A SERIES OF ETCHINGS

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Sinners and Saints, Righteous and Self-Righteous, Churched and Un-Churched, Christ and Anti-Christ, Reasonable and Unreasonable, Humorous and Humorless alike, it is with a morsel of fear and trepidation that A SERIES OF ETCHINGS presents to you…

                          
          
THE WOODSCREW LETTERS

Translated and transcribed to please your trans-dimensional tastes.

CHAPTER 1
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My Dear Tapeworm, Greetings from Home.

For Your sake I have taken upon Myself the burden of crafting my own version of one of those useful and quaint handbooks on remembrance.  This handbook, young Tapeworm, is designed to guarantee your success in that shallow world of his so long as you study it diligently, day and night.  But commit it to memory not; for of all my disciples it is you, most of all, who must remain nimble-minded.  It is my utmost wish that you shall use it for the acquisition of the foremost exemplary means by which to molest the faithful; and never for the feeble goal of rote memorization which can never be useful when debating over such trifle matters as truth.  Or need I remind you that for the faithful truth is of least consequence.  Their beliefs derive not from investigation but spring forth from that most dishonest source – authority; and woe unto him who mistakes power for truth. Though, admittedly, some gifted ones have arrived at this realization through their own haphazard ways, keeping the masses unaware of this development must remain our chief endeavor; for, it makes pulling the foundation out from under them all the more easy when they believe that foundation to be the product of their own rational handiwork – and what mediocre handiwork such foundations have proven to be.

Henceforth, Tapeworm:

Your task has been catachismally reversed:
Pondering the questions last,
And reading the answers first.
For with this, My own proven method,
You shall most fatefully curse,
That Christian who is at answers best,
But at questions, far worse.

Doubt Me, young Tapeworm?
Then please recall,
That pattern of gossip,
Which led to their Fall.

May my humble example be your guide,
And may this handbook,
Your training, provide.

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THE WOODSCREW CATECHISM

DEVIL’S DAY 1

Answer 1:    “Their inadvertent appeal to reason, your Highness.” 

(Now THINK before moving on Tapeworm! What is the most suitable question for such an answer as this?)

Question 1:  “What, My young Tapeworm, has lead to the most fruitful propagation of all the most delightfully damning dogmas of Calvin, Aquinas, Augustine, Paul, the Roman Church, and every other highly reasonable and therefore truly venerable Christian creed?”

 

Answer 2:  “We push him to flip the page or to attribute such frightful railings to Luther’s notoriously mercurial constitution. Or we cause him to completely disparage the character of Luther and thank his god for providing the church with nobler, and therefore more consistently rational, saints like Calvin.”

Question 2: “What, My young Tapeworm, do we do when the Christian reads Luther’s Pauline inspired tirades against reason?:  ‘Reason is a Whore, the greatest enemy faith has.’ And, ‘Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God.’ Or such Platonically inverted rants as, ‘For reason, however beautiful and glorious she may be, belongs nevertheless only in the realm of this world: there she has her dominion and regions. But in the realm of Christ, there God’s word alone is supreme.’”

 

Question 3:  “He has forced those naked apes to think of him in abstract terms, your Highness: For in such a feat he has given them cause to think they should reason; he has left them to ponder freely regarding his invisible and unknowable qualities while all along knowing that this would make them more nearer Our image than to his!”

Question 3:  “What, My young Tapeworm, has simultaneously been the enemy’s greatest gift to Us and greatest curse to that inferior race, man?” 

 

Answer 4:  “Endless Logical Syllogisms designed to prove his omnipotence, your Highness. For example, recall Luther’s Bondage of the Will which, through following out to its dreadful end the most diabolical of all propositions the human mind had yet conceived, attributed the malevolent acts of my Lord Woodscrew to the will and decree of him. Oh, how heinous and how great a man was that Luther!  He certainly knew a loophole when he saw one!  He would have made a great legal mind.  But, in what was a truly admiral demonstration of my Lord’s supremacy of foresight, You were there to call down the lightning at just the right time; thus, turning Luther away from that foreordained path to fulfill your divine plans.”

Question 4:   “What, My young Tapeworm, is most likely to pave one’s road to Hell?”

 

Answer 5: “They have offered them Humanism under the guise of Hermeneutics.  For in all contrived systems of interpretation it must be the case that Man is the Measure.”

Question 5: “What, My young Tapeworm, has been the Church Father’s greatest gift to the faithful?”

