Some Cats Know...

A man I deeply loved, but whom I only briefly met, died this week and it makes me very sad.

Willliam Sloane Coffin was the kind of man that made me believe in America and made me believe in the church. There are only a few of those folks around (some of them even read this blog) and I consider myself abundantly priviledged to have gotten to meet even a single one of them. Some (a very few) I have even gotten lucky enough to call my friends. Bill wasn't one of those… but there are many times when I feel like he was.

The first time I met Bill Coffin I was at a "refugee conference" in Tucson Arizona. There were many strange things about that weekend in Tucson… Not the least of which was going with my then lover to see The Talking Heads concert film (directed by Jonathan Demme) "Stop Making Sense" at a theater where in high school I had gone with a then girlfriend, to see the musical "You're A Good Man Charlie Brown." There were several other weird experiences on that trip and it was the last time I entered the city limits of Tucson… When the week was through, I really had no desire to ever go back.

"Same… as… it… ever… was."

I was there for the first time since I had graduated from the University of Arizona. I was there because the conference I was attending was a church conference, and in Tucson I had been very active in the church… but the only people I knew at the conference - just around the corner from where my grandmother had lived, and just a few blocks from a big Baptist church where I had spent an enormous amount of my time - were from California. I had gone to jail with some of these folks… the folks I had gone to church with in Tucson were nowhere to be seen... "Same… as… it… ever… was."

The conference was on immigration and refugees, and I was in from San Francisco where I had developed a small reputation with people that I worked with for being "the guy who said 'no' to Bank of America." I didn't think it was a big deal, because it was really based on the simple fact I didn't want to subject some of the people that I was employing at the time to the idiotic, capitalistic grandstanding of a project I was being asked, by the bank, to produce. I had actually said NO to a whole lot of people and things at the time (including the IRS, the State Department, the INS, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Southern Baptist Convention), but in Tucson I met the real thing… Bill Coffin stood up before us and shouted in that Bronx Preacher accent that we were CALLED damnit… CALLED to stand up for the people who could not stand up for themselves. And he proved it… He had been there… He was one of the real ones. He stood and stood and stood... until finally toward the end, he really just had to sit.

At the same conference, another of my life's heros, Elie Weizel, stood up and made the statement that has come to define large parts of my life and psyche ever since… "NO PERSON CAN BE ILLEGAL." I will never forget that moment… and I will never forget that phrase. It, perhaps more than any other set of words, has defined what I believe about responsibility, citizenship, and personhood for the last 25 years.

"Same… as… it… ever… was."

On another occasion, I had the opportunity to hear William Sloane Coffin in his home church, that big grand amazing building that Rockefeller built on Riverside Drive as much as a memorial to himself and to money as it is to God… but Coffin (like so many other preachers in that pulpit) seized the moment and stole the show, speaking truth to power and suffering no fools, gladly or otherwise.

Recently, as a result of that little storm from last summer (remember Katrina?), I have of late had the opportunity to meet with, visit with, and break bread and fish with another of those heros that make me who I am. Dr. C. T. Vivien. A man who walked the roads and stood the lines with Dr. King, who calls me (and just about everybody else) "Doc" and loves to talk about church, and preaching and Jesus… while also talking about the great paintings on the walls, and the great food that comes out of the kitchen, of Dukie Chase's restaurant in New Orleans. When I sit to dinner (or in the car on a ride like hell's fury to catch a plane out of NOLA) with C.T. I am simply in awe; I experience the moment like one of my favorite scenes in the movies when Jack Nicholson looks at "his girls" in The Witches of Eastwick and says to his dog… "see what humans can do?" When I'm with C.T. I find he calls my mind to another Son of the South, a man who I have had great conversations with on the phone, but whom I have never met in person, Brother Will D. Campbell. He's another one of those folks that gets under my skin and makes me want to suck meaning out of every moment I've been given on this planet. I'll never get to that place... but it's one hell of a ride tryin' out the path.

I just want to thank all y'all… But… tonight… especially I want to thank Bill. You - a Presbyterian - made me a better Baptist, a better American, a better man, and a better human being. A dear friend of mine recently had the opprotunity to get to know Bill as a friend... I envy him that oppportunity, but I'm glad he had the chance. As I look up from my computer and out the window across the city, the big bright moon shines right in my face and it feels like Bill's come by to check up on me.

Here's to ya Preacher Coffin... I hope the beer's cold… the music's good and the conversation's as spicy as ever.

What Then Must We Do... What Then Must We Do...

Naomi Klein has piece in The Nation entitled "'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate"

It's an important article in light of some of what I talked about yesterday. Go read it. If you have trouble getting it (you might have to register for The Nation) email me and I'll send you a copy.

