I've written about Don and Sally Goodrich in my book. On September 11, 2001, their son Peter was killed on United 75, the second plane to hit the World Trade Center . Their response to that loss was to create a foundation in his name that funds a variety of social welfare projects in Afghanistan: a girls' school in Logar province; a water distribution project in a village in Kunar; more schools and an orphanage in Wardak, and, most recently, a library in Bamiyan, whose towering 13th-century Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.
Don and Sally's involvement with Afghanistan and its people isn't theoretical. It's deep and visceral. Both of them have traveled to that tortured country. Sally says it's the one place on earth where she feels wholly comfortable—because it's a country where everyone has suffered, and takes suffering for granted. As part of that involvement, they've arranged for nine Afghan children to receive educations at prep schools and colleges, primarily in New England and upstate New York . The children—their names are withheld in the interest of their privacy and their families' safety—live with the Goodriches or their extended family during breaks. Their academic performance has been exemplary, and their adaptation to their new lives after years of war, poverty, and displacement is a wonderful thing to witness. They are not turning into American kids—most, if not all of them, will return to their homeland. They are what Afghani kids would be like if they had the luxury of growing up in a country where the fields weren't land-mined and young girls could attend school without the fear of being murdered.
In May one of those kids, a 21-year-old boy, was diagnosed with Burkitt's lymphoma, an aggressive cancer most commonly seen in Africa and in young patients. He has spent most of the last month and a half in and out of emergency rooms and hospitals and is currently receiving a chemotherapy regimen that gives him an estimated 70 percent chance of survival. But the drugs are terrifyingly expensive: Vancomycin, a "last-resort" antibiotic, costs $1000, and the Neupogen injections he was given to stimulate the production of white blood cells were $7000.
It is a terrible thing when any sick person can't afford the treatment she needs to stay alive: It seems all the more terrible when that person was rescued from a battlefield on the other side of the world.
I urge anyone reading this to visit the Goodrich Foundation website to learn more—and to give what s/he can.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Beyond Tits Up
E. Annie Proulx's story "Tits Up in a Ditch," which appears in the June 9-16 New Yorker, might be subtitled "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." Though, truthfully, you don't learn enough about the protagonist, a young woman named Dakotah, to know if she's really good. The things that happen to her, though, are really, really bad.
[SPOILER ALERT HERE]
Briefly, Dakotah is abandoned as a baby by her mother, raised on a bleak ranch in the bleak state of Wyoming by her mother's parents, a couple who make the one in American Gothic look like Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig in "A Christmas Carol." They dress her, grudgingly, in off-brands. Nobody hugs her or kisses her. Her grandfather drowns her kitten.
It goes on: Sneering schoolmates, a feckless boy who knocks her up and then skips for the army, though at least he marries her. At her grandfather's urging, Dakotah joins the army herself, leaving her baby in his and her grandmother's care. At the story's end, Dakotah has lost an arm and the only person she ever loved, the baby has fallen out of grandpa's pickup and been crushed beneath the wheels, and her husband, who is still alive after having been essentially blown in half in Iraq, is passed into her care.
This is when Dakotah realizes that she is, in grandpa's expression, "tits up in a ditch."
Proulx has become such a specialist in writing about unfortunate events in Wyoming that you daily expect to hear that the state's board of tourism has filed a lawsuit against her.
But for her next story, she will write about a happy Wyoming-ite. In January 2009, Dick and Lynn Cheney move back to their home state, laden with official souvenirs and sacks of gold. Cheney spends his declining years running coins through his fingers and surveying the vistas out his windows: the scoured prairies, the oil pumps leaking sludge into the water table and poisoning elk and prairie dogs, the refineries pumping noxious effluents into the big sky, the ranch families dispossessed by soaring fuel prices and Eastern speculators, the families of illegals driven from town to town, the empty food banks, the overcrowded emergency rooms, and smiling grimly, seeing that it is good.
My preferred title would be "Balls Down on the Pot," but I'm open to suggestions.
