I missed my last deadline for a column in the Reader. I had one I liked but because it impinged on my better half I set it aside for further consideration. As I told the editor of the Reader I have no shortage of things to write about. But I’m at a point where I’ve been reading quite a bit and I’ve got a reading list of, as I think of them, planes flying over an airport waiting for clearance.
Reading daily of the vile smearing of excrement by Republicans on Christianity I’ve been strongly inclined to read to its conclusion the official complete cannon of the New Testament. Thirty years ago with people claiming to know Christianity taking over the party they were turning slowly into greedy putrescence I got almost all the way through the new testament. Jerks like segregationist Moral Majoritarian Rev. Falwell described his Bible reading regime as reading a little of the Bible before bed every night getting through the Bible in a year. For a guy who must have read it fifty times before his death he seemed utterly clueless about the beatitudes. So much for immersing yourself in oxygen and refusing to breath.
So, finishing from start to finish is one goal I’ve been sitting on for a couple years during Trumps smearing excrement on it.
I’m well over two thirds through a dandy book I bought used twenty-five years ago called the Luck of Nineveh. What appealed to me when I bought it was the notion that the fellow who discovered Nineveh had revived Christian belief in the Old Testament’s history at a time when the Religion was on the ropes with science challenging its myth and superstition heavy reliance.

I don’t think the basic ideas that Jesus propounded have to have a Godly origin to work. Much of the modern western world has benefited greatly from applying the Beatitudes to socialist governing. Now Donald Trump is sending us back to a time of Herod with religious cranks cheering him on from their Lear Jet runways.
Yesterday I woke from a dream thinking, of all things, about the notion of the “full faith and credit” of the United States and other fuzzy economic and intellectual ideas which undergird the United States. I knew that meant after Luck of Nineveh I would be reading Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton. like Luck it has spent a decade or more on my shelves waiting for its chance to land in my terminal. Nineveh is only 336 pages. Hamilton is double that with pages much more densely packed with verbiage.
I have a two weeks to get it started before we drive to Colorado to visit our grand daughters. Then I’ll have a week to work on it while there. I’m more interested in Economics than Lyn Manuel Miranda was.
Then for our trip to and from Colorado which will take us about 30 hours of driving time we will be listening to a Pulitzer winner about the long history of Native America.
It felt important to write about my reading list before I plunged into the last 100 pages of Nineveh. Its a great read, good history, and describes a world long gone whose echoes still report across our news which is being strangled by villains who want history dead while AI arises from computer programing and the Internet to decide the fate of the truth.
