Not the Best Wednesday

I’m trying hard not to concede to the nihilists, but I must confess that it is with increasing difficulty. The rebuttal to nothing is something, but the something is becoming more and more irrational, parochial, and dogmatic. Reason is disdainfully attributed to intellectual elitism by those for whom thought must be a dreadfully painful process. It seems like we went through all this before during the Sixties, but obstinate redneckism is making a powerful resurgence. How, in the same society, do we manage to elect the first black president and then put a poll on the web as to whether or not he should be assassinated? For several years now it has been a standoff between the intelligent and the stupid, and the smart ones have not historically come out on top. If one ever has pause to wonder about how someone like Adolph Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany, one need look no further than the fascist flexing in our own time of the likes of Rush Limbaugh. It seems that we’ve decided to patriotically wave our flag as we bury it and ourselves in the grave we are hell-bent upon digging.

Tuesday Afternoon

Now closer to sixty than fifty-nine affects my worldview; I am well past the midpoint. My thoughts have always gravitated toward the eternal, but the attempt to understand my relationship to it becomes daily more significant. A recent journal entry: do we die from the outside in or the inside out? The seeming human rejection of the reality of death prevents us from pondering such questions, and I can’t help but wonder if that does not somehow influence the quality of the inevitable experience. There is not a human alive that is not going to die, and yet we allow our beliefs to construct absolutisms that subvert any attempt to objectively and rationally examine our destiny. Perhaps this is why killing comes so easily to some. To ignore the miracle of life is to demean the reality of death. Watch the World Clock tick away and just try to find any meaning in it all.

Worth Reading...

How Women of Faith Fought a Dictator with Nonviolence by Becky Garrison

Regular Incite readers know how heavily influenced I am by TIME. It is my lunch hour source to study while I eat. Then it many times gets vomited onto this blog. I promised my good friend that I would provide an explanation for the direction of my blogs this past week. I am deeply disturbed and concerned by what is going on in our country right now:

Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?

And Another Thing

Now that I’ve started expounding on those things that anger me, there just doesn’t seem to be any end to this list of things that make me mad. For example: women! Even white women make no sense, and women of color are just plain infuriating. When I worked at McDonald’s it was men only. Not too many years after that they started letting females on the crew, and you’ve seen what’s happened to McDonald’s since then. Women want to do everything these days. They want to be doctors, lawyers, and ministers. They’ve dominated the fields of education and nursing for years, so we can expect that soon medicine, law, and religion will follow the trend of being substandard and counterproductive. It would be best if women would just do what they were made for by bearing children, cooking meals, and cleaning the house. But if they must venture away from the homestead, for God’s sake let them follow the example of Ann Coulter, Peggy Noonan and Sarah Palin. Bleeding-heart liberals like lesbian Rachel Maddow and black Gwen Ifill need to keep their mouths shut and be taken off the air. Indeed, I think that nationalizing Fox News and making it the sole source of news would be a great step forward (not to be misunderstood as progressive). As I work through this, it’s becoming clearer to me that what I hate, what angers me, what makes me mad is anyone or anything that’s different from me. Leave the viva la difference business to those cowardly Frenchies.

Color Me Blind

Today I’ve decided to be angry with colored people. Never mind that white is supposed to be composed of all colors while black is the absence of any color, because that’s physics, not biology. Everybody knows that Adam and Eve were Caucasians, and the insidious introduction of lesser strains has been dragging humankind down ever since. My own theory is that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was colored, and that’s why it encouraged the pure couple to defile themselves by eating of the forbidden fruit. It was when they were expelled from Paradise that people of color started populating the earth. This is what I find so infuriating about the theory of evolution, because the whole damned thing is a scheme to undo the obvious superiority of clean white people and the inferiority of dirty colored people. I could accept that these inferior breeds perhaps did evolve from monkeys, but only Creationism justifies white superiority (God, too, is white, you know). November 4, 2008 was clearly the last straw as a colored family occupied the White House. You can better understand what I’m talking about when you consider that only Obama’s father was black, because even a white mother couldn’t cleanse the man of his Negro features. No wonder he’s being called a socialist, a fascist, and a neo-Hitler. Obama has besmirched the pure character of the white presidency, and for that alone he should be impeached! I thank my white God for my white Jesus and all the white saints that have followed. America the White! Let’s keep it that way.

Has Anyone Seen My Idiot?