[SPOILER ALERT HERE]
Briefly, Dakotah is abandoned as a baby by her mother, raised on a bleak ranch in the bleak state of Wyoming by her mother's parents, a couple who make the one in American Gothic look like Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig in "A Christmas Carol." They dress her, grudgingly, in off-brands. Nobody hugs her or kisses her. Her grandfather drowns her kitten.
It goes on: Sneering schoolmates, a feckless boy who knocks her up and then skips for the army, though at least he marries her. At her grandfather's urging, Dakotah joins the army herself, leaving her baby in his and her grandmother's care. At the story's end, Dakotah has lost an arm and the only person she ever loved, the baby has fallen out of grandpa's pickup and been crushed beneath the wheels, and her husband, who is still alive after having been essentially blown in half in Iraq, is passed into her care.
This is when Dakotah realizes that she is, in grandpa's expression, "tits up in a ditch."
Proulx has become such a specialist in writing about unfortunate events in Wyoming that you daily expect to hear that the state's board of tourism has filed a lawsuit against her.
But for her next story, she will write about a happy Wyoming-ite. In January 2009, Dick and Lynn Cheney move back to their home state, laden with official souvenirs and sacks of gold. Cheney spends his declining years running coins through his fingers and surveying the vistas out his windows: the scoured prairies, the oil pumps leaking sludge into the water table and poisoning elk and prairie dogs, the refineries pumping noxious effluents into the big sky, the ranch families dispossessed by soaring fuel prices and Eastern speculators, the families of illegals driven from town to town, the empty food banks, the overcrowded emergency rooms, and smiling grimly, seeing that it is good.
My preferred title would be "Balls Down on the Pot," but I'm open to suggestions.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Why we love war: From an article by Tony Judt
". . .War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. The first primitive concentration camps were set up by the British during the Boer War of 1899–1902. Without World War I there would have been no Armenian genocide and it is highly unlikely that either communism or fascism would have seized hold of modern states.
Without World War II there would have been no Holocaust. Absent the forcible involvement of Cambodia in the Vietnam War, we would never have heard of Pol Pot. As for the brutalizing effect of war on ordinary soldiers themselves, this of course has been copiously documented.[3]
The United States avoided almost all of that. Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat.[4]
Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.
This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million.
In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940.
In the US Army's costliest engagement of the century—the Ardennes offensive of December 1944–January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge")—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.
With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries.
But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead.
Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict.
I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."
Tony Judt, "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" --The New York Review of Books, , 55:7, May 1, 2008
Without World War II there would have been no Holocaust. Absent the forcible involvement of Cambodia in the Vietnam War, we would never have heard of Pol Pot. As for the brutalizing effect of war on ordinary soldiers themselves, this of course has been copiously documented.[3]
The United States avoided almost all of that. Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat.[4]
Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.
This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million.
In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940.
In the US Army's costliest engagement of the century—the Ardennes offensive of December 1944–January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge")—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.
With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries.
But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead.
Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.
As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict.
I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."
Tony Judt, "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" --The New York Review of Books, , 55:7, May 1, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
September on Jessore Road
At last weekend's Asia Society symposium on the Beats in India, I listened to an odd and frustrating conversation between the poet John Giorno and the journalist and novelist Gita Mehta. What made it frustrating was the way the participants kept speaking past each other, volubly, cheerfully, relentlessly, like two far-gone and slightly deaf seniors in the TV room of the senior center.
Mostly, they were talking about Allen Ginsberg, the first of the Beats to arrive in India and the one who fell most completely in love with it. For the Indian poets (and not just poets, but journalists, shopkeepers, ricksha-wallahs, and beggars) that he befriended, Ginsberg came to symbolize America. Not many Indians back then had ever met an American, and very few had ever encountered one like Ginsberg, endlessly curious, shamelessly queer, generous, tender, ecstatic. A better good-will ambassador than anyone the State Department had ever sponsored.
In 1971 Giorno came to visit Ginsberg in Calcutta. Gita Mehta was a journalist for the BBC. Just across the border, East Bengal was wrenching itself away from Pakistan preparatory to becoming the independent state of Bangladesh. Pakistan was doing everything it could to avert this, mostly by sending in its army to slaughter as many Bengalis as possible.
Tens of millions of Bengali refugees were flooding along Jessore Road toward Calcutta, with the Pakistani army at their heels. The stragglers were literally being ground under the wheels of troop carriers. Of those who managed to cross the border, thousands-- maybe millions-- starved to death.
This slow-motion holocaust drew both Mehta and Ginsberg to the border. Mehta, of course, was filming the refugees. I haven't yet read all of Deborah Baker's wonderful A Blue Hand, so I don't really know what Allen was doing there. Judging by things he did on other occasions in India, he may have just wanted to help in any way he could.
He recorded what he saw in the poem "September on Jessore Road." (See link above). It's a crude poem, written in the thudding doggerel of a nursery-rhyme:
Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road-- long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts
Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
The effect is not just artless but primitive, as if what Ginsberg saw had shorted out his sophisticated poetry-making mechanism and forced him back to the most basic tools of the art, the ones used by children and the illiterate. By many standards, "September on Jessore Road" is a "bad" poem, or even a bad one, but I suspect that Ginsberg's biographer Bill Morgan may be right when he says it's among his greatest.
At the symposium, John Giorno showed some footage he'd shot of Ginsberg wandering among the refugees. It was rough and grainy, shot with a Super-8. The screen was crowded with emaciated bodies, with white eyes glowing from drawn dark faces. A potbellied child sits splayed in the sand. A man crawls brokenly forward like a corpse animated by nothing more than residual nerve impulses.
What is truly awful is the way some of the subjects smile at the camera. I don't know if they do this out of the reflex that causes most people to smile when a lens is pointed at them or because they recognized the good will of the two Americans, the one pointing his camera and the other stumbling dazedly in their midst.
The soundtrack was Ginsberg chanting or singing "September on Jessore Road." Bob Dylan is said to have played on the backup band. Ginsberg isn't much of a singer-- putting it kindly, he brays-- and the musical accompaniment is similarly crude. The instruments are muddy and out of tune, the rhythm lurches. I thought of someone trying to start a car with a busted engine, turning the ignition and stepping on the accelerator over and over. The engine coughs, gurgles and dies, coughs, gurgles, dies.
I don't mean to write a review of a lost piece of film footage. I want to know whether this artifact-- this conjunction of footage, poem, and music-- is an obscene harvest of other people's mistery or a legitimate response to it. "September on Jessore Road" doesn't read like a formed, aesthetically-poised work of art. It reads like a bystander's cry for help:
Where is America's Air Force of Light?
Below see two videos of the poem, a more polished one by Ginsberg and an interpretation by the Bengali singer Moushoumi Bhoumik:
Mostly, they were talking about Allen Ginsberg, the first of the Beats to arrive in India and the one who fell most completely in love with it. For the Indian poets (and not just poets, but journalists, shopkeepers, ricksha-wallahs, and beggars) that he befriended, Ginsberg came to symbolize America. Not many Indians back then had ever met an American, and very few had ever encountered one like Ginsberg, endlessly curious, shamelessly queer, generous, tender, ecstatic. A better good-will ambassador than anyone the State Department had ever sponsored.
In 1971 Giorno came to visit Ginsberg in Calcutta. Gita Mehta was a journalist for the BBC. Just across the border, East Bengal was wrenching itself away from Pakistan preparatory to becoming the independent state of Bangladesh. Pakistan was doing everything it could to avert this, mostly by sending in its army to slaughter as many Bengalis as possible.
Tens of millions of Bengali refugees were flooding along Jessore Road toward Calcutta, with the Pakistani army at their heels. The stragglers were literally being ground under the wheels of troop carriers. Of those who managed to cross the border, thousands-- maybe millions-- starved to death.
This slow-motion holocaust drew both Mehta and Ginsberg to the border. Mehta, of course, was filming the refugees. I haven't yet read all of Deborah Baker's wonderful A Blue Hand, so I don't really know what Allen was doing there. Judging by things he did on other occasions in India, he may have just wanted to help in any way he could.
