The trip was interesting though, in many ways. I thought many deep, scintillating thoughts. So many, and so scintillating, that I immediately began to feel for you, my public. So much beauty and truth, but no means to record it. Two thirds my way down the East Coast I was resolved: I here, hither, thither, withersoever and forthwith, shall always carry upon my person a dictaphone by which to trap all my diaphanous interior poetic magic, to then write it all down and out, and so bestow my genius more fully upon humanity.
I'm honing my creative process, is what I mean. I realized that as I write more that I need to become more mindful of process, and brainstorming and organizing thought is the most important step.
Anyway, the trip, as I say, was a good one.
I realized in the trip's shifting context that I've re-gained my clarity and sense of humor that I'd lost after baking away last summer in that tropical golfing paradise known as Florida.. Weather down there now is really nice - too nice, really.. Every day in March there is like a totally sunny Maine summer day, something that in Maine actually nearly never occurs, because every day Downeast is normally a stark climatic succession, with weather dramatically changing every 5 minutes. So I was briefly re-seduced, and wondered if I could arrange my life so that I could live winters there, summers elsewhere.. But then the last two days got insufferably hot around midday, and I snapped out of that reverie. No, I am meant for where there is snow and dry winter air. After a week it was very clear that I needed to come home..
Here.
I take three days to drive the route, taking my time and visiting with people on the way, so I had a long spell of listening to NPR and CBC talk on my satellite radio (which came 6 months free with the car, but because the talk - in English, French, Spanish and Arabic, no less - is too good to let lapse, I'm now subscribing and even listening to it in the house while working) and plenty of time to think.
On the way, I realized with sudden forceful lucidity that I really do not like the United States. I realized, consciously articulated this last trip what has been inchoately felt and repressed since high school: I am nearly always discontented here.
It must be the fluoride in the water or something.
I mean, I still from force of childhood habit love my country, my home. I am a patriot in that fundamental (and to me only authentic) sense.
But this collective relationship is just not working for me, practically. It's like I am married to my high school sweetheart, whom I've known and loved since childhood, and have this deep intimate history with, but now I realize has never been faithful to me, is a sociopathic and compulsive liar, and whose behavior and attitude these last ten years has suddenly become repulsive to me..
America & Me: it's become one of those "dysfunctional" relationships where the other party is constantly ravaging you emotionally, never caring how it effects you.
I'm beginning to feel a bit like I did when I was in high school, minus insecurity and self esteem issues.. Paying attention to the media - either "entertainment" or "news" - almost instantly makes me feel trapped and powerless, jaded, either constantly annoyed, or bored or emotionally spent. Even the few things I enjoy and do watch when there's a television around (I refuse to own one) like Stephen Colbert or John Stewart end up curdling me..
I think it's being in close psychological contact with large undifferentiated numbers my fellow Americans.. Being forced to inhabit their common psychic space (Snooki! Bankers need bonuses! Hey, you catch ball good, we earn you billion dollars! Bomb sandniggers!) in mass aggregate is for me something like being caught and repeatedly trod underpaw by a lemming herd of gigantic diabolically retarded muppets.
Bruising, scary, and in a demented way, funny.
That's the one saving grace in it all, that people like Glenn Beck are so absurd that they make me laugh. For about five minutes, then I start clawing my ears and eyes out.
A party of Villagers is almost as bad.. No talk of substance, mostly prattle about sports or something equally mindless.. If politics do come up, it's almost always the same regurgitation of libertarian boilerplate followed by an excoriation of Obama, maybe Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi thrown in for sophistication's sake.
The only year that I've had since high school that was in any way as unpleasant as last year in Florida was when I unwisely decided to take a French teaching job at another American high school.
The first trauma was when I was a child and could not choose. The second was due to my own naivete and lack of sense that put me in harm's way. The third was the consequence of my not making good choices, and being trapped by circumstance.
Never again. Thrice abused has been well and more than enough.
I want out of here. This culture is fatal for my sanity. I've been getting out, again and again, in one way or another, ever since high school, never fully articulating my motives to myself. It's now become clear to me that I need to make a final departure, and stop screwing around.
There's two ways to do it: I can either become a monastic, probably a hermit, or a perpetual exile. I'm going, one way or the other, soon.
When I figure it out, you my public will be among the first to know.
So, as I say, when I hit the Carolina border I realized that the South is especially noxious and toxic.. It's like the rest of the country on a redneck meth and acid bender.