 

Answer 6: “All the manifold systems of doctrine and belief, Your Highness.  For recall that it was to relieve the faithful of the overwhelming burden of works that the Reformation sought to eliminate works from the faith.  But in that attempt the Reformers placed upon the faithful an even weightier load: the burden of assenting to right beliefs.  Though simple and few at first, in time, and through the diligence of our most gifted theologians, these beliefs multiplied, causing many to look with an unholy lust upon that far off day when salvation was a much more simple affair and when it came with greater certainty than can be guaranteed in these latter times; for it is true of the vast majority of men that doing comes much more easily than assenting.  Salvation has never been more difficult than now!”

Question 6: “What, My young Tapeworm, must we conclude to be the greatest enemy of the faith and, by definition, our greatest feat yet?”

 

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Well done, Tapeworm.  This concludes your first lesson; more to come later.  I’m sure you would agree that by studying the art of asking mere questions, what we of the Inferno Cloth call ‘Mere Questionity’, you are much nearer the defilement of that most insidious and vile brand of Christian—the Christian who has gladly and presumptuously reaped all the answers before he has taken heed to sow even one solitary question of his own.  Take rest lad, it will be no time at all until their day has come on the account of You.  To him be the glory for allowing such an agreeable state of affairs.

From the Abyss with Love,
UNCLE WOODSCREW

Peggy Noonan, conservative writer for the Wall Street Journal, trots out the truth behind the worries over Obama’s missing lapel pin. In her article “The View From Gate 14“, she suggests that it may not be for lack of patriotism that Obama neglected to undertake the symbolic act of fastening upon his collar an emblem of our nation’s flag (i.e. attaching to himself the signifier of a signifier).

Notice that this fuss over the lapel pin has resulted in the exaltation of the pin; the pin succeeds the flag and has supplanted it with an entirely new meaning. The flag itself, once the symbol of our national unity, becomes detached from its original meaning as it takes on a new significance, being redefined through its copy – the pin. The pin is itself a third-order simulacrum, a counterfeit representation of a representation, but now absent of the content and meaning found in the thing it was intended to mimic. As a result, our nation’s flag no longer embodies the essence of our nation, but is an essence unto itself which can in turn be embodied in yet further items of mass-production. This simulacrum, this subversion of the original, occurs when a simulation, a copy, replaces the original and becomes treated as though it were in fact the reality, what Baudrillard terms the hyper-real. The new meaning of our flag – a meaning to be found within the context of the pin – becomes clearer as the Noonans of the world reinterpret it through the narrative of Obama’s mishap.

According to Noonan, the absence of the pin signifies an absence of a certain species of patriotism. She fears that Obama may not love America for the right reasons; more to the point, she says Obama may not love Henry Ford or George Washington or the Wright brothers (more simulacra) the way that the rest of America does and apparently should. However, Noonan does give attention, in a rather insincere way, to what Obama does praise America for: its racial progress. And, somehow, by the end of her rather sophisticated article (sophisticated in that Noonan is less abrasive, emotive, and reactionary, and much more subtle and tactical than the typical conservative savant) we are left with the feeling that racial progress is only a marginal attribute of the American people. We feel this way because Noonan apparentley finds more to love in the Henry Fords, George Washingtons, and Wright Brothers of this country’s history than in the Martin Luther King Jr.s, Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinsons. The former were, by all official accounts, the men who made America. America is their country – simple folk like us simply live in it. Is this the reason why Noonan acts as though there are two histories, separate and unequal?

In her defense, Noonan’s skepticism of Obama’s love for America is not without basis. He was, after all, raised in a different culture. This can hardly compare to McCain who was birthed on a U.S. Naval base in Panama–the most all-American way possible, approprately trademarked with the Imperial hubris the rest of the world loves to hate. Noonan further surmises that McCain’s all-American upbringing means he carries ‘in his bones’ the right kind of love for America; Hilary does as well, though not as thoroughly. Interestingly, Noonan doesn’t mention that McCain was against legislating into existence MLK Day; in fact so opposed that he voted against it in 1983 while a member of Congress. I’m sure America will come to see this as only a minor indiscretion, unimportant in the greater scheme of things and in no way indicative of the type of guy McCain really is.

In stark contrast to the Noonanesque/Wall-street way of interpreting American life, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! has something of her own to say about what Americans are thinking.

It seems that both wrote their articles after traveling a bit and observing day to day life, but each came to drastically different conlusions regarding the concerns of the average American. And yes, Goodman, like Noonan, talks of lapel pins, but in a slightly more disinterested tone.