Archive for March, 2005
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Ongoing confession of a long-standing party-pooper pessimist
March 29th, 2005 |Posted In: General, Scenic Views from the 20th Century
Back in the early 80s, there was a lower economic area of Buckhead that began to eat itself in the hopes of attaining glory. We lived in the area right before it began to chow down. The name of the apartment “complex” may have been Oak Hill. My husband thinks it may have been Oak Hill. I don’t have a clue. And he’s not certain because that isn’t how it was known. Its common name was “Viet Cong Villa”. The buildings were dark red brick, each consisting of, if I remember correctly, 4 to 6 townhome type apartments (upstairs and down), either two or three bedrooms, probably built in the 40s. The Emory family-student housing complex was in the same style, the one they tore down and replaced around the time of the Olympics.
The name “Viet Cong Villa” should clue in as to the neighborhood. I don’t know why but a large number of Vietnamese families had settled in the complex. Extended families of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. There was also a significant-sized “hispanic” community and a number of other nationalities. In our little cul-de-sac we were the only household with English as the primary language. The two apartments on our left were Vietnamese. The one on our right was Hispanic. The next building was all Vietnamese with the exception of one German family. The complex was probably close to 90 percent Vietnamese and Hispanic.
Between 1975 and 1984 about 8000 Vietnamese arrived in Georgia as refugees, poor, bewildered, struggling to cope with new culture. One set of my grandparents lived in southwestern Missouri and a number of Vietnamese had landed there as well, not quite so easy to overlook, seeming like a wayward flock of birds blown off course by a storm, about as inobvious as if if you were watching Shirley Jones and Robert Preston in “Music Man” and suddenly there was this group of Vietnamese extras in the background who you could swear weren’t within two worlds of the parade your last viewing. But there are a lot more buildings in Atlanta where the roads snake around and about instead of squaring off in neat orderly blocks, and those faces disappeared into the fringes in the midst of the city, hidden in the nicks and tucks of those roads, such as at Oak Hill, the entrance to which was deftly hidden in plain view at a stop light at an imposing RR trestle that served as a gate to Piedmont Road’s ascendance into Buckhead. Most people we knew or know never realized the apartment complex even existed.
The apartments, as far as I was concerned, were quite nice. Walk in and there were the stairs to the second-floor and then a decent-sized open living/dining room area. The kitchen was to the rear, had a stove/oven and refrigerator that worked and also a small pantry for storage. Upstairs was the bath and the bedrooms. Some of the walls were plaster and some sheet rock, and as there was more plaster than sheet rock the apartment had that solid feel persevering feel that comes with plaster. The windowsills were deep, the center windows large, and the side windows all opened with a hand crank. The flooring downstairs was a godawful but tolerable vinyl. The upstairs flooring was real wood. The bath was old tile. The stairs were so worn that I fell down them, from the top all the way to the bottom, several times. Always, I landed in a frightfully contorted heap with half my body stretching up the front door and my husband would come running in thinking I’d broken my neck. Each time I fell I happened to be carrying a cup of hot coffee or tea, and each time I remember thinking I didn’t want to spill that hot coffee or tea all over me. And never once, falling down those steps, did I spill a drop. As I fell down the steps I always somehow managed to set down my cup.
Without speaking a word to each other, only nodding, it still managed to be a friendly cul-de-sac. Except for the teen-age hopeful drummers who practiced in the afternoons, it was surprisingly quiet. One may wonder how we ended up scarcely speaking a word to the neighbors, only nodding, but that’s the way it was, and one never heard English spoken. If you heard anyone speaking English outside it was so unusual you’d go look to see what was going on. We were usually on the road but I don’t think it would have been different had we lived there full-time.
I have no idea who the owners were. Management was a single white guy who lived in one of the front buildings. If you lodged a complaint, nothing ever went unattended for more than a day or two.
The apartments lined several tree-lined streets that were widely spaced. There were no back porches or private yards. Instead there was a large, sprawling communal area out the back doors. It was a grassy little valley where there were no trees, the grass always well-tended, not muddy. A basketball hoop where the teenage boys played was behind our apartment, and there was a small childrens’ play area in another part of the complex.
One day one of the apartments back behind us, across that little valley, put up a small enclosed back porch area. Cheap screening with a rippled green fiberglass roof and a cheap screen door. Within a month it seemed nearly every other apartment had put up the same style back porch area and then everyone had small bar-b-ques that they cooked on and sat outside early evenings during the summer months.
The apartments were warm in the winter but were beastly hot in the summer. There was no built-in AC and few had window units. We didn’t. No one else in our cul-de-sac did. This was the early 80s and most left their apartment doors open all night during the summer. I remember more than once, the upstairs an oven, seeking some relief from the heat by sleeping on the linoleum floor downstairs. It seemed just plain crazy that in the middle of Atlanta you could leave your front door wide open all night without anyone seeing that as an invitation to walk off with all your belongings, but we were shortly leaving our door open as well.
One time we returned after a couple of weeks on the road to find that our back door had been open the entire time. One of us had forgotten to lock it and a cat had gained entrance. A white cat. Shed a lot of white fur all over the furniture and the bed but that was it. It was the only place we lived in where we never had a break-in or anyone stealing anything from outside. The only trouble we did personally have was once we came back after a week out, 4 or 5 am, were happy as we’d finally saved enough money to get our car fixed, were looking forward to getting it running again, we went to bed and next thing we knew the police were visiting outside, all the cars vandalized, headlights smashed, tires slashed. We didn’t have the money to fix the car plus buy tires.
Before we moved out there had begun to be talk of gangs and there were two more predawn incidents in the parking lot, gunfire finally, blue police lights filling the upstairs front bedroom. An air conditioning unit immediately appeared in the upstairs of an apartment across the street. People began closing their doors. I don’t know where we first heard about gangs moving in. Some things you remember like that and others it seems like one day you know, you breathe in and there’s news in the air which becomes knowledge that seems a priori, no questioning how you ever came to know as it was as natural as breathing. I do remember that no one was talking about Vietnamese gangs yet in Atlanta. The night of the last incident, I was dreaming that I had entered the front upstairs bedroom and looked down to see myself dancing in the street in blue-green light. Which is when I woke up and went into the front bedroom, blue light playing on the white walls, and stood a long while looking down at the police cars.
The strip mall next door (across an access to Buford Highway) had stores and restaurants that served the different communities. The theater had been one of the few in Atlanta that showed alternative films back then. On the weekends and late nights they showed martial arts films, not dubbed. The lines were long.
On the other side of the strip mall was another apartment complex, newer, early 70s vintage, already sagging, that was almost entirely Hispanic. A couple of blocks down a side street one started to get into the sex district. Across the road from our complex was Atlanta’s one Church of Scientology. An odd building that was part house. When they moved out a kindergarten center took it over and stapled on a pink tower so everyone would know there were children there.
I didn’t feel a very good neighbor around the Vietnamese families. I was staggering a lot around there, and when I went out to walk the dog and couldn’t walk I felt rather obvious. Indeed, it was so quiet there (to me) and I felt so obvious that the clanking of the bottles I tossed into the dempsey dumpster late at night unnerved me. I didn’t want the neighbors with their families of children and grandparents to hear them. So one night at around three am I found myself sensibly digging a hole in the garden under a neighbor’s window where I could bury my bottles in peace. I woke up a bit as I dug and stopped and thought what am I doing because I couldn’t remember, and then I remembered and I thought to myself y’know this isn’t exactly normal. I was off the road by then and was supposedly, hopefully trying to stop doing this kind of thing. Having already been hospitalized and kicked out after smuggling in alcohol and drinking on Antabuse (goodbye, you’re hopeless, we’re not going to be responsible) I figured I’d be dead in a couple of months.
I was, I felt, a sensible insensible drinker. With my hair cropped close to my head and my leather cap and jacket I felt I was less noticeable playing tag with the cars on the highway as I made my way across from the liquor store. A woman with long hair I thought now that would be a stand out in the sun obvious bit of staggering news crossing the highway. But not me. I thought I was considerate, forgoing my authentic stiletto 60s heels for tennis shoes because I was aware I wasn’t too steady on my feet and didn’t want anyone having to rake me up off the road.
