America: A Land of Prophets

Warning. The world is ending. Don't believe me? Just look up in the sky!

I think it's important to maintain a healthy distance between human beings and their ideas. People are much more than their thoughts. I'm an ardent follower of the Enlightenment Project and its ideological stance expressed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all thirty articles of it, and particularly the first one, which reads:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

But the fact that I make such a declaration publicly doesn't prove that I put what I say into practice. For that you really need to observe my behavior over time. The important thing isn't me or others who make the same claim; it's the idea which is broadly shared by people of good will.

It is important, I think, that we make such declarations, that people defend democracy even when their voting habits suggest they don't practice what they preach. Sometimes, I think, people listen to themselves and talk themselves into things.

The other side of the coin is that all sorts of stupid things come out of people's mouths, and given some time for reflection, they retract those moments of carelessness. They deserve a chance to retract the occasional slip. And also they should be given the liberty to change their minds.

Consider the evangelical preacher John Hagee, for example, the guy who founded Christians United for Israel. He's a literal fundamentalist. If the Bible tells us Noah put animals in his ark two by two, it bothers John Hagee not a whit that there probably wasn't enough room for lions and tigers and giraffes and deer each to get a separate room or how it was that the pairs were 100% fertile and once the ark let everybody off on Mount Ararat, they were all able to keep their species going.

I think John Hagee's lack of familiarity with even the stuff of elementary school science classes makes him look like an idiot. I'd still shake his hand and offer him coffee or tea should he pass my way. But I'd also want to check out whether his ideas are simple b.s. or whether they actually cause harm. Does he hurt Catholics when he calls their church the "whore of Babylon"? I'd let that one go, but then again, I'm not a Roman Catholic. What about Palestinians, or Israelis who believe the answer to the standoff in the Middle East must be solved by getting Israelis and Palestinians to work together?

Of course, maybe koala bears and polar bears and grizzly bears really did all fit together somehow. Hagee's claim that the Noah's Ark tale was not some kind of exercise of early biblical imagination but a literal historical event doesn't bother me anywhere near as much as his claim that God used Hitler to punish the Jews for not following his commandments. And check out his 1990 sermon where he tells you God had another purpose, as well: he wanted the Jews to have the motivation to found the State of Israel. Which they had to do to before they could all convert and become Christians, and fulfill biblical prophecy. I've decided that was Hagee simply having a dumber-than-shit moment. Let it pass. Maybe.

Whether you take this claim as evidence that Hagee is just another half-witted televangelist making a personal fortune from leading the vulnerable and the clueless to part with their shekels, or whether he's totally sincere, he illustrates this bizarre everyday phenomenon that is American religiosity. The problem is when we gave "faith" a seat at the table along with "reason," we opened the floodgates to the tragedy we live with today, where anybody can come up with the most cockamamie proposition imaginable and defend it with the political argument, "I've got a right to my beliefs!" Yes, of course you do, but that don't make it right!

Because Hagee is a religious leader, nobody can touch him, legally. And that's OK with me. I think the best response to nonsense speech is non-nonsense corrective speech, not censorship. As long as a critical mass of people use their heads, check their facts, and commit to civil and reasonable discourse, we'll make it through such diatribes as John Hagee puts forth from his pulpit. But recently evangelicals - and not just evangelicals but some mainstream Christians as well, the kind who believe Mary was a virgin, her son walked on water and Methuselah married a woman named Edna and lived to the age of 969 - have been working hand-in-glove with politicians to make national policy. Best pay attention here, as women, people of color, Jews, gays and transsexuals can tell you.

Hagee became a strong McCain supporter until McCain got wind of his Holocaust stance and dropped him like a hot potato. But, as Daniel Benjamin of the Brookings Institute reminds us, this is just Hagee getting started. Hagee also explains Hurricane Sandy as God's punishment for Louisiana's bad behavior. A kind of replay of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell's suggestion that 9/11 was God's punishment for abortion, homosexuality, feminism and secular public schools.

What gets me about such claims - besides their sheer hilarious nonsense, I mean - is what it says about their concept of their Christian god - that he is ready, willing and able to starve and torture children for their parents' sins. Never could get my mind around that line of thinking.

But back to Hagee. These days, Hagee has gone full speed ahead in his support for Israel. No such thing as the Palestinian people, he says. No concern for how Israel formulates its foreign policy; all that matters is that they fulfill biblical prophecy.

