Saturday Night Radio Drama - Roger Hall - Book Ends

Book Ends 

I know, I promised I'd get back to stand-alone plays this week but people liked the two series I posted the past two weeks so here's a short one.  It's a bunch of old farts of a literary sort who have solitary work and who meet to try to maintain a connection with the world.  It's pretty good, going past a scenario that could turn really quaint and cosy but which turned out to be better than that.   It's by New Zealand's most successful living playwright. 

Roger Hall (1939 –), New Zealand's most successful playwright, Roger Hall was born in Essex and moved to New Zealand in 1958. As well as stage plays, Roger has also written scripts for radio and television, and for children. His writing is known for its comedy, political and social purpose, and underlying pathos. His plays have toured widely and have been performed at international venues. His biggest success was with Middle Age Spread that ran for 18 months in London's West End and won the award for Comedy of the Year (1979). Hall has been the recipient of awards and fellowships in recognition of his work. Book Ends was first performed at Dunedin’s Fortune Theatre in 2014.

Hate Mail

I am aware of Robert Bannister's revisionist and seriously wrong idea that Darwinism and social Darwinism are not equivalent and claiming that Darwin and his closest associates were not racists.  I think one of the problems is that the old regime of pre-internet scholarship which could more easily assert an ideological agenda as scholarship is running into the problem of primary documentation that gives away their game being freely available and easily found.  The post-war revisionist Charles Darwin is a construct that depended on the unavailability and even obscurity of that documentation but that's over and done with. 

The first idea is, as I have had to point out over and over again, not only contradicted by no one less than Charles Darwin, himself, when he explicitly said, in HIS 5th edition of On the Origin of Species he said that Natural Selection was the same thing as Survival of the Fittest and that he repeatedly asserted that natural selection was at work in human societies and in human institutions in The Descent of Man and in his correspondence, going so far as to express opposition to such ideas as equal pay and organized labor as a hindrance of his struggle for existence.  That is enough to dispel anything claiming otherwise.   His racism is also on full display all through The Descent of Man and in his correspondence, any claims to the contrary by any scholar of the subject is, in my opinion, a discreditable distortion for clearly ideological purposes.   The example you sent me, of Bannister claiming that the infamously racist essay of Thomas Huxley was not racist is absurd and clearly obvious to anyone who read it. 

Not only that but it is also disconfirmed in the understanding of Darwin's closest colleagues, his children and in other people who knew the man as well as the next several generations of Darwinists who never knew him but certainly knew his work, it is also disconfirmed by many of his critics who, as well, perhaps even more so, did a close reading of his scientific writing and his other written legacy.  It is certainly disproved in the Darwinian character of eugenics, something whose origin in Galton's and Schallmeyer's reading of On the Origin of Species we know, beyond question, by their own assertions and that Darwin agreed with eugenics by his own written approval sent to Galton on the publication of Hereditary Genius and his citations in The Descent of Man praising that work, the two articles in Macmillan's Magazine which Galton marked as his first eugenics publication as reliable science in The Descent of Man.  From Francis Darwin, Charles' son and the first collector of his correspondence,  we have confirmation that he supported George Darwin's very early eugenics proposals published in a magazine article calling for the legal dissolution of marriages - even against the will of those so married - in the event of a mental illness in one of the partners, even if such a person were held to have recovered from it.   We also have Leonard Darwin's assertions that his eugenics activity was something his father would have approved of and that he was continuing his father's work in it. 

Bannister can claim many things, as any present day scholar can, he and they can't, however, claim to have superior knowledge of what Charles Darwin thought as compared to people who knew him intimately, even his own children.   Nothing he claims can reasonably be said to overturn what they said, nothing short of Charles Darwin, himself, contradicting their claims, in writing.   That record will stand as long as the book and articles and letters written by Charles Darwin, Galton, Haeckel, Huxley, Francis, George and Leonard Darwin, etc. exist.  And all of that evidence is fully available now, online, where it can be known through a fairly simple online search.  

The cover up of Darwinism's relation with eugenics, scientific racism and social Darwinism that was mounted by academics in the wake of the reaction against crimes of the Nazis and English speaking eugenicists is over, for good.   You don't have to "cherry pick" or "quote mine" or depend on secondary sources and tertiary and lower junk to make that case, it is best made by a full reading of the original source material which is almost all available online.  The pre-internet cover-up of that kind is over in so far as anyone wants to honestly know the truth about it.

