"Having heard, or more probably read somewhere...that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble...and if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something." --Samuel Beckett
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Rev. George Bush's "Life of Mohammed"
From a clarification posted in December on the website of the U.S. State Department's "Identifying Misinformation Team" in response to the claim by Cairo's Al-Azhar Islamic Academy that President George W. Bush had a grandfather, also named George Bush, who wrote Life of Mohammed, an out-of-print book insulting to Muslims.
U.S. biblical scholar Reverend George Bush did write a book titled Life of Mohammed in 1830.
Reverend Bush was NOT the grandfather of the current president. Reverend Bush was the cousin of Obadiah Bush, who was the great-great-great-grandfather of the current president. This makes the Reverend Bush a distant relative of the current president, five generations removed, but NOT his direct ancestor.
The Al-Azhar Department of Research, Translation, and Writings claims that the book describes Arabs and Muslims as being "degenerate races, insects, rats, and snakes."
The word "degenerate" is used twice, both times in a characterization of the state of the Christian Church at the time of Mohammed. There are two references to snakes, neither of them in a characterization of Arabs or Muslims. Word searches find no instances of the words "insects" or "rats," although in one section Reverend Bush does compare Muslims to locusts.
The way of tea has nothing to do with discriminating good utensils from bad utensils nor considering the form of making tea. The basic meaning of tea is to realize samadhi while using tea utensils and to practice seeing into the original nature.
-- Sotan
In the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight.
The creak of boots.
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks,
what do we know.
--Gary Snyder
To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach you the cloth. --William S. Burroughs
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers."
--Thomas Pynchon
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