Happy New Year!

I'm grateful for old friends and new ones, and for all of my friends through the internet. A Happy and Prosperous New Year to you all!

To celebrate, here is my all time favorite Busby Berkeley number where he goes all dark and expressionist with a disturbing twist at the end.

Happy New Year!!

The Ultimate Answer

On my Facebook page and on IT's blog, people have been discussing relations between religion and atheism. I say let's settle this thing once and for all and use a computer.





Well, there you have it.

What Happened to Christmas?

I must confess that Christmas is not my favorite holiday, probably for my own reasons. My birthday is on December 25th, so I’ve always felt overshadowed by the holiday. It’s a little like not having a birthday. The presents weren’t the problem. I could not have a party that day, or even get together with friends and go out. I’d have to be like the Queen and have 2 birthdays, the actual one, and an official one more convenient for people to celebrate.
Also, after doing 6 years time in retail, it’s hard to come out of that experience without a very jaundiced view of the whole holiday. I can be as sour on the Christmas holiday as any atheist celebrating Festivus. Even in the midst of celebrations that I truly love, the whole thing sometimes has a forced treacley quality about it.

Like almost everyone brought up in Christendom, I loved Christmas as a child. The smell of Christmas evergreens transports me back 45 years to my own early childhood. So what happened? Is it simply a matter of growing up? Or did the holiday itself change somehow in recent years?

To me, Christmas these days can be an unholy consumer culture potlatch with all of its former sentiments turned into sales pitches. Small wonder that the relentless and ruthlessly enforced good cheer drives the grief-stricken into even deeper despair. Our geniuses in marketing and advertising research always conspire to find new ways to squeeze more profits out of the holiday and make it ever more dreary. Needs and desires must be created where there were none before, compounding the sense of frustration and disappointment that comes with the whole gift exchange, and driving up higher and higher sales as people try to fill the new found emptiness. There are times when I think Christmas is becoming almost as dreary as airline travel, and I wonder why people still bother with it (a growing number of people don’t; a number of people I know who still celebrate the holiday have dropped the whole gift exchange part of it entirely).

I make a distinction now between that annual actuarial economic event called Christmas, and the religious holiday it replaced formerly known as The Feast of the Nativity. I usually focus my attentions on the latter and deal with the former as little as possible. The happiest and most satisfying part of it for me these days is Midnight Mass at my parish church. It’s a beautiful ceremony with a lot of before and after feasting that usually begins at 6PM and doesn’t end until the wee hours of the morning. We usually have beautiful music, ancient pageantry, and a packed house. I usually play a small part in the liturgy, which is deeply satisfying. There is lots of gemütlichkeit (for lack of a better word) in the informal dinner at a neighborhood restaurant for all those participating in the service, and more in the little party in the parish gym that follows the Eucharist. A new part of Christmas that really pulls the sting out of my birthday problem is Facebook. I used to feel very isolated on Christmas, and now I get pages full of birthday greetings from around the world. I love it! Thank God for social media!


Christmas at my parish this year (photos courtesy of Vince Chiumento):


Yours Truly on the left carrying a candle




The crowds watching our rector, Reverend Mother Stacey, lay the infant effigy in the creche



Our Italian Rococo Baby Jesus all strapped into his safety belt for the procession to the creche




A 13th century fresco by Giotto's shop showing St. Francis instituting the creche at Greccio. The painting shows a scene close to what still takes place in many churches (including ours) to this day. The original creche at Greccio was in a cave with a live baby playing the starring role.


We also had magnificent music such as this Mass setting by Cesar Franck, though not quite this lavishly orchestrated. We had a harpist, a cellist, a very hardworking organist, in addition to our magnificent choir.





In former times, Christmas was a rich and long holiday. Today’s secular celebration only lasts for a day, but the official religious feast lasts 12 days, from December 25th to Epiphany on January 6th. In between are other feasts like that of St. Stephen, Holy Name, the 2 Sundays of Christmas, etc.

Christmas, like all Christian holy days, has a lot of pre-Christian and pagan content. To all the secularists and neo-pagans who love pointing this out to me, I give the same answer that Italians give to American evangelicals who point out the pagan origins of all of those ex-votos and miracle working images in Italian churches, “e allora” (so what?). We all know the ancient pre-Christian origins of Christmas trees (I can remember a time when many churches banned Christmas trees from their premises for that very reason). Yule logs are definitely from ancient pre-Christian Europe, a legacy of ancient solstice rites. There are a number of extreme Christian fundamentalist denominations, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that consider Christmas to be a pagan holiday and will have nothing to do with it.


