the defeatists!

Execute me in absentia...

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge

Seamus Healy, Punishment, 1975

Crusader AXE is an Irish-Catholic American. My religious beliefs have wandered far from what the good sisters and priests tried to map for me; while I donate to my Jesuit college and to Catholic Charities, I do so because of what they do and do well, not because of who they are. Of course, having made the 9 First Fridays more than once, I can sin very boldly indeed. Of course, the ravings of a French teenager in the 19th century are probably not worth more than a moment of sad reflection; but, Bernadette believed, and so do a lot of people. Still. I can respect that, and I can understand it. Hell, there's a strong possibility that it's my reluctance to get up early on Sundays that led to the whole Tiffany-Anti-Theist thing.

Now, over at the other place where I write under an assumed name, I have been in a bit of a pissing contest over a commentator who thinks that all soldiers who have been in Iraq and Afghanistan are, ipso facto, war criminals. The fact that he also appears to believe that the Jews were behind 9/11 should make me less worried about responding to the idiot, but I'm bothered by it. That sort of simplicity and conspiracy-theory nonsense may reflect strong ties to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion combined with Palinesque desire to blame the mainstream media and the Liberals and the Federal Reserve and the fucking Bildenbergers and George Soros and the Koch brothers and eveybody else including victims for horrible nonsense. While I have none of the volumes of poetry I wrote as an undergraduate -- thank god -- I do remember one line in a poem to girlfriend named Anne Winschel who has led a marvelous and productive life with nothing to do with me with lines to the effect that "But, I said she's too tall!/When what I meant was "I'm too small..."

Self-awareness is a hierophany in a teenage boy, especially an Irish Catholic American teenage boy getting ready to go off to Holy Cross. Rare as they are, hierophanies happen occasionally, and that was one occastion. In something like the Irish Catholic Church and in the Catholic Church as a whole and in all organizations, self-awareness is critical and yet so non-existent. It's called for in fact -- anyone who has attempted or even read the Exercises of Ignatius Loyola and the other people like St John of the Cross or St Teresa knows that. If you want to approach the fundamentals of existence, be you Catholic, Jew, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, Wiccan or Devil-Worshipper, self-awareness is critical.

Self-awareness is not self-centeredness, of course. And this article by Russell Shorto from the New York Times Magazine about "The Irish Affliction" reflects the problem both from a religious and an organizational dynamic point of view. The Irish Church is Catholicism writ large; as the article points out, the Catholic Church is established as a partner with the government and the Irish Nation in the Irish Constitution. The article cites one activist in this way:

Certainly many Irish people find the idea of abandoning Catholicism to be as counterintuitive as giving up their racial or sexual identity. A televised panel discussion on the abuse crisis last summer ended with a reporter asking a woman who was voicing her anger if she was ready to leave the Catholic Church. She paused, as if befuddled, then said, “Where would I go?”

Certainly there is a reflection here of something deeper than self-identity. I am compelled to think of the Book of Ruth, of all things. The language in the King James Version (Chapter 1, verses 1-20) is marvelous, and I have to admit, the allegory is worth considering.

Naomi is a widow, and with two of her daughters-in-law, decides to go back to Isreal from Moab. She asks her daughters-in-law to leave her and return to their homes. She is old, and has nothing to offer them. Oprah, one daughter in law, kisses her and leaves. Ruth, the other, does not but in the words of the text, "cleaves" to her.

 ¹⁵And she said, Behold, thy sister in law is gone back unto her people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister in law.

 ¹⁶And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:

 ¹⁷Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

Interestingly, the article describes an organization and website that was intended to help Irish Catholics to leave the church formally. To respond, the Church changed Canon Law, eliminating the ability to defect from the Church. Of course, I'm sure they maintained the right to excommunicate. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I have been excommunicated for years -- and, as a Tiffanyist Anti-Theist, quite comfortable with that.

The totalitarian mindset really doesn't like to let you leave. Like the Book of the Month Club from Hell, they're not ever going to let you go. I left one cable-internet provider about a year ago for another because I was really unhappy with the one I had. They call, they write, they email -- Baby come back. Well, the closed totalitarian organization doesn't need to do that; the Irish are certainly used to that as are any one who's ever joined a secret organization (Illuminati, Masons, Skull and Bones, Delta Tau Chi, the Mafia, whatever). The IRA has a very direct and fairly simple point of view on this -- Once In, Never Out.  The Mafia has a rather more florid approach --

"I (NAME GIVEN) want to enter into this secret organization to protect my family and to protect my brothers. ""morte alla Francia Italia anelia!" With my blood. (A knife is used to place a cut on the right index finger or hand) and the blood of all the saints, and the souls of my children.  
(The sign of the cross is made) I swear not to divulge this secret and to obey with love and omerta. I enter alive into this organization and leave it only in death." 