Again, as I have said recently, I could fill this short piece with citations and links so that virtually every word of it would how up red on my blog.  Perhaps it's time for me to do another comprehensive index of the pieces I've written on this topic, each of them with citations and links to primary documentation of what I said, but there are so many of them.   I'm absolutely certain on this, you can be when you find the exact word confirming that in Darwin's own writing and that of those he cited as having the reliability of science. 

Robin Eubanks - X-Base

trombone: Robin Eubanks
bass: Kenny Davis
guitar: Kevin Eubanks
drums: Marvin "Smitty" Smith
horns: Randy Brecker, Antonio Hart

For N. - Thomas Tallis - Third Mode Melody - Sung to "Why F'umth in fight" a paraphrase, kind of, of Psalm 2

Theater of Voices
Paul Hillier, conductor

The "Theme of Thomas Tallis" which Ralph Vaughn Williams wrote his fantasia on, originally one of nine 4-voice pieces Tallis wrote to be sung to metrical paraphrases of the psalms in Archbishop Parker's Psalter.  The same setting could be used for any text that shared the same metrical structure.  This one is notable for being in the third, of Phrygian mode which, in my analysis, gives it the distinctive feel it has and which gives it both a definite feeling of  non-repose and harmonic motion, even though the actual melody dwells and lingers on the fifth degree,  a feeling of active not altogether easy meditation.  Though Tallis, like William Byrd, remained a faithful Catholic for the entire period of the Tudor persecution of Catholicism, he also wrote music used by the Protestant establishment.  Williams included it in the Anglican song book that he edited in 1906 set to a much later hymn by John Addison, as well as his Fantasia. 

The Anti-Gay KKK Is Emblematic of The Anti-Christ Here And Now In The Republican-Fascist-Putin-Nazi Axis

For even the most hardened atheist and anti-Christian and, perhaps most resistant of all, liberalish member of the First Church of the Brunch* one prophesy in the Bible is on full display, in real life, in the clearest of terms, manifesting in the world,  starting today.

For most of my life I've considered the last book of the Christian Bible, what we called The Apocalypse, what most Protestants call Revelations, to have been a big mistake.  The often misunderstood, easily and often sensationalized vision of some guy named John, is among the most abused books in the collection.  When I was young I thought it was just silly to believe in it, that is at the childish and historically and literarily ignorant hermeneutic of believing it was to be taken as literally true, a literal prophesy of things that were to come.  But those habits of reading, which modern atheism holds in common with modern Biblical fundamentalism aren't the terms under which it was brought into the cannon of Biblical scriptures, it was brought in because it was understood that the book was not literally describing future events but it was a poetic description of how disaster would come, a description, in figures, illusions, symbols, numerological implication, etc. of any enormous disaster, even ultimate, cataclysmic environmental destruction on top of  horrendous violence, oppression, moral decay and mass slaughter on a, well, these days the journalists like to say, "Biblical scale". 

But it was during the 2010 BP oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico that, hearing the description and seeing the aerial footage of the oil pollution that my thoughts went to the passage that says,

The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead person, and every living thing in the sea died. (16:3)

though that wasn't the first thing that led me to think maybe the author was on to something, it was witnessing the degenerate association of Christianity, of Jesus, with the corporate-Republican agenda that had co-opted the Biblical fundamentalists, integralist Catholics and others who, together with their other political allies made a pretty convincing anti-Christ. 

The "Values" Voters Summit, who turn hate and depravity and injustice and inequality into a perversion of "values" is a particularly evil hate group, well connected, well financed, and powerful, perverting the name and superficial trappings of Christianity to pretty much try to do the evil work of destroying any progress made to make The Gospel, the Law and the Prophets real in law and in life in the United States.   It is addressed by a whole host of people who could either stand in for or easily represent figures in the Book of Revelation as a manifestation of evil, using lies and deception and superficial appearance to sucker the gullible, the foolish and, most of all, those whose own moral failings make them easy prey for Satan or The God of the World or any of the other names given to evil and its emanations in the book.   In that reading of the Apocalypse or The Revelation, I believe completely because I see it unfolding before our eyes and have seen it unfolding my whole life and in recent history. 