A Yule Log



Probably the tastiest manifestation of the Yule Log, the French holiday dessert buche de noel.


The pagan content of Christmas and so many Christian holy days is perhaps a legacy of ancient missionaries like St. Patrick and the Irish monks who restored Christianity to Europe after the tribal invasions of Europe in the wake of Rome’s fall. The early church fathers like St. Jerome were revolutionaries who wanted nothing to do with former religions. Christians were supposed to smash the idols and plant the cross. The missionaries were pragmatists (unlike the Church Fathers) who used the native religions of various peoples as a path to the Gospel. Patrick’s shamrock is the most famous example of this pragmatic hybridization. Ancient Irish Gospel books and stone crosses swarm with pre-Christian patterns and images that lost none of their magical powers in their conversion to Christianity. Frequently, pre-Christian rituals and practices survived the transition through widespread popular usage and pragmatic tolerance. Christmas and other Christian holy days are a hybrid of Christian and pre-Christian beliefs and practices. Religion is a messy and untidy business, as untidy as people themselves. Those who would tidy it up frequently do more harm than good.

In pre-industrial times, Christmas was a long celebration in the darkest days of winter when the fields were fallow after the last harvest. There was little to do except to dispel the darkness with as much feasting as possible. The calendar of religious feasts (much more of them then than now) provided necessary breaks and opportunities to blow off steam in an age when labor was always hard and seldom rewarding.


From the most famous of all books of hours, Les Tres Riches Heures painted by the Limborg Brothers for the Duc du Berry in the 15th century, showing the month of January. The Duke seated before a fire screen on the right feasts lavishly in one of his many chateaux. The guest Bishop of Chartres in the center exclaims at the lavish gold and silver ware.



The month of February from the Tres Riches Heures showing what the peasants on the Duke's estates would be doing in winter, struggling to stay warm.




A very original conception of Christmas by Pieter Brueghel the Elder; if you look carefully, you can see Mary and Joseph arriving in a 16th century Flemish village in December transforming it into Bethlehem. On the lower right, children play with toys on the ice. On the left is a busy inn with hogs being slaughtered and bled for Christmas feasting (for that legendary boar's head and for blood sausages). Snow covered casks of ale have just arrived. And crowds of people gather to be counted in the census and pay the tax described in the Biblical account. A big Christmas wreath hangs over the entrance to the inn. On the upper left through the tree branches, a red winter sun rises.


The weekend is an invention of the American labor movement, and like so many inventions of the labor movement, it is in the process of being eliminated (the dark side of the repeal of Sunday closing hours together with the reality of global markets that never sleep). Those celebrations could be rowdy, lewd, and crude as people let loose. The celebrations of the Christmas holidays in all their drunken revelry survived the Reformation, even in the very Calvinist Dutch Republic, celebrations of everything from Saint Nicholas Day to Epiphany were every bit as rough and drunken as in former times, as the artist and innkeeper Jan Steen records in his paintings.


Jan Steen, The Feast of Saint Nicholas




Jan Steen, Twelfth Night


Christmas almost did not survive the Industrial Revolution. Time was now money, and the integrated global economy no longer had time available for the proles to frolic. Production schedules and profit margins had to be met ASAP. Christmas became attenuated down to one day on the 25th day of December, and frequently not even that.

As Adam Gopnik points out in a recent article in The New Yorker, what we in the English speaking world call Christmas is entirely an invention of the Victorian era, from Santa Claus to Christmas cards.


A sampling of some Victorian Christmas cards:














Christmas as we've inherited it from the Victorians is the invention of writers, especially Charles Dickens, with reformist sympathies eager to relieve some of the brutality of life for the toiling classes without necessarily sacrificing their own comfort. Those of a much less generous nature saw the humanitarian reforming agenda behind the melodrama and sentimentality of Dickens’ serialized stories. Thomas Carlyle, in words and tone that sound like an angry pundit from a libertarian think tank today, said Dickens “thought that men ought to be buttered up and the world made soft and accommodating for them, and all sorts of fellows have turkey for their Christmas dinner. Commanding and controlling and punishing them he would give up without any misgivings in order to coax and soothe and delude them into doing right.”

