Wyrd and Wonderful

And now this is ‘an inheritance’ –
Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked
In the long ago, yet willable forward
Again and again and again.

"The ‘Finnsburg episode’ immerses us in a society that is at once honour-bound and blood-stained, presided over by the laws of the blood-feud, where the kin of a person slain are bound to exact a price for the death, wither by slaying the killer or by receiving satisfaction in the form of wergild (the ‘man-price’), a legally fixed compensation. The claustrophobic and doomladen atmosphere of this interlude gives the reader an intense intimation of what wyrd, or fate, meant....All conceive of themselves as hooped within the great wheel of necessity, in thrall to a code of loyalty and bravery, bound to seek glory in the eye of the warrior world.... [v]engeance for the dead becomes an ethic for the living, bloodshed begets further bloodshed; the wheel turns, the generations tread and tread and tread..."

"Within these phantasmal boundaries, each lord’s hall is an actual and a symbolic refuge. Here are heat and light, rank and ceremony, human solidarity and culture."

http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/beowulf/introbeowulf.htm

----------------

I signed off a 'post' (no-one writes letters any more!) with the word 'salaam'. An American, 'M', wrote back saying I was unaware of Islamic Jurisprudence, had a poor grasp of a great religion ..either that, or I had an "ulterior motive"! There's something quite endearing -as Larkin saw- about Mid-West desert bigotry. It's produces the type of innocence that leads one to think CNN or the World Bank are "leftist" organisations -I kid thee not, I have heard them described in this way in America. Or that the East Coast is full of "liberal elites" with their love of gays, Jews, commies, Negroids, feminists, "welfare"...the list is endless.

And this, from an intelligent and very articulate correspondent,

By any objective standard George W. Bush is not a stupid man, but he gets elected by playing one on TV cause everytime the Democrats call him stupid he calls them pointy-head.

What's intriguing about that is not only that an American has to play stupid (as if there's a whole vast constituency that identifies with a moron) but the idea of "objective standards". Corruptio optimi pessima.

Reading in Luban's article that 33% of Americans think torture is permissible, and that an equal number think the govt. had something to do with 9/11, why is it that that doesn't, now, seem so weird after all?