I Had A Dream I Stood Beneath An Orange Sky

(Last year’s Memorial Day piece. This year’s, too.

(for and from ala)

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

Please do not forget anything that you take with you.

                                                              —automated announcement, Beijing taxicab

One of the key indicators that I do indeed too often dwell in what William Burroughs identified as “an annex of Hell” is the local radio newsperson. He labors out here in the sticks, in the near-invisible bush leagues, but he is in his heart a Fox person—his station a Fox affiliate. I suppose his way of feeling as One with those far-off Fox mandarins who don’t even know he is alive is to endeavor ebulliently al-ways to out-Fox Fox. Thus, there is nothing too mental to come out of this man’s mouth. Nothing.

This man was on the air the morning that President Obama convened his extraordinary and unprecedented press conference to Stop The Madness. Obama deploying his long-form birth certificate as a sort of seawall, to break the tsunami of maniacal jabberers roiling with Knowledge that Obama is a nefarious foreign-born Manchurian Muslim out to outrage all that is America.

This man’s radio station aired Obama’s “Yes, I Am Not A Not-Person” statement, in its entirety, live. The man himself then returned to the microphone to declaim that Obama had just said things that he had not, in fact, said. Words were put into Obama’s mouth; words were taken out of his mouth. And the sense of all these omissions and commissions was that Questions Still Remained as to whether Obama might not truly be a nefarious foreign-born Manchurian Muslim out to outrage all that is America.

It was a jaw-dropping performance. I mean, mere moments had passed since we’d heard the words from the president himself. All had been recorded; the thing itself was even then available for playback to anyone with access to an intertube. Other tubes already bore transcripts of Obama’s words. Yet this “news”man was boldly, methodically laying a track along which chugged an alternative reality.

Gonna Lift Me Up To That Drinkin’ Fountain

I Like Birds

Silver Apples Of The Moon

There is a piano now, here in the Manor. It arrived this morning. A little Baldwin spinet, birthed in the 1960s. It is a sturdy and game little being. We are learning each other.

There is a great poem by Lew Welch, called “He Thanks His Woodpile.” It goes like this:

The wood of the madrone burns with a flame at once
lavender and mossy green, a color you sometimes see in a sari.

Oak burns with a peppery smell.

For a really hot fire, use bark.
You can crack your stove with bark.

All winter long I make wood stews:

Poet to stove to woodpile to stove to
typewriter.      woodpile.        stove.

and can’t stop peeking at it!
can’t stop opening up the door!
can’t stop giggling at it

“Shack Simple”

crazy as Han Shan as
Wittgenstein in his German hut, as
all the others ever were and are

            Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers

who walked away from it, finally,
kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of
man-hooked Man

          (which is not, at last, estrangement)

That’s what it’s like here now, with this piano.

Feets Don’t Fail Me Now

A lot of people don’t like English ivy.

A lot of times these people have been my landlord. Or landlady. Who will bellow: “It will tear the house down!”

At which time they commence to put on the Hitler moustache, and start goose-stepping furiously around the property, decreeing that no English ivy vill they permit mein to das grow.

Well . . . sure, ivy’ll tear a house down.

But there’s no malice in it. That’s just the way they be.

Now, finally, at long last, here in the Manor, I am Free. For this here rental agreement says that I am “solely responsible” for all “landscaping.”

And the property-manager ladies have explicitly said “you can grow whatever you want.”

Meanwhile, they will pay for all the water.

BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

There is English ivy here—a lot of it—and I fully intend to permit it to get completely out of control.

I am Free; so is they. I shall not allow these ivy people to actually rip the walls off, but close to that: okay.

This ivy is absolutely beautiful, and pulses with pure life-force.

It’s just rained and rained and rained here all late winter, early spring, which has kept everybody else all sullen and underground, but the ivy has sent out these pure raw youngblood lime-green shoots, that are avidly crawling all over all and everywhere.

It’s alive: therefore, so I am.

I might not appreciate it so, if I had smilax here, but I don’t; smilax was my pal, for many a year, ringing green and clear and lovely, every February, when everybody else was all still head under the hoodie.

