Infidel music: mail call

In all the mail through which I’ve been wading the last several days is one pointed query from a subscriber wondering if my intent is to maintain a well-crafted blog that no one reads. Touché! Yes, I’ve been busy. It’s the end of the fiscal year for us bureaucrats and desk jockeys, and then there’s life—not to mention all this mail. More about the mail in a moment, but above is a playlist of a few things to which I’ve been listening while reading, replying, deleting, and what not. It always helps things along to have a little music in the background, don’t you think? Of course, just as one man’s personal, interior struggle is another man’s violent jihad, one person’s mood music is similarly another’s annoying noise pollution. Nevertheless, there should be something in the list for all but the most obtuse cretins like my friend Jack, who listens to crap that should be illegal. If the whole playlist makes you ill, then you may want to think about it as piped-in sound for the elevator ride you’re sharing with me.

BIMBO’S DATE: “Do you like Billie Holiday?” BIMBO: “I love him!”

As for my intentions as a publisher, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This blog is a lot like western civilization or even modern life as we know it. Just because it’s here today, that doesn’t mean it will be here tomorrow. Only our love is here to stay. All else may just be passing fancy and in time may go. There may be trouble ahead. Soon we’ll be without the moon, humming a different tune, and then there may be tear drops to shed.

So while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance.

From the mailbag, where tons of notes have been piling up, come quite of few engaging and downright fascinating comments and questions from subscribers and passersby. I should mention before I get to these matters that from my search-engine stats I am learning a great deal about how people find me, as they somehow have been doing despite my lazy posting habits from all over the US and Canada, as well as from Australia, China, the Czech Republic, Bahrain, Chile, Germany, Finland, the UK, Indonesia, Ireland, Nigeria, the Russian Federation, Spain, and several other countries, some unknown. Admittedly much of this traffic comes not from search engines but from links I leave when I comment on other blogs, bulletin boards, and forums, both public and private. But there ARE the search engines, and they account for the great variety of countries from which I have been visited. Let’s start with Spain.

I could never have imagined how many people here, there, and everywhere are interested in the patron saint of Spain. Google searching for the saint under various search strings accounts for a full seven percent of hits to this site, which is pretty astounding when one considers that I was just fooling around when I wrote about the four-year-old story. I was just learning to work with WordPress when I posted in March about St. James, and this weblog in fact wasn’t even online when I crafted that early post. As indicated in my opening sentence, the post was a photo test—at the time I was trying out blogging software—and I never really thought about anyone reading the piece, much less finding it via Google, which as it happens to my astonishment is fairly easy to do. For example, a Google search on “moor slayer saint” (sans quotation marks) lands this blog at third or fourth out of over 231,000 search results! It’s funny, really, that for various search strings my post comes in ahead of major stories on prominent blogs like Dhimmi Watch, where Robert Spencer covered the story when it was news in 2004. Of course, the reason for Google’s generous ranking is largely because my post is much more recent than, for example, Robert’s post—which is the funny part, because I didn’t even hear about Spain’s patron saint until years after the besieged statue was in the news! I either simply missed it entirely at the time, or I deleted it from my memory banks. Point is, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.

So why did I write the post as if it were a breaking news story? Well, I was just practicing—or rather rehearsing—blog publishing, you know? The post was designed to be inordinately Google-friendly, so that part of the rehearsal was a resounding success, but the photo test itself was a blurry failure. I decided nevertheless to leave it up when I went live, and I’m glad I did, because thanks to Image Search it will continue for a while to gain me regular, albeit occasional, visits by folks whose paths would otherwise never cross with mine. One of them was a bit perturbed that commenting is disabled on the St. James post, so he used the contact form to give me his take on the story from Moor country:

You should know that the saint is not only the great protector of Spain, but he has also been entrusted by God with the heavy responsibility of defending the larger Church, the universal Church. Islam is sworn to destroy the Church, and thus St. James will come once again on his winged steed to beat back the awful Mohammedan hordes and to usher in the Kingdom of God on Earth.

