Carey Rowland's blog

Brave New Whirl

 

The descent of man:

 it does spiral down through history and time

  to some questionable fate, beyond freedom

and dignity;

    it just takes our breath away.

 

Passing through Huxley's brave new world,

 a controlled world that is-- made stable by

  bio-engineered castes, who've been rendered "blissfully

   ignorant 

    of passion and old age" by test-tubed wonderkinds,

     with social pharmakia and so forth and so on--

      well, here came a working class hero

       into this spiraling business of mankind.

 

He wandered in--

  another Brit he was, and another genius, at that-- 

    into the vortex of supine wizardry

     that is the art and sciences, and of course the music,

      hawking tickets to soma magical mystery tour;

       he would pied-piper us through strawberry fields,

        over men and barrels and hoops and horses

         and lastly through some hogshead of real fire,

          and onward 

through the brave new whirl.

 "Imagine" said he,

   "there's no countries…nothing

     to kill or die for,

      no religion too."

 

Well whoopdy do.

 

In your dreams. 

 

All the while, the fool on the hill

 had nails in his hands.

  But that was no dream;

   yeah, I say unto thee, it became the resurrected

brave new pearl

    of great price. Oh! what a price! 

Now that's the descent of Man,

 and the Ascent too.

  What's it to you?

 

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Son delivers father, Utah 2007

Wide. That's what Utah is. And bright. Bright as a sandstone mesa under noonday sun.

Dry, as a bone.That's where we were, two men walking on hot, dusty trail in the middle of Nowhere, Utah.

With a pack on the back, an old fifty-something like me couldn't hear the unexpected as it lurked somewhere in the distance.The near distance, on the middle of the trail, and the same color as the sand itself: death.

Potential, death.

So the old guy, father, couldn't hear death wait for him, just a pebble-toss ahead. The rustle of the pack, the shuffle of feet, the heat of the day. Dad's old ears render him clueless sometimes.

But the son heard, and he responded.

Quickly.

Old dad shuffling right along on the trail, heading directly for death. Suddenly, he is pulled backward rudely, violently."Dad!" shouted the son to the father who had given life to him.Dad got stopped in his tracks, son's hand firmly jerking him back by grab of his pack.

The snake was coiled in the middle of the trail, coiled, rattles just a-hissin' through the desert heat.

Son who had been given life through the father gave life back again. Thanks, son.

(This really happened.)

Glass half-Full

PGD: a new stem cell reconciliation?

When a man and a woman make love and give life together to a new person, this is a beautiful event. The love act is creative in every sense of the word, but most especially because of this: the two lovers have contributed to an eternally procreative art project that has been blooming on our planet for a very long time.

Whoever or whatever the Creator of this life process is, or is up to, is not my question to explore just now, although I have made some decisions in my belief about that question. I merely want to point out a fact or two about the process through which we humans have come to have our individual existences. 

Fact #1 is this: you, as a human person, have 46 chromosomes. 

2.) 23 of your chromosomes were passed to you from your father; the other 23 came from your mother.

3.) These chromosomes, or coded genetic programs, establish a biological framework for your physical existence and life-long development.

4.) Since the unique man who is your father paired his 23 with the 23 chromosomes within that unique woman who is your mother, then you yourself are unique. You--your particular combination of 46 chromosomes-- had never existed before. So you are a unique creation. Congratulations. There has never been another "you"; nor will there ever be.  

These days, microbiologists can husband this human-making process in a laboratory. Believe it or not. It is not as much fun--not nearly as satisfying-- as making babies the time-tested Adam and Eve hubba hubba way. But hey, this test-tube thing is happening. This is what humans, in their quest for improvement, do. The scientific rationale for in vitro fertilization is this: some couples have not been able to conceive a child naturally, and so they can get  clinical help to bridge that fertility gap.    After obtaining sperm from a man, and an egg from a woman, the microbiologist combines them (in the famous "test tube"), and a new human is begun. 

Here's where the scientific work, and the ethical discussion surrounding it, becomes a breeding ground for controversy. My opinion is: Since a unique, never-before-existing 46-chromosome arrangement is manifested in space and time, soon to be flesh and blood--no matter how the conception was facilitated-- we have a new human being our hands. This is creation, by which we men and women participate with the original Creator. And it is serious business, because a person's life--and entire lifetime development--is at stake. There are great--dare I say "sacred" responsibilities present here.

