Marriage in NY State -- a Modest Proposal

The marriage laws in NY state have been opened to include gays, but not polygamists or animals. What is so sacred about monogamy, or humans? If marriage is no longer founded on the absurd dreams that man is the center of the universe in a drama over his soul between God and his woman, then why not be tolerant and allow polygamy as well as bestiality? Who are we to deny the love of a man for his cow? Why not encourage women to love gorillas? You know it's how Dian Fossey really felt. Whether silver backed or lowland mountain gorilla, floral shops will benefit, and there'll be more marriage licenses. If a fork was to marry a spoon, and were supported by a table, there might be a problem with what to buy for a present, but we should not table marriages based only on the difficulty of finding matching drapes.

What about Sasquatches? You know you love them, so why not marry one? A couple of glitches in the DNA got you worried? If you marry one of the same sex, you won't have to worry over offspring.

Now's the time to dismantle not just all marriage laws, but law itself. Why do we even have a legislature. We have baboons of the left and mandrills of the right. Why do we support them?

Why do we even bother with definitions? Why should not six equal three, and the circle be redefined as a square? Such dislocations would break up the monotony of conversation and introduce enchanted exchanges in which whales and sharks could go flipper and fin into a new world of love.

What Should America's Motto Be?

Mottos are fascinating. Allen Ginsberg told us he had two:

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

AND

"Discretion is the better part of valor."

He lived between those two phrases.

Calvinist Coolidge said of America, "Business is the business of America."

BO won an election with the strangely vacuous phrases, "Hope and change," and "Yes we can!" Incredibly stupid phrases that led us down a chute into 20 trillion dollars of debt. Now the debt is killing the economy the way the BP spill killed the Gulf. And what did we even get for it?

What should be the new motto for America? Here is one that I've liked recently:

"We can't afford it." Ron Paul

The American Penchant for Saving Peoples

Saving peoples is something I think all Americans agree upon, but is it right? Genocide is the great wrong now at the United Nations, but in the OT it was the norm. The Jews were SUPPOSED to wipe out the Canaanites because they had weird gods. They had temple prostitutes. Everything they believed was upside down. So the Jews were supposed to kill them. Instead, as with Samson, they often married them, because they thought they were cute as buttons.

If people have a weird god or set of gods, should we save them? I think we should only save other Protestants.

I'm not against saving per se. I do believe that everyone should have a savings account, and that this should begin in childhood with piggy banks.

Of course the communist left will want to smash the piggy bank, and spend it on some pork program.

But the Dems (communists) always want government to spend, spend, spend. They want to save everybody through bailouts. Not just banks and other businesses too big to fail, but whole genders, whole races, whole classes. Everybody must be saved: even non-sustainable species like the mountain gorilla.

They point to the Good Samaritan as the principle behind this. But the GS was a businessman who used his own money to save a single person. He wasn't the government. He could do what he wanted with his money. He had earned it.

The Dems want professional Good Samaritans to get to play the role of savior with other people's money. This isn't structurally sustainable, and so then we are supposed to save the saviors with even more bailout money (save their jobs). The Republicans want to put individuals back in control of their own lives: get the government out of the role of savior (although they do think the police and military are a pretty good idea).

How did America become such a believer in saviors?

We had the Civil War, and still pat ourselves on the backs for saving the slaves. We build statues of Lincoln, and everybody agrees he was a pretty good guy. He took a bullet in the head for the good and proper.

The Lone Ranger, Batman, Superman, Spiderman. Wonder Woman. To some extent these mythical creatures have grown out of the chivalry model. To some extent that has come out of the Good Samaritan. The problem of good works, preservation commissions, do-gooders, art and beauty, etc., haunt America, because of a misunderstanding of the GS parable, and a too widely applied version of it. It's at most about a single businessman who saved one single person, one time. It isn't meant to become what we do all day and night.

At this point the government is sinking into a quagmire of debt as we try to help the Afghans and the Iraqis, and we tell ourselves now that it's their women we're saving in the name of Universal Human Rights. How imperialist is it to tell a religion how to treat the other gender? Whose agenda is this? Is it at bottom a Protestant pushiness behind this pact? In most of the mainline Protestant faiths women can now pastor. And yet, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, they weren't even permitted to read. The penalty for girls caught learning to read was death. We see the inability to read as a kind of slavery.

