ALICE and YUYA, the HOLY GRAIL and WE

Excerpt: ALL OF A KEY, an unpublished novel:  (Scene: Seniors Alice  and Lou and Twenty-something Charlie tour Cairo Museum)

The ground floor entrance of Cairo Museum was dominated by a statue of Queen Tiye seated beside her husband, Amenhotep III, in a huge composition seven meters high and five meters wide.

“For the first time in Egyptian history,” Alice said, “the queen is shown the same size as the king.  She was a commoner.  Her father, Yuya, was her husband’s chief vizier, as he had been for his father, Tuthmosis IV.  We’re going to see Yuya today.”

“He would be important, why?” Lou asked, fumbling with his folding map guide to the exhibit halls.

“The Exodus may have occurred at several different times and places, and a great deal of money and faith has been expended to ‘prove’ each of them.  Each has its merits and advocates, each its flaws and detractors.  What is incontrovertible is that a Semitic tribe co-mingled with the Egyptian pharaonic family, fell afoul of orthodox Egyptian authorities, left or fled Egypt, looting as much of the place as possible as they went, setting up a religious opposition and a separate organization that not only challenged Egyptian traditions, but declared a ‘special,’ ‘separate,’ and ‘supreme,’ relationship and claim to the only true god.”

“God,” Lou agreed.

“Inventing different versions of the same truth, denying common roots, and claiming sovereignty over the myth has been criminally disruptive.  Akhenaten and his Habiru-Shasu shepherd henchmen were power-obsessed manipulators, breaking the peace and harmony of the world for personal gain.”

“Selfish bastards,” Lou agreed.  “Let me get this straight, you’re talkin’ about Joseph and Moses and those guys, right?”

“I’m talking about a particularly garbled tract of proto-history, beginning with the Story of Joseph in what is referred to as the first book of the Old Testament in the compendium called collectively the Holy Bible.”

“Oh,” Lou said.

“Scholars agree,” Alice continued, “that the Joseph Story was an original narration put down in writing in the 9^th Century B.C. and is thought to be the Judah-Israel version.  A second story came a century later, the Reuben-Jacob version.  The story in Genesis is mainly from the two sources, however, priests returning from the Babylonian exile arranged the sources, and added details: Joseph’s age (30) at time of Pharaoh’s elevation, the number of the tribe of Israel that went down into Egypt (70), the length of the sojourn (430 years), and Joseph’s request to be buried in Canaan.  Then, an editor, sometime before the second century B.C. took on the task of making one story from the three sources, and added the section on Joseph’s death and his request to be reburied in Canaan on his own initiative, or orders.”

Lou looked at her blankly.

“People believe a cobbled, fiddled myth,” she said.  “We must go to its roots to see the truth, which should prevail.  However, our self-deception and self-aggrandizement overpower facts with inventions suiting our basest desires for certainty and dominance.”

“Yeah, but so what?” Lou disagreed.  “Guy got lucky, huh?”

Charlie laughed.

“Okay, Alice,” Lou said, “men wrote the Talmud and the Bible…”

“…and the Koran,” she said.

“…and the Koran, but refute this: they also made the mistakes – not God.  God had to use several men until we correctly reconstructed what happened.”

“With another man to pronounce the trail ended.  Neatly bent,” she complimented.  “First rate religious counterpoint to reason.  That’s just the trouble, isn’t it?  Religious people see what they’ve taught themselves to believe and deny any exception on the grounds of deviltry and perdition.

“Muhammad is the descendent of another of Abraham’s sons,” Alice continued.  “Ishmael out of Hagar, Sarah (Sarai’s) Egyptian maid.  Muhammad was born in Mecca in A.D. 570, eighteen centuries after Exodus.  He started his mission at age 40 or so, preaching to Arab idolaters the ‘true faith’: Islam, the monotheistic Hanif religion of his remote ancestor Abraham.  Hanif is the Islamic word for someone who believes in one God, but is not a Jew, a Christian, or a worshipper of idols.

“Significantly,” Alice said, “the Koran agrees with the Judah-Israel and Reuben-Jacob versions of the story, but ends there, making no connection to the later priestly and editor’s additions.  This reinforces the conviction that the original story is in the first two sources, before it was given shape, or included Joseph’s reburial in Canaan.  It helps convince me that he never left Egypt.”

“So, where’d he go?” Lou scoffed.

“He’s in Room Number 12 according to the floor map,” she replied.  “I like what I understand of the ancient Egyptian concept of our relation to god.  God created all out of thought and word.  Everything is part of god.  The million gods are one; all creation, everything, is part of the whole.  Hence, the world went out of balance when the Akhenaten-Moses megalomaniac took his god out of Egypt and set him up separate above everything else in the world.  It would be good for all of us, if we recognized and nourished the roots instead of losing ourselves in the branches.  Of course, anything is possible, Lou, but let’s have a look at this particular mummy.  I really believe it’s  your Joseph.”

Yuya had a long thin dignified face, almost alive, wearing a calm confident expression.  The position of his hands was striking.  They were normally placed over the chest in the Osirian position, but here, in the only example Alice had ever seen, the palms were down just under the chin, as if giving reverence, not to the gods, but to himself.

Unusually, his ears were unpierced.  His strong, aquiline features and hooked nose immediately suggested foreign, possibly Semitic origin.  His white hair and aged appearance indicated that he was at least sixty years old when he died.

“Commanding figure,” Lou admitted.  “Lot of character in that face: full, strong lips, prominent determined jaw.  He could wake right up.  Wow!  What an embalming job.”

“He’s the originator of the great religious movement that his daughter and grandson carried into execution.”

“Come on, he could be Syrian, or anything.  You don’t know he’s Moses.”

“He is Yuya, father of Tiye, whom Amenhotep III made his Great Royal Wife. Their son, Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) married his cousin, Nefertiti, Yuya’s grand daughter by his son Aye.  Akhenaten closed the temples, banned the ancient gods of Egypt, and established a monotheistic God, like the God of Israel, with himself as high priest.  I believe he can be linked to Moses, or rather to the mythological stereotype we know as ‘Moses.’”

Looking at the well-preserved features, Lou thought that Yuya did have the face of an ecclesiastic; there was something around the mouth.

“I have in my files at home,” Alice said, “a photocopy of Yuya’s titles, taken from the book written in 1907 by Theodore M. Davis.  One of them was it ntr n nb tawi, “the holy father of the Lord of the Two Lands”, and not just the common semi-priestly it ntr, “the father of the god”.  That certainly sounds like a blood relation, doesn’t it?  If we’re ever to get the truth, this is a good reason for re-examination.”

“To what end, Alice?” Charlie asked.

“All three religions revere Joseph,” she replied.  “If this is he…”

“They’ll kill each other to get him,” Charlie said.  “Best to let the poor beggar lie.  If that’s your Joseph, or anyone else’s, he didn’t get to Canaan, but he looks content.  Let’s not trouble his rest.”

Lou laughed and nodded.  Alice took a few notes and made a sketch from which she would later do an ink painting.  Yuya’s profile was particularly interesting, she thought.  He’s not Syrian.

Yuya, “Holy Father of the Lord of the Two Lands”

PARTIAL SOURCES:

Moses the Egyptian, Jan Assmann, the memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism.  Harvard University Press. The author is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg. A brilliant study by a world-renowned specialist.

Hebrew Pharaohs of Egypt, Ahmed Osman, the secret lineage of the Patriarch Joseph.  Bear & Company.  Cairo-born author presents results of twenty-two years writing and research.

BEYOND DAN BROWN: The DeVinci Load. 

The so-called Holy Grail is the object of legendary quest for Arthurian knights and may be a “wide-mouthed or shallow vessel,” although its precise etymology (in the true literal sense of the word) remains uncertain, and small wonder.

The Grail was probably inspired by classical or Celtic mythologies, which abound in horns of plenty, magic life-restoring caldrons, and the like.  In Finland, the pre-Christian Kalevala features the sampo, which might be a pillar that holds up the sky, or a mill to produce salt, meal and gold, or a talisman of happiness and prosperity.  Take your pick.

The first extant text (or more aptly invention) about the Grail is Chrétien de Troyes’ late 12th century unfinished romance Parceval or Le Conte du Graal, which combined the religious with the fantastic.  In the 13th century Robert de Borron’s poem extended the Christian significance of the legend, linking the Grail with Christ’s cup at the Last Supper and with Joseph of Aramea whom he said used it to catch Jesus’ blood as he hung on the cross.  In the same century, Wolfram von Esenbach’s Parzival gave the Grail profound and mystical expression as a precious stone fallen from Heaven (sampo, anyone?).  Malory’s late 15th century Le Morte D’Arthur transmitted the fanciful Grail essence to English-speaking readers.

In the story-telling invention, the quest itself became a search for mystical union with God.  Through various permutations by many different writers over several hundreds of years, the Grail theme formed a culminating point for the Arthurian romance.  It’s a good story device; it doesn’t really matter what it really is, as long as it stands for truth, justice and the “right” way.  Its physical presence is just like the True Cross, Longinus’ Spear, St. Michael’s pickled peritoneum, or any other “holy” relic: e.g. entrepreneurs started fabricating bits of the true cross as soon as they noticed a market for it; as we’ve seen from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the DeVinci Code, and Newsweek, people are still making big bucks selling new baubles to hang on the old artificial tree, which is patently, the Grail’s only real value.  When you get right down to it, it’s buying a box of air, isn’t it?  That’s the way faith works, so have fun with the storyline.