Indeed there is a Tea Party affiliated economist today who thinks Carlyle doesn’t go far enough:

Dickens's ignorance of basic economics would, if acted upon by Scrooge, have produced adverse consequences for Cratchit himself. Had Ebeneezer paid Cratchit a higher salary for his work, he [Scrooge] would very likely have been able to attract a larger number of job applicants from which he could have selected employees whose enhanced marginal productivity might have earned Scrooge even greater profits. At such a point, terminating Cratchit's employment would have been an economically rational act by Scrooge. As matters now stand, Scrooge's employment policies have left him with the kind of groveling, ergophobic, humanoid sponge we have come to know as Bob Cratchit; a man we are expected to take into our hearts as an expression of some warped sense of the "Christmas spirit." Being an astute businessmen, Ebeneezer Scrooge was well aware of the marketplace maxim that "you get what you pay for."
Unaccustomed as Commissar Dickens is to the informal processes of the marketplace, we would not expect him to tell us anything about competitive alternatives for Cratchit's services. Perhaps there are employers out there prepared to pay him a higher wage than he is receiving from my client. If this is so, then we must ask ourselves: did Bob Cratchit simply lack the ambition to seek higher-paying employment? It would appear so. At no time do we see this man exhibiting any interest in trying to better his and his family's lot.

Social Darwinists then and now don’t like Dickens, and in their heart of hearts, they really don’t like Christmas and what it stands for either.

A big problem with the Victorian Christmas is that it created a candied version of the original Christian story of the Incarnation. We can blame the Victorians for today’s Nativity Scene with Gentle Joseph, Mary in Blue, The Sweet Baby Jesus, The Shepherds, and The Little Drummer Boy. It’s a soft candy version of what is really a very dark story. Christ was born a bastard to an unwed teenaged mother, the result of a divine act of adultery that transformed poor fiance Joseph into history’s most famous cuckold. Christ was born on the run and spent His early childhood in hiding or in exile with a price on His head. His parents arrived in Bethlehem to satisfy some bureaucratic command from a far-away colonial power, to be counted in a census designed to control and tax a rebellious population. His mother was a pariah, and certainly people talked about her fiancé. They were astonished that he would keep her around, especially in her condition. The innkeeper turned her away probably because of her scandal as much as any over-crowding. She was forced to give birth out back in a stable with the animals. Then God Almighty appeared on earth as a completely helpless crying drooling infant whose diapers needed to be changed. A local warlord and client of the colonial power heard some wild prophecy about a king born in Bethlehem and sent in his military to murder every child under age 2 in the town. The little family barely escaped in time and fled to Egypt as homeless refugees. As so many who have commented on this story have pointed out, the Nativity story, literally true or not, graphically demonstrates what sort of Messiah this was to be. Bethlehem today is actually a lot closer to Bethlehem then than we would care to admit; a small out-of-the-way town occupied by a colonial power and deeply divided by sectarian and national conflicts.


The security wall near Bethlehem




Manger Square in Bethlehem with the Church of the Nativity; note all the little security precautions like all the bollards to direct traffic.



There are some on the left, Christian and not, who recognize the scandal of Christ’s birth and want to recover some of the original revolutionary challenge to established power so heavily implied in this story. For example, here is a recent Christmas message issued by Occupy Denver:

Today, some are celebrating an underprivileged mom giving birth in a stable, to a baby who grew up to be a prominent activist for peace, love and anti-capitalist values; who preferred the company of honest prostitutes, the poor and the disabled than that of the religious or financial elite; who partook in radical direct action against the banking system and who, at the conclusion of his life, was executed publicly as an enemy of state. Jesus was a revolutionary -- Merry Christmas

Indeed, Christmas is the one time of year when Mainstream America celebrates the birth of a bastard child to an unwed teenaged mother. Ben Franklin may have said that “God helps those who help themselves,” but it’s only the wishful thinking of some Americans determined to believe that God Himself ordained that “Nothing $ucceed$ like $ucce$$,” that put that phrase into Scripture. Jesus actually said quite the opposite throughout the course of His short life on earth.


The Captains of Industry and Masters of the Universe soon figured out that there was a lot of money to be made off of Christmas, and off of the Victorian version of it. And now our marketing wizards are busy creating desires and needs where there were none before. Christmas is now the year’s biggest retail accounting event.

