“Well,” said Flavius after an uncomfortably long pause. “Bit of water under the bridge since I’ve last been seeing you, eh? How’s life been treating you, then?”
“It is as you feared, Your Imperial Majesty,” Papantzin said, ignoring Flavius. “The Sajal has debased herself with the lesser-sentient.”
“If Your Imperial Majesty would--” Anacaona began, but the Empress Malinche raised a hand, cutting her off as she entered the room, closing the door behind her.
“I’ve never entirely grasped how it is that the imperial cousins are always so eager to bring scandal down upon themselves with this impure fixation on... beastiality,” Empress Malinche said easily as she walked over to Flavius.
“Disgraceful,” muttered Papantzin.
“Hold on, now,” protested Flavius. “Nae need to talk that way about me! I have seen ya starkers, after all. And a whole lot more that I cannae remember...”
“His Imperial Majesty said you had no memory of the affair,” gasped Anacaona in surprise.
“People don’t always tell the whole truth, now, do they?”
Empress Malinche stepped in front of Flavius, so close he had to stop himself from flinching back. Her manner was light, but he could almost feel the heat of her rage lurking beneath the surface. The Empress examined his erection with pursed lips, then ran her hand across his chest. It came away glittering with a dusty sheen. “Oh my. This is most distressing. You’ve shed your passion all over him, Sajal...”
“Anacaona,” Anacaona said. “Your Imperial Majesty knows very well who I am, third cousin--”
“Debased Sajal should know to hold their tongues in the presence of Her Imperial Majesty,” Papantzin said.
“Gently, dear Papantzin. Sajal Anacaona is obviously beholden to her more primitive urges. We mustn’t judge her too harshly. This defect sometimes manifests itself among the distant cousins where noble blood runs thin,” Empress Malinche said, rubbing her thumb and forefinger together thoughtfully. “The only decent thing to do is to protect her from herself. Tell me, Papantzin, do we know of any likely candidates for a union?”
“Nu’n Huyng comes to mind,” Papantzin answered.
“Ah! Perfect! Nu’n and Sajal always do make exceptional marriage pairings. Their unions are always so vigorous.”
“No,” Anacaona said, eyes wide. “You can’t do this. You can’t condemn me!”
“Anacaona, think of this as an act of Imperial generosity,” Empress Malinche said gently. “Think of the scandal. You’ve irredeemably tainted yourself. What citizen in the Eternal Dominion would consent to union with you after you’ve spread your sheen all over this lesser sentient?”
”His corpse fucking glowed when they dragged it out of your bedchamber!”
Silence descended like a vacuum, sucking all the air out of the room.
“You... you...” stammered Papantzin finally, “dare to slander Her Imperial Majesty so? In front of the lesser sentient? The penalty for those words is--”
“Death?” Anacaona offered. The Sajal was trembling, but uncowed. “Her Imperial Majesty has already given me a death sentence should she follow through on her threat to force my union with Nu’n Huyng. I wonder what the unfortunate Nu’n has done to earn her disfavor?”
Papantzin struck quickly. Flavius jumped in surprise. Anacaona lay on the floor, bleeding from a nasty gash running from her cheekbone up to her scalp. Flavius eyed Papantzin warily. The handmaiden had moved so fast he hadn’t seen the blow land. The notion crept into his mind that she might be somewhat more than a mere handmaiden.
“Hoo! Nae need to be getting rough on my account,” Flavius said, easing on his kilt. Not an easy task, unwilling as he was to unbuckle his swordbelt to do so. “Why dinnae we sit down and discuss this over a pint?”
“An interesting suggestion, friend Flavius, although I don’t believe the Sajal will be joining us,” Empress Malinche said, rubbing Flavius’ bare shoulder with her over-jointed fingers. He pulled on his shirt then, using it as an excuse to slip from her grasp. “She has overstepped herself by a wide margin, and needs time alone to contemplate her transgression.”
“She means I get a knife in the back and a toss over the side of the palace walls,” Anacaona said, wiping her bloody cheek. “She can’t stand it that I bedded you out from under her.”
Papantzin hit her again, a lightning strike to the opposite side of Anacaona’s face. Anacaona cried out.
“Hey!” Flavius shouted, and lunged to interpose himself between the two. In an instant, he found Papantzin’s hand at his throat, holding him with more force than he’d thought possible.
