Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival

SCENIC TULSA: LAND O' FROST

2007-12-13T17:59:00.001-06:00

SCENIC TULSA: LAND O' FROST

2007-12-13T17:55:00.000-06:00

SCENIC TULSA: LAND O' FROST

2007-12-13T17:49:00.000-06:00

SCENIC TULSA: MORE LAND O' FROST

2007-12-13T17:42:00.000-06:00

SCENIC TULSA: LAND O' FROST

2007-12-12T16:54:00.000-06:00

CHILLIN' WITH THE GREAT SPIRIT

WOODWARD PARK, TULSA, OKLAHOMA

More later.

The Counsel of the Emperor

2007-06-04T16:08:00.000-05:00

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was born in 121 CE and became the Emperor of Rome in 161 CE. He was afforded the best education available to an upper class Roman, and followed the Stoic tradition. He spent the majority of his time as Emperor with his legions on the marches of the Empire, putting down revolts and repelling incursions by what today are referred to as "non-state actors." He contracted an infection and died in camp on the Danube in 180 CE.

While on campaign he wrote—in Greek—what have been passed down to us as his "Meditations." In essence, he was keeping a journal in which he collected his thoughts, took notes, wrote down quotes, and so on—today perhaps he would blogging his 'meditations'—or, like me, he would keep a private stash of scribbles, stored, in my case, in a tottering and still growing stack of well-thumbed Moleskine memorandum books.

The Greek title of the Emperor's memorandum book, translated, is "To Himself." In our excitable age Marcus Aurelius is not fashionable reading. He is not flashy. He is not witty, or even funny. He is not the slightest bit interested in irony. Nor in paradox. His insights are not brilliant. There are no epiphanies such as are retailed in the modern genres of the personal spiritual journal, or the solipsistic journalism of the blogosphere. He has no interest in aggrandizing "Himself," after all, he is the Emperor. The odd fact is, in spite of his exalted position, he is a humble man, and often seems to be nagging himself.

All in all, the Emperor sounds like a great, crashing, gloomy bore, doesn't he? The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius was popular, a generation or two ago, as a shelf filler at least, snuggled among the other "Harvard Classics" in a classy uniform binding. It's a short, slim book of no particular theme divided into easily digestible bits—A middlebrow's feast. Hannibal Lector, no middlebrow, quotes the Emperor to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, so we know the creator of Dr. Lector, Thomas Harris, has read the book.

At this point, the question glistening on your slightly parted lips should be: "Why are you bothering me with this Emperor guy?" I find, like Dr. Lector, that it is well to take counsel of the Emperor. Particularly in these latter days of the American Empire. The truth is, George W. Bush is the man who has driven me to take mental shelter in the yellowed pages of my dog-eared Penguin Classics translation of the Meditations.

Marcus Aurelius was a man who knew something about running an empire in troubled times. He knew every victory was temporary, and that every triumph was hollow. He knew the futility of being the most powerful man alive, and was not unhinged by it. The Emperor says (to himself, as it were),

Begin the morning by saying to yourself, "Today I'm going to meet busy-bodies, the ungrateful, and people who are arrogant, deceitful, envious, and antisocial."

I have seen the nature of the good which is beautiful, and of the bad which is ugly. And realizing that the nature of those who do wrong, that it is within me also, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it shares the same intelligence and the same portion of the sacred—then I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can determine what is ugly within me, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him.

The vices of humanity? Remember the doctrine that all beings are created for one another; that toleration is a part of justice; and that men are not intentional evildoers. Think of the myriad enmities, suspicions, animosities, and conflicts that are now vanished with the dust and ashes of the men who made them and knew them.

If the inward power that rules us be true to Nature, it will always adjust itself readily to the possibilities and opportunities offered by circumstance. It asks for no predeterminate material; in the pursuance of its aims it is willing to compromise; hindrances to its progress are merely converted into matter for its own use. It is like a bonfire mastering a heap of rubbish, assimilating and consuming the fuel, and flaming the higher for it.