The main point of the article is that torture is not a new way of doing business for the U.S. What IS different is that the Bushies are trying to do it publicly and while that's a treacherous step down a slippery damn road, it is NOT the only news. The School of the Americas has been in the business for a very long time.

When I went to Nicaragua 23 years ago with the very first Witness for Peace team in the midst of our nation's support of the Contras, I heard many stories of ugly abuse and blatant torture and those came first hand from people who had experienced it personally. I heard more of the same three years later when I returned with a group of people to paticipate in a music festival and record an album with Ken Medema and local Nicaraguan singers. On both occassions I had interviews with victims of our government's policies and I was moved and motivated to make some serious changes in my life.

Over the years, some of those changes have remained and some have fallen by the side of the road. What I am aware of at this particular moment on this particular day is that, as Arthur Miller has Linda Loman say of her husband's life in the play "Death of a Salesman," attention MUST be paid.

With all that is going on, from my backyard to Baghdad, I am feeling the need, as I said yesterday, to do something... ANYTHING... but to do it right away.

So... to quote another of my favorite dramatic characters, Billy Kwan (played by Linda Hunt) quoting Tolstoy in the film "The Year of Living Dangerously"...

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

The Things We Think And Do Not Say

I woke up this morning at 6:45, reached my arm out from under the covers as I usually do and turned on the radio. But, for some reason, instead of listening, as I usually do, to the morning jazz set on WWOZ, I switched over to WWNO for NPR's Morning Edition.

The first story right out of the box (so to speak) was news on the "trials" of Guantanamo detainees. The next story was about Dubya's visit to New Orleans tomorrow. I switched off the radio, got up, went to the kitchen and started to make coffee. As the coffeemaker did it's thunk, spurt, fizz thing I sat down and turned on the computer. This is something that I keep prommising myself I will not do - starting the day in cyberspace - but, like some weak assed, morally wrecked junky, I do it day after day after day despite my best intentions and theoretically better judgement.

The news on the radio made me think about a story I saw on 60 minutes Sunday night (in the hour before the Oscars) when they did a bit on a soldier who was being "unjustly accused" of killing two Afghan detainees. Men who died hanging from the ceiling by chains and with their legs, as the coroner's report stated, "pulpified."

It also made me think of a statistic that has been running randomly around in my head for the past couple of weeks. A statistic on the number of people dead and/or missing in New Orleans post-katrina. The official death toll of the storm is approximately 1100. However, as we move into the seventh month post-katrina it is important to remember that there are, depending on whose numbers you choose to pay attention to, between 500 and 1900 more people still missing and most likely dead. So let's expand that out shall we? If we make the obvious next step that officials are unwilling and/or unable to make and accept those folks as no longer with us, it brings the New Orleans death toll post-Katrina to at least 1,600 and very possibly 3,000 people.

This is what triggered my search for Jerry Maguire.

The premise of the movie, the "inciting action" as it were, is Jerry's creation of his mission statement, "The Things We Know And Do Not Say." His decision to say it elicits positive response from everyone… even the copy store clerk. Googling the title of the mission statement, I was surprised to actually find a copy of the document at a wonderful website from New South Wales, Australia. I have to say, I've always liked Cameron Crowe, but the fact that this guy actually wrote the mission statement out in full is a piece of screenwriting homework that I really admire… It's not really what I'm writing about here, but I had to say it anyway. Dealing with backstory is the woodshed work of writing and I am not very good at woodshed work. I prefer to think about it for long periods of time, but doing the actual work of writing out character bios, personal journals, mission statements… Ugh, please, do I have to!??!?

Well that's the synchronistic lesson of the day.

It really is the woodshed work that matters and I am as guilty as the rest of the U.S. electorate in not having done my part.

George Bush will fly into my town tomorrow - his tenth visit since Katrina - and he will make a nice show of how much he cares, just like he did back in September when he stepped out from behind Andrew Jackson's statue, strode across the grass of Jackson Square (originally named the Place de Armas) and told the displaced citizens of New Orleans and the nation as a whole that he would see that everything that could possibly be done to help New Orleans would be done, and that he would not rest until he made sure that it had happened. He'll make another grand and glorious statement for a collection of media people and at ten p.m. EST Anderson Cooper will make some grand and glorioius declaration about "keepin' em honest" while ultimately missing the point.

