Eric The Blue

Books of the Bible: Amos

Begins with the prophet denouncing, in formulaic phrases, the wickedness of nations that experts in ancient Mideast geography will recognize as neighbors of Israel.  The first auditors would have nodded in dull agreement.  You don't think twice about agreeing with your enemies' critics.  But then, without warning:

Thus says the Lord:
"For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment;
because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes--
they that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth,
and turn aside the way of the afflicted. . . ."

It is as if, when the revolving light lands upon Israel itself, the high beams click on.  For its neighbors, the language is flat and general: even upon repeated readings, you receive no vivid idea of the nature of the offenses.  Then Israel is called out, and now if you read twice or three times it is not to try to extract meaning.  God's chosen people have sold the needy for a pair of  shoes!  They have trampled upon the poor, grinding their  heads into the ground!  Amos is only warming up.

"Hear this word, you cows of Bashan,
who are in the mountain of Samaria,
who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,
who say to their husbands, 'Bring, that we may drink!'
The Lord God has sworn by his holiness
that, behold, the days are coming upon you,
when they shall take you away with hooks,
even the last of you with fishhooks.
And you shall go out through the breaches,
every one straight before her;
and you shall be cast forth into Harmon,"
says the Lord.

This is the Revised Standard Version; I haven't chosen a translation that strives to be colorful.  Since no place called "Harmon" has ever been identified, and the Hebrew characters that spell out that  place name diverge only slightly from those for  "dung-heap," some scholars have suggested that a better translation would have these Israelite women of ease suffering a distinctly shitty demise. 

So Israel cares not for the plight of the poor.  What does it care about?  Religious observance, worship services, displays of religiosity.  According to Amos, it fills God with disgust:

"I hate, I despise your feasts,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

The book states, at 7:10, that Amos was active when Jeroboam was king of Israel, which places it in the middle of the eighth century B.C.  In The Oxford Annotated Bible, the introduction to the book of Amos, by Old Testament editor Herbert May, notes that this was a period when "israel attained a height of territorial expansion and national prosperity never again reached."  It is hard to refrain from drawing historical parallels, and I'll save time by not even trying.  It seems unlikely that Amos would approve of Israel's treatment of the non-Jewish population of Palestine.  In our country, he would denounce the growing chasm between the wealthy and the poor; the alternating thumping of the Bible and coddling of the rich that characterizes the modern Republican party he would regard as an abomination.  Certain trends in evangelical Christianity, such as the preaching of a "prosperity gospel" by the pastor of a suburban megachurch here in Minnesota, would trigger a torrent of judgmental abuse. The book includes a biographical snippet that, as it describes Amos's brush with the political authority of his day, is in this regard of interest.  One Amaziah, priest of a sanctuary at Bethel, complained to Jeroboam that "the land is not able to bear all [Amos's] words," which of course included the prediction of Israel's--and therefore the king's--ruin. This may have been beneath Jeroboam's notice, but Amaziah, referring to Amos sarcastically as a "seer," bid him to "never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king's sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom."  Amos had earlier in the book expressed his opinion of the activities at these "temples":

"Come to Bethel, and transgress; to Gilgal, and multiply transgression;
bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days;
offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened,
and proclaim free will offerings, publish them;
for so you love to do, O people of Israel!"
says the Lord God.

He now answers Amaziah:

"Now therefore hear the word of the Lord.
You say,'Do not prophesy against Israel,
and do not preach against the house of Isaac.'
Therefore thus says the Lord:
'Your wife shall be a harlot in the city,
and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword,
and your land shall be parceled out by line;
you yourself shall die in an unclean land,
and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.'"

When conservative, upstanding Americans speak of the infallible and inerrant word of God, they do not have in mind the prophet Amos.

Best picture?

The other movie we saw in L.A., when I was fresh from being released from the hospital (and therefore too limpy for walking tours) and Amanda was fresh from having run a marathon (and therefore too limpy for walking tours), was Argo.  It held my interest, as for some reason I credited the theoretical possibility that the good guys would not unfailingly arrive just in time to avert disaster and that, in the climactic scene, the bad guys would not be a second too late. 

Sickness: the upsides

One prescription for longevity, according to someone (Lewis Thomas?), is to contract a chronic disease and then take good care of it. The idea is that the ill are less apt to smoke, or drink and drive, or drive fast without seat belts, or have unprotected sex with lots of partners, and are as a result likely to live, with an assist from modern medicine, all the days that their one piece of bad luck allows.  There are other upsides to illness.  For example, it is conducive to indoor pursuits.  I'd been making my way through Mansfield Park at the rate of two chapters per day, but, admitted to the hospital for a night and two days, I was through the last hundred pages in a single, sick-aided bound. 

I have to report that the novel does not work on me in the way I imagine Jane Austen intended.  I am not able to regard amateur theatricals as a gateway to depravity, or the high-spirited Crawford siblings as blackguards, or the adulterous affair of a family member as an occasion for personal humiliation and self-lacerating woe.  But what the hell?  Part of "the experience of literature" must be the broadening exposure to different outlooks.  Tolstoy was hysterical on the same general topics and he is probably one of the handful of people in the history of the world who was an even greater novelist than she.