Incidentally, Christ is the Greek Chrestos – a mystery cult popular with the poor and lower middle class of the 1st century C.E.  Self-proclaimed “Apostle” Paul of Tarsus cobbled Chrestos with the historical Jesus movement as a sales package for Gentiles (infuriating the Jesus movement because he co-opted and lied about their guy; of such petty human foibles are great religious movements conceived), but that’s another story.

REVERY:

We’ve come a long way, you and I.  Thousands upon thousands of light years, and yet we’re still far short of our destination.  Where were we going anyway?  Haven’t we already been there?  The universe is a big round circle in a dimension so large that we poor mites cannot see the curve.  It looks like a straight line to us, but so does time, and time is a repetition of itself, always telling us the same thing.  As each generation is born, the next arises, and each of those, and all of those billions more, grows by the same learning process, through the same biology, give or take a tenth of a percent of one gene, which seems to specify skin tone and what we call racial differences.  It’s the same as classifying men by the size of their nipples and finally as insignificant.

We all begin as fertilized eggs.  We are one with the chicken and the salamander, fish and spider.

There is not one atom within us that is remarkable for being unique.  There is nothing unique in the universe, except individual discovery.

LINK WORTH VIEWING:

Washington Diarist by Leon Wieseltier, Accommodationism:  “One of the most troublesome qualities of reason is that it is not always reasonable.”

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=cf4e433c-60bd-4184-abc3-fc372c7f8304

Little King Rides Again.

A PROGRESSIVE REVOLUTION

“Starry Night Market”

COMMON LIVES (?)

I never wanted to succeed within the system. I always fancied an independent existence, and have been resentful at having to go back to the system – time and again – in order to survive. They’ve got the medicine, books, roofs and most of the food. I’ve met survivalists and read about them: pro-, con-, and how-to. I don’t want to scratch out a marginal living on the edge of wilderness; I don’t want to divorce community. I want to live a free, reasonably unencumbered, but comfortable life, serving the greater good as I am given to perceive it. I ardently wish to avoid corporate connection; they are too goddamned connected. They are invasive in our lives far beyond routine and poorly imagined governmental civil surveillance. The corporatists would enslave us and are working to achieve that. Fascism – the merger of corporations with the state is Mussolini’s original definition – is aggressively reasserting ascendance over worldwide society. It is time for the rest of us to fight for our lives and freedoms again. We must destroy the present royal corporatists and make corporations serve the nation that enabled them again. We do not exist for them!

Life is much shorter at the back end than it is at the front – duh. The days, weeks, months, and years speed by at ever-increasing pace – as the universe seems to be doing. The older earth is beyond ripe and well into rot. There are too many of us and we are breeding. Species in danger of extinction over breed just before the lights go out – it’s a screwed-up survival thing that only works if the species has the room and resources to make it work.

I’ve thought long and hard about what to post in this blog. There is a plethora of crisis and dispute, a right royal battle between good and evil, rich against poor, corporatist plutocrats against democracy, and truth versus fiction.  Most of the topics and alarms I’ve had to share, I have shared. They are now common lament from progressive to mainstream media, and even right wing media acknowledges them by manically denying their existence. Glenn Beck holds rallies to celebrate the void. The Repuglicons stand for greed and despoliation; they would defoliate the planet to make a lousy useless buck; they’d sacrifice their own grandmothers for a bus token. My guess is that they will be huddled in a cave eating pieces of our corpses as the seas rise, the winds howl and the sun bakes the earth flat in the wasteland they created. Honest to the Big Sky-borne Nincompoop, they can have that.

[NOTE: We need a Progressive Revolution: defeat all Repuglicons, Koch brothers Tea Potty goons, corporatist democrats and racist "blue dog" democrats. Most specifically, do not support racists, reject them and reject racism. Racism sucks! Keep your eye on the prize: we have a world to potentially save].

Paul Ryan, the Great Stinker

RECOGNIZE THE ENEMY:

Rupert Murdoch bought National Geographic. The NG Channel has now produced a bio-documentary about Rudy Giuliani’s “gallant” 911 actions in his own words.  Every fire fighter and public safety officer in New York should be insulted and enraged by it. Ask them how contemptible Rudy’s words are to them. He is at the top of the neocon shill list. However did we give way to all of these crap talkers? NatGeo also spews a lot of the bible as “history” crap – the old scientific National Geo would have laughed the script right out of production in the flicker of an eyelash.

Ben Stein narrates a “docu-drama-mentary” about Creative Design being conspired against by “rotten old scientists.” We should give him a new show entitled: “Ben Stein Will Do ANYTHING For Money!”  Ben would have us throw out the Enlightenment and revert to the Stone Age. Virgin sacrifice, I suppose, what a sick puppy Ben turns out to be – a whack-a-mole salesman for loan sharks and decrier of reason. Some intellectual. Why do we have to put degenerate theories and philosophies in our public schools? It is insanely self-destructive to accommodate these know-nothing morons who would be our overlords. Why do we want our children to be ignorant and dumb?

An American Carol – Three ghosts visit an anti-American filmmaker – who is obviously a Michael Moore ringer – to show him the “true” meaning of the nation. It’s not about people: it is about “Free enterprise” – as controlled by the narrow-minded few, in opposition to the great unwashed horde of sub-human immigrants, and the uppity middle class.

The recently sold-out History Channel just pumped out a series entitled the Bible; it is a re-telling of the same old King James nonsense without much intellectual or scientific balance. It is superstitious religious memory transmitted as fact to further propagandize and confuse our increasingly gullible public. We are losing the truth to these greedy self-interested relativists.

Poor Beleaguered Billionaires

Koch brothers – here are the most “do anything for money guys.” They fight to make their dollars more important than human lives or nature’s health. They are the ultimate arrogant my-cash-makes-me-special sleaze balls among our self-designated would-be “landed elite.” These high-handed thieves are traitors worse than Benedict Arnold. Common to Arnold they are trying to turn the country over to plutocrats – an aristocracy of the rich – a king (who may be the megalomaniac and vicious Charles or devious mealy-mouthed David Koch) – piss ants, working against the nation, humanity, reason and posterity around the world just to stay rich. They do NOT know what’s right for the rest of us; they don’t care about us; they consider us cannon fodder and/or wage slaves to be used and discarded at their august petty filthy and sick grandiose will.

No more grievous immediate threat to our free nation exists than the traitorous Repuglicon Radical Right and their corporatist masters. If I had the influence, I would call the people to battle against the corporate monopolists and their fundamentalist toady right wing allies today. “Kill all royal corporate charters!” Let them know that we are coming for them. It’s judgment day for corporatist thieves and would-be kings, like the Kochs. Things Get Worse with Koch! (And, that goes for all the rest of the Mitt Romney-Loyd Blankfein, Business roundtable, Chamber of Commerce and Tea Potty crowd).

Anti-American Terrorists

We Move to Amend.We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

• Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
• Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
• Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

Signed by 283,041 and counting . . . CONTACT: http://www.movetoamend.org/

Liberty crowning defiant American democracy.

EUGENE ON THE GREYHOUND

Excerpt, COMMON LIVES, an unpublished novel.

There was a clean Latino man in the seat beside Eugene on the Greyhound bus, who alternately dozed, or read from Antoine Saint Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars.  His clothes were clean: dark new Levis and a good blue cotton denim shirt.  He also had a clean white straw cowboy hat with a sedate blue and white band.  Tucked under his elbow, between his body and the window wall of the bus was a new black leather jacket – not the kind bikers wore, but a skirted coat a gentleman might wear to take a lady out.  He also had a small brown paper bag with food for the trip – sausage and cheese, baguette of French bread, small condiments, crackers, fruits and vegetables in sealed plastic sacks.

Eugene met him when their bus driver narrowly avoided collision with a highballing semi-trailer headed north in a hurry.  Eugene banged into his seatmate as the bus made a wild swing onto and off the shoulder of the road.

“Sorry!” Eugene yelped, more frightened than he wanted to be.

“No problem!” the man said, clinging to the seat in front of them with one strong brown hand.  Saint-Exupéry was clutched securely in the other.

“Some drivers,” Eugene said as their driver regained control.

“Guess he has to make some time.”

“Eugene Formsby,” Eugene introduced himself on impulse, holding out his hand.

“Armand Garcia,” Armand said, shaking Eugene’s hand.

“Headed for Portland?” Eugene asked.  Armand’s hand was hard as horn.

“Wilsonville,” Armand replied.  “I follow the crops.”

“You’re a migrant worker?” Eugene asked in disbelief.  Armand fit none of the stereotypes.  He was clean and neat.  He wasn’t traveling in a caravan of scruffy dirty brown men.  He wasn’t drunk.

