Love And Jihad—Oil And Ashes

February 25th, 2015  |   

Who Can Solve This Mystery?

On Valentine’s Day, as the myth goes, Cupid, the messenger of love, flies overhead like a drone. I picture the chubby cherub bombarding folks with arrows dipped in chocolate, perfumed arrows, lace covered arrows, Viagra coated arrows, arrows camouflaged as flowers, arrows encrusted with diamonds, arrows attired in fashionable cloth.

Valentine’s Day has come and gone. But the odds are good that Cupid will reappear next year. Yay! Sure, we romantic types recognize the commercialization that engulfs the day, but we find a way to sidestep the consumerism by personalizing Cupid’s message. We let more than enough reality in our lives, too much violence and death on a day-to-day basis. We welcome a day when we can just say, “I love you!” to special people in our lives”

Cole Porter wrapped a beautiful melody around his ode to love. Recognizing the power of love, he refused to denude the mystery inherent in the experience of love. “What is this thing called love? This funny thing called love? Just who can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me?

That said, along comes former mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, seemingly eager to continue focusing on matters of the heart, just three days after Cupid has departed. He wants everyone to know that President Obama doesn’t love our country. As Rudy wallows in the ditch he’s dug for himself, I’m not interested in solving the mystery around why love can make a fool us. No, I want to unlock the mystery of why Rudy is making a fool of himself.

Examining President Obama’s Heart

Maybe Rudy is a reincarnated version of the Roman Emperor, Claudius II, who is said to have beheaded Valentine, a holy priest in Rome on February 14, 278. You see Claudius, was committed to building a strong imperial army, but had difficulties in recruiting men to fight. He thought their unwillingness to go into combat was because they wanted to stay home with their wives and children. So, he banned marriage and even engagements. But Valentine, cognizant of the injustice of the decree, married young lovers in secret. For listening to his heart, Valentine lost his head on the way to becoming a saint.

Maybe Mr. Giuliani’s, “I know this is a horrible thing to say,” was his own recognition of the penitential season of Lent that began on Ash Wednesday, the day he did his own kind of sonogram on President Obama’s heart. Who knows what ?  Maybe God  ? Maybe Rudy the Shadow, that omniscient character I used to hear on the radio as a kid. I can still hear his deep, resonant voice: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.” 

The coup de grâce came when Rudy went on to say, “He (Obama) doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” I think I do know what he was saying, because as a fellow white man I have learned how to parse and decode my own tribe’s words. Rudy may not realize it, but his racism was on display as nakedly as his baldhead.

While there are still a few chocolates left in the heart-shaped box, and a few flowers that haven’t wilted, and while the residual effects of Viagra haven’t gone flaccid, perhaps we should thank Rudy for having raised the subject of one’s love of country.

As Cole Porter might put it, perhaps we should ask the Lord in heaven above, what is this thing called love of one’s country? But fearing a busy signal, or a sharp referral suggesting that we consult the Bible, I shall, instead, pursue an answer in concert with you who read these Notes.

Does Uncle Sam Love Me Or Just Want My Body? 

We live in a country where everything gets weighed and measured. A scale will tell us how much we weigh. A Breathalyzer is capable of measuring how much alcohol a person has in his or her system. But no one has invented a machine that can evaluate how much love a person has for his or her country.

When the subject of loving one’s country comes up, I warn you, be ready to step into an old fashioned Laurel and Hardy pie fight movie, where everyone in the room will wind up covered with meringue.

I still remember very well, as a kid, hearing Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, singing  the patriotic song, “This Is My Country.” But what did the heart-stirring final verse mean to me back then? “I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold. For this is my country! To have and to hold.”

To have and to hold? Why those were the very words, from the wedding vow, I said to Judy, and she to me, in Batavia, New York, back in 1958, two weeks prior to reporting in for Marine training at Quantico, Virginia. Was love for this woman somehow to be equated with love for my country?

Back when I joined the Marine Corps, the word love wasn’t in any of the documents I was required to sign. Those enduring recruitment posters that had Uncle Sam, with an outstretched arm and a finger pointed in my direction, didn’t say, “I love you.” Instead, they said, “I want you.” Posing as my uncle, all the old goat wanted was my body, along with rank after rank of  bodies, more sheep to slaughter as a sacrifice on an altar to Mars. I want you for a war in Southeast Asia.

