He Would Have Laughed Out Loud
A Tennessee state legislator is a COVID coward who gives new meaning to the idea of betraying his family, those he represents and his very self.
Alexander Schmorell was a hero; today he is a saint.
Concerning the legislator, we were tempted to quote the verse about “a reed shaken by the wind,” but that would be unfair to reeds.
No. This Tennessee state legislator is more like swamp slime.
It is bad enough that the one-time high school basketball coach was caught on tape apologizing to two former students who accused him of molesting them – “I can promise you one thing, I’ve been so sorry for that. I’ve lived with that and you don’t know how hard it has been for me.”
And when a third student made a similar accusation, the man called “Coach” by his fellow legislators refused to resign his legislative post, claiming, “I’ve done nothing wrong or inappropriate during my term as state representative.”
“During my term as a state representative”!!!!!
[In a spirit of charity towards his wife, children and grandchildren, we won’t use his name. They have suffered enough.]
But his response to the COVID-19 is hypocrisy beyond words.
He minimized the coronavirus as no worse than the flu and opposed masking and social distancing. In June 2020, he joined 54 Tennessee Republican representatives signing a resolution alleging “the mainstream media has sensationalized the reporting on COVD-19 in the service of political agendas.”
In mid-November he attended a House Republican gathering, ignoring public health recommendations and not wearing a mask. The day before Thanksgiving, he tested positive for COVID-19 and was helicoptered to a Nashville hospital, from where he pleaded, “Please pray for God’s healing for my lungs, that He will give me strength and endurance as I battle this virus.”
He spent 55 days on a ventilator and later reported, “My wife and family prayed for a miracle while facing the very real prospect of planning my funeral.” Seven months after his intubation, he received a liver transplant and, despite having missed the entire legislative session, on July 29 returned to the House to renew his oath of office.
“Life is a miraculous gift that I am humbled beyond all odds and explanation to receive a second chance at living,” he said in a statement release by his caucus. No mention of those who died after his and his caucus’s insistence that COVID-19 is just like the flu. Not a word of apology.
In truly polite Spanish, the greatest possible insult is sin verguenza – without shame.
This most fortunate of COVID survivors had his consummate shameless – swamp slime – moment when he recently joined the entire Republican caucus petitioning the governor to call a special session of the legislature to prohibit local mask mandates and keep businesses from barring the unvaccinated. Sin verguenza!
To borrow words from an ancient rabbi: He has seen with his own eyes, heard with his own ears and experienced in every cell of his body the devastation of the coronavirus. Nonetheless, he - who is still called “Coach” by his fellow legislators - is afraid to antagonize rightwing science-deniers and anxious to preserve himself in office.
Surely the people of Tennessee deserve better than swamp slime.
It’s time for him to study the courage of Alexander Schmorell.
Born in Russia in the midst of the Civil War (1914 – 1925), he was two-years-old when his mother died of typhus; two years later, his father – an anti-Bolshevist German doctor - remarried and moved to a Munich suburb, where Alexander was cared for by a Russian nurse who spoke no German and reared him with a profound appreciation of and devotion to Russian Orthodox Christianity.
Nicknamed “Schurik,” he resented the German arrogance that treated Slavs as untermenschen – barely human – and refused to hide his Russianness. He abandoned the Schamhorst Youth – a horse artillery unit – when it was absorbed into the Hitler Youth.
As a teen, he established what would be a lifelong friendship with Christoph Probst and, years later, was godfather to Probst’s second son. It is often reported that the examples of Willi Graf and Alexander’s profound religious commitments were primary factors in Probst’s request to be baptized as a Roman Catholic in the final hours of his life.
He began medical studies at the University of Hamburg in 1939 – in part because of his father and because military service was required of all students and medical students received better placements. A man of principle, he refused “the Hitler Oath” – “I swear by God… that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolph Hitler, the Fuhrer….” - and served briefly in Czechoslovakia and France, before continuing his studies in the fall of 1940 at Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich.
In his new medical school, Alexander soon met Hans Scholl and became a critical partner in the composition and duplicating of the first four Leaflets of The White Rose. Imitating the example of Roman Catholic Bishop Clemens von Galen, who denounced Hitler’s euthanasia programs and had copies of his sermons duplicated and distributed throughout Germany, the youthful authors duplicated their manifestos and anonymously mailed them to students, academics, intellectuals, even pub owners – in the hopes that they would discuss the declarations with their friends and customers – across Germany and Austria.
Schmorell was the primary author of the Second Leaflet – the first and only outright public condemnation of the Holocaust during the war years:
“At its very inception this [Nazi] movement depended on the deception and betrayal of one’s fellow man; even at that time it was inwardly corrupt and could support itself only by constant lies…
“…since the conquest of Poland three hundred thousand Jews have been murdered in this country in the most bestial way. Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history. For Jews, too, are human beings – no matter what position we take with respect to the Jewish question – and a crime of this dimension has been perpetrated against human beings. Someone may say that the Jews deserved their fate. This assertion would be a monstrous impertinence; but let us assume that someone said this – what position has he then taken toward the fact that the entire Polish aristocratic youth is being annihilated?