In the OT we would see this as a problem with their gods, or god. And simply destroy them. Today, it's a sign of election if instead we want to help them. But can we help the Afghans and the Iraqis without destroying their religion?

These conversations about conservation versus "progress" haunt America. We have the completely down to earth viewpoint of Ron Paul: we don't have the money. We have the mysterious viewpoint of BO: who seems very nice until his commandos land on your doorstep or his drones take out your village.

We have a savior complex but there is a dark side to this. Batman could kill people, as did Superman. Lincoln killed a whole lot of people (just thought I'd get GM going again). To save people you often have to kill others. In the old chivalry stories there was always a dragon or an ogre that needed killing. Substitute Qaddafi, and you have the picture.

I think to the extent possible we ought to try to inculcate in others a sense of the Protestant work ethic. We ought to remember the story: give a man a fish, and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, and he can feed himself for the rest of his life. The parable of the talents can be used as an appendix. Teach a man to fish using his own aptitudes. Teach women, too.

Calvinists thought wealth was a sign of election whereas communists see it as theft, and want to appropriate and demand reparations for whoever the wealth was stolen from. So if you set up a company and get a thousand people on the payroll the Democrats want to legislate how you have to give them insurance, and how you have to treat them, often down to the finest detail. To some extent this is good, but it can go too far until the government becomes a bully and nobody wants to run a business.

Elections turn on this distinction, and the ability of voters to discriminate between the paradigm of property as theft, and property as election. Setting people on their own two feet is difficult. It is the job of parenting, and parents aren't supposed to give up.

But when it's other people's kids, it's easier to stop. Instead of exacting gratitude by giving them checks in exchange for votes, we ought to see ourselves as getting individuals in charge of their lives. Those who won't or can't probably have the wrong gods or the wrong values. To heck with them.

"The business of America is business," as Calvinist Coolidge put it. Let people start their own businesses and use their own sense of how it should be done. Let evolution follow. A mean employer will lose employees and lose business. A mean country will stagnate, and its people will suffer, and attempt to emigrate. Situations right themselves. If government bullies businesses, they will take their business overseas.

To correct this, it is perhaps time to think about making laws that America should only help Protestant countries like Norway and Sweden and Finland. We should also only do business with such countries. All other countries suck.

We should see a valid Protestant business as being as important as an art work, and should try to buy their stuff, instead of stuff made by criminals. We should see a solid Protestant business as a good work, in James' sense. It's the most important component of America. Our Protestant entrepreneurs are our most important group. Government should spend its dime helping Protestant entrepreneurs: educating them, and getting them going, and keeping parasites (thieves) and every kind of non-Protestant off of them so they can prosper. But I guess this might violate the Establishment Clause.

1 and 2 Samuels

I've now arrived at the end of 2nd Samuels and have yet to hear a peep about how the government owes monthly checks (or any kind of charity) to the poor. I am more and more convinced that this is a Marxist overlay that cherry picks specific scenes from the Bible and takes them out of context. However, I still have about 1100 pages ahead of me. I'm fairly certain however that in Job, Isaiah, Psalms, and the New Testament that there is nothing about how the government should turn itself into a social net for the poor, and arrogate all power and all commerce to itself in order to accomplish this. I could be wrong. It's just that so far I haven't seen anything remotely like this, and strongly doubt that I will.

Who Will Be the Moses of the PWLs?

There are presently 3 million sufferers of Lyme.

No presidential candidate has ever addressed them. Many of those with Lyme are too young to vote, but they have parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and friends. It is all too clear to those people how alike the PWL can be to those with Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's, or Parkinson's (strangely, we don't say, Lyme's, but this is an anomaly among diseases -- we just say, has Lyme!).

The recent documentary by Andy Abrahams Wilson entitled "Under Our Skin" which aired last week on PBS, drew my attention anew to the problem of the PWL.

3 million sufferers! Who will be their Moses? There were only 600,000 Jews who got out of Egypt.

3 million people! That's the population of Norway!

