Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Raising Cain to the Nines

Governor Christie isn’t going to run for the GOP nomination nod. So be it! Although I did not hear in his speech that he would not accept an acclamation nomination at a deadlocked convention.

The GOP is tossing out flavor after flavor these days in hopes that someone will sit and stay on top of the crème de la crème candidate cone. First it was Bachman, then Perry and now Romney is back on top.

Herman Cain is tied for a second scoop position.

He may have an edge though with his nine, nine, nine proposal.

Nine has a strange magic to it. 9 planets, 9 orders of angles and 9 daughters of Zeus, the Muses. There are the nine earths of Milton, nine crosses and nine days of wonder, nine crowns in heraldry and 9 judges on the Supreme Court.

9 members on a baseball team that have nine at bats in 9 innings.

Golf has two nines to make an eighteen-hole game. And one and eight is nine.

9 is an endless aid to merchants, who will always charge $9.99 for something.
 
The Egyptians were devoted to the Enneads, groups of nine gods. The legends of northern Europe have 9 bards, 9 dragons, and 9 stones in a circle.

We all know of Dante's 9 circles of Hell, which were merely the inversion of the 9 he associated with Heaven.

In the Middle Ages, 9 was the angelic number.  Milton divided his Nativity ode into 3 sections of 9 stanzas each.

In old China, there were nine buttons of rank and not too long ago the Emperor would ascend the Altar of Heaven—a perfect circle inside a perfect square and his 9 grades of Mandarins performed a 9-fold bowing before him.

That’s not going to happen in this country and culture, but the 2012 election year is going to need nine times the patience, nine times the tolerance and nine times the intellect to get through the rhetoric, the distortions and the distractions that politics engenders.





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