In Which We Panic and Review Books

Panic mode! Christmas in 13 days! Cards neither purchased, signed, nor mailed! Gifts for out-of-town family neither purchased, wrapped, nor mailed! Party this weekend! House not cleaned! Wassail not brewed! Many people coming! If I know you you've probably been invited; if I don't, and you haven't, just come with Homer.

Pant, pant.

In a perplexing development, our house is the only one on our block--and, actually, on our street for several blocks--to have put up lights. The neighborhood is usually lit up pretty well, so this year the girlfriend scrambled and got the front of the house tastefully strewn with electric festiveness the day after Thanksgiving. Ha, we said, we have finally beaten Mario across the street for once. Eat it, Mario! The days and now weeks have dragged on and no other lights have appeared. Was there a neighborhood protest of Christmas we weren't invited to? Perhaps our lights are so incredibly awesome as to make everyone else decide it is not worth trying to top them. I'm flattered, but sad.

Bibliophilia corner: Current concurrent reads are David Copperfield and an utterly bizarre Bookman's find called Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures. It caught my eye because it's big, robin's egg blue, and on the spine has a drawing of a weird little horned, pink puppy clutching a sword. And was printed in Canada! Quelle exotique! It's a fantasy, but not one of those annoying fantasies where all the characters are named Galadriel or Etherial and speak in hack faux-Elizabethan prose. In a huge plus for a grownup book, it's full of pen-and-ink drawings reminiscent of Edward Gorey, if not as dark. If you hated Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you'll probably hate this. If you liked it, maybe give Rumo a shot, for the pictures if nothing else.

Never got around to reading Copperfield in school, and I am pleased to find that I like it. I liked A Tale of Two Cities when I read it last year, after loathing it as a high school sophomore, and have decided that people shouldn't be forced to read Dickens as teenagers because they'll probably end up screaming every time they hear him mentioned and won't give him a second chance as adults.

Same for Faulkner. Reading The Sound and the Fury off and on is rather not unlike wading through molasses, having to go back every three steps to retrieve your boots yet again, but it feels worth the effort. I did give Cooper a second go several months ago, managing the first fifty pages of The Spy before admitting defeat. Is that the one he wrote on a bet with his wife, that he could churn out better fiction than what she was currently reading? That must have been one fucking dull book Mrs. Cooper was saddled with at the time.

Panic mode! Again! Christmas in 13 days! Fuuuuuuuuuck!!!!

The New Sign of the Beast

By now you've probably read about the kerfuffle in Pagosa Springs. Bob Kearns, the president of the Loma Linda HOA, got his shorts in a knot over the peace-sign-shaped wreath a couple hung outside their house, because, variously, some other residents of the neighborhood have kids serving in Iraq, or he thinks it might actually be a satanic symbol, or

"Somebody could put up signs that say, 'Drop bombs on Iraq.' If you let one go up, you have to let them all go up."

My mom lives outside Pagosa Springs. It was a sleepy, funky little live-and-let-live community of 5,000 until rich Texans discovered it. In the last ten years the surrounding area has mushroomed to well over 15,000 people as formerly open parklands and Ponderosa pine forests have been bladed for subdivisions. The traffic flowing out of these and backing up at the new stoplights consists in large part of Suburbans bearing Texas plates, Jesus fish, and magnetic yellow ribbons.

That's a little context, although I have no idea how long Mr. Kearns has lived in the area or if he, too, is a transplanted Texan. Regardless of his background or that of the other residents who complained about the wreath, it's a perfect microcosm of... of what? What are the words? Is "conservatism and superstitious Christianism run rampant" too strong a phrase? The mindset that sees the message Peace as an affront, that somehow twists a generic wish for world peace into a negative message specifically aimed at the Americans serving in Iraq, that utterly fails to recognize within it the wish that all those kids come home safely, seems to me completely divorced from reality. It strikes me as paranoia.

And, of course, fast on the heels of that uber-nationalistic sentiment (professing peace equals opposition to war equals opposition to America's forces) comes trip-trapping along its faithful fear-based religious companion.

"The peace sign has a lot of negativity associated with it," association president Bob Kearns told The Durango Herald in justifying the order. "It's also an anti-Christ sign."

Some would probably argue that "superstitious Christian" is redundant, but I use it here for that special breed that doesn't see a benevolent God everywhere and in everyone so much as they see Satan lurking in every innocuous word and symbol, waiting to pounce on the unaware and haul them straight off to the lake of fire. The Christianist and the nationalist go hand in hand. Nothing like seeing enemies under every rock and deception in every sign to forge an identity and compel obedience to the ideology. And yes, well all know where that road goes.

Anyway. I love Pagosa, the town itself, and am delighted that it's doing its level best to distance itself from the inanity of one of the outlying HOAs.

Monday morning, Pagosa Springs town-hall officials received an e-mail that asked, "What kind of little Nazis does your town grow?"

That prompted town manager Mark Garcia to change the southwestern Colorado town's website, clarifying that the town doesn't have any authority over the homeowners association and that the subdivision isn't even within the town's limits.

"The town wholly supports their peace-sign display and also wishes for peace on earth," the message concludes.

Time to call Mom to ask if she's put her own peace wreath up yet. Have you?