god's on vacation

“Are you lost, sir?”
“Yes. I was trying to exit from that end of the church but it’s blocked off.”
“It’s beautiful isn’t it? Are you from Padova?”
“No, I’m from San Francisco in California, the United States. I study in Florence and right now we are on a field trip.”
“Florence, I know where that is.”
“Where are you from?”
“Trieste, but I live here now. What do you study?”
“Art history, but right now a little bit of everything. I really like philosophy and think I want to study that next.”
“You made a mistake. Where is philosophy going to take you? You know what you should study? Languages. With China becoming the strongest world power, it’s going to be needed. You need to earn a living, and language is where you need to be.”
“Yes, language does interest me, but right now I really have no idea what I want to do.”
“How old are you, sir?”
“23.”
“Oh, you’ve got time, but you need to start soon: the more languages the better. Look at the world we have today, without language you have no other means to do anything if things begin to get worse, which they continue to do.”
“You’re right.”
“You know the four basic questions of philosophy, the ones that people have been trying to answer for the last 3,000 years: Who are we? Where do we come from? What are we doing? Why do we do it? These four questions that never lead anywhere, just a continuous circle. Take a look at this, you see what it says?”
“It says that life is the continuation of the wonder of existing.”

This was the conversation I had with a very nice old man inside Saint Anthony’s basilica. I had just finished using the bathroom and was walking around the courtyards, looking for the exit that eventually was blocked off. He stopped me and asked me if I was lost, and I said yes. I think that that question and answer have a more profound meaning that locates itself a little bit under the surface. He told me more of his life; we talked about politics, both Italian and American. I don’t need to get in to too many details. Then as we were walking out he started reading an old stone tablet, first the Greek and then the Latin, all this while he was telling me words in French mixed with his beautiful Italian language. He had to have learned it in school, since the city of Trieste is located at the southern border of Italy and Slovenia. Five languages that I could count in the short half an hour that we spent together.

I don’t remember his name, and for a few minutes it bothered me. He has an identity, and is alive just as anybody else, maybe even a little more, and at this point his name doesn’t really matter. It’s the experience and insight that we talked about standing in the courtyard of one of the most beautiful churches I have ever seen. And I’m not even religious.

The next day me and a few good friends decided to skip out on the Villas and head off to Venice to play around and hopefully get thrown out of a museum or two. The weather couldn’t have been more beautiful, and we spent just about the entire day walking around and laughing. Come to think of it, every time someone asks us what we did the only thing that comes to mind is walking and talking. Nothing too spectacular, but I guess that makes it more amazing.

We also formed a band called “god’s on vacation.” There are four of us, and all you have to do to join is fart in a church. I believe farting in church is one of the most rewarding experiences that anyone can ever do, and all I have to say to those non-believers is this: Jesus was a man, most if not all of us agree on that. Which means he pooped, he had boogers, and most of all he farted. Jesus farted, and so farting in church is being like Jesus, a man, rather, a person. Any questions?

Oh yea while walking around we tired to make as many “street” euphemisms that we could, obviously switching “street” with “canal,” since Venice doesn’t have any streets, just canals. I have to give credit to Mitch Hedberg for the inspiration and all the first two on the list that follows:

We’ve got to get the kids off the canals
I got canal smarts bitch!
That’s going to hurt your canal-cred
Is that thing canal-legal?
It’s the end of the canal for you bud
Let’s get this show on the canal
Hit the canal jack
Canal-head
Please pull your gondola to the side of the canal
Do you want to see some illegal canal racing?
Country canals, take me home, to the place, I belong
It’s a long canal ahead
I’m from the canals!
We were raised on the canals!
Do you want to end up on the canals like everybody else?
Go play on the free-canals
On the canal again
Canal-musicians
Canal-vendors, etc.

The last day of our trip we visited Vicenza and its sweet old theater and then Mantova and even got to see the “Pharmacy” where “Romeo” bought the supposed “Poison.” I didn’t ditch the group as much as last year but still managed to enjoy myself thanks to the beautiful Italian culture that still can be found amongst its cities.

