Heathrow!

Heathrow!

Flight-catcher for the world

Trip-maker, Gate-shaker for planes,

Router of jets, and the globe's baggage handler

Moving, busy, enthralling,

Hub of all Western Orb-travellers:



How many flying souls have passed through your doors!

How many rushing feet thrashed your slickety floors,

after how many flights that o'erflown your Albion shores?



Beneath miles and miles of glist'ning glass,

flashing sunshine, while they pass--

myriad travelers of all class.



Hurry, scurry, flurry, don't show worry.

Slurp tea with breakfast, or take dinner with some curry.

But make your flight! catch that connection--hurry!



From far Mombosa, from far Bombay

from here, from there, every which-a-way

they pass like cattle every day.



Mega-beams of steel overhead--

they span a mega-traveled Heathrow shed

of tubular steel and electronic thread.



"Oh lovely Rita, security maid,

just scan my bags; don't make me late.

Why'd you take my gels?" I said.



While bags roll beneath the scan,

hurrysome travelers fly where they can,

'cross ocean, air, o'er sea and land.



Oh London bridges, what a town!

conducting travelers, up and down

through Heathrow gates the world around,



As planes go up, while flights abound

at Heathrow 'port, they do come down,

but not without a sound. They do astound

me.



Smoke

The Breakdown of Society

It starts with polarization. Is that okay, or not?

Polarization between left and right; or between conservative and liberal; libertines vs. disciplinarians; religious vs. atheist; sinners vs. saints; Democrat vs. Republican; libertarian vs. socialist; communist vs. fascist; And of course there's the original human version, and most fundamental one of all: right vs. wrong, also known sometimes as "us" against "them."

Is your personal identity, or mine, defined by one's decision to take a position on "one side or the other"? Philosophers and sociologists call this way of classifying stuff as dichotomy, an insistence on believing that everything is either one thing or its opposite thing.

In reality, of course, we are all composites of both. I suppose that makes us all mixed up. Why, my own chosen faith framework, Christianity, teaches that we are all sinners, while we can be, even at the same time by God's grace, saints. Consequently, we discover that everywhere you look in this world we find, not so much black and white, but shades of gray. Shades of gray in every societal, political, and religious entity and institution that is out there.

And most important of all: shades of gray within my own (formerly) damned self.

Where does this endless diversity of contentions take us? What's the world coming to? And how will little old me end up in it?

Over my sixty years of life, especially in the last half-decade or so, I have noticed a certain suspect predisposition within myself, and it disturbs me. To describe it simply, I would have to say it can only be called a kind of death-wish on society, because the world is so screwed up. It's a perverse reasoning that if society--or the nation or the world--were to fall apart because of so much dysfunction and injustice, then conditions would spontaneously emerge that would somehow facilitate my self-actualization as a person, and hence my fulfillment with a meaningful role in the new society.

But this is madness. I mean, this was Hitler's problem. And look what happened there.

Furthermore, in research and reading that I have undertaken in the last year or so, I have discovered that I am not the only one who experiences this feeling of delusory self-justification at the expense of societal downfall. There are many others out there whose attitude toward the world is reflected as what some have called "apocalyptic."

As I am presently writing a novel, Smoke, which is set in the year 1937, I encountered this word, "apocolyptic" as descriptive of the fascists in Britain during that convulsive period of pre-WWII history. These desperate extremists didn't care if their movement would bring about the downfall of British society, because they were so convinced that they were right and everybody else wrong, especially the communists across the street (in East London). And Britain's experience of this polarization was minimal as compared to the Continental manifestations of it just across the Channel.

