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How do you fell an evil ogre?
Seems like the Democrats may finally have figured it out.
If you haven't reread Jack and the Beanstalk lately, you probably should.
Somehow, in the current political climate, all those old monster-slaying tales shine with unexpected relevance.
How do you fell an evil ogre? You do what the stories all say you do.
So: someone took a potshot at Donald Tr*mp and winged his ear.
As a friend of mine observed this morning: “Half the country are saying, 'Thank god he's OK,' and the other half, 'Damn, he missed.'”
Hearing the talking heads mouth the obligatory words last night and today, decrying the violence, I couldn't help but think that they're maybe saying what has to be said in public. Fortunately, being myself a nobody from nowhere, I at least have the freedom to be more honest.
If anyone has done more to foment political violence in the US than Donny-boy himself, I can't think who. In many ways, he's been given a taste of his own medicine. Call it—fully savoring the mangled metaphor—cows coming home to roost.
Don-don, you brought it on yourself.
If the twice-impeached convicted felon/presumptive Republican presidential candidate (!) is smart, he'll ramp down the violent rhetoric from here on in.
Hubris, Thy Name Is Donald
Well, well, well. The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine.
Sin isn't a particularly active category in most contemporary New Pagan thought, but the ancestors, having more experience, and hence more wisdom, than we do—not to mention a worldview uncontaminated by knee-jerk reaction against natal monotheisms—accounted hubris as the chiefest of sins.
Hubris: excessive pride. (“Overweening” is the classic adjective here, but it's silly to define one unfamiliar term with another.) Not pride, note, but excessive pride: that's what the gods hate.
Well, gods, I'm with you on that one.
Of what does hubris consist? Of arrogating (whence “arrogance”) to oneself that which properly belongs to the gods. Thus, oddly, hubris is a form of theft: more specifically of sacrilege, stealing sacred property, accounted by the ancients as one of the most terrible of crimes.
For all the hallmarks of hubris, utterly lacking in the greatness of heart or nobility of spirit that characterize, say, Achilles, look to the former American Criminal-in-Chief: a life without honor, lived only for himself, in the misbelief that, for him, deeds have no consequence.
AP: Washington DC
Why the Republican cowardice?
On the eve of the vote which will, in all likelihood, end with Senate Republicans once again shamefully failing to impeach disgraced ex-president Ronald Rump for crimes of which he is transparently guilty, many Americans will be wondering: why do Republican members of Congress so often seem to lack even the slightest amount of courage or moral conviction? In fact, there's a very good reason.
None of them have spines.
In 1989, a little-known statute was passed by Republican leadership that requires all incoming Congressional Republicans to undergo surgical removal of their spines before their term of service begins.
“It's a relatively simple procedure,” says Dr. Mark McKinney, a DC surgeon who, over the course of almost four decades, has performed the operation on more than 150 Republican Senators- and Representatives-elect, “and we fit them for the brace that enables them to stand upright at the same time.”
He adds that some also choose to have optional lobotomies performed at the same time.
One of the things that astounds me about the human animal is our stubborn will to believe, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Case in point: the Turin “Shroud.”
Dating to the mid-14th century, the so-called shroud is a 14-foot piece of linen displaying what appears to be the imprint of a man's naked body, fore and aft. As a quick web search will show you, many, many people continue to believe that this is the actual burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth.
They continue to believe this in spite of the fact that three separate C-14 tests performed in three different laboratories in 1988 proved the cloth to be of medieval origin.
They continue to believe this in spite of the fact that, counter to all historical likelihood, the figure shown on the cloth looks exactly like conventional Western representations of Jesus.
They continue to believe this despite the fact that an actual human body laid out on a cloth wouldn't produce an imprint looking anything like what we see on the “shroud.”
Take a look at the image's “butt,” (lower right). Looks like a (skinny) butt, right?
(“I've seen Jesus' butt. Now I can die happy,” a Christian friend recently quipped.)
Contains sexual content
Call it the “honor system.”
Most traditional societies were—and are—societies of honor.
In such societies, honor—also called reputation or name—is an important motivator of action. In these societies, one acts in such as way as to preserve one's honor, whether individual or collective, and tends to avoid acting dishonorably to avoid the resultant shame.
The opposite of honor is a state that the Old English-speaking Hwicce, the original Tribe of Witches, called níð: dishonor.* One who behaved dishonorably was known as a níðing or—even more cutting because it's diminutive—a níðling.
None of these words survived into Modern English, having been replaced by Norman French instead. (In any given society, the moneyed/ruling classes are the ones who can best afford to be preoccupied with matters of honor.**) If they had, we would today speak of nithe (rhymes with writhe), and know the nitheful as nithings (r. writhings) or nithlings.
For the ancestors, what was considered nitheful was frequently non-normative behavior. In societies with strong gender-role categories, the paradigmatic act of nithe for a man would have been to experience receptive sex, especially willingly. (Some, of course, would still see it this way.)
Nowadays our ideas of what constitutes nitheful behavior have changed in major ways; but in neo-traditional communities—like the pagan community—the concepts of name and nithe are still important.
What do other people say about you? If you give your word, do you keep it? Can others trust you?
Those seeking current examples of nithe and the nitheful will have not far to look.
Trumpery
n. pl. -ies
1. Showy but worthless finery; bric-a-brac.
2. Nonsense: rubbish.
3. Deception; trickery; fraud.
—adj. Showy but valueless.
[Middle English trompery,
from Old French tromperie,
from tromper, to cheat.]
