Biden and Bernie in 2019: Not a Primary for Old Men

I supported Bernie Sanders in the primary elections in 2016, and I am grateful that he's bringing into respectable political discourse some important ideas on economic justice and just general decency. 

I like Joe Biden personally, and he's the only candidate I can literally like personally since he's the only one I've met. (Although with the number of candidates still in double digits, it's possible most Americans will be able to meet at least a couple.) Anyway, in 1984, I attended a conference on — wait to it — George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in Akron, Ohio, and we all got stuck in the hotel by a blizzard. I ended up in the bar, and was sitting there alone, I think, when the Honorable Joseph R. Biden, U.S. Senator and one of the hot-shot guests of the conference came over, and we had a drink or two and talked. Or, as I recall it, he talked mostly, but he was a good talker, and I appreciated the company. He's a good guy.

But I'm not supporting either of them now, because I want the Democratic nominee to be an anti-Trump; and the major worry we should have with Trump (age 73)  — what should "scare the hell out of the American people" — is that he's a declining old man, losing words and syntax and his train of thought and what he's policy tweets were yesterday … and he has following him the "nuclear football" and immediate access to "the Gold Codes" for launching a nuclear strike. 

I'm suggesting that Democratic Party operatives, not the candidates, should go full Barry-Goldwater 1964, Daisy ad ageist on Donald Trump's ample ass and make clear that you don't want an increasingly incompetent old man making life and death decisions for a large portion of the human species and other complex forms of life on Earth. 

Such attacks are more difficult to make if your candidate is old and tends toward gaffes.

That's my main reason for not supporting Sanders (77) or Biden (76): just too old for the central question of this campaign: United States Doctrine is that we will use nukes first; Who do you want to make that call?

Also, I'm betting that young people will vote heavily against Trump on global warming alone and that the problem there is getting them registered and to the polls. Old people will be where a fair amount of the action is, and I think a lot of old folks just want a rest from the constant mishugaas of Trumpian governance by Tweet and shouted interviews. Part of anti-Trump is being calm and calming, which Biden can do, but not always; and just isn't in Sander's repertoire. 

Also, a campaign against Sanders would get very dirty very quick: an agnostic Jew from the East coast who calls himself a "democratic socialist" and can be easily presented as excitable and extreme. 

He's certainly stubborn: Sander is a social democrat, which has the word "democrat" in the stressed ("climax") position and back in 1967 could be presented casually in a comedy routine on prime-time television as where to locate the US political Center (about 1:45 in in "Mort Sahl Explains Politics"). He can't do it now, but Sanders once couldhave been more prudent and more exact, if less consistent, as in stubborn.

Again, Biden can be comfortable and comforting, but he slips up now and then, and he has a history. Most of that history is good; part of it makes it more difficult to attack Trump for his profoundly creepy — to start with — attitudes and actions toward women. 

The anti-Trump must be careful with his or her hands, and Biden has not always been.

So, Bernie and Joe: Thank you for your service; may you long continue it. But not as the Democratic candidate in 2020 against Donald J. Trump.

*

Having said that — this much for context for Biden's over-active hands: not excuse, but context.

In addition to the gender/power issues, in the deep background of Biden's history may be another turn of the wheel on base-line standards of personal space, modesty, and "touch" (an important word — usually but not always positive — in the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin). 

In the late 20th c., some of my Miami U (Oxford, OH) colleagues and I discussed briefly generational differences on nudity in both the men's and women's locker rooms on campus. The sample was small, but all and sundry from both groups had noted stricter nudity taboos among younger people than with our generation. (Gay liberation and cell phones with cameras both figure in here, but also the principle, "It's never 'just' fashion": there are fashions even in customs and morës [2 syllables], and fashions usually cycle. If the old farts are walking around the locker room with just a towel covering their for-real shame — or over the shoulder — "da younger guys" and gals may not get undressed at all and shower at home, or not.)

And there were tendencies in the late 20th c. sneered at as "touchy-feelie": eliminate the sneer, and there's a significant point here. I like Le Guin's work and her praise of "touch," but personally would prefer that good old republican slight bow in greeting one another and have little patience for the politics of personal physicalcontact ("pressing the flesh," manipulative PDA ["Public Displays of Affection"] where there really can't be more than a bit of abstract affection, as one might have for an actor one likes [rather precisely as for actors]).

