I woke this morning up to half a world
Through one eye saw the half-men rise to work;
Half-cars were parked on half of every street.
Half-coffee poured out into splintered mugs,
The bosses gave half-orders.
Half-papers, half unfolded, told the news,
(or half of it) to only half their readers:
Of half the world’s plunge midway into chaos,
Of politicians telling quarter-truths.

After a while, I only half noticed it,
then half again, so here is what I wonder
Which half is gone, which half remains?  The top
or bottom, left or right? The first, or last?
Your half, or mine?

It was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible
Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies
that had not been sown–as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted
to be done, that had led to it–as if observers of the wretched
millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such
vapouring, combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,
and worn out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be endured
without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew the truth.

-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

It suddenly occurred to me, about Robert Mugabe: the international community urging other African leaders to condemn him is just a bit rich. Not that his government isn’t brutal, ill-advised, and illegitimate, because it undoubtedly is. And not that other African leaders aren’t the only ones in position to have any real moral authority over him, because they undoubtedly are. Think about it, though - Zimbabwe gained its independence in 1980. That’s living memory - hell, that’s your living memory, some of you. It’s certainly Mugabe’s. He basically took over from Ian Smith - if you want to talk undemocratically elected tyrants who thought of themselves as perfectly legitimate authorities - and is it any wonder that he is also prickly, repressive of political opponents, and profoundly suspicious of his own people and the Western world?

Understand!  I am not saying that someone’s actions are excusable because they are explicable.  Guilt is as vast and expansive as the air; it is not diminished by being shared.

Speaking of governments that fail to understand those they govern, I came across an article some time back that suggested that the Burmese (Myanmarian?) government really failed to grasp the scope of the destruction wreaked by Nargis; with their flow of trusted information basically self-controlled, the fear of foreign interference was more real and comprehensible than vague rumors or bald statements of disaster.  This capacity for self-deception, on a personal, ethnic, or a governmental scale, is what happens when you become the center of the world and is by itself an excellent argument against tyranny. But it got me thinking: as a civilian, as a chump on the ground, is it better or worse to know the scope of the disaster that has befallen you?  Your family has been wiped out, your village, your livelihood - what difference does it make to you to know that this has befallen tens of thousands?  You are the last of everyone you knew - does it make a difference to know whether or not you are the last of your people on the earth? One town perishing in agony and chaos is sad and unfortunate.  Hundred of towns perishing so is a humanitarian disaster - but where does the difference in sorrow cease to be individually perceptible?

The most adorable picture in the history of the world.

Look, I know what you’re thinking, and once I thought as you did. Who wants to look at pictures of other people’s babies? Doting grandparents, dotty officefathers, with images of their progeny plastered on their walls and foisted on their visitors - good for you, said I in my heart, you are associated with a tiny human. Small, squashy, inarticulate, not really distinguishable from all the other ones. Yee for you. But now I understand them - they are simply performing the rightful human office of sharing good things with others, and what could be a better thing than the most adorable baby in the world?

I was thinking about babies the other day. The smile of an infant who has just learned to smile is practically heartbreaking; why is that? Is this because the smile is the first time that the child can not only express, but communicate its happiness? It figures out how to communicate unhappiness pretty goshdarn quick, but happiness takes a while longer. Or it because of the purity of just about any emotion expressed by a three-month-old? Sure, you’ll be a deeper and more complex person twenty years from now, with increased capacity for comprehension and for response.  But can you, twenty years from now, be purely and simply happy with your whole heart?*  No, it’s all downhill from three months old.

*The sad thing is that twenty years from now, being tired and hungry will still make you cranky and hard to deal with.

The future gets less retro all the time; this was written in 1933, I believe.  Stephen Vincent Benet, everyone.

Metropolitan Nightmare

It rained a lot that spring. You woke in the morning
And saw the sky still clouded, the streets still wet,
But nobody noticed so much, except the taxis
And the people who parade. You don’t, in a city.
The parks got very green. All the trees were green
Far into July and August, heavy with leaf,
Heavy with leaf and the long roots boring and spreading,
But nobody noticed that but the city gardeners
And they don’t talk.
Oh, on Sundays, perhaps you’d notice:
Walking through certain blocks, by the shut, proud houses
With the windows boarded, the people gone away,
You’d suddenly see the queerest small shoots of green
Poking through cracks and crevices in the stone
And a bird-sown flower, red on a balcony,
But then you made jokes about grass growing in the streets
And politics and grass-roots - and there were songs
And gags and a musical show called ”Hot and Wet.”
It made a good box for the papers. When the flamingo
Flew into a meeting of the Board of Estimate,
The new mayor acted at once and called the photographers.
When the first green creeper crawled upon Brooklyn Bridge,
They thought it was ornamental. They let it stay.

That was the year the termites came to New York
And they don’t do well in cold climates– but listen, Joe,
They’re only ants, and ants are nothing but insects.
It was funny and yet rather wistful, in a way
(As Heywood Broun pointed out in the World-Telegram)
To think of them looking for wood in a steel city.
It made you feel about life. It was too divine.
There were funny pictures by all the smart, funny artists
And Macy’s ran a terribly clever ad:
“The Widow’s Termite” or something.
There was no
Disturbance. Even the Communists didn’t protest
And say they were Morgan hirelings. It was too hot,
Too hot to protest, too hot to get excited,
An even African heat, lush, fertile and steamy,
That soaked into bone and mind and never once broke.
The warm rain fell in fierce showers and ceased and fell.
Pretty soon you got used to its always being that way.

