Sunday
"Blood? I don't have any blood!" -Matt Hacker, 11/07/2004
From the Book of Common Prayer, Prayers of the People, Form Six:
- For this community, the nation, and the world;
For all who work for justice, freedom, and peace.
For the just and proper use of your creation;
For the victims of hunger, fear, injustice, and oppression.
Though Form Six is definitely my favorite of them, I've never particularly cared for the Prayers of the People, preferring the 'deeper prayers' elsewhere in the Eucharist. They always seemed so superficial and trite to me. This year, though, they've begun to seem more relevant; and when I read those words tonight, words I've recited a hundred times and more, it somehow clicked just how important these things are. I mean, yes, the forgiveness of sins still takes dominance in my mind, but I can't say things like "justice, freedom, and peace" are trivial.
I wish fewer things were important; it would make life.... actually, no matter what adjective I used there, it'd be wrong. If my life were more trivial, I would just assign greater importance to those trivialities. There is no escape, and my spacebar is becoming increasingly unreliable.
I've been meaning, if excessive political musings maybe forgiven, of posting my Caesar theory as well. It goes along these lines: Using Rome as the classical (and Classical, heh) example, most Republics have a functional duration of just over about two hundred years before shifting into an autocracy. Caesar acheived this autocracy by uniting the various fields of government under himself and killing off his enemies. Is any of this this sounding familiar yet? Let me continue. He acheived popularity by, among other things, leading campaigns again the enemies of the state in foreign wars. Getting creepy? Don't worry too much, all you Democrats. Geoff "Zechariah" Thompson expressed in his usual hyperbolic way to me his belief that the new Caesar will be "a Liberalist". Consider that a large part of Caesar's success was his vast charisma. While I could not claim that Bush lacks charisma (he won, didn't he?), I would not think he has sufficiently enough to become the Caesar. What is worrysome in this theory is not that this particular consul -excuse me, 'President'- is displaying Caesarian qualities, but that a trend towards qualities has been forming.
The catchphrase "Unless we learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it." is decieving; it tries to make us think that history does not still repeat if we have learned the lessons it offers. Of course, those lessons at least allow us to make pretentious political commentaries like this one.
This post is getting long, ne? And perhaps a bit heavy-handed? Perhaps you may, like Roy Orbison, find relaxation in the loving caress of cling film. So.
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