But smilax is a couple abodes behind, and now I hear you can’t even buy it in California anymore. Supposedly it’s a “weed.”

Yeah. Right. Like it’s a “weed,” worse than “politics.”

Anyway, English ivy has like these most marvelous feet. That’s how it grabs hold of things, and causes landlords and landladies to screech that it’s a menace, about ripping houses down.

In the photo above, hopefully, you can see its little wee feet, in nascence, before they’ve grabbed hold of things.

Once they do, of course, the feets get all dry and brittle and clingy . . . like anybody or anything else that grabs too tight ahold of things.

Anyway, it’s a gas, right now, watching this sweet yearning alleged menace climbing up over my front-porch wall. At any time, I can trim it back. But not yet. Not yet.

Like Babies At Birth

I have no name
I am but two days old—
What shall I call thee?
I happy am
Joy is my name—
Sweet joy befall thee!

—William Blake

Space is changing humans. And that is a good thing.

A while back I wrote about Ron Garen, spacehuman who takes marvelous photographs, and compiles wondrous videos, while up and out, in the great wide open.

Garen is responsible for, among other things, the video below, which always makes me happy, in the best, because the most vulnerable, of ways. It documents the final hours of Garen and two Russian cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station; then, their return to the planet.

I realize there still exist supremely silly larvals, like Captain Underpants, who, in presuming to speak for the transitory artificial construct known as the United States, recently bellowed that Russia is “our number one geopolitical foe.”

But all that is so over. Russians and Americans: they are the same human. Space helps people to understand that. For: as above; so below. Garen and his fellows, Alexander Samokutyaev and Andrey Borisenko, they get that. So should we. Space, it has shaped these humans’ sense and sensibility. Having gone up, they more clearly apprehend and appreciate what is down to the ground. So should we.

Now comes this spaced-human. Who has fallen in love, up there on the International Space Station. In love with space itself. And so, as all true lovers will, he has written his beloved a poem. Titled “Space Is My Mistress.”

This would never have happened, if he’d never gone out there.

But space has made him more, of who he really is.

we stroll outside together 
enveloped by naked cosmos 
filled with desire to be one 

Yes indeedy.

This sort of thing has been happening to humans ever since they began venturing into space. Most recently, in machines. As we not long ago passed the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s first trip into the great wide open, let us recall, beyond the “furthur,” what happened to Mr. Glenn, in his up and out.

We Is Risen

Nel Momento Eterno

And He Would Be There When Jem Waked Up In The Morning

Mr. Finch, you think Jem killed Bob Ewell? Is that what you think? Your boy never stabbed him. Bob Ewell fell on his knife. He killed himself.

There’s a black man dead for no reason. And now the man responsible for it is dead. Let the dead bury the dead, Mr. Finch. I never heard tell that it’s against the law for a citizen to do his utmost to prevent a crime from being committed. Which is exactly what he did. But maybe you’ll tell me it’s my duty to tell the town all about it, not to hush it up. Well, you know what’ll happen then. All the ladies in Maycomb—includin’ my wife—will be knockin’ on his door, bringin’ angel food cakes. To my way of thinkin’, takin’ the one man who’s done you and this town a great service, and draggin’ him, with his shy ways, into the limelight: to me, that’s a sin. It’s a sin. And I’m not about to have it on my head.

I may not be much, Mr. Finch, but I’m still Sheriff of Maycomb County. And Bob Ewell fell on his knife.

—To Kill A Mockingbird

Once upon a time, I introduced Mr. Ha-Ha to these pages. I now feel uneasy about that.

And so I’m here, now, as this year is put to rest, to lay him to rest, too.

He first appeared here, did Mr. Ha-Ha, just about two years ago.

So far as I know, and though obviously accomplished with assistance from folks like the Gnostics, I invented him.

Not my finest hour.

I invoked him again here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

His last appearance was here, in early April of this year. By that time, guided by the light that had come into my life, I had moved beyond him. Though I didn’t see that at the time. Sometimes I’m slow. And it takes me a while. To catch up even with myself.

