Meditations on a Foreign Sortie, Part the first

In which I dupe the German TSA

I have nothing against the Transportation Security Administration. They are a lovely organisation of patriots whose competence and value to these United States cannot be impugned. Also, please don't put me in prison. But the German variety has really got their number.

I was in Germany the other day, Dusseldorf to be precise, and more or less against my will. I blame Delta for this, as well as the fifth columnists in New York public transportation services. But I had had a long and tiring week, and was exhausted and a little sick. But when the stewardess started passing out medical forms before we landed, I knew it was time for subterfuge. Obviously, they were screening for der swine flu, and I was not about to be trapped in some German quarantine. So (and I admit this only because I have no plans ever to return - we don't have an extradition treaty with them, do we?) I lied. There were boxes to check with symptoms... and I left them all blank. Crazy. Then it was just a matter of striding nonchalantly through the phalanx of medical staff, handing off the form, and bluffing my way through customs. I also corrected the grammar of the English version, which I am sure they appreciated. Smooth criminal.

So having broken through to freedom, and feeling very much species: man of mystery, genus: international, I wended steadily outside, and proceeded to be lost for approximately the next fifty minutes.

To quote from Austen: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an airport with the name of a city large enough to be interesting must be within convenient walking distance of said city. Leave it to Jerry to blow my tidy paradigm out of the water, just like the Lusitania. Apparently there is nothing close to Dusseldorf Airport except more Dusseldorf Airport, and finally in desperation I sought parley with a native.

I was vaguelly disappointed that she answered me in perfect English, as I had been concocting and declining a foolproof back-up plan that consisted of asking her in Latin. Germany, as everyone knows, has a laudable tradition of classical scholarship, and it goes without saying that airport employees would know the once-international language of business, culture and the Church.

But as I say she knew the modern one, and I finally and disappointedly found myself upon the metro.

Meditations on a Foreign Sortie, a Prologue

In which the Author asserts the relative Veracity of his Account

It's like the man said. With the possible exception of the made-up bits - because who really wants to read about me getting on a plane and eating peanuts whilst the world turns smoothly? - the vast majority of what follows shall be substantially the truth. At least from some conceivable perspective.

Hard Prayers

Our church has just begun a series on Habakkuk entitled "hard prayers" with the idea that the prophet's passionate, nigh accusatory address (and subsequent acceptance of the Divine prerogative of justice) represent a model for our own relationship to God's promises. This seems fine and lovely and quite necessary: we have not because we ask not, maybe the reason I am not so good a Christian as I might be is my own slothfulness in expecting God to change me.

What I want to know is, how about the other hard prayers in Scripture? For example, I was reading in Judges yesterday and ran across the song of Deborah, where she basically spends a couple verses making fun of Sisera's mom's soon-to-be devasting grief over the prospect of her virile warrior son lying with a spike crushed through his head. Am I allowed to pray like that? Seems downright uncharitable somehow.

Perhaps it goes along with the temporal context of holy war: no-one argues that today it's alright for me to sack Jerusalem and burn it with fire, or to pig-stick fat despots, even if I am left-handed. Likewise, the reasoning would go, I have no right to wish that sort of distress on anyone, let alone celebrate the fact.

On the other hand, that line of reasoning also rules out a good many Psalms, and maybe one or two things that Paul says in re, for example, high priests and smiting. And what about the damned? Ought we to say their condemnation is just... and yet be brokenhearted?

Religion and Politics

And other topics for when the company comes over.

In light of recent events (by which I mean "I was thinking in the shower this morning") I have decided to become a-political. The amount of time I spend reading newsmagazines, following opinion journalists, and bemoaning the state of the union is absurd. (Not to mention the amount of time I spent playing Diplomacy online when I should ought to have been writing papers last semester... does that count as political involvement? What about Risk? Discuss.) These things are not important. I'm not invested in America, or at least I shouldn't be: we are citizens of a heavenly kingdom. I suppose I might still vote...

The fallacy of Firefly

In a parodic application of the scholarly credentials I one day hope to win, I read a book of theoretical essays on the failed yet awesome Joss Whedon television show Firefly. Jenny and I recently finished watching the season on Hulu, culminating with the feature film, and now in feverish avoidance of actual work, rather than some sensible divertissemente like playing Frisbee, I spend my time critiquing the barely literate.

Not that the essays are terribly written: they're about what one would expect from TV fanatics, which is to say profoundly lacking in references to Augustine and the Scholastic renaissance. (This is my standard essay format. Point 1: Author X tries to show Y. Point 2: Here is how Dante does the same thing, better, in terza rima. Conclusion: Author X should give up.) But there is a pervasive and aggravating fallacy that they seem to share with Whedon which drives me nuts.

One of the show's most common tropes is the absolute denial of transcendence. Captain Malcolm Reynolds is at his best confronting an abstract principle of some variety - best seen in the movie in the person of the Operative, but also in now-deceased character of Book - and denying it in favour of an immanent situational requirement. As Nathan Fillion, the actor who played him, said, "Mal didn't have any grand dreams, he didn't have any great causes or goals." Unlike, say, the Operative, (citing Eric Greene) whose "ideals have been severed from the true values that arise from lived human experience: the need for self-determination, the importance of dissent, the simple moral imperative that children should not be kidnapped, killed, or turned into killers... faith, in the eyes of Serenity's aethist writer/director, is a problem."