Take no enterprise in hand at haphazard, or without regard to the principles of its proper execution.

To pursue the unattainable is insanity, yet the thoughtless can never refrain from doing so.
How is it that souls of no proficiency nor learning are able to confound the adept and the sage? But what soul is truly both adept and sage?

For a human soul, the greatest of self-inflicted wrongs is to make oneself a kind of abscess on the Cosmos; for to be at war with circumstances is always a rebellion against Nature.

Whenever you are outraged by some one's impudence, ask yourself at once, 'Can the world exist with without impudent people?' It cannot; so do not ask for impossibilities. That man is simply one of the shameless whose existence is necessary to the universe. Keep the same thought in mind whenever you meet with the treacherous, the deceitful, or with those who willing to commit any sort of evil act. Remind yourself that the existence of these people is indispensable, and you will become more kindly disposed towards every one individually.

What is wrong, after all, in a boor behaving boorishly? You should blame yourself if you did not expect him to behave that way. You had every reason to suppose that he would do so, and yet you are amazed when he does. When you blame the shameless for having no shame, or the ingrate for being ungrateful, look to yourself, because the error is clearly your own, if you put any faith in the good faith of a man of such dubious disposition.

Once you have given service, what more do you want? Isn't it enough to have obeyed the laws of your own nature, without expecting to be paid for it? That is like the eyes demanding to be paid for seeing, or the feet for walking. For that purpose they exist, and they have their due in doing what they were created to do.

Where life is possible at all, a life of right conduct is possible; life in a palace is possible; therefore even in a palace right conduct is possible.

Every time you feel that harm has been done you, apply the rule, 'If the city (polis, or citystate) is not harmed, I am not harmed.' But if the city is indeed harmed, never rage at the culprit: rather, find out where his vision failed him.

To refrain from doing wrong in imitation of the wrongdoer, is the best revenge.

In a pivotal scene in Thomas Harris' novel, Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling comes to ask the caged Hannibal Lector about the serial killer 'Buffalo Bill.' Dr. Lector tells her that she already has all the information she needs to solve the case, if she is paying attention. He further intimates that if she understood Marcus Aurelius, she might solve the case. She replies,

"Tell me how."

"When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can't read, Clarice. The Emperor counsels simplicity. First Principles. Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?"

"That doesn't mean anything to me."

"What does he do, this man you want?"

"He kills—"

"That's incidental. What is the first and principle thing he does, what need does he serve by killing?"

"Anger, social resentment, sexual frus—"

"No."

"What, then?"

"He covets. In fact, he covets being the very thing that you are. It's his nature to covet. How do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet?

"No. We just—"

"No. Precisely so. We begin by coveting what we see every day."

Covet is an old fashioned word not much in use these days; it's one of the shalt-nots in the Ten Commandments, in the King James version, at least. To covet means to harbor a powerful desire for something that doesn't belong to you, to want all of it, every bit of that something, for yourself. So let us return to First Principles: What does he do, this man, this party, that rules? He, and they, like the serial killer Buffalo Bill, covet. They want it all, until it's all used up. That is their nature. Bush and his minions are what Dr. Lector refers to as the 'free-range rude.' He might relish a nice little Filet Minion. To the extent that we share that nature, as well as the 'same portion of the sacred,' we cannot blame them, but, as the Emperor advises, if we are true to our inward power and innate reason, like a bonfire, we can master a pile of rubbish.

Cold Moons

2007-05-26T20:31:00.000-05:00

Like a fiddle bow
on a flexed saw
my bones twang.

I rise from the bed
of the woman
of my dearest nightmares

and wake up
beside my wife.
My father walks

out of the cracked mirror
and without a word,
kisses me on the left shoulder:

I wake again,
beside, again , my wife.
How many wakings left to go?

I am no longer a young man.
Seven times seven
are the winters I have seen.

No longer the chosen lamb,
I still dream dreams
but I am not the son of these cold moons.

