SmokeSound

Once, when the world was young, and when I was a holy man held in check by a clergy collar and crucifixed chain, I subscribed to a series of books called, "Luther's Works".   I collected more than fifty of those red-covered volumes, and read them for the translated secrets of the 16th century.  I recall thinking, one day while trying to follow Luther's logic through to his conclusions, that it took almost a physical determination to get my head squeezed into such a shape that it could accommodate 16th century assumptions before the text made sense.  The moment I relaxed, the whole point drifted off. It happened, a few years later, that I sold the whole lot of those books to a college student for about the price of a pizza. There is a splendid article in today's New York Times about an exhibition of artifacts from the Dead Sea.  At about the time I traded Luther's Works for a pizza, I tried to read the early translations of some of the Dead Sea scrolls.  Oh

I was going to say that, in my present condition, I walk a fine line. . . . The fact is that, in my present condition, I do not walk fine lines.  I have had hip surgery.  I walk a stuttered line. The hospital apparently chain-sawed a delicate incision up my right hip, did unspeakable things to my framework, stapled the incision, sold me a cane, and sent me home.  They advised that I rent a walker, unless I thought I might have long-term plans, in which case I should buy one. Owning an adjustable cane, and renting a walker, does something dreadful to one's psyche.  Prescribing modest pain killers does more than modestly restructure the pain:  it obscures all the sharp edges of perception, sands down the details.  Somewhere, some time ago, I got a pair of what might be called "trousers", or probably--better--pajama bottoms.  They are made of paper, just like the academic gowns graduates now rent and throw away after the rain.  They are no so much something to wear as

Things may be a little quiet here, on SmokeSound, for a while.   If I do not flunk the Pre-Op-Test, which consists of some completion questions about health insurance, I will have my old-fashioned, bony hip replaced with an all-aluminum walker tomorrow (Friday, Oct. 14).   I am not sure I am capable of whimpering and writing at the same time, so Michele Bachmann may be gone before you hear from me, and Jesus may have come again.  (Or maybe I have those events reversed.)

I wonder if Our Belle, Michele, obedient wife of Marcus Bachmann, suffers from hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.  You all know what that refers to:  666!  The number of the Beast of the Book of Revelation! Actually, Herman Cain started it all when he proposed a new tax code:  his mysterious 9-9-9 plan.  It is a plan to tax just about everything at 9%:  income, corporate income, and a sales tax.  Mr. Cain doesn't say much about it, but his plan also shifts supporting Social Security related plans to the states.  They have no money, of course, but an increase in property taxes, up to about the eaves, would take care of that. None of this slipped by Michele!  She saw what was at stake immediately.  She just stood on her head and said it was nothing more or less that the Mark of the Devil--666--upside down.  "When you get the 999 plan and turn it upside down, the Devil's in the details!" As all of you know who spend these long autumn evenings browsing through the Book

From the Star-Tribune Nasty stuff!  Not life threatening, just, "I hope this hail doesn't take the paint off the pickup" stuff. Something like trying to listen to a Republican primary debate. The Senate was barely able to muster a majority to support Obama's jobs bill, but a majority is not enough in the Senate:  it takes 60% to get anything done in the Senate.  They are not hasty, they!  They are hopeless. More and more, I wonder whether we might better be served with multiple parties.  When there are two parties--in our case, both a little right of center--if one party decides it will not do anything, then nothing can be done.  There are no real coalitions, no real bargaining, no deals, no compromises.  We have trench warfare. The Tea Party has dragged the Republican party off to the extreme right, and the Democratic party--which seems rarely comfortable making up its own mind--bargains from a position of poll reading.  Obama says, rightly, that we need t

"In This Sign, You will conquer" Are Mormons christian? I don't know.  For the most part, people who call themselves christian are christian.  The variety is astounding, ranging from one of the oldest christian churches--the Copts, in Egypt--to the Pope in Rome, or to the Russian Orthodox Archbishop, and to those Get-Rich-With-Jesus charlatans. A sect is just a new group of christians with a distinctive idea, or practices.  Some of them succeed:  most don't. The first christians were a sect, once.  The establishment usually tries to throw out the fringe groups.  The fringe groups claim to the true believers, or to have a new revelation, or a fierce itch.  I think Joseph Smith had a fierce itch. Joseph Smith, and many early Mormons, rather liked the idea of polygamy, but the U. S. government said it didn't, so most Mormons said, "O.K.!  Can we have Salt Lake City, instead?"  Some Mormons packed up their itches and moved to dusty towns in Arizona

Mircea Eliade wrote, "The Sacred and the Profane", which he considered to be central to understanding what religion was about. The term, "profane", refers to what is outside the Temple, or in derivative culture, "not belonging to the Church". I was a student at The University of Chicago when he was there, but I was such a student as found his books dense and obscure. But this post is not about Eliade:  it is about profanity. At about the same time that I stood uncomprehendingly and watched that giant walk by, I took a year off to live and study in Germany.  I had been a clergyman, and my solution to watching my religion seep off into the sand was to learn as much as I could about the religious enterprise.  Going to Germany was part of that process. I worked hard to learn German, and I was intrigued by how Germans swore.  It seemed to me to be much more anal than what I was used to.  At about the same time, I became aware that my own profanity had