I gotta qualify that: I do still somehow like rural Northern Virginia and Maryland. The land that is still touched by the traces of colonial culture, like my own dear Vermont, Boston and Massachusetts are.. Those places along with the non-suburban Mid-Atlantic - and oddly enough, given my country upbringing, D.C., Baltimore, New York City, Providence - are the only ones in these United Sates where I feel well these days. Their history and ghosts speak to me, the landscape soothes me, and the North Eastern weather (cool mist and drizzle, warm muggy summer idles - rarely too hot, never too cold - distinct seasons, with turning leaves and occasional snow) calms me, and all makes me feel at home.
I also have this love of certain aspects of and things from the South - some of the music, the moonshine (real moonshine is divine dew, something out of this world), some of the food and literature..
To Kill a Mockingbird, for example. That tale - a "kid's book" - is one of the greatest stories in the English language. Atticus Finch is an archetype of the best in humanity - dignified, wise, kind, humble, generous. When I think of the South with love, my imagined transcendent South, I think of him.. And Boo Radley, Mr. Dolphus Raymond (who pretends to be a drunk, just so he can escape the hypocrisy and hatred of the community - he lives with blacks, and the only way they forgive him for that is by dismissing him as a drunk..) and Calpurnia, the servant who in her charity and humility is masterful.
They are the ones I love, my true beloved. My imagined friends. But they are only an poetic figment of the past. When I think of the South with fondness, I edit out the inevitable interaction with the rest of the characters in that story.. The actual contemporary South is overrun with the likes Bob Ewell maliciously accusing "the nigger" (the other, black venal eroticized) of a crime he himself had committed. Southerners are still more the poor ignorant lynch mob that came to the county jail to face down Atticus and kill that "nigger," only turned aside in being shown up by the innocence of a little girl .. (How often that still happens, even still.. Where would we be without her?) ..
I'd far rather live in Cairo (the only place of the half dozen places outside the U.S. that I've lived that I have no desire to live in again) than the Deep American South, is what I'm saying.
I'll take me some crazy assed Muslims over all those crazy assed evangelical protestants any day, in a heartbeat. No question or hesitation.
I mean what the heck is stuff like this all about? Yellow tiger striped spandex?
Really? I still can't believe it.
So when I get into the cracker country, then hit that North Carolina border, I become gradually repulsed. It's the bible belt, and all that evangelical bible thumping is immediately felt throbbing, vibrating like scent of violence in the air.
This time it struck me forcibly: from North Carolina all the way to mid- Florida there suddenly are everywhere billboards advertising for strip clubs and porn emporia seemingly just off every third exit. These are interspaced with billboards exhorting passersby to keep their babies if single and pregnant, and others bearing bible verses.
Full-blown roadside culture "war," one marked by imbecilic incoherence. This is a phenomenon I've not seen in Communist New England. The South has apparently risen again in more ways than one.
Sodom in the South. Only I'm not sure the likes of Lot are amongst them.
There's a chain of titty bars advertising with locations in North Carolina and Florida that specializes in drawing in truckers and other travelers - "showers, good food, sex toys and paraphernalia, DVD's and magazines, WE BARE ALL!" on dozens of roadside billboards.. Like South of the Border, only with naked girls. There's even a porn store conveniently located on the Wildwood exit, which is the one I take to the Villages, usually. Very thoughtful of them. If I ever say, were hypothetically (here's a philosophical paradox much like that of Epimenides, a true Cretan..) to run out of free porn on the internet at home, or am seized with an urge to masturbate in my car 15 minutes before I get to my parents' house, I can stop in just after stopping next door and picking up my last Big Mac™ along the route.
The porn industry has my interests at heart and always in mind, see. Everything's for sale, and modesty's cheap. God bless capitalism and Amereeka.
There were other billboards of note, such as this one:
Now, for those of you amongst my dozen or so readers who do not know, John Galt is a character in Atlas Shrugged, a novel by the sociopathic libertarian-bourgeois dime-store Nietzschean Ayn Rand. You see people carrying placards with that question on it at "tea party" rallies all the time.
Here's an interview with Mike Wallace where she tells us what she is about herself:
From her own lips to your soul.
This, her "philosophy" has more or less become the predominant American Creed. I'll give you some of the words she puts in John Galt's mouth in her loathsome book. His most famous soliloquy:
Watching that video just stuns me. It's pure twisted comedy. The guy who created it is apparently a fan of Ayn. But the images he juxtaposes against his histrionic reading,
"I ask for nothing less and nothing more than what I earn. That is justice!" over film of an atomic bomb exploding..
