What Islam Needs Now Is The Return of Mullah Nasrudin

Not more car bombs. Nobody even listens any longer.

What I'd like to see is an Islamic comedian along the lines of Woody Allen. One who will skirt the rules of the imams in order to accomplish his only true end: bedding the girl.

I think of Woody Allen's schlemiel in Bananas. He's even willing to become the dictator of a small country to get at Louise Lasser.

The Sufi tradition of humor is largely unknown but does still exist at least in books! There is a funny figure called Mullah Nasrudin who could be the basis for a Woody Allen figure of sorts within Islam. He's a variant on the schlemiel.

Moussa Nabati (Islamic student of Levinas) wrote a book entitled L'Humour-Therapie (Bernet-Danilo 1997) that compares and contrasts the jokes of Nasr Eddine (his French name) with Jewish jokes.

The jokes aren't much. It's basically about people who go to Nasrudin for advice, and the dumb advice he gives them.

"One day a man didn't like the length of his horse's tail. He was about to cut it to the length that he liked when he decided he'd better go and ask the Mullah. Off he went. He explained the problem, asking what is the perfect length for a horse's tail, and the Mullah Nasrudin says, "You have to judge on the whimsy of the moment. One day you'll think it's too long, and another day too short. No mood about horse's tails is ever the same from moment to moment, even in the same person."

Here's another one:

"The Mullah Nasrudin was really tight on money one year so he decided to sell his donkey.

His wife cried, 'How can you get rid of our old friend? Are you heartless or mad?'

'Don't worry,' the Mullah responded, I will ask such a low price that no one will buy him.'"

I don't think anybody will remember all the dust-ups of this time as after all military history is fairly dull. Jokes, however, like good poems, can pull people together, and build a common culture. When that starts to happen, I suppose peace will already be here.

WRITING WITH A PORPOISE, or, UNDERSTANDING BOB DYLAN

Dylan's new album Modern Times is an indictment of matriarchal tyranny. Using Bachofen's skeleton key in Mother Right we open the first song, "Thunder on the Mountain."

The opening imagery begins with a discussion of how night is ending and the sun is coming up. Night is an image of matriarchal communism in which everything is the same under the moon. Then with the rising of the sun we have the birth of principles. It's difficult to parse the whole song because I haven't got the lyrics at hand. When he says, "Some sweet day I'll stand beside my king," it's not difficult to understand from the context that he's talking about Jesus Christ.

"I sucked the milk out of a thousand cows," is a reference to another matriarchal image -- the cow. The bovine is an image of nurturing but without principles. One could see it as a reference to matriarchy, even to Hinduism. Perhaps we could say that the song is about the ending of the Kali Yuga (which according to some scholars ended in 1969). The ending of a time when desire held sway and principles were mostly visible in their absence.

Other images that clearly refer to the matriarch/patriarch distinction: orphanages (? ambiguous), doing unto others, and putting myself aside to see what others need (very clear Christian references).

"I got the pork chop she got the pie," can be seen again from within symbolic referents table of Bachofen. Uh, somehow. Pie is clear at any rate. Not sure about pork chops.

He says something about finding a good woman, and then says, what's with good women these days, but it's unclear to me. The problem with him is that he's often kidding, and putting things in backwards so that you have to sort it out.

I'm just glancing off the surface but I am going to investigate my claim further that Dylan's work at least since Maggie's Farm is largely a massive if rather sly and recondite assault on matriarchal tyranny. There's something about mother in the last song Ain't Talking that is fascinating, but just out of reach.

Partially out of reach because I can't quite hear the lyrics. It seems that I can find most of Dylan's lyrics on line but this album has yet to be parsed. I haven't been looking very hard I must say. No doubt this exists somewhere. "Shame on your greed/ shame on your wickedest schemes!"

What church does the narrator say he's been to in song one, to take his religious vows? Sounds like St. Hermit's -- but I can't make it out.

We were up in Albany, NY this weekend at the Crossgates Mall since the wife wanted to go to H & M (A Swedish company) to get some new clothes for the kids.

To my amazement they now have a huge Borders bookstore. I bought two journals: First Things (a conservative Catholic journal edited by a former Lutheran named John Neuhaus), and a journal called Christian Research Journal, which appears to be Protestant but I haven't figured out its slant as of yet (progressive or not).

In First Things is a quite good article by a professor from Wheaton college that claims that Bob Dylan was always Christian, and this is why the left was able to constantly find such a source of renewal in him. I suppose that's so. So then I went over to Best Buy and got the new Dylan CD Modern Times and took it home. I liked the first and last song best but I can't always make out the lyrics. In the middle of the first song he gets angry (I like it when Dylan gets angry) and he says, "I'm going to raise an army of tough sons of bitches/ I'm going to get me an army of oafalitches [huh?] and ...." then he manages to makes "religious" rhyme with bitches, which I thought was neat.

