October 6, 2010

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’

Ah! The good old days!

Such was the level of theological debate 6 or 7 centuries ago.

While tonsured monks debated the point the cathedral at Chartres was built, Aristotle was brought back into the Western world, and Dante held up a mirror for the Christian world to see itself.

Today the great theological debate in the Muslim world is over the size of the rocks to be used when stoning a wife who “steps out” on her husband.

If they are too big the slut dies too quickly.

If they are too small the harlot suffers needlessly.

I am at a loss as to whether or not the above will lead to a Reformation a la Martin Luther. Somehow I don’t think there will be a Luther wanabee named Abdul nailing any theses to any door in Mecca.

I don’t know whether the issue of big stones versus little stones shakes out as a Sunni/Shia thing. “As far as I know” – a phrase made popular by then Senator Clinton about Senator Obama’s religious beliefs – “moderate” Muslims are mugwumping this issue. Our policy has been to let the “lesser breeds” work those things out by themselves.

My sense of the aesthete has DNA starting at the Parthenon. The roads, the aqueducts, the armies, the arches, LEX, the comedies, Plutarch. SUM ROMANUS.

A part of me was at Marathon and Salamis. I was at Tours, Runnymede, and Lepanto. One of my uncles helped build St. Peter’s Basilica. That’s the Christian church that Yusef and Farouk still say that they will stable their horses there.

Philadelphia, 1787. Gettysburg, 1863. Omdurman, 1898.

I was there.

It is a legacy that I intend to preserve and leave for my 3 granddaughters.

That’s why a croissant shaped man with an orange beard wearing a gray table cloth standing in front of the proposed mosque in NYC and snarling like a rabid badger in heat so bothered me.

It wasn’t what he said. It was what we didn’t say that bothered me in a most profound way.

Laying aside the self evident fact that it was a week, maybe 10 days, since he had interfaced with soap and hot water he did serve one useful purpose.

We in the West are still asleep.

Hillaire Belloc was right.

“We sit by and watch the Barbarian. His comic inversion
of our old certitudes and fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh.
but as we laugh we are watched by large and awful eyes from beyond;
and on those faces there is no smile.

Using the Noam Chomsky method of translation, the one that says those words mean exactly what you want them to mean, Imam Slobbo said, “Kill all Jewish pigs and apes! Behead all Christians! Uncircumsize all non-Muslim males!”

The official translation was “Why can’t we all get along?” You would think his middle name was Kumbaya.

Plus, if you have an orange beard how do you accessorize?

The call to arms is faint; its sound is from an uncertain trumpet.

We invite the beast in at our own peril.




KS