“Flavius, take me with you,” Anacaona pleaded as she used the bed to push herself to her feet. Blood streamed down both cheeks now. “She won’t kill me in front of you, because she still wants you in her bed. But I’m dead the moment we separate. Please, let me travel otherwhere with you.”
“Friend Flavius, do you really take us to be so barbaric?” Empress Malinche said.
Flavius managed a strangled wheeze in response.
“Oh, yes. Papantzin, let him go.”
Papantzin released her grip, and Flavius took a staggered step back, rubbing his throat.
“Her venomous attacks on my person must not go unanswered, but all justice is even-handed and well-considered. Papantzin will escort the Sajal back to her suite while you come with me to the Imperial wing. I’ll show you we really are a genteel and loving people.”
“She’s jealous and selfish and loathsome,” Anacaona said. “It’s not enough that she had you to herself for four days last time, she has to possess you again this time as well.”
Papantzin moved to strike Anacaona again, but this time Flavius was ready. In an instant, Memory came unsheathed, its gleaming edge interposed itself between the women.
“There now,” Flavius said. “Nae need to punctuate everything with fisticuffs, eh? As I was saying before-- Wait, did ya say four days?”
“Do not--” began Empress Malinche.
“Four days. Give or take,” Anacaona said, matter of factly. “Then they tossed your body over the wall.”
“That’s nae how I heard it,” Flavius muttered.
“I’ve tried to be tolerant, but your insolence...” fumed Empress Malinche. “You should not have bedded Flavius.”
“It’s not like you left me many alternatives, Your Imperial Majesty,” Anacaona shot back. “You’re the one who had all the peq castrated, after all.”
“Whoa there! I dinnae need to hear that.”
Empress Malinche closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “Just so,” she said softly. “Papantzin, kill the Sajal.”
Friday, January 30, 2009
MEMORY: 32
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Austin infects Austen with zombieism?
Be warned, people! The streets of Austin are not the only places you must be on guard lest shambling undead corpses attempt to devour your brains. Now comes word that not even proper British comedy-of-manners novels are safe havens:
Is there any doubt that Austin, a proudly bookish city with such landmark literary institutions as Book People is the city that infected Austen (merely one letter apart--clearly a case of the zombie virus mutating and "making the jump" if ever there were one)? Now that this virulent plague has leapt from the living world to the literary one, where will the horror end? Certainly, some writings will fare better than others. On the genre front, Starship Troopers and Zombies I can't imagine being much different at all, but Flowers for Algernon and Zombies promises to be very painful, indeed. Thank goodness William Hjortsberg's 1971 tour-de-force Gray Matters remains safely out of print. Can you imagine the unending carnage were zombies to gain access to four billion brains in jars?
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.
Is there any doubt that Austin, a proudly bookish city with such landmark literary institutions as Book People is the city that infected Austen (merely one letter apart--clearly a case of the zombie virus mutating and "making the jump" if ever there were one)? Now that this virulent plague has leapt from the living world to the literary one, where will the horror end? Certainly, some writings will fare better than others. On the genre front, Starship Troopers and Zombies I can't imagine being much different at all, but Flowers for Algernon and Zombies promises to be very painful, indeed. Thank goodness William Hjortsberg's 1971 tour-de-force Gray Matters remains safely out of print. Can you imagine the unending carnage were zombies to gain access to four billion brains in jars?
Zombie invasion update
A quick update on our Monday report about the zombie invasion of Austin: over at the Austin American-Statesman, reporter Katie Petroski is investigating the Nazi zombie invasion story (complete with photos from this blog):
Sign hacker broadcasts zombie warnings
By Katie Petroski | Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 04:10 PM
Someone reprogrammed two city construction road signs near the University of Texas early Monday morning in an attempt to warn Austin of an imminent zombie attack.
Messages that typically alert Lamar Boulevard drivers to a detour for Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard splashed several warnings like “Caution! Zombies Ahead!” and “Nazi Zombies! Run!!!”
As he drove south on Lamar, traffic controller Bruce Jones saw the first sign flash the Nazi zombies message at 6 a.m. and wheeled his truck around for another look. Then he said he noticed that the second sign, directed at northbound drivers, had also been tampered with.
Jones, who has one of only two keys to the locked access panels on the portable signs, said that the hacker broke into the panels on each sign and bypassed the passwords before leaving five different zombie messages and even changing one of the passwords. Jones said he had to wait until 8 a.m. to call the manufacturing company to figure out how to override the hacker’s work. He speculated that the hacker could be a computer genius from UT.