“Somebody’s gotta do it,” Armand said reasonably.  He smiled.  He had even white teeth, obviously well-cared-for beneficiaries of good professional dental attention.  “It’s a good livin’, if you don’t blow it all on booze and women.  A lotta the guys do that: make a little money and piss it all away.  They’re stupid.  Sure, it’s a little bit of money here, but it’s a lot where I come from.  I send my money home.  I got a wife and kids in Mexico.”

“Did I see you reading Saint Exupéry?” Eugene asked, fascinated.  He was meeting an industrious Mexican migrant farm worker – a clean one with a sense of responsibility.  The world was truly a marvelous place.

“Yes,” Armand said promptly.  “Would you like to hear a passage?”

“Well…?”

“And suddenly,” Armand read, “I had a vision of the face of destiny.  Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame.  No one ever helped you to escape.  You, like a termite, built your peace by locking up with cement every chink and cranny through which light might pierce.  You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conversations of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars.  You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man.  You are not the dweller upon an errant planet, and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers.  You are a petty bourgeois to Toulouse.  Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time.  Now the clay from which you were shaped has hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.’

“Good stuff, ain’t it?” Armand asked, smiling.

“It’s uncanny,” Eugene replied, nonplused.  Did someone send you here to read that to me?  He wondered, imagining all sorts of divine interventions and messages from Beyond.

“I’m tryin’ to improve my mind,” Armand said amiably.  “I don’t always wanna be pickin’ crops.  That’s stupid.  Gonna kill my back one day and then I won’t be able to do it anymore.  I’m thinkin’ of studyin’ book-keepin’.  What do you think?”

“Well, book-keeping is a reliable occupation,” Eugene said seriously, dismayed that the reader of Saint Exupéry was going to intentionally crash land in the desert.

“I was thinkin’ more along the line of tax preparation, ya’ know?”

“Uh-ha,” Eugene replied, nodding. 

“You’ve got a family?” Armand asked politely.

“No.”

“You should have a wife and children,” Armand said reasonably.  “They make your life mean something.  A lot of those guys I work with, they don’t know that.  They don’t work for the family.  They come up here and get drunk and wild and land in jail, or get run outta the country by the INS.  Stupid sonsabitches.”

“INS,” Eugene said, “that’s Immigration Naturalization Service?”

“That’s them.  They’re not too bad if you don’t get stupid.”

“You get hassled?”

“Sometimes, but I travel by bus and keep pretty much to myself.  Some of those other guys all chip in, ya’ know?  Buy an old junker car.  They get a little drunked up and ride along about a hundred miles an hour and get busted by a local cop.  Man, that’s stupid!  Local cops can be real mean.”

“I didn’t know migrant workers came all the way up to Oregon.”

“Sure, all the time.  We follow the crop right up into Canada.  We’re chasing the harvests, don’t ya’ know?”

“Well, yeah, sure, I know that.  That’s what migrants do.”  Eugene felt stupid.

Sometime around noon, the bus broke down.

“I always bite off a hard chunk,” Armand said as they stood by the side of the road.  The bus was disabled, its rear hatch open, smoky steam clouding up into the cool Oregon air in thin wet tendrils.  Passengers stood straggled along the roadway, or seated on their luggage, which had been removed in preparation for a relief bus, which was expected “momentarily” for the past two hours and twenty-three minutes.  Passing motorists speeding by on their way north glanced curiously at the stranded bus riders.  No highway patrolman appeared.  The driver smoked cigarettes, paced and scowled, stopping periodically to deal with impatient frustrated passengers.

“A hard chunk?” Eugene asked disinterestedly, holding Armand’s dog-eared Saint-Exupéry, which he’d asked to see.  He longed for the relief bus.  He leaned into its vision, hoping that it would soon put an end to his seemingly endless return to Portland.  Perhaps the fates were trying to tell him something – like, maybe, you’re a loser, go no farther.

“If it’s hard to chew,” Armand continued, “I try to spit it out.  If it don’t spit out, I have to tough my way through.  Life is like that; you don’t get to spit the damn thing out, until you croak.”

Reassuring, Eugene thought.

“I been thinkin’ lately on how man is an animal,” Armand said seriously.  “Unlike the other animals, he’s the only one who gets to remember much of anythin’ – includin’ hates and discontents – and the only one who knows he’s gonna die.  Pretty depressin’.  It’s also the human condition which everybody reads about – which some people think died out with those Frenchmen, sittin’ in Paris cafes, stickin’ knives in their hands to make a point durin’ the Nazi occupation; or walkin’ the beaches in self-exile in plague-ridden Morocco.  Camus had it bad.  Malraux and Sartre, all those thoughtful Frenchmen.  All life’s absurd.  It’s the human condition.  Man’s fate.  It all comes home.”

Eugene stared at Armand.

“Hey, who are those guys?” Armand asked with sudden concern.

Eugene looked around.  There were about a dozen, furtive men trying to slip into the small crowd of stranded bus riders.  The men fit Eugene’s stereotype: dirty, rough-looking Latino laborers, wearing faded jeans, straw hats, black mustaches, flannel shirts and heavy, thick-soled shoes.

“Shit,” Armand said furiously.  “Fuckin’ wetbacks ruin it for everybody!  Stupid motherfuckers!”

“What are they doing here?” Eugene asked nervously.

“I don’t know,” Armand replied angrily.  “Catchin’ the bus, I guess!  The stupid mother fuckers are gettin’ tickets from the mother fuckin’ driver!”

Sure enough, Eugene saw the newcomers line up, clutching their money in grimed hands, pressing it on the surly Greyhound bus representative in his surly-gray bus driver’s suit.  As he watched, a trio of official white sedans pulled off onto the shoulder of the road behind the bus.  A second trio of sedans and a large white van pulled up in front.

The next few moments were bedlam.

The laborers began running in all directions.  To Eugene’s horror, Armand went with them.  Men in dark blue bulletproof vests and matching ball caps ran past Eugene in hot pursuit.  The pursuers wore badges and the large letters INS were stenciled across their backs.  They were armed with batons and carried side arms at their belts.  Within minutes, the laborers returned, singly and in pairs, their hands handcuffed behind them, escorted by officers into the back of the white van.  Eugene saw Armand among the last herded up to captivity.  Armand did not see him.  The van was sealed, the officers returned to their vehicles, got in and drove away, leaving a gaping busload of passengers still stranded at the side of the road.

The surly Greyhound bus driver looked furtively at all the ticket money he’d just collected and pocketed it.  He glanced nervously at the passengers and smiled at a nearby older woman, who looked at him disapprovingly, thinking his unctuous smile the most terrible anomaly thus far in a terrible trip.

My God! Eugene thought. Armand is a wetback!  A goddamned literate wetback! How do I meet these guys?  Why do I meet these guys? What the hell?

The relief bus arrived almost immediately thereafter and Eugene climbed aboard gratefully, still carrying Armand’s copy of Saint-Exupéry.  He sat down with the book in his lap.  Armand would stay on his mind for a long time, maybe for life; he had only touched the surface.   He wished him well, commending him to his Catholic or Indian gods, or Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps.  Impossibly, he hoped he would meet him again.  He looked down at Saint-Exupéry and opened it to the part Armand had marked.  He read:

“No one ever helped you to escape.  You, like a termite, built your peace by locking up with cement every chink and cranny through which light might pierce.  You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conversations of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars.  You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man.” 

Eugene turned to the first page and began to read.

UNITED FARM WORKERS :

To provide farm workers and other working people with the inspiration and tools to share in society’s bounty

http://www.ufw.org/

TIME OUT FOR REASON

Time Out for Reason

It’s easy to become buried under the avalanche of bad news rushing over us; easy to become discouraged and fatalistic.  Shakespeare wisely and famously mused,  “To be or not to be, that is the question.  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to seize arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.”

The overall point of the exploration – from my perspective – is to know.  I’ve found that keeping the goal simple is best.  The persons benefiting from the robberies, rapes and murders do not care about any patterns or even predictable outcomes.  As long as they are profiting in some wise, the behavior goes unchecked.  As to the rest of us, we generally seem to suffer in silence until the pain becomes too great, and then we produce the predictable outcomes mentioned above.  I often think of Cassandra predicting the fall of Troy when I am contemplating the latest “I told you so” in the news.  Really bad case of “Nobody ever listens to me.”

I spent a few years, fifteen years ago, trying to inform the county commissioners of our great land that the West and Midwest are for sure running out of water.  The environment is observably in major transition and we are losing the human-friendly ecosystem that greatly enabled our planetary success.  Do we act to conserve what we’ve got?  No, of course not.  The powers that be commission studies to postpone action so that the last possible penny can be squeezed out of whatever the exploited resource might be.  Hence, I am contemptuous of the bozos that use the cliché, “Well, we lost ‘it’ in California (Birmingham, Detroit, wherever), but we still have a chance to save it here.”  I want to yell at them, “It didn’t need saving until you assholes showed up!”  Many also believe that someone or thing is going to save them before it’s “too late”.  They’re wrong.