Although the Catholic mass has been simplified, the nature of the priesthood is understood that way -- the Consecration contained the words "Remember you are a priest forever, by the order of Melchisedec."

Well, the problem with this is fairly simple. As Brendan Behan said once about an IRA internal catfight in Dublin, "They tried me in absentia, convicted me in absentia, and sentenced me to death in absentia -- so, I said they could execute me in absentia."

What we're seeing in the Irish response is interesting -- Catholicism is part of our heritage, part of our way of looking at the world. Less so in American Irish, by the bye, than in Ireland. At the same time, the Church has done horrible, horrible things in Ireland to the people. And, the clergy has conspired to not only protect the guilty but to go out of their way to blame the victims. Again, the article cites some fairly horrific examples. Some of them are either hysterical false memories or the sexual abuse was a reflection of out and out Satanic practices in various orders. Shorto quotes an abbot who has achieved some level of awareness light years beyond the senior hierarchy...

“Ireland is a prime example of what the church is facing, because they made this island into a concentration camp where they could control everything,” Mark Patrick Hederman, abbot of Glenstal Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in County Limerick, told me. “And the control was really all about sex. They told you if you masturbated, it meant you were impure and had allowed the devil to work on you. Generations of people were crucified with guilt complexes. Now the game is up.” (AXE emphasis added)

One of the things that I note in these accounts as well as others from around the world is that the issues usually are not sexual. Priests and brothers and preachers and politicians and other people who perceive themselves as having power are not so much as reflecting their sexual urges as their power, their ability to inflict themselves on others. This is debased, but it is human. Totalitarian organizations develop these practices because they can. If you consider the treatment of most "heretics" in history, you realize that you're dealing with sexual fantasies played out by people who can play them out. The Templars were accused of horrible practices that were largely sexual in nature -- the Jews of the same sort of things. Priests and Nuns and Catholics in general were accused of sexual deviance, rape and murder of babies by Protestants in Northern Ireland and in the US. The College of the Holy Cross was established in large part as a response to the burning of an Ursuline Abbey in Boston in 1841 by a mob of Know-Nothings convinced that there were tunnels with the aborted fetuses of the nun's babies underneath the place.

So, blanket condemnations tend to make me wonder about large organizations in general. I find something both hopeful and at the same time mournful about this passage from Shoto's piece...

To reach the geographical heart of Irish Catholicism, you leave the main road in windswept County Donegal and drive through miles of gorsy heath, past sheep poised on gray knuckles of rock, until you come to Lough Derg, a wilderness lake edged with pines. Half a mile offshore lies Station Island, where according to legend, St. Patrick had a meditative epiphany in the fifth century, during his mission to convert the Irish.

Station Island has been a place of pilgrimage since the Middle Ages. Its director, Prior Richard Mohan, who has worked there since 1974, greeted me as I stepped ashore, while a brewing autumn storm roiled the tea-colored water of the lake. Over lunch in the staff dining room, he told me how he has modernized the pilgrimage center. Early pilgrims relived the saint’s experience of huddling in a pit in the ground. Today there are updated dormitories, showers, even a gift shop. Prior Mohan said that Station Island “is in the genes of the Irish people,” so much so that there is a phrase for making the pilgrimage: going in on Station. Indeed, Ireland’s greatest living writer, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, devoted what is perhaps his most beloved collection, “Station Island,” to a meditation on the pilgrimage, the Irish and their tug of war with the church.

Mohan reckoned that the island’s impressive number of visitors — more than 20,000 a year — actually relates to a drop in church attendance in Ireland. Many people have abandoned the institutional church but not their faith, so they come to this wild spot in an effort to plug directly into their historical religious tradition without the mediation of the church. “This is seen as independent,” he said. In fact, the Catholic Church maintains control over the island, as it does over dozens of such places around the world.

Plotshave I laid, inductions dangerous...

"I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other."--Richard III

The governor of Alabama denies the universal brotherhood of mankind. I have tried not to get too weird lately, but this one is pretty much out there. If you're not a Christian but a Jew, a Buddhist, a Zororastarian, an Atheist, a Deiist, an Agnostic or a Tiffanyist and you are a resident of Alabama, the governor denies you. He'd like to be your brother, but he just can't...I'm actually thinking it's even more restrictive -- you probably have to be a born again Christian. Roman and Orthodox Catholics, Episcopalians, Anglicans, Lutherans and Quakers need not apply for his love; it really makes you wonder. One guy hallucinates various founding fathers; one guy wanders around the house babbling inane crap; one guy shoots signs and threatens people; this guy is stating that he feels that non-Christians are lesser creatures in spirit. Is it necessary to handle snakes or speak in tongures? What the hell is wrong with the public life in these places that nutcases get elected and then are free to babble this nonsense?

I like Alabama; I like the south. I like a lot of people. I suppose that if I were to sit next to the governor of Alabama on a plane, I'd find him polite and courtly. That said, doesn't this set up a religious test? If Muslim is convicted of a capital offense in Alabama, can he expect a fair hearing by the governor? Who denies his basic humanity...

Soon, at a city near you...Is Dick Armey the Republican Ernst Rohem?

When Bachmann-Palin-Overdrive top the charts... Moral laxity? Really?

 

Trembling I asked, what do you want of me oh Lord? Feed my lambs...yak blood.

You know, I am starting to just give up on this whole Christianity thing. Not on the Jefferson Jesus, but on the whole idea that Christians have anything to do, as a group, with things like hope and charity and tolerance. Greed...O'Reilly says that Jesus wasn't into extreme charity, which leads me to believe he was dozing during catechism classes. If charity was Chuck Norris, Jesus would have used Chuck Norris as a bitch...One of the patrons of soldiers was St Marin of Tours, a Roman Officer who, according to legend, came upon a cold beggar one winter night, and drawing his gladius, the Roman Infantry sword that was the AK47 of it's day, cut his warm cape in half and gave one to the beggar. Later, that night he had a dream in which Jesus appeared as the beggar, wearing the cape and saying, "Whatever you do to the least of them, you do to me."

 

Now, I can stand a little disingenious stuff in political discourse, and I accept that hypocrisy is as human as blocked colons. But, the nonsense delivered by the Christian Right is going to result in something pretty damn disgraceful. I grew up hearing about the starving children in Europe; when the plight of people in Appalachia was revealed, it became a scandal. Things were done by government, churches and individuals to provide food, clothing, shelter and some minimal level of medical care.

And then, the Christian Right found its true voice -- the Falwells, Robinsons, Reagans, Bushes, Cheneys and DeMints, the Brownbacks and the Palins and the Bachmanns. Tom Delay crowing that in time of war, the most important thing is to cut taxes. Cutting taxes for the rich and then complaining that critical and deserved social programs are just too expensive because they have to be paid for.

There's already entirely too much truth in this cartoon, and it's only going to get worse. When the fuck are we going to wake up as a people? As soldiers, citizens, men and women who deserve the rights, freedoms and liberties we have by rising to our responsibilities to provide our own people freedom of speech --which is for people, not corporations; freedom of religion, including from religion if need be; freedom from want so that no American should be cold, hungry, dirty; and, freedom from fear. Of losing a job and never finding another one; of losing one's home and having no place to go; of needing surgery and not being able to pay for it.

You know, I kind of hope these Bible-Belting, fundamentalist twits are right and the rapture comes -- they're going to be amazed to find themselves left behind while all the poor, cold, tired, hungry, alone and afraid are gone. I'm sure the Rupert Murdochs, Glen Becks, Koch Brothers and Tea Partieres will spin it that being left behind with the Bernie Madoffs, child rapists, swindling capitalists, and terrorists means that they were the ones raptured and there was just some misunderstandings along the way...

Faster rats who can use computers...so says Christine and Friends...

(Note: I initially wrote this a couple of weeks ago then set it aside to marinate. Unfortunately, things continue to get worse for the home team – the American Working Class and the remnant of the Middle Class that need to get very concerned about how things are going to play out.  So, while it’s probably hopeless, I need to take ironic inspiration from Mother Teresa, who when asked once why she did what she did in Calcutta since she could never win, smiled and said, “It’s not about winning.” )

I haven’t been writing enough lately. As I was sitting here this evening, it occurred to me that I could probably have some fun with a discussion of how I feel left out because Mossad hasn’t tapped my phone the way they have one of my colleagues at the site where I write under an assumed name and it’s just not fair – and then I realized that would be a unwise thing to do. Not that Mossad would tap my phone or that they’re tapping HIS phone. They have better things to do. Rather, that people would take it not as a piece of heavy-handed satire but as true. Joe Lieberman would probably issue a Fatwah against us.

