Monthly Archives: September 2006

ROP

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(part 1 of 2)
The pufferfish is an odd little creature with mostly poisonous flesh, which has developed as a primary defense, the ability to inflate itself in order to appear larger to predators. In addition, the spiny pufferfish is covered all over it’s body with short bony barbs. In full defense mode, it looks like nothing so much as a small spiky ball, a sort of aquatic porcupine, attempting to look larger and more combative, more dangerous than it actually is. I was reminded of these qualities this week when I read something apropos of the latest Muslim hissy-fit over Pope Benedicts’ mildly stated observation as regards violence and Islam. I am not quite sure where I read it, or anything but the general thrust of the suggestion, which was in a way, revolutionary.

What if Islam is not a strong, vibrant and attractive faith, growing like some sort of theological kudzu, sweeping all before it? What if it is actually a hollow construct, under stress from a number of directions, seeming strong but in reality fragile, riven throughout with tiny cracks, and teetering on the edge of implosion? What if the frequent explosions of violence at the slightest of critical voices were not a demonstration of power and strength, but of tamped-down fear – fear that if the orthodoxy is questioned or defied, then the whole construct will come crashing down in ruins? What if the whole structure of Islam is actually shivering on its foundations, and the whole bloody-handed constellation of imams and ayatollahs, of shaheeds and jihadists know and fear that, down in the pit of their souls? That the whole thing is a sham, based on the maunderings of a desert bandit, pulled from bits of this or that, for his own aggrandizement? What if the whole jihad against the West is the last spectacular lashing out of those who know in their hearts that if the roots of Islam are ever questioned, then doubt will set in, and the whole edifice come crashing down – and that quietly, here and there, the faithful are slipping away, and ever more would join them but for the threat of death for apostasy.

This is an interesting train of thought; as Eric Hoffer pointed out decades ago in his study of fanatical belief, The True Believer – a certain sort of fanatic is driven by secret doubts of his or her own abilities or qualities. The most violently inclined towards homosexuals, for example, may be someone who may in their deepest and most private part of the mind feel homosexual urges, and is then shamed and horrified by them. The most virulent advocate of racial superiority, for example, may be the one who at heart has doubts about himself – and reacts with special brutality against a member of what is supposed to view as a lesser race who yet exemplifies more superior qualities than himself. For myself, I have always observed that someone who was entirely comfortable in themselves and in their deeply-held beliefs was not threatened by someone who did not share them – and certainly not threatened enough to erupt in threats and violence.

Ages ago, I read Bernard Lewis – The Roots of Muslim Rage, when it first was published in Atlantic Magazine. I made a total pest of myself to my friends, because I ran around with my tattered copy (this was at about the start of the first Gulf War) saying “See! this is what makes them so angry with us!!!” It seemed only the sensible, empathetic way of looking at it then, and still does now: that the Islamic world, once so powerful, glorious, famed for tolerance, scholarship and culture, was diminished and shattered. That men who had been told all their lives that they were the righteous and blessed, should look around and see that their world was diminished, powerless and ridden by disease and ignorance, and should at once seek for a reason that this should be the way of things, that there should be a reason for this. And of course, it is always easier to find a reason – that the rich and powerful should be so because they had cheated, or were empowered by Satan. There could not possibly be any fault in Islam or in those who followed the faith most perfectly for they were chosen and favored by God, in being submissive to him. It was entirely understandable to me, with a great deal of sympathy and regret, that of course, those who thought themselves so chosen must be looking around and observing that most of the lands where Islam ruled were plagued with poverty, disease, ignorance and autocrats. Even those in the Middle East who sat on a lot of oil reserves were not in all that much better a shape. Only so much can be imported and paid for with oil money.

Being carefully raised in the Lutheran tradition and somewhat of a history nut as well, I had been schooled in the history of the Protestant Reformation. I knew very well how the great unified fortress of the medieval Catholic Church began fracturing once the Bible began to be translated from Latin into the various vernaculars spoken across Europe. It was revolutionary not just because ordinary people could read it for themselves, without the intercession of a priestly authority – but because a great many clever people had to sit down and work out for themselves exactly what each word, each phrase, each sentence actually meant. Ambiguities had to be resolved, alternate versions of varying antiquity had to be consulted – there’s nothing like a translation for thrashing out meaning from a text. The authority and power of one holy, catholic and apostolic church shattered on the rock of textual analysis – something that is just now beginning to happen with the Koran. Again in The Atlantic, I found a fascinating article about the work of various scholars, just beginning to analyze the Koran with the same attention and care long given to the Old and New Testaments. (link to article here)

But the Koran may not be translated, examined, analyzed – merely accepted whole and entire, memorized and recited. For what dangerous heresies and doubts might emerge then?