I never rode with coven
or Joan of Arc
and I never was a fickle one

tho’ all cats are grey
in the dark,
and a coat of many colors

is all black
in the Great House
of Mother Night.

A mercenary not for hire,
an assassin who does not kill,
worth no one's salt,

I take my pay in sand,
sands of sleep and time,
and spend it all

in the precinct of harlots
in the temple of the Crone.
She lays me down to sleep,

drapes me with her cloak
of many daughters,
so that I may be stabbed with sickles of light,

sore afflicted
with a pox of moons,
so that I may walk in other worlds,

in new wrinkles
of laminate verse,
and this is not a sin.

Dana Pattillo, 2007

Devil Goin' Down

2007-05-26T20:23:00.000-05:00

Not Even Wrong

2007-05-26T20:14:00.000-05:00

Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel Prize winning physicist, the Pauli in the Pauli Exclusion Principle, as the tale is told, once succinctly reviewed a young physicist's paper, saying sadly, "That's not right; it's not even wrong." I heard a soundbyte of Bush on the Beeb yesterday, and those three words said themselves to me with my own mouth. Not even wrong. Almost every statement that comes out of Howdy Dubya is so dumb and delusional that his assertions (pre-programed or otherwise) do not even rise to the level of being wrong. Not falsifiable, as Karl Popper put it; not susceptible to proof, because the proposition has no testable hypothesis. The Decider doesn't have a plan or a goal, much less a strategy, he has articles of faith so slippery that they can explain any fact and elude any test.

People speak of framing the debate on the war; that we must change the frame, that is to say, we must alter the rhetoric and metaphors of political discourse in our favor, ala George Lakoff. We must substitute, insinuate, and impose our memes such that we replace the Republican frame with a Democratic frame. That's OK as far as it goes. We are all soldiers on the field of memes. But a frame is just a frame; it may largely and elaborately distract from, subtly direct attention to a particular aspect of, or complement the essence of the picture; but the picture is still the same picture no matter what the frame. It's the same picture if it has no frame at all. And the picture we're looking at is ugly. It's so ugly people can't bear it. We can't face our shame. No one is putting a frame on this picture, we're all putting a good coat of whitewash on the picture so we don't have to look at it. We don't want to look in the mirror and see ourselves as we truly are. Dubya, like Tom Sawyer, is standing by and collecting our treasures one by one, as we each take our turn with the sopping brush.

Every day I listen to NPR and the BBC World Service. I read the blogs, sometimes even WaPo or other MSM. If I pinched myself every time I thought, "I can't believe that Bush is President, it just can't be this bad," I'd be covered with so many welts I could get a job exhibiting myself at a freakshow as "The Pincher." I feel like I am living in some alternate reality, but that hypothesis is not testable.

Another soundbyte that has got a lot of play is John Boehner's tearful

"After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to stand up and take them on? When are we going to defeat 'em?"

That is not the pertinent question. Rather ask, "When are we going to stand down from these people?"

We already got us right where they want us. Some Republican or other, I can't recall who, had the absolute, fatuous arrogance to assert that we will see the light at the end of the tunnel, come September. The conventional riposte is, "Yeah, and it's the headlight of an oncoming train." There is no light. We're groping in black void, hoping to find a wall, and to feel our way to the opening of a tunnel. The tunnel has already left the station.

Follow the tropes.

We have our ass in a crack in Iraq, and Dead Eye Dick is offering Iran the other cheek. The longer we stay, the bigger chunk we leave behind. Meanwhile, Al Qaeda has the Enemas-R-Us franchise. In all seriousness, folks, what we are facing away from is the Crack of Doom. It is too late to do our duty and get off the pot. The situation calls for a crowbar, not a plunger. Congress has handed the Plumber-in-Chief a new plunger; he's already got a fan.

Open a frame shop, invest in Sherwin Williams, pray to the murderous God of Love, if conscience permits; we, as individuals, as a people, as a nation, will not make this right because we can't even make it to wrong.