Well, simple enough, really. Not. The further you climb on the tree of knowledge (or the double-helix of DNA), the more complex do your choices become. This is part of what Moses was getting at when he wrote Genesis. But I'll not go there now, as if I could. Anyway,  as it turns out, there is another reason that scientists have for working with in vitro embryos. Some of them are leftovers.  

Yes, Virginia, the outcome of the test-tube baby boom is that we have thousands, possibly millions, of little embryos suspended in cold-storage, probably at about -196º C.  Most of them will never be implanted in a mother's womb. Some of them will be, but not all. So guess what--another thing that's happening is this: the key to medical progress is contained deep within the very life process itself, beginning with its earliest stage, the embryo. These frozen embryos. So the scientific community wants to call these microscopic potentialities into the service of mankind--involuntarily, of course--by harvesting their totipotent genetic characteristics to improve the health of living persons.These little ones are the source for the famous "embryonic stem cell" lines that are cultured in petri dishes in laboratories all over the world.

So then the question becomes, quite infamously: Are we, as a human race of civilized persons, going to allow these suspended potential kids to be sacrificed, for the sake of medical progress, so that already-living persons can have qualitatively better lives?

We don't want to kill those 46-chromosome-bearing new creations just for the sake of heartlessly improving our own already-established lives. That would be, in the biblical sense, not unlike child sacrifice. Civilized people don't do that, do we?

Well guess what. I heard on the radio yesterday that microbiologists have developed a technique for obtaining individual embryonic stem cells from a 3-day embryo (in what's called the "cleavage" stage of fetal development) without killing the embryo. The procedure is called PGD, which stands for pre-implantation diagnosis. In it, the microbiologist extracts a single cell  from the 8-cell embryo, leaving the embryo virtually intact for further development and life. 

The PGD single-cell extraction procedure has been widely used all over the world. According Dr. Robert Lanza, in his statement during an interview with Ira Flatow on ScienceFriday (NPR), its use is dependable. http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201201275 Dr. Lanza's research pertains to stem cell therapy for improved eyesight in patients who have suffered macular degeneration. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2812%2960028-2/abstract  

But what caught my pro-life ear was Dr. Lanza's mention of this technique for obtaining totipotent embryonic stem cells without killing the fetus. The little guy gives up a single cell, then moves on to further development. Assuming the best, maybe its a little like giving blood. 

A little further reading brought me to: 

http://www.pennmedicine.org/fertility/patient/clinical-services/pgd-preimplantation-genetic-diagnosis/#step-by-step-process and this explanation: "After three days in culture, the embryos typically reach the eight–cell stage. One to two cells are removed from each embryo on day three and analyzed..." 

The extracted cell ia generally used for a genetic assessment of the embryo, so that parents, assisted by the scientists and doctors, can make choices about which of the embryos to choose for implantation in the mother's womb. This is another controversial development in the can-of-DNA-worms that constitutes genetic research and practices--"designer babies," and so and so on…

But my interest in this procedure revolves around its potential as a reconciliation between the value that we pro-lifers place on embryonic sanctity, and scientific use of surplus embryos without wholesale killing of them. A little more googling brought me to more info, from a fertility clinic in Houston, where I found this (emphasis mine):

http://www.houstonivf.net/Services/PreimplantationGeneticDiagnosis.aspx 

"Preimplantation genetics can be performed in vitro at any of the following developmental stages, the zygote (day 1), cleavage stage (day 3) or blastocyst (day 5). At each of these stages, cell(s) are removed from the embryo for genetic testing in special laboratories. This does not appear to harm the ongoing development of the embryo with over 1000 healthy babies born worldwide after preimplantation genetic screening. However, an insufficient number of babies have been born to confirm that the procedure is completely without risk.

So now I'm wondering: Does this change, at all, the debate between pro-life opponents of embryonic stem-cell research, and the researchers whose microscope sights are trained on all those frozen surplus embryos?

Glass Chimera

Shades of things to come

 It might have been seventy million years ago that a large asteroid hit the earth somewhere near Cancun.  And it might have been that the big space-tossed boulder would have thrown such a cloud of dust and disturbance into the earth’s atmosphere that it probably  altered the pecking order of biological  kingdoms for thousands or even millions of years thereafter.

Earth shaking events.  They happen.

