Saturday

 

Breakfast: black coffee and, from an aging pack of cheese from Sam's that, once opened, now needs to be eaten, a slice or two of each of four "foreign" cheeses. There's a Dutch, a French, an Irish, and a - - something else - - Swiss maybe? All fine, and goes well with the hot, black coffee that I brewed extra strong to start this Saturday morning. Even though my cheese drawer in the refrigerator has all kinds of cheeses to suit my taste for cheese I can taste instead of something so delicate and mild that it has no taste at all to me. Fresh shipment of German Brick, Limburger (I'm finding American Limburger more fragrant and tasty than German Limburger), and Liederkranz (newly back into production after several decades not available) from Chalet Cheese Co-op in Wisconsin. I mean, I know you're thinking Here we go again with his weird food, but okay, mox nix mir.

For Saturday I have the usual (when I'm not preaching, which most recently was about one Sunday in three) handout for our adult Sunday school meeting tomorrow morning. It's finished, and'll be published here later today or this evening. For now, though, I've made the mistake of upsetting myself by going online to my email and reading a couple or three or four editorials in various favorite newspapers, including Jerusalem Post and Haaretz. 

One is Avigdor Lieberman, who is spot on in saying the world is about to collapse in chaos and anarchy. Everybody gets it but the politicians, who make their careers in stirring up enmity and confrontation instead of international cooperation and interdependence. Lieberman says the West needs to work with Russian and China for international order, and he's right. Maybe the Chinese are correct that there's such a thing as too much personal freedom and obsession with rights? Of China, and e.g., the US with our inhumanity history is ludicrous shunning the Beijing Olympics because of China's human rights record.

All the media are wrought up about what Whoopi Goldberg said that got her suspended for a couple weeks (take time off to think about how naughty you've been, young lady). We are finally in America down to where I remember, in college and maybe high school English classes, reading Nineteen Eighty-Four and Darkness at Noon, about societies in which only politically correct right-think is tolerated; where what is correct thinking constantly shifts, as in James Russell Lowell's line "time makes ancient good uncouth" from his poem "The Present Crisis", itself right on for here and now. 

As to Whoopi Goldberg, we are not yet to the executions for real or suspected wrong-think and politically incorrect statements, but we are to the shaming and suspensions and firings. The network official who disciplined Whoopi is a stupid alphabet a-h whose own fearful political correctness to protect herself she values more than the human decency of seeing that, for Whoopi, a Black person, Jews are indeed White people, and to whom the Holocaust seems not racist but inhumanity against White people of other ethnicity and religion. It's perfectly reasonable that in our racist society Whoopi doesn't, there's my Mark 9:1 word again, see, realize, discern, comprehend, understand the viewpoint of the Jews, for whom the Holocaust was indeed the most extreme imaginable virulent racism. Until the network Big Brother/Sister came out self-righteous and made it otherwise by suspending Goldberg, the program seemed to be a place for people to speak freely and instigate discussion. But, no, there are unmentionables.

Look, it's Saturday, and +Time is my blog and I'll write what I DWP at least until Blogger's own Big Brother gets to me, at which point I don't care anyway.

What comes to mind? My colleague Max Biber years ago, getting into my car when I picked him up at Dulles, bristling about the man in front of him at the baggage pickup, who'd turned around and confronted Max about his blowing cigar smoke. "Did you put out your cigar?" I asked Max. "No," Max said, "I told him, 'It's a free country.'" 

Max smoked in my new Cadillac too, but in freezing weather I'd roll down the window behind him to take the smoke out, and when he complained that I was freezing his neck, I told him, "Max, it's a free country: you can smoke cigars if you wish, but it's my car and I don't have to breath the cigar smoke." Poor Max, an Australian immigrant but a native Austrian who spoke Strine with a German accent, and who never quite got it, he's been dead maybe forty years.

If any crazy can own a gun, any Black person ought be allowed, without fear of being fired, to opine that the Holocaust was inhumanity between White people.

Sean of the South moving out of Florida to another state? Where? 

RSF&PTL

T