So here's a long quote from  Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest (1972, 1976) on Terran ("Earthling") colonists vs. the native forest people (Athsheans) of a world being colonized, on touching and Touch:

Touch was a main channel of communication among the forest people. Among Terrans touch is always likely to imply threat, aggression, and so for them there is often nothing between the formal handshake and the sexual caress. All that blank was filled by the Athsheans with varied customs of touch. Caress as signal and reassurance was as essential to them as it is to mother and child or to lover and lover; but its significance was social, not only maternal and sexual. It was part of their language, it was therefore patterned, codified, yet infinitely modifiable. 'They’re always pawing each other,' some of the colonists sneered, unable to see in these touch-exchanges anything but their own eroticism which, forced to concentrate itself exclusively on sex and then repressed and frustrated, invades and poisons every sensual pleasure, every humane response [...]."

Times change, baselinesfor behavior change. And those changed times on "touchy-feelie" taken too literally is another reason the Presidential campaign against Donald J. Trump is no contest for old men.

Trump, Sessions, Timing — and Climax of Epic Film, THE LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE!!!

LUBYANKAN CANDIDATE

Production Notes

FROM: Natasha F., Executive Producer

TO: Boris, nobody in particular (and associate producer)

DATE; 7 November 2018

Subject: Re-re-rewrite: Climax

Boris —

Get semiliterate hacks you call writers chained to desks again. Fearless Leader and fearful oligarch money-people want turning-point/climax with great instinctive move by insomniac Trump-puppet pushing story into Tent-Pole-epic heights, but maybe with tragic fall for end, if FL in that kind mood.

Is day after 2018 Mid-Term Election, and political apparatchiki of Deep State hung over and thinkingThanksgiving and Christmas when thinking at all: visions of sugar-plums, lobbying jobs, and maybe getting night’s sleep. And BANK-BANG!! Trump-puppet (not so puppety here) snaps off TV, fires Jeff Sessions, and appoints consigliere new Attorney General.

Do in S.-M.-Eisenstein heroic montage, cutting back-forth, and quick shot Sessions as snake slithering off — plus appropriate music: snatches “God Save the Czar.” (Americans play for 4^thJuly “1812 Overture” and not get irony, so this work.) Also on sound-track, bits pieces great Karl Rove on fake-news and other Enemies of People “’in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' […]. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality […] —we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, […]. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Maybe Trump-puppet get away with it; maybe not. Win-win-win-win for Fearless Leader and Motherland. Also big profit on movie.

So: get writers writing. A little enhanced motivation okay, but no knout … yet.

N.F

PEDANTRY TIME: "Our Democracy" and Other Mischievous Myths

The US is not a democracy; at least aspirationally, we're a liberal federal republic with a "mixt constitution".

The "mixed" part includes a large dollar of monarchy with a president who's chief of state and head of government (or head of state and chief of government, and screw it, I'm not going to look *that* up again). The Senate was initially designed to represent the States and to be the aristocratic element, and for good and for ill it's kept a lot of the aristocratic bits.

And we common ruck got the House of Representatives and elections.

From the Bill of Rights on, we've had the liberalism of limited government with a People with "unalienable" rights, and eventually and most of the time a judiciary that aren't "lions under the throne" working for the king, but an independent branch of government having final say — in theory — on the meaning of the Constitution and laws. (Check out Andy Jackson and the Indians on the "in theory" part.)

This is all important, because "democracy" has some literal meanings and history as well as the warm-and-fuzzies of a complimentary term. It's a bit part, but the nominal hero of Aristophanes's THE CONGRESSWOMEN gets to summarize a whole lot about Athenian democracy when he identifies himself as "I'm Athenian, male, of age, and free." I.e., he's a native and not a resident alien, a girl or woman, a boy, or a slave. He's part of the _demos_ which was only a relatively small part of the population of democratic Athens.

A lot of the history of the "liberal" part of "liberal (republican) democracy" is expanding that "demos" in "democracy."

The US formula for a long time was "free, White, and 21," with "male" and often "Christian" going unstated: that was the effective demos. We may be heading back to that idea, which will not be good for republican institutions and liberal protection of people who's ancestors weren't free in the USA, are not White — and who's White and who's not has been complex historically — and maybe young and on their way to inheriting messes their elders created ("Posterity don't vote").