It is unfortunate that, with our modern and simplistic expectations of literal truth that the poetic language of the author and the seemingly bizarre and easily and facilely ridiculed aspects in those do more to blind people to the truth behind them than to inform them.  The condemnation of wealth and its accumulation - often expressed in the contemporary equivalent of our billionaire class, kings, emperors and other rulers - and the moral degeneracy and disaster that they promote and practice couldn't possibly be clearer, once you get past the language of dragons with stars on their heads.  Though that can be useful, too.  If Putin is taken to equal "Babylon" Trump would certainly be a good candidate to be his whore, or, in contemporary terms, "his bitch".   I think once you take it on its own terms and see it as a general analysis of what happens when great fortunes rule the world instead of a one-off event in the extended future, there's an enormous amount to learn from it.  John could have written it as a political science or sociological treatise instead of giving it a poetic treatment but, really, who would read it now except for old farts writing papers in little read journals? 

For the record, I don't think a single person who is going to address that coven of anti-Christians really believes in anything they're going to say, they're either trying to rope in the dopes like a carny huckster or they're going through the motions for their patrons.  The whole thing is an exercise in lies on behalf the father of lies, as Jesus, recorded by another John said:

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

I've come to understand a lot more about that most troublesome of the Gospels, too, looking at the signs of the times and to appreciate much that is found in it. 

* The estimable Garrison Keillor's phrase is perfect.  That sort of nominal Christianity,  in its easy-going liberal wing, is not enough to fight against real evil.  It's to busy with keeping up buildings, salaries, etc.  It can, at its worst, be sort of like Trump during the campaign going back to the Presbyterian church where he made a pro-forma profession of faith in his youth but, it having since become a majority minority congregation, he had to ask the pastor if Presbyterians were Christians during the campaign. 

Is Mueller Trying to Stop Trump From Pardoning People?

I For One Hope That Barack Obama Doesn't Attempt To Lead The Resistance To Trump

I can't agree with Charles Pierce that having Obama "joining the resistance full time" would be a good thing, if that were going to help then why didn't it during the eight years he held actual power?  In his piece, yesterday, Pierce noted that Barack Obama, instead of being engaged in full time efforts to resist the destruction of American democracy and the world has been engaged in socializing with the A+++ list of celebrities and giving $400,000 speeches to bankers and the such, which, given his presidency which never challenged the utra-rich and ultra-powerful at any basic level should surprise no one.  It's what a golden-boy preppy-Ivy leaguer who became and remained president for two term could be expected to do, that is the dominant culture of his class.  I was really disturbed earlier in the year reading that his idea of resistance was unleashing the Wall Street lap dog, Eric Holder.   To be fair, I was just as skeptical about the idea of Bill Clinton being any kind of effective opponent of George W. Bush.  While I wouldn't say that Barack Obama is someone I would like to never hear from again, something I have said about Bill, though not Hillary Clinton, I can't see him as being any more effective in opposing what, out of power, he did little to nothing to fight against while in power. 

No, I think any leadership in opposition to Trump has to come from someone who isn't a member of the elite which has never been an effective opponent of that kind of thing.  I suspect the set of all former elite law school grad and faculty such that they might be effective in leadership in opposition to Republican-fascism might be pretty much limited to one member, Elizabeth Warren.  And the null set, but that's just a formality of set theory.

Obama is a figure of the past, a great campaigner, while he was running for office but one who I heard many down ballot politicians complain about being unwilling to help them with resources or even lists.  In office he did a good job of setting low bars, achieving easy wins, being unwilling to play political hard ball for even his own signature agenda items, more interested in courting Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and making nice with Republicans who regularly spat in his face than even trying to get the votes from stray members of his own party in the Congress.  By comparison with Trump, I certainly miss him, as the leader of the Democratic Party I see what he squandered and gave away.   If he and Holder had held the wall street crooks accountable, if he had pursued a full and extensive economic recovery instead of giving away huge chunks for the non-support of Snowe and Collins, if he had put the screws to conservative Democrats and passed a really great healthcare bill which would be more resistant to sabotage, we wouldn't be where we are right now.

So, please, Barack Obama, don't try to do now what you refused to do then.  Obama's big mistake wasn't what Charles Pierce noted, giving the country absolution without penance, though that is a good idea, too, it is that he decided to play statesman while he was holding a political office during a time when statesmanship was never going to work.  I always said I'd give him 2009 before I gave up hope.  That was a long, long time ago and hope deferred evaporates. 

Wednesday Lecture - Walter Brueggemann - Truth-Filled Futures

So much said in less than 16 minutes.  

