Word: chariots
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When George Baker first got into the God game back in 1907, the pantheon was packed. What with such ranking deities as Father Obey, Elijah of the Fiery Chariot, St. John the Vine, and Joe World, among many others, the heavenly host could hardly muster enough worshipers to go around. So George, an itinerant lawn mower and hedge clipper from Georgia, settled for an apprentice apostleship - a "God in the Sonship Degree" - with Father Jehovia, a former Pittsburgh steelworker who had a cult in Baltimore...
...Benzoni kept his cool, and we moved to the next scene ... riding our bikes to school (we'd all borrowed bikes from our more typical friends). This became a real chariot race as smiling bodies tried to pedal as close as possible to the camera protruding from the back end of Benzoni's convertible...
...flick of a switch. Its radioscope tracks a bugged automobile 240 km. away. From vents in the rear it releases a smokescreen and an oil slick. From ports in the grille it protrudes a pair of machine guns. What's more, the rear axle of the chariot is armed with bladed hub caps that telescopically extend to chew up the rubber of an overtaking vehicle. And if the driver should decide to ditch an obstreperous passenger, he need only press a button: the roof glides back and the jump seat violently ejects the jerk...
This grass-roots power has taken a twofold?if not an eightfold?path. In the more agitated countries, the monks have used it as a way into politics; in the quieter lands, all of the lesser-chariot persuasion, they have used it to stay out of politics, merely adding a conservative prop to support existing institutions...
Patrick White has offered his native Australia an embarrassment of literary riches. As to the riches, there is no doubt. White's six novels, from Happy Valley (1939) to Riders in the Chariot (TIME, Oct. 6, 1961), make up Australia's greatest fictional creation. Nor is there any doubt as to the embarrassment. White's bleak and austere vision is deeply antipathetic to the semiofficial Australian credo with its jovial good cobbery, manly democratic virtues and no-nonsense sex. White sees Australia, like his defeatist characters, as drifting toward a lost-generation doom of "impregnable negation, where...