The Judge (Part 5)

Previously:

Parts 1&2: http://elasistentedos.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-judge-part-1.html

Part 3: http://elasistentedos.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-judge-part-3.html

Part 4: http://elasistentedos.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-judge-part-4.html

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It took The Judge two years of constant effort to memorize the Quran. In that time, he heard a hundred cases. They came from across the country, rich businesspeople from the metropolises whose children had all made aliyah but who could not break themselves from the work of their lives and pastoralists who couldn’t imagine scraping together the money to get a bus to the airport, much less a plane ticket to Israel, made up the bulk of his cases. They came to meet his discerning gaze and speak their peace to him, before he made up his mind. There was no one left to share the load, and the judge himself conceded it was getting small.

Not in the 998 year history of the program of religious study at Al-Azhar University had a non-Muslim been admitted. Perhaps that was because no non-Muslim had ever thought to become a Hafez, to memorize the Quran. The Judge had given the idea to The General, originally.

The General took the idea first to the mosque. As He had on every occasion except the death of the General’s daughter in a jetski accident, God had nothing to say to the General, so he took the problem to the Minister of Islamic Affairs, Sheikh Toufik Abdlkrim. It was the trap, he knew, that would finally out the Sheikh.

Sheikh Abdelkrim’s office had been redecorated. His secretary, a young man of Amazigh heritage whose aptitude for languages had propelled him to the attention of the ministerial headhunters, had introduced the aging Sheikh to the concept of interfaith organizations, a concept the old man had taken to with gusto, having lost his own faith a decade earlier when he read (for the first time) reports of the horrors of the Holocaust, and then saw them for himself.

While grappling with the theological questions, Sheikh Abdelkrim (whose reputation was still staked to his history as a radical firebrand who lent his religious legitimacy to the King in the postwar chaos of almost-accidental decolonization) still kept up appearances. He had, he often told his aides, nowhere to go but in the ground.

And so it was that a man recognized as a central theologian of a not-altogether-modernizing branch of Islam in the 20th century had come to have a portrait of himself with Cardinal Albino Lucciani and one with the Dali Lama in his office. Though he could never maintain his credibility and hang a portrait with a major rabbinical figure, he had framed a letter from Yad Vashem, in Hebrew, thanking him for nominating Oufkir Msensen, an Amazigh herdsman who had hidden three dozen Jewish children among his many grandchildren and great grandchildren as Rommel swept through the hills toward Dar Al-Aswad, as Righteous Among the Nations.

Sheikh Abdelkrim lit a candle when the General asked him the question, and opened the Hadith of Al-Bukhari. “Have you asked him,” asked Sheikh Abdelkrim, “If he would be ashamed of this course of action?”

“I have not, why would I ask him that?” said the General. “He has no shame as it is, to come to me with this.”

“Well then he would not be ashamed, and the Messenger of God, peace be upon him,” and he glanced down to read the passage he had memorized as a child and recited it to his mother whenever she disapproved of his actions, “ tells us, ‘If you would not be ashamed, do what you would like.’” He blew the candle out. “I will ask His Majesty so that you don’t have to. This is a proud man, from a line of proud people.”

“One day, Sheikh, someone will ask you about God. Maybe His Majesty.”

“One day, General, I may have to answer a vengeful God for having spurned him these past ten years. If you had seen, if you had only seen Majdanek like I did when I was on my mission to the Palestinian refugees in Poland, you would not be able to believe either.”

“This is a bad idea.”

“It is, but it was your bad idea originally.”

On the Radio Today

While I was in the field today, because Dan Patrick was out and because On Point is a show I don't like, I turned on 103.9, the Spanish station down here, after The Takeaway ended at eleven. The eleven o'clock show on 103.9 is a lawyer show, which advertises that the lawyer host comes "con un muy buen conocimiento de leyes" and it strikes me that you better fucking have a very good knowledge of laws to be hosting a radio show on the law, and it doesn't inspire much confidence that the announcer feels the need to tell the audience that the host is so-equipped.

The Car Dealer

I got a call from the Car Dealer today, where my car had been repaired. Apparently he wanted to contest the thing I wrote in my survey, that the dealership "broke my car." He explained that the repair they performed had used corrupted software they got from Ford, and that their technicians had done nothing wrong. I countered with the assertion that I drove my car to the shop, and was unable to drive it away, having not touched it in the meantime.

