Anglocat at Prayer

When holy and devout religious cats
Are at their beads, 'tis hard to draw them thence,
So sweet is zealous contemplation.

Photo: Anglocat

The Lost Leader

I have pretty much given up on Abp. Williams. The recent political machinations of the Archbishop of Canterbury, including his petty slights to the Presiding Bishop (some of them
truly petty), are one thing. Add Canon Kearon's informing the Episcopal Church's Executive Council (in a meeting he tried to have behind closed doors)that TEC's relegation to second-tier status will not be limited to the sanctions thus far and that the "problem of increased and growing diversity in the Anglican Communion has been an issue for many years....[and that]" by the 1990s leaders in the communion "had begun to name 'the diversity of opinions in the communion and diversity in general as a problem and sought some mechanisms to address it.'" Now add his last ditch effort to peel some of the required 2/3 votes off of legislation to allow consecration of women bishops to create overlapping bishoprics so that anti-women bishop parishes may secede from the diocese while urging that the far more radical Anglican Covenant be adopted by a simple majority of votes at Synod. (1)

Williams, surprisingly to those of us who welcomed his selection, has spent his arch-episcopal tenure living up to Pete Townshend's depressing image of religious authority here:



How sad. He could have been a true shepherd, and not just a man in a purple dress.

(1) Williams' position is all the more notable since he has written that the "diocese is the organ of union with the wider church" and yet is willing to fragment it, meanwhile making it easier to radically change the relationship of Church of England to the other members of the Communion to a juridicial one on a fast track, while drawing out and requiring a supermajority to approve the consecration of female bishops, the logic of which is pretty inexorable in view of the prior decision to ordain women to the priesthood.

Be Right or in Relationship?

Well, I just has a two-week involuntary hiatus, and what happens? Well, essentially, the entire Anglican Communion goes nuts. Meanwhile, my friend Nathan Humphrey tries to urge us all to consider relationship over rightness. As the responses he generates show, rightness is winning the straw poll. I appreciate Nathan's effort to reach both sides, but it seems to me that he's bucking the tide, quite possibly on the Progressive side as well as on the Reasserter. My own views on this is that the level of hostility toward TEC suggests that relationship at this point may not be a viable option, for now. We may need to take a break from each other, and let history--and the Holy Spirit--lead us to the next phase. It's sad to me that this is where we are, but I think the emotions in the air may require a time out. I certainly don't believe we should be the whipping boy for the Communion, but that we should remain always open to reconciliation.

Memorial Day

Every year, I struggle with a couple of days--this is one, as is September 11. How to pay tribute to our armed services without lapsing into bathos? I'm an admirer of G.B. Trudeau's the Sandbox, a "milblog" where you can here the concerns and musings of our soldiers themselves. Or you can read the timeless poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. Or the superb poems and memoirs of Robert Graves (I especially admire Good-Bye to All That).

Best of all, show the veterans and active duty members of our armed forces that you appreciate them and honor their service.

And remember the fallen.

The MERS Mortgage Twilight Zone

In the wonderful world of mortgage foreclosure, in which dwells, one of the most frustrating aspects is the way that the banks and their agents have set up fictional chains of assignment upon assignment, by entities in which the same people appear as lawyers and principals, agents and employees--all to paper over the loss of the paper trails which are required to establish what entity (if any--a lot of the original lenders are defunct and may not have assigned the notes before, er, defuncting). As the scope of the forclosure crisis has expanded exponentially, the mortgage companies and their attorneys have engaged in remarkable legal pirouettes to hide the fact that the necessary records don't exist, or are lost beyond recall. As the New York Times reported last August, Judge Arthur M. Schack of Kings County has dismissed a series of foreclosures for just such gimcrack song-and-dance lawyering, and earned fame just by making banks follow the rules applied to ordinary litigants.