Well, it's a long, long time
From May to December
But the days grow short,
When you reach September.
And the autumn weather
Turns the leaves to gray
And I haven't got time
For the waiting game.

Music by Kurt Weill,
lyrics by Berthold Brecht,
translated by Maxwell Anderson,
and best sung by Lotte Lenya.

Burning in Heaven

2007-05-17T15:54:00.000-05:00

Oscar Wilde said, on hearing of the demise of his nemesis Lord Douglas, "I have no doubt that he is burning in heaven."

Jerry Falwell is dead since the day before yesterday, and he will be dead a long time. That is some consolation. Some. Not much.

A co-worker me told that his wife knew Falwell personally, and when she got the news of his death by cell phone while driving on the expressway, she was so upset she almost had a wreck and had to pull over.

I can't find it in my black heart to feel the slightest bit of sympathy for the bereaved. I couldn't squeeze out even a single crocodile tear if you tied me to a chair and made me watch the PTL Club until I was as mad as Jose Padilla.

On the other hand, I'm not singing and dancing like a Munchkin after Dorothy drops in on the Wicked Witch without leaving the house. Falwell was well past his "pull by" date, but the damage is already done. The man did a truly monumental amount of harm to our country and the planet in the three score and 13 years allotted to him by Fate. I do mourn. I mourn what he did in this life--I mourn that he ever lived.

I have no call to judge him or any other mortal soul, but in all honesty I think the world would be a better place if Jerry Falwell had never been born.

Without Falwell, perhaps, there be no Bush Regime; no Iraq war. There might not be a Supreme Court poised to reverse Roe v. Wade; no Justice Dept. wiping its collective arse with the Bill of Rights. There might not have been long eight years of Reagan.

Falwell was present at the creation, so to speak, of the Christianist movement that has brought us to our present pass. He was one of the first mullahs of the American Taliban. One of the first dominoes to drop. At the very least, there would be no "Moral Majority" and no Liberty U. madrassa training the next gen prayer warriors and lawyers.

The Fascists wouldn't be calling themselves Republicans, the Republicans wouldn't be calling themselves Democrats, and "Liberal" would not be a synonym for "Pariah." I'm not saying that we all would be living in some ecologically balanced people's paradise, absent Falwell--but all by himself he made he made the world a worse place to live in--a much, much worse place.

Now, I believe, Falwell is beyond all reward and punishment. I am glad he's gone. But my--joy--is tempered by my suspicion he is beyond all suffering. I don't believe in an afterlife, heaven, or hell. I wish there was a heaven for him to burn in. I kind of like imagining Rev. Falwell's entry into heaven and his turn before the Judgement Seat in the style of a Jack Chick cartoon tract--in the last panel he'd be makin' like bacon in the skillet of righteousness.

AHA!—The Diabolical Canadian Death Poppy

2007-05-10T01:13:00.000-05:00

U.S Army "Contractors" travelling in Canada earlier this year filed confidential reports that lead to a Defense Department espionage warning about mysterious coin-like objects with RFDs—radio frequency devices.

According to the Associated Press,

The worried contractors described...the coin-like objects, each marked with a sinister red dot...as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nanotechnology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The mysterious coin-like object

"...did not appear to be electronic [analog] in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it (the red dot) appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coin-like objects with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

One contractor believed someone had placed two of the mysterious coin-like objects in an outer coat pocket after the contractor had emptied the pocket hours earlier. "Coat pockets were empty that morning and I was keeping all of my coins in a plastic bag in my inner coat pocket," the contractor wrote.

But the Defense Department subsequently acknowledged that it could never substantiate the espionage alarm that it had put out and launched the internal review that turned up the true nature of the mysterious coin-like object.