The secularization of Christmas may bother Bill O’Reilly, but it does not bother me. Asking people to believe in virgin birth these days is asking an awful lot. The return of pre-Christian Yule by all sorts of Neo-Pagan groups doesn’t bother me either. Why shouldn’t Christmas have more than one meaning? Everybody needs a party at the darkest time of year.

What bothers me is the commercialization of it all, and how the drive for ever higher sales and profits so warps the holiday in both its sacred and secular meanings. Commerce transforms a time to get together, to make a little light in the dark, to eat, drink, and be merry, to enjoy a little life when all the world is in frozen suspension, into an orgy of greed and selfishness. Such a world of pervasive corruption and casual brutality is a gold mine for satire. One of the sharpest and most brilliant of current satirists gives The Holiday Season created for us by our corporate Betters the send up it deserves.




But hey, there's still 10 days left, so let's party.

Person of the Year

Counterlight's Peculiar's first annual Person of the Year,

Mohammed Bouazizi

It's Still Christmas

Louie Crew sent this to me for my birthday yesterday.

It Ain't Over Yet!

Still 11 days left in Christmas, 2 days left in Hannukkah, the Solstice is over but the Yule log is still with us.

Happy Holidays from Brooklyn and from Hollis, Queens!

Christmas

On Christmas, every child is the Christ Child.

Iraqi orphan

Santa Maria Gloriosa

A 12th century apse mosaic from Torcello near Venice






The Virgin of Vladimir, a magnificent 12th century icon from Constantinople sent to Kiev. A painting that has been worshiped to death; probably all that is left of the original are the faces of the Mother and Child. The rest is later restorations.






The Donskaya Virgin by Theophanes the Greek, a variation on the Virgin of Vladimir by one of the few medieval Russian icon painters who was not ordained.






The Blue Virgin from one of the oldest surviving windows in Chartres Cathedral, from the end of the 12th century





The North Rose window of Chartres Cathedral given by Queen Blanche of Castille. The window is about Christ's first coming. The Virgin and Child sit in the center surrounded by the ancestors of Christ described in the opening of the Gospel of Matthew,and by prophets who foretold His coming.






Fra Angelico, The Linaioli Tabernacle






Fra Angelico, The Cortona Polyptych







Donatello, The Madonna of the Clouds






Luca della Robbia, The Madonna of the Apple






Jan Van Eyck, The Dresden Triptych






Jan Van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. The artists of the Renaissance identified the Virgin Mary with the natural world, especially in this painting where Jan Van Eyck includes one of his most splendid landscapes in the background, a view of a city and surrounding countryside with distant mountains lit by the morning sunlight.





Jan Van Eyck, detail of the landscape from the Rolin Madonna. The painting is probably based on the Venite recited at the morning office in most books of hours at the time. As the Venite is a hymn to God the Creator, so is this painting as we view a sparkling morning landscape through the Trinitarian symbolism of three arches.






Rogier Van Der Weyden, center panel of the Columba Altarpiece






Rogier Van Der Weyden, detail from the Columba Altarpiece, to my mind, one of the finest Madonnas ever to come out of the Flemish painting tradition.





Botticelli, Madonna of the Pomegranite






Botticelli, Madonna of the Magnificat; Botticelli was a conservative reactionary who wanted to return to something like the romance and transcendence of earlier Pre-Renaissance painting. In an age when most artists used oil paints, Botticelli resolutely painted in tempera, by then a very old fashioned painting medium. Like all conservatives who want to return to the past, he ended up innovating. Mimicking the styles of the past would lead into the dead end of pastiche. So Botticelli created a very original and personal style.







Giovanni Bellini, a Renaissance Madonna in a beautiful landscape with echos of the old Byzantine icon tradition well known in Bellini's native Venice.






Giovanni Bellini, The Barbarigo Madonna; one of Bellini's best and least visited Madonnas in a church on the island of Murano near Venice.





Giovanni Bellini, detail from the Barbarigo Madonna, a splendid landscape.






Titian, Madonna and Child with Saint Catherine and John the Baptist; Titian's magnificent continuation of the natural poetry begun by Bellini.





