Today is 6.6.06, the Day of the Beast. Unless of course, you go for the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, which puts the number of the Beast as 616. In which case the Day of Evil was last January or last week, depending on the date encoding conventions in your area.
The remake of “The Omen” opens today. Housemate went to an advanced screening last night, and said it was okay, but the kid looks a lot like Youngest Boy. With the filthy glares that kid can give, I’m not surprised.
I hate scary movies, but for some reason, it doesn’t frighten me when a movie features one scary character who’s doing evil things. What really scares me is when a bunch of people who think they’re good act evilly. It’s a major theme in To Kill a Mockingbird, which I’m reading aloud with Oldest Boy. You have a whole community of decent people, but because racism is so entrenched, it turns out all wrong. And yet they see nothing wrong with the outcome. You have lots of tiny bad decisions by lots of ordinary people enforcing their values ignorantly, and it multiplies into monstrosity.
Let’s look at a case:
The customer is always right? Not at Geno’s Steaks in South Philadelphia.
Belly up to its counter and order a cheesesteak in a language other than English, and you’ll walk away hungry. Fromage-avec? Fugheddaboudit.
It seems that Joseph Vento, Geno’s owner, feels strongly that everyone in this country ought to speak English – even if they’re tourists from faraway climes looking for that fabled Philly cheesesteak fix.
Vento insists his customers order in English. No pointing at the menu items. Speak English, a sign at Vento’s popular, curbside counter reads.
Okay, so the guy has an value that it’s important to speak English in the USA. Fine. It probably is. But what an ignorant ass to enforce this value in such an ignorant way.
I’m a language-learning guy. I speak Spanish and French (pretty well), and Russian (some, but I’ve forgotten a lot). I’ve also taken some first-year Japanese, and I can still recognise a few words and phrases. But when I go to Japan, I have real trouble with ordinary tasks. And I’m so grateful when someone is helpful to me, the dumb gaijin who can’t speak Japanese. What if no one helped me? First, they’d be assholes. And second, I’d starve. Which they’d probably be happy about if they were the kind of assholes that are running Geno’s Steaks. Or the kind that are currently whipping up popular ire about America’s language policy.
This is the kind of evil I find really scary. The kind of evil where a whole community turns the cold shoulder to someone because they don’t speak the right language. Or have the right colour skin. Or the right religion or family connections or … well, you can fill in the blanks. If there were just one evil person, you could find them and stop them, but when it’s everyone making those tiny decisions, they don’t feel like they’re doing anything evil at all.
I recently heard (again) that line that Edmund Burke probably never said: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”
To that I would like to add: People aren’t always very good at knowing whether they are good or evil. And evil often triumphs when good but ignorant people take it into their heads to do something.
6 June 2006 at 9:34 pm
Two things. First, smart people do this too. Think 1950’s psychologists using a wonderful new tool called the lobotomy. They were on the right track but boy did they do some scary things getting there.
Second, and I could be completely wrong about this but I seem to remember hearing that the roman numerals for 666 contain evry symbol needed for all numbers up to 1000. as such it was often used as the symbol for numbers or mathmatics in Rome. Is it possible that the goat hearding people that wrote this stuff just thought that science and mathmatics were evil magic?
7 June 2006 at 12:10 am
Ha! I never noticed that.
The prevailing view is that Revelation is a political document relevant to its time. The Beast is Nero, who persecuted Christians.
From the Oxford Companion to the Bible:
The number was arrived at by presenting Nero’s Greek name Kaisar Neron in Hebrew letters, which also function as numbers: qsr nrwn; q = 60, s = 100, r = 200, n = 50, w = 6, so ‘qsr nrwn’ adds up to 666. (Some western manuscripts read “six hundred sixteen”; the scribes possibly did not understand John’s usage of Hebrew numbers, and thought in terms of the Greek kaisar theos, the “god-emperor,” which would add up to 616 using the Greek letters as numerals; but it is more likely that they simply dropped the final n: ‘qsr nrw’ for Kaisar Nero, making 616.)
Boy, has that occasioned a lot of crackpot theories though.
You’re right that good people do this. That was sort of what I was getting at: evil is caused by lots of good people making tiny bad choices. And the choices may be driven by good values acted upon ignorantly. I’m thinking of the way people use too much petrol instead of walking, or me buying bananas. We’re not evil for doing these things, are we? And yet we cause pollution and depletion of resources and oppressive plantation economies. But I might not make those choices if I knew better.