PT Barnum is credited with saying that no one ever went broke underestimating (“misunderestimating?”) the stupidity of the American people. Well, I have been unable to write much of late, and nothing for this site because I’ve been so discouraged and disheartened by the gullibility of the American people – the Tea Party types and their enablers. While the left can piss me off at times, and they do and have since I was an aspiring student radical as an undergraduate but couldn’t bring myself to believe that Dean Rusk was having the Army and the Air Force target water buffalo, most lefties in the US are reasonably well educated. The Gingiches and the Armeys aside, most of the right is determined not to be fooled by someone with facts. The Grinch of Gingrich and the Dick of Armey know better at some level, but the fact is, they are in denial too. And, batshit crazy on Newt’s part. So, the rank and file are scared of Arithmetic and the leaders are insane. But, here’s the problem…these people are not imagining this stuff…they actually believe it.  At some level, Newt connects with a Dinesh de Souza and figures that the President of the United States is a Kenyan anti-revolutionary at heart…an African-American Thomas Paine, perhaps? No, they can’t go there…because Glenn Beck has claimed both gold and Thomas Paine. Paine would be...surprised, I suspect. Horrified. Utterly pissed off to be associated with Glenn Beck...he'd sue the bastard for slander. Unfortunately, Tom Paine is dead...

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistant that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel

Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifiying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity. Too absurd for belief, too impossible to convince, and too inconsistent for practice, t renders the heart torpid or produces only atheists or fanatics. As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism, and as ameans of wealth, the avarice of priests, but so far as respects the good of man in general it leads to nothing here or hereafter. [Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason]

However, I have my own problem. You see, in the Tea Party and the Republican resurgence I see the hand of Religion gone insane. Now, I am no longer a practicing Catholic, and have come to terms with the fact that I don’t have the belief gene. Sorry, long before Hawking I figured that God didn’t really add a lot to the universe. I am reasonably well educated and did major in Philosophy and Theology at a very good Catholic college.  This coin should probably have dropped in the slot by the votive candles months ago, but it happened when I was listening to the new dim-bulbed Delaware Bimbo.

Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Jim DeMint and some Tea Party types don’t merely yearn for the country they idealize from the 1950s. They want to go back to the 1750s.

Joe Miller, the Palin-blessed Republican nominee for Senate in Alaska, suggests that Social Security is unconstitutional because it wasn’t in the Constitution. The Constitution is a dazzling document, but do these originalists really think things haven’t changed since then? If James Madison beamed down now, he would no doubt be stunned at the idea that America had evolved so far but was hemming itself in by the strictest interpretation of his handiwork. He might even tweet about it.

Evolution is no myth, but we may be evolving backward. Christine O’Donnell had better hope they don’t bring back witch burning.

Whether we're talking about evolution or sex, Maureen Dowd channeling a Scot deist awakened me from my doctrinal slumber. I realized that I heard that drivel about masturbation being like adultery somewhere before; when I listened to her blabbing about how if the guy doesn’t abstain from masturbation, why did the guy need her for sex, I really had flashbacks. To my freshman year in high school and to James Joyce.

Although I was largely educated by Jesuits and by lay people, for the retreats in high school they always brought out the Big Guns – the Dominicans.  These were the guys who did a number on Jews, heretics, and the insane during the Inquisition, and they have made a trade over the centuries out of doing days of reflection or retreats. They are great preachers, God’s Catholic fire and brimstone corps…and, they are seriously deranged on the subjects of hell, damnation, and sex. MS O-Spot from Delaware may have finally gotten her degree from Farleigh Dickinson, but her mind is pure Frosh Year at Our Lady of the Perpetual Frown.

Seriously, pick up a copy of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce. Read the sermons during the retreats. They’ve been updated, but the basic themes are still there, only more scary and graphic than Joyce could write.

When I was an undergraduate, the Catholic campuses were awash in posters drawn by Sister Corita Kent…primitive scrawls with platitudes and catch-phrases. CELEBRATE! GOD IS LOVE! Bad puns both visual and verbal polluted lots of landscapes. Primary, bright colors and crap – unsophisticated. Good enough for Big Bird, of course, but not a lot of depth or thought there. The artist ‘s work was a lot deeper than most thoughts it inspired. I suspect that’s true of all great art, though.