I read horrifying things about Vietnam during those years. Things I’d not heard before, some things I’ve not read published since. I’d known Vietnam Veterans but none had ever talked about the war. I had known about My Lai. It was big news in Georgia as Calley was from Georgia. But for all the media coverage, the photos, one still never read in graphic terms the one-on-one American against Vietnamese violence, and though I took for granted a lot there were things I read that would never have occurred to me. It had only been five or six years since, in high school, I’d watched on the news the chaos of the evacuation of Saigon. Desperate crowds you know are composed of desperate individuals but the camera never settles long or close enough to get too personal.
The early 80s had its own set of horrors that sank to the bottom of America’s media pit where news is news for an instant then gone. Bits and pieces were little knife points sticking up through the newsprint from Central and South American that John Travolta and disco balls and the shrieking sopranos of the BeeGees kept converting into part of the splintered, sparkly bedazzle along with Reagan smiling smiling and George H. W. Bush. Reading between the lines would sometimes eventually coalesce into a more detailed story in alternative publications. I read up on fascism as best as I could, going through the libraries, carrying armloads of books with me on the road. For some reason there didn’t seem a lot available in Atlanta, or not as much as I wanted, and here I was forgetting and leaving books at motels.
In 1981 “Mad Max” was released in America, the same year Negroponte was appointedAmbassador to Honduras.
J. Emmett Winn writes in “Mad Max, Reaganism and the Road Warrior”:
These films entered the US during a period of renewed nationalistic interest and conservatism linked with the Reagan/Bush administrations… The Road Warrior was very successful in the US at a time when Reaganism touted the need to “right” the social order and build a conservative nationalism that could thwart the supposed threat posed by multiculturalism. Simultaneously, it provided the violent white male hero of Western mythology who would rid the hegemonic “space” of the “deviants” threatening the dominant elite
I don’t recollect the first time I saw “Mad Max” but I was likely not all there and just got the feeling of grit in my teeth. The second time would not have been too long later and I remember watching and thinking, “Oh, uh, this doesn’t seem to be what I thought it might have been,” though I couldn’t much remember what I thought it might have been. The first time, there’d just been a sense of punk rage blowing in off the desert and it got high marks for not being disco. Almost everything was damn disco or an exercise video dressed up to look like something else and “Mad Max” wasn’t that.
I read on the internet an individual being mystified at the supposed punk cult following that Mad Max had. But I don’t know that Mad Max had really a punk following.
One felt like one was living in a desert wasteland. And having grown up partly in the desert, and loving the desert, I mean the cultural and political waste of the time. If you came out of the 70s there was the sense your older brother and sister hippies had gone and left you in the lurch. By the time you were out of high school social and political consciousness seemed to be eaten up by coke. The future had been ripped out from under one, squandered by this seeming collapse into no-holds-barred greed and a terrifying disregard for a crumbling environment. I remember 1980 very clearly and one felt assaulted, one felt raped by the Reaganites and what they were preparing to do, felt raped and assaulted already because you knew their plans and how they had no boundaries. A detached clip of Mad Max seemed to capture the futility and rage of that abandonment to merciless sneering power but as you sat and watched it became clear the brief clip and the whole book had nothing to do with each other. Mad Max turned down being a hero, disappearing into the desert, but he was no punk, and the villains were being sold as punk, and all that was left was an insane vigilante justice that felt like conservatism out for a long-running, gory, good old time. What the general public, the college boys, the fashion punks saw and identified as raw, as punk, wasn’t Patti Smith, Television, the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop. What they whooped and hollered over was anger dissociated from despair, becoming a violence fetish instead and a reaffirmation of what I would call the Death Culture of the Reaganites and Bushites. Appearance over substance. Meaning beaten to a black and blue pulp, trussed up in fashion handcuffs and sold as something other than what it is. By the late 80s the alternative paper here was running fashion pieces with models featuring bruised eyes and legs as desirable, coquettish, apparently perceiving no conflict with occasional stories on violence against women, which I don’t think is another story but is part of the continuum.
The fetishism of violence seems to me always to do with subversion and denial of despair.
On 6 March 1978 Larry Flynt was paralyzed during an assassination attempt. On 27 Nov 1978 the Mayor of San Francisco and Harvey Milk had been assassinated. On December 8, 1980 Chapman murdered Lennon. On Oct 6 1981 Anwar Sadat, the President of Egypt, was assassinated. On March 30 1981 there was the assassination bid on Reagan that missed his heart and got Press Secretary Jim Brady’s head. On May 13 1981 there was an assassination bid on the pope. It wasn’t exactly the most settled of times. Conservative, nihilistic, Hollywood gold punk gunk came crawling out of the confusion with Reagan at the helm, waving like a beauty queen and there was nothing ironic about it that rapture ecstasies trumped faith in realism. Yes, I know my view on nihilism isn’t typical. I know that Reagan was billed as the antidote to nihilism. I don’t think what’s regarded normally as nihilism is what it’s purported to be, and is instead realism stomped on and repackaged as unprincipaled sullen joy in doom and gloom. The way I looked on it in the early 80s was if what’s billed as nihilism is unprincipaled and valueless, then Reagan was its muscled mardi gras king. I remember looking out the front window of the “Viet Cong Villa” apartment, it was a sunny day, summer, and Reagan and his grand nihilistic parade constellated in the shimmering ether (I believe this was while I was getting sober), and I don’t know why I was seeing Schwarzenegger as his body-double riding the same float, don’t know what had happened to cause him to be on my mind, but he was there too. The parade was furiously vaporizing the omnipresent drizzle that had darkened the parade route since the hippies and their flowers had vacated it. Annointed in ask-me-no-questions oil, dazzling, the float hunted down every party-pooping pessimistic that shirked the parade route, zapped away their cloud with global warming and careened off, laughing, vindicated followers cheering wildly.
Was the damndest thing I ever saw.
I got sober in 1982 or 1983. I know one is expected to keep a track on that, but I’m not good with remembering numbers and I stopped worrying about the exact date a long while ago. Became just 1982 or 1983. We moved out of Oak Hill or whatever it’s real name was as we’d heard the place was due to be torn down and while moving out came upon stashes of pills and bottles I’d hidden away in stupors as security then forgotten about. The apartment complex was torn out, one part then another. Bulldozed and businesses installed and more and more businesses installed near it, trying to pull the glory aura of Buckhead down down the hill to the RR tracks and beyond. But it all went flat. A high profile strip club, appropriately named the Gold Club, at its peak during the Olympics, kept the area alive for a while. Now the strip club is gone. Scandal took care of it, I guess after it had served its purpose. Some congregation, determined to illustrate how Jesus covers sin with righteousness, made the building their church home, a god club, draping the mirrors with gold fabric. Whatever happened to them I don’t know but they’re gone now. And finally the strip mall is gone. That part of town which had just been different before now looks desolate.
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A Radiant Botanist's Primer: Lesson one, on the weeds and the flowers
March 27th, 2005 |Posted In: General
From the NY Times which I see today has an article on megachurches (a subject I brought up in Friday’s post).
When you ask people how Radiant has changed their lives, they will almost invariably talk about how it helped open their hearts. But there’s a kind of narrowing going on here as well, which became clear a few minutes later, when Tom flipped to another passage from a recent sermon. ” ‘Some seed fell among the thorny weeds, and the weeds grew up with them and choked the good plants,’ ” he read, quoting Luke 8:7. Then he added his exegesis: ”We’ve had friends who were not Christian, and for me they were like the thorny weeds,” he said. ”We’ve had to commit ourselves to friends who could help us grow spiritually.”
The following night I heard this same message, communicated more explicitly, at Radiant’s youth service. ”If I asked how many of you have close friends who are unbelievers, a lot of you would probably raise your hands,” the pastor told the crowd of about 150 teenagers, most of whom looked dressed for a rock concert. ”I’ll tell you right now, if one of you is a believer and the other is not, your relationship is doomed.”
