We spent the day in Rome today, hitting the Borghese Museum and the Roman ruins in the afternoon. It’s pretty much mandatory.

Cardinal Scipione Borghese was the nephew of Pope Paul, appointed so in a nepotistic move in 1610. He set about collecting Roman works of art, commissioning others and sponsoring Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose works are in the center of most of the great rooms. I was surprised yesterday to
learn that Jesus as we know him didn’t appear until that time, and also that the Roman generals, statesmen and emperors were sculptured during the 16-18th centuries. That Roman Empire was in vogue and ally educated men of that time studied Latin and Greek civilization.

Bernini did remarkable work, carving in marble with astounding detail and managing to convey both action and emotion in his work.

Enough about that. Museums are hard for me with aching back and information overload. Other than Napoleons’s sister, Pauline, sculpted in the nude and quite voluptuous, the women, even though naked, are not so hot. Painters seemed to concentrate on the male form, natnurally rippling muscles and magnificent buttocks. I’m not gay, mind you! But they did very fine work.

The Roman Ruins, Colosseum, Palentine Hill – it takes imagination to picture life and color in the ruinous settings, and to imagine the thousands of men and and animals that died in that arena. It was not working for me. All I saw was an engineering feat. I could not hear the roar of the crowd or sense death. It was just a rundown down stadium with all of the lower rooms under the area exposed. I know that people were brutal back then, but I am an American, and so know that we are still bloodthirsty bastards.
kely to argue with people that cuff them or tase them. The culture of police state does not seem present here as it is in the US.

People don’t smile – they don’t not smile either. Whenever you see a toothy grin for a photo, think American. Americans also wear emblems of corporations or worse yet, military units, while other cultures amply wear shirts without emblems. I have looked for clothing without advertising in the US. It is hard to come by.

Medieval religious art is impressive,but a little goes a long way. These are the learned piieope of that time, and their minds had been completely captured by the church, which dictates the icons of the age, much as American corporations give us ours. 

Brain not so fried. Long day, very tired. Walked many hot pavement miles. iPod is very annoying this evening. Forgive the typos. It’s Jobs.

We flew to Atlanta, four hours, and then to Rome, ten hours. We arrived here at 8:30 AM Rome time, 12:30 AM Denver time. We decided to deal with jet lag all at once, and so had a full day today. We found our hotel, and then headed over to Vatican City for the grand tour.

It is wise not to see all of that stuff while jet lagged. It is overwhelming! The Church has miles of long rooms lined with statues from the Roman era. Just one room must have 200 statues and busts. Some of them are of mythical beings, many of real historical figures such as Augustus Caesar and Trajan. Add to that identical long rooms filled with tapestries and maps, and several rooms painted Sistine-style by Raphael, and then the Sistine itself, and even a non-fried brain is overwhelmed.

Add to that more current art work (there is one by Dali – I swear he was making fun of them. His Madonnas and Jesus haver no faces.) There is lots of that as well, and then St. Peter Basilica – a statement of the power of the Catholic Church in medieval times. The Church still has moral suasion, but commands no armies besides its silly Swiss guards. But there are flocks of oddly dressed groups all over Rome – brothers in robes, priests in long flowing gowns, nuns of all stripes, and assorted groups from all over the word wearing t-shirts to memorialize their trip to the Vatican. As we viewed the Star Wars-like canopy* that stands seven stories over the alleged tomb of St. Peter there were groups around us praying the rosary. Creepy. But then there were happy and carefree groups like the young people from Guatemala, having the time of their lives.

A word to the wise – after seeing all of those statues today, I would advise young men to wear a catcher’s cup – those penises that had not been covered with fig leaves were mutilated. Only the really tiny ones were left alone. Catholics seem to have a little angst about the that organ.

My fried brain took it all in, but perhaps I was hallucinating as I realized tyhat Christianity is am amalgamation of pagan religions, most centered around the Sun. The array of gods was reduced to three by the Catholics, who later added a fourth, Mary. It made sense – to primitive people, the sun was the giver of life. It traveled through the sky during the course of a year, and ancients divided that journey into twelve parts, which became in literature twelve tribes and twelve apostles and is still with us today as astrology. Jesus, one of many ‘sons’ sent down to visit, was ‘born’ on the fourth day after the solstice – it takes three days for the earth to begin to tilt back the other way after solstice – get it? Dead three days and then rises?

I was struck today by solar imagery – the halos around the heads of saints, the ‘crown of thorns’ representing the fire of the sun – the golden ring during a total eclipse. Apollo has a round face completely surrounded by his hair, resembling the sun. Surely all of this religion from China to Salt Lake City to Rome has but one origin – the sun and moon and stars.

Someone will have to check me on this, but as we walked through all the antiquities, I was looking for extant references to Jesus. There are none in all of the roman statues and architecture. No symbols, no references. He doesn’t really turn up in any literature until the gospels, four accounts from the first or second century, each in disagreement with the others on important facts.

The image of the man Jesus does not turn up at all until the 16th century in what we saw today – that’s when da Vinci and Raphael personified him as a European. I wonder if Jesus-centric faith is even more current than the second century. Was he even the center of the religion before that time?
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*Designed by Bernini, the sewing machine guy.

We need to catch a plane here, but I wanted to toss in this Cockburn bomb before we leave. He is suggesting that Mitt Romney might be a wise choice for the office of The One next time around. Logic is familiar to me.