The most acute problem is the chronic sufferer. Because the AMA refuses to recognize Lyme as a chronic condition, those who cannot rid themselves of Borelia Burgdorfia via a fast round of antibiotics fall into a no-man's land of illness not recognized by the AMA (whom sufferers claim are well-paid by insurance companies to deny the condition's existence!), and there is no political movement (it affects Democrats and Republicans alike so has not become a hot partisan issue either for BO or for the leading Republicans).

Some claim it is sexually transmitted, but unless it affects a powerful and vocal political minority it will never matter to the CDC.

The PWL constituency has no identifiable means of calling attention to themselves aside from a few atomized science writers and specialty clinics. Dr.s who define someone's condition as Chronic Lyme are hounded out of the AMA via their kangaroo courts. Anyone who dares to speak up risks ostracism or loss of their license.

And yet some doctors have claimed that Alzheimers, Lou Gehrigs, ALS, and Parkinsons victims have one common root: Borelia Burgdorferi is found in all of the sufferers.

A cousin of syphilis, Borelia Burgdorferi often has a different transmission route: via Bambi and Mickey.

Wipe out Bambi, and there is no more room for Borelia Burgdorferi to hide. However, Bambi has powerful political backers: hunters, NRA, Sierra Club, to name a few. So Bambi lives, and on Bambi, lives Borelia Burgdorferi.

Mickey Mice have fewer political backers. But they are cagey and quicker and difficult to hit from the air with drones and helicopter funfire.

More information can be found here at the documentary's site:

www.underourskin.com

There is also a newish movie with Alec Baldwin entitled LymeLife, about a family who all have the disease. I have not viewed this movie, as I am too offended by the light tone in the trailer. Lyme is a tragedy not a comedy:

http://www.trailerspy.com/trailer/2460/Lymelife-Trailer

Toward the Revival of Humor

Race, gender, class as rock, paper, scissors.

Two Trips to NYC in Three Days

Sunday we piled into the car so that my daughter Lola could audition for Annie, the revival of a musical to be staged in 2012.

I took a weird road called the Barkaboom Road south of Andes to connect with the Beaverkill. This was a new route for me and isn't recommended. It is only partially paved, and is crumbly, and winds up and down. That said, it was picturesque. I saw a waterfall set off nicely in a shaded nook. But my kids and wife couldn't sleep and it was still five in the morning. (Only accident I could find on the road was a New Jersey man on April 30, 2002 plunged to his death at 4:15 am, but he was inebriated. No other online mentions of serious accidents.)

Arriving in NYC at 8:30, the audition time was at 9 am. I dropped Lola, her mother, and our other daughter at 87th and 3rd Avenue, and saw a line draped around the block with kids and their moms. Many of those kids probably have had voice lessons. Lola was kid #814 out of a field of more than 1500. She's had dance lessons, and sings well, but it isn't her strength. At 2 pm after five hours in the line, she sang for two minutes in a bare room with a pretty middle-aged woman watching her, who then said, "We have your contact information, thank you."

Meanwhile, my two boys and I parked next to the towering building just north of the American Museum of Natural History (it was a Sunday so parking in NYC is free). I had only six inches to spare, but parallel parking is my one practical feat. If I have one inch of wiggle room, I can park anything from a boat to a bus. A bored doorman watched me parking and I think was impressed.

The kids and I went into the Natural History Museum and Julian (first grader) read the inscription on the wall from Teddy R. about the need for conservation. He read the words but didn't understand them so the fourth grader and I unpacked them for him. Then we decided to get a bagel, and walked through Central Park to the Bethesda Fountain. This is the nicest park area in New York, and perhaps the world. It features a fabulous sculpture called the Angel of the Waters, by a woman named Emma Stebbins. In a book about Central Park Sara Cedar Miller claims that Stebbins' brother was the head of the Central Park committee and got his sister the commission (the fountain celebrates clean water from the Croton Reservoir). Stebbins was a lesbian.

I talked the kids into going into the Met and we walked up there and saw the Richard Serra drawings (they weren't much! just big lines and blocks of black squares) and looked at a Tiepolo for a while (there are several painters by the name of Tiepolo -- this one painted the destruction of Carthage). We also looked at a painting by a member of the school of Bosch called Christ Descending into the Realm of the Dead. Not many know that Christ went into Hell after his death. Our pastor had given a sermon on this, and it fascinated me.

