Love Department

Who can resist summing up Christmas? People say Christ was the greatest lover of all time. And time is considered to be admissible in the Department of Physics, while love got no Department.

Scripture sounds like longtimeago, but a Tariq Ramadan can write “The Quest for Meaning” and get Greenpenguin to publish it in 2010, etching in stone what Kipling could not when he said, “East is East and West is West …” Ramadan says we have set tolerance up as a goal, when it is only a doorway that might awaken us to that mysterious magic called love, which involves active curiosity. What Romeo had.

Most teachers teach peace, so we have to keep a stiff upper lip as we read in the recent New Yorker magazine that our government had a (seriously, folks!) place called Edgewood where U.S. military personnel were given various drugs which permanently damaged their psyches. We need to know, you understand, if maybe we should spray our enemies with it.

Take the A train north from Santa Barbara, look into the midnight eyes of a pair of muledeer standing next to ghostly gray edifices with no windows in the land of Grubnednav, where the mammoth plunged into the surf, thinking she would spend Sunday swimming to those islands, islas vistas.