Last week we were treated to proof of what most of us (at least those of us who were watching television in New Orleans on Saturday August 27) knew six months ago. When George Bush stood before the public in early September and made the statement that "no one anticipated the breaching of the levees," he was lying. Straight out, no holds barred, fully functioning in his right wing, compassionate conservative, neo-con casuistry, lying. He did know that the levees would probably fail and he knew it well before the storm came ashore. Last week we saw the video evidence of it; the discussions of the levee problem took place and a week later Bush lied about it.

What the news folks chose to focus on last week was not the real story. Those who wished to make the president select look stupid tried to show video that made him look stupid and as usual the bilious pontificators proclaimed, with full dedication to the administration's talking points, that we weren't seeing everything.

Of course we weren't seeing everything! But what matters is what we were seeing and what we were seeing was proof that George Bush lied AGAIN.

He lied in September 2005, just like he lied in September 2001 when he, and his stiffly quaffed mannequin, Condi, spouted the line "No one anticipated that these people would use airplanes to crash into buildings!" As with the Katrina issue, it became clear very shortly thereafter that not only did a whole lot of people anticipate the "use of planes as missles," but they told the administration about it, and they did so rather emphatically.

As for the levees… hell… I even knew about the breaching of the levees. It wasn't that deep a secret. While still safely ensconced outside the hurricane zone in Northern California, I watched with fear in 2004 as hurricanes bored their way through the Gulf of Mexico and then, always at the last minute, turned aside from my (then) home away from home. There was a huge piece on 60 minutes about it in the summer of 2004 and there was a detailed article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune about that same time.

The video evidence of last week was not about how stupid Dubya looked (we've had plenty evidence of that and even his supporters think he looks dumb). What the evidence showed last week, and what most people didn't talk about, was that BUSH ISN'T STUPID, HE'S A LIER!

Yeah yeah yeah… all president's are liers. Most likely true. They probably have to be to survive long enough in politics to get to the position of president. As the bumper sticker says… "Would somebody please give this guy a blow job so we can impeach him?"

There are lies… and then there are lies.

So back to the story about the soldier. He claims that he was trained and ordered to torture people, and Bush claims we don't do those kinds of things. But, when John McCain gets a bill passed through Congress, Bush signs the bill and crosses his fingers, issuing a presidential statement that says, essentially, "that's all well and good, y'all go ahead and play your funny games, but I'm gonna do what I feel like 'cause I'm the president damnit."

It's back to that quote from Edmund Burke that every single one of us has heard at some point in our lives… “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” There is some question as to what the actual quote really is, but thepoint is obvious.

George W. Bush has lied… consistently, repeatedly, intentionally and with malice. He has used a smokescreen of "I didn't know" and/or "I don't care" as a way to excuse actions that are intellectually dishonest, probably illegal, and certainly immoral. It has served him well to appear inept, but he is not inept. He is evil.

3,000 people died on 9/11 because he chose not to pay attention while on vacation at his ranch. Several thousand more American soldiers have died since then in a war that he lied to take us into and continues to lie to keep us from leaving. Countless thousands of innocent people have died for the same reason.

At a minimum, 1,500 people, and probably closer to 3,000 people have died from the worst natural disaster in American history because he chose not to pay attention in August 2005 while on vacation on his ranch. Subsequently he has made hollow promises while backing and filling, rolled up his sleeves while closing his eyes and ears.

It's impossible to begin to imagine the damage that has been done to the reputation of the U.S. - and the danger both present and future to U.S. citizens and soldiers abroad - because of immoral, illegal, and irresponsible torture policies sanctioned by his administration that he has chosen (and continues to choose) to ignore.

These really are "the things we think and do not say."

New Orleans cannot survive another summer based on lies and hope.

The country cannot survive another three years of lies and criminality.

The world cannot survive any more silent acceptance by those of us who know better, but do nothing.

Many of us - and I am definitely including myself - have mirrored the president's dishonest behaviour, giving silent agreement and willing participation with a wink, a nod, and shrug of our shoulders while this man and his handlers take our country down into hell on a set of greased rails.


It's time to stop doing nothing.

It's time for the woodshed work.

It's time to do ANYTHING.

I was just talking to God...

So Ray Nagin, in his post Katrina stress mode, or in his "Help Mister Wizard I don't want to be Mayor anymore" attempt to throw the forthcoming election, has decided that talking to God AND to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is all a very good thing. In this he joins other wonderful, forthright and intellectual public servants like of course George Bush and, my personal favorite, Pat Robertson.