(to be continued)

*Original Atlantic link is for subscribers only

Will I Get One Zune?

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The more I hear about MicroSoft’s “iPod Killer” the less likely I am to buy one. Set for release on 14 November, just in time for Christmas, the new Zune sports a larger screen at a cheaper price ($249.99). It also comes with an F.M. radio and WiFi. MS is also planning to buy all of your downloaded iTunes purchases in order to bring you over. It may be able to do something with the latest XBox. It will run Windows Mobile.

And ladies and gentlemen, that’s what’s going to kill the “iPod killer.” You’re going to get a lot more stuff for about $50.00 cheaper, but with Windows at it’s core, folks who already have one or two iPods simply aren’t going to convert. Windows sucks. You know it, I know it, Bill Gates knows it. The only reason we tolerate it is because Macs are too expensive and Linux can’t get any decent applications going. I’ve already put Beautiful Wife on notice, my next notebook is going to be a Mac. I’m done fighting Windows when I don’t have to.

The good news about the Zune? It could make Apple lower some of it’s prices. Maybe. If I were Steve Jobs, I wouldn’t be shaking too much. Cuz it’s Windows and everyone knows Windows sucks.

UPDATE: Our very alert readers have corrected me on the current price of the 30gig iPod. It’s $249.00 making it .99 cheaper than the Zune.

And I have to agree with some of the comments, I want my MP3 player to be my MP3 player and my iPod does that better than anything I’ve seen so far.

It resonates with me

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Sgt Hook has done it again. This time, he shares a message from Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai. He visited our troops at Walter Reed, and visited the Pentagon. While at the Pentagon, someone asked him if he had a message for our soldiers.

A brief taste:

“So my message for the American soldiers in Afghanistan is that they have liberated us from tyranny, from terrorism, from oppression, from occupation into a country that is now moving towards prosperity, that is once again the home of all Afghans. I don’t know if it resonates with you. It’s a very important thing for Afghanistan. Afghanistan was not the home of all Afghans. Today it is. Everybody’s back in that country with a parliament, with a constitution, with a market economy, with a free press, with all that.

Green Stamps

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I don’t know what brought it on, remembering green stamps and blue stamps, and those thin little books that you glued them in to… possibly emptying all those receipts from the grocery store out of my purse, especially those wadded up ones that accumulate down at the bottom. Heck, is that one from the hair-cut place where if you bring in the last receipt again they give you a dollar off? Maybe I had been reading one of Lilek’s little musings about paper ephemera, and it all came together; the memory of Granny Jessie folding her receipts and a long perforated block of green S & H stamps neatly into her purse, and all those times when we were considered slightly older and more responsible, and dispatched to Don’s Market on Rosemead (about a block south of the intersection of Rosemead and Colorado Boulevard) which had had Granny Jessie’s grocery-buying custom for the best part of three decades, with a couple of dollars for some small item, and strict orders to bring back the change and the stamps.

When was the last time I ever saw a block or a string of trading stamps? Mom didn’t patronize grocery stores that offered them, but Granny Jessie did, and most likely Granny Dodie did also. It must have been sometime in the early seventies; by the time I came back to the States to live for good, trading stamps had gone the way of home milk delivery and those wire baskets with glass milk bottles that used to sit on front porches across the last. Which is to say, along with the dodo and passenger pigeon, except in certain very rare neighborhoods. They were a customer rebate scheme dreamed up early in the century just now over, intended to build customer loyalty, and keep the regular customers coming back, again and again and again. That description fit Granny Jessie to a tee. She patronized the same grocery and department store, the same shoe store, the same church and the same doctor for most of her long adult life, from the time she and Grandpa Jim married in the early twenties, until she went to live in Long Beach, in the Gold Star Mother’s home, fifty years later. According to this entry, they were given out mostly by grocery stores, department stores and gas stations. There were several different kinds, and colors of them. I remember S & H Green, and another sort which was blue; both were about an inch long, half an inch wide, perfed and gummed, and given out at the rate of a single stamp for every ten cents spent.

I do remember Granny Jessie sometimes had great long sheets of them, which must have come from Hertels’ on Colorado, where she had an account for as many years as she was a customer of Don’s Market. And Grandpa Jim must have gotten strings and blocks of them when he bought gas for the ancient Plymouth sedan which he had to sell after being rumbled by the local traffic cop when he made a left-hand turn from Colorado Boulevard onto South Lotus Avenue… from the right-hand lane of Colorado Boulevard. Grandpa Jim’s indignantly voiced plea that he had performed the turn in that manner every day for nearly thirty years cut no ice with the Pasadena constabulary, especially when they discovered that his license was several years expired and he was nearly blind, anyway.

