| 13 August 2006 The Mask of Pharaoh The eyes glitter black, the obsidian taking all the light, and the lapis is bluer than blue. The gold is what takes you, on the headdress, and the whole idea that this is eternity looking back at you, when it was supposed to only look the other way. It is a cool mask, and I marveled when I saw amid the Babel of the Egyptian Museum in a land far away. I was supposed to be writing a script this morning, and I need to think through what the implications of the cease-fire in the latest brutal flare-up the continuing war in Lebanon might me. I know only this: if there is peace tomorrow, there will be extra death tonight. I'm at a wedding, which is a strange place to be taking up the task of writing about the two major factions that want to kill us. The kids who wed today are voting for the future, and the ceremony that joined Christian and Jewish tradition in an ecumenical ceremony in a Catholic church, complete with the Christ on his cross and the wineglass smashed beneath the heel of the beaming groom leaves me filled with hope. It did that, and that is why I have a lingering confidence in the survival of the West. But from Iran comes the word that a week from Tuesday is when the end of the world will go down, and they are going to bring it about with their hands. Shia hands, in this case. The Sunni side has its terror champions in the Wahabbi-based Sunni faith of Osama bin Laden. He declared war on America in August some years ago, and is comfortable the month itself is close enough for an operation of mass murder rivaling 9/11. Al Qaida and its franchise operating units are not claiming the end of the world, at least not up front. They have a vision for the world to come, which features the triumph of the adherents of the True Faith. I have been reading some of the source documents, and it seems perfectly clear. It there for all to see, and Osama has been perfectly blunt about how it is supposed to work. The leaders of what used to be known as the Free World are dancing around the issues. I hope they are pretending. I fear that it is simple as the fact that Texans cannot understand the difference between Sunni and Shia. That makes me a little nervous, but it is one of those things that did not matter. Perhaps the early schism in Islam does not lend itself easily to the sound-bite. I was pretty much one with the Lone Star State on that count. I have never attempted to divine the theological differences between sects of charismatic Baptists. In my world, I was always free to move down the road if the noise from the tent revival got too loud. I mean no offense to any of the great faiths I just referenced, even the ones who handle serpents, since that demonstrates my commitment to the cultural relativity that is blind to the fact that someone, somewhere, is waking and thinking of ways to bomb our airplanes and subways, and has a religious code of conduct to impose on all of us. We are supposed to acknowledge that all this violence is the result of some sort of historical wrong. I do not get up angry about what happened after the last Christian ceremony in a town once known as Constantinople, or that the Crusades would never have happened if someone else had not given Jerusalem the choice between the Truth and the sword. That could be the subject of discussion, if anyone could be rational about it. The Barbary Pirates could be an exemplar, raiding across the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea, seething about the Reconquista in Spain, serene in the expansion of the Faith. They did not yet know of the colonial yoke, and their philosphy is oddly resonant today. They provoked the young United States into building a Navy, and deploying a Marine Corps for the very first time. I am not smart enough to judge the folly of the West in throwing open the gates of emigration. The pressure of globalization coupled with the serene sense of entitlement in its primacy is at the root of it, the pervasive influence of oil, and the competitive struggle between the Sunni and Shia are all parts of the mosaic. For us across the waters, the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the defeat of the Sultan before the gates of Vienna is ancient and irrelevant history, as far away as the Pyramids. I was in a bus in 1990, traveling from Al Iskandria, the Islamized name of the city of Alexandria, down to Cairo to see the glory that once was Egypt. I found the city along the great river joyless and drab. The glory was contained in a marvelous, if inadequate, building constructed by the British. Our guide was a personable woman of impeccable demeanor. She made us all fall silent when she spoke of the great victory against the Israelis in the 1973 war. Foolish as we were, there were questions about how one could construe a proper ass-kicking as a victory, and she did, without a hitch, filled with poise and aplomb. It was surreal, a sort of acid trip through history. If you turn your hat around, it can actually be plausible. Relatively small acts of murder are depicted as great victories. Since there were no consequences, these tales assume a mythic aspect. The story of the defeat that was a victory is strange, but quite real. It was as profound viewing the death mask of Tutankhamen, and realizing that this magnificence, back in the day, was for a Pharaoh so small as to be not worth the looting, His funereal goods survived as our defining window into his ancient world only because it was not worth the trouble to steal. It was then that I realized how fundamental our inability to communicate was, like the great head of Ozymandus, the zenith of the West could be a passing thing. But the thought passed. I had other things going on as a soldier of the empire of that time, and the Islamist loons in Tehran did not seem to be an immediate crisis. I was right about that, since we had yet to settle on the collapse of the Communists. Of course, there were others who did not take the same view. I think back now, realizing there were thousands alive right then who were going to die because we were wrong about so much. I wish now I could tell you how many will die before this delusion runs its course. I wish I could tell you if we are among the number. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |