|
|
January 03, 2005
Reader Katie recommends Simon Winchester's Krakatoa for some insight into the mess that is the tectonically active Sunda Shelf of Indonesia. I haven't read it, myself, and Amazon Reviewer opinion is divided, but there you are.
A book that I have read, and can recommend highly, is William Pene du Bois' The Twenty-one Balloons. It's a children's book, and concerns the ballooning adventures of 19th century professor and explorer William Waterman Sherman, who crashes onto Krakatoa just prior to the eruption and discovers a wonderfully oddball, incredibly wealthy commune of inventors and gourmands who have all adopted single letters of the alphabet as surnames... sort of the lighter side of Indonesian tectonics. I read it as a kid and still hold its illustrations and large swatches of its text in vivid memory.
January 04, 2005
Via INDC Journal: Itar-Tass is reporting that Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi has been arrested in Baakuba.
INDC's Bill is skeptical.
So am I, because I've got al-Zarqawi here in this sack.
Down, Abu! Or it's back to the Ham Room. And we don't want to be in the Ham Room, do we?
I thought not.
Under the heading of Media Bias Watch, Mr. Sullivan directs my attention to Alan Greenblatt's "Journalists shouldn't be cheerleaders" in the St. Petersburg Times. Apparently Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism invited Norman Mailer (among others) to speak at a conference, and Mr. Mailer's anti-Bush rhetoric provoked sustained and loud applause from the audience of "freelance writers and editors and reporters from nearly every major paper in the country."
Conference attendee Jack Hart, managing editor of the Portland Oregonian, said that "These people don't seem to understand what their role in society is." Greenblatt writes,
Increasingly, it's difficult for the average American to tell supposedly objective or balanced mainstream reports from the vast army of opinion mongers.
From this we can gather that Hart and Greenblatt believe that the journalist's role in society is to present objective facts, and to accomplish the delivery of this information with transparent integrity, so that the average American can trust that what the media delivers is, in fact, fair and balanced.
To me, that's a fantasy. And a harmful one, at that.
The idea of an "objective reporter" is a fiction that was much easier to maintain before the information pipelines got fast and fat. Take, for example, the recent flap over CBS getting suckered--perhaps willfully--by forged documents. If this had happened in the pre-Internet era, nobody would heard much about the debunking of the documents by experts like Philip Bouffard or Joseph Newcomer, simply because the information channels were narrow and well-guarded. The rumors of forgery would have remained rumors, as far as the general public was concerned. CBS would never have been forced to present its own experts, because its reporting would have been sufficient. The network would have remained well-protected by the elven cloak of Woodward and Bernstein--standard equipment issued to all post-Watergate journalists--with Papa Cronkite giving the whole thing an air of genial respectability.
That's the problem with positing the reporter as impartial arbiter of fact. It's akin to an informal logical fallacy: argumentum ad verecundiam, or appeal to authority. Mr. Hart would have us regard the position of Journalist as somehow sacrosanct, and is upset that the current crop of reporters and editors is betraying that trust. Mr. Greenblatt believes that the problem is that reporters now "willingly reveal their political leanings at a public forum," as though the Journalist who does not demonstrate his partisanship in public is somehow better able to avoid bias in reporting. In both cases, the idea is that journalists are supposed to function as information gatekeepers: they should have expertise in identifying not only which piece of information is important, but in mapping each piece of information to a given position, in such a way that all sides of an argument are presented to the reader, who then becomes "informed."
But this was never the reality of the profession, and the authority of journalists was always an illusion. The reason it has become "difficult for the average American to tell supposedly objective or balanced mainstream reports from the vast army of opinion mongers" is not because journalists have failed to fulfill their charge, but because the average American is not an appropriately skeptical thinker, has little or no idea about what does and does not constitute an acceptable argument, and does not readily distinguish theory from fact. If I accept that it is the journalist's responsibility to provide me with the information I need to become informed about a given issue, I have abdicated my responsibility to gather information, parse arguments, determine what I and others consider to be an acceptable level of proof, and arrive at a reasonable conclusion that is, nevertheless, always subject to revision or reversal in light of new information or a superior argument.
Mr. Hart and Mr. Greenblatt are lamenting the passing of the idea that the Journalist is, in fact, the Socratic gadfly of American society: an impartial pursuer of Truth, in service to the public good. But Plato, in the person of Socrates, called the written word "the bastard speech." [Phaedrus 276a], a mere image of "the living and breathing word of him who knows." I can only assume that he would think as little of television's talking heads: these are people who are experts in little beyond the presentation of images, which we call "news." In contrast, Plato wrote that an admirable man is one who
[... ] thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much that is playful, and that no written discourse, whether in meter or in prose, deserves to be treated very seriously (and this applies also to the recitations of the rhapsodes, delivered to sway people's minds, without opportunity for questioning and teaching), but that the best of them really serve only to remind us of what we know [... ] that man, Phaedrus, is likely to be such as you and I might pray that we ourselves may become. [Phaedrus 277e-278b]
The pursuit of truth requires active participation on the part of the listener. It is an interrogative process, whether that means a conversation with someone else or the "interrogation" of a written or recorded source using the tools of reason and critical thinking. Hart and Greenblatt and others who lament the passing of "unbiased media" are, in addition to mourning the death of a fiction, expressing regret for the loss of an easy way for Americans to convince themselves that they are informed.
Being truly informed requires effort: the application of mental energy, a certain intellectual self-reliance, and, above all, the acknowledgement of one's own ignorance. A journalist is no substitute for this process, and never has been.
Now--having demonstrated that there's really no point in taking this post very seriously--I'm off to have some decaf.
January 05, 2005
Well, duh. Of course he wasn't captured.
For a change of pace, I've got him ball-gagged in the basement inside a locked trunk half-full of well-congealed bacon fat that I've been saving for the past two years.
But I think he's starting to get off on it. So I may have to move him back into the sack.
January 06, 2005
Today is one of those strange, dough-headed days. I woke up too late, observed the snow that was now getting a nice crust of ice on it from the rain, ate a peanut butter sandwich, and have yet to turn my mental crankshaft over once. Dough. Or, as I once remarked, "My synapses are filled with cotton and glue." Same difference.
Lots of people have asked me over the past several months, "What're you saving all that bacon fat for? It's disgusting, and you're some kind of freak."
And I replied, "You never know when you might need a trunk full of bacon fat. The imprisonment and humiliation of murderous extremists is just one of bacon fat's many uses."
Mediocre minds and all that. Who's disgusted now?
Abu, for one. I think he's got hives, which is just fine with me. Soon, it will be time for the pork hood, always a favorite.
Anyway. Don't expect much from me today.
Unless you pay me.
That would be nice.
January 07, 2005
I'm guessing that Mr. Sullivan would not be amused by the pork hood, or the trunk half-full of bacon fat, or the Ham Room, but might think that the sack was OK, if not particularly comedic. All pig meat-related fun is, as he puts it, "anti-Muslim technique."
Of course, I am talking about Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi here. The fact that we Americans will eat anything, coupled with a failure of imagination, probably meant that a simple beheading was all he could muster up for the people that he murdered.
Still... it's just wrong to humiliate someone because of their religious beliefs.
So this evening, when I hog-tie Abu, wrap him in prosciutto, and lock him in the high-decibel Klezmer Kabinet, it will be because he's an evil fascist bastard with no more right to live on god's good earth than a weasel.
---
[For serious commentary on this issue, see "The Grand Inquisitor 2" in today's Belmont Club, and "The Grand Inquisitor" from yesterday's.]
 It's not every day that you get to buy a gen-yu-wine James Bond gadget. In 1963's From Russia With Love, Bond unpacks a Q-supplied briefcase that contains, among other things, a handy little .22 caliber rifle that comes apart and fits into its own stock. He later uses it to snipe a hapless minion who was dropping grenades on him from a helicopter.
That rifle was the AR-7, a survival rifle manufactured for the US military by Armalite. These days, it's made by Henry Repeating Arms in Brooklyn, which re-named it the Henry Survival Rifle. Now I have one of my very own, because the last time I got grenades dropped on me, all I had was some harsh words and a rock, and that was lame.
