A Pilgrim’s Digression

I am very much a late-comer to the music of Bob Dylan, having only discovered the richness of his music over the course of the past twelve months. But I am making up for lost time. For me, it began with the 1964 live album, which I told myself I did not like, but which nevertheless I found myself listening to again and again.

In particular the song, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” entered my dreams and for a long time haunted me throughout the day, until I had to start listening to another song in order to shake it. Then I watched Masked and Anonymous, where for the first time I heard “The Times They Are A-Changing” as sung by a little girl, as well as an aged Dylan himself singing such oddities as “Dixie” and a new version of “Diamond Joe.”

From there, Dylan became a steadily mounting obsession. I watched the Scorsese film, No Direction Home, and decided I even liked this guy, Bob Dylan, as well as his music. He is an unlikely star, an ugly poet without any of what most people would term “beauty” to his voice. His ordinariness appealed to me, and he seemed genuine in all respects. In one song on the album Slow Train Coming, he even says “You may call me Bobby, / Or you may call me Zimmy.”

Almost 20 purchased and illegally downloaded albums later, the obsession is nearly total.

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M. Night Shyamalan seems to be living up to his own bad press. Variously termed “arrogant” and “difficult,” he has lost some of his gleaming, wunderkind sheen, in the years since The Sixth Sense premiered. According to a recent USA Today article, when Disney read the script for his latest film, Lady in the Water, they withdrew from the project, at least in part because Shyamalan gave himself a co-starring role in the movie.

We aren’t talking about a Hitchcock-like cameo, either. Shymalan plays a character named Vick Ran, also referred to as “the vessel,” a writer whose work will change the course of human history. Too bad as an actor, Shyamalan can’t change the expression on his face. He’s a bad actor, as bad as Hayden Christianson, almost as bad as Keanu Reeves.

Also, I couldn’t quite get over the egotism of Shyamalan casting himself in the role of “writer as world savior.” The fact that his character is murdered for his teachings, at some point beyond the end of the film, only makes his egotism that much more outrageous.

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My final evening in Ithaca, we had dinner at the house of one of the professors who taught the workshop. It was a pleasant, but highbrow affair I could have done without, with lots of wine drinking and cheese eating. I drank only one beer, however, because I was the driver for a group of three or four people from my hotel.

Perhaps if I’d been able to drink more, I’d have been more comfortable. As it was, I had only an Ithaca Pale Ale, which turned out to be one of those beers that taste so dreadful you have to drink at least three before you don’t mind the taste anymore.

As for the cheese eating, I think it was the brie that, later that night, resulted in my violent illness. More later on that.

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After a half-day working session yesterday, myself and my fellow Digital Preservation Management participants took a field trip to the Cornell Ornithology laboratory, the curiously nicknamed “Lab of O.”

For me, this field trip has been the highlight of my week at Cornell. I have had an amateur interest in ornithology all my life, inherited from my Grandpa who early on taught me to identify by sight and song all the birds one might see in an Eastern back yard or woodland.

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My week at Cornell is drawing to a close. I have one full day of work left, tomorrow, and a half-day on Friday. At the risk of sounding clichéd, it has been an interesting and rewarding week.

Among other people, I have met folks from the Library and Archives of Canada, from CNN News Archives, from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, from the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, and from several Universities and Colleges.  The farthest a participant came for this workshop was from the island of Yap, which is in Micronesia, in case you didn’t know (I sure didn’t).

Oh, and looking at my list of participants now, I see that someone I’ve been talking to routinely is actually the Counselor for Archives for the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.  She probably told me that, and it went right over my head.

Cornell has one of the ten largest research libraries in the United States. Each day, I’ve been able to spend a little time in the rare book and manuscript room, examining the public exhibits. I’ve seen parts of the library’s Melville collection. I’ve seen a Hemingway autograph letter, as well as letters from other writers, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Tolkien letter is interesting, partly because it is a perfectly ordinary letter between Tolkien and his publisher, yet he wrote it in a kind of perfect, neat calligraphic script that any reader would immediately recognize from his novels. In the letter, written in 1958, Tolkien speculates that a new edition of LOTR may be necessary, as long as the book does not sink into obscurity in the next year amidst the sea of other novels on the market.

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• Sunday: Korean
• Monday: Japanese
• Tuesday: Mexican
• Wednesday: Frou Frou
• Thursday (tentative): Vegetarian
• Friday (tentative): McDonalds

One thing about traveling for the government, one eats well. I am on a per diem of $44.00, and since breakfast (albeit spare) and lunch (gourmet) are being provided by Cornell, I have plenty of money left to spend on dinner.

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Everywhere I go, I feel like I have come home. Driving up through central Pennsylvania this afternoon, through small towns with Scotch Irish names like Clyde and Armagh, I thought to myself, I could live here.

Green fields of corn and brown fields of soy stretch at the feet of green mountains; highways cut straight through those mountains, so that when you look ahead, you see a straight road running downhill, then up again.

Then, as you come down from these mountains to a town, you may find a lone strip bar or adult video store on the outskirts. As I am from West Virginia, the marketing of sexual vice always makes me feel at home. I like to see towns that cater to certain elemental needs, such as the need to gawk at naked women in the company of other men.
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Born July 14, 1912, today is the 94th birthday of Woody Guthrie. The best tribute ever paid the man has been by Bob Dylan, who wrote “Song To Woody” about 1962.

Song to Woody

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walking a road other men have gone down
I’m seeing a new world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that’s coming along
Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s dying and it’s hardly been born.

Hey Woody Guthrie but I know that you know
All the things that I’m saying and a many times more
I’m singing you the song but I can’t sing enough
‘Cause there’s not many men that’ve done the things that you’ve done.

Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that travelled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

I’m leaving tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hitting some hard travelling too.

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When people run in circles
It’s a very, very
Mad world.

Tear For Fears, “Mad World”

For the entire 32 years of my life, the nightly news has led with the statement “More violence in the Middle East today.” As a child of the late Cold War, the nightly news filled me with fear. Beirut was a cancer always threatening to spread its poison beyond the Middle East. Russia was generally viewed as an ally of the Arab states that threatened Israel and, by extension, the U.S. A third World War seemed not just likely but inevitable.

In my early teens, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, I began attending a Fundamentalist Christian church with my Grandmother. She gave me a book to read titled The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. I read that book probably five times because of the almost pleasurable, chilling fear of imminent apocalypse it instilled in me.

The movie The Day After (1983) terrified me, as well; but more than Lindsey’s prophecies, more than Hollywood’s fictional Armageddons, what really scared me was the nightly news.

When Reagan bombed Libya, the men in suits who analyzed the news on TV said that a wider war was likely. Reagan was a cowboy; he was sure to raise any ante tossed into the pot by a petty tyrant like the leader of Libya. The words Nuclear Holocaust were uttered.

The night the bombs fell on Tripoli, I lay in bed wide-eyed and frightened, unable to sleep for fear that the end of the world had come. The next morning, I woke to discover that nothing much had happened in the night, after I had fallen asleep. The world was still here; I still had to go to school. Apocalypse was postponed awhile longer.

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[Following is a parody of a typical Ann Coulter column, based on what I perceive her response would be to a very real news story taken from the Washington Post. The character I created to represent Ms. Coulter does not really exist, nor does the town newspaper for which she writes].

Anne Crupper is an op-ed contributor for the Pinchburg Vigilante, a daily newspaper for Pinchburg, Missouri. Although Ms. Crupper has spent time in Washington as a speech writer for Senator Rick Santorum, she has never abandoned her provincial values. Her columns on local and national issues, from a brash Conservative perspective, have gained her a devoted following and led to the syndication of her column on Conservative websites such as TownHall.com. Ms. Crupper’s first book, Not Just Godless: how the Democratic Party has embraced Satanism, will be published by Regnery in November 2006.

Democrat Says: There’s No Nicer Witch Than You

Any number of labels can justly be applied to the Democratic Party and its hate-filled, mind-numbed liberal constituency. A Democrat is a traitor, a liar, a coward, a Socialist, a terrorist sympathizer, a baby killer, and a sexual predator; yet however evil liberal Democrats have become, no major member of the Democratic Party could be called a Devil Worshiper. Until now.

As reported in the Washington Post, on July 10 Virginia Governor Tim Kaine pardoned the state’s only person ever to be convicted of witchcraft. In 1706, Grace Sherwood was accused of witchcraft. To determine the truth of the charge ahainst her, the local authorities gave her a trial by water, an accepted practice for determining whether a person is a witch or not. Her thumbs were tied to her toes and she was thrown into a river, where she floated to the top, a clear sign that she was indeed a witch.

Governor Kaine, apparently, thinks he knows better than our forefathers how to deal with witches: he pardons them. In a typical display of astounding liberal arrogance, Kaine said, “With 300 years of hindsight, we all certainly can agree that trial by water is an injustice.” In other words, those Colonials were a bunch of intolerant, backwoods bigots; if they found Sherwood to be a witch, they must have been motivated by misogyny and ignorance.

Liberals disgust me with how easily they can dismiss the wisdom of our ancestors.

Why not give the witch a Congressional Gold Medal while we’re at it? I am sure Ted Kennedy would gladly endorse such an award, even when he is sober. Heck, why not pay restitution to the witch’s family. The entire Democratic caucus will stand behind any resolution to award taxpayer dollars to someone who has done nothing to earn it.

What most appalls, in reading this story, is the flagrant way in which Governor Kaine stepped over the bodies of martyred Christians in order to pluck this one obscure witch from history. In the days before Thomas Jefferson (blessed be his name) enshrined religious freedom in our law, undoubtedly there were Christians tortured for their beliefs at the hands of ruthless, British inquisitors. Yet Kaine can’t seem to find one single eighteenth century Christian to pardon who was tortured or executed for his beliefs.

The trial by water test the witch Elizabeth Sherwood was subjected to does not even constitute torture, by most modern standards. The United States Army Field Manual prescribes a similar kind of “torture,” known as waterboarding, as appropriate for the interrogation of terrorists. The practice of dunking, or waterboarding, or testing by water, has been around since the middle ages and is an honorable technique of coaxing a recalcitrant terrorist, witch, or heretic to provide useful information to the authorities.

Moreover, almost totally elided from the news articles concerning the “pardoning” of the confessed witch, Elizabeth Sherwood, is the fact that she suffered no real damage, either physical or material. She survived and was released! She was not burned at the stake in 1706, as she no doubt should have been (apparently, there were bleeding heart liberals in the eighteenth century, as well).

Afterwards, she lived out a quiet life on her property until she died in 1740. Yet to hear the liberal Kaine discourse on the subject, Sherwood suffered the most grievous of injustices, when in fact she received not a fraction of the punishment she deserved.

Kaine’s deference for a Satan worshipper is merely one more symptom of how the Democratic party has completely abandoned the values of ordinary, Bible-believing Americans. Liberals have embraced the Prince of Darkness as their “god,” and they are worshipping him daily, through acts both small and great.

Governor Kaine’s pardon of Elizabeth Sherwood, the Witch of Pungo, may seem insignificant, but it must not be viewed as a single act of misguided kindness. When a Democrat pardons a witch, it must be viewed as a treasonous, heretical act of aggression against America and our Lord Jesus Christ.