"A Fatwa on your head?"

Dear Dr. Bones,

I know your Ph.D. is in Progressive Assyriology, sir, but perhaps you know a trick cyclist or two with a veterinary sideline?

Common sense and general knowledge fail me, I fear, when presented with sweet puppies capable of supposin’ with a straight muzzle that their own 'liberty' -- "(yes, those are sneer quotes)" [0] -- to consist in publicly placardin’ the religionism of others as if it were a communicable disease.[1]

The potential fun side of the latest puppy game is obvious, though, or at least it was great fun for me up to the point at which Paddy knocked me down after noticing the sketches I was preparing for my proposed "You, Too, Can ESCAPE FROM PAPISM!" ad campaign.[2]

Oh, well! I doubt the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority would have taken my doits and sheqels and published my copy in all their buses and trolleys: the VC people are a forty-four percent (44%) plurality up here, according to Big LEW . And by the way, "Isn't that a bit of Destructive ©®eationism™ to set Governor Winthrop revolving in his grave?," I ask you.

Further afield by the way, I walked across Boston Common on a sunny spring afternoon (yesterday’s) and, begorrah, did not hear even a single word of Irish (Gaeilge) ! What does the late Henry Adams make of that, I wonder, down there below where the warming, though global enough, is decidedly ananthropogenic?

Gov. Winthrop, for his part, with a much longer posthumous career already behind him, may (as I conjecture, perhaps a tad wildly) even be somewhat pleased that at least a little something has been snatched from the burning: in A.R. 1431/2010/5770, the bread worshippers of MA mostly worship their bread in "a language understanded of the people."

That was not exactly the main plank of the original reform platform, yet if the Muses and you and I, Dr. Bones, were to concoct something like St. Woodrow’s XIV Point Plan for the salvation of humanity by A. R. 1803/2371/6040 -- as far in the future, that is, as His Worship’s obituary date lies in the past -- would we not, all things considered, be happy if only whichever Point we now original-intent fourtheenth and hindmost were actually instantiated in full?

’Twere a blatantly impar congressus to contrast and compare a Party Neocomradess (Seventh Class) P. X. Geller with a veritable parens patriæ -- so let’s do it! [3]

At any rate, let me point out one seeming resemblance that looks primâ facie plausible to this coarse and illiterate keyboard, namely that, like His Worship, today’s specimen of Chlorella vulgaris in human or pajama form seems to be afraid of the religionism that she craves to badmouth and swiftboat. Furthermore, Gov. Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay seem, in retrospect at least, to have been in quite as little immediate danger of being overrun by proto-Ratzingerites and Foxites and Laudians (and even Ms. Anne Hutchinson, by G*m!) as is the now Dade County FL by the Baní Ibn Taymiyya.

With NC7 PXG, the Chicken Little shtyk can instantly be put down to bad judgment and courage-challengedness, imprudentia ignaviaque, two qualities very prominent indeed at Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City and, indeed, up the slippery slope at Castle Podhóretz also.[4]

To present Governor Winthrop as an out-and-out proleptic disciple of Party Neocomradess Ch. X. Little and Party Neocomradess P. X. Geller would be scandalum magnatum to the max. Fortunately there is no need to think it, for His Worship judged by rather different canons of judgment back in Century X/XVI/LIII than those of Dade County FL wingnutettes and wingnuts circâ 2010. Governor Winthrop was not scared of proto-Ratzingerites and Quakers and ‘prelatists’ directly, the way ChXL and PXG cower under their beds in personal terror for the safety of their physical and material hides. Winthrop’s undeniable Enthusiasm having not yet undergone the decerebration process that eventually produced the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, he can have been directly afraid of Father Zeus alone.

As follows: Puritan divines took certain passages of the Uncommon Testament seriously and literaliter after a fashion that I betcha pretty well nobody at all in Dade County does nowadays. Various afflictions that fell of yore upon Palæojerusalem in deed and not in allegory alone were attributed to the anger of Himself at toleration of idolatries and abominations perpetrated upon the High Places. ’Twould be silly to fancy that ’Elîyáhû was afraid of Queen Jezebel as Neocomradess P. X. Geller and her Party base an’ vile are self-terrorised of M. bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí: the problem was simply that if the Elect did not ditch the bitch and stop playing ball with Baal and otherwise change the régime a little, Father Zeus would make sure that it never rained again, so good-bye milk and honey! [Lib. III Reg. cap. 18]

The allegorice of that for the Massachusetts Bay of 1640 was not far to seek, the search being of course conducted upon the inexpugnably sound basis of Enthusiasm in Massachusetts as it was in 1640. It would be extremely unreasonable, Dr. Bones, to subtract even a single point from John Winthrop’s score because, eighteen score years afterwards, an uncharitable painter could, if he chose to, paint His Worship’s short way with dissenters to look like the notions of those evil Qommie ayatollahs who was in the news this week for discovering that female unchastity and impudicity, and missed prayers, and being stingy about charitable giving somehow provoke Father Zeus to harrow the land with earthquakes.[5]

I wish you, Dr. Bones,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[0] Cf. peanut-gallery Peanut #3.

Final score: singles enclose sneers, doubles mark mere quotation. (( Yet can any 'quotation" ever be really "mere' ? A promising topic for some other day. ))


[1] I had written "COMMUNICABLE disease" but have decided the adjective is unwarrantable.

Neocomradess (Seventh Class) P. X. Geller provides only the one sample of her factionette’s agitation and propaganda -- " ‘Fatwa on your head?’ " &c. &c.--and that one happens to offer relief to victims of the alleged disorder, rather than callin’ upon healthy sheep to quarantine afflicted goats in ‘existential’ self-defense. Though everything we know in general about this less common neobreed of sweet puppy suggests that NC7 PXG would not hesitate a nanosecond to do the latter, still in fact it is not done here.

Accordingly, I withdraw "placard ... as communicable" so as not to fall afoul of the Charles Williams guideline, " Hell is inaccurate. "

And Father Zeus knows best!

(( You may remember Comrade C. R. Dawkins, Oxon., who proposed that all Enthusiasm and Superstition without exception consists of memes , these being feigned entities which, as far as I was ever able to make out, are much the same thing as "communicable diseases." To be sure, when one borrows a term from the High Tongues, or coins one that pretends to be such a borrowing, Wally Wombschool, and Cindy from Wasilla, and (probably) NC7 PXG are not half so likely to notice that one is laughing from them. ))


[2] Cal Luther -- you may remember I introduced you to her once when we were touring Nantes ? -- offered some criticisms that were less trenchant but more weighty, as that simply substituting "Ratzinger" for "Alzheimer" in all sorts of existing scripts would not just "vix dignum ingenii vestri", as Cal neatly put it, but positively tacky.


[3] Like the man said, "Never give a wingnut an even break!" Furthermore, only a genuine blue-state meanie could wish to deprive sweetpuppiedom of their occasions of sweetest self-sorrowin’: "Nobody knows the trouble [they've] seen, nobody knows but G. Suss" -- whoever G. Suss may be.


[4] Hooverville is much more intellectually respectable, perhaps because one can always gauge from casualty insurance rates how afraid of the Islamophalangitarian Menace (Pat. Pend.) Daddy Warbucks and Uncle Scrooge really and objectively are. BFZKB.


[5] Chicken Little and NC7 P. X. Geller et al. might -- but doubtless will not -- reflect that they maybe look just a little silly bein’ existentially autoterrorised by a religionism not yet purged of flagrant Dark Ages stuff like that.