With whom shall I get angry today? I know! The idiots! I’m mad as hell that the idiots are taking charge of everything: media, government, religion, education, etc. I’m showing my age because, when I was young, idiocy was frowned upon. Seriously, can you imagine Dwight D. Eisenhower taking Sarah Palin as his running mate? Making an idiot of yourself was something to be avoided at all costs, but now is the hallmark of celebrity. Kanye West wrests the microphone from Taylor Swift’s hands to extol the virtues of Beyonce? And while I try, really try, to give them the respect that is due their office, what can the Republicans from Mitch McConnell to Eric Cantor to John Boehner be called but idiots? The country is still reeling from the disastrously idiotic presidency of George W. Bush. Now, much like Thumper, my mother instructed me to not say anything if I couldn’t say something nice, but what can be nicely said of idiocy? An idiot is certainly deserving of our compassion, our forgiveness, our encouragement to stop being an idiot, but not our support and allegiance. Who but an idiot would call for the collapse of the United States just to prove that Barack Obama should not be president? Who but an idiot would carry firearms in public to display their pathetic misunderstanding of the Second Amendment? Who but an idiot would drive a Hummer? Perhaps the saddest thing is this: when we let the idiots take charge, we all become idiots with them.

You Lie!

Last month I revealed what it took to change the ongoing relationship between Sidney Crane and me. Dad was not available much of the time to converse with me about such issues, and even if he had been his pastoral counsel might not have struck me as what I wanted to hear. Mom’s older brother, Uncle Hud, listened once to my plight and suggested that “if you can’t lick them, join them.” For that particular situation, neither of the elders I consulted offered a practical resolution. I had to come up with my own.

In a peculiar sort of way, however, Uncle Hud’s advice is coming back to me in today’s climate of “anger in America”, and realizing that any hope of “licking” the problem is unrealistic, I have decided to join them in being angry. Naturally, because this is my blog, I get to give it my own personal twist.

I am mad as hell that the Right has discovered that it can lie with impunity. The great irony of Joe Wilson’s outburst was that it was definitely the kettle calling the pot black. Joe Wilson is a liar. Rush Limbaugh is a liar. Glenn Beck is a liar. Bill O’Reilly is a liar. Senator Grassley is a liar. Senator Ensign is a liar. Governor Sanford is a liar. Governor Gibbons is a liar. This could go on ad infinitum, but I think I make my point. I’ve already confessed to my younger proclivity toward chronic lying, and that allows me to certify my accusations on the basis of “it takes one to know one.”

So, dismiss me if you like because I’ve admitted to having once been a liar, but I’m going to get angrier and angrier that liars are now being condoned by government and the media because they’ve managed to shake the stigma that I could not. My reformation involved learning to tell the truth and to accept that as the only legitimate means of gaining the confidence and trust of others. So, yes! I’m mad as hell that prominent people are lying and getting away with it. This should do it for today, and rest assured that I’m going to be angry about something else tomorrow!

Thursday’s Thud

It’s my Friday, and I’ve had my fill of government. Through the pale of idiocy that has beset our society I can see the reason why some of the reasonable are wary of giving more and more control to the feds. The hundreds of millions of dollars that my agency pumps out of the pockets of irresponsible parents into the accounts of equally irresponsible parents do absolutely nothing to address the issue of irresponsible parenting. I’m sure that there are some custodial parents who use their monthly stipend to the benefit of their children, but that has to be the exception rather than the rule among a segment of our population that procreates without conscience. I’m beginning to understand that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else. With our kitsch definition of love, I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’m talking about something more than narcissistic infatuation. I’m talking about a reverence for the miracle of one’s own self that lays the foundation for reverently loving others. I’ve been at this circus long enough to watch some of the children who received support now having to pay it. Monkey see, monkey do is the grim analysis of what happens when human beings lack any sense of self worth to pass on to the next generation. It’s a good thing that it’s Thursday, because I can use the next three days off to renew, to refresh, to bask in the love of my wife and daughters, so that I’ll be somewhat better equipped to come back next Monday to deal with the tragedy of worthlessness.

In These Final Days

Visigoths and Vandals are given partial credit for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. In the fifteen-hundred or so years since then, a plethora of theories have emerged on just exactly what happened to the once ruler of the civilized world. That Christianity was adopted as the state religion about the same time cannot be underestimated as also having played a role, something to think about the next time you hear someone proclaim the United States of American to be a Christian nation. With so many of our civil liberties and constitutional rights under assault since the Bush era, it may seem unimportant to argue for the separation of church and state, but closer attention to what’s going on in our country right now reveals a sinister blurring of the distinction. Whether it is anti-abortion, pro-guns, or just saying “no” to President Obama on general principle, there are zealous Christianists at every rally. And rather than encourage the constitutional separation of church and state, Christianist preachers are leading the assault on that wise and, dare I say, sacred distinction. If you like what you see going on in the Muslim world these days, you’re gonna love when Christianism becomes our state religion. There’s no question that the devil is hard at work, and these days he’s slipping the wolves into the flock disguised as evangelical Christianists.

Had I Ever Dreamed

With children comes the prospect of grandchildren, great grandchildren, and so on. I’m thinking today of the hours Mary and I spent deliberating whether or not bearing children in the Atomic Age was the right thing to do. Obviously, our two beautiful daughters attest to the correctness of our decision. This does not, however, relieve me of the misgivings that still persist. I’m not happy with the world that Rachel and Rebecca were born into, although I see them as part of the promise for a brighter future. Three generations past the first detonation of a nuclear weapon doesn’t seem to have brought us any closer to a peaceful resolution, to a world resonating with harmony. Indeed, as the human population continues to grow unchecked we seem daily to draw nearer to that eschatological precipice which so many ignorantly yearn for. First-century apocalypticism was perceived from a far different worldview in which it almost made sense to think of a redeeming Parousia, but a Twenty-first century apocalypse bodes the end of the human experiment. Had I ever dreamed that evil idiots would prevail, I might have decided differently about having children. Had I ever dreamed that these evil idiots might well spark the second American civil war, the third world war, etc, I might have decided against bringing innocents into such folly. Had I ever dreamed that the hope of the world rests in the hearts and minds of my children and their children, then I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.

You Say You're A What?

I’ve had it with extremists who find nothing wrong with coopting whatever they want in order to further their cause. My grandfather and uncle were strong Republicans, but they would not recognize what has become of their party today. Nor would they recognize what has become of their Christian faith as expressed by the Church. That is because Christianity hijacked has become Christianism, and adherents of the extreme ideology are not truly Christians but Christianists. In this context, Mohandas Gandhi’s statement, “I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ;” becomes more understandable. A Christian is a person who attempts to become Christ-like, literally a “little Christ.” But a christianist blindly believes in a kind of dogmatic ideology that is truly antithetical to the way of Christ. A Christian could never condone the murder of anyone. Christianists justify the murder of anyone and everyone who does not agree with them. A Christian could never use the teachings of Christ to justify war, but christianists have been doing so from the beginning. Had Jesus not been crucified, I truly believe that there may not have been any such thing as Christianity and its Church. It is plausible that there might have been a powerfully reformed Judaism that would have never generated the Abrahamic offshoots that later emerged. I’m still not going to feel comfortable labeling myself a Christian, but I can now begin to reclaim my authentic faith tradition as I grow in my understanding that christianists proclaim christianism that has little, if anything, to do with the Christ.

Thanks, Mary...

...for the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03blumenthal.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

09/11/09

“…just about a short time ago…”

This precise measurement was broadcast (cabled, really) to those tuned into HLN (that’s what Headline News now bills itself as, although my rather dated spell checker allows ‘headline’ as one word, so I don’t know what that does to the ‘L’) about an hour ago (10:49 AM PDT). Seems there was a “routine” Coast Guard exercise in responding to a terrorist alert on the Potomac, and sister-station CNN announced that shots were fired. Well, this made nearly the whole civilized Western world to move to the edge of their seats. This all happened “just about a short time ago.”

“…ancient synagogue found in Israel…”

This is third of three headlines now being touted on CNN.com. Can’t say I’m surprised.

How are we going to handle the shock of realizing—one way or another—that we’ve been sold out, that we’ve been betrayed (ironically) by those who most loudly proclaim their Right-Winged Christianity whenever it is necessary to justify their evil insanity? The slime has oozed into the post-electoral background with Cheney continuing to distract attention from Bush. Where are they now? Did they just disappear? I don’t think so, because the next step of their plan no longer requires their visible control of government. Their corporations are now in control of government and—much as pilotless drones remotely execute imperialistic warfare from work stations half a world away—they have moved from Washington, D.C. while cloaking themselves in the further distraction of their simple-minded replacements who publicly display an embarrassing inability to do anything more than belligerently recite the crude and vulgar dogma with which they are indoctrinated. The party of Lincoln? How utterly absurd!