And "male" can also get complicated: "Real men" and all that.

I'm a member of the Democratic Party and fond of democracy, but I swore allegiance to the Constitution and a Republic in which institutions and norms are supposed to keep any part of government from growing tyrannical, including a self-defined Demos that comes to see itself as a Nation and "The People" (who count) and an arrogant, exceptional, downright Chosen People at that.

Lyrics: Tom Lehrer's "MLF Lullaby" in the Time of Trump

Sleep, baby, sleep, in peace you may slumber;

No danger lurks your peace to encumber.

Our missiles will un-leash fury and fire

Gone with the whim of a com-pul-sive liar.

Donnie controls our nuclear forces;

He'll lose control, when he next divorces.

Melania walks, and calls him damn glutton —

So he freaks and shows the power of his button.

Once we most sweated some mad General Ripper,

But that couldn't happen today;

And no deadly confusion gripping the Gipper

That's not how we'll be blown away.

So sleep tight my darlings, let your sweet dreams linger;

We know the Donald won't give us the finger.

Heil — Hail! — dear Leader; you'll make us great again;

Hail the Commander-in Chief;

Our orange goon,

Will kill Kim Jong-un:

"Death from above" in full-gold leaf!

Sy Hersh on Syrian Gas/Trump's Missiles, Rich Erlich on Where Rich Erlich Is Coming From on the Issue

Link to Coverage of Hersh Article (see below for link to the article itself).

At an informal high school group reunion after the end of US warfare in Vietnam, and later when I was talking to someone who'd been in the CBR biz during the 'Nam years (that's "Chemical, Biological, and Radiological warfare") — I was told that despite my training in microbiology I would not have gone to Fort Detrick to make new and better bubonic plague had I been drafted but would've been infantry in 'Nam itself, probably with a promising (brief?) career as a tunnel rat. Still, I considered submitting to conscription and trying to get to Detrick as opposed to other options, in part on the ethical grounds that if white phosphorous and napalm were okay, the threat of "germ warfare" wasn't all that out of line. (Bigger part was my not being keen on the outdoor life, plus some idea from ROTC about what infantry grunts do and can suffer.)

And from there I came to the question raised by a student in the CBR course I took of why the international conventions prohibiting CBR have mostly held, whereas there was no similar success with long-dead conventions against submarines' blowing ships out of the water without warning, or fleets of aircraft bombing cities and starting fire-storms that would incinerate civilians by the thousands. 

HINT: Check out probable casualties by kilogram of various lethal stuff. (I found the figures in the 1970 ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, and yes, Virginia, there are people who work out tables of such things, even as human beings before and during World War I worked out gunnery tables for rolling barrages that maximized enemy casualties while minimizing one's own, including casualties from "friendly fire.")

And from there I came to the conviction that we should support the international prohibitions against CBR on the grounds that any rules limiting weapons were better than none — but come off it! Biological warfare is inherently dangerous to the human species and therefore should be out of bounds, but gas warfare is ethically no worse than various ways of burning people with other kinds of chemicals, or using mines or cluster munitions to maim them. (And Virginia: There were people who worked out that maiming enemies is more effective than killing them. Do the math on how many people are taken out of military action by a death as opposed to severe bodily harm, and the psychology of what people — young men and older boys most specifically — most fear.)

And so I can't get too excited over "Red Lines" crossed in Syria with gas warfare and tend to believe that Assad et al. wouldn't use gas so long as they can deliver more effective agents to kill, wound, maim, and/or traumatized enemies and/or perceived enemies and/or people in the general vicinity thereof. (See "collateral damage" as the euphemism of choice for blowing the shit out of said people in the general vicinity. Or burning them. Well, etc.: There are lots of different munitions.)

And so I think we should definitely consider the argument by the usually reliable Seymour Hersh that the Syrians did not use Sarin gas and, therefore, weren't in line for the missile attack ordered by US President Donald Trump.

Please do see the article, and please try to help it go viral. Whether he's right or wrong in this case, the article and where it was and was not published raises important issues. 

