Return To the Middle Ages
D URING the First World War it was usual for the Allies to represent their cause as that of democracy, which was defined as the free and spontaneous movement of the human spirit, unfettered by logic. Germany, on the other hand, stood for machine-like regularity and cold, calculating rationality. Henri Bergson and Gustav LeBon grew quite eloquent on this theme. During the Second War, the roles were reversed. This time Germany was the country of blind instinct and wild emotional surges, moving in a kind of somnambulism and thinking with its blood. The West stood for reason and logic, for an ordered view of life in conformity with permanent rational values. In defiance of all respectable historiography, the United Nations were made the heirs of the cool and tranquil culture of Rome, with Christian universalism added, whereas Germany represented the survival of the frenetic barbarism of the Nordic pagans. Even the boundary line was supplied: it was the Wall of Limes in southern Germany, which marked the farthest outpost of permanent Roman settlement. Now that the Third War is in the offing, the boundary line has been changed, but the protagonists remain much the same. The Wall of Limes has moved to the Elbe, a shift which makes naturalized democrats of the Germans, who a short time ago were regarded as the mortal foes of democracy. On the west bank of the Elbe today stands Christian democracy, a sort of Joan of Arc, the champion of reason and natural law, while atheistic Bolshevism, foe of this two-millenial culture, glowers from the east bank. The reader can document this picture from his daily paper. There is nothing new or out of the way about this. The Incas, before conquering an adjoining people, used always to spread the story that their enemies were cannibals and deserved what they were about to get. What the Incas said may or may not have been true, but it is certain that the current representation of the East-West dispute is false. The idea of a unified Christendom with a common heritage was always a myth, and the myth itself was shattered at the Reformation. Democracy, again, is the product of the spiritual individualism and the secular rationalism which replaced the theocratic conception of a law of nature of the middle ages, and is altogether inconsistent with that conception. Ten years ago no one would have had the face to talk the kind of history that is now current.
GOT GRAIL? MONTY PYTHON AND THE BROADWAY STAGE
Money matters. In Act 2 of Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical based on the 1975 cult classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the show's star, Tim Curry, as King Arthur, comments that the characters are running around in a “dark and very expensive forest.” The joke, it turns out, is entirely on us. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was an inexpensive independent film, costing $250,000 to make, a bargain compared to the same year's The Rocky Horror Picture Show ($1,200,000) and Python's own 1979 Life of Brian ($4,000,000). From its release, Holy Grail ran continuously in many theatres, and large numbers of people could afford the price of a ticket; it still circulates widely in relatively inexpensive DVD and VHS editions. Fast-forward thirty years to March of 2005. Production costs for Spamalot, Eric Idle's Broadway musical “lovingly ripped off” from the film, top $14 million (not atypical start-up costs these days on Broadway). Playing in a single theatre that seats only about 1,600, the show commands ticket prices that begin around $100 and can cost $350 and up. According to the Wall Street Journal, Spamalot is setting the pace for the spiraling costs of Broadway entertainment. Many fewer people will see the musical than the film, and those who can will tend to be more affluent; Spamalot's target audience is Holy Grail's first audience “all grown up,” prosperous, middle-aged Monty Python fans (like the authors of this article). In their youth, Holy Grail denied this audience the pleasures of narrative cinema. It made fun of film, relentlessly disturbing the seamless illusion of reality that is the cornerstone of Hollywood cinema, refusing narrative coherence and narrative closure. A parody of the clichés of mass culture, it exposed the political conservatism of the various forms of nostalgia for a medieval past that never was, a past in which strange women lying around in ponds distributing swords could be a basis for a political system. Spamalot, on the other hand, adapts its cinematic original, repackaging the youthful rebellion of the 1975 film and offering the pleasures of nostalgia remarkably free from political consequences.
The Mound on the Mount: A Possible Solution to the Problem with Jerusalem
Following Knauf's suggestion (2000), the article raises the possibility that in most periods in the second and first millennia BCE the main built-up area of Jerusalem was limited to a mound on the Temple Mount. This mound, which may have covered an area of five hectares and more, was boxed-in under the Herodian platform. At these periods activity in the City of David ridge was restricted to the area near the Gihon spring. In the Iron IIB and late Hellenistic Periods the fortified settlement expanded simultaneously to both the City of David ridge and the southwestern hill. In these two periods there was no need to fortify the western side of the City of David, as this line ran in the middle of the city.