SmokeSound

Sometimes the line between religion and pure madness is pretty thin. A religious group in Michigan was arrested a couple of days ago.  They planned to ambush police officers and kill them, and then go to the funeral and kill some more officers.  They described themselves as acting on behalf of God, getting ready for the battle at the end of the world, when the forces of God and the forces of government would wage what the Book of Revelation calls, "Armageddon".   Inside their murderous heads, they took God's side against government evil. A long time ago, in a previous life, I had a sermon published in a volume of young promising preachers.  I recall the title of the sermon was, "God and Government Glue".  Other than licking stamps, I do not remember what it was about.  I do not think it had to do with killing policemen for God.  Other than the pure madness of planning murder, those people saw a world in which the end times was near, in whi...

.  I do enjoy morning coffee, in a coffee shop, with other people who are ready to greet the day, greet each other, and engage in wit, argument, debate and pure "I'm glad to see you!".  That is to say, it is pleasure to think about things together.  That is in contrast to those times when we meet people who simply shout.  They are not early morning coffee drinkers, glad to see each other, glad to talk about what is in the news.  They are . . . well . . . they are the people who don't drink tea:  they wear it on their hats.  They spit on other people; tell them to do impossible things to themselves.  They are people like the Tea Baggers; calling the President a fascist, Barney Franks a faggot, and seeming to believe that providing a lame version of universal health care will bring Jesus on a cloud, and cause an end-of-the-world war that will have blood coursing through the valleys as high as horses' bits.  Frank Rich has it righ...

Let us spare ourselves the details, other than to say that the case of the priest in Wisconsin who was reported to the Vatican by two Bishops for having raped about 200 deaf kids demonstrates how a theological idea can result in allowing horrible crimes to happen.  It has been the case that, not only Catholics, but many other religious people, deal with crimes, such as those that outrage and embarrass people all over the world--the rape of children by clergy-- by calling it a sin, and asking the criminal to repent. It is not a sin:  it is a crime, and it does not call for repentance:  it calls for punishment.  I don't care if the monks in the Monastery on Mt. Mythos look good to each other!  I blame it on poor eyesight. But raping children is a crime!  Churches tend to protect their priests by calling it sinful, and calling for repentance. Naughty, naughty!, they said, and transferred the sinners to a parish or an orphanage in a differe...

Now someone has shot at Republican Eric Cantor's Richmond, Virginia campaign office.  Do you suppose someone shot at his office because he is a Republican. or because he is Jewish?

The Red River, flowing north into Canada, meanders through what used to be grass and swamps and prairie.  In the Spring, every year since the glacier melted, the river bloats, and floods thousands of acres of land which was once vacant, but which now has cities and towns and farms and fools.  Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota are two of those cities, and they are the home to the largest collection of sandbags north of New Orleans.  There are a hundred schemes to solve the problem of water coming into the basement, climbing up to the first floor, easing on up to the second floor and the attic and, finally, over the T.V. antenna.  Most of the solutions involve building a huge levee that will divert the water to the people outside the levee, or on the other side of the river.  Others involve building dams to hold on Red River tributaries, and allowing it to flood whoever is upstream.  This morning I heard a Red River Valley resident lament that,...

I am assuming that one of our neighbors is named "Gott", because they have a sign out front that reads, "Gott's Acre". Gottesacker:  German, for God's field, that is to say, a cemetery, where the bodies of the dead are sown in the consectrated field in hope of the resurrection. I do not know the Gotts.  I am reluctant to go in and ask.  Instead, I whistle when I go by. 

. You probably don't remember when Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon called for law and order.  Hardly anybody is that old.  People were smoking pot and refusing to drink only at their racially designated water fountains, and thought getting naked was fun. "Law and Order!" was the antidote.  Long prison terms was the outcome.  Today, the Republican Party is not calling for law and order. Elected members of the Party are standing on balconies at the Capitol cheering on the advocates of overthrowing the government.  The Tea Baggers come with signs urging people to take the law into their own hands, with signs likening Barack Obama to Hitler, with guns on their signs and with real guns as a threat.  Sarah Palin, cute Sarah Palin, who makes the people who call themselves the Scrota tingle somewhere, puts a hit list up on her website, complete with gunscope crosshairs showing where the targets live.  She says, don't repeal health care: reload...

. I wish we had named our cat "Stevens". Then we could have our own Cat Stevens. It would probably have been a mistake. We do not need a Muslim cat.  That led me to consider a modest spelling proposal: we should make better use of the "at" (@) symbol.  C@ Stevens, for instance.  Our f@ c@ Stevens th@ s@ in a h@. (I hope th@ does not offend Dr. Seuss.) Th@ is not a complicated proposal.  If you want complicated, consider all the ways "gh" and "ght" are pronounced: high sight fight height cough straight though brought weigh I cannot do anything about any of th@, but for the love of Mary and all the angels, can we not just save ourselves time and insert the loveliest symbol on the keyboard into our idle pr@ about   h@s  and c@s and all th@?

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Michele "Our Belle" Bachmann, is a fine and fierce enemy of big government.  City Pages reports that on Thanksgiving Our Belle's blog entry was titled:  "What We Learned from the Pilgrims".  Michele says we learned free enterprise, and that is the reason we should avoid contributing to food kitchens.  Our Michele is part owner of a family farm which she reported in 2007 netted her somewhere between $100,000. and $250,000. The family farm received a little more than $250,000. in federal handouts between 1995 and 2006, which means that our fierce opponent of handouts netted her, personally, somewhere between $2,500. and $5,000. in federal subsidies for not farming in 2009.  That is what Michele learned from the Pilgrims.

Richard Nixon once tried to nominate G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court.  There was some evidence that Judge Carswell might not be up to par, intellectually, for the job.  In fact, the Senate refused to confirm him, but not before Senator Roman Hruska, something of an intellectual enigma himself, had fought for Carswell's appointment: "Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers, and they are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises and Cardozos and Frankfurters and stuff like that." Harrold Carswell and Roman Hruska may simply have shown up too early in history.  They would be right at home in the Tea Party.    Want to keep government out of Medicare?  Want to keep government out of the postal business? Want to keep government out of Congress?  Want to argue that Congress is not a place to take votes?    I know that we can't have all Brandeises and C...

Why is it that religious people get all messed up, sexually? We expect it from goofy sects, even large, goofy sects, such as those Mormon holdouts who refuse to end polygamy.  What is astounding is how the largest Christian church in the world--the Roman Catholic Church--is wallowing in shameful sexual practices.  They are not alone.  Maybe it just began early in church history, and subsequent subdivisions of the church inherited some of the goofiness and criminality. At the very beginning of Christian religion, people claimed that a virgin gave birth to a god-baby.  Well, at first it was not quite that wild and unimaginable, but it gradually became that:  Mary was impregnated by the Spirit of God, which is a very spiritual kind of mystery, and had a baby.  It was not even a claim for parthenogenisis:  the father was a spirit.  Mary was a virgin. Sure! Jesus never married.  He was the ideal man.  In subsequent centuries, the prie...

"Do you, Lucy Lou, take Chet, here, to be your lawful wedded husbin?" "Lucy Lou?"

.      CHILI DOG He comes up the hill with the urgency of a fanatic running at the end of the world our neighbor's dog skidding to a halt precisely in center yard as he does every day doing what must be done leaving evidence that he eats chili con carne with habaňero sauce then charging relieved across the street hopping three-legged from bush to bush Our neighbor's culinary dog

. Steven King, that Steven King, the Representative from Iowa, not the other Stephen King, is even more fun than I first thought.  He and Glenn Beck--Yes!  That Glenn Beck, the guy whose horse allegedly kicks people in the head--got together to discuss the way atheists and communists and heretics are performing in Congress.  Mr. King is a member of Congress, but he is not at all like those atheists and communists and heretics who sit beside him, mostly because of his horse.  They were outraged, not just at the proposed health care bill which, for all its faults, will cover thirty million people who do not have health care now, and which will save the country billions of dollars in its first ten years, and more than a trillion in the following ten years, but at the God-awful prospect that the bill will come up for a vote on Sunday!   Sunday!  And not just on a Sunday, but a Sunday in Lent! Beck and King (Glenn and Stevie, if you wish) said that voting on ...

I am writing this blog to apologize for Mari. Mari was born in Iowa, grew up there, had a fine career there, and loves Iowa still. Steven King is from Iowa, too.  People, somewhere in Iowa, elect him as their Representative, probably because an astouding number of people in Iowa think like Steven King does.  That is why I am apologizing for Mari.  Mari does not think like Steven King, and it is wrong of her to characterize herself as a down-to-earth, practical, loyal, sensible former citizen of the Sovereign State of Iowa. Steven King understands Iowa in the same way that Michele Bachmann understand Minnesota.  He knows that the communists have taken over our government, of which he is an elected part, and that if we want to preserve our liberties, our lives, and our sacred corn cobs, we shall have to rise up in rebellion against the bolsheviks. (I do not know why Mari does not understand this!) This is what Representative King said recently...

