If they ever come up with a swashbuckling School, I think one of the courses should be Laughing, Then Jumping Off Something.

When you're riding in a time machine way far into the future, don't stick your elbow out the window, or it'll turn into a fossil.

It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.

At first I thought, if I were Superman, a perfect secret identity would be "Clark Kent, Dentist," because you could save money on tooth X-rays. But then I thought, if a patient said, "How's my back tooth?" and you just looked at it with your X-ray vision and said, "Oh it's okay," then the patient would probably say, "Aren't you going to take an X-ray, stupid?" and you'd say, "Aw fuck you, get outta here," and then he probably wouldn't even pay his bill.

One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said. "Disneyland burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down, he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.

A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite. Then you call the guy and hold the burning fuse up to the phone. "Hear that?" you say. "That's dynamite, baby."

Why do people in ship mutinies always ask for "better treatment"? I'd ask for a pinball machine, because with all that rocking back and forth you'd probably be able to get a lot of free games.

I'd like to be buried Indian-style, where they put you up on a high rack, above the ground. That way, you could get hit by meteorites and not even feel it.

If I lived back in the wild west days, instead of carrying a six-gun in my holster, I'd carry a soldering iron. That way, if some smart-aleck cowboy said something like "Hey, look. He's carrying a soldering iron!" and started laughing, and everybody else started laughing, I could just say, "That's right, it's a soldering iron. The soldering iron of justice." Then everybody would get real quiet and ashamed, because they had made fun of the soldering iron of justice, and I could probably hit them up for a free drink.

I bet when the neanderthal kids would make a snowman, someone would always end up saying, "Don't forget the thick, heavy brows." Then they would all get embarrassed because they remembered they had the big hunky brows too, and they'd get mad and eat the snowman.

Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, let's say you're an astronaught on the moon and you fear that your partner has been turned into Dracula. The next time he goes out for the moon pieces, wham!, you just slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and say he's not Dracula, but you just say, "Think again, bat man."

Too bad you can't buy a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin real fast and freak everybody out.

The people in the village were real poor, so none of the children had any toys. But this one little boy had gotten an old enema bag and filled it with rocks, and he would go around and whap the other children across the face with it. Man, I think my heart almost broke. Later the boy came up and offered to give me the toy. This was too much! I reached out my hand, but then he ran away. I chased him down and took the enema bag. He cried a little, but that's the way of these people.

I wish I had a Kryptonite cross, because then you could keep both Dracula AND Superman away.

I don't think I'm alone when I say I'd like to see more and more planets fall under the ruthless domination of our solar system.

Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.

Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself: "Mankind". Basically, it's made up of two separate words - "mank" and "ind". What do these words mean ? It's a mystery, and that's why so is mankind.

I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they chose a king, they don't just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas.

I guess we were all guilty, in a way. We all shot him, we all skinned him, and we all got a complimentary bumper sticker that said, "I helped skin Bob."

I bet the main reason the police keep people away from a plane crash is they don't want anybody walking in and lying down in the crash stuff, then, when somebody comes up, act like they just woke up and go, "What was THAT?!"

The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.

Ambition is like a frog sitting on a Venus Flytrap. The flytrap can bite and bite, but it won't bother the frog because it only has little tiny plant teeth. But some other stuff could happen and it could be like ambition.

I'd rather be rich than stupid.

If you were a poor Indian with no weapons, and a bunch of conquistadors came up to you and asked where the gold was, I don't think it would be a good idea to say, "I swallowed it. So sue me."

If you define cowardice as running away at the first sign of danger, screaming and tripping and begging for mercy, then yes, Mr. Brave man, I guess I'm a coward.

I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.

When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges.

To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.

What is it that makes a complete stranger dive into an icy river to save a solid gold baby? Maybe we'll never know.

We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.

Probably the earliest flyswatters were nothing more than some sort of striking surface attached to the end of a long stick.

I think someone should have had the decency to tell me the luncheon was free. To make someone run out with potato salad in his hand, pretending he's throwing up, is not what I call hospitality.

To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kind of scary. I've wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.

As I bit into the nectarine, it had a crisp juiciness about it that was very pleasurable - until I realized it wasn't a nectarine at all, but A HUMAN HEAD!!

Most people don't realize that large pieces of coral, which have been painted brown and attached to the skull by common wood screws, can make a child look like a deer.

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.

Better not take a dog on the space shuttle, because if he sticks his head out when you're coming home his face might burn up.

You know what would make a good story? Something about a clown who make people happy, but inside he's real sad. Also, he has severe diarrhea.

Sometimes when I feel like killing someone, I do a little trick to calm myself down. I'll go over to the persons house and ring the doorbell. When the person comes to the door, I'm gone, but you know what I've left on the porch? A jack-o-lantern with a knife stuck in the side of it's head with a note that says "You." After that I usually feel a lot better, and no harm done.

If you're a horse, and someone gets on you, and falls off, and then gets right back on you, I think you should buck him off right away.

If you ever teach a yodeling class, probably the hardest thing is to keep the students from just trying to yodel right off. You see, we build to that.

If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy.

I'd like to see a nude opera, because when they hit those high notes, I bet you can really see it in those genitals.

Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someones neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what is that thing.

He was a cowboy, mister, and he loved the land. He loved it so much he made a woman out of dirt and married her. But when he kissed her, she disintegrated. Later, at the funeral, when the preacher said, "Dust to dust," some people laughed, and the cowboy shot them. At his hanging, he told the others, "I'll be waiting for you in heaven--with a gun."

The memories of my family outings are still a source of strength to me. I remember we'd all pile into the car - I forget what kind it was - and drive and drive. I'm not sure where we'd go, but I think there were some trees there. The smell of something was strong in the air as we played whatever sport we played. I remember a bigger, older guy we called "Dad." We'd eat some stuff, or not, and then I think we went home. I guess some things never leave you.

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is "God is crying." And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is "Probably because of something you did."

Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It's a shark riding on an elephant's back, just trampling and eating everything they see.

As we were driving, we saw a sign that said "Watch for Rocks." Marta said it should read "Watch for Pretty Rocks." I told her she should write in her suggestion to the highway department, but she started saying it was a joke - just to get out of writing a simple letter! And I thought I was lazy!

One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to DisneyLand, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. "Oh, no," I said, "DisneyLand burned down." He cried and cried, but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real DisneyLand, but it was getting pretty late.

If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone.

Laurie got offended that I used the word "puke." But to me, that's what her dinner tasted like.

We used to laugh at Grandpa when he'd head off and go fishing. But we wouldn't be laughing that evening when he'd come back with some whore he picked up in town.

I wish a robot would get elected president. That way, when he came to town, we could all take a shot at him and not feel too bad.

As the evening sky faded from a salmon color to a sort of flint gray, I thought back to the salmon I caught that morning, and how gray he was, and how I named him Flint.

If you're a young Mafia gangster out on your first date, I bet it's real embarrassing if someone tries to kill you.

Whenever I see an old lady slip and fall on a wet sidewalk, my first instinct is to laugh. But then I think, what is I was an ant, and she fell on me. Then it wouldn't seem quite so funny.

If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn't open, and you friends are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were swimming.

When I was a kid my favorite relative was Uncle Caveman. After school we'd all go play in his cave, and every once in a while he would eat one of us. It wasn't until later that I found out that Uncle Caveman was a bear.

Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling.

The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.

When you die, if you get a choice between going to regular heaven or pie heaven, choose pie heaven. It might be a trick, but if it's not, mmmmmmm, boy.

Whether they find a life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet.

Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, we should be thinking about getting more use out of the ones we already have.

I think a good gift for the President would be a chocolate revolver. and since he is so busy, you'd probably have to run up to him real quick and give it to him.

Just because swans mate for life, I don't think its that big a deal. First of all, if you're a swan, you're probably not going to find a swan that looks much better than the one you've got, so why not mate for life?

If you're robbing a bank and you're pants fall down, I think it's okay to laugh and to let the hostages laugh too, because, come on, life is funny.

If you ever catch on fire, try to avoid looking in a mirror, because I bet that will really throw you into a panic.

Sometimes I think I'd be better off dead. No, wait, not me, you.

I can't stand cheap people. It makes me real mad when someone says something like, "Hey, when are you going to pay me that $100 you owe me?" or "Do you have that $50 you borrowed?" Man, quit being so cheap!

I think the mistake a lot of us make is thinking the state-appointed shrink is our friend.

I think one way the cops could make money would be to hold a murder weapons sale. Many people could really use used ice picks.

If you ever reach total enlightenment while drinking beer, I bet you could shoot beer out of you nose.

I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex.

Even though I was their captive, the Indians allowed me quite a bit of freedom. I could walk freely, make my own meals, and even hurl large rocks at their heads. It was only later that I discovered that they were not Indians at all but only dirty-clothes hampers.

I wish outer space guys would conquer the Earth and make people their pets, because I'd like to have one of those little beds with my name on it.

It's true that every time you hear a bell, an angel gets its wings. But what they don't tell you is that every time you hear a mouse trap snap, and Angel gets set on fire.

If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.

I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it.

The next time I have meat and mashed potatoes, I think I'll put a very large blob of potatoes on my plate with just a little piece of meat. And if someone asks me why I didn't get more meat, I'll just say, "Oh, you mean this?" and pull out a big piece of meat from inside the blob of potatoes, where I've hidden it. Good magic trick, huh?

Life, to me, is like a quiet forest pool, one that needs a direct hit from a big rock half-buried in the ground. You pull and you pull, but you can't get the rock out of the ground. So you give it a good kick, but you lose your balance and go skidding down the hill toward the pool. Then out comes a big Hawaiian man who was screwing his wife beside the pool because they thought it was real pretty. He tells you to get out of there, but you start faking it, like you're talking Hawaiian, and then he gets mad and chases you...

Sometimes, when I drive across the desert in the middle of the night, with no other cars around, I start imagining: What if there were no civilization out there? No cities, no factories, no people? And then I think: No people or factories? Then who made this car? And this highway? And I get so confused I have to stick my head out the window into the driving rain---unless there's lightning, because I could get struck on the head by a bolt.

The whole town laughed at my great-grandfather, just because he worked hard and saved his money. True, working at the hardware store didn't pay much, but he felt it was better than what everybody else did, which was go up to the volcano and collect the gold nuggets it shot out every day. It turned out he was right. After forty years, the volcano petered out. Everybody left town, and the hardware store went broke. Finally he decided to collect gold nuggets too, but there weren't many left by then. Plus, he broke his leg and the doctor's bills were real high.

Too bad when I was a kid there wasn't a guy in our class that everybody called the "Cricket Boy", because I would have liked to stand up in class and tell everybody, "You can make fun of the Cricket Boy if you want to, but to me he's just like everybody else." Then everybody would leave the Cricket Boy alone, and I'd invite him over to spend the night at my house, but after about five minutes of that loud chirping I'd have to kick him out. Maybe later we could get up a petition to get the Cricket Family run out of town. Bye, Cricket Boy.

I think a good product would be "Baby Duck Hat". It's a fake baby duck, which you strap on top of your head. Then you go swimming underwater until you find a mommy duck and her babies, and you join them. Then, all of a sudden, you stand up out of the water and roar like Godzilla. Man, those ducks really take off! Also, Baby Duck Hat is good for parties.

I wish I lived back in the old west days, because I'd save up my money for about twenty years so I could buy a solid-gold pick. Then I'd go out West and start digging for gold. When someone came up and asked what I was doing, I'd say, "Looking for gold, ya durn fool." He'd say, "Your pick is gold," and I'd say, "Well, that was easy." Good joke, huh.

A funny thing to do is, if you're out hiking and your friend gets bitten by a poisonous snake, tell him you're going to go for help, then go about ten feet and pretend that *you* got bit by a snake. Then start an argument with him about who's going to go get help. A lot of guys will start crying. That's why it makes you feel good when you tell them it was just a joke.

I guess I kinda lost control, because in the middle of the play I ran up and lit the evil puppet villain on fire. No, I didn't. Just kidding. I just said that to help illustrate one of the human emotions, which is freaking out. Another emotion is greed, as when you kill someone for money, or something like that. Another emotion is generosity, as when you pay someone double what he paid for his stupid puppet.

Many people think that history is a dull subject. Dull? Is it "dull" that Jesse James once got bitten on the forehead by an ant, and at first it didn't seem like anything, but then the bite got worse and worse, so he went to a doctor in town, and the secretary told him to wait, so he sat down and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and then finally he got to see the doctor, and the doctor put some salve on it? You call that dull?

I scrambled to the top of the precipice where Nick was waiting. "That was fun," I said. "You bet it was," said Nick. "Let's climb higher." "No," I said. "I think we should be heading back now." "We have time," Nick insisted. I said we didn't, and Nick said we did. We argued back and forth like that for about 20 minutes, then finally decided to head back. I didn't say it was an interesting story.

If you're a Thanksgiving dinner, but you don't like the stuffing or the cranberry sauce or anything else, just pretend like you're eating it, but instead, put it all in your lap and form it into a big mushy ball. Then, later, when you're out back having cigars with the boys, let out a big fake cough and throw the ball to the ground. Then say, "Boy, these are good cigars!"

I remember that one fateful day when Coach took me aside. I knew what was coming. "You don't have to tell me," I said. "I'm off the team, aren't I?" "Well," said Coach, "you never were really ON the team. You made that uniform you're wearing out of rags and towels, and your helmet is a toy space helmet. You show up at practice and then either steal the ball and make us chase you to get it back, or you try to tackle people at inappropriate times." It was all true what he was saying. And yet, I thought something is brewing inside the head of this Coach. He sees something in me, some kind of raw talent that he can mold. But that's when I felt the handcuffs go on.

If I ever opened a trampoline store, I don't think I'd call it Trampo-Land, because you might think it was a store for tramps, which is not the inpression we are trying to convey with our store. On the other hand, we would not prohibit tramps from browsing, or testing the trampolines, unless a tramp's gyrations seemed to be getting out of control.

I can still recall old Mister Barnslow getting out every morning and nailing a fresh load of tadpoles to the old board of his. Then he'd spin it round and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he'd yell out, "Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!" We all thought he was crazy. But then we had some growing up to do.

Once when I was in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, I met a mysterious old stranger. He said he was about to die and wanted to tell someone about the treasure. I said, "Okay, as long as it's not a long story. Some of us have a plane to catch, you know." He stared telling hes story, about the treasure and his life and all, and I thought: "This story isn't too long." But then, he kept going, and I started thinking, "Uh-oh, this story is getting long." But then the story was over, and I said to myself: "You know, that story wasn't too long after all." I forget what the story was about, but there was a good movie on the plane. It was a little long, though.

I bet a fun thing would be to go way back in time to where there was going to be an eclipse and tell the cave men, "If I have come to destroy you, may the sun be blotted out from the sky." Just then the eclipse would start, and they'd probably try to kill you or something, but then you could explain about the rotation of the moon and all, and everyone would get a good laugh.

I wouldn't be surprised if someday some fishermen caught a big shark and cut it open, and there inside was a whole person. Then they cut the person open, and in him is a little baby shark. And in the baby shark there isn't a person, because it would be too small. But there's a little doll or something, like a Johnny Combat little toy guy---something like that.

"The Senate needs to leave enough money in the proposed budget to not only reduce all marginal rates, but to eliminate the death tax, so that people who build up assets are able to transfer them from one generation to the next, regardless of a person's race."—Washington, D.C., April 5, 2001

"I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and Hispanically."—Radio-Television Correspondents Association dinner, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2001

"A lot of times in the rhetoric, people forget the facts. And the facts are that thousands of small businesses—Hispanically owned or otherwise—pay taxes at the highest marginal rate."—to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; Washington, D.C., March 19, 2001

"Then I went for a run with the other dog and just walked. And I started thinking about a lot of things. I was able to—I can't remember what it was. Oh, the inaugural speech, started thinking through that."—Pre-inaugural interview with U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 22, 2001 issue

"I want it to be said that the Bush administration was a results-oriented administration, because I believe the results of focusing our attention and energy on teaching children to read and having an education system that's responsive to the child and to the parents, as opposed to mired in a system that refuses to change, will make America what we want it to be—a literate country and a hopefuller country."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 11, 2001

"Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods."—Austin, Texas, Dec. 20, 2000

"The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law."—Austin, Texas, Nov. 22, 2000

"They misunderestimated me."—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000


bushisms The president's accidental wit and wisdom.

The Complete Bushisms
Updated frequently.
By Jacob Weisberg
Updated Friday, Dec. 23, 2005, at 11:41 AM ET

"If you found somebody that had information about an attack on America, you'd want to know as best as we can to find out what the facts are."—Philadelphia, Pa., Dec. 12, 2005

"I think we are welcomed. But it was not a peaceful welcome."—Philadelphia, Dec. 12, 2005, on the reception of American forces in Iraq

"I mean, I read the newspaper. I mean, I can tell you what the headlines are. I must confess, if I think the story is, like, not a fair appraisal, I'll move on. But I know what the story's about." —Philadelphia, Dec. 12, 2005

"[I]t's a myth to think I don't know what's going on. It's a myth to think that I'm not aware that there's opinions that don't agree with mine, because I'm fully aware of that."—Philadelphia, Dec. 12, 2005

"I mean, there was a serious international effort to say to Saddam Hussein, you're a threat. And the 9/11 attacks extenuated that threat, as far as I—concerned."—Philadelphia, Dec. 12, 2005


"Those who enter the country illegally violate the law."
—Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005

"We got the best workforce in America—in the world."
—Washington, D.C., Dec. 2, 2005

"As a matter of fact, I know relations between our governments is good."—On U.S.-South Korean relations, Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2005

"Let me be very clear about this. Steroids ought to be banned from baseball."—Washington, D.C., Oct. 4, 2005

"Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, 'what is good for them and what is not.' "—Washington, D.C., Oct. 6, 2005


"I think it's important to bring somebody from outside the system, the judicial system, somebody that hasn't been on the bench and, therefore, there's not a lot of opinions for people to look at." —On the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, Washington, D.C., October 4, 2005


"We look forward to hearing your vision, so we can more better do our job. That's what I'm telling you."—Gulfport, Miss., Sept. 20, 2005.

"Listen, I want to thank leaders of the—in the faith—faith-based and community-based community for being here."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 6, 2005.


"If it were to rain a lot, there is concern from the Army Corps of Engineers that the levees might break. And so, therefore, we're cautious about encouraging people to return at this moment of history."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2005

"My thoughts are, we're going to get somebody who knows what they're talking about when it comes to rebuilding cities."—On how the rebuilding of New Orleans might commence, Biloxi, Miss., Sept. 2, 2005

"And Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."—To FEMA director Mike Brown who resigned 10 days later amid criticism over his job performance.—Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005


"Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house—he's lost his entire house—there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." —Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005

"I can't wait to join you in the joy of welcoming neighbors back into neighborhoods, and small businesses up and running, and cutting those ribbons that somebody is creating new jobs."—Poplarville, Miss., Sept. 5, 2005


"So please give cash money to organizations that are directly involved in helping save lives—save the life who had been affected by Hurricane Katrina."—Washington D.C., Sept. 6, 2005


"The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who's spending time investigating it."—Expressing hope that the probe into how CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity was leaked will yield answers, Washington D.C., July 18, 2005


"I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend."—On the prospect of visiting Denmark, Washington D.C., June 29, 2005

"I was going to say he's a piece of work, but that might not translate too well. Is that all right, if I call you a 'piece of work'?"—To Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, Washington, D.C., June 20, 2005


"You see, not only did the attacks help accelerate a recession, the attacks reminded us that we are at war."—Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005

"We're spending money on clean coal technology. Do you realize we've got 250 million years of coal?"—Washington, D.C., June 8, 2005


"I think younger workers—first of all, younger workers have been promised benefits the government—promises that have been promised, benefits that we can't keep. That's just the way it is."—Washington, D.C., May 4, 2005

"We got people working all their life at hard work, contributing by payroll taxes into a Social Security system."—Washington, D.C., May 13, 2005


"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

"It means your own money would grow better than that which the government can make it grow. And that's important."—on what private accounts could do for Social Security funds, Falls Church, Va., April 29, 2005


"But Iraq has—have got people there that are willing to kill, and they're hard-nosed killers. And we will work with the Iraqis to secure their future." —Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005


"Well, we've made the decision to defeat the terrorists abroad so we don't have to face them here at home. And when you engage the terrorists abroad, it causes activity and action."—Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005

"He understands the need for a timely write of the constitution." —on Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of Iraq, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005

"We expect the states to show us whether or not we're achieving simple objectives—like literacy, literacy in math, the ability to read and write."—on federal education requirements, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005

"It's in our country's interests to find those who would do harm to us and get them out of harm's way."—Washington, D.C., April 28, 2005

"Part of the facts is understanding we have a problem, and part of the facts is what you're going to do about it."—Kirtland, Ohio, April 15, 2005

"We have enough coal to last for 250 years, yet coal also prevents an environmental challenge." —Washington, D.C., April 20, 2005

"We look forward to analyzing and working with legislation that will make—it would hope—put a free press's mind at ease that you're not being denied information you shouldn't see."
—Washington, D.C., April 14, 2005

"I understand there's a suspicion that we—we're too security-conscience."—Washington D.C., April 14, 2005

"I'm going to spend a lot of time on Social Security. I enjoy it. I enjoy taking on the issue. I guess, it's the Mother in me." —Washington D.C., April 14, 2005

"I want to thank you for the importance that you've shown for education and literacy."
—Washington, D.C., April 13, 2005

"If they pre-decease or die early, there's an asset base to be able to pass on to a loved one."—On Social Security money stored in private accounts, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, March 30, 2005

"I repeat, personal accounts do not permanently fix the solution."—Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005

"In terms of timetables, as quickly as possible—whatever that means."—On the president's time frame for shoring up Social Security, Washington D.C., March 16, 2005


"In this job you've got a lot on your plate on a regular basis; you don't have much time to sit around and wander, lonely, in the Oval Office, kind of asking different portraits, 'How do you think my standing will be?' "—Washington, D.C., March 16, 2005

"I believe we are called to do the hard work to make our communities and quality of life a better place."—Collinsville, Ill., Jan. 5, 2005


"After all, Europe is America's closest ally."—Mainz, Germany, Feb. 23, 2005

"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table."—Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 22, 2005 (Thanks to Fred Kaplan)

"If you're a younger person, you ought to be asking members of Congress and the United States Senate and the president what you intend to do about it. If you see a train wreck coming, you ought to be saying, what are you going to do about it, Mr. Congressman, or Madam Congressman?"—Detroit, Feb. 8, 2005

"Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the—like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate—the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those—if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."—Explaining his plan to save Social Security, Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005

"I'm also mindful that man should never try to put words in God's mouth. I mean, we should never ascribe natural disasters or anything else, to God. We are in no way, shape, or form should a human being, play God."—Appearing on ABC's 20/20, Washington D.C., Jan. 14, 2005

"And that's why I'm here at the community college system today."—Jacksonville, Fla., Jan. 14, 2005

"I want to appreciate those of you who wear our nation's uniform for your sacrifice."—Jacksonville, Fla., Jan. 14, 2005

"We need to apply 21st-century information technology to the health care field. We need to have our medical records put on the I.T."—Collinsville, Ill., Jan. 5, 2005

"It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 21, 2004

"They can get in line like those who have been here legally and have been working to become a citizenship in a legal manner."—Referring to immigrant workers, Washington, D.C., Dec. 20, 2004

"And so during these holiday seasons, we thank our blessings. ... "—Fort Belvoir, Va., Dec. 10, 2004

"I always jest to people, the Oval Office is the kind of place where people stand outside, they're getting ready to come in and tell me what for, and they walk in and get overwhelmed by the atmosphere. And they say 'man, you're looking pretty.' "—Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2004

"I believe that, as quickly as possible, young cows ought to be allowed to go across our border."—Ottawa, Nov. 30, 2004

"The president and I also reaffirmed our determination to fight terror, to bring drug trafficking to bear, to bring justice to those who pollute our youth"—Speaking with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, Santiago, Chile, Nov. 21, 2004

"We thought we were protected forever from trade policy or terrorist attacks because oceans protected us."—Speech to business leaders at APEC Summit, Santiago, Chile, Nov. 20, 2004

"After standing on the stage, after the debates, I made it very plain, we will not have an all-volunteer army. And yet, this week—we will have an all-volunteer army. Let me restate that."—Daytona Beach, Fla., Oct. 16, 2004

"The CIA laid out several scenarios and said life could be lousy, life could be OK, life could be better, and they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like."—New York, Sept. 21, 2004

"Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 17, 2004 (Thanks to David Stanford.)

"That's why I went to the Congress last September and proposed fundamental—supplemental funding, which is money for armor and body parts and ammunition and fuel."—Erie, Pa., Sept. 4, 2004

"Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."—Sept. 6, 2004, Poplar Bluff, Mo.

"They've seen me make decisions, they've seen me under trying times, they've seen me weep, they've seen me laugh, they've seen me hug. And they know who I am, and I believe they're comfortable with the fact that they know I'm not going to shift principles or shift positions based upon polls and focus groups." —Interview with USA Today, Aug. 27, 2004

"I didn't join the International Criminal Court because I don't want to put our troops in the hands of prosecutors from other nations. Look, if somebody has done some wrong in our military, we'll take care of it. We got plenty of capability of dealing with justice."—Niceville, Fla., Aug. 10, 2004

"So community colleges are accessible, they're available, they're affordable, and their curriculums don't get stuck. In other words, if there's a need for a certain kind of worker, I presume your curriculums evolved over time."—Niceville, Fla., Aug. 10, 2004

"Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign. You're a—you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 6, 2004

"Secondly, the tactics of our—as you know, we don't have relationships with Iran. I mean, that's—ever since the late '70s, we have no contacts with them, and we've totally sanctioned them. In other words, there's no sanctions—you can't—we're out of sanctions."—Annandale, Va., Aug. 9, 2004

"I mean, if you've ever been a governor of a state, you understand the vast potential of broadband technology, you understand how hard it is to make sure that physics, for example, is taught in every classroom in the state. It's difficult to do. It's, like, cost-prohibitive."—Washington, D.C., June 24, 2004 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 (Thanks to Alicia Butler.)

"And I am an optimistic person. I guess if you want to try to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look, you know?"—Washington, D.C., June 15, 2004 (Thanks to Robert Irwin.)

"[A] free Iraq is essential to our respective securities."—Washington, D.C., June 1, 2004

"I want to thank my friend, Sen. Bill Frist, for joining us today. … He married a Texas girl, I want you to know. (Laughter.) Karyn is with us. A West Texas girl, just like me."—Nashville, Tenn., May 27, 2004

"I'm honored to shake the hand of a brave Iraqi citizen who had his hand cut off by Saddam Hussein."—Washington, D.C., May 25, 2004

"This has been tough weeks in that country."—Washington, D.C., April 13, 2004 (Thanks to David Huddleston.)

"[B]y the way, we rank 10th amongst the industrialized world in broadband technology and its availability. That's not good enough for America. Tenth is 10 spots too low as far as I'm concerned."—Minneapolis, Minn., April 26, 2004

"My job is to, like, think beyond the immediate."—Washington, D.C., April 21, 2004

"This is historic times."—New York, N.Y., April 20, 2004

"Obviously, I pray every day there's less casualty."—Fort Hood, Texas, April 11, 2004 (Thanks to Pat Gallagher.)

"Recession means that people's incomes, at the employer level, are going down, basically, relative to costs, people are getting laid off."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 19, 2004 (Thanks to Garry Trudeau.)

"God loves you, and I love you. And you can count on both of us as a powerful message that people who wonder about their future can hear."—Los Angeles, Calif., March 3, 2004 (Thanks to Tanny Bear.)

"The march to war affected the people's confidence. It's hard to make investment. See, if you're a small business owner or a large business owner and you're thinking about investing, you've got to be optimistic when you invest. Except when you're marching to war, it's not a very optimistic thought, is it? In other words, it's the opposite of optimistic when you're thinking you're going to war." —Springfield, Mo., Feb. 9, 2004 (Thanks to Garry Trudeau.)

"See, one of the interesting things in the Oval Office—I love to bring people into the Oval Office—right around the corner from here—and say, this is where I office, but I want you to know the office is always bigger than the person."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"More Muslims have died at the hands of killers than—I say more Muslims—a lot of Muslims have died—I don't know the exact count—at Istanbul. Look at these different places around the world where there's been tremendous death and destruction because killers kill."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"In an economic recession, I'd rather that in order to get out of this recession, that the people be spending their money, not the government trying to figure out how to spend the people's money."—Tampa, Fla., Feb. 16, 2004

"King Abdullah of Jordan, the King of Morocco, I mean, there's a series of places—Qatar, Oman—I mean, places that are developing—Bahrain—they're all developing the habits of free societies."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004

"But the true strength of America is found in the hearts and souls of people like Travis, people who are willing to love their neighbor, just like they would like to love themselves."—Springfield, Mo., Feb. 9, 2004 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"My views are one that speaks to freedom."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004

"In my judgment, when the United States says there will be serious consequences, and if there isn't serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences."

"There is no such thing necessarily in a dictatorial regime of iron-clad absolutely solid evidence. The evidence I had was the best possible evidence that he had a weapon."

"The recession started upon my arrival. t could have been—some say February, some say March, some speculate maybe earlier it started—but nevertheless, it happened as we showed up here. The attacks on our country affected our economy. Corporate scandals affected the confidence of people and therefore affected the economy. My decision on Iraq, this kind of march to war, affected the economy."—Meet the Press, Feb. 8, 2004

"I was a prisoner too, but for bad reasons."—To Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, on being told that all but one of the Argentine delegates to a summit meeting were imprisoned during the military dictatorship, Monterrey, Mexico, Jan. 13, 2004

"[T]he illiteracy level of our children are appalling."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 23, 2004 (Thanks to Lewell Gunter.)

"Just remember it's the birds that's supposed to suffer, not the hunter."—Advising quail hunter and New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici, Roswell, N.M., Jan. 22, 2004

"One of the most meaningful things that's happened to me since I've been the governor—the president—governor—president. Oops. Ex-governor. I went to Bethesda Naval Hospital to give a fellow a Purple Heart, and at the same moment I watched him—get a Purple Heart for action in Iraq—and at that same—right after I gave him the Purple Heart, he was sworn in as a citizen of the United States—a Mexican citizen, now a United States citizen."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 9, 2004

"I want to thank the astronauts who are with us, the courageous spacial entrepreneurs who set such a wonderful example for the young of our country."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 14, 2004

"And if you're interested in the quality of education and you're paying attention to what you hear at Laclede, why don't you volunteer? Why don't you mentor a child how to read?"—St. Louis, Mo., Jan. 5, 2004

"So thank you for reminding me about the importance of being a good mom and a great volunteer as well."—St. Louis, Jan. 5, 2004

"I want to remind you all that in order to fight and win the war, it requires an expenditure of money that is commiserate with keeping a promise to our troops to make sure that they're well-paid, well-trained, well-equipped."

"See, without the tax relief package, there would have been a deficit, but there wouldn't have been the commiserate—not 'commiserate'—the kick to our economy that occurred as a result of the tax relief."

"[T]he best way to find these terrorists who hide in holes is to get people coming forth to describe the location of the hole, is to give clues and data."

"Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 15, 2003

"[A]s you know, these are open forums, you're able to come and listen to what I have to say."—Washington, D.C., Oct. 28, 2003

"The ambassador and the general were briefing me on the—the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice."—Washington, D.C., Oct. 27, 2003 (Thanks to Robert Hack.)

"[W]hether they be Christian, Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu, people have heard the universal call to love a neighbor just like they'd like to be called themselves."—Washington, Oct. 8, 2003 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."—Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 3, 2003

"[W]e've had leaks out of the administrative branch, had leaks out of the legislative branch, and out of the executive branch and the legislative branch, and I've spoken out consistently against them, and I want to know who the leakers are."—Chicago, Sept. 30, 2003

"Washington is a town where there's all kinds of allegations. You've heard much of the allegations. And if people have got solid information, please come forward with it. And that would be people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources, or people outside the information—outside the administration."—Chicago, Sept. 30, 2003 (Thanks to Andy Bowers.)

"[T]hat's just the nature of democracy. Sometimes pure politics enters into the rhetoric."—Crawford, Texas, Aug. 8, 2003 (Thanks to Inigo Thomas.)

"I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 21, 2003

"I'm so pleased to be able to say hello to Bill Scranton. He's one of the great Pennsylvania political families."—Drexel Hill, Penn., Sept. 15, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"We had a good Cabinet meeting, talked about a lot of issues. Secretary of State and Defense brought us up to date about our desires to spread freedom and peace around the world."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 1, 2003 (Thanks to Tanny Bear.)

"Security is the essential roadblock to achieving the road map to peace."—Washington, D.C., July 25, 2003

"Our country puts $1 billion a year up to help feed the hungry. And we're by far the most generous nation in the world when it comes to that, and I'm proud to report that. This isn't a contest of who's the most generous. I'm just telling you as an aside. We're generous. We shouldn't be bragging about it. But we are. We're very generous."—Washington, D.C., July 16, 2003

"It's very interesting when you think about it, the slaves who left here to go to America, because of their steadfast and their religion and their belief in freedom, helped change America."—Dakar, Senegal, July 8, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"My answer is bring them on."—On Iraqi militants attacking U.S. forces, Washington, D.C., July 3, 2003

"You've also got to measure in order to begin to effect change that's just more—when there's more than talk, there's just actual—a paradigm shift."—Washington, D.C., July 1, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"I urge the leaders in Europe and around the world to take swift, decisive action against terror groups such as Hamas, to cut off their funding, and to support—cut funding and support, as the United States has done."—Washington, D.C., June 25, 2003

"Iran would be dangerous if they have a nuclear weapon."—Washington, D.C., June 18, 2003

"Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history—revisionist historians is what I like to call them."—Elizabeth, N.J., June 16, 2003

"I am determined to keep the process on the road to peace."—Washington, D.C., June 10, 2003 (Thanks to Tanny Bear.)

