How The World Is Run

[poliphilo]

It happened again. They put the ballot papers on the fire and the smoke coming out the chimney was white. Everybody in the square was jumping up and down, weeping and clapping their hands- we have a new Pope! And then the smoke turned black. Sorry, folks, no Pope today.

Quaint.

But communicating by smoke signals isn't the half of it. We're choosing a man to fill one of the most powerful posts in the world and the electorate consists of a handful of (supposedly) celibate old gents in their seventies.

Why aren't we laughing?

This is the 21st centry, not the 14th.

But I guess you and I don't get to vote for the chairman of Microsoft either.

Comments

[airstrip.livejournal.com]

Oh, but it gets worse. Some 115 men who not only have little experience in the human experience because they are not fathers, businessmen, dock workers, farmers, people trying to make it from paycheck to paycheck, etc. but live in a world that prides itself in part on its removal from it, are being asked to crown a man who will inevitably make grand statements on the nature of that human experience and how it should be.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well, yes...

But it's our fault. We allow ourselves to be impressed and taken in by the robes and the processing and the fiction of papal authority.

[airstrip.livejournal.com]

I have to say that I agree. As my latest entry makes abundantly clear, I'm absolutely obsessed with the formalism of the Catholic Church. One could call it an interest in the fashion of faith.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Do you know the ecclesiastical fashion show sequence in Fellini's Roma?

[airstrip.livejournal.com]

No?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

A mad old woman- a member of Rome's "black aristocracy" - stages a exhibition of ecclesiastical fashion in her huge, decaying palazzo. She invites all her fellow ghouls. Nuns and bishops process along the catwalk- wearing ever more outlandish costumes. The show ends with a vision of Pius IX in glory.

It's both a satire and a celebration. I think you'd like it.

[airstrip.livejournal.com]

Interesting, I looked the movie up. Very interesting.

[airstrip.livejournal.com]

I just noticed, we have a new pope. With the pomp and circumstance largely concluded, I'm free to go back to my largely godless existence.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ratzinger- scourge of the liberals- John Paul's enforcer.

Heigh-ho.