Back to the trading stamps…. They had to be dampened and pasted into the pages of thin little books, so many a page, which was nice and easy when it meant the long sheets, earned when Granny Jessie had spent a lot on groceries and Christmas presents, but was not so easy when you had to paste the little strings and small blocks of stamps gleaned from many small purchases. This was rather finicky and tedious work, which may be why Grannie Jessie saved it all up for JP and I to do, when we came for a visit. She had a great lot of empty stamp books and a bundle of stamps in a drawer in the kitchen hutch. It would be our job, to sit down at the kitchen table with a damp sponge set onto an old china saucer, and fit stamps onto the pages of the blank book. This meant working in several months worth of stamps, tearing off the large blocks at the perfs, and fitting together the smaller quantities in order to completely fill in the page.

And this was entirely worthwhile from Grannie Jessie’s point of view, because the filled books could be taken around to the S & H Green Stamp store…. Which was, I think, on Rosemead, close to Don’s Market, and redeem the filled books for various bits of consumer merchandise; plates and saucepans, serving dishes, appliances large and small, furniture large and small. I have a distinct memory of Granny Jessie saving up her filled Green Stamp books for some rather substantial piece of household fittings, a television even. Probably much of what passed for luxury goods in the tiny white house on South Lotus, with the enormous oak tree in the front yard, came from Granny Jessie’s careful collection of stamps.

Mom had no truck with them at all, though; she was of the opinion that the stores that offered them were more expensive than those which didn’t, and Mom shopped on a strictly lowest-price-available agenda, no fancy fripperies like Green Stamps need apply for Mom’s household dollar. And furthermore, she had no time to fiddle around with pasting stamps into a book… and that is probably what led to the decline and fall of the whole scheme, although it does linger in several different and less cumbersome formats.

Deluged!

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We have been deluged with another tidal flood of automated spam, all of it offering a number of semi-legal, quasi-legal and possibly-barely-legal services, commodites, and experiences.

I have had to add a number of new words to the totally banned/instantly nuked list, and another number of words to the held-f0r-review list.

There have been comments held over, and not appearing for a while, and some which may have been nuked. Sorry. Repost. And if your comment included some questionable language, or references to insurance, prescription drugs, or assorted possibly x-rated personal services… maybe do the old-fashioned thing, first and last letters and dashes for all the letters in between?

Or something.

My life is busy enough, I don’t need to turn on the computer at 5:00 AM and begin bailing out 150 spam comments, at least two thirds of which have references to beastility, shaved nether regions and drugs of dubious provenance.

Ye Choose and Ye Do Not Choose

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Well, watching the all-Islamic spazz-out as regards Pope Benedict’s recent suggestion that violent coercion had no place in leading the individual towards a particular religious belief has afforded me a number of opportunities for cynical amusement: the indignant demand that the Pope be fired for his disregard for Moslem sensibilities was one, and the demand from a group of Pakistani clerics (very obviously not the sharpest scimitars in the drawer) that the Pope Benedict formally debate a collection of Moslem scholars, and snappily upon being defeated by logic and reason, himself convert to Islam was just another item in a rich banquet of shadenfreude.

It’s almost as comic as President Ahmedinajad demanding that President Bush convert to Islam himself… in hopes probably, that the entire US would follow after. Ah, the frustration of those who are just bloody-mindedly sure that they are right, and it is only perversity and ignorance that prevents everyone else from seeing it… but enough about the far-left of the Democratic Party, I was talking about those representatives of the “Religion of Peace” who seem to be all over the headlines of late. (Enable extreme sarcasm mode) That 98% of whom it is said, give all the others a bad name. (End extreme sarcasm mode)

The sheer gall and towering ignorance combined and on display is such a dense confection that it probably pulls light into itself and wanders through the universe as a nascent black hole. One can easily understand how a barely literate imam from the wilds of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia can achieve such a such a monumental mass of misunderstanding about the West’s religious beliefs, or supposed lack thereof. But when Sayd Qtub, supposedly one of Islam’s great modern political thinkers managed to see every sort of licentiousness and depravity in a church sock-hop in teetotal Greeley, Colorado in the late 1940ies, one is not inclined to expect too much out of Qtub’s intellectual heirs or their powers of observation. Alas, large chunks of Western media and intellectuals, to include our own very dear bi-coastal types, also manage to comprehensively miss or misinterpret the religious mores of heartland America, so I don’t suppose I can expect much from the Seething Islamic Street ™.