I just came across his 2013 book on another thing that mystifies me about how God apparently works in mysterious ways - through riddles. He sends us signs that require prophets to interpret. Hagee is happy to answer the call. He's been obsessing for years now over another message from heaven, another "Watch out, folks, I'm a-comin' for ye!" 

A little background on the sign. From time to time, the earth lines up perfectly between the sun and the moon, creating a huge shadow on the moon. Eclipses can be partial.  Or total, when a full moon becomes totally dark.  However, some of the sunlight leaks, and when it passes through the earth's atmosphere, the light gets filtered and scattered. Some wavelengths are shorter than others, and the shorter the wavelength, the more likely they are to appear reddish or orange in color. On rare occasions the moon can take on the color of blood; hence the term "blood moon." Also known as the sanguine moon, the travel moon, or the harvest moon. It's the same phenomenon as occurs during sunrise or sunset, when the light is the kind of red that sends poets into a tizzy. 

Where the plot thickens, though, is when these blood moons come in groups of four. Tetrads. If you want to know more, there's a quite useful Norwegian site called timeanddate.com, which has information on the topic. The simplified version is this: every six months or so there is an eclipse season, during which time a lunar eclipse at full moon and a solar eclipse at new moon occur. And, according to timeanddate.com, every so often there are four such eclipses in a row - hence the name tetrad, which may be defined as four blood moons in a row, about six months apart.  For a complete list of up-and-coming eclipses, click here. 

Hagee is apparently done with seeing Hitler as the messenger of God and into a new shtick, interpreting the blood moon phenomenon and citing the Book of Revelation 6:12: 

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.

Hagee wasn't the first clever devil to take advantage of the gullible. Christopher Columbus, whose knowledge of the heavens puts Hagee's to shame, told the Arawak Indians shortly before a blood moon was due that God was angry that they weren't feeding his men properly and would turn the moon red. It worked. The Indians couldn't get provisions to the ships fast enough after that.

Hagee obsesses over this tetrad phenomenon in his 2013 book, Four Blood Moons: Something is about to change. He is unconcerned, apparently, about the fact that you don't see the eclipses of the sun and moon everywhere on the planet, and what you experience depends on where you are located. In order to experience the two to five eclipses that occur every year, you'd have to be constantly on the move. The total eclipse of the sun coming up in April 2023, for example, will not be seen by anyone in North America. But when God commanded the sun to "stand still" in the sky so that Joshua could fight the battle of Jericho and make the walls come tumblin' down, he wasn't talking about the sun as viewed in Peoria, Illinois or Bariloche, Argentina.

There once was a time when most people in America simply brushed off the wacko flame-throwing bible thumpers. Considering the evidence that we have all but lost our government to people manipulating the populace by fear and loathing of the "other," I suggest we might oughta give these clowns more serious consideration. Just because you want to defend to the death their right to spew stuff and nonsense doesn't release you from the responsibility of calling out bullshit when you see it.

Cheerful poepzakjes for love dogs

If you are a doggie owner, you are familiar with what we call "poop bags" in English. That's not the polite term. The polite term is "waste bags," waste being the polite word for shit.

Something in the vicinity of 50% of the houses in my neighborhood are inhabited by dog owners, and on any given day there will be dozens of poodles, chihuahuas, Jack Russell terriers, labradors, German shepherds, samoyeds, Lhasa Apsos and mixed breed animals walking their owners up and down the street, stopping to sniff every blade of grass, squatting to whiz, or depositing their waste on the ground for a human to pick up and dispose of. We are a responsible bunch. You occasionally come across a fugitive dog turd, but mostly people are good about keeping the sidewalks and lawns tidy.

In the mail today a package came from China, via Mexico City (importado por importadora Amazon México, S. de R. L. de C. V. Juan Salvador Agraz No. 73, Piso 5, Colonia Santa Fe Cuajimalpa, Delegación Cuajimalpa de Morelos, Ciudad de México, Distrito Federal C. P. 05348) (See screenshot of building at left - it's between the Volvo and the Renault dealerships.)

Taku ordered the poop bags in December 2021. I don't know whether the delay was in China, in Mexico, or here in the USofA. No matter. They are here now, all 900 of them.

What caught my eye was how poop bags is rendered in the various languages Amazon chooses to provide for the international set, and the varying degrees (or complete lack thereof) of euphemism involved.

Besides English, where we speak of "waste", there is the Japanese:

愛犬用処理袋　- aiken yō shoribukuro - literally "love dog use disposal bags"

(And don't miss reason lost-count-how-many for loving the Japanese language - the fact that "pet dog" is rendered "love dog.")

