Alexander Pope's Universal Prayer

My journey involves things half-felt, thoughts ill-formed, impressions and sensations only partially detected. I move forward in what the anonymous 14th century mystical writer called a “cloud of unknowing.” My path is not illuminated with glaring flourescent lighting; my guide does not announce the way with the sound of a blaring voice. I move towards faith rather at the calling of a gentle whisper...

-- Christopher Page





_ _ _



Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!


Thou Great First Cause, least understood:
Who all my sense confined
To know but this—that thou art good,
And that myself am blind:


Yet gave me, in this dark estate,
To see the good from ill;
And binding Nature fast in fate,
Left free the human will.


What conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do,
This, teach me more than Hell to shun,
That, more than Heaven pursue.


What blessings thy free bounty gives,
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when man receives,
To enjoy is to obey.


Yet not to earth’s contracted span,
Thy goodness let me bound,
Or think thee Lord alone of man,
When thousand worlds are round:


Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
And deal damnation round the land,
On each I judge thy foe.


If I am right, thy grace impart,
Still in the right to stay;
If I am wrong, oh teach my heart
To find a better way.


Save me alike from foolish pride,
Or impious discontent,
At aught thy wisdom has denied,
Or aught thy goodness lent.


Teach me to feel another’s woe,
To hide the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.


Mean though I am, not wholly so
Since quickened by thy breath;
Oh lead me wheresoe’er I go,
Through this day’s life or death.


This day, be bread and peace my lot:
All else beneath the sun,
Thou know’st if best bestowed or not,
And let thy will be done.


To thee, whose temple is all space,
Whose altar, earth, sea, skies!
One chorus let all being raise!
All Nature’s incense rise!

-- "The Universal Prayer" by Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope's Universal Prayer

My journey involves things half-felt, thoughts ill-formed, impressions and sensations only partially detected. I move forward in what the anonymous 14th century mystical writer called a “cloud of unknowing.” My path is not illuminated with glaring flourescent lighting; my guide does not announce the way with the sound of a blaring voice. I move towards faith rather at the calling of a gentle whisper...

-- Christopher Page





_ _ _



Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!


Thou Great First Cause, least understood:
Who all my sense confined
To know but this—that thou art good,
And that myself am blind:


Yet gave me, in this dark estate,
To see the good from ill;
And binding Nature fast in fate,
Left free the human will.


What conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do,
This, teach me more than Hell to shun,
That, more than Heaven pursue.


What blessings thy free bounty gives,
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when man receives,
To enjoy is to obey.


Yet not to earth’s contracted span,
Thy goodness let me bound,
Or think thee Lord alone of man,
When thousand worlds are round:


Let not this weak, unknowing hand
Presume thy bolts to throw,
And deal damnation round the land,
On each I judge thy foe.


If I am right, thy grace impart,
Still in the right to stay;
If I am wrong, oh teach my heart
To find a better way.


Save me alike from foolish pride,
Or impious discontent,
At aught thy wisdom has denied,
Or aught thy goodness lent.


Teach me to feel another’s woe,
To hide the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,
That mercy show to me.


Mean though I am, not wholly so
Since quickened by thy breath;
Oh lead me wheresoe’er I go,
Through this day’s life or death.


This day, be bread and peace my lot:
All else beneath the sun,
Thou know’st if best bestowed or not,
And let thy will be done.


To thee, whose temple is all space,
Whose altar, earth, sea, skies!
One chorus let all being raise!
All Nature’s incense rise!

-- "The Universal Prayer" by Alexander Pope

Obama and the Choom Gang

The media is rocking with the story that Obama was quite the marijuana smoker in his high school days. Interestingly, this story does not originate from the right-wing and Fox News. Instead, it comes from respected biographer David Maraniss, who did some good biographical work on President Clinton.