Well, after all of this God Talk (and talk back) I've become very curious as to why God keeps saying different things to all these different people. I mean he tells Dubya that it is important to go to war in Iraq, but he tells Ray Nagin that he's angry about the war in Iraq, so he's sending hurricanes to get us. Of course, the hurricanes don't wind up in Crawford Texas (now THAT would be a miracle worthy of divine blame!). Robertson, who I'm pretty sure has been talking to God (and to the dust bunnies) for a lot longer than Nagin or Dubya COMBINED decided that God is mad at New Orleans because of Gays and Abortions and sent Katrina to take us out for that reason. He picked up this line of reasoning from another pinhead God talker… Jerry Falwell who blamed the maniacs who crashed planes into the twin towers on Lesbians, Abortionists and… drum roll please… the ACLU, while Pat sat next to him doing his best impersonation of Harpo Marx.

Most recently Pat has been saying that God has a biological contract out on Ariel Sharon (much like Pat called for the government assasination of Venezuelan President Chavez) for messing with YHWH's real estate investments.

Of course, in the Katrina case, Robertson negelected to note that the brunt of Katrina actually MISSED New Orleans ever so slightly and that the people hit hardest by the flood were neither gays nor abortionists. Which brings me back to Ray Nagin who has decided that GOD wants New Orleans to be a "chocolate city." Almost immediately he started back peddling on that one, winging his way to the proclamation that what he meant was CHOCOLATE MILK, not a really great metaphor either (ESPECIALLY after Katrina), but I guess his omnipresent speechwriter wasn't taking calls right at that precise moment.

I really don't think Nagin meant that he only wants African Americans in New Orleans, and the fact remains that pre-K the city was a majority black city, and there is absolutely no denying that the makeup of the city AS a majority African American city goes a long way to making New Orleans the very place it is. If the central cultural marker of New Orleans is Jazz music and its related genres, not to mention all of the other art that grows out of the rich cultural gumbo created here, then any thought that somehow New Orleans can (or will) substantially change in that way is ludicrous, callous and stupid. But New Orleans' mixture is more than all of that… and frankly, Dr. King's message was oh so much more than that.

Somehow I'm having a hard time getting my mind around God (or Martin Luther King Jr. for that matter) sitting up in heaven, screaming to Ray Nagin at the other end of a cell phone like Cuba Gooding Jr. and Tom Cruise.

Mayor Nagin seems to have decided that as a follow up to his career as a cable tv executive, and mayor, he now wants to be a Baptist preacher. I learned a long time ago (when I actually WAS a Baptist preacher) that one should not speak for folks who are significantly superior to oneself in behavioral, intellectual or rhetorical skills. So, with all this confusion I decided to have a little talk with God myself… and she asked me to pass on a message to everyone. She told me to tell y'all to…

SHUT THE HELL UP!

Say Amen Somebody!

Well damn! Just as we come to the end of the year, to the HOLY DAZE SEASON we get good news in the battle against teaching religion as science.

A report from Associated Press this morning tells of the ruling against "Intelligent Design" in the Dover Pennsylvania School District. What's even better, is that the case addresses the issue on exactly where it should be addressed. It is unconstitutional to teach religious doctrine in public schoools as if it were fact. What's more significiant is to remember that those religious folk advocating the teaching of religious "values" were themselves lying about their positions, their curriculum and their motives. The judge in the case, John E. Jones III, made this point beautifully when he commented, "It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

This is the crux of the whole thing. I have no complaint with what anyone wants to believe. Lord knows, I believe some bizarre things myself, and frankly I largely subscribe to a foundational belief I learned in seminary, from pastoral care professor J. Lynn Elder, who was adamant that, "Whatever you can say about God, that God is not." In other words, whatever our small minds conceive about the world, the God, or the Universe, it is by definition going to be too small to fit the granidosity of what actually exists out there. So go ahead... believe whatever the hell you want, because the universal and probably immutable law is...

EVERYTHING THING YOU KNOW IS WRONG.

In America you can believe... you can even SAY... pretty much anything you want. That's what we're here for.

But you can't teach it to impressionable young minds in schools with state enforced attendance. It isn't fair, it isn't right, it isn't "christian", and most importantly (thank you Judge Jones) it isn't CONSTITUTIONAL!

Score two points for the good guys!

When you add the latest speculation that a Democratic Congress after the 06 elections (we can hope can't we?) could lead to Articles of Impeachment against Dubya, well the LIGHT really is returning folks!

Burkha Dolls for American Girls

I've been waiting for a really good story to grab me before getting around to writing another of my rants about The American Taliban, and this morning The Huffington Post finally provided the link I needed.

This week's leader of American Taliban is Donald E Wildmon, chairman of the Tupelo, Mississippi based American Family Association which boasts a membership that is 2,213,284 pinheads strong and claims to be "America's Pro-Family Action Web Site." Evidently what Donald Wildmon thinks is pro-family is threatened by the organization Girls, Inc. which has partnered with American Girl to sell some more of those ubiquitous wristsbands, this time with 70 cents of each purchase going to support the programs of Girls, Inc.