The true nature of the mysterious coin-like object? It was a 2004 Canadian Quarter adorned with the image of a red poppy, Canada's flower of remembrance, inlaid over a maple leaf. The 25 cent piece commemorated Canada's 117,000 war dead. Approximately 30 million of these coins imprinted with the dread Canadian Death Poppy were struck by the Royal Canadian Mint. The supposed RFD nanotechnology was the coating applied by the mint to keep the coins from losing their scarlet, so to speak.

Numismatist Dennis Pike of Canadian Coin & Currency near Toronto, Ontario, quickly matched a grainy image and physical descriptions of the suspect coins in the contractors' confidential accounts to the 25-cent poppy piece."

It's not uncommon at all," Pike said. He added that the coin's protective coating glows peculiarly under ultraviolet light. "That may have been a little bit suspicious," he said (...after he stopped laughing).

Meanwhile, senior Canadian intelligence officials expressed annoyance (between bouts of hysterical giggling) with the complete lack of intelligence in U.S. intelligence agencies.

WHAT I DID WHILE I WAS AWAY (1)

2007-05-09T00:49:00.000-05:00

I...pontificated...at the wedding of friends Barbara and Randy.

Papal vesture (full pope drag) was requested by the bride.

FOR I AM WITH YOU

2007-05-08T23:53:00.000-05:00

All moons, all years, all days, all winds

reach their completion and pass away.

So does blood reach its place of quiet,

as it reaches its power and its throne.

Measured is the time in which we can praise

the splendor of creation.

Measured is the time in which we can know

the blaze and warmth of the sun.

Measured is the time in which

the phalanx of stars will wheel,

and the gods trapped within the stars

watch over us.

BOOK OF CHILAM BALAM

My 9-11

2006-09-11T21:24:00.000-05:00

My mother was killed on September 11th—September 11, 1978—28 years ago today. She died a month short of her 46th birthday, two years younger than I am today. “9-ll” has been a grim sort of anniversary for me for long time, you see.

She and my father had borrowed my motorcycle—a 400cc Suzuki—not one of these lifestyle accessory Harleys you see on the streets these days—for a Sunday afternoon jaunt on the lakeside drive a mile or two from our suburban home. I don’t really know whether September 11, 1978 fell on a Sunday, but that’s the feeling of the memory.

I had two helmets, but one of them was in my locker at the trucking company loading dock where I was employed at the time, so neither Mom or Dad took the one that was at the house. That turned out to be a fatal mistake. They were put-putting along at about 25 miles an hour, on a section of the lakeside drive that was part of the original roadbed of Hwy 66, on the north side of the lake.

A man had been sitting by the shore on one of the turn-outs, fishing and drinking, but mostly drinking. I don’t think the fish were biting that day. I don’t know for sure, but that’s what I suspect. This man had already lost his driver’s license due to repeated DUIs, but he had driven his employer’s pick-up to the lake that day. The man got tired of watching slack fishing lines, perhaps, or maybe he ran out of beer. He got in his employer’s truck, and pulled out of the turn-out at the precise moment my parents happened to be passing by on my motorcycle enjoying a fine September afternoon. This is the intersection of fate that resulted in my mother’s death—that, and the intersection of my mother’s helmetless head with the pavement of old Hwy. 66.

Much of the above is conjecture built on fallible memory. I only know what my father told me about it, and he couldn’t bear to tell me much. I don’t know the precise spot where my mother died. I don’t know how fast the drunk in the truck was driving, but I don’t think it was a high speed collision, my dad would not have going as fast as the speed limit, which I believe was 30 mph. Dad came away from the accident with cuts and scrapes. I don’t know how badly my motorcycle was damaged—I never saw it again, because Dad never wanted to see it again. He bought me a car to replace it.

I never met the man who killed my mother. I don’t even know his name, though I must once have known it. He was tried in county court for my mother’s death under a charge of manslaughter; somehow, he was acquitted. I did not attend the trial; I couldn’t bear it. Odds are he’s dead now—a penchant for drunk driving and associated bad behaviors has a way of shortening the lifespan—your own as well as others. Be that as it may, I never sought him out, either for vengeance, or just to know who it was that killed my mother.

I can—have gone—to that lakeshore, watched slack loops of fishing line lean sideways on a breeze, and listen to that same breeze hum on the mouth of an empty beer bottle. I don’t need to know him. I can be that man, that place, that moment just before…as Tess Gallagher wrote, vengeance is a hurt given to the self in the name of another.

The company that had the insurance on the employer’s truck—which, of course, my mother’s killer was not authorized to drive—offered my father a settlement of something like 3500 dollars. Dad sued them, and won a larger amount. Just how much larger an amount it was I don’t know, because Dad is not very chatty when comes to money, and I never asked, but I suspect a couple of zeros were added to the final check.

My memory is not entirely clear on several points. I was deep into a long nap at my parent’s house when my father called from the hospital. I had been living in an apartment with a roommate, a friend from high school. I think I was still living at the apartment, but my friend and I were having a falling out, and that may have been why I was at Mom and Dad’s place that day.

My fourteen year old brother woke me in the midst of a vivid dream, in which I was pursuing a thin but muscular older woman dressed in dark silverish clothing that occasionally glittered. She walked very fast, taking long-legged strides, through the nightscape of a futuristic but ruined city—or cities—and my dream self followed after, never quite catching up with her.

Still caught up in the dream, I heard my father’s voice on the phone, “She’s hurt, she’s hurt real bad…” What Dad didn’t say, what he was probably incapable of saying, was that Mom was dead, probably killed instantly. I held this against my father for a long, long time—very unfair and completely irrational, but I did.

I got my brother and sister into my dad’s van, and drove to the emergency room. I remember very vividly sitting down across from my father in the little waiting room watching his face as he told me, as he admitted to himself, that Mom was dead. It was an extraordinary thing. I watched him age twenty years in less than thirty seconds. My brother went into a sort of walking coma; he didn’t speak for three days.

I asked to see the body. I wanted to see my mother in death, as death had come to her, before the morticians put formaldehyde in her veins and pancake makeup on her face. A nurse took me to a curtained alcove, where my mother’s body lay on the gurney, with a sheet over it. The nurse turned back the sheet from her face and shoulders, and went down the hall a little bit.

Her eyes were closed, bruised black and swollen, from internal hemorrhaging. Tracks of drying blood ran from her ears down the sides of her neck. I don’t remember much if any blood in her dark brown hair; the fatal injury was what is referred to as a “closed head wound.” As I said, she was probably killed almost instantly. I picked her hand, the hand on which she wore her wedding band—it was still warm, the fingers still supple. Not enough time had passed for her body to cool, for rigor mortis to set in. My mother’s body lay there under a white sheet, but there was a vast black hole pulling at me where my mother had been. I stood there a long time, looking, taking it all in, wanting to remember what death looked like.

I lost some part of myself to that black hole; some fraction of my “I” followed after the absence where my mother had been, as if I had lost my shadow to that greater shadow. I did not get my shadow back for a long time. Part of my shadow never came back.

I had to ask the nurse to help me with my mother’s ring. I did not want to leave it on her body. We had use Vaseline to get it off. By that time, my grandmother had arrived in the hospital, and I gave it to her for safe-keeping, because I didn’t think it would be good for Dad to see it right then.

Oh, how I hated the funeral—a Baptist minister who didn’t even know my mom, speaking over her, selling Je-sus over her dead body—Mom looking like a painted doll in the open casket—People trying to be kind—I hated it. I did not wish to be consoled or condoled. The mania that is my inheritance from my mother had been cut loose of its bonds by the grim reaper’s sickle. The crack in my pot became a rift, and on the other side of that rift was the consensus reality where my family and most everyone I knew lived. To say that my mother’s death changed my life is species of litotes so extreme it becomes hyperbole. Like America’s 9-11, it’s not something you “get over.”

No, you don’t get over something like that. I remember the faces in the pictures we saw over and over, of the dust-covered people on the streets of New York on September 11, 2001. Many of those faces twist in the same contortion—can’t call it an expression—that overcame my brother’s face when he heard my father say, “She’s dead.”

