I crossed the Delaware out of New York state on the feast of the Epiphany. I will be on the road for awhile.
Crossing the Delaware.
07-Jan-12Botanical Latin R.I.P.?
02-Jan-12There are new regulations in place as of 2012 which allow new species to be described in the vernacular. Since Latin-death, like climate change, tends to accelerate rather than slow down, this could mean the whole edifice will come crashing down. That said, I suspect a lot of this is aimed at speeding up the process of describing fungi; and Latin is very firmly established in the world of fungi, because most mushrooms don’t even have common names. A friend was telling me about the Audubon Guide to mushrooms – Audubon requires that common names be included – so the writer just made them up, on the spot, by the hundreds, for all those with unfindable “common names.”
Anyway, we’ll see what happens. “English is the new Latin,” as the bishops say, so maybe we’ll be talking about “scientific English” and “Botanical English” soon.
Voodoo Sacrifice.
31-Dec-11
In Forest Park there is a place atop a little glacial hill where the ground levels out briefly into a small platform; many decades ago, probably before the park was owned by the city, a small concrete basin was poured there, which was never removed. It made a convenient pit for fires, and became the reputed scene of devil worship in the park: as a kid we would go visit the pit (daytime hours only of course) and find occasional animal bones in there along with the more predictable beer cans and Colt .45 bottles. I remember the place being called “Riders” by us kids, though I don’t know where the name came from, and it is such a dim memory I don’t know if it is accurate anymore. Perhaps the name “Riders” was painted on a nearby rock?
I passed by it today and found that it was still living up to its old reputation: there was a black garbage bag just a few steps from the pit, with flies buzzing around it on this warm December day, and inside the bag was the torso of some dead animal: from its size I thought at first it was a dog, but its short tail and long neck suggest to me that it was an adult goat. The head – I mean, obviously, this is Queens – was removed. The feet had also been cut off. I thought at first that the absence of head and feet might be due to animals gnawing them off (they did stick out of the bag) but they appeared to have been cut by something sharp. And animals generally go for the organs, which are far more nutritious. The body had not yet been ripped open and was not bloated.
Any lingering suspicion that this was just an unceremonious tossaway of Woofers the family dog was quelled by the fact that the garbage bag was filled with potatoes and corn, including the husks. The corn had been gnawed, presumably by mice and squirrels.
Does anyone know if there are specific Santeria rituals combining goats, potatoes, and corn?
This neck looks a bit long for a dog.
The Federation of Black Cowboys.
31-Dec-11
So I’m walking out of Forest Park, and what do I see? A big red trailer with a bunch of horses on it – with the logo The Federation of Black Cowboys.
The Bayside Prophet.
31-Dec-11
Veronica Leuken, the Bayside Prophet.
Stumbled across the writings of Veronica Leuken, the authoress of a series of mad, mildly sadistic and occasionally humorous prophecies revealed to her by the Blessed Virgin and Jesus in – where else? – Bayside, Queens. As with all prophecies – one of the very worst habits of the Biblical tradition – they are a combination of patent certainties (one of the prophecies: “your country [the U.S.] will soon be embroiled in another war”), old-fashioned moralizing (“Do not feel, parents, that you are doing unjustment to your children when you reprimand them for doing wrong.”), and apocalyptic sadist fantasies (“A killer comet hovers – at least a billion people will perish.”). Some of the detailing is worth the price of admission – “unjustment” and “billion” above are quite priceless in their own way, as is the following account of a beatific vision of Mary:
Oh, and Our Lady is coming directly through that star. She’s stepping down as though She was held up on the pedestal there. Our Lady is stepping down and She’s looking all about Her. It’s not still up there; there seems to be a wind because it’s blowing Her skirt back and forth.
Our Lady looks so fragile and so beautiful. And there’s a light emanating from Her. There’s a light shining that makes Her look so beautiful that there are no human words to describe.
Now Our Lady is looking up and smiling. I, I understand She is looking at what just went overhead and making quite a bit of noise [an airplane]. Now Our Lady is smiling, and She’s coming down to almost now – very close to us. And Our Lady touches her finger to her mouth.
