Sex, Love, and Lock & Load

U Wisconsin Law Prof Ann Althouse had a question, 'Why no student protests against the Iraq War?,' to which I gave the following reply:

'But once I saw in the dark, and now I see in the light.' VN is the prism which draws the light which is broken into its components and we, the boomers, see America and its foreign relations. To understand the protests, one needs to go back to the fifties, to Lassie and Leave it to Beaver, sanitized from commie thought after the black list, and Eisenhower who said to his Press secretary he would answer a tough question by addressing it with an apparent sincerity and malapropism (which would cause people to lose interest and Daddy would take care of it). Then we had our War and maybe we weren't democratic because Eisenhower said 'they would only vote once' and didn't support the Geneva accords ending the previous war in 1954, and we faced the Vietnamese somewhat phase shifted and fighting against French colonialism and Japanese holding rice in warehouses, at that point directing the French, while 2 million Vietnamese starved. But they were patriots and collegial in their own Comintern, which is why VN has worked out better than North Korea. Suddenly the leftist virus was released and we, having been kept previously from exposure to it, were infected. And Richard Nixon freed us. We had our own 'communism' without knowing it which we inherited in fighting the identitarianisms of WWII and the Cold War. We had been owned by the state. But we were freed. The draft was not a law of nature like complementary winter and summer, mirabilu dictu. And we saw the signs of infection in ourselves, for example 'Cambodia' and 'communism' both start with 'C's; 'what the hey?' And the vitims in our own society when we went to work in it turned out to be victims a lot of themselves though it was hard to see that from the distance of a University, and even more we found it took real effort to produce and accommodate ourselves to it; so we, at least selectively, rid ourselves of the virus. But now the children are exposed to viruses all the time, which is possibly why they sometimes feel 'global warming,' but an overwhelming infection is not to be anticipated.

The Origin of Islam

Aramaic was once the lingua franca of a vast area of the ancient Middle East, similar to what English is today or Latin was in Europe in centuries ago. It has now given way to Arabic, but according to some researchers, Syriac or Syro-Aramaic was also the root of the Koran. When the Koran was composed, Arabic did not exist as a written language. Aramaic, however, was still widely used between the 4th and 7th centuries in Western Asia. Ibn Warraq estimates that up to 20% of the Koran is incomprehensible even to educated Arabs because parts of it was, in fact, originally written in another, though related, language before Muhammad was born.

The author of the most important book on the subject – a German professor of ancient Semitic and Arabic languages – prefers to write under the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg. Not because of lawsuits of “racism,” but out of plain fear for Muslim violence. According to Luxenberg, the chapters or suras of the Koran usually ascribed to the Mecca period, which are also the most tolerant and non-violent ones as opposed to the much harsher and more violent chapters from Medina, are not “Islamic” at all, but Christian:


“In its origin, the Koran is a Syro-Aramaic liturgical book, with hymns and extracts from Scriptures which might have been used in sacred Christian services. […] Its socio-political sections, which are not especially related to the original Koran, were added later in Medina. At its beginning, the Koran was not conceived as the foundation of a new religion. It presupposes belief in the Scriptures, and thus functioned merely as an inroad into Arabic society.”

An interview with Luxenberg is here. A Jew, wondering what the problem was from the Moslem faith, converted for 3 years. He says the problem is not the Koran but a commentary, perhaps alluded to in the interview with Luxenberg. Recently half of the Christians in Iraq have left. They are Aramaic speakers. It would be of interest to have Iraqi refugees teach us Aramaic. I had originally brought brought this discusssion up in an earlier post which I had shifted to 'Draft' but am reposting.

How Lebanese Catholics see it.

War Morality. Haaretz answers the question in the air. Amnesty International don't hurt your noses on the trees.

Reaction to sacking of the head of the Vatican Observatory

Continuing the psychological discussion, Freud's conceptualization of cathexis in the Project for a Scientific Psychology is more central to the issue of depression than is the old canard about 'your angry at somebody and it is unexpressed.' Psychoanalysis is more like case law than a double blind investigation and we can overemphasize aspects of a case. The psychoanalyst might say, 'Life is about getting and giving up.' It is the 'getting,' the cathexis, that provides happiness; the difficulty in 'giving up' inhibits us from getting there. In therapy or development, one should emphasize the Aim, not the defense. The emphasis on anger may suggest that we should control, by aggression, the object that has not given us what we want, which may be to encourage a regression to a grandiose attitude. To reflect on recent posts, this is the Gentiles complaint about Trotsky or other frustrated Jews, that, for example in the case of the Russians, they were not treated as objects in themselves. But I was depressed today by the Pope's action. I very much liked the Jesuit who was head of the Vatican observatory for the position he took against 'intelligent design' and even more admired him for taking it. I understand that one can get into a transcendental feeling and it is perhaps best not to limit that a priori, but to assert it simply has no place in science. For me the syllogism: idiot = Pope, Pope = Jesus, QED "You're a good fellow Charlie Brown" works pretty well.

A Self revealed in clothes

Was Kant the predecessor to Freud? As I understand it, Kant said we really can't perceive what is outside. We only have our senses of it. On the one hand that seems a mathematical quibble. On the other a kind of mystical insight. When I was young, someone asked me if I could believe that old comfortable in itself looking brown wood chair was made of atoms? Kant preceded the rise of Chemie. But really, from Kant it is but a derivative philosophical step to psychoanalysis which has our emotional life as a grounds for perception.