It might have been that the severe rearrangement of earth’s biomes had put a major crimp on the old dinosaurs.  Maybe they became like DOS after Microsoft, just slipping down into the dark hidden recesses of the new program, relegated to subterranean, hydrocarbon pools of potential energy, their giant-generating introns and exons having been unraveled and liquefied like the assets of international  corpuses and cartels that would later profit from their demise.  It might have been that the superbad, supermad totally-rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle could no longer compete with the smaller, sleeker, smarter, uppity mammals who  were in the ascendancy and currently favored by the committee for Natural Selection.  It might have happened that way. And maybe the superbad supermad totally rad reptile kings and queens of the jungle found themselves faltering, over the next few eons, losing their command of the playing field, becoming more and more baffled  at their waning ability to throw their weight around any more, until finally they just, maybe, gave up the ghost and conceded their diminished reptile role to those miniscule, dust-lickin’ mutated cousins who would  later distill all that serpentine angst  and alienation into a venomous infusion of death—inflictible  on those new-kid-on-the-block mammals who were ruining the neighborhood. Equipped with  the ugliest, hissingest triangulated  head that God ever allowed on a breathin’ creature, these slitherin’ peabrains  could nevertheless still proudly carry on, simply by opening their mouths, the dominance and intimidation of their ancestors. Speak of the devil……

“Watch out for the damn snake!” yelled Simon.

from chapter 19 of Glass Chimera

And this just in, Cen0zoically speaking...from Ezekiel, at the River Chebar, among the diasporas:

" Thus says the Lord God, 'Behold, I am against you, O Gog, prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal. I will turn you about, and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you out, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them splendidly attired, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them wielding swords--"

"...Persia, Ethiopia, and Put with them, all of them with shield and helmet, Gomer with all its troops..."

Stay tune for more planetary updates on the continuing crisis of Darwinian survival of the fittest on the third rock from the sun.

Gift of Soul, and so on...

If you think people evolved from lower life forms,  then please understand that this creative work was revealed long ago--before science was invented-- when it was written very simply that "the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground."

And if you think that hominids such as Neanderthals or Cro-magnons lived on earth before Adam and Eve, then please wrap your mind around the fact that at a certain selected point in time,  the Creator-- the One who had written the double-helixed codes of life itself--touched a man and gave him an essential gift--something very new and unprecedented. God placed within the man, Adam, a gift that would forever define the quality and direction of human life.

We call it soul. From that point on, men and women became less like the animals, more like God.

"God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."

This gift of soul set men and women apart from other life forms, as its metamorphosing wonder formed within them self-consciousness and God-awareness. This had never been possible in the animal existence.

The soul-enabled path of  higher development now available to us through God's shared creative work led ultimately to a new requirement--the need for law.
Through Moses, Law was given, so that we might civilize the world and live peaceably and productively within it.

The subsequent progress that sprung up through law-enabled civilization-- and its incessant entropy toward downfall-- led ultimately to a new epiphany--the need for Spirit, and not just any spirit, but a holy and righteous Spirit.

Through the life, death, and resurrection of  Jesus, the holy Spirit was given. Are you ready for this?

From baroque Bach to funky Browne

My friend David Browne just consummated his latest musical project with a loving embrace of grace.

Beneath a canopy of powerfully eternal security, he and Patty had established a home base in our promised land many years ago. From that sacred place of intmacy, they were able to raise up a crop of fine young'uns, even as David persevered in the development of his God-ordained musical gifts. Together, the musician and his proverbs 31 bride smashed the glasses of postmodern musical conventionality, which dictates that musicians must confound their lives with exhaustive tours and frantic pursuits of musical success.

But not David.  From a quiet place of intimacy with our Creator, D. Browne has been enabled, over the years, to fulfill multiple responsibilities as husband, father, businessman and good citizen; but he managed this legacy of faithful works while composing and recording a prodigious collection of original music.

Reminds me of J.S. Bach.
David Browne's life does parallel Bach; both have that sort of German knack for exquisite musical precision, although David displays his percussionist heart in a decidedly Abrahamic framework. You may even detect a mezuzah hung somewhere in his mezzo-tenored doorway. But as I was saying, the grand master Bach had managed, about three centuries ago, to glorify God in an intricately constructive way without losing sight of what is truly precious in this life.

As Johann had labored long ago at his clanky harpsichord or on some cloistered organ, so David, in our times, caresses and thumps out a toccata of masterful sound in his garage-top studio near the Atlantic Ocean in North Carolina.  Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring gets a funky new rendering a few hundred years after the original.