He recorded what he saw in the poem "September on Jessore Road." (See link above). It's a crude poem, written in the thudding doggerel of a nursery-rhyme:
Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road-- long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts
Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
The effect is not just artless but primitive, as if what Ginsberg saw had shorted out his sophisticated poetry-making mechanism and forced him back to the most basic tools of the art, the ones used by children and the illiterate. By many standards, "September on Jessore Road" is a "bad" poem, or even a bad one, but I suspect that Ginsberg's biographer Bill Morgan may be right when he says it's among his greatest.
At the symposium, John Giorno showed some footage he'd shot of Ginsberg wandering among the refugees. It was rough and grainy, shot with a Super-8. The screen was crowded with emaciated bodies, with white eyes glowing from drawn dark faces. A potbellied child sits splayed in the sand. A man crawls brokenly forward like a corpse animated by nothing more than residual nerve impulses.
What is truly awful is the way some of the subjects smile at the camera. I don't know if they do this out of the reflex that causes most people to smile when a lens is pointed at them or because they recognized the good will of the two Americans, the one pointing his camera and the other stumbling dazedly in their midst.
The soundtrack was Ginsberg chanting or singing "September on Jessore Road." Bob Dylan is said to have played on the backup band. Ginsberg isn't much of a singer-- putting it kindly, he brays-- and the musical accompaniment is similarly crude. The instruments are muddy and out of tune, the rhythm lurches. I thought of someone trying to start a car with a busted engine, turning the ignition and stepping on the accelerator over and over. The engine coughs, gurgles and dies, coughs, gurgles, dies.
I don't mean to write a review of a lost piece of film footage. I want to know whether this artifact-- this conjunction of footage, poem, and music-- is an obscene harvest of other people's mistery or a legitimate response to it. "September on Jessore Road" doesn't read like a formed, aesthetically-poised work of art. It reads like a bystander's cry for help:
Where is America's Air Force of Light?
Below see two videos of the poem, a more polished one by Ginsberg and an interpretation by the Bengali singer Moushoumi Bhoumik:
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Somebody Does It Better
I don't think there's any question that the Sichuan earthquake is a worse catastrophe than Hurricane Katrina: as many as 70,000 dead in Sichuan vs. 3,000 in New Orleans and the Gulf. So why then has the response of the Chinese government been so much faster and more efficient than that of our own government in 2005? Case in point: the speed with which army engineers dug channels to drain a temporary lake that threatened to inundate the city of Chengdu.
Is this an unanticipated benefit of dictatorship?
Judging by the recent example of Myanmar, apparently not.
Is Wen Jiabao just more competent than George W. Bush?
Speculation welcome.
Is this an unanticipated benefit of dictatorship?
Judging by the recent example of Myanmar, apparently not.
Is Wen Jiabao just more competent than George W. Bush?
Speculation welcome.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Ketchup and Mustard
Looking back over my earlier comments about the Revs. Wright and Hagee, I'm trying to identify what distinguishes them-- the Revs, I mean-- apart from their skin color and the fact that one of them damns America, or asks God to damn it, and the other claims that God damned the Jews or at least caused some 6 million of them to be murdered as a means of herding them to the Holy Land.
Here I must add that Mr. Hagee, like his God, is a big fan of the Jews.
As a Jew, I personally thank him.
The salient difference, I think, has to do with the reverends' use of language and the underlying thought their language reveals. Jeremiah Wright speaks metaphorically. A lot of his rhetoric derives specifically from that of his prophetic namesake, Jeremiah, which is metaphoric. So is most of the Bible's rhetoric.
John Hagee uses language literally. His explanation of the Holocaust is as literal as an instruction manual for a microwave. The hunter is not a metaphor, but a real man, with a real gun-- or, in Hitler's case, guns, plus tanks, bombs, and gas chambers. Israel must be reestablished because the Bible predicts it will be, and its final, catastrophic clash with its neighbors must be hastened for the same reason.
Hagee and other fundamentalists-- that is, other literalists-- see a one-to-one correspondence between those prophecies and contemporary referents.