Radiant is a megachurch in Maricopa County AZ. It has a weekly attendance of 5000. They were expecting 15,000 for Easter weekend services. It is the core gathering place for the “exurbs” in that area who purchase the new middle class homes for $175,000 without the amenities of community planning, parks, local government. As the article states, the church, Radiant, has taken the place of local govt in providing certain amenities. The cost? The tithe. 10 percent of your income. The church is like a mall with Starbucks and a drive-thru Latte window. They are conservative. When the GOP asked for church directories they handed them over and had church voter registration drives, in church, making sure to point out in sermons that they were non-partisan.
One of the more striking facts to emerge from the 2004 presidential election was that 97 of America’s 100 fastest-growing counties voted Republican. Most of these counties are made up of heretofore unknown towns too far from major metropolitan areas to be considered suburbs…These exurban cities tend not to have immediately recognizable town squares, but many have some kind of big, new structure where newcomers go to discuss their lives and problems and hopes: the megachurch…In sprawling, decentralized exurbs like Surprise, where housing developments rarely include porches, parks, stoops or any of the other features that have historically brought neighbors together, megachurches provide a locus for community. In many places, they operate almost like surrogate governments, offering residents day care, athletic facilities, counseling, even schools.
One can go look at Radiant at the link above, but don’t get too attached to the photo of the building as it being what Radiant looks like. Because Radiant is building a new church, all 55,000 square feet of it, to look like a ski lodge.
They play down that they’re Assemblies of God. The article states you often don’t learn this until you’re preparing to join.
They don’t believe in evolution.
Homosexuality and abortion are considered sins.
The church was built on canvassing which learned most people wanted a place to go to without dressing up. The majority of young middle class families with children are conservative. Radiant is a monster of a fast growing church. It didn’t exist 9 years ago. Some elders felt the area was about to take off and they called in Lee McFarland, who had just left his job with Microsoft in Washington State to take up the ministry. They felt they needed young blood. Lee put on chinos and went around canvassing, door to door. No one wanted him. He put on jeans and presenting himself then as a secular canvasser he went out asking what music people liked and why they didn’t go to church. And built the church according to the responses he received.
What’s interesting about this is, and I could very well be wrong about it, but how much do the current ammenities of socializing with a certain group of people play in the moulding and remoulding of one’s beliefs, over the idea that people, based on beliefs, seek out individuals and groups with which they’ll feel at home?
Ask people at Radiant what first brought them to the church, and you will almost never hear a mention of God. It might have been a billboard: ”Isn’t It Time You Laughed Again?” Or the twice-a-week aerobics class (with free child care) called Firm Believers. Or one of their children might have come with a friend to play video games. ..McFarland’s messages are light on liturgy and heavy on what he calls ”successful principles for living” — how to discipline your children, how to reach your professional goals, how to invest your money, how to reduce your debt, even how to shake a porn addiction. ”If Oprah and Dr. Phil are doing it, why shouldn’t we?” he says.
But never mind all that. Never mind what they believe. Never mind what has brought them together. How they live. What I’m interested in is this, repeating again a passage already quote d from the article,
‘’If I asked how many of you have close friends who are unbelievers, a lot of you would probably raise your hands,’’ the pastor told the crowd of about 150 teenagers, most of whom looked dressed for a rock concert. ‘’I’ll tell you right now, if one of you is a believer and the other is not, your relationship is doomed.’’
The non-believers are thorny weeds to be broken away from. They are the weeds that choke the good plants.
Apparently most don’t stray too far from the hand that raised them. The success in voter registration drives at these churches is credited to many of these people coming up during the Reagan years.
These are people that the Republican Party has always run well with — it’s conventional wisdom among political analysts that young, middle-class couples raising children tend to be conservative — and in 2004 the G.O.P. made a strong play for exurbanites. Megachurches were a key part of the strategy. Supporters were asked to supply the Bush-Cheney campaign with church directories so it could make sure these churchgoers were registered and planning to vote. ”For the first time we didn’t just engage businesspeople or Second Amendment supporters; we engaged people who said they were motivated first and foremost by their values, and these people were often churchgoers,” Gary Marx, a liaison to social conservatives for the campaign, told me recently. ”We asked them to reach out to their community, and their community is the megachurch.”
Marx also went directly to megachurch pastors, not for endorsements, he says, but to encourage them to help get out the vote. More often than not, he was well received. ”An old-line pastor who went to seminary in the 60′s is not going to be open to something like Citizenship Sundays when you pass out registration cards to everyone at the church,” Marx said. ”But many of the pastors of these megachurches are in their late 30′s, early 40′s. They were teenagers during the Reagan years, and that’s when conservatism and engagement by evangelicals began to become mainstream. So they would be more willing to do voter drives and things like that, more tuned into citizenship and engaging the community beyond soup kitchens.”
I doubt in Surprise there’s much call for soup kitchens, not so far from urban centers. Where you have people who can afford to separate themselves off in this manner, areas where a broad mix of income isn’t likely to happen, they’re not only exempt from dealing with the dynamics of urban centers but even the dynamics of typical smaller towns where not everyone is cut from the same cloth.
Out in the exurbs, you don’t have to work to learn to live with and get along with thorny weeds. They are not part of your community socially or economically. They and their concerns can easily be shed.
I read an article a Minnesota megachurch, Wooddale.
We skip the nosh and buzz past a number of small meeting rooms labeled with today’s discussion topics (9:00: “Making Sense of Creation and Evolution,” 10:15: “Handling Difficult Situations”). A banner hanging outside one room announces “Classes at Disciple U.” This is not simply a church, it’s a religious campus—a fusion of theology, education and business.
Crossroads Church hosts 5000 members. A “vast majority” voted for Bush. The pastor says that abortion and value-of-life issues are the #1 reason they voted for Bush, taking precedence over the war and economy. Indeed, he compares abortion to terrorism.
“Suppose you ask some candidate for office if it should be OK to allow terrorists into our country, and he tells you he’s all for it. At that point, the other issues on your plate wouldn’t much matter. Well, for us, the value-of-life issue is that critical.”
The area in which Crossroads church is located, in Vancouver, Washington, is home to three megachurches. It is believed that most are Bush supporters.
And now that the elections are over with and Bush is set for another four years, they’ve had some thinking to do on the heat, the divisiveness.
Pastor Ritchie is tired of divisiveness.
Now, “I’m tired of divisiveness” would make many think, “Oh, a willingness to try to communicate.” And that’s what it might mean coming from the mouths of people who treated other people like people and believed in working toward a tolerable living agreement according rights to those of differeing opinions.
“I’m tired of the divisiveness,” Pastor Ritchie says. “There was a letter to the editor… just the other day from a lady who said Bush is delusional if he thinks God had anything to do with him being president.
“In that case, what is she saying about the Bible and being led by God to do anything? What is she saying about people’s faith? That kind of arrogance does not win friends and influence people.”
There’s nothing the woman could likely have said that would have influenced Pastor Ritchie. Nothing she could have said that would win her his friendship other than, “I want to be a member of your church.”
Being tired of the divisiveness here means only it’s high time for the weeds to shut up.
Despite the euphoric conviviality and the tremendous and successful social outreach of these churches, these are not people who are interested in getting along. They don’t believe in dialogue. Their numbers have increased significantly, and what they’re telling their children is this, “If I asked how many of you have close friends who are unbelievers, a lot of you would probably raise your hands…I’ll tell you right now, if one of you is a believer and the other is not, your relationship is doomed.”
I feel for those kids living in a world full of expendable weeds which they must root from their gardens.
(Man, I hate this. It is so depressing.)
Shadow Walking
by H.o.p.
And here a proud mom struts her son’s stuff. H.o.p. did this when he was 5 actually. I always think he was 6 but he was 5 and had just discovered Photoshop. Was one of his first pieces in Photoshop. At age 5 he is superior here to anything I’ve ever produced.
Heretik posted on Munch. Below “The Sun” 1909-1911. One of my favorites now. Obviously related to “The Scream.”