Nothing Left To Say

It’s a humbling experience to realize that you’ve tried all the various ways you can think of to communicate a point, an idea, and that the well of means has simply gone dry. Love God. Love one another. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. It’s hard to improve upon perfection, although that seems to be what the human mind forever strives to do. It’s a game of sorts, reinventing Truth to seem more truthful, more palatable. Imagine the number of sermons that have been preached on the teachings of Jesus for the last two-thousand years. And yet humankind still chooses apathy, hate, violence and destruction over compassionate love. Think of all the things that could be done with the current technology, and yet the vast majority of our country’s resources are focused upon using those technologies for war, entertainment, and gaming. Television is a good case in point. A medium that could have enlightened the world instead became a privatized, for-profit corporate enterprise that endlessly pumps out junk. Don’t worry, though, dear reader, because I’m not about to let having nothing left to say stand in the way of saying it over and over again. It’s one hell of a mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, and perhaps there will be some redeeming value to the last words of the final chapter being: love God, love one another, do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Number Nine

I’m challenging myself to write today’s date, 09/09/09, as many times as I can before the day is through. Like Mom says, small things please small minds. I’m also exercising my right to be lazy and just link you to the Wikipedia article on Revolution 9. Ahh, those were the days…

The Folly of Forecasting

I’m not smart enough to know what the future will be. I can only hope that I have some awareness of the way the present may affect it. The eye-for-an-eye mentality that has been around apparently since the dawn of human consciousness comes complete with a reactionary default that justifies retaliation. Someone just hit me. The natural thing to do is to strike back. This kind of thinking goes further toward a good defense being a good offense, and before we even know it we find ourselves being the first to hit. Whether we are the attacker or the attacked retaliating in defense, we succumb to the vicious cycle of violence begetting violence. We are told, however, that there is a different way, a better way. “What’s the word?” asked the Beatles, “the word is love.” “People will know that you are my disciples by the way you love one another,” proclaims the Christ. As I said at the beginning, I’m not smart enough to know what the future will be, but I think I am smart enough to understand that humankind has the ability to destroy itself unless it learns to truly love.

A Labor Day Hymn

Working Class Hero
by John Lennon

As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and class less and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me
If you want to be a hero well just follow me

The September 7 issue of TIME is fittingly devoted to the life and death of Edward M. Kennedy. The thoughts of those who knew him best are profound in their description of a man who matured into the ability of putting others first. This, for me, is the definition of human maturity. We start out selfish, but realize our human potential by becoming selfless. The parent who stands in harm’s way to protect a child, the politician who serves the public rather than corporate interests, the list of real life examples goes on and on. It is time to put a stop to the immoral “greed is good” mentality that has been embraced by all those who choose to remain selfish. Their evil has been condoned for far too long. I offer these words by Ralph Waldo Emerson as the new definition of what it means to mature into a genuine human being:

To laugh often and much,
to win respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty;
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better
whether by a healthy child,a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.

In The Life After That I Want To Be Nancy…

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Joe Klein, but Nancy Gibbs stands just as high in my regard. As justification (as if any is needed) I offer her latest masterpiece: Cash for Clunkers: The Bribery Stimulus. I’m increasingly concerned by what is happening on the American scene. Gibbs provides but one example of how this once great nation is slipping into decline as all corrupt empires always have. Faithful Incite readers can thank Nancy for putting off my tirade for another day.

Why Am I Doing This?

First, I offer my sincere thanks to the good friend who bothered to comment on yesterday’s post. Some of you more seasoned Incite readers may want to explain to her what a cynical, sarcastic curmudgeon I am. It is delightful, however, to have elicited a response.

To articulate my calling has turned out to be what Dad calls An Endless Search. It would have been nice if my vocation would have disappeared when I left the active ministry, but there’s still that nagging little voice in my mind that asks, why are you here? What is your purpose? What is your reason for being? My humble attempt to answer is this: to incite thought. I am living proof that it doesn’t pay—at least financially—to think, but I am still convinced that thinking is the primary function of human beings. Psychologists have pretty well proved that human thought is developmental in nature, and combined with M. Scott Peck’s postulation of spiritual entropy it becomes clear that we are all called to optimally utilize and enhance this greatest of all gifts.

So, why am I doing this? To make myself think! And if I can incite others to think with me, well then, that’s just icing on the cake.