Too long ago, Stephen Marglin wrote a book about economics titled, "The Dismal Science".  Even though it was a beautifully written book, I have always taken perverse comfort in the title.  My perverse comfort has something to do with the fact that economics has always captivated my mind  in the same way rhubarb has.  It hasn't.  But the book is not the point, here.  It is this:  we easily delude ourselves about economics.  For instance, the notion that tax cuts will increase government revenue is a wildly popular political theme.  As soon as little Republican tots are weaned from their mother's milk, they are fed the notion that cutting taxes will somehow, magically, actually increase government revenue.  Little Republican tots first words are, "Ronald Reagan proved that!" Almost every economist, whatever his or her political preference, agrees that, as Joel Slemord puts it, "Tax cuts don't pay for themselves!  Period!" (...

. Yesterday the ice dam up on the roof finally melted. Today Mari and I went for a walk in the neighborhood, just because we could, and we wanted to celebrate the fact that we took down the Christmas tree. It is, after all, March 15; the Ides, the old tax day. This year, we put the tree outside the living room windows, partly because it looked out over the river valley, and partly to keep all those needles out there where they belong.  And it also meant that we did not have to rearrange the house to make a space for a tree that belonged outside, anyway.  The back lawn appeared for the first time in months, and it appeared that field mice spent most of the winter just below the snow, eating whatever grass could afford them.  I did not have a teeny little hay bailer, so I raked up the "straw"--if that be the term for short grass stems left about like undersnow tunnels.  Not enough is said about global warming.  Here and there, it is a very pleasant thing...

. CINCO DE MAYO MAY 10 .

410 Doctor Visit   Doctor Visit Modishly unshaven his gristled pepper beard shadowing the arroyos in his face the doctor circles about me tapping as if I were cavitied a roadside bomb delicate Calling me my friend as if to disarm me Asking for my diagnosis of life toward eighty And I wonder who his doctor is those tired eyes Laying a heavy arm on my shoulder for support Slouching toward reception saying to come back if I hear a ticking sound I told him a story to make him laugh March 11, 2010

I have just listened to several ad hoc economic geniuses explain that we cannot afford to maintain health care at the level we have now.  Their argument went something like this:  If you calculate how much people have been putting into our health care programs, and compare that with how much health care is costing us, we will go broke.  Their conclusion:  we have to cut benefits now.  It does no good to wait.  What they do not compute is that our  health care system costs us about twice as much as health care costs most other industrialized nations, and we don't even serve millions of people.  What they do not compute is that having insurance companies stand between the money people have paid in, and the medical community that provides the care, is a horrible skimming-off process.  The twenty or thirty percent that the insurance companies keep does not provide health care.  It provides enormous profits.  Just look at what insu...

. For the first time in months, we have had nights without freezing.  Here and there, small openings in the snow reveal that there is still grass in the world.  The glacier on the roof above our entry has been reduced to an ice moraine. Color is returning to the goldfinches who have survived the winter, in anticipation.  They are tougher than the Twins, who have flown to Fort Myers for spring training, the worst possible preparation for their first games in their new outdoor, open to the sky, to rain, to snow and sleet, baseball stadium.  We hear a lot about how baseball was meant to be played outdoors, not in an outdated, inflatably-roofed dome, where it never rains, snows, or sleets.  The players themselves, when asked about the new stadium, smile frozen smiles, and say they are really excited about pond hockey and double-headers. Target Field.  Target is the sponsor.  By chance and fortune, Target sells mittens and raincoats and woolen und...

"You from Duluth, too?"

My International Woman knows exactly where she was born in a small town in Iowa From a family long ago uprooted from the side of a fjord in Norway Seeded and settled and nested where there are no fjords and where they drained lakes For the deep rich soil prairies patiently leave behind Who counts all her ancestors from northern fjords But with gathered and garnered children Asian and European and African In one generation she has become the world her mother had not imagined Before her daughter looked beyond the low horizons west and east and south Recognizing the faces of human family She sits at her computer International Woman finding other women on other continents Sending them goats and loans because they are women looking over their own horizons Dreaming Like the International Woman In my life March 8, 2010

. 8. MARCH they marched in the gray slop that is the eighth of March Women's Day in Oslo bannered red and burning bright in long street-wide lines Youngstorget past the city hall up Carl Johan puzzling the grand cafeers around Kirkeristen Grensen the university square freedom the signs said freedom and equality six hour work days free nursery schools Palestine Eritrea Equality freedom freedom freedom he read lesbians he said all you lesbians need is a good fuck even drunk he knew that women's liberation had something to do with his testacles freedom he said lesbians cruddy lousy neckdripping smallsnow and long long lines of young all young women and men baby-buggies and banners she cheated oh lovely long woman on crutches and cut across Stortoget with her husband and child burning bright want to buy some porno playboy pictures he said smart-ass grinning all he needs where have you been Trina said marching too you...

