Interwar Postcard

After the Out Breath, by and © monkeytime.

I posted this before learning that today a Christian, right-wing terrorist murdered Dr. George Tiller inside a Christian church in Wichita, Kansas. Dr. Tiller was truly a hero, having risked his life for years (and nearly lost it in a previous terrorist shooting) to provide abortions to women in an area of the country that has been under enormous pressure from people who want to control women’s bodies and restrict women’s access to reproductive medicine.

I’m leaving this photo up because I like it and there’s not necessarily a direct connection between guns/gun culture and the sort of terrorism practiced by the forced-pregnancy crowd. Indeed, society’s protectors must use most of the same weapons used by its enemies. But Dr. Tiller’s murder can’t go unremarked, nor can the link between significant parts of American gun culture and other elements of right wing culture that are violently reactionary and seriously, dangerously unhinged.

Ave atque vale, Dr. Tiller – Hail and farewell.

For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth, by and © monkeytime.

I seem to have decent luck shooting pelicans. Perhaps this makes me a crypto-Catholic. The pelican figures prominently in some branches of Catholic mythology as a model for Christ, piercing her side and feeding or resurrecting her young with blood from the wound. This lore of the pelican apparently predates Christianity.

Interestingly enough, the pelican also appears in Christian writing (and perhaps Jewish writing) as a metaphor for isolation and desolation. Psalms 102 says (verses 3-7, King James Version):

For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth.

My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.

By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.

I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

It is not clear that the original writing actually referred to the sea-bird we know as the pelican, but most English translations seem to use the word pelican (notably, the New International Version does not). The Vulgate appears to use the Latin equivalent, and the Septuagint the Greek.