So, here we go, one more time, for the benefit of those who have, perhaps supped too deeply of the BBC and it’s ilk: Yes, America is religious, to a greater extent than the cultured and secular types consider seemly. But please, please stop with the old game of picking out some congregation of freaks like Fred Phelps, or any other assortment of fundamentalist nutjobs, Elmer Gantry-ish televangelists begging for dollars from their mega-church’s cable TV station, or some credulous hick who sees the Virgin Mary’s face in an oil slick, or a pancake or some other bit of ephemera… and implying that they are just typical of all devout Americans. They are not… they are, in fact, atypical, and we have been pointing our fingers and snickering at them for decades.

By the way, just to demolish another sweaty intellectual fantasy, there is no way on earth that a single bread-and-butter fundamentalist sect could ever take over the US, a la “Handmaids’ Tale”, other than in Margaret Atwood’s feverish dreams. There are just too many other sects, synods, denominations, congregations, or whatever, most of whom rather cherish their own particular idiosyncrasies, and many of which have, in the past, fought like cats in a sack. Look, you can describe both the Amish and the Mormons as being rather conservative and old-fashioned, but aside from the fact that they both have large numbers of adherents living in the US, that’s about all they have in common. Even the Lutherans have two opposing synods, both of whom view each other with deep suspicion. Frankly, the only way that Americans would ever conform to a single, over-arching religious belief would be at gunpoint, and very possibly not even then. Most of us, though, are unostentatious in our beliefs, or lack of them, and are somewhat suspicious of those who are not. Our houses of worship will probably never attract the attention of a BBC producer… nothing to titillate or tut-tut.

A church community of some kind or other has been the mainstay of American life since before the beginning of the Republic. Most of them came to these shores as refugees from religious orthodoxy in the places they originated; and while some of them were not averse to imposing their own orthodoxy, most did not care for having orthodoxy imposed upon them by others. This may yet be the hard rock upon which the wave of Islam breaks, that Qutb and Bin Laden and their ilk do not see, because they were too busy looking at the flashy vulgarity of popular American or Western culture, and never saw the bedrock underneath.

So let them bluster, demand away, stamp their feet in Peshawar, or Mecca, or Qom, and expect the arrival of the 12th Imam, and demand submission; in the meantime, we are watching.

“Look well, O Wolves! What have the Free People to do with the orders of any save the Free People? Look well!”

Two weeks later…

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It was two weeks ago today, give or take an hour, when I walked into the vet’s office with my little Jessie for one last visit.

I left the following Monday on a 10-day business trip, so this is the first weekend I’ve been back home since that sad day.

Last weekend, I dreamt that I was in a small house, visiting with friends (it reminded me of Sgt Mom’s house, but it wasn’t her in my dream). My little Jessie was sitting beside me on the sofa while we visited. Towards the end of the dream, one of my friends mentioned her, and I replied something along the lines of “Oh, this is my little dog, Jessie. But she’s not really here. She died last week, but I remember how she looked and how she felt, so I can have her with me whenever I want to.” My dream then faded into another dream, which meant it should have been forgotten, but as I was brushing my teeth the next morning, I remembered it. I’m glad I remembered it, because I fully believe its message was true.

As long as I remember my little girl, she’ll always be with me.

I’m house-sitting this weekend, for my dog-sitter (a wonderful lady who keeps my girls at the drop of a hat). So as I was driving in from the airport Thursday night, heading straight to my dog-sitter’s house, I started realizing that for the first time since she’s been my dog-sitter, there won’t be a little dog there, so happy to see me that she can’t stop quivering.

So I called one of my good friends and said “who am I gonna snuggle with tonight? My snuggler’s not here anymore.” She didn’t really have an answer for me (there’s not really an answer to a question like that). I got to the house, and let the dogs out to run in the backyard. But one of them wouldn’t run out.

Little Giorgio, and elderly italian greyhound, has appointed himself as my special friend this weekend. If I’m sitting in a chair, he wants to be on my lap. If it’s bedtime, he’s snuggled up beside me, keeping my back warm.

This intrigues me, because George was out in the van as we were helping Jessie to the Rainbow Bridge, and right about the time she was gone, he started barking. Doc suggested that maybe Jessie had stopped at the van to say goodbye to George. Usually, when I’m house-sitting, George hangs out in his little bed, covered up with his blanket, sleeping. This weekend, he’s the most sociable I’ve ever seen him. He’s not Jessie, but he helps. :)

Thanks, George.