A couple of interesting things arrived on my Face Book page this week. One was a notification by a Lutheran Church that it has opened its doors and its mind to what the religious right considers to be flotsam, jetsam and no-account trash.
These former church rejects, whom the holy rollers of yore, today and tomorrow consider worthy only of extinction, exclusion and punishment, are different from those bigots who judge them in that they don't always act, think, believe, look or behave the way they should.
"Should" meaning the acceptable way the people who are filled with god's love and compassion do - and insist everyone in the world do under penalty of ostracism or much, much worse.
Any social or religious non-conformity fills those with crocodile brains with terror and causes them to dance about, shoot off things like their mouths, as well as their guns, and try to pound the offenders into the dirt in every way possible - including literally.
These godless creatures who have so offended the pure in heart and soul are worthless and even if they have a central nervous system, breathe oxygen, sleep, weep, bleed, feel, love, hate and hunger , they must not be allowed to exist.
When they are the wrong color, it's difficult to differentiate the "right thinking and behaving" people from the reviled "others" and it is therefore necessary for the "good" to keep close watch for any "bad" behavior, which is behavior that is not approved by church and god and, particularly, by parishioners.
And even more particularly, parishioners who are running for public office.
But which god is on deck?
The other interesting item that arrived on my Face Book wall was an image of a small block with 3,500 teeny, tiny black dots. The legend on the graphic explains that each one of the dots represents one of the 3,500 known gods in recorded history.
It goes on to explain that "your" god is represented, and colored red amongst the black. It even tells you it is smack dab in the middle. Even so, it takes a while before you can absolutely identify it.
The few gods worshiped today - two or three of which have caused centuries of pain and bloodshed - are simply the newest.
Not the best, not the mightiest, not the only.....just the newest.
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In the tradition of the game of venery introduced by James Lipton in his book, "An Exaltation of Larks", where some usual interpretive collective nouns - such as a gaggle of geese and pride of lions - are listed, as well as some more colorful ones, I have joined the game.
I offer here a selection of collective appellations to apply to some of the pols campaigning throughout the bible belt:
A treachery of teabaggers seems apt. But so does a sounder of swine. Or, how about a glut of goons? A larder of loonies? A kneeling of know-nothings? Taken all together....a plague of religious fundamentalist politicians.
Inspiration is infinite.
Seem over the top? Not as over the top as these nutsos. We have an array of candidates swinging their way into the hearts of the hideously religious inhabitants of the least well educationally endowed states in our Union. They are totally bereft of brains if they are taken in by the likes of Paul Broun.
Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia, a medical doctor and a member of the House Science Committee! publicly and vocally has stated that he does not agree
with the most basic tenets of scientific process and critical thought.
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the
Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell... And
it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from
understanding that they need a savior.”
The other specimen of abject mindlessness is Republican legislator Charlie Fuqua, running again for legislature with financial support from the Arkansas Republican Party and U.S. Reps. Tim Griffin and Steve Womack, among others.
Here is an inspiring example of Arkansas at its finest. It is giving serious consideration to electing this prince of a fellow even after, or - since it is Arkansas - maybe because he has announced his support for executing, offing or otherwise legally murdering recalcitrant children.
Citing this most excellent solution to bad behavior as God's will, he explains it, apparently seriously, in his book, "God's Law, the Only Political Solution".
Bad kids have to die. Vote for him and the law of the land in ancient Israel comes alive.
Religion has flipped it's marbles and the inmates have taken over the asylum.
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I think it's generally conceded by people who think about things like this, that nature is careful of the species, but careless of the individual.
This of course flies in the face of the liberal point of view that everyone is important, or, as our President likes to say, "Everyone is entitled to a fair shot."
It's a complicated issue and made even more complex by the dichotomy presented by our religious/right and atheistic/left factions.
The religious adopt what could seem to be the egalitarian point of view: Every human being, including zygotes, should be equal and enjoy life - at least until they die a natural, if painful, death, or require execution.
They don't care how they live...sick, poor or starving....just so they are not allowed to slip the surly bonds of earth before appropriate suffering.
Whereas we atheists are generally in favor of allowing the old and ill to check out early, and permit the elimination of any inconvenient or unhealthy zygotes that pop up in our wombs.
But we want to feed and offer succor to the world.
It's a puzzle, isn't it?
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When Samuel Taylor Coleridge was living near Porlock, a British coastal town, he wrote the glorious poem, Kubla Khan:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man......
This famously unfinished poem is purported to have been conceived in an opium-induced dream.
The dream was interrupted by an unexpected visitor - possibly a politician looking for Coleridge's support.
Puff! The dream was gone and the poem is unfinished.
Since the literati agree this is a tragedy of some size, it demonstrates on what slender threads hang the important things in life.
People from Porlock turn up every day in every way....and we can't guard against them and remain in society.
They take our attention, bleed us of our creativity and our time and generally upset the equilibrium of our lives.
But now they can be managed. If you live your life entirely on the Internet and Face Book, nothing can disturb your dreams unless you let it. Or you don't have to dream. You can spend hours reading, researching and learning. You can interact with people all day and all night. Or, you can sleep all day or all night.
Some
of us have found the Internet to be the "pied a terre" we have dreamed
of. Free rent and it makes no demands of our time that we don't allow.
Also, it is filled with an infinite variety of people and information. Friends come and stay, or they
go....at our whim or theirs. No fuss, no muss.
And you can share a meal without having to cook or wash dishes.