The biggest safety hazard came from drivers slowing down or stopping their car to take pictures, Jones said.
The hacking occurred within weeks of various articles appearing online with descriptions of how to hack into these road signs — which point out that such an act is illegal.
Dennis Crabill, project manager with the Public Works Department, said the access panels are always locked and are not programmed with the default passwords these sites suggest. Short of having a watchman on duty around the clock, he said there is little more the city can do to prevent such vandalism.
“It’s a pretty childish prank,” he said.
Crabill said he is optimistic that MLK Boulevard will be open to two-way traffic again by this weekend, and the detour will no longer be necessary.
No zombies have been seen in the area, and with any luck, Tuesday night’s cold front killed off any undead with ghoulish plans to invade the city.
This story appears to have inspired (re)publication of a bunch of how-to stories, like this one, in case you know of another strategically located sign that needs to be put to proper use...
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Consumer culture, the annotated edition
From Christopher Barzak, via Maureen McHugh, the Amazon review feature transformed into a vehicle for social satire courtesy of the Playmobil airport security checkpoint playset:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3,028 of 3,078 people found the following review helpful:
Great lesson for the kids!, September 9, 2005
By loosenut (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.
I wonder what other nuggets are lurking in these post-Talmudic virtual annotations of the endless variations on cultural self-expression embodied in our consumer culture?
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
This Time. . .
Like everybody else, the recent campaign had me thinking about political language. There were slogans, phrases, images from the election that are going to be buried in people's heads for the rest of their lives. I come by this knowledge honestly. Years ago my dad used to drive me to school. Torture because every morning, I was treated to his Tourette's-like invocations of old Republican political slogans. So: "I Like Ike" and Barry Goldwater's "In Your Heart You Know He's Right" repeated over and over again. And then he would start riffing, dropping in long pauses: "In your heart (30 second beat as I claw at the dashboard) you knowww he's right."
But his favorite old slogan, bar none was for Richard Nixon. It was three simple words, just "This time. . . Nixon."
Besides the repetition, what drove me crazy was that I could find no evidence that this actually was a Nixon slogan. Eventually, I had a shelf full of books on the 37th President and as far as I could tell, my Dad had just made it up. Then, I found the Living Room Candidate site, found a trove of Nixon's 1968 commercials, and it became clear to me why they'd stuck in his mind all those years. I think they're brilliant.
In the use of still images with narration, they are clearly building on the famous "Daisy Girl" commercial and others from Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign. And in context, the meaning of "this time" becomes clearer. Remembering that Nixon had run and lost in 1960, these spots are basically asking the Silent American voter, "How have you enjoyed the Sixties? Want a do over?"
I also think it's interesting how these commercials reinforce the two themes for presidential elections, Stay The Course and Change. A candidate has to pick one. In 1968 (hard as it is for some to believe 40 years later) Richard Nixon was the change guy. If you get caught in between the two, like Hubert Humphrey did in 1968 or McCain did in 2008, you are going to lose. Watching these as the 2008 campaign played out, I was struck how the tone wouldn't have been out of place in Obama's ads. Nixon even struck the hope note in this classic "deal closer" spot probably run in the last week or so of the campaign.
But his favorite old slogan, bar none was for Richard Nixon. It was three simple words, just "This time. . . Nixon."
Besides the repetition, what drove me crazy was that I could find no evidence that this actually was a Nixon slogan. Eventually, I had a shelf full of books on the 37th President and as far as I could tell, my Dad had just made it up. Then, I found the Living Room Candidate site, found a trove of Nixon's 1968 commercials, and it became clear to me why they'd stuck in his mind all those years. I think they're brilliant.
In the use of still images with narration, they are clearly building on the famous "Daisy Girl" commercial and others from Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign. And in context, the meaning of "this time" becomes clearer. Remembering that Nixon had run and lost in 1960, these spots are basically asking the Silent American voter, "How have you enjoyed the Sixties? Want a do over?"
I also think it's interesting how these commercials reinforce the two themes for presidential elections, Stay The Course and Change. A candidate has to pick one. In 1968 (hard as it is for some to believe 40 years later) Richard Nixon was the change guy. If you get caught in between the two, like Hubert Humphrey did in 1968 or McCain did in 2008, you are going to lose. Watching these as the 2008 campaign played out, I was struck how the tone wouldn't have been out of place in Obama's ads. Nixon even struck the hope note in this classic "deal closer" spot probably run in the last week or so of the campaign.
