From OCramer@ColoradoCollege.edu Sun Mar 4 06:21:34 2001 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id GAA132142 for ; Sun, 4 Mar 2001 06:21:33 -0800 Received: from exchange2.ColoradoCollege.edu (exchange2web.ColoradoCollege.edu [205.170.0.14]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id GAA31765 for ; Sun, 4 Mar 2001 06:21:29 -0800 Received: by exchange2.ColoradoCollege.edu with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) id ; Sun, 4 Mar 2001 07:21:28 -0700 Message-ID: <5E5B5397B92DA849874262D1AF191C2C011D6A22@exchange2.ColoradoCollege.edu> From: Owen Cramer To: "'classics@u.washington.edu'" Subject: RE: Done Deed in Afghanistan Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2001 07:21:27 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain Looking for classical content, I think about PTR's thousand-year curse and the truly multicultural conflict that blew up the Parthenon in 1687: Muslim Turks storing black powder inside, Catholic Venetian Doge in command of the other army but using German Evangelical artillerists do the deed. Of course nobody thought of this as abuse of a world cultural treasure, back then. But the tatters of the past, and their very tatteredness, do form much of the contemporary Greek "identity". G. B. Shaw once wrote that he was glad to get out of Athens "with its stupid classical Acropolis and smashed pillars", evincing a figurative iconoclasm which I'm inclined to honor, as I also honor Nietzsche's image [sic, I guess] of the Twilight of the Idols. Yet we're terribly upset when a madman with a hammer takes after the Pieta\ or this Taleban does what it seems to be doing to the sculptures. Is it possible that those seeking the put the Second Commandment on all schoolroom walls could eventually provoke similar events and fall under the curse themselves? Owen Cramer .