Actually, I got it for bikepacking. It weighs 2.5 pounds, and the barrel, receiver, and a spare 8-round magazine all tuck ingeniously into a plastic stock that floats. It will fit nicely into my trailer. Just the thing for defense against the varmints, four-legged and otherwise, who might want to eat my food, steal my bike, or disembowel me while I'm camping in the woods not far from a road.
When you put it together, it looks like this:
For $130, that's right imposing. I haven't actually fired it yet, because Pea frowns on gunplay in the house, but it will go to the range this weekend.
I also picked up an MSR Dragonfly stove, which means that the only major piece of kit left to get is a sleeping pad. Soon, I will be prepared to ride as far as I can in a day, then creep off into some unfenced and unposted woods, pitch a tent, rehydrate some food and cook it, sack out, then wake up in the morning, fry up some instant pancake mix, and head off again.
This, I will call fun.
Wow!
Someone actually bought an Astonished Head golf shirt. That's the only one that's ever been sold. You are the only person in the world with that shirt. Treasure the moment.
As for the rest of you--there remains a wide assortment of merchandise at the Astonshed Headshop.
Well, not a wide assortment. But the Proloxil coffee mugs come in two sizes.
That's right--two.
So get shopping.
January 10, 2005
Sometimes you find reminders of evil in the most unexpected places. The glittering world of fashion, for example. Take this account of a dinner in Boston from designer Joseph Abboud's Threads:
We were buying 4,000 garbadine suits a year from a company called Windsor of Germany. They were made of Italian fabric and manufactured in Germany, where they were fused.
The traditional suit is hand-tailored, made by people who actually sit down and sew. But these suits were... the nice industry words are "automated" or "engineered," but in reality, fusing is a form of gluing. It doesn't sound very appealing, but there's an art to it. In many cases the fabric will look smoother because the linings are fused--by steam, heat, and adhesive.
Our sales rep at Windsor was a guy named Hans Schultz. We called him "Schultzie," like a Hogan's Heroes thing, and we loved him. One night Murray and I were having dinner with him out in Chestnut Hill, and one of us asked, "When did Germans get so great at fusing? How come you don't do tailored suits anymore?"
Silence from Schultz.
Then, "Don't you know? Most of the tailors in Cher-many were Choo-ish."
Here was the German salesman with the Jewish retailer, offering a forceful history lesson. The Germans had killed off their workforce, then developed all this great technology to fill the need they'd created. They'd come up with something good, but to us it was now like a weed in a beautiful garden.
Having to glue your suits together is among the least of the consequences of a fanatical ideology that leads to genocide. But the persistent depth of evil's effect on the perpetrating culture is something of which certain modern fanatics seem entirely unaware...
January 11, 2005
I would just like to note that I am not the new Andrew Sullivan, either.
In case anybody was wondering.
I am, however, the new Whore of Babylon.
---
UPDATE:
I am not the new Whore of Babylon.
I am, in fact, the new Enlil, God of Air and Storms, supreme ruler of the gods, guardian of the city of Nippur, holder of the Tablet of Destinies, and king of all the lands.
So don't mess with me.
January 12, 2005
 I was going to write about how I put big fat metal-studded tires on my recumbent, donned shiny reflective Tron clothing, and rode through the snow-covered streets of the town last night, illuminated by halogen lights, LEDs, and cold-cathode neon, but I seem to have run out of momentum today, slain by the mighty casein sword of the mac and cheese I foolishly consumed for lunch yesterday. This has resulted in the swelling of my nasal tissues, so that they resemble Argentina. That, in turn, necessitated medication, which then required a nap, and now it's dark out again--which keeps happening, despite my blood-soaked entreaties to He Who Must Not Be Named--and all I have left is the energy for this paltry recap of the day.
Oh, and this: I am not interested in the salvation of my soul through a personal relationship with Jesus and the liberal application of aluminum foil to the walls of my house.
That is all.
January 13, 2005
Some days, everything goes perfectly. The death squads deploy smoothly. The right people are in the right place at the right time to get shot or blown up or covered with honey and fire ants. The earthquake-ray satellites do their jobs. The extra thirty seconds of the Zapruder film remain safe and hidden in Elvis' bedpan in Nebraska. The Kerry/Bush/Blair/Annan neuro-implant network functions with brilliant efficiency. There are still no purple M&Ms.