In his day—which were dark days—Mr. Ha-Ha seemed to explain things. From the madness of Lucia Joyce to “The Nine Billions Names Of God.” From the dementia of Linnaeus to the nature and meaning of generals. From the airplane crash that took the life of Ted “Tubes” Stevens to the presence of 100 helpless “magicians” on a becalmed cruise ship. From the man from Porlock who starcrossed Coleridge to my daughter’s fall on Solstice.

But, really, he never explained a thing. Mr. Ha-Ha. He was but a creature of fear and cowering. Masked in ironic simmering would-be detachment. He was of giving up, of hiding. Of “everyone said/i’d come to no good/i knew i would/purely to please them.” Of expecting the worst. And thereby making it manifest.

He never belonged here. This creature of the dark. Because this a blog that, as it says right up top, exists “because the light is beautiful.”

Which it is. Long have I seen it. And now I do live it.

Life is light. And in it one can vibrate, shimmer, fade and fancy, without boundaries. That’s where I am. I am no longer interested in “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” That’s Mr. Ha-Ha. I am not about him any longer. Oh no. I am now, alpha and omega, world without end amen, about Ms. Ah-Ha. She of the light. Of what is possible made probable made Real. Of seeing and feeding and bringing into being. Of the Fool of a Magician that is the World that is the Fool. Mr. Ha-Ha sees the world as dark: and thus the world is dark. Ms. Ah-Ha sees the world as light: and, yea verily, the world is truly light.

Life is light. So am I. And so I will be there, each dawn, when Jem wakes up in the morning. Because that is the light of what I am. What I was brought here, unto the final spiral of this mortal coil, to be.

Holy Mary, Mother Of Pinball

The French can differ from other humans. They are for instance known, in the immortal words of National Lampoon, as folks who “fight with their feet and fuck with their faces.”

Now it seems they have determined that a proper way to honor Mary, mother of Jesus of Nazareth, is to light up a building like a pinball machine, and play it.

For many centuries the people of Lyon have in early December paid homage to Mary, in gratitude to the god-woman for interceding with the Mean Man to spare the place from the plague, back in 1643.

In them Olden Times, said homage involved a procession culminating at the Basilica of Fourviere, where candles were lit and offerings presented.

In 1852, the sculptor Joseph Hugues Fabisch erected a Mary statue next to the Basilica. The people of Lyon planned for December 8 a mammoth Mary party. Here is what happened:

Leading up to the inauguration, everything was in place for the festivities: the statue was lit up with flares, fireworks were readied for launching from the top of Fourvière Hill and marching bands were set to play in the streets. The prominent Catholics of the time suggested lighting up the facades of their homes as was traditionally done for major events such as royal processions and military victories.

However, on the morning of the big day, a storm struck Lyon. The master of ceremonies hastily decided to cancel everything and to push back the celebrations to the following Sunday. In the end the skies cleared and the people of Lyon, who had been eagerly anticipating the event, spontaneously lit up their windows, descended into the streets and lit flares to illuminate the new statue and the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Fourvière, later superseded by the Basilica. The people sang songs and cried “Vive Marie!” until late in the night.

In years since, Lyon humans have each December 8 placed Mary-devoted lit-candles on their windowsills. The place is alive with light. Meanwhile, in the center of town, various assorted performances and such now draw up to 4 million tourists, to what has become a four-day event.

As it is necessary on this planet that things mutate to survive, this year the Mary-fest featured some clever humans, from the French lighting company CT Light Concept, who projected with colored lights an assortment of pinball bumpers and flippers onto the side of the Celestine Theater. The display was fully playable, as can be seen in the video below.

Pretty cool.

The French: good with light.

Deviant Daughter Deprived Of First Prize

Howling mobs of enraged art-lovers are today marching on that satanic citadel of pure evil known as deviantART, ululating in holy outrage at the infamous anathema in which my daughter was awarded second prize in a deviantART poetry contest, rather than first.

“This shall not stand!” Yahweh thundered, in a fervent burst of righteous wrath, making a rare public appearance before a roomful of startled reporters. “An injustice has been done—yea, verily: one worse, even, than what I did to Job. This decision violates all standards of God and Man, and tempts Me to bring on The Fire Next Time.”

