April 25th
It is an absolutely delicious morning, as crisp and sweet as biting into a ripe apple. Last night there were tornado warnings, thunderstorms and pounding rain and the last of those clouds were lying across the eastern horizen when we woke, turned gold and pink as the sun came up through them. The wind drove the dogwood blossoms apart and large white petals are strewn over lawns, driveways and our back deck.
We are heading out to go back roading.
April 26th
I can't ever seem to write a blog during the weekends.
There were no tornadoes this weekend, though the thick, cloying clouds remain and the temperature had dropped. The day seems to be growing darker, if anything. Torn dogwood petals are everywhere, they glitter deep in the shadows of the woods, like the crumbs dropped from Gretal's hand on their way to the Gingerbread house.
(I'm listening to Van Morrison's "Stranded." One of my most favorite songs of all times. Liquid seduction.)
Yesterday we returned to the olde tyme inn deep, deep in the Kentucky past, where previously we were too nervous to linger. There we had a Sunday brunch of deep fried cat fish chucks, finger lickin' fried chicken, country ham balls, fried okra and other "signature Kentucky cuisine," as advertised. It was delicious, the coffee was especially good. Other offerings included chicken fried chicken liver, spiced apples and corn pudding.
We ate out on a porch that reminded me of summer camps of long ago, the deep green, glossy paint on the window sills, the screens, the muddy river frothing over the rocks in the holler. The main house is old, so old that Abraham Lincoln's father helped with the masonry. The creek was discovered by Dan'l Boone's brother, Squire Boone. We live in the lap of American history around here; this was the Western Frontier back before the American Revolution. Mind blowing, is it not?
For the first few months, the only books I would borrow from the library were historical fiction such as "O Kentucky!" and some about the Appalachian mountains, which I have yet to see.
That first time in the library, as I spoke, I heard my clear and carrying northern vowels cut sharp against the quiet, Kentucky murmur around me. It was as though my voice were printed and readable.
I wonder what Georgia will be like.
This time around I have borrowed "The Once and Future King" by T.H.White and "The Little Friend," by Donna Tartt, both hefty tomes.
I read an article this morning about the death threats "South Park" creators received recently. The first I heard of it was watching "The Daily Show." Jon Stewart was awesome, point blank. In any case, I thought this article was particularly thought provoking. (What was equally thought provoking is that it's from The New York Times, which is about as left wing as the Huffington Post these days. Which is fine, if you want to be an ideologically driven publication, but don't keep pretending you have anything to do with impartial journalism. Anyway.)
"But there’s still a sense in which the “South Park” case is particularly illuminating. Not because it tells us anything new about the lines that writers and entertainers suddenly aren’t allowed to cross. But because it’s a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all.
Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows.
In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.
Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.
This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.
Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy.
For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down."
-The New York Times, "Not Even in South Park?" by Ross Douthat, April 26th, 2010