Other days, your cat pisses all over the damn house.
But that's life, I guess.
Reggie Bastard Eats An Omelette
To continue the implementation of Management's excellent plan for making Astonished Head into the world's premier provider of things, we came up with some staggeringly original never-been-done-before ideas that are really stupendously smashing and great.
Among them: equipping Company Secretary Reginald Bastard with a microphone, a camera, some candied yams, a ferret, and a hand grenade and sending him out to talk to the Viewing Public.
This year's Man On The Street question: how groovy is the President?
-----
Phillip Small, Disco King
"Not very. Personally, I think that he needs more cocaine. Doesn't everyone?"
Emmet Phelps, Professional Yokel
"Ya'll cain't come 'round here askin' questions like that. 'S agin' God's law t' be groovy. So git along now, afore ya git yerself battered up and fried, and served with some slaw and mebbe a root beer."
Howard "Buffy" McGuinness, Philosopher
"By all accounts, the President excels in grooviness, mainly due to the vast Texas plain from whence he sprang, like a fiery demon of the South'ren groove, what with his ears and his cock-eye'd grin and his prodigious manglement of the English language, lacking only a smooth coat of exterior polyester to make him, indeed, the very paragon of all that is groovy on this earth. Is that a ferret?"
Sarah Flippant, Satellite Dish Repairman
"I think that he ought to be shot, because I'm partial to children, and he eats far too many of them. That's just selfish."
Walt Lever, Taxidermist
"Not nearly groovy enough. I know what hunts him."
Saddam Hussein, Inmate
"Much groovier than I thought he was, apparently."
-----
And there you have it. Next year, our man Reggie Bastard will hit the streets, which is unfortunate.
January 14, 2005
Well, damn. Night has fallen and made a mess of everything. Which is just as well, because absolutely nothing of import happened today.
Anywhere.
To anyone.
Except maybe on Titan.
January 17, 2005
I probably should have mentioned that I got a new toy, so posting would be light, because I only have two hands and they are now otherwise involved. And there was real work to do today as well, which always saps the old brain juice, and I guess I should have told you that, too, and while I'm at it, I might as well tell you about the bodies down in the Jersey Pine Barrens, and also about that time with the horse, or, maybe, in fact, almost certainly, I shouldn't tell you about that at all, but I suppose it's too late for that, because once I enter the text into the damnable Entry Body window it's there, mocking me, daring me to censor myself, and we can't have that, can we precious, no, certainly not.
And while we're on the subject, is it really fair to assume, just because I spit out these carefully arranged pixels, that anyone drops by and wonders "Well, gosh, there's nothing new here today, and that bastard didn't even leave a note," which leads me to to imagine a graphic utility for posting notes without the bother of firing up Movable Type, sort of a .CGI refrigerator, so I can say brief things like OUT TO LUNCH or NO POSTING, EATING or GONE TO EXHUME THE CORPSES although, again, I probably shouldn't mention that.
Such a queer transparent zone of shrinking privacy we live in, isn't it, what with the Information Age not making much distinction between my information and your information, and a culture of ever-more-indecent exposure becoming the norm, wherein hotel fortune heiresses schlob knobs in night-vision hues and every slipped nipple shows up on the web sooner or later (even Jackie O isn't safe, and she's dead), therefore I, with rambling nonsense such as this, merely contribute to the ever-increasing bolus of useless tidbytes that are clogging up the lightpipes.
There.
That's much better.
*urp*
January 18, 2005
OFF EXHUMING THE CORPSES BACK SOON
January 19, 2005
 Mmm. Coconut.
Snow, actually. The good, lazily drifting, fluffy kind that you get when it's cold enough... right now, flakes close to the building are falling upwards, and those farther away are falling properly downwards. I expect that has something to do with Science.
We're only supposed to get about an inch of the stuff over the next ten hours, but that still means that panicked fellow New York Thruway Is Closed Man commuters will slow down and creep along as though they expect a gust of wind to blow them across the frictionless, frozen road surface and into an ice-choked gorge, there to die and be exhumed millennia hence by bald descendants with big heads and perfect dentition who will make a highly speculative and heavily promoted Discovery Channel special about the life and culture of the North American homo sapiens variant, called homo sapiens automobilius.