Listening to the new cd, A Place I Go,  is for me a little like opening some hobbit hole of contemporary Christian musical passion. Then this awesomely productive audio entity comes leaping out at you in a sound  that's thick with warm, furry layers of complex virtuosity. I think the den of unique creativity in which David's labor of love began must have been hallowed out, originally, somewhere near that mountaintop lane--the one pictured in his cover photo. A swaddled child--one of the Browne kids--is seen in the pic going to that place where David goes, a place where he has wisely taken his wife and children. He will take you there too, if you'll give him a listen.

That place is a place of holy intimacy with the God who created us-- the Yahweh of Abraham, Elohim of Isaac, the El Shaddai of Jacob, whose Son was given as the Word made flesh, nailed to a cross and then resurrected, although David never actually mentions, in his tender dynamism, the name of Jesus. But you get the message. You know who he's singin' about--the One who walks with us closer than a brother.

A Place I Go is a sacrificial offering sent forth from the most holy place of profound grace.  From his abode of redemption, the artist sends up a smoky thickness of rock-driven conviction, punctuated with delicate piano and smooth acoustic interludes. He even tosses in a dash of  rap on "A Better Way," and a smattering of scatty electro-phased vocal, propelled by  retrofuture cultural relativity funk on "When I think of you." My favorite is "Promised Land," which sojourns on the "ancient steps" upon which our great faith is founded.

Check out David's new labor of love; he is a unique composer with an expressive gift, and an intense love for our Creator. He is, however, meshugginah.

Glass half-Full

Let them come to New York!

In 1944, as the combatants of World War II crept wearily toward  their blood-bought peace, econimist Friedrich A. Hayek wrote:

"Contemporary events differ from history in that we do not know the results they will produce. Looking back, we can assess the significance of past occurrences and trace the consequences thay have brought in their train. But while history runs its course, it is not history to us. It leads us into an unknown land..."

Three years earlier...

It had been the unprecedented wilderland of World War II that provoked, in 1941, Dr. Hayek to wrestle his incisive thoughts down onto some kind of intelligible mat. He began to jot some observations about that death struggle  embroiling Europeans in ferociously destructive warfare at that time.  What emerged from his typewriter three years later was an historical opus which he named The Road to Serfdom.

But back in '41 on this side of the Atlantic, you (or your grandparents) may remember... 

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we Americans joined the Allies in their war to defeat Germany, Italy, and Japan. Together with the British, Russians, the resisting French, and a few other courageous nations, our brave soldiers collectively ran the Nazis into the  European ground,  and then chased the defeated Japanese back onto their island.

From 1945 onward after that terrible war, a widening political rift developed between us Americans and our former comrades-in-war, the Russians. We are a freedom-loving, constitutional democratic republic. The USSR was at that time a communist state. We wanted to make the world safe for democracy. They wanted to foment a worldwide revolution in order to overthrow what they considered to be our corrupt capitalist system, and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat, the working classes.

For several decades the defeated Germans were thereby divided into two countries, one on each side of this politico/philosophical struggle. The dispute was known euphemistically as the Cold War. West Germany was being rehabilitated according to our democratic traditions, beginning with our American leadership as provided through Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. East Germany was being ruled by the communist Russians, led by Josef Stalin and then Nikita Kruschev. Those Germans in the western half of their country joined us western Allies as advocates of free democratic-republican government. Their countrymen in the east part of Germany were stuck with being occupied by the USSR communists.

The strange treaty arrangements that had followed negotiations after WWII divided not only the German nation, but also its capital, Berlin. This bizarre situation was further complicated by the fact that Berlin is located geographically in eastern Germany. Since the Allies insisted that the German capital not be yielded totally to the Russians, Berlin became a divided city of east/west, even though it was located in the midst of eastern Germany. West Berlin, or the western half of Berlin, became a (literally) isolated enclave city-state of western political freedom in the midst of communist East Germany. The freedom-seeking citizens of West Berlin were totally surround by communist, Russian-dominated East Germany.

But many Germans of the east were not content to stay on the totalitarian side. So many fled to West Germany, and many escaped to West Berlin. But the Russian overlords didn't like this, so they built a wall in 1961 to keep the imprisoned east Germans from getting over to the free side.
But then along came, also in 1961, John F. Kennedy. Formerly a naval officer in the Pacific part of WWII, he had since been elected our American President. He took the mantle from President ( and former Commander of the Allied troops) Eisenhower. Jack Kennedy had kept his eye on Germany; he had been in the Oval Office less than a year when he decided to visit the Germans and give them some much-needed encouragement.

