The second part of this essay can be found here.

With memories still slick from the worst blood-letting in history, followed by the less dramatic horrors of the Soviet “peace,” the modern-day evil I witnessed wasn’t the worst thing ever to have happened in the city of Lviv, western Ukraine. But it surely was the offspring of the grossly satanic events of the preceding century.

The spectacle took place a brisk five-minute walk from the NKVD prison where the Soviets wreaked a frenzied slaughter before the German advance in ’41, murdering so many “dissidents” that the building became a charnel house with a mass grave in the courtyard. Victims included prominent Greek Catholic priests, martyred for the Faith and beatified by Pope John Paul II: for example, Blessed Fr. Zynovii Kovalyk, crucified against a wall; or Blessed Fr. Severian Baranyk, a cross carved into his chest.

Following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Treaty, the Soviets devoured this part of western Ukraine (then eastern Poland). Love they did not engender, and so the Germans were welcomed as liberators. The Nazis among them, however, would prove equally evil. The old NKVD prison, slated to become a museum, is a pistol shot from the muddy park where a memorial marks the site of a synagogue blown up by the Nazis. The Jews comprised a third of Lviv’s pre-war population. The Nazis murdered all of those whom their righteous gentile neighbors could not manage to hide. One beneficiary of Christian love, the young Simon Wiesenthal, was rescued by a Ukrainian policeman.

In this neighborhood marred by old evils, a stodgy woman fumbling up the street precipitated a new nightmare.

Heavily bundled on a mild Sunday afternoon, she leaned against poles and storefronts for support. A clear liquid leaked from her cloth bag. As she approached the wide entrances to the open-air market, which offered no means of support, it didn’t take Nostradamus to predict that, whatever happened, it would be bad. And this is a country where extremes are often the norm.

Releasing her grip from the last pole before the entrance, she took a few faltering steps and collapsed among the bustling crowd on the busiest market day of the week. Despite a few pedestrians who glanced at the human pile, the crowd parted around her as disinterestedly as a river around a rock. As I watched this spectacle, holding a piece of pizza for which I no longer had an appetite, I felt sick. Wouldn’t anybody help? Call the police? What could I do, practically ignorant of the language?

A little black and white dog sauntered over and licked her face. After a minute, but probably less, she sat up. Then a man approached her familiarly, bent over, and took her by the arm. Thank God somebody was helping this sick woman.

Then he began shaking her with reproaches, picked up the leaky bag, whipped it around his body, and bashed her in the head. This was her man, it seemed: a tall bony bastard and no model of sobriety himself. He continued admonishing her in a loud but controlled manner, and then swung the bag again, this time smacking her in the face. What was going on? People walked by, pretending not to notice, except for the crone wearing a babushka who watched in silent concern about three yards away.

The brute finally gave her a farewell blow, leaving her slumped over with her red-knitted hat in her hands. He quickly returned to retrieve her bag after dumping its contents, a broken vodka bottle, on to the sidewalk.

Finally she half walked, half crawled to a ledge in front of a food stand and sat down. I turned and began walking away, feeling ill at the sight of a human reduced to less than an animal; the measured brutality of that man; and the indifference of the crowd. Then I stopped. “What would Jesus do?” I asked myself. (Yes, it sounds trite and reminds me of those cheesy “WWJD?” wristbands popular among Evangelical teenyboppers, but it is a basic question that Christians often forgot.) I didn’t precisely know, but He certainly wouldn’t walk away. So I bought her a piece of pizza.

“Please,” I said in Ukrainian, offering her the food. She stared up from a confused, miserable countenance: bloated face, lips blistered with sores, several broken teeth. She accepted the pizza placed in jaundiced hands and muttered a few words which I didn’t understand. I left her, but glanced back several times. She kept looking at me, still holding the pizza. The crowd carried on.

*****

In spite of this street theater from Hell, the day’s events portended blessings which would blossom throughout the following weeks. In fact, this day (Sunday, February 24) marked the halfway point in my tour-of-duty volunteering at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv. At the invitation of the Ukrainian Catholic Education Foundation, headquartered in my native Chicago, I came impelled by the desire to learn and report about a unique and powerful apostolate on the Catholic Church’s Eastern Front. UCU is the only Catholic institution of higher learning in the former Soviet Union, fighting for the Faith in a culture corrupted by communism and prone to the more insidious depredations of Western secularism.

The first month began hopefully but haltingly, like the transmissions of the buses (called mashrutkas) that race about Lviv. It was beset with the introductory surprises and difficulties encountered by any foreigner in a new but, in this case, rather familiar European culture. Except for the communist legacy and an alphabet that supposedly was a blessing from Sts. Cyril and Methodius, but seems more like a curse to ward off Westerners, it reminded me of ethnic enclaves in Chicago had the Mayors Daley governed them with a steel grip in a one-party state. (Bad analogy, perhaps.) But the half-way mark was auspicious.

First, the weather was the foretaste of spring that happens in late February before winter makes her last stand. The warmth and sunshine of the third Sunday in Lent made even the Soviet-era prison of high-rises in which I reside—the epitome of what Russell Kirk called the “architecture of servitude and boredom”—seem a tad less conducive to suicide and alcohol abuse. “Without God, anything is possible,” said Alexandr Solzenhitsyn. With God, however, such dispiriting architecture certainly would not be possible.

A five-mile walk from this purgatory on the city’s outskirts took me through a Mordor of crumbling factories and commercial outlets; past the rambling forested bluffs of Striskiy Park, opposite the Ukrainian Military Academy and hulking Soviet war memorial, despised by patriotic Ukrainians, some of whom fought the Soviets occupation into the 1950s; down straight Austro-Hungarian streets constructed in the nineteenth century when the city, then called Lemberg, was the capital of Galicia; and finally into the charming medieval heart of Lviv, erected by the Poles who called it Lwow (pronounced “La-voov,” there being no letter “V” in Polish).

The further I walked from the present, the better. A city’s soul is evident in its architecture, and the pre-communist era evinces a confident civilization deeply rooted in faith and the love of spiritual values. Churches, churches everywhere. Statues of saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary are omnipresent: some new, some desecrated or intact from communist days, a few of the pedestals standing bare. The earth-bound, unloving, and easily disposable environment of the totalitarian twentieth century looks like a filthy child as compared to the venerability and faith and hope eminent in Christian Europe.

The morning walk ended at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Assumption. The devotion of the worshipers and the wooden kneelers—abjured by some for the marble floor, perhaps because the kneelers are positioned at a sloping angle that makes kneeling straight difficult—emphasize the sacrificial nature of the Mass to an almost masochistic degree. But thankfully the sacrifice wasn’t too painful this day: Sometimes the holy water freezes in the unheated church.

The Cathedral of the Assumption is the only Roman Catholic church to have remained open in Lviv during the entire Soviet occupation. A priest remained in residence at all times, concerned that if the church were ever left empty, the commies would have had the pretext to lock the door and put up a sign reading “Closed for renovations.” And, of course, the communists could have cared less about renovating a church.

The Greek Catholic Church, however, was completely banned in Ukraine.

Native to this land, the Greek Catholic Church is the largest Eastern Rite in communion with Rome, acknowledging papal authority while retaining the Byzantine liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. In 1946, Stalin convened a sham ecclesiastical council that merged it with the Russian Orthodox Church, which assumed control of all its assets. Conveniently, no Greek Catholic prelates were present at the so-called “Council of Lviv” to give their assent, having already been executed or exiled to Siberia. Forced to function as an underground Church until 1989, today the Greek Catholic faithful are enjoying a renaissance. The Ukrainian Catholic University is their flagship institution of learning. But more about this later.

From the outside, the Roman Catholic cathedral has an Italianate appearance, with bright yellow stucco walls. Inside, it’s an ethereal montage of centuries of art and architectural styles, from gothic bordering on the gloomy to the merry lightness of the baroque paintings which adorn the ceilings. The effigies of recumbent knights on the walls of their tombs are especially moving, if that’s the right word. It is also the seat of the oldest active cardinal in the Catholic Church, Marian Jaworski, who won from Pope John Paul II his mitre, though perhaps at the expense of his right hand. The story behind the black glove covering Cardinal Jaworski’s prosthetic hand—indirectly the fault of his fellow young priest, Karol Wojtyla—is worth Googling.

The cathedral is the spiritual home of Lviv’s remaining Poles, most of whom the Soviets evicted into present-day Poland after World War II. The Roman Catholic religious orders, predominately Polish, followed the exodus. These included the Franciscans. Their most famous member from old Lwow was St. Maximilian Kolbe, who offered up his life for a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz.

Indeed, the city holds a prominent place in Polish sacred history. Following a miraculous victory over the militantly Protestant Swedes, King Jan Kazimierz crowned Our Lady of Czestochowa as Queen and Protector of Poland in this cathedral in 1656. A tapestry commemorating the event hangs in the Polish chapel in Washington, D.C.’s Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. I often prayed in that chapel. Being able to pray at the site of the actual coronation, however, has been one of life’s unexpected joys.

But the Poles are mainly history. Though it’s said that some continue to hold keys to homes that the Reds chopped up into apartments in the style of Doctor Zhivago, their world is gone but in memory. In turn, the Soviets restocked the city with additional Ukrainians from the country roundabout, as well as Russian imports. The Reds also imported the scourge of vodka into a beer culture.

Walking into the refreshing late morning air, buoyed with the blessings of the Faith, the day promised more goodness: namely, the twin delights of art and human beauty. In the evening I would meet a pretty young woman from UCU to enjoy Verdi’s Il Trovatore at the opera house, one of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s finest and the centerpiece of Lviv’s main square. Like the rest of the city, the 1901 building escaped World War II unscathed, at least architecturally. And good seats cost four dollars.

Spring and high culture were in the air, and Nataliya was on her way. Sunday indeed seemed propitious of many more good tidings for the remainder of my stay. And propitious the ensuing weeks have largely proved, but for the black mark that would blight that very afternoon.

Arriving at our opera rendezvous a bit early and very hungry, I walked two blocks to the open-air market to buy a slice of Ukrainian-style pizza, which is more like a hot open-faced pastry. (Another market is two blocks in another direction, but it specializes in folk art; small artifacts left behind by the fleeing Poles; and Soviet and Nazi kitsch. The irony of a period ashtray depicting Hitler made it an irresistible purchase. That anti-smoking zealot would be so proud of his successors’ recent successes. Or maybe he is lighting up in Hell nowadays?) And then the stodgy woman fumbled up the street.

*****

It is no revelation that communism assaulted the civic spirit, so this most shocking of spectacles was, in a way, unsurprising. It was hard to be a comrade when one’s neighbor or spouse could be a KGB informant, so one tended to look out for number one. Indeed, there’s a spirit here of public diffidence—in contrast with the private warmth and conviviality—that makes the Manhattan subway seem like a Des Moines church bake sale. Wishing strangers on the street a good day sometimes elicits a strange look, like telling somebody that their grandmother sews smelly socks. Irene Danysh, a Ukrainian-American who works at UCU, summed up the problem with an apt anecdote. Her first Ukrainian landlady, after taking it upon herself to tell Irene that she did not search her bags when she was out, told her: “I myself trust no one.”

The wicked pre-opera feature and the audience non-response were stark reminders that Ukraine’s resurgent Christianity confronts post-communist hangovers.

Religion is literally in the public square: a life-sized crèche in front of Town Hall; brimming churches on Sunday (according to a survey, some 60% of Lviv residents are weekly church-goers and 90% say they believe in God); several statues of Mary down from the opera house that always seem to have worshipers gazing up in silent prayer. But it needs to be taken to heart as well. And the secularism which Pope Benedict XVI recently called a greater threat than communism … well, that makes the work of the Church here all the more dire.

If the preceding analysis seems serious, it is. And two days after the sick, plastered woman was publicly assaulted with nary a glance, I had tears welling up in my eyes again: not of impotent frustration and anger but pure bliss. For I was in the presence of Divine Love, manifested in human kindness.

Sister Lukia Murashko was making her rounds to her ministry’s workshops for Lviv’s mentally handicapped. These people used to remain locked up at home, shunned by society; or worse, incarcerated in Soviet mental asylums with personnel who must have made Nurse Ratched look like Mother Teresa.

A Basilian nun, Sister Lukia resembles Maid Marion as played by Olivia d’Havilland in The Adventures of Robin Hood. And her little ministry, run from an office in UCU’s basement, is one of several corporal counterparts to the intellectually spiritual work occurring in the classrooms upstairs. This university and her people are doing the Lord’s work in a culture perhaps more needy of redemption than most, and understandably so. And doing it very well, indeed, as the next installment will relate.

Matthew Rarey is an independent journalist, and can be reached at MatthewRarey00@yahoo.com.

When H. G. Wells wrote his fantastic tale about a scientist who breeds human-animal hybrids with sadistic intent—created to destroy one another, plus any humans unfortunate enough to wash up on The Island of Dr. Moreau—that utopian socialist probably didn’t envision his own country becoming another island of lost souls.