I expect my commute to only take about 15 or 20 minutes more than it should. But it's the principle of the thing. Drive, dammit! If the weather unsettles your fragile coordination, pull over and let the confident and surly through. Bastards.
Oh, the laziness engendered by the remote office! Makes being in the actual office feel so superfluous. Today my mind has been fogged by the imagining of my latest creative venture, which will involve much Flash, original music by the Astonished Head himself, and the launch of an entirely new sister website, which will remain nameless for now because its name is skull-shatteringly wonderful, and I'm sure you all like your heads the way they are.
Of course, it doesn't take much to send me off window-staring, and now that the... snow... pretty...
Oh yes! Anyway, the thought of actually, finally being able to put me own tunes to me own visuals is just a grand distraction, something I've been wanting to do for many years... ever since I scored 1991's The Magus, actually, the critically-acclaimed short film produced and directed by Hollywood icon Don Wygal, the only person I know in the IMDB. He's my first degree of separation from Steven Spielberg.
Actually, he's not so much an icon as a production assistant, and although he has met Mr. Spielberg, The Magus was probably seen by maybe 50 people, and was made for a class at Lawrenceville, New Jersey's Rider College (before it decided it was worthy of becoming a bonah-fydee University).
But still: it was fun to hole up in my garret-style room and bash away on the CZ-5000 and my Krep-brand 12-string and make, you know, art and whatnot. Soon, I will do so again! And there will be much rejoicing.
I said, there will be much rejoicing.
That's better.
Looks like the snow is letting up a bit. Time to get my parking validated and make my escape.
*shoop!*
You must also visit the Manolo, for he will tell you about the wearing of the clothes for the mens, and other things fashionable.
(You don't have to see Lord of the Rings for this one. Silly helps a bit, though.)
[Via Belmont Club.]
If you are prone to silliness and have seen the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy two or more times (or at least once all the way through in one sitting), then you must also see this.
Because it's funny, that's why.
Bloody peasants.
[Via Reverend Sensing, who got it from American Digest, who got it from Kevin Bacon.]
January 20, 2005
Seymour Hersh may be all puffed up with his New Yorker article, boldly headlined Fact, which is good to know, because I certainly couldn't have made up my mind without that helpful hint, and he may feel important and just so in-the-know with his super-extra-special-secret information about preparations for airstrikes in Iran, provided by his unnamed "former high-level intelligence official," but we know where the real intel comes from--Mr. Reynolds' secretary:
MESSAGE FROM MY SECRETARY, currently serving in Iraq: "I hear Damascus is nice in the Spring!" More details later.
Hello Syria!
Meanwhile, Mr. Hersh writes,
The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
This is "Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq," and, given the tone of the article and the author's radio interviews, more evidence that the Bush Administration is comprised of Very Bad Men Indeed. Mr. Hersh quotes his source:
"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."
Which immediately reminds me of something I wrote back in July of last year:
Iraq is not the war. Iraq is a campaign in the war. And John Kerry's way of winning that campaign will be to "reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers [... ] and bring our troops home."
Then what? Turn America into a fortress? Hunker down? Wait for the next inevitable attack on American soil, spend years waiting for intelligence that will never be certain because of its very nature, then do nothing because it doesn't meet the UN's evidentiary requirements?
It's about real moral certainty, Senator Kerry. It's not about nuance, or intellect, or animus disguised as conviction. You're relying on all three, because you think that this election is about Bush.
It isn't, and you're going to lose.
I was going to do some snide riff on one of Kerry's slogans, to the effect of, "Who's laughing now, ketchup-boy!" But at the moment I honestly can't remember anything the man said, slogan-wise, and that's not really the point, anyway.
The point is, once again and all together now: this is a war. And in war, you do things like this. You divorce certain military actions from the bureaucracy, because that's what the successful resolution of the conflict demands. This conflict in particular demands it, because it is not primarily a matter of going to the enemy's country and snooping around. This is a war of networks, cells, and individuals, all moving about rapidly from place to place and from task to task. It can't be won by committee.