And there's the "Nixon's the One" slogan. Getting back to my Dad, I think the reason he had a special affection for the Republican campaigns was that, being in politics his whole life, he appreciated the work of fellow craftsmen. And if you play with the Living Room Candidate site, it's amazing how rare it is for the Democratic candidate to have a clear advantage in the quality of advertising. LBJ and Obama and I would say that's about it. I've read the suggestion that since they tend to come from business backgrounds, Republican operatives are comfortable with advertising and more tuned into its importance. These ads represent Madison Avenue near its height (the apotheosis probably being Reagan's Morning in America and Bear spots from 1984). And of course, the suggestion has been made that the Obama campaign with its emphasis on online and alternate forms of getting its message out represents a shift to a method of advertising more natural and friendly to Democrats. We'll see.
Amen and Amen
Calamity looms. At this point in our national history, anybody who can't see calamity looming has their head in the sand. Of a beach. While a tsunami is building on the horizon. Today's headline news in the Houston Chronicle reads JOB LOSSES MOUNT ACROSS U.S. The rest of the day's and week's paper is full of war, climate change and economic upheaval. We know darn well that the United States caused some of this trouble and failed to mitigate some of the rest of it. We're now afraid about what the next wave of calamity is going to wash away. I, for one, am glad that last week's Inauguration pointed out where the moral bedrock is.
Last Tuesday like never before there were amen corners all over the USA. Americans were amenning to joy, hope, justice, righteousness, inclusion, and choosing good over evil. In other words, the entire inauguration had religious overtones, in a wholesome way, as distinct from the notion that religion holds the copyright on goodness. As we know, religiosity doesn't map onto who's actually a good person or not. Religion too often validates evil; witness how the Bible was used to justify slavery in the United States. Religious people are in constant danger of doing evil in the name of God and good.
Most time-tested religions seem to understand that. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there's a long prophetic tradition of saying truth to power, afflicting the comfortable, and telling ordinary folk to shape up in the name of God. On Inauguration day, I don't know that any of the speakers literally said the word repentance, but the idea ran like a red cord through the day, in the lyrical words of the pastors and the poet and in President Obama's inaugural speech. According to newspaper accounts, Bush administration insiders were offended that Obama didn't laud George W. Bush. The sour grapes were predictable but misplaced. Obama was talking to Bush and his people, all right, but also to everybody else in the United States and including himself every time he said we went wrong. We tolerated world-wide wrong done in the name of the people of the United States for far too long. While the greed and irresponsibility of some weakened our economy, we failed to make hard choices, failed to use energy wisely, and let our politics be strangled by behaviors unworthy of us. We now have hard work to do.
If the election had gone to the Republican Party, Inauguration Day would have been a very different story. I suspect that there would have been much praise for Bush and little about national repentance, because John McCain and Barack Obama understand evil very differently. A New York Times article by Peter Steinfels on January 17 reviewed a campaign debate sponsored by Rick Warren back in August. This is the same evangelical minister who did the main-event Inaugural invocation. I think he's very wrong in his opposition to same-sex marriage, but he did the country a service with that debate. Steinfels identifies "one of the most revelatory moments in the presidential campaign" when Warren asked the two candidates, "Does evil exist?"
McCain answered in the affirmative and talked at length about victory over Islamic extremism.
Obama answered in the affirmative and located evil abroad—but also in American cities and in abusive homes. We have to have some humility in how we confront evil, he said, because evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil. "Just because we think our intentions are good doesn't always mean that we're going to be doing good."
The presidential election went as it did. At the Inauguration's end, it was not whomever McCain-Palin might have chosen to sanctify their enterprise. It was the Reverend Joseph Lowry who closed the Inauguration with a prayer that began with words from "Lift Every Voice and Sing." That great hymn is associated with the Civil Rights movement, but it goes back further than that; it was created in the early 1900's and sung against Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan.
We were a nation that had slavery and vicious segregation, and yet through long, heroic and costly struggle, we repented of those evils, to the astonishment of the world and astonishing us too. This year on the eve of the holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. and two days before the inauguration of Obama, lots of American churches sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing," even if they sang it at different tempos. White churches tend to make it peppy. When a black church sings "the days when hope unborn had died" they linger on those agonizing words. Anyway, churches black, white and variegated sang that hymn on Sunday the 18th.