I have decided to get back to posting lectures, sermons, interviews on a more regular basis.  This is one given by Walter Brueggemann which I listened to recently while doing some otherwise boring chore.   I've listened to it several more times.  While listening  the first couple of times, I was impressed with the expansive interpretation that Brueggemann gave to what is implied in those troublesome, often exclusively interpreted texts where Jesus said no one came to God except through him, and which have been abused so often to say that no one but a small circle of believers were eternally damned.  His association of Jesus as conceived of as The Logos in John with Wisdom in Proverbs Chapter 8 and the association of Jesus with the justice and mercy and compassion that Wisdom created as fundamental attributes of the universe and that THAT is what we have to conform ourselves and our lives to or there will be disaster is the first time I've ever felt entirely comfortable with the idea.  NOT that Brueggemann's interpretation is more comfortable or easy or untroubling than the tradition that interprets that as being baptized and claiming that you're a Christian.   It's not easier, it's to throw yourself against the machine of the powerful, the rich, governments, societies that oppose those, "the world of power" which Brueggemann says, so well, "is dedicated to phoniness".   By the time he gets to the part about Jesus saying "it's all mine" and that he will give it all to us, Brueggemann associates that distribution with conformity to justice, compassion, generosity.

Particularly worth noticing is what he says about the folly of that American, modernist virtue "self sufficiency" and how destructive and stupid that ultimately is.

Here's the talk, I'll probably transcribe parts of it to discuss some ideas in it later, when I'm not feeling so exhausted.

P.S. 

It happened that just the other day I listened to another lecture session that was much longer, William Lane Craig on "God and the Platonic Host" which got into the concept of The Logos and much more, in which Craig talked at length about his years long philosophical study of the nature of abstract objects and the aseity of God, which is extremely interesting and pretty convincing on an intellectual level but, much as I appreciated what Craig was saying I didn't find nearly as useful.  

Both of these did leave me more convinced than ever that materialism, scientism and atheism are symptoms of intellectual vacuity and the dumbing down of intellectualism.  I have some profound disagreements with William Lane Craig about specific things but he is intellectually heads and shoulders above the atheist competition in the realm of ideas.  To a large extent that could be the result of most of his debate opponents being trained in some narrow aspect of the sciences and so-called sciences, relieved of any in depth knowledge of even the areas of philosophy that deal with logical argument.  As I pointed out not long ago, when he has an argument with another philosopher I've found the atheist was far less prone to arrogantly make an ass of himself, maybe unknown to his own audience but obvious to anyone who has read much philosophy or dealt in rigorous self-criticism of thier own thinking.  I specifically wouldn't include someone like Daniel Dennett or John Shook in that category, I think that Shook in particular is someone who should never have been given an undergraduate degree in philosophy, nevermind a PhD.   I have to confess that I've come to be skeptical of anyone who has a philosophy degree from the University of  Buffalo. 

What Mike Pence’s Cynical Anthem Stunt Cost

Dietrich Buxtehude - Suite in e minor

Wim Winters, clavichord

I played this on organ many, many years ago and once in a while on piano since then (not for performance) along with some of the other Buxtehude suites.  It's virtually certain that Buxtehude wrote the suites and associated variations, etc. in the collection this was found in for a small, fretted clavichord with a short octave in the bass (some of the fingering issues on a modern keyboard make that evident) which was the commonest domestic keyboard instrument in Germany at the time.  J. S. Bach, also wrote many of his pieces in the range that would fit that instruments, including many of his most well known works.  His earliest biographer documents that people who knew him said he favored the clavichord for practice.   His son, C.P.E. Bach as well favored the instrument, though I believe his music is generally for an unfretted instrument with the range of a harpsichord.

Score

Score of the manuscript  in tablature.

This suite, unlike most of the others in the unique tablature containing them, is also known in a lute tablature in which the music is somewhat different. 

If you hadn't guessed, I'm not feeling very well the past couple of days.   Truth be told, I have a serious illness that is going to knock me down every once in a  while.   Nothing to get my enemies hopes up so far but I have to take it easy a bit.  

Fré Focke - Tombeau de Vincent van Gogh

The player isn't listed, the comments carry a speculation but I don't know so I won't pass it on.

Fré Focke was one of Anton Webern's students and while the pieces here are very short, as Webern's were, they are quite different from his style.   I think it's a sign of a great composition teacher that their students don't end up copying them.