Hersh article in Die Welt: Here

Note: The war wonks went from "CBR" to "NBC": Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical" warfare, which helped allow the G. W. Bush administration to conflate poison gas with hydrogen bombs as "WMD" (which has its own labelling issues) and now. for homeland security purposes, "CBRNE": Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosives.

"Punk!" OR, An Observation On the Donald J. Trump's Pushing Aside Dusko Markovic, Prime Minister of Montenegro 24/25 May 2017

Washington (CNN) While walking with the NATO leaders 

during his visit to the alliance's headquarters Thursday, 

President Donald Trump pushed aside Dusko Markovic, 

the prime minister of Montenegro, 

as he moved to the front of a group of the leaders.

Ignoring the sort of behavioral problems that can go with mental problems that go with his increasing language problems over time — What we've got with President Trump's bulvon behavior is also an idea of manliness that would work for a big-city street punk ... but only when dealing with other punks. That military school his family sent him off to should have taught him better, or watching a few minutes of President Obama's Chicago style for a man of power (beautifully parodied by Joe Mantegna's over-controlled, over-correct Fat Tony D'Amico on THE SIMPSONS).

Mr. Trump's popularity with significant demographics in pop culture and politics points at widespread juvenilization of ideas of masculinity shoved to my attention when I had to explain to my overly-polite, mostly-good-Catholic Miami University (Oxford, OH) students that Michael Biehn's quiet but strong Kyle Reese and Cpl. Dwayne Hicks were the male role models in TERMINATOR and ALIENS and not Bill Paxton's motor-mouth punks, nor Jenette Goldstein's macha (sic) Pvt. Vasquez, nor the Terminator: the ultimate macho-man as no man at all but an unfeeling killer robot.

A friend of mine and I used to jokingly throw out the line, "Ah, I fear for the Republic!" I'm feeling that line as increasingly less of a joke. "Swaggering Strong Man" is more than just a style, and its dangers have been obvious and harped upon since (at least) old King Hrothgar sermonized on the subject at length to the young Beowulf. The swaggerer commanding the most lethal military on the planet in 2017 has character flaws that would disqualify him for leadership of a proto-Viking war band in the European Dark Ages.

Censors to the Right of Them, Censors to the Left Volley and Thunder

      I've participated lately in some ListServ and Facebook discussions of what a professor can get into trouble for teaching nowadays, and two closely related works that came to mind were Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Stanley Kubrick's 1971 CLOCKWORK ORANGE film, at least as I taught them at conservative Miami University at Oxford (Ohio) — in John Boehner's Congressional District, alma mater for Paul Ryan — in the late 20th and very early 21st centuries.

      They are interesting works to teach.

      In my classes, the film was much more controversial than the novel even though Burgess cheerfully admits in his preface to the reprint we used that his novel is heretical in Christian terms and most of my students were pretty orthodox Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants (with a few theologically radical evangelicals thrown in). The 21-chapter British version of the novel — unlike the initial 20-chapter US edition and the film — is "Pelagian," Burgess says, claiming for human beings an essential goodness and the freedom to choose the good. St. Augustine of Hippo would not have approved, and Augustinian views on Original Sin and a variety of innate, essential depravity are orthodox in Christian tradition — and my generally pious students didn't give a rat's ass. What concerned those who disapproved were the images of sex and violence in the film, and Burgess's once damnable, burn-at-the-stake heresy was no big deal.

      As I said: interesting.

      Also interesting and highly instructive were my students' fairly typical perceptions of the sex and violence in the film.

      To start with something memorable, the Rape Scene in the film and how my students remembered the rape but sometimes forgot that this is also the Crippling Scene. Kubrick's camera pays a lot of attention to the rape of Mrs. Alexander, a woman in young middle age, but it also shows in graphic detail the beating of Mr. Alexander, a man entering a vigorous old age — until that crippling beating and being forced to watch the rape. (Adding to the trauma, Mr. Alexander tells us that the rape killed his wife, but we only have his word for that, plus the problematic trope of rape being lethal to virtuous women. We can be confident, however, that Mrs. Alexander has died.)

     My students' attenuated concern for Mr. Alexander got me asking myself for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE a question from studies of Christopher Marlowe's plays on how audience's perceive violence. So I sat down with a stopwatch and timed the on-screen violence in the film and asked my students for their estimates of how much time we got to see violence against various characters.

