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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (62768)	10/16/2002 5:17:03 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

But its customs have changed- thus according to your definition, it is not continuous.

To: Neocon who wrote (62768)	10/16/2002 5:19:54 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I liked this: If we had time, I would go through the entire poem on pp. 246 ff. “We are the centuries. We are the chin-choppers and the golly-woppers , and soon we shall discuss the amputation of your head. We are your singing garbage men, Sir and Madam, and we march in cadence behind you, chanting rhymes that some think odd. Hut two threep foa! Left! Left! He-had-a-good-wife-but-he Left! Left! Left! Right! Left! Wir, as they say in the old country, marschieren weiter bis alles in Scherben fällt.” The first cadence is the cadence of the American army; the last line is from the hymnus of the German Waffen-SS. The underlying notion is Nietzschean: history will repeat itself; there is nothing we can really do about it. People in the aggregate are predictable and predictably self-destructive. “Atrophy, Entropy, Proteus vulgaris.” Atrophy is the falling apart of a pattern; entropy is the slow decay of order; and Proteus is shapeshifter, in this case: the shapeshifter named “common people.” The poem alludes to the tension of Dionysian fervor and Apollonian constructiveness, very much as Nietzsche does in the Birth of Tragedy. This poetic preamble to Fiat Voluntas Tua confuses me. On the one hand, God’s plan of salvation for humanity ought to be at the horizon; and yet, ultimate destruction is unavoidable. Lucifer has fallen again; Jesus has not come; and the cycle comes ‘round again. Read the rest of the poem for an appreciation of the pessimism that Miller brings into these few lines. The departing spaceship with the laconic “Sic transit mundus,” variation of “Sic transit gloria mundi” (The former phrase means: “thus transpires the world” and the second phrase means: “thus transpires the fame of the world.”) reminds us that the salvation of God is incomplete. The Wandering Jew is still about. And the world shows signs of decay. Note that the vulture waiting on Zerchi’s death is marked himself by the signs of radiation poisoning. While in the first two parts of the trilogy, the writer ends with a kind of affirmation in citing the continuing life cycles of the vultures, the end of the third part of the trilogy is more pessimistic in that the implication is that even the vultures are dying. And do we wonder whether the series of mishaps, sign of a fallen world, will repeat itself at the colony near Alpha Centauri? I don’t know the answer. But Miller definitely leaves me with philosophical questions; he is not unambiguously pro-Christian.