I'd never heard of Focke until last weekend when I was reading about Webern's little known conducting career.  This is his only piece I managed to listen to.   The pictures represented are listed by the person who posted this as:

Barques aux Santes-Marie
Iris
La moisson
La café de nuit
Les blés verts
La berceuse
La cueillette des olives
Le pont-Levis
Les lavandières
Nuit étoilée
Verger
L'arbre
La route aux Cyprès
Champ d'oliviers
Tige d'amandier fleuri
L'homme à l'oreille coupée
Jeune fille assise
Les paveurs
Paysage à Auvers
Champ de blé aux corbeaux.

 

There are many evocative and distinct moments in the music, the composer was clearly talented.  

The Truth About Pence’s Despicable NFL Stunt

B B King and Stevie Ray Vaughan - Texas Flood

Stevie Ray Vaughan Live at Montreux 1985

That's my answer.

23 Of These Die Every Month To Keep Donald Trump In Hair

Dave Holland Quintet - How's Never

Dave Holland - bass
Robin Eubanks - trombone
Chris Potter - saxophones
Steve Nelson - vibraphone
Nate Smith - drums

Prime Directive 

They Bite But I Won't

I am told that Duncan's Daycare for Dotty Duffers, aka "the braintrust," is snarking on my description of Neil Gorsuch as a pretty face the Federalist fascists chose to put on their sheer evil. 

Well, I'm not going to go to a lot of trouble to answer it, but I'm not the first person who noticed that  For example there is this from Ari Berman in The Nation on March 21:

Neil Gorsuch Is Not Another Scalia. He’s the Next John Roberts.

Gorsuch puts a handsome face on an ugly ideology.

Duncan's day care isn't so big on doing any reading, not even looking at the headlines of a word search online, they'd rather trash talk without any thought behind it.  I have huge problems with The Nation magazine and its direction under the trustafarian leadership of Katrina Vanden Huevel, just as I've come to look back and see it was hardly a great source of non-ideological  truth under Victor Navasky (another reputation that fades under a wider reading and consideration of his writing) but they make a few points, now and again.  I don't play the game of cooties that is the mainstay of Eschatonian discourse.   It's not only post literate, it's post truthiness.

Neil Gorsuch Is Such An A-Hole And Republican-Fascists Have Guaranteed That He Is The Future Of The Supreme Court

Jeffrey Toobin said it so well that I don't think I have much to add.

The argument had gone on for nearly an hour when Gorsuch began a question as follows: “Maybe we can just for a second talk about the arcane matter of the Constitution.” There was a rich subtext to this query. Originalists and textualists such as Gorsuch, and his predecessor on the Court, Antonin Scalia, often criticize their colleagues for inventing rights that are not found in the nation’s founding document. Gorsuch’s statement that the Court should spare “a second” for the “arcane” subject of the document was thus a slap at his ideological adversaries; of course, they, too, believe that they are interpreting the Constitution, but, in Gorsuch’s view, only he cares about the document itself.

Gorsuch went on to give his colleagues a civics lecture about the text of the Constitution. “And where exactly do we get authority to revise state legislative lines? When the Constitution authorizes the federal government to step in on state legislative matters, it’s pretty clear—if you look at the Fifteenth Amendment, you look at the Nineteenth Amendment, the Twenty-sixth Amendment, and even the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2.” In other words, Gorsuch was saying, why should the Court involve itself in the subject of redistricting at all—didn’t the Constitution fail to give the Court the authority to do so?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is bent with age, can sometimes look disengaged or even sleepy during arguments, and she had that droopy look today as well. But, in this moment, she heard Gorsuch very clearly, and she didn’t even raise her head before offering a brisk and convincing dismissal. In her still Brooklyn-flecked drawl, she grumbled, “Where did ‘one person, one vote’ come from?” There might have been an audible woo that echoed through the courtroom. (Ginsburg’s comment seemed to silence Gorsuch for the rest of the arguments.)

In one cutting remark, Ginsburg summed up how Gorsuch’s patronizing lecture omitted some of the Court’s most important precedents, and Smith gratefully followed up on it: “That’s what Reynolds v. Sims and Baker v. Carr did, and a number of other cases that have followed along since.” In these cases, from the early nineteen-sixties, the Court established that the Justices, via the First and Fourteenth Amendments, very much had the right to tell states how to run their elections.

In short, Ginsburg was saying to Gorsuch that he and his allies might control the future of the Supreme Court, but she wasn’t going to let them rewrite the history of it—at least not without a fight.

