In the same article, a Wall-Streeter tweets  "A protester sees my Benz, and wants to rip me out of it. A real man sees my car, and wants to work hard so he can buy it one day."

I have been blessed with a personality that feels deeply about issues of social justice, and cursed with a personality that does not express or argue those feelings well.  I tread lightly, keeping the peace and not wishing to provoke or offend people with different ideas, income levels, and value systems.  I try to find areas of common ground, and centrist positions on which we can all agree.  I don’t like to argue with friends, with family, or even with strangers when nothing good can come of it.

All of that stated, Mr. Cain and Mr. Wall Street, yours is the kind of horse shit that comes out of the flapping lips of people of means every day. 

Say that you, reader, want a private jet and a house in the Bahamas.  If you do not achieve this in your lifetime, have you failed, per Mr. Cain?  Is it your fault?  Do you just need to work harder until you can buy your jet?  Is your inability to obtain this simply a factor of the choices that you made – because you became a cop rather than a Wall Street banker, or took a career in the military instead of becoming a hedge fund manager?

America is a place of dreams, and a place of opportunity.  It is also a place in which social mobility has become harder and harder to achieve, where the middle class is evaporating, and in which jobs are harder to find.  It’s a place where one working person in a family could buy a house in the 50’s, two in the 70’s, and maybe two in the 2000’s with the help of a no-doc jumbo mortgage that balloons in 3 years, with a HELOC buying the new appliances.  After all, appliances are part and parcel of the middle class.

America is a place in which education is better for the upper-class who can afford private schools with better teachers and an Asian girl who can take their daughter’s SATs.  If you live in the ghetto, you could be functionally illiterate when you graduate with straight A’s, and when you can’t write a college entrance essay, Community College won’t even look at you.

Anyway, about that Benz that I’m simply not working hard enough to achieve – it must be very easy to look through the windshield of it every day, instead of through the bars that you so richly deserve to be looking through, and tell the people who are upset at your existence to shut up. 

I’ve enjoyed the ports of call.  I finally got to see Old North Church in Boston (I’m told I’ve seen it before, but have no memory of it). Portland, Maine was wonderful, and the Public Gardens in Halifax, NS were remarkable. 

Even taking the ports into consideration, however, my favorite spectacle throughout the journey, has been the crowd of people on the boat.  The people-watching began the first night of the voyage, when I was in the photo gallery and heard a man say “Can I buy a picture of the cross-dresser?  She’s in every other photo! Standing up, sitting down, glasses on, glasses off…”

I searched the photos to see who he was talking about, and sure enough there was a M-to-F trans-person in virtually every other picture.  I was expecting gowns and wigs and elaborate drag, but she had a stately gray wig, a very matronly dress, and granny glasses that were too cute for words.  I still don’t know if this attire is full-time for her, or just dress-up-for-dinner drag, but that I never see her around the boat otherwise makes me wonder.

In the main dining room, I sit in proximity to two Asians.  Ten feet to my right, there is a Korean woman who is quiet and reserved until the wait staff decides to sing or dance.  Then, as if the witching hour has struck, she screams and kicks as though every bottled emotion from her past 35 years is released in one enormous paroxysm.

The Japanese man sitting at a booth ten feet in front of me is equally reserved until the wait staff sings.  When showtime begins, he draws a Nikon with an eight-inch-long lens like Jesse James quick-drawing a pistol and clambers over his wife as though he were about to miss a photograph of the Loch Ness Monster.  I don’t think that he even enjoys the show in his race to take pictures of it.

Finally, there’s the casino woman who, as the reels spin, places her hands on the machine and massages the glass as if able to manipulate where the fruits will stop.  She pushes up.  She pushes down.  She paws at the spinning pictures like a dog seeking a treat in a cabinet, were a dog to have a cigarette dangling from its lips.

With people like this in my life, I don’t need a multimillion-dollar boat or exotic ports of call.

I write this post from the White Heat lounge of the Carnival Glory, though it’s two in the afternoon and the only music is Norah Jones coming through my headphones.  I am the only one here, sitting at an unused, flecked granite bar.  The biggest difference between the lounge now and tonight at 11:30 PM is that tonight it will be darker, there will be music, and a lonely bartender will likely likely join me in overlooking the empty dance floor.

This is my fifth cruise – the third with Carnival – and I have absolutely nothing to complain about.  The boat is beautiful, I was rocked gently to sleep last night, the food is good, and I’m happily detached from the world.  The views of Lady Liberty while leaving New York yesterday must have been similar to those of my ancestors, from both sides of the family, as they headed the other way.  They could not have dreamt of a boat such as this, and it is on their hard work, risk-taking and combined years of education that I have built a life that allows me to aimlessly wander, eat, and be waited on for an entire week.