The mighty Moor slayer will ride again.

You learn something every day if you’re paying attention, or sometimes if you’re just lucky, and so now I know that there’s a Spanish version of the ethnic prophecies found in rich variety in several European traditions about a coming Great Catholic Monarch. According to some of these prophetic legends from visionaries who enjoy official Church approbation, the Great Monarch will save the Church and the world by militarily vanquishing the followers of Mohammed. I am now trying to acquire English translations of obscure Spanish sources that develop this traditional prophetic theme, which is elaborated in the known writings of a great many Catholic mystics across the ages, most notably the German Holzhouser, who best develops the Islamic angle, and St. Bridgett of Sweden, who predicted among other things that the Great Monarch—a Spanish emperor in her vision—will restore the Hagia Sophia (for over a thousand years the greatest church in all Christendom) to the faithful.

Along these lines, I am also flabbergasted to find that my cursory allusion to the Fatima apparitions (“What’s religion got to do with it?”) garners me an unexpectedly large number of hits from search engines, and to see what people are searching about is illuminating, to say the least. I was telling a subscriber (he’s the same one who quipped that I appear to want a blog no one reads) about my SEO discoveries, and he replied with exasperation, “And what IS the relevance of Fatima to Islam, apart from the name of one of the Prophet’s unfortunate (for being his) children?” Well, to make a long story short, here’s how a referral from Google queried me in an email on the same topic:

You think the Muslims will convert to Christianity, don’t you?

Yes, something like that, difficult as it is to imagine, but in my view this event is neither imminent nor is it much consolation to me, considering the enormous conflagration that would immediately precede it. I also believe in a New Heaven and a New Earth, for that matter, but I don’t look for them any time soon. I am gratified, however, to see that my verbal constructs aren’t entirely cryptic, since at least some folks seem to be able to read between the lines to glean information at which I have only hinted. In one case my hints were interpreted instead as evidence that I don’t really know what I’m talking about, and so I was taken to task by Some People Call Me Maurice:

The village of Fatima wasn’t named after Mohammed’s daughter.

I know that, and I never said it was. I only said that Fatima is the name of Mohammed’s daughter, who he said exceeded in holiness all other women save the mother of Jesus. Yes, Maurice, Fatima was named after a Muslim convert to Christianity, but Muslim women called Fatima are named after the daughter of Mohammed, you know. Some people just can’t take a hint, so since I appear already to have exasperated even my friends with my brief remarks, and since in the mailbag is more of the same, let me just say that regarding Marian doctrine Islam is more easily interfaced with Catholicism than is almost any flavor of Protestantism. Muslims still largely hold to the ancient doctrines of Mary’s perpetual virginity and perpetually inviolate sanctity, but these beliefs are no longer held by most Protestants. I probably engage in more useful interfaith dialogue than even most specialists, and I can tell you from both my research and my personal experience with these matters that Marian dogma remains the single biggest obstacle to Christian unity. So before my new pen pals get too excited about the coming mass conversion of Muslims to Christianity, they should reflect on my statement that before we can convert the Muslims we will need to convert ourselves. A spectacular reunification of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant professions will have to precede the miracle of Islam’s conversion. Maybe I should insert “The Long and Winding Road” into my playlist.

There’s lots more interesting stuff in my mail, but most fascinating to me is what’s not there. Two people (maybe the same person from two different IP addresses) in the UAE, running English-language OS, were found visiting my contact page for over six hours in five different sessions over three days! I expected, therefore, a juicy note, or several notes, but I got nothing. I wonder if they couldn’t crack the anti-spam challenge question, “In which month is Christmas?” Perhaps they just decided to give me a break.

Finally, into every mailbag a little dirt bag must fall, and one nasty little dirt bag was found in mine. He had another prediction for me:

Any one with that name have to be gay so I hope you deserve to die. I think you will to die from AIDS dude.

Lots of folks are interested in prophecy these days.

Tagged as: audio, jazz, jihad, music, photo, playlist, religion