I’ve gone back and forth on the meaning of life.  I conclude that Monte Python made the definitive statement on the subject: “Every sperm is sacred.”  That coupled with the Life of Brian – particularly the crucifixion chorus singing, The Bright Side of Life while hanging on their crosses.  There you go, all said and done.  Don’t even have to read Nietzsche or Sartre.  I prefer the light side to the dark, humor to grim acceptance (although there are times for each, I admit).  Still, I find myself more Zen than anything else, plus a strong, strong touch of Deist.  Don’t know if that latter is because of my erratic Roman Catholic upbringing, but I do believe in some sort of life force, great spirit, for want of another word, god.  For all I know though, god may be a composite of all souls, or a board of directors somewhere, or an alien playing space invaders.  Believing in a god doesn’t preclude the overwhelming sense that the world is one big turkey shoot and loony bin.  If the divine being has some sort of purpose, other than hanging out and looking at stuff, I have yet to discern it, but then who am I?  Moses, He talks to; Me, He doesn’t call, He doesn’t write…

Learning history has value in finding out that all the crap around you has happened in some form before you – not once but probably hundreds, if not thousands of times, or even more – and the world went on as if nothing mattered and there’s the key, I think.  As the in-country Vietnam vets used to say, “Don’t mean nothing.”  The insanity finally reaches a point of such overwhelming monstrosity that all one can do is cover up in the fetal position and whimper, or throw one’s head back and laugh like hell.

Everything we do is good and/or bad, it’s all interconnected, and each generation sees the world as new, and never before traveled – until it’s probably too damn late to correct for a wayward course.

Corporatists destroyed the New Deal and bankrupted the people of the United States, shoved them into war, and took their jobs and personal freedoms away.  Those of us who care, who are American, who are democrats – small “d” – are most in danger and must destroy the corporatists and re-instate the New Deal, or we are lost.  We shall be slaves of corporate masters for evermore.  We must live as if people mattered, not to protect stupid-ass property rights, or spend our lives at the level of swine.  Do you understand why their masters murdered slaves, serfs and peasants who learned to read?  The New Medievalism is just around the bend.

RELATED ARTICLE: CRUSHING AMERICA

 

Execution by Stoning: not just a sadistic bible tradition.

An Iranian woman at a protest in Brussels highlights the barbarity of death by stoning, in which women are buried up to their necks in front of a crowd of volunteers. Photograph: Thierry Roge/Reuters

ALEXANDER THE GREAT

 

And, now, for a complete change of pace, and without apology to Oliver Stone:

ALEXANDER THE GREAT By Will Cuppy

Alexander III of Macedonia was born in 356 B.C., on the sixth day of the month of Lous. (1)  He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time. (2)  He did this in order to impress Greek culture upon them.  Alexander was not strictly a Greek and he was not cultured, but that was his story, and who am I to deny it? (3)

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1 That is what the Macedonians called the month of Hecatombaeom, Plutarch says, and he ought to know.

2  Professor F.A. Wright, in his Alexander the Great, goes so far as to call him “the greatest man that the human race has as yet produced.”

3  He spoke what was known as Attic Greek.

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Alexander’s father was Philip II of Macedonia.  Philip was a man of broad vision.  He drank a good deal and had eight wives.  He subdued the Greeks after they had knocked themselves out in the Peloponnesian War and appointed himself Captain General so that he could uphold the ideals of Hellas.  The main ideal of Hellas was to get rid of Philip, but he didn’t count that one.  He was assassinated in 336 B.C. by a friend of his wife Olympias. (4)

Olympias, the mother of Alexander, was slightly abnormal.  She was an Epirote.  She kept so many sacred snakes in her bedroom that Philip was afraid to go home after his drinking bouts. (5)  She told Alexander that his real father was Zeus Ammon, or Amon, a Graeco-Egyptian god in the form of a snake.  Alexander made much of this and would sit up all night boasting about it. (6)  He once executed thirteen Macedonians for saying he was not the son of a serpent.

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4  After Philip’s death, Olympias had one of his wives boiled alive.  Shows what she thought of her.

5  Having real snakes at home does an alcoholic no good.  It just complicates matters.

6  He got so he believed it himself.

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As a child Alexander was like most other children, if you see what I mean.  He had blue eyes, curly red hair, and a pink-and-white complexion, and he was small for his age.  At twelve he tamed Bucephalus, his favorite horse.  In the same year he playfully pushed Nectanebo, a visiting astronomer, into a deep pit and broke his neck while he was lecturing on the stars.  It has never been entirely proved that Alexander shoved the old man.  The fact remains that they were standing by the pit and all of a sudden Nectanebo wasn’t there any more.

For three years, until he was sixteen, Alexander was educated by Aristotle, who seems to have avoided pits and the edges of roofs.  Aristotle was famous for knowing everything.  He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking.  This is true only of certain persons.  He also said that the sheatfish is subject to sunstroke because it swims too near the surface of the water.  I doubt it.  In spite of his vast reputation, Aristotle was not a perfect instructor of youth.  He had a tendency to wander, in the classroom and elsewhere.  He didn’t keep his eye on the ball.

With a teacher like that, one’s values might well become warped.  On the other hand, even Aristotle couldn’t help some people. (7)  As soon as he had finished reading the Nicomachean Ethics, Alexander began killing right and left.  He exterminated the Theban Sacred Band at the Battle of Chaeronea while his father was still alive, and then got some fine practice killing Thracians, Illyrians, and such others as he could find around home. (8)

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7  Some years later, when Aristotle asked his former pupil to find out what caused the rising of the Nile, Alexander answered correctly, stating that it was caused by rain.  This pleased Aristotle very much, as he had worried about it for years and had almost given up in despair.

8  The Thebans were only Boeotians, generally regarded as oafs.  Plutarch, however, denies this with some heat.  Plutarch was a Boeotian.

            __________________________________________________________________

He was now ready for his real career, so he decided to go to Asia where there were more people and more of a variety.  After killing a few relatives who might have claimed the throne, (9) he declared war on Persia and crossed the Hellespont to preach Hellenic civilization.  The Greeks were embarrassed about this, but they couldn’t stop him.  They just had to grin and bear it.

Asia proved to be a regular paradise.  In no time at all Alexander had killed Medes, Persians, Pisidians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, and miscellaneous Mesopotamians. (10)  One day he would bag some Galatians, the next he would have to be content with a few Armenians.  Later, he got Bactrians, Sogdians, Arachosians, and some rare Uxians,  Even then, an Uxian, dead or alive, was a collector’s item. (11)

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9        He had connived at the liquidation of Philip.

10    “He boldly proclaimed the brotherhood of man.” – F.A. Wright.

11    The Uxians, or Huxians, may have been the ancestors of the Loories.

            __________________________________________________________________

Alexander put an end to the Persian Empire by defeating Darius in three important battles.  This Darius was not the Darius, but only Darius Codomannus, or Darius III, who had been placed on the throne by Bagoas, a eunuch. (12)  Bagoas had poisoned Artaxerxes III and his son Arses and had in turn been poisoned by Darius, just to be on the safe side. (13)  Darius was easy to defeat because you could always count on his doing exactly the wrong thing.  Then he would whip up his horses and try to escape in his slow-moving chariot.  He did this once too often.

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12    The name Bagoas is a shortened form of Bagadata, meaning Given by God.  It was often applied to eunuchs for reasons I have been unable to check.

13    Xerxes I was poisoned by the eunuch Aspamithres.

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The Persian army was all out of date.  It relied chiefly upon the Kinsmen, who were allowed to kiss the King, and the Apple Bearers, or royal guard, who had golden apples on the handles of their spears.  Darius believed that if he kept adding more Apple Bearers to his army the Persian Empire would never fall.  But life is not like that.  Apple Bearers are all right, if you know where to stop.  After a certain point is reached, however, the law of diminishing returns sets in and you simply have too many Apple Bearers.

Darius also had chariots armed with scythes on each side for mowing down his enemies.  These did not work out, since Alexander and his soldiers refused to go and stand in front of the scythes.  Darius had overlooked the facts that scythed chariots are effective only against persons who have lost the power of locomotion and that such persons are more likely to be home in bed than fighting battles in Asia.

Alexander’s best men were his Companions, or heavy cavalry, and his Phalangites, or improved Hoplites, who composed the Macedonian phalanx.  There was some doubt about what the Hypaspists were expected to do.  They acted as Peltasts at times and they could always run errands.  Alexander never advanced without covering his rear.  The Persians never bothered about that, and you see what happened to them.

At the Battle of Issus, Alexander captured Darius’ wife and two daughters and the royal harem of 360 concubines (14) and 400 eunuchs.  He snubbed the harem, as did his inseparable friend and roommate Hephaestion, but the soldiers obtained many beautiful rugs.  Alexander’s project more than paid for itself, for he acquired valuables worth 160,000 Persian talents, or $280,000,000, in the cities of Susa and Persepolis alone.  Unfortunately, much of this was stolen by Harpalus, a cultured Greek serving as imperial treasurer.

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14     Eunuchs were widely employed as royal advisers, as they had more time to think.