It’s also nice to travel with my mom on her 65th birthday.  When not at sea, she often seems to be in the doldrums, or at least having an existential crisis, so putting her on a boat seems to be a logical course of action.

Back to the White Heat bar and its emptiness.  It’s empty because the average age of person cruising on this boat is probably 65.  The pools, so often packed with children, are completely empty on this sailing.  I’ve counted 3 teenagers and perhaps 5 kids under the age of 11.  After that, there are a few 30-something couples (mostly the parents of the 5 kids), and then retirees.  Last night, the boat went quiet after the early seating of dinner was complete.

Being prematurely old myself, one would think that I would fit in well with the early-bird dinner, sleep-at-9-PM-and-up-at-5-AM-for-stretching-class crowd.  I am having a good time with many of them.  Still, given the amount of bitching I hear in the elevators and from the old woman sitting next to me at dinner, one would believe that the ship is in splinters following  a cannonade, and that we were sustained by brined mackerel, limes and rancid water from barrels.

“Mom,” I asked, “what is it about old people complaining about everything when they’re surrounded by luxury?”  I expected one of the following answers:

• “They don’t feel acknowledged, or that people listen to them, so they take it out on staff.”
• “They’re bored and have nothing else to talk about.”
• “They’re overwhelmed by technology and the changes in the world, and are frightened.”

Her answer, however, haunts me, and makes me very sad, and I don’t know why.  Perhaps because it’s simple in that Mister Rogers sort of way, and I never really considered it:

“Because many of them don’t feel well.  When you don’t feel well, it’s hard not to be angry.”

For a woman who questions existentialism all the time, I wasn’t expecting such a common-sense, physiologic response.  It made me think differently.

Anyway, onward and forward.  Less Mister Rogers and More Jolly Rogers.  I’m going to have a margarita, and then perhaps jam with the Filipino woman who sings in the lobby.  Yesterday she sang “You’re Just Too Good to be True” and danced in her stilettoes and gown with her microphone.  Hard not to love that.

Jacob, tending uncle Laban’s herds, bargains for all of the spotted and speckled goats in the herd as a form of payment.  Laban agrees, and then removes all of the spotted and speckled livestock so that Jacob will be empty-handed.  Not to be outdone, Jacob places black-and-white striped sticks in front of the mating livestock and creates a herd of spotted and speckled sheep that he can call his own.  Having built his wealth, and tired of Laban, he leaves town unannounced.

On their way out the door, Rachel decides to help herself to all of Laban’s “household gods” – figurines used in idol worship, but also as a symbol of family leadership and property.  A few days into their journey, a red-hot uncle Laban catches up to Jacob and company in search of his Gods.

Jacob says that he did not steal, and that any man who did deserves death.  Rachel, the thief, places the idols in a saddlebag and sits on them.  When the search party comes to look for the figurines, she says she cannot stand because she is menstruating.  The search party then leaves her tent.

This passage is interesting to me for two reasons: first, the Jacob of the passage is ethical compared to the Jacob who stole from Esau twenty years earlier.  Second, oral storytellers must have had a great time talking about the false-God idol figurines being defiled by an unclean woman.

Convinced that Jacob did not steal, Laban forms a truce with him.  They build a small stone border, representative of the border between Ancient Israel and Aram, thus creating the legend of how that border came to be.  Jacob is now free with his twelve sons, patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Speaking of Israel, Jacob has his name changed to Israel by God, or one of God’s representatives, after a fisticuff.

The twelve tribes of Israel, headed by Jacob’s twelve children, are thought to be a prime example of revisionist history and eponym.  J.R. Porter notes in his Illustrated Guide to the Bible that many of these tribes existed long before they were given names through the Genesis legend.  This is to say, for example, the tribe of Gad may not have been named after Jacob’s son, Gad. Rather, because there was a tribe of Gad already in existence, biblical authors named one of Jacob’s sons Gad to make an origin legend. 

Now that Jacob is working his way home, the only thing in his way is Esau – his brother who, 20 years ago, threatened to kill him.  Esau now has an army of 400 men… what will come of this?

The Lord then stands beside Jacob and promises he and his offspring land, as the Lord has done to almost everybody throughout Genesis.  Jacob asks for protection, provision and peaceful return, which God grants.