Consider this two posts in one.
Happen (yesterday morning now) across the story at Pandagon. The IMAX movie, “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea”, banned at venues in southern states (GA, SC, NC and TX). Why? Because it mentions the dreaded big E word. Even the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History in Texas has declined to show the film, not wanting to spark controversy.
More here at Edpolitics and then at Panda’s Thumb.
A spokesman for the Science Museum in London described the development as worrying: ‘It is a very tight market in the Imax business and we would be extremely disappointed if this sort of pressure led to a narrowing of the market for popular Imax films.”
So march on the Creationists who are endeavoring to “take back” America from the terrorist nonpuritans who threaten to destroy holy capitalist industry with irreverent speculation on bipedalism.
The capitalist spirit alone was inadequate for ensuring the triumph of the market over a world of hostile forces, and more than the profit motive was needed to tame the American wilderness. The Puritans believed it had to be a holy endeavor. They were not interested in placing a few isolated trading posts on the edge of a wild continent; they wanted to build a model society, one founded on the precepts of God. For they understood very clearly the close connection between civilization, the Christian faith, and private property. The ownership of property teaches man responsibility, reinforces in his mind the importance of law, raises man above brutish existence, enables him to pass a better life on to his children, and affords him the leisure to meditate on matters concerning the soul. Perhaps better than any other people, the Puritans of New England understood that piety, liberty, and commerce were three essential pillars of a lasting and flourishing culture; knock one down, and civilization falls.
– Benjamin Hart, former director of the Christian Defense Fund
Yes, believe it or not, despite there being a church on virtually every corner, Xtian persecution is alive and well today. David Limbaugh’s book, “Persecution”, let’s us all in on how overwhelming, rampant, threatening, all-encompassing is that persecution (my bold face):
Christians are increasingly being driven from public life, denied their First Amendment rights, and even actively discriminated against for their beliefs.
In this relentless exposé of political correctness run amok, best-selling author David Limbaugh rips apart the liberal hypocrisy that condones selective mistreatment of Christians in the mainstream media, Hollywood, our schools and universities, and throughout our public life.
In Persecution you’ll enter the hotly contested battle for the soul of our public schools. Here are appalling — but true — stories of how anti-Christian social engineers not only prohibit school prayer and forbid students from wearing Christian symbols, like a simple cross, but even expunge the real story of Christianity in America from history textbooks. Worse still, in the name of “diversity,” “tolerance,” “multiculturalism,” and “sex education,” the social engineers actively inculcate hatred of Christianity as ignorant, repressive, and offensive…
Looking honestly at the dominant influence of Christianity in America’s colonial culture and schools, where the Bible was routinely used as a textbook, Limbaugh makes a compelling case that the education students receive today is not what the Founders would have endorsed. Indeed, they would have been outraged at what is taught — and what the courts say — in their name, under the pretext of the non-constitutional and woefully misunderstood phrase: “separation of church and state.”
Limbaugh zeros in on how activist judges misinterpret and misapply the Constitution to eliminate Christianity from American government and public life. He reveals a society-wide disinformation campaign that has successfully obscured, for many people, what the Constitution actually says about religious freedom. While allegedly promoting religious freedom, liberals actually suppress it.
Providing details of case after shocking case, Limbaugh demonstrates that the anti-Christian forces now controlling significant portions of our society aggressively target the slightest hint of public Christianity for discrimination, yet ardently encourage the spread of secular values — including “alternative sexuality” and promiscuity.
Limbaugh cuts cleanly through this confusion and distortion, exploring the deeply held Christian faith of the Founding Fathers, and showing that Christianity and Judeo-Christian principles are essential — and were recognized by the Founders as essential — to the unique political liberties Americans enjoy.
Persecution is an indispensable tool to help Christians reclaim their right (and duty) to enter the political arena and to try to influence the course of this country. It helps every liberty-loving citizen to champion what America is supposed to be about-religious freedom.
There is why you can endlessly seek middle ground with the refrain of “live and let live” in mind, pursue sensible commonality with the notion that if you just act nicely and treat fairly then you will be treated nice and fair in return, employ the Golden Rule of treating others as you would wish to be treated, and–you’re still a fanatic, persecuting heathen out to take away the rights of Xtians. Because these people don’t care about First Amendment rights and religions freedom. Never have. They say they must have freedom and rights, are being denied freedom and rights, when what they mean is that they feel they’ve been denied their right to Xtian government–because you’ve got it wrong, secular government isn’t what it’s about at all.
Yeah, Xtians have it hard. American Church Lists is ready to sell you their lists of 488,000 U.S and Canadian churches and Xtian private schools so that you can reach this $40 billion dollar industry (notice the blue star and Red and white bands proceeding into or from, recalling the U.S. flag).
Megachurches with weekly services holding no less than 2000 and up to 16,000, are on the increase with megabuildings and acres of parking lots. If you’re leery of getting lost in such a church, Atlanta’s own Roswell Street Baptist Church lets you know just how OK it is by comparing it with business success and reassuring you that big business success (and religious success) is the American Dream.
Atlanta happens to have one of the highest concentrations of megachurches in the country.
Only the suburbs of L.A., Houston and Dallas compare. One Atlanta suburb also happens to have three behemoths within uncharacteristically close range — Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Decatur, New Birth Baptist Church in Lithonia and World Changers in College Park. Not surprisingly, the churches — which measure power by number of members — have been known to get feisty about attracting and keeping congregants. After all, the church’s economic health (which, measured in tithes, can total more than $100,000 a week) hinges on how fully the pews are packed.
No, sorry, I don’t buy it, the persecution of Xtians bit, that they have been beaten back to the fringes of society where they must fearlessly connect with one another by means of underground tunnels and profess their confidence in the cross writing in the dust of their floors, from which they can wipe the evidence of their faith when the secular police darken their door.
I live in the south (not from) but live here and as I wrote on some lost comment board a while back, two and three decades ago I wouldn’t have believed it if anyone had told me this would be an issue later. First in schools and now causing theaters to reject films. And a couple of weeks ago when I wrote that comment it wouldn’t have occurred to me that IMAX theaters would bend and ban a film because of the word “evolution”. If these Creationists are looking, as they say, for freedom of speech, then their idea of freedom of speech sounds like what you might feel free not to say if you don’t want a back alley mugging.
I go back to check the comment board at Pendagon and the Discovery Place at Charlotte NC has chosen not to show it.
Also in the news, a school in Raleigh NC is apologizing that a teacher used text that preached creationism and encouraged children “to proselytize for Jesus”. “God’s word tells us about a kind of odor only Christians have…Christians carry forth the fragrance of Christ wherever they go by the way they live; that is, they remind people of him.”
The school admits it crossed the line. They’re excusing it on the teacher being from Australia, using a Christian-based ABEKA text (geez) and that she didn’t know the rules. But this doesn’t explain why, when the parents complained to the principal, she asked, “What’s the problem? Don’t you and your family go to church?” She also said she didn’t understand their objections as their daughter was making perfect scores.
“Could someone find Christ by the scent trail you are leaving behind you?”
–A Beka
The National Center for Science Education is tracking state bills on creationism and evolution in the schools.
Evolution is only mentioned once in Alabama schools and even that required a disclaimer, though evolution is no longer described as controversial.
On February 10, 2005, the Alabama State Board of Education adopted a revised set of state science standards (the Alabama Course of Study: Science, or ACOSS). The treatment of evolution in the revised ACOSS remains weak: evolution is explicitly mentioned only once in the high school biology standards, under the section on protective adaptations. Evolutionary concepts such as hierarchical classification are described without mentioning evolution. During the board meeting, John Schweinsberg of Alabama Citizens for Science Education protested that evolution was obviously downplayed for religious reasons, despite the fact that “[i]t’s just as basic to biology as the periodic table is to chemistry. Teaching biology without evolution is like teaching chemistry without the periodic table” (quoted in the Montgomery Advertiser, February 10, 2005).
The revised ACOSS also continues to contain, in its preface, a version of the evolution disclaimer originally mandated in the 1996 version of ACOSS, but evolution is no longer described as controversial.
