They’re the two fall-back adjectives of the moment: awesome and amazing. I think of them as the new A-words. And if the world were full of people in a state of awe and amazement, I’d be fine with them. But it’s not.

I risk being totally ungracious here, since both words have been used on occasion with reference to me. I am grateful for the compliments, but really, I hardly inspire awe – at least I hope I don’t, since awe is as much terror as exhilaration. And I see nothing amazing in what I do, which consists of reading, thinking, writing, and speaking out. My problem is that however well-intended such compliments may be, both “awesome” and “amazing” have been so corrupted by over-use that there’s next to nothing either awesome or amazing left in them.

“Awesome” has spread so far up the age range from its origins in teen-speech that I find it hard to understand why newly minted teens still revert to it. When a freshly purchased pair of sandals or a new ice-cream flavor is called awesome, the word is worth about as much as the price of the cone the ice-cream’s served in. It has nothing to do with real awe — a state of being the speaker has clearly never experienced.

As for “amazing,” consider the way it’s said — in a tone of voice that no longer contains any hint of amazement, and with a downward inflection so that the speaker might just as well be saying “depressing.” This fake amazement has become an automatic response, in much the same realm as “Have a good day.”

I tested it not long ago at a gathering of well-connected millennials who prided themselves on what they took to be unconventional thinking, and whose standard conversation-starter was the utterly conventional “Where are you from?” At first I said Seattle, and this was deemed amazing, as though it were a surprise that anyone could possibly live in such a place. Then, just to check, I began to give other answers. Des Moines, I said. Or Detroit. Or – why not push it? – Dubai. And each answer got the same glassy-eyed response: that un-amazed “amazing.”

Scroll through the click-bait headlines of such sites as Gawker or Buzzfeed or The Huffington Post and you’ll find the A-words used ad nauseam (note to self: does ad nauseam count as an A-word?).  Playful bear cubs and science breakthroughs, inspirational talks and dumb pratfalls, see-through dresses and stars exploding in outer space — all are mashed together in a mini-tsunami of awesomeness, amazement, astonishment, astoundingness. The A-list, I guess.

In the face of so much amazement and awe, I find myself gasping for space in which to breathe, let alone think. I’d say let’s avoid the meaningless use of such words, but the go-to impulse remains strong, and I’m sure I’ll keep using them just like everyone else.

But I hope to stay faithful to my favorite A-word: absurd. And – how could I forget? – accidental.

I’ve just experienced a strange sense of time travel — seeing myself twenty-odd years ago and finding her familiar and yet unfamiliar.

A reader found this video online and sent me the link.  I had no idea it even existed.  I only vaguely remember doing the interview, so had no idea what I was going to say next.  Sometimes I laughed as I watched, sometimes I cringed, but for the most part, I looked at this self-possessed 1992 self in amazement, as though asking, Who is this woman?

So for the record, and because it is part of my past, of the decade I spent writing about matters automotive (and earning far more money doing it that I ever have by writing about politics or religion), here it is:

A footnote, also for the record:  it took a few years, but I drove all the speed out of me, and now take an almost perverse delight in slowness.

And, um, I no longer wear leopard print shirts.

“It’s almost laughable,” says M. J. Rosenberg of Media Matters. “The organized Jewish community, which claims to be worried about young Jews defecting in droves, just cannot help itself from doing things that drive Jews (not just young ones) away. Between supporting Netanyahu, advocating for war with Iran and maintaining the occupation, and keeping silent as Israel evolves into a theocracy, it is also in the business of preventing debate on all these things and more.”

The case in point?  New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, which describes itself somewhat oxymoronically as “a living memorial to the Holocaust,” first scheduled and then turned around and canceled a talk by New Republic senior editor John Judis, author of the newly published Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict.

As this review in the Boston Globe points out, Judis’ book is no polemic, but a serious historical study.  So why the cancellation?  The book challenges the conventional Zionist wisdom about President Truman’s recognition of Israel in 1948, showing him as a hard-nosed politician trailing in the polls in May of an election year, and being heavily lobbied by American Zionists who then helped ensure his reelection.

Judis quotes this from Truman: “I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Such were the folkways of American politics: squeaky wheels getting the oil. And with American Arabs and Muslims still generally reluctant to take an active organized part in national politics, such they remain.