. Now the Republicans are lining up to argue that unemployment benefits encourage unemployment.  The theory seems to be that hunger and homelessness are really a way to encourage people to apply for a job at Chrysler Corporation, where all the jobs are.  Right?  Sleeping in a car is a grand way to encourage job creation! Is something bass-ackward here, or is this the most callous disregard for human well-being we have heard in a long while? It is something like arguing that madness is inherited.  You catch it from your kids.  I am shameless, so I shall say that once upon about fifty years ago, I was a parish pastor in California.  I wanted to join Social Security, but there were just a fine, large number of religious people who thought that any form of such insurance was an admission that God would not take care of his children when they became old and poor and badly in need of health care, so special provisions had to be made for people like me who d...

David Brooks, a columnist of considerable repute, wrote a column in which he compared the student uprising of the 1960s to that of the Tea Baggers at the present time. The column amazed me!  I was already of middle age during the 1960s, and I recall that, with a few exceptions, mostly from academia, the people who raised hell were young.  They hated war. They were angry that universities were cooperating with the military to conduct war, and to draft young people to fight the wars the young thought were insane.  The movement quickly merged with the struggle against racism. The movement found synonyms for the terms used in the French Revolution:  liberty, equality, fraternity; nobody refused to eat French Fries.  Muhammad Ali refused to go to war.  The guns were all on the other side.  Lots of guns. Because conventional Americans defended the war, and the government that conducted the war, young people in the 1960s rebelled against...

. I am refinishing a plant stand built by Mari's father about 88 years ago.  There is nothing, and everything, special about it.  Before it ever became Mari's plant stand, it had already been demoted to less colorful duties in Parnell's basement, or out in the tool shed.  Drops of old paint on the stained surface suggested that it was about the right height to hold a paint can, but now all of those small humiliations are cleaned away.  There is solid oak there, as good as it was when first put together in a grade school woodshop class, long before woodshop became industrial arts, or interior design.  We have a jade plant that will get first chance to try the new perch.  With a little good luck, and a lot of affective memory, many other plants will look down at generations of kids and cats during the next 88 years.  That will bring Parnell's plant stand almost into another century. .

.   There you are!  More evidence that we have gone morally bankrupt!  As if it were not enough that track athletes wear colored Speedos,  now some woman in Rahway, New Jersey, together with her son and daughter, have created a snow sculpture of Venus de Milo, right out in their yard where people can see it.   See!  You can see for yourself!  Well, you can see in the left photograph.  The Upholders of Public Morality--the Police--said bare naked snow ladies were a threat to decency, so the Connerans covered up Venus' . . . you know:  ice cold privates, to prevent easily aroused neighbors from getting chill blains or hot flashes.  Then, before warm weather could cause Venus to run around in the neighborhood, the Connerans bludgeoned her to a horrible end.  We barely avoided a moral meltdown, there! .

It was bad enough that Jim Bunning, Senator from Kentucky, held up the whole Senate in an effort to deny emergency unemployment money from millions of people, in order to make a few deals.  Now Bart Stupak, Congressman from Michigan, is threatening to block the entire health care reform bill in order to satisfy his religious views about abortion.  Mr. Stupak is one of the religious zealots (who call themselves The Family) who lives in an apartment building on C Street in Washington, D.C., which calls itself a church in order to keep its taxes low.  (Most members of the Family do not live there.) Of course people have a right to religious points of view.  And maybe they even have a right to try to write their religion into law, although the Bill of Rights makes it clear that Congress will neither endorse a specific religion, nor hinder the free practice of religion.  That is to say, as a nation under law, we are not a religious nation, but people...

. MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM

. EPIDEMIC

. AVATAR II: THE MOVIE Best Supporting Actress

. "Do about unemployment?  Oh, Gee!  I'm drawing a blank!" .

"Cancun!  Why do you ask?"

. "Long ago, and far away, I dreamed a dream one day, and now, that dream is here beside me." That is to say, long ago, and far away, I was taught a dream world, something before and around and in every plain and lovely thing. In addition to Santa and the Tooth Fairy--one of whom I think I probably did believe in--there were far-off places, shadowy places never really seen, but of certain existence.  We sang songs of what once was, and what forever would be.  In the meantime, we did our chores and went to school.  In school, we Dick and Jane and Spotted our way toward reading.  We sat in awe of parts of speech, and tried to diagram them, an introduction to mysteries that elude me to this day.  We built tinker-toy models of atoms.  Atoms were like hornets nests with a steelie in the middle.  We solved algebraic equations, proving that X was Y I am not a mathematician.  Parson--Hans Svinth--spoke aggressively, if not confidently, abou...

. AVATAR II:  THE MOVIE

"Does anybody else want to dance?"