Los Angeles II

We're home from California.  Amanda ran her marathon Sunday morning in 4:34:23 while her one-man support crew lounged in the Santa Monica branch of the UCLA Medical Center with blood clots in one of his lungs.  Bound by marriage and shortness of breath.

The onset of a pulmonary embolism, according to the Wikipedia article, is typically sudden.  In my case, I was wolfing down spaghetti at 7:00 and unable to sleep on account of chest pain by midnight.  An American needing medical attention in the wee hours of the morning while away from home would be better off almost anywhere in western Europe than in an adjoining state, where the phrase "out of network" has a plain meaning.  It's not obvious where you should go, and it could end up costing anything.  In civilized countries, the sick do not have to navigate other choppy seas, but this is America so Amanda and I darted about the World Wide Web in our Culver City motel room at two in the morning.  We decided to forgo the nearest options in favor of a hospital with "UCLA" in its name.  I think that was probably a good idea.  I got good care, and now that the emergency is over, I've learned that I have a $2500 per person annual maximum. I'm pretty sure I had enough fancy diagnostic tests, and a long enough stay, to blow past that, even if I'm only responsible for thirty per cent.  As I type, Amanda is out in the backyard inspecting our money tree for buds.  But it looks like a late spring.

All the brown-skinned people taking such good care of me in the hospital recalled to my mind one of Archie Bunker's more memorable lines:  "If you're really sick, make sure you get a Jew," he advised, in a grumping departure from his usual pronouncements concerning Jews.  From what I saw of Los Angeles, there are few Caucasions of any kind: it's a "majority minority" city full of quiet, plainly dressed, mostly young people with black hair, dark skin, and a "tap card" for the public transportation.  Who would have thought?  In Minnesota, certain facts about the last election--that Romney won the white vote by 59-39 but lost the election 47-51; that Romney won the over-30 vote by half a million but lost the election by 4.5 million--have a Ripley's believe-it-or-not quality.  But in Los Angeles these facts seem prosaic.  The Republicans have a problem so big even they can see it.

 

Los Angeles: this and that

We're in Los Angeles, where Amanda is running in the L.A. Marathon on Sunday.  When you don't travel much, everything is new, so I hope jaded frequent flyers will forgive my enthusiasm for the tapas snackbox served by United Airlines.  For a mere $8.59, you receive all of the following: a bag of marinated olives ("Oloves"), a bruschetta spread, hummus (served in a toothpaste-like tube), a cheese spread, pita chips, two different kinds of crackers, a small bag of almonds, and chocolate acai with blueberry (morsels of chocolate with a "juice piece" at the core).  

My one mild complaint is that I ran out of crackers before the various spreads were gone and was as a  consequence reduced to squirting hummus into my mouth directly from the tube.  Be liberal with your applications, and take the time to match the spread to the most suitable salty treat.

LAX is a dump.  It appears not to have been updated since Tom Hagen flew out there and ended up arranging a one-night stand between an entertainment exec and the head of his dead horse.  The departures and arrivals are listed on a screen that has a behind capable of accommodating a poker game.  And grime, everywhere.

On the credit side, I've been pleasantly surprised at how well the public transportation system seems to work.  The only inefficiencies we suffered have to be attributed to our own rookie mistakes. We've also rented a car, and those trips are more of an adventure.  Yesterday, we drove out to Yorba Linda from our motel in Culver City and it took so long that we were left with only an hour to tour the Nixon library and birthplace before it closed at five.  Amanda pointed out that for Democrats an hour is really more than enough.  Trying to make nice, she praised the layout of Nixon's boyhood home to the tour guide who was showing us around. 

The drive out made us afraid of trying to drive back during the evening rush hour, so we ate dinner in nearby Brea and saw a movie--"Silver Linings Playbook"--at the Brea mutiplex.  So mediocre you might be inclined to call it bad.  Eleven-fifty per ticket.

I see that Rob Portman, Republican from Ohio, has come out for gay marriage now that it turns out his son is gay.  I guess it's okay to wipe the floor with other people's kids but not with his.  At least we'll always have the pope to kick around. 

 

The human drama of athletic competition

How many times have I answered a version of the question, put to Woody Allen by his exasperated former love interest in Annie Hall, "What is so interesting about watching a bunch of pituitary cases stuff a ball through a hoop?"

Here two smart guys take up the question.  I can't say I disagree with their general conclusion.  On the other hand, so many of our entertainments are built upon market research--figure out what people like, then give it to them--that one might say, in defense of us fans, that at least the ninth inning hasn't been focus-group tested. 

By the way, Woody Allen's character has an answer.  "Because it's physical," he says.  She protests that he should remove himself from the tv in the den and rejoin the party, where professors and writers are having interesting conversations.  He sticks his hand down her blouse and says (I'm going by memory), "Just think!  They'll be out there discussing 'modes of alienation' and we'll be in here quietly humping.  Debusschere shoots from the corner, got it!"

