Art of Reading by Samuel Bak

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Clocks from Hell

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  Last night I finished Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. Its one of his earlier works, published in 61. At the end his main character gives an interesting analogy on extremist like Nazis or the KKK, etc. He describes them as clocks from hell. Not exactly.   Clocks, at least in the past, were built on interlocking gears and it was the teeth lining up that kept the time. He said some people file teeth off. So then the clock tells time perfect for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, then misses, then another 2 hours and 52 minutes and then misses. These people in extreme political movements have access to see the world as all of us do, to know reality as we all do. But they take some of their teeth off with a metal file. They remove the vision of, lets say, little Jewish children being so similar to their own children. So then all their gears turn and they love Wagner and Brahms, perhaps even Prokofiev Peter and the Wolf (1936), but they file off the teeth for Jewish human-likeness.  ...
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Idolatry in the West

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"in order to promote killing in civilized societies it must be legalized under deceitful names. Yet liberal societies seem happy to be deceived exactly to the degree to which they have developed into societies of covetousness." Ok ... I know you need more before you know where this is going ... I am reading a book of essays on the ten commandments. This is in a section talking about the relatedness of all ten commandments, primarily through the command not to murder. He goes from there to make the point that we are a society dominated by want and covetousness and the more the claws of greed entangle us (from human traffiking to slave labor for our cheap consumer goods, to "designer babies" and whatever else technology deems to sell) the more we will redefine sin and morality. Bernd Wannenwetsch continues: "the culture of death is essentially marked by the business of redefinition. In defining our own humanity we claim the property rights that entitle us to dist...
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Why History?

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  Interesting story - vignette that sounds familiar from about 80 years ago. February 1961 in Montgomery, AL where the seven states who seceded gathered to create the Confederacy one hundred years earlier … the city organized a weeklong celebration. White men dressed up as confederate colonels and women as confederate belles for a parade and fair attended by fifty thousand. There was also a pageant that told the dramatic story of secession and resistance to federal power. The parade passed directly in front of Dexter Avenue Baptist, the home pulpit of Martin Luther King, Jr. The pageant included a detailed reenactment and swearing-in of Jefferson Davis, played by a local attorney.   Judge Walter Jones said white people had gained “a deeper appreciation of the things the Confederacy fought for, and helped them to realize that unrestrained federal power is destroying this nation.” Another newspaper comment was “Today the South is facing many of the same problems it faced in 186...
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