As for the irony of a museum banning historical discussion, this is quite the trend among elderly American Jewish poohbahs when it comes to Israel.  When Peter Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism came out last year, Jewish community centers, under pressure from wealthy donors, seem to have all but blackballed him. “Pretty soon,” says Rosenberg, “any institution under any kind of Jewish auspices will have to abide by speech limits set by the Jewish 1%. The 92nd Street Y already does (it will not allow any Palestinian to speak unless ‘balanced’ by a Jew). Brandeis University wouldn’t permit President Carter to speak [on his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid] without a simultaneous rebuttal by Alan Dershowitz. Pretty soon, Mount Sinai hospital will check what books patients are sneaking into their sick rooms.”

Or maybe not. Controversy over the museum’s about-face on Judis’ book is sparking exactly the public debate its donors sought to avoid — and far beyond the presumably hallowed halls of the museum itself. As with the conservative Indian attack on Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus, which I posted on here, the desire to squelch consideration of Judis’ book is fated to achieve the precise opposite of what it intended. Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism became a bestseller, and now Judis’ Genesis looks set to do the same.

As I post this, it’s #2 on Amazon’s list of books about Israel and the Middle East. By the time you read this post, it may well be #1.

Penguin Books India has been forced to recall and possibly destroy all copies of this book — The Hindus: an alternative history, by Wendy Doniger — in order to settle a lawsuit brought about by a fundamentalist Hindu group that says the book over-eroticizes the religion.

In case you are wondering, Wendy Doniger is not exactly a sensationalist.  She’s the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School (and despite that formidable title, writes well).

What she does do is trace the many strands of Hinduism, and argue that “the greatness of Hinduism — its vitality, earthiness, and vividness — lies precisely in many of those idiosyncratic qualities that some Hindus today are ashamed of and would deny.”

The basis of the lawsuit was not that Doniger’s book was wrong.  It was that it hurt the group’s feelings (see the quote above, from page 2).  It didn’t present Hinduism the way they wanted it presented. I’ve heard this same argument from fundamentalist Muslims about both my books on Islam, to which the only sensible response, since I’m neither Muslim nor fundamentalist, is “But of course not!”.  Such arguments leave no room for anything but what’s politely called “devotional literature” — the apparently endless stream of pious pamphlets read only by “true believers” of whatever faith. Though I often wonder if even they have the patience.

The logical conclusion of the hurt-feelings argument is that publication of anything at all — books, newspapers, websites, whatever — should be banned, because someone somewhere may have so little faith that their feelings can be hurt by even the most empathetic outsider eye.

Doniger’s response to all this on Facebook was gracious yet to the point:

I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate. And as a publisher’s daughter, I particularly wince at the knowledge that the existing books (unless they are bought out quickly by people intrigued by all the brouhaha) will be pulped. But I do not blame Penguin Books, India. Other publishers have just quietly withdrawn other books without making the effort that Penguin made to save this book. Penguin India, took this book on knowing that it would stir anger in the Hindutva ranks, and they defended it in the courts for four years, both as a civil and as a criminal suit.

Penguin India, I should add as a declaration of interest, also distributes The First Muslim, which elsewhere has been subject to a quieter and less newsworthy form of censorship, as happened when the Turkish-language publisher backed out a month before publication for fear of a fundamentalist backlash.  But at least he committed to publish in the first place.  In other countries, publishers and literary-festival organizers have quietly refrained from expressing any interest, cowed not by specific threats, but by their fear of possible threats, and the book, like so many others that do not meet the requirements of conservative piety, appears to be semi-officially banned from public sale in most Arabic-speaking countries. (I say “appears to be,” because there’s no website called BannedInTheMiddleEast.com where one can get a complete picture.)

This is how censorship works: it creates an atmosphere in which good people are afraid to publish, speak, listen, read, even think. When it succeeds, it brings everyone into line.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t succeed. Not any more. Not when you can order books online, or listen to talks on YouTube, or access blogs, newspaper articles, opinion pieces from all over the world.  

So guess what:  Doniger’s book is now Amazon’s #1 bestselling book about Hinduism. The fundamentalists seem to have forgotten one basic element of publishing:  sex sells.  By insisting that the book be pulped because they think it too erotic, they’ve managed to give it a huge sales boost.

And that is the kind of unintended consequence I adore.

Can comedy do what common sense can’t?

In case you somehow missed it, this video mildly satirizing the Saudi regime’s absurd ban on women driving has gone totally viral since it was posted on Saturday:

That thing about ovaries?  The Sauds seem to imagine that driving can make a woman infertile.  I kid you not.  Being a back-seat passenger has no such effect, it seems.

Could this possibly have anything to do with the idea of control?