So, let’s run down the Catholic bona fides of these people. Newt is a Catholic convert, which I find interesting – they will obviously let anyone in. Sarah Palin was a Catholic and is now something else. Christine O’Donnell couldn’t be more Catholic – her thoughts are like badly interpreted Corita Kent designs selling spiritual cheeseburgers. The first family of Conservatism, the Buckleys, couldn’t have been more Catholic. While the Kennedy family makes the Tea Party type squirm and hiss, old Joe would probably have felt right at home with these guys. The Clowny-Kake Sopranos wannabe running for governor of New York is probably a Catholic. Glen Beck was a Catholic, only he decided to become a space alien. O’Reilly, Hannity? Come on – it doesn’t escape me that there’s a strong Irish twinge to these guys and gals Catholicism. I think O’Donnell looks a bit like Maureen O’Hara.

If they aren’t Catholic, they appear to way out on the Born Again Fringe. I suppose Bill Kristol would be the exception that proves the rule, but between Sharon Angle’s lunacy and Palin’s concern about witchcraft with O’Donnell’s multiple concerns and everybody’s love affair with guns, I gotta wonder.

The bad part about it is that the Catholic Church was for decades a source of enlightened thinking on most social and political issues, and stayed that way in part through the present moment. I suspect that Catholic guilt makes Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg think about things like the Senate or social action or Hillary Clinton. From whom much is given, much is indeed expected.

Unfortunately, no particular faith or direction or hair color will define politics or ethics. I find the ability of people like Palin and Gingrich and now O’Donnell to ignore their own falls from Grace and actually find virtue in them troubling. You see, I believe these people believe what they are saying. It’s not a mass movement led by sophisticates – it’s a mass movement led by boobs, in the best HL Mencken sense of the term. Mencken didn’t particularly like the Irish and Catholics either.

Now, not unlike Jefferson, I regard the ethics, the answer that Jesus is shown providing us in scripture to the question later formulated by St Augustine, --How then shall we live together?—to be exceptional. One of my problems with Christianity, and Christians is the inability of so many of these guys to focus. The heart of the message is charity. Not faith, not hope but charity. Certainly not some form of self-reliance…poor houses…lower taxes for the rich.

In times of economic madness, it helps to retreat to first principles. And, at the moment, we are definitely in economic madness. I’ll pass over the debacle that is California, for now and discuss instead the continuing war on reality conducted by the Republican Party and their center, the Tea Party. Paul Krugman, as usual, does a great job of explaining where we’re at from the idea of first principles. The first rule of economic analysis is fairly simple –THE LAWS OF ARITHMETIC APPLY!

Once upon a time, a Latin American political party promised to help motorists save money on gasoline. How? By building highways that ran only downhill.

I’ve always liked that story, but the truth is that the party received hardly any votes. And that means that the joke is really on us. For these days one of America’s two great political parties routinely makes equally nonsensical promises. Never mind the war on terror, the party’s main concern seems to be the war on arithmetic. And this party has a better than even chance of retaking at least one house of Congress this November.

Banana republic, here we come.

Now I've been reading for a while that there is a serious imbalance in the Labor Market -- the workers with the skills are not where the jobs for those skills are. Really? One site today suggested that workers look in places like DC, South Carolina, North Dakota and Louisiana for jobs. The author was obviously drunk. DC is possible, but they can draw from the entire country for some things -- and, there is no real shortage of people in Northern Virginia, Chesapeake Bay or other palces. South Carolina has lots of jobs going begging? First time in decades -- and, one wonders what sort of jobs? Boeing is supposedly ready to start cranking out Dreamliners there; probably at $15 an hour, which is pretty good for South Carolina. But, since most of their suppliers are in China, Japan and similar locales, not a lot of work from the suppliers happening. Lousisiana is looking for what? People to wash pelicans? Granted, they do have a serious shortage of trained workers, but...not really. The unemployment rate there is normally 15% in good times. North Dakota? Seriously...lots of call center work moved in, but both Dakotas have had a downturn in population over the last couple of decades. Jobs in energy may be possible.