We met with the female side of the family at about 91st and drove home shortly after. The kids usually get to go to Toys R Us at Times Square but the parents were wasted.

Then yesterday I went back down to NYC as a chaperone for the 6th grade class. This time we went back into the American Museum of Natural History but looked at dinosaur bones, American Indians, a neat show called Tibetan medical paintings (they showed black stuff coming out of a penis and had a treatment for this with yak butter and the girls giggled and said let's get out of here so we did). I like Tibetan Buddhism, but you have to wonder if they understand anything about medicine. The paintings were very precise depictions of water buffaloes and stuff coming out of people's eyes and anuses.

Then we went to the Bronx Zoo by way of Harlem, shooting up Frederick Douglas Avenue to 157th, where I finally saw Rucker Park -- famous for its basketball tournaments. It seemed small, just a few courts.

I don't know what I loved most about the Bronx Zoo -- the Madagascar house had specific areas of that fabled island with lemurs, and strange fish that were left over from the Jurassic period. In another house we saw a lungfish. It is a fish but it has lungs instead of gills. It can hold a bunch of water in its mouth and extract the oxygen from it while sitting outside of water. Its eyes sat up on top of its head like those of Mr. Crabs in the Spongebob series.

The mountain gorillas were quite touching as they always remind me of Gregory Corso, one of my favorite poets. They have such a lost look of sorrow, but can suddenly be funny, twirling about and exposing their rear ends.

My daughter Lola, and her friends Ava, Emily, and Morgan were on the trip. They were good kids. They wanted to ride the camels. It cost six dollars each. Request denied. They wanted to eat ice cream at $4.25 a pop. Request denied. But they didn't complain that much. They wanted to buy little souvenirs and stuff. If they had their own money this was fine, but they weren't getting any money from me. On the way out of the city I saw a small dark car barrelling 40 mph in reverse and thought that's totally illegal. Just then another car pulled across the road and banged into it. That's WHY it's illegal, I said to myself.

Bad day for them, but for me, a pretty good day. I had followed all the laws.

I bought a book on the trip entitled In the Kingdom of Gorillas: Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land, by Bill Weber and Amy Vedder. It usually costs 27.95, but I found it on a sale table in the A M of Natural History for $4.95. It documents their years in Rwanda living on Dian Fossey's volcanic mountain top with gorillas. They claim Fossey shot a Rwandan poacher, and misbehaved with Rwandan servants, lording it over them. She was quite a curmudgeon, sometimes not appearing from her residence for weeks at a time. I'm on p. 90. They say something about the genocide later on in the book.

Nowitzki as Moses: Leadership

The recent NBA Finals has left me thinking about leadership qualities. Dirk Nowitzki's leadership of the Dallas Mavs has been stellar. He never got on anybody's case. Even after a loss he would slap five with everyone including the waterboys. An article in the WSJ said that the teams that slap five the most win the most (of course it could be because the teams that are winning the most have the most to celebrate). But Nowitzki was still slapping five on losses, and never had a harsh word for anyone.

The Miami Heat were good. They were even excellent at times, but in clutch moments their leader (LeBron James) seemed to fall apart. This has to do with mental toughness. I don't know when I first noticed in James this mental frailty. But it was at least five years ago that I saw in him a resemblance to a powerful slamdunker in Seattle named Shawn Kemp. Kemp would play well all season then in the playoffs he'd get three fouls in the first minute. He'd get overexcited.

The Mavs this time around were a study in even temperament. Jason Kidd, Jason Terry, Tyson Chandler, and the bench itself (including the general manager) composed themselves as adults. They played like men. The Heat, on the other hand, were like spoiled Bratz. Even when they announced they would be a dynasty it struck me as so much hooey, and I couldn't wait for them to lose. It was always about their top three, and last night when they lost, Bosh laid on the ground and wept and couldn't compose himself for interviews.

One thing I saw in the OT is that it's about leadership lessons. Moses is a study in a certain kind of tough leader. He has to have faith. He has to hunker down with God and get the message right. He has to have public relations skills. He has to take his people on his shoulders and do what's right for them even if it's oppressive for him.