            __________________________________________________________________

Alexander spent the next nine years fighting more battles, marching and countermarching, killing people at random, and robbing their widows and orphans. (15)  He soon grew tired of impressing Greek culture upon the Persians and attempted to impress Persian culture upon the Greeks.  In an argument about this, he killed his friend Clitus, who had twice saved his life in battle.  Then he wept for forty-eight hours.  Alexander seldom killed his close friends unless he was drunk, and he always had a good cry afterwards. (16)  He was always weeping about something. (17)

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15    Among the Persians, sixty or any multiple of sixty was regarded as lucky.

16    He was often extremely brutal to his captives, whom he sold into slavery, tortured to death, or forced to learn Greek.

17    He evened an old score by hanging the historian Callisthenes, a grandnephew of Aristotle.  Callisthenes refused to prostrate himself in the Persian fashion, then Alexander refused to kiss him, and things went from bad to worse.

            __________________________________________________________________

Bucephalus died of old age and overwork in India, and the soldiers, who thought the whole business was nonsense, refused to march any farther. (18)  Three fourths of the soldiers died of starvation while returning through the Gerosian Desert, but some of them finally got back to Susa and broke training.  At this point, Alexander and Hephaestion felt it was time to stop fooling around and get married, and they decided to marry sisters, so that their children would be cousins.  Wasn’t that romantic?

The girls they chose were Statira and Drypetis, the daughters of Darius, who had been waiting around ever since the old Issus days nine years before.  I never heard how these marriages turned out.  All of Alexander’s biographers say that his nature was cool, if not perfectly frigid. (19)  He is said to have sinned occasionally, but he never quite got the hang of it.  He was not unattractive, if you care for undersized blonds. (20)  His physique was reported to be all right, what there was of it. (21)  I have found no description of Hephaestion’s looks, but I gather he was tall, dark, and handsome.

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18    Alexander did not conquer the world, by any means, since he had never been in Italy, Gaul, or Spain, to mention a few places.  He might have spared the tears about that.

19    Alexander had always been kind to Bucephalus, after whom he named a city.  He named another after his dog Peritas and seventeen after himself.

20    “From the weaknesses of the flesh, to which many great men have been subject, he was almost entirely immune.” – F.A. Wright.

21    There is probably no truth in that story about Alexander and Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons.  Still, Thalestris usually got her own way.

            __________________________________________________________________

Nothing much happened after the doings at Susa.  Hephaestion died a few months later of drink and fever.  Alexander passed away in Babylon from the same causes in the following year, 324 B.C.  He was not quite thirty-three, and he had been away from home eleven years.  He might have lived longer if he had not crucified his physician for failing to cure Hephaestion.  Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Alexander’s death left Macedonia rather at sixes and sevens.  Roxana, Alexander’s Bactrian wife, had Statira and Hephaestion’s widow murdered and thrown down a well, and Sisygambis starved herself to death.  Olympias executed Alexander’s illegitimate and feeble-minded half brother Arrhidaeus and forced his wife to hang herself.  Cassander executed Olympias, others murdered others, and it was all quite a mess.

Alexander’s empire fell to pieces at once, and nothing remained of his work except that the people he had killed were still dead.  He accomplished nothing very constructive. (22)  True, he cut the Gordian Knot instead of untying it according to the rules.  This was a silly thing to do, but the Gordian Knot itself was pretty silly.  He also introduced eggplant into Europe. (23)

Just what this distressing young man thought he was doing, and why, I really can’t say.  I doubt if he could have clarified the subject to any appreciable extent.  He had a habit of knitting his brows.  And no wonder.

            __________________________________________________________________

22    He is said to have smelled like violets.  I heard different.

23    But see F.A. Wright on Alexander’s work “above all as an apostle of world peace.”

WILL CUPPY – HUMORIST

(1950) The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, New York: Holt. Edited by Fred Feldkamp. Illustrations by William Steig.

Harvest Night. Roman Nights series. ROMAN NIGHTS

BROTHER WOLF

Alien Wedding Cineplex.
“Among the Arabian philosophers, Averroes has been accused of despising the religion of the Jews, the Christians, and the Mahometans. Each of these sects would agree that in two instances out of three his contempt was reasonable.” – Edward Gibbon.

WALDO HEMMERSLEGG’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD: (Excerpt from COMMON LIVES, unpublished novel).

Our story begins – for it is literally our story, the story of humankind – about three million years ago in an African gorge in Tanganyika.  To the west is towering Mount Kilimanjaro, but here in Olduvai there is desert where once it was savannah teeming with antelope and zebra, wildebeest and all manner of animal treasures – some still with us and those now extinct.   In the midst of this was a hunting, gathering troop of advanced apelike creatures, one of whom, a female we call “Lucy” was the recipient of a rare mutated gene that made her the first human.  All human females carry that gene.  It is not present in males.  Left to the males, humankind would revert to apedom.  No wonder the ladies are considered a “civilizing influence.”  Hell, there wouldn’t be any civilization at all without them.  No man would ever think of building a chair when he had difficulty mastering the stick in the termite hole when trying to obtain a little protein.

If we had a time lapse film of the species from its beginning, we would see Lucy’s descendents evolving and expanding up out of Africa into the Middle East, hence to Europe and Asia, thence all over the planet.  The genetic material that makes human beings white, brown, black, yellow or red is a tiny marker in our genetic makeup.  Everything else is the same. We are identical in every other genetic respect.  We all come out of Mother Africa.  That should make us a tolerant, peaceful species, but we’re not.  We’ve fought and killed each other from Lucy’s day on, often over “proper” melatonin levels.  We form and maintain select groups as the “best” and attempt to destroy any one or any thing (including ideas) that threatens our belief in the holy righteousness of our own brand of blind ignorance.  We are all entitled to be ignorant and superstitious.

There is, in reality, only we and us.  It is apparently hard for red-necked hate-filled crackers, suicide bombers, militants of every stripe, ultra-Americans and other “special” groups to admit that they are just part of the human race.  “Otherness” is a big issue for them.  It is only by denying the humanity of their victims that they are able to do such savagery upon them, and by denying their own humanity that they are able to be so ruthlessly cruel. In Rite of Passage, Alexei Panshin wrote that there are “no spear carriers in real life.” A spear-carrier is the guy in the opera or movie who is stabbed as the hero goes by to save the maiden; the one who falls off the parapet feathered by an arrow.  They are anonymous, often faceless and assuming soulless creatures to be killed at will for dramatic effect.  They are not other people, but props to make the hero look good.

That’s why the military concentrates on “doing a job of work.”  Moving boulders, or whole villages, or killing whole peoples is easier when they are objectified as things subject to our divinely directed whim.  When one’s “cause is right,” because “God is on our side,” and “we must protect our way of life,” murder is most “holy”.  Sadness to relate, we still seem to be comfortable with that, and remain irate about our inherent equality.  What’s the real problem?  Nobody’s really all that special.

“LIKE TEARS IN THE RAIN”:

“I am bored by people who keep returning life to a moral plane, as if we were reducible, now, to some Biblical concept or its opposite, as if all our history and prehistory had not conditioned us for what we’ve become.  It’s enough to make a moral nigger out of a man.  The niggers are down there, no doubt about it.  But Jack didn’t put them there and neither did I.  When we get off the moral gold standard, when the man of enormous wealth is of no more importance to anybody than the man in rags, then maybe we’ll look back to our own day as a day of justifiable social wrath. Meantime, the game is rising, not leveling. Jack taught me that. Cured me. (Brother Wolf, are you listening?)” - William Kennedy, LEGS. 

“Never judge a book by its cover unless it’s red.”  Leo Gorcey, Bowery Boys.

“Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” Gandhi.

Meaning of Life var.

STAR WARS: Obligatory Long Shot rev.

IS THAT GROVER?

Okay, I don’t like Star Wars. I can’t accept George Lucas as my personal lord and savior, and parts I-III, and V-VI suck. Re-title the series: Cliché Bores.

The special effects (eye-candy) are storied, superior and endless. Never have I been bored to death by more wonder, except maybe in a church crawl in Europe, a mosque crawl in Cairo, or camping out in Room 5,212 in the Louvre. Too much of a good thing?

Well, in the midst of all this mind-boggling clutter: our heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses (not too many of those – George doesn’t handle the female element very confidently or sympathetically – doesn’t seem to understand it). This is my major complaint with the whole second series: characters are as flat as cardboard cutouts, motivations as thin as tissue, dialogue as transparent as wax paper, drama as heavy-handed as wood chips in a roll of toilet paper. Lucas just does not understand either human psychology or actual human emotion; he’s a middle-class privileged guy from the Valley. He’s obviously read about them though, and borrows feelings one is supposed to have, according to his research, but it comes out so leaden, so slowly, tediously – just like the humor in Howard the Duck (was that supposed to be a comedy? I really don’t know. Howard makes my skin crawl).

And, although I shouldn’t expect unnecessary logic in a fantasy work, I find it utterly impossible to figure out why all the alien peoples have absolutely human earthbound attitudes, senses of humor, and even get hot for human women – isn’t there any sort of cross-species disinterest in outer space, or is the entire universe just get-anything-that-moves horny? Oh, yes, something else would require imagination, and might actually estrange audiences who only understand the just-what-they-know obvious – such as folks who go to Nascar (the kid in the flimsy-jack pod racer. Worst roadworthy design EVER). I know, picky.