Girls Incorporated started out in 1864 and is probably best known as Girl's Clubs (back when Boy's and Girl's Clubs were separate entities). Their website has a Girls' Bill of Rights that I suppose makes Wildmon and his group apoplectic with the idea that girls might actually learn how to grow up to be strong, independent and self-fulfilled women. Wildmon's group insists that Girls, Inc. "promotes abortion and lesbianism" which, it would seem, are two of the devil's darkest, strongest and most egregious tactics. Wending one's way through this idiotic use of bandwidth it becomes rather obvious why the uber-conservatives are having a problem with Harriet Miers (MY problem with Harriet Miers is for another post). An unmarried woman who has made it 60 years on her own without the help of a husband is clearly a threat to the paternalistic, misogynist Wildmon with his deep fears of the devil's powerful ways. If these guys could make it happen, the little girls at Girls Incorporated would be covered head to toe in muslin and never leave the doors of their fathers' homes until they were carted off to be married in a ceremony officiated by Wildmon himself.

The AFA website even offers a comic version of the New Testament for youth who, having been home schooled with the AFA's resources, are evidently incapable of reading a bible with actual WORDS in it, or possessing the critical thinking abilities to allow them to come to their own conclusions about what those words might actually mean for people in 2005. The AFA website also has articles and links to such relevant contemporary issues as a Constitutional Amendment to ban courts from ruling on The Pledge of Allegiance, a Tenessee Republican legislator taking on his state's Black Caucus for racism, a link to a petition against gay marriage, and a diatribe against Target stores for selling sex merchandise by Elexa.Evidently, for Wildmon its important that sex be for procreation only and that nobody have any fun in the process. Wildmon and his idiotic minions seem to have missed one rather significant segment of the Bible they are so sure they believe in; a section that is much closer to the poetry of modern lovers than it is the dried up, joyless and ugly diatribes from these puritanical grumps.

I haven't fully investigated Wildmon's home schooling curriculum, but I'm making a wide ranging guess that it doesn't include Freud's views on human sexual behavior and I imagine Alfred Kinsey is considered a sort of perverse sexual antichrist.

I want to say that numb nuts religious zealots like this should simply be ignored, but I'm afraid that ignoring them will not make them go away. Instead, we need to listen to the words of Tupelo's favorite son and get to work. Those who believe that United States of America really DOES stand for freedom - ALL FREEDOM - and that such a belief is not just a slogan - or a dumb ass lyric in an insipid country song - need to get up off our butts and say so. We need to make our voices heard on the same issues that these dimwits spout off about, we need to donate to organizations like Girls Inc., we need to celebrate goodness, lightness, connection, and yes damnit... even (or perhaps especially) sex.

Beyond all that... we need to make it clear that there are MORE of us than there are of them and that the last time anyone checked, the majority was at least supposed to rule in this country, even if it doesn't always work out that way.

Won't Wash Us Away

Randy Newman's classic tune, "Louisiana 1927," is a song which, following Katrina's slam dunk of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, became a sort of theme song for the disaster and the Bush administration's magnificently incompetent response. It begins with the stellar line, "What has happened down here is the wind have changed." That may be the clearest statement of the overall realization that we, as a nation, have come to in the four weeks since Katrina slammed my home town and washed our national sleepwalk over the levees and off into the Gulf of Mexico.

I was one of the ones that Sunday evening who, like another of the lines in Newman's song, "got away alright." That night (four weeks ago as I write this, but a seeming eternity inside my head) I sat in the driver's seat of an old beat up Ford van, a sort of fortunate gift from my absentee landlord that allowed me (and my landlord's little dog) to flee the hurricane and make it to the relative safety of my former sweetheart's house in Hattiesburg. Despite our less than stunning end to a 17 year relationship, Marsha welcomed me into her home and even befriended my disheveled companion. Together we spent Monday watching trees fall for eight hours. When it was all over, there was no power, but the little bit of news I could pick up on the radio proclaimed that "New Orleans dodged a bullet." I went to bed that night, thankful for the relative safety I had found and with the glad feeling that after putting in some heavy lifting to help my Mississippi benefactors dig out from under the pile of pine wood that surrounded the house I would be back on the road home, a little tired, a little sweaty, but mostly no worse for wear.