On the editorial page

One of the mainstays of the prose style of wing-nut Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten--besides the dashed off parenthetic comment--is the use of scare quotes to indicate her scornful disapproval.  Thus in today's column:

The issue, they say, is a no-brainer--a simple matter of "equality," and the logical next step in the struggle against "discrimination."  The point is so obvious that anyone who questions their project must be a "bigot," and so drummed out of hearing in polite society.

She means that laws banning same-sex marriage are not discriminatory, that they in no way offend against the principle of equal protection, and that it would be wrong, very wrong, to call her a bigot.  Why is she right about this?  It has to do with something called "sexual complementarity," a phrase I put in quotes to indicate (1) that it is hers, not mine, and (2) its meaning is indistinct.

My best guess is that "sexual complementarity" is just a polysyllabic stand-in for "can't make babies."  Of course, there are a lot of heterosexual couples who can't make babies, or who have no intention of making any and would be quite distressed to discover that--woops!  Since Kersten doesn't appear to be upset by them, and doesn't support laws preventing them from obtaining the benefits of marriage, it appears to me that her position is, you know, "discriminatory," or even just discriminatory, and that she has a good start at qualifying as "a person who is obstinately and intolerantly devoted to her own opinions and prejudices." 

Home from work

Home from work.  Not a cold, not the flu.  On Monday I slipped and fell on a patch of ice and hurt my knee badly enough so that I am ambulatory again today for the first time.  Maybe I could have gone to work, but I feel gimpy enough to justify staying home.  It's unusual and pleasant to be alone in the house, doing what I want, like listening to music, which is impossible while the TV is going or children are asleep, which is approximately all the time that I am at home and awake.  Except for today.

I had something nice happen to me while I was limping to Urgent Care on Monday.  I was in bad enough shape so that, at intersections, I had to wait to begin crossing till the light was newly green.  It must have taken me twenty minutes to walk the few hundred yards from my work to the nearest Urgent Care.  When I had maybe a hundred yards to go, someone whose appearance screamed--Poverty!--African American woman, 20-something, overweight, smoking a cigarette, shabbily dressed in outer wear not warm enough for the weather--came up from behind me like forty others had during this odyssey.  But she stopped and asked whether I had hurt myself.  Was I going to the hospital?  Could she help me?  Would I like to lean on her?  "I'm strong," she laughed.  So that's how I traversed the last sixty yards or so.  (It took her about forty torturous yards to break down my idiotic Scandinavian reserve.) 

At the Urgent Care, when they had collected the $30 co-pay that I believe is intended to keep people who don't need medical attention away from the doctor, they transferred me to the ER after watching me try to take my pants off.  I then spent the next ninety minutes observing what there is to observe in the waiting area of a big-city public hospital's emergency room.  According to the philosopher Schopenhauer, you can gauge whether there is in the world a preponderance of happiness over misery, or the other way around, by considering the feelings of two animals, one of which is on the point of beginning to eat the other.  You reach the same conclusion at the ER of the Hennepin County Medical Center.  When I began receiving medical attention, and could overhear the conversations occurring in adjoining examination rooms, I didn't change my mind.

Here's what I'm listening to right now.

 

 

Cardinal Keith O'Brien: the beat goes on

Keith O'Brien, the recently retired head of the Roman Catholic Church's Britain Division, said in a statement today: "I wish to take this opportunity to admit that there have been times that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a priest, archbishop and cardinal."  Some comments.

1. The language, which presumably was labored over by people with Catholic educations, is more stilted than that of teen-aged confessors to "impure thoughts."  Everyone knows there aren't standards, just a standard, and that it forbids everything that falls under the heading, "sexual conduct." You'd think these clods could do better.

2. But they had been doing even worse before today.  O'Brien at first denied the allegations against him and indicated, through spokesmen, that he was considering legal remedies against the newspaper that reported them.  A few days later he admits it's all true.  These guys can carry around staffs and dress up in funny clothes and hats but one recognizes a pattern that applies to those who don't claim any special expertise in the field of morals.  Deny, deny, deny.  Then, if it turns out that they've got the goods on you, issue a "frank" apology to those who "may be offended." 

3. The Church's high officials are unable to see what this all looks like to people who aren't blinded by their devotion to a bureaucracy that has had the great good sense to promote them into its upper echelons. It's not that there are some bad peaches.  The orchard's soil is rotten.  The only people who don't understand this have read Augustine's Confessions in the original Latin.

4. The celibacy requirement for priests should be abolished.  In theory, it's a sacrifice, but in practice it has the effect of screening out healthy people.  The priesthood has become a hideaway for cripples whose sexual predilictions have to be secret in any case.  This is another thing understood by virtually eveyone who hasn't studied Catholic theology.

5. O'Brien himself seems to have understood. Just a couple of days before the allegations surfaced in news reports, he said in a BBC interview that priests should be able to be husbands and fathers.  He had a reputation for "liberal" views and was therefore required to swear an oath of fealty to Catholic orthodoxy before becoming a cardinal in 2003.  He then appears to have toed the line in public while continuing in private his double life.  It's evident he wanted to be a cardinal.  But what does he think about his Church's teachings?