Category: Uncategorized

Russian: what gives?

In 1975, when foreign language lessons appeared in textbooks and on vinyl, I decided to learn Russian as a complement to the German that I had just learned with some fluency. The Cyrillic alphabet provided interesting and confusing sets of letters — enough to keep a learner engaged in sounds and texts that looked familiar to the under-aided eye. It appeared to resemble Gellarese in many ways, cobbled together in a manner that seemed intuitive to the 1970s Cold War setting, an interesting series of words that deliberately resembled a code and a language history that included the drama of Tolstoy and a presence that made it seem like background music in a Soviet department store.

Intrigue comes across between German and Russian as it is cast against a background that the geography of post-war Europe provided. However, German and Slavic speakers would not yield to translation with any degree of ease. Russian uses neither the definite nor the indefinite article, whereas German conveys the meaning and usage of every noun and pronoun. The German language spoken by a five-year-old in Berlin provide all the parts of speech, every inflection, and every nuance of meaning. Stack Russian next to German and you arrive at that enigma wrapped within a mystery that Russia represented to Churchill. The Slavic and German ways seem to play out like a spy thriller, where the similarities may lie somewhere between the butler and the wrestler. God help the translator maintain any measure of surety and sanity in such a world.

A Passionate Love Story

My German and Russian proceeded along these avenues of restriction. Of course, the tools available on the internet were yet decades away. It is difficult to imagine how any new language can be approached without Google and YouTube: an assuring set of mouse clicks away. Hence the heightened curiosity that is aroused upon employing YouTube and Google to assist the learner who arrives to answer the question posed for this post — what gives?

Somehow, languages once learned to any extent seem to stick onto various brain cells and cortexes. I still remember much of the Russian that I heard on those 1975 records, language segments that blended together like a fermenting beverage. Somewhere between beer and vodka, I believe.

Thanks for reading.

Freedom and Liberty

For me, but not for ye.

Jim Jordan Trips Over His Own Asshole Trying to Debate Anthony Fauci

Yesterday, Representative Jim Jordan and progressive epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci met to meet on the absence of civics in the marketplace. Jordan represented the wealthy sectors who depend upon the Republican Party to keep the markets pumping gilded wealth to the capitalists who count on cheap labor and fossil fuels to remind their purchased politicians in D.C. that the chains must continue to keep the marginalized on the margins and to keep libertine liberty to pass the laws that keep the 99% to the whims of the marketplace. Jordan called on Fauci to give a date for opening the economy to full-throttle openness. Unlock the American economy that he had unfairly held hostage for so long. Just give us a date Dr. Fauci, just name the date. That was all he required of a country that had simply had too many chains imposed upon economic miracles, in the view of Mr. Jordan. Need I mention that Jim Jordan was standing for his Ohio constituents, that among those participants were those who called on the execution of Anthony at the earliest possible moment.

Dr. Fauci, don’t tread on me!

Freedom and Liberty, as understood by the comfortably wealthy beneficiaries of unfettered capitalism, keep cash flowing from the most productive participants of our economy to the least productive members of that economy. Jim Jordan wants to know when the most decimated groups would be permitted to simply return to the mills, when the most protected can see the invisible finger pry the economy fully open. These are the billionaires who multiplied their gains the most at the expense of individual working for a minimum wage that has not increased since the 1970s.

There appears to be no shame at wearing the tiniest fig leaves — call it a fig-leaved futures market. Freedom and Liberty are always fobbed off in this way. The Evangelical Right feel themselves the victims of a new brand of persecution. Churches seem the last bastion in their mode of thought, the progressive elements of our society are battering at the door. Mind you, it is a metaphoric door, not the kind of door bludgeoned open at the Capitol Building on January 6th. The legions who followed every word of their Emperor God flew in on private jets, in muscled pick up trucks with all the flags of MAGA “free” to flap in the breeze, to fuel their need to vandalize and to plunder. The leader was on his way up Pennsylvania Avenue, wasn’t he. No, he was bunkering in a room reserved for friends and family, the kind of nice people you could find on the town square, the kind who were debating the form of execution. A predilection for the mighty noose, a more “scary” beheading of a guillotine. Any form of execution that would provide the most theatrical moment, guillotines and noosing devices started to appear. The would be a reign of terror not seen on any scene, but long longed for. A gentle return to the lynchings that so very well conveyed the spirit of law and order that called for the bloodiest of theatrics, a return to the perfectly proper white-supremacist call to revenge by the most highly armed. Strange fruit would once again be found dangling from the branches of trees to affirm a new spirit of magical madness that would mean a return to the great white way by those who had been denied the true meaning of the Second Amendment and who wanted the removal of the Fourteenth.

A massive mob to redress the wrongs inflicted by the Marxists upon the spirit of American manliness, a return to family values, an America First point of view solidly anchored to the Holy Bible of the founding fathers and based on freedom and liberty.

Thanks for reading.

Jesus: Demigod?

Yesterday, I researched the word etymology of the word “Demigod” in the light of a monotheistic religion that offers explanations eternal. The European belief in their Western Civilization, a product of solidly imperial traditions, casts all other faiths in terms of a Western White Supremacy that infuses explication in terms that treat European imperial histories as special institutions constructed by a disciplined God that acts in very mysterious ways. Missionaries who bring their propaganda to “lesser developed” cultures do not require any additional explication. They already retain an eternal truth bestowed by an eternal God. Eclectic Orthodoxy.

Demigods are described by those Western institutions as driven by a higher level of beings who are capable of explaining miracles and completely inexplicable to a system of beliefs that must be explained as totally explicable. The Easter season seeks to explain the death of a God that was predicted by a Judeo-Christian testament that began with Genesis, a break of testaments within a coherent system commanded by a trinity of three Gods that already existed since that Genesis in their flawless Bible. That system does not include any room for alternative beliefs. The monotheistic faith relies upon the reality of a single exalted being that simultaneously act(s) as distinct entities of a miracle accepted by faith alone. Any belief system that does not accept the monotheist terms exacted by the “wiser” Western Civilization is a pagan threat to a God’s intent.

The concept of a couple demigods acting on a triune stage is made conceivable by dint of revelation, a revelation that may only be ascribed to a Bible that is accepted without qualification and without question. Their God works in mysterious ways, whereas the idea of a couple demigods to explain the impossible is unforgivable heresy.

The Judeo-Christian concept is commanded by a jealous deity that does not suffer the idea of a separate reality — actually a deity that is explained in terms of something else that it does not suffer: heresy. Heresy is understood in terms that draw distinct lines to separate the pagan heretics from the enlightened West.

This Easter Season tells an annual tale that distinguishes the Judeo-Christian understanding of how things work from the perspective of European systems that maintain a church militant to bless the faithful with eternal life while consigning all other “false” faiths with a punishment that exists eternally, meted out with a fidelity that relies upon the enforcement of a faith that leaves no room for alternative explanations. There is no evidence that Apostle Peter ever came within a thousand miles of Rome, but the concept of “tradition” wipes all inexactitude to the side as utter heresy. Saint Paul was a product of the institution that developed out of the remnants of the Roman Empire. Any discovered throne could be declared the seat of Christ revealed by Peter, bones found among the millions of skeletons could be exalted as springing from the bones of the first apostle. Infrastructure left by the millennia of Roman rule makes the propagation of the “faith” speedy at each corner of the former middle-of-the-Earth: the Mediterranean, Middle Earth if you will.

Thanks for reading.