“…Why do the German people behave so apathetically in the face of all these abominable crimes, crimes so unworthy of the human race? Hardly anyone thinks about that. It is accepted as fact and put out of mind. The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on their depredations; and of course they do so…
“Each man wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues in his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience. But he cannot be exonerated; he is guilty, guilty, guilty!...”
Theology – in part influenced by Wilhelm Graf and Schmorell, also reflecting the reading of St. Augustine and others by many members of The White Rose – was reflected in their texts:
“Every word that comes from Hitler’s mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan… We must attack evil where it is strongest, and it is strongest in the power of Hitler.”
Four Leaflets were published and distributed through the mail and by couriers before Hans, Schmorell and Willi Graf were assigned as medics to the Russian front, where, again, they witnessed the atrocities being carried out in the name of the German people and Alexander was confronted with the moral reality that he could kill neither Russians nor Germans; he experienced himself at home among his own people and their culture and, together with Hans and Willi, attended Orthodox liturgies – wearing Nazi uniforms.
On returning from the Eastern Front, where they had witnessed the horrors of the earliest stages of Hitler’s disastrous Siege of Stalingrad, the three and new members of The White Rose – including Hans’ sister Sophie – renewed their efforts. They continued to receive information on the Furhrer’s monumental blunder through letters from Sophie’s fiancé, Fritz Hartnagel.
[The Battle/Siege of Stalingrad - August 23, 1942 – February 2, 1943 - turned decisively against the Germans in mid-November. The Soviets ultimately recovered 250,000 German and Romanian corpses in and around the city and total Axis casualties are believed to have been more than 800,000 Germans, Romanians, Italians, and Hungarians; of the 91,000 Germans who surrendered on January 31, 1943 only 6,000 ever returned to their homelands, some a full decade after the war ended; the rest died in Soviet prisons and labor camps. The Soviets suffered 1,100,000 Red Army dead, wounded, missing or captured and 40,000 civilian deaths.]
A Fifth Leaflet – “LEAFLET OF THE RESISTANCE: A Call to All Germans” - was produced in January 1943 and boldly declared:
“The war is approaching its destined end… It has become a mathematical certainly that Hitler is leading the German people into the abyss. Hitler cannot win the war; he can only prolong it. The guilt of Hitler and his minions goes beyond all measure…
“But what are the German people doing? They will not see and will not listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin. ‘Victory at any price!’ is inscribed on their banner. ‘I will fight to the last man,’ says Hitler – but in the meantime the war has already been lost.”
Hans and Sophie Scholl were arrested on February 18 as they attempted to distributed copies of the Sixth (and final) Leaflet on the University of Munich campus. Christoph Probst was taken prisoner the following day. Their trial on February 22 lasted but hours and they were executed by guillotine before sunset.
With aid from Lilo Forst-Ramdohr, a war widow who provided Alexander with new clothes and a fake passport, he attempted to escape to Switzerland but was arrested when a friend recognized him in an air-raid shelter on February 24. He and Professor Kurt Huber and Willi Graf were sentenced to death on April 19.
On the day of his execution and from the infamous Stadelheim Prison, he wrote his family:
Now it shall be none other than this, and by the will of God, today I shall have my earthly life come to a close in order to go into another, which will never end and in which all of us will again meet. Let this future meeting be your comfort and your hope. Unfortunately, this blow will be harder for you than for me, because I go in the certainty, that in my deep conviction, I have served the truth…
This difficult ‘misfortune’ was necessary to put me on the right road, and therefore was no misfortune at all… What did I know until now about belief, about a true and deep belief, about the truth, the last and only truth, about God? Never forget God!”
At age twenty-five, after a brief visit from Father Alexander Lowtschy of St. Nicholas Church (now the Cathedral of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia), who administered communion to him, Alexander Schmorell was executed by guillotine on July 13, 1943 – long after the Hitler’s Stalingrad debacle.
On February 5, 2012, Alexander Schmorell was “glorified” – canonized – as a New Martyr by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in Munich.
“He would have laughed out loud if he’d known,” says Furst-Ramdohr. “He wasn’t a saint – he was just a normal person.”
For legislators like “Coach” who can never be exonerated of their COVID-19 guilt - they are “guilty, guilty, guilty!”
Let us pray:
St. Alexander and the Holy Martyrs of The White Rose,
pour out your courage upon weak-hearted legislators,
that they might speak truth instead of lies,
govern free of all fear and
attack evil where it strongest.