Skip to main content

God and Glenbeck are a Majority

One of my earliest memories was of a box-like radio
with a great round speaker sitting on top.  It did not work very well.
Mostly, it produced magic static, interrupted by an occasional
actual radio broadcast, only to be overcome by static, again.

Later, better radios brought whole broadcasts.
Not necessarily better; just whole broadcasts:
Father Coughlin, for instance.  "Cog-lin".

Father Coughlin earned the title, "Father of Hate Radio".
First he supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal,
even calling it God's work.  Then Father Coughlin and God
began to get suspicious about FDR and all those Jewish bankers
that Father Coughlin saw everywhere.  Coughlin began
to display some sympathy with Hitler and Mussolini.

Bad stuff.  Hateful stuff.  By 1938, Coughlin's followers
were marching in the streets chanting, "Send Jews back where
they came from in leaky boats!"  Back to Nazi Germany.


Glenbeck is my Favorite New Convert (not to Catholicism, 
but to Mormonism).  The denomination isn't important.  
The religion is, because finding God provides absolute certainty
to his conspiracies and hateful opinions.  He says Barack Obama
is a racist, that the people whose houses burned in brush fires
in California hated America, and that Keith Ellison (a Black 
Muslim Representative from Minneapolis) has to prove that
he is not working with Middle Eastern Muslims to destroy America.
Not really saying that!  Just saying!  Doom!  Doom!


Sister Sarah, the Former Almost Half-Governor of Alaska,
gets up early to watch the sun rise so she can blame it on Obama:
he should have known!  She gives the impression that only she,
and mama grizzlies, and the people who buy her books and pay
her speaking fees, care about the real America where oil drilling
is encouraged, and health care is discouraged, and guns are good.


Sister Sarah has no doubts about God being on her side.  
Lately, she has been cozying up to what is left of the feuding 
Billy Graham family, reaching across the aisle, so to speak, 
from evangelical fundamentalist to Baptist fundamentalism.


And now Tiny Tim Pawlenty, the Former Evangelical Governor
of Minnesota, the one who turned our State around, fiscally,
by stoutly and manly refusing to raise taxes on anything 
(although a few user fees here and there appealed to him)
left the State 6.2 billion dollars in debt.  He is a traveling man, now,
traveling from one Christian book store to the next explaining
how we need a God-fearing, tax-thumping, President who will
reinstate "Don't Ask, Don't Tell".  He just happens to mention
that his pastor is a big honcho in the evangelical movement.


Tiny Tim is a sweet man.  True religion oozes from his pores.  


Even Barack Obama feels compelled to go to prayer breakfasts
and talk publicly about how often he prays, in English, not Arabic.


Psychopaths and Sociopaths don't have any human empathy.
Everyone knows they are dangerous to human society.


I wonder if, next down the scale, are the people with hateful
ideas, and a head full of conspiracies, who know that God is 
on their side.  God and Glenbeck, you know, are a majority.  


Sister Sarah and Tiny Tim seem to think that God wants them
to become President, or maybe just to sell a lot of books.


In old Norman tradition, the eldest son inherited all the property.
The next often went into the military.  Somewhere down the line,
another son went into the clergy.  We have forgotten the rules.
Now, even the daughters want to get into politics, by getting
cozy with God.  And God won't ask, or tell.  He whispers 
his preferences mostly in mega-churches, these days.  


Sometimes on FOX news.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more