Monthly Archives: November 2004

U2: Wide Awake in Falluja

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I’ve been consuming U2′s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
nonstop since buying it last night. The final track, the audaciously
named “Yahweh,” caught my attention immediately. U2 is well-known not just as a rock band, but as a Christian
rock band, and quite possibly the only commercially successful
“liberal” Christian rock band. A song titled “Yahweh” is a presumptive
statement of their faith, and in fact it doesn’t disappoint.

I’ll
leave the deeper biblical exegesis to Rachel, though the lyrics are
fairly transparent. (The overall mood is much like Christmas eve, a
prayerful waiting). To me the part that leaped out was the last verse
of the song and of the album, the first half of which reads…

Take this city
A city should be shining on a hill

Take this city

If it be your will

What no man can own, no man can take

… if only because there has been so much news
recently about U.S. armed forces “taking” the city of Falluja.
Certainly Falluja is no city on a hill, and if it is a rebuke to say
that it “should be,” the question of who ought be responsible is an
open one. Yet if it is not our right to “take” the city, it’s also true
that neither did the insurgents “own” it. The actual city of Falluja
itself is not its buildings but rather the huddled homeless refugees.

Take this heart

Take this heart

Take this heart

And make it break

The song’s final plea is not the usual one for world peace,
but rather something both simpler yet equally impossible. Bono prays
not for our hearts to heal but to break.
To love our neighbors and
indeed our enemies is to hurt that they hurt, whoever or whatever may
be responsible for the pain. It is not a prayer for compassion, though
compassion is implied; it is not a prayer for love, though love is
necessary; it is not a prayer for justice, though justice would result.
It asks us just the simple question: do our hearts break for the city
of Falluja?

(Why is the song titled “Yahweh,” and does the line “Always pain
before a child is born” imply a latent antisemitism? This is a
troubling question that’s close to the root of historic
Jewish-Christian tensions. I can’t really judge this, but simply refer
for now to Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby’s claim
that Judaism countenances — indeed, sometimes commands — hatred of
evildoers, with the added caveats that (1) he shows a lot of chutzpah speaking on behalf of such a diverse faith, and (2) he’s an idiot.)

The New Yorker on Family Circus

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I’m halfway through an essay in the latest New Yorker (the annual
“Cartoon Issue”) and couldn’t help but note yet another easy
dig at the perennial gimp of comic strips, the Family Circus:

Although “The Family Circus” was resolutely unfunny, its panels clearly
were based on some actual family’s life and were aimed at an audience
that recognized this life, which compelled me to posit an entire
subspecies of humanity that found “The Family Circus” hilarious.

Looks like a good article; I’ll try to comment more when I finish.

Boston City Council Public Hearing on Bike Czar

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I attended about an hour of the public hearing at Boston City Hall on the need for a bike czar in Boston. In addition to the usual suspects, representatives from Walk Boston
and Zipcar both testified in favor of creating this new position who
would fight for cyclists from “within the bureaucracy” (such an
appealing way to describe it, even if true!). As a resident of
Cambridge, not Boston, I didn’t quite feel empowered to speak, even if
only half the speakers seemed to live in Boston; there were over 50
names on the list, and I’m sure I had nothing new to say, really.

Just that I hope that Boston does hire a bike czar and re-form the
bike committee that withered from lack of funding 2 years ago.

Power outages in Riverside neighborhood

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For as long as we’ve lived at our apartment, we’ve had irregular
power outages. Sometimes we get notices from NStar about planned
“service upgrades,” but about 90% of the time we don’t. Generally the
power goes out between the hours of 1 and 3 a 15-minute stretches.

The situation is quite annoying because it causes all the clocks to
reset, and in particular it drives the UPS backups on our computers
nuts. (I need to figure out how to disable their audible alarms).

Today I talked with “Cathy” at NStar customer service, and an
engineer should be getting back to me. If this continues I am going to
start talking to our neighbors to identify what actions we can take.
Certainly these outages are only nuisances when compared with, say, the
power situation in Baghdad, but, like I said, it’s annoying.