(In case you’re amazed at how uniquely backward the Sauds are with respect to women, by the way, you might consider this ironic detail:  exactly the same argument was used in Israel for decades to stop women from flying planes.  Again, being a passenger was held to have no such effect — just being at the controls.  As a result, the first group of female Israeli air-force pilots graduated not in the ’70s or the ’80s or the ’90s, but all of two years ago, in 2011.)

So who is the guy in the No-Woman-No-Drive video?  He’s Hisham Fageeh, he’s a Riyadh-based stand-up comic who’s studied religion, and thanks to Mother Jones magazine, there’s more on him here.  And if you need a sense of what the dozens of women who defied the ban this past weekend were risking, here’s a TED talk by the wonderful Manal al-Sharif, who went to jail for doing it.

Meanwhile, I’m taking to the road (and the air) through mid-November, with Bob Marley on my playlist. But will I ever be able to listen to ‘No Woman, No Cry’ the same way again?

This video got a big grin from me.  I suspect it’ll do the same for everyone who’s often asked “where are you from?” because it’s a perfect debunking of the assumptions and condescension lurking behind that question:

This came in as a comment from someone called Bob.  It seems to be a response primarily to my previous post, Guilt By Drone, and the earlier Armed to the Eyeballs.  I’m running it as a separate post with a kind of wondering bemusement at its rather low level of literacy and humanity, and its rather high one of piety and righteousness.  Am particularly intrigued by his saying “too many guns and killing of children by drones, and all I see are complaints,” and by the almost delightful non sequitur of his concluding with “thank you and God bless.”

I read some of the posts like guilty by drone and armed to the eyeballs and I thought, wow are these people serious, to much of an military to many guns and the killing of children by drones and all I saw we’re complaints. Well if your not happy with the free, great country America than why don’t you leave I mean come on your lucky to have such a dedicated military like ours and truly I don’t know if you’ve realized this but the only way to gain peace is through war I’m sorry but that’s basically how no doubt about it. Our military keeps this country safe and under our lord and savior and keeps us the nation we are. No ones perfect and we can’t make everyone happy in this world sorry, and what are we just gonna sit back and watch our country get attacked like 9/11 saying o please don’t hurt us let’s make peace well wake up not everyone wants that and the reason we send drones and kids die is because unfortunately that’s how it has to be why I don’t know and neither do you but each decision we make has a impact and is for the greater good so give thanks to who we are and how great of a military we have and how much you and I have. Thank you and God bless

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Later:  novelist Michael Gruber posted a brief but cogent analysis of Bob’s thinking on my Facebook page.  Here it is:

“The statement arises naturally from the characterization of 9/11 (which we owe to Mr Bush) as an act of existential evil, rather than as a political act with its own logic. The man’s premises are that the USA is an exceptional nation under the special protection of Christ, and thus any attack against it is not a political act but a move in a cosmic contest, in which an apocalyptic response by the American military is not only justified, but required.

“The logic moves from the legitimate desire to punish the organizers of the attack, to the desire to punish those who are “like” the attackers, which results in killing those associated with those who are like the attackers, to, ultimately, the punishment of the societies who produce those who are like the attackers.

“A similar progression characterized WW2, in which the world was shocked when the fascist nations bombed cities, after which it was considered legitimate to bomb the cities of the fascists into rubble. This at least had the amoral logic of tit for tat. But in the present situation, some militants kill their own people in pursuit of sectarian triumph, and we drone kill the militants and their kin, so that . . . And here we lose the last scraps of logical policy. At some level we [I’m assuming he means US policy-makers — LH] sort of agree with this bozo.”

Like we really needed this:

This is how to advance the cause of gun control?

What the hell was Obama thinking?  Why on earth did he feel the need to claim that he was into skeet-shooting “all the time”?  And then to kowtow to Fox News demands for “proof” by releasing this photo?

So go ahead, accidental theologists.  Let’s caption this photo.

Fire away!

Here’s a few that come instantly to mind:

— “Hey, see how tough I am — I can shoot lumps of clay to smithereens all day!”

— “Look, ma, I can make things go Bang!”

— “I’m the new Teddy Roosevelt.”

— “I shoot, ergo I’m American.”

— “I shoot, ergo I am.”

Remember how Todd Akin thinks you can’t get pregnant if you’re “legitimately raped“?  Best comment yet is this satire on TV pharmaceutical ads for “feminine products.”  Presented with a megawatt Republican smile.

(Do read the small print at the end.  This idiocy isn’t just Akin’s;  the whole Republican party has gone totally Neanderthal.)

Worst comment yet:  Polls show Akin currently trailing in the Missouri senatorial race by 1%.  Yes, all of one percent.  Way to go, Missouri.