You got used to the changed rhythm, the altered beat,
To people walking slower, to the whole bright
Fierce pulse of the city slowing, to men in shorts,
To the new sun-helmets from Best’s and the cop’s white uniforms,
And the long noon-rest in the offices, everywhere.
It wasn’t a plan or anything. It just happened.
The fingers tapped slower, the office-boys
Dozed on their benches, the bookkeeper yawned at his desk.
The A.T.&T. was the first to change the shifts
And establish an official siesta-room;
But they were always efficient. Mostly it just
Happened like sleep itself, like a tropic sleep,
Till even the Thirties were deserted at noon
Except for a few tourists and one damp cop.
They ran boats to see the big lilies on the North River
But it was only the tourists who really noticed
The flocks of rose-and-green parrots and parakeets
Nesting in the stone crannies of the Cathedral.
The rest of us had forgotten when they first came.

There wasn’t any real change, it was just a heat spell,
A rain spell, a funny summer, a weather-man’s joke,
In spite of the geraniums three feet high
In the tin-can gardens of Hester and Desbrosses.
New York was New York. It couldn’t turn inside out.
When they got the news from Woods Hole about the Gulf Stream,
The Times ran a adequate story.
But nobody reads those stories but science-cranks.

Until, one day, a somnolent city-editor
Gave a new cub the termite yarn to break his teeth on.
The cub was just down from Vermont, so he took his time.
He was serious about it. He went around.
He read all about termites in the Public Library
And it made him sore when they fired him.
So, one evening,
Talking with an old watchman, beside the first
Raw girders of the new Planetopolis Building
(Ten thousand brine-cooled offices, each with shower)
He saw a dark line creeping across the rubble
And turned a flashlight on it.
“Say, buddy,” he said,
“You’d better look out for those ants. They eat wood, you know,
They’ll have your shack down in no time.”
The watchman spat.
“Oh, they’ve quit eating wood,” he said, in a casual voice,
“I thought everybody knew that.”
–And, reaching down,
He pried from the insect’s jaws the bright crumb of steel.

Since y’all have got me thinking about the Puritans and the mixed bag of a legacy they’ve left us, now’s as good a time as any to link to this, slacktivist’s epic deconstruction of Left Behind. It begins here, and it’s well worth it. Worth it? you say, glancing at the dates of the previous entry. How on earth can spending five years on those things be worth it in the slightest? If a book’s bad, surely five minutes suffices for the summary, and ongoing criticism is overkill, or worse, an excuse to show off how clever you are.

It’s worth it because in the analysis Fred turns the books into a kind of accidental Screwtape Letters, an inverted plea for reason, imagination, and good writing. In excoriating their failures - bad theology, bad morals, an astonishing blindness to political realities, historical records, and English prose - the author illuminates the wider world. And the analysis begins in righteous wrath, to be sure, but amid the horror and the anger are flashes of compassion.

The books have always exercised a perverse fascination for me, and reading slacktivist I begin to understand why. They are the visible evidence of the spectre that haunts American Christianity: the mixture of cultural belligerence and craven superstition that is what you get when you have no healthy outlet for paganism. I’d always thought they were bad books and based on the theological equivalent of an urban legend, but it wasn’t until I read the one that involves the actual return of Christ that they turned from bad to Bad, from merely incompetent to active instruments of detriment.

(My other nomination for Worst Book in the World, by the way, is this.)

I am at that stage in my life, it seems, where I am bound to receive a lot of mail for other people. Mobile and living in housing for mobile people, I have seen mail for at least six other names come to this address. Usually they are not the kinds of missives from which one can glean much as to your ghost-lodgers character: packets of generic coupons, misplaced DMV missives - but the other day I received something truly remarkable.

“Your briefcase or beachbag,” proclaimed the flyer, “a PURITAN PAPERBACK is a perfect fit this summer.” No, this is not a line of romance novels; when they say “Puritan Paperback” they are actually talking about, um, Puritans. Seriously. Among their suggestions: “Acceptable Sacrifice, Bunyan, $8″, “Mortification of Sin, Owen, $9″, and “Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, Brooks, $9″.

Now, I have a great deal of fellow-feeling for anyone practicing a faith known to most as a historic curiosity. Still, of all the holdovers to revive, Puritanism? I may have grown up one town over from Cromwell, but I was under the impression that Puritanism in America has been pretty thoroughly transmuted into Congregationalism. But no, the Puritans are (or were) alive and well, and living (to judge by this mailing) in my house.

This one is for Martin.

Passing a good idea around (From Mirabai):

1. You guys tell me what kind of music you want.

I can’t make the song permanently available. Unless the song in question is already available on the band’s website (in which case, I’ll provide a link to their site instead of posting an mp3), I’ll be posting them on muxtape. 

This is what I get for capitulating to the patriarchy!

I opened my eyes.  It was 5:53.  Enough time to close them again, not enough time to really sink into sleep, which was what I wanted to do.  Someone presented me with a folded slip of paper.  I unfolded it, there were three headings: “Benign” “Region” and “Option”.  It was describing my alternatives.  None of them seemed really pleasant, the best of them seemed to be the one where I was a hostage in a Middle Eastern country.  “It’s still better than getting up for work,” I thought to myself.  “How glad I am that this is an option!”  Then my alarm went off.