Intelligent Design. I go to visit the Intelligent Design web home to see what kind of an image they want to project. Blue and white. Unimaginative, tired out science and corporate colors that because of mundane pervasiveness go hand-in-hand with “look, see, we’re official”. IDnet logo in red, white and blue, maybe drawing on patriotism, of course drawing on patriotism, the red white and blue belonging first and foremost to Xtians (review above). ID. Identification. I imagine there was some bantering back and forth about how that was incredibly clever. Intelligent Design is our ID. Anyway, the website came out of someone’s cookie-cutter template archive, but whose, I know it has to be on here somewhere. Indeed, there it is. CDS Creative Design, whose home page, oh man, let’s get past that ugly home page. And yes, the same template used for “Love Mercy” (non profit charity) is also used for ID. the IDnet logo derives from the Love Mercy global logo or vice versa. A needy African American child smiling at the benevolence of white people highlights the entrance page, and I’m not even going there. Back out. Let’s see what else the CDS people have designed for. A website for “Troubled House”, “The modern trial of a biologist persecuted for his lack of faith in Darwinism.”
God vs. Scicence as God. Okay. We get it. Written by Daniel Shwabauer with an intro on the front page by Phillip E. Johnson, author of “Darwin on Trial.” I was thinking this is the kind of thing they must sell for presentation at churches, but navigation has a link to “students and teachers” and a media kit.
Heroic characters say things like:
“I did win. I won freedom. I won the right to question… The right to ask , “What if it didn’t happen that way?”‘
Yes, but we certainly wouldn’t want anyone else to ask the question for themselves, so keep the E word out of it shall we? Let’s not darken the IMAX theater with it, shall we? No, god forbid. Which they believe god does.
Teachers are urged to get the manuscript.
Teachers who truly want to challenge students to think independently will find ‘Troubled House’ inspiring and challenging. This play will fuel great discussion about the definition of science, intolerance, academic freedom, and integrity…
Get in and read the study guide. All wants to sound very sensible and reasonable. No hint here that they’ll take your IMAX away. Instead, the kids seem to be ready for a revolution in the schools. They want their Intelligent Design. That’s what their hungering for. They’ve been deprived long enough. Like refugees wanting bread and water they storm doors seeking truth, seeking freedom, demanding to be afforded the right to Intelligent Design.
I have never been to an IMAX movie by the way. I have always, for some reason, connected them with monster trucks, these behomoths that for some reason make for major entertainment drawing thousands because they have big wheels and wantonly crush things. Maybe because many many years ago I was with a friend at Six Flags and people were leaving the IMAX theater there, and despite it providing relief from the Georgia sun and humidity I wasn’t willing to stand in line the rest of the day to see a film that had no plot, was just “See how big I am. Never mind capturing you with character and plot. Instead, we’re just going to make stuff really big so you can walk out going wow, so big!! That was the biggest movie I’ve ever been to!” Anyway, my friend’s husband was in the Air Force and so when I think of this I always think of when I visited her in Florida (many many years ago) and we were driving through the woods at night, through the Air Force Base, and I remarked on the lights back yonder in the pines and asked what was back there and her husband, blank-faced, said, “Nothing’s back there.” And so for the fun of hearing him say, “Nothing’s back there,” I kept saying, “You sure there’s nothng back there? I see lights.” And he’d respond, on command, “Nothing’s back there.” Eventually he admitted there might be lights but he didn’t know what they were.
Before going to Florida my friend lived in Douglasville GA which, I noticed, before the advent of Monster Truck mega rallies, was a place where people liked to put really big, big wheels on their trucks. I don’t know if it’s still like that out there, which is now really just another suburb of Atlanta.
“She’s prejudiced against monster trucks! She’s a culture snob!”
Well, uhm, I just assume from experience that where there are monster trucks I’m not likely to find uhm, never mind. And, yes, I’ve never been to a monster truck rally, and for all I know I might enjoy one in a wow I got super-stoked kind of let’s beat ‘em up who can we beat em up kind of let’s flatten mountains into molehills and run over the cars of Iraqi’s with our big jeeps kind of way. Right? As in here is a video of what happens if you’re in Iraq and you’re caught stealing some wood. The video shows a clip from “Frontline”. A white car. About five men. A few dollars worth of wood on top of the car. They were caught stealing some scraps of wood. The soldiers say they tell them not to loot but they don’t understand so they will crush the car. First they shoot out the windows of the car. Then they take the tank and roll it over the car and crush it. The soldiers laugh and they say to the Iraqis, “That’s what you get when you loot.” The car belonged to a taxi driver; it was how he earned his livelihood.
Yeah, crushing cars pumps the old adrenaline up. Feels powerful, feels good. Let’s go do it again!
I am wondering what the subject of the first IMAX film was and looking for it come upon a page at the America’s Air Force webite (more blue and red and a jet unfurling its load of missiles) where it has an Air Force “first”, an Air Force IMAX movie which had its premiere at the Smithsonian last December. An attempt no doubt to get the high school boys to sign up with visions of themselves playing Tom Cruise.
Badly written play, the one selling Intelligent Design. I’m not even going to bother with quotes. And I’m tired of looking at the Intelligent Design website which has on one page a pic of a girl in goggles pouring red kool-aid from one vessel into another. Has a pic of a microscope. Pics from cans that seek to give the impression, against the blue field, with the red, white and blue logo, that “We are America’s Best in Science.”
Now, the why of the problem of looking for a common middle ground with these people and bending over backwards until your back is broken. There is no common middle ground. Those who literally accept that they are the possessors of right, who carry the truth of the world and universe, that’s one thing. Add to that the divine directive to evangelize, to go from town to town spreading the gospel, and where it is not received to shake the dust of the place off one’s feet, handing them over to damnation, these are not middle ground people just looking to get along. They’re businessmen. What they’re selling is Xtianity. When a person always has something to sell, then the people they meet who has not purchased the product is not so much a kindred human as a customer to be won. They have a higher goal for you in mind, a better plan for your life, one that lasts eternal, not just until the latest new in laundry soap has run out of the box. And there’s nothing quite like communing with people who pray that you see the light so that you may be saved from eternal damnation. It’s not like they’re going to trust your taste in books.
Problem is, these folks aren’t satisfied with knocking the dust of your house off their feet, walking off and leaving you to your sorry fate. And most aren’t really that interested in saving you either, because if they were they wouldn’t keep blasting down that rock of faith until you have in every church each believing themselves to be one member of a very select group of individuals who have heard and received rightly and even their fellow churchmen and churchwomen as in dire need of repentence and salvation as the general heathen on the street. What they do have is the lust of fifteenth century papal bulls in their hearts and a burning mission to bring the earth into submission–and protect their children as best they can from coming into contact with contrary thought.
Well, some of them are satisifed with shedding your dust.
A young woman lived briefly across the hall from us here, and the day she was moving out last year (neighborhood scared her) she came knocking on the door. She wanted to leave me the key for the landlord, but she also seemed to want to talk, which surprised me, that she was suddenly all friendly. She was nice. She commented on a painting I’d done. Though I was unbathed and stinky, and my son was still asleep, I invited her in, wondering what was up. She was tall, pretty, red hair, pink hoodie, mid 20s, friendly, exceptionally adept at packing her bio into a brief amount of conversation as in a short amount of time I knew her favored artists and where she’d been to school in NY and how well-traveled she was (which always makes me feel quite small as I’m not well-traveled at all, it taking money and time to travel, and we were always working and slaving for rent money) and I thought well it’s too bad that we didn’t talk before the day she was moving out–for we had met when she was moving in but hadn’t talked–except I’m two decades older and have a son and I wouldn’t have imagined she’d have been interested. She started going on about an art gallery she was involved with downtown and maybe I’d be interested in showing there, talking about how she liked the small galleries so much better than the professional ones only interested in big names, money etcetera. I am skeptical of easy things and asked some question about it and it was I guess the kind of question that couldn’t be easily ducked and she said that well it was part of their new Xtian church they were starting downtown, trying to do a neighborhood ministry that involved people in the area and I ought to come down some time and check it out. I”ve heard a lot of this type thing over the years and so I said in a nice friendly but have no doubt about it way that I wasn’t Xtian, we weren’t Xtian. This didn’t seem to perturb her too much and she continued on about the art gallery and neighborhood mission and I should go down and check it out.
