The Chinese buffet in Kingston – the ‘trough’ as Robert and I like to call it – sports an astonishing chandelier. Somehow it’s perfect. This weekend is the last peepers’ rapture, as the leaves turn to grey. We barely had 2 days of perfection, while I was down in the city, this fine fall. So another visit to Platt Clove was called for, and the weather responded, clear but for a little cotton-wool-ball puff of cloud above us. Later we made the mistake of going to the movie, ‘Left Behind,’ which has claims to being the worst film ever made, a botched tale of a different kind of rapture, The Rapture, in which the chosen suddenly disappear leaving their clothes behind and a mess that looks not unlike my bedroom. “Where did they go? They were here a moment ago!” It was certainly enlightening: Hollywood is being invaded by born-again billionaire backers, who are replacing the old quasi-Biblical Christian tales that form a thread through the history of American popular culture, and replacing this with hardcore born-again values. An all-too-perfect sign of the times, and the alarmingly widening rift in America between its twin traditions of tolerance and intolerance.
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