However, I do find myself drawn to the enormous energy, will to succeed, and effort to achieve that Lucas demonstrates; he’s a pure work and win example of Horatio Alger proportions. He deserves his reputation for technical wonders, and for bringing the length and breadth of CG I to film. He is deservedly considered a pioneer genius of the technical side of film. So on that level, I totally GROK Star Wars. The cityscapes, et al are the best eye-candy without – I’m fairly sure – real rival. In this race, George is the one to beat.

And I just like to look at Natalie Portman – period. Sorry, women friends, I’m a guy – not dirty, just worshipful, watching a rare and unusual talent and charismatic feminine charm. She captivated the screen in her debut with Jean Reno in the Professional and has held it ever since.

I would gladly throttle the little kid in Part 1. Perhaps he was just playing the part of an insufferable little creep, in which case, he’s a fine actor.

In Parts 2 and 3 I kept hoping Hayden Christensen would misjudge those stories-falling leaps of his and hit an awning or a balcony. Something. Anything. Hated his hair, it blinded me to the rest of him. He does sullen and near clueless very well.

Someone should have given Ewen Mac Gregor something to say – he looked simply out of place, hard-working, a fine actor, but utterly wasted. He was supposed to be Alec Guinness later? Gotta say, there was a whole lot of learning to achieve Old Obi-Wan’s level of wisdom between Parts 3 and 4 that we obviously didn’t get to see. Maybe there should be a Midquel (bite my tongue, must not invoke the Force).

I could go on, but it would only be more of the same snarky thing.

Loved her, hated him. The eye-candy par excellence. Lose the kid.

George, hire a scriptwriter and let him/her come up with the storyline, character development and dialog. Stop pumping out your boyhood dreams and high school theme books, before we’re consumed by Star Wars the Postquel Parts 7-8-9 – suggested titles: The Republic Goes Rotten; Return of the Sith Lords; and Hell’s Bells, We’re Right Back Where We Started!

O, no, I said it aloud! Now the Force has been invoked! O, no! Scotty, beam me up!

The DOOM PATROL (det.)

DISORDER and FACT reprise

MEDITATIONS ON DISORDER and FACT:

Persistent and determined belief in fiction over fact is a clear sign of an emotional disorder. – See also: religion, supply side economics, 7/17/05

Poseidon: “Without gods, man is nothing.”  Odysseus: “I was only one man in the world – nothing more and nothing less.”

GIBBONISMS: Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Of interest: “The Gregorian chants of the Christian church preserve the vocal and instrumental music of the theater in an attempt to imitate the melody of the Roman school, which was meant to soothe the distress, confirm the faith, mitigate the fierceness, and dispel the dark enthusiasm of the vulgar. “

“It is not surprising that superstition should act most powerfully on the fears of her votaries, since the human fancy can paint with more energy the misery than the bliss of a future life.”

“Among the Arabian philosophers, Averroes has been accused of despising the religion of the Jews, the Christians, and the Mahometans.  Each of these sects would agree that in two instances out of three his contempt was reasonable.”

“…many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God, than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.”

“…such is the progress of credulity that miracles, most doubtful on the spot and at the moment, will be received with implicit faith at a convenient distance of time and space.”

“…the favor of the people is less permanent than the resentment of the priest…”

“Ambition is a weed of quick and early vegetation in the vineyard of Christ.”

“The calculation of their number [pilgrims to Rome] could not be easy or accurate; and they probably have been magnified by a dexterous clergy, well apprised of the contagion of example…”

“The dominion of priests is most odious to a liberal spirit.”

“…all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance…”

OTHER PEOPLE SAY:

A guru will tell you just enough, but not everything, to lead you on.  A bad guru wants you to suppress your doubts and serve him, or you will be set aside, dropped from favor, lose the “love.”  A good guru tells you to serve a cause, not him, or yourself, and never demands belief.

“In the case of gods, death is only a matter of prejudice.” Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

“The history of Christianity is rife with violence resulting from an organized central authority wishing to force its minions to adhere to a rigid doctrine of belief…Even more ironic is the fact that the Church’s attacks on fellow believers have been the worst events in the history of religious persecution.” – Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar, Steven Sora.

“It is evident that use of manipulative methods and blackmail can be a very effective means of controlling members.  In certain organizations and movements secrecy and control are very important.” – ibid, Sora.

In order to control the mind, one must control the body.  That is the primary reason religions proscribe sex and cleanliness.

INTERESTING STRAY FACTS:

St. Morris was the African Christian who inspired the code of chivalry: Serve the king, but answer only to god.

Quid pro quo – one for another, tit for tat. (Only goes so far if chopping off fingers, say).

One light year is six trillion miles!

Humans are by biology and temperament, the dancing ape.  Our closest relatives, Chimpanzees, can’t dance.  Anyone or anything that stops, or tries to control the dance is anti-human.

SO, I THINK, IT’S FUNNY:

She looks like an old couch somebody threw out of a trailer.

“I’m really intrigued about what I’ve found out about this woman’s skull!” – bright cheerful English archeologist, History Channel, Meet the Ancestors, “The Tomb that Time Forgot.”  “Time” forgot no less.

Go ahead, make my dinner.

“How dumb can you be and still be useful?” – scientific question applied to robotics.

“If enough people say, ‘My god, stop talking,’ you become a good listener.” – Gilbert Gottfried, Becker.

“These days, doctors can keep people alive way past their usefulness.” – Hugh Neutron, Jimmy Neutron.

“Church Potluck: What a Friend We Have in Cheese Puffs!” – church sign, Simpsons.

“No one gives a [crap] about labor if they can get a delicious sandwich.” – Squidward, Sponge Bob.

“Barbarians don’t have an education, so they go for the nearest thrill.” – History Channel professor.

END ON THE UPBEAT:

“One cuts it and the other gets first choice.” – How brothers should share pie, Baxter Black, PBS.

PRETTY IMPORTANT NEWS (earlier views, but obviously still true):

Published on Monday, July 27, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

World Will Warm Faster Than Predicted in Next Five Years, Study Warns.  New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Nino southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming skeptics, by Duncan Clark.

The world faces a new period of record-breaking temperatures as the sun’s activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted over the next five years, according to a new study.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/27-9

Published on Monday, July 27, 2009 by The Telegraph/UK

Climate Change to Force 75 Million Pacific Islanders From Their Homes.  More than 75 million people living on Pacific islands will have to relocate by 2050 because of the effects of climate change, Oxfam has warned, by Bonnie Malkin in Sydney.

A report by the charity said Pacific Islanders were already feeling the effects of global warming, including food and water shortages, rising cases of malaria and more frequent flooding and storms. Some had already been forced from their homes and the number of displaced people was rising, it warned.

Published on Monday, July 27, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Profiling CEOs and Their Sociopathic Paychecks, by Thomm Hartmann.  The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “Executives” and other highly compensated employees received nearly $2.1 trillion of the $6.4 trillion in total US pay in 2007, the latest figures available.”

One of the questions often asked when the subject of CEO pay comes up is, “What could a person such as William McGuire or Lee Raymond (the former CEOs of UnitedHealth and ExxonMobil, respectively) possibly do to justify a $1.7 billion paycheck or a $400 million retirement bonus?”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/27

SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Ant Farm

EXCERPT from Common Lives, a novel

This piece won 98th place in the 80th Writer’s Digest Annual Awards literature and mainstream fiction category – in competition with 11,800 others. 98th! I’m 98th! LOL.

“In the Beginning”

Lost in the formless void of space, an electron came spinning out of nowhere to collide foolishly, randomly and willy-nilly with some microscopic other thing and a large explosion resulted. When the debris settled and the dust cleared, when the incredible multitude of subsequently tossed, collided and bumped other things slowed their rate of reaction, space became again a relatively calm place – although, it was now decidedly more cluttered, larger things having been mashed together from the smaller ones. As one can well imagine, that lone electron must have been in an incredible hurry, and the resulting accident at Lexington and Forty-First was a big one, with traffic backed up in all directions, clear to the edges of the city. It was later inferred by a philosopher-scientist in an ermine robe while speculating before his medieval books of alchemy that the electron may have been drinking.

For Eugene R. Formsby, the amazing thing about the Universe was its consistency; it had a beginning, middle and an end. Some scientist in Cleveland, staring through a telescope in order to bring the macroscopic down to earthly size, suggested that the whole thing was a sort of gigantic bubble of slowly expanding gas, which would eventually collapse, as bubbles always do. Eugene had once seen a bubble-blowing magician on television impregnate a soap shell with cigarette smoke. Eugene thought the end of the Universe would be as fleetingly unspectacular as watching the magician pierce the soap shell to allow the cigarette smoke to escape in a dirty, gray-white rush, to dissipate in the broader air. The soap shell itself collapsed with a wet spurt; all very satisfying as a television show, but lame as a proper end to the Universe.

Eugene felt a little disappointed with the magician. There were just so many things one could do with soap shells: spin them, encase one inside of another – rings of air, worlds of air, nested like wooden, brightly-painted Russian dolls – tie them together like balloon puppets, or whatever, the bubbles always vanished with the same, wet spurt.