Gog and Magog have to be Iran and Syria (or Russia and China). The Great Beast has to be Islam; the Whore has to be the Catholic Church. The Antichrist has to be the Secretary General of the U.N. (at least according to Tim LaHaye, though another school is now equating him with Obama and a lady who used to give massages up here thought he was the United States government).
Each dot in the Bible must be connected to a point on the contemporary horizon. Never mind if there seem to more points on one side than there are on the other, or that the lines connecting them are dotted or tangled or broken.
That kind of literal-mindedness is the thing that characterizes all fundamentalism. It's what gives it its jabbing, argumentative character. My own feeling is that all spirituality is metaphorical, has to be metaphorical.
It speaks of things that are not of this earth. When the Old Testament calls Jesus the Lamb, it doesn't mean a sweet, dullwitted creature that gambols and bleats and shits on the grass.
When the Buddha (in the Fire Sermon) says that "the eyes are ablaze," he is saying something about the volatility of the senses and the desires that arise from them and not talking about a Fire-Starter. (Hagee might use this as evidence that Buddha was an incarnation of Satan and offering his followers the power to barbecue their enemies with a strong look.)
The power of metaphor is that one word or image can be used to evoke a multiplicity of things and ideas. A metaphor, to use a metaphor, is like Jesus' mustard seed. Hagee's language-- or Osama bin Laden's-- is like a foil packet of ketchup with a picture of a tomato on it.
These posts have been criticized for being insufficiently blog-like. I promise to head my next one, "John McCain: Like Bush, only not stupid but crazy."
Here I must add that Mr. Hagee, like his God, is a big fan of the Jews.
As a Jew, I personally thank him.
The salient difference, I think, has to do with the reverends' use of language and the underlying thought their language reveals. Jeremiah Wright speaks metaphorically. A lot of his rhetoric derives specifically from that of his prophetic namesake, Jeremiah, which is metaphoric. So is most of the Bible's rhetoric.
John Hagee uses language literally. His explanation of the Holocaust is as literal as an instruction manual for a microwave. The hunter is not a metaphor, but a real man, with a real gun-- or, in Hitler's case, guns, plus tanks, bombs, and gas chambers. Israel must be reestablished because the Bible predicts it will be, and its final, catastrophic clash with its neighbors must be hastened for the same reason.
Hagee and other fundamentalists-- that is, other literalists-- see a one-to-one correspondence between those prophecies and contemporary referents.
Gog and Magog have to be Iran and Syria (or Russia and China). The Great Beast has to be Islam; the Whore has to be the Catholic Church. The Antichrist has to be the Secretary General of the U.N. (at least according to Tim LaHaye, though another school is now equating him with Obama and a lady who used to give massages up here thought he was the United States government).
Each dot in the Bible must be connected to a point on the contemporary horizon. Never mind if there seem to more points on one side than there are on the other, or that the lines connecting them are dotted or tangled or broken.
That kind of literal-mindedness is the thing that characterizes all fundamentalism. It's what gives it its jabbing, argumentative character. My own feeling is that all spirituality is metaphorical, has to be metaphorical.
It speaks of things that are not of this earth. When the Old Testament calls Jesus the Lamb, it doesn't mean a sweet, dullwitted creature that gambols and bleats and shits on the grass.
When the Buddha (in the Fire Sermon) says that "the eyes are ablaze," he is saying something about the volatility of the senses and the desires that arise from them and not talking about a Fire-Starter. (Hagee might use this as evidence that Buddha was an incarnation of Satan and offering his followers the power to barbecue their enemies with a strong look.)
The power of metaphor is that one word or image can be used to evoke a multiplicity of things and ideas. A metaphor, to use a metaphor, is like Jesus' mustard seed. Hagee's language-- or Osama bin Laden's-- is like a foil packet of ketchup with a picture of a tomato on it.
These posts have been criticized for being insufficiently blog-like. I promise to head my next one, "John McCain: Like Bush, only not stupid but crazy."
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Terms of Service
The only condition under which I'd advise Barack to take Hilary as vice is if she agrees to let him appoint Bill official White House Taster.
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