Then there is the hyper-avoidance euphemism, Italian, which renders this object 

sacchetti igienici (hygenic sacks/bags). 

You could get more euphemistic, I suppose, if you called them "butterfly wing bags" or maybe "cherry pie bags" but "hygenic" is going some.

And at the other extreme are the zero-euphemism languages, French and Spanish:

sacs à excréments and bolsas para excrementos.

German uses the word 

Kotbeutel,

 Kot being the standard translation for feces, i.e., not vulgar, like shit, but not a word to toss into a conversation while sipping tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. Beutel is German for sack/bag.

Back in the day when I was teaching a seminar at Keio University called "International responses to the AIDS crisis" we marveled at how differently people put out the word that the best approach to take toward the disease was not to mistreat the victims, but to practice safe sex. For Brazilians, this meant showing pictures of loving couples, adding some salsa music to the background, and then the words, "protect those you love by using a condom." In Japan, it was comic book cartoon characters, (i.e., at two levels of euphemistic remove) one male, one female (it wouldn't do to suggest, back in those early days, that AIDS was affecting same-sex people having sex), with the message "Please remember to use a condom." The French were handing out free condoms at railroad ticket offices to people buying long-distance vacation tickets. And the Dutch? The Dutch message was, "When you fuck, use a condom!"

That came back to mind when running down the list of Amazon languages on the poop bag box. I was all ready for strontzakken - which would be the zero-euphemism Dutch term for "shit bags." Instead, I found the (at least to me) utterly delightful 

poepzakjes  "poop sacks."

Amazon didn't stop there. You know that sealing tape around the box that normally tells you, if the contents are "Fragile," that you should "Handle with Care"?  This time the tape read:

Handle with cheer.

I kid you not.

The box contained 900 bags/Beutel/sacs/bolsas/zakjes/sacchetti/fukuro. Our two girls don't poop with each walk, but sometimes go early in the morning or late at night in the backyard. We pick those dropped treasures up when we see them, of course, but we occasionally miss one here and there and leave it to the sunshine to dry them up and roll them away. But mostly we make very high use of this wonderful modern invention, the poop bag. When the girls were young, I suggested (obviously before giving it sufficient thought) that we should not be using plastic, but picking the turdies up with paper towels and carrying them to the toilet. Taku quickly disabused me of this false attempt to be environmentally conscious, reminding me that this is California, and flushing toilets was bad enough when all you did was pee, but adding four flushes a day for dog turds was seriously irresponsible. So poop bags (which are sealed tight and tossed into the trash bin) it is.

Given the eleven month delay in shipping, we're figuring it's time right about now to place another order.

The question is, should we be boycotting China and Amazon and buying our poop bags elsewhere?

That would be my inclination at the present time. But I love getting packages delivered with cheer.

Young Royals - a film review

Sweden has a king. He is known as Carl XVI Gustav, with the number in the middle indicating he's the sixteenth Carl but not the sixteenth Carl Gustav.  A bit of trivia I picked up while digging around to find out if there is a Swedish crown prince who might take offense at the portrayal of the royal family in Young Royals, an extremely popular and beautifully done series on Netflix. I'm tempted to call it a "beautifully done series on a gay crown prince on Netflix" but that would tilt all the marbles toward the gay aspect of the fictional story and completely miss the political stuff, which is a fierce condemnation of Sweden's upper class.

Let me pick these things apart, and talk about the gay crown prince, Wilhelm, first, and then the political stuff. Both the (fictional) gay love story and the critique of the (fictional) monarchy and non-democratic hierarchy make this series very compelling indeed. I've watched it twice. And I appreciated it even more the second time around.

To get this out of the way, yes there is a Swedish prince and he was at one time heir to the throne. But on January 1, 1980, the Swedish parliament passed, for the first time in European history, the feminist new law establishing absolute primogeniture.  What that meant is that Crown Princess Victoria, the daughter of Carl Gustav and his wife Sylvia, became heir to the throne, and not her younger brother Prince Carl Philip (note: not Crown Prince; just prince), who had been heir up to that point, because he's the first-born male heir. Carl Philip was only seven and a half months old at the time, so I doubt he took the move as an insult. Instead he has had forty-three years to get used to his sister prepping to become future Queen of Sweden.

But first, let me get to the gay love story. Two Netflix streaming shows have made waves this year, both thrilling the loving bejeezuz out of the LGBT crowd, if I have assessed the scene correctly. As well they should. Both are superbly well-done: well-acted, well-written, unabashedly unapologetically pro-gay, and sweet as honey on sugar cubes. I'll stick to Young Royals for now, and leave Heartstopper for another time.

