late -- no matter

Running through my head this morning, “Choral Fantasy on Nearer My God To Thee,” Karg-Elert, from yesterday’s worship service, calling up the Titanic orchestra playing on deck as some passengers crowd into lifeboats and untold hundreds more face freezing drowning as the ship tilts and slides under. A magnificent piece for a nation in the throes of a terrifying era in world and national experience and of a horrifying presidential election, let the reader understand.

We weren’t so noble after all, America, not as noble a nation as I grew up thinking, believing, knowing, being, all those years. I’m in the dangerous trap of despising the politician class, wanting them deposed, the lot of them; and worse than deposed, wanting to hear carpenters at work outside; but the slogan “make America great again” sickens me with dread and foreboding of what the perpetrators may have in mind. Truth, they have nothing in mind but stirring fear and hatred amongst the dull and the abysmally ignorant, if the shoe fits, …

Grow old along with me, the worst is yet to be. Every nation and empire — we have been an empire, finally hated from without, and not unjustifiably, with the most violent and consuming passions imaginable, and now fatally from within — has its time in history unto decline and fall. We could not have been brought down by external enemies, but collapse from within by insatiable greed and its fools; what great sadness, having begun when America was loved, to have lived into such an age and to fear for the young whom I love most in life and the world. They will not know, America will not be the same for them, and the make america great again slogan is the alchemy of those who know not and know not that they know not. God help us; but not helping, God has rather loosed scorpions.

UPS delivered my basket of summer fruit this morning, reading to end the summer: The Jewish Annotated New Testament. I’ve begun with According to Mark. Next, First Thessalonians. 

From outside: thunder claps