Yet today, on what is a grim anniversary for all of us, I listen to the radio and I hear the voices of the President and his men speaking, with nostalgia almost, of 9-11, “a day of national unity.” I hear vainglory and lies served behind pious sentiment; the day and its victims no more than prelude, an introit to a high mass celebrating an endless war against an “Enemy” that “hates Freedom,” appealing to the very same god—the war god, the god who takes sides—for whom the 9-11 hijackers martyred themselves.

I listen to these voices, and a grim anniversary grows grimmer. In the theater of memory I see a preacher in white robes gesticulating over a painted corpse, mouthing empty words.

Grendel's Lost Sock: Thought for Today

2006-08-30T13:59:00.000-05:00

Occam's Razor for Political "Scientists" and Conspiracy Theorists:

Do not succumb to the temptation to explain current events by resort to "a vast conspiracy controlled by a sinister intelligence" when things can be explained by vast incompetence under the misdirection of sinister stupidity.

Flarf Poem composed on a Google of “War is not a Time of Joy”

2006-08-29T13:51:00.000-05:00

Call President Bush
for quick deployment
of international force.

Uphold the fragile
cease—“The need is urgent,” Bush said,
“War is not a time of joy,

These aren’t joyous times.
These are challenging times,
and they’re difficult times,

and they’re straining the psyche
of our country,”
The President said.

“Sometimes I’m frustrated,
rarely surprised.
Sometimes I’m happy.”

The President said.
I believe the next verse is
“I thought of, this is, you know…

War is not a time of joy.”
Quite the bout of finger-pointing
is underway. Really.

There is absolutely nothing wrong
with being frustrated.
Bush is human. Really.

These are challenging times,
leaving now would be a disaster.
Pullout is impossible. Got that?

“Nobody wants to turn on their TV
on a daily basis and see havoc wrought by terrorists."
The President said.

Well, he did say he just finished
the plot against America.
War hurts. I want my Jesus back.

“War is not a time of joy,” he said,
Thrilling linguists everywhere
by speaking an entire English sentence:

The President said,
“Nobody likes
to see innocent people die.”

Unwinning Wars

2006-08-23T13:41:00.000-05:00

Have you ever noticed that whenever America makes war, a war declared in the media and not in Congress, a war against a word, an idea, a state of mind, a condition, or a category of nebulously defined behaviors, substances, or political entities, instead of a war declared and waged against a nation or nations, that these Wars On are conflicts which America never wins, or at least is never the clear victor? That, in fact, these Wars On never really end, though such wars may subside and flare up, are occasionally discretely abandoned by their sponsors, or else we declare victory and withdraw.

There was/is the War on Crime. In America, the main victors in this war are politicians who are “tough on crime” during their election campaigns. Often the criminals join the politicians creating in a “win/win situation.”

There was the War on Poverty, and America certainly did not win that war. Today, under various dog-whistle rubrics such No Child Left Behind, and Welfare Reform America wages an undeclared War on the Poor.

There was/is the War on Drugs; did America win that war? We just say no to the drug-du-jour, and when next year’s model hits the streets it always seems to be more noxious, more addictive, and more destructive to society than the last drug “scourge.” However, this crusade, like the War on Crime, is a perennial winner for politicians and for the drug businessman too, on the whole.

For a long time, America fought a War on Communism, aka the Cold War; to my mind better called the Hot-and-Cold War. Some say we won that war, around the time the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell. But both North Korea and Vietnam, “Communist” states to which we served up piping-hot war in the midst of the Cold War, still have “Communist” governments run by the same basic set of people that were in charge when we were making war on them.