Jihad

John McCain and an assortment of Republican Congress members, along with the Fox Network commentators, are throwing apoplectic tantrums. They are foaming at the mouth over the fact that President Obama will not label ISIS activity as Muslim terrorism. They are in a rage because their Commander in Chief won’t talk about jihad, holy war.     

Let’s stop kidding ourselves; we need to stop indulging in the ancient art of wool-pulling, the practice of pulling the wool over our eyes. When it comes to unpleasant truth, information we’d rather not face, we reach for a big swath of wool.

We would do well to own up to the realization that every war is a holy war, I mean it, each and every war. Muslims don’t have a monopoly on holy war. There is a jihad lurking behind every war. Bob Dylan, during the Vietnam War, recognized that fact when he sang “With God on Our Side.” The best motivator for getting people to go to war is the conceived conviction that the fighting is for something good, in response to something evil. Everyone wants the god of their own choosing on their side in the battle.  

Religion is the aphrodisiac for anyone who lusts after a justification for picking up a weapon and marching off to war. The hideous nature of war, when clothed in religious garments, becomes a crusade. A battlefield becomes holy ground, blessed with gravestones and monuments, bones and blood interred beneath grass, buried there for future generations who come to pay homage to human sacrifice. Never mind the poor bastards that took a bullet in the heart, or a bomb in their village. 

Karl Marx wrote about religion as the opium of the people. I do believe, however, that Charles Kingsley, a nineteenth century Anglican priest, said it better than Marx. “We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable’s handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded, a mere book to keep the poor in order.”

When people are down and out, or poor and oppressed, or looking for a purpose and a place for their lives, or unemployed, there is no more powerful weapon to carry into battle than a holy book, a Bible or a Koran or a prayer book. I carried one overseas—a tiny book full of Bible passages and prayers.

Should I make mention that Kingsley was a Christian Socialism? He embraced evolution, advocated with and for the poor, championed children’s welfare, espoused pacifism, and was an early environmentalist who loved God’s creation. Had he been an American, alive today, some folks may very well have accused him of not loving his country.

Ashes And Oil

I drive over snow and icy roads that lead to a church. There, the priest puts a smudge of ash on my forehead. It’s an old Christian ritual practiced on Ash Wednesday.  He reminds me, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” A modern song mirrors those words: “All we are is dust in the wind.”  

Those words are a brutal reminder that pleads in hope for something more than that for us human beings. The church bulletin in my hand lists a calendar full of educational and meditative opportunities leading up to Easter. I leave an offering, a puddle of water on the church floor, melted snow from my boots, as I leave the church. Maybe, if I come back for Easter there will be a sequel to this ashes thing.

Crossing the Kanawha River, I think about the train that has crashed only a few miles east of me. It is still burning and bleeding crude oil into the river, a river that only a year ago had to suck up a coal-chemical spill that left 300,000 people without drinkable water. I think about the workers already laboring on the riverbank, amidst muck full of ashes.

Jews traditionally dressed in sackcloth and ashes and wept as a sign of repentance for their sins. No sackcloth on my back, but with ash on my forehead, I am compelled to weep for our water, into which poison from coal waste, chemicals, and now crude oil has been leached. 

Oiled For The Journey

To grant to those who mourn in Zion—to give them a beautiful headdress, instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of a faint spirit… Isaiah 61:3

The phone rings. It’s the middle of the night. The woman’s voice, my friend, says her husband is dying. She is with him at the hospital. I put my feet on the floor, grab and don the clothes I’d shed before falling into bed, with one exception. I put on my black shirt and white collar, garb fit for facing the angel of death, and the man she has come to fetch.

I didn’t bring oil with me. In my haste, I’d rushed past the cabinet at home where a vial of holy oil is stored. I ask the  nurse if she can locate some oil, a small cupful. All she has is a tube of petroleum jelly. I take it. Blessed, it will be the oil I need for anointing.

Holding his hand, and mouthing a prayer, I smudge the oily substance, in the image of a cross, on his forehead, the same place where, as a baby, he was baptized—marked with water. It is said that oil and water do not mix. Could that be a lie?   

I sense from those gathered around the hospital bed—the dying man’s wife, his son, and the doctor who stayed with his patient to the very end—that we’ve done something  significant, even though I do not know the full extent of what has taken place. I had poured oil on troubled waters, a farewell gesture, for his trip across the Jordan River.