Dallas Mavericks had a similar personality in Dirk Nowitzki. He took the team on his shoulders even when he had a 102 degree fever. He continued to make his fade-away jumpers. Last night in the ultimate game of the series he was 0 for 12 going into the second half. I knew he would explode in the fourth, and once again he did, getting 11 points in the fourth quarter.

LeBron James, on the other hand, had only 18 points in the fourth quarters of the six entire games of the series.

When the chips were down, James yelled at the lesser players. He threw the ball out of bounds and threw up air balls and passed the buck.

Dirk, on the other hand, remained kind, and reached out to the lesser players. Last night even Mahinma, a behemoth without much of a brain, scored a key three-point shot in the fourth. Mahinma is a disaster who fouls everyone around him, and generally couldn't make a shot to save his life, but is huge and can get clutch rebounds. Nowitzki got the best out of him.

The great leaders pull the best out of their people. It happens in teaching that great teachers get excellent papers out of their students. They are the kinds of papers even the students didn't know they could write. Great editors pull the best out of their writers. Great parents pull the best out of their kids.

Lousy leaders can lead a group to perdition. They focus on envy, or other worst-case emotions. Feminist leaders have led a generation of women out of the kitchen into divorce and suicide and therapy centers. Partially this is because they've used Marx and Foucault as their touchstones. No one can use Marx and Foucault as their touchstones and end up as anything but a blackhole of evil and loss. Generations of black leaders have kept their people in poverty, pushing themselves as poverty pimps. Again, they focus on the worst possible emotions and use them to lead their people into emotional bondage. It's a shame.

Great leaders can rise in an instant. George W. Bush pulled it together for five minutes to give an important speech after 9/11. He met with religious leaders of many faiths and pulled together an impressive array of priests rabbis and imams, who were willing to argue against OBL.

On the other hand, when the Navy Seals took out OBL a month ago Obama wanted all the credit.

In the next round of elections we need to find a decent leader. Sarah Palin's family is a mess, and I think this bears on her. When kids make poor decisions, the parents are at least partially to blame. We don't know much about the Obama family but the kids seem ok. This says a lot for BO and his wife. I don't know if they've accomplished anything else, but if the kids are ok, that's the most important thing that adults can achieve. If the kids are thriving: if they are clean, have decent values, are achieving well in school, the parents are doing their job.

Nowitzki, like Moses, shows us what great leadership is.

What made Moses so great? Many other leaders in the OT don't come off so well. They either get the message wrong, or they take their people back into bondage with the Philistines or the Canaanites. They make bad choices and sell their people into poor compromises with crude nations and crude ideas that don't get the best out of their population. Mrs. BO, whatever else we can say about her, is trying to turn things around with her diet plans. But has anybody lost so much as an ounce due to her? I grant that she herself is a pretty good role model in this respect, as is BO himself. They have self-discipline. A lesser couple would be ordering chocolate mousse for breakfast out of the WH kitchen, and bloating up. To their credit, they haven't done this.

But the rest of the nation is eating Hotpockets.

Michelle asks her constituency to get out and play basketball. But she's wearing a party dress when she says it. Shouldn't she be in sweatpants and show us her three-point shot? Does she herself play basketball? Can she stuff her husband?

Nowitzki hopefully will lead the country back to the gym. He's a tall gangly goofy grape with a great fade-away jumper that is almost impossible to defend and which arcs in the air like a rainbow leading to the Promised Land of an NBA championship.

Congratulations, Dirk, you've inspired America, perhaps you will lead us out of the Egypt of couch-potato-dom.

New Poem in Watershed Post

I have poems coming out in a few top poetry journals but aside from other poets I doubt if anybody reads the top poetry journals.

So I've tried to get into news media.

There is an online newspaper in the Catskills run by a Harvard and MIT grad out of a tiny town called Andes (pop. 300).

I try to publish a poem there now and then on local themes. Today another one got published, in turn about an event that took place, or didn't take place, three years back. A twister was predicted, and the entire county shut down on June 10, 2011. Read the poem to find out what happened next:

http://www.watershedpost.com/2011/if-you-dont-weather-wait-10-minutes

OLD & NEW TESTAMENTS: A Theory

Conservatives think the OT is still very much in play, and look to the Ten Cs.