      One of the reasons I'd probably get into trouble teaching Kubrick's film is that I think it ethical for a critic to sit with a stopwatch and get some numbers on who on screen is messing over whom and to what degree and for how long. Period. However much in Trumpian times the Left has endorsed fact-base studies, there were academic attacks on Empiricism in the late 20th/early 21st, and I suspect some of that ill-will toward number-crunching horrors still remains.

      It depends on how you evaluate such things, but the major victim of violence in A Clockwork Orange (novel and film) is its nasty antihero, Alex. My students were surprised with this because (I would argue),
            * In the tradition of audiences going back to that of the first English theatrical blockbuster, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, my students judged violence to a large degree in terms of the victims' worth, and Alex was an attractive but still violent, dangerous, and misogynistic little shit who had it coming. Except with Tamburlaine most of the audience apparently identified with a noble superman, the serial mass murderer Tamburlaine, and not his banal victims.
            * My students sometimes didn't see violence committed by the State and other authorities as violence. I told them that the State's claim was a monopoly on legitimate violence, but that the traditional idea was to allow that violence is violence, and they didn't argue the point; still, they didn't see justified violence as violence. Alex's acts of violence were violence; the violence of State authorities against him were in some sort of unnamed limbo.
            * Etc.

      My students' attitude was something like that mocked in the 1960s with the joke, "I hate violence and them violent demonstrators. Violent people should be taken out and shot!"

      Returning to A Clockwork Orange as novel and film would be interesting nowadays for how different groups would value the value put upon freedom by the story and the question of how much freedom should be restricted to protect decent folk from young monsters like Alex and his drugs. Not to mention how much young readers should identify with decent older people as opposed to guys nearer their age, however despicable those guys — or how much old teens and 20-somethings should be on the lookout for, and push back against, youth-bashing. And it would be fascinating in terms of victims.

      US President Donald J. Trump at least claimed to be appalled by the violence of killing babies with poison gas in Syria, so he blew up property and (enemy) people with Tomahawk missiles, and then went on to use in a related battle the MOAB ordnance: a very large explosive device. Justified or not we can argue about; what I find downright fascinating is the many Americans would not see Mr. Trump's actions as violent. It's unlikely Americans generally could have a rational argument about the actions of the all-too-real Mr. Trump; it's possible we could have one about Burgess's and Kubrick's fictional Alex.

      Or not: I'm not sure one could nowadays — or at least not this off-White male "one" — could teach A Clockwork Orange; and that would be unfortunate.  

Trump, Truth, and Temptation — for Kazantzakis's Christ and Us in 2016/17

On Monday, 19 December 2016, Donald J. Trump is scheduled to be elected 45th President of the United States; less than a week later, Christians will be celebrating Christmas and then, come spring, commemorating the Passion and celebrating Easter. Right about now would be well, I think, to consider the moment in the trial of Jesus where Pontius Pilot, the story goes, asked "What is truth?" That question has become more important lately, and a bit out of season I'm going to throw in a quotation on the subject from my study guide on Eric Hoffer's The True Believer (1951).

"'What is truth?' said jesting Pilot,

and would not stay for an answer." —  Francis Bacon

============================================

From Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ

Trans. from the Greek by P. A. Bien (New York: Bantam, 1968)

{Excerpt from the vision of Jesus of Nazareth, accepted by Christians as Christ, the Messiah, as he hung from the cross, in the instant between uttering Eli, Eli ("My God, my God") and lama sabachtani ("why have You forsaken me?" [see opening of Ps. 22]). The excerpt is from a vision of a scene between Paul the Apostle and the disguised Jesus ("Master Lazarus"—alluding to Lazarus, raised from the dead by Jesus). In this vision, Jesus had been saved from crucifixion and had returned to the world to take up a domestic life married to Mary and Martha. This desire to lead a normal life as husband and father was, in Kazantzakis's opinion, the last and most dangerous temptation for the Man-God Jesus Christ.}

                      "Why are you rolling your eyes?" cried Jesus. Why do you stare at my hands and feet? Those marks [i.e., the stigmata] were stamped on me by God during my sleep. By God, or by the Tempter; I still can't understand which. I dreamed I was on the cross and in pain, but I cried out, awoke, and my pain disappeared. What I should have suffered while awake, I suffered while asleep—and escaped!" […] "I escaped; I came to this tiny village under another name and with another body, . Here I lead the life of a man: I eat, drink, work[,] and have children. […] I am the son of man, I tell you, not the son of God. […] And don't go around the whole world to publish lies. I shall stand up and proclaim the truth!"