And The Hero Is…

Abraham Lincoln was the best president the United States has ever had. But we live inside his tomb. For a very long time now, too many Americans have found it easier to think about Lincoln’s body — that brawn, that bullet — than about the bodies of the millions of men, women and children who had been kept in slavery, bodies stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved, murdered and buried in unmarked graves. The mourning of Lincoln has come at the expense of mourning them.

That’s Jill Lepore scrutinizing two new books about Abraham Lincoln. These words have been sniping at me. Perhaps I use that word, sniping, because, I can’t help but connect her observation to Chris Kyle and the film, The American Sniper.

In Bertolt Brecht’s play, Life of Galileo, Andrea, a student of Galileo’s, says: “Unhappy the land that has no heroes.” To which Galileo replies: “No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.” I have mixed feelings about that exchange, I figure a hero or two won’t do us any harm. But Brecht’s Galileo does make me ask myself just who our heroes are, and why they are our heroes.

Certainly I think Lincoln is an American hero. Chris Kyle, the American Sniper, on the other hand, is being lionized as an American hero, but I do not see him that way. Instead, I view him as a man who thought that by killing people, he was making us safe here at home, while he was establishing a safe and free Iraq with his rifle.

But we are not safer now. In fact, the killing we have done since the invasion of Iraq makes us less safe here at home, and the Iraqis, and others all over the region, are anything but safe and free. And, the ironically tragic ending to the story is that Kyle is dead, shot with the kind of weapon he used to kill people. Bullets have not proven to be the balm from Gilead capable of healing a wounded world.

At the Oscar ceremony, Kyle’s wife, Taya, called the movie a blessing and that it showed “that he touched a lot of lives when he was there.” Touched people’s lives, like the child he killed in the film? Kyle is called a hero for having killed Iraqis, but I wonder how people in Iraq feel whose family and friends have been touched in a deadly way by American bullets and bombs.

Focusing on Chris Kyle, the sniper, we neglect the people he shot, people he did not know or understand, along with the devastation this senseless war unleashed. The film will, I promise you, be a recruitment tool to lure young Americans into military service to fight evil. I feel, also, that the film will be a recruitment tool for the very people we will be trying to kill in an expanding war in Syria, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Dr. Seuss To The Rescue

Waking up to news about ISIS, apocalyptic craziness, and my street full of ice, I looked for some good news, a story that might accentuate the positive. Hey, I found one! It’s just what the doctor order—Dr. Seuss, that is.

It seems that Dr. Seuss’ daughter found a box full of papers full of text and sketches in a big glass dining room table. So we are about to get a book, or two, or three from a man who we thought had left us bereft of his genius when he died in 1991. In July, bookstores will get copies of “What Pet Should I Get.”

My son and daughters were raised on Seuss’ book. It is said that God writes with a crooked line. It could also be said that Dr. Seuss wrote with crooked words to capture and enrapture us with the beauty of language. His words helped shape them, and that includes me as well. How right he was when he wrote, ”The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”    

His work invites imitation. At the risk of a flop, here goes:

Lo and behold what was found in a drawer

was more than some junk, there were papers galore.

And so very soon what we’ll get is a book.

I must get it, you know, by hook or by crook.

 

So sound the good news, gather a big band.

And make lots of music that’s ever so grand.

Get Frankie Horniski and Betty Bassoony,

gather Durk Drumitch and Harriet Harposy,

Get Sudie Patootie to play on her flutie.

Make music fantastic, loud and bombastic.

 

Sing la-la loudaski, melodically spastic.

Carry a tune in a bucket to snowy Nantucket.

Let the mountains sing, from Nitro to Nanking.

 

Call Yertle the Turtle and Circus McGurkus.

Get the Grinch into town, and the Cat in his hat.

Alert Horton and Lorax and Gertrude McFuzz.

And the Whos down in Whoville, don’t leave them out.

Let them welcome the Seuss-pet with a resounding shout.

 

Let your piggy bank know

that what’s in him will flow.

Not to Mamazon Amazon, no!

The bookstore nearby is where you will fly,

to purchase another Dr. Seuss in July.

I extend my apologies to the beloved Dr. Seuss for my fumbley, jumbley mumbley imitation. Out of profound respect for him, and for my Notes From Under the Fig Tree friends, I’ll say “I love you!” with the good doctor’s very own words: “Today you are you! That is true-er than true! There is no one alive that is you-er than you!”

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