Raphael, The Sistine Madonna; There's good reason why Raphael's Madonnas are such classics and so popular. He creates the impression that the Virgin and Child with 2 saints are descending from the realms of light to greet us. Raphael perfectly calibrates just the right amount of emotion, compositional harmony, and dynamism to create a perfectly gratifying image. This was the last Madonna Raphael painted entirely by his own hand. It was originally commissioned by Pope Julius II for the church of San Sisto in Piacenza. The Pope intended it to be a gift to Piacenza for the city's support for his military campaign to subdue the Papal States in Emilia Romagna. After the Pope's unexpected death, Raphael turned it into a memorial picture including Pope Julius' features on the figure of Saint Sixtus. Some historians argue that the wooden part that the adorable cherubini are leaning on is the Pope's coffin. Perhaps. St. Barbara on the right looks, not out at us, but down at the cherubs and the "coffin." At that time, St. Barbara was invoked at the time of death, along with the Virgin Mary. The parting curtain can be seen in a lot of Italian tomb art since the 13th century. It is as though the bed curtains part and the Virgin Mary and the host of Heaven arrive to greet the deceased. To my mind, it's a Christian version of a Japanese Buddhist raigo painting.






Correggio, Rest on the Flight Into Egypt with St, Francis







Nicholas Poussin, Holy Family on the Steps; Poussin's most magnificent variation on Raphael's work.





Rembrandt, Virgin and Child, etching; a Protestant interpretation of a traditionally Catholic subject





Giovanni Batista Tiepolo; one of Tiepolo's regal Rococo Madonnas








Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child, pastel; not a religious picture, but I believe it belongs here. Her work is in that long tradition of Madonnas that begins with the Renaissance, though here secularized and brought into the modern era. While Cassatt discarded the transcendence, she lost none of the tenderness inherent in the subject matter.






Henry Moore, Virgin and Child carved for St. Matthew's Church in Northampton in 1943; a 20th century attempt to return to some kind of suggestion of transcendence in an age where all the traditional language and imagery of religion are in doubt.




My favorite remarks on this subject come not from Dante or Saint Bernard, but from a scientist and author, a secularized Jew, Dr. Jacob Bronowski:

Every so often some visionary invents a new Utopia: Plato, Sir Thomas More, HG Wells. And always the idea is that the heroic image shall last, as Hitler said, for a thousand years. But the heroic images always look like the crude, dead, ancestral faces of the statues on Easter Island -- why, they even look like Mussolini! That is not the essence of the human personality, even in terms of biology. Biologically, a human being is changeable, sensitive, mutable, fitted to so many environments, and not static. The real vision of the human being is the child wonder, the Virgin and Child, The Holy Family.
When I was a boy in my teens, I used to walk on Saturday afternoons from the East End of London to the British Museum, in order to look at the single statue from the Easter Islands which somehow they had not got inside the Museum. So I am fond of these ancient ancestral faces. But in the end, all of them are not worth one child's dimpled face.

Happy Holidays to All.

Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel, who is to be buried today, belonged to that rarest of species, the leader who took on an empire, and won without firing a shot. He was a playwright with roots in absurdist and surrealist literature. Like his fellow Czech national, Franz Kafka, he realized that the absurdity and misery reflected in his work came not from his psyche, but from the reality of life under the heel of arbitrary and lawless power. For Kafka, it was the dying absolute monarchy of Austria-Hungary. For Havel, it started with Hitler's occupation and extended into the long years of Soviet domination. The basic requirements of his literary work forced him into politics. The very absurdity that Havel wrote about could be turned back upon the quisling regime and create a space where people could breathe freely, if only for a moment. He needed that little moment of space in order to write. Almost against his will, he found himself involved in dissident politics, and at the forefront of the effort to end the Soviet occupation of his country.

While the North Koreans wail over the death of their god king, and others mourn for Christopher Hitchens, I'm saving my grief for Havel who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk.








Havel was a lifelong Zappa fan.

Note to My Readers

... all 2 of you out there.

This blog has been rather spotty the past few days. I'm buried in work right now with the end of the semester. Believe it or not, I have a lot of projects underway in my studio, but none of them are getting finished and are on hold. Not only the workload, but also some necessary construction prevents me from going there. They are installing new windows and heating in my studio, but they are also having plumbing problems in the building (as in port-o-potties in the back lot).