Progressives think the OT is outmoded, and that the Sermon on the Mount is the only part of the NT that still matters, it being the latest thing Jesus offered.

Which one is more realistic?

Centrists like myself want a dialogue between the two groups, and want to keep it endlessly open.

We like nutcases for president like Rudy Giuliani who is strict in terms of law, but fun on stage (dresses up as a transvestite and goes to town).

The radicals of the fringes say if you're not with us, you're against us. Not really, we're just against your totalitarian mentality.

Balaam's Ass & the Ethical Relationship to Animals

The image is from a German artist Gustav Jaeger who worked in Leipzig. This painting was done in 1836.

Having read the first 8 books now of the OT, there are many wonderful and striking stories, but among the most interesting is the story of Balaam and his ass. In brief, Balaam is a sorcerer for profit (prophet) who is asked to curse the Israelites by Midianites. He is thinking about it, when his ass sees an angel on the road. Balaam doesn't see the angel. The ass stops three times, and Balaam "smites" the ass with the broad side of his sword. Then the ass actually speaks to Balaam, and says, "Why are you hitting me, can't you see the angel?"

Balaam is quite vexed, but then the angel makes itself visible (do angels have a gender? -- the angle in the picture's arms look male, but the posture is somewhat feminine). Once it's visible to Balaam, it says "If it wasn't for the donkey, I'd have killed you." Is that male or female to say such a thing? Or is it just the kind of thing an angel would say?

Balaam ends up blessing the Jews, but is later killed in a great battle.

Lots of animals have been sacrificed so far in the first six books. I don't know if anyone has totaled the sacrifices and come up with a sum, but it has to be in the thousands, with an implication of millions. Suddenly, an ass speaks.

I think the ass actually represents the people who are led and misled by their leaders who hire themselves out for profit, instead of prophet. They should do the work of God, but are instead out for themselves (many on the right believe that Bill Clinton was like this, on the left you often hear it said of Dick Cheney). Leaders of course have their own lives to manage (or mismanage, if you think of Spitzer and his whore, or the more recent Weinergate).

But as I read it I wasn't thinking of politics so much as our ethical relationship to animals. The creationist view is that we were co-created with animals. So this makes animals of divine origin. God says to be stewards. The secularist view is that we are animals, too, that have evolved from lower forms, but are a lot like the apes, which makes us wonder about our ethical relationship to apes (The Great Ape Project argues that we are a species of ape, and thus should accord apes the same rights we grant to humans).

Some argue that we shouldn't eat pate fois because it injures the kidneys of the birds so that we can batten on their fattened organs.

I'm pretty sure I have no ethical obligations to fire ants or to spiders. If they are in my house I always smash them, because all spiders are venomous, and I don't want a fire ant to sting a child. Tiny ones under a quarter inch can't break your skin, but they will try. Centipedes are venomous. Ants, wasps, and bees will sting, but are useful in that they pollinate flowers which turn into delectables. But now I'm thinking along purely utilitarian lines: I will keep you alive if you do something for me, otherwise, smash.

Peter Singer at Princeton argues we should have an ethical relationship to any creature that can feel pain (we have no such relationship to mollusks, because their central nervous system is nebulous, he's decided). He thinks along the same lines that people who are brain dead should have no rights.

I would go so far as to say that any creature that can talk should have rights. If it can recognize and discuss angels, then it should have rights. But I think Balaam's ass didn't continuously have this ability, but only had it for a moment. So for that moment it should have rights. Once the ability disappeared, should its rights also disappear? Or, is it, once you have rights, they should remain? I think that people who are brain dead should still have rights. Otherwise, no one shopping at malls would have rights.