That was before the flood. Before the retaining wall two blocks from my friend's house gave way and buried the house she has lived in for the last seven years under a sea of water. Before "da lower nint" turned into an extension of the Mississippi River and took houses, cars, pets and people with it. Before the police in Gretna turned on their cousins from the Crescent City and sent them across the bridge back to face devastation, disease, and maybe even death. Before the mayor of New Orleans got on the radio and said what we all wanted to say when he told the president and his associates to "get off your asses!" Before Barbara Bush stood in the Houston Astrodome and proclaimed that, "this is actually working out pretty well for these folks." Before the ubiquitous Crescent City greeting, "Where Y'at?" morphed from a question about one's relative health and demeanor and into a serious question about a displaced friend's whereabouts, safety, health and personal circumstances.

That was before I was told that I better get a tetanus shot before I go back home.

Most significantly, it was before Bush swaggered out from behind Andrew Jackson's statue and into the glare of the TV lights to "take responsibility" for "the problems" and to promise 200 billion dollars of money that is not his to give, to bring the city back.

Which of course begs the question… Back to what?

A week after George's moment in the lights of New Orleans (which were turned off again almost immediately after this latest in the long series of staged moments that characterize Bush's ever so theatrical presidency) I returned to my former home in ostensibly liberal Northern California and was greeted by people who were actually discussing the value of plowing the city under and starting over with a sort of instant Disneyland version of The Big Easy; a city that might be just a little higher, a little cleaner, and populated by a whole lot fewer poor people.

In the aforementioned song, Randy Newman repeatedly offers the line, "They're tryin' to wash us away," as an explanation of the inaction, ineptitude, and devastation that resulted in and with the flood of 1927. It is a sentiment that serves as the perfect metaphor for the present circumstances and the present state of the political mind. What was different about the week following Katrina was the simple fact that for 7 days the national self-image, normally defined by the carefully scrubbed images of happy people in sitcoms and talk shows was sent into a state of toxic shock. As if some evil interloper had collectively poisoned all the drinking water, our televisions, newspapers and computers spilled over like the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and flooded our homes with the deep, frightening hallucinations of people living and dying without all the things that we like to believe our nation stands for. Without water, food, medicine, safety, help, attention, hope, or love.

It is these images, and not their underlying reality, that seems to now be the target of "relief efforts." After ignoring the problem for nearly a week, the Bush administration finally figured out that they better do some damage control, so the military finally made it in, people were finally pulled out and the streets were made safe, dry, and clean with astonishing rapidity. Within days we were treated to the official announcement that New Orleans was "… now among the safest cities in the nation." Of course, the only people left were soldiers with M16s, but why quibble with such impressive crime statistics? Katrina had succeeded in accomplishing something that countless administrations had been unable to achieve, she had cleaned up crime in New Orleans. If the city was now a toxic wasteland unfit for human habitation, well, tough problems demand tough solutions.

It is this mindset that seems to characterize all the efforts at some sort of cultural clarity in America today. The broad differences and exciting quirks that make our national culture as unique as it is seem to be the prime target of efforts to turn us into some sort of Calvinistic, money producing, oil consuming, cultural machine. From this point of view, it's not for nothing that the people who suffered the most were simply the people who didn't own cars. In the New America it's important to have a car, to have a job and to have a solid handle on the cultural expectations of the primary demographic.

The problem is, as Randy sings, "the wind have changed." The nightmare of Katrina has finally demonstrated to the country that the little boy emperor really has no clothes and we aren't going to cheer the parade. New Orleans (like San Francisco, that other precariously positioned coastal city), does not easily fit into the mold. As a people, New Orleanians will not fit into the mold. In general, we are a damned stubborn and rather ribald bunch of folks. We're mostly like that old joke about how you can "dress him up but ya can't take him out." We are inevitably going to pop out of our monkey suits, laugh too loudly, drink too much and spill things on our dinner jackets. We're very likely to dress up in stupid costumes, throw worthless beads (but only at clearly specified times), play loud music and celebrate when we should be working. We know how to party, and we aren't really good at being puritanical, judgmental and intolerant. You can come to our richly cultured city and spend your entire vacation drinking on Bourbon Street and return home thinking that you experienced New Orleans, while we have gone on being the lively, vibrant, mixed up human gumbo this little delta town has always been and you will have missed all the best parties. We won't judge you for that. In New Orleans people are mostly allowed to be who (and what) they are. As things come back together, you're welcome to come and join the party (for there will most definitely be a party), and you can pull out a cleaning rag and put a new shine on our city. We might even like it. But it's best to understand that we will always be who we are and we are highly unlikely to fit the mold that others have set for us. The rest of the country might want to take note.

You can clean us up, but you won't wash us away.

Three Thousand Words

It's been said that a picture is worth a thousand words.
It's also been said that ACTIONS speak louder than words...


