Every time I set foot in the First World, I feel like the Last Man. It starts, as if filmed by a student of Kusturica’s, with the guards by the X-ray machine at the airport checking the shoes of my two-year-old for plastic explosive. That, and the ritual command to “remove the belt,” is the great propylaea to the world beyond Palermo. They are afraid the traveler will hang himself with the belt while they screen him.
I remember reading somewhere that the Japanese, whose diet in historically rich in soy, have a preternaturally high level of estrogen in their bodies. Soybeans have a high concentration of isoflavones, plant estrogens known as phytoestrogens and similar in function to the human hormone. Soy isoflavones, notably genistein, bind to estrogen receptors in the body.
The “Nanny State” is a figure of speech that could only have come from England. To devise a metaphor one needs a more than passing familiarity with its vehicle, indeed it must be second nature to the metaphorist. “All the world’s a stage,” said William Shakespeare because he was a playwright. “The Lord is my rock,” said the nameless Canaanite psalmist because to this day Palestine is a stony place in more ways than one.
A frothy brouhaha is brewing in Georgia, a political and religious scandal worth following. An Orthodox icon has been uncovered in Tbilisi’s Holy Trinity Cathedral which shows a twentieth-century Saint, St. Matrona of Moscow, in the company of no less unsavory a personage than Joseph Stalin.
New Year’s Eve is always a conundrum wrapped in tinsel dilemmas, still more so for a habitual inebriate prone to superstition. But even when sober, my compatriots believe that “as you meet it, so you’ll spend it,” meaning that the last day in December represents the coming year in miniature, something like one of those presepio Biblical scenes, complete with microscopic sheep and papier-mâché Magi.
Well, here we are again, on the isthmus between Catholicism and Orthodoxy – shall we call it Christhmus? – as all around us the Italians stock up on panettone and prosecco while we fast. No worries, because in two weeks’ time, when our Christmas comes, we infidels can buy those festive trappings discounted.
My thesis last week was that the ambition to create world caliphates on the part of groups or regimes with totalitarian methods and aims often breaks on strategic mistiming, of which the invasions of Israel and Ukraine are examples currently in the news. Peace, peace, peace is the war by which the West is won, whereas those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.
Contemplative inaction, as the gentle reader may be reminded by the calls to patience back in the days when he was a boisterous child, is of the essence. But then, when at last the fish takes the bait, it’s dexterous action that is of the essence, with the angler jerking his rod at just the right moment to set the hook and eventually landing the catch in the hand net.
The big reason I welcome colder weather is that after the inescapable shorts and sleeveless shirts of Sicilian summer I can wear jackets and suits again. But not only because a jacket lends respectability – my vaguely professorial look has on occasion helped me get credit from merchants and of course I would never go see the bank manager dressed for a budget excursion – but also because a gentleman’s jacket is like a lady’s handbag. It safeguards the algorithms.
The gentle reader, I’m quite certain of it, is long grown tired of my adventures in the dentist’s chair. But the naked man – or the man with lice, in another version of the Russian proverb – keeps on about the bathhouse, as “thou talkest of what ails thee.” And so I square up for yet another round of self-indulgence and self-pity, an indifferent hand to begin with, but downright embarrassing when played once too often.