Genocide vs. Hospitality in the Pentateuch and Joshua

In the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th books of the Bible the Jews, having escaped from Egypt, have to kill off a neighbor, in order to have land to found their own civilization. After many years working as slaves of Pharoah, God plagues Egypt until Pharoah lets go of the Jews. Then God slays a massive Egyptian army that has been sent to get the Jews (second thoughts). God not only tells the Jews to kill the Canaanites and others, but demands that they do it. They have to kill everyone, including the children, of these foreign civilizations, for fear that the foreign gods of these strange peoples will come to plague them in the future. Meanwhile, the Jews themselves had just been held captive by the Egyptians. At least the Egyptians fed them. The Jews on the other hand are going to slaughter the civilizations they encounter. Sometimes they can't bring themselves to finish the job, and they bring home some of the prettier women, some of the cuter children. Holding back on the genocide creates problems, and God is often furious with them for putting decency before His Word. It's somewhat like Abraham having to kill his own son.

Creating a counter dynamic, God tells the Jews that they have to accept strangers in their land as if they are Jews. So, there's a law of hospitality for strangers, on the one hand, and a law of the abolition of certain strange civilizations (those unchosen by God), on the other.

In Joshua (I just finished it two minutes ago) a group of foreigners (it seems to be a coalition of peoples called Hivites from the west side of the Jordan (Chapter 9:1) who are about to be exterminated come to the Jews and say, "we are thy servants," (Joshua 9:8) and the Jews allow this, even though they had already slated this civilization for extermination, but they only allow it because the Hivites dress up like travelers with muddy boots and coats and old cloaks, and they tell the Jews when asked where they are from, "From a very far country thy servants are come because of the name the Lord thy God; for we have heard the fame of him, and all that he did in Egypt, And all that he did to the two kings of the Amorites" (9:14), and they go on with the masquerade, indicating old bread and wine sacs that had dried up on their long journey.

So the clever foreigners play off one law against the other. They had already heard about what took place at Jericho, and wondered how they could survive. The reputation of the Jews is beginning to precede them. The Hivites use one law in order to insinuate themselves as friends, when God meant them to be the enemies of the Jews. This seems to work, although there may be repercussions later on.

We have a similar debate going on within our own borders with the Mexican illegals. We are bound to be hospitable, and yet, other laws to do with immigration are being broken. The Supreme Court has voted that Arizona can defend itself against alien invasion. But BO wants to use the Hispanic vote to create a permanent majority for the Democrats so he has challenged the Arizona law. The Republicans are stumping for principle above partisanship. Are the illegals actually Americans, or are they the enemy, and should they be expulsed? The Democrats say let them stay. This encourages the Hispanics in general to side with the Democrats. But Hispanics make up only about 15% of the population. Will more real Americans (people with actual American passports) turn against this group, evening things out? The Democrats claim they are being decent, when in fact they are interested in committing genocide against their Republican neighbors: wanting to wipe them out by diluting citizenship to include a vast new group of millions of Mexicans who they will ask to vote for them. Sharpton is w/ the Hispanics, but Herman Cain is not.

Meanwhile, because babies can't vote, the Democrats are more than willing to exterminate them in mass, precisely because it also guarantees the votes of their moms. (If you go back to the time of the Irish immigration waves, Tammany was playing similar games with the Irish vote.) Vote for us, and we will waive all laws and principles. Doesn't this in turn undermine all laws and principles precisely in order to use them as protection for the outlaws?

Without law, I don't see how we can live together. Laws are now made and passed by whoever can get into office by any ruse whatsoever, and the Constitution is something that either side interprets shamelessly, and without much regard for any original truth it may have contained. Many Democrats don't even believe the document matters except when it buttresses their own arguments. It's no longer a document that unites Americans. Some are even arguing it doesn't matter so much. We do still believe in the vote, but every contest is now increasingly fraudulent, with enormous numbers of dimpled chads showing up in the aftermath of every election.

In the OT the only uniter is God's word. There is no such thing as Democracy. God demands stuff. If you don't follow through on his demands, you're dead.

Moses, or Joshua, have total power in the OT. Power comes not from the vote, but from God. So it is a divine election. At this point this is an authoritarian people who use God, and who God uses, to establish His Power. There is no debating although there is some dialogue. At Sodom, Lot argues that it will be too difficult to find legions of decent people. So he keeps whittling down the number of decent people he has to gather.

But God is the ultimate arbiter. Inside His Power is already a countervalent spirit of hospitality. All these laws can be played with (rused with, in Lyotard's terminology) and they all ruse mightily.