And then I don’t what possessed her, but she brought up the The Da Vinci Code. Our apartment is lined with books and no doubt she must have seen something that sparked the comment, though I don’t know what as we have no best sellers lying around, and it wouldn’t have been a copy of the Da Vinci Code because we don’t own and I’ve not read and I told her I’d not read it and I said from what I had read though it seemed a modern variation/pistache/pot boiler selling as big conspiracy mystery some beliefs that have been around a very long time in one form or another. I wish I could remember how this came up. I didn’t know whether she was slightly confused about her present religious position in life, or if she was in some way impressing upon me her worldliness, which was confusing to me that she would use the Da Vinci Code to do this. I was tired and kept smiling and thinking you don’t know when to stop do you. I said yes whether it’s pagan or Jewish mysticism or what-not there were all kinds of ways of reading the bible Xtianity just didn’t have a clue about. She started looking confused and said she would have to talk to her minister about that as he knew Hebrew etc. and had studied the bible. And I thought I should not go there, I should not surprise her , but said yes I’d learned Hebrew on my own so I could read the Old Testament, and it was interesting what I’d learned but it certainly didn’t make me Jewish or a Xtian. Well, she would have to talk to her minister first to see what he had to say about all this, she said, that he would know. I said I thought Percival would be a better read. She admitted she’d never heard of it, which really surprised me, that she’d not. I said, oh well, definitely forget the Da Vinci Code, read Percival, only abandon thoughts of Xtiandom. Her shoulders were starting to shrink a bit but I for some reason kept on and how it never is what it says it’s about or what the jacket cover tells you and she must read Percival, really must, if only because it’s essential reading for knowing anything about Western literature, and I read it every few years if for no other reason than it was quite funny, that many people don’t get just how hilarious it is.
Along the way she had mentioned the art gallery/mission should have a website up, and I said well let me check and I insisted I check while she was here. It wasn’t up. She said she could get me on the mailing list. I said sure here’s my email but I knew I’d never get any notices from the mailing list. I knew she was just going through the motions now. She left. And that was that. The gallery was bait. I’d failed to measure up even for the mailing list and I knew that was the last of it. And I was thinking it was kind of too bad this was just a sales job because she was nice, friendly, probably had a lot of interesting stories to tell as she was from Poland and had been to India etc. I know If I’d been to India and was from Poland I’d have some interesting stories to tell.
Oh, by the way, she stole all the curtains and a dresser that the landlord had lent her. He was furious and called her for months and she never would call him back.
It’s an odd kind of thing that Xtians who I have to inform that I’m not Xtian, that I’m not interested in their church, I’m often made to feel that I’m somehow just not being nice to them. Their sensibilities are too delicate, and I’m being antisocial and condemning when I say, “No, I’m not Xtian.” My Xtian landlord and I ended up having a discussion on this. He’s not too delicate. I know other Xtians who aren’t too delicate or we just stay away from the subject. They don’t evangelize to me. There are more important things in this world. Perhaps not personally–their convictions may mean them the eternal life of their soul, mean everything in their world to them. But that’s their world. There are more important things socially, in trying to live in a compatible manner, yes.
Billmon’s left sidebar shows he’s reading Robert Gellately’s “Backing Hitler, Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany”. I would post too in side bars what I read but the things I’m most influenced by I’ve been reading for 20 years, so wouldn’t be “things I’m reading” but “here’s my flesh and bone, looks suspiciously like paper and print, dunnit…”
Rolling along to the next death bus stop, “Natural” death in Afghanistan at Body and Soul brings up again how the FBI criticized “inhumane” interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay saying they also accomplished nothing and revealed no more than what the FBI got using simple techniques. The Justice Department, reviewing the memo for “national security secrets” before releasing it to “a civil liberties group in December, redacted the part about the intelligence information being “suspect at best” and also blocked out an assertion that the military’s interrogation practices could undermine future military trials for terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. It did this after the Defense Dept expressed its own opinions on what parts of the letter should be redacted.
The FBI was so concerned about the interrogation practices that they went to William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s chief attorney. However, Att. General Alberto R. Gonzales, is skeptical on the reliability of the FBI’s accounts.
Sneeze, kerchoo! (Finally over winter colds and now into the damned Atlanta pollen season and no matter what I do I’m blowing my nose like crazy again but at least I had almost two weeks respite). And now returning to Billmon, he writes here on a revelation he had before the election:
And that’s when it hit me – as if, to quote Col. Kurtz, I’d been shot in the forehead with a diamond – that Kerry was almost certainly going to lose the election, that the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren’t going to persuade them otherwise.What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques – as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn’t very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate – particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers..
It was depressing but Billmon eventually accepted the futility and resurrected his blog, though approaching it differently.
I read others stopping writing with that sense of overwhelming futility, and some come back and also decide to approach their writing (blogging) differently.
Futility has as way of making one rethink the relationship between action and result, endeavor and reward..
There are differences, but America is waging much the same kind of war in the Middle East that it did here with American Indian Nations and is still ongoing, unsettled. I keep wanting to quote from George Tinker”s “Spirit and Resistance’” on how deeply rooted in the expansion and dominance, the policing and bringing all to conformity (for its own good, though in accordance with western priorities) is a peculiar theological mix so taken for granted that different camps may not recognize how similar is their food and ignorant of the why of the taste for it, a theological mix often at odds but has as its driving force the notion of individual greed being what motivates individuals.
But I’m not going to go there because I’m looking at the cover of the book “Backing Hitler, Consent & Coercion in Nazi Germany”, I’m looking at Billmon’s statement of futility in the face of the knowledge that “the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren’t going to persuade them otherwise…the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.” I am considering how many Germans responding to Hitler as Father, how many Americans responded to Reagan as the consoling Father who raised their spirits and made them proud again after what they viewed as a decade of defeat and humiliation.
And I’m reflecting on this account of the trip of some Otoe chiefs to Washington in 1873:
STAND BY: If you have a piece of land and I sell it, you would not like it.
COMMISSIONER: If you are my Agent and sell it, it is all right. You must remember there is a difference. You are the child of Government, and it must take care of you.
STANDY BY: If you have children and they want money, they have it. They do as they want to.
COMMISSIONER: No, they do not. My child does as I want to have her. If any child wants anything and I want her to have it she gets it. But if I don’t want her to have it she don’t get it and she does not turn around and ask me how I would like it if she had my money and would not let me have it.
I am thinking about modern responses to these accounts, the speeches of the politicians of the day toward the American Indians,. There are those who accept the paternalism as they see the American Indians as having been barbaric, child-like and in need of the progress their Anglo-European superiors were supposedly offering them. Then there are those who recognize the paternalism for what it is. How many recognize in this language the coercion and anticipated consent that predisposes people to hearing and accepting reassuring lies?
But of course that language wasn’t dreamt up only for coercing, in this case, the Otoe. It is a way of thinking and dealing with people that the Commissioner expected the Otoe to bow before and respect, to not question, because his general experience of it in his own society was positive and rational argument that purchased desired result. That he refers to his child here as “her” perhaps has nothing to do with his child’s actual sex but is part and parcel of his acknowledging his child as an inferior (just as women were subordinate, inferior) who has been taught not to question how the world responds to her, how authority responds to her. Americans may not like to think of themselves as living in this manner, but then when one grows up always knowing that a square house is the perfect shape for a house then one is predisposed to think of modifying domicile according to one’s needs and desires in the manner that a square teaches it may be modified. Or even subverted.
“Apocalypse Now” is about Anglo-European sensibilities in the same way that “Heart of Darkness” is about Anglo-European sensibilities.
