Vic Socotra

13 April 2007

Friday the Thirteenth

It's a day people look out for. Filled with symbolism. Make plans cautiously. I am not talking about the gusting wind, which could reach 40 knots, nor the rain that will make the Beltway slick. I am just happy it is not snowing.

Some folks reach far back in our ancestral memory for the significance of the numbers. I have seen the assertion that Eve tempted Adam with the apple on Friday the Thirteenth. I saw that linked to the claim that the biblical Flood was the original Friday the Thirteenth horror show, and that the Last Supper should have been on a Saturday with another couple guests.

It is all hooey, of course. Before the gift of the apple, there were no time-clocks or calendars in the Garden, so how could they tell? Noah had never heard of Freya, the Norse Goddess of Eros, which is the reason we all love a Friday, regardless of what day in the month it comes to us.

Don Imus, the former radio personality, may have other feelings about it, since this is Friday the Thirteenth is officially the first day that his highly-rated program has been banned. He probably feels he has something in common with Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who was busted along with thousands of his senior knights on Friday the Thirteenth. He confessed to high crimes and blasphemy under torture thereafter. He recanted later, even as they roasted him alive.

He cursed his torturers, minions of the French King Philip the IV, and he cursed the Pope before he died. For his part, Philip was sort of stressed out. The Crusades and the ransom of hostages had him in a financial bind, had he had exhausted all the usual means to balance the State's books. He had appropriated property of the Nobility, arrested the Jews, and devalued his currency. As a last resort, he turned on the powerful and secretive Knights of the Temple.

He dispatched sealed orders to every bailiff, seneschal, deputy and officer in the Kingdom. The officials were forbidden under pain of death to open the papers before Thursday night, the twelfth of the month. The following Friday morning, the mass arrests of the Templars commenced, and by nightfall thousands were cast into dungeons and torture chambers.

The Templar treasure was confiscated, and the King's treasury was saved. There were some other downstream consequences, which include the lamentable book and movie by Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code. King Philip did not have to live with the consequences of his historic act, leaving us to cope with the peculiar assault on Catholic dogma, and the larger swipe at the central mysteries of the Christian faith.

In other times, notably those of Philip, the sort of assertions that Dan Brown turned into a best seller would get you the best seat in the house at a personal B-B-Q. Right on the spit. Not now. Times have changed, and you can say what you want about the church.

I guess that is progress. I am a hearty advocate of Free Speech, which is central to our Democracy. I am so passionate about it that I gave mine up for a couple decades in the military to defend it. Now, I can say what I like, but am always mindful that the freedom goes along with the self-evident truths contained in the Declaration of Independence.

You are entitled to say anything you want, just as you are untrammeled in your pursuit of happiness. That is not at all the same thing as a guarantee that people will like what you say, anymore than you are assured actual happiness.

I think we tend to slide by the distinction in these self-indulgent times. We are supposed to be sensitive to issues of self-esteem, and respect the strangest of notions.

If you have not taken a long car trip with a young man recently, I highly recommend it. My younger son brought his music collection with him for the long drive to Michigan after the holidays at home. I was pleased that there was some classic rock that I recognized, but there was much more. I heard the most astonishing assertions about the relations between men and women, portions of the human anatomy, self image and murder.

Misogyny would be the most charitable term for some of what I heard, and another would be communication of criminal threats. The mass market for the musical depiction of rage against oppression is directed, paradoxically, to young Caucasian men like my son.

Go figure.

That is the nature of free speech. Don Imus has several curious notions, too, and probably came of them with his times. He was born in 1940, the year of the Blitz. There were several very strange notions abroad in the wide world then, some of them with direct links to the times of Philip IV, and others thought up in new lands across the sea. You absorb them with the air as you grow up.

I was born a little later than Mr. Imus, in the Age of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is indeed the message, but at the dawn of the electronic age the media required content. What was available was the content of old Hollywood, and in the 1950s we were bathed in the classic black-and-white feature movies and Warner Brothers cartoons.

The cartoons were masterpieces of the golden age of animation, and featured characters still beloved today. They also reflected the notions of the day, and someone has cleaned up the library to ensure that what is on television reflects our evolving sensitivities. I rented a DVD the other day that contained a collection of the wartime Looney Tunes, which have been banished from the airwaves. I thought I might enjoy seeing some of the cartoons that lambasted the Nazis and the Japanese Militarists.

It was a far more unsettling experience than I had intended. The first thing I recognized was that I had seen them all before, some of them many times, seated wide-eyed on the living room floor of my parent's house.

The ugliness assigned to the wartime foes was understandable, if a little crude. There was something else, though, a reflection of American society that was so matter of fact about the brutal characterization of race that it was a bit like watching a speech by Philip the IVth.

Or Don Imus.

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