Those  wall-ensconced west Berliners extended an enthusiastically fond welcome to President Kenndy. Standing at the Brandenburg Gate, in the very shadow, as it were, of the odious Wall, he told the eager Berliners:

"There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future... Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin. Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us."

A very good point, that, Mr. President.

He also told them:

"When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades."

That day of liberation did come for the Germany people, and for all the citizens of  Berlin. Twenty four years later in 1987, another American president, Ronald Reagan, stood in the same Brandenburg Gate location and spoke boldly to the Germans gathered there. He used the occasion to challenge the top-dog Russian wall-keeper:

"Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

In 1989, the Russians did tear down the Berlin wall, and the divided Germans were united once again--this time not in a nazified third reich-- but in a democratic nation.

The great tide of freedom as expressed in democratic, constitutioanl government, and led by our American republic,  achieved at that time, along with our freedom-generating allies, another landmark victory. The USSR gave up the abusive Stalinist ghost and decided to join the free world.  I'm hoping the Chinese government will one day permit, or be required to enable, such political liberty.

However, as Friedrich Hayek had been trying to express back in the '40s, history and its struggles are never as clearcut as we would like to think.

The 9/11 attack on World Trade Center and its ensuing terrorism may be a harbinger of a new death-struggle between ancient worldviews on the global horizon. While its true that developed nations have conducted a century of economic debates and political wars--both hot and cold--over freedom vs.totalitarianism, now that old ideological kamph is synthesizing.  Communism (and fascism, as two peas in a rotten statist pod, whether they admit it or not.) are reconciling with "democracy"as strange bedfollows  into a dialectical tension of constituionally-arbitrated political battles: socialists vs. libertarians, democrats vs. republicans.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or back at the caliphate, the real death-struggle among humans has reverted to guess what?--religion!

Go to New York City and see the hole in the ground. It was not dug there by communist workers, nor was it blasted by fascist fanatics.  That rapacious gap was inflicted as an airborn, calculated casualty careening  waywardly on a fateful collision course--a path plotted between Islamic hegira and liberty-hugging westerners. Let the world come and see.  Let them come to New York! Let them come and see the hole in the ground.

We've got a new brave-new-world morphing here. The once-new brave-new-world is devolving back into an old brave-new-world. Its a different kind of beast we're dealing with, much more vindictive than the animal spirits on Wall Street. And its zealous vehemence is much older than either communism or democracy. Now is the time for  citizens in this  land of the free and  home of the brave to reach deeper into our spiritual heritage than politics or youtube will propel us.

Turn or burn.

Glass half-Full

Hey man, carry the sacred flame

There is a sacred flame that passes from generation to generation, and this is how it happens:

Every man carries deep within himself a volatile liquid; it is an essence of who he is and who is destined to be.
That volatilte essence can be ignited into a passionate flame when a spark of desire flies between him and a woman.

Something mysteriously exquisite about the shape and presence of a woman produces the spark.

The man does not understand the chromosomal power of his desire, but he feels it. The sight of the woman--just about any woman--sets the spark flying. But that does not mean that the potency of his essence can find its best fulfillment in just any woman he lays desiring eyes on.

Herein is the difference between civilization and savagery:

The sacred flame is passed from generation to generation when a man and women unite for the purpose of protecting that flame, and tending it with love and purpose. She is the temple in which his holy fire burns continually, if he trims the wick faithfully.

But if a man seeks self-fulfillment by setting fires any old where at any old time with just any person, he becomes a sexual anarchist, tossing out firebombs that ignite jealosies and confusions and untended children wherever he goes.

DNA, and the One who wrote the DNA code, has designed all this, and ordained it. But its powerful built-in yearnings can operate in one of two very different ways. The One who wrote the code programmed in choices for us, and this is what makes true love possible.  The way of holy fire establishes a warm, bright environment for the good life to flourish; the other way lays IEDs of  trouble and mayhem that maim this generation and the next.

