jumpingfish

“When are you leaving?” Trudy texted.

“In 30 minutes,” I texted back.

By the time I left, which was almost certainly longer than the promised 30 minutes, it was mostly dark. I walked across the parking lot and made my way to where the car was parked.

The sky was glowing that urban gray that low skies glow when the city lights reflect off the low-lying clouds. But it was dark in the shadows under the Oaks and Elms. You could only barely make out the green of their leaves, because it was that time of day when colors flee and shades of night set in.

“Hoo. Hoo-hooo.”

I stopped and looked up.

“Hoo. Hoo-hooo.”

I stood a bit longer, trying to find where the owl was perched that I might see golden-glowing Great-Horned eyes. It was somewhere up in the canopies, and although it was hardly being shy, it was not about to reveal itself.

So I humored myself into thinking that I knew where it sat — somewhere just up there on that branch over in that tree among those shadows.

Then I got in the car and drove home.

Juan Cole has an analysis of the soon-to-be cabinet and their views on political islam, a term he has a little trouble with, since it’s often used (my interpretation) in a context that ignores obvious (?) parallels with political movements in other religions.

He points out that whereas the term is used to whip up right-wing hysteria, it fits alongside what we might call political judaism and political christianity.

Political Islam is the attempt to make Islam the basis for a political ideology that would dictate government policy. It is analogous to Zionism, which makes Jews the basis for a political ideology. It is also analogous to the Christian Right in the US, which makes Christianity a political ideology and pursues the Christianization of American law (e.g. striving to ban abortion, to outlaw sex outside Christian marriage, etc.)

So to connect the dots, we should be equally hysterical about christianists who yearn for a christian caliphate.

Christian caliphate!? What on earth are you talking about, man!?

Well, have you ever seen this bumper sticker?

Stop and think about this for a second.

The key phrase is in that order, subtly rendered in a small font at the bottom but proudly rendered in red. The driver declares that their christian religious values trump their conservative political ones and that those trump their American ones (pun intended).

This is a proclamation that constitutional values are subservient to christian ones — equivalent to a call for a christian caliphate.

So why isn’t that cause for hysteria?

She helped me find a pair of running shoes. The ones I’ve been running in need replacing, or will soon. And the store was having a 10% off sale, so I found myself in the market for a new pair. But I didn’t have the faintest idea what to get, nor did I particularly care, because the days of me feeling strongly about my shoes have passed.

Still, I needed something to replace my wearing out pair, so when she walked past where I was sitting, I asked for some help.

It didn’t take long. She knew what she was talking about. And she was able to bring out several boxes for me to try on that were probably sufficient replacements. 

I tried one pair, and they didn’t feel right. I tried another pair, and they felt great. And the final pair slipped loosely on my heels as I walked, so I never even got up to a jog in them.

“I’ll take the Mizunos,” I told her. “How much are they?”

“$120.00,” she said.

“And with 10% off,” Trudy added…

“Oh, I can’t do that math,” she said.

She can’t do that math. Ten percent of 120? I know I’m being harsh, but what a shame. She knew the shoes in the store. She was a runner. She was friendly and cheerful. But she didn’t know how to calculate ten percent of 120.

No wonder, I thought to myself. No wonder we got to where we are.

0. What I won’t discuss

Yesterday the sky was blue and the sun shined down from the sky as Trudy and I ran our six-mile long run.

Yesterday our Rain Lilies exploded into a white-and-yellow supernova, attracting butterflies away from the other delights here and there in the back and front yard.

Yesterday, I saw a Monarch imbibing on the blossom of a Blue Mist Flower, drunk perhaps with the nectar of it, focused perhaps on making it to Costa Rica for the winter.

But I will not discuss these things.

Rather I have three links to share. In the past weeks, they helped me be (in some sense) more joyful than I might otherwise have been.

They helped me put my head together.

1. Black Jeopardy

SNL has been hitting it out of the park, lately. The skits have been funny, which we might expect of them. But they have been (in my opinion) deep. Perhaps the most significant in my limited sampling of SNL (which I do not watch per se, because we do watch TV and frankly don’t care to devote that much time to something that had of late descended into irrelevance) is the Black Jeopardy skit with Tom Hanks as a good-ol-boy Trump supporter.

It was funny. But more importantly, it was… important. It showed the turning of our left-right political spectrum back on itself. It showed the red and blue ends meeting in some kind of intersection (without over-romanticizing it). This was something I tried to talk about here. It’s something that the establishment (pundits, politicians, bureaucrats, the press) managed to completely ignore.

It’s worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. There’s a very important message for the left to be derived from it.

2. Live From New York

You’ve probably seen the Clinton skits on SNL. They’ve been going on for a while, and if nothing else they have given Kate McKinnon a chance to show how good she is. In particular, the SNL cold open debate skits in which she and Alec Baldwin parodied Trump and Clinton have been blockbusters.

Last night, McKinnon played Clinton at the piano singing Leonard Cohen’s Halleluja. 

This isn’t comedy. This isn’t what I think of as SNL. It’s literature. It’s philosophy. It’s consolation. And it is something quite different from what I have come to expect from television.

3. Culture Matters

This Golem XIV article is a long read. It’s worth it. I can’t do it justice here.

There’s Brexit. There are immigrants on the beach. There’s a painful clash of cultures. There’s globalism and free trade and the emptiness of being nothing more than an economic entity in a world otherwise devoid of meaning.

The writing is spectacular. The discussion is provocative and profound. It outlines an intellectual framework for making sense of a lot of things that have been bouncing around our society.