I glance through a few pages of “Heart of Darkness” and come upon the lines where it’s acknowledged “I am not disclosing any trade secrets” that Kurtz’s methods had ruined the district, and there had been nothing profitable in them (I glance back up to the FBI saying there was nothing profitable in the investigative techniques used by the military), they only showed a lack of restraint, marked a deficiency found out early by the wilderness, and “had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion”.
But we just got a little out of control and besides you know they deserved it, right?
March 23rd, 2005 |Posted In: General
By Liberal anti-war Avenger sent over to Roachblog, the question being, how many POW’s died in North Vietnamese custody and how many prisoners have died in American custody.
I’ve got this image in my mind of Bush with post-it notes going around and renaming everything in my apartment. From object to object he goes slapping yellow post-it notes on lamps, table, chairs, books, computer…
A’rambling I shall go in a moment but before that some sites I’ve been visiting, Ratboy’s anvil (where I read first that the Florida Judge had refused reinserting Schiavo’s shunt) and Tild’s blog (where Kubrick meets Lynch) and Bagnewsnotes where I was first captivated by what I think is just a great portrait of Mahmoud Abbas from the NYTimes Magazine., colors and textures keep calling me back. I’m one of these perverse sorts who brings up more and more notepads as I wander about, copying and pasting in URL’s to go back and ponder (yes, I’ve better ways to do this but I prefer accumulating 18 notepads then boiling down to one and filing it away for future reference).
The heart’s not here today. I had a subject to blog upon. But as I went about collecting the required evidence of others, the beforehand knowings (not required in fiction) the heart got emptier and emptier, not because of the collecting, I enjoy reading others, their views. Something else.
My husband says he doesn’t think in pictures. I’m pretty much a thinking all in pics person with vague nascent mumbo-jumbo wrestlings with cursed language fumbling somewhere in the low frame of the image. They say thought (and thus intelligence) requires language. Maybe so. Though I often feel that language strips thought of a complicit knowing where all the world is verbs and not a matter of many but is instead a matter of being, that verb of being resembling a cloud that shapes and reshapes, never settles. One labors to force it still, freeze it then break it with a deconstructivist hammer into so many meaningless parts of speech, the alphabet bits directors that one’s reduced to relying upon in language, that point from the verb of being as it was here to what it was next. I read and reading I know it’s easier for some people that translation of the image into language, maybe for many. For me it’s a struggle where the hairy beast is never quite caught and caged. The verb is now Bigfoot waving bye to me as it lopes off into the forest.
Needless to say, I flunked diagramming sentences in schools year after year, until a sympathetic teacher stopped grilling me in Junior High, exempted me from the diagraming lessons. She had pulled me in apart from class to work on diagramming with me and finally put the chalk down, said she didn’t often have a student who so loved to read and never mind the other. She was my hero for the year. She lived next to the grade school I’d attended and from then on every time I passed her house I’d think, imagine, all the times I’d been on that playground and didn’t know she lived, the hero who would tell me it was fine if I couldn’t diagram, who would just let me read.
But that is not what caused the loss of heart, the struggles in conjuring language. Thinking in pics, when I read of Bush I have always the face of Bush in front of me. When I think and read of him he pops into the apartment and commences sneering at no one in particular as he doesn’t know I’m there. Being in the company of Bush’s face, the longer it is there, the emptier the heart becomes. Well, maybe not all days. But today yes. Imagine if every time you opened the refrigerator there was an empty mayo bottle with rancid crusting. You throw it away, then go back and open the refrigerator and there’s another empty mayo bottle for the trash.
I’ve kept this sitting in my in-box a couple of days. March 21st NY Times article on Nonprofits getting squeezed by the Govt for…well…the Govt isn’t loving them just the way they are:
[T] he National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is locked
in a standoff with the Internal Revenue Service, preferring to risk its tax
exemption rather than hand over documents for an I.R.S. review that the civil
rights group contends is politically motivated.While it is rare for an organization to defy the I.R.S. openly, the
N.A.A.C.P. is not the only group that believes it is being made a government target
for its positions on issues.Roughly a dozen nonprofit organizations have publicly contended that
government agencies and Congressional offices have used reviews, audits,
investigations, law enforcement actions and the threat of a loss of federal money to
discourage them from activities and advocacy that in any way challenge government
policies, and nonprofit leaders say more are complaining quietly.
Afro-netizen had a positive take on it last October.
Julian Bond had made remarks about Bush. Unflattering remarks. Bond said they were criticisms of the administration directed to policy and not at a political candidate.
Talk Left pointed out that the IRS wasn’t pursuing churches who openly supported Bush.
Continuing. The article related there was a “higher level of attention to nonprofits
and their activities and that people are getting more sophisticated in how to
get nonprofits to back off their message.”
I liked that part. The “getting more sophisticated in how to get nonprofits to back off their message.”
Kind of like Teddy Roosevelt’s “Walk softly but carry a big stick.”
Now comes the compulsive boring rehash. The world’s too big to crush down into a shoebox in the closet I pull out and open and reveal one-by-one assorted treasures going, “See? See? What, it’s not doing it for you? ”
I should close the box and put it back up before I decide that Homeland Security really is old, past news and hasn’t reshaped our world. And I don’t mean the war. I mean Life in America as Bush wanted everyone to see it and went around taping redefiners on every piece of furniture and made in China figment of this world’s imagination that he must remake the meaning of so that if you bite out of one side it is the face of terror and bite out of the other it is the face of savior Bush and Homeland Security.
Bits and pieces. All bits and pieces.
Strolling back in time to October, Evil Bastard observed that dissent from anyone at all was not allowed in Bush America. Wear a t-shirt at a Bush rally that reads “Protect our civil liberties” and we are now likely to be arrested. Shout one , “No!” at a Cheney Ralley and even if you had a ticket arrest is the response and a charge of criminal trespass. Reclaim Democracy noted the story of Brett Bursey, arrested for holding a “No War for Oi” sign during Bush’s visit to SC. He was amongst hundreds carrying signs in support of Bush. The Secret Service ordered him to the “free speech zone” a half mile away from where Bush was speaking.
Bits and pieces.
What’s interesting, what naturally follows is it’s the pro-Bush happy campers are the ones in a Controlled-Speech-Zone. Interesting. Wonder why they’re not complaining about having their right to free speech taken away? One could say that at least it’s an admission by the administration that Bush only permits controlled speech anywhere around him, but the administration hasn’t been exactly reticent about letting everyone else in on their little joke..
“Homeland Security.” That says a whole red-white-and-blue running fence full around the US.
When Bush visited London back during that period he had British police ban all protest marches and close down the center of the city.
The spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center equated protest against the war in Iraq with terrorism., saying if you had someone protest against a war against terrorism, “You can almost argue that a protest against that (the war) is a terrorist act.” He further said that terrorism was anything that was violent or has an economic impact…
Wait? Economic impact? Terrorism is anything that has an economic impact? That’s not how the Patriot Act defines terrorism, supposedly but it’s all squidgy uncertain language. Squidgy is when terrorism is defeined as ” intended to coerce or intimidate a civilian population, influence government policy by intimidation or coercion or affect the conduct of government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnaping.” The stuff from mass destruction on out just distracts from the squidgy “intended to coerce or intimidate…influence government policy by intimidation…”
I’m gonna have to return to that choicest of wonders, the crystal glass that gives Bush’s total view of the world and defines as terrorist his economic policies for all those middle Americans sliding down the slopes. The poor too, but they’re used to it–been there, done that, want to share my bowl of rice? That wonder deserves a book.
But first the walking softly and carrying a big stick, the soft approach in the middle of a national whiplashing. Which middle America must enjoy. Feel the love.
In the same above mentioned article, Reclaimdemocracy noted that following Ashcroft’s effectively abolishing restrictions on FBI surveillance of Americans in their everyday lives, an FBI internal newsletter encouraged FBI agents to conduct more interviews with antiwar activists “for plent of reasons, chief of which it will enhance the paranoia endemic in such circles and will further service to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
On a third reading of the above I realize that he isn’t saying that the paranoia will have them imagine there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox. He says instead, “will further service to get the point across there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.” I had expected him to say imagine…
Separating protestors into a Free Speech Zone, only permitting pro-Bush signs around Bush or along a motorcade, creating false news at every turn, managing and renaming everything around him, you know how the animals felt when imperial Adam appeared and started with the giving of names.