Morally speaking, however, modern-day Britain increasingly resembles the futuristic dystopia Wells depicted in The Time Machine: a post-historic world where mutant cannibals, the Morlocks, sustain themselves upon the helpless descendants of modern men, the Eloi.

A harsh analogy? Just consider this breaking news: Britain’s own Moreaus have been given the all’s clear to farm human-animal hybrid embryos for stem-cell research. Like Moreau, these gods of the laboratory also create to destroy, but with the putative aim of doing good: saving sick people by curing incurable diseases. Creative destruction, if you will.

Even if this should prove possible, the notion of achieving good ends through destructive (or, if you like, evil) means is still a Devil’s bargain, smacking of hubris and destined to folly. Even if Grandma shouldn’t die of Alzheimer’s any longer, that won’t make the Grim Reaper reconsider his vocation. People will continue to die, however many nascent human beings (or, literally, human guinea pigs) are destroyed to delay the inevitable.

Despite the ghoulish attempts of men who would play God, it’s instructive to remind ourselves that no man can create a living being from scratch. Animal hybrids count no more than plant hybrids. In both cases, creation is merely manipulated to assume new forms, like lumps of clay molded into sundry forms.

Creating even the simplest organism is beyond our ability, a cell being incomparably more complex—and awe inspiring—than a computer chip. Playing God is best left to science fiction, where freak shows can entertain without incurring moral culpability.

*****

No man can create an animal, but history shows men terribly capable of making animals of themselves. To be fair to the lower orders of creation, however, they don’t deserve to be grouped together with self-debased humans. While we can lower ourselves, smothering the spark of the divine that makes us human, animals cannot rise above their natures. Besides, some animals have exhibited a certain nobility that reminds us that one Creator made us all for each other’s mutual benefit. So it would be cruel to put Lassie or Robert E. Lee’s horse Traveller in the same pen with disgraced football star Mike Vick, who cashed in civilization for savagery.

As most know, Vick faces prison time for running a dog fighting operation. Evidently his $130 million contract with the Atlanta Falcons didn’t serve to cultivate higher forms of leisure. With his cronies, he trained dogs to fight to the death. Stacks of bloody Benjamins exchanged hands as they bet on the winners. Pooches who weren’t up to the ultimate challenge were killed: some drowned, others hanged (yes, hanged: but how, and why?).

After the court hearing where Vick entered a no-contest plea agreement, he consoled his mother, his sobbing pregnant fiancée, and legions of distraught fans who live vicariously through such "heroes." His actions were "immature," he said, his tail between his legs.

"I want to apologize to all the young kids out there for my immature acts and, you know, what I did was, what I did was very immature, so that means I need to grow up.”

It’s unmanly to kick someone when he’s down, and there’s always hope for redemption: of "mak[ing] Michael Vick a better person," as he put it.

But such gruesome acts of cruelty, which is the sheer pleasure of inflicting pain upon the helpless, demand punishment. Of course, Vick’s masters would have preferred covering up their star player’s "immature" pastime off the gridiron. He was an incredibly lucrative fighting machine himself, and his #7 jersey was one of the best selling in the whole NFL.

Although the dog fighting angle may be shocking, is it surprising that rotten things should bob to the surface of our cultural swamp? Cruelty toward the weak and helpless is often mistaken for strength nowadays, though it’s usually packaged as a virtue. Destroy a country for democracy? It’s just a blessing in disguise, really, and the wogs—never called such, of course, but that’s how the benighted are regarded—will thank us when they trade in their bullets for ballots. Pry good jobs from your countrymen and ship them to strangers overseas? That’s just the marvel of free trade. Besides, lighter wallets can buy cheaper foreign manufactures at the local Wal-Mart. Don’t have cash? Put it on plastic.

When it comes to the Neanderthal realm of commercial sport, however, there is no window dressing. "Being a man" is celebrated as the in-your-face exhibition of the rawest characteristics of the male sex, human or not: unbridled aggression; using females as mere vehicles for sexual gratification; expressing language in grunts with the aid of gesticulations; all accompanied to the "music" of a primitive beat with lyrics from that ring of Hell where all evil is banal.

And whereas the ancient Romans never would have dreamed of treating their human fighting animals as heroes, the lucrative contracts showered upon males like Vick give their behavior an imprimatur of propriety, though as fake as the "gold" in bling jewelry.

