Various Dirty Birds

This afternoon at lunchtime, I headed down to the lobby of the building I work in, and there was a man sitting there with two parrots - one on his lap and one on his wrist.

I used to know a guy who kept a macaw as a pet. Maybe these parrots were also pets, I don't know. What I do know - and this is kind of hard to explain - is that seeing those two birds there woke me up in a way that crowds of people seldom do.

Maybe it was the colors of the birds. One was bright green, the other dark blue all over. Maybe it was just the unfamiliarity of seeing parrots in the city, outside of a cage. Maybe it was just how unexpected the whole thing was. In any case, I wish to heck I had a camera.

Then again, even with a camera, I don't think I could capture the experience. There was something inescapably alive about those birds, like they had a magnetic aura around them that drew everyone around. By comparison, most of what you see every day (especially the various attempts to imitate nature) is a sort of dirty joke.

Later on, I came across an article on Tom DeLay's good buddy Jack Abramoff. I've read about him before, of course - this is the guy who's currently under investigation for a couple dozen financial irregularities, seems like. Evidence suggests that he's taken public monies, which may not be used for any partisan campaigning, and finagled a way to give them to a bunch of conservative congressional candidates. But although I'd heard about him before, this is the first time I learned that he's an orthodox Jew.

Being an observant Jew is something I aspire to - keeping the Sabbath, eating kosher, praying every day, learning Torah. Apparently, Jack Abramoff actually does all that, and his religious activities obviously have no impact on the rest of his life in any degree. He professes a devotion to virtue and then undercuts the rules intended to prevent corruption in public discourse.

Let me put it this way - I make no pretensions to speaking for what God does and does not like, but the behavior of the sleazebag Abramoff is profoundly offensive to me, anyway. Compared to the spiritual power thrown off casually by those parrots this afternoon, Abramoff's activities are just another dirty joke.

Benshlomo says, in the words of the ancient sages, It's completely possible to obey each and every Biblical commandment and still lead a completely empty life.