A Lady Called Me Today to Follow Up

On conversations we had had about her starting a business renting (and delivering) kayaks and stand-up paddleboards to vacation renters in beach houses. Yesterday, I had told her that she could operate as a Home Occupation out of her boyfriend's house in Charleston, and she had been incredibly excited. Today she said "He told me, he's so incredibly supportive, that he didn't want his insurance rates to change, so I should find a different location." 

Nothing Happens in This

I went out to Hollywood this evening, a short way from the only Piggly Wiggly left in Charleston County. You veer left off Savannah Highway onto State Route 162 just after the combination motel/tile store, head down past Wide Awake Plantation, where one or another actress got married in the kind of celebration of antebellum life that tends to raise eyebrows outside of the former confederacy, and turn left at the Propane distributorship to get to the field.

The former St. Paul’s Academy Country Day School (Mascot: The Rebels. Academy Status: Segregation) campus is in a state of partially suspended disrepair. St Paul’s Academy Country Day closed some years back, as the recession hit it hard. Part of the reason people think of Charter schools in South Carolina as facilitating the fuck out of segregation is because the campus was taken over by a St. Paul’s Academy parent group who got a charter from the state and started operating a public charter school the next year.

The main building is newly refurbished, but everything else on the campus is not. The bleachers are eaten out by termites and rot and blown hard by hurricanes, collapsing into themselves, a cinderblock outline holding up a teetering press box that should probably have been red-tagged by a building inspector years ago. The oak trees tower above and around the buildings, and some more scraggly poplars dot what might have once been a baseball field but is now clearly some kind of agricultural experiment, outlined in scrub brush.

The biting gnats, which the folks with real accents they learned from their grandparents call “noseeums,” were out in force. They coated my partner’s arms, dying in his protective layer of Skin-So-Soft, and gave me a “mi vida loca” tattoo right where a prisoner would probably put his.

It was the hottest March day in the recorded history of temperatures in March in the South Carolina Lowcountry today, and what was left of the grass on the field after the assaults of flood, dry winter, and late freeze was the same orangish tan as the sun over the pine forest ringing the back edge of the campus, and crunched like fall’s first leaves underfoot. The only green was the greedy crabgrass.

The game went well.

Why is Everything so Fucked?

Starting from small, and focused on Los Angeles.

LAUSD is fucked because of Prop 13, because forced busing isn't a thing, and because they let shit get way too sour for way too long before getting their heads out of their asses.

Los Angeles is fucked because the water doesn't come down hard enough in the Owens Valley anymore.

California is fucked because eventually the Gavin Newsom Liberaltarians will form their own party and govern in coalition with the Republicans to screw the poor.

Our country is fucked because of our antiquated system of picking the president, but also because the Democratic party refuses to stand up for and run on its many, many impressive accomplishments, like Obamacare and the social safety net.

But none of that matters because of global warming, which is likely going to wipe us all out in a couple hundred years, so we might as well enjoy the benefits of it now while we're here! Shorter winters!

Want to know why everything is Going to be Fine?

LAUSD is going to be fine/get better because UTLA is strong enough to fight off privatization and reject admin bullshit, but also smart enough to play ball when it comes to making needed reforms

Los Angeles is gonna be fine because it's surprisingly high ground, and eventually desalination will get cheaper, and it has enough forward-thinking people in leadership to do good for folks

California is gonna be fine because eventually liberals will realize that the Liberaltarians are Republicans and marginalize them with Harry Reid-style Latino union machines and Old-school dyed-in-the-wool coastal progressivism that continues to improve people's lives on the daily.

Our country is gonna be fine because this election will have hopefully caused a fuckton of introspection in the Democratic party, and even though some of the problems the next four years will create will be generational or even multigenerational, the arc of the moral universe is long and bends toward justice, and if we didn't know for totally and completely sure that that was true, what would be the point of sticking around?

And the human race is gonna make it because solar and wind power are quickly becoming cheaper, so that even if we have to abandon Florida and the Gulf Coast and the Carolina Lowcountry and New York as the oceans rise, we'll meet back in sunny Chicago for Chanukkah and dance around in jeans and sweaters outside but we'll be around still and reversing the problem as much as we can in 50 years.

There was a Hard Frost overnight.

I had forgotten that I missed about the temperature dropping below freezing:

1. The smell of the cold first hitting the nose just outside the door.

2. The slightly-related sudden recognition of the existence of the tip of the nose.

3. The way the entire world seems to have suddenly dried up.

4. Yesterday's mud supporting steps.

5. The grass pancake held together by tendrils of new ice.

6. The indestructible stillness of the natural world, even with the humming of the nearby expressway.

7. Being actually cold.

There was frost in the marsh, and I imagine the fiddler crabs still found a way to survive.