But this week Judge Schack reached a new peak in HSBC Bank USA, NA v. Yeasmin, in which he analyzed such a "who's on first" in litigation:

Plaintiff made its renewed motion for an order of reference 204 days late, in violation of the Court's May 2, 2008 decision and order. Moreover, even if the instant motion was timely, the explanations offered by plaintiff's counsel, in his affirmation in support of the instant motion and various documents attached to exhibit F of the instant motion, attempting to cure the four defects explained by the Court in the prior May 2, 2008 decision and order, are so incredible, outrageous, ludicrous and disingenuous that they should have been authored by the late Rod Serling, creator of the famous science-fiction televison series, The Twilight Zone. Plaintiff's counsel, Steven J. Baum, P.C., appears to be operating in a parallel mortgage universe, unrelated to the real universe. Rod Serling's opening narration, to episodes in the 1961 - 1962 season of The Twilight Zone (found at www.imdb.com/title/tt005250/quotes), could have been an introduction to the arguments presented in support of the instant motion by plaintiff's counsel, Steven J. Baum, P.C. - "You are [*7]traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone."

****

The language of the MERS corporate resolution flies in the face of documents recorded with the City Register of the City of New York. The filed recordings with the City Register show that the subject mortgage was owned first by MERS, as nominee for CAMBRIDGE, and then by HSBC as Trustee for a Nomura collateralized debt obligation. However, if the Court follows the [*8]MERS'corporate resolution and enters into a new dimension of the mind, the mortgage twilight zone, the real owner of the subject mortgage is WELLS FARGO, the MERS Member and loan servicer of the subject mortgage, because the corporate resolution states that the Member is "the beneficial owner of such mortgage loan." The MERS mortgage twilight zone was created in 1993 by several large "participants in the real estate mortgage industry to track ownership interests in residential mortgages. Mortgage lenders and other entities, known as MERS members, subscribe to the MERS system and pay annual fees for the electronic processing and tracking of ownership and transfers of mortgages. Members contractually agree to appoint MERS to act as their common agent on all mortgages they register in the MERS system." (MERSCORP, Inc. v Romaine, 8 NY3d 90, 96 [2006]).

The Court's journey through the wondrous land of imagination takes several more permutations, leading to the dismissal with prejudice of the foreclosure action, but I think you get the idea.

Judge Schack has earned a tribute, and this one seems apt.

Manhattan Transfer- TWILIGHT ZONE theme 1979 from Coleccionista80 on Vimeo.

Kagan to the Court?

According to NBC News, yes.

Not my first pick of the names floated this time, but, then, I want W.O. Douglas back. Kagan's record to date is left of center, but cautious. (More detail here). Still, she's young--just fifty--a consensus-builder, and a legal craftsperson of high skill. She could develop--Douglas himself was known predominantly as a corporate law professor in 1939, when he was appointed to the Supreme Court.

More, I am certain, to come.

Edited: A typo resulted in my moving Douglas to Julian of Norwich's time frame. I blame the Doctor. Or the Master. Or Adric--yeah--Adric.

A Century With and Without Mark Twain

Yesterday was the centennial of Mark Twain's death, with Halley's Comet in the sky. In the years since his death, his writings have been swept aside and minimized by critics from Van Wyck Brooks to Charles Neider (who, in fairness, loved Twain, but reduced him to an anecdotist). But they don't stay gone. Like Halley's Comet itself, Twain's words come back to us when we need them--when we have lost touch with our own inner sense, we turn to Twain's the War Prayer to right ourselves, or Huckleberry Finn, or the Gilded Age, or--well, you get my point.

A century since he died, and yet books from his hand continue to issue--soon, his Autobiography will at long last be published--just as Twain predicted. I wrote my senior thesis on the Autobiography, and tried to get a sense of it from the fragments published in various fora and formats over the years. I look forward to that thesis's coming obsolescence.

Twain was a genius on the platform--and, sadly, no trace remains. Here's his foremost interpreter, Hal Holbrook, with a taste.