So, hey man, don't wander around tossing out firebombs. Find a safe haven for your sacred fire; then tend the flame with love and care.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

Our feet of clay

Men have felt compelled to explore this vast planet ever since they first set one foot in front of the other.  Legends and histories of humankind are full of adventurers whose travels and expeditions opened up new territories and opportunities for human development.
In the  annals of  exploratory expeditions by so-called civilized nations, it would be difficult to find a leader whose accomplishments are more impressive than  Captain James Cook.
As an English sea-captain, he lead three voyages of discovery around the world during the 1700s, in wooden sailing ships.
In 1776, after he had already conducted two  global circumnavigations,  the energetic Captain Cook was ready to embark upon another. Some men can never get enough of adventure; he was one of them.

Captain Cook's exploits probably have little to do with our American struggle for independence from George III's reign. But (I notice, coincidentally) it was eight days after our famous Declaration, that on July 12, 1776,  the vigorous expedition leader  lifted anchor to depart from Plymouth, England and sail around the world yet again. This came during a restless age of brave expansions for human enterprise, while at the same time an era of bold political experiments.
 
Long story short. After Captain Cook had guided his two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, all the way southward through the Atlantic, around the treacherous currents of South America's contenental tip, and then northward in the Pacific, he arrived at the Hawiian Islands, which is where I am now writing this 233 years later.

Captain Cook did not linger long there. After touching upon the westernmost island, Kauai, his two crews continued northward. They explored the North American coast in the areas of present day Seattle and Vancouver, then proceeded along the (now) Canadian coast toward Alaska, upward through the Bering Strait. Their attempts to make northern progress and discover the long-sought-after Nothwest Passage back to England were stopped cold by Arctic ice. So they turned around, followed the Russian coast southwestward along Kamchatka, then southward back into the Pacific. Eventually they hit upon, again, the Hawaiian archipelago, which were called by the English at that time the Sandwich Islands.

What a long, rigorous voyage that was, a very impressive accomplishment for a bunch of men in two rickety sailing ships propelled only by the wind and their own fortitude. Their southward return brought the ships Resolution and  Discovery  back to Hawaiian shores.

Here is curious a characteristic of human nature. In initial encounters between civilized and uncivilized people groups, it has been oftern reported that the so-called savages greet the civilized men with respectful awe that borders on veneration, and leads in some cases to a kind of worship. This is what Captain Cook eperienced in Hawaii. He and his men were greeted as gods.
Dumbstruck by the glitters of European gold, the strength of forged steel swords, the wonders of sailing ships and billowing sails, and the authoritative behaviour of the swaggering English sailors, the Hawaiian primitives responded with reverence. On many occasions, they prostrated themselves before the strutting sailors who had traveled from a technologically advanced society.

When residents of the big island, Hawaii, first encountered Cook's entourage at Kealakekua Bay, they prostrated themselves before the newcomers, then showered the hapless explorers with copious gifts of meat and fruit. All was well for a few weeks, and the strutting sailors from afar basked in the glow of their newfound divinity. But it wasn't long before the lustre of their godhood began to tarnish around the edges, and the Hawaiian King, Kalani'opu'u, suggested to the good Captain that maybe his band of merry men should be moving along.

So the English drew up their anchor and sailed away. But very soon, the foremast of Captain Cook's Resolution broke. They had no choice but to turn back and repair the damage. So they returned to Kealakekua Bay on the big island of Hawaii to repair it.

This time, however, the natives' reception was less obsequious. In fact, the Hawaiians were by this time a little weary of their new alien supermen. Their was tension in the air. A few of the Hawaiians had begun to view  the amazing white man wondermnts more as potentially useful implements instead of objects of mysterious power. Some of the natives  managed to abscond a small boat (called the pinnace.) The English, men of military inclinations, became quite alarmed.. A confrontation occurred. Men stared; tempers flared. One irreverent Hawaiian spotted a chink, as it were, in the superior English armored facade. He might have even discerned, beneath the techno-civilized countenance of Captain Cook, a mere man, like unto himself.

As events are commonly wont to do in human skirmish, a minor altercation suddenly and unexpectedly became the impetus for a lethal act. A knife--a knife wrought of English craftsmanship, but now wielded without warning in the hand of an Hawaiian protective of his King--put an  end to the life of the legendary Captain James Cook. The great explorer's powerful implements of wood and iron, his golden mantle of authority, were not sufficient to ensure his power over men, nor to extend his life beyond a sudden disagreement's violent outcome.