"The true strength of America happens when a neighbor loves a neighbor just like they'd like to be loved themselves."—Elizabeth, N.J., June 16, 2003

"We are making steadfast progress."—Washington, D.C., June 9, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"I'm the master of low expectations."—Aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003

"I'm also not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things."—Aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003

"I recently met with the finance minister of the Palestinian Authority, was very impressed by his grasp of finances."—Washington, D.C., May 29, 2003

"Oftentimes, we live in a processed world—you know, people focus on the process and not results."—Washington, D.C., May 29, 2003

"I've got very good relations with President Mubarak and Crown Prince Abdallah and the King of Jordan, Gulf Coast countries."—Washington, D.C., May 29, 2003

"All up and down the different aspects of our society, we had meaningful discussions. Not only in the Cabinet Room, but prior to this and after this day, our secretaries, respective secretaries, will continue to interact to create the conditions necessary for prosperity to reign."—Washington, D.C., May 19, 2003

"First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill."—Washington, D.C., May 19, 2003

"We ended the rule of one of history's worst tyrants, and in so doing, we not only freed the American people, we made our own people more secure."—Crawford, Texas, May 3, 2003 (Thanks to Tony Marciniec.)

"We've had a great weekend here in the Land of the Enchanted."—Albuquerque, N.M., May 12, 2003 (New Mexico's state nickname is "Land of Enchantment.")

"We've got hundreds of sites to exploit, looking for the chemical and biological weapons that we know Saddam Hussein had prior to our entrance into Iraq."—Santa Clara, Calif., May 2, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"I think war is a dangerous place."—Washington, D.C., May 7, 2003

"I don't bring God into my life to—to, you know, kind of be a political person."—Interview with Tom Brokaw aboard Air Force One, April 24, 2003

"You're free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order—order out of chaos. But we will."—Washington, D.C., April 13, 2003

"Perhaps one way will be, if we use military force, in the post-Saddam Iraq the U.N. will definitely need to have a role. And that way it can begin to get its legs, legs of responsibility back."—the Azores, Portugal, March 16, 2003

"I know there's a lot of young ladies who are growing up wondering whether or not they can be champs. And they see the championship teams from USC and University of Portland here, girls who worked hard to get to where they are, and they're wondering about the example they're setting. What is life choices about?"—Washington, D.C., Feb. 24, 2003

"Now, we talked to Joan Hanover. She and her husband, George, were visiting with us. They are near retirement—retiring—in the process of retiring, meaning they're very smart, active, capable people who are retirement age and are retiring."—Alexandria, Va., Feb. 12, 2003 (Thanks to Dennis Doubleday.)

"Columbia carried in its payroll classroom experiments from some of our students in America."—Bethesda, Md., Feb. 3, 2003

"And, most importantly, Alma Powell, secretary of Colin Powell, is with us."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 30, 2003

"The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself."—Grand Rapids, Mich., Jan. 29, 2003

"When Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried, and persecuted as a war criminal."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 22, 2003 (Thanks to Chad Conwell.)

"Many of the punditry—of course, not you (laughter)—but other punditry were quick to say, no one is going to follow the United States of America."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2003

"One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 8, 2003

"I think the American people—I hope the American–I don't think, let me—I hope the American people trust me."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2002

"The goals for this country are peace in the world. And the goals for this country are a compassionate American for every single citizen. That compassion is found in the hearts and souls of the American citizens."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2002 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"There's only one person who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the kids upon the death of their loved one. Others hug but having committed the troops, I've got an additional responsibility to hug and that's me and I know what it's like."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 11, 2002

"In other words, I don't think people ought to be compelled to make the decision which they think is best for their family."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 11, 2002 (Thanks to Stephanie Nichols.)

"Sometimes, Washington is one of these towns where the person—people who think they've got the sharp elbow is the most effective person." —New Orleans, Dec. 3, 2002 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"The law I sign today directs new funds and new focus to the task of collecting vital intelligence on terrorist threats and on weapons of mass production."—Washington, D.C., Nov. 27, 2002

"These people don't have tanks. They don't have ships. They hide in caves. They send suiciders out."—Speaking about terrorists, Portsmouth, N.H., Nov. 1, 2002

"I know something about being a government. And you've got a good one."—Stumping for Gov. Mike Huckabee, Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 4, 2002

"I need to be able to move the right people to the right place at the right time to protect you, and I'm not going to accept a lousy bill out of the United Nations Senate."—South Bend, Ind., Oct. 31, 2002

"John Thune has got a common-sense vision for good forest policy. I look forward to working with him in the United Nations Senate to preserve these national heritages."

"Any time we've got any kind of inkling that somebody is thinking about doing something to an American and something to our homeland, you've just got to know we're moving on it, to protect the United Nations Constitution, and at the same time, we're protecting you."—Aberdeen, S.D., same day (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"Let me tell you my thoughts about tax relief. When your economy is kind of ooching along, it's important to let people have more of their own money."—Boston, Oct. 4, 2002

"I was proud the other day when both Republicans and Democrats stood with me in the Rose Garden to announce their support for a clear statement of purpose: you disarm, or we will."—Speaking about Saddam Hussein, Manchester, N.H., Oct. 5, 2002 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"You see, the Senate wants to take away some of the powers of the administrative branch."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

"We need an energy bill that encourages consumption."—Trenton, N.J., Sept. 23, 2002

"People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

"I'm plowed of the leadership of Chuck Grassley and Greg Ganske and Jim Leach."—Davenport, Iowa, Sept. 16, 2002

"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

"There's no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons."—South Bend, Ind., Sept. 5, 2002

"If you don't have any ambitions, the minimum-wage job isn't going to get you to where you want to get, for example. In other words, what is your ambitions? And oh, by the way, if that is your ambition, here's what it's going to take to achieve it."—Speech to students in Little Rock, Ark., Aug. 29, 2002 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"See, we love—we love freedom. That's what they didn't understand. They hate things; we love things. They act out of hatred; we don't seek revenge, we seek justice out of love."—Oklahoma City, Aug. 29, 2002

"There's no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide."—Oklahoma City, Aug. 29, 2002 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"President Musharraf, he's still tight with us on the war against terror, and that's what I appreciate. He's a—he understands that we've got to keep al-Qaida on the run, and that by keeping him on the run, it's more likely we will bring him to justice."—Ruch, Ore., Aug. 22, 2002 (Thanks to Scott Miller.)

"I'm a patient man. And when I say I'm a patient man, I mean I'm a patient man."

"Nothing he [Saddam Hussein] has done has convinced me—I'm confident the Secretary of Defense—that he is the kind of fellow that is willing to forgo weapons of mass destruction, is willing to be a peaceful neighbor, that is—will honor the people—the Iraqi people of all stripes, will—values human life. He hasn't convinced me, nor has he convinced my administration."—Crawford, Texas, Aug. 21, 2002

"I'm thrilled to be here in the bread basket of America because it gives me a chance to remind our fellow citizens that we have an advantage here in America—we can feed ourselves."—Stockton, Calif., Aug. 23, 2002 (Thanks to Christopher Baird.)

"There's no bigger task than protecting the homeland of our country."

"The federal government and the state government must not fear programs who change lives, but must welcome those faith-based programs for the embetterment of mankind."—Stockton, Calif., Aug. 23, 2002 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"I love the idea of a school in which people come to get educated and stay in the state in which they're educated."

"There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we're going to do it again."

"I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here."

"I can assure you that, even though I won't be sitting through every single moment of the seminars, nor will the vice president, we will look at the summaries."

"Tommy [Thompson, Health and Human Services secretary,] is a good listener, and he's a pretty good actor, too."

"The trial lawyers are very politically powerful. … But here in Texas we took them on and got some good medical—medical malpractice.""I firmly believe the death tax is good for people from all walks of life all throughout our society."

—Waco, Texas, Aug. 13, 2002

"There was no malfeance involved. This was an honest disagreement about accounting procedures. ... There was no malfeance, no attempt to hide anything."—White House press conference, Washington, D.C., July 8, 2002

"I also understand how tender the free enterprise system can be."—White House press conference, Washington, D.C., July 9, 2002

"Over 75 percent of white Americans own their home, and less than 50 percent of Hispanos and African Americans don't own their home. And that's a gap, that's a homeownership gap. And we've got to do something about it."—Cleveland, Ohio, July 1, 2002

"Whether you're here by birth, or whether you're in America by choice, you contribute to the vitality of our life. And for that, we are grateful."—Washington, D.C., May 17, 2002

"I'd rather have them sacrificing on behalf of our nation than, you know, endless hours of testimony on congressional hill."—National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland, June 4, 2002

"We're working with Chancellor Schröder on what's called 10-plus-10-over-10: $10 billion from the U.S.,$10 billion from other members of the G7 over a 10-year period, to help Russia securitize the dismantling—the dismantled nuclear warheads."—Berlin, Germany, May 23, 2002

"Do you have blacks, too?"—To Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2001

"This is a nation that loves our freedom, loves our country."—Washington, D.C, May 17, 2002

"The public education system in America is one of the most important foundations of our democracy. After all, it is where children from all over America learn to be responsible citizens, and learn to have the skills necessary to take advantage of our fantastic opportunistic society."—Santa Clara, Calif., May 1, 2002

"After all, a week ago, there were—Yasser Arafat was boarded up in his building in Ramallah, a building full of, evidently, German peace protestors and all kinds of people. They're now out. He's now free to show leadership, to lead the world."—Washington, D.C., May 2, 2002 (Thanks to M. Bateman.)

"This foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating."—as quoted by the New York Daily News, April 23, 2002

"I want to thank the dozens of welfare to work stories, the actual examples of people who made the firm and solemn commitment to work hard to embetter themselves."—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2002 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"And so, in my State of the—my State of the Union—or state—my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation—I asked Americans to give 4,000 years—4,000 hours over the next—the rest of your life—of service to America. That's what I asked—4,000 hours." —Bridgeport, Conn., April 9, 2002

"It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber."—Washington, D.C., April 10, 2002

"For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times."—Tokyo, Japan, Feb. 18, 2002

"We've tripled the amount of money—I believe it's from $50 million up to $195 million available."—Lima, Peru, March 23, 2002

"We've got pockets of persistent poverty in our society, which I refuse to declare defeat—I mean, I refuse to allow them to continue on. And so one of the things that we're trying to do is to encourage a faith-based initiative to spread its wings all across America, to be able to capture this great compassionate spirit."—O'Fallon, Mo., Mar. 18, 2002

"There's nothing more deep than recognizing Israel's right to exist. That's the most deep thought of all. ... I can't think of anything more deep than that right."—Washington, D.C., March 13, 2002

"I understand that the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region."—Washington, D.C., March 13, 2002

"The suicide bombings have increased. There's too many of them."—Albuquerque, N.M., Aug. 15, 2001

"Brie and cheese."—Taunting a reporter who recently spent time on the West Coast, Crawford, Texas, Aug. 23, 2001

"You'll hear people say it's racist to test. Folks, it's racist not to test. Because guess who gets shuffled through the system oftentimes? Children whose parents don't speak English as a first language, inner-city kids. It's so much easier to quit on somebody than to remediate."—Referring to his education bill, Independence, Mo., Aug. 21, 2001 (Thanks to Julie Reagan.)

"One of the interesting initiatives we've taken in Washington, D.C., is we've got these vampire-busting devices. A vampire is a—a cell deal you can plug in the wall to charge your cell phone."—Denver, Aug. 14, 2001

"There's a lot of people in the Middle East who are desirous to get into the Mitchell process. And—but first things first. The—these terrorist acts and, you know, the responses have got to end in order for us to get the framework—the groundwork—not framework, the groundwork to discuss a framework for peace, to lay the—all right."—Referring to former Sen. George Mitchell's report on Middle East peace, Crawford, Texas, Aug. 13, 2001 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the—in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen."—Crawford, Texas, Aug, 13, 2001 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"You saw the president yesterday. I thought he was very forward-leaning, as they say in diplomatic nuanced circles."—Referring to his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Rome, July 23, 2001 (Thanks to Alex Hernandez.)

''I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe—I believe what I believe is right."—Rome, July 22, 2001

"I can't tell you what it's like to be in Europe, for example, to be talking about the greatness of America. But the true greatness of America are the people."—Visiting the Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C., July 2, 2001

"Well, it's an unimaginable honor to be the president during the Fourth of July of this country. It means what these words say, for starters. The great inalienable rights of our country. We're blessed with such values in America. And I—it's—I'm a proud man to be the nation based upon such wonderful values."—Visiting the Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C., July 2, 2001

"I want to thank you for coming to the White House to give me an opportunity to urge you to work with these five senators and three congressmen, to work hard to get this trade promotion authority moving. The power that be, well most of the power that be, sits right here."—Washington, D.C., June 18, 2001

"We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease."—Gothenburg, Sweden, June 14, 2001

"I haven't had a chance to talk, but I'm confident we'll get a bill that I can live with if we don't."—Referring to the McCain-Kennedy patients' bill of rights, Brussels, Belgium, June 13, 2001

"Can't living with the bill means it won't become law."—Referring to the McCain-Kennedy patients' bill of rights, Brussels, Belgium, June 13, 2001

"Russia is no longer our enemy and therefore we shouldn't be locked into a Cold War mentality that says we keep the peace by blowing each other up. In my attitude, that's old, that's tired, that's stale."—Des Moines, Iowa, June 8, 2001

"Anyway, I'm so thankful, and so gracious—I'm gracious that my brother Jeb is concerned about the hemisphere as well."—Miami, Fla., June 4, 2001

"It's important for young men and women who look at the Nebraska champs to understand that quality of life is more than just blocking shots."—Remarks to the University of Nebraska women's volleyball team, the 2001 national champions, Washington, D.C., May 31, 2001

"Our nation must come together to unite."—Tampa, Fla., June 4, 2001

"So on behalf of a well-oiled unit of people who came together to serve something greater than themselves, congratulations."—Remarks to the University of Nebraska women's volleyball team, the 2001 national champions, Washington, D.C., May 31, 2001

"If a person doesn't have the capacity that we all want that person to have, I suspect hope is in the far distant future, if at all."—Remarks to the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Institute, Washington, D.C., May 22, 2001

"Thirdly, the explorationists are willing to only move equipment during the winter, which means they'll be on ice roads, and remove the equipment as the ice begins to melt, so that the fragile tundra is protected."—Conestoga, Pa., May 18, 2001

"Presidents, whether things are good or bad, get the blame. I understand that."—Washington, D.C., May 11, 2001 (Thanks to Jay Schlossberg.)

"For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it."—Philadelphia, May 14, 2001 (Thanks to John Brooks.)

"There's no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead."—Washington, D.C., May 11, 2001

"But I also made it clear to [Vladimir Putin] that it's important to think beyond the old days of when we had the concept that if we blew each other up, the world would be safe."—Washington, D.C., May 1, 2001 (Thanks to Gene Mosher.)

"Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend theirself."—On how far we'd be willing to go to defend Taiwan, Good Morning America, April 25, 2001

"First, we would not accept a treaty that would not have been ratified, nor a treaty that I thought made sense for the country."—On the Kyoto accord in an interview with the Washington Post, April 24, 2001

"It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce."—Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

"Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."—Declining to answer reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

"We must have the attitude that every child in America—regardless of where they're raised or how they're born—can learn."—New Britain, Conn., April 18, 2001 (Thanks to Eric Beerbohm.)

"It is time to set aside the old partisan bickering and finger-pointing and name-calling that comes from freeing parents to make different choices for their children."—Remarks on "parental empowerment in education," Washington, D.C., April 12, 2001 (Thanks to J.R. Taylor.)

I think we're making progress. We understand where the power of this country lay. It lays in the hearts and souls of Americans. It must lay in our pocketbooks. It lays in the willingness for people to work hard. But as importantly, it lays in the fact that we've got citizens from all walks of life, all political parties, that are willing to say, I want to love my neighbor. I want to make somebody's life just a little bit better."—Concord Middle School, Concord, N.C., April 11, 2001

"This administration is doing everything we can to end the stalemate in an efficient way. We're making the right decisions to bring the solution to an end."—Washington, D.C., April 10, 2001

"The Senate needs to leave enough money in the proposed budget to not only reduce all marginal rates, but to eliminate the death tax, so that people who build up assets are able to transfer them from one generation to the next, regardless of a person's race."—Washington, D.C., April 5, 2001

"It would be helpful if we opened up ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). I think it's a mistake not to. And I would urge you all to travel up there and take a look at it, and you can make the determination as to how beautiful that country is."—Press conference, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2001

"I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and Hispanically."—Radio-Television Correspondents Association dinner, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2001

"And we need a full affront on an energy crisis that is real in California and looms for other parts of our country if we don't move quickly."—Press conference, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2001


"I assured the prime minister, my administration will work hard to lay the foundation of peace in the Middle—to work with our nations in the Middle East, give peace a chance. Secondly, I told him that our nation will not try to force peace, that we'll facilitate peace and that we will work with those responsible for a peace."—Photo opportunity with Ariel Sharon, Washington, D.C., March 20, 2001 (Thanks to Scott Beber.)

"There are some monuments where the land is so widespread, they just encompass as much as possible. And the integral part of the—the precious part, so to speak—I guess all land is precious, but the part that the people uniformly would not want to spoil, will not be despoiled. But there are parts of the monument lands where we can explore without affecting the overall environment."—Media round table, Washington, D.C. March 13, 2001

"A lot of times in the rhetoric, people forget the facts. And the facts are that thousands of small businesses—Hispanically owned or otherwise—pay taxes at the highest marginal rate."—to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; Washington, D.C., March 19, 2001

"But the true threats to stability and peace are these nations that are not very transparent, that hide behind the—that don't let people in to take a look and see what they're up to. They're very kind of authoritarian regimes. The true threat is whether or not one of these people decide, peak of anger, try to hold us hostage, ourselves; the Israelis, for example, to whom we'll defend, offer our defenses; the South Koreans."—Media roundtable, Washington, D.C., March 13, 2001 (Thanks to Peter Sagal)

"I do think we need for a troop to be able to house his family. That's an important part of building morale in the military."—Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, March 12, 2001

"I suspect that had my dad not been president, he'd be asking the same questions: How'd your meeting go with so-and-so? … How did you feel when you stood up in front of the people for the State of the Union Address—state of the budget address, whatever you call it."—Interview with the Washington Post, March 9, 2001

"I think there is some methodology in my travels." —Washington, D.C., March 5, 2001

"I'm also honored to be here with the speaker of the House—just happens to be from the state of Illinois. I'd like to describe the speaker as a trustworthy man. He's the kind of fellow who says when he gives you his word he means it. Sometimes that doesn't happen all the time in the political process."—Chicago, March 6, 2001 (Thanks to Gary Belkin.)

"Ann and I will carry out this equivocal message to the world: Markets must be open."—Swearing-in ceremony for Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, Washington, D.C., March 2, 2001

"Of all states that understands local control of schools, Iowa is such a state."—Council Bluffs, Iowa, Feb. 28, 2001 (Thanks to Peter Sagal)

"Those of us who spent time in the agricultural sector and in the heartland, we understand how unfair the death penalty is."—Omaha, Neb., Feb. 28, 2001

"My pan plays down an unprecedented amount of our national debt."—Budget address to Congress, Feb. 27, 2001

"The budget caps were busted, mightily so. And we are reviewing with people like Judd Gregg from New Hampshire and others some budgetary reform measures that will reinstate—you know, possibly reinstate budgetary discipline. But the caps no longer—the caps, I guess they're there. But they didn't mean much."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 5, 2001 (Thanks to Ehren Meditz)

"I have said that the sanction regime is like Swiss cheese—that meant that they weren't very effective."—White House press conference, Washington, D.C., Feb. 22, 2001

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.''—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001

"Home is important. It's important to have a home."—Crawford, Texas, Feb. 18, 2001

"One reason I like to highlight reading is, reading is the beginnings of the ability to be a good student. And if you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams; it's going to be hard to go to college. So when your teachers say, read—you ought to listen to her."—Nalle Elementary School, Washington, D.C., Feb 9, 2001

"It's good to see so many friends here in the Rose Garden. This is our first event in this beautiful spot, and it's appropriate we talk about policy that will affect people's lives in a positive way in such a beautiful, beautiful part of our national—really, our national park system, my guess is you would want to call it."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 8, 2001

"We're concerned about AIDS inside our White House—make no mistake about it."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 7, 2001

"I appreciate that question because I, in the state of Texas, had heard a lot of discussion about a faith-based initiative eroding the important bridge between church and state."—Question and answer session with the press, Jan. 29, 2001 (Thanks to Tim Santry.)

"I confirmed to the prime minister that we appreciate our friendship."—After meeting with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of Canada, Feb. 5, 2001

"There's no such thing as legacies. At least, there is a legacy, but I'll never see it."—To Catholic leaders at the White House, Jan. 31, 2001

"I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2001

"My pro-life position is I believe there's life. It's not necessarily based in religion. I think there's a life there, therefore the notion of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness."—Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 23, 2001

"Then I went for a run with the other dog and just walked. And I started thinking about a lot of things. I was able to—I can't remember what it was. Oh, the inaugural speech, started thinking through that."—Pre-inaugural interview with U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 22, 2001 issue

"Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment."—Interview with the New York Times, Jan. 14, 2001 (Thanks to Rachael Contorer.)

"The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants."—Interview with the New York Times, Jan. 14, 2001

"I'm hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure."—Interview with the Associated Press, Jan. 18, 2001 (Thanks to M. Bateman.)

"If he's—the inference is that somehow he thinks slavery is a—is a noble institution I would—I would strongly reject that assumption—that John Ashcroft is a open-minded, inclusive person."—NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw, Jan. 14, 2001

"She's just trying to make sure Anthony gets a good meal—Antonio."—On Laura Bush inviting Justice Antonin Scalia to dinner at the White House. NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw, Jan. 14, 2001

"I want it to be said that the Bush administration was a results-oriented administration, because I believe the results of focusing our attention and energy on teaching children to read and having an education system that's responsive to the child and to the parents, as opposed to mired in a system that refuses to change, will make America what we want it to be—a literate country and a hopefuller country."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 11, 2001

"I would have to ask the questioner. I haven't had a chance to ask the questioners the question they've been questioning. On the other hand, I firmly believe she'll be a fine secretary of labor. And I've got confidence in Linda Chavez. She is a—she'll bring an interesting perspective to the Labor Department."—Austin, Texas, Jan. 8, 2001

"I do remain confident in Linda. She'll make a fine labor secretary. From what I've read in the press accounts, she's perfectly qualified."—Austin, Texas, Jan. 8, 2001

"I mean, these good folks are revolutionizing how businesses conduct their business. And, like them, I am very optimistic about our position in the world and about its influence on the United States. We're concerned about the short-term economic news, but long-term I'm optimistic. And so, I hope investors, you know—secondly, I hope investors hold investments for periods of time—that I've always found the best investments are those that you salt away based on economics."—Austin, Texas, Jan. 4, 2001

"The person who runs FEMA is someone who must have the trust of the president. Because the person who runs FEMA is the first voice, often times, of someone whose life has been turned upside down hears from."—Austin, Texas, Jan. 4, 2001

"She is a member of a labor union at one point."—Announcing his nomination of Linda Chavez as secretary of labor. Austin, Texas, Jan. 2, 2001

"Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods."—Austin, Texas, Dec. 20, 2000

"I also have picked a secretary for Housing and Human Development. Mel Martinez from the state of Florida."—Austin, Texas, Dec. 20, 2000

"Let me put it to you this way, I am not a revengeful person."— Interview with Time magazine in the Dec. 25, 2000, issue.

"I am mindful of the difference between the executive branch and the legislative branch. I assured all four of these leaders that I know the difference, and that difference is they pass the laws and I execute them."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2000

"The great thing about America is everybody should vote."—Austin, Texas, Dec. 8, 2000

"Dick Cheney and I do not want this nation to be in a recession. We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work."—60 Minutes II, Dec. 5, 2000

"I knew it might put him in an awkward position that we had a discussion before finality has finally happened in this presidential race."

—Describing a phone call to Sen. John Breaux. Crawford, Texas, Dec. 2, 2000

"As far as the legal hassling and wrangling and posturing in Florida, I would suggest you talk to our team in Florida led by Jim Baker."—Crawford, Texas, Nov. 30, 2000

"The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law."—Austin, Texas, Nov. 22, 2000

"They misunderestimated me."—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

"Think about that. Two hundred and eighty-five new or expanded programs, $2 trillion more in new spending, and not one new bureaucrat to file out the forms or answer the phones?"—Minneapolis, Nov. 1, 2000

"They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it's some kind of federal program."—St. Charles, Mo., Nov. 2, 2000

"They said, 'You know, this issue doesn't seem to resignate with the people.' And I said, you know something? Whether it resignates or not doesn't matter to me, because I stand for doing what's the right thing, and what the right thing is hearing the voices of people who work."—Portland, Ore., Oct. 31, 2000

"Anyway, after we go out and work our hearts out, after you go out and help us turn out the vote, after we've convinced the good Americans to vote, and while they're at it, pull that old George W. lever, if I'm the one, when I put my hand on the Bible, when I put my hand on the Bible, that day when they swear us in, when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not—to uphold the laws of the land."—Toledo, Ohio, Oct. 27, 2000

"It's your money. You paid for it."—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

"That's a chapter, the last chapter of the 20th, 20th, the 21st century that most of us would rather forget. The last chapter of the 20th century. This is the first chapter of the 21st century. "—On the Lewinsky scandal, Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

Advances in Phonauralalchemy

The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. -- Gorgias, Encomium of Helen

Right from the very beginning of Encomium, Gorgias promises to replace the falsehoods told about Helen with the truth. In saying so, is he being truthful with us about his true intention? In fact, he goes on to imply that the worth of all speech is best measured not by its truth value but its practical efficacy -- in particular its contribution to the flourishing of the soul. And his discourse on Helen exemplifies this implication. That speech can be good or bad as well as true or false is the main point of the simile Gorgias draws, likening the relationship between discourse and the soul to that between drugs and the body. Speeches, like drugs, possess the power to cause changes: whereas drugs affect the body, discourses act on the soul. Moreover, different kinds of speech produce different effects, and in this too it is like drugs, some of which "bring an end to disease and others to life ... some cause fear ... and some bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion." Drugs are distinguished according to whether they are good or bad for the body, and the implication is that speeches ought to be evaluated according whether they are good or bad for the soul -- not whether they are true or false. As a further development of implications of this simile, Gorgias invites us to imagine a physician of the soul whose treatments consist of discourses that allow the soul to evaluate things differently. Both a medical and a soul doctor pursue a profession in which something of great value and that is irreplaceable is at stake. And the form taken by the knowledge of medicine and that of efficacious discourse is similar: both are practical not theoretical, concerned with useful knowledge rather than objective truth. That is, knowing which discourses are good for the soul and which are bad requires experience as well as study, skills as well as ideas, and innate talent as well as rigorous training.

But who is the physician of the soul? The answer seems to be: the rhetorician, the one who dispenses words in ways that make souls flourish. "I have by means of speech removed disgrace from a woman." Gorgias asserts that spoken words in a sentence, the act of speech, a speech act , can actually do things as well as assert truths, a performance that can change a state of affairs. The right words must be selected in the same manner that a doctor chooses the correct instrument for a surgical procedure. In this case, speech is meant to be a kind of instrument in the hand of a skilled surgeon of the soul. The speech act becomes an operation that eradicates dementia of the soul: the soul of a people as well as Helen’s. By restoring the good name and character of a woman who is also a central historical figure, he operates with words to re-interpret the people's memory of its past, purging it of disgrace and strengthening its disposition. What Gorgias proposes then is that from the present one is able to re-interpret the past with words and therefor able to actually alter the course of future memories of an immortal soul. And to whose soul is Gorgias ministering? Not Helen's so much as the collective soul of the Greeks. He sees that it is more important to purify Greek’s memory of Helen, than it is to tell the truth about her misfortunes. From this we can see that what is at stake in this case is not truth, but what is good for the immortal soul of a people, a polis, a civilization.

“…To tell the knowing of what they know is right but shows no delight.” Is truth worth nothing, according to Gorgias, if it is not also beneficial or flattering to the soul? I'm not sure. Perhaps goodness and truth are not equal because what is spoken can sometimes be the wrong truth at the wrong time. Gorgias promises to tell the truth of what matters, because truth leavened with goodness allows us to see the world differently. Truth is good when it is fashioned in a way that enhances the soul by putting bad memories in a new light. Perhaps... Gorgias is telling us the truth when he promises to tell us the truth, after all, and perhaps it is true that "what lingers is exactly analogous to what is spoken."


Gorgias' Encomium of Helen
Source: Rosamond Kent Sprague, ed. The Older Sophists: A Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments in Die Fragmente Der Vorsokraticker Edited by Diels-Kranz with a New Edition of Antiphon and of Euthydemus. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1972. 50-54.
Gorgias, the most famous rhetorician of the late fifth-century, composed this display speech as an exhibition of his talents. The brief he sets himself is to free Helen of blame for her part in causing the famed Trojan War through being seduced (or perhaps kidnapped) away from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta, by the Trojan prince Paris (Alexander). Sections 8-14 represent a hymn to the power of rhetoric. MG
(1) What is becoming to a city is manpower, to a body beauty, to a soul wisdom, to an action virtue, to a speech truth, and the opposites of these are unbecoming. Man and woman and speech and deed and city and object should be honored with praise if praiseworthy and incur blame if unworthy, for it is an equal error and mistake to blame the praisable and to praise the blamable. (2) It is the duty of one and the same man both to speak the needful rightly and the refute the unrightfully spoken. Thus it is right to refute those who rebuke Helen, a woman about whom the testimony of inspired poets has become univocal and unanimous as has the ill omen of her name, which has become a reminder of misfortunes. For my part, by introducing some reasoning into my speech, I wish to free the accused of blame and, having reproved her detractors as prevaricators and proved the truth, to free her from their ignorance.
(3) Now it is not unclear, not even to a few, that in nature and in blood the woman who is the subject of this speech is preeminent among preeminent men and women. For it is clear that her mother was Leda, and her father was in fact a god, Zeus, but allegedly a mortal, Tyndareus, of whom the former was shown to be her father because he was and the latter was disproved because he was said to be, and the one was the most powerful of men and the other the Lord of all. (4) Born from such stock, she had godlike beauty, which taking and not mistaking, she kept. In many did she work much desire for her love, and her one body was the cause of bringing together many bodies of men thinking great thoughts for great goals, of whom some had greatness of wealth, some the glory of ancient nobility, some the vigor of personal agility, some command of acquired knowledge. And all came because of a passion which loved to conquer and a love of honor which was unconquered. (5) Who it was and why and how he sailed away, taking Helen as his love, I shall not say. To tell the knowing what they know shows it is right but brings no delight.
Having gone beyond the time once set for my speech, I shall go on to the beginning of my future speech, and I shall set forth the causes through which it is likely that Helen's voyage to Troy should take place. (6) For either by will of Fate and decision of the gods and vote of Necessity did she do what she did, or by force reduced or by words seduced or by love possessed.
Now if through the first, it is right for the responsible one to be held responsible; for god's predetermination cannot be hindered by human premeditation. For it is the nature of things, not for the strong to be hindered by the weak, but for the weaker to be ruled and drawn by the stronger, and for the stronger to lead and the weaker to follow. God is a stronger force than man in might and in wit and in other ways. If then one must place blame on Fate and on a god, one must free Helen from disgrace.
(7) But if she was raped by violence and illegally assaulted and unjustly insulted, it is clear that the raper, as the insulter, did the wronging, and the raped, as the insulted, did the suffering. It is right then for the barbarian who undertook a barbaric undertaking in word and law and deed to meet with blame in word, exclusion in law, and punishment in deed. And surely it is proper for a woman raped and robbed of her country and deprived of her loved ones to be pitied rather than pilloried. He did the dread deeds; she suffered them. It is just therefore to pity her but to hate him.
(8) But if it was speech which persuaded her and deceived her heart, not even to this is it difficult to make an answer and to banish blame as follows. Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity. I shall show how this is the case, since (9) it is necessary to offer proof to the opinion of my hearers: I both deem and define all poetry as speech with meter. Fearful shuddering and tearful pity and grievous longing come upon its hearers, and at the actions and physical sufferings of others in good fortunes and in evil fortunes, through the agency of words, the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own. But come, I shall turn from one argument to another. (10) Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft. There have been discovered two arts of witchcraft and magic: one consists of errors of soul and the other of deceptions of opinion. (11) All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument. For if all men on all subjects had both memory of things past and awareness of things present and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not be similarly similar, since as things are now it is not easy for them to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future. So that on most subjects most men take opinion as counselor to their soul, but since opinion is slippery and insecure it casts those employing it into slippery and insecure successes. (12) What cause then prevents the conclusion that Helen similarly, against her will, might have come under the influence of speech, just as if ravished by the force of the mighty? For it was possible to see how the force of persuasion prevails; persuasion has the form of necessity, but it does not have the same power. For speech constrained the soul, persuading it which it persuaded, both to believe the things said and to approve the things done. The persuader, like a constrainer, does the wrong and the persuaded, like the constrained, in speech is wrongly charged. (13) To understand that persuasion, when added to speech, is wont also to impress the soul as it wishes, one must study: first, the words of Astronomers who, substituting opinion for opinion, taking away one but creating another, make what is incredible and unclear seem true to the eyes of opinion; then, second, logically necessary debates in which a single speech, written with art but not spoken with truth, bends a great crowd and persuades; and, third, the verbal disputes of philosophers in which the swiftness of thought is also shown making the belief in an opinion subject to easy change. (14) The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions form the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.
(15) It has been explained that if she was persuaded by speech she did not do wrong but was unfortunate. I shall discuss the fourth cause in a fourth passage. For if it was love which did all these things, there will be no difficulty in escaping the charge of the sin which is alleged to have taken place. For the things we see do not have the nature which we wish them to have, but the nature which each actually has. Through sight the soul receives an impression even in its inner features. (16) When belligerents in war buckle on their warlike accouterments of bronze and steel, some designed for defense, others for offense, if the sight sees this, immediately it is alarmed and it alarms the soul, so that often men flee, panic stricken from future danger as though it were present. For strong as is the habit of obedience to the law, it is ejected by fear resulting from sight, which coming to a man causes him to be indifferent both to what is judged honorable because of the law and to the advantage to be derived from victory. (17) It has happened that people, after having seen frightening sights, have also lost presence of mind for the present moment; in this way fear extinguishes and excludes thought. And many have fallen victim to useless labor and dread diseases and hardly curable madnesses. In this way the sight engraves upon the mind images of things which have been seen. And many frightening impressions linger, and what lingers is exactly analogous to what is spoken. (18) Moreover, whenever pictures perfectly create a single figure and form from many colors and figures, they delight the sight, while the creation of statues and the production of works of art furnish a pleasant sight to the eyes. Thus it is natural for the sight to grieve for some things and to long for others, and much love and desire for many objects and figures is engraved in many men. (19) If, therefore, the eye of Helen, pleased by the figure of Alexander, presented to her soul eager desire and contest of love, what wonder? If, being a god, Love has the divine power of the gods, how could a lesser being reject and refuse it? But if it is a disease of human origin and a fault of the soul, it should not be blamed as a sin, but regarded as an affliction. For she came, as she did come, caught in the net of Fate, not by the plans of the mind, and by the constraints of love, not by the devices of art.
How then can one blame of Helen as unjust, since she is utterly acquitted of all charge, whether she did what she did through falling in love or persuaded by speech or ravished by force or constrained by divine constraint?
I have by means of speech removed disgrace from a woman; I have observed the procedure which I set up at the beginning of the speech; I have tried to end the injustice of blame and the ignorance of opinion; I wished to write a speech which would be a praise of Helen and a diversion to myself.