While various lesser deities strive mightily to restrain the enraged celestial brimstone-brewer, the earthside hacker collective known as Anonymous has vowed to publicly reveal the names, addresses, phone numbers, genomes, and underpants sizes of all involved in the anathema.

Remarks by the dissed daughter herself (“Oh no, no bombs!” she pleaded to a cell of the Weather Underground, one that had reconstituted specifically to bomb all those involved in the anathema who need to be bombed, “I actually really loved the poem that got first place, and thought it really deserved to win”) are to be disregarded.

This is because “it is Known that she has always been Nice,” said her father, busily attaching a timer. “And as can be seen: here in this world, this world that is Wrong, nice people finish second.”

Earlier installations in the saga of the deviant daughter are as follows.

Here is some background on her daughterness. Here is where her deviant proclivities were initially exposed. Here is where she first became an award-winning deviant, acknowledged as both “Author Of The Month,” and authoress of “Poem Of The Month.” Here is a deviant poem of hers I published last December, when snow was suffocating all the land. Here is a different-one poem of hers that also won a deviant award.

Here is her deviant page.

And here is the poem that most recently finished second, of 128 entries. But really finished first. On the Earth where there is no anathema.

Lark Ascending

Occupy Wall Street was born of this image. That is what it is about. That is its power.

The United States Supreme Court, when, in the early 20th Century, it moved to codify restrictions on free speech in this country, decreed that it was unconstitutional “to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”

The Street people evade that. They, in fact, turn that decision on its head. They, instead, as seen in that image, in re that ballerina, dancing upon that bull, encourage all and every, to instead “shout ‘theater’ in a crowded fire.”

There has not yet been a United States Supreme Court decision, extinguishing that right. To “shout ‘theater’ in a crowded fire.” Because that is too far afield of what is believed to be normal. And so it was believed to be unnecessary. To outlaw it.

But that is its strength. Its very abnormality. That is what, even into these days, lives. The impulse to shout “theater,” in a crowded fire. The very reason the Street people are successful, in what they are doing.

The true meaning of the ballerina upon the bull, is not something that can be translated into language. And that is why no one can “define” what the Street people are. For they are beyond definition. And so, flowing from that, the Street people will not have leaders. They will have not demands. They will not have goals.

Though they do have an end. Inchoate as that may sometimes seem to be. And they will employ means. As shifting as those may be.

What is key: the Street people know there is a fire. They are not asleep, as the fire rages ’round them. They are, instead, standing amid it. The fire. And they are shouting “theater.” So that all those, who are also being consumed, might see. And mayhaps move out of the flames.

Five Feet Four

How High The Blue

My way with words, generally, is to deploy several thousand of them, in hopes of thereby somehow arriving at something like what I want to say.

Results?

Meh.

I am envious of those who can say more with less. Such as Ezra Pound, in his poem “In A Station Of The Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Can’t beat that.

A couple days ago over in the Orange Place appeared a brief piece by Wee Mama that contains just about everything you need to know. I’m nicking it and reprinting it here because, well, people need to know it.

Ride ‘Em, Cowgirl

When you’re a kid, and you see on television people jumping horses, it looks pretty cool. And you think maybe you’d like to try that, too.

And you live on a farm, and so you ask your parents if you can have a horse. And then, for some monstrous and inexplicable parental reason, they say no.

Now, many a young person, confronted with such a stunning, incomprehensible, autocratic pronouncement, would retire to their room to pout. And then go into town, there to do drugs, shoplift, buy booze through winos.

Bristol Palin, as we know, would get pregnant, and then rake in more than $250,000 from advising teens, in the words of “House Of The Rising Sun, “not to do what I have done.”

But not Regina Mayer, now 15, of a farm in Laufen, Germany. When her parents rudely decreed that she could not have a horse, she decided that she did have a cow—one Luna. And knowing from the wisdom of Mother Goose, from the immortal “Hey Diddle Diddle,” that a cow is fully capable of “jump[ing] over the moon,” Regina resolved first to ride Luna, and then to teach her to jump. And that is just what Regina has done.

That Remains In Africa

The sacred grove took my breath away. I had expected only more myth-making, something calling once more for a suspension of disbelief.