Nor is cruelty masquerading as manliness the sole domain of over-muscled morons. Maybe Vick truly believes that staging his little horror show was merely immature, though this recognition may be more reflexive—the humiliated reaction to getting caught—than genuinely understood. Less can be said of otherwise admirable men like Ernest Hemingway and his friend, the great actor Gary Cooper. They should have known better.

In the biography Hemingway: Life into Art, Jeffrey Meyers recounts one of Papa and Coop’s hunting expeditions. They were accompanied by Ingrid Bergman’s first husband, Petter Lindstrom, and the gentle Swede was shocked by the indiscriminate slaughter: "We drove along the power lines in a jeep and they shot eagles off the power lines using telescopic scopes. ... Another day we went rabbit hunting. They engaged these farmers to ride in trucks chasing the rabbits towards them. They killed maybe fifty rabbits. Nobody wanted them."

Killing distant eagles and scurrying rabbits may be one thing, though Natty Bumpo (who felt such remorse for shooting an eagle) and Beatrix Potter would beg to differ. Cruelty to man’s best friend, however, is more beastly than anything a mere animal could contrive. It’s impossible to imagine Hemingway, Cooper, or any real man abusing a dog.

*****

On a lighter note, it’s worth mentioning that even when man’s best friend isn’t available to pet and play fetch, he sometimes has to be invented as an imaginary friend.

Strolling about Capitol Hill the other evening, I saw a little boy playing on the sidewalk in front of his home. He was maybe five years old. As I approached, he said, "Hi, you got a dog?"

"Yeah, but she’s on vacation," I answered, which is sort of true: It would be tough caring for a dog given my work schedule (a dog being not a cat), so Julia—a Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix consisting of equal parts charm and naughtiness rolled up into one furry roly-poly of a mutt—resides with my folks back in Chicago.

"Well, you wanna see my dog?" asked the boy. Of course I did.

So he ran into his front yard and pulled out a sort of toy dog—or so it appeared—attached to the end of a push cart resembling one of those make-believe lawnmowers with bobbing balls that a boy pushes alongside his father while the old man cuts the grass. And so the three of us walked a few yards down the sidewalk together.

It was twilight, and when the last rays of sunshine broke through the shady trees, I saw that the boy actually was pushing a toy frog.

"Hey, that’s not a dog, that’s a frog," I said.

"Yeah, I know he’s a frog, but I call him my dog," said the boy.

Then he swiftly turned around with his frog-dog and said, "Nice meeting ya’, but I’ve gotta go inside now!"

He didn’t abruptly depart because he was disenchanted by this statement of fact. He was just your usual uninhibited kid, in this case for the better. Some children can be the cruelest human beings for the same reason; others never are cruel, their marks of Original Sin expressed in other deformations of character; a few, alas, never develop the moral maturity requisite to conquer cruelty, becoming pathetic shades of the men we all are called to be.

Matthew Rarey writes from Washington.  He can be reached at MatthewRarey00@yahoo.com

“Why, good ’mornin’, son! How ya’ feelin’?” answered the sprightly little black church lady, well past retirement age and wearing a beautiful white hat with little lavender-colored flowers.

So began a simply beautiful Sunday, the first real day of spring in Washington, as I skipped down Capitol Hill’s red-brick sidewalks to commune with my own fellow guilt-ridden Catholic worshipers. From morning through dusk, I felt like singing “Zippity Do Dah,” the happiest song from the only film to suffer Disney’s self-censorship. (Looking for a video or DVD re-release of “The Song of the South”? Thank the greedy Shylocks who neutered Walt’s magical kingdom.) And I did sing it, especially after a bottle of Riesling in the early evening as I read the latest number from The Spectator.

I live on Capitol Hill. And on Sunday mornings I walk to Mass, either to St. Joseph’s on the Hill for convenience or, if I’m not too hung over, the earlier nine o’clock Tridentine Rite at Old St. Mary’s in Chinatown where the congregants include Pat Buchanan (Does he own but one suit, dark and pin striped?) and the abdicated king of Rwanda. This diversity shows the true universality of the Catholic Church, when united under the Latin tongue. But even we RCs can’t match the Baptists for suitability. It’s such a pleasant sight to walk past Baptist churches and watch the black churchgoers who look like their forebears of three generations ago. The men in suits and fedoras, their women wearing pretty dresses and flower-festooned hats: It almost makes up for the cavalcade of grossly-bossomed tarts and guttersnipes strutting about American Idol. Today the Pop 40 features tatooed skanks like Mary Blige. Yesterday we embraced the elegance and elocution of Ella Fitzgerald. Sliding downhill, are we?