The next morning, Jacob feels that the ground on which he slept is indeed a portal to heaven.  He accepts the Lord as his, and pours oil over the rock on which he slept to turn it into a pillar, or sacred stone found in sanctuaries of the day.  He calls the location “Bethel.”  We will return to this place later in the Bible.

One may say that it’s not fair that, after being so cruel to his brother, Jacob gets in good with the Lord.  This is true.  It’s not fair.  Shit happens, and sometimes horrible people have all the luck.

“Shit happens,” by the way, is another lesser-known theme that runs through the Bible, seldom discussed.  I will point it out when it comes along.

Now comes my favorite part of the Jacob story because of it’s insight into the community structure of the Ancients.  Jacob arrives in Haran at a well, where three flocks of sheep await to be watered.  Jacob asks why the sheep aren’t drinking, as it’s getting late. Ancient custom dictates that everybody entitled to use the well must be there before the stone is rolled from its mouth.  In fact, the stone was large enough that no ONE person could open it.

Who was everybody waiting for?

While Jacob was still speaking, Rachel came with her father’s sheep, for she kept them.” Gen 29:9

Indeed, Rachel is a working woman.  Jacob falls in love immediately.

Jacob tells Laban he’ll work for him for seven years in exchange for Rachel’s hand in marriage.  At the end of seven years, Laban brings Jacob a veiled bride, whom he marries.  Surprise!  It’s not Rachel, but Rachel’s older sister, Leah!  Wah-wah horns for Jacob!

Ever determined, Jacob accepts the offer of another seven-year indentured servitude for Rachel in addition to Leah.  Now, he’s married to both sisters.

Often overlooked: This is where Jacob gets his comeuppance for being mean to Esau.  When he realizes he has married Leah, he asks Laban, “why have you deceived me?”  Laban replies, “This is not done in our country – giving the younger [sister to be wed] before the firstborn.”

Indeed, whatever “rights of the firstborn” Jacob stole from Esau, he is now paying for by having to heed the “rights of the firstborn” for Leah.

During this second seven year tour of duty, Jacob has a lot of sex with a lot of people. 

Jacob loves Rachel more that Leah.  To counter this, Leah’s “womb is opened” by God while Rachel (like Sarah and Rebekah earlier) is barren.  Leah has four kids, and with each one hopes that Jacob will love her best. Rachel is furious, and gives Jacob her maid, Bilhah, to screw.  They have two kids.  Leah, not to be outdone, gives her maid, Zilpah to Jacob.  Zilpah has two kids by Jacob.

Leah’s son, Reuben, finds some mandrake root – thought to be a powerful aphrodisiac and fertility drug.  Rachel wants it, and tells Leah that she can sleep with Jacob in exchange for the mandrake.  The mandrake doesn’t make Rachel pregnant, but sex does make Leah pregnant.  Thrice.  She has two more sons, and then a daughter.

Finally, the curse of Rachel is lifted, and she has a son.

This begs the question… what else could Jacob have had time to do in seven years?

Next time: Rachel menstruates.  Seriously.  That’s a big part of the next part of the story.

Isaac is now an old man, likely with cataracts.  He cannot see, and knowing that he is soon to die, he calls Esau to his bedside.  He tells Esau to go hunting and bring back dinner, at which point Isaac will confer his blessing upon Esau.

Biblically, a “blessing” is the opposite of a curse – it is thought to be a prophecy, containing a power that controls the destiny and success of the individual receiving it.  Like shooting a gun, once a blessing is conferred, it cannot be retracted.

Rebekah wants Jacob, not Esau, to be successful.  She hatches a plan: Jacob will grab two goats which will be prepared as a meal, and then, dressed in Esau’s coat, Jacob will pretend to be Esau until the blessing is conferred.  Furthermore, because Esau is hairy and Jacob is smooth, the ruse on the blind man will be carried out by Jacob wearing a goatskin on his arms and neck.

All goes according to plan, except for one thing: Isaac wonders how Jacob was able to find game so quickly.  Jacob’s response is ugly: “The Lord YOUR God gave me success.”

I love this part, because not only is it a lie in the name of God, but God is YOUR god, not “the Lord MY God,” or “The Lord OUR God.”  Jacob seems to have little need for the Lord.

Isaac points out that the voice is Jacob’s but the hair and smell (because of the coat) is clearly Esau.  He asks “Are you really my son Esau?”  Jacob lies, “I am.”

Isaac confers upon Jacob, through his blessing, the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, plenty of grain and wine, and lordship over his brothers and nations. 