"Why is it moral to produce something of value and then keep it for yourself? When it is moral for others who haven't earned to accept it?" over video of Bush standing in the post 9/11 ruins of the usurers' financial district in New York ..
"Your acceptance of the code of selflessness has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab.." over video from Columbine..
All just leave me mute.
Absolutely insane, so mindlessly ironic that it staggers. I don't think reasonable conversation is possible with someone so stupid, so clearly conscienceless and amoral.
This is the whole text read in that video:
For twelve years you've been asking "Who is John Galt?" This is John Galt speaking. I'm the man who's taken away your victims and thus destroyed your world. You've heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis and that Man's sins are destroying the world. But your chief virtue has been sacrifice, and you've demanded more sacrifices at every disaster. You've sacrificed justice to mercy and happiness to duty. So why should you be afraid of the world around you?
Your world is only the product of your sacrifices. While you were dragging the men who made your happiness possible to your sacrificial altars, I beat you to it. I reached them first and told them about the game you were playing and where it would take them. I explained the consequences of your 'brother-love' morality, which they had been too innocently generous to understand. You won't find them now, when you need them more than ever.
We're on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. If you want to know how I made them quit, I told them exactly what I'm telling you tonight. I taught them the morality of Reason -- that it was right to pursue one's own happiness as one's principal goal in life. I don't consider the pleasure of others my goal in life, nor do I consider my pleasure the goal of anyone else's life.
I am a trader [editorial aside - I take this a pun. Yeah, John/Ayn that you are. A traitor to human kindness]. I earn what I get in trade for what I produce. I ask for nothing more or nothing less than what I earn. That is justice. I don't force anyone to trade with me; I only trade for mutual benefit. Force is the great evil that has no place in a rational world. One may never force another human to act against his/her judgment. If you deny a man's right to Reason, you must also deny your right to your own judgment. Yet you have allowed your world to be run by means of force, by men who claim that fear and joy are equal incentives, but that fear and force are more practical.
You've allowed such men to occupy positions of power in your world by preaching that all men are evil from the moment they're born. When men believe this, they see nothing wrong in acting in any way they please. The name of this absurdity is 'original sin'. That's impossible. That which is outside the possibility of choice is also outside the province of morality. To call sin that which is outside man's choice is a mockery of justice. To say that men are born with a free will but with a tendency toward evil is ridiculous. If the tendency is one of choice, it doesn't come at birth. If it is not a tendency of choice, then man's will is not free.
And then there's your 'brother-love' morality. Why is it moral to serve others, but not yourself? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but not by you? Why is it immoral to produce something of value and keep it for yourself, when it is moral for others who haven't earned it to accept it? If it's virtuous to give, isn't it then selfish to take?
Your acceptance of the code of selflessness has made you fear the man who has a dollar less than you because it makes you feel that that dollar is rightfully his. You hate the man with a dollar more than you because the dollar he's keeping is rightfully yours. Your code has made it impossible to know when to give and when to grab.
You know that you can't give away everything and starve yourself. You've forced yourselves to live with undeserved, irrational guilt. Is it ever proper to help another man? No, if he demands it as his right or as a duty that you owe him. Yes, if it's your own free choice based on your judgment of the value of that person and his struggle. This country wasn't built by men who sought handouts. In its brilliant youth, this country showed the rest of the world what greatness was possible to Man and what happiness is possible on Earth.
Then it began apologizing for its greatness and began giving away its wealth, feeling guilty for having produced more than its neighbors. Twelve years ago [editorial aside: interesting numeric there, Ayn], I saw what was wrong with the world and where the battle for Life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality and that my acceptance of that morality was its only power. I was the first of the men who refused to give up the pursuit of his own happiness in order to serve others.
To those of you who retain some remnant of dignity and the will to live your lives for yourselves, you have the chance to make the same choice. Examine your values and understand that you must choose one side or the other. Any compromise between good and evil only hurts the good and helps the evil.
If you've understood what I've said, stop supporting your destroyers. Don't accept their philosophy. Your destroyers hold you by means of your endurance, your generosity, your innocence, and your love. Don't exhaust yourself to help build the kind of world that you see around you now. In the name of the best within you, don't sacrifice the world to those who will take away your happiness for it.
The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath:
I swear by my Life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.
The world according to John Galt, spoken like a a true Cretin.
It's the Will to Power, dumbed down for Glenn Beck's audience. Deep thoughts for the likes of Jared Loughner, Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold.
Like I say, Nietzsche himself was bad enough. Rand is even more spiritually idiotic than poor crazy Fred.