That same day saw the Inauguration's opening event at the Lincoln Memorial with a prayer by Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop. What a symbolic choice he was—someone who can speak from the crossfire of change and oppression while he speaks for all of us. He offered an Anglican-style bidding prayer. One of the biddings was this: "Bless us with discomfort—at the easy, simplistic 'answers' we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future." He closed with a heartfelt bidding to keep Barack Obama and his family safe. Bishop Robinson understands the danger they are in. At his ordination as Bishop, he wore a bulletproof vest because he'd received so many virulent death threats.
An eventful week later, on Sunday the 25th, the lectionaries of many mainstream Christian denominations had the spectacularly relevant Old Testament lesson about Nineveh. It's part of the Jonah story, but not the part of about the whale. The whale episode happened because God told Jonah to go to Nineveh to preach to that city that the judgment of God was about to fall on it. Jonah wanted Nineveh to be righteously destroyed by God. Instead of going to Nineveh, Jonah scuttled onto a ship. He meant to sail far, far away. The weather turned supernaturally awful and the sailors in desperation tossed him overboard into the sea, where was ingested by the whale, i.e., enormous fish. Three days later the fish regurgitated him. The story continues:
The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, 'Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.' So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, three days' walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, 'Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!' And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
On Inauguration day, without putting it quite so bluntly, the President, the poet, and the pastors said that being a lazy, violent, self-indulgent nation at the expense of the world is paving the way to hell and has got to stop. In honor of who we came from and how we got here, we have got to do better. At the end of his benediction, the Rev. Lowry had a fair fraction of people in the United States, and visitors, and people around the world, saying amen, amen, and amen. It wasn't yes-yes-yes to we're wonderful, good, great, and kings of the world. It was YES to we have got ourselves into deep and shameful trouble and dragged much of the world in with us, but we can turn around, and we should, and we will.
Last Tuesday like never before there were amen corners all over the USA. Americans were amenning to joy, hope, justice, righteousness, inclusion, and choosing good over evil. In other words, the entire inauguration had religious overtones, in a wholesome way, as distinct from the notion that religion holds the copyright on goodness. As we know, religiosity doesn't map onto who's actually a good person or not. Religion too often validates evil; witness how the Bible was used to justify slavery in the United States. Religious people are in constant danger of doing evil in the name of God and good.
Most time-tested religions seem to understand that. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there's a long prophetic tradition of saying truth to power, afflicting the comfortable, and telling ordinary folk to shape up in the name of God. On Inauguration day, I don't know that any of the speakers literally said the word repentance, but the idea ran like a red cord through the day, in the lyrical words of the pastors and the poet and in President Obama's inaugural speech. According to newspaper accounts, Bush administration insiders were offended that Obama didn't laud George W. Bush. The sour grapes were predictable but misplaced. Obama was talking to Bush and his people, all right, but also to everybody else in the United States and including himself every time he said we went wrong. We tolerated world-wide wrong done in the name of the people of the United States for far too long. While the greed and irresponsibility of some weakened our economy, we failed to make hard choices, failed to use energy wisely, and let our politics be strangled by behaviors unworthy of us. We now have hard work to do.
If the election had gone to the Republican Party, Inauguration Day would have been a very different story. I suspect that there would have been much praise for Bush and little about national repentance, because John McCain and Barack Obama understand evil very differently. A New York Times article by Peter Steinfels on January 17 reviewed a campaign debate sponsored by Rick Warren back in August. This is the same evangelical minister who did the main-event Inaugural invocation. I think he's very wrong in his opposition to same-sex marriage, but he did the country a service with that debate. Steinfels identifies "one of the most revelatory moments in the presidential campaign" when Warren asked the two candidates, "Does evil exist?"
McCain answered in the affirmative and talked at length about victory over Islamic extremism.
Obama answered in the affirmative and located evil abroad—but also in American cities and in abusive homes. We have to have some humility in how we confront evil, he said, because evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil. "Just because we think our intentions are good doesn't always mean that we're going to be doing good."
The presidential election went as it did. At the Inauguration's end, it was not whomever McCain-Palin might have chosen to sanctify their enterprise. It was the Reverend Joseph Lowry who closed the Inauguration with a prayer that began with words from "Lift Every Voice and Sing." That great hymn is associated with the Civil Rights movement, but it goes back further than that; it was created in the early 1900's and sung against Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan.
