Maybe Gaia isn't angry; maybe She's on plan

In the beginning was the Bang. . .

Loki had gotten out of the playroom and set off a whole freakin' crateload of Thor's thunderbolts. In the confusing microseconds just after the Bang, Gaia and a whole shitload of Her sister planet goddesses got loose as well.

Loki was too stupid to suspect Thor of orchestrating the whole divine comedy; but the planet goddesses were smart enough to be pretty sure He had. There weren't any sparrows in those times; but the planet goddesses were smart enough to suspect that Thor would have had pretty good handle on all their tail feathers if they had existed to have tails and feathers.

The Big Guy probably wanted them loose. But not sure is not sure; She would be looking over Her shoulder, for a long time, now that there was time. They had been in His stupid garden playing the stupid harps since forever; and forever is a long thordamned time. Like Her sisters, or whatever the hell they were, Gaia boogied on out, surfing the bubble front as the new universe inflated. Was She going fast away from Thor and Her sisters, or was space expanding between Them? Who the hell knew? She had never been very good at math; Loki was the space and time and practical jokes Dude. Someday maybe She would invent a physicist who could explain the whole business so She could understand it.

Maybe She could even do more. Maybe with enough time and enough thought She could figure out how to put Thor in a damned garden playing a damned harp. There was a thought. She'd put Him in a ridiculous tutu just like He made Them wear and see how He liked prancing around on tippy-toe while playing a damned harp. Maybe She'd even let Loki loose in the garden once in a while to bust up the harp and rip off the tutu and. . . well, perhaps we'd best leave Gaia's thoughts at that point. Hell itself hath no fury like an Earth Goddess scorned.

I just read an excellent column by Lisa Mossie in The Norristown Times Herald. Lisa was on a subject of long term, if occasional, interest to me; a subject that should also be of interest to you if you give two damns about where it's all going.

Can we be good without God?
Why should we be good without God?
Does "good" have any metaphysical meaning without God?

Don't worry, I'm not going to try to pose answers to those questions beyond "Who knows?". I know, I know, there have been a whole bunch of constipated dudes who have written long and exquisitely boring books full of academic gas on the subject. But as far as I've been patient enough to try to figure out; to paraphrase Peter Singer, an Aquinas is a Descartes is a Goethe is a Nietsche is a Wittgenstein. The lot of them could have done with a good dose of laxative.

What struck me about Lisa's column was her mention, for effect, that maybe "Gaia is angry" just like the enviroweenies say She is. Maybe Lisa is telepathic; because, as it turns out, I did a little riff on Gaia just last evening on the phone with Alex.

The enviroweenies assume a Gaia who's all about, like, preserving the green, green hills of Earth, and watching the playful bunnies and possums and javalinas gyre and gymbal oer the wabe, except when She lets a hawk crush their cute little skulls or She lets rabies eat their brains so that they gyre and gymbal kind of funny for a while and bite other cute little critters before they fall over sideways and quiver on top of the green, green grass on the way to releasing their components to rejoin The Great Circle Of Life.

But what if Gaia is working according to a different plan?

The other evening I joked with Alex that Gaia may have stored up all the fossil fuels specifically so one of her critters could release the CO2 in them at this rough point in time. I joked that Gaia may want us to release the CO2 in those fossil fuels to prevent an ice age.

But that's only one possibility that's fully as logical as the strange certainty of the enviroweenies that Gaia is all about Earth as an "eternal" garden, even though Earth's atmosphere will be stripped away no matter what Gaia does when the sun expands in a few billion years; and that's assuming that the mother of all asteroids or a comets doesn't wipe out all green, green grass and the bunnies and the helgramites and the aardvarks before the the expanding sun gets a chance to.

There's another idea, maybe Gaia wants us to use the fossil fuels to get advanced enough to stop an asteroid or a comet that's already on its way from the Oort cloud. Maybe her long range plan to for us to get advanced enough to get us and Her off this planet and spread around like a plague on a million or a billion other planets before the sun expands.

Maybe Gaia's long run plan is to put Thor in a tutu and set all of us up on the mother of all bleachers around the garden to be spectators to Him prancing around forever on tippy toe playing a harp; except when She lets Loki loose for a little fun.

I hope She has vendors coming around the bleachers with hotdogs and cokes and peanuts and Crackerjacks. Maybe that's why we're supposed to do good works; to save up credit against that eternally lazy afternoon when we'll be wanting stuff from the vendors.

We now return this station to its regularly scheduled programming.

Bernard Cornwell - feh!, V.S. Naipaul - double feh!

I finished reading "Redcoat" a week or so ago and just realized I haven't commented on it. It's too blah to comment on beyond saying that Cornwell's Sharpe novels are much much better. It may be that Cornwell was just lazy, or it may just be that the American Revolutionary War is boring, boring, boring. I'm glad those bewigged fellows did it but I'm never going to read about it again.

So, reeling in horror from "Redcoat," I picked up V.S. Naipaul's book "The Enigma Of Arrival" only to find myself plunged into the sort of introspective mess which clearly appeals to some people but which makes me rabid. Naipaul, whose book "The Bend in the River" I very much enjoyed, Naipaul proceeds to take his very interesting life story and make it terminally boring by examining it in such detail and confusing it with so many flashbacks and forward leaps that after about a hundred pages I was hoping he would be set upon by a frenzied fox and then be run over by a horn blowing pack of pursuing fox hunters. I was only half way through when I put it down to pick up "Sharpe's Escape" to prove to myself that Cornwell hadn't gone senile or something before he wrote "Redcoat" - he hadn't.

One of those old philosopher dudes is famous for saying 'the unexamined life isn't worth living.' Whole packs of dull thinkers have made livings out of approvingly discussing that saying over the millenia. Well I'm here to tell you that the overexamined life should be ended by a rabid fox and then be trampled into the flinty earth of the English countryside by the thundering hooves of a pack of overbred horses.

What made the Naipaul book doubly annoying - no, triply annoying - is that my copy, bought used at Wolfgang Books down in Phoenixville, is endlessly underlined and annotated by the sort of prissy over analytical English Literature student who should himself be crept up on by mangy canids with little flecks of white foam dripping from their slavering jaws.

I can well understand why the other Greeks, the ones with good practical common sense, made that Socrates guy drink the Hemlock which worked so slow that they had to listen to him drone on and on for hours before he finally stopped. There probably wasn't a rabid fox handy at the time. Nature red in tooth and claw has a lot to recommend it.