Last fall I was at the Gainesville VA to pick up a prescription, and had to talk to the pharmacist. I went in, sat down, and noticed a little card with "Who is John Galt?" on it, taped to the side of his desk. I was mildly shocked, and perplexed. I asked him what it meant (innocent as a serpent, wise as a dove.. or something like that) curious as to why a government employee would be displaying something so politically charged at his place of work for all to see.. He smiled and brushed the question off, and I did not press him.
This is the absurdity we've come to. Espousing crypto-fascistic individualism while working for one of the best run health-care systems in the world - that is also perplexingly enough from a retarded libertarian point of view, government run - is now accepted as somehow sane, coherent and kosher. That dude's probably got lurid dreams of going to work for big pharma and making a million bucks discovering a new priapic elixir in the deepest Amazon someday. The VA is just to be a jumping off point for his coming world conquest.
I thought he looked like a impotent dweeb, so I hope for his sake that that elixir of his really pays off.
Every time I hear or see someone ask "Who is John Galt?" I want to counter "Quienes somos José y Maria, pendejo?"
See, the conceit behind the entire Galt fantasy is that if the entrepreneurial class - businessmen with capital - were hypothetically all to walk suddenly away from the table at once in a general strike, the entire economy would be instantly paralyzed.
They are supposedly the sole creative force driving our economy, see.
They make money the old fashioned way: They Earn It. By watching a stock ticker through beer goggles on Bloomberg in between rounds at the country club.
Thing is, I think that if all the people picking our fruit and vegetables, washing the shit out of our toilets, taking care of our laundry and watching our children were to walk away in a general strike those pussies would be so undone - "Clean my own toilet? Build my own summer home? Pick my own food? Mow and landscape my own lawn? Slaughter my own animals? With my own hands?" - there'd be an immediate collapse on the minimum and even the living wage issue.
"Please come back and wipe my baby's ass for me! Please! My wife is about to beat me to death with her Jimmy Choos!"
Whereas if the conniving investors who deliberately and recklessly speculated us into the current market collapse were to walk away, they would be doing all the rest of us a favor.
Please, sail your 100 million dollar yacht to Somalia! I hear the beaches are awesome there. Bunch of sheiks and warlords hang there, like Monaco.. just your type of people..
Note, and this is really important, that this "ethical thought" of Ayn Rand's has been publicly embraced by Alan Greenspan. He doesn't even try to hide his amoral power worship. He's openly warned us where he's coming from.
She called her philosophy "objectivism" - accept only what is objectively true. No faith, only rational calculation. Admire and love only what is "objectively" admirable and loveable. Love people who are beautiful and strong, those who "win" and "succeed" have virtue, which is material power. Do not love people for what they do for you - they only act of self interest and weakness.
The lines about in Galt's speech about use of force being illegitimate are either disingenuous and cynical or idiotically stupid. We all use force, whether physical or metaphysical, to influence reality and others. It is unavoidable. The only issue is the end to which we will use the power (no matter how slight - getting out of bed or opening your mouth effect things) we have.
Ayn Rand is, to put it square and blunt, a moral idiot. Her work is both utterly and howlingly stupid, as well as pretty much a crib of Mein Kampf.
Stupid isn't always evil, but evil is always stupid.
One thing for sure: none of it is Christian. The stale irony though is that so many so-called Christians think that Ayn Rand is an ethical genius.
"You've Sacrificed Justice to Mercy.. Let me Explain to You the Consequences of your brother-love morality.. We are on strike against your creed of unearned rewards and unearned duties."
"I swear by my Life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine."
No better articulation of the mind of anti-christ than that.
It is, not at all incidentally, also pretty much a summary of radical (i.e., libertarian) feminist ethics. Take care of little kids and old people? Be subservient to the needs of others without reward? Hell no, neuter me with hormones, and show me the cash baby! Sex and monay, powah and freedam!
"I will never live for the sake of another man."
Non serviam. I will not serve. To hell with you.
The stupidity or cynical disingenuousness of the anti- government libertarian is that their philosophy if triumphant will demand the reversal of feminism and the restoration of traditional anti-libertarian institutions (with all their attendant hierarchies and repressive social norms) such as the patriarchal family and culturally and politically dominant churches. If the government does not provide social democratic alternatives that supply basic human needs like child care and elder care (such as the public schools or social security and medicare - all of which are sneered at by Ayn Rand, notice) then the family - read women - will have to again take up that charge. And that work will not be remunerated with cash, believe me you.