"Threadbared," isn't that a clever neologism? One smiles at hearing the word. Dr. DeLoache, noted in the left column, in discussing someone psychotic he interviewed who had presented himself bizarrely in public, said that it was our appropriate ideal to 'stand naked in the world.' One senses that he did not mean that literally but in ways that one can imply, and I thought it was his most gracious statement about a patient, who could be seen as an ideal. The blog "Threadbared" takes the Kantian/Freudian notion that in our clothes what we perceive as fitting the occasion may, without our sensing it, express ourselves 'nakedly to the world.' The post "What are friends for" cleverly takes up the unconscious expression of an identity arising out of the relations of 3 people.

Trotsky and Shoah

Kesher Talk's recent noting of Trotsky sparked in me a reflection on how much Jewish involvement in the Red revolution in Russia sparked a German response against the Jews as 'the river in which the revolutionaries swim' to adapt Ho Chi Minh. Solzhenitsyn has a recent book 'Alone Together' or 'Two Hundred Years Together'* which ideally would cast light on the reality in Russia. Though it has been used as a polemic for answering my question positively, the reality, cf. the generous review of noted scholar Richard Pipes and another very interesting Russian source review, seems to leave the ascetic author correctly viewed as autistic. One could view the evidence as suggesting that the hypothesis of my opening sentence is an intellectual bridge too far.

The psychological fact would seem to be that Trotsky's action challenged those who believed in Jewish dhimmitude and the role of the Jew in this challenge became the primary problem with communist Russia, its other defects flowing from that, rather than the Red revolution being an unfortunate totalitarianism destroying the world of Chekov and Tolstoy and common men in which some Jews, ? apostate, but mostly others, nonorigined participated. Nevertheless, it would have been better for the Jews and everybody else, given Lev Davidovitch Bronsteins's being successful as head of the Red Army, if he had followed that admonition which almost undoubtedly occurred to him, "Es ist nicht bar dir." As Anna Freud told me in a letter of August 9, 1971 "...it is very necessary to come to terms with oneself before one is really able to do something drastic about the environment, whether the drastic action is positive or negative."

*compendium of reviews here.

Tres Leches of religious dessert o quatro o dos o uno

Was interested, consequent the DaVinci code, in the feast day or Memorial Day of Mary Magdalene which occurred in the Catholic calendar 22 July. One might focus on the experience of Mary Magdalene, which is the fulcrum of Christian faith. In the Gospel, John 20:1-2, 11-18, Mary goes to the tomb and finds Jesus not there. She enquires of a man she finds in the vicinity, ? the gardener, where he might have been moved to. He speaks. She sees that it is Jesus, and she says 'Rabuni, which means teacher in Hebrew.' The priest who discussed the Gospel passage in the course of a Mass did not talk with disdain of caring for those lesser than us but rather that 'we all have had the experience of finding our Lord in others I think, a family member or someone we know in business ... and hopefully others have found Him in us,' one might say a Gnostic perspective. This is a message in the book reviewed by Oswald Sobrino on this feast day. This book and review give a Spanish noble attitude, which is distinctive and attractive in its chivalry, which finds the Lord in the other.

'It is not unusual for a pack of animals to function in a group but what makes the species man successful is its ability to trust its understanding of the intentions of another, an outsider.' After the delirium of the creation of the earth and sky and our first parents, what strikes me as the coming into a consciousness of the real in the Bible is the competition of Cain and Abel, which has perhaps the most dramatic denouement in literature when the murderer finds in himself the voice of G-d saying 'Am I my brother's keeper?' Thus of course the discovery of the perspective of G-d coming from man appears early in the Bible. Returning to Mary Magdalene, she respectfully calls Jesus 'Rabuni.' In this we do not find the fierce hostility to other Jews heard in other parts of the Gospel. Less emphatically do we not not hear a differentiation between a G-d and man. Being the dearest part of the Christian faith, this experience would seem least likely to be corrupted in the retelling. In the day's Gospel, perhaps we find the Gnostic hope, the transfer of the life of God in another. It is said that the early and main part of the Koran is of Syriac origin in Aramaic and was Christian prayers to be carried to the Arabs. Being from about the fourth century it may have been before the suppression of the Gnostic heresy. The Gnostic view would seem to be on a delicate balance in terms of helping I Thou ethics. If we should find the Lord in ourselves and others, then, given sufficient rank as the monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella had in Spain, to make that easier, others should be like us. My friend Dr. Perez, whose father was the foreign minister of Ecuador, said to have helped Jews escape from Europe, once, in speaking of his origins, pointed out that his name was really the same as the prime minister of Israel. There is an amusing story that the Spanish language changed when a crown prince could not pronounce a consonant and the 'dj' sound that he gave it became proper Spanish. Perhaps such a transformation in needing to find the Lord in others has occurred in Islam.

Reflections on 'Belmont Club'

Solzhenitsyn's austerity, ironically, represents an increase in our 'material possessions.' The conjunction of his views and ours can lead to statements that a Texas girl might call a "hoot," one such "It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline."