Prime Minister Bhutto, rest in peace.

Sometimes I think that we have poisoned our world with so much war that there is simply no road back. We are overrun with war, all over the globe. The plague of our age is violence, more violence than humankind has ever seen. We have grown accustomed to shootings at schools, at malls. We casually accept the invasion of other countries, of torture committed in our name. As John Steinbeck wrote in 'The Sea of Cortez,' sailing past the vast gray military installations carved out of the stunning California coast, we have already made all the machines - our species is now simply waiting to die.

All of this must be inverted. All of this must be turned over completely. We simply must replace all this death with life, or everything beautiful that human beings have created will vanish from the earth.

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However...I originally intended to write good news today!

I'm down south with my family for the holidays, and I have just discovered that there is, in downtown Nashville...are you ready for this...a full-scale replica of the Parthenon!!!! No I am not kidding, how cool is that!!!

Apparently Nashville built it a century ago for some world's fair, to prove it was the "Athens of the South." (They wanted to copy Philadelphia!) Now as we all know, the Parthenon was the greatest shrine in Greece, dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, civilization, and military victory, and Greek generals wishing for success in their campaigns would go there before their battles and offer goats, cows, etc. Hooray!

I've never been to the real one but I am definitely going to the fake one before I come back to Philly, so if anyone wants me to put in a good word at the shrine, let me know on this blog or email me at hannahdmiller at gmail.com. I am already going to cover the basics - Democrat in the White House, pickups in the Senate, retain the statehouse majority, all that stuff. I think I will also put in something about the lawsuit with the river because the Delaware's rights are just not being respected, yo. I doubt they allow animal sacrifices so I will just have to make do with a bag of McDonald's cheeseburgers.

One of the reasons I am so interested in this was something that Rick Santorum wrote in his Dec. 20 column for the Inquirer that just drove me nuts. In his column, this man, a self-styled expert on religion and politics - in a column on religion and politics - wrote that "the ancient Greeks had no religion."

Now I know that the Inky doesn't have a fact-checker but perhaps they could invest $10.99 and buy Rick a copy of "Heathens for Dummies" and save me the time it takes to write these rants. Greek religion did in fact exist, was incredibly complex, diverse, and vibrant, and in no way interfered with their invention of democracy, the greatest system of governance the world has yet known.

Rick's apparent blindness to the existence of an entire religion chock-full of female deities says a lot about the man - nothing we didn't already know - but most of all, it finally goes a long way towards explaining why one of the most heavily targeted, top-tier Senate candidates in the country could suffer, in 2006, such a massively punishing defeat, losing his reelection bid 58.7 to 41.3 percent at the hands of good-hearted Pennsylvanians.

Must've gone to the wrong shrine, Rick!