Which made Eugene think about beginnings. He, Eugene, was the product of a minute, wet spurt, which – reacting, colliding – forced masses of other inert (or nearly so) materials to react and collide with…an endless series of seemingly chaotic, entirely trivial and absolutely fascinating mini-events, resulting in one Eugene R. (for “Robert”) Formsby. Life, Eugene decided, was funny that way: there was no accounting for it. Multiplied by all of the other minute, wet spurts, amid the howling, moaning, grunting and groaning cacophony of all the copulating creatures since the dawn of auditory, vocalizing creaturedom, Eugene felt quite insignificant and more than occasionally like a supernumerary.

Still, Eugene tried to please everybody, tried to appear like a superstar (which he was not), cleaned his supper plate assiduously – hearing the voice of his long-dead Mother chanting, “Starving children and half-mad dogs. The world’s a savage place, Eugene. Watch your step and don’t lose your way. Be careful crossing streets, Eugene, and always eat your peas.”  Eugene always ate his peas. He ate them first, to get that little chore out of the way.

“Eugene,” his mother would say. “Eu-gene,” she would whine. Eugene was a name made for being whined; a name one could get one’s nose tightly involved with. It was possible to draw the “Ewe” up and the “geene” out, so that the name was at one and the same time, an attention-grabber and an accusation, laden with extreme, resigned disappointment. The way his mother often said it sounded like, “You jean” – as if a jean was a poor thing to be, fit only for covering up assholes and crotches when skinning down trees and mud banks, and ending up dirty (which Eugene often was, being a relatively normal child.

Non-human creation fascinated Eugene early on, being less harmful and generally more peaceful than the World of Men. He identified with Kipling’s hero Mowgli in the Jungle Book, delighted in the savage tales of Tarzan, who defeated evil by breaking its back, or by stabbing it in the chest with his “mighty tooth” – which was really a knife, only being raised by apes, Tarzan didn’t know any better. Years later, Eugene equated the knife with something Sigmund Freud speculated about – but, as a boy, Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Conqueror (“eventually over-muscled by Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said), and Tarzan of the Apes (“bloatedly defiled by a decaying Johnny Weismuller,” he lamented, “and prematurely denatured by Bo Derek and her cynical, self-styled Svengali of a husband”) stood for all that was wholesome, romantic and achievable. The orphan of the apes grew up to move freely, though begrudgingly, in society’s upper circles; Conan became King of Aquilonia; and Johnny Weismuller apologized for the racial stereotypes populating his naive, little films.

From such stuff, and its subsequent manipulation against real life, Eugene gradually formed the notion that under every rock, there was apt to be a disgustingly formed grub.

Nonetheless, Eugene loved nature and spent hours happily hiking woods, warmed by nature shows aired by public television, or sitting on a rock observing ants busily dismembering butterfly carcasses. He found fascination in small things, from which he extrapolated theories about the governance and overall uniformity of large things. Things became ever more complex as their size increased. Just as corporate machinery had to expand the secretary-typist’s pool to encompass and accommodate modern computerized word processing, so too, extra parts were required to adapt the feeding apparatus of an amoeba into the mouth of a moose. Yet, regardless of scale, the end purpose remained the same: one to reproduce words in frozen lines of print; the other, to feed the living organism, so that it might go on to multiply and/or divide, before ultimately subtracting itself altogether from the Universe as this specific amoeba, or that unique moose.

Uniqueness was a particularly troubling theme to Eugene, for he felt that each entity was unique, never-before-assembled, yet so integrally related to the Whole that, it was difficult to tell where something ceased to be a part of something else, and where it became, separately, all there was to one sort of thing alone. Within his own body, he knew that there were entire colonies of contributing members, which scurried about tending and maintaining him, so that he, the amalgamated Eugene, could continue to function and so maintain them – a fact which made Eugene sometimes wonder if he was really self-motivating when left to his own devices, or simply the end product of a committee decision, which predicated that Entity Twenty-one-billion-and-eight should be entitled Eugene R. Formsby, Consolidated Research Unit, Model X-4-D, and should now, by unanimous consent of the governing board members, sit down and eat.

“What do you think about life so far?” Father Randolph “Teeth and Tongue” Nornocker once asked Eugene as the two sat in the pastor’s study. Eugene was at that time a somewhat precocious eleven and expected by his elders to be able to philosophize to a limited extent. Father Nornocker was, appropriately enough, a big, knock-kneed man with a virtual awning of overbite, a high starched collar and dirty fingernails. Even as a child, Nornocker’s nails gave Eugene pause. As far as Eugene knew, Nornocker did no real work – a gardener tended the parish grounds; a handyman did the repairs; a housekeeper cleaned and cooked – but the pastor consistently had dirty nails. Eugene attributed it to lint in the padre’s pockets.

“About life?” Eugene asked blankly.

“Yes,” Nornocker said, nodding, threatening to bite himself in the neck to Eugene’s fascinated gaze. “Life,” said Nornocker, “the Universe, God.”

“I like God,” Eugene said innocently.

“Very good.” Nornocker smiled, audience ended.

Eugene’s conversations (if they could be called that) with Nornocker always ended anti-climactically. Nornocker gave no direct advice for daily living, except from the pulpit (“Repent or you are damned!”), or in formal counseling sessions held particularly for about-to-be-marrieds (“Are you on birth control, dear? Ah, yes, I see. You do know that’s a mortal sin?  See me for confession, dear.  We can handle it.  Don’t worry.  God is understanding. Do you, Jim, know the real meaning of the words, ‘husband’ and ‘father?’  Ah, good. Rehearsal’s at eight – sharp.  I don’t like latecomers, so don’t be tardy, we lock the doors!“). Eugene thought being locked out of one’s own wedding might possibly be a blessing in disguise.

Marriage appeared to him to be a particularly militant institution, populated by unwilling combatants who had taken an oath of service while under emotional duress – amounting to temporary insanity as fired by engorged genitalia. While Eugene’s own parents rarely fought, rarely spoke, rarely looked at one another, they were nonetheless at war. During momentary fits of lust, however, they apparently copulated – well after dark, when the children were sleeping, the doors were all locked, and neither partner had to directly see the other’s naked, flaccid body. Eugene had a rather bizarre childhood view of sex as a result, believing that the female navel somehow accepted the male organ; hence, he believed, his mother’s dismay over baby sister’s extruded umbilical orifice, referred to as an “outy,” and known to be cause for a tragic lifetime with no release from one-piece bathing suits. Boys might have an outy without undue comment, since no one was ever going to stick anything into it – unless, of course, they were trapped in, or naturally inclined toward the restrooms in Greyhound bus stations.

This set of views, as well as others, gradually led Eugene to believe that certain kinds of information were “wrong,” “prejudiced,” or “totally unreliable.” Unfortunately, he couldn’t easily tell which was which, and so left the whole affair to chance, operating on the best of what was currently available, while guarding his rear against yapping dogs and angry, leathershod feet.

Eugene was again the small boy who stood on the steps of the great cathedral, awed by its spires and turrets, its filigrees and gargoyles, its stained glass windows and golden crosses. Inside was the dark perfumed lair of the Lord God, with its high altar overhung by the bloody plaster body of Jesus Christ, His only begotten son. The outer aisles containing the sea of pews were marked by the boxed dioramas of the Stations of the Cross, which led to the place where the Son died. Old ladies in pillbox hats with veils sat on age-oiled mahogany seats beside straight old men with stiff collars and rose-oiled hair. The air was rich with incense, cologne and perfume. Altar boys ringing bells and flame-tipped candles filled the imagination with flickering images of high holiness, augmented by the mysterious repeated chanting, the rigorous standing, kneeling and sitting – all of which confused his small, earthbound brain and threatened rather than uplifted him. He knew nothing of the acts being performed, wished fervently to leave that enchanted, terrifying palace of extraterrestrial power for some richly-grassed sunlit park, where birds sang sweetly and he could hear the speakers from the ball grounds, buy a hot-dog and a cold drink, watch a butterfly investigate the flowers and close his eyes and dream with the sun’s warmth full on his face.

Eugene often dreamed. In dreaming there was escape and in escape there was peace. For a time, he did not have to do what all of those others wanted – the “big people” who ordered him this way and that, preparing him for “responsibility” and “correctness” and a “grand sense of the indomitable self” unsupported by the frailness of his small body or the muddle of his pliable mind. The world was so confusing, so mixed up with “thisses” and “thats,” propounded by robed men, collared men, high-hatted women, women in scarves, ermines, overalls and nothing at all. There had been a time when nylons had confused him and girls’ underpants had almost consumed him. He could not possibly enter a church when the solitude of confession alone nearly reduced him to paralytic fear and terrible, self-accusatory embarrassment.

But the small boy’s mother stretched out her hand and drew the child up the steps of the cathedral, toward the towering open doors and through the yawning mouth of the massive portal, into the secret, dark sanctuary of the blooded God within.