However, once again, I turn to Paul Krugman. Who calls bullshit, not only on the right on this one but also the left...the reason for unemployment is lack of demand. Businesses are not going to expand until there is a demand for goods and services, and unless they think it is substantial and sustained, there will not be a lot of hiring regardless of using the shell game to move us all around...Krugman is not a historical economist like the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is a histroical economist, but he can tell a kite from a king just fine...and I suspect that, like me and most thinking individuals, is enough of a Marxist to remember the saw about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce...I'm calling the "Great Recession!" the tragedy...

I’ve been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is “unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.” A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs — and suddenly industry was eager to employ those “unadaptable and untrained” workers.

But now, as then, powerful forces are ideologically opposed to the whole idea of government action on a sufficient scale to jump-start the economy. And that, fundamentally, is why claims that we face huge structural problems have been proliferating: they offer a reason to do nothing about the mass unemployment that is crippling our economy and our society.

The thing I keep thinking about is Public Works spending. Construction is in the tank and that's a big problem -- if we put the building trades folks to work building things besides houses like, oh, schools, roads, electrical grids, natural gas lines, sewers, water lines, hospitals and so on, those are real jobs that need to be done. Only government has the wherewithal to do those things...so, a stimulus package that focuses on long term public works will drive growth. No brainer...we used to do big things in this country...we should be able to do them again. If we can't, well, hell, we're screwed.

Seriously, while I'm all for faster broadband, things like high speed rail and improved infrastructure will do more for the future and the present, generate inital and sustained demand for goods and services that will drive demand for labor across all sectors. This will, oh by the way, generate more tax income. Since government will be spending more, taxes will probably need to increase over time until the taxes equal the outlay, but what the hell? If you increase the taxable base, then you increase the revenue and any increases can be less.

Willie Sutton and the Democrats are right though; if the government wants to get money to fund the things needed to keep us from depending on all the roads running down hill, they have to go where the money is...

Now, in the distant past, I found myself running a St Vincent de Paul organization in a large city. I thought I was going to run HR for them, but a couple of weeks after I joined, they fired the executive director for malfeasance, misfeasance and general "feasance..." and told me I was in charge until I figured it out. I played the role of the good Catholic for that year and actually became influenced in a lot of my thinking about social justice by the writings of St Vincent de Paul and Frederic Ozinam, the founder of the Society of St Vincent de Paul. St Vincent played politics, flattered Cardinals and Queens, and did whatever he had to do for his "hard masters," the poor. St Vincents all over the world do good things for lots of people. I do not regret my time with them. I was the wrong guy on the spiritual side, but on the side of keeping the lights on, the doors open and the poor assisted I was the right guy for the time.

Reason I raise this is simple -- Religion in this country used to be focused on increasing tolerance, helping the afflicted, feeding the hungry, helping people out of poverty. Now it is concerned with periperal things; it doesn't have the moral focus on the things that their savior wanted them to focus on; it is focused on periperals. As long as Catholicism remains mired in sexuality, and Evangelicals remain mired in the end times, and the Black Churches mired in the gospels of Prosperity, then the Sharon Angles and Christine O'Donnells and Newt Gingriches will claim the mantle of religion and call the faithful to arms on a bible of exploitation of the poor, increasing the gap between the rich and the rest, intolerance, hatred and a weird kind of reverse Marxist-Keynesian economic and political philosophy that would make Hobbes regret Leviathan...

 

 

So, a prayer room was ok then but not now...

Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes is not sure which is more likely on this one although given the choice between ignorance, bigotry and hypocrisy, I'd probably go with ignorance and bigotry for the fruitcakes in Florida and elsewhere who are so vehemently opposed to the Park 51 Project. Some of the leadership trying to push this for publicity purposes are of course driven by hypocrisy.

But the presence of a prayer room in the South Tower for Muslims is really troubling...are we, as a people, so ignorant as to not recognize that the World Trade Center was not just part of New York but also a somewhat seperate community, a vibrant and incredibly diverse community? Barring any faith from the area based on the fatuous sacred ground argument is evidence of an evil spirit flowing through our national psyche -- Bar one faith, bar them all and make it a secular monument to profit? Really -- certainly, a lot of people really worship Mammon but still not all.

There were probably Muslims at prayer when the aircraft struck the towers. There were Muslims killed by the terrorists. The ash and debris included Muslim Prayer Rugs, ritual materials and, yes, Korans. And now, a bunch of pinheaded crackers led by Mustache Pete there outside Gainesville are reaping publicity from this debacle cum disaster cum disgrace.

