[ by Charles Cameron — personally, i don’t at all mind the fact that both saddam and the abbot are no longer around, given the brutality of their acts ]
.
Saddam reveals himself {upper panel] to be plausibly mediaeval [lower panel]:
He also puts himself in the judgment seat the Abbot reserves for God…
**
The massacre of Béziers, and the Albigensian Crusade of which it was the opening salvo, came about, I’d suggest, fundamentally because the good people of Languedoc — home of the Troubadours as well as the Cathars or Albigensians — found the leaders of the Cathars, known as the Perfecti, to be humbler, poorer, and less ostentatious than the Abbots and Bishops, leaders of the Catholic Church, who tended to be among the “fat cats” of their day.
Understandably, the Church disliked this almost unavoidable comparison, but was unwilling to relinquish its personal and institutional wealth — hence the Abbot’s instruction, Kill them all, God will sort out his own, which somehow made the massacre tolerable, theologically speaking.
[ by Charles Cameron — via Strange Fruit and Jonestown, deviously wandering, to Merton and thence O Happy Day ]
.
Let’s start with the exceeding dark, brilliantly brought to us by Billie Holiday:
**
I got there via the phrase “strange fruit” — which cropped up without any overt reference to the song in an account of the aftermath of the Jonestown mass-suicide / murder in Guyana — Gaiutra Bahadur‘s The Jonestown We Don’t Know in the NYRB.
A sapling had lifted a child’s patent leather shoe off the ground like “strange fruit that some rare and exotic plant had produced.”
As I tweeted on reading this, “shades of Southern trees bear strange fruit / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root” — Ms. Bahadur responded, “I also thought of this song when I read those lines” to which I replied, “I’m betting Jan Carew. was conscious of it, too.” — Jim Carew being one of Ms. Bahadur‘s sources and the grandson of the Carib chief who had observed Jonestown from its inception to its post-destruction, albeit invisible to the participants from the fringes of the forest surrounding Jim Jones‘ settlement.. “I agree, he probably was” Ms Bahadur commented in closing out our little Twitter ping-pong.
Ms. Bahadur is a vivid raconteur.
Here’s more on the Carib chief, his grandson Carew, and Jonestown from her marvelous piece and those forest fringes:
Jonestown was built in the Kaituma region, heartland of the Caribs, who had dispersed to various islands from their historical homeland in Guyana over centuries. Named after the river running through it, Kaituma means Land of the Everlasting Dreamers..
With candle flies in bottles to light the way, I walked amongst their dead. They’d died in circles, like worshippers around invisible altars
the old man recounted singing Carib death-songs among the suicide victims. The elder explained that he was calling on the homeless spirits of the Americans to reconcile with the ancestral Carib dead, because they had never asked for permission to share the land
and:
Carew reflected that if anyone understood mass suicides, it was the Caribs, whose mythology marks sites across the Caribbean islands where they jumped from cliffs to their deaths rather than accept slavery at the hands of European colonizers..
I hope you can appreciate with me the poetry to be seen in these quotes.. dark though the Jonestown tragedy indeed was..
**
Here’s how I was taking this: it seemed like another glimpse, from another angle, of the rich stew of religions bleeding into everything and blossoming anew where the Americas meet, that I’d mentioned in a tweet the day before — a tweet I was, let me admit, just a wee bit proud of:
For the record, far & away most fascinating, explosive area of religious studies these days is the cross-border Mexico-USian folk-syncretic part-narco-theological terrain, Santa Muerte, Templarios cartel &c, studied by Andrew Chesnut, Kate Kingsbury, Robert Bunker and David Metcalfe, with more doctorates between them than I can count.
and here’s my follow-up:
Life lives at the intersection of cultural anthropology, comparative religion & depth psychology — not studied as three separate fields, but as one breathing whole, since the drivers of human actions found at that hermetic crossroads are among the most radical, powerful for change
These have been a rich couple of days for my stumbling onto materials of this sort.
**
Here are some more mythico-anthro-religious quotes of keen interest — two concerning the Northern Lights:
In ancient China and Europe, the auroras were dragons and serpents, flitting around in the night. In Scandinavian folklore, they were the burning archway that allowed gods to move between heaven and Earth.
and:
According to Sami mythology, spirits are present in everything, from rocks and trees, foxes and reindeer, and the northern lights in the sky.
Those quotes are from what’s ostensibly an Atlantic “science” article, An Ancient Tradition Unfolds in New York, subtitled “The recent light show over the city tapped into a deep vein in human culture”. The city, here, is New York. Is it always?
As to the Sami — here I’d like to drop in the cover of a paperback just issued by Hurst publishers in London, just so you know:
their camouflage is so perfectly tuned that they appear ethereal, as though made from storm clouds
Who they? Rangers? SEALs? Storm clouds themselves? the Fay? Angels? –Who knows? I’ll give you a hint — Peter Matthiessen. Beautiful, no? who or whatever they are..
And then there’sThomas Merton, Trappist monk, priest, hermit, writer, world traveler, on his final journey from Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky to visit his Buddhist monastic equivalents in Thailand…
I dreamed I was, temporarily, back at Gethsemani. I was dressed in a Buddhist monk’s habit
Merton’s, i suppose, was one of my poet transmissions, delivered by letter. I was just two days into 21 at the time., more than a half century ago.
**
We’re getting lighter, time to close these files and give you the final video.
Jonestown was gruesome with its strange fruit, lynchings, lynchings and lynchings likewise. It is, I surmise, the depth of our griefs and wounds that allows in us an equal height of joy — as though our griefs hollow us, and thus we can be filled with joy..
Within the profundity of Billie Holiday mourning, then, let us find the possibility Ray Charles embodies in his song, O Happy Day:
There will never be a 2,200-mile wall built, period,” he said. “I think it’s become symbolic of better border security. It’s a code word for better border security. If you make it about actually building a 2,200-mile wall, that’s a bridge too far — but I’m mixing my metaphors.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, has called the wall a “metaphor” for border security – saying it’s one tool, among many, to protect the nearly 2,000-mile frontier.
**
Comes now Senator Graham, late to the party:
The wall has become a metaphor for border security. What we’re talking about is a physical barrier where it makes sense. There’s nothing wrong with a physical barrier along the border where it makes sense.
**
Pelosi opines “The wall has become a metaphor for border security” and Colbert deadpans “So the wall is a metaphor for his manhood? No wonder he’s having trouble erecting it.” Alexander Hernandez, Esq. ponders “I wonder if we can pay for the wall with cash metaphors?”
And Rolling Stone:
It’s all a power game to the president, and in that sense the border wall is, like Graham admitted on Sunday, nothing more than a metaphor, one that Trump wants Americans — not Mexico, as he promised — to pay tens of billions of dollars to conjure into existence.
Pelosi again:
He says, ‘we’re going to build a wall with cement and Mexico’s going to pay for it’ while he’s already backed off of the cement – now he’s down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.
“The president still says ‘wall’ — oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats. But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it.”
**
This metaphor thing is getting out of control. Has been, in fact, since April 2017, still just last year as I write this, with less than a dozen hours to go.
Let me take that in two parts. One is a bit Eastern, Taoist in fact, but we’ll get to that — and the other more Western, and I’ll tackle that one right away.
It seems to me these two needless deaths constitute an obligation: to hold the administration — and such super and subsets thereof as may be relevant, both up to and down to the level of individuals — to account. Such accountability is in my view one of the micro-slices of the price we pay for freedom — the States’ extraordinary experimental freedom.
And then, what probably interests and concerns me more.. Grief like a river.
**
Grief, like a river, finds its own level.
Let it.
Media opinion people, and maybe others, fret quite a bit about the degree to which one can grieve for all the world’s troubles, should pick one’s battles, can care deeply only for those we know, family perhaps, or tribe.. the great question of compassion fatigue, or should that be moral fatigue?
Love your neighbor stays in the hood: love your enemy parachutes down enemy lines, oh and weltschmerz is way overextended, perhaps?
Let, therefore, your compassion, your grief, and your charitable outreach find their natural levels — don’t force them to some arbitrary limit or standard, they’re naturally overflowing in season, needing no push.
Or so I suggest, with however much humility comes natural to me, that too being subject to flow..
**
Requiescant in pace, two younglings I never knew..
[ by Charles Cameron — this one with quite a few neat chyrons, a book recommendation, &c ]
.
**
Here’s PW Singer on his new book, LikeWar, and our cyber-security future:
**
Notable in the above, for the games metaphor collection as well as general understanding:
This is a space where ISIS’ top recruiter and Taylor Swift are using the very same tactics to achieve fundamentally the very same goal in terms of online, but very different effects offline.
And final point of it, if we don’t understand these new rules of the game, we are the losers of them.
**
A great few hours for chyrons
MTO 12/26/2018
Melber Beat 12/26/2018
**
Melber 26 Dec: echoing politics as just a savage game ..
trump has no agenda here,he has no endgame, he has no strategy, he has no tactics ..
look, i went to the mat, i did everything i could do, i shut down the governmentmover this, and democrats just wouldn’t give me the billions that we agree we need to get this done
…..Bob Corker was responsible for giving us the horrible Iran Nuclear Deal, which I ended, yet he badmouths me for wanting to bring our young people safely back home. Bob wanted to run and asked for my endorsement. I said NO and the game was over. #MAGA I LOVE TENNESSEE!
.
djt: we’re not playing to lose slowly in iraq ..26/2018
.
all in chris hayes 12/26/2018
the secretary of defense jim mattis resigned with a letter that politely torched the president’s worldview ..
more and more like a mob boss ..
what’s the game plan here? ..
i wonder how you, your colleagues are thinking about gaming out the strategy of this house majority which is walking into day one, a sort of staring contest with the president ..
.
uncertain misc 12/26/2018
it’s given every other country around the world whiplash ..
pulling the rug out from under his own policies [ourob] ..
and the question is, does pressure work any more on the operators in this sort of game ..
it will be ironic if he was hoist by his own petard of sexism ..
they organize their own demise because they ask for too much ..
katy mtp: i wonder what the end game is for the president ..
ari: the federal reserve has to raise rates, because they have to reducfe the balance sheet, in order to get the dry powder, to come rescue the economy ../
.
chris hayes: markets have whipsawed back and forth as investors try to figure out whata exactly is going on ..
.
12/27/2016
rule #1 of negotiation is don’t negotiate against yourself – the president negotiated against himself, and now he’s in a corner..
.
Ant=d this, IMO, is brilliant, capturing a whole series of mirroring arguments:
to play that “if obama had done” game..
that’s one heck of a game!
.
Subtitle from Vanity Fair’s Hive today:
The author of Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace recounts the society columnist who tried to out-Trump the future president.
ourob?
Some culture!
Some contest / fight / war..
**
More as relevant events, quotes, tweets, headlines & videos crop up in my various feeds..
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