Anyway, our culture won't go back there unless forced by catastrophe, but we'll still have to put up with libertarian idiocy and nonsense until then, anyhow..
Feed your head, and live for your pleasure and greed.
Welcome to the United Sates of America, 2011.
Anyway, to draw this little screed to a close, I have another little story to tell you all.
Last fall I got a circular in the mail:
A glossy mass mailing circular to every PO Box in Lady Lake, FL advertising a series of free talks - "come as you are," "free bible," "free nightly handouts," "free children's program.." - by a speaker named Scott Moore. He makes three promises: 1. The Bible alone will be your textbook. 2. We will not beg you for money. 3. You will be inspired as you attend nightly.
There are cheesy garish graphics illustrating motifs from the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation that so many evangelical protestants go all jiggaboo over. The statue in four types of metal from Daniel 2, the whore on the dragon.. The beasts of Revelation..
The only identifying information on the thing as to who these people are, other than the name Scott Moore, is the address of the American Legion hall where the event was to be held.
Nice detail, the Legion is renting space to an apocalyptic preacher.
This last week, I remembered this circular, and pulled it out of the little scrapbook where I keep such curios. I googled the name Scott Moore.
That name is worn by a major league baseball player, an English rugby player, one of Elvis's guitarists, a screenwriter who worked on the films Wedding Crashers and the Hangover and..
This guy:
The second "man" ever to become pregnant. He's not really a man, actually. She's a transgendered woman who decided to keep her uterus and get artificially inseminated with her partner's sperm.
I thought this was really amusing, in that sick way that I've taken up as a defense against misanthropy.
I got a little more sophisticated in my search, and found old Scott's site.
It turns out that our Scott Moore is a preacher on the staff of Hope Media Ministries, a Seventh Day Adventist group.. He was "born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama. He was raised in a Christian home, but did not dedicate his life to Christ until the age of 27. Shortly after his conversion, Scott left his job as a truck driver to attend the Mission College of Evangelism. It was here that he developed his passion of getting all members of the church to be on fire and involved in doing evangelistic ministry inside and outside of the church. Scott joined the ARISE team two years ago, and now functions as the Director of ARISE."
The Adventists are of course a Millerite apocalyptic church born of the early to mid 19th Century Second Great American Awakening that also gave rise to the Shakers, the Mormons and then later in echoes the Christian Scientists and Jehovah's Witnesses and eventually the modern Pentecostal movement. All of which also deeply influenced rise to the Abolitionist, the Suffragist, the Prohibitionist and Progressive movements. A very fecund and important period in world religious history, to say the least.
Note that none of that was on the flyer. No denomination (trying to be "post denominational" and appeal to the chronically unchurched, I think), no accreditation. I notice that Hope Ministries has some luminaries with guns, though: One "Barry Black.. the first African-American chaplain to hold the office of chaplain to the United States Senate. Black was best known in the United States as historically becoming the first African-American chief of naval chaplains in August 2000.."
Impressive, and curious..
There are quite a few links to all sorts of interesting stuff on that site. I listened to a couple hours of preaching, because I'm a freak and enjoy such things..
Check out this one series of sermons, for example. I especially dug the graphic at the head of the page:
Scary bible monsters, and a nice happy non- threatening cool dude Christ. Sporting a mullet, no less.
Perfect pitch. Love it. Lots of blather about how prophecy is not mysterious. The scriptures interpret themselves, anyone can do it! It's relevant and fun!
No mention of this:
36 “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,[f] but only the Father. 37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41 Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.
42 “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. 43 But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. 44 So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.
Or this:
18 Woe to you who long
for the day of the LORD!
Why do you long for the day of the LORD?
That day will be darkness, not light.
19 It will be as though a man fled from a lion
only to meet a bear,
as though he entered his house
and rested his hand on the wall
only to have a snake bite him.
20 Will not the day of the LORD be darkness, not light—
pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?
21 “I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
22 Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
23 Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
24 But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
25 “Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings
forty years in the wilderness, people of Israel?
26 You have lifted up the shrine of your king,
the pedestal of your idols,
the star of your god[b]—
which you made for yourselves.
27 Therefore I will send you into exile beyond Damascus,”
says the LORD, whose name is God Almighty.
Though.
In three sermons and several hours I heard a few biblical quotes
(very few - ironic how these "Bible believing" Christians carry on for hours while citing only a few verses in all that time - that's why I hate most extended sermons because most preachers babble and simper and try to amuse - and long for the apostolic liturgy - for oh so "ironically" it in all of its forms, the Rite of Paul VI included, are almost entirely direct quotes or paraphrases of scripture),
and those were all from Daniel, Revelation or occasionally the Gospels or Isaiah.