No sooner is Jacob out the door with one hell of a blessing that Esau returns and the ruse is uncovered.  Everybody is pissed off.  Isaac trembles with fury.  Esau is beside himself, having neither birthright nor blessing.

..he has supplanted me these two times. He took away my birthright; and look, now he has taken away my blessing.” Then he said, “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?” Isaac answered Esau, “I have already made him your lord, and I have given him all his brothers as servants, and with grain and wine I have sustained him. What then can I do for you, my son?” Esau said to his father, “Have you only one blessing, father? Bless me, me also, father!” And Esau lifted up his voice and wept. (Gen 27:36-38)

The only blessing that Isaac can muster, having given away the farm to Jacob by mistake, is that Esau will live away from the fatness of the earth, living by the sword – but that he will eventually break his brother’s yoke from his neck.

Esau is furious and determines that as soon as Isaac dies, he will kill Jacob.

Rebekah decides to send Jacob away to safety with her brother, uncle Laban in the land of Haran.  Recall, this is the location of the well where Rebekah was first discovered a few chapters back.  Rebekah tells Isaac that this must be done because Jacob is being hit on by Canaanite women, and she doesn’t want him to marry one.

Yes, once more, the Canaanites (Hittites) are getting the short end of the stick as an undesirable race of people.

Esau, who had two wives, both Hittites, overhears Isaac and Rebekah discussing their negative opinions of Hittites.  They are already upset that Esau has married two Canaanite women (Gen 26:34-35), so to reconcile, he marries one of uncle Ishmael’s daughters, too.

Anyway, how unfair life is for poor Esau… and how prophetic is the name “Jacob,” or “he supplants?”

When there is a famine, Isaac and Rebekah arrive on the doorstep of King Abimelech of the Philistines.  This is notable for two reasons.  First, it’s the son of the king (or perhaps even the same king) that Abraham and Sarah duped with their wife-sister act many decades earlier.  Second, the Philistines were not around at the time of this story – they entered the picture in 1200 BC, long after events unfolded as described.  “The Philistines” is an anachronism.

Just like Abraham, Isaac is afraid that the Pharaoh will kill him and steal the beautiful Rebekah, so just like Abraham and Sarah, they decide to dupe the king with another wife-sister act.  Abimelech falls for it until he catches Isaac and Rebekah fondling one another.  Then, the jig is up.

Rather than send Isaac and Rebekah away, Abimelech makes a treaty with Isaac, giving him amnesty.  Isaac then goes on to farm some land and becomes wealthy.

The point of this story is threefold: First, it shows that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.  Kids are like their parents.  Second, it suggests that Isaac has accumulated substantial wealth, which plays a role in his kids’ birthright.  Third, it is a parable to explain why the Israelites and Philistines were good friends, and should live in peaceful coexistence.  Of course, the Philistines are the Palestinians in today’s world, and things didn’t quite work out as they did in ancient times.

I backtrack now to Genesis 25, in which Rebekah, much like Sarah, is barren.  She prays to the great fertility expert in the sky, and conceives twins.  God says

Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger. (Gen 25:23)

Indeed, she births twins. Esau, nicknamed Edom, is very red and very hairy (indeed “Esau” means “hairy” and “Edom” means “red.”)   He becomes a hunter and a favorite of his father.  Jacob becomes domestic and “lives in tents.”

One day, when Esau is very hungry, he returns from the field and asks Jacob for a bowl of stew.  Red stew.  Jacob says that the price of a bowl of red stew is one birthright (essentially leadership of the family and the inheritance that would normally be entitled to Esau).  Esau is hungry and has no problem giving up his birthright.  After all, what good is his birthright if he starves to death?”

In the two brothers, we have a parable of the ancient rivalry between hunter and shepherd, or two rival ways of life.  These two men will go on to spawn two rival nations, as God predicts.  In ancient times, the Edomites were rivals of Israel – and guess what color the clay earth is in the region of the Edomites?  Red!  So you see, it’s like a Kieslowski film with the color theme.

The authors of the Bible were not sympathetic to the Edomites, so they naturally made Esau a dull, brutish, stupid, hairy man, capable of selling his birthright for lentil stew.

Edom may be stupid, but Jacob is diabolical.  Now that he’s taken Edom’s birthright, he goes about stealing something just as important: a blessing.  That’s next.

First, name what’s going on.  Right or left hyper?  WORSE in right or left gaze? WORSE with right or left head tilt?  In this example, we’ll discuss a left hyper, worse on right gaze, worse with a right head tilt.