There will come a time, and that time is coming soon, when I will have the words to write in a way that will express my feelings of sadness, frustration, anger and outrage about what occured last week in my lovely city.

But right now I, quite uncharacteristically, don't have the words. So I am going to allow these pictures, sent to me by friends, to speak instead.

For your edification... 3,000 words on George Dubya Bush


Okay... it's actually 3,014 words.

Stop Me Before I Have Another Facelift!

We already know that Pat Robertson doesn't have any Juevos. He proved that four years ago after 9/11, when he shared the TV screen with Jerry Falwell - another mental midget - who proclaimed that God was attacking our country, "because of the gays, and the lesbians and the abortionists, and the ACLU..." Robertson sat there nodding and grinning like some leatherette Walmart knockoff of Charlie McCarthy. Later, when he briefly came to his senses, Falwell actually apologized for the remark, yet Robertson spent the time backing and filling and trying to claim that he never said anything.

Now the man is facing into his battery of TV cameras on what they have the audacity to call the "Christian" Broadcasting Network, speaking to his multi-million person audience of true believers and directly calling for the assasination of the duly elected leader of a sovereign nation! Why? He says why! Because he's "sitting on a big pool of oil." Robertson wants someone to assasinate Chavez, not because he has attacked the U.S. Not because he has advocated attacking the U.S. Not because he lives in a country that will likely become "a launching pad for... Muslim extremism," as he puts it. In Venezuela, 92% of the population are baptised Catholics!

He wants him whacked for oil!

I'm sure that if Pat were questioned on the matter he would be incapable of seeing the similarity between this "Fatwa" issued by a Christian (rather than Islamic) fundamentalist wacko (namely himself) and Fatwas issued by various Islamic (rather than Christian) fundamentalist wackos regarding the murder of everyone from Salman Rushdie to George Bush, or any other set of "unworthy" people. Not only is he a hypocrite an idiot and a coward, but it seems to me that the man has gone completely insane! Assasination is not simply a cheaper method of reducing the price of gasoline, it is international aggression, it is murder, it is ANTI-Christian, and, even though we have clearly been known to use it as a method, it is UN-American.

Robertson, Falwell , Dobson and their millions of followers have become, as Cenk Uyger calls them, the American Taliban. They are no more Christian than the Taliban are Muslim. Neither of these groups represents the "better... natures" of their chosen religious models. They are a menace to true spirituality and they are a menace to American society. We can't kill them, and frankly we can't even shut them up. But we don't have to listen to them, we don't have to give them the time of day, and we CAN send them into exile where they belong.

As best I can figure from the evidence in the picture above, Robertson has simply had so many facelifts that his brain has been sucked out the back of his head and the only remaining goal for his life is to see if he can transform his face into a mirror image of that other marvelously cosmeticized fundamentalist wacko, Tammy Faye!



Now the only thing is, I may have been wrong about Pat up above when I said he had no Juevos. Clearly he has more balls than Bush who can't even bring himself to acknowledge his lies, come clean on the real reason for our war in Iraq and meet with a lowly housewife from Vacaville who is mourning the loss of her son in Bush's War for Oil. Ol' Pat just comes right out and says it.

On the other hand, Bush's main occupation seems to be peddling around the ranch with the one guy allowed into his circle who we actually KNOW has a ball!

It's Good to be King

Bush and Lance went riding around the ranch on Sunday.

On the Huff Post, Bob Cesca projects a little on the conversation.

It makes one wonder what Sheryl's thinking. Too bad Cindy Sheehan had to go to LA to be with her mom. Maybe we could have had a shot of Sheryl and Cindy and Joan, while the boys were peddling the ranch.

The big news is that it looks like Dubya was able to remain upright on the bike this time... Talk about Hard Work!

Head coming back together... need coffee

In the light of morning, and a reading of a more reasoned perspective on the same NPR website, I am feeling a little bit better about the fact that the people who have made an idiot like Al Mohler the "president" of a formerly legitimate educational institution do not have control of all religious perspective (or even Christian perspective) in U.S. The piece by Dr. Katharyn Jefferts Schori is a well reasoned and well explained example on what is actually possible to believe as a thinking person with christian proclivities in a contemporary society.

Another of the accompanying articles, this one by Rabbi Brad Hirschfield does a marvelous job of explaining the possibility of holding more than one position simultaneously. Rabbi Hirschfield even addresses the issue of why the debate raises so many hackles on both side (mine for instance). His statement that, "The increasingly nasty debate between believers in Darwinian evolution and advocates for intelligent design theory hinges on the fact that most creationists relate to evolutionists as if they have no soul, and most evolutionists relate to the creationists as if they have no brain," is pretty accurate. He then suggests that a better perspective would be to acknowledge that we all have both.