Problem throughout the album is the lead guitar. Not too inventive and occasionally quite awkward. Mark Knopfler is needed at the very least. He did wonders on Slow Train. Dylan's voice is quite good, but all the smoking he's done has certainly caused a few vocal chords to fray and now and then he sounds faint.

Then in the Christian Research Journal there was an article about Qtub, some nutty journalist in Egypt who claimed that there had to be a TOTAL LINK between church and state for there to be JUSTICE, and the author claimed that this was the secret motivation behind Bin Laden.

While here everybody wants a separation of church and state, over there, people want the two to be combined. Well, there is an opposition in Muslim states that wants the separation, and over here is an opposition that wants the combo, but basically we're mirror images of each other on this question.

I found this funny.

Like, we're over there trying to build in the separation to help them out, and they're over here trying to force us to combine church and state.

And then I had some big revelation, and everything fell into place as I was falling asleep on Saturday night, but I was too busy sleeping to write it all down and now it's lost.

I am getting slow. I turned fifty this last week, and my two year old said after the family had demolished the birthday cake, "We ate your whole birthday, dad!"

UPDATE

Finished the Clive Wynne book entitled Do Animals Think?

The students and I didn't like the ending, as he doesn't really tackle the question of animal rights.

Rather, he pokes at it.

His best poke was a sentence toward the end where he argued that to rationally lessen pain around the globe you'd have to kill ALL carnivores including people.

The students and I are with Wynne, and we are against this idea.

Even Singer is against this idea.

I think only humanity can understand perfection. Or even glimpse it.

This separates us from the other animals.

Only we can see the geometry beneath the real world.

This is ONLY meaningful within a Christian framework.

IF we go to the Darwinian framework it makes SENSE that pain is rendered. Animals MUST continue to evolve which means that the less perfect members of their species are eaten while the more perfect members survive, and replicate.

Animal rights activists are Darwinians who nevertheless have in the back of their heads the Edward Hicks paintings of the Peaceable Kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb.

Fat chance.

Part of the animal rights problem is just getting all the paradigms separated and getting the Two Kingdoms idea to function on this issue.

VICTIMS OF THE PANOPTICON UNITE

Yesterday at lunch someone brought up Hegel, and from there we got on to Michel Foucault, and one of the newer hires -- a historian -- said that if anybody were to bring up Foucault at lunch he'd promised himself to leave. At that he grabbed his bag lunch and left. He had to teach a class, he said laughing.

I said that I hate Foucault, too.

At that point, one of the women present (a poet) said that she thought that I, more than any of the others present, was a victim of the Panopticon. Then everyone started to laugh because they knew this meant that I would stay up at night thinking about this comment.

So I did. And I realized that the Panopticon is another term for the superego. And that Foucault wanted to wipe out the superego. Following Nietzsche, he wanted not only to recognize the monstrous ID of Schopenhauer, but to celebrate it. Hence, Foucault's infamous pp. 31-32 of the Intro to Sexuality where he says that M. Jouys, a child molester and rapist of a previous era, should not have been policed by the medical juridical establishment for paying pennies to local girls for sexual favors.

Because in Foucault's insane universe there is no superego.

He wants to welcome the monstrous ID in all its forms.

Everyone from cannibals to Hitlerites is welcome to dance to the ID in Foucault's amoral universe.

I believe in the Superego as the foundation for universal moral law, and I believe that such a thing MUST EXIST if we are to have a society at all. This is more or less what Freud himself says. That Society and its Discoteques are not the whole ballgame. That repression is the price we pay for civilization.

I think that those who break social norms must be disciplined and punished. Child molesters should be broken on the wheel, and bank robbers do hard jail time, and rapists and cannibals should never be permitted to enter into society, but should be disciplined and punished.

Foucault however, like the amoral id-iots of the 68 generation in general -- believed that the police were always wrong, and that in fact they were the problem. No, I say it's the criminals, and I say, they should be disciplined and punished, disciplined and punished, disciplined and punished.

Moreover, I was secretly delighted by the comment that I was under the gaze of the Panopticon more than others. Especially in secrecy, in moments where no one is thought to be watching. This is where God the Father is still watching. I believe in God the Father, and in the Ten Commandments, and in the holiness of scripture.

And I bow down on my knees to the rules He has given us, now and forever, world without end. Amen.

Communism is not incompatible with humor.

Humor requires a double-vision, while communism gives us double-vision.

Lutheranism is compatible with humor, too.

Lutheranism argues that we should expect little from people.

But then of course we are also divine.

So this discrepancy makes for humor.

On the other hand, communism expects people to act like saints, when in fact too often they act like pigs. No, worse than pigs.

Lutheranism expects nothing from people, and therefore gives us the sense that there is hope.

Marxism expects everything from people, and therefore gives us a sense of despair.

Perhaps the great difference in the two kinds of humor is in the quality of despair or optimism that accumulates in the Lutheran or the Marxist societies.

In Marxist societies people joke in their despair.

In Lutheran societies people joke with guarded optimism.

DREAM: My glasses fell 90 floors at the Times Square Marriott.

The Finnish Winter War: Fire & Ice, a Film by Ben Strout

Saw a really good documentary of the Finnish Winter War in the little village of Hobart, NY this afternoon. I had been scheduled to give a talk on my novel Temping as a prequel to the celebration of the Finnish undertaking of the EU leadership. Diplomats from Finland were all over the tiny village of Hobart, and there were Karelian pies, and lots of posters and books, but the big event was to be the unveiling of Ben Strout's film.

The Winter War was a miraculous event in World War II. Stalin sent millions of troops to attack because the Finns had refused to allow the Russians to cross their territory. About a million Russians came back dead. Another half million were injured. I was unable to watch the film straight through because I was also parenting on and off, but I got a copy of the DVD by trading my novel for it later. But I think I got the main gist of the Russian defeat.

Partially it was overconfidence on the part of Stalin. And of course nobody ever wanted to tell Stalin, hey, that's not a good idea to attack the Finns in the middle of winter when it can get to be 50 below. So the Bolshevik machine, like the Persian machine under Darius, was not very intelligent.

Streams and streams of men were sent into the Karelian isthmus only to be chewed up by wily Finnish snipers. A good Finnish sniper could hit a wire at 500 yards. The Russians weren't even wearing white outfits. They wore dark green, with a red star on their caps to provide a cue for cross-hairs. They could have been hit a mile away. And still they came, on and on and on, into Finnish machine guns, anti-tank devices, grenades, and snipers. They tried to get across frozen lakes, and the Finns lobbed shells into the lakes and sank whole battalions of batty Bolsheviks.

This documentary is really well put together and explains the war for the geographically challenged. A lot of it is in Finnish and features interviews with men who fought in the war, and owmen who played key support roles. No war can be won without the women. The Finns lost a quarter of their men. But they retained their democracy and are often ranked at the very top of what has been called The Misery Index.

If I were to fault the film at all, I would say that the ideological apparatus of Finland (Lutheran, democratic, and tough) against the Russians (godless, under the thumb of a matriarchal tyrant, but also very tough), may have made a difference worth mentioning.

The Finns were outnumbered 50 to 1. One of my most thrilling moments in Paris in 1995 was going to the Invalides Military Museum and seeing the wax displays of Finnish soldiers destroying the Bolsheviks in the Winter War, but this documentary went one better.

I remember the light humming of the Marseillaise in the museological sound system at Invalides. I don't know what song the Finns were really humming. It wasn't Battle Hymn of the Republic. They have an anthem, but I can't say that I could hum its bars on cue. It has something to do with their Independence Day, and if someone told me I would remember instantly.

THE REASON THAT SCANDINAVIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACIES WORK SO WELL IS?

No one has really ever asked me to explain why Scandinavian social democracies work so well, so I thought I would take it upon myself to explain why these democracies (still over 90% Lutheran) function so well, even if I have to pose the question myself!

They work because of two-kingdoms theory.

What's that?

Early Christianity (probably the truest Christianity) was a kind of sainthood. There was all kinds of kissing and hugging and sharing food. Kind of icky, although it can still work in small anarchist communities for about two months at a trot.

When the Roman Empire turned Christian under Constantine, it was no longer workable. We couldn't kiss both cheeks of the oncoming hordes and survive. St. Augustine developed the notion around 450 AD that we cannot reliably be saints and yet still govern, and run an economy. If we were to do so, the government would collapse.

Using the phrase,

"REnder unto Caesar

That which is Caesar's...

And unto God that which is God's..."

Augustine performed a remarkable separation of church and state.

It was the first mental operation in human history that successfully separated these entities.

Luther in 1520 multiplied language games. He said that not only is the church not subordinate to the state, nor the state to the church, but that there is a de facto differend (eternal squabble between the two).

He said moreover that art was no longer to be judged by either state or church...

Artists were free to pursue their own visions of beauty...

Automobile mechanics free of church....

And yet, there remains a leaven for the lumpenproletariat!

The thief hanging next to Christ on the cross was going to go to heaven, Christ said, because he believed! That is now the sole criterion of judgement for the next kingdom. Ha ha.

In this kingdom he had been judged as a thief and had been put to death for his crime. In the next, he will be forgiven. Yes, there is a meaning to the world, but it is found in the next.

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, many in the avant-gardes sought to escape this totalization sponsored by the Marxist braintrusts.