I never thought I’d write anything at all in praise of beach volleyball.  But the very idea of holding that Ur-beach-bum event in the stuffily hallowed sanctum of London’s Horse Guards’ Parade, just round the corner from Bucky Palace, was terrific.

Such deliciously nutty brilliance was totally lost, of course, on the commentators at NBC, the network currently holding the whole of the United States hostage to its primitive Flag-Waving-for-Idiots take on the Olympics.  Samuel Johnson, please return from the grave:  patriotism as the last refuge of scoundrels indeed.

NBC’s so-called newscasters only seem aware that there might be one or two non-American athletes in London when one of them threatens to deprive an American of gold.  And of course they were totally stymied by the opening ceremony.  They’d been expecting all the usual pomp and circumstance.  They were well primed on all the stock kitsch images of Englishness.  But kids on giant hospital beds?  Dozens of Mary Poppinses?  Suffragettes?  Dark Satanic mills?  “William who…?  Blake?  A poet?”

The London Olympics has slyly subverted the Chinese big-state staging of 2008 (an uncanny reminder of the 1936 Berlin Olympics).  From the little I’ve seen (I’d have seen more except that would only lead to my posting madly to #NBCfail on Twitter), there’s a lovely tongue-in-cheekness to it all.  And a real celebration not of nationalism, but of athleticism, no matter who wins.

No wonder those couch potatoes at NBC don’t get it.

I’m as much a fool for high-wire acts as anyone else.  It’s exciting to watch someone expand the boundaries of what’s possible.  But when it’s literally a high-wire act?

Last night a “daredevil” (such an old-fashioned word) walked on a tightrope over Niagara Falls in a well-financed stunt, and every news source I’ve looked at this morning, even those you might think would cast a cooler eye, is agog with breathless admiration.

Is anyone else as puzzled as I am by all this hype?  I mean, sure, walking on a steel cable is a skill, but aside from a vague appreciation of Nik Wallenda’s sense of balance, I’m left with an empty “So what?”

In fact I’d have ignored the whole thing except that I’m so insulted by the constant use of the word “inspiring.”  Not least by the “daredevil” himself.  Faced with the standard question from a Canadian customs agent – “What is the purpose of your trip, sir?” – he replied:  “To inspire people and the world.”

This is bullshit.  If anyone had asked what exactly he was inspiring them to do, he’d probably have continued the stream of clichés with something about fulfilling one’s dreams.  In fact he did:  “This is what dreams are made of,” he said.

Not my dreams.

Degrading inspiration this way leaves me, appropriately, kind of breathless.  Inspiration literally means breathing in.  It means inhaling not merely air, but spirit and life.  The spirit of life, that is – or the life of the spirit.  It implies transcendence, going beyond oneself, reaching for a higher and presumably better level of existence.

Risking your life to save another:  that’s inspiring.  Refusing to be silenced by fear:  inspiring.  Expanding your own sense of the possible:  inspiring.

But walking 1,800 feet on a steel cable?  As any circus pro can tell you, that’s entertainment.

Groundhog-like, the hermit emerges briefly to note a small victory for sanity this week, when the US military academy at West Point was forced to rescind an invitation to certified bigot and extremist William Boykin, a self-described ‘Kingdom Warrior,’ to address their national prayer breakfast.

In fact they didn’t actually un-ask him.  They gave him the option of saying he was canceling.  I believe the technical military term for this is Covering Your Ass.

That’s the good news, sort of.  The bad news is of course that he was even invited in the first place.

And the real point is this:  what the hell is the US military academy doing having a ‘national prayer breakfast’ in the first place?

To which a friend  commented by forwarding this video clip (as he notes, it even includes a reference to breakfast cereal):

What not to do when you meet a living saint?

On a live morning news show in Australia last week, the host told the Dalai Lama:  “I have a joke for you, that my son told me, that he said you would laugh at, even though it’s about you.”   So here’s what happened:

Trouble is, the guy’s so dumb you don’t even cringe for him.  Something tells me Dalai got the real joke.  (A longer version is here, with him sweetly trying to comfort the idiot.)

What’s interesting in the longer version is that the host is reduced to sitting there looking like the dumb kid he is — and probably for the first time, he’s aware of it.  Could this be Buddhism in action?

More absurdity this week:  FIFA, the international governing body of football, banned the Iranian women’s soccer team from an Olympic qualifying event because the players wear hijab — Islamic headscarves.  The official reason:  safety.  Wearing a hijab while playing “could cause choking injuries.”

Yeah, sure.  As one commenter noted, Google “hijab soccer choking deaths” and the search engine doesn’t exactly hum.

