I'm still on a political kick. I was reading, or listening, somewhere that high school kids are protesting bottled water by satirically selling bottled air. The idea of course is that water is free and the plastic is bad for the environment. It's so interesting to me how fashionable it's become to be green, and of course it's even more prudent than it is fashionable and that's a good thing. But... but, but, but, what if way back in 2000, the election would have gone the other way, and rather than Bush being the object of our dissatisfaction, half the country would have resented Gore. He likely would have shown better leadership following 9/11. However, except for the most creative conspiracy theorists among us, we wouldn't have been able to imagine quite as bleak a conflict as that which we currently face, so he wouldn't have scored any points. He certainly wouldn't have been able to generate the celebrity necessary to get us fired up about the environment. And Nader wasn't going to do it. I think we can say, with confidence, that green wouldn't be part of mainstream fashion if it weren't for, or in revolt of, George W. Bush.
We can imagine a relatively similar scenario surrounding the 2004 election. Had Kerry won, we could still be decades from the first real chance of an American president with a vagina or African heritage. The extreme to which Bush operates paves the way for his alternative.
Whenever I come into contact with an idea from a book or instructor, I sort of feel like I discovered that idea fair and square, I get to reference it all I like without citing anyone other than the maybe the original scientist or researcher, if it's that sort of fact. However, if an idea is introduced to me from an adjacent student, it feels like cheating if I don't include them in the chain of reference. I don't know why that is, it doesn't make any sense. Sometimes I almost feel like I'm supposed to reject the idea all together, but some are just to damned solid, and that is the case of this alternate interpretation of Judas Iscariot. Certainly for the biblical narrative to unfold properly, Judas is necessary; and because his actions were carried out in a universe whose overseer is both omnipotent and omniscient, we couldn't be to far off the mark to suggest that Judas was just the right tool for the job. Furthermore, Judas, who is spending eternity in Hell, made a much more dramatic sacrifice than Christ; if his soul wasn't enough, they got his reputation too. What sacrifice did Jesus really make? People have died worse deaths, and after he finished bleeding out, he beamed up to Heaven; there's an entire movement of people that can't wait for that...
I'm off topic. What's really important is that Bush is bad, but bad things have implications about their opposites. Like Judas, Bush's badness has made things possible. Bush's bad policy has made America (most of us? some of us?) much more aware of how far we can fall. It's like dualism, everything is dualism for me lately, I think I'm on to something, there's dualism in everything, everything.
And, unrelated, Odette is the subject of this block quote that I can't stop reading:
"Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as this gust of feverish agitation that sweeps over us from time to time. For then the die is cast, the person whose company we enjoy at that moment is the person we shall henceforward love. It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when- in this moment of deprivation- the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of the world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage- the insensate, agonizing need to possess exclusively."
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