Nothing at all from my favorite books in the Old Testament apart from what protestants call the Apocrypha, those beautiful little poems from the minor prophets..
They're at the end of the text, right before Maccabees in the Vulgate. The first is Jonah, which is a beautiful antetype for Christ ("I give them the sign of Jonas") as well as a charming and funny parody expressing the profundity of divine mercy. Then there is the wonderful righteous anger and profound theology of Amos and Malachi (inspirations for the "I have a Dream" speech of MLK) and all the others..
Ah yes.. Why am I typing all this? What's my deal?
Well, I've been thinking quite a lot about the apocalypse these days.
Of how the end will come in all things revealed, the hearts and deeds of men laid bare.
I've been thinking about all these sacred myths in the Bible that so capture our minds and undergird our history, our discourse and politics.
So many people are fixated with sexual sin, and so with stories such as Abraham's hospitality to the three men in Genesis 18.
Two of them depart for Sodom and the third - identified as the Lord - remains with Abraham, who then pleads with the Lord for the righteous men living in the cities about to be destroyed.
The two men, now called angels, in the next chapter arrive to stay at Lot's house in Sodom, and the debauched population of the place comes to demand that Lot turn them over so they can get to "know" them..
Lot refuses, and offers the mob his two virgin daughters instead.
Then they flee, having been warned that God was about to reign brimstone and fire on the city. Lot's wife turns back to look at the inferno against the angels' instructions, and is turned to the famous pillar of salt.
Then, at the end of the chapter Lot's virgin daughters get him drunk and sleep with him, getting pregnant.
Like so much of the Bible, all truly amazing and very subversive (no matter what your prejudices or point of view) stuff.
This story, and not (as is so often asserted by people attacking the Catholic tradition on sexual issues) the prohibitions against man laying with another man in Leviticus is the deepest Biblical root of all subsequent Jewish and Christian - as well as (need it be said) Islamic thought - against what we today call homosexual acts.
But to me, this story is much broader in its implications than just that.
The Church Fathers saw this story as revealing the Triune nature of God, and call the three visitors the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
One of my favorite icons is the Hospitality of Abraham by Andre Rublev, a depiction of the angelic visitors as images of the Triune God as the Fathers attest:
This iconic truth seems to imply many several things.
One of them is that God is not bound by our consciences or ideas of good and evil. We in a atavistic way are, of course. But he is emphatically not. The bourgeois moral universe is not that of God.
His mercy is not our mercy, our justice is not his justice.
Another is that the inherent sacredness of the human person as a living icon of God is what gives us our profound value.
This means that desecrating ourselves and others for the sole sake of pleasure and gratification of lust and violent impulses is not good, of course.
But it also means that the weak, the poor, the stupid..
And even the evil..
Even fools who embrace sadistic ideologies like that of Ayn Rand..
Must be treated with reverence and respect. We must love our enemies. Love those who are useless and economically stressed.
A true Christian society is ordered toward the good of all human persons.
We must treat others as we would be treated ourselves. This is a duty owed our God.
For he loves all of us, even in our sin. All of us are evil in our wills. All of us are thus, in this limited but profound sense enemies of God who is good beyond all words and human understanding.
He loves us his enemies, so must we then love our enemies.
That's my sermon for the morning.
So, to finally wrap this back on my juicy post title: I've been wondering these days about the sin of Gomorrah.
The Biblical narrative never tells us what they were doing there. The place is silent to myth and history.
That silence intrigues me. The sexual nature of the Sodomite's sin is what most often captures and titillates our imaginations.
So many of us revolt in pleasure against that, and so many of us rise up in judgment against those we see as transgressing - while probably none apart from Christ (and of course one other) among us are truly pure of heart in these matters.
That's obvious, and I'm weary of all the juvenile hullabaloo about the titillating supposed taboo.
I'm more concerned with the silent sins these days. What goes on in the halls of power, the money changers' gilt backrooms, the hearts of every one of us? Those cryptic acts of the powerful, the whispers of the gnostics at their occult altars?
To me, this country is rife with that sort of sin.
The god of the dollar bill is not my God.
Of that I am sure, even in my sin.
I'll leave the last word to the prophet Malachi, to tie (I hope) this all together:
I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the LORD Almighty.
The Word of the LORD. Wisdom attend.
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