In our Italian Politics class last week we were talking about the “American Dream,” what it was, what it meant, and the teacher brought up a very interesting point/question. He wondered how the youth of today (us) felt about our future, if we were given any hope for change, or if we were just told to keep our mouths shut and get a job. For the most part we agreed that we were told to study, to listen, and to learn, without ever questioning the means or the reasoning behind it. This “American Dream” and I put it in quotation marks for many a reason (one being that it never existed, similar to a marketing ploy aimed at convincing people to come over here and work like slaves (i.e. the Italian/Irish immigrants on the NYC subway and the Chinese on the transcontinental railroad), and the other being to work and keep quiet, because who likes a shit-disturber?). I’ll have to get back to that in a second.

The second article up for discussion was the war in Iraq vs. the war in Vietnam. He brought to our attention the fact that more people have died in the current war than they did in the Vietnam war, but for some reason the mass of people couldn’t care less. Yes, there are some newspapers that tell the story, but for the most part the mass media concerns us with britney spear’s kids and what color the homeland security monkeys have designated for the day. Strikes still seem to happen, but there definitely isn’t this unity in the so-called “united” states. One reason could be for all the toys we have (ipods, the internet, big cars, and 80 hour a week jobs), which seems logical. If our attention is kept in material things that we make important then we’ll never really open our eyes and see the world, at least not the whole world. This rise of individuality I guess has its perks if you are well off and don’t need to worry, but for the other 99% of the world population it’s not that easy. People need people to survive, at least that’s what Plato said, and Aristotle made sure to say that there are people that oppress and people that get oppressed, and that is how the hierarchy keeps to its own needs to survive. I don’t know if I agree with either of them, but it’s obviously a great topic to talk about, if we can ever turn off our ipods and stop telling our kids to sit and listen to the farces that come out of our mouths everyday.

This honor idea, I was talking to a good friend in Venezia, and it occurred to me that a very “honorable” life would be to be born, go to school, graduate, work for 50-60 years, retire, sit around the house, and then die. That, to us at least, is honor. We can all just stop right now, go back to work, and shut up, and in the end we fortunately have this great “excuse” for not doing what we believed in, for sitting still and being oppressed, and we call that honor. Honor, the American Dream, means to not question everything because we supposedly have everything we need. But once you scratch the surface you find that most of the fundamental values in society go away completely (honor, love, history, knowledge, order, majority rule, etc.). And I hope that we have understood at least the tip of the iceberg in the past few months.

Honor, however, has another meaning, and that comes with the Jesus’ and the Socrates’ and the people that go against everything we thought was true for a better life, assuming that progress means betterment and that betterment is related to the “common good.” That leaves us in a state of shock, because we don’t know what to do. We have a system in place to survive, and we are drilled that it’s perfect, that government is needed, and that democracy…whoops.

Democracy, majority rules, the people have the power. Wrong, at least for us. It’s never been about democracy, because our system of government is a republic. And a republic is a monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy put together, under the assumption that if one facet of government has unlimited power that it will eventually degenerate, ultimately ending up in anarchy and then right back to a monarchy (which happened in 1799 with the French Republic and Napoleon).

In other words, the Roman consul is the American president, which by definition is our king. The Roman senate is our senate, which fulfills the government of a small group of people. And here’s the kicker. We don’t have a democracy, we have representatives. The fundamental assumption associated with the reasoning from taking the government out of the hands of the people and putting it in the hands of people to think for the people? We don’t know what’s good for us, and we don’t have the capacity to think for the whole, so we have to elect someone to think and act for us, so that we can worry more about our jobs and our kids and our new TV and the paycheck that’s coming on Friday so we can buy more junk.

god I love the american dream

Just to add a little more fuel to the fire, marinate on this: George Washington, the first president of the United States under the constitution of 1787 (there were about 8 presidents before him under the Articles of Confederation that we borrowed from the Iroquois) fought for the british army. He was a red coat. You know what that makes him?

A TERRORIST!!!

And while we’re on the subject, that would make our precious jesus a terrorist too. Don’t you just hate logic?

-Anthony