Informant38

One more quote:

For the past thirty-five years American politics has been dominated not by a class of people but by a group of people who got their start with Richard Nixon. From that time to this, as has been proven not merely in books or public opinion but in actual courtrooms, these individuals have ceaselessly plotted against free government, committing break-ins, illegal wiretaps, show trials, extortion, perjury, war crimes in Central America and the Middle East, obstruction of justice, and theft of an election. The Nixonians are thugs who have never paid any real price for their actions and have drawn from their experience the apparently correct lesson that the more they get away with the more they will be able to get away with.

It is probably whistling past the graveyard to make the suggestion; but if we ever manage to bring down the Bush regime, there really must be a reckoning this time, not primarily to inflict pain on the guilty but to rectify the record and, above all, to drive the Nixonians out of public life once and for all. Justice is the point, not the self-indulgence of payback. The recent South African example shows that such an accounting is both feasible and deeply helpful.

Inanus et Vacua Thursday, June 05, 2003

Nymphs, associated with groves, mountains, caves, fountains, and other beguiling locations, figure numinous powers, neither immortal nor human, that arise from the accidents of land and water. The Greeks were exceedingly sensitive to such phenomena�Vincent Scully�s work on the relationship of Greek temples to their geographical settings is very revealing on this score�and so am I. I feel the lay of the land in my own body and in fact respond to certain places as to a beautiful woman, thus suffering or enjoying the peculiar inspiration the Greeks called nympholepsy. The supposedly disenchanted have their own piety.

�Inanis et Vacua

Hence the assertion recently voiced by some Fundamentalists that Yahweh, God, and Allah aren�t the same entity at all. That seems to make God into an action figure in a fantasy game, but in the absence of some conceptual understanding of the Supreme Being, what�s the alternative?

Toledah

A lot of the ideas in the Old Testament are disturbingly red�the New Testament is even worse�but it�s easy to forget that radical thinking stems from scripture. Much of the Book of Isaiah, for example, is quite a bit to the left of the New Democrats or me, for that matter. You might think that the political tendencies of the Bible, particularly the endlessly reiterated denunciations of the rich, would create a problem for rightist Fundamentalists. What must be understood is that people like Bush are actually pagans who, by a historical accident, have come to call their idol by the name of Jesus.

� ibid.

Flying Solo

In Roman times, a fool accompanied the victorious general in his golden chariot and whispered in his ear, "Remember, you are mortal." The recent photo opportunity on the aircraft carrier honored this tradition in an elegantly economical way.

�ibid
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Ω{Rather than continuing to cut and paste snippets of its wealth of sagacity and wit, let me say go there. This guy is Socrates and Sitting Bull, Thoreau and Hemingway, Jane Austen and Elaine Pagels.
The real deal.}