy. Here the goal is not surplus, not profit, but sufficiency, and of course here I will be talking about sufficiency for, in the first instance, living breathing humans. But even if we could think about sufficiency for those non-human (not to say inhuman) artificial persons, that is, corporations, whose profits are today thought to be the only real moral good in the universe, this would not be such a bad idea either.

In a sufficiency economy, the goal would be to have enough economic activity for the purpose of making sure that all participants are fed, clothed, adequately housed, and allowed to enjoy their life as well as they can. There is actually a biblical precedent for this, and several attendant mandates.

The precedent is found in the story of the manna in the wilderness: every morning, when the manna would appear on the ground, the people would go out, household by household, to gather food for the day, and “he who gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.” Those who tried to hoard a surplus found that it putrefied overnight. Sustained activity was assured, because new food had to be acquired each day; but there was no chance of anyone garnering a profit from the needs of others.

The mandates that support this way of thinking are many, but I’ll mention only two to begin with. One was the prohibition against any one person acquiring large tracts of land, enforced in part by the second, which was the release of debts every seventh year. One of the major driving forces behind a profit/suplus/deficit/debt-driven economy, the creation of a permanent debtor class, or a situation of permanent indebtedness, was anticipated and cut off at the knees by these provisions of the law of Moses. The goal was not to create an unattainable Utopia by the elimination of poverty (“the poor you will always have with you”) but to provide for its continued mitigation and relief by both structural and social means (therefore you shall be openhanded and not close your heart against your brother).

Nothing to see here. Move along

Or was that, MoveOn?

This affects us all. Take a look. The issue is something called Net Neutrality.

save the internet

No Comment

Does the church ever send a mixed message?

Jesus isn't magic

Could hardly have said this better myself. A highly recommended article.

Excerpt:

Rather than the magic Jesus, there is a very real and powerful Christ whose teachings continue drawing the world to his kingdom community from many neighbors. Ironically, many who preach about absolutes and literal interpretations use situational ethics and complicated arguments to explain that Jesus did not mean what he said.

decoding Dan Brown

Okay, so I finally swallowed my gum and got a copy of The Da Vinci Code, and read it. I wasn't so interested that I would pay for a new copy, so I got a used one through Amazon. I read it out of a sense of professional duty; in my line of work, people are likely to ask me what I think of this book (and movie, which I don't intend to inflict on myself for a while yet).

Full disclosure: I really, really can't stand the way Dan Brown writes. I got through maybe five or ten pages of Angels and Demons and couldn't bring myself to read further. He's juvenile, overdramatic, does not know how to portray simple human emotions, so he doesn't try; he just tells you that his characters are scared, shocked, confused, puzzled, worried, relieved or whatever. So, okay, going in I have a fairly well-formed resentment at a guy that can have the chutzpah to pass this stuff off as good writing, and actually make money at it. Fine.

Add to that the myriad ways he gets his basic facts wrong (I counted at least six separate errors in one short but particularly egregious paragraph, and that's not the whole of it by any means). So okay, as fiction it's junk, and as reliable material for anything like history, it's worse than junk. And the cryptography is grade-school level and implausible to boot. What's left, then, is a fairly ordinary page-turner of an adventure story, with a few puzzles and twists to keep the pages turning.

I'm not about to take up the cudgels on behalf of post-Constantinian Christianity, but really in this instance there's no need. For all that he bashes, in various ways, the institutional Church (and some of its colorfully imagined components), the bashing is limited to an idea of a monolithic mind-control organization which, to the extent that such a thing exists, would not be worth defending. As to the big controversial idea that he expropriates from the 1983 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which is supposed somehow to be in danger of shaking the faith of millions, even if it were accurate, I've only got two words:

So what?

Kurt Lortz

Kurt Lortz, a friend of mine for thirty years, died Monday.

Steve and Kurt Lortz are the brothers responsible for the now hard-to-find game Panzer Pranks and Kurt's never-published Dark Worlds, which, after it was replaced, pursuant to a creative dispute with the publisher over certain details, by the moderately successful Call of Cthulhu, continued to be developed as a more generic (non-Lovecraftian) vampire-hunting roleplaying game. Back in 1976, Steve introduced a number of us to the role-playing-game concept; Dungeons and Dragons was a fairly new thing back then, and Steve knew the authors, or at least Dave Arneson, pretty well. So Steve taught us game mechanics and something of the basics of how to run an rpg, and has gone on to design more games and sculpt a lot of miniature figures, making him fairly well-known in gaming circles; whilst Kurt, his more flamboyant younger brother, did research into arcane background material, and with his flair for the dramatic could be counted on to create conditions for a dynamite (sometimes literally) interactive story. Many nights we spent, with various groups of unwashed geeks, into the wee hours and beyond, especially as we playtested the various iterations of that great project, Dark Worlds. But we might also be discussing the great questions of life, delving into spiritual truth or political untruth.

Some people you meet, and get along with, and spend time with pleasantly enough, because you happen to live nearby and have some common interests. Other people you choose, and keep in touch with no matter what the geography, and despite how interests may change. I've known Steve since the fall of 1968, and Kurt since 1976. We've kept in touch because we wanted to, and have become legends in one another's lives. Locations, relationships, marriages, various jobs and responsibilities change over time; but friendship has remained a constant. So it was that this past March when I was in central Indiana for a day or so, I called Steve, and the two of us took a few hours and went to visit Kurt, who due to a series of deteriorating health conditions, was by then residing in a nursing home outside Indianapolis. For the past several years Kurt has been teaching in a private school, and had continued to do so until this most recent series of hospitaizations. He was absolutely devoted to his students. Last year he told me how he had, over the previous year, battled successfully against an agressive cancer, and consciously used his own situation as a teaching tool for those in his charge. He wanted them to learn how to face the realities of life, including suffering, with dignity and faith, and he was proud of how they had succeeded. Now the cancer was back, along with other issues. But he was still the same Kurt: deadly serious about facing reality head on, but full of humor, able to laugh at himself and evoke laughter, and at the same time able to make every situation into a larger-than-life story. He had a laptop computer in his room, on which he was composing music. Our visit together was like old times, though his body was failing him: confined to bed and wheelchair, painful sores on his body, his hands wrapped in bandages, periodic bouts of pain so severe that sometimes he would pass out from the pain. But in heart and spirit bouyant, the twinkle never leaving his eye, always full of gratitude to God for his grace. It was a good visit. I couldn't help wonder if it might be the last.

Last night, Steve phoned to give me the news. There had been time enough for his family to gather, some from far away, and be with him in his final moments. Steve told me that when the moment came, strange to say, they felt like dancing, the way you would when a runner on your team breaks the tape at the finish line. I'm sure you just would have had to be there.

Kurt Lortz: a legend in my life, large in every way. A man of courage, and dignity, indomitable faith, and utmost loyalty.