The whole European world was, at that time, attempting to divide itself according to the two opposing apocalyptic, or revolutionary, movements of that day: fascists vs. communists: fascists in Germany and Italy, Communists in Russia, eastern Europe and possibly Spain. There is so much to say about this, I cannot possibly do it here, so I'll continue dealing with it in the book I am writing. But I would like to bring to your attention this passage about Germany in 1930, from page 15 of World Crisis and British Decline, 1929-56, by Roy Douglas (St. Martin's Press, 1986.):

"Economic misery was matched by political chaos. At the General Election (in Germany) of September 1930 there were eleven parties each with a dozen or more representatives, and no single party held as many as a quarter of the total. The Nazis, who had only won twelve seats a couple of years earlier, became second party of the state with 107; while the Communists advanced from 54 to 77. Both of those parties believed in revolutionary solutions, and were perfectly willing to allow the state to collapse in ruins, in order to rebuild from their own preferred foundations. Thus they had no interest in making the economy work as well as possible, and every interest in refusing to cooperate with anybody."

Sound familiar?

What they had back then was a failure to agree, and consequently, movements of both formerly-centrist positions toward extremes. Ultimately, the only reconciliation of those polarizations was one hell of a big war.

So, is the lesson of history that failure to agree may lead to apocalyptically chaotic rearrangemets of society? It could happen, but I'm not looking forward to it. When I was younger, I thought I might be awaiting some kind of apocalypse. I thought it was beginning in the fall of '08. But we're still here, all of us plodding along.

So, in this sixth decade of my time on earth I'm hoping and praying that the world does not fall apart. How about you?

Glass half-Full

Mr. Baldwin is us.

In the mid-1930s, when Adolf Hitler began his big push to re-arm Germany, nobody in the world really knew or understand what the mad dictator had in mind. The once-and-future enemies of Germany--England, France, and Russia, were somewhat alarmed at the initial stages of Hitler's expanding wehrmacht.

He got their attention when he sent German soldiers to re-occupy the Rhineland in 1936. Third Reich belligerence became even more apparent when Hitler ordered the anschluss of Austria in 1938 and then the military occupation of the Sudenland in Czechoslavokia in March 1939. But when, on September 1 of 1939, Adolf Hitler cranked up his war machine to invade Poland, the Allies knew that they would surely have to put a stop to German aggression, and so they declared war.

And those Allied nations, especially Britain, were really scrambling to equip their fighting men with military equipment and weapons. They were playing catch-up ball. Nazi aggression was taking them by surprise. But not really, because a few vigilant leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, had recognized the signs of war to come before everyone else did, and had advised their governments accordingly.

So its not like the British didn't see it coming; its more like they didn't want to see it coming, and so they had failed to make adequate preparations. When the necessity for defense of Europe and of Britain itself became woefully obvious, politicians began to accuse each other of dropping the ball on military readiness.

We can never really do enough in this life to prepare ouselves, individually or collectively, for the storms and roadblocks to come. Most times, governments and folk are caught unawares, blindsided, by the catastrophes on planet earth. You know the ones I'm talking about--floods, earthquakes, nuclear accidents, wars, climate change, depressions, etc. And even if people are not totally clueless about the imminent dangers, their institutions are generally underfunded and overextended when the card houses begin to crumble.

Mr. Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister 1935-37, was a primary target of those who, in 1939 and thereafter, were looking for scapegoats. Although he had advocated for military re-armamant during his time of leadership, he had not, it seemed, done enough to get the job of military preparedness done adequately to meet the real needs when push later came to shove.

In his 1975 book The Past Masters, Mr. Harold MacMillan, who later served as Prime Minister 1957-63, wrote this about Stanley Baldwin:

"The truth is that, like many other people, he could not believe that there could be a man in the world so wicked and so lacking in any kind of moral feeling as Hitler. Baldwin's life had been cast on the whole in pleasant places. He had had to deal with a lot of people in varying degrees of good and evil in their character...(but) He had never believed that there could be a living devil. So although the full development of Hitler's career came after his (Baldwin's) resignation, he was unable to attune his mind to the thought that in this century of 'progress' the world might be hurled for a second time into the abyss of destructive war."

Nevertheless, the worst happened anyway. And I think most of us are like Mr. Stanley Baldwin.

Smoke

got them sharia-sheddin' blues again

On May 12, 1937, the archbishop of Canterbury placed a crown on the head of a young prince. In that act, the Church of England, a religious authority much stronger and older than any one man, proclaimed George VI the anointed King of Great Britain and its dominions. After the disruptive abdication of former King Edward, the restoration of British royal authority into the hands of a willing sovereign was a welcome relief for the English people. And all was once again well in the realms of the British empire, or so it seemed.