Wilhelm, usually called Wille (played by Edvin Ryding), heir to the Swedish throne is enrolled at the country's leading private boarding school. His mother, the queen, and practically everybody who's anybody in Sweden's Who's Who of noble families, went there. It is a hotbed of upper class twits who bully the non-upper class kids in their midst. These include the kid from the other side of the tracks, Simon (played by Omar Rudberg, a Venezuelan-Swede in real life). The casting director obviously worked at getting people to play the roles who fit expectations.

It's a coming out story. Both boys are sixteen. Simon has been out as gay for years, and has a wonderfully (divorced but) supportive mother and father, and he's very close to his sister, Sara (Frida Argento), who has Asperger's, a fact which enables her to stir up a lot of dust, furthering the plot in a school where everybody keeps secrets. Wille, on the other hand, is just discovering he has a strong attraction for this outspoken and self-aware classmate, Simon, and in no time they are making out to beat the band. Then there is August, a melodramatic bad guy (Malte Gårdinger), leader of a pack of bullies who follow him because he is a member of one of Sweden's oldest families, a first-class bully - and you can almost see him tying Wille and Simon to the railroad tracks. He is a member of the royal family and when things go sideways, Wille's mother, the queen, calls on August to "help out," thus making things even rougher for her son than he already has it.

The story revolves around the conflict Wille faces in having a life to share with his lover and having to live up to the hetero expectations put on him as crown prince. At sixteen, he's at the absolute edge of endurance and often collapses under the stress. Simon, loving and kindly as he is otherwise, is also unable to manage expectations that he will play second-fiddle to the kingdom and keep his love life secret. Young Royals is all about stress, frustration and hypocrisy. Great material for a powerful drama. The episodes are written with cliff-hangers, and I dare you to try not to binge.

As I implied, it's the political as much as the gay love story, that I find so compelling about this series. It portrays Sweden as a complex mix of what the world thinks it is - the world's most socially progressive country - on the one hand, and an inherently conservative place where people worry about what the world thinks of you and tradition matters. The kids are only in their mid-teens, but their parties are filled with alcohol and drugs and they are open to the world about their sexual interests and proclivities. Even the queen admits to her son that she is not bothered about his homosexuality; it's just that, as crown prince, he has a duty to be hypocritical and keep his sex life secret.

It's a fictional portrayal of the Swedish royals and Swedish nobility, in the same vein as The Crown is about British royals. And it almost dares reporters to knock on the real Queen Sylvia's door and ply her with questions about similarities to Wille's mother, the fictional queen. And ditto for the real Prince Carl Philip. I can just see somebody sticking a microphone in his face and asking, "I know you're married with children, but are you really hiding your homosexuality?" You may want to tell me I'm making too much of this inclination by fans to confuse actors for the characters they play. But I don't think I am. Look, for example, at what this poor kid, Kit Connor, who plays a bisexual lover in Heartstopper, is going through now that he's dating a woman. A whole bunch of gay folk are showing that while they like the L and the G in LGBT, they're not sincere about their support for their B brothers and sisters. (I'll wager these folk are even less sanguine about the T element, as well.) It's homophobes and entirely too many gay monosexuals joining up to be little shits these days. Further proof, for those who still need telling, that LGBT people are just folks trying to make a living and pay their taxes. Some are saints, some are sinners or in-between.

And, in the end, this is the actual focal point of the political side of this drama: in real life, the character of Simon is played by a young man who is openly bisexual. But Edvin, who plays Wille, refuses to talk about his sexuality. He could say, "I'm still trying to figure that out." That might well be the case. But he could also say, "I'm leaving it ambiguous, because if I come down on one side or another I'll just lose the fans from the side I don't come down on. And this is a business. And it's all about keeping everybody happy." So don't blame the fictional queen. There's much to be said for ambiguity and keeping the world guessing.

But while there's no way we can or should avoid the political aspects of coming out to the world, there's no reason we can't celebrate and fully enjoy an absolutely lovely gay love story. Which is what Young Royals is.

photo credit

Magrippa did it

I love Rome. If I could manipulate time, I'd go back and build a separate and parallel existence for myself where I'd live my life in Rome and become a historian. I wouldn't want to give up my actual history, so it would have to be that I could live two lives or more simultaneously.

