Buried in a Petrified Forest

I note this week we've been studying the Book of Acts in Sunday School where there's much ado about a Faith that's barkered by a mighty wind announcing Holy Spirit appearences that never fail to astound Jewish and Gentile audiences alike.

I've been wondering if acting on faith is practical.

In multiple volumes, Thomas Friedman repeatedly advocates faith isn't conducive to chasing great profits, though the technocracy he champions doesn't inevitably gain the upper hand either. The NY Times reports on a fantastic short era lost to history when an eccentric Brit planned to run a country from a Star Trek-like captain's chair, incorporating terminals in the armrests, soliciting real-time data flowing non-stop from the nation's factories.

The Cybersen program of A. Stafford Beer, whom Chilean Presidente Allende hired in 1972, was designed to fashion a socialist alternative to moribund economies managed by rigid Communist apparatchiks in Cuba and the USSR. The project concluded the afternoon Allende was shot dead by fascist underlings of Pinochet, yet it's not a stretch to venture Cybersen was doomed the day Beer attempted to inspire his team of twenty-somethings by reading passages from Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

What's the best way to plan an economy? The AP reports "a new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles - sex." Apparently, after young men view porn, in lieu of scarier pictures, say, of spiders, it stimulates a part of the brain that's also excited at the prospect of financial risk and gain. If money in itself isn't the kick, instinctive desires must otherwise lie in a perception of what advantages money may gain.

It's difficult to imagine a Nixon possessing a determinent drive for sex, if not money, rather than the attainment of power as a sole end in itself. The same was said of the seemingly a-sexual J. Edgar, in his lifetime, but, evidentally, we were mistaken.

If economic growth is not always spurred on by evolutionary struggle, what might our world be like if driven by passion's opposite number instead? The local rag reports, "Fed up with violence and economic hardship, voters in deeply conservative Northwest Pakistan threw out Islamist parties and gave their support to secular parties that promised to pave the streets, create jobs and bring peace through dialogue and economic incentives to the extremists."

In India, as well, the Post writes of a "silent revolution where citizens' groups have been empowered to walk into any office and demand answers, no small feat in a country infamous for its bureaucracy and red tape."

Activists in New Delhi gained recent success as measured by streetlights repaired, increased collections of accumulated trash, and elimination of the so-called 'monkey menace,' fashioning an Indian derivative of Giulianni governance, i.e., a de-militarized Times Square model, swept of all Tom Waits not for profit 3 in the a.m. diner denizens, small change grifters, homeless drifters, squeegee sifters, neutralizing likewise perceived threats of alien-simian home invasion, for if we don't fight them over there, we must fight them....

Is freedom the worthy enemy of efficiency? When Tito gained dictatorial power in Yugoslavia after World War II, the region enjoyed forty years of peace and reasonable prosperity for an erstwhile Communist state. After the break-up of greater Serbia in the 1990's, and after Kosovo declared its independence this past February, gay activist Korab Zuka, whose life, no bed of roses before the uprising, was forced to flee the nation, entirely.

Yet no American instinctively desires to live under such a Tito-style dictatorship despite a generally stable quality of life. When Whittake Chambers asked William Buckley why he was starting National Review, since the West was already doomed, and "any effort to save it is correspondingly doomed to failure." Buckley replied, even if that were so, "the Republic deserved a journal that would argue the historical and moral case that we ought to have survived so that even if the worst were to happen," I hope the magazine "might serve, as the Diaries of Anne Frank had served, so to speak, as absolute, dispositive proof that she should have survived in place of her tormentors - who ultimately perished."

On the eve of war, in 1938, when the question of whether Western civilization might not survive wasn't merely theoretical, Leslie Howard, playing a precursor to Ashley Wilkes, the ultimate champion of all lost causes, tells Bogart, the gangster on the lam holding him hostage, "I'm planning to be buried in the petrified forest. You know, I've been evolving a theory about that, that would interest you. It's the graveyard of the civilization that's shot out from under us, the world of outmoded ideas...they're all so many dead stumps in the desert. That's where I belong. So do you. You're the last great example of rugged individualism."

Ten years earlier, in an essay on Andre Gide, English critic Cyril Connolly describes the writer in Wilkes-ian terms as "the apostle of the Hybrids - perpetually haunted by a conviction of exile; his spirit is expended in home-sickness, his intellect in trying to discover what is his home. This leads to a passionate curiosity that sends him experimenting everywhere to find out where he belongs, left on earth to wander, and forlorn."

There we are; left at passion's doorstep, once again, regardless of how we might have striven for a more orderly life. It always comes down to our battles with passion, forlorn, nevertheless, since we tend, so often, like Leslie Howard, to prefer being buried in petrified forests of what once was and might have been.

Jonathan Swift wrote, "men are never more mistaken when they reflect upon Past things, and from what they retain in their memory, compare them to the present...So I formerly used to envy my own Happiness when I was a Schoolboy, the delicious Holidays, the Saturday afternoon, and the charming custards in a blind alley; I never considered the confinement ten hours a day, to nouns and verbs, the Terror of the Rod, the bloody noses, and broken shins."

The Book of Acts conveys the discomforting fantastic unprecedented presence of a risen God which can not be logically comprehended through corroborative historical evidence. The appropriate response, therefore, may only be found in the far wistful regions of the heart.