We were a nation that had slavery and vicious segregation, and yet through long, heroic and costly struggle, we repented of those evils, to the astonishment of the world and astonishing us too. This year on the eve of the holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. and two days before the inauguration of Obama, lots of American churches sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing," even if they sang it at different tempos. White churches tend to make it peppy. When a black church sings "the days when hope unborn had died" they linger on those agonizing words. Anyway, churches black, white and variegated sang that hymn on Sunday the 18th.
That same day saw the Inauguration's opening event at the Lincoln Memorial with a prayer by Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop. What a symbolic choice he was—someone who can speak from the crossfire of change and oppression while he speaks for all of us. He offered an Anglican-style bidding prayer. One of the biddings was this: "Bless us with discomfort—at the easy, simplistic 'answers' we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future." He closed with a heartfelt bidding to keep Barack Obama and his family safe. Bishop Robinson understands the danger they are in. At his ordination as Bishop, he wore a bulletproof vest because he'd received so many virulent death threats.
An eventful week later, on Sunday the 25th, the lectionaries of many mainstream Christian denominations had the spectacularly relevant Old Testament lesson about Nineveh. It's part of the Jonah story, but not the part of about the whale. The whale episode happened because God told Jonah to go to Nineveh to preach to that city that the judgment of God was about to fall on it. Jonah wanted Nineveh to be righteously destroyed by God. Instead of going to Nineveh, Jonah scuttled onto a ship. He meant to sail far, far away. The weather turned supernaturally awful and the sailors in desperation tossed him overboard into the sea, where was ingested by the whale, i.e., enormous fish. Three days later the fish regurgitated him. The story continues:
The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, 'Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.' So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, three days' walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, 'Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!' And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
On Inauguration day, without putting it quite so bluntly, the President, the poet, and the pastors said that being a lazy, violent, self-indulgent nation at the expense of the world is paving the way to hell and has got to stop. In honor of who we came from and how we got here, we have got to do better. At the end of his benediction, the Rev. Lowry had a fair fraction of people in the United States, and visitors, and people around the world, saying amen, amen, and amen. It wasn't yes-yes-yes to we're wonderful, good, great, and kings of the world. It was YES to we have got ourselves into deep and shameful trouble and dragged much of the world in with us, but we can turn around, and we should, and we will.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Year of the Ox
January 26 is the first day of the New Year for people from East Asia and everybody else who celebrates the occasion too. When I lived in the Berkeley a number of years ago, the San Francisco Chinese New Year Parade was huge and wonderful and included everything from lion dancers to bagpipers!
As I understand it, the animals in the Chinese Zodiac are all noble in their way, but it occurs to me to use it as a springboard to label some of the ignoble developments in recent years. We've had Years of the Dragon's Teeth (Greek myth: from the teeth of a dragon sown in the ground, armed men spring up.) And we've had Years of the Sheep. (Timid beasts, strong herd instinct, not very smart. We weren't thinking because we were all out shopping.) There's been more than one Year of the Cock-a-whoop (being in a state of boastful elation or askew.)
This is the Year of the Ox. Per Page One of today's Houston Chronicle, the Ox is dependable, calm, modest, and the best kind of good friend. Wikipedia offers, "the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work.... patient, tireless in their work, and capable of enduring any amount of hardship without complaint....not extravagant...." Says the San Francisco Chronicle, "They do not back down in the face of obstacles."
President Obama is an Ox person. That sounds propitious. For that matter, this year we should all do our best to be oxen too!
As I understand it, the animals in the Chinese Zodiac are all noble in their way, but it occurs to me to use it as a springboard to label some of the ignoble developments in recent years. We've had Years of the Dragon's Teeth (Greek myth: from the teeth of a dragon sown in the ground, armed men spring up.) And we've had Years of the Sheep. (Timid beasts, strong herd instinct, not very smart. We weren't thinking because we were all out shopping.) There's been more than one Year of the Cock-a-whoop (being in a state of boastful elation or askew.)
This is the Year of the Ox. Per Page One of today's Houston Chronicle, the Ox is dependable, calm, modest, and the best kind of good friend. Wikipedia offers, "the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work.... patient, tireless in their work, and capable of enduring any amount of hardship without complaint....not extravagant...." Says the San Francisco Chronicle, "They do not back down in the face of obstacles."
President Obama is an Ox person. That sounds propitious. For that matter, this year we should all do our best to be oxen too!
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