I alone, however, have the remedy.

Lyotard got close! He had begun life wanting to be a Dominican friar and had only managed to get as far as Wittgenstein. Had he read Luther, he would have beaten me to the punch, and the world would be better. He might have become a Hug You Not. Lutherans do not hug. We shake hands while looking at our shoes.

Luther's two kingdoms is Lyotard taken to its most logical extension, but it adds the dimension of faith. It takes the differend to new and more ingenious levels, in fact it takes it all the way to heaven. Instead of subordinating everything to politics, and calling politics saintly, politics becomes always already a necessary evil, and nothing more. It can never be anything more than that anyhoo.

Automobile mechanics should be automobile mechanics. If they ruin a car in order to charge more than the original problem suggested, then they should pay a penalty. The government will therefore put in motion various police actions against those who threaten the life, health, property of citizens.

But in no moment are we under the imperative to act as saints. Lutheran banned the very notion of saints (like that, don't you?). We don't need to give away our baked goods until the point where our bakery goes bankrupt. We do not need to give money to non-functional populations that won't work until the government itself is to collapse. Sainthood is impossible in this kingdom and those who try are frauds and mountebanks.

We must each follow a calling. We must each work, and be reliable. But that's all we can be called upon to do. Even that is a lot to achieve. We can also hope that, in the kingdom to come, there will be perfect love and mercy such as we can only occasionally glimpse it in this

Kingdom...

Marxism on the other hand says that we can be saintly. And yet it erases God.

Calvinism argues that we absolutely MUST be saintly, and it erases the economy.

Lutheranism leaves the economy to work on its own terms.

And it offers the promise that in the world to come...

We can finally finally finally render

Unto God...

The soul with which we were born.


Call it a fictional economy. What isn't?

The thing is that it actually works.

And for pragmatists -- that should be all that matters.

For idealists, there is a leetle something more. God lives in the hearts of believers, and what could be more surreal?

The floor is almost done. Now we had a leaking issue in our bathtub. Apparently the man who built the house in 1977 put the tubs in backwards so that the drain that is supposed to be inside the back wall of the shower isn't there, and so the grouting needed new silicone so that the water would stop leaking or something. While talking to the man who had been hired to analyze and deliver this verdict, and then prescribe a solution (the silicone implant in the crease between tub and wall), I talked with him about my animal rights class. He said he had seen a video about how elephants have a deep grieving process. It had appeared on the National Geographic Channel.

Elephants have a powerful memory (has this been proven scientifically?), he said, and they remember their children, and their parents.

When one dies, they can go into mourning for years.

Also, he said, the documentary stated that elephants have achieved a species-wide consciousness that humans are mistreating them. They go into rage now and then, bursting through their shackles, and smearing their handlers.

Who made this documentary? Are the facts right?

I'm not terribly surprised that elephants have emotions. But such deep exquisite feelings! It seems that perhaps we could recruit some of them for Lutheran Surrealism, and even open a pachyderm synod. If they can feel and if they can think, they can be our brothers and sisters in Christ. They would in fact be our only converts.

Problems to overcome:

They might not relate to the bi-ped on the cross. We may need an elephant on the cross.

But they might not like to see an elephant on the cross either.

Plus the cross would have to be made of steel, and who would have the heart to pound stakes into the legs and um, legs, of elephants? I couldn't do this.

We'll need to find the Mel Gibson of elephants, and see if we can arrange something with special effects. A movie of sorts, to be played in the savannahs. Expense, but we will go to any length to find converts of any species. Right now, our eyes are on the elephants, those beautiful beasts with magnificent memories!

The Carson & Barnes Circus is coming to town on Labor Day. I got tickets from a friend who will use the proceeds to help the creation of a new swimming pool. The old one cracked and now we have to drive twenty miles to go swimming in the summers.

Then the next morning after buying the tickets (36 smackeroos) in the newspaper The Delaware County Times there was an article concerning the poor treatment of the elephants in the Carson & Barnes Circus. The article was in fact a letter addressed to Peter Bracci, town supervisor, and it had come from PETA. PETA claims that the elephants in the Carson & Barnes circus are regularly mistreated. There is a showstopping finale under the big top (I saw this circus five years ago with Lola) in which twenty some elephants run around pell mell and then form into a pyramid. Apparently a bull hook (what's this?) is used to torment the pacific animals into overcoming their natural caution and climbing the pyramid.

The PETA letter claims that an elephant's hide looks tough but is in fact sensitive enough to register a minor insect such as a mosquito. A bull hook therefore is just as painful to the elephant as it would be to myself.

The PETA letter did not give scientific data or citation for this assertion.

I'm hoping my kids enjoy the circus. I'm not going to tell them about the bull hook. They hate that kind of thing, and they will cry if I tell them.