Civil Commotion

Sometimes, a vine is just a vine.

Here’s a nice set of webcams on the Outer Banks, most of them pointed out to sea. Hard to say, though, how long any of them will be in service.

“When the going gets weird,” Hunter Thompson once said, “the weird get going.” Thus, we have the spectacles of Glenn Beck, a Mormon, summoning evangelical Christians to revival and, in Oklahoma City, a Satanic Church renting a city-owned convention facility to hold a public exorcism of God. No kidding.

The leader of an Satanic church firmly planted in the Bible Belt has raised eyebrows by renting a theater in the Oklahoma City Civic Center for a ritual exorcism of God.

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Though the police have been notified of the potential for violence — Hale said his members and other Church of Satan supporters have received letter bombs and been shot at in the past — the city is not preparing any special accomodations for the event.

City leaders are already getting testy e-mails, and local preachers have doubtless got the material for several sermons.

I love stories like this; they’re good examples of how crazy people really are.

The Jewish tribe formed out of the underclass at the collapse of the Assyrian city-state system; they were a cosmopolitan polyglot from all over the then-known world, and they remained substantially pagan for almost 1000-years. King Josiah, fanatically monotheist and occupying his throne uneasily, decided around 625 B.C. to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. During construction, a copy of an ancient Mosaic text was ‘discovered’ in the ruins; scholars agree all but universally that the discovered text was a forgery, planted to serve Josiah’s monotheistic agenda and, incidentally, secure his political power.

The text commanded that the Jews were to perform sacrifices at only one temple: the temple in Jerusalem. In this way, Josiah succeeded in imposing monotheism upon the Jews and moving the locus of Judaism to his front door.

But this created a problem nobody had foreseen:

“Yo, Rabbi! We want to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“There is only one god, right?”

“Yes.”

“And he is all-knowing?”

“Yes.”

“And he is all-powerful?”

“Yes.”

“And he loves us?”

“Yes.”

“And we are his chosen people? His special beloved children?”

“Yes.”

“So: How come we’re always getting the crap beat out of us?

You can see the problem. Now, right then, the rabbi could have said, “Go ask your mother,” and that would have been the end of it. But he didn’t. No. He invented Satan to explain misfortune.

So: The transformation of the Jews to monotheism was a political necessity resting upon chicanery, and Satan was invented to sustain it.

Today, more than two and one-half millennia later, though every seminary-educated preacher in the land knows the story, a bunch of yahoos in Oklahoma are holding a Satanic exorcism and equally ignorant Pious folk are quavering with the vapors.

And the only part of the story that isn’t totally made-up, the only part that isn’t a cynical self-serving fiction … is the anger and fear of the believers and the money their preachers will be putting in the bank.

The Nazi invasion of Poland begins, provoking a British declaration of war under the terms of a mutual defense treaty.

September 1, 1939
W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.