Sketch a chart that looks like this:
RSR  RIO     LIO  LSR
RIR  RSO     LSO  LIR

Because it’s a left hyper, we know that either the LIR or LSO isn’t working, so circle them; likewise, circle RSR and RIO (just in case it’s a right hypo instead).

It’s worse on right gaze.  Pretend that your little graph is a patient looking at you, and circle the options to the patient’s right: RSR, RIR, LIO, LSO.

Finally, if things worsen on head tilt to the right, we choose the muscle circled twice on the patient’s right eye – the RSR in this case.  If things worsen on head tilt left, we choose the muscle circled twice on the patient’s left eye – the LSO.

And there you have it, fellow optometrists!  You’ve just isolated the paretic muscle!

Very special thanks to Cherie Farkash for correcting my original posting which had the bit about the head tilt wrong.  Cherie also reminds us of the “marching pattern” found in superior oblique palsy.  Right hyper, worse on left gaze, worse with right head tilt – Right-Left-Right = Right S.O. palsy. Left-Right-Left = Left S.O. palsy.

Abraham marries again – this time a woman named Keturah – and has six more kids.  He also has many more by his concubines.

One day, he approaches his servant Eliezer, and makes Eliezer put his hand under Abraham’s thigh.  Kinky as this sounds, it’s an ancient pinky-promise.  Eliezer has to pinky-promise that he will leave the land of Canaan and find Isaac a woman  in the land of Horan.  Why?  The Canaanites aren’t good enough to be wed to Isaac – it’s an ancient dig at the Canaanites, who you recall are inferior.

Elizer says, in short, “God, if you’re serious about me finding Isaac a woman in this land, make her say something.  Make her say ‘would you and your camels like some water?’”  Surely enough, a woman at a well named Rebekah asks “would you and your camels like some water?” and she is bartered away by her family, albeit with her consent.

Rebekah’s brother Laban is mentioned, because he’ll be important later.  In the meantime, Isaac and Rebekah consummate their marriage in Sarah’s tent.  Ick.

Having seen that all is well, Abraham dies at 175 years of age, and is thrown in the cave of Machpelah with Sarah.

There’s not much insight I draw from this particular passage, except that it explains legally how Abraham acquired the promised land, and sets the stage for more genealogy.  It also sets the stage for new characters and adventures. 

The book of Genesis, including the story of Abraham and Isaac, makes me question the image of an all-knowing future-predicting God.  It seems that if God already knows what humankind is bound to do, his tests of faith are moot.   If God doesn’t know what Abraham will do when his faith is tested in our next story, he’s not all-knowing.  If he does know, he knows that Abraham is a righteous man, so why carry such a test out, and in such a cruel manner? 

How about this: The story of Abraham and Isaac does not stand up to a logic test about God Almighty, who’s not supposed to be the focus, anyway.  It is a fable about the extent of faith, meant to show us that Abraham has placed the fate of everything he was promised – many descendants – in God’s hands.  It goes like this:

During Isaac’s weaning party, Isaac and Ishmael are playing together.  Sarah does not want “the son of the slave woman” inheriting with her son, so she casts the slave woman, Hagar, away with Ishmael.  Abraham is unsure of this decision, but is promised by God that Isaac will be protected and bear him many ancestors.

Then God tells Abraham to knife Isaac and burn his corpse.

Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest , and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. (Gen. 22:2, KJV)

There is no argument from Abraham, strangely.  Telling Isaac that they are to burn a lamb as an offering, Abraham makes Isaac carry the knife and the wood for the funeral pyre up the hill.  Isaac asks where the lamb is that is to be burned.

Jeffrey Geoghegan points out in The Bible for Dummies  that Ancient Hebrews weren’t fond of excessive punctuation, which serves Abraham’s answer well: “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering my son.”  Most biblical translations add a comma, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son,” but in the original text the meaning could be twofold… “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering… my son!"

Isaac doesn’t seem to question his father’s ambiguous answer.  He also doesn’t question why he’s being bound, and just lets it happen.

As Abraham raises the knife to kill Isaac, the LORD stays the execution, and tells Abraham that it was all just a test of faith.  He then promises… what else?  Many descendants and blessings.

People like to interpret this story as one of unquestioned obedience to God.  I think that Abraham and Isaac is a story more about faith in the future than obedience to God.  After all of Abraham and Sarah’s struggles to have a child, and after all of the promises that Abraham would be a father to multitudes, he draws the conclusion that even if his heir is murdered by his own hand, somehow God will make it work out as promised.  Abraham has faith, and has evolved.