The First Dark Galaxy?

By Ken Croswell

Published on Astronomy.com (February 18, 2005).

A cloud of gas in the Virgo cluster may be the first dark galaxy ever found, say astronomers in Britain, Australia, Italy, and France. The mysterious object has one-tenth the Milky Way's mass but consists of hydrogen gas and dark matter--with no detectable stars.

“If we can pin down what it is, it'll be an interesting clue to galaxy formation," says Martin Rees of Cambridge University, who was not part of the discovery team. "It could be a dark halo where, for some reason, some of the gas was swept out or the gas is more spread out than in a typical galaxy." According to current ideas of galaxy formation, dark-matter halos merged in the early universe; gas settled into these dark halos and turned into stars, thereby giving birth to luminous galaxies like the Milky Way.

Robert Minchin, Jonathan Davies, and Michael Disney of Cardiff University in Wales and their colleagues recently made follow-up radio and optical observations of the object, which they first spotted five years ago. Named Virgo HI 21, the cloud was discovered because its hydrogen atoms emit radio energy at a characteristic 21-centimeter wavelength. The waves were first detected by a radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in England, then by the Arecibo facility in Puerto Rico.

The redshift of the 21-centimeter radiation indicates the cloud resides in the Virgo cluster of galaxies. The Virgo cluster marks the center of the Local Supercluster, the enormous structure of galaxies whose fringes include the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.

If the cloud is at the Virgo cluster's distance of 52 million light-years, it is roughly 50,000 light-years across, about half the diameter of the Milky Way's starry disk. The strength of the 21-centimeter radiation indicates the cloud harbors 200 million solar masses of atomic hydrogen--about one-tenth the Milky Way's supply.

But the cloud's total mass is much greater, implying that, like most galaxies, including our own, it consists primarily of dark matter. Astronomers think dark matter consists of exotic subatomic particles that exert gravitational force but do not otherwise interact with ordinary matter.

Minchin's team estimates the cloud's mass is at least 90 billion Suns. The astronomers reached this conclusion because hydrogen atoms in the cloud move relative to one another at 220 kilometers per second (about half a million miles per hour). If the cloud had less than 90 billion solar masses, its gravity would be too weak to hold on to such speedy atoms.

A normal Virgo galaxy having such a mass should shine at 12th magnitude and be easy to see. But the astronomers used the 2.5-meter Isaac Newton Telescope in the Canary Islands to obtain deep images at blue, red, and near-infrared wavelengths--and failed to see a galaxy. This means the object emits no more than 100 million solar luminosities. For comparison, the Milky Way gives off over 100 times more light than this. The mass-to-blue-light ratio of the object is over 500--at least 10 times that of the Milky Way.

"This may be a dark galaxy that has failed to form stars because the low disk surface density prevents fragmentation of the gas," write Minchin's team.

Previously, astronomers have suggested galaxies cannot give birth to stars in regions where the surface density of gas falls below 1020 hydrogen atoms per square centimeter--about the area of one side of a sugar cube--because the gas is too diffuse to clump together and form stars. The Virgo cloud's mean density is about half this threshold, 4 x 1019 atoms per square centimeter.

Martin Rees would like to know whether the dark object is rotating faster than the typical galaxy. "Is this a system where the gas has more angular momentum than average?" he asks.

"There are known to be a class of galaxies which have a low surface brightness--there's one called Malin 1, for instance--and they are perhaps galaxies which have an above-average spin, and therefore the disks end up with a larger radius and a lower surface density than average,” explains Rees. “One question is whether a system like this could be a more extreme version, where the halo was spun up much more than average; therefore, the disk doesn't get as small as average and has a surface density below the threshold that triggers star formation."

If Virgo HI 21 is a dark galaxy, its existence does not significantly raise the universe's estimated mass. Considering the volume of space the team and other astronomers have searched, Minchin and his colleagues say the quantity of matter in such dark galaxies probably amounts to only about 1 percent of that needed to stop and reverse the universe's expansion.

Astronomers have reported discoveries of other dark galaxies in the past--but these claims met with equally dark fates. In 1989, for example, radio astronomers Riccardo Giovanelli at Arecibo and Martha Haynes at Cornell University found a hydrogen cloud in Virgo that seemed to be starless. They claimed it was a protogalaxy, but optical observations soon revealed it as a small irregular galaxy.

Minchin and his colleagues hope their dark galaxy fares better. Their paper, "A Dark Hydrogen Cloud in the Virgo Cluster," will appear in a future issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Comments Rees: "I think it's an interesting observation and a clearly written paper where they are aware of all of the obvious uncertainties because, as they say themselves, there have been lots and lots of searches for these so-called unborn galaxies, and the earlier candidates have either proved to have stars in them or proved to be disrupted galaxies, and they've tried to rule out those options in this case."

Ken Croswell is an astronomer in Berkeley, California, and author of a book on cosmology, The Universe at Midnight.

The Key of Time

List ye, O Man. Take of my wisdom.
Learn of his deep hidden mysteries of space.
Learn of the THOUGHT that grew in the abyss,
bringing Order and Harmony in space.

Know ye, O man, that all exists
has being only because of the LAW.
Know ye the LAW and ye shall be free,
never be bound by the fetters of night.

Far, through strange spaces, have I journeyed
into the depth of the abyss of time,
until in the end all was revealed.
Know ye that mystery is only mystery
when it is knowledge unknown to man.
When ye have plumbed the heart of all mystery,
knowledge and wisdom will surely be thine.

Seek ye and learn that TIME is the secret
whereby ye may be free of this space.

Long have I, WISDOM, sought wisdom;
aye, and shall seek of eternity's end
for know that ever before me receding
shall move the goal I seek to attain.
Even the LORDS of the CYCLES
know that not yet have THEY reached the goal,
For with all of their wisdom,
they know that TRUTH ever grows.

Once, in a past time, I spoke to the Dweller.
Asked of the mystery of time and space.
Asked him the question that surged in my being,
saying: O Master, what is time?

Then to me spoke HE, the Master:
Know ye, O Thoth, in the beginning
there and VOID and nothingness,
a timeless, spaceless, nothingness.
And into the nothingness came a thought,
purposeful, all-prevading,
and It filled the VOID.
There existed no matter, only force,
a movement, a vortex, or vibration
of the purposeful thought
that filled the VOID.

And I questioned the Master, saying:
Was this thought eternal?
And answered me the DWELLER, Saying:
In the beginning, there was eternal thought,
and for thought to be eternal, time must exist.
So into the all-prevading thought
grew the LAW of TIME.
Aye time which exists through all space,
floating in a smooth, rhythmic movement
that is eternally in a state of fixation.

Time changes not,
but all things change in time.
For time is the force
that holds events separate,
each in its own proper place.
Time is not in motion,
but ye move through time
as your consciousness
moves from one event to another.

Aye, by time yet exist, all in all,
an eternal ONE existence.
Know ye that even though in the time ye are separate,
yet still are ONE, in all times existent.

Ceased then the voice of the DWELLER,
and departed I to ponder on time.
For knew I that in these words lay wisdom
and a way to explore the mysteries of time.

Oft did I ponder the words of the DWELLER.
Then sought I to solve the mystery of time.
Found I that time moves through strange angles.
Yet only by curves could I hope to attain the key
that would give me access to the time-space.
Found I that only by moving upward
and yet again by moving to right-ward
could I be free from the time of the movement.

Forth I came from out of my body,
moved in the movements that changed me in time.
Strange were the sights I saw in my journeys,
many the mysteries that opened to view.
Aye, saw I man's beginning,
learned from the past that nothing is new.

Seek ye, O man, to learn the pathway
that leads through the spaces
that are formed forth in time.

Forget not, O man, with all of thy seeking
that Light is the goal ye shall seek to attain.
Search ye for the Light on thy pathway
and ever for thee the goal shall endure.

Let not thine heart turn ever to darkness.
light let shine Soul be, a Sun on the way.
Know ye that eternal brightness,
ya shall ever find thy Soul hid in Light,
never fettered by bondage or darkness,
ever it shines forth a Sun of the Light.

Aye, know, though hidden in darkness,
your Soul, a spark of the true flame, exists.
Be ye One with the greatest of all Lights.
Find at the SOURCE, the END of thy goal.

Light is life, for without the great Light
nothing can ever exist.
Know ye, that in all formed matter,
the heart of Light always exists.
Aye, even though bound in the darkness,
inherent Light always exists.

Once I stood in the HALLS OF AMENTI
and heard the voice of the LORDS of AMENTI,
saying in tones that rang through the silence,
words of power, mighty and potent.
Chanted they the song of the cycles,
the words that open the path to beyond.
Aye, I saw the great path opened
and looked for the instant into the beyond.
Saw I the movements of the cycles,
vast as the thought of the SOURCE could convey.

Knew I then even Infinity
is moving on to some unthinkable end.
Saw I that the Cosmos is Order
and part of a movement that extends to all space,
a party of an Order of Orders,
constantly moving in a harmony of space.

Saw I the wheeling of cycles
like vast circles across the sky.
Knew I then that all that has being
is growing to meet yet another being
in a far-off grouping of space and of time.

Knew I then that in Words are power
to open the planes that are hidden from man.
Aye, that even in Words lies hidden the key
that will open above and below.

Hark ye, now man, this word I leave with thee.
Use it and ye shall find power in its sound.
Say ye the word:
"ZIN-URU"
and power ye shall find.
Yet must ye understand that man is of Light
and Light is of man.

List ye, O man, and hear a mystery
stranger than all that lies 'neath the Sun.
Know ye, O man, that all space
is filled by worlds within worlds;
aye, one within the other yet separate by Law.

Once in my search for deep buried wisdom,
I opened the door that bars THEM from man.
Called I from the other planes of being,
one who was fairer than the daughters of men.
Aye, I called her from out of the spaces,
to shine as a Light in the world of men.

Used I the drum of the Sertpent.
Wore I the robe of the purple and gold.
Placed on my head, I, the crown of Silver.
Around me the circle of cinnabar shone.
Raised I my arms and cried the invocation
that opens the path to the planes beyond,
cried to the LORDS of the SIGNS in their houses:
Lords of the two horizons,
watchers of the treble gates,
stand ye One at the right and One at the left
as the STAR rises to his throne
and rules over his sign.
Aye, thou dark prince of ARULU,
open the gates of the dim, hidden land
and release her whom ye keep imprisoned.

Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye,
dark Lords and Shining Ones,
and by their secret names,
names which I know and can pronounce,
year ye and obey my will.

Lit I then twith flame my circle
and called HER
in the space-planes beyond.
Daught of Light return from ARULU.

Seven times and seven times
have I passed through the fire.
Food have I not eaten.
Water have I not drunk.
I call thee from ARULU,
from the realms of EKERSHEGAL.
I summon thee, lady of Light.

Then before me rose the dark figures;
aye, the figures of the Lords of Arulu.
Parted they before me
and forth came the Lady of Light.

Free was she now from the LORDS of the night,
free to live in the Light of the earth Sun,
free to live as a child of the Light.

Hear ye and listen, O my children.
Magic is knowledge and only is Law.
Be not afraid of the power within thee
for it follows Law as the stars in the sky.

Know ye that to be without knowledge,
wisdom is magic and not of the Law.
But know ye that ever ye by your knowledge
can approach closer to a place in the Sun.

List ye, my children, follow my teaching.
Be ye ever seeker of Light.
Shine in the world of men all around thee,
a Light on the path that shall shine among men.

Follow ye and learn of my magic.
Know that all force is thine if thou wilt.
Fear not the path that leads thee to knowledge,
but rather shun ye the dark road.

Light is thine, O man, for the taking.
Cast off the fetters and thou shalt be free.
Know ye that they Soul is living in bondage
fettered by fears that hold ye in thrall.

Open thy eyes and see the great SUN-LIGHT.
Be not afraid for all is thine own.
Fear is the LORD of the dark ARULU
to he who never faced the dark fear.
Aye, know that fear has existence
created by those who are bound by their fears.

Shake off thy bondage, O children,
and walk in the Light of the glorious day.
Never turn they thoughts to the darkness
and surely ye shall be One with the Light.

Man is only what he believeth,
a brother of darkness or a child of the Light.
Come though into the Light my Children.
Walk in the pathwaythat lead to the Sun.

Hark ye now, and list to the wisdom.
Use thou the word I have given unto thee.
Use it and surely though shalt find power and wisdom
and Light to walk in the way.
Seek thee and find the key I have given
and ever shalt thou be a Child of the Light.


TABLET XI


THE EMERALD TABLETS

The magic bullet enters the President's back, headed downward at an angle of 17 degrees. It then moves upward in order to leave Kennedy's body from the front of his neck -- his neck wound number two -- where it waits 1.6 seconds, turns right and continues into Connally's body at the rear of his right armpit -- wound number three. Then, the bullet heads downward at an angle of 27 degrees, shattering Connally's fifth rib and leaving from the right side of his chest -- wounds four and five. The bullet continues downward and then enters Connally's right wrist -- wound number six -- shattering the radius bone. It then enters his left thigh -- wound number seven -- from which it later falls out and is found in almost "pristine" condition on a stretcher in a corridor of Parkland Hospital. Magic Bullet then makes talk show circuit...

Busy as a beaver all day, he was as tired as a dog when he hit the hay last night. He thought he would fall into the arms of Morpheus and sleep like a log, but his pad was cold as ice and he tossed and turned and didn’t sleep a wink. Well, to cut a long story short in the wee small hours he hit the deck like a bolt from the blue to get himself a hair of the dog to warm the cockles of his heart, but, as luck would have it, this was more easily said than done because he was fresh out of what the doctor ordered. Make no bones about it; he was really over a barrel. Little did he think he would be without the necessary. He was in a pretty kettle of fish, it goes without saying. Rather than open a new can of worms, he threw in the sponge without further ado and hit the sack to await the Old Sol and another day, another dollar. It was too funny for words, needless to say. You get sick of reading clichés. Sick and tired.

Bremner, Words on Words

Apollo and Daphne:
Bernin’s Negotiation of Classical and Christian Narratives


Bernini's representation of Apollo and Daphne (c. 1622-25) is an explosive and dramatic pictorial of verse, interpreted from Ovid's poetry in the Metamorphoses [1]. The sculpture is a fresh and vivid reconciliation of the classical and religious narratives of redemption and sacrifice, beautifying the notion of chastity. This is the most likely reason that it was the final commission of Cardinal Borghese of Rome. Carved into a single block of stone, this multi-faceted, neo-classical sculpture offers varying perspectives on passion, desire, and pedagogy, to name a few. However, Howard Hibbard tells us that Bernini had one main vantage point in mind: Bernini designed the sculpture to fit its architectural surroundings, intending to make it a part of the viewer’s everyday interaction within its space. The central aim of his method is to make direct sensory interaction with the object inevitable for anyone who comes into contact with the almost unbelievable dynamism of its elusive desire and tempered sensuousness. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the sculpture's subject matter of a Pagan event. To somehow provide a reasonable explanation for the content of this object, as it was curiously commissioned for a church cardinal, this discussion of the sculpture must be prefaced with reference to the classical mythological context. The relationship of the God of Light, Apollo, and the river nymph, Daphne, was fated, sparked by Cupid's arrows, one of love and desire and one of a repellent force. Bernini freezes movement becoming when Daphne's exquisite body changes into the form of a tree at the behest of her father, the river god, Peneus. Her metamorphosis was the instantaneous response to her prayer that her honor be preserved and that she be saved, or redeemed, from the perils of the carnal chase. This mythological theme parallels the Christian narrative of the denial of the flesh, the elevation of God’s will over one’s personal will, as spiritual redemption. But the question is this: how does Bernini achieve in his sculpture the appearance of the dynamic and transformative action of physical transformation? Bernini's task was to break away from the antiquated style of sculpting to offer his innovative manner of illustrating the anatomy in motion, a method that invites the engagement of the viewer's senses at first sight. Hence, Bernini's rendition of Apollo and Daphne is the fusion of both classical and Biblical mythologies. This is to say that the Apollo and Daphne pictorial is a physical object depicting the sensuality of transformation, redemption, and sacrifice, metaphorically presented as “Metamorhoses.”

Bernini thus conveys, in a still visual image, the dynamic motion of a chase and
the appearance of the transfiguration of flesh. Needless to say, the sculpture is made up of several components to form a single verse, if you will. As the metamorphoses of Daphne take shape, it is as if the movements of a concerto are performed simultaneously. Taking into account that Apollo's image has already been borrowed from Leochares' reproduction of the Greek classical ideal, Apollo di Belvedere (circa, 4th c. BC), Daphne's transformation is the real challenge to Bernini. He masterfully uses the marble medium to create negative space between the two figures. When dramatically lit, this negative space blends in with the shadows to create an illusion of volume in an exaggerated chiaroscuro manner. He juxtaposes the smoothness of curving drapery, supple flesh, and fluid motion next to the abrasive textures of roped hair, tree bark, and gnarled branches. In addition to the formal elements of the sculpture, it has a notable realistic quality. The idealistic proportions of Apollo's youthful physique are not only an aesthetic aim of this piece, but as well refer to the significance of the antique model as the ideal form. The flex of his right leg as it steps to the ground and the definition of his pectoral muscles are pleasing to the curious eye, as one can happily imagine what lies beneath the drapery which is about to fall off his rushing body. And if this weren’t seductive enough, Daphne's perfect, pear-shaped breast is elegantly exposed and adds just the right amount of sensuality. Although she is still half tree at this point, that is not fatal to her still-enticing feminine beauty. Her swinging roped braids expand the space around her head while framing the expressive shock of her entrancing face and particularly her alluring open mouth.

Bernini's combination of diagonal and vertical contour lines fashions a beautiful circular space encompassed by and around the form of the two angular movements. Hence, the composition is mainly made up of two movements: the visual entrance and exit of the text. The visual entrance is an inward moving spiral beginning at the feet up toward the bodies, and then to the drapery, moving into the negative space. The exit is a diagonal movement from the feet through the eyes and then out through the arms. The base is fused into the body of the sculpture, making it an anchor for the two figures, thus creating remarkable balance to the composition. From this the base becomes more than a functional prop but emerges as an integral part of the whole. Daphne's feet are rooted into the groundwork, firmly planted into the foundation of the sculpture's anchor. The deliberate forward step of Apollo's right foot is also positioned in the same place securing his posture in motion. His left leg lifted in mid-air forms a slightly arching diagonal slope following up to the reaching arch of Daphne's right arm, which is raised above her head and curving back toward Apollo. This same curving line is repeated with the Apollo's posterior drapery. It moves in line towards the expansive space occupied by the upward swing of Daphne's hair, which has been fixed permanently in the motion of her backward glance. And yet again, the same order of line repeated for a third time with Apollo's right arm and the leaves and branches coming up and over Daphne's head. Hence, the rhyming lines of their still motion create three arches and are no accident in this composition. In Greek mythology, this tripling thematic imagery connotes what is known as the three phases of the moon or the triple goddess[2]. Bernini does several things in this manner. He incorporates meaningful classical motifs and at the same time creates huge volume in the sculpture. Moreover, volume is further enhanced by the illusion of a circular swirling space created around the mass of the two figures. The diagonal line of Apollo's mid-flight pose meets the vertical stretch of Daphne's upward arms and the sweeping movement of her hair at the apex. Apollo's billowing drapery whirling from front to the back of him, and the swing of his reaching arms around to the front of Daphne's torso creates a counter clockwise line. This line shapes a rolling motion around this illusion of upward circular movement creating even more voluminous effects. Bernini has combined Apollo's motioning posture with Daphne's mid-air pose to work together both generating the effect of being in still transition and still in action to create the illusion of the transmutation becoming.

The main perspective of Apollo and Daphne is the metamorphosis, or sudden conversion from one thing to another, in the blink-of-an-eye, one representation of dramatic irony. Bernini's pictorial interpretation of Ovid's poem may also serve as a pedagogical device to benefit women of the church by reminding them of the importance of chastity. Together the two figures, Apollo and Daphne, are depicted as if caught in a space of penultimate interaction just before she stops his power. He almost had her. He was so close that Daphne could feel his breath on the nape of her neck. The viewer can see that Apollo has grasped his beloved and has almost obtained her charms, but he is yet to discover that she has been transformed from chaste to chafing. This is the spectacular moment at which Bernini pulls down the ironic curtain, as he changes the subject to wood. In a Christian context, this message would then convey to women that it would be better to die than to be raped by a heathen invader. In this instance, Bernini metamorphosed her supple flesh into a stiff slab of tree bark, which wraps around her torso covering her pelvis and waistline. Daphne's soft, inviting flesh is now an abrasive tree trunk impervious to any further intrusions. Apollo's delicate grasp around her waist creates a gentle and airy negative space between them. He catches her heart beating just beneath the layer of bark, only to discover his Pyrrhic victory. In this moment, Bernini superbly applies the dramatic irony in Greek mythology to the Biblical tenets of the redemption of the flesh.

Bernini studies both religious and classical values (the church’s adoption of pagan mythology) to successfully render in his sculpture the ideal form juxtaposed to a contorted opposite, as the final commissioned work for Cardinal Borghese of Rome. The sculpture was designed for the Cardinal's private viewing, which, in my opinion, signifies the patron's preferences, values, and aesthetic judgement. The sculpture was originally stationed in the corner of a room in the Villa Borghese, the group protruding from out of the woodwork and set off in dramatic lighting. When one entered from one of two doors a sudden astonishment was the inevitable response. Given the mix of spiritual and secular content, which is a great source of intrigue, this pictorial might also have provoked meditation on the spiritual vs. the material, the redemption of the flesh, if you will. More significantly, it may have served as a concrete model of the role of women at the time, and perhaps illustrated a thesis in the Catholic Church that the preservation of a woman’s chastity is preferable to any adversity. Although it seems that Bernini, and possibly Cardinal Borghese, were more interested in the aesthetic effects than the dramatic meaning. In other words, it may have been the bodies, not the story, that drew their gazes. It is also important to note that this piece depicts not only the idealized male body of Apollo, which is kept very similar to Leochares' antiquated Apollo of Belvedere, but it as well captures the motion of two bodies, male and female, moving with opposed but complementary forces of will – as in the sexual act. That synthesis issues in the dynamic posturing of anatomy in motion, as it were, his own version of visual poetry.

Ovid set for himself in Metamorphoses the aesthetic task of representing dramatic change, persona, passion. But his medium was narrative poetry. In illustrating the Metamorphoses, Bernini represents change in a visual medium involving a spatial relationship. This is far more difficult because visual images, unlike narratives, are static. Bernini gets around this obstacle by masterfully transforming the marble medium from a single block of stone, to fluid drapery and smooth, supple flesh, and then to abrasive petrified wood, by creating distinct volume, contour, and texture. These details are rendered with such genius and extraordinary precision that any encounter with Bernini's Apollo and Daphne is a sensuous delight. Adding to the theme of transfiguration, this pictorial also pairs opposites, contrasting an ironic grouping of one idealized male physique to the gnarled and contorted female form that didn't quite match it. This may suggest that the sculpture celebrates the male body and distorts and defaces the female form. Perhaps the implication is that male anatomy is more aesthetic than that of the female. But this may not be entirely true, as we must consider what the patron's political views and personal tastes might have been at the time. Beyond this, perhaps Bernini suggests a background allegory, the juxtaposition of timeless temporality in space, so to say, the immaterial penetrating the material: the carnal desires of God incarnate qua Apollo tantalized by his near grasp of the nymph and her forbidden fruits. Notwithstanding the Pagan content of the subject, although Apollo is a god, he is also a man and is subject to the bases, i.e. lusts, temptations, that drive men from low to high places of the flesh, and vice versa.

Bernini does not merely interpret Ovid's Metamorphoses. He steals it as he characterizes in his own interpretation a complex synthesis of both religious and classical imagery of chastity, redemption, and sacrifice while isolating the differences of specific values. According to Classical and Christian myths, while the Greeks made their gods in their own image, God made man not only in the image of the gods, but also subject to law. This goes to say that God’s law is the final authority. We must consider whether the patron’s pious, yet apparently not so ascetic, values imposed a limit of poetic license in terms of the moral and social issues at stake.

An interpretive coda: Beyond the physical attributes of aesthetics posited by Hibbard, authoritative ambiguity of the artist’s intention is visible in this work. All intentionalist's fallacies aside, this sculpture’s composition is derived from a classical narrative poem, and its substantive content must be noted with emphasis on intention. One possible idea is the notion of active and reactive forces of will. The piece is reduced to a play on the ambiguities of privileged and fated polarities of man vs. woman, or of personal will vs. state mandated morality, both dependent on the interpreter’s vantage point or worldview. Assuming Biblical exegesis, Apollo and Daphne stands in for a fated mortal dilemma: Historically, because man is compelled by nature, he succumbs to the temptation of woman, so she must redeem her sensuous flesh as punishment for being the beautiful thing, the object of forbidden pleasure. If assumed affirmative, Bernini maintains a hierarchical difference in favor of the Christian representation that (the godless Pagan invader) Apollo is in his fall and (the chaste, faithful) Daphne is in her ascension, redeemed. Assuming the classical text, Apollo has been infected by the vector of Cupid’s love arrow. Once a noble god, now a man incarnate, Apollo’s desire propels him into mortal disgrace and humiliation. This view parallels a Christian ideology and its philosophical and sexual ambiguities are possible reasons that the patron had selected the text. Ultimately, Bernini seamlessly reconstructs meaning despite negotiation of any ambiguities and his flawless aesthetic style remains intact.























----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

[1] The theme of transfiguration in the "blink-of-an-eye" is related to
Ovid, a Roman poet who wrote about the Greek myths. His "Metamorphoses" are poems about how the gods transform things into other things and
how the world (including the world of the gods) is a constant process of
transformation (or metamorphosis).



[2] This motif is tempered in the Hellenistic narrative, however. The
relevance is that it signifies the transformation of the three phases of a
woman: the nymph, the maiden, and the crone.

Renoir and Cassatt: An Opportunity to Look



In this essay we compare Renoir’s La Loge (c. 1875) and Mary Cassatt’s Lady in Black at the Opera (c. 1879), two works painted in the same medium, oil on canvas, and during the same period. First we will consider the overall Gestalt conveyed by the two images, moving from there to a closer look at the formal building blocks of each painting. We then ponder the sexual connotations of the paintings, as well as the ways in which gender or social status represented in them. In a concluding paragraph we return to the erotic charge that can be felt in these works, and we try as well to sum up the implications of our various observations. As we shall see, viewing Cassatt’s painting in light of Renoir’s has the effect of making us sensitive, in a way that we probably would not otherwise be, to the subterranean sexual content of that seemingly so ascetic work.

The paintings’ looks are very different from each other, but the events and settings they depict are identical: figures at the theatre are caught in the act of looking. Both pictures show moments of leisure, theatre life, the act of being seen, and the game of flirtation. Interestingly, the title of Renoir’s painting directs our attention not to the figures but to their circumstances and, perhaps, their intentions and desires. La Loge is a box at the theatre, but it is also a place where intimacies may be exchanged. Imagine a mid-twentieth-century impressionist work called The Drive-In, and we glimpse the range of connotations suggested by La Loge. A dandy’s wandering eye, an alluring, receptive woman seated next to him – it is like a snapshot, where the figures are seemingly caught almost at random rather than being formally posed, and is all the more sexually suggestive for its lack of formality and sense of raw, immediate presence. On the other hand, Lady in Black at the Opera, in which the lady is trying to remain hidden while in the public sphere, seems almost morbid.

To understand these images, we must also examine how our feelings and assumptions about gender roles work to shape the meanings we attribute to them. This is not to say that one must address gender to appreciate these works; we do so in the hope of achieving a more finely-grained understanding of the act of looking – which includes the power to express that act. As we know, the meaning of an artwork can change as its context changes, and “context” includes the period in which it is viewed and the question of whether or not the viewer’s period coincides with the work’s. Cassatt’s painting presumably speaks differently to a twenty-first century Californian than it did to nineteenth century frequenters of the Paris Salon. One strives not to be anachronistic, but we cannot help reacting to a painting with the ideas and perceptual habits that are ours. That is why we feel justified in noting – aware that it might be considered somewhat fantastic – that the negative space within the contours of the lady in black’s profile, forearm, and supported elbow forms what appears to be an image of a circumcised penis. We are not saying that Cassatt intended this image, of course. It may be quite invisible to someone who is not looking for it. But it is highly visible to one whose senses have been aroused by the erotic atmosphere of La Loge. The question of the penis will arise again.

Cassatt’s Lady in Black is an elliptical, sweeping, circular composition forming a lazy X of curving diagonals creating a background element of stirring action. The paint is a bit more tightly applied than in Renoir’s Loge, with a strong contrast of light and dark elements. There is a general quality of portraiture in the piece. The way it is cropped, with the figure in stark profile, directs our attention to the subject’s intense concentration, opera glasses in hand, on the spectacle before her. The juxtaposition of the indistinct blackness that forms virtually the entire lower right diagonal of the painting with the sweeping light and depth of the space that makes up the upper left introduces a powerful element of disorientation. The lines of the “X” meet at the locus of this disorienting contrast, namely the lady, whom, we discover, is much more than she appears. She appears to be unaccompanied, although we cannot say for sure whether she really is or whether this only seems to be the case as a result of the way the artist has composed the scene. The woman is of an age and is dressed in a way that suggests she is a spinster. The only exposed flesh, her face, emerges from out of the formless background to assume an aspect of precisely concentrated clarity. Thus framed, she gazes through her glasses at something in the open space of the theatre beyond the frame of the picture. Because we see her as unattended, and because she appears to ignore the viewer as well as other lookers, we feel inclined to say that she has adopted a masculine stance, in so far as it is right to associate masculinity with the assertion of the right to look without being looked at. From this we can infer that this woman is the flaneur, the dandy, the invisible eye wandering through the crowd. With her binoculars, she sees “farther” than others do, as if she occupies the future as opposed to the present that is inhabited by those around her and also, perhaps, by us. Even so, despite the subject’s distance from the others (and perhaps from us), all are involved in acts of looking. As she focuses on a distant goal, object, or desire, from a distance men focus on her. But she remains indifferent to the bold man in the middle background, who appears to be straining to see her through his binoculars. Does he desire her? Or is he merely curious? Is it legitimate to imagine that she disdains to notice him out of a refusal to be made into a mere spectacle, like the one on stage? Subdued, asexual, withdrawn, and disinterested, in her dark and unflattering dress, she seems to melt into the background – only to highlight the sharp clarity of a profile that, confident and self-composed, becomes the center of the composition.

Renoir’s La Loge is a diamond shape composition, with thick and heavy black and white vertical lines that seem to move glacially, if at all, compared to the dynamism of Cassatt’s Lady in Black. Renoir applies the paint in thick creamy swabs, loosely, as if in slow motion or rather freeze-frame – an invitation to look (and possibly more). The feathery brushstrokes are apparent, and the image is magnified as if seen through opera glasses, up close, blurred, and slightly out of focus. The woman, rendered in thick ribbons of black and white, occupies the foreground and most of the composition. Her arms amply spread, she displays an attitude that seems almost smug: she might want to know you, and is interested in what is happening now. She wants badly, we surmise, to be desired, or at least to be desirable. The delicate, pink, flesh-toned flowers we see in her hair, her fan, and her chest signal her fecundity and direct our attention to the glistening pearls draped loosely over her pillowy breasts and around her neck, the entire “scene” exposed frontally as if it were being offered at a buffet. The frothy texture of impasto paint lends a translucent quality to the surface of her flesh adding a butter-cream frosting appearance to the comely pink flowers at the plunging neckline of her open bodice. This chiffon texture of paint is like that of fresh icing over a Bundt cake – sweet, luscious, and eminently edible. Inviting your gaze, passive, open, receptive, she is addressing the viewer, you, and ignores the man who is sitting closely behind her and who seems stiff and rigidly composed by comparison: an erection prodding for a response. His figure composes a voluminous diagonal line, thrusting behind her and rhyming, as it were, with the arrow pattern that forms in her left sleeve. His back is straight and narrow; his left arm is drawn upward in his rippled evening jacket. While the girl leans forward into the light, illuminating her face, the man leans back, plunging his face into relative darkness that (together with his opera glasses) obscures the true direction of his gaze, though not disguising his pursed, anticipating lips. Pretending indifference to his companion’s open flirtation with – us?, he ostentatiously attends to other interests, if not the spectacle, then perhaps the ladies. Restrained, awkward, posturing, stiff, and erect, in formal dress that appears to be one size too small, rumpling around lapel and chest, a kind of strait jacket, he is finally no more than fussy – in other words, not much fun. It is no wonder that his date is flashing a “come hither” look our way. The juxtaposition of open female receptivity with frustrated, fidgeting masculine prissiness reflects, we are certain Sigmund Freud would agree, a psychological disposition of sexual voyeurism and repressed desires. Our eyes flit about the man, but settle on the woman. She is appetizingly forward, open, and inviting, but her invitation is extended not to her companion but to you. All of these nuances and innuendoes are put together in an image which is, we are inclined to imagine, an example of sophisticated pornography of the day.

The differences between these two works of art extend to differences between the artists. On one hand we have Mary Cassatt, an affluent American woman of decorum, who is invited by the Impressionists to work and show with them in Paris. And on the other hand, we have a middle-class Parisian man, Auguste Renoir. As we now know, a man painting a woman was so ordinary, in their day, as to go unremarked, whereas a woman painting anything at all was almost unheard-of. La Loge is clearly Renoir’s vision of an ideal lustful encounter, real or imagined (or both). This was an appropriate and acceptable way for a man to portray a modern, coquettish woman who seems to be on the verge of slipping out of her escort’s reigns. The subject of Cassatt’s painting is quite respectable by comparison. Cassatt’s affluence, connections, and decorum come through her art in her choice to portray a woman at a moment of change in how men and women are seen – a somewhat combative stance given that women painters would have been under pressure to portray women as they were typically portrayed by men. In other words, what Renoir can do with a woman and what Cassatt can do with one, as artistic subjects, are scrutinized and evaluated according to different standards. These standards are not only in accord with the Salon and its critics. They also operate in the larger social world of the artist. In that world, it would have been easy for Cassatt to portray women as decorous ladies. She also had “permission” so to speak, to play with sexual overtones, as Renoir did in La Loge, but that was not her style. The Lady in Black expresses Cassatt's vision of the limits to expression placed on women in a bourgeois society. It dramatically depicts the operation of social expectations and norms and presents, as it were, a “snapshot” of them in action. Cassatt’s exploration of the male aspects of her artistry is a delicate balancing act. To be a respectable female artist in a man's art world was to challenge expectations without becoming overly “political.”

Speaking of influences in both works of art, we must briefly address those of Courbet’s Burial at Ornans and Manet’s Olympia. If we examine closely enough Cassatt’s Lady in Black we will begin to see the influence of Courbet in her work: the black gown that blends into an undefined background is like the large area of darkness that predominates in The Burial at Ornans, and the predominance of negative space at the center of Cassatt’s composition expresses a similar disregard for the viewer’s expectations. The intensity of her gesture in this painting is all the more evident in comparison to Lydia Seated in A Loge Wearing a Pearl Necklace, also done in 1879 and typical of her more usual style. As Cassatt speaks to Courbet in this image, she seems to announce her desire to adopt his recalcitrant, avant-garde manner, usurping a male role for the female. At this point we again bring up what lies within the negative space that is the true center of the composition. Perhaps unwittingly, but entirely fittingly, Cassatt has “centered” the composition in the shape of a penis, as if to claim possession of the phallus as master signifier, a kind of microphone through which her artistic voice is amplified. The lady in black literally wears her phallus on her sleeve. There is also a hint of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait, though more as an allegory of looking rather than of painting. In this sense, it could pertain to the representation of a modern woman, Cassatt herself being the flaneur. And, moving from here to Renoir’s Loge, we are reminded of the frontal, direct, steady gaze of Manet’s Olympia. Manet’s style is blunt and uncompromising, and Renoir’s portrayal of the woman in the loge is similarly brazen. The difference is that unlike Olympia, who is posed as an object for the male gaze, Renoir depicts a woman of a higher class, very much clothed, who acts for her own pleasure and not merely set up as needed for the enjoyment of a man. Aside from other obvious differences (class, hairstyling, social setting, etc.), the lady in the loge has a personality of her own and is accompanied rather than merely observed by the man who sits next to her.

Despite these many planes on which the works function, it is the erotic and sexual levels that remains most prominent, and we return to this dimension in conclusion. The paint in Renoir’s Loge is applied in a feminine manner, loosely and softly. The subject is a provocatively dressed bourgeois woman in a passionate and assertive posture. The invaginated pleats of her bosom are splayed away from one another and, together with her receptive expression, suggest the feminine position in sexuality. The man next to her is seated with a stiff, arched spine. His lips are tense and pursed, as if about to burst open. His gaze is focused and determined, as if concentrating on a specific goal. All this suggests the masculine position in sexuality. Perhaps he is looking off to another box, or perhaps his missing hand is behind or around the woman’s backside. There is also the possibility that he is getting a look at the woman next to him while pretending to look away through the glasses. He could be doing one or more of many things, but they all suggest sex. Though the couple are at the theatre, they are putting the loge to a time-honored use. La Loge, to my mind, is a portrait of sexual intercourse.

As for Cassatt, on the other hand, The Lady in Black at the Opera appears to be the complete opposite of sex. While Renoir is able to convey his own experience of a woman as a sort of edible confection, Cassatt is still adhering to the accepted social mores of the day. Cassatt portrays her subject as a lady of puritanical demeanor. Her use of paint is strong and tight, perhaps suggesting a lady in mourning, but in any case subdued, conformed, and absorbed in the activity of looking. Her hair pinned up tightly in her bonnet, she has the look of a lone spinster, surveying the crowd through her spectacles as if in scientific observation. She is focused on a distant object as she almost studiously avoids seeing the man in the crowd who quite assertively focuses on her. There is something comic about how this man, waving his arm for attention in a humorously futile, frozen gesture, egocentrically and who we feel believes himself to be at the center of things, has been placed by Cassatt in the distance, blurred, a mere speck in the crowd. It is this idea, we believe, of a woman who is there to see rather than to be reduced to a sight, that is at the center of The Lady in Black. The protrusion of a narrow band of loges extending from the man and ending at the lady’s head illustrates a solicitation to look, as if it were the bridge of the man’s desire that the lady acknowledge him. With her spinsterish look, the lady’s femininity is dormant, if not nonexistent. She is the agent, out to please no one, looking to her own pleasures, curiosities, desires, as in the orthodox male position. But the role of gender is in fact more ambiguous than we have so far suggested. Is the man necessarily trying to attract the lady’s gaze? Or is he merely straining to see her? If he is merely fastening his attention upon her, then he is assuming the role of the male gender. If he is trying to persuade her to accept him as a sight, then he is producing himself as “female.” Cassatt uses overlapping to create confusion in the viewer as to whether the man in the distance is rudely putting his hand in the face of the woman seated next to him, or whether it is resting, behind her, on the chair. Moreover, we cannot say for certain whether the lady is unselfconsciously enjoying the performance or engaging in some more contemplative or “scholarly” study. We must be careful to acknowledge that the lazy "X" in the painting's composition, and the corresponding ambiguities like these, as well, make it impossible to arrive at any final determination of the painting’s singular meaning.

As Renoir offers a stereotypical example of the male-female relationship, where the woman appears as the reactive object and the man as the active looker, Cassatt takes the subject into a different direction. To define the difference between the two impressions – that Renoir’s woman is there to catch your gaze and be admired while Cassatt’s lady would prefer not to be seen at all – is not entirely satisfactory, however, because the works contain irreducibly ambiguous elements. We can’t really know where the man is looking in Renoir’s Loge, whether he is gazing off or secretly groping the woman next to him. There is the question as to whether Cassatt’s lady is meant, loosely, as an “anonymous” woman at the theatre, or as the kind of “masculine” presence that surveys its dominion. The ambiguities in each picture persuade us to view them from a variety of angles, as the meaning of the picture shifts according to the filters constituted by them. In art, no conclusion is absolutely conclusive, so what follows is presented as the most probable interpretation at this moment of an on-going inquiry.

To state the obvious, then, Cassatt knows that she is a woman. We might assume, ipso facto, that she understands what a woman is thanks to her own experience of being a woman – a perspective not available to Renoir. And rather than “proving” her worth as a female artist by painting her version of woman as spectacle – as a sight to be seen, something to be evaluated or reduced to a commodity to be purchased and hung on someone’s wall – she disengages from this discourse. She seizes the opportunity to portray the woman as the looker in the theatre, this being the one place where it is à propos for a woman to be seen actively looking. Cassatt then upstages herself, qua woman-who-sees, by directing our attention to a man in the background and thus undermining the centrality of the lady in black – as if to represent her refusal to represent woman as object – even as an active object. In designing this composition, Cassatt is controlling the gaze from every angle, inside and outside the painting. Cassatt’s assumption, as the female maker of the painting, of the traditionally masculine position of mastery correlates with the painting’s subject, who is a woman but displays (as we have seen) decidedly masculine traits. Moreover, if we use Renoir’s La Loge as a control, as in the scientific method of comparing data, and accept his version of the ideological roles of males and females in society, we can see that Cassatt is arguing against Renoir’s version of the male-female dynamic. From one pivot, she defies his supposition by presenting the female, parallel to the male, as operating in a male-oriented manner. And from another point of view, she juxtaposes the male and female in opposite roles: the male, a distant object in the crowd subject to the gaze of the flaneur, who is in this case, the lady in black. In this way Cassatt accomplishes several things. First and foremost, by painting a woman with masculine characteristics, Cassatt plays with the presuppositions of femininity and inserts within this model the notion of androgyny. This is, perhaps, an understated suggestion that men can be objectified – that masculinity can be made into a commodity by means of art. By presenting the traditionally “objectified” woman as displaying masculine qualities, she associates masculinity with objectification. Cassatt further reinforces this theme by showing the man with the binoculars to be desirous of attracting the other’s gaze, in the way women are imagined to be. In this way, defining women as masculine and men as feminine, Cassatt formulates an unstable and dynamic set of questions about gender and art.

One might say that by assuming the dominant male role as the artist, the actor per se, Cassatt redefines the role of the modern woman. She challenges the conventional vision, as exemplified in Renoir’s La Loge: the ideologies of the way women exist in relationship to men, and vice versa.

…What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms,
and anthropomorphisms- in short, a sum of human relations, which have
been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically
…truths are illusions…coins which have lost their pictures and now
matter only as metal, no longer coins… Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy


Truth, as it is conceptualized in Western philosophy, is something that can never be acquired. And, as for Nietzsche, truth is a mere plaything, something we use to transport us from ourselves to an imagined reality. Truth has become a mere homonym, a displaced, connotative term that we’ve made which is detached from absolute meaning.

To Socrates and other ancient Greek philosophers the sign, truth, equals αρετή (areté), i.e. excellence and virtue. And to modern philosophers truth is now defined as the quality of being real. I can’t say for certain how theologians define truth as they perceive within the confines of their own mythologies, belief systems, what have you. Nonetheless, in man’s very pursuit toward truth an epic fascination spawned by Socrates over 2000 years ago in Athens ensued. Nietzsche claims in his Birth of Tragedy that, in summary, Socrates is the equivalent of evil deriving from the total destruction of values in Greek culture, i.e. the perfection of art and all that was good. For Nietzsche, this is a dramatic problem attributed solely to Socrates’ efforts, because truth is neither ascertainable, nor is it attainable; hence, the pursuit of it yields negative results, i.e. zero pleasure value minus the time wasted on its pursuit. It becomes, as all other illusions, just another way to expend limited resources. By studying Nietzsche, we discover his radical differentiation between this particular illusion and all others before it. As other Greeks created gods as representations of their archetypal values in order to live, so did Socrates set out to make a god of himself when he propagated the (latent) value of truth.

Nietzsche argues that in Greek (Attic) tragedy, and more specifically, in song and dance, the pinnacle of art in Greek culture could be expressed in its purest form. For, unlike other illusions, it was song and dance, dramatic dithyramb, through which man could completely identify with his god, the inspirer of the art, Dionysus. This identification with Dionysus led man, or members of the tragedian chorus, into an utterly complete intoxication (Rausch), with the essence of life qua the interconnectivity of nature via song and dance. The distinction between this and all other illusions is that the sheer desire to be something rather than nothing, or than oneself, disappears through a kind of transubstantiation experienced by the participants of Greek tragedy. For it is through this Dionysian intoxication that man communes with himself and his fellows as his god. Man is thus able to lose himself entirely and becomes something far beyond the illusion of identity he once had, something we ourselves might find essentially beautiful.

As Nietzsche claims, this experience of sheer intoxication yields pleasure enough to far surpass all other activities, and is unlike any other in the hierarchy of illusions. Despite all of that, Greek culture became intrigued with the study of a mere concept rather than the experience of intoxication. This study led to a dominant fascination with right and wrong thinking, logic, statements of truth, and higher virtues disassociated with the more primitive. However, if truth were a woman (or the archetypal value of its corresponding ruler, Socrates), would we be able to identify ourselves in her virtues as well? This may seem like a rather odd way of examining the notion of truth. But truth is a mere projection of the beholder onto its object:
…that whole tangle of subjective passions and stirring of the will
directed at some specific thing which it takes to be real…


It is only until we begin to identify ourselves with the illusion that we can see the actual transparency of the very idea or projection and thus become disillusioned by it. So, perhaps in this discussion we should be asking the question: what is the motivational structure behind the identification with truth or the desire for truth? That is, what kinds of motives made Socrates need this illusion? In order to answer these and other questions (e.g. have we any practical use for truth?), we must first consider the source of this fascination/identification with truth and the various hierarchies of illusions. For it is within the hierarchical structure that the meaning of truth rests. It is the very notion of the illusion that corresponds to its Greek creator, Socrates, who must have believed that a) people are all just going along locked up behind their phony exteriors, and b) civilization is just another illusion that can be altered by someone’s will and his will was just as good as anyone else’s.

…The Greeks knew and felt the horrors of existence; in order to live
at all they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-born
figures of the Olympians…

Nietzsche claims that in order to live, the Greeks needed to create the gods. This means that the Greeks needed to subordinate their will to an illusion in order to escape the horror of living. They were called by their own desires to be subordinate to imaginary influences, some benevolent and some malevolent, which operate within a complex structure of power. Allow me to digress momentarily to explain how this works: For example, Zeus is a benevolent god who corresponds to the archetypal values of hospitality, travel, philosophy, and who looks after the suppliant. If I want to go on a long voyage away from home in hopes of meeting others who would look after my needs, I would make a generous offering to the Temple of Zeus. This act of sacrifice of a lesser token for a greater benefit would bless my quest. That gods are made in the image of the Greek’s values, unnamable energies that may already exist outside the folklore of our minds, this kind of performative is, in a sense, like praying to one’s idea of an aggrandized self as the avatar of Zeus. There, then, becomes a temporary identification with protection from a fear of harm. It is like a game of conscious sublimation.

Socrates, on the other hand, had a distinct aversion to this kind of identification with external gods, and specifically to the Dionysian. He needed to subordinate his will to his own mind, to reason, and to his own idea of what was good and virtuous because he believed that from virtue follows riches and all good things.

The distinction that Socrates makes of the sum total value of truth is that it amounts to virtue and beauty, that it derives from the realm of thought, and it ought to represent man’s highest attainment. Thought is a mere product of the mind, and the body anatomizes the mind of each and every man. The pursuit of truth becomes not only a matter of right thinking, or virtue, and wrong thinking, but it as well becomes a service to the archetypal values corresponding to Socrates.

Hence, the entire fulcrum of Western thought hinges on this very ideal, an obscurity of reality, and is based in homage to Socrates’ mythical imagination, one whose archetypal values are those of the purest asceticism. Since truth is an ascetic illusion that is neither ascertainable, nor desirable, is there no satisfaction associated in pursuing it? We ask ourselves why Socrates engineered such an insidious fantasy. What Nietzsche would like to suggest then is the question of the importance of this truth. If we could get our hands on it, would it be a good thing to have?

One way to test the value of truth is to draw from the methods of practical application. In law, a conclusion is drawn on which of two arguments was successful or whether or not the defendant successfully answered to the charges. Most of legal practice carried forward into a trial is based on the act of asking specific questions for predetermined responses. (A good lawyer is never fishing when engaged in the rigors of a courtroom drama and therefore never asks a question unless he knows the answer.) If the charges were reduced to some kind of bargain, then the defendant had then to answer to those respective charges. Criminal charges are always raised or reduced according to a scale of a reasonable degree of probable victory or to whatever the People, i.e. the attorney representing the state, believes he can prove based on the persuasion of the jury pool along with other variables like suppressed evidence, etc. The verdicts of criminal actions are based on a belief of whether a person is guilty as charged according to the burden of proof by the prosecution. This belief stems from collective assumptions usually of a jury whose decision is based on ascertainable evidence of which truth is excluded entirely. This is because truth, unlike empirical evidence, is not ascertainable to a judge of fact. Furthermore, locutionary statements of facts are not always truths, but most often are the best answers given based on one’s memory. Consider the usefulness of truth for Socrates in his Apology. First, he was charged for corrupting the youths of Athens. Yet he was unable to defend himself because he attempted to structure his argument on the very basis of truth. Truth had no suasory power in Socrates’ Apology because truth is neither ascertainable nor valuable in practical application, and it is for this very reason that any judgment or verdict in law is based on actual, ascertainable proof, which is usually in high percentage, substantive documentation, i.e. reliable hearsay and stuff that can be manufactured, oftentimes right on the spot.

Given that truth is neither valuable, in a practical sense, nor pleasurable, what does it take for a man like Socrates to want to believe in such an ascetic life pursuit? Socrates claims in the Apology that people are nothing pretending to be something. He also states that he knows that he knows nothing. And, it is in this knowing of nothing that puts him at an advantage over those who pretend to know something. But, at the same time, he claims a) to know the value of truth and virtue, and b) that virtue leads to riches and all other good things. He also argues that his poverty should be evidence enough that he knows nothing. This means that even he knows not the value of said truth and virtue. I am not convinced that Socrates really knows truth at all. He merely believed in his illusion and wished to impose it upon everyone else. And, history shows us that he has been just as successful as someone like Hitler- a man with a dream. So, why did Socrates set out to destroy a civilization? He admits that everyone else is pretending to be something when they are really nothing. In other words, Socrates believes that it is the better cause to have faith in one’s own ability to reason in pursuit of ascetic virtue, rather than to direct or subordinate the will to external illusions in pursuit of Dionysian debauchery. To Socrates, truth is not something external but is of a potentiality within all men.

We can’t say that Nietzsche is entirely justified in his accusation that Socrates legitimately destroyed all that was good and replaced tragedy with the pursuit of truth, which Nietzsche also claims has become a prejudice of Western Philosophy. Notwithstanding the problems of Nietzsche’s argument, he makes an interesting proposition. Though, personally, I would have to argue against Nietzsche on the grounds that his supporting evidence of the claim is neither sound, nor useful, but merely his opinion.

Since Nietzsche cannot know what the perceptions of people actually were while experiencing Attic tragedy at the time first hand, he also cannot know the value of it first hand. The pursuit of identification with the Dionysian nature and the pursuit of truth are not dissimilar. Both are still mere illusions, playthings that can be equally intoxicating. As one man metaphorizes his reality through song and dance and the aid of dramatic dithyramb, so does he have the power to transform his consciousness through reason. For Nietzsche to call Socrates evil because he allegedly destroyed what Nietzsche regards as the highest art of Greek culture, i.e. something that Nietzsche liked, is far too subjective. What reason could Nietzsche have given about intoxication that would persuade me that something is at stake in comparing truth to art? Not only does Nietzsche admit that art is the highest truth, but he also relies on Socratic reasoning to attempt to persuade us into siding with art against reason. Even so, his argument fails. It simply can’t be done without implementing a mutual language, one that excludes all mythologies. Even if he decided to use art as this common language to assess and appraise meaning, a common practice of the church and for several millennia, this is still impossible since culture is language made up of its respective mythology. Art is still grounded in mythology and its spectrum of cultural symbology and meaning. Needless to say, Nietzsche can’t seem to get around the very thing he refutes, because in doing so he accidentally reduces the worth of his own illusion by neutralizing the distinction between two comparable “metaphors.”

It seems what Socrates has proposed is that it is better to be a reasonable man than an intoxicated man. For, it is by reason that man can answer to his actions. This is virtuous. But, by intoxication, he becomes a madman who can potentially destroy himself and others. This is stupidity. To Selenus, who claims that the best thing about life is “not to have been born, not to be, or to be nothing,” Socrates would say: that if you are born, it is better to know you are nothing rather than to pretend to be something. This is his truth. This is his intoxication.

The
Triumph
of 20th Century America:
Art, Alienation, and the Pursuit of Garbage

See, we have everything backwards…garbage rose first
…inciting people to build a civilization around it…we had
to find ways to discard our waste, to reprocess what we couldn’t use…Garbage pushed back…And it forced us to develop the
logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations
of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics…


Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (New York, Vintage, 1995), and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (New York, Scribner, 1998), offer many illustrations of the figure of “the hidden yet unavoidable”. An important example in Underworld is garbage and waste management. In Underworld, waste and its management metaphorizes the cyclical labor process of consumer society in which goods/commodities are (a) produced in order to be used up, destroyed, or rendered obsolete in their consumption, or (b) discarded as rapidly as possible, so as to (c) stimulate another round of production and consumption. As Detwiler says, “garbage comes first”: the commodities are designed so as to become valueless (i.e., waste) as quickly as possible. With this figure of waste as central rather than peripheral, DeLillo is saying that Twentieth- Century America is ruled by a sense of malaise and futility that subsists just beneath the glittery surface of our affluent society. The sport of constant hunting and gathering of things has become a futile pursuit, a feeling that is both “hidden and unavoidable.” In the story of Invisible Man, one example of the hidden is Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, the unnamed narrator to which the general population is blind. While DeLillo uses very clearly and explicitly the figure of garbage as the metaphor that stands in for the nucleus of consumer society, Ellison, I will show, examines less obviously, but no less importantly, how his unnamable, invisible man experiences the effects of this condition as an identity negotiation and his placement in the hierarchical order of garbage, as such. What is invisible is not a man, per se, but the elusive freedom to which he is by nature entitled, yet never quite realizes. In examining objects as invisibility, the hidden yet unavoidable, DeLillo and Ellison illustrate the way our culture utilizes objects e.g. commodities, other persons, etc., as a game for temporary amusement that ultimately leads to the misuse/waste of freedom.

There is much emphasis concerning the various kinds of trash i.e., artifacts of civilization, which are used metaphorically by DeLillo in Underworld. The whole business of trash economics comes into sharp focus as we become confronted by the exponential build-up of the gross domestic product of our pathological, cultural habits. DeLillo’s Underworld is a true revolution in the study of garbage consciousness, as he examines how the production of garbage has become an end in itself. As Detwiler explains, “garbage comes first.” This means that as we produce consumer goods they immediately lose any economic value because they are designed to become inferior at the minute of purchase. The labor, which is used up in the production of these goods, is wasted on the mere production of garbage. No interest or capital is to be gained by the purchaser, thus making the goods either immediately consumable, or else they become obsolete objects, ready for recycle, e.g. glass becoming aggregate filler for concrete, pavements, etc. Civilization is built upon and around garbage. However, being as such, most objects never actually get recycled.

Comparatively, in her essay on Labor, Work, Action , Hannah Arendt discusses the concepts of work vs. labor as she also makes the distinction between consumer goods, art, and the masterpiece. Arendt defines work as the fabrication of durable goods. As well, she describes the labor process as an act of violence on the earth. The difference between work and labor being that labor is the production of inferior goods for human subsistence and/or mass profit. The consumption of these goods is merely a pause in labor, a never-ending cycle. DeLillo’s figure of waste production parallels Arendt’s definition of labor. What DeLillo specifies, however, is that there is no difference between durable and consumer goods. The claim being that the production of commodities equals the production of all goods, and commodities equaling subjective needs and wants; hence, the production of commodities equals the production of garbage. This is to say that it is all the same garbage. As Arendt explains, one modern laboring man produces far more consumer goods than is required for his own subsistence. According to DeLillo’s model, all durable and consumer goods produced will eventually reach an inferior state of elemental decomposition. Notably, Arendt makes a definite distinction between art and all the rest, art classified separately as being a lasting good. Art is a lasting good because it has no subjective or utilitarian function, yet is produced to be appreciated and preserved for as long as is possible- its sole purpose being to attain permanence. Hence, the life span of art long outlasts that of any man, thus making man inferior to the permanence of art, death, and plastic.

DeLillo uses both Life magazine and Bruegel’s medieval painting, Triumph of Death (c.16th C.), to emphasize that, metaphorically speaking, American consumer society is, on a large scale, analogous to this medieval figure of the living dead managing the relics of the dead. This is to say, as man lives to consume in order to fabricate durable yet soon to be obsolete goods, man is synonymous to garbage, because mere consumption in the unending chain of the means-end process leads to the death of man. As man becomes a slave to the fabrication and management of human waste the distinction between labor and work collapses. Man-qua-laborer merely becomes a means to consume. Arendt also examines the conflation of the laboring man and the inanimate machine:
machines indeed demand the laborer should serve them,
adjust the natural rhythm of his body to their mechanical
movement

DeLillo is able to use Breugel’s masterpiece Triumph, a sixteenth-century image, to suggest the mechanical quality of consumer society today, a lifeless, mechanical, mass laboring in the management of decomposing, putrefied waste. And, all of this suggesting that perhaps in the end there is no use for reason, man’s higher faculty, if its sole purpose is the means to bring about his own destruction. In the consumer society, most of man’s labor is used up in the fabrication of lifeless trash or trash making tools (e.g., toxic and nuclear waste, pollution, explosives, etc.). An example of this is the fabrication of war: the war on drugs, the war on terrorism. (Of course not the war on taxes.) These are all just government strategies to rename spending in order to appropriate tax dollars for an indefinite period. It’s just another way to spend more money on more garbage, and to place new jobholders in the bureaucracy of government. While in the act combat, to justify the direct killing of our own species, we rename our enemy as garbage as we then process their remains as waste. All of this is done ultimately to gain resources, to stimulate our own economy so as to amass soon-to-be inferior goods (e.g., more war machines, sport utility vehicles and the fuel required for their operation, seasonal fashion clothing, other disposable commodities, what have you). What we produce, in other words is made for disposal.

What DeLillo’s Underworld celebrates then, is that being at (a cold) war is the same as laboring to produce consumer goods, with an occasional pause for consumption. If the laboring man is no different than a machine, then there is no difference between, man, machines, and dead objects. This is because what man-qua-machine produces is for his own consumption- fodder for the machine. Triumph is used by DeLillo to stand in for the way we cover the earth, not with beautiful prospering gardens, but, for example, concrete parking lots that lock in deadly toxins only to generate gaseous fumes swirling around, polluting the Earth’s atmosphere. And, out of this we, qua, the glamorous retail food industry, regulated by government offices, happily produce genetically modified food, a.k.a. GMO, commonly known as Frankenfood, drowned in pesticides and toxins from our polluted soils and water table and then irradiated for our nourishment. When consumed on a regular basis, this radioactive food likely causes cancer- producing cells in the body. This manmade plague spurs society to breed a fleet of doctors and nurses who will then secure positions as laborers in the medical profession. Exposed to a myriad of diseases, they resign themselves to the futility of urgently treating the near dead. This pattern becomes a cyclical loop. According to this model, if we are what we produce, then humans are in a sense, some form of garbage, living debris, the dead. It makes no difference what one chooses in life for we are all equal by design in some great scheme: As the dying become the dead they then decompose back into the Earth’s closed system becoming no more than a worm’s meal-the fate of all men.

Another paradigm of the hidden yet unavoidable is the sense of alienation felt by Ellison’s invisible man who deems himself as one of society’s more inelegant features, a sort of cultural defect. Invisible Man is a testimonial of a man’s identification with invisibility and how he copes with the feeling of being devalued to less than human waste. The invisible man is constantly being undermined, told what is appropriate to say and how to behave, there is the feeling that he is a mere puppet on a string. The institutional bodies utilize him to exercise their own freedom, and then later make him their scapegoat. Although he doesn’t see it happening, his whole world as he has dreamed it to be, begins to fall apart around him. After the battle royal, where he is virtually forced to fight another black man blindfolded on an electrified carpet, it is then revealed to him the principle of his life: We mean to do right by you, but you’ve got to know your place at all times…
In chapter fifteen, the morning prior to his meeting with the Brotherhood, the invisible man is reminded, metaphorically, of this rule when he tries to dispose of an iron bank head found in Mary’s house. It is, now broken, a primitive statue of a stereotypical black man with big red lips and bulging white eyeballs, a piece of early Americana that (humbly) accepts coins. The narrator refers to the object as a “self-mocking” image. His automatic response to the object is that it must have been left there by someone else, that it belonged to no one, and that it must be disposed of immediately. In its ancient state it crumbled to pieces when handled. Though this artifact is, in its current state, damaged goods, he cannot dispose of it. When he tries to throw it into a trash bin on the street, he is chased down the block by an old man from the neighborhood. The invisible man, trying to rationalize with the old man, explains that it is just a piece of garbage. In response, the old man exclaims,
“Don’t try to hand me that simple-minded crap…
I know what kind of garbage it is…”

It becomes a burden he can’t get rid of- an abandoned object without a master or an apparent heir. He manages to carry this bodiless head with him in his effects wherever he goes, physically and metaphorically. It is the primitive ideology that he is, by virtue of nature, intrinsically unredeemable. At some point in his life, the invisible man retreats, during which time he comes to grips with the equality of man and his own place in the world.


In the prologue, the invisible man claims that others don’t even see him, that they are blind to his existence. If they see anything at all, they see a headless body, some kind of circus freakshow. The image of a headless body carrying a bodiless head in its briefcase suggests a kind of displaced thing-ness, unhomeliness, that disconnected objects are, in a way, primitive artifacts or dead matter of no real use, garbage. The narrator also begins to realize that not only are there variants of garbage, but that by some obscure twist of fate, he has a place within this pecking order. To cope with all of this, he renames himself invisible man. But, he is, by contrast, an invisible repository of wisdom. He sees that it is better to be an invisible man than to be equal to trash. And, as suggested in the epilogue, he knows, as well, that even when at war with our own fellow man, we will eventually become equal in the end. He has something to say, to share with those on the “lower registers”, those who are equally invisible. But what does he mean by the lower registers? Does he speak to invisible mankind, all unnamable-qua-objects displaced from nature?

DeLillo and Ellison are in effect saying the same thing: We are a clannish organization, because we are derived from the “lower registers”, and therefore all potential precursors of garbage. DeLillo’s speaks more on the point that the human motivation to “play the game”, as it were, is ultimately to produce garbage in order to have something to consume, not just to subsist, but in order to produce something that is worthy of competition. DeLillo, while examining the more synthetic features of American culture, is introducing a new vocabulary for garbage. Underworld’s waste manager, Nick Shay, would see art as recycled garbage either clothed, vacuum packed, recycled; the object, art, or artifact, it is all the same ordinary garbage, all organized in various types of elaborate packaging. While DeLillo is suggesting that what may be art to some is to others just another form of garbage, Arendt, also in Labor, Work, Action, makes a distinction between art and the masterpiece. All things are imbued with meanings connected to various genres. Art needs an explanation, whereas the masterpiece stands on its own, never requiring the referencing to its master. The masterpiece, then, is something that anyone can understand, not intellectually, but viscerally. It becomes an artifact that in some mysterious way embodies the values of humanity. There is a definite relationship between art and garbage in Underworld. Detwiler claims:
See, we have everything backwards…garbage rose first
…inciting people to build a civilization around it…we had
to find ways to discard our waste, to reprocess what we couldn’t use…Garbage pushed back…And it forced us to develop the
logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations
of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics…

This is to say that garbage, in some abstract way, has an animated force. It has a voice that needs to be heard. Garbage rose first, and art is just an inventive way to acquiesce its persistence to be valued. Contract killing machines, the B-52 bombers, designed with a built-in obsolescence, assume their fate as a new art medium to artist Klara Sax. Sax sees herself in some way as removing the old planes from a war that never happened. She wants to give them a new life by renaming them as art. During this phase of redistribution these war machines will then be transformed into useless, yet glorified, artifacts. But, who is to say that the war never happened? As we ponder the effects of the cold war as shown to us in Underworld, it appears that we have been hit harder than we are led to believe.

The point of war is the preservation of our freedoms to act spontaneously, expressively, the key aim of our government. Yet, as seen through Underworld, it is all a false front. Ellison’s invisible man suggests the invisibility of said freedoms in the epilogue:
Did he mean to affirm the principle which they had
dreamed into being out of chaos and darkness of the
feudal past, and which they had violated and compromised
to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds?

To put it another way, how can we justify the claim of freedom when it amounts to the production, consumption, and the laboring of an unimaginable, unmanageable heap of garbage? This is the implication reminiscent in DeLillo’s use of Triumph. Perhaps what Ellison and DeLillo are suggesting then, is that as long as we live under these conditions, there is no real freedom as we become slaves to our own waste. Perhaps, the only real freedom is in the death of the machine, mankind as we know it? DeLillo’s use of Triumph certainly foregrounds this as an ideal.

But, a hopeful escape from this fate can’t be all there is to life. Hannah Arendt has a more optimistic philosophy:
Action, with all its uncertainties, is like an ever-present
reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in
order to die but to begin something new…With the creation
of man, the principle of beginning came into the world- which,
of course, is only another way of saying that with the creation
of man, the principle of freedom appeared on Earth.


As Ellison’s invisible man suggests the blindness of humanity, that the all-pervading, unavoidable effects that we have on the world, on nature, on our own nature are mostly overlooked. Perhaps the blindness that Ellison points to, is, that we are too nearsighted to see beyond the futility of effort. Yet, despite this notion of futility, Invisible Man suggests that there is hope to preserve the visibility of true freedom, the freedom to begin again: I believe in nothing if not action…hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

THIS PAGE IS UNDER HEAVY REVISION. DO NOT READ


The Dionysian Faith
of
Jesus the Jew



Although what follows may frustrate some early Christian scholars, this reconstructive interpretation of what Jesus (Ἰησοῦς), is said to have done has nothing to do with early Christianity, per se, but is as it might appear to a someone in the early part of the twenty-first century using biblical archetypes and metaphors. In this discussion we will compare and contrast Jesus’ teachings as an attempt to foreground the phenomenological nuances of a noble and life-affirming attitude for the sake of clarity and insight into Nietzsche’s perspectives on Christianity and morality from a Dionysian point of view. In the gospels of the New Testament, Jesus’ life-affirming attitude is characteristic of a noble manner, which we define in these interchangeable terms a) force of will and b) pure potentiality. By force of will we mean to say that there is an absolute awareness of one’s natural propensity to create. And, by pure potentiality we mean to say that within all life there is an indiscriminant, creative force that manifests will for the purposes of expression of will, ipso facto. In the Nietzsche system of philosophy, this is often referred to as will to power or willing of the will. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche proclaims himself to be a disciple of the Greek god and philosopher, Dionysos, as one of his final statements about his identity, psychological state of mind, and life-affirming practices:

I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysos […]
From this statement we can discern with a reasonable amount of certainty that as a disciple of Dionysos, Nietzsche, like Jesus, affirms the totality of his experience of life because all of it is contained in every bit of it. This may seem like a leap at this point, but will be clarified further on in this discussion.

Before moving forward, this work must be prefaced with a reference to the term ressentiment. This is an essential concept of feeling utilized by Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals, as it pertains to his study of ascetic ideals vis-à-vis the relationship of slavish and priestly morality. Hence, he conveys tremendous disdain for the self- fashioning Christian priests for their disregard of the Spirit of Christianity, something that follows in our discussion later on. Nietzsche likes to use the French term ressentiment, as it best explains the conditions that bring about certain attitudes of those following the ascetic life practices of life negating life, namely slaves. The slavish Jews often held untoward feelings of ressentiment to those who were unlike them, i.e. the master. And, since the Bible was written and translated in this same spirit of ressentiment , good, bad, and evil are slavish and subjective terms of interchangeable meaning and will be ignored for the purposes of this discussion. Our central concern here is to define what it means to be noble and life-affirming, the terms of a Dionysian faith. We will not delve any further into the deeper concepts of ressentiment in this essay, but pause only to introduce it for clarification on how the following view relates to the discussion of a noble and life-affirming spiritual faith excluding ressentiment, and how we will apply this concept to the scriptures of interest discussed later on, which pertain to the topic of Letter and Spirit of Law. The following passage on Letter and the Spirit is taken from the King James Biblical Encyclopedia :


Every generation of Christians is puzzled as to the exact application of Christianity to life. Christ wisely left not precepts but spirit. The Jews had too many applications in the Law. These applications demanded new sanctions and hid from view the greatest sanction of all, Spirit. Men are still lost to Christ because of the tendency on the part of the Church to create too many applications. A man must grow (wisely guided perhaps) into his own method of applying the Spirit.


Let us begin by examining Jesus qua a new philosopher, as it were, who steps forward to claim his role as the Messiah- the new promise, the new agenda, as will to power. He was not hand selected from the herd, but simply, he chose to live the life of the Christ. In a world of free will, this is called self-selection. We can never really know with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty the facts surrounding the life Jesus actually lived, nor the subjective reality of his first realizations of his power, i.e. as a miracle worker and the voice of God. It is through these selected metaphors that we glimpse the mythical scriptures and metaphorical teachings of the word of God as generosity, purity, and love and through love, forgiveness. A) the loaves and fishes B) baptism, and C) love thy neighbor are metaphors of a life-affirming, prosperous characterization of Jesus and his teachings fashioned in a Dionysian light, the forthcoming of humans as pure potentiality. This is considerably different than the historically orthodox view commonly held by Christian scholars, theologians, and evangelicals.

As a political actor, Jesus recognized himself as pure potentiality and so made assertions publicly of his self-identified, anointed nature. Jesus shows us alternative ways of living by way of demonstration of his own noble manner. He knew just how to focalize intrinsic power that is his ability to manifest order from chaos with the acceptance of chance that order may lead to an infinite number of outcomes or more chaos.
The scripture taken from the book of John offers a metaphor representing abundance from within- a lesson in creativity and generosity:

…When Jesus then lifted up his eyes, and saw a great company come unto him,
he saith unto Philip, “Whence shall we buy bread that these may eat .” And this
he said to prove him: for he himself knew what he would do. And Jesus took
the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the
disciples to them that were set down, and likewise the fishes as much as they
would. […] Therefore they had gathered them together and filled twelve basket
with the fragments of the five barley loaves which remained over and above
unto those who had eaten.


Typically, this passage is read as a miraculous performative by Jesus. That somehow he materialized numerous loaves and fishes as, not of his will, but by some extrinsic force. This compromises the teaching and is life negating. Our reading will be slightly different as the scripture tells us nothing of the sort. It clearly states that Jesus stood in that place and blessed the food and suddenly every one who ate was made full. It could easily be read idiomatically as follows: Before the multitudes, waiting for a blessing, Jesus produced loaves and fishes (and also turned water into wine, John 2:3), and so manifested his glory. When Jesus brought forth his loaf and fish, this act inspired and organized others to bring forth theirs as well. Jesus used this didactic approach to demonstrate to his followers how to bless their food and be satisfied enough with what they have that they can share it with not only their families, but with those around them. This is what Jesus meant when he said that he qua his spirit is the bread of life. By his teaching, i.e. God’s word, one can experience a kind of heaven amongst his own brethren in spirit and hereafter lack no more. The scripture states, “he knew what he would do.” Meaning to say that Jesus knew he had an opportunity to use the bread of life metaphor to reset the status quo, as it were, by scattering the seeds of charity and allowing everyone an opportunity to give to each other freely. Jesus, willing his will, was aware of his creative power and seized an opportunity to show what he could do, just for the sake of his own expression. A spirit of fellowship followed and generosity changed the appearance of lack into abundance when Jesus created a reality one split-second different than everyone else’s and then precipitated this mutation of consciousness from one individual to another. Jesus’ will proliferates into “multitudes” as they became intoxicated by their own spiritual elixirs of joy and lightheartedness rather than poisoned by their fear of lack.

Another way to read this scripture is that when we allow ourselves to surrender into communion with the intoxication of our essence as joyful and creative beings, that is our godlike creative power, we might suddenly forget about the trivialities of difference that cause to separate us from the sheer joy of being together as mankind. When we recognize that we are joined by the brotherhood of life, our fellow man, it becomes clear that equally we share the burdens of humanity and we must support in welfare of one another. In the illusion that we are separate as individuals, we should not be deceived that we are separate from the abundance of life.

Before anyone can perform Christianity he must first know the meaning of the name of God, ipso facto.
John 14:6
λέγει αὐτῷ Ἰησοῦς· ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ὁδὸς καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια καὶ ἡ ζωή· οὐδεὶς ἔρχεται πρὸς τὸν πατέρα εἰ μὴ δι’ ἐμοῦ.
I say I am Joy (Ἰησοῦς/Jesus). I am myself the road the truth and the life. He/she/it does not come and go before the father but through me.
John 17:6
I have manifested thy name which thou gaveth me out of the world.
John 17:13
And now I come to thee and these things I speak in the world that they might have my Joy fulfilled in themselves.

All of these claims point us in the direction of an indiscriminant, all-pervasive joy in nature and with one's fellow man. It becomes a theme in this spiritual literature that in order for one to know God, he must rejoice in his neighbor and thereby rejoice in himself. The very tranference of joy in each and every breathing body is what defines the Biblical Holy Spirit as such. A mere acquaintanceship is not enough. One must become intoxicated with joy. This is the relationship of a life-affirming Holy Spirit and through this one can commune with God as joy fulfilled.


Signification of baptism .
For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you have
been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is
neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

Originally a Jewish religious rite, now it has many interpretations as a symbolic action after it was adapted by John the Baptist as purification of the old way and the washing away of one’s errors and trespasses or sins. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche says that man is a polluted river and needs a sea to dump himself into :

[…] One must be a sea, to receive a polluted river and not be defiled… Behold, I teach
you the Superman: he is the sea, in him your contempt can go under.

Zarathustra, like John, announced the coming of a new way, an overcoming of man. The life-affirming process of baptism serves as both a spiritual purging as well as a physical revitalization. This does not become the baptism into a new religion, but it is a spiritual enlightenment that washes away the old ways and attitudes about living. It becomes for one a metaphysical death and resurrection from a watery grave to be made alive again, but as a newly refreshed state of being that prepares the way for new endeavors. In this symbolic representation of resurrection we can say that there is life after death. The act of dying below water and rising from the aqueous grave can as well be a poesis, a making of a new life where one, by assent, relinquishes one way for a new way. To participate in this practice, one must abide by a fundamental principle that relinquishment of life follows the belief that life is eternal. There would otherwise be no reason to give up one’s life for nothing. So, we might say that heaven is life after a symbolic death by consenting to being reborn, and its abundant treasure is in the honor of having a new and anointed consciousness. This is a way for man to concentrate his will on new and creative experiences rather than being burdened by the past. By washing away our sins, mistakes, or trespasses through baptism we can face the world in good conscience as the innocence of the children of our own heaven manifest. This makes baptism both a noble and life-affirming act.

Matthew 22:37-39
Love thy neighbor as thy self .
ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς ἔφη αὐτῷ· Ἀγαπήσεις Κύριον τὸν Θεόν σου ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ καρδίᾳ σου καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ ψυχῇ σου καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ διανοίᾳ σου·
Jesus said unto him “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thine breath, and with all thy thoughts. This is the first and great commandment.
δευτέρα δὲ ὁμοία αὐτῇ· ἀγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον σου ὡς σεαυτόν.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hand all the law and all the prophets.”

Ἀγαπήσεις (agapesis), above all things, acts of charity, acts of brotherly love, affection, caressing, delight, are all contained in this message as literal commandments. It is imperative that we love each other in charity and affection as prescribed by God. It is not enough to be taken as a surface idea or hyperactivity, but rather as something felt deeply within one's entire being and breath and power. We are commanded to be consumed by love as the highest order, and secondly supported by charity and affection toward others.

These are the rudiments of the forgiveness of trespassing of material property of all kinds. Jesus tells us here that we are all the same are are both our neighbor and self. We are all human and in so expressing our individuality we are all capable of making moral mistakes and lapses of good judgment of ourselves and others. Therefore we should forgive ourselves and forgive others for doing as we do from time to time, whether or not we believe that certain actions are right or wrong, for in joy they are neither. This is a lesson in the vicissitudes of mood- the proposition that acceptance ought to be a strategy for human nature. This is because, by virtue of carrying the physical body by our souls, we are intrinsically weighted down by emotive and calculating behavior. We have thinking minds that carry with them possessive dominion of the Earth, equally.

Let us pause for a moment to examine one of the ways that the Bible has been erroneously translated. Taking the term sin, for example: the literal meaning of sin means off the mark, or a trespass. Historically, as a practical remedy for security and privacy, buffer markers of property lines were instituted in order to keep away undesirable nuisances. Sometimes, a neighbor could intentionally or unintentionally move the stake or marker so making way for trespassers. If one was caught off the mark, or his stake was over the original buffer zone, this was called a miss stake, or a sin.

Since a man must grow into his own method of applying spirit we could read this to mean that when we forgive someone of his or her trespasses, we are acknowledging that whatever was done was neither intended nor bad, but just one’s mistake of operating over the equal boundaries without permission. To forgive means to give honor beforehand. This is meant in the spirit that in order to truly forgive someone, forgiveness is granted before it is prayed. And when we give freely and carelessly with no expectation of results or returns, we are rewarded with a clear and free conscience. This is truly noble and an important life-affirming practice because when each of us is about willing our will trespasses are imminent. When this act of forgiveness is faithfully practiced, we can allow our neighbors the room to make mortal mistakes and see that our mistakes are qualitatively equal and there can be a communion with the Earth, rather than segregation upon it. If the human mistakes we make are immediately disregarded, life with all of its flaws, upheavals, seeming conflicts, can then become a dance of experience or a march of synchronicity.

In a constant state of flux, we are ever changing, evolving and being reborn in consciousness. Although we can’t really say for certain if there are any absolute truths, we might want to say that this could be the truth for the way we are right now. Christianity wants to provide a basis for Truth. Through this study we have found that within the confines of scriptural textas, absolute Truth can only be defined as will itself, will being the one thing that always remains true, and all that Christianity demonstrates is that random acts of will manifest in the physical realm: will is the essence of all life and is the foundation upon which all truths rest; this is because the only certain truth is that will is the ever changing essence of life and yet is the only constant. This means that the concept of Truth is a byproduct of the mind, as created by the will as an idea for its own amusement. Will provides no basis for absolute truths, per se, since the basis for Truth is always grounded in change and so remain ambiguous and subjective. Hence, will is the way and thus provides a basis for freedom of expression and remains the sole basis for creation. The transmission and free application of this will characterizes the truly noble and life-affirming essence in all life. As free agents, we all have the power to follow the principles of the Christ model in our own lives, just as Jesus did by his own will. It is up to each of us to discern how those principles will be applied in our individual everyday practices, that is, how we choose to perform Christianity. According to what Jesus is said to have proclaimed, the law is what is in our own hearts:
Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also .
This is something that Nietzsche expounds upon as well in his Anti-Christ:
…The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart- not something that comes
‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death’[…] The ‘kingdom of God’ is not something one waits
for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come ‘in a thousand years’ – it is an
experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere …
This is the spirit of law. The Dionysian Jesus is a representation for us to remember how to behave as noble individuals who are willing in order to face the consequences of our actions right now. All we really can do is to offer ourselves to the world today, this moment. As we continue to improve ourselves and the purity of our intentions we will upon the world our individual gifts by spiritualizing the material life. If all we have to give to the world is each other, the only way we will know what it is that we have to offer is to take action. This is the only way to truly see our potential as humankind. According to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, God is dead and all we have left is our fellow man. To stay present, the life-affirming force, our true nature as performed by Jesus, extends far beyond mere burdensome survival and is the key to a carefree and noble existence. Although Nietzsche’s teachings convey that it is much more noble mannered for one to be a warrior, oppositional, in this case Jesus is being just that. Nietzsche writes in his Anti-Christ:
The ‘bringer of glad tidings’ died as he lived, as he taught- not to ‘redeem mankind’ but to demonstrate how one ought to live […] He does not resist, he does not defend his rights,
he takes no steps to avert the worst that can happen to him- more he provokes it…

Jesus set out with the task of defying moral weakness. This is to say, there is no punishment for the execution of one’s will, only for the denial of its power. To deny one’s will is what it means to be life-negating. This is a trespass against oneself. And, in this case its punishment becomes a self-enforced sentence. People are used to doing the same things in the drudgery of the everyday like going to the market for food, foraging elsewhere. Jesus wanted to remind mankind of will by teaching how to give to each other so that we may look back at past experiences we have shared together. It is Jesus who demonstrates: look at what I can do. I can take command of the multitude by my own demonstration of creative will, because by my own volition I can execute the task of willing my will. The universe can be altered, even in the slightest sense, by any will. If all men, including Jesus, are equal and God acts through man as God, then all embody this creative force as God in action. This is what Jesus is trying to teach when he utters these words, “thy will be done ”. This means that his will is just as good as anyone else’s, and vice versa. The simple power of our true nature is that it can be tapped at any moment and is what is to be made of it. This is what it means to be noble. If we follow the Spirit of this life-affirming formula for living a pure, thankful and generous lifestyle, there would be no need to clamp down on the injustices of others and mundane life as we know it would cease. Acceptance of life, all life, would be the governing dynamic, if you will, such that the world would be in a state of forgiveness and love that injustices would not register in this state of being. Nietzsche does not intend to say that we should go about the world in a reckless manner. He emphasizes taste, diet, balance, and things of a self-commanded nature . The Dionysian Nietzsche, like Jesus, wants to emphasize individual mastery of will. Perhaps the key to this kind of living is the allowance for each a chance to lead the way, that each may initiate change. With this kind of temperance the will of an individual can co-exist with the will of chaos in a life-affirming totality of experience.

Historically, the outline of the Christian epoch follows a Dionysian pattern of inevitable entropy, a history far too vast for the scope of this discussion. But, if we examine what we can of the splintered and fragmented development of Christianity and its corresponding consciousness as cited in this essay, we see several theoretical discrepancies from its origins to modernity. The retelling of the mythical story of Christianity has over time transfigured Jesus’ teachings from spirit to law and back to spirit. This is because the spirit of Jesus’ teachings were adopted by Christian scholars of the church, and that law then recycled into the byproduct of letter. After several centuries of the practice of this law, it became shattered into pieces, each bearing a relationship to the original doctrine by religious affiliation. Speaking as someone in the twenty-first century, Christianity as we know it is not by precept, but is in actuality by spirit. This sort of entropic transmutation is characteristic of Dionysian disorder. The church has taken the letter of Christianity as far as it can go. We are now witnessing a second coming of the Reformation. In the heart of the communication/information era evidence of priestly indulgences are widespread and new age sects are cropping up worldwide. The church is becoming radically unpopular as a desire for a more personal relationship with spirit, i.e. will, and our fellow man is becoming the norm in more of an educated society. The rigidity of law has now shattered within the kaleidoscope of representation turning it from letter into spirit, its opposite, by mere chance in the same manner of the transfiguration of Jesus as in the history of Christian folklore. This is a triumph. The problem is that the church held the power of biblical exegesis that somehow successfully restrained the freedom of personal interpretation that the unified effects of this change will become globally mainstream very gradually. It is precisely for this reason that Nietzsche polemicizes the self-fashioned Christian priesthood and is the origin of his disdain of the hypocrisy of Christianity. Nietzsche was ahead himself just a bit and he admits that his writing is often untimely. He was not in the position that we are in today and if he were here with us now, looking back over the trajectory of Christianity, he would probably agree that we can ascribe all of what is post-modern Christianity to mere chance, if nothing less.

If will is the pure potentiality of nature and we qua consciousness are the agents of will, directing intention in the physical realm, then all will is in some way related to all action making every thing, thought, and cell in existence interconnected on even the most distant periphery. This will has no end or beginning. We can from this adduce that Jesus not only knew this principle, but as well applied it in his every demonstration before his followers as the essence of the human condition. This is the portrait of a Dionysian Jesus.

We return now to the passage cited earlier from the King James Biblical Encyclopedia, … Christ wisely left not precepts but spirit. In a somewhat of a haphazard manner Jesus passed one central, life-giving principle, “thy will be done” to a handful of peasants and scholars who have passed down his tradition over two millennia. This spirit has miraculously made it to the twenty-first century via letter. Here we must acknowledge that all along the Christian priests were merely willing their own will, as much as that may have upset Nietzsche. How can Nietzsche preach to us from his corpus the totality of experience and redeem himself and all his bitterness without being taken for a hypocrite? He tells us in Ecce Homo that his task is to redeem and justify the past:
On one occasion Zarathustra strictly defines his task- it is also mine- the meaning
of which I cannot be misunderstood: he is affirmative to the point of justifying, of
redeeming even the entire past.

As we have mentioned early on, all of it is contained in every bit of it. Even so, in the Dionysian model, the whole thing could just as well flow back into itself, or evolve into something entirely different, or even its opposite as a random set pattern within the totality of experience, per chance. One cannot judge something in advance of its completion of course eternal. To be truly noble would be to have no true concern about outcome either way, but to experience the totality of what one creates of life. This is not to say that Nietzsche is not a true Dionysian devotee. We are just pointing out a minor, yet significant flaw in his reasoning.

Perhaps Jesus anticipated the results of his own regeneration and replication of spirit in advance, free of attachment to the preservation of his word. We can’t say for sure. Nonetheless, this is of interest to us because it is this kind of attitude that establishes a nature that is both noble and life-affirming. Notwithstanding the correlation of letter and spirit, the unforeseen coup by Christian scholars, and the subsequent mismanagement of the scriptures in the church, the spirit of Jesus’ teaching prevails. A twenty-first century Nietzsche would relish in this outcome as it affirms the totality of experience.
-Have I been understood? –Dionysos against the Crucified.

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best...
And...

...always look on the bright side
of life...
(Whistle)

Always look on the light side
of life...
(Whistle)

If life seems jolly rotten
There's something you've forgotten
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing
When you're feeling in the dumps
Don't be silly chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle
- that's the thing.
And...always look on the bright
side of life...
(Whistle)

Come on.

Always look on the right side
of life...
(Whistle)

For life is quite absurd
And death's the final word
You must always face the curtain
with a bow
Forget about your sin - give the
audience a grin
Enjoy it - it's your last chance
anyhow.

So always look on the bright side
of death...
(Whistle)

a-Just before you draw your terminal breath...
(Whistle)

Life's a piece of shit, when you look at it
Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true
You'll see its all a show, keep 'em laughin as you go
Just remember that the last laugh is on you

And...
Always look on the bright side
of life...
(Whistle)

Always look on the right side
of life...

C'mon Brian, cheer up

Always look on the bright side
of life...

Always look on the bright side
of life...

Worse things happen at sea you know.

I mean - what have you got to lose?
You know, you come from nothing
- you're going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing.

Always look on the right side
(I mean) of life...

what have you got to lose?
You know, you come from nothing
- you're going back to nothing.
What have you lost?

Always (Nothing.) look on the right side of life...

Nothing will come from nothing ya know what they say?
Cheer up ya old bugga c'mon give us a grin!
There ya go, see!

Always look on the right side of life...
(Cheer up ya old bugga c'mon give us a grin! At same time)

There ya go, see!
Song:Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life
Album: Monty Python Sings

Half a bee, philosophically,
Must, ipso facto, half not be.
But half the bee has got to be
Vis a vis, its entity. D'you see?

But can a bee be said to be
Or not to be an entire bee
When half the bee is not a bee
Due to some ancient injury?

La dee dee, one two three,
Eric the half a bee.
A B C D E F G,
Eric the half a bee.

Is this wretched demi-bee,
Half-asleep upon my knee,
Some freak from a menagerie?
No! It's Eric the half a bee!

Fiddle de dum, Fiddle de dee,
Eric the half a bee.
Ho ho ho, tee hee hee,
Eric the half a bee.

I love this hive, employee-ee,
Bisected accidentally,
One summer afternoon by me,
I love him carnally.

He loves him carnally,
Semi-carnally.

Song: Eric The Half A Bee
Album: Monty Python Sings

Whenever life gets you down Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite enough......

Just, remember that you're standing on a planet thats evolving,
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour.
Its orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In an outer spiral arm at fourty thousand miles an hour
In a galaxy we call the milky way.

Our galaxy itself, contains a hundred billion stars,
Its a hundred thousand light years side-to-side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
but out by us it just three thousand light years wide.

We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point,
We go round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and
expanding universe.

[Interlude]

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can wizz.
As fast as it can go, the speed of light ya know,
Twelve million miles a minute and thats the fastest speed there is,
So remember when your feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth.
And pray that theres intellegent life somewhere up in space,
Cause theres bugger-all down here on earth.

"Heaven is all around,
Translated to sound."

Michael Hedges,
1953-1997.

Savage mythology by Anil Prasad Interview date: September 20, 1990© Copyright 1990 by Anil Prasad. All rights reserved.
Conventional thinking says autobiographies are expressly tied to the written word. Acoustic guitarist Michael Hedges was determined to challenge that notion on Taproot, his latest release of predominantly instrumental music.The disc finds the Oklahoma native expressing various moods and experiences via his unparalleled eclectic and versatile six-string approach. But Hedges won't offer specifics on Taproot's content. He prefers listeners to find their own meaning when absorbing the material. That's why he recorded the album as an "autobiographical myth."Hedges' interest in music developed at age four when he first began tickling the ivories of his parent's piano. In high school, he moved on to cello and clarinet before settling on flute and guitar. He later earned a degree in composition from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.It's been argued that formal training can impose a framework on musicians that prevents them from developing a unique voice. That was never a problem for Hedges. His approach to guitar includes the use of alternate tunings, replacing the odd guitar string with a bass string, and a one-of-a-kind mix of slapping and tapping.Although Hedges is best-known for his instrumental compositions, he's also made waves as a singer-songwriter. 1988's Live On The Double Planet and 1985's Watching My Life Go By featured a variety of self-penned tracks and covers that include Sheila E.'s "A Love Bizarre" and Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower."Taproot possesses a lone vocal track in "I Carry Your Heart." Culled from the poetry of e. e. cummings, the song extends the ethereal feel of the album with the addition of Hedges' airy voice and background harmonies from David Crosby and Graham Nash. But the album isn't entirely dependent on a meditative and reflective vibe. "The Rootwitch" takes a different approach with its dramatic twists and turns that find Hedges testing the limits of his instrument. He recorded the piece on an instrument he refers to as a "savage myth guitar.""It's a way of looking at music," he explained. "The savagery implies that it's tough and the myth implies that it's mystical. It's my current acoustic guitar title—my main strum."Innerviews spoke to Hedges about the making of Taproot prior to a performance at the University of Toronto.

Taproot represents the most complex music you’ve created to date.I worked really hard at getting the album to flow together. I think it flows better than anything I’ve put together before. I know my bio says it took me five years to make. I did a live album three years ago and since then I’ve been playing live. Then I went about making my next record and it took me two-and-a-half years. So, whoever writes my bio is thinking "how can we get people interested in learning about Michael? Let’s tell everyone this is his first studio record in five years. They’ll think he’s had a big hiatus." I don’t know who wrote it, but I’m gonna get on their ass. [laughs] I just feel it’s a long line. I finished the live album, took a little break and then started writing more tunes and thinking about a natural subject. Taproot is a myth. It’s autobiographical. I wrote a story. I was having personal problems and whenever I get bothered by something or get wondering about something, I feel like putting my thoughts down so I can look at them, reflect on them or meditate on them. My meditation was on a story that I wrote that was made of characters from my life. But I kind of made it into a myth so I could kind of live in this little fairy tale world that I’d created. All the characters, places and events in the myth are song titles. The actual story does exist, but only for my formal reasons. In other words, my structure for the record follows that story. But I don’t want to force that story on my listeners and say they should perceive the album a certain way, according to these guidelines. So, I let the music tell the story and I keep the verbiage in my files.What made you want to put e. e. cummings’ words to music on "i carry your heart?"The most memorable thing about e. e. cummings poetry is that it’s beautiful, yet it’s stream of consciousness. So, I thought it would be a good, fun way to make a song go rather than just write verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus-chorus-chorus. The poem lends itself to two verses and it just goes off. I thought about how to make the music go off as well and have it match up so I don’t mess with cummings’ form. So, I didn’t change them. I used the words verbatim.David Crosby and Graham Nash contribute background harmonies to excellent effect on that track.They just wanted to sing on something and I only had one tune. So, I took the tape down to Los Angeles and we transferred it onto a digital machine and they recorded their harmony parts on it. Then I mixed it down from 24-track to my eight-track and brought it home. Then I had it on a mix with two tracks.















I played on David Crosby’s solo album a couple of years ago and we stayed in touch. I also wrote a song with David for the latest CSN album Live It Up called "Arrows." I’m not all that pleased with the way they did it, but I always have a good time with Crosby. The new CSN album didn’t do that much for me because they didn’t do much of the producing. I enjoy Joe Vitale’s work. He’s a great guy. I just like Crosby, Nash and Stills producing it. They should produce their own music. Stay a little more involved guys.Describe your production approach.I do produce quite a bit, but it’s more from the actual performance. The textures aren’t too dense. They become dense on a few tunes, but that’s because I was experimenting. I rely on technology too, but you have to ask "What is the nature of your reliance?" when you do. I rely on technology to give me certain things. I don’t rely on it to give me anything musical. Hopefully, my ideas are musical things and the technology will only help that. I’ve always thought about the fact that I use steel strings as technology. A steel string is made in a factory by a machine. But I like to provide my own rhythm, There’s only one tune where I use a click track which is "Scenes." It was there because I needed a click track to keep the whole tune together. After I recorded the first couple of tracks, I did away with the click track so I could go with the rhythm I was perceiving on the guitar. I hear a lot of great music that uses technology to its fullest extent that really works too. It all depends on how much the artist is involved in the piece musically. You occasionally stray from your favored guitar techniques on Taproot."Rootwitch" came from my desire to finally write something where there wasn’t a single plucked note on the whole thing. So, everything is tapped or slapped. It’s drumming on the guitar. And "Spirit Farmer" is all bass notes from the harp guitar turned around backwards. I also did that early on quite a bit on "Spare change." It’s very simple but very time consuming. It involves quite a bit of discipline for me.You use a little bit of synth on Taproot. I understand that’s a direction you may want to explore in a larger manner in the future.I didn’t think I had an original enough voice to put much on, so I just used it where I felt I had something to say. The keyboards and techniques are already there. I have an Oberheim Expander, an Akai Sampler, a DX-7, a Roland D-50, software, computer, MIDI patch bay, digital reverbs, EQs and compressors. In the future, there may be more and more synthesizers as I become more familiar with how to use the instruments musically.















Do you find the idea of guitar synth at all attractive?I don’t think I would want to control a synthesizer with my guitar technique. I would rather control it with a sequencer or keyboard technique. I have a keyboard technique that works better on a synthesizer than a guitar technique. What I tend to do originally on the guitar doesn’t transmit through the guitar synth. The guitar synth doesn’t pick up things like pull-offs and harmonics.You’re a big fan of the TransTrem guitar. What draws you to it?It’s a guitar that bends. It has a whammy bar that you can lock down in a key. So, you can bend all the notes down—they all go down equally. On most whammy bars, you can only do it with one note or use the vibrato. Lately, heavy metal people have been bending it way up or way down. So, you can strum a chord, listen to it ring, grab the whammy bar, bend it down, listen to the whole chord go down in tune, lock it down a whole step down and then you can strum and do harmonics through them. So, naturally, I had a blast with it. I first got ahold of one three years ago. I was on tour in Europe as the opening act for Suzanne Vega. I would leave early because I heard her show a couple of times and didn’t have to be on her bus. So, I’d have my road manager take me back to the hotel and I’d get out my TransTrem and wail ‘til dawn. I don’t write wailing tunes, but I’d work out on it with all those different positions. It’s like learning to drive a semi-truck with all those different gears.One of your own innovations was to put a bass string on your guitar to dramatic effect. I wanted to hear lower notes. Lots of people tune their guitar lower, but I thought "Let’s make this a bit of a hybrid and see what happens." So, I did away with the high E string and put the B where the E should be and the G to where the B should be and so forth. It left me having a naked six-string spot, so I put a bigger one there. What criteria does a song have to meet in order to make you want to cover it?Usually, I just have to go crazy and listen to it all the time for a period of time until I say "I’m tired of listening to this. I have to sing it myself now." "Love bizarre" is the only tune Sheila E. did that I really got excited about, probably because Prince wrote it. Prince is a writer more than anything else. He’s written so much. It’s really amazing. I don’t think he should have recorded everything he’s written, but maybe it’s just his way of getting it off his chest. I like his new record a lot. I don’t listen to his guitar playing. I listen to his compositions, melodies and structures. I like "Lay down your funky weapon." More and more, I just get completely floored by Lisa Dal Bello. If she walked into this room right now, I’d faint. Her latest release is called She. It’s my favorite record. It’s probably logged more listening hours than anything I’ve heard. Also, Whomanfoursays is a great record too. I put them both in the same category. Whomanfoursays is more on the creative side. She is more produced in a more poppier vein. But her strength is what I like. If you ever meet her, tell her I want to meet her. Tell her I’m dying with desire to meet her. Tell her I’m her fondest admirer.

Concise Overview of Recent Israeli-Palestinian History
Nov 2, 1917 British issued the Balfour Declaration, viewed by Jews and Arabs as promising a “National Home” for the Jews in Palestine.
1936-1939 Arab Revolt led by Haj Amin Al-Husseini. Over 5,000 Arabs were killed according to some sources, mostly by British. Several hundred Jews were killed by Arabs. Husseini fled to Iraq and then to Nazi Germany.
May 15, 1948 Israel War of Independence (1948 War). Declaration of Israel as the Jewish State; British leave Palestine; Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia declared war on Israel. Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian invasion began.
April 3, 1949 Armistice - Israel and Arab states agree to armistice. Israel gained about 50% more territory than was originally allotted to it by the UN Partition Plan.
Oct. 29, 1956 Suez Campaign. In retaliation for a series of escalating border raids as well as the closure of the straits of Tiran and Suez canal to Israeli shipping, and to prevent Egyptian use of newly acquired Soviet arms in a war, Israel invades the Sinai peninsula and occupies it for several months, with French and British collaboration.
May, 1964 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) founded with the aim of destroying Israel. The Palestinian National Charter (1968) officially called for liquidation of Israel.
May, 1967 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser closes the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and dismisses UN peacekeeping force. Negotiations with US to reopen the Straits of Tiran fail.
June 5-10,1967 6-day war . Israel destroys the Egyptian air force on the ground, conquers and occupies Sinai and Gaza, then conquers the West Bank from Jordan, and Golan Heights from Syria. UN resolution 242 called for Israeli withdrawal, establishment of peace.
Oct. 6, 1973 Yom Kippur War (October War). In a surprise attack on the Jewish day of atonement, Egypt retook the Suez canal and a narrow zone on the other side. Syria reconquered the Golan Heights. Following massive US and Soviet resupplying of the sides, Israel succeeded in pushing back the Syrians and threatening Damascus. In Sinai, the IDF crossed the Suez Canal and cut off the Egyptian Third Army.
March 26, 1979 Peace treaty signed between Egypt and Israel.
June 7, 1981 Israel destroys Iraqi nuclear reactor in daring raid.
Oct. 6, 1981 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is assassinated while on the reviewing stand of a victory parade.
June 6, 1982 Massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon to fight PLO.
Sept. 13, 1993 Oslo Declaration of Principles - Israel and PLO agree to mutual recognition.
Sept 28, 1995 Oslo Interim Agreement signed. Palestinian Authority to be established.
Nov. 4, 1995 Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin assassinated by right-wing Israeli fanatic Yigal Amir. Rabin is replaced by Shimon Peres
June, 1996 Right-Wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu elected Prime Minister in Israel, replacing Shimon Peres.
Sept, 1996 "Al-Aksa tunnel riots - Arab sources spread the false rumor that a gate opened in an underground tunnel tourist attraction by the Israeli government, endangered the foundations of the Al-Aqsa mosque. This caused several days of rioting and numerous casualties.
Jan 18, 1997 Israel and Palestinians reach agreement on Israeli redeployment in the West-Bank city of Hebron
Oct. 1998 Wye River Plantation talks result in an agreement for Israeli redeployment and release of political prisoners and renewed Palestinian commitment to correct its violations of the Oslo accords including excess police force, illegal arms and incitement in public media and education.
May 17, 1999 Israel elects Labor party leader and Former General Ehud Barak as Prime Minister in a landslide. Barak promises rapid progress toward peace.
March, 2000 Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations fail when Hafez Assad rejects an Israeli offer relayed by US President Clinton in Geneva.
Sept. 28, 2000 Palestinians initiated riots after Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, which is also the location of the Haram as Sharif holy to Muslims.
Sept. 11, 2001 Terror attacks on World Trade Center in NYC and the Pentagon carried out by fanatic Islamic Al-Qaida group headed by Osama Bin Laden initiate US war on terror. Israel and Palestinians agree to a cease fire, but it is not implemented.
Feb 6, 2001 Right-wing Likud leader Ariel Sharon elected Prime Minister in Israel replacing Ehud Barak and promising "peace and security."
March-April 2002 Israel conducts operation Defensive Wall in the West Bank, following a large number of Palestinian suicide attacks on civilian targets. Saudi peace initiative adopted at Beirut summit.
Jan 28, 2003 Elections in Israel give wide margin (40 seats) to right wing Likud party, returning PM Ariel Sharon for another term.
March 19,2003 US begins invasion of Iraq by a strike against a building where Saddam Hussein and other leaders are meeting. Baghdad falls, April 9.
July 9, 2004 International court of Justice (ICJ) rules that the Israeli security barrier violates international law and must be torn down.
Nov 11, 2004 Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat dies.
Jan 9, 2005 Mahmoud Abbas elected President of the Palestinian National Authority.
Jan 10, 2005 Ariel Sharon forms unity government with Labor and United Torah Judaism parties in Israel.
April 2005 Ariel Sharon visits US President George Bush at his Texas ranch. Syrian Army leaves Lebanon, officially ending Syrian occupation.
May 26, 2005 Mahmud Abbas visits US President George Bush at the White House, an important symbolic gesture signaling US backing for Abbas and Palestinian aspirations. Israel releases 400 Palestinian prisoners including some with blood on their hands. Britain confirms "low level" negotiations with Hamas.
June, 2005 Violence flares in Gaza. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits Palestinian and Israeli leaders to ensure coordination of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Israeli PM Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas meet in Jerusalem June 21. Sharon announces that Palestinians have promised to coordinate regarding Gaza withdrawal. PM Abbas postpones Palestinian legislative elections in order to change the election law, amidst growing concern that Hamas will trounce Abbas's Fatah party in the elections. Lebanese elections give a decisive majority to the opposition to Syria, led by Saad Hariri, son of slain leader Rafiq Hariri.
Aug. 15, 2005 Disengagement - Israeli evacuation of Gaza settlements and four West Bank settlements began on August 15 and was completed August 24.

See detailed timeline below

Current Commentary

* Suicide Bombing in Nethanya or 'The Iranian Candidate?'
* Springtime for Sharon
* Israel political earthquakes: Sharon quits, Peretz resurrects Labor
* Rice brokers deal to lift Gaza Siege - Maybe
* Laptop computer evidence of nuke program - is it conclusive?




Detailed Timeline
1300? BCE Migration and conquest of Canaan by the Philistines and Israelite tribes. Map of Canaan.
1000? BCE Jewish conquest of Jerusalem; reign of David (maps); After the death of David's son, Solomon, the kingdom split into two: Israel in the north, Judea in Jerusalem and the south (maps). Brief History of Early Palestine in maps.
721 BCE Fall of Israel (Northern Kingdom) to Assyria
586 BCE Fall of Judea (Southern Kingdom) to Babylon and destruction of the first temple
About 539 BCE Fall of Babylon. Jews allowed to return to Judea. Tradition has it that Ezra and Nehemia led this return, and later rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, but the walls were apparently not built until 100 years later.
About 519 BCE Rebuilding of the Second Temple under Persian rule.
331 BCE Alexander the Great conquers Persia. The land was subject to Egyptian rule after his death, followed by Seleucid Syrian rule.
313 BCE Ptolemy of Egypt rules Jerusalem and Judea.
170 BCE Antiochus Ephiphanes rules Judea.
166 BCE Revolt of Judah Maccabee against Syrian Hellenic dynasty; Simon. 164 - Liberation of Jerusalem. Judah is named Friend of the Roman Senate and People; Rule of the Maccabees: 166 - Judah 160 -Jonathan 143
About 61 BCE Roman conquest of Jerusalem by Pompei. Land is divided into various provinces (maps).
40 BCE Reign of Herod the Great; Herod conquered Jerusalem in 37 BCE. Herod began an extensive restoration of the temple about 20 BC
4 BCE Probable year of birth of Jesus. Jesus was crucified between 31 and 33 AD.
66-73 AD First Jewish revolt. Fall of the Jewish Second Temple to Romans in 70 AD.
133-135 Second Jewish revolt under Bar - Kochba crushed. Judea renamed Palestina. Jews are banned from Jerusalem by Hadrianus Caesar.
313 Roman Emperor Constantine legalizes Christianity
614 Persians conquer Judea and Jerusalem..
622 Hijra of Mohammed. Islam is founded.
628 Emperor Heraclius defeats Sassanid Persians, reconquers Jerusalem.
About 638 Arab conquest of Jerusalem. (slightly earlier or later according to different sources). Caliph Omar provides the Christians of Jerusalem with the Covenant of Umarguaranteeing their protection. Land divided into the Jund of filastin, in the south (capital in Al-Lod and later in Ramlah), and the Jund of Urdunn in the north, with capital in Tiberias (Tabariyeh).
641 Arab conquest of Egypt.
705 Dome of the Rock (Omar) mosque is completed by Caliph Abd’ al Malik ibn Marwanwho rules from Jerusalem.
715 The Al-Aqsa Mosque is completed by the Caliph Walid.
717 Caliph Suleiman builds Ramlah
750 Rise of the Abbasids in Baghdad, full of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus.
969 Fatimid conquest. Churches and synagogues of Jerusalem destroyed.
1071

Battle of Manzikert. The Byzantine emperor Romanus IV Diogenes is defeated by the Seljuk Turks, opening Asia Minor to Turkish invasion. Seljuks devastate Jerusalem.
1099 Crusaders conquer Jerusalem, slaughter most Jewish and Moslem inhabitants, expel Jews.
1187 Salah-ed-din (Saladin) reconquers Jerusalem
1229 Jerusalem briefly held by Crusaders.
1244 Rise of Mamlukes. Jerusalem taken by Muslims.
1260 Battle of Ayn Jalut (Nazereth) - Holagu (Mongols) defeated.
1291 Crusaders defeated at Acre and evicted from Palestine.
1453 Constantinople falls to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed.
1517 Ottoman Turkish conquest of Palestine.
1537-41 Muslim walls built around Jerusalem by Suleiman the Magnificent.
1799 Napoleon conquers Jaffa but retreats before Acco (Acre); 1799 - Napoleon's Proclamation of a Jewish State was stillborn, and his declaration of equal rights for Jews was repealed in part in 1806.
1831 Egyptian Conquest of Palestine area by Mehmed Ali of Egypt, who rebelled against the Ottomans. He was forced to withdraw in 1840 under pressure by European allies.
1834 Jerusalem families including the Abu Ghosh clan revolt against Egyptian rule. The rebellion is eventually crushed.
1839 Tanzimat - reorganization program- is proclaimed in the Ottoman empire.
1840 Blood libel (accusation that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood for Passover Matzoth) against Damascus Jewry
1843 First Zionist writings of Rabbi Alcalay and of Rabbi Kalischer, Emuna Yeshara.
1844 First census in Jerusalem shows 7120 Jews, 5760 Muslims, 3390 Christians.
1856 Ottoman reforms (Tanzimat) - including requirement to register ownership of land and pay taxes on it.
1860 First Jewish settlement (Mishkenot Sha'ananim) outside Jerusalem walls.
1878 First Zionist Settlement - Petah Tikwa.
1892 Railroad from Jaffa to Jerusalem.
1897 First Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland.
1906 Beginnings of Zionist socialist movements. First Congress of Poalei Tziyon in Poltava, under the leadership of Ber Borochov.
July 3 1908 The Young Turks revolt breaks out in the Ottoman empire, and is eventually led by Enver Pasha; Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II is forced to restore the constitution of 1876, entailing the creation of a new parliament, and indirect representative elections. ‘Abd al-Hamid is then deposed (27Apr 09), and his brother Mehmet V installed. Policies for the ‘Turkification’ of the Ottoman territories promulgated through 1909, resulting in the creation of societies promoting pan-Arab ideas
1908 First Arabic newspaper in Haifa, al-Karmil, popularizes opposition to selling land to Zionists.
1909 Foundation of Tel Aviv by Zionists (Called Ahuzat Bayit) near Jaffa; foundation of first Kibbutz - Degania.
1911 Filastin, large Arabic newspaper, launched in Jaffa.
June 15, 1914 Anglo French agreement on Baghdad railroad and Mesopotamia
Aug 1914 Start of WW I
Nov 1914 Allies at war with Turkey
Dec 17 British protectorate in Egypt; Prince Husein Kemal becomes Khedive.
April 25, 1915 Anglo-French landing at Gallipoli
July 1915 Husayn-McMahon Correspondence - Britain promises independence for Arabia.
Jan 6-8 1916 Allies evacuate Gallipoli
Apr 29, 1916 British surrender to Turks at Kut, in Mesopotamia
May 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement divides up Fertile Crescent between France & Britain into zones of influence, recognizing Arab independence in part of the land.
Jun 1916 Husayn of Arabia proclaims revolt against the Turks urged on by British promises of independence and with support of T.E. Lawrence for military operations. In October or November he was proclaimed king of Saudi Arabia, but the British supported Saud, who had been in control of Riyadh since 1902, and who made a pact with the British in 1915.
Jan 1, 1917 Britain , France and Italy recognize Husayn as king of the Hejaz.
Nov 2, 1917 British issued the Balfour Declaration, viewed by Jews and Arabs as promising a “National Home” for the Jews in Palestine.
Dec 1917 Gen. Sir Edmund Allenby captures Jerusalem from Ottomans for the British. Col. Reginald Storrs is appointed military governor.
Apr, 1918 Zionist commission arrives in Palestine.
June, 1918 Emir Feisal and Dr. Weizmann meet near Aqaba
Oct, 1918 British and Arabs occupy Damascus, French occupy Beirut and Alexandretta
Nov 1918 First Muslim-Christian association formed in Jaffa to oppose the creation of a Jewish homeland. Another was formed in Jerusalem soon after. Armistice between Allies and Germany, Nov 11.
Jan. 1919 First Palestinian Congress advocated incorporation of Palestine into greater Syria.
Jan 18, 1919 Paris Peace Conference opens - results in Treaty of Versailles, June 28, 1919.
March 1919 Widespread national revolt begins in Egypt against British rule after nationalist leaders were arrested and Zaghloul Pasha was exiled. The Wafd party is created.
May 19 1919 Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) lands at Samsun in Turkey and begins organizing nationalist forces to oppose the sultanate & the Allied occupation
May 23 1919 Kurdish revolt against the British, led by Shaykh Mahmud Berzendji of Sulaymaniyya, who proclaims an independent Kurdistan. The revolt continued until 1931.
July 1919 General Syrian Congress (which included prominent Palestinians, Transjordanians, Lebanese & Syrians) held in Damascus, supporting the independence of an undivided Syria, and opposed to Zionism. Britain cedes authority over Syria to France after the congress finishes; Gen. Henri Gourand becomes High Commissioner.
July 19 1919 In Turkey, Ataturk creates a provisional government based in Ankara.
28 Aug 1919 Henry King and Charles Crane, the US members of the International Commission of Inquiry, sent primarily on the initiative of President Wilson, present their report based on their visit to the region in June-July, against creation of a Jewish National home in Palestine.
Feb - Mar 1920 Jewish settlements of Tel Hai and Metullah in N. Palestine attacked (Feb 20). Josef Trumpeldor killed in second attack at Tel Hai (March 1)
March 1920 Faysal elected and crowned king of Greater Syria at 2nd General Syrian Congress in Damascus; assembly proclaims independence from France of Greater Syria; rejects Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot agreement. Allies occupy Constantinople.
April, 1920 Musa Kazim al-Husayni, mayor of Jerusalem, is replaced by Raghib al-Nashashibi; clan rivalry grows.
April, 1920 "Nebi Musa" Arab riots led by Haj Amin El Husseini and Aref El Aref in Hebron and Jerusalem. Forty Six Jews Killed.
Apr 25, 1920 San Remo Conference - Supreme Allied Council assigns mandates for Mesopotamia and Palestine to Britain, and Syria and Lebanon to France.
June 1920 Haganah,Jewish Self Defense, organized by Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, Eliahu Golumb and others.
July 1920 Herbert Samuel named High Commissioner of Palestine. King Faisal recognizes French Mandate. French forces under Gourand retake Damascus by force with British support. Britain arrests Palestinian notables who had supported Faysal.
Dec 1920


Histadrut, the General Federation of Hebrew Workers in the Land of Israel (Histadrut Haklalit Shel Haovdim Haivriyim Be'eretz Yisrael), was formed. Remained exclusively Jewish until 1960s, when it officially dropped ‘Hebrew’ from its name (1966).
May 1921 Arab riots in Jaffa against Jewish population.
May 10, 1921 Haj Amin El Husseini appointed Grand Mufti by British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, though Husseini had been convicted of organizing riots in 1920 and had been sentenced to ten years in jail
Jan 1922 Haj Amin El Husseini appointed President of the Supreme Muslim Council.
March 1922 British grant independence to Egypt.
June 3, 1922 The Churchill ("Command") White Paper notes that the Balfour declaration only promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and reserves East Palestine for Transjordan.
July 24, 1922 British Mandate for Palestine; Official establishment of Transjordan as a separate state; Britain, in military control of Syria, allows French forces led by Gourand to retake Damascus by force.
Nov 1, 1922 Mustapha Kemal Proclaims Turkish Republic
May 25, 1923 Proclamation of Transjordanian Independence under Emir Abdullah
May 29, 1923 Palestine Constitution suspended by British after Arabs refuse to participate in the government.
July 24, 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty signed by Greece, Turkey and the Allies
Sept 29, 1923 Palestine Mandate officially comes into force.
Feb 19, 1924 Shah Ahmed deposed in Persia; Reza Khan Appointed Regent
Nov 20, 1924 Egyptian troops withdrawn from Sudan under British ultimatum, after the assassination of Sir Lee Stack.
1925 Official inauguration of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
July 20, 1925 Druze uprising in Syria, continues until June, 1927.
Oct 12, 1925 Syrian uprising against the French Mandate.
Jan 8, 1926 Ibn Saud becomes king of the Hejaz, now called Saudi Arabia.
May 23, 1926 France proclaims Republic of Lebanon.
May 20, 1927 Britain recognizes Saudi independence.
Dec. 14, 1927 Britain recognizes Iraqi independence (subject to treaty provisions) and continuing mandate.
Feb. 20, 1928 Britain recognizes Transjordanian independence (subject to treaty provisions).
July 5, 1928 Sir John Chancellor becomes High Commissioner in Palestine.
July 19, 1928 King Fuad dissolves Egyptian parliament, suspend freedom of the press.
August, 1929 Arab Riots and Massacres in Hebron, Jerusalem, Safed, Haifa, Motza and elsewhere. The Jews had set up a dividing screen at the Wailing Wall in Yom Kippur of 1928 to separate men and women worshippers, prompting rumors that the Jews wanted to build a synagogue at wall, which were spread deliberately by Haj Amin El-Husseini. Amid heightening tensions, a demonstration by Jews in 1929 and Arab incitement ignited violence and rioting again Jews. Thousands of Jews fled the ancient Jewish quarter in Jerusalem. The Hebron Jewish community was evacuated after 64-67 were killed in riots.
Oct. 21, 1929 Egyptian Constitution restored.
1930 The Hope-Simpson Report recommends cessation of Jewish immigration.
Oct 21, 1930 British Passfield White Paper proposes to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine.
1931 After questions in commons and League condemnation, Ramsay MacDonald writes to Haim Weizmann Rescinding the Passfield White Paper; IZL (Irgun or Etzel - The Irgum Tzvai Leumi) formed by Jabotinsky and others who leave the Haganah.
Oct. 3, 1932 British Mandate over Iraq terminated.
Jul-Aug. 1933 Massacre of Assyrian Christians in Iraq.
Sept. 8, 1933 King Feisal of Iraq dies, succeeded by his son Ghazi.
May-June 1934 War between Saudi Arabia an Yemen.
Nov. 2, 1934 Syrian Parliament suspended indefinitely
Nov. 30, 1934 Egyptian Constitution of 1930 suspended
Jan. 14,1935 Iraq-Mediterranean oil pipeline opened.
April, 1936 Farouk succeeds Fuad I as King of Egypt; Arab Higher Committee formed in Palestine.
1936-1939 Arab Revolt led or coopted by the Al-Husseini family and Fawzi al-Kaukji and financed by Axis powers. Over 5,000 Arabs were killed according to some sources; most were killed by other Arabs and by British.Orde Wingate forms "night squads" for Jewish self-defense. Several hundred Jews were killed by Arabs. Husseini fled to Iraq and then to Nazi Germany.
Aug. 26, 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty ends military occupation of Egypt except in the Suez Canal zone.
Oct, 29, 1936 General Sidqi Bakr seizes power in Iraq.
1937-1938 Peel and Woodhead commissions recommend partitioning Palestine into a small Jewish state and a large Arab one.
Aug. 11, 1937 Assassination of General Sidqi Bakr, Iraqi dictator.
Oct. 1, 1937 British declare Higher Committee in Palestine an illegal body.
Oct. 16, 1937 Haj Amin El-Husseini Mufti of Jerusalem escapes to Syria and thence to Iraq.
Jan.-Mar. 1939 Round-table conference on Palestine in London, with Arab countries, Zionists and Palestinian representatives.
May 17, 1939 1939 White Paper limits Jewish immigration to Palestine to 75,000 in total, restricts Jewish land purchases, envisions an Arab Palestinian state. Jews found the Mossad to arrange for illegal immigration.
Sept. 3, 1939 Britain and France declare war on Germany
Nov 25, 1940 The Jewish illegal immigrant ship Patria (also called Patra) carrying refugees from Europe, detained in Haifa by the British, is blown up by the Jewish underground Hagana to prevent transshipment of the refugees to Mauritius. The explosion was supposed to cause a small leak. Instead, the ship sank and 252 people died.
Apr. 1, 1941 Agitation by exiled Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin El Husseini leads to coup. Pro-Axis Government under Rashid Ali in Iraq.
May -June, 1941 British reoccupy Habbanieh and Baghdad, Rashid Ali and pro-Axis leaders flee to Teheran and Berlin; After the revolt is suppressed, a pogrom against the Jews (Farhoud) takes place in Baghdad, while British troops stand by and refuse to intervene. Click for details of Iraq Axis coup, Mufti, British Intervention and the Farhud
June, 1941 Free French and Australians occupy Syria and Lebanon; Britain and France guarantee Syrian independence.
Feb. 1942 British force the appointment of Nahas Pasha, a British ally, as Egyptian PM.
Feb. 24, 1942 The Jewish illegal immigrant ship Struma, forced to sail north from Turkey, is torpedoed by a Soviet submarine (either collaborating with British or because the ship was mistaken for German shipping) and sunk with the loss of 428 men, 269 women and 70 children.
Oct. 1942 Battle of El Alamein. British under General Montgomery defeat Rommel's Afrika Korps and end the Nazi threat on Egypt.
May 9, 1942 Biltmore Program - Zionist leaders, headed by Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, convene at the Biltmore Hotel in New York and set their postwar program (known as the Biltmore Program). The program recommended an end to the British Mandate and demand Jewish control over immigration to Palestine with the aim of founding a Jewish "Commonwealth."
Oct 7, 1944 Arab leaders meet in Alexandria to discuss postwar plans for independence and ways to prevent implementation of Jewish control over Palestine.
Nov 6, 1944 Members of the Jewish Lehi underground Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet Zuri assassinated Lord Moyne in Cairo. Moyne, a known anti-Zionist, was Minister of State for the Middle East and in charge of carrying out the terms of the 1939 White paper - preventing Jewish immigration to Palestine by force.
Mar, 1945 All Arab states declare war on Germany and Japan.
March 22, 1945 League of Arab States set up (Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Transjordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, with Musa ‘Alami as Arab States’ chosen representative of the Palestinians) with British approval to shift welfare responsibility onto local population and to ensure continuing Arab support. The goals of the league were as stated in the Alexandria Protocol, of which it was an outgrowth. Arab League charter proclaims goal of achieving closer aims between Arab States and declares that Palestine is a member of the League in a special annex.
May-June, 1945 Crisis in Syria and Lebanon. British ultimatum to French causes French to withdraw their forces.
Aug, 1945 US President Truman asks British to admit 110,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine.
Sept., 1945 British limit Jewish immigration into Palestine to 1,500 a month.
Nov. 1945 Anglo American Committee of Inquiry for Palestine appointed.
Mar, 1946 British-Tranjordanian treaty; British recognize Emir Abdullah as King of Transjordan.
Apr. 1946 Report of Anglo American Committee of Inquiry published. Recommend admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine.
June,, 1946 Haj Amin El Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, escapes from detention in France aided by French collaborators. Husseini was to have been deported to Germany and tried for war crimes after spending the war working for the Nazis in Germany.
July 22, 1946 Irgun Jewish underground blows up British HQ in King David Hotel, Jerusalem, killing 91 persons.
Aug, 1946 British start deporting illegal Jewish immigrants to detention camps in Cyprus.
Sept, 1946 Palestine round-table conference opens in London.
Dec. 1946 Nokrashy Pasha, new Egyptian PM, repudiates Anglo-Egyptian treaty.
Feb. 1947 Britain refers Palestine issue to the UN
May, 1947 UN General Assembly appoints UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP ).
July 18, 1947 British rammed the Jewish illegal immigrant ship Exodus (formerly "President Warfield") on the high seas. They towed it to Haifa where it was the subject of extensive publicity, generating public sympathy for the Zionist cause. The passengers were eventually disembarked in Hamburg. The incident set world and particularly US opinion against the British, and caused the British to intern illegal immigrants thereafter in Cyprus, rather than attempting to return them to Europe.
Sept 1, 1947 UNSCOP issues its report, calling for partition of Palestine.
Nov. 29, 1947 UN Partition Resolution (GA 181) - Palestine was to be divided into a Jewish State and an Arab State; Jerusalem was to be internationalized. The resolution is supported by both the US and USSR. Arab countries and Arab league refuse to recognize the resolution.
Dec. 1, 1947 Arab riots in Jerusalem. Beginning of Arab blockade of Jerusalem. The period to May 1948 was characterized by numerous skirmishes, road ambushes, riots, bombings and massacres, whether organized by one of the other sides or spontaneous. The Haifa riots and massacres were typical.
January 1948 Arab Salvation Army (also called Arab Liberation Army - ALA) are admitted to Palestine by the British, following a promise not to attack Jewish settlements. Their leader, Fauzi Al-Kaukji may have entered Palestine only in March. Jewish Agency concludes arms deal with Czechoslovakia, but most arms do not arrive until June 1948, after the British have left. The UN, including the US, had placed an arms embargo on Palestine. This did not apply to Arab countries including Transjordan. As independent states, they were allowed to acquire arms. The Jordan Legion received a steady supply of arms from Britain through the Suez Canal, at least until May 1948, including a large number of 25 pounder cannon at the beginning of 1948. Hagana agents purchased 20 Auster light aircraft in Britain, sold for scrap, rebuilt them and brought them to Palestine for use of the Haganah. Haganah later rebuilt Spitfires left by the mandate for scrap as well, but did not have real fighter and bomber aircraft until May 1948 or, when Czech Messerschmidts and B-17s purchased clandestinely were brought into the country.
January 16, 1948 Jewish convoy to Gush Etzion intercepted
Feb. 1948 Anti-British riots in Baghdad against new British-Iraq treaty bring down pro-British government.
Mar. 1948 Provisional Jewish government formed in Tel-Aviv. Convoy to Gush Etzion ambushed in Nebi Daniel. Arabs begin to flee Haifa.
April 6-8, 1948 Arab blockade of Jerusalem is broken temporarily by operation Nachshon. Death of Abd-El-Qader Al-Husseini at Kastel - The foremost Palestinian military leader is shot by a Jewish sentry when he wanders into Jewish held Kastel in the Jerusalem corridor thinking it is in Arab hands.
April 9, 1948 Deir Yassin Massacre - Jewish dissident underground groups - Irgun and Lehi kill over 100 Palestinian civilians in the Jerusalem village of Deir Yassin.
April 13, 1948 Haddassah Convoy Massacre - In retaliation for Deir Yassin, Arabs killed Jewish medical personnel and sick persons on their way to Hadassah hospital.
April 13-20, 1948 Operation Har'el launched by Hagannah at conclusion of Operation Nachshon, does not succeed in opening the road to Jerusalem.
April 1948 Arab flight from Haifa continues; Arab flight from Jaffa.
April 22-31 1948 Operation Misparayim launched by Hagannah to assume control of Haifa after British withdrawal and attacks by Arab forces and Irgun.
May 12, 1948 Haganah captures Tsfat (Safed). Arab population flees the city before it is captured.
May 13, 1948 Jaffa surrenders to Haganah.
May 13, 1948 Kfar Etzion Massacre - In retaliation for Deir Yassin Massacre, Arabs killed about 128 Jewish defenders at Kfar Etzion, after they had surrendered.
May 14, 1948 Remaining kibbutzim of Gush Etzion surrender. British High Commissioner Cunningham leaves Palestine. State of Israel declared on Friday May 14, in advance of the Sabbath. recognized immediately by USA and on May 17 by USSR.
May 15, 1948 British leave Palestine. Israel War of Independence (1948 War). Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia declared war on Israel. Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian invasion began.
May 17, 1948 Haganah captures Acco (Acre). Most of the Arab population flees the city before it is captured.
May 18, 1948 Syrian army captures Massada and Merom Hagolan.
May 28, 1948 Jewish quarter of the old city of Jerusalem falls to the Jordan Legion. The inhabitants were protected from the wrath of a lynch mob by the Legion under Abdullah Tell, and noncombatants were expelled to West Jerusalem. About 300 Haganah defenders were taken prisoner and sent to Jordan. The entire quarter including 58 of the 59 synagogues was demolished by the Arab mob despite efforts of the Legion.
June 11, 1948 First truce begins, lasting until 8 July.
June 23, 1948 Irgun’s Altalena ship brings weapons and 940 immigrants to Palestine. The arms shipment was a violation of UN embargo, but Israel government agreed to it, provided the Irgun handed over the weapons to IDF and formed a unified force. Irgun Commander Menahem Begin refused to hand over weapons and Irgun insisted on keeping a portion of the arms for its own use as a separate force. Palmach units of IDF under Yigal Allon attempted to capture weapons by force, killing 14 Irgun men. Yizhak Rabin, in command of shore batteries in Tel-Aviv, was ordered to fire upon and sink the Altalena after it attempted a landing there. According to some reports, factions of the Irgun (Etzel) were planning a coup with the arms.
June, 28, 1948 Count Folke Bernadotte's first peace plan - Jerusalem to be Arab.
July 08, 1948 Egyptian army breaks truce, due to end July 9. Attacks from neighborhood of Majdal (Ashdod). Israeli counterattack at Faluja was unsuccessful. This phase of the war is known as "the ten days," and included Mivtza Dani - the Israeli conquest of Lydda (Lod) and Ramla, breaking the Arab siege of Jerusalem, and creating thousands of refugees, as well as advances in the north. During this time Israel had acquired three B-17s and some Dakotas. One of the B-17s succeeded in dropping some bombs on Cairo on its way to delivery in Israel, others bombed Damascus and Rafa.
July 10, 1948 Arab League announced the establishment of a temporary Palestinian civilian administration over Arab held-areas of Palestine, but it was never implemented.
July 12, 1948 Egyptians attack Kibbutz Negba with armor and massive troop concentrations. Israelis suffer 5 dead, 16 wounded, Egyptian casualties 200- 300 dead and wounded.
July 19, 1948 Second truce in Palestine.
Sept 17, 1948 Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, a UN mediator, was assassinated in Jerusalem, and Lehi members were suspected. The Israel government outlawed the organization's branch in Jerusalem and shut down its publication, Hamivrak. The leaders of Lehi, Natan Yellin-Mor and Mattityahu Shmuelevitz, were sentenced to long jail terms by a military court, but were released in a general amnesty. Bernadotte, who had been instrumental in saving about 21,000 Jews in WW II, was proposing to "relieve" Israel of the Negev and force return of the Palestinian refugees. The latter proposal was adopted in UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
Sept 22, 1948 Palestinian States - AHC communiqué announces the establishment of the Government of All Palestine (APG; Hukumat 'Umum Filastin); Declaration of Independence proclaimed by Hajj Amin to Palestine National Council in Gaza (30Sept-1Oct) on 1Oct, with Hajj Amin as President of the PNC, Ahmad Hilmi ‘Abd al-Baqi as PM, Jamal al-Husayni as Foreign Minister, in the Mandate territory of Palestine, with the flag of the 1916 Arab Revolt. Jerusalem as capital, Gaza as seat of government. Recognized and sponsored by Egypt and Arab League, who sought to forestall ‘Abdullah’s plan to annex West Bank; strongly opposed by Jordan, who organized a much larger rival Palestinian Congress in Amman on 30Sept to support Jordan’s policy in Palestine. APG issued Palestinian passports; but with Egyptian disillusionment, HQ transferred to Cairo in Oct, Hajj Amin was confined to Cairo and is & actions curtailed; many leading members left to work for Amman. Ahmad Hilmi continued to represent Palestine in the League until his death in September 63.
Oct. 15, 1948 Second truce ends; Israeli offensive breaks Egyptian siege of Israeli settlements in the Negev (operation Yoav). Beersheva is taken. In the north, operation Hiram defeats the Arab Liberation army. IDF massacres in Eilabun, Saliba, Safsaf, Jish, Hule, Majd el-Krum, Bi'na, Dier el assad and Arab al-Mawassa.
Dec. 11, 1948 UN Resolution 194 called for cessation of hostilities, return of refugees who wish to live in peace. The resolution reflected UN and US anger over the assassination of Count Bernadotte.
Dec. 1948 Israelis advance into Egypt; Nokrashy Pasha, Egyptian PM, assassinated.
Dec 19, 1948- Jan 7, 49 Israeli Operation Horev conquers Gaza and enters Sinai. Intervention by British and US forces Israel to withdraw. Israel shot down several British reconnaissance planes, apparently unarmed (four Spitfires and one Tempest) January 7, 1949.
March 7-10, 1949 Operation Uvda - IDF captures southern Negev including Eilat with no resistance.
Feb-Jun, 1949 Israel and Arab states agree to armistice in separate agreements. Israel-EgyptIsrael -Lebanon Israel -Jordan Israel-Syria) Israel gained about 50% more territory than was originally allotted to it by the UN Partition Plan. The war created about 780,000 Palestinian refugees who fled or were evicted from Jewish held areas. Gaza fell under the jurisdiction of Egypt. The West Bank of the Jordan was occupied by Jordan and later annexed, consistent with secret agreements with the Jewish leadership made before the outbreak of hostilities.
April 27 – Sept 1949 Lausanne conference - Abortive Israel Arab Truce Negotiations. Minor achievements - working recognition of Israel by Arab States who attended the conference, and acceptance of UN Resolutions by both sides. However no substantive agreements were reached.
July 20, 1949 King Farouk of Egypt and PM Za'im of Syria agree on a common front against Iraq.
Aug. 1949 Syrian coup d'etat - PM Za'im executed; Colonel Hinnawi in power.
Dec. 1949 Syrian coup d'etat - Colonel Hinnawi executed; Colonel Shishakly in power.
Jan. 1950 Wafd party win Egyptian elections; Nahas Pasha PM
Apr. 1950 De Jure British recognition to Israel and Greater Jordan (including West Bank).
May 1950 Tripartite Declaration of USA, Britain and France - Middle East security and stability are a common interest.
May 2, 1951 Mossadegh, PM of Iran, nationalizes oil industry.
July, 1951 Assassination of Jordan's King Abdulla because of rumored plans for peace with Israel. His grandson Hussein was crowned in his place following the brief reign of Tallal.
July 23, 1952 The Free Officers (al-dubbat al-ahrar) movement in Egypt - aware of royal plans to remove dissidents from the army - launch a near-bloodless military coup (only 2 fatalities). Officers were nominally led Gen. Muhammad Najib (who was not invovled in the coup's planning), though were organized by his deputy Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser. King Faruq forced to abdicate (26 Jul) and is exiled. A new governing authority, the Revolutionary Command Council, is established (27 Jul), and chaired by Nasser with 8 other members (11 from early 1953). Initially, a civilian administration is set up under ‘Ali Mahir, but he opposed RCC plans for land redistribution (Sept 52), with compulsory purchase by the state, and so was dismissed and replaced with direct RCC control. Constitution is suspended (Dec 52), Parliament disbanded, parties banned (Jan 53, for a projected three year period of military rule), monarchy formally abolished, a republic declared & Najib is installed as President, with Nasser as deputy PM (June 1953) Land reform ensures that the power of large landowners and royal family was broken. Press brought under State control, esp. influential Al-Ahram (later nationalized in 1960). At Nasser’s urging, the nationalism of Egypt's previous government - especially its opposition to Israel and Sudan - is toned down; and Najib indicates that Egypt would participate in US/UK regional defense arrangements (10 Nov), coupled with a request for economic & military aid.
Aug 11, 1952 King Talal of Jordan abdicates in favor of Hussein, aged 17.
Sept 7, 1952 Najib becomes PM of Egypt.
Jan 16, 1953 Plot against Najib in Egypt; Rashid Mehanna arrested, political parties dissolved; Najib proclaims 3 year transition period without elections,
Jam. 18, 1953 Beginning of anti-Zionist stance in USSR. Moscow accuses "Zionist agents" of murdering Zhdanov and attempting to murder other Soviet leaders.
June 18, 1953 Egypt proclaimed a Republic with Najib as President.
July 12, 1953 Shishakly becomes President of Syria.
Sept. 7, 1954 Ben-Gurion resigns as Israeli PM, succeeded by Moshe Sharett.
October 1953 IDF paratrooper unit 101 under Ariel Sharon killed 69 civilians and destroyed a great deal of property in a raid on the Jordanian village of Qibieh. The raid was a reprisal for a raid on Tirat Yehuda.
Feb. 25, 1954 Nasser deposes Najib in Egypt and assumes chairmanship of junta. Najib regains authority 2 days later.
Feb. 27, 1954 Shishakly flees from Syria following army revolt.
April 18, 1954 Nasser ousts Najib and becomes PM of Egypt.
July 1954 The Lavon Affair: Israeli government spies, seemingly without PM Sharett’s knowledge, attempt to sabotage British & US property in Egypt to put blame on Egyptian terrorists, thus driving a wedge between Britain and Egypt, and postponing British evacuation of the Suez. The plan’s failure leads to the fragmentation of Mapai’s leadership, with recurring crises of mutual recrimination over the next decade. Ben Gurion insisted on a full investigation of the affair but was rebuffed by Lavon partisans. Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon resigns in Feb 1955. Egypt retaliated against Egyptian Jews, some of whom were involved in the plot.
Oct 19, 1954 Anglo-Egyptian evacuation agreement signed (troops guarding canal to leave).
Nov 15, 1954 Najib dismissed as President of Egypt, after Revolutionary Command Council - alienated by his public prominence - had attempted unsuccessfully to engineer his resignation (Feb), had orchestrated pro-RCC demonstrations (25-29Mar) & had installed his main opponent, Nasser, as PM in Apr. Najib is placed under house arrest, Nasser takes over as President.
Jan. 27, 1955 Military court in Cairo sentences 2 members of Israeli spy ring to death They are executed Jan 27.
Feb, 1955 Pinhas Lavon resigns as Israel defense minister and is replaced by David Ben-Gurion;
1955 Continuous incidents between Egypt and Israel/Syria, primarily in Gaza DMZ. Operation Black Arrow (Hetz Shahor) launched by Israel in Feb 1955, following Egyptian incursions, killed 38 Egyptians, resulted in a major embarrassment for Egypt and caused Nasser to rethink his strategy with Israel.
Feb. 24, 1955 Baghdad Pact - Pact of Mutual Cooperation Between the Kingdom of Iraq, the Republic of Turkey, the United Kingdom, the Dominion of Pakistan, and the Kingdom of Iran (Baghdad Pact). British/US attempt to minimize Soviet incursions and protect friendly regimes. Israel feels isolated and lacking Western protection.
Sept 27, 1955 Egyptian-Czech arms deal. Secret clause requires Egypt to get financing of Aswan dam from USSR.
Nov. 2, 1955 Ben-Gurion replaces Sharett as Israeli PM.
Dec 11, 1955 Israel launched an attack on Syria following firing on a police patrol boat possibly sent as a deliberate provocation. (operation Olive Leaves), condemned in SCR111, 19 Jan 56,
April 5 1956 Increased tension between Israel & Egypt-Syria. IDF claimed 180 attacks on Israel from Gaza in past four months. Three Israelis killed April 4 when Egyptians opened fire on an Israeli patrol. Israel responded, and an artillery duel culminated in an Israeli artillery barrage at centre of Gaza City (4-5Apr) that killed 59, wounds about 100, mostly civilians. Egypt responded with increased commando raids, sending hundreds of fedayeen across the border in separate raids and killing 12 Israelis. Temporarily calmed through offices of UNS-G.
June 1956 Sharett resigns as Israeli FM ( dies.1965); Golda Meir takes over; Last British troops leave Suez Canal base on June 13.
July 26, 1956 The US withdraws funding from the Aswan dam, USSR steps in. In response, Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal Company (26 Jul), to opposition of British (lease due to terminate in 1968). Is unanimously supported in this by the Arab League (Aug), though Iraqi leaders secretly call on the British to topple Nasser; imposition of martial law in Iraq. Britain, France and USA announce financial retaliation.
Aug. 16, 1956 London Conference on Suez Canal boycotted by Egypt.
Sept 10, 1956 Egypt rejects 18 nation proposals for Suez Canal.
Sept 19, 1956 Second London conference on Suez.
Sept. 23, 1956 Britain and France refer Suez dispute to UN Security Council.
Oct. 29, 1956

Suez Campaign. In retaliation for a series of escalating border raids as well as the closure of the straits of Tiran and Suez canal to Israeli shipping, and to prevent Egyptian use of newly acquired Soviet arms in a war, Israel invades the Sinai peninsula and occupies it for several months, with French and British collaboration. French and British were interested in reversing the nationalization of the canal. Israel withdraws after a UN peace keeping force is placed in Sinai, and US guarantees right of passage for Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran. Suez Canal reopned March 23, 1957.
1957 Fateh founded (informally) with the aim of destroying Israel. Formal establishment about 1964.
1957 (?) Construction of Israel nuclear breeder reactor using French technology begins in Dimona some time in the latter part of the 1950s. The French later tried to stop the program, but backed down when Israeli FM Peres said Israel would make the deal public.
Feb 1, 1958 Egypt and Syria announce merger into United Arab Republic, on Syrian communist initiative in an attempt to outbid Ba‘thist call for a federal union, taken up by Syrian Ba‘th FM Salah al-Din Bitar, a Syrian military delegation had flown to Egypt for unity talks (11Jan). Nasser, unexpectedly agrees to immediate unity. Approved by legislatures on 5Feb, and parallel plebiscites on 21 Feb (which also approve Nasser as President). Armies placed under Egypt command; Syrian political parties dissolved (Mar); Syrian "province" is headed by the left Ba‘thists under Akram Hurani. Large land redistribution schemes in both Syria & Iraq, on model of Egypt 1952. Egypt receives its first economic loan from USSR (($126 million) to promote national industries.
July 14, 1958 Revolution in Iraq ousts and murders British clients, King Feisal II and PM Nuri As-Said. Kassim becomes takes power.
July 15, 1958 US Marines land in Lebanon at the request of President Chamoun.
July 17, 1958 British paratroops land in Jordan to support Jordanian gov't following Iraqi coup.
Oct. 23, 1958 Soviet loan to Egypt to finance Aswan Dam.
Nov 18, 1959 Israel abandons earlier Jordan river diversion scheme, begins work on the National Water Carrier Project, to divert the waters of the River Jordan from the Sea of Galilee to the Negev, taking its share of Jordan water in accordance with Johnston plan.
1959(?) Yasser Arafat, Khalil al Wazir and others found the Palestine Liberation Committee, soon renamed "Fatah" (Conquest). The organization was to be modeled on the Algerian FLN.
1960 Israeli Agents capture Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and abduct him to Israel. Eichmann had order the deaths of millions of Jews as well as Romany people and other minorities.
1961 Eichmann trial is televised and seen around the world. Eichmann was executed in June, 1962.
June 25, 1961 With Soviet support, Kassim declares Kuwait is part of Iraq.
Sept. 29, 1961 Syria secedes from union with Egypt.
Sept 27, 1962 Army coup in Yemen, Abdulla al-Sallal proclaimed PM. Nasser announces support for revolution Sept. 29.
Nov. 5, 1962 Saudi Arabia severs relations with Egypt.
Feb 8, 1963 Baathist coup against Kassim in Iraq; Kassim executed on television and approximately 10,000 alleged communist supporters killed.
March 8, 1963 Baathist coup against President Qudsi in Syria.
March 14, 1963 Egypt, Syria and Iraq open abortive unity talks in Cairo.
24 June, 1963 Ben-Gurion resigns as Israeli PM, because of his frustration at being unable to get justice in the Lavon Affair.
Nov. 18, 1963 Abdul-Salem Aref takes power in Iraq, expels Baathist government members and breaks military union with Syria.
Jan 13-17 1964 First Arab summit at Cairo (the Egyptians count this as the third Arab Summit) (ie. heads of State, instigated by Nasser), prompted by Israel’s R .Jordan diversion scheme and Palestinian agitation against it. Arabs declare their intentions of stopping the Israeli diversion scheme, which is in accordance with the Johnson plan, and decided on establishment of the PLO. A Unified Arab Command under Egyptian supervision was created. This summit and the one that followed in September caused considerable alarm in Israel, and is cited by Avi Shlaim (The Iron Wall) as the actual beginning of the 6 day war.
May, 1964 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) founded with the aim of destroying Israel. The Palestinian National Charter (1968) officially called for liquidation of Israel. PLO was founded by Egypt to divert Palestinian energies from the nascent Fatah movement of Yasser Arafat, which had become anti-Nasserist.
Sept 13, 1964 Second Arab Summit at Alexandria decides on diversion of the headwaters of the Jordan as well as strengthening regional Arab armies. Arabs declare the aim of destroying Israel. Israel addressed two notes to the UN Security Council, concerning the alarming nature of the summit resolutions to destroy Israel.
Sept. 18. 1965 Third Arab Summit at Casablanca. Conference draws up staged plan for combating Israel, first building up armed forces of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon over 2.5-3 yrs & refraining from war with Israel; then proceeding to war.
April 13, 1965 Iraq President Aref killed in helicopter crash - possibly sabotage, and is succeeded by his brother, Abdul Rahman Aref.
Nov 13, 1966 Samu' raid: Israeli troops kill 15 Jordanian soldiers and 3 civilians, & dynamite 125 houses, in an attack on the frontier village of Samu‘ near Hebron; in response to the death of 3 Israeli soldiers by a road mine. Israel is censured by SCR228 (25 Nov 66), but no military response from Amman. This leads to recriminations in the Israeli government, which had intended a smaller scale raid, and Palestinian anger & clashes with Jordanian security forces throughout West Bank, especially in Nablus where the army had to intervene. The PLO gains support.
May, 1967 Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser closes the straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and dismisses UN peacekeeping force. Negotiations with US to reopen the Straits of Tiran fail.
May 27, 1967 Nasser cancels a planned Egyptian attack on Israel, after it became obvious that the Israelis knew about the plan.
May 30, 1967 Jordan signs a defense pact with Egypt, allows Egyptian command of Jordan Legion.
Jun 2, 1967 Moshe Dayan joins Israeli cabinet as Minister of Defense. Unity gov't formed.
June 5-10,1967 6-day war. Following a long period of tension, Israel attacks - destroys the Egyptian air force on the ground, conquers and occupies Sinai and Gaza, then conquers the West Bank from Jordan, and Golan Heights from Syria. UN resolution 242 (November 1967) called for Israeli withdrawal, establishment of peace.
Aug-Sept 1967 Khartoum Conference - Arab summit says no to peace or negotiations with Israel.
Sept. 4, 1967 50 Egyptian officers arrested, including Commander in Chief Amer, on charges of plotting against Nasser. Amer later reported to have committed suicide
Nov 22, 1967 UN Security Council resolution 242 (November 1967) called for Israeli withdrawal, establishment of peace
Oct 21, 1967 Egyptian missile ship sinks the Israeli destroyer Eilath. Israel retaliates by heavy artillery bombardment of Suez refinery complex.
Nov 5., 1967 Pres. Sallal of Yemen Overthrown.
Nov. 30, 1967 People's Republic of Southern Yemen formed; last British troops leave Aden.
Jan 16, 1968 Britain announces intention to withdraw from Persian Gulf by 1971.
March 21, 1968 Battle of Karameh - Jordanian and Palestinian forces inflicted a partial defeat on Israel troops staging a massive retaliatory raid on a Jordanian town that had served as a staging area for guerilla attacks and a base for PLO/Fatah guerillas.. The Fatah declared a great victory and retreated into the hills. The anniversary of Karameh is still celebrated as a victory by Palestinians.
Jun 1968 Escalation along the Suez Canal. Egyptians violated the cease fire repeatedly along the Suez canal. Nasser stated as strategy that Egypt can suffer numerous casualties because of manpower reserves, while Israel cannot.
20-30 Jul, 1968 Baathist Gen Ahmed al-Bakr overthrows Aref Regime in Iraq. Rise of Saddam Hussein.
21-30 Nov, 1968 Student riots in Egypt;
Dec 1968 PFLP attack on El Al plane in Athens. One Israeli killed; Israel responds on Dec 28 with helicopter raid on Beirut International Airport. Commandos destroy 13 Arab planes and damage airport. SCR262 of 31Dec unanimously censures Israel,
Jan 6, 1969 French ban on arms supplies made public by Israel
Jan 27, 1969 Iraqis hang 14 (9 Jews) as Israeli spies.
Feb 1-4, 1969 Fifth Palestine National Council (PNC) in Cairo. Fatah gains formal control with Yasser Arafat declared chair of Executive Committee. PNC statement sets goal of a "secular democratic state" society for Muslims, Christians & Jews.
Feb 18, 1969 PFLP attack El Al plane in Zurich; strong international condemnation.
Feb 20, 1969 PFLP bomb attacks on a Jerusalem supermarket
Feb 24, 1969 Israeli airstrike against 2 al-Fatah camps near Damascus; large no of casualties. Fatah moves to strengthen its position in Jordan; PFLP becomes more explicit in its call for the overthrow of King Hussein, seen as a Western puppet.
Feb 1969 Internal struggles in Syrian Ba‘th party: Hafez al-Assad, defense minister, takes full control over military in Syria; civilian institutions left under the control of President Atasi. Former stressed pan-Arab cooperation, especially with Egypt; latter rejected cooperation with the conservative regimes, & controlled the Sa‘iqa fida’i organization.
Mar 11 1969 Golda Meir becomes Prime Minister in Israel after death of Levi Eshkol.
Aug 29, 1969 Group commanded by Layla Khalid hijacks TWA plane flying to Tel Aviv.
March 1969 Hostilities along the Suez canal. between Israel and Egypt escalate as Soviets supply SAM-2 radar and pilots, US supplies Israel with Phantom jets and Hawk missiles.
April, 23, 1969 War of attrition between Israel and Egypt - Nasser formally declares that he is no longer bound by the terms of the armistice. Constant artillery and air duels around the Suez canal, as well as IAF bombardment of Egyptian targets. US agreed with Israeli reports that Nasser was violating the cease fire agreement and preparing for another war.
Sept 1, 1969 Army coup in Libya deposes King Idris; Col Muammar Ghaddafi takes power and proclaims republic.
Sept 9, 1969 Major Israeli raid on Egypt.
Oct. 22, 1969 Palestinian guerillas clash with Lebanese security forces. An agreement between al-Fatah and the Lebanese was concluded on Nov. 3.
Nov 26, 1969 Clash between Saudi Arabian and South Yemen troops at al-Wadeiah.
Dec. 9, 1969 US Secretary of State William Rogers outlines US proposals for an Israeli-Egyptian peace settlement (Rogers Plan), which are rejected by both sides.
Dec 21-23 Fifth Arab summit in Rabat ends in disagreement.
July 1970 War of attrition terminated by a cease fire, July 1970, following pressure from USA and USSR on both sides.
Sept. 1970 "Black September"- King Hussein of Jordan moves against the increasingly menacing power of the PLO. Palestinian guerillas flee Jordan and take up residence in Lebanon.
Sept 6, 1970 PFLP hijack Swissair, BOAC, PanAm and TWA flights and divert them to Jordan. 310 passengers are held hostage and released after governments agree to release Palestinian prisoners. In the wake of the hijackings Lufthansa reportedly paid protection money to guerilla movements, and France purchased immunity for Air France by agreeing to maintain an anti-Israel policy.
Sept 28 1970 Nasser dies of cardiac arrest after negotiating Jordan-Palestinian truce; Anwar al-Sadat comes to power in Egypt.
May 30, 1972 PFLP and Japanese Red Army attack at Lod Airport killed 27.
Sept 5, 1972 Black September movement massacres Israeli Olympic team in Munich, triggering a systematic manhunt by Israelis for the assassins.
Oct. 6, 1973 Yom Kippur War (October War). In a surprise attack on the Jewish day of atonement, Egypt retook the Suez canal and a narrow zone on the other side. Syria reconquered the Golan Heights. Following massive US and Soviet resupplying of the sides, Israel succeeded in pushing back the Syrians and threatening Damascus. In Sinai, the IDF crossed the Suez Canal and cut off the Egyptian Third Army. . Israeli casualties were unacceptably high however, and both Syria and Egypt celebrate the anniversary of the war as a victory.
Oct. 22, 1973 UN Security Council Resolution 338 called for cease fire and negotiations for peace. Following the cease fire, Israel withdrew from part of Sinai in stages, beginning with relief of the Egyptian third army, and likewise withdrew from a small part of the Golan heights.
Dec - 21-29 1973 Middle East Peace Conference convened in Geneva, with Jordan, Egypt, SU, US & Israel attending (Syria refused). First objective is the disengagement of forces.
Jan 18 1974 Egypt-Israel Separation of Forces Agreement (Sinai I), opposed by Syria. UN Emergency Force takes up positions in the buffer zones established in Sinai; fully deployed by Mar. 3.
April 10, 1974 Golda Meir resigns as PM of Israel following popular protest over the Yom Kippur War. Yitzhak Rabin, former Chief of Staff of IDF and ambassador to US takes her place.
April 11 1974 Kiriat Shmona Massacre - PFLP-GC takes dozens of teenagers hostage in Qiryat Shmona, Israel, to demand the release of prisoners. IDF storms the building, but terrorists kill 19. Israeli reprisal raids on Southern Lebanon condemned by UN Security Council in SCR347 on April 24.
May 15, 1974 Ma'alot Massacre - PLO (PDFLP) gunmen took over a school in the northern Israeli village of Ma’alot, demand release of prisoners, killing 25 and wounding many others.
May 31, 1974

Syria-Israel disengagement agreement over the Golan, with Syria accepting SCR 338 (& thus 242) as a basis for peace, & Israel partially withdrawing to establish a demilitarized zone, with UN Disengagement Observer Force separating parties. Israel withdrew from Quneitra on 26 June, but Syria did not rebuild or repopulate the town.
June 1974 Twelfth Palestine National Council resolves that “the PLO will struggle by every means ... to liberate Palestinian land & establish the people’s national, independent ad fighting authority on every part of Palestinian land to be liberated." Israelis interpret this as staged liberation of Palestine. However, this was also widely portrayed later as meaning that a State in part of Palestine was acceptable to the PLO, eventually causing PFLP (George Habash) to leave the PLO on Sept. 26, forming the "refusal front." PFLP rejoined the PLO in 1980.
Oct 29, 1974 Rabat Summit - Arab League summit in Rabat declares that the PLO is the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. This makes it more difficult for Israel to conclude a peace treaty with Jordan on the basis of return of the West Bank. Hussein declares that he is no longer empowered to act for the Palestinians, and prevents possibility of negotiation with local Palestinians.
Nov 13 1974 Yasser Arafat speaks at UN General Assembly debate on Palestine, on invitation of Oct 14 (GAR3210; vote: 105-4), with his pistol showing. UNGA recognizes Palestinians’ right to sovereignty (GAR3236) and grants PLO observer status (GAR3237; 22Nov).
November 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 equates Zionism with racism. Harold H. Saunders tells house subcommittee that the Palestinian problem is in many ways the heart of the conflict, and that the US must seek partners who will recognize the relevant UN resolutions and engage them in dialog for peace.
May 31, 1976 Syria is invited into Lebanon by Maronite Christians.
June-July 1976 Palestinians hijacked an Air-France Air bus to Entebbe in Uganda. IDF commando units landed in Uganda, storm the plane and free most of the hostages.
Aug 13, 1976 Lebanese militias massacre over 2000 Palestinians in the Tel Al-Zaatar refugee camp, apparently with participation of Syrian troops. According to journalist Robert Fisk, the attack began when Yasser Arafat asked that the camps be considered a non-combat zone, and then ordered Fatah gunmen to open fire on Christian militia. Palestinians retaliated with a massacre of Christians in Damour.
June 20, 1977 Likud party and Begin government took office in Israel. Israeli settlement of the West Bank and Gaza was intensified following the rise of the Likud to power.
Nov. 20, 1977 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem, spoke in Israeli Knesset (Parliament).
Mar. 15, 1978 Israel invaded Lebanon (operation Litani) after the PLO hijacked a bus on the main Tel-Aviv to Haifa highway. UN resolution 425 of March 19, 1978 called for withdrawal of Israeli forces. Israel did not fulfill the terms of Resolution 425 until May 2000.
Sept. 17, 1978 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli PM Menachem Begin, meeting at Camp David under the auspices of US President Jimmy Carter, sign framework agreements for peace in the Middle East and peace between Egypt and Israel.
March 26, 1979 Peace treaty signed between Egypt and Israel.
June 7, 1981 Israel destroys Iraqi nuclear reactor in daring raid.
Oct. 6, 1981 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat is assassinated while on the reviewing stand of a victory parade.
April 29, 1982 Israel completes return of Sinai to Egypt under the peace agreement, including Yamit settlement.
June 3, 1982 Attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London apparently by Abu Nidal faction, backed by Iraq. Large scale bombings by Israel in Lebanon especially on W.Beirut (4Jun). PLO send First rockets at towns in N Israel since Jul 81.
June 6, 1982 Massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon to fight PLO. . UN Security Council Resolution 509 demands that Israel withdraw all its military forces forthwith, but Israel advances rapidly to Beirut, surrounding the capital by 13 Jun. Israeli cabinet is split on the sudden expansion of the war, beyond the 40 KM limit originally declared by Sharon.
June 9, 1982 Syrian Soviet SAM radar destroyed by Israel, Israeli-Syrian armor engagements.
Summer, 1982 Foundation of the Lebanese Shi’ite Hizbulla Islamist terror group.
Aug. 22, 1982 PLO evacuation of Beirut. About 14,000 leave. PLO headquarters in Tunis. Evacuation complete Sept 1.
Aug 23, 1982 Bashir Jemayeel made President of Lebanon.
Sept. 14, 1982 Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayeel assassinated, by explosion of a bomb operated by Habib Tanious Shartouni, apparently an agent of Syrian intelligence. Amin Gemayeel, his brother was elected instead, Sept 21.
Sept. 15, 1982 Israeli invasion of West Beirut
Sept. 16-17, 1982 Lebanese Christian Phalange units under Elie Hobeika, allowed by Israeli forces to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, massacre between 400 and 800 Palestinian civilians. Israel Gen. Yaron and others overheard incriminating conversations between Phalange officers but no action was taken by Israel to stop the massacre.
24 Sept, 1982 Peace Now movement holds record demonstration in Israel (~300,000), demanding end to war, commission of inquiry for Sabra and Shatilla
Nov 11, 1982 Israeli military headquarters in Tyre destroyed in an explosion, killing 75 Israelis and 16 of their prisoners.
Feb 8, 1983 Israeli Kahan commission found Ariel Sharon and others indirectly responsible for allowing the massacre in Sabra and Shatilla.
April 18, 1983 Hizbulla suicide bomber destroyed the American Embassy in Beirut, killing over 60 people.
May 17, 1983 Israel and Lebanon conclude an abortive non-belligerency agreement.
Sept.3, 1983 Israel began partial withdrawal from Lebanon.
Oct. 23, 1983 Hizbulla suicide bomber destroyed the US Marine compound in Beirut, killing 241.
Sept. 20, 1984 Hizbulla suicide bomber destroyed the rebuilt American Embassy in Beirut, killing 25.
June 1985 Israel unity government, headed by Shimon Peres, orders withdrawal from most of conquered Lebanese territory.
Nov. 1985 Jonathan Pollard arrested by US authorities for spying for Israel. He was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment.
Dec 8, 1987 First Intifadeh - Stone-throwing Palestinian teens led by local groups took on the Israeli occupation, attacking Israeli soldiers relentlessly. The triggering incident may have been the death of four Palestinian workers in a road accident with an Israeli vehicle.
Jan. 1988 Foundation of the Hamas Islamic Brotherhood. Hamas published their Charter in August 1988, based on the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and advocating destruction of Israel.
Nov. 15, 1988 Palestine National Council of the PLO declare a Palestinian state in absentia - See Palestinian Declaration of Independence
May 14, 1989 Israeli Peace Plan of May 14, 1989, calls for a negotiating process with the Palestinians very similar to the one actually implemented by the Oslo accords.
Nov. 1989 The Taif Accords, 1989 - were concluded to settle the Lebanese civil war and legitimize the Syrian occupation.
August 1990 Iraq invades and conquers Kuwait.
January, 1991 "Operation Desert Storm" (called "Gulf War" in US). Iraqi missiles fall on Israel as US pushes Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Palestinians support Saddam Hussein, lose popularity in Gulf states.
May 20, 1991 Syrian-Lebanese Cooperation Agreement is signed.
Oct 30, 1991 Madrid Peace Conference for peaceful resolution of the Middle East Conflict.
June 23, 1992 Labor party leader and former General Yitzhak Rabin, elected Prime Minister of Israel
April 16, 1993 First Hamas suicide attack at Mehola Junction in the West Bank. A car bomb blew up outside a small restauran

3300-1000 BCE: Greece - The earliest known prehistoric civilizations occupy the Aegean world. This period marks the rise and fall of the MINOAN and MYCENAEAN civilization.

2200 BCE: Greece - Indo-European invaders, speaking the earliest forms of Greek, enter the mainland of Greece, and the MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION (named after the leading Greek city on the peninsula from 1600-1200 BCE) emerges.

2000-1500 BCE: Greece - MINOAN CIVILIZATION (named after the Cretan ruler Minos) reaches its height with its central power in Knossos on the island of Crete. This culture is apparently more female-oriented and peaceful than others at the time.

1400 BCE: Greece - MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION replaces MINOAN CIVILIZATION after the destruction of Knossos. Bronze weapons, war-scenes on art, Cyclopean defence walls, and the fact that male warriors were buried with their weapons provide evidence for the claim that the Mycenaeans were militaristic. The horse-drawn chariot emerges around this time. The Mycenaeans dominate the Aegean world for about 200 years.

1250 BCE: Greece - Though this is disputed, some scholars believe that the MYCENAEANS wage war with the Trojans of western Asia Minor and are successful. By 1100 BCE they are overtaken by barbaric Dorian invaders who are using iron weapons. From this point, Greek culture enters the so-called Dark Ages, characterized by the disappearance of writing and a decline in architecture and other aspects of material culture. The period lasts until about 800 BCE. The two Homeric epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are often used by scholars as evidence of the traditions and institutions in place during this time. However, such use is strongly contested.

800 BCE: Greece - Increase in trade and the establishment of governmental defense fortifications allows for the emergence of Greek city-states from tribal communities. These grow up around marketplaces and include ATHENS, Thebes and Megara on the Greek mainland. The Greek city-states are considered the most famous units of Greek political life to develop in this society.

800-500 BCE: Greece - This period, often referred to as the Archaic period, marks the developments of literature and the arts, politics, philosophy and science. The Peloponnesian city of Corinth, SPARTA and cities along the coast of the Aegean Sea flourish. For the most part, the Greek city-states are similar in their political evolution, with the exception of Sparta's elite dictatorship. Most begin their political histories as monarchies, evolve to oligarchies, are overthrown during the age of the tyrants (650-500 BCE) and eventually establish democracies in the sixth and fifth centuries. Of the Greek city-states, ATHENS and Sparta were the two most important.

700 BCE: Greece - HESIOD, Greece's second poet (after HOMER) and the first poet to name himself, is composing his poetry. His most important works are The Theogony and Works and Days.

640 BCE: Greece - Sparta's form of government, which is adapted from the Dorians, is heavily influenced by militarianism. The Messenian wars initiate Sparta's fear of change. They remain an isolated people, primarily by banning trade and discouraging travel outside of Spartan territory. Alcaeus, Greek lyric poet, is born in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. His lyrics expound on contemporary politics, love, hymns to Apollo and Hermes, and include some drinking songs.

612 BCE: Greece - Sappho, Greek lyric poet of Lesbos, is born. The most famous female poet of the ancient world, Sappho is inscribed in the Palatine Anthology among the Muses, rather than among the great lyric poets, in the second century BCE. Her lyric poetry includes the exploration of female sexuality, female values in a male dominated society, and love.

594 BCE: Greece - Solon, the great elegiac poet, is appointed chief magistrate of ATHENS. His reforms include both political and economical adjustments which lead to dissatisfaction in the upper and lower classes.

585 BCE: Greece - In Miletus, the founding city of philosophy, Thales predicts a total eclipse of the sun. The founder of the Melesian school, Thales, teaches that all things are composed of moisture; he is the first to put forth a rational explanation of the cosmos. By the end of the sixth century, philosophers begin to question the metaphysical nature of the cosmos with inquiries into the nature of being, the meaning of truth, and the relationship between the divine and the physical world.

546 BCE: Greece - The first of the Athenian tyrants, Peisistratus, replaces Solon as ruler.

530 BCE: Greece - Pythagoras and his followers found the city of Croton and combine philosophy and literature with political activity as the foundation of their community. Pythagoras, mathematician and philosopher, is credited with the Pythagorean theorem and the Pythagorean table of opposites (the "dualism" that underlies Greek thought).

525 BCE: Greece - Greek drama grows out of the Dionysian festivals. The plays of AESCHYLUS are considered to be the beginning of this long history of tragic drama. His stories are drawn from conflicts between the individual and the cosmos.

518 BCE: Greece - Pindar, considered by some to be the greatest Greek lyric poet, is born in Cynoscephalae, Boeotia. Pindar's odes celebrate games held at the religious festivals of Greece. Athletic victory serves as the ground for his poetic fancy and his religious, moral, and aesthetic insights. He dies in 438 BCE.

515 BCE: Greece - Parmenides of Elea is born. He is the founder of the Eleatic school in the Phocaean colony in southern Italy. He is the first to focus attention on the central problem of Greek metaphysics: the nature of being. For Parmenides, the laws governing the universe are stable. Change is merely an illusion.

510 BCE: Greece - Hippias, the son of Peisistratus, succeeds his father and is overthrown by a group of nobles with the help of SPARTA.

508 BCE: Greece - Cleisthenes, the father of Athenian democracy, rules ATHENS. His reforms grant full rights to all free men of Athens.

500 BCE: Greece - The height of Greek sculpture begins with the work of Phidias. His masterpieces include the statue of Athena in the PARTHENON, the Parthenon reliefs and the statue of Zeus in the Temple of Olympian Zeus. The second most important sculptor, Myron, is renowned for his statue of the discus thrower.

490 BCE: Greece - Lasting until 479 BCE, the Greeks initiate war with Persia when Persia, at this time the strongest power in western Asia, establishes rule over Greek-speaking cities in Asia Minor. The PERSIAN WARS are commonly regarded as among the most significant in all of history. Darius the Great is defeated at the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. The Greeks emerge victorious and put an end to the possibility of Persian despotism.

486 BCE: Greece - A contempoary of Darius the Persian, Heraclitus of Ephesus lives somewhere around this time. For Heraclitus, reality is flux which originated out of fire (as opposed to Parmenides' "stable" reality -- see 515 BCE). PLATO credits Heraclitus for saying, "One cannot step into the same river twice." Heraclitus was also known as "the obscure."

485 BCE: Greece - Accompanying the high point of democracy in ATHENS is a Greek intellectual revolution, with its beginnings in Sophism. The Sophists situate ethics and politics within philosophical discourse which, before, was limited to physics and metaphysics alone. The leading Sophist, Protagoras, states his famous doctrine: "Man is the measure of all things." For him, all truth, goodness, beauty, etc. are relative to man's necessities and inquiries. Emerging in opposition to the Sophists are Socrates, PLATO and ARISTOTLE, each of whom offers alternatives to the Sophists' relativism.

484 BCE: Greece - The father of history, Herodotus, is born. He is author of a nine-book History of the Persian War and a book dedicated to his travels through Egypt. He dies in 420.

478 BCE: Greece - ATHENS joins with other Greek city-states in the formation of the DELIAN LEAGUE. The League continues even after the end of the PERSIAN WARS and transforms into a naval empire with Athens as its leader.

469 BCE: Greece - SOPHOCLES is born. He is the second Greek dramatist, following AESCHYLUS, and is considered by some to be the greatest of the Greek dramatists. His works include Oedipus Rex and Antigone. He dies in 406 BCE. This year also marks the birth of Socrates, a philosopher of ethics who leaves no written philosophy. He is the major critic of popular belief in ATHENS and is the protagonist of Plato's dialogues. He is condemned to death in 399 BCE on the charges of corrupting the youth and introducing new gods into Greek thought.

461-429 BCE: Greece - During this "Age of Pericles," Athenian democracy reaches perfection, and the court systems are completed. A jury system is put in place with the jury serving as absolute authority in judicial matters.

448 BCE: Greece - ARISTOPHANES, considered by some to be the greatest Greek comedy writer, is born. He dies in 380 BCE. Greek comedy, like Greek tragedy, originates out of the Dionysian festivals.

431-404 BCE: Greece - During the PELOPONNESIAN WAR between ATHENS and SPARTA, the political supremacy of Athens is ended. Athenian trade is destroyed. Athenian democracy is overthrown, and Athens is forced to surrender to Sparta as a subject state. Sparta assumes dominance over the Greek world and replaces many Greek democracies with oligarchies. The two major causes of the war are Athens' growth in imperialism and the economic and cultural differences between Athens and Sparta. Between 404 and 338, Sparta is not able to persist in the rule of Greece. Power over Greece shifts from Sparta to Thebes and then to numerous other city-states, none able to maintain rule over such a large empire.

427 BCE: Greece - PLATO, Socrates' most distinguished student, is born. He is a prolific writer and is considered by some to be the most important of all philosophers. Among his most noted works are The Apology, The Symposium, The Phaedo, The Phaedrus, and The Republic. His written works are in dialogue form. He dies in 347 BCE.

406 BCE: Greece - EURIPIDES dies. Born in 480 BCE, he is the last of the tragic dramatists. His contribution to the history of Greek tragedy is his creation of a drama that deals with situations analogous to human life.

384 BCE: Greece - Plato's most distinguished student, ARISTOTLE, is born. He enters Plato's Academy at the age of seventeen. After spending several years as tutor to Alexander the Great, Aristotle returns to ATHENS and founds the Lyceum. Among his writings are treatises on logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, rhetoric and several on natural sciences. He dies in 322 BCE.

350 BCE: Greece - HELLENISTIC GREECE witnesses the new philosophy of the Cynics. Their leader, Diogenes, puts forth the first argument against conventional life. The Cynics believe that people should live naturally and strive for self-sufficiency.

343 BCE: Greece - The greatest dramatist of HELLENISTIC GREECE, Menander, follows the comedic genre put forth by ARISTOPHANES (the subject of which is romantic love).

338 BCE: Greece - Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great's father, conquers Greece and is succeeded by his son two years later. At age twenty-two, Alexander begins his campaign to acquire new territory in Asia. Within four years, Alexander conquers the entire Persian Empire (including Asia Minor, Egypt, Persia, Syria and Mesopotamia). Alexander continues his campaign farther east and eventually returns to Persia in 323 BCE, where he dies of fever in Babylon. Before his death, Alexander was the ruler of the largest empire the world had seen. HELLENISTIC GREECE, a combination of Greek and western Asian cultures, lasts from Alexander's time until the beginning of the Christian era.

323 BCE: Greece - Alexander leaves no successors, and the highest generals engage in many wars which result in the decisive battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE. The empire is divided into four major states under the separate rules of Seleucus, Lysimachus, Cassander and Ptolemy. Greek cities revolt against Macedonian rule but to no avail. The next four hundred years witness the growth of large cities and Hellenistic international trade.

300 BCE: Greece - Epicureanism and Stoicism both originate in ATHENS. Both Epicurus (342-270 BCE) and Zeno, the Stoic (not to be confused with Zeno of Elea), believe in an individualistic and materialistic philosophy. Neither believe in spiritual substances. The soul is thought to be material. The Epicureans believe that pleasure is the highest good, and only by abandoning the fear of the supernatural can one achieve tranquillity of mind. The Stoics believe that tranquillity of mind is only achieved by surrendering the self to the order of the cosmos.

310 BCE: Greece - Hellenistic astronomy is founded by Aristarchus of Samos. His major contribution to Hellenistic thought is his theory that the earth and all other planets revolve around the sun, contrary to ARISTOTLE.

200 BCE: Greece - Under the influence of Carneades, Skepticism arises with doctrines closely tied to Sophism. They teach that because all knowledge is achieved through sense perception, nothing can be known for sure.

146-30 BCE: Greece - Between these years, nearly all Hellenistic territory becomes subject to Roman rule.

* 130,000-900,000 BC (Middle Pleistocene): Homo erectus walks the earth near Peking, leaving remains to be found at Zhoukoudian cave ("Peking man").
* 6,000 BC: "Neolithic revolution" initiates the Bronze Age.
* 1,000 BC: Yu establishes first Chinese dynasty, the Hsia, which lasts for seventeen kings.
* 1,550-1,050 BC: Shang dynasty becomes first dynasty to leave historical records.
* 1,111 BC: Royal house of Chou wins decisive battle against last Shang king, initiating the Chou dynasty.
* 770-476 BC: Ch'un-ch'iu ("Spring and Autumn") period of the Chou dynasty. Chou royal line is broken, feudal system in decline.
* 551 BC: Philosopher and teacher Kongfuzi (Confucious) is born. The archetypal Chinese wise man, he elaborates a philosophy of filial piety, respect for education, and a meritocratic view of government.
* 221 BC: Ch'in ruling house survives Ch'un-ch'iu power struggle and initiates the first imperial dynasty, the Ch'in. Shih huang-ti unifies China and becomes first Chinese emperor. Defensive walls in north of China are connected and strengthened into what will become the Great Wall of China.
* 202 BC: Han dynasty founded by Liu Pang, the first long lasting imperial dynasty.
* 220 AD: Single Han empire split into the Three Kingdoms when the last Han emperor cedes authority to Wei, the son of a warlord. Shortly after, two other military leaders declare themselves emperor, Shu-Han in the interior, and Wu, in the south. The Three Kingdoms period is marked by civil war.
* 263: Wei conquers Shu-Han.
* 265: A general of the Ssu-ma clan overthrows the Wei dynasty, founding the Hsi Chin (Western Chin) dynasty.
* 280: Hsi Chin armies conquer the Wu dynasty, reuniting China under a single rule and initiating a short period of peace.
* 304: Liu Yuan, a northern barbarian cheftain, conquers northern China. North China splits into a collection of barbarian states known as the Sixteen Kingdoms.
* 317: Six Dynasties period. Southern China is ruled by a succession of royal families. Considered one of the most culturally creative periods in Chinese history.
* 577: The Pei Chou (Northern Chou) unify Northern China.
* 581: The general Yang Chien usurps the northern throne and founds the Sui dynasty.
* 589: Yang Chien invades the south, and once again China is reunited, this time under a barbarian ruler.
* 617: Li Yuan, one of various rebel leaders, marches on the capital and deposes Yang-ti, the current Sui emperor. A Sui prince, Kung-ti, is put on the throne as a puppet emperor, while Yang-ti is demoted to "retired emperor". One year later, Yang-ti dies and Li Yuan takes the throne for himself, beginning the T'ang dynasty.
* 624: The T'ang defeat the other rebel leaders, who have been causing trouble contending for the throne. All of China is reunited and pacified.
* 874: A wave of peasant uprisings begin that eventually topple the T'ang dynasty.
* 907: Fall of the T'ang dynasty gives rise to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Five short-lived dynasties subsequently control northern China, while ten stable regimes control sections of southern and western China.
* 960: Chao K'uang-yin (better known as T'ai-tsu), a military leader, stages a coup and usurps the throne from the Wu-tai, last of the Five Dynasties. Under the Pei Sung (Northern Sung) dynasty, the civil service system achieves its most sophisticated form.
* 965: T'ai-tsu begins program of reunification by taking Szechwan.
* 978: The Wu-Yueh, last of the Ten Kingdoms in the south, surrenders without a struggle, completing reunification under the Sung dynasty.
* 1127: After several cycles of reform and antireform, extravagant spending by the rulers, and an alliance with the Manchurian Juchen that goes awry, the Juchen invade the Chinese capital and demand heavy ransoms. The court pays them off, but realizing that the emperor's resources have been exhausted, the invaders usurp the throne and found the Nan Sung (Northern Sung) dynasty.
* 1276: After four decades of effective defense from the Nan Sung, Mongol invaders outflank the defenders to the west and take the Sung capital.
* 1279: Mongol invasion topples the Sung dynasty when the boy emperor and a loyal minister commit suicide by jumping into the sea, beginning the Mongolian Yuan dynasty under Kublai Khan.
* 1368: A weak emperor and increasing militarization of Chinese society encourages the formation of rebel movements following disastrous flooding in 1351, which culminate with the fall of the Mongol emperor. An ex-Buddhist priest, Chu Yuan-chang, becomes the Hung-wu emperor, founding the Ming dynasty, one of the stablest and longest dynasties in Chinese history.
* 1592: Japanese forces under Toyotomi Hideyoshi invade Korea. Ming China comes to its support, but the war drags on and precipitates a military decline in China.
* 1624: Beleagured by partisan politics, the T'ien-chi emperor grants totalitarian power to his favorite eunuch, Wei Chung-hsien, who begins a bloody purge of reformist officials.
* 1616: Nurhachi becomes the leader of the Manchus and initiates an invasion of China, gaining control over northeastern China by 1621.
* 1644: Li Tzu-ch'eng, a domestic rebel, captures the capital. The Chinese emperor commits suicide. The Manchu forces help Ming forces to remove Li Tzu-ch'eng, but take the throne for themselves. The Ch'ing (Qing) dynasty is declared by Dorgon, the regent for Nurhachi's grandson, who becomes the first Ch'ing emperor.
* 1839: Lin Tse-hsu is named Imperial commissioner for an anti-opium campaign. He seizes and destroys 20,000 chests of smuggled British opium in Canton. Fighting breaks out between China and Britain.
* 1840: Rear Admiral George Elliot sets sail with 16 British warships to demand a lifting of the ban on opium. No agreement is reached.
* 1841: Elliot's forces attack Canton and hold it for ransom for $6,000,000. The Cantonese counterattack and kick off the First Opium War.
* 1842: Henry Pottinger, Elliot's successor, takes Nanking and forces the Treaty of Nanking, with China giving up concession after concession to British trade. Antiforeign sentiment grows.
* 1851: Hung Hsiu-ch'uan fails his civil service examination, goes into a trance and discovers that he is the Son of God. He declares the T'ai-p'ing T'ien-kuo, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace, and kicks off the Taiping rebellion, the bloodiest civil war in history.
* 1856-1858: A British-registered ship, the Arrow, is seized and its Chinese crew charged with smuggling. A joint force of British and French led by Lord Elgin is sent to occupy Canton, beginning the Arrow War. In 1857, the Anglo-French forces occupy Canton; the next year, they march on Tientsin. Four Tientsin treaties are signed, establishing foreign diplomats in Peking and freedom of movement for Christian missionaries.
* 1859-1860: The Western signatories to the Tientsin treaties show up to get their treaties signed, but are repulsed by the guns at Ta-ku fort. In 1860, allied forces march on Peking. In response to the torture and execution of several emissaries, Lord Elgin orders the destruction of the Summer Palace.
* 1894: Japanese Navy clashes with a Chinese fleet over issues of Korean independence, starting the Sino-Japanese War.
* 1896-1898: Bands of I-ho ch'uan (Righteous and Harmonious Fists), or Boxers, stir up anti-Christian hysteria and begin the Boxer Rebellion.
* 1898: Kuang-hsu emperor initiates the Hundred Days of Reform, a series of radical reform decrees. The empress dowager Tz'u-hsi puts the stop to that, has the Emperor detained, and takes over the reins of government.
* 1900: The Boxers beseige the foreign legation quarter in Peking. Empress dowager Tz'u-hsi declares open war and calls on all Chinese to attack foreigners. The rebellion is put down by an expedition of the foreign powers.
* 1908: Tz'u-hsi and the Emperor die, and the Hsuan-t'ung emperor is crowned. His father, the Prince Chun, becomes regent and initiates a series of reforms.
* 1911: Chinese Revolution. Yuan Shih-k'ai is recalled from retirement to take command of army to put down the revolution. He negotiates with the revolutionaries, with the hope of being instituted as the head of a new government, but is disappointed when Sun Yat-sen is appointed president of the new republic.
* 1937-1945: Sino-Japanese War
* 1945: Civil war begins, Nationalists vs. Communists.
* 1949: People's Republic of China established with the victory of the Communists.
* 1966-1976: Cultural Revolution

753 BC: Roma (Rome) is founded by Romulus
750 BC: Greeks establish a colony at Cuma
750 BC: first Etruscan inscriptions
616 BC: Tarquinius I becomes an Etruscan king of Roma
600 BC: Etruscans build the colossal tombs of Cerveteri
600 BC: the Forum is built
600 BC: oldest Latin inscriptions
578 BC: Tarquinius Priscus builds the Cloaca Maxima, the first sewer
550 BC: Servius Tullius builds city walls
474 BC: the Greeks defeat the Etruscans at Cuma
509 BC: the last king is expelled and Roma becomes a republic
450 BC: the Twelve Tables of the Roman law
396 BC: Roma conquers the Etruscan city of Veii
390 BC: the Gauls/Celts sack Roma
326 BC: the Circus Maximus is built
313 BC: the Basilica of Maxentius is completed
312 BC: the Via Appia is opened
312 BC: the first aqueduct, the Aqua Appia, is built
308 BC: Roma conquers the Etruscan city of Tarquinia
295 BC: Roma defeats the Gauls/Celts in northern Italy
287 BC: the Lex Hortensia makes plebiscites binding
280 BC: Roma issues coins
275 BC: Roma conquers southern Italy (Greek colonies)
272 BC: a second aqueduct, the Anio Vetus, is built
264 BC: Roma and Carthage fight the first Punic war
264 BC: the Romans destroy the last vestiges of the Etruscan civilization (Volsinies)
222 BC: the Gauls are defeated
221 BC: the Circus Flaminius
218 BC: Hannibal invades Italy
214 BC: war machines designed by Greek mathematician Archimedes save the city of Syracuse, an ally of Carthage, from a Roman naval attack
202 BC: Scipio defeats Hannibal and Roma annexes Spain
196 BC: the Romans defeat the Macedonian king Philip V at Cynoscephalae
189 BC: Antiochus III, king of the Seleucids, is defeated at the battle of Magnesia and surrenders his possessions in Europe and Asia Minor
184 BC: the Basilica Porcia
149 BC: Roma destroys Carthage
149 BC: Roma conquers Greece after winning the battle of Corinth (and destroying Corinth)
133 BC: Attalus III of Pergamum wills his kingdom to Roma and the whole Mediterranean Sea is under Roman control ("mare nostrum")
106 BC: the Romans defeat Jugurtha, king of Numidia
88 BC: Italians are granted full citizenship
83 BC: Sulla becomes dictator
74 BC: Cicero enters the senate
73 BC: Spartacus leads the revolt of the gladiators
71 BC: Mithridates VI of Pontus is conquered by Roman general Lucius Lucullus
71 BC: Crassus puts down Spartacus' revolt
70 BC: Crassus and Pompey are elected consuls
69 BC: Rome invades Tigranes' Armenian kingdom and edstroys its capital, Tigranocerta
64 BC: Syria becomes a Roman province under general Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius)
63 BC: Pompeus captures Jerusalem and annexes Palestine to Roma
60 BC: Crassus, Pompey and Caesar form a "triumvirate"
59 BC: Caesar is elected consul
57 BC: Caesar conquers all of Gaul
53 BC: in the first war against Persia, Crassus is defeated and killed by the Parthians at Carrhae (Syria)
51 BC: Caesar crushes revolt of Vercingetorix in Gaul
50 BC: Roma introduces the gold coin "aureus"
49 BC: Ceasar crosses the Rubicon, defeats Pompey and becomes sole dictator of Rome, calling himself "imperator"
47 BC: Ceasar invades Egypt and proclaims Cleopatra queen
45 BC: Julius Caesar employs the Egyptian astronomer Sosigenes to work out a new 12-month calendar (Julian calendar)
44 BC: Ceasar is killed.
36 BC: Rome tries to invade Persia
31 BC: Octavianus (Augustus) becomes the first emperor after defeating Mark Anthony at the battle of Actium
30 BC: Cleopatra commits suicide and Egypt is annexed to Roma
20 BC: a treaty between Roma and Persia (Parthians) fixes the boundary between the two empires along the Euphrates river (Iraq)
17 BC: the theater of Marcellus
13 BC: Augustus expands the borders to the region of the Danube
6 BC: Jesus is born in Palestine
1 AD: Roma has about one million people
2 AD: the Forum of Augustus
5 AD: Roma acknowledges Cymbeline, King of the Catuvellauni, as king of Britain
6 AD: Augustus expands the borders to the Balkans
12 AD: The last Etruscan inscription is carved
14 AD: Augustus dies and Tiberius becomes emperor
14 AD: five million people live in the Roman empire
25 AD: Agrippa builds the Pantheon
37 AD: Tiberius dies and the mad Caligula succeeds him
41 AD: Caligula is assassinated and is succeeded by Claudius
43 AD: Claudius invades Britain
46 AD: Thracia becomes a Roman province
50 AD: the Romans found Londinium in Britain
54 AD: Claudius is succeeded by Nero
58 AD: the Romans conquer Armenia
64 AD: Nero sets fire to Roma and blames the Christians for it
68 AD: Nero commits suicide and is succeeded by Vespasianus
79 AD: Vespasianus is succeeded by Tito
70 AD: Tito destroys Jerusalem and Jews spread in Armenia, Iraq, Iran, Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Spain and Greece
77 AD: the Romans conquer Wales
79 AD: the Vesuvius erupts and Pompeii is buried under ash
79 AD: the Colosseum is completed
80 AD: the Romans invade Caledonia (Scotland)
81 AD: the Arch of Titus
84 AD: British rebels are defeated by the Romans at the battle of Mons Graupius
97 AD: Rome forbids human sacrifice throughout the Roman empire
97 AD: Chinese general Pan Chao sends an embassy to the Roman Empire
98 AD: Trajan becomes emperor
100: the city of Roma has one million inhabitants
106: Trajan defeats Dacia that becomes a Roman province
106: Trajan captures the Nabataean capital Petra (Jordan) and turns Nabataea into the province of Arabia
107: The Roman Empire sends an embassy to India
110: the Basilica of Trajano is completed
112: the Forum of Trajanus
113: Colonna Traiana
116: Trajan conquers Mesopotamia and the Parthian capital Ctesiphon
117: Trajan dies on his way to the Persian Gulf and Hadrian becomes emperor
122: Hadrian's Wall is built along the northern frontier to protect from the Barbarians
132: Jews, led by Bar-Cochba, whom some identify as the Messiah, revolt against Roma
134: Villa Hadriana
136: emperor Hadrian definitely crushes the Jewish resistance, forbids Jews from ever entering Jerusalem, and changes the name of the city to Aelia Capitolina
138: Hadrian is succeeded by Antoninus Pius, who repels Hadrian's anti-Jewish laws
139: Hadrian's mausoleum (Castel Sant'Angelo)
161: Marcus Aurelius becomes Roman emperor
164: the plague spreads throughout the Roman empire
193: Septimius Severus, from Libya, becomes emperor
194: Rome annexes Palmyra to the province of Syria
212: Caracalla grants Roman citizenship on all free people who live in the Roman Empire
214: Caracalla murders King Abgar IX of Edessa and declares Edessa a Roman colony
216: the thermae of Caracalla
217: the Baths of Caracalla are inaugurated
217: Caracalla is murdered in Edessa
218: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the last of the Antonines, becomes emperor and promoties the cult of Elegabalus, a Syriac sun god
244: Shapur I becomes king of the Sassanids and attacks Roma
250: emperor Decius orders the first emperor-wide persecution of Christians
256: the Persians/Sassanids defeat the Romans and conquer Dura Europus in Mesopotamia
273: the Romans destroy the rebellious city of Palmyra in Syria
284: Diocletian becomes emperor but rules from Nicomedia in the East
298: Roma captures Nisibis and the Sassanids sign a peace treaty with Roma
300: the population of the Roman Empire is 60 million (about 15 million Christians)
303: Diocletian orders a general persecution of the Christians
303: the thermae of Diocletian
312: Constantine becomes emperor
313: Constantine ends the persecution of the Christians (edict of Milano)
313: Constantine recognizes the Christian church
330: Constantine I builds a new city, Constantinople (Byzantium)
337: after Constantine's death, his sons split the empire: Constantine II (Spain, Britain, Gaul), Constans I (Italy, Africa, Illyricum, Macedon, Achaea) and Constantius II (the East)
356: Roma has 28 libraries, 10 basilicas, 11 public baths, two amphitheaters, three theaters, two circuses, 19 aqueducts, 11 squares, 1,352 fountains, 46,602 insulae (city blocks)
359: Constantinople becomes the capital of the Roman empire
360: pagan (Mithraist) general Julian (the "apostate") defeats an invasion of Barbarians and is declared emperor by his German troops
363: Julian dies attempting to invade the Sassanid kingdom of Persia, which recaptures Nisibis and Armenia, and general Valentinian becomes emperor
363: an earthquake destroys Petra
364: Valentinian delegates Valens as emperor of the East
376: Valens allows Visigoths to settle within the empire
378: the Visigoths defeat the Roman army at Hadrianopolis
380: Theodosius I proclaims Christianity as the sole religion of the Roman Empire
393: Theodosius forbids the Olympic Games because pagans and shuts down the temple of Zeus at Olympia
395: Theodosius divides the Roman empire in the Western and Eastern Empires, with Milano and Constantinople as their capitals
402: the western Roman empire moves the capital from Milano to Ravenna
406: Barbarians invade France from the north
410: the Visigots sack Roma
410: Roma withdraws from Britannia
418: the emperor grants Wallia's Visigoths to settle in Aquitaine (Atlantic coast of France)
425: the eastern emperor Theodosius II installs Valentinian III as emperor of the west
427: Gensenric's Vandals crosses the strait of Gibraltar and lands in Africa
443: the emperor grants Burgundi to settle in Savoy
450: Theodosius II dies and Marcian succeeds him, the first Roman emperor to be crowned by a religious leader (the patriarch of Constantinople)
452: the Huns invade Italy
455: the Vandals sack Roma
476: Odoacer, a mercenary in the service of Roma, leader of the Germanic soldiers in the Roman army, deposes the western Roman emperor and thereby terminates the western Roman empire
488: emperor Zeno sends Theodoric's Ostrogoths (still settled in Pannonia) to conquer Italy
500: Roma's population has declined to less than 100,000 people
526: Antioch in Syria is destroyed by an earthquake
527: Justinian becomes eastern Roman emperor
527: Byzantium enforces anti-Jewish laws and the Jews all but disappear from the eastern Roman Empire
529: Roman emperor Justinian shuts down the Academia of Plato
533: Justinian's code of law ("Corpus Juri Civilis") is published
537: Justinian's general Belisarius deposes pope Silverius and replaces him with pope Vigilius
534: Justinian's general Belisarius destroys the Arian kingdom of the Vandals and reconquers southern Spain and northern Africa
536: the Ostrogoths surrender and Belisarius reconquers Rome (beginning of the Barbar wars)
537: Justinian builds the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople
540: Justinian's general Belisarius takes Ravenna from the last Ostrogothic resistance and thus reconquers Italy to the empire
542: the plague decimates the Empire
546: Visigothic rebels led by Totila sack Roma
551: imperial troops reconquer Rome
552: Nestorian monks smuggle silkworm eggs from China to Byzanthium
554: Rome is reduced to a camp of about 30,000 people, while Constantinople has about one million people
554: the new king of the Visigoths, Athanagild, accepts the emperor's sovereignity over Spain
554: the empire reorganizes Italy as an imperial province (end of the Barbar wars)
565: Justinian dies
568: Alboin's Lombards invade northern Italy
600: Constantinople has 500,000 inhabitants
602: the Persians (Sassanids) attack the eastern Roman empire in Asia Minor
610: Heraclius I overthrows the tyrant Phocas and becomes emperor
614: the Persians (Sassanids) capture Jerusalem
614: the Visigoths reconquer all of Spain from the Roman empire
619: the Persians capture Egypt
620: the Visigoths conquer the last Roman possession in Spain
626: the Sassanids besiege Constantinople
627: the Sassanid king Khusrau II is defeated by Roman emperor Heraclius at Niniveh
628: the Romans retake Syria from the Sassanids
636: Arabs capture Syria and Palestine
639: the Arabs invade the southern provinces of the Empire
673: the Arabs besiege Constantinople
714: the Arabs besiege Constantinople
718: Leo III repels the Arabs from Constantinople
726: Emperor Leo III orders the destruction of all icons (iconoclasm)
739: emperor Leo III issues the Ecloga that introduces Christian principles into law
800: Charlemagne, king of the Franks, is crowned emperor by Pope Leo III and founds the Holy Roman Empire
811: the eastern Roman emperor recognized Charlemagne as emperor of Roma
812: a peace treaty between Charlemagne and the Eastern Roman Empire surrenders Venezia to the Eastern empire but grants Venezia the right to trade with the Holy Roman Empire
813: an Armenian general becomes eastern Roman emperor Leo V
840: Basil's fleet retakes Bari from the Muslims
843: Icons are restored
846: the city of Roma has 17,000 inhabitants
860: the Rus attack Constantinople
867: Basil I becomes the Byzantine emperor and founds the Macedonian dynasty
879: Basil I defeats the Arabs and reconquers Cappadocia
896: Symeon of Bulgaria defeats the Byzantine army for the first time
922: Symeon of Bulgaria defeats the Byzantine army for the fourth and last time
934: Magyars raid Constantinople
968: Nicephorus II defeats the Arabs and reconquers Syria
969: Nicephorus II defeats the Bulgars
976: Basil II becomes the Byzantine emperor
1018: Basil II annexes Bulgaria and the Byzantine empire reaches its zenith
1025: Basil II dies
1054: The patriarch of Constantinople and the pope in Roma excommunicate each other (the Great Schism)
1057: end of the Macedonian dynasty
1064: the Seljuks invade Armenia
1071: the Byzantine army of Romanus IV Diogenes is defeated by the Seljuks at Manzikert in Armenia, and establish a sultanate in Anatolia
1071: Normans led by Robert Guiscard conquer southern Italy from the eastern Roman empire
1081: Alexius I Komnenos establishes the Komnenos dynasty
1099: the first Crusade captures Jerusalem
1187: Saladin defeats the crusaders
1204: the Crusaders, led by the Doge of Venezia, sack Constantinople, expel the Greek emperor Alexius III and set up a Latin kingdom, led by Baldwin I of the Flanders, while Venezia acquires territories in the Mediterranean and Black Seas
1204: Theodore I Lascaris, son-in-law od Alexius III, flees from Constantinople to Nicaea (Bithynia), where he founds a the empire, whereas Alexius founds the empire of Trebizond further east
1211: Nicaea emperor Theodore I Lascaris conquers most of Anatolia
1261: Constantinople is liberated by the Nicaean emperor Michael VIII Paleologus and Greek becomes the official language of the ever smaller eastern Roman empire
1291: the Moslems expel the Crusaders from the Middle East
1345: Serbia defeats the eastern Roman empire and annexes Macedonia and Thrace
1347: the plague (Black Death) strikes Constantinople and it will kill half the population of the city
1348: Serbia defeats the eastern Roman empire and annexes Thessaly and Epirus
1453: the Ottoman Turks under Mehmet II capture Constantinople
1461: the Ottomans conquer the empire of Trebizond, the last Greek state

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not,
His notice instant is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.


-Dickinson

anangelanangelanangelanangelanangel. ya. that's me. i'm just a lilttle angel

A Critical Deposit


In Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Michael Baxandall states that any “fifteenth-century painting is a deposit of a social relationship.” In other words, Italian paintings of the Fifteenth Century in some sense embody, reflect, or offer information about the conventions governing how individuals interact with one another. In my opinion, however, Baxandall’s thesis, at least in this form, is otiose. Baxandall discusses a number of contracts that were executed by painters and patrons. We are shown financial records that document what is clearly a stark business transaction in which, because these paintings were frequently commissioned for the church, the artists’ freedom is quite limited. This is not to say that there was an absence of piety associated with the production many of these works. The audience presumably believes the stories these paintings tell. To try in any way to discount this obvious fact would be futile. But piety is not the only issue for the painters. A painter might also want to show that he is favored by the muses, that he is the greatest story-teller of all, a bard. After all, it is the centrality of the Biblical stories and what they represent, together with the artist’s skill at evoking them, that makes these works worth paying for.

Like the money spent by Hollywood producers in order to make movies with state-of-the-art visual effects, Italian painters too required substantial investment to contribute to their equivalent of the entertainment industry. But here again the question of piety arises. As often as not, piety and money go together quite well. The willingness to invest extravagant resources in the production of religious art is itself a tribute to God’s word, not merely as a way of giving alms to the church, but more significantly to clarify the story, to render it fresh and more vivid – a properly aesthetic aim. Both financier and artist are thereby each gaining grace, the one advertising his willingness to put his wealth, and the other his willingness to put his skill, aesthetic prowess, in the service of God. To say, as Baxandall does, that paintings embody social relationships is to say too little. Of more interest is the character of the social relationships that we find emerging through these paintings. We see business contracts for mutual profit, the struggle for achievement and recognition on the part of the artists, the desire to inform the public about sacred matters (and also to reinterpret them), the desire of financiers to demonstrate their piety, and no doubt much else as well. Our aim should not be merely to identify “the social,” but to characterize it in its complexity, ambiguity, and multiple and overlapping meanings.