I've been to Italy six times. Each time I've said to myself, "Why didn't I come to live my life here instead of Japan?"  Japan and Italy both have an esthetic that appeals to me, but it's almost as if they were at opposite ends of the spectrum. What is beautiful in Japan tends to be contained, restricted, individualized. What is beautiful in Italy is expansive and extroverted. Japan is the kinkakuji, the Golden Temple, in Kyoto. Italy is the Colisseum. Japan is the sound of the shakuhachi in the foggy distance, Italy is the chorus from Nabucco. In the end, I love them both.  It's not either/or with Japan; it's both/and.

The Latin language never quite took with me. When I went into languages seriously, I wanted them as a way to communicate with living people. I entered the field of linguistics first with an interest in grammar, and used to shop the second-hand stores for grammars of languages which I would then pore over the same way my mother would read True Confessions or follow the lives of movie stars. Once into linguistics seriously, that interest expanded into the other subfields of phonology and morphology - sound systems and how words are formed. If given the gift of building several parallel lives, I would today be a fluent speaker of Russian, French, Spanish and Japanese and my German would be the level of my English instead of the never quite ready for prime time level I am stuck with. Oh, yes, and Italian. By all means Italian, which I consider the linguistic equivalent to watching a kaleidoscope of butterflies at play.

When I was about fourteen, we took a family vacation to Lake Massawippi, in Quebec. Vacation, for my father, meant a chance to go hunting and fishing. In order to have his way he had to promise he'd take us to town to see a movie, and that movie turned out to be Magnificent Obsession, with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. Since that time I've internalized the phrase and made it synonymous with happiness. In order to be happy - or maybe "fulfilled" is a more accurate word for what I'm getting at - one should have an obsession of some kind. A life project. Jane Fonda has political activism, concert pianists have the piano, and I once heard somebody (it may have been Itzhak Perlman?) giving a master class tell a budding musician, "Unless you are certain you would die if you could not do music, you should not become a professional musician."

Ever since Covid put us all into lockdown, I've been obsessed (not necessarily in a magnificent way) by YouTube. Music, politics, language and culture lectures. I love Tyler and Todd, the gay couple who have made an off-the-grid life for themselves in rural Nova Scotia, all sorts of bloggers. I love listening to Davide Gemello giving Italian lessons online and the magnificently obsessed Luke Ranieri, the guy trying to convince the world that it's been going downhill ever since we stopped speaking Classical Latin. Don't share their obsessions, most of the time, but love that they have them.

I can get obsessive over wanting to get answers to trivial questions. Like what does the inscription МАGRIPPA-L-F-COSTERTIUM FECIT mean on the facade of the Pantheon? I know that 'fecit' means 'made' but I suddenly realized after all these years I didn't know who Magrippa was and I didn't know what the rest of the label said that was carved into stone about 120 years after the birth of Christ, give or take. Just now, a half century or more since I first took note of this magnificent building, which I've gone back to visit with each visit, I have the answer. It means "M(arcus) Agrippa - i.e., not Mr. Magrippa - filius (son) of Lucius, consul for the third time, made (this)." And for an extra bit of trivia, the inscription is a lie. That building was actually built by Hadrian, the same guy who built the wall to keep the blue-faced Scots from overrunning Yorkshire a few years later. He just kept the facade of the old pantheon, which had burned down.

The Pantheon, incidentally, still functions today as a catholic church, and you can get married here, if you have the right connections, although you will need to reimburse the state for the loss of revenue, I'm guessing, from the six million tourists who shuffle through the world's largest unsupported dome with a hole in the ceiling to let the rain in and splash all over the floor. Just kidding. It has a slanting floor and holes to drain off the rain and it rarely rains in anyway.

For Italy lovers, let me recommend you watch Luke Ranieri's vlog on how Latin became Italian. If the phonology and the morphology make your eyes glaze over, you can always turn the volume off and just enjoy the gorgeous views of Italy.

I'm currently between obsessions. I was obsessive about the Trump phenomenon there for a time, but am now so burned out by this champion of the rebirth of fascism in the United States, that I can't stand the sight of him. I think he's a distraction anyway and the real problem is the lack of demand that liars be exposed and civility be restored, although if he gets reelected in 2024 I will kick myself down several flights of stairs for not working harder to get our clumsy justice system to throw his ass in jail.

But I digress. I was obsessing over the beauty of Italy there for a while. How is it that I constantly get pulled back into obsessing over America's national shame?

Must work on that.

source: photo of the Pantheon: credit goes to John Harper and Getty images