Author Archives: jidol

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Out to Pastoral by John Idol “The devil, in fiction and drama, presents a subject worthy of close study, and that has indeed been the case with Dante’s Satan, Marlowe and Goethe’s Mephistopheles, Milton’s Satan, Mark Twain’s, Mysterious Stranger, and Golding’s Lord of the Flies, to list but a few of works in which Satanic [...]

Out to Pastoral John L. Idol BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris) —3/19/12—Most of us begrudgingly render unto Caesar what Caesar needs to run town, state, or nation. Tax-dodgers live amongst us, but enough of us, having tallied as many deductions as the tax laws allow, do give Caesar a piece of our American pie. He’s not [...]

Out to Pastoral by John Idol BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—3/12/12—The melody of our national anthem climbs above the range of most untrained singers—that is, most of us—when we come to, “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air.” If we can go falsetto, we take a stab at singing along; if not, we [...]

Out to Pastoral by John Idol BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—2/27/12—Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote/The droghte of Marche [hadde] perced to the roote/And bathed every veyne in swich licour . . . Than longen my cousin C. B Watson and I to go fishing. And, of course, since we sneaked away from our fifth-grade [...]

Out to Pastoral by John Idol BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—2/13/12—The team of horses my Grandad, Rufus Idol, used on his small farm in Deep Gap, North Carolina, brought together a heavyweight, Joe, mostly Percheron, and Dan, mostly a mixed breed gelding lassoed out West and partly broken in to earn his feed. Dan, a motley [...]

Out to Pastoral by John Idol BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—2/6/12—If an aging memory isn’t too rusty, I first heard my older brother, Jack (short for Jackson), read the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk” when I was a little over three years old. As he practiced the reading lesson, he took particular delight in yelling [...]

Out to Pastoral by John Idol BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1/30/12—No fancy riding habit, no well-groomed steeds, no blast on a hunting horn, no cry of “Tally-Ho” and the sound of galloping hoofs. Barking, eager hounds, yes, but a pack of fewer than a dozen, most of them selected for their stamina, voice, and ability to [...]

Out to Pastoral by John Idol BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1/15/12—Few documents stir up as much controversy as the Ten Commandments. Few have such an interesting history. The story begins in the book of Exodus and, presumably, will have no ending, since the original source of the commandments will repose in the New Temple in the [...]

Out to Pastoral by John Idol BURLINGTON North Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1/16/12–My great grandfather, John Nicholson Idol, returned to his native North Carolina from Appomattox, having served in the Army of Northern Virginia under General Lee as a Tar Heel Sharpshooter. He found no suitable work near his home in The Piedmont and so headed to the [...]

Out to Pastoral by John Idol BURLINGTON North Carolina—Weekly Hubris)—1/9/12—Why a non-smoker, light drinker, and only slightly overweight man with low blood pressure and non-elevated cholesterol should be hit with five TIAs in just over a year is something of a puzzle to me. Puzzle or not, I have to deal with them, driven by [...]