Mars approaches. And burns people to death! Ten thousand or more in France, where idiot families left their old people in sweltering apartments while they went on les vacations. A report from The Guardian this morning says that a total of 36 kids died this year in cars -- distracted parents or daycare workers left them in the backseats, the temperatures got up to 140 degrees.

I'm looking for more of this, not less, now that Jupiter is on the scene.

When I saw the pictures of New Yorkers enduring the power outage, I was trying to place the expression of their faces. They were blank, numb. These same expressions -- or lack of expressions -- are on the faces of holocaust victims as they are being liberated. I'll try to find some of these for comparison.

These are the early hours of the power failure in the northeast section of The Culture, but not too soon to mull over its meaning.

I am starting to see that Mars is kicking us in the pants, and that this may be just the beginning -- Mars, which is approaching us quickly (next week is the closest meeting in 60,000 years, as far as anyone can tell). Mars is Power. Interesting that the first pictures of Earth from Mars came in only three months ago, on 22 May.

But beyond the obvious, I am thinking that The Culture is being asked to examine its conscience about Power -- by being Powerless for a time. Much is being said of 'the grid.' The first time I heard it mentioned, on NPR, I thought the announcer said 'the greed.' So if the grid is being unmasked and failing, there may be some hope toward The Culture salvaging itself. I wouldn't count on it, of course. The operative image of what's happening in these years is still the Titanic going down.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. (Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887)

Loss of power.

A gay Episcopal bishop? Why not? Certainly many churchmen would qualify...and have through history -- I'm thinking of Augustine, and probably St. Paul. The real issue here is: organized religion's main purpose, it appears, is to contain human sexuality -- to rein it in, to corner it, to deny it, to consign it to secrecy, to slow it down, and finally to torture and burn people for it. So, of course, it pops up in peculiar places -- like priests (men of God) obsessing over pre-teenage boys...or synods called (as this weekend) to discuss the grave matter of a bishop being a homosexual. It's not even the homo...just the sexual that causes organized religion's blood pressure to spike.

Look, we would be so much better off if the O. R.'s simply passed into the elephant's burial ground...and left the rest of us in peace to find our own sacred sexual expression. If they insist on hanging around, well, they can do that, then just go to hell.