The airplane is a Queens touch that really even the greatest artist would fear to put on paper. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
The billion-person-devouring comet she mentioned she gave the interesting name “the Ball of Redemption.”
“You must keep a stern attitude also toward the rearment of your children. Many will die in the great flame of the Ball of Redemption. How many will be saved, the count is only known by the Eternal Father.
“My child and My children, please, I ask – I’m willing to beg you as your Mother to save your children and also in the end, save your own souls.
“My child, you will sit back and wait, because I have a great surprise for you in a short while, but I am now stepping back as I have a conversation with someone, My child, who you know.”
Veronica – Oh, over Our Lady’s side, on Her left side, I see the sky opening up and – oh, it’s Jesus! He’s standing right next to Our Lady on Her left side. And He’s wearing a long, sort of an ecru-colored gown and sandals. I can see His feet from down here. He has on brown sandals. They look like leather; I think they’re leather.
And He has on a cape, an ecru, almost white-colored cape over His gown. It’s quite, it’s quite a bit chilly over here. That is why I would assume that Jesus is wearing His cape.
Queens NY.
31-Dec-11
Jamaica Avenue, old siding under the El.
Simplify.
31-Dec-11From the Charles Gray Dept.:
I think my greatest accomplishment of 2011 – certainly the one Thoreau would most approve of – is not purchasing a single article of clothing – no coats, no hats, no gloves, no shirts, no underwear, no socks, no shoes, no belts, nothing. “Beware any enterprise that requires new clothes.” Honesty requires me to admit that someone gave me a (used) t-shirt and someone else gave me a (used) scarf, which last I seem to have lost. I’ve never purchased many clothes – I really don’t even know where a lot of my clothes have come from, they just seem to be in my life by no agency of my own – but I doubt I’ve gone through a year where I was the cause of no activity in the textile industry. I did plan on buying a pair of shoes, but not finding any I liked I forewent the footwear and found that I could get another year out of the ones I had.
It’s the Sermons and Music, Stupid!
30-Dec-11When you talk to Catholics about the problem with mass, they really say the same thing all the time: the sermons and the music are terrible. The sermon is the main problem, and is often offensively dumb and bigoted, and the music is just bad. I had a brilliant idea: since everyone agrees about this – and I think that’s true, because literally I hear this comment on the order of fifty times a year, and I don’t even talk about this topic often – I figured, “let me start a campaign to tell this to the Archdiocese. Who knows, maybe something will happen! Maybe the clergy really don’t know what to do and would welcome an idea. And I bet I can get thousands, thousands of people to send emails! Maybe it’ll go viral!” It would be very easy to implement: all sermons have to be less than two minutes long (maybe three). This is an easily measured rubric, and to be honest no one ever remembers more than three minutes of any sermon ever anyway, so it really would be an improvement.
So I went to the homepage of the Archdiocese to find their “contact us” info – I figured I’d post it on Facebook – and of course, they have nothing of the sort. Their contact page is for journalists or people looking for records. It’s quite clear that they don’t care what we think. How atrocious. I mean, for Christ’s sake, even Halliburton has a decent and personable contact page. Literally.
“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Catholic Charities on the Dole.
30-Dec-11Catholic Charities in Illinois has closed down all its foster-care operations rather than comply with new regulations allowing same-sex couples to adopt. The bishops’ lawyers are out, contesting that they have a First Amendment right to freedom of religion, and hence do not have to abide by state regulations; which sounds mildly plausible, until you hear that in fact they are receiving government money to run these foster-care centers:
… much of its revenue comes from the government. Catholic Charities affiliates received a total of nearly $2.9 billion a year from the government in 2010, about 62 percent of its annual revenue of $4.67 billion. Only 3 percent came from churches in the diocese (the rest came from in-kind contributions, investments, program fees and community donations).
It’s hard for me to conceive how Catholic Charities came to be a majority-taxpayer-funded operation. It makes fairly risible the idea that we should get rid of the welfare state and let charitable organizations do it all: It sounds like if the government pulled its supporting funds, the entire Catholic Charities edifice would collapse. The parishes – the actual people in the pews – have almost no connection at all (three percent!).