But the grove was real and it was beautiful: a piece of tropical woodland which had been left untouched for some time, and where no animal or creature was to be killed. That was what we had been told; and that was what we found.

Through the wilderness of tree-trunks and hanging lianas inside we had glimpses of the river that ran through the sanctuary. It was a muddy tropical river, and no attempt had been made to beautify or soften the turbid water; the scalloped melting forms on the wall were intended to match the bounce of the fast-moving river, narrow at this point.

It was all very moving to me, especially the idea of the grove as an animal sanctuary. It was said to be a hundred and sixty acres in all, a quarter of a square mile. I wished it was ten times the size.

A big gate opened into a short lane—this was for the procession at the time of the river festival. The lane led down, past a number of small home-made shrines at the foot of trees, to what was said to be a pavilion, just where the yellow river curved. It was an open pavilion, thatched, with timber uprights. To one side of the pavilion was the big shrine. The shrine was also thatched, and had mud walls decorated with figures in white, chocolate, rust and black. The priests and the soothsayers lived within those walls. The legend was that the pavilion stood on the site of the first Oba of Osun. At the time of the river festival, as people said, thousands of people of the black diaspora came here. There were morality plays in every corner of the wood.

The event had now taken hold; and the people of the diaspora who came for it would understand that though they had taken many of the Yoruba gods across the water, and though the whole apparatus of the supernatural had also travelled with them, reminding men of the precariousness of their hold on life, and though they had taken much of this Yoruba magic to the New World, making that difficult world safe, they could never take the sacred grove with them. That remained in Africa.

—V.S. Naipaul, The Masque Of Africa

Some Thoughts On The Common Toad

(I like occasionally to post here crabby private missives from George Orwell, because they gently amuse me, in a fond sort of way; they humanize him, revealing him to be just another guy grumpy about the cold seeping in through the holes in his socks; they’re not the sort of things people normally associate with the flowings from his pen.

(But I have received complaints about these pieces, from people wondering if Orwell was always an Eeyore, whether he ever once enjoyed anything. And of course he did. Sometimes he even wrote about it. One of my very favorite Orwell essays is the one reprinted here, “Thoughts On The Common Toad,” which appeared first in Tribune on April 12, 1946, and is a very fine paean to the coming of spring, one that could be considered positively rhapsodic.

(It is really spring here now, all of a sudden, in the wake of the 80 days of rain. It took me by surprise, it took me hard. So I am offering up now the spring Orwell, illustrated with some says-spring-to-me photos I’ve recently found amongst the tubes, and closing with a spring incantation from Van Morrison.)

Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something—some kind of shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the temperature—has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time—at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently well, in the middle of the summer.

At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-colored semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.

Para Mi Tesoro, El 23 De Diciembre

My Daughter, The Award-Winning Deviant

As I recently noted in this post, my daughter is now hanging out with deviants; specifically, the people at deviantART, a tubes-nest of illustrating and elucubrating young people.

She has posted there her novel, Maiden of Woodland Secrets, the first of a projected seven-part saga. It is a rollicking tale of magic and mystery, featuring a mother who is a raging madwoman, and a father who is a good-hearted but feckless drunk, and thank jeebus the work is in no way autobiographical.

This novel, as I indicated then, can be accessed from my daughter’s deviant page, here. I now note that this page has been updated to include a photograph that indicates my daughter may have become a dominatrix. I reprint: you decide.

Anyway, the deviant people began by giving her feedback on her book, which was nice, and now they have gifted her with an award for that book, which is even nicer. She has been named Featured Author Of The Month.

Further, one of her poems has been selected as Poem Of The Month. That poem can be read here. It features La Musica and Variations in B-Flat, is subsumed in Eros but haunted by Eternal Recurrence, and thus is extremely depressing.

It’s a genetic thing, I guess.

My daughter is also mentioned in this deviant newsletter. A Different One explication of why the deviants believe my daughter to be Good may be found here.

I am glad that these deviant people recognize that my daughter is A Star, for that is indeed what she are.