These aren’t just any hijabs, mind you.  They have to be the coolest  ones ever.  They’re like speed-skaters’ hoods, and the players look like white-clad ninjas.   I’ll bet they can move like ninjas too.   Clearly FIFA has no sense of style.

Correction:  FIFA has no sense, period.

The decision to ban the Iranian team was made by FIFA head Sepp Blatter, who’s apparently one of those Berlusconi-type men who’ll tell you how much he loves women, by which he means how much he loves looking at female flesh.  No, I’m not making assumptions.  The arrant hypocrisy of this ban is clear when you consider the fact that Blatter proposed in 2004 that women players wear plunging neckines and hot pants on the pitch to boost soccer’s popularity.  Tighter shorts, he said, would create “a more female esthetic.”

I guess it was kind of amazing he didn’t propose wet tee-shirts.

And if you believe that Blatter is for a moment concerned about women being injured, his response to requests by human rights organizations to take a stand against the sex trafficking that accompanies the arrival of the World Cup was this:  “Prostitution and trafficking of women does not fall within the sphere of responsibility of an international sports federation but in that of the authorities and the lawmakers of any given country.”

No, Blatter’s all about the sport.  He’s presumably salivating for more on-field celebrations like Brandi Chastain‘s famous shirtless moment when the U.S. won the 1999 Women’s World Cup.  And drooling over women’s sportswear catalogs instead of Victoria’s Secret ones.  In which case he’s pathetically misreading that Chastain photo.  This was the victory of hard work and muscle over frills and pretty posturing.  Serena Williams revolutionized women’s tennis in much the same way, making it a power game (in dress as well as style of play — the black catsuit she wore a couple of years back was dynamite).

What Blatter’s really doing is trying to piggyback on the burqa ban in France and the minaret ban in his native Switzerland.  But the good news is that it’s backfiring on him.  Badly.  Already the focus of multiple accusations of corruption in his 12-year tenure as FIFA president, he probably saw this as an easy way to try to redeem himself by jumping on the anti-Muslim bandwagon.  Instead, the storm of criticism might be an indication that Europeans are beginning to realize just how badly they’ve been manipulated by misogynistic xenophobes on such issues as burqa bans.

One further note on that shirtless photo:  Chastain herself was amazed when it ran worldwide .  “I wasn’t trying to make a statement;  I was just carried away, and doing what male players do in the same situation,” she told me when I met her not long after.  “I was really surprised there was so much fuss about it.  I mean, there’s a much better photo of the victory moment, but nobody ran that one.”  Here it is, on the right — the photo they didn’t run, baggy shirt, baggy pants, and all.  Which I guess just means the world is full of Blatters.

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(Thank to Sarah Hashim for alerting me to this story.  I know I was born in England, but soccer’s not my thing.  Tennis, though…)

Overwhelmed by religion?  Lost your faith in modern medicine?  Never fear:  you too can be healed.  If not saved, at least salved.

The good news gospel (all it takes is a pinch or two of irony) comes from the Art Healing Ministry under the pastorship of conceptualist Alexander Melamid, newly opened in NYC and offering a wide array of products, services, and personal treatment sessions.

The services on offer include:

ART-HOME CLEANSING:
The power of certain Masterpieces, chosen by our experts according to your dwelling’s artistic demands and deficiencies, is harnessed to get rid of your home’s harmful impurities on spiritual and molecular levels. These masterpieces will be driven robotically across the surface of your floor for two or more hours, depending on the size of your home.

Among the products, you might want to snap up the happiness box (a steal at $100), a pair of Van Gogh stress-relieving insoles, or a couple of bottles of art-infused drinking water, guaranteed to bless you with the healing power of good taste.

Or you could choose any of the series of Healing Power of Art books and downloads “customized for the great museums of the world, featuring detailed, annotated floor plans indicating the best periods, artists, and paintings for a wide spectrum of afflictions.”

Back pain? – Vermeer is recommended.  Hay fever? – Monet.  Anemia? – Pollock.  PMS? – Raphael.  Repetitive stress injury? — Warhol.

The healing-art gospel was revealed to Melamid shortly after his earlier work with Vitaly Komar on ‘Painting by Numbers:  Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art.’ Published in 1997 complete with full results from “capitalism’s most venerated tool, the market research poll,” the book detailed what Americans want in art (broken down every which demographic way and including comparative polls from nine other countries).  Click here for the most wanted and least wanted paintings, or be content to behold the glory of George Washington and the Hallelujah sky in the painting anointed America’s most wanted:

But will it match the sofa?