On top of all that, I'm back on the insomnia/ depression treadmill up at 3AM playing solitaire and feeling like crap in the morning. And yes, I do go to bed earlier these days, usually around 10PM.

Above all, I'm feeling an overwhelming sense of futility these days. Maybe it's just the annual holiday blues and it will pass as soon as Xmas is over.

I hope to be back to regular posting shortly after Christmas, if not before.

And since Brad Evans, our resident sociopath, is back in business, I'm taking the comments offline. If you wish to speak to me, then do so on Facebook or by email.

Two Cheers for Obama

Barack Obama is the ultimate dream date heart-breaker. One minute he makes your fondest dreams come true, and then the next he's flirting with your worst enemy right in front of you.

Barack Obama is the best president on gay issues ever, hands down. Far more than any of his predecessors (and more than his successors I fear), he's been out front and in the lead on gay civil rights. Of course it's political calculation, but that doesn't preclude genuine conviction and some courageous leadership. Ending the ban on gays serving openly in the military was a major accomplishment, and in the teeth of a hostile Republican House. He's now out front of Europe on the issue of international recognition for the basic human rights of gays and lesbians.

One of his unsung accomplishments is in the area of education, especially the student loan program. He brought a certain measure of sanity to a program long out of control by taking the profiteers out of it. Tuition hikes are still out of control, but at least some measure of law and order returns to the once very lawless and profitable business of interest, penalties, and fees. Loan repayments are still a huge burden on the young, affecting their decisions about careers (there's a reason why a lot of MDs these days are foreign; most Americans can't afford the quarter million dollar debt load to go to medical school, while other countries see paying the high tuition and expenses as an investment in their best and brightest).

The health insurance reform plan is a lot less than the Medicare-for-all solution that I'd like to see. But, it is the most significant piece of progressive legislation since the Medicare Act of 1965. It will end many of the worst abuses by the insurance and health provider industries. It will make health insurance available for many more people, though not for everyone.

Barack Obama decisively ended the reckless go-it-alone cowboy foreign policy of the second Bush Administration. While the damage is not undone, there is a new and more cooperative approach to the rest of the world that goes a long way toward restoring at least some of the lost authority and power of the USA. Obama deserves credit for ending the Iraq War and drawing a line under the Afghan War.

And yet, he is the whole reason the Occupy movement exists.

Obama, like the rest of the Democratic Party, depends on corporate patronage, and most of it came from Wall Street. That patronage kept him from sensible policies like seizing and breaking up too-big-to-fail banks that even the Reagan Administration used on the collapsing savings and loan industry. Wall Street influence on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue kept post-crash regulatory reforms very minimal and full of loopholes. The SEC remains an emasculated agency. The current reforms are far short of a necessary revival of the Glass-Steagall Act that once forbade banks to gamble with depositors' assets.

That same financial industry influence keeps any real relief for underwater homeowners a very remote prospect.

The House Republicans humiliated the President in last summer's budget battles. He allowed himself to be humiliated with his repeated preemptive surrenders on major budget policies. He nearly lost my support entirely when he offered near unilateral surrender on Social Security and Medicare. I'm willing to delay and even halt progress in the name of political expediency, but I'm not willing to go backward.

Obama's absence on the issue of economic justice is the whole reason for the rise of Occupy Wall Street. That's the problem with being a progressive. The leaders of the Democratic Party are usually in bed with the very people making life miserable for everyone else. As a consequence, the rank and file must take matters into their own hands.

His worst offense of all is his continued expansion of the National Security State begun by Cheney and Company. Obama's decision not to veto a bill mandating the arbitrary detention of American citizens by the military puts the long term health of our democracy in doubt.

On some issues, Obama is another FDR. On most others, he's another Grover Cleveland.

Since it looks like the Republicans are offering us a choice between Gordon Gekko and WC Fields with a back up chorus of assorted crazies, then there is no question who this blog will endorse in the coming election year.

Four more years of the black guy in the White House. We could do a whole lot worse.

Is There Something In The Water?

Unfortunately for the future plutonomy, it looks like the unwashed masses will not make a return to serfdom quite so smoothly and quietly after all.

It's hard to return to servitude and humiliation after tasting freedom and dignity.

Expectation, the spark of revolution. Something to contemplate for Advent.

Moscow

London

Cairo

Tel Aviv

Santiago, Chile

New York

Dallas