Among the race of men, these things happen. Great forgers of human progress die; explorations falter; institutions crumble; empires fall, in spite of the reverence and awe lavished upon them. Ultimately all men are vulnerable in some way or another. Though the mighty and the great among us are given golden opportunities, silver adornments and iron-like authority, they are struck down by the great equalizer of death, and exposed as unsustainable, mortal men. Their inherent feet of clay will topple their lives, their institutions, their empires of gold,  silver and iron.

In the ancient empire of Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar was a man not unlike like Captain Cook. Though not a great explorer, he performed that role which is among men the most revered--conquering king, But one strange night he had a dream that he didn't understand, and it worried him. He summoned an aide, a captive prophet, who interpreted the dream. Daniel explained to Nebuchadnezzar that his great empire, with him as the golden head of it, would one day crumble and fall, because of those vulnerable feet of clay, which are the fallen nature, the fallible genetic heritage, of every homo sapiens who has ever stood on God's earth.

Whether you are a conqueror of nations, or an explorer who has sailed around the world three times,or a pretty nice guy, or a drunk who sleeps in a storefront, your feet of clay infallibility will topple you someday. It may be that another savage like yourself will cross your path in a barfight or on a freeway and put an end to your deal. 

Little had  Captain Cook known, when he made that landfall at Hawaii, it was his last one.

Glass half-Full 

Egalit'e

When the noble ideal of egalit'e among men leads to state-enforced egalitarianism it degenerates to tyranny. This historical truth is seen in the bitter collateral damage of the French revolution and the Russian revolution.

The proper function of government in regard to equality is to protect equal opportunity, not to impose an institutional egalitarianism. Where Marxism went wrong, and degenerated utimately to Stalinism, was in force-feeding societal equality to all citizens. Likewise, among the Chinese, the reign of Maoism following their 1949 revolution degenerated to oppressive governmental structures from which the people are still striving to free themselves. The Russians too.

The earlier revolution, the one that happened here in America, presented equality as a God-given attribute of the human race. That has made quite a difference in the playing-out of it.  Jefferson, Franklin, and the many leaders who followed them were breaking new ground on an undeveloped contintent. That has also made quite a difference in the flowering of American equal opportunity among men and women.

The French revolutionary model, established soon after the American one, was encumbered from its inception with the weight of millenia of societal baggage, heaped upon the people mostly by the Church in Rome. When French republicans succeeded in freeing themselves from the bondage of the ancien regime, their progress was quite different from the wild and wooly American experience.

About a century later, Marx took a remnant of that French egalite principle and ran with it; it later developed as historical Marxism. Under the brutally communist hands of Josef Stalin, it enslaved and murdered millions of Russians and east Europeans.

Thus the revolutionary ideal in old Europe developed quite differently than the American experiment.  Our working out of it emphasized equal opportunity instead of enforced equality. That had a lot to do with our continent-wide abundance of undeveloped land. This is the heart of American exceptionalism; Such swift and wide incubation of democratic conditions will never happen again in the history of this world.

But these days, the old Western debate of democratic republicanism vs. authoritarianism is being rendered irrelevant due to the forceful power of Islam.

What was previously a philosphical debate, then a multi-faceted political division and military wars, has now retrograded to a more fundamental debate among homo sapiens: a religious struggle.

The Protestan Reformation, and the humanistic Enlightenment that accompanied it, eclipsed a millenial Roman Catholic domination of European culture and its institutions.  One result was a vast power vacuum. The revolutionary ideals that bloomed as political movements thereaftere drifted further and further from their religious moorings, and back toward archival Greek philosophic underpinnings.

Now western revolutionary zeal, having wrested itself from authoritarian Catholicism, has bankrupted itself of spiritual stamina. Its wantonly amoral end now renders us culturally weak as compared to the  heavy legalistic hand of Islamic fundamentalism.

So we in the post-European world will be playing catch-up ball to recover a principled spiritual heritage. This is a situation analagous to that in which Churchill and the British were struggling to prepare their defense against the onslaught of Nazism and Fascism in the late 1930s.

Oh what a dear price the people of Britain and their Allies paid. Never had so few sacrificed so much for so many, said Mr. Churchill, about the hardly-won defeat over authoritarian tyrrany in Europe.

Our generations probably face  similar upheavals in the years ahead.

I know not what course others may take. I take my refuge, and my inspiration in the One who, having decided not to participate in the prolonged skirmish, chose instead to spread his arms and allow the powers of this world to crucify his body so that spiritual rebirth could begin for all mankind.

Resurrection is better than insurrection.