One day last week, at a point when we thought that we will never see a full day of sun again, after six long months of cloudy skies, rain, snow, and hail I made a remark to someone at home. I suggested that the monarch around here, may he lead a long life, should also lead an un-rain payer, or a sunshine prayer. Or maybe it should be called the stop-the-rain prayer. A sort of tea party against long weeks of damp, cold, dark weather.
She looked at me as if I was delivering another of my senseless suggestions, the kind I make in frustration and despair (doesn’t everybody?). I patiently explained that in Saudi Arabia the king leads what is called the istisqa’ prayer, the rain prayer. That they do the same in other countries of the Middle East, especially in the Arabia Deserta region. The mullahs in Iran probably don't do it, they have rivers, nor the Iraqis, nor Husni Brezhnev Mubarak in Egypt.
“No, you mean they do the rain dance….”
Now I was really getting into it: “Maybe they do the dance as well, like the Indi…the Native Americans, I am not sure. But I know they do the rain prayer every year, especially when things look dry. And you can’t get any drier than Saudi Arabia….unless you’re talking Afghanistan under the Taliban. If you get my meaning.” She seemed to get my meaning, but was not amused about the inevitable pun.
“We don’t have a king. We have a governor.”
“Well the governor then…but Chris Gregoire is a woman. A governess? Like the south Asian and southeast Asians that run households and raise Arab children?”
That last remark managed to elicit some laughter, not without mirth: “Not a governess, a governor. She is the equivalent of a king or a shaikh here, an elected one. Our Arnold.”
“Ah. An elected king or shaikh… a female one at that. Not sure how the muftis and the ulema will look on that. Not sure how the tribes will look at that.”
Which for some reason led me to think about global warming, that gimmick created by liberals, progressives, and leftists of all stripe to undermine the business community, rabid talk radio hosts, and the American way of life. Not to mention undermining the major oil companies, Halliburton, and OPEC. Is it possible that it is an act, nay a process, of divine will?
Some U.S. conservatives believe in the phenomenon, the fact, we call global warming, but they do not believe that it is necessarily caused by man or woman or whatever. This line of thought has the advantage of accepting plain facts, yet disarming the main arguments of the left, the part about the need to d something about it and harming the oil majors and Halliburton.
Which led me to think: if not caused by man, then who made it? Other creatures on Earth do not have the potency and ability of man: not even all the cows and horses in Montana and Wyoming, throwing in the famous prolific asses of Jordan and Yemen, can together produce enough methane to account for the melting of the polar ice caps.
If we pray for rain, then maybe it is because we know the draught is caused by someone else. Ditto for global warming. So, ergo, global warming could be an act of God. It is his way of telling us he wants us elsewhere, either back where we came from, up there somewhere, or down there in that other place that Dante wrote about.
In the meantime: Our lawn is still soggy, after three days of non-rain, to the extent that it is like walking over a huge green sponge: water spurts up into your shoes and your socks as you walk, with sounds of noisy suction emanating around you. I still roll up my regulation Northwest jeans in order to go check the mail (I haven’t got used to the regulation Northwest outfit of shorts combined with fleece in temperatures below fifty).
Back in the Middle East: FYI-did you know that the head of Libyan intelligence is a gentleman named Musa Kusa? That would be Moses Kusa (Zucchini), or Moishe Kusa (Zucchini). Who knows, some day we may see a president Musa Kusa (Zucchini) at the Middle East summits. Then I can tell the leaders at the next summit what they can do with that kusa. I thought someone might be interested....
Cheers
Mohammed
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