Old news, I know. Patriot Act. Old news. Tired news. The Patriot Act.
Patriot Act and the National ID are going to make a hell of a winning team though.
Some say Bush is dyslexic. Is he? I’m dyslexic. Is his brain like mine? If I crawled inside and sat behind the controls, though opposing all (it would seem) he says and does, would I feel completely at home in his brain?
When I write about Bush and his Homeland Security and Patriot Act I feel oddly fractured. It’s because it is so massive and yet so little at the same time. Outside the war, of course.
There were these sweeping changes in law. Hundreds of pages appear on congressional desks in no time at all. Little lawmaking elves worked all through the night while Bush’s brain slept and in the morning there it was at the foot of his bed. The Patriot Act.
Not just one sweeping change but periodic bouts of renaming and reidentifying the features of the landscape. And then what do they do, they go around here and there arresting people for t-shirt slogans, sending FBI to the homes of high school students to ask about anti-Bush posters they’ve done. Not everyone. Some here, some there. Bits and pieces.
Now, I think that a good portion of the Patriot Act simply approves of what the government has been doing illegally for years. What the Patriot Act does is instead attempt to convince everyone it’s all right, and broaden the base of possible suspects.
So for several years now, bits and pieces. The Patriot Act has probably largely slipped the minds of many Americans. Bits and pieces. Bash and step back. There’s no list that I know of on the web for people arrested thus far. The Patriot Act was passed through and people approved because of 9/11, state of crisis, if we couldn’t catch those terrorists beforehand the Patriot Act will make sure we do now. Several years later the landscape has changed and many people have long since moved to thinking of the Patriot Act as permanent, as essential to security. Homeland security.
As many Americans are of foreign birth then Homeland is going to mean something different from a place of nativity. It’s going to define by ideology. The flexible Patriot Act becomes even more elastic. Thus:
The spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center equated protest against the war in Iraq with terrorism., saying if you had someone protest against a war against terrorism, “You can almost argue that a protest against that (the war) is a terrorist act.” He further said that terrorism was anything that was violent or has an economic impact…
Bits and pieces. They’re out there hacking the landscape to bits and renaming all the pieces. The colonists renamed places and landmarks with names from their countries of origin, occupying and changing the landscape.
Take the Patriot Act, throw in the National ID and Mandatory Mental Health Screening and well, it just may be the key to a utopian society. People may find that it is in their best interests to appear not to be too upset by the new status quo.
The ACLU kicked off a coalition Tuesday in response to the Patriot Act, hoping to curtail parts. Ashcroft says one is aiding and abetting terrorism if you question the law.
The Bush administration has offered a sharp rebuttal to growing attacks on the law in the last two years, saying that federal agents have used their new powers sparingly and judiciously.
Administration officials note that the Justice Department’s inspector general and other groups that have examined the law have not documented any abuses of power.
Critics, however, counter that because most aspects of the law’s use in terrorism cases remain classified, it has been very difficult to assess how it is being utilized.
Following up Revolution, I promised Buck Hill the next Idyllopus unauthorized nonrelease of a cover would be Mac and Lennon’s “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”
Again. Excellent music track by husband. Vocals by moi (either one likes or one does not). I can’t really think of anything much to say in the way of an introduction.
Wondering what’s a good third choice. “She said, she said” or “Polythene Pam”? “Hide your Love Away”?
Or maybe “Give me Some Truth”?
So, I went from Alas, a Blog’s postings on Schiavo to Trish Wilson’s posting on Schiavo, after which she promised it would be a Schiavo-free zone.
I commented and am now back here.
I, too, hadn’t intended to blog on Terri Schiavo. Even last night after reading the latest at the NY Times, the argument that the politicians are going with, that it would be violating Schiavo’s constitutional rights with the withholding of nutrition needed to keep her alive. Enraged after reading this, I wrote on how if they believed at all in what they said they’d be doing something about health care and pharmaceuticals out of reach of those who need them because of the costs, and wouldn’t be penalizing those who go bankrupt due to the high cost of health care. Enraged, I wrote how I can sympathize with the concern of disability rights groups who have banded together in support of the Schiavo bill, but that there’s nothing to do with compassion here, and political intentions are stinking rank. And before I wrote and as I wrote, accompanying me was this image of Harpies, gigantic dark Harpies who, drawn to the Capitol by this audacity, clung by nightmare talons to the gutters, eerie wind rippling feathers, and screamed and shrieked down the politicians with their rage. Unable to explain the why of the Harpies who just would not let go, the largest of which kept her eyes on me as if I should be able to hear and explain, I erased the post, incapable.
Then I was over at Trish Wilson’s and I realized why. The Harpies. Came to me perhaps the why of the Harpies, creatures that never come to mind, and why they had now.
It was perhap because the Harpies of the Aeneid are ever hungry, and prophesy famine for the sons of Laomedon who slaughter cattle in their domain for food and offer righteous prayers. But instead of the gods being appeased and fulfilled, there appear the Harpies to whom the cattle belong, and the men battle and attempt to slay the Harpies over the banquet. May sound an odd and even a terrible link to make, considering that this is about Schiavo having her shunt removed and permitting her body to starve. But the politicians are taking advantage of the tragedy of Schiavo, making their own cynical, opportunistic, hypocritical meal off her. A vile piece of politics with Bush rushing from Texas to sign the bill.
There is another tale of the Harpies, wherein they repeatedly steal the food of the prophet Phineos, who had been doomed to live to old, old age, who gave no honor to Zeus. Whenever he attempted to eat, the Harpies appeared and stole his meal, they being as famished as he was.
But it was instead the Harpies of the Aeneid that came to mind, and Celaeno, who lingers long enough to plea their case.
I read the Harpies were once akin to thunder goddesses of the storm and that Celaeno’s name means “dark”. That they came to be seen as ghosts, and as the wind they swiftly bore away spirits.
“She is responsive. She does try to vocalize. She emotes. … And, at least according to the family, she is still in that kind of condition where she responds,” said Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla. He is a sponsor of the legislation to order her feeding tube reinserted until a federal judge reviews the case.
Weldon doesn’t believe in what he’s doing for any other reason but politics. “…at least according to the family…” He’s a Brevard County doctor. Why is he saying, “at least according to the family…”
I’m not saying one way or another about Terri Schiavo. Only that what’s being done in her name is wrong.
So why? If they lose they’ve still scored lotsa brownie points.
If the law is declared valid?
From Andrew Cohen’s column:
The implications of this move are astonishing…And this from a Congress that has for a decade or so tried to keep all sorts of citizens– including disabled employees–out of federal court. If this law is declared valid, no decision in any state court in the country will be immune from Congressional second-guessing. It would throw out of whack the entire concept of separation of powers. The constitutional law expert Tribe calls it “trial by legislation” and he is right…
Congress is intruding so far into the power of the judiciary, on behalf of a single family, that it is breathtaking. It truly will be fascinating to see how federal court judges react to this– whether they simply bow down to this end-run or whether they back up their state-court colleagues. And it will be interesting in particular to see what the Supreme Court does with this case.
Senator Rick Santorum, a Republican of Pennsylvania, says of the bill:
We need to do something to stop this unconscionable act on the part of the Florida court. Terri Schiavo is a daughter, a sister, and most importantly – a person. We cannot allow an innocent person to be put to death.
What does Rick Santorum’s voting record have to say about him? No on $40 billion per year for limited Medicare prescription drug benefit. No on allowing importation of Rx drugs from Canada. No on allowing patients to sue HMOs and collect punitive damages. No on including prescription drugs under Medicare. Rated 0% by APHA, indicating a anti-public health voting record.
Right. Unconscionsable. Can’t allow an innocent person to be put to death.
The sons of Laomedon make lame prayers over food stolen from the Harpies.