Couple years later, and all hell was breaking loose; the world was falling apart. Britain was fighting for its life to prevent Hitler and his crew of thugs from taking over. The Teutonic madman had usurped governmental authority from the whimpering sovereign of Hohenzollern of Germany,and was running roughshod over civilization, bent on conquering Europe and probably the world if he'd had half a chance.

King George VI of England ultimately had to lean on the common sense and fortitude of his vigorous people, their army, the RAF, and Winston Churchill's fierce resolve to prevail against the heathen horde that had sought to subdue them.
After that war to end all wars had subsided, after the Brits had repelled the Nazi war machine away from their obstinate island and had driven their blitzkrieging Nazi asses back into the forlorn fatherland. After that-- the English, having received no small measure of assistance from us, the Russians, all our other Allies, even the humbled French-- the formerly-fortuitous God-ordained English monarchy commenced to lapsing into a ceremonially opulent impotence.

But the Brits still cherish their Queen.
Even mean Mr. Mustard still loves to go out to Buckingham palace and catch a glimpse of her royalty on the occasional Sunday afternoon. They're clinging to a vestige of their former magnificence is what it is.

Most folks these days don't put much stock in that whole theocratic authority trip--divine right of kings and all that. We tossed out those antiquarian channels of governmental legitimacy a century or two back, when We the People, in the interests of liberté egalité fraternité, supplanted our churchified heritage with the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, scientific hypothesis, Darwin's Galopagosic observations, and Einstein's curved universe of relativity.

Hence has our hubric secularity at long last overgrown our outmoded religious foundations. This includes our moral moorings too. Having no basis, except the opinions of mankind, on which to determine what is right or wrong, we have forged a brazen new world in which anything goes--if it feels good do it: off-the-books accounting, infant selection, lady gaga libido, high-frequency-trading on steroids, heavy metal on meth and sado-machismo with online hyper-voyeurism to whet the libidinous appetite.

While lapping up all this pleasure, wealth and leisure, we've managed to educate so many people now who've gotten the complicated world all figured out; we can view the overthrow of quaint queenly monarchies and past mythologies as progress, societal evolution, and good riddance.

In the midst of such widening post-modernity, the sun is definitely setting on the British empire, if it hasn't already. And little brother yankee Sam, so bright with energetic potential in the post-GreatWar suburban expansion, is lapsing into self-absorbed lethargy and self-medicated entitlement depression blues. Consequently, Chinese bureaucrats will soon be calling the shots on how we spend our federal reserve notes, and the sharp sword of sharia law will eventually slit through our aspinal moral mediocrity, as is now happening among the disoriented, burka-detesting citoyens of liberated France.

Will our long-sought secularity be any moral match for the long arm of Islamic Law? Will our watered-down, politically correct, hypersensitive "nigger"-eschewing egalitarianism even hold a candle of character to these burka-sizing self-righteous Mohammedans who are determined to compel us infidels to pray five times a day and cover our women so they won't look like Marilyn Manson on a bad day or Marilyn Monroe on a good one?

Western culture is on the skids. Where's some royal dignity when you need it?

That British empire-- fading as it is into the dust of history, that obsolete futile monarchy, that despised colonialism which had selfishly sought to sweatshopize the world while claiming to civilize it-- that same limey cartographying, meddlesome mandate-making meshugganism-- That same British kingdom had, in 1917, cleft ancient Palestine in twain. That same Balfour-declaring John Bull ridin' colonializin' fee fi fo fum empire had allowed a lapsed, stowaway dormant Davidic theocracy-- now a left-leaning democracy-- to insert itself right smack into the middle of the infidel-whippin' Mohammedan world. And what a mess it has been since then.

Thanks a lot, England.

Nevertheless, here we are in 2010. Mr. Ahmadinejad is strutting his authoritarian shiite around the world and who knows if the Persians have got evil intentions to nuke Israel or if Israel's just paranoid?

Who knew?

God help us.