global scorning

Thanksgiving in Manhattan is beautiful this year. The weather is perfect -- it's mild, the sky is clear, the air is delightful. Even though it's a busy day for me, I ordered up a medium cappuccino w/two sugars and took a walk down to Battery Park to enjoy it. How could I not? The weather, the day, the Statue of Liberty -- all were beckoning.

Crowds were beginning to trickle in, vendors were setting up, and those living Lady Liberty replicas were already in place, all in anticipation of a busy day. These sights nudged my thoughts in a philosophical direction. Why should Thanksgiving Day bring big crowds to the Statue of Liberty? In a way, it makes sense, doesn't it? Liberty and Thanksgiving. They go together. And you get to Lady Liberty from...Battery Park. Battery. As in, battle. Battery Park is a war memorial. You don't get to Lady Liberty without passing through it.

I strolled over to the dock and took a seat where I could see Her clearly, basking in the gorgeous weather. Then I had a New York moment. In a flash I thought how such a beautiful day in November would probably send scores of New Yorkers to their therapists to exorcise their mortal fear of global warming. Scores more would probably try to organize protests of anything and everything American -- financial, industrial, useful -- and who knows how many warped ideas will be hatched all because it's a beautiful day in November.

Of course, one can't think of global warming without picturing the ranting, twisted mug of Al Gore, hollering and shaking his fist and pointing his fat, useless finger at someone...Al Gore, on a mission to make beautiful days in November joyless and tormented with guilt. Al Gore -- and, let the reader understand that we are talking of the universal Al Gore, not just the individual -- determined to make the few hours you might spend cruising down a beautiful country road in a Ford Explorer a sin worthy of self-flagellation. Al Gore, the poster-boy for warped ideas, and all his idiot stepchildren, on a mission to make good days in November a cause for national mourning and reparations to third world victims of western imperialism; to make everyone just as miserable as they are. And if he can make a few bucks in the process, well, that's gravy, baby. Soy gravy, of course. Guilt-free. No animals involved.

I have a hunch that his compulsion to infect the world with his personal misery sprung from the world-class humiliation Mr. Gore's life was made by his association with the Clinton presidency; with a sound defeat in a subsequent presidential election that he is apparently still struggling to accept. Because those whose insignificance makes them miserable won't feel significant until everyone's miserable with them. Because hell hath no fury like a fool scorned, he's set about scorning the globe for the beautiful days in November.

One gets the feeling that if he could wave a wand and make it "always winter...always winter and never Christmas,*" he would.

*CS Lewis, The Lion, the witch, and the wardrobe.

"is good evil?"

As you might imagine, a subway station is a repository of all sorts of the nastiest trash. Among the filth in one station I noticed a magazine, Harper's, with the following question emblazoned provocatively, idiotically, on its dark blue cover: "Are Christians Evil?"

Well, this is an interesting question to ask in a society that takes the lives of its offspring by the millions; probably a reasonable question, given that perspective. I am sure minds much more supple than my own can render such rhetorical waste its just due.

What first came to my mind, then, was this: here is a curious question. It is Christianity that proposes the existence of evil to begin with. Well, OK, let's say the origin of the concept of evil lies with Judaism. Nonetheless, Christianty asserts that it is the fulfillment of Judiasm, and that it, by definition, is good, and that which rejects it, evil. So here we have that which apparently rejects Christianity, invoking a Christian concept by which to judge it. There has to be a Latin term for this sort of twisted reasoning, but I don't know what it is, although I suspect "reductio ad absurdum" might come into play there somewhere. A less erudite but probably no less accurate term might be "intellectual incest."

It seems akin to a person asking, "is black, white?" And presumably, after you fork over 5 bucks for the magazine, you get to read how it is. This makes me think of my post below, which I called "Safety in Numbers." Yes, this is the sort of thing that intelligent people pay to read about, in a time when they can't decide if "is" really means "is."