While I know my friend IOZ and a bunch of other people are finding this amusing and probably wondering what the hell is wrong with AXE, and my brothers are probably metaphysically seeking the cold towels to wrap me in, here's the deal. The Muslim Community behind Park 51 are proposing a Community Center. It will contain an Islamic Prayer Room; it will also contain a Christian Room and a Jewish Room. Muslims are no more basically oriented toward inclusiveness than Christians or Jews -- I remember being told that I was a devil worshipper because I was a Catholic by my Protestant friend while I was in 2nd grade. I remember being told all sorts of weirdness about Protestants. Bigotry binds religions together in ways that amaze the anti-theist. (By the way, as Keith Obermann pointed out on Letterman, the Park 51 Iman has not provided a secular liberal prayer room or an atheist reflection room in his plan, and probably should do so...) The Park 51 Community has responded to their better spirit and the hope of Islam as a religion of peace. And, those so incensed and those so ignorant as to demand it be moved away from the stip clubs and delis and the rest of the New York neighborhood to show respect for our White Christian Dead are so wrong as to be funny.

It's been said that God takes care of fools, drunks and the United States. I wonder if he protects the United States from our homegrown fools and drunks. By the way, the Park 51 site will begin to accept donations next week through it's blog. I recommend going back to it and I will do my best to not go totally insane and repost the address then.

These people? People? Whackjob facist religious nuts...

Just to be clear, despite this asshole''s assurance that he and his lickspittle congregation are prepared to die for their right to burn Korans, they are not the one's who are going to be killed, wounded, psychologically traumatized and bereaved. I hate to disrupt their martyrdom fantasy, but burning a bunch of Korans in Gainsesville ain't going to mobilize the Old Man in the Mountain and his Assassins to descend on Gatorcountry on a mission of revenge. If they want to be martyrs, I recommend they scrap their plan to do this outside their church but to gather all their friends, family and relations and go to...oh, Isreal. Note the irony. Mossad will have their cracker asses in jail in no time; or, go do it at the international airport in Yemen. Just fly in, sit around until everybody is there, grab some trash cans and go do your thing. Burn those Korans...and enjoy hell.

Phil Ochs wrote a song called I ain't marchin anymore that is a classic antiwar song. The chorus is"It's always the old who lead us to war/Always the young to fall/Now look at what we've done with a saber and a gun/Tell me was it worth it all?" I think it needs to be modified to say some something about inbred, ingrate, liars, thieves and nutjobs getting us into situations that kill soldiers.

Seriously, any soldier who is injured or killed, and any bereaved family, and any US civilian who is a victim of reprisal from the whackjobs who will be enraged by the act of these inbred, ingrate, liars, thieves and racist bastards should sue them. Burning the Koran is not an act of worship -- legally, I think it falls under the heading of a Tort. Worth thinking about. And, if anyone is thinking about it in Islam, I think that suing these bastards is probably legally defensible. What reputable figures would testify on their behalf?

Before the dimwits riot and they pile the brush around the stake...

It's a silly thought, but why hasn't Stephen Hawking been burned to death at the stake for heresy, witchcraft and general weirdness? Oh, yeah -- he lives in Cambridge which is radically more rational and civilized than Arizona, Georgia, or Wassila. Still, the latest piece due out on the 7th of September is probably going to bother people. Hawking once again makes a point made by lots of other cosmologists, including Terry Pratchett in Small Gods... a god may or may not exist, but it exists only because of the believers. God is largely irrelevant. This is the true intelligent design argument seen through a contemporary deist lens -- the universe has rules and they make sense but they don't depend on god to exist or to make sense.

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

What exactly is hallowed ground or sacred about Ground Zero?

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Nineteen Endtimers decide to kill a bunch of people and do so. People die horrifically and on national TV. The local tinpot/tinheaded dictator, Benito Guiliani fucks up the response, ultimately forcing a near riot between his police department and his fire department, both of which organizations largely consist of guys who think he's a tool and his umbrella carrying police commissioner are twits. Body parts are found in landfills. One bunch of loonies blame the Jews; another bunch of loonies blame the gays; the religious right blames the gays, the fornicators and the liberals. A lot of people were killed, injured, psychologically damaged and basically left bereft. The reason it was a target was because it was the psychological symbol of American greed and capitalism. The World Trade Center wasn't devoted to unicorn farms, orphanages, or feeding the poor, or succoring injured eagles -- it was about money, and greed. The response to this attack -- let's build another Temple of Mammon and really charge some rents.