I am not getting that vibe that this is deadly for Obama. After all, those were high school days, and people know Obama now, after four years in office. Sure, the people who think Obama is an anti-colonialist Kenyan looking to subvert the United States will doubtless make a lot of hay out of this, but any fair minded person would have to acquit Obama as a sober and serious man. This marijuana story might have killed him when he was running for his first term, but not now. On the other hand, I doubt it helps, and this promises to be a close race.

I will get down one snippet to capture some of the wild side of Obama's get-down youth. He apparently had a patented move when the bud was going round: “When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.” The president was young once too, and, hey, he was also a cool guy. At least he wasn't ganging up on weaker kids to bully them, like a certain Romney that we all know too well.

And you know, when the presidential debates roll round, Romney is ready to drop this rhetorical grenade:"I don't know what you have been smoking, my friend!"


(Source: Natalie Jennings, "The Choom Gang: President Obama’s pot-smoking high school days detailed in Maraniss book" at The Washington Post)

Obama and the Choom Gang

The media is rocking with the story that Obama was quite the marijuana smoker in his high school days. Interestingly, this story does not originate from the right-wing and Fox News. Instead, it comes from respected biographer David Maraniss, who did some good biographical work on President Clinton.

I am not getting that vibe that this is deadly for Obama. After all, those were high school days, and people know Obama now, after four years in office. Sure, the people who think Obama is an anti-colonialist Kenyan looking to subvert the United States will doubtless make a lot of hay out of this, but any fair minded person would have to acquit Obama as a sober and serious man. This marijuana story might have killed him when he was running for his first term, but not now. On the other hand, I doubt it helps, and this promises to be a close race.

I will get down one snippet to capture some of the wild side of Obama's get-down youth. He apparently had a patented move when the bud was going round: “When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.” The president was young once too, and, hey, he was also a cool guy. At least he wasn't ganging up on weaker kids to bully them, like a certain Romney that we all know too well.

And you know, when the presidential debates roll round, Romney is ready to drop this rhetorical grenade:"I don't know what you have been smoking, my friend!"


(Source: Natalie Jennings, "The Choom Gang: President Obama’s pot-smoking high school days detailed in Maraniss book" at The Washington Post)

Noomi Rapace

“I don’t have this crazy dream about going to Hollywood, because I really love to watch movies and do movies that are complicated, and I want more strange things and complicated things.”

-- Noomi Rapace

Ms. Rapace is the star of the original Swedish film "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". Which I did enjoy. Even in a Monk-ish sort of way. The sequels did not do much for me, and I didn't even manage to see them through. To be honest, it seemed kind of Hollywood-ish - not so brilliantly subtle and deep.

Noomi Rapace

“I don’t have this crazy dream about going to Hollywood, because I really love to watch movies and do movies that are complicated, and I want more strange things and complicated things.”

-- Noomi Rapace

Ms. Rapace is the star of the original Swedish film "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". Which I did enjoy. Even in a Monk-ish sort of way. The sequels did not do much for me, and I didn't even manage to see them through. To be honest, it seemed kind of Hollywood-ish - not so brilliantly subtle and deep.

Noam Chomsky Updated

It sounds like Noam Chomsky has moderated his message lately, if this piece in the New Stateman is not misleading. He even speaks of the relative freedom that Americans enjoy over the Egyptians. During the early days after 9/11, he seemed to be among those blaming the United States as the Great Satan. It is interesting to see these intellectual moves when he is so old. His mind is obviously still agile. I like what he is saying.


_ _ _

In October 2011, at the high water mark of the Occupy movement, Bill Gross, a Republican who is the manager of the world’s largest bond fund, PIMCO, tweeted: “Class warfare by the 99%? Of course, they’re fighting back after 30 years of being shot at.” This volume by Noam Chomsky opens with the declaration that Occupy is “the first major public response to 30 years of class war”. It is some measure of the movement’s success that the bond manager and the left-wing intellectual should define it in identical terms, yet also unsurprising. Occupy’s slogan of choice – “The 1 per cent v the 99 per cent” – enjoys the rare distinction of being grounded in empirical truth.

