Lolcats: Words, Pictures, Theology

Large numbers of people, all doing the same thing at the same time, can produce repeatable social phenomena (and possibly alarm the authorities). Adding electronics to the mix can make events even more startling. The LED lights have seen queer sights, but the queerest of all may be the mushroom growth of interest in humorous cat photos, and the emergence of a new language to describe the doings, thoughts, and even theology of the irresistible moggies.

We are talking, of course, about Lolcats. Those who have not yet visited the 'I Can Has Cheezburger' site have yet to succumb to Lolcatmania. This, then, is an introduction to the madness.

John Rabe and the Nanjing Massacre

The year: 1937. The place: Nanjing (Nanking)¹, the capital of Guomindang China². The problem: The encircling Imperial Japanese Army. Bayonets, machine guns, and terror. Rape, pillage, and mayhem.

The question: What weapon do you use to oppose mass murder?

• Armed resistance.
• World opinion.
• A very large Nazi flag.

If you chose the last option, you are on the same page as John Rabe, also known as 'The Good German of Nanjing'. The bald, bespectacled businessman used his Party membership – and a very large flag, every pfennig he could scrape together, and the last ounce of his courage – to save an estimated quarter-million of his fellow humans from certain destruction. This is his story.

Gentleman's Agreement - The Book, the Film, Antisemitism, and the HUAC

How do we teach tolerance? Is there a magic formula for helping ourselves – and our neighbours, but ourselves first of all – to understand our actions in the light of their effect on others? How do we learn to invite everyone to the table when it comes to prosperity and acceptance? Most of all, how do we do this without being dreary, preachy, and confrontational? What unintended consequences might our attempts to teach tolerance have, for ourselves and others? What panic might we unleash in those not ready for the next step in human social development?

Some of these questions were addressed by Laura Z Hobson in her 1946 novel, Gentleman's Agreement. Some of the others were answered when the film came out the following year. Hobson, the writer, and Darryl F Zanuck, the crusading Hollywood producer, set out to teach the US a lesson about its failure to live up to its own standards. The results teach us a lot, over on this side of the millennium divide – about how the 'thin end of the wedge' can be used to pry open the hard core of prejudice, and about how the backlash against such an attempt can be ferocious.

In 1946 all Laura Hobson had to do to set the cat among the complacent pigeons was to write a novel with a simple premise: an agnostic Christian pretends to be Jewish – simply by saying that he is. Then the character, and the author, sit back to watch the feathers fly. The result was not only edifying, but electrifying for readers in the post-World War II US. The book sold 1.6 million copies and was translated into 13 languages. The film version won Best Picture of 1947, arousing a response from liberals whose eyes were opened to the subtleties of antisemitism, and fierce alarm on the part of guardians of the status quo, who began taking a closer look at the dangers presented by Hollywood intellectuals.

The Haunting of Bikini Atoll

MEN OTEMJEJ REJ ILO BEIN ANIJ. (Everything is in the hands of God)

– Motto on the flag of Bikini Atoll

The flag of Bikini Atoll, a Marshall Island group in the Pacific Ocean, looks a lot like the US flag – red stripes with a blue field in the corner. The blue field contains a circle of 23 stars, representing the islands of the atoll. Three black stars on a white stripe signify the islands damaged by a 15-megaton nuclear blast in 1954. Two lower-placed black stars stand for Kili and Ejit Islands, the new homes of the displaced islanders. The slogan, 'Everything is in the hands of God', is what their leader, Juda, said when told by a US Navy commodore that the islanders would have to give up their home 'for the good of all mankind'. This was how the US Navy characterised relocating 167 people in order to use Bikini's lagoon for nuclear testing.

The Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Described by some as a wonder of Gothic Revival architecture, by others as a 'pseudo-Gothic monstrosity', the University of Pittsburgh's 42-storey Cathedral of Learning is the tallest educational building in the western hemisphere; the world's tallest belongs to Moscow State University.
The Building
The University of Pittsburgh, itself one of the oldest universities in the United States (founded in 1787), grew out of a log cabin built at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers.

In the 1920s, then-Chancellor JG Bowman commissioned the architect Charles Klauder to design a grandiose new building to replace the temporary structures in which so much of the university was housed. The building, to be erected on a 14-acre site in the Oakland section of the city, was to be, in Bowman's words, 'a symbol of the life that Pittsburgh through the years had wanted to live'.

Why the architect, a Philadelphian, believed that Pittsburghers had always wanted to live in a Gothic skyscraper has never been adequately explained.

Abram's Delight, Winchester, Virginia, USA

Visualising the Virginia 'frontier' and its early colonial settlers, it is easy to imagine only wooden stockades and log cabins. But as early as the mid-18th Century, some very substantial and noteworthy buildings were constructed, some of which still stand today as witness to the ambitions and ingenuity of the first Englishmen in the region. An imposing dwelling-house, Abram's Delight, built in Winchester in 1754 by the son of the area's first white settler, is an interesting example.

Stone Mountain, Georgia, USA

32 kilometres east of Atlanta rises the world's third largest monolith1, 513 metres above the plain of the Georgia Piedmont. Used as a landmark and sacred meeting place since prehistoric times, Stone Mountain, which is also the world's largest exposed piece of granite, breaks another record in having the world's largest bas-relief. This unique geological feature, and its assorted owners and exploiters, is a record of the migrations, ambitions and sheer stubbornness of the people who have lived in its shadow. Its story reaches from the time when long-vanished tribes gathered at its summit, to the day when the Reverend Martin Luther King made his most famous speech and beyond. The beginning of this tale is 3000 years in the past.