Ok, to a certain extent, that's the American Way. We have lots of hallowed ground in this country that has been under threat by capitalism, and to a certain extent, that makes sense. We are a free people, and free people do engage in something else besides Jeffersonian Democracy and Socratic dialogues about the meaning of love, peace, Woodstock and "Is" -- free people engage in commerce. The difference between 1 World Trade Center and the Gettysburg Battlefield is that no one has put a fucking outlet mall on Cemetary Ridge. Little Round Top itself doesn't have a goddamn Wendy's on it.

If the people who think the World Trade Center is sacred, why are they not furious about what's going to be done. The Twin Towers of Light that was shown for a while was hauntingwas haunting; one of my great regrets as an American is that I haven't been to Ground Zero since the attack. I was dumbfounded by the valor of the cops and the firemen and the people who just did what they were supposed to do, unlike Benito who was bumbling around looking for a camera. Maybe he figured that those working class Irish, Italian, Pole, Puerto Rican and Black guys and gals needed to see his penile-implant-resembling face that day. If the ground is sacred, then nothing should go up there.

So, I'll weigh in on whether or not the Park 51 Community Center should be allowed to go in a couple of blocks away when the people who are acting like assholes and idiots actually do something to make the ground sacred and awesome...crystal towers with no businesses, seperated from the rest of the city by a moat. Until then, it's just a commercial abomination being built on a landfill...

Crusader AXE mad this offer earlier today to Vote Vets, and will make it again here. One of the most awful things that this new Right Tea Party bunch of loonies has hijacked is the Gadsden Flag, the "Don't Tread on Me" banner that indicates the willingness of Americans to fight for their individual rights. They've used it to back corporate capitalism, of course; tax cuts for the rich; denial of care or rights for the poor; the imposition of state religion as a goal; what are the odds that the Gadsden Flag will turn up at Glen Beck's Sausage Fest and Rummage Sale this weekend at the Lincoln Memorial? We need to take back our symbols -- Lady Liberty, the Constitution, and, oh yeah, the Gadsden Flag. The one thing that these yokels have shown is a gleeful joy in saying rights don't matter. To build the Park 51 Project there is within the Muslim Community's Rights, it's just not right and they shouldn't do it within sight of this new finance and banking mega-complex with a few plaques that the developers are putting up...I mean, sacred ground. Fuck you all blind...if the Community Center agrees to fly it, I will gladly purchase and donate a Gadsden Flag to them. All that I have heard is a willingness to trample on rights based on opinions...as Jon Stewart pointed out last night, there's no logic to this. It's simple -- the Jihadis will claim we're wrong and they're right regardless of what they do, so why are we worried about what they think? Fuck 'em -- we need to do what's right. And, since the Muslim Community is willing to raise and invest money and build a community center that I believe is supposed to be open to everyone, why the hell not! More power to them. And less to the bigoted twits who oppose this...

Heresy! Blasphemy! And general bullshit...Evangelicals smoke crack! Seriously...

Well, after Teddy Boy Haggard , we already knew about the crack smoking. But, Tim LeHaye of the Right, I Mean, Left Behind series is now crediting a mere human with the ability to bring on the Apocalypse. This is, of course, heresy and blasphemy. God will decide when the end times are, and if Barrack Hussein Obama is preparing for the way of the Lord, then good Evangelical Christians should be voting for him. Seriously, if you want the rapture and you think this way you should be voting Democratic while looking for your a totally pure red hefifer to send to your Ultra-Orthodox Jewish friends clustered in condos on the west bank...LaHaye went on Huckleberry's TV show to spew...

Evangelical Christian minister Tim LaHaye says that the policy initiatives put forth by the Obama administration are bringing the country "closer to the apocalypse." LaHaye issued the dire warning in an appearance this week on Mike Huckabee's talk show on Fox News."Our present president doesn't seem to get it," LaHaye explained. "He doesn't understand that some of the things he's introducing that many of us call 'raw socialism' -- it's a different name, but it's essentially government control and government domination of everything."

Well,did you know that Haggard's father was a Veterinarian and founded a charismatic movement? And now he's claiming that he was too contrite for the whole gay hooker/massage/crank thing...For people who claim to be Christian and to spout the bible and trust it verbatim, these guys really are confused.

So, since we missed the Eurovision thing, here's a bit of gratuitous Apocalyptic stuff...Happy End Times, and I hope the gal in the crab suit gets LaHaye...