Well, Woody Allen had some fun with this meme in his latest film, Whatever Works. I’m not going to give it away, but I’ll just say that everything dissolves in the universal solvent of New York City. It’s fashionable, whenever a new Allen film comes out, to say things like, “Not his best screenplay” and then something derogatory about his latest starlet and the fact that all his movies are really the same movie, and all his male leads are really himself (all true, by the way). Of course, we’ve known this for a long time. What we never hear is that Allen’s track record for enjoyability is unmatched. So if you get nothing else from the movie than ninety minutes of unwholesome fun, shouldn’t that be worth something?
Next week a campaign will begin in NYC to promote the possibility that people can be moral without God.
Predictably, not all New Yorkers are enthusiastic about such a campaign. But, President Obama noted in his inaugural speech, America is a country in which non-believers are citizens, too.
A small step for humanism, a huge leap for humankind.
The UAAR posted this rebuttal on its website, from Il Tempo:
The real enemies (of faith) are individualism, hedonism, indiscriminate thirst for profit, consumer slavery, lack of goodwill and weakened soldarity. “Secularism” in our time reinforces and energizes these countervalues, which proliferate among the young. Here the enemy makes its nest: not in the synagogue or the mosque.
Funny, in the Book of Revelation the Synagogue of Satan was the real enemy of faith. Now Satan is a humanist?
A frightening new law was recently proposed in Italy: in addition to the already fatuous “religion hour” in Italian public schools (and you thought “one nation under God” was bad) – which is really an hour in which students are obliged to listen to a handpicked Vatican mouthpiece mouth off (paid for by the State, naturally) – there has been a recent proposal to add Islam to the “choice” (I am quotating here – see sidebar) of religions that are taught. The reason is worth quoting: to avoid abandoning little Muslims “to the ghettos of the madrassas and integralist Islamic schools” (Corriere della Sera). Brilliant! So let’s bring integralist Koranic teachings into the public schools, where they can wage their eternal battle for children’s minds with the Catholic Church itself. Let’s let our children be the little soldiers in State-funded religious warfare. Otherwise – and here, I feel, is the real reason behind the proposal – they might become kamikazes.
For an alternative to the teaching of the Catholic religion (IRC), the UAAR (Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics) has proposed a program to abolish this propagandistic aberration from Italian public education.
Think about it: shouldn’t every single child have the right to personalized religious teaching in the classroom? The son of Wiccans, the daughter of Hidus, the twins born to Red-Letter Christians should all have the same right that is granted to the children of Catholics in this country. It would be chaos, as you can imagine. Muslims may yet get that taste of equality, but only because integration is so poor and Islamic schooling has the unfortunate tendency to churn out suicidal religious fanatics (and they have growing numbers). This really has nothing to do with integration or equality.
Religion should simply be abolished from the public sphere. You have a home. You have a church, mosque, synagogue. Use them to teach religion, and leave the public schools to teach science, math, history and perhaps even the history of religions. That would be a fair and necessary innovation. Anything else is bigotry.
“During Operation Cast Lead, the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.” Kemp said this at the United Nations. Courtesy of UN Watch.
Here’s the weird item of the week: “America’s Rabbi,” Shmuley Boteach, has a new book out: The Michael Jackson Tapes. It turns out–for those of us who weren’t following either of their careers too closely–that Boteach was Michael Jackson’s “close spiritual guide.” I actually held the book in my hands and opened it today. The subject matter varied from Michael’s days as a Jehovah’s Witness to his hopes that children get to play in heaven. We even get Jacko on Hitler and his boundless love for the Jewish people (ok so I didn’t open the book at random, exactly).
Remember, this is a man who surrounded himself with mannequins.
The indefatigable Taxi Gourmet recently reviewed Muhammad Rahman’s Kwik Meal #1, midtown Manhattan’s most viral food cart. I should know, as I used to go there back in the day when it was still an upstart, and before there were even two of them, and word was just beginning to spread across the borough. It still has the best falafel sandwich I’ve ever tasted, bar none. Then again, after six years in Rome, that’s not such a difficult accolade to aquire.
Taxi tells the tale, as it was told by me:
It was actually a poem by Taxi Gourmet reader Marc Alan Di Martino that moved me to consummate my curiosity about Kwik Meal’s food:
“I was a regular at Muhammad Rahman’s Kwik Meal #1 cart, as were we all at the Gotham [Book Mart]…And one day Mr. Rahman — who was aware that I wrote poetry — asked me to write him something that would make people stop and eat. I declined. He insisted. I wrote, and he paid me in falafel sandwiches.”
I wrote about this here. It was Macy Halford at the New Yorker who “discovered” my little couplets and wrote them up in the New Yorker’s Book Bench column. Midtown is a great place to get noticed, even if you’re not a naked cowboy.
Here’s the poem, a stab at heroic light verse:
Of pleasures gastronomical I sing
Incomparable treasures; everything
Cooked to perfection by the expert hands
Striving to meet the customers’ demands.
A sweet aroma scents the afternoon
Air like some harbinger of happy June
When people hunger for the tastiest
Sandwich in Midtown: they have the best.
The really great part of the story, and the reason I had to get in touch with Ms. Halford, was that the poem (admittedly no great shakes) was attributed to a certain Thane Dimatims. Such blunders often inspire innovations, and in this case it became the stuff of poetry,or rather a long narrative poem which will be published to great acclaim a century or so after I am dead. “As it was, so it will be”, said the pope. Or was it Pope?
The escalators don’t work anyway.
I have yet to meet Layne Mosler, better known as Taxi Gourmet. But I like what she does, which is go around town in a taxi trying to find great places to eat. Of course, you have to be adventurous. Every so often, you even have to squirm before a plate of tripe.
Marc Di Martino 