You simply cannot trust the people you brunch with! They will turn you in for violating Prohibition! You may take my word for it:  we are surrounded by Carrie Nations who are trying to turn us into gangsters by denying hard-working, coal-mine-and-sweatshop-grimy, honest, ordinary beer drinkers into a nation of sneaky, cocktail-sipping, white-gloved dandies who pray in public and drink in private, and who report us to the police! And I commend them! My favorite local brew pub and restaurant has a Sunday brunch and--would you not know?--someone turned them in to the police for serving wine and beer with brunch on Sunday morning!  On Sunday morning!  When good citizens do not eat brunch and swill alcohol, but when they go to Holy Communion, instead, and drink wine!  ( Except for those who go to brunch at the pub and report what they see to the police.) I have no doubt, personally, that the owners of the restaurant knew that we have a law that says, in essence that, on Sund

My new best friend, the doctor, the guy with a patch over one eye who keeps saying, "Arrgh!", says he will operate on my hip in about a week.  He calls me, "Matey". "Here is what you should do, Matey!" he said to me.  "Best have somebody drive you there in your pickup.  It will make it easier to get you aboard when the time comes to send you home." No food before the operation.  He says rum is O.K.; lots of rum.  It won't hurt so much, then, he says, until the rum wears off, and then my  head will hurt so much my hip won't seem bad. He says a hip operation is tricky, because if something goes bad, they can't just strap on a peg leg, as they often do for knees.  He advises that I think about a new career, now, before I really understand what went wrong; something like bookkeeping, or palm reading. I kind of wish I had a smaller pickup, lower to the ground.

National Public Radio is debating the ethics of "He said/She said" journalism.  Someone called it, "the lowest form of journalism".   Simply reporting the two, or three, sides of a story to be told, and leaving it at that, might not be irresponsible, but it ought not to be confused with anything other than data gathering--or more likely--opinion gathering.  Gathering the opinions of two experts, or two idiots, and reporting them, might or might not be helpful.   If it gives the impression that the opinions presented are of equal worth, it is probably a disservice. The discussion of the problem on NPR (of which I heard only a part) was laced with another phrase:  "the truth"; something like, "Should a reporter just report both sides without indicating what the truth is?"  It wasn't quite that clumsy, but that is the argument, in essence. Sometimes it works that simply.  John says the well is 100 feet deep, and Hank says it is 50.  Maybe

Ken Burns' documentary on Prohibition showed how it is possible for idealists to take a bad situation and turn it into something awful.  There is no doubt that in the years preceding Prohibition, some people drank themselves stupid, beat their wives and children, and pissed themselves into poverty.  But the attempt to ban alcohol altogether turned the whole country into a nation of criminals, not just because they continued to drink, but because law itself became a joke.  They even had a name for themselves:  "scofflaws"!  Prohibition made the Valentine's Day Massacre almost certain to come. His documentary also showed how easy it is for religious zealots to crawl into bed with really hateful people.  Banning alcohol was not just a crusade against drunkenness.  It was a white, Anglo-Saxon war against blacks, Catholics,  Germans. and immigrants generally,   It allowed haters to sound moral while lashing out at people they feared and despised. It still happens.  It

The debate is how Barack Obama should conduct his campaign for re-election.  Should he imitate FDR and attack?  Should he emulate Bill Clinton and run toward a centrist position?  Should he continue as the Great Compromiser?  Maybe he should just fold up his tent and steal away. This is what I do know:  people are tired of Congress.  Obama has spent altogether too much time trying to get them to do something.   No one wants to hear another word from any of them, nor about them.  Our two-party system has degenerated into trench warfare.  There is very little to be said for hunkering  down in the trenches, and firing mortar rounds.  To try to establish a base in the middle of that gruesome warfare means getting fired at from both sides.  Obama should not even run against them.   He should run for things! He should run for a fair tax system, in which everyone is taxed fairly . He should run for an honest banking system in which customers, and not executives, get a good deal. He

Want an easy, cheap way to solve our economic problems?  Say, "No new taxes!" Want a stupid, lazy way to solve our economic problems?  Say, "No regulations.  No tax revisions!" The easy, cheap, stupid, lazy way assumes that all we have to do is fiddle with the cost of a muffin here, or a debt ceiling deadline there, and things will work out.  No problem!  Just don't raise taxes! Our previous President, and Congress, spent money like drunken sailors, fighting insane wars, refusing to raise a cent to pay for them, cutting taxes--especially on the rich, who were going to have leaky pockets allowing money to trickle down to ordinary human beings--turning health care over to insurance and drug companies, and giving the huge amounts of money to run it, and cutting back regulations on the banking and financial industries in order for them to fleece everybody, while paying themselves monster bonuses and salaries. Our expenditures have been out of whack, not beca