Ok, you know me better than to think I won't have something to say.  This is a good example of how the fascists will use the language of the Constitution to destroy democracy, installing de facto one party rule and a government that greatest desideratum of the rich, the powerful and the mainstream of the American media and much of legal academia, government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

About the only glimmer of light I see in this is that Gorsuch is such a callow. conceited and sanctimonious asshole that I think he's going to be unpopular with even some of his fellow fascists.  I recall reading that in his first session of oral arguments that even Alito lashed out at his idiotic and superficial dismissal of the complexity they were dealing with.  The boy is a pretty face put up by the Federalist Fascists because they knew they could run him and his looks would conceal the banality of evil to people trained to think by show-biz.

Update:  RMJ's comment shows how good it is for us non-lawyers to listen to people trained in the law.

I wanted to add to RBG's comment: "Or judicial review, for that matter?" Which is a product of Marbury v. Madison, and a doctrine hotly opposed by Jefferson, among others, as not being a part of the Constitution at all.'

"Originalists" are very proof-texting assholes. Nothing "originalist" in Scalia's Heller opinion. It's convenient bit of sophistry for saying "I'm right and you're wrong" no matter what the Constitutional issue is.

I will confess that my respect for the kind of logical thought that can come with a good legal training wielded for honest purposes has risen even as my disgust at how a stupid scientism has become the "civic religion" of so many has grown, a direct result of being able to read more scientists and their lay faithful on the alleged left, online.

For the LORD hears the poor, and does not spurn those in bondage. Psalm 69

I
Save me, God,
for the waters have reached my neck.
I have sunk into the mire of the deep,
where there is no foothold.
I have gone down to the watery depths;
the flood overwhelms me.
I am weary with crying out;
my throat is parched.
My eyes fail,
from looking for my God.
More numerous than the hairs of my head
are those who hate me without cause.
Those who would destroy me are mighty,
my enemies without reason.
Must I now restore
what I did not steal?

II
God, you know my folly;
my faults are not hidden from you.
Let those who wait in hope for you, LORD of hosts,
not be shamed because of me.
Let those who seek you, God of Israel,
not be disgraced because of me.
For it is on your account I bear insult,
that disgrace covers my face.f
I have become an outcast to my kindred,
a stranger to my mother’s children.
Because zeal for your house has consumed me,
I am scorned by those who scorn you.
When I humbled my spirit with fasting,
this led only to scorn.
When I clothed myself in sackcloth;
I became a byword for them.
Those who sit in the gate gossip about me;
drunkards make me the butt of songs.

III
But I will pray to you, LORD,
at a favorable time.
God, in your abundant kindness, answer me
with your sure deliverance.
Rescue me from the mire,
and do not let me sink.
Rescue me from those who hate me
and from the watery depths.
Do not let the flood waters overwhelm me,
nor the deep swallow me,
nor the pit close its mouth over me.
Answer me, LORD, in your generous love;
in your great mercy turn to me.
Do not hide your face from your servant;
hasten to answer me, for I am in distress.
Come and redeem my life;
because of my enemies ransom me.
You know my reproach, my shame, my disgrace;
before you stand all my foes.
Insult has broken my heart, and I despair;
I looked for compassion, but there was none,
for comforters, but found none.
Instead they gave me poison for my food;
and for my thirst they gave me vinegar.
May their own table be a snare for them,
and their communion offerings a trap.
Make their eyes so dim they cannot see;
keep their backs ever feeble.
Pour out your wrath upon them;
let the fury of your anger overtake them.
Make their camp desolate,
with none to dwell in their tents.
For they pursued the one you struck,
added to the pain of the one you wounded.
Heap punishment upon their punishment;
let them gain from you no vindication.
May they be blotted from the book of life;
not registered among the just!

V
But here I am miserable and in pain;
let your saving help protect me, God,
That I may praise God’s name in song
and glorify it with thanksgiving.
That will please the LORD more than oxen,
more than bulls with horns and hooves:
“See, you lowly ones, and be glad;
you who seek God, take heart!
For the LORD hears the poor,
and does not spurn those in bondage.
Let the heaven and the earth praise him,
the seas and whatever moves in them!”

VI
For God will rescue Zion,
and rebuild the cities of Judah.
They will dwell there and possess it;
the descendants of God’s servants will inherit it;
those who love God’s name will dwell in it.