Is it a little nerve-wracking to read about covert operational authority that is, apparently, beyond Congressional oversight? Sure it is. Is it troubling to read yet another unnamed source (this time "a former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities") say "We’re going to be riding with the bad boys"? You bet. Has the Administration's handling of the current campaign been less than stellar? Without a doubt.
But I've got a little artichoke-heart jar full of gypsum dust, with a few scraps of the perforated edges of pink tractor-feed computer paper mixed in with it--the sort of paper that banks or financial companies use to print out multi-part forms. I gathered that material in October of 2001 from the deep marble sills of Federal Hall, at the corner of Nassau and Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. That jar is in a blue plastic box full of newspapers, magazines, photographs, a small blob of molten metal, and a blank piece of singed blue copy paper that I picked up from the plaza in front of my office building at around 9:45 AM on September 11, 2001. I find all of these artifacts to be far more troubling than Mr. Hersh's insinuations and hand-wringing.
"Riding with the bad boys," "giving [Rumsfeld] the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally," and "[signing] a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets" are all part of the Administration's "not [reconsidering] its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region."
I don't want that policy reconsidered. I want it implemented.
And that, it seems to me, is exactly what the Administration is trying to do.
---
For more on Mr. Hersh's article, see Mr. Gandelman. [Via Mr. Esmay].
Turn with me now, to the Book of Petty Glee, chapter three, verses eleven to sixteen:
And Lo! There did exist on the Net
a certain mustachio'd conservative
with whom the Head Most Astonished did contend
in the early days of His Headage;
And when time had passed,
the Head did see that the conservative's Ecosystem rank was 4897,
and His own rank was 4881.
He was most pleased,
and smote a small nation of heathens into smoking wreckage,
sending a plague that caused their goats to swell up,
and the skin of their women to become like unto a pecan's,
and their men to curse the sudden smallness of their private parts.
For the Head was both mighty and petulant,
and there are few altars to His glory,
because few are the men
who desire to have a nut-faced wife,
and a small organ, and a swollen goat,
simply because the Head Most Astonished
is mildly pleased.
Let us pray.
January 21, 2005
 William Safire praises Bush's second inaugural speech in today's NYT, calling it "among the top 5 of the 20 second-inaugurals in our history."
He writes,
In Bush's "second gathering" (Lincoln called it his "second appearing"), the Texan evoked J.F.K.'s "survival of liberty" phrase to convey his central message: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Bush repeated that internationalist human-rights idea, with a slight change, in these words: "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."
The change in emphasis was addressed to accommodationists who make "peace" and "the peace process" the No. 1 priority of foreign policy. Others of us - formerly known as hardliners, now called Wilsonian idealists - put freedom first, recalling that the U.S. has often had to go to war to gain and preserve it. Bush makes clear that it is human liberty, not peace, that takes precedence, and that it is tyrants who enslave peoples, start wars and provoke revolution. Thus, the spread of freedom is the prerequisite to world peace.
He concludes with,
Cut out of a near-final draft was the line on the side of the bell from Leviticus that rings out Bush's theme: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ... "
That verse is Leviticus 25:10, which reads in its entirety,
And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
Leviticus covers everything from the slaughtering of herd and bird sacrifices, to the preparation of grain sacrifices and the removal of mold from the walls of a house. It contains the laws that were intended to keep the people of Israel holy in the sight of their god, so that they could successfully maintain their relationship with him. These laws were said to be part of the whole ethical package received by Moses.
Leviticus 25 deals with the sabbatical year and the Jubilee year. Like the seventh day, which is to be a day of rest, every seventh year is to be a year of rest. The sowing and reaping of fields, and the pruning and picking of vines, is prohibited. During a sabbatical year, only what grows naturally is for the taking.
Every fiftieth year is a Jubilee (yovel in Hebrew) year. In addition to the normal sabbatical year observances, all tenured land reverts to its owners, and all indentured Israelites return to their homes.
In his commentary on Leviticus, Baruch Levine outlines what the Israelites meant by "liberty" in this context:
The Hebrew term deror has conventionally been rendered "freedom, liberty." More has been learned about it in recent years, however. Hebrew deror is cognate with Akkadian andurāru, which designates an edict of release issued by the Old Babylonian kings and some of their successors. This edict was often issued by a king upon ascending the throne and was a feature of a more extensive legal institution known as mesharum, a moratorium declared on debts and indenture. The Akkadian verb darāru, like Hebrew d-r-r, means "to move about freely," referring in this instance to the freedom granted those bound by servitude. In Jeremiah 34:15, we read that, as the Chaldeans approached Jerusalem, King Zedekiah ordered the people to release their indentured servants, to proclaim a deror, "release." In Isaiah 61:1, the Judeans are to be freed under terms of a deror as they are restored to their land. The biblical laws of the Jubilee year thus incorporate Near Eastern legal institutions of great antiquity.
Great antiquity, indeed: the Old Babylonian period ranges from 1728 to 1685 BC. Across more than 3700 years, the culture of the ancient Near East reaches us through the words of the 43rd President of the United States of America, delivered on the steps of our secular temple, our Capitol. Concepts directly derived from a time of blood sacrifice and theophany are now expressed in a purportedly rational age.
I don't believe that the President is aware of these things. He's not that sort of man, which is unfortunate, but not the unmitigated disaster that so many of his opponents believe it to be. In place of an acute sense of the long flows of history, the President has his faith. In the West, that faith, and faiths like it, are what connect many people to the ancient temples of Babylon, the sands and vineyards of Mesopotamia. That faith, with its attendant, multiply-translated, heavily redacted, 2,500 year old texts, can create a sense of cultural resonance that operates at an irrational level, but can nonetheless guide actions and form convictions.
This isn't always a good thing. In the extremist elements of Islam we see a bad resonance, a dissonance. The waveforms of the ancient blood sacrifice elements of pre-Islamic, nomadic faiths and early Islam have created an unholy bloodlust, whereby the power and rush of murder are mistaken for the power and rush of the approving presence of Allah.
These two sensations, the harmonious and the dissonant, can recognize one another. You don't need to be explicitly aware of the Near Eastern roots of our culture and its extreme elements to recognize the equally ancient roots of another culture and its extreme elements. You don't need to know about the Hebrew and Akkadian roots of "liberty" to sense when someone is opposed to it.
Although President Bush isn't "intelligent" in the sense that is currently the fashion among academics and the intelligentsia, he has enough perception of the great resonances of human history to recognize evil when he sees it, and to feel the pull of the long centuries that draw him to approve actions that are, more or less, in proper opposition to it.
And that is all that history requires of him.
---
For more on Bush's inaugural speech, how it well it played (or didn't), and some speculation about "damage control," see Mr. Gandelman.
January 24, 2005
I WILL TELL YOU WHERE I HID THE BODIES FOR A PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICH AND A COPY OF RITA RUDNER'S "NAKED BENEATH MY CLOTHES."
January 25, 2005
What a histamine-coated, mucous-laden, Benadryl-sucking day.
Benadryl got its start as a psychiatric drug. Back in the 50s and 60s, good old over-the-counter diphenhydramine, in addition to being used as an antihistamine that blocks H1 histamine receptors in the brain and elsewhere, was prescribed for its atropine-like effects on acetylcholine receptors. It was also used as a hypnotic, like Xanax or other benzodiazepines, and is a mild serotonin reuptake inhibitor. Research on the chemical construction of Benadryl and other antihistamines derived from it eventually led to the development of Haldol, Thorazine, and, later, Prozac and the other fashionably modern happy pills. These days, it's still used for side effect control in patients who are taking antipsychotic medication--in can alleviate neuroleptic-induced tremors and other symptoms.
So, that bottle of little generic pink allergy pills is great-great-grandfather to the bottle of expensive white Lexapro tablets that sits next to it, a bit of pharmacological history in my medicine cabinet.
Be that as it may... food-induced nasal devastation necessitated the ingestion of about 50mg of the stuff, which knocked me out for over four hours. That was pleasant... collapsed on the couch with a big fat cat snoring on my chest, I snoozed in a hypnotic fugue. It's the same sort of thing I once chased after when I drank, only without the shouting and staggering and passing out. Sometimes, a little zoning is what's needed, a temporary dip in the waters of the Lethe.