So instead of faith in abstract ideals, which as we learn from the series is pretty much synonymous with setting teenagers on fire and authorising large-scale massacres, Mal upholds pragmatic, tangible values such as freedom of the press? How about the Fourteen points, while you're at it, or the three-word motto of the Jacobins? It is such tiresome lapses of reason - or rather the complete absence of thought - which stain what might otherwise have been a clever, even brilliant show. Sigh.

Death and...

En route to the post office this morning, weighed down by sorrow and four absurdly thick envelopes of tax documentation (albeit considerably lighter, fiscally speaking, than they might have been - hurrah for Brilliant Wife) - weighed down I say, there met my eye a mob in miniature demonstrating without the aedifice. One fellow had a ball and chain wrapped about his leg of dubious authenticity, judging by his gait; a stout damsel, rather more so than her altitude, bore like the head of a former French aristocrat a sign inscribed with revolutionary ardour: "break the tax slaves chains." It is probable the word "sheeple" appeared as well. (White Person that I am, it first occured to me to deplore the evidence that zeal for English grammar had not likewise consumed her.)

Having rendered unto Caesar, who would not doubt have appreciated the ablative absolute in memoriam sui, I returned to parley with the restless natives, feeling quite the amateur ambassador. It seemed upon interrogation that the anarchists were a house divided: Ball and Chain considered roads and sewage systems not wholly despicable, he simply posited that one might have them substantially shorter rates. The Ithacan Defarge, however, laughed him to scorn. Government, she swore, was not only unethical but futile. Private citizens, using private means, would suffice for the just ordination of society. The dream of Proudhon was manifested in her eyes: a universe of lascia stare, in which all humans coexisted, each contented with his own, and none constrained by violence to obey. It was glorious - the ambassador from civilisation felt his paltry cloak of hierarchic manners slip aside. I proclaimed myself a convert, but did not fall upon my knees - it seemed ill-measured to the new philosophy. Rather, I hit her with a largish rock and stole her purse.

Thoughts in re: the Good Friday service.

Tonight my church and another in town held a joint good Friday service. It was very stimulating.

One speaker mentioned the affective power of Jesus' despairing question: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Obviously Jesus knew the answer. It occurs to me, however, that rather than a simple cry of animal pain, it may well have been rhetorical. That is to say: perhaps it was intended to remind the listener. The answer to his question is of course beyond question and concise. Why indeed was he forsaken? Me.

***

I know it's quite Romantic of me, but still. During the eucharist, a woman of a certain age played an air the name of which I don't recall upon the viola. Bach, perhaps. It was dreadful: ill tone quality, intonation worse. But then I reflected: this woman now accompanies the smashing of my Lord, the sublime humiliation of the world's prince; why on earch should it be sung in any but the humblest mode? Let it be cried out in the weakest treble, let her scratch upon her tuneless scrap of wood, let the very rocks and stones of earth adjoin their voices to the choir. The harshest broken notes can do no less to celebrate the Deity who let himself be crushed.

The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Avaricity of Coffeeshops
(In which the author discovers, to his horror, that his local cafe charges full price for refills.)

How much does a cup of coffee cost the coffee shop? Considering the known variables: standard wholesale price for coffee beans, cost of water, price of two minutes employee time (@ 7.50/hr), proportionate maintenance expense... I am coming up with something on the order of about a nickel, and that's if they use deluxe beans and buy the coffee farmer a new burro every Christmas. So, okay, given that they charge around a dollar fifty per cup (which, calling my advanced math skills into play, yields a profit of approximately 3,000%), how in the name of all that is decent in the world can they possibly justify charging the same price for a refill? This is a classic case of usury - they obviously aren't selling coffee, as my initial payment covers the price of my next thirty cups and the farmer's annual new burro (what is he doing that he needs another every year? Is he building a herd?), so they must be charging me, at extreme interest, for the time it takes to drink it.

Which is a grave inhumanity: time is not the commodity of man, that we should put it up for sale. Like the soul itself, it is drawn inexorably to its end, and heralds on its silent wings the very judgment of the world. Does this awesome current seem a bauble to be vended on the street by our modern pirate-kings? I say thee nay!

Like the Buddha in spirit, if of body less well-padded, I hereby renounce, decry and vituperate such vaultingly ambitious greed. I laugh their very mockery to scorn. For what is it but a mockery of justice: to establish such a rule as the 'price' after the accustomed manner of wholesome trade? As fit payment for such vice, I shall have no further part supporting it. My coffee shop days are at an end. Perhaps someday, some happy day, I shall again in fellowship and cheer new venue for my patronage descry. But until then, I kick the dust from my sandals and homeward stride with twofold purpose. Namely, to keep from getting frostbite; and possibly, with the extra money, to save up for a burro of my own.