Start with Obama. Of course he blew it. Whether by artful design or by sheer timidity is immaterial. He blew it. Two days before the United States was officially set to default on its debts on August 2, Barack Obama had the Republicans where he wanted them: All he had to do was announce that he’d trudged the last half mile towards a deal but that there’s no pleasing fanatics who reject all possibilities of compromise, who are ready and eager to shut down the government, to see seniors starve and vets denied their benefits. So, Obama could proclaim, he was invoking the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution which states that the “validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.”

Obama could have done that, but he didn’t. At the eleventh hour and the fifty-fifth minute he threw in the towel, and allowed the Republicans to exult that they’d got 95 per cent of what they wanted: cuts in social programs, a bipartisan congressional panel to shred at its leisure what remains of the social safety net, no tax hikes for the rich, no serious slice in the military budget.

As America plummets into phase 2 of the double-dip recession Obama’s deal has stripped the country of all available remaining defenses: no jobs program, no hope of stimulus money for stricken states and cities across the country. It’s as bad as the Republicans’ onslaught on Franklin Roosevelt’s programs seeking to prise America out of the great Depression – a Republican onslaught that launched the terrible downturn of 1937, from which America was extricated only by the vast war spending after Pearl Harbor.

Read the whole thing, just for shits and giggles. I’ve been reading Alex for two decades now, and his insight is always two floors above me. Love the guy!

OK. We’re outta here!

We are off on the trip of a lifetime, starting in Rome, working our way up the boot, followed by five days hiking around Mt. Blanc. From there we head to Interlochen, and I hope to be able to spell it correctly by the time we leave. We ride Eurorail overnight to Budapest, and from there to Prague, and then home. We elected to skip Vienna to extend our Swiss stay.

I’m going to try to write some as we travel, offering keen and unique insight. Or, I might just write like I normally write. It’s going to be good to get away from our circus here, our orchestrated politics, our controlled media and mindless hackery, and get into theirs. I mean, are people really that different in other places?

Anything I write will be on the iPad. I’m not very good on it, and don’t know how to move photos up to a blog. Maybe I’ll figure it out.

Sen Joe Lieberman is, like President Obama, a man who shed his progressive and liberal pretenses while holding office as a Democrat. But Lieberman is a little more interesting. He had presidential aspirations one time, and as a cloaked right winger was taken on as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. In 2004 he set out to become the first Jewish* president of the United States. But his campaign never gained traction. He seemed hurt by the rebuff, and stopped pretending to hold any progressive views other than being pro-legal abortion. In 2006 he was beaten in the Connecticut primary, and so ran as an independent, garnering enough Republican votes to hold on to his seat.

Lieberman was useful during the health care debate, announcing at various times that he would oppose any bill that contained a public option. He appeared to be a renegade, but was not at all that. He was merely playing the antagonist in a scripted stage play. But ever since he lost his presidential bid, he’s been openly right wing. He’s come out. I appreciate that about him, and wish others, like Jon Tester and Max Baucus, Michael Bennet, Diane Feinstein, Ben Nelson, Harry Reid, Mary Landrieu … it’s quite a long list, actually … would abandon the closet and simply announce that they are right wingers. That’s no way to live.

Lieberman came out today in favor of cutting Social Security benefits in favor of additional war spending. Coming from a liberal Democrat, that would be a huge surprise. But from a formerly closeted right winger, it’s expected.

So no news here. Move along folks. Move along.
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*There are twelve Jewish senators. Two, Lieberman and Bernie Sanders, are Independents. The rest are all Democrats. It’s an interesting story, the result of discrimination by the old establishment ruling class, which was Protestant and Republican. It forced many Catholics and Jews who would otherwise be instinctively Republican into the Democratic Party. That tradition continues to this day.

I just listened to Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado on the radio. She voted against the debt ceiling agreement, to her credit. (It must be noted, however, that once a bill is assured of passage, representatives are free to vote either way on it.)

DeGette was asked how Democrats were going to approach the electorate next year in the wake of the sellout on the manufactured crisis. Ninety-five of them vote with the president and against our interests. Amazingly, she blamed the voters for electing Tea Party people to congress. If Democrats had fulfilled their 2008 mandate, voters might not have abandoned them in 2010. To blame the voters now for the making the only other choice they were offered – weak Democrat or Foxy Tea Party – is disingenuous in the extreme.

But it is so typical. In the ongoing game of good-cop bad-cop, the “good” ones are orchestrating stealth attacks against us. Democrats rally around their stealthies out of fear of the bad cop, the mean old Republicans. When called to task for their own failures, they blame the bad cop.

Will it ever change? No. It’s two-party lesser-evil politics, and for as long as our campaigns are financed by the oligarchy, it will not change.
Continue reading “Foxy Democrats” →

It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to Infidelity. (Abraham Lincoln, Manford’s Magazine, quoted from Franklin Steiner, The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents

Acharya S writes in “The Christ Conspiracy” about the origins of the Christian religion. It is not a scholarly work by any means. It’s merely derivative, a mishmash of the works of others, with no original research. But it helps this non-scholarly layman to read her summary of that research, as I will never read that stuff myself. Religion is not part of my life, and there are too many other fun things to be doing. Her sources may be cranks and quacks, but all of religion is quackery anyway. So who better to read – S, or learned theologians?

I do see Gore Vidal’s wisdom in placing polytheism above monotheism:

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not for just one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. (Lowell Lecture, Harvard University, 1992)

Continue reading “Issa-ra-el” →