Well... you're a better man than I am Gunga Din. I'd really like to be that broad minded, but when someone like the good "dr." Mohler abdicates the use of his brain in such a clear manner it is my perspective that, like any muscle consistently ignored, his brain has likely turned to mush.

For another example of the phenomenon all one needs to do is look toward Crawford this week to find a man who may have allowed BOTH his brain and his soul to atrophy. Perhaps we just need to wait for him to fall off his bike... again.

All hope is not quite lost.

Exploding head... Watch for shrapnel

NPR has decided that the process of considering all things means giving people who claim to be things that they are not the attention they might deserve if reasonable people accepted their claims of authenticity.

Weighing in on the "debate" about evolution and "intelligent" design is R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisvile, KY a school that in days gone by was considered the "liberal" outpost of Southern Baptist life.

NPR has decided to give "dr." Mohler the opportunity to express an equal time type of opinion on the "evangelical baptist" perspective regarding the issue.

There are so many things wrong with this, before we even get to the question of whether the term"evangelical baptist" is redundant or an oxymoron, that I just want to run naked and screaming down St. Charles Avenue. Actually, it's so bleeding hot that I really wouldn't mind running naked (and screaming) down St. Charles Avenue, so I probably shouldn't go blaming that proclivity on poor "dr." Mohler.

In any case... there will be more forthcoming on this matter, as my recent move back to the south has, for some strange reason, pushed me back into the arms of my old southern baptist tradition, but with a new and absolutely unrelenting perspective on what that all means... and doesn't mean.

The Pomo of Crawford

While George Bush avoids Cindy Sheehan and makes pronouncements about creationist education, Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic offers a fabulous analysis of the issues that are really alive in the "Intelligent Design" absurdity.

Check out his article here. If you aren't already registered with The New Republic you'll have to jump through their little hoops, but it's free and it's worth it.

You might also want to have a look at the Jerry Coyne article on the Harrisburg Pennsylvania school case (where's Clarence Darrow when we need him?) that launched this rickety ship.

Since when did religion become scientific theory in the modern world and when ever did accurate science actually do harm to a true and reasoned faith? These realities don't speak to the same part of the human animal. Something I learned a long time ago in seminary (before the extreme fundamentalists gutted anything that could actually be mistaken for education) was that Science and Faith are NOT mutually exclusive, but you better not try to make them explain the same things. They don't let them teach that any more since the reactionaries took control of the SBC, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Opening Salvo

So... I've long thought of doing a political pontification blog, but I've never really bothered to broadcast my opinions anywhere except as a blow hard down at the local pub.

The thing is, I come by my political inclinations honestly... I was raised with the understanding that I am as close a relation to George Washington as it is possible to be (a first cousin seven generations removed). After doing some of my own research, I'm not completely sure that claim is totally accurate, but I'll post more on that later. The main point is that I have been given that label (and the attendant charge) all my life. Hell, I even sang Yankee Doodle Dandy on TV when I was 6 years old. I was doomed to showbiz or poilitics from the start, so as a compromise, for a short period of time that has subsequently scarred me for life, I became a Southern Baptist preacher... a little bit showbiz, a little bit politics, a whole lot of God on my side. One of the best things about that "calling" was the fact that with GOD on my side, who could possibly be against me; not the bullies down the block, not the government, not my mother, not anyone. GOD was my ultimate authority and GOD talked to me directly. That fact that this GOD might actually be talking to other people, and that to those other people he might be saying something different than what he was saying to me, was sommething that I never even considered, let alone seriously entertained.

At this point in my life I don't believe I have any special knowledge of God's dealings with humanity, and whatever it is She might be saying, I am fully prepared to accept that the message for me is possibly, even probably different than the message for somebody else. This is one of the things (besides not being president) that makes me different from George W. Bush. When I hear from God these days, I usually notice that God has a tendency to be speaking to me through the mouths of other people. Sometimes that person is a homeless guy on Market Street, sometimes he's the Dean of a grand cathedral. Sometimes its in the words of a song. Sometimes, God speaks to me through the lips (or the email fingertip tappings) of my daughter and sometimes I hear the "still small voice" like Elijah; not in the wind, not in the earthquake, but in the quiet, when I sit down and shut up.

So... in this blog, despite it's clearly political intention, I will endeavor not to speak for God, or anyone else. I'll just try and speak for me.


Dubya says that God told him to strike Iraq.

Sometimes God speaks from strange locations... and usually to "lesser vessels" and maybe the president should be listening to one of them.