You can find someone to talk to a 3 a.m., or you can disappear for days
on end and not inconvenience anyone....if you leave a note.
I suspect the danger in all this enhancing of - or submitting to - such a purely cerebral life is that we may lose our ability to move.
That being the case, our needs would be spare....and so would the regulations that rule our lives. Maybe we could even avoid all the political haggling since people wouldn't need to care about much of anything that wasn't right in front of them. Everything in life could be virtual.
I suppose that it is worth considering that Coleridge had a better way to deal with life as an opium eater. He just immobilized his brain and tuned out of the world instead of on or in to it.
But then he had to get up and answer the door.
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Following this election, I suspect we are going to see a gentrification of the Republican party. Particularly if the wingnuts in the House and Senate turn out to be losers.
Way back, when I was a girl from New York, the boys I dated mostly went to Ivy League schools and belonged to the Young Republicans Club where we went to cocktail parties, not political rallies.
To me, it was a social thing, not political. Nice boys from nice families with enough cash to do dinner and a movie - or take me dancing at the yacht club.
Today, Republicans seem to be mobs carrying signs that generally contain misspelled epithets, or pictures of bloody fetuses or insults to Muslims.
Or middle-aged, fat-bellied white men wearing cowboy hats, toting guns and threatening the overturn of the government.
Or sharp-tongued old women with sneering expressions and teabags dangling from their hats.
Or young women wearing big crosses on their breasts - all claiming to be filled with God's love but spewing enough hate to fill the bathtub Grover Nosetwist wants to drown our government in.
The funniest thing about these lower and middle class Neanderthal types is they are agitating for the election of the upper class snob of the century.
All the whores and whore hounds on Fox News - and I don't ascribe these references to their sexual mores (necessarily) - are following along the well worn path of denigrating and insulting the "democrat" party and jeering at what they call its failures.
But in the background, steadily but quietly coming forward, there are less fevered views emanating from some of the deeper thinkers of the party.
Lincoln, unaware of how much he sold himself short, said at Gettysburg: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here but it can never forget what they did here."
It's a reference that I am misapplying here because I think the same can be said for the vulgar conversation this country is having with itself.
I hope when Obama wins, when education once again gains stature, when the dust settles and what was once the "Party of Lincoln" can retrieve its reputation and its sanity with a re-gentrification of its principles.
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A
friend of mine, not known for dealing in smut, just posted a link on
Face Book. He was recording his amusement after having seen a pair of
outsize testicles hanging from the bumper of a truck plying the highways
of Arkansas.
He,
as I, was ignorant of the popularity of these phenomena, but we were
both thoroughly disabused of our innocence - he in the flesh - which,
hopefully, was not a literal description - and I after viewing this
site:
Judging
from the comments to his revelation, these cuties are very popular in
certain parts of the country. Namely, those states that are colored red
and pink on the maps that daily mark the political poll results.
Sure, those who dwell in those states will say I am making an unfair generalization but, unfortunately, statistics are clear.
There
is a class of people who seem to favor all the same things. NASCAR,
fundamental religion, fervent and frequent displays of the flag, the
Tea Party, the Republican Party, scouring voter registrations of Dems,
overturning laws favorable to gays and abortion and "truck nutz." And
they all live in what is called the bible belt and its extensions.
And
the odd thing is that they, the so-called "conservatives" of the
country, appear to be residents of the states with the lowest
educational scores and the highest numbers of welfare recipients.
A
few (very few) of my friends are from the South and have an accent to
prove it...but they are among the few who don't fit the mold. It pains
me to criticize their origins (but not much).
My
view is to live and let live, but it is maddening that these kinds of
people seem always to have so much of the entire country by its
testicles.
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I have always been fond of words. They were my best friends when I was a latchkey kid with a library next door.
My hearing is acute when one of my "friends" gains currency - particularly in the world of politics, which also interests me.
What brought this to mind was realizing that the phrase "writ large" has been springing to the lips of many commentators with unusual frequency. It's a colorful term only in that it wears the hoary coat of time long gone. Isn't this the vocabulary of the 18th century, at the latest? What brings it back into modish use? Apparently, someone resurrected it or simply adopted it from lawyerly language and it caught on.
I first noticed this coattail effect in the 80's. I was working for a weekly newspaper and became aware that no one I quoted or interviewed had conversations anymore. They were all having "dialogues." Nothing wrong with that except it became so universal as to be risible.
Now "risible" is a good word that, in the misty dim past, I found used frequently in Taylor Caldwell's early works, and rarely anywhere else. But it, too, is making a comeback and I am reluctant to credit her since her books are dusty with time.
Who then?
"Redound" is a perfectly fine word but not one that rushes to everyone's mouth. It's one I have always liked and was pleased to hear Rachel Maddow use it. It is now circulating with a degree of enthusiasm.
Was it Rachel?
Probably the word that seemed to gain its highest degree of popularity among the goppers around the time of George the Better's single term was "demagogue." When I first noticed it I have to admit I had to look up the definition. Naively, I thought that is what people do when they don't know the meaning of something. However, I was mistaken.
In an interview just after her husband's defeat, Barbara Bush kept referring to the "bad effects" of all the "demagoguery" being the cause of his loss. She spoke with disarmingly candid certainty.
Amazingly, the interviewer (a newsman whose identity is lost to me) asked Barbara what "demagoguery" meant. I credit her with honesty but I am still blown away by her answer. "Well, I don't know," she admitted.
There is a lesson here but I don't have a word for it.
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