            Now it was Paul's turn to explode. "Shut your shameless mouth!" he shouted, rushing at him. "Be quiet, or men will hear you and die of fright. In the rottenness, the injustice, and poverty of this world, the Crucified and resurrected Jesus has been the one precious consolation for the honest man, the wronged man. True or false—what do I care? It's enough if the world is saved!" "It's better the world perish with the truth than be saved with lies. At the core of such a salvation sits the great worm Satan."

            "What is 'truth'? What is 'falsehood'? Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts us a man's height above the earth—that is true. Whatever clips off man's wings—that is false." […]

            "You won't keep quiet, will you, son of Satan! The wings you talk about are just like the wings of Lucifer."

            "No, I won't keep quiet. I don't give a hoot about what's true and what's false, or whether I saw him or didn't see him, or whether he was crucified or wasn't crucified. I create the truth, create it out of obstinacy and longing and faith. I don't struggle to find it—I build it. I build it taller than man and thus I make man grow. If the world is to be saved, it is necessary—do you hear—absolutely necessary for you to be crucified, and I shall crucify, like it or not; it is necessary for you to be resurrected, and I shall resurrect you, like it or not. For all I care you can sit here in your miserable village and manufacture cradles, troughs[,] and children. If you want to know, I shall compel the air to take your shape. Body, crown of thorns, nails, blood […]. The whole works is now part of the machinery of salvation—everything is indispensable. And in every corner of the earth, innumerable eyes will look up and see you in the air—crucified. They will weep, and the tears will cleanse their souls of their sins. But on the third day I shall raise you from the dead, because there is no salvation without a resurrection. The final, the most horrible enemy is death. I shall abolish death. How? By resurrecting you as Jesus, son of God—the Messiah!"

            "It's not true. I'll stand up and shout that I wasn't crucified, didn't rise from the dead, am not God! […] Why do you laugh?"

            "Shout all you want. I'm not afraid of you. I don't even need you any more. The wheel you set in motion has gathered momentum: who can control it now? To tell you the truth, while you were talking there I felt for a minute like falling upon you and strangling you just you case you might accidentally reveal your identify and show poor mankind that you weren't crucified. But I calmed down immediately. Why shouldn't he shout? I asked myself. The faithful will seize you, will throw you on a pyre for a blasphemer and burn you!"

            "I said only one word, brought only one message: Love. Love—nothing else."

            "By saying 'Love' you let loose all the angels and demons that were asleep within the bowels of mankind. 'Love' is not, as you think, a simple, tranquil word. Within it lie armies massacred, burning cities and much blood. Rivers of blood, rivers of tears: the face of the earth has changed. You can cry now as much as you like; you can make yourself hoarse by yelling, 'I didn't want to say that—that is not love. Do not kill each other! We're al brothers! Stop!' […] But how, poor wretch, can they stop? What's done is done!"

            "You laugh like a devil."

            "No, like an apostle. I shall become your apostle whether you like it or not. I shall construct you and your life and your teachings and your crucifixion and resurrection just as I wish. Joseph the Carpenter of Nazareth did not beget you; I begot you—I, Paul, the scribe from Tarsus in Cilicia."

            "No! No!"

            "Who asked you? I have no need of your permission. Why do you stick your nose in my affairs?" […] "How can the world be saved by you, Master Lazarus? With you, will it surpass its own nature, will its soul sprout wings? if the world wants to be saved, it will listen to me—me!" […] "Brothers lift up your eyes. Look! On one side Master Lazarus; on the other, Paul, the servant of Christ. Choose! If you go with him, with Master Lazarus, you will lead a life of poverty bound to the treadmill; you will live and die as sheep live and die—they leave behind them a little wool, a few bleats[,] and a great deal of dung. If you come with me: love, struggle, war—we shall conquer the world! Choose! On one side, Christ, the son of God, the salvation of the world; on the other, Master Lazarus!"