(I'm enjoying the Bible. It's a pretty good book.)

The Jews are a chosen people, much like Americans believe themselves to be. On the one hand we are busy making rules for living around the Globe: insisting on democracy, and destroying any civilization that doesn't practice it (communists and now Islamic societies have found themselves imploding or exploding either due to American armament or subterfuge as we semi-secretly fund democratic groups within authoritarian nations). On the other hand if you manage to get into America you can enjoy the law of hospitality, otherwise known as multiculturalism, and you can worship your weird gods. Some are even arguing that our laws should be multicultural, and allow for Sharia.

Genocide is a strong force and was a simple answer to create unity. It is not just sheer hatred, or abolition of the other, although it is of course that, too. Hospitality is a weaker force, known too as the law of inclusion: and has to do with toleration (less good than acceptance or welcome). I feel that I am reading a history of America as I read the history of the Jews. We too had to get out of England. We too had to destroy the Indians to make room for our civilization. The parallels are clear.

There is no way to make genocide palatable and in this day and age, it is universally abhorred, and yet it is still practiced. "Ethnic cleansing," it was called by the Serbians. In Rwanda, it didn't have a euphemism.

"...Joshua passed unto Eglon, and all Israel with him; ... and they took it on that day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein he utterly destroyed that day ... he left none remaining ... but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded" (Joshua 10:33-37).

The staggering number of towns, kings, and peoples that are decimated are told and retold in the book with swagger.

One could replace those names with the names of American Indian tribes. But the tribes have mounted a comeback in many places and have their own reservations. Many Americans now believe those tribes have a right to exist. Others believe that we should pay them reparations as monthly checks. Probably there are a few today who believe we should finish them off. Finishing off a whole people is now explicitly outlawed by the United Nations, but only when they exist in another country. Stalin made it possible to destroy an entire group within your own country.

What's impressive about the first six books of the Holy Bible is that genocide was not only tolerated or accepted but welcomed and even demanded by the Lord. I think a lot of the ethical thinking in these books is demented, but who am I to judge?

NEXT BOOK: JUDGES

Cleaning Robot

Yesterday I came home and found a disc of some kind vacuuming the floor. My wife explained that it's a Roomba 560, and that we no longer need to vacuum. The robot will do it. If it runs out of energy it goes back to its port. It doesn't get tangled in the fringe of a rug. It will spit out pencils and large objects. It won't fall down stairs, because the sensor inside won't let it. I named it The Protestant Work Ethic.

PWE, for short.

The Politicization of the Weather

Today, even the weather is political. I find myself wanting warmer winters and yet wanting Al Gore proven wrong. So either way I am pleased, as well as irked. If we get pounded with blizzards then Al Gore is wrong (although some will twist it to say, no, he's right, he PREDICTED the extra snowfall would come with a milder climate), but I still think it bothers the leftists, so I don't mind shoveling an extra three hours a day.

If the weather is seasonable, that's good, but especially because Al Gore is wrong.

Al Gore is fat, and idiotic, even if the left claims he has one of the highest IQs in human history. (IQ means nothing if someone they don't like has a high one.) Could Gore be right about global warming? If so, do we need 3000-page protocols, to drive less, to monitor the ice in Antarctica, and to care about liberal low-lying lands like Holland with their open prostitution and pot haze and the age of consent set at 14? Much is at stake in the drift of the patterns above. As above, so below.

Now, when I pass a known Democrat, or a known Republican, when I say, "Nice weather we're having," they know just what I mean.

The weather and discussion of it used to be one of the few neutral things that everybody could discuss. It was objective, and seemingly meaningless. Now, the weather has a political and even a religious edge. Even to talk about religion or politics directly doesn't carry such weighty implications as the weather has taken on. In my tone I might imply:

Your side is right about some things, perhaps.
Your side is completely wrong about everything.
I no longer have quite such a fervent belief in my side.
Why doesn't the weather conform to your political expectations?
Every time we wake up and look out the window, our politics are at stake.
So far this summer: quite hot. That's good for the tomatoes, which are red.

As I eat them, I will not just be eating vegetable bliss.
I will be eating the political implications.
So will almost every other American.
God help us!