The Beatniks were fading out, bearing Kerouac’s limp body with them, and the Hippies were coming in, bearing narcotics and flowers, when he first attained political consciousness. One group was too old for him to be a peer; the other was too young to see him as anything except suspicious. He was fascinated and excited by both, but became a member of neither, remaining that impossibility: a non-conforming non-conformist. Left to his own devices, he became one of the first generation of television addicts. He grew up living the lip service on so many lips. As a goal, as a model, the myth reeked of individual power, but the first Superman he ever knew, George Reeves, blew his brains out. How could Superman put a bullet in his head? He wondered. Wouldn’t it just bounce off? The myth, in practiced fact, was a conditioner: a view of the world in carefully molded packaging. Careful, my son, don’t remove the plastic wrap if you don’t want the contents to lose value. Use caution, my son, when stealing peeks into Pandora’s box.

Later, he read the Book of Daniel and the Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, refreshed himself on the case of Saco and Vanzetti, the lunacies of Attorney General Palmer’s Great Red Scare, Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts, and narrowed the glass to Ronald Reagan, the CIA, both Bushes, an Ashcroft, a Gonzales, and the “Moral” Majority. Rambo bulged out of the silver screen in living blood and the whole, mad, delirious killing frenzy danced on, with kids carrying submachine squirt guns and rubber knives the size of Route 66. The myth versus the reality: it echoed. Properly connected, with the correct measure of rising and falling sounds, clicks and “syllabalings,” words conjured up any sort of world. Once believed, the words structured reality and even reinforced the impulse to self-destruction.

Sadness to relate, Lamentation Number 4-billion-and-something: the scientific humanists have turned us into mechanical appliances. The corporate boardroom bastards have turned us into assembly line spare parts. And, the religionists have turned us into dependent, frightened moral bankrupts.

Why did I have to awaken? He wondered. Why couldn’t I have remained as mindlessly narcotized as my peers, skipping to the top, mesmerized by depilated crotch in designer bathing suits. The clever little ripper on his way to a semi-lifetime in the pen, darts in and out of the Square John crowd, putting time and distance between himself and the scene of his most recent petty crime. Xerox sells obsolete product two weeks before new product release, saying nothing to the client. The fossil-fuel barons, the Koch brothers, are poisoning the planet and opposed to all life-affirming change. Are they all the Devil’s helpers?

Q: What’s the fastest animal in the world?

A: A chicken crossing Darfur.

NEW BOOK: 

The COPPER-HANDLES AFFAIR: The Great San Francisco Earthquake, Fire and Bank Heist by John Patrick Legry (Oct 20, 2010)

NEW NOVEL at Amazon.com, etc.

THE COPPER-HANDLES AFFAIR: The Great San Francisco Earthquake, Fire and Bank Heist, begins with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and a simple opportunistic bank robbery, plunging John Law Copper, accidental thief, and Frederick W. Handles, the pursuing policeman, into the greater game of big money power politics and civic corruption on the Ragtime U. S. Pacific Coast. The chase takes them through the vanished garden world of northern California to the dangerous shanghai town of Portland, Oregon. 50 b&w line drawings and two maps.

From reviews:

“FARGO meets LES MISERABLES meets LONESOME DOVE”

“John Legry’s novel “The Copper-Handles Affair” will especially delight lovers of history as well as those who enjoy a good cops-and-robbers story. Set at the time of the San Francisco earthquake, the reader follows two men: a thief, John Law Copper who stumbles across $400,000 in bank money during the aftermath of the quake; and Frederick W. Handles, a detective bent upon bringing Copper to justice.
The chase between San Francisco and Portland, Oregon exposes both characters to a variety of angels and villains and so the story’s pace never slackens. One twist follows another until the conclusion which surprises with a laugh.
The settings are authentic, the characters believeable and the writer’s drawings are beautiful renderings of the period. I can think of no more pleasant way to experience a bit of history while having a good read.”

“A great fast paced read. …hard to put down.  …characters are fully developed and believable. …the literary style of switching back and forth from Copper’s escape to Handles pursuit kept the adventure moving… Many of the “switches” ended in a cliffhanger that compelled the reader…on. Besides being a good read, this book takes you on a geographical and historical tour of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.”

Click on images below to sample the flavor of the story:

Thugs in the Parlor

Quarantine

The COPPER-HANDLES AFFAIR: The Great San Francisco Earthquake, Fire and Bank Heist by John Patrick Legry

ODD SHOTS and IDLE PENSEES Master Link Index

Gene Kelley danced past Joe’s in “Singing in the Rain.”

OCCASIONAL INSTALLMENTS of THISSES and THATS collected over the years: HUMOR, bits of philosophy, short-short rants, CURIOSITIES.

ODD SHOTS and IDLE PENSEES Master Link Index:
#1 – Odd Shots and Idle Pensees Nr. 1
#2 – This Man Needs a Chicken Suit!
#3 – Mother’s Advice
#4 – Say What?
#5 – Old Black Magic
#6 – The Lesser Known Earl Poppins
#7 – Tell the Truth and Run
#8 – Notorious Sex Scandal
#9 – Basic Human Behavior
#10 – Hacking Jack’s

Magic Mountains – Poster (cards, postage, magnets) available at both the JLegry Gallery (prints, posters, cards) and Magic Mountains – Keepsake Box
at John Legry’s Store (gift boxes, t-shirts, mugs).

ODD SHOTS and IDLE PENSEES Sampler:

Ancient Greeks: To sin = “to miss the mark” – can be high or low. Sin is not living up to, or being who you are.

Dead, uncorrupted saints make good listeners.

548 Primrose Lane – Robocop’s home address before all the bad stuff went down.

“The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.” – Mechanic, Repo Man.

Note: Feeling loss of identity? Eager to believe in something, anything? You’re prime fodder for cults!

Madison 5-1190: Perry Mason’s phone number.

“Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic.  The kings lose their labor at this, and their honour.  Sooner or later, the submerged country floats to the surface and reappears.  Greece again becomes Greece, Italy again becomes Italy.  The protest of the right against the fact, persists forever.  The robbery of a people never becomes prescriptive.  These lofty swindles have no future.  You cannot pick the mark out of a nation as you can out of a handkerchief.”  – Victor Hugo, Les Miserables.

Mom’s Advice:  “Use Clorox to get rid of the DNA evidence.  Burn the barn.” – Some CSI-type crime show.

G.W. Bush’s recent efforts to rewrite his history remind me of Ramses the Great (pharaoh of the biblical exodus, if you believe).  He is called “great” because he managed to live longer than any other pharaoh and used the time to build more monuments to himself than all his predecessors and successors combined.  He had a factory that just turned out busts of his head so that he could knock the heads off other pharaohs’ statues and put his in their place.  He advertised himself shamelessly: painting and carving the story of the Battle of Kadesh on every wall and pillar in sight.  Kadesh was not even a draw and Rameses quickly signed a peace treaty with the victorious Hittite King, and went back to Egypt.  He nearly got himself killed and almost lost his army due to his egotistical rash actions as an inexperienced military leader, but he declared victory from near defeat, and covered up the fact that he came precious close to losing the farm – not just for himself, but for the whole kingdom of Egypt.  And that’s why G.W. Bush’s recent rewrite of his history reminds me of Ramses the Great, pharaoh of the biblical exodus, if you believe.  G.W. became president of the United States by the skin of his teeth and the lies on his lips: the same way Ramses II became “Great.”  – 11/04.

“On a farm with no watch dog, the fox rules the roost.” – Ancient Sumerian proverb.

First rule about dealing with the Devil: Don’t.

Law of Probable Dispersal: “Whatever hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.”

“Separateness is a useful illusion.”  – The Big Kahuna.

Separateness is a youthful illusion.  Jl.

“God, the original Tony Soprano.” – church sign, Simpsons.

So, kick back, here are MORE ACTUAL Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays:

• The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
• The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

“Even if you’re a born loser, you can and should be holy.”– Mother Angelica, cable TV nun

“Only fools and priests do squander life with thoughts of death.” — The Green Knight (Sean Connery), Sword of the Valiant.

Jimmy Neutron: “I didn’t know my candy would be that popular.” Candy Store Guy: “That’s what the man said who invented underwear.”

“I don’t want to go to prison; orange makes me look hippy!” Carl Wheezer, Jimmy Neutron.

“You are a smudge on history’s ledger, but you are my brother.” Agamemnon (Rufus Sewell) to Menelaus, Helen of Troy.

“The problem with the world is there’s too many stupid people, and nobody to eat them!” Carlos Mencia.

“I’ve heard it said that out of men, bishops are made!” – Cervantes, Man of Glass.

“This just isn’t the same cold, oppressive place I built with the sweat and toil of others.” Evil Emperor Zurg, Buzz Lightyear.

“I’m always up for a bit of adventure, Valerie, but you’re getting rather slapdash, aren’t you?” Art instructor to student, Midsommer Murders.

“Self-improvement is best handled by people who live in big cities.” Marge Simpson, Simpsons.

Visit the Galleries:

Fine Art: JLegry Gallery http://www.zazzle.com/jlegry

Humor, Sci-Fi, Fantasy: FatLemon Gallery http://www.zazzle.com/FatLemon

VINTAGE and COLLECTIBLES, including POLITICAL MEMORABILIA: TheAttic Gallery http://www.zazzle.com/TheAttic

A Choice, Not an Echo