Let’s see.

No sane conservative actually lives in the past. Those who do are eccentric nowhere men living in a nowhere land, though their company can be entertaining for an evening at most. Their port and cigars are the truest manifestations of the bygone era they seek to replicate.

The Bertie Wooster wannabes are both the most egregious and amusing offenders of the living-in-the-past set. Though they wear the best-cut suits and sport accoutrements everyone else abandoned fifty or more years ago, it’s evident that they never read Evelyn Waugh’s comment that the world of Wooster and the Drones Club never existed but in the comically fruitful imagination of P. G. Wodehouse. (And of course gold cigarette cases are superb, but even FDR smoked his Camels from the pack And so does Taki, unless he forgot his cigarette case at home when we met last week at the National Press Club for a seminar honoring Sam Francis.)

Rather, we true-blue conservatives live in the present, albeit with a sense of loss that we seek to redeem by manifesting the best manners and mores of old. This has little to do with style, though the best men’s wear is inspired by that of the Thirties with minor variations. To paraphrase Jefferson, however, styles come and go but principles of conduct and demeanor stay the same.

If the unthinking Philistines who mock the conservative disposition toward nostalgia were worth reasoning with, one could cite the leading cultural indicators of decline. The family being the cornerstone of civilization, the major indicator is the historically high rate of fouled-up families (oops, “family units”) riven by divorce, illegitimacy, and abortion, and assaulted by the family-by-turkey-baster model of the VP’s daughter, called “loving” by his putative boss. But statistics are forgettable, reminding one of Stalin’s quip that “one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Not that any good soul would have regarded Stalin’s untimely demise a tragedy: next to Jimmy Carter, the most evil Georgian of them all.

But forget the leading cultural indicators. Subjective analysis always is more effective than statistics. Spend ten minutes in any American town, big or small, and observe people of all economic classes dressed like slobs and, the most blatant of all offenders, “listening” to the “music” of a satanic jungle beat audible from a car stereo two blocks away. Yet even worse, however, are the young and nice looking people hooked to their Ipods, grooving in their own universes rather than engaging a beautiful spring day and greeting passerby. At least the ghetto-blasters don’t mind sharing their depravity. And have you noticed the relatively new fashion in young girls’ trousers: logos spread about the lower bottom? What more evidence does one need of the insidious perversion of fashion designers who unwittingly cause people (me, for example) to read logos on passing pants, only to rebound in revulsion that the placement of that damned logo caused one to watch the fanny of some pre-pubescent girl?

Now compare this to life just forty years ago, when even the poor still had a sense of sartorial propriety they imitated from their social superiors, who are the real culprits of the present demise. Ignore it at your peril, but hierarchies are a natural thing in life, and ours dropped the ball when they began slumming it in the late Sixties. No respect shall be given to middle-aged Yuppies riding in convertible BMWs and wearing pansy-ass, adjustable-sized baseball caps. Where’s an IED when you need one?

One segment of society has not abandoned the proper sense of decorum, however, and that is the military.

Last month I helped host a birthday party at the Foreign Service Club in Washington for a grand old woman of Old World charm, the German-born journalist Viola Drath. Lots of high-ranking brass was in attendance—Viola’s late husband was a big shot in the Air Force—from American major generals to Johnny Torrens-Spence, British military attaché to the United States, wearing boot spurs and scarlet coat. (His father, the late Captain Michael Torrens-Spence, was the hero of the Battle of Cape Matapan, hailed by Winston Churchill as the most important naval victory since Trafalgar.)

Perhaps the most honored guest, because the most deserving of honor, was Lt. Gen. Edward Rowny: 1941 graduate of West Point; three-time recipient of the Silver Star; the officer on MacArthur’s staff in Korea who devised the Inchon invasion plan; a Vietnam advisor in the early Sixties who developed the concept of “Airmobile,” in which helicopters were integrated into infantry tactics; confidant of several presidents but the especial friend of Ronald Reagan (Rowny taught him to play the harmonica!), who appointed him his chief nuclear arms negotiator, etc. In comparison, I feel like a bum.

Anway, next week I’m lunching with General Rowny, who, though 89 and blind, is a hale and hearty man with a sharper mind than most. Though he won’t see it, I’ll be recording notes and discreetly ordering an extra martini. Cheers!

Matthew Rarey writes from Washington.