Unfortunately, I've discovered that Benadryl "resets" my other meds a bit, so that I revert to an anxious state for the next 24 to 48 hours. I've not seen anything about this in the literature, but that's the nature of today's psychiatric pharmacopeia. Much of the experimentation is done by the patients.
So now I'm a bit woozy, a bit befuddled, a tad anxious, all at the same time. Marvelous, what you can do with your brain these days.
Nothing a bag of miniature Oreos can't fix, though, so I'm off to find some.
January 28, 2005
What is it about some doctors that causes them to become deaf to the needs of their patients? Perhaps it's hard to hear through the walls of their own rectums.
In any event--Pea's upcoming surgery and various ancillary medical issues are taking up quite a bit of time lately, so content will be thin.
January 29, 2005
WELCOME to all folks from Dave Barry's site (and thanks to Judi for the link).
None of you are bandwidth thieves, honest. That was some other dweeb, who is annoying and bad, and, like poorly-made cream cheese on a stale bagel, shall not be spoken of again. I like you, really. Have a look at the cartoon ("Miserable Ovoid Creature"... it's over there on the left, and up a bit). Come back often.
While you're here, why not visit the Monthly Archives, have some Headage, or rifle through the Fictives. You may find amusing stuff there. Or some serious stuff. Or some silly stuff. Or stuff that was intended to be serious but, due to my overwhelming arrogance, turned into silly stuff.
Or, you may become enraged, and vow to hunt me down and beat me about the head and neck with an assortment of garden implements.
That's a risk I'm willing to take.
January 30, 2005
But hey, ladies and germs, don't take my snarky word for it. Mohammed and Omar are there, and have the inky fingers to prove it:
I walked forward to my station, cast my vote and then headed to the box, where I wanted to stand as long as I could, then I moved to mark my finger with ink, I dipped it deep as if I was poking the eyes of all the world's tyrants.
Take that! splorch! And that! plook! And this, and this, and that, and that again! plonk! glurch! poitt! poitt!
Ah, yes, I love the sound of tyrannical eyeball-jelly in the morning...
From this early AM's NYT:
Qasim Muhammad Saleh, 45, walking with his two sons, Sajad, 5, and Jowid, 12, had just come from voting at Lebanon High School. The boys were carrying Iraqi flags, and Mr. Saleh's right index finger carried the ink marks showing he had cast his ballot.
"We now have our freedom," he said. "After 35 years, we finally got rid of Saddam and now we can vote for whoever we want.
"After casting my ballots, I'm hoping that the situation will improve."
But, of course, none of that matters because Bush is a pretzel-munching papa's boy and Cheney's shriveled heart is kept beating with daily infusions of light sweet crude mixed with young American soldiers' blood and Karl Rove directs the worldwide Axis of Evil Dead White Men from his chalet in Davos and he orchestrated the whole Halliburton/Enron/Dan Rather thing to keep the poor poor and the rich rich, and we shall resist because we're like, progressive and that's what progressive means, right? I'm all about the resistance, man... hey, didn't I see you at the Inauguration protest? Too bad about your giant puppet... you looked cute with it...
---
And from the early afternoon edition:
Preliminary estimates of a 72 percent turnout by a member of the Independent Electorial Commission, Adel Lami, were later revised at a news conference to "about 60 percent" by another commission official. The initial estimate excluded the mainly Sunni Muslim provinces of Anbar and Nineveh. Polling stations closed at 5 p.m. Iraqi time, or 9 a.m Eastern time.
This is insignificant in the face of America's overwhelming imperalism and its capitalist hegemony over the world's poor, and we like totally wiped out all the Indians, and the Founding Fathers owned slaves, and you know it's all about oil anyway. The oil companies are supressing technology that would make cars run off water and like, air. Hey, where'd you get those beads? They're really cool... you want to get a latte or something, after the meeting?
Ann Althouse notes a change in the NYT's uncharacteristically positive tone today.
Meanwhile, over at Mr. Not A Single Nomination's site, the big big news is a file photo is of a C-130 Hercules transport, headlined "British Troops Killed In Plane Crash Near Baghdad."
Because that's the most important thing that happened in Iraq today.
|
