M&D, the Internet&W.A.S.T.E

[Vaska]

David Casseres opines: 

----------------------------------------------------------
I'm not either, but the OTHER thing about Hermes was, well, his thing.  In
some aspect or other he was portrayed all over Athens by statues called
"Herms" that were a very sketchy human form with a huge (and more detailed)
erection.  Was he about to hear something?  Doesn't the combination of that
symbolically reduced humanity with that symbolically enlarged hardon remind
us of our pal Slothrop?  A-and does it shed any light if we think of
Slothrop as a messenger, a herald?  I have a hard time connecting commerce,
though, much less toxicology and pharmacology (nice idea bout those snakes,
though).  [snip, snip]

Can't remember the details but wasn't it a bunch of overexcited academics
that got in all that trouble by running around Athens knocking the dicks off
those herms.  Watch out for those Grove guys, all you ithyphallic
antiprophets of dysentropy!)
-----------------------------------------------------------

Nah, no bunch of academics those: the mutilation of the Hermae, done in the
course of a single night, was/is thought to have been the work of an
oligarchic or aristocartic consipracy [symposia].  Check out I.F. Stone's
"the Trial of Socrates," pp.140-42.

As for Hermes, I always thought that his association with both commerce and
communication [as well as travel and lying] had to do with how inextricable
those two activities were for the people of the ancient Mediterranean.  If
you were in Athens, say, and you wanted to send some mail to a friend in
Smyrna, you had to wait for one of those trading ships, right?  And the idea
of travel, of crossing over, of moving things around in space was not that
far from the idea of "crossing over" from the land of the living to the
shores of the dead -- hence that other function of Hermes.  Seems logical.

Vaska