Dan Savage points out that you can’t take people’s money and not let them have a say in how it’s used. And despite the lawyers getting involved and the bishops grexing, that’s ultimately what is happening: the churches are refusing the money and the rules that go with them, and shuttering the charities.
Which leaves us with the issue of priorities. CC’s regulations do not require any particular religious affiliation (“We welcome prospective parents of all religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds who have a financially secure and stable family life.”), presumably because they recognize the value of a child being cared for, no matter what the religious beliefs of the foster parents. But a same-sex couple is excluded, even if they are Catholic. They will close down the entire system before they allow such a thing. The priorities displayed here do not reflect well on the bishops and do not immediately suggest themselves to common sense.
I am reminded of Chesterton’s assault on the Tolstoyans, who he felt represented the modern danger of fundamentalism perfectly – the problem of “reasonable insanity,” i.e. the operation of reason to the exclusion of our native moral sense. (Ironically, he considered the Catholic Church a bulwark against all this). I will let him speak:
If anyone wishes to form the fullest estimate of the real character and influence of the great man [Tolstoy], … he will find it best expressed in the news that has recently come from Canada, that a sect of Russian Christian anarchists has turned all its animals loose, on the ground that it is immoral to possess them or control them…. To the languid contemporary politician and philosopher it seems doubtless like something out of a dream, that in this iron-bound, homogeneous, and clockwork age, a company of European men in boots and waistcoats should begin to insist on taking the horse out of the shafts of the omnibus, and lift the pig out of his pig-sty, and the dog out of his kennel, because of a moral scruple or theory. It is like a page from some fairy farce to imagine the Doukhabor [anarchists] solemnly escorting a hen to the door of the yard and bidding it a benevolent farewell as it sets out on its travels…. A sect of men start with no theology at all, but with a simple doctrine that we ought to love our neighbor and use no force against him, and they end in thinking it wicked to carry a leather handbag, or to ride in a cart. A great modern writer who erases theology altogether, denies the validity of the Scriptures and the Churches alike, forms a purely ethical theory that love should be the instrument of reform, and ends by maintaining that we have no right to strike a man if he is torturing a child before our eyes. He goes on, he develops a theory of the mind and the emotions, which might be held by the most rigid atheist, and he ends by maintaining that the sexual relation out of which all humanity has come, is not only not moral, but is positively not natural. This is fanaticism as it has been and as it always will be.
So it is with a group of nuns and priests closing down an orphanage because they don’t like the abnormal sex life of a few otherwise acceptable couples who show up hoping to adopt a child. Common sense here says merely that the love the prospective parents are offering trumps any uncertainty about the effects of homosexuality just as it has been already determined to trump differences of religious creed. If it can be shown to be a bad idea, later on, for children to be in homosexual households, then by all means, present the data and make the case and change the policy.
Disconnection.
02-Jan-12One of the strange and unpleasant things about being away from my cabin is the fact that I can be contacted at any moment, and, being in need of employment, I have nothing particularly better to do; and so I find myself constantly opening my phone, or refreshing my computer screen, like a five-year-old trying to grow potatoes, digging them up every few hours to see if they’ve gotten any bigger. It feels unhealthy and weird; and I must confess that time at the cabin has not strengthened me against temptation; it has only isolated me from it. The center of my being shifts from inside to out; you live in constant expectation of something from outside which can inflect your day.
Pico Iyer wrote a finely-worded piece about this phenomenon in the Times; the writing, I must say, is unusually silky and nice, and its general parabolic purport – disconnection is the route to true connection – is congenial and wise. I will confess, though, that I left the piece with a terrible case of moral indigestion, as I cannot imagine how a man who seems so cultured otherwise could possibly be involved in the first person in so morally repugnant a sentence as the following:
If there ever was an event which deserved to be hit by an asteroid I think that was it. (I take back everything negative I ever said about Prophetic Sadism – if there are conferences in the world called “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow,” and the people who attend them can be considered respectable human beings, then as far as I am concerned the Ball of Redemption cannot come fast enough.) I am going to give Mr. Iyer the benefit of the doubt and presume that he came to the conference to thunder against the moral atrocity of preying for your own profit on the innocence of a child.