Over the past three decades the US has experienced one of the greatest redistributions of income and wealth from poor to rich in modern history. In 1980, members of the infamous “1 per cent” received 10 per cent of the national income. They now receive a quarter. In 2010, 93 per cent of the $288bn in new US growth went to the top 1 per cent. The “Great Compression” of the 1940s has given way to what the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls “the great divergence”. The most remarkable thing about Occupy, then, is that it took so long to be born.

This pamphlet (dedicated to “the 6,705 people who have been arrested supporting Occupy to date”) comprises Chomsky’s address to Occupy Boston, where protesters pitched 150 tents in the financial district, an interview with the New York University student Edward Radzi­vilovskiy, an “InterOccupy conference call”, a question-and-answer session on “occupying foreign policy” and the author’s tribute to the late historian Howard Zinn.

Chomsky has never been a gifted orator, and those yearning for Shelleyan displays of rhetoric will be disappointed. Indeed, in view of the breathless commentary Occupy has attracted, it is his moderation that is most striking. Asked by one protester, “Should we be working up to revolution or should we be trying to achieve it some other way?” he replies: “First of all, we are nowhere near the limits of what reform can carry out.” To the evident surprise of many gathered in Boston in Dewey Square, he is nostalgic for the Keynesianism of the postwar period, hailing the “egalitarian” growth of the 1950s and 1960s. He points to the New Deal legislation of the 1930s as an example of the gains that “large-scale popular activism” can achieve. This self-described anarchist sounds very much like a social democrat. Invited to endorse a general strike, Chomsky offers the sort of cautious, provisional response one might expect from a Labour shadow cabinet minister: “You can think of it as a possible idea at a time when the population is ready for it.”

Elsewhere, he gives mercifully short shrift to those who echo Norman Mailer’s description of the US political climate as being “pre-fascist”, observing that, “about a century ago . . . the dominant classes came to realise that they can’t control the population by force any longer”. Those who castigate Chomsky as an unthinking anti-American will be similarly surprised by his declaration that “in the United States we can do almost anything we want. It’s not like Egypt, where you’re going to get murdered by the security forces.” At a time when conspiracy theories and paranoia are flourishing on the left, there is something exhilarating about his passionate sanity. Although he can be maddeningly banal (“I like Gramsci. He’s an important person”), more often than not he fulfils the Orwellian injunction to “see what is in front of one’s nose”.

The virtues of “speaking truth to power”, he once observed, are overstated because power usually knows the truth already. The public, however, does not. In this regard, Chomsky rightly hails Occupy as an act of consciousness-raising. Research by the Pew Foundation shows that 66 per cent of the US electorate believes there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor – an increase of 19 percentage points since 2009. He considers this transformation on both a macro and a micro law. The “Buffett Rule” recently proposed by President Obama, which would introduce a minimum federal tax rate of 30 per cent for those earning over $1m a year, may have been sabotaged by Senate Republicans, but it enjoys the support of 72 per cent of the American public. The reforms that Chomsky advocates – publicly financed political campaigns, a cons­titutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood, a progressive tax system – are no longer mere leftist talking points.

Yet the overwhelming public sympathy for Occupy is both a blessing and a curse. As the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann wrote recently, “the 99 per cent is too big a category to be an effective political force”. The US statute book is likely to remain unmarked until a less disparate coalition of interests emerges. And so, for now, there is much to commend Chomsky’s radical pessimism.

-- George Eaton at The New Statesman

Noam Chomsky Updated

It sounds like Noam Chomsky has moderated his message lately, if this piece in the New Stateman is not misleading. He even speaks of the relative freedom that Americans enjoy over the Egyptians. During the early days after 9/11, he seemed to be among those blaming the United States as the Great Satan. It is interesting to see these intellectual moves when he is so old. His mind is obviously still agile. I like what he is saying.