I, as evidenced by the sentence above, am, unlike my daughter, no poet. And I know it. : /

Water Music

Courtesy of Repeating Islands, comes this, which is deeply cool. Underwater sculpture by artist Jason de Caires Taylor; lifelike figures cast from real people and placed on the sea floor off Isla Mujeres in Mexico, and Moliniere Bay on the west coast of Grenada.

His most recent in-stallation, the one off Mexico, required eight months to complete, and features people talking, walking, working, thinking . . . dreaming.

Taylor uses inert, PH-neutral concrete that doesn’t pollute the water. The sculptures attract sea life, becoming home to coral and other marine creatures. The figures off Grenada, which were installed in 2008, already exhibit “sea change,” as they are adapted into the undersea environment.

Spend some time at Taylor’s website, here. Pretty much magic. I could post these images forever. Probably I will.

My Daughter, The Deviant

Okay, this is pretty cool.

My daughter, when she was 16, wrote a novel—then intended as the first work in a trilogy; now, I believe, the first of a projected seven. No publishers have yet picked it up, because they are Wrong. But still she perseveres.

Apparently she has been hanging out of late at a website called deviantART, which appears to be a sort of vortex for illustrating Young People. There she posted her novel, which I discovered has somewhere along the line been renamed Maiden of Woodland Secrets, which sounds sort of literary-erotica. I don’t recall any particular lubriciousness the last time I read it, but who knows? Things change.

In any event, deviant people are there giving her feedback, which is quite nice. One of the deviants even created a drawing of the book’s title character, Violet, which I have stolen and posted here.

If you too would like to read this book, you can access it via my daughter’s deviant gallery here.

My daughter is a Star, and someday by this world that will be Seen.

What’s Good: Moonbows

I like it when I stumble upon a form of magic that I never even knew existed.

That’s what happened Thursday, as I desultorily flipped through A Book About A Thousand Things, the 1946 magpie’s-nest from George Stimpson that addresses such burning questions as “how do bees hum?” and “does fright cause the guinea fowl’s flesh to turn blue?”

And therein I learned that there is such a thing as a “moonbow.”

Rainbows by moonlight, known as moonbows, are unusual but not rare phenomena. Aristotle referred to lunar bows about twenty-two hundred years ago, and they are well known to scientists, although they are not often observed, chiefly because of the faintness of the light at night. Only under exceptional conditions can the colors of a moonbow be seen. Lunar rainbows are most likely to occur after showers on nights when the moon is bright but not too high in the heavens. Similar lunar bows are periodically visible in the spray of certain waterfalls, such as the Cumberland Falls about eighteen miles southwest of Corbin, Kentucky.

That’s a Cumberland Falls moonbow, of the harvest kind, up yonder. More moonbows beyond the “furthur.”

What’s Good: Malaysia

It’s Monday, so what the hell: let’s put on the Happy Face.

Collected here are some genuinely good-news pieces from out of Malaysia. Malaysia, like all artificial European-colonial constructs, has had its problems, some of which I’ve addressed here and here. But the people there, they’re trying. As these pieces will hopefully show.

Malaysian immigration officials in Kedah state raided a house of bondage and rescued 71 women who had been forced for more than two years to work without pay as housecleaners. The women, originally from Indonesia, had been lured to Malaysia on promises that they could earn $160 a month as maids. Once they arrived, recruiters seized their passports, locked them up in a house, and sent them out every day to work, without pay, in cleaning houses. Some of the women were as young as 17; the men who enslaved them could face up to 15 years in prison on human-trafficking charges. It is estimated that some 2 million people from countries outside Malaysia, mostly its poorer neighbors, work in Malaysia in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service industries. Claims of overwork, underpay, and sometimes even physical abuse, it is said, “are common.” Sorta like in the US.

Malaysian Muslim clerics have decreed that while soccer uniforms featuring devils, crosses, and skulls promote the “wrong value,” they do not believe such items should be banned.

For reasons I do not want to think about right now, the British soccer team Manchester United is particularly popular in Malaysia. The team’s emblem is a red devil holding a trident, and the players are ofttimes referred to as “the Red Devils.”

Though he and his fellows are not interested in banning the things, Muslim cleric Harussani Zakaria says: “We just advise people not to wear this. Satan is, for us, our enemy. It’s the wrong value. Satan is always bad.”