_ _ _

In October 2011, at the high water mark of the Occupy movement, Bill Gross, a Republican who is the manager of the world’s largest bond fund, PIMCO, tweeted: “Class warfare by the 99%? Of course, they’re fighting back after 30 years of being shot at.” This volume by Noam Chomsky opens with the declaration that Occupy is “the first major public response to 30 years of class war”. It is some measure of the movement’s success that the bond manager and the left-wing intellectual should define it in identical terms, yet also unsurprising. Occupy’s slogan of choice – “The 1 per cent v the 99 per cent” – enjoys the rare distinction of being grounded in empirical truth.

Over the past three decades the US has experienced one of the greatest redistributions of income and wealth from poor to rich in modern history. In 1980, members of the infamous “1 per cent” received 10 per cent of the national income. They now receive a quarter. In 2010, 93 per cent of the $288bn in new US growth went to the top 1 per cent. The “Great Compression” of the 1940s has given way to what the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls “the great divergence”. The most remarkable thing about Occupy, then, is that it took so long to be born.

This pamphlet (dedicated to “the 6,705 people who have been arrested supporting Occupy to date”) comprises Chomsky’s address to Occupy Boston, where protesters pitched 150 tents in the financial district, an interview with the New York University student Edward Radzi­vilovskiy, an “InterOccupy conference call”, a question-and-answer session on “occupying foreign policy” and the author’s tribute to the late historian Howard Zinn.

Chomsky has never been a gifted orator, and those yearning for Shelleyan displays of rhetoric will be disappointed. Indeed, in view of the breathless commentary Occupy has attracted, it is his moderation that is most striking. Asked by one protester, “Should we be working up to revolution or should we be trying to achieve it some other way?” he replies: “First of all, we are nowhere near the limits of what reform can carry out.” To the evident surprise of many gathered in Boston in Dewey Square, he is nostalgic for the Keynesianism of the postwar period, hailing the “egalitarian” growth of the 1950s and 1960s. He points to the New Deal legislation of the 1930s as an example of the gains that “large-scale popular activism” can achieve. This self-described anarchist sounds very much like a social democrat. Invited to endorse a general strike, Chomsky offers the sort of cautious, provisional response one might expect from a Labour shadow cabinet minister: “You can think of it as a possible idea at a time when the population is ready for it.”

Elsewhere, he gives mercifully short shrift to those who echo Norman Mailer’s description of the US political climate as being “pre-fascist”, observing that, “about a century ago . . . the dominant classes came to realise that they can’t control the population by force any longer”. Those who castigate Chomsky as an unthinking anti-American will be similarly surprised by his declaration that “in the United States we can do almost anything we want. It’s not like Egypt, where you’re going to get murdered by the security forces.” At a time when conspiracy theories and paranoia are flourishing on the left, there is something exhilarating about his passionate sanity. Although he can be maddeningly banal (“I like Gramsci. He’s an important person”), more often than not he fulfils the Orwellian injunction to “see what is in front of one’s nose”.

The virtues of “speaking truth to power”, he once observed, are overstated because power usually knows the truth already. The public, however, does not. In this regard, Chomsky rightly hails Occupy as an act of consciousness-raising. Research by the Pew Foundation shows that 66 per cent of the US electorate believes there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and the poor – an increase of 19 percentage points since 2009. He considers this transformation on both a macro and a micro law. The “Buffett Rule” recently proposed by President Obama, which would introduce a minimum federal tax rate of 30 per cent for those earning over $1m a year, may have been sabotaged by Senate Republicans, but it enjoys the support of 72 per cent of the American public. The reforms that Chomsky advocates – publicly financed political campaigns, a cons­titutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood, a progressive tax system – are no longer mere leftist talking points.

Yet the overwhelming public sympathy for Occupy is both a blessing and a curse. As the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann wrote recently, “the 99 per cent is too big a category to be an effective political force”. The US statute book is likely to remain unmarked until a less disparate coalition of interests emerges. And so, for now, there is much to commend Chomsky’s radical pessimism.

-- George Eaton at The New Statesman