We went to the brink of the hottest of hot wars during the episode known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and since maintained a simmering enmity against the “Communist” regime of Fidel Castro. Yet nearly a half century later we are still waiting for Fidel to just fall down and not get up. The most populous nation on Earth, China, has a “Communist” government run by the same ruling class for almost 70 years. China and its present day ruling class are more powerful than the Imperial dynasties of old. Even in most of the territories of the former Soviet Union, the same ruling class, more or less, is in charge, where there is anybody is in charge; the rich are richer, the poor poorer. Did America really win the so-called Cold War?

For the past few years now, America has waged the War on Terror. How terrified do we, the people, have to be, before our own ruling class can call it a win? How many of our freedoms will we give up before we will surrender the least of our comforts, or give up the strangely comforting fear itself? How many countries must be laid waste, how far must “Democracy” be spread, before the “Terrorist” bogeyman can be retired? How many people have to die before the President the United States of America can declare final victory?

To “Sir” With Something Other Than Love

2006-08-19T00:47:00.000-05:00

Open Letter to George W. Bush: Just Shut Up

Sir:

I take strong exception to your remarks on the recent court decision by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor that declared your warrantless wiretap program illegal and unconstitutional. I take particularly strong exception, sir, to your opinion that people who oppose your abuse of the office of President in this (or any other matter)

“…do not understand the nature of the world in which we live."

I think that the people that oppose your regime most avidly understand quite well the nature of the world we live in, and your large and regrettable part in making that world much worse that what it could be. You, sir, understand nothing; you are a liar; a thief; a murderer; and a tyrant, and in all your endeavors ultimately a failure and an incompetent. The truth is not in you, sir. God does not speak to you; or if he does, you’re not listening.

You, sir, have embroiled the United States of America in an undeclared, illegal, and apparently endless war, spent the treasure and the reputation our country, the lives of our soldiers, and the lives of countless innocent civilians on the basis of constantly mutating justifications and in pursuit of ever-shifting goals that recede like the flickering waters of a desert mirage. Virtually every decision you and your advisors have made in prosecuting this war against “ter-rism” has not only been wrong, but wrong-headed and self-deluded as well. You, sir, have condoned, encouraged, incited, and on numerous occasions ordered the commission of war crimes. You, sir, though you have never dirtied yourself with the blood of an enemy—make that “enemy combantant”—are a war criminal, and I dare say, if you were not the President of the United States, you would by now be facing charges in the dock at the Hague.

In the course of waging this so-called “War on Terror,” which is better named the “War to Terrify,” you, sir, have converted the constitutional democracy of which you are the chief steward into a proto-fascist state. For the sake of your war games, you, sir, have mortgaged the future of our children, and bid fair to wreck our country, and perhaps accelerate a world wide collapse of human and natural systems in a planetary disaster.

You, sir, are the one who does not understand the nature of the world we live in.

You, sir, in the words of Sha Zukang, the Chinese Ambassador to the U.N. at Geneva, should “shut up.” Shut up and be quiet.

It is better for you to shut up and keep quiet. It's much, much better.

Grendel's Lost Sock: Quote for Today

2006-08-13T20:09:00.000-05:00

"In a world full of excrable excresences, there is always a fetid coprostatis of an idea to make your own."

Ned Seeman

Liquid Terror and the Scent of Fear

2006-08-10T15:53:00.000-05:00

In light of the roll out of “Liquid Terror” and its effect on the airlines and airports of the world, Dr. Omed has a suggestion as to how to simplify and improve airport security. Check all baggage. Instead of the current security checkpoints, airline passengers should be checked onto the airport concourse in the same way that prisoners are checked into a county jail.

In dressing rooms under the supervision of security guards, passengers would strip, submit to a cavity search, and their clothes, wallets, purses, ids, pocket change, and what-not would be bagged, tagged, examined for contraband, and checked for transshipment.

Passengers would be issued color-coded jumpsuits or hospital scrub type pajamas, and flip-flops or slip-on tennis shoes. At some county jails, prisoners charged with misdemeanors get an orange jump-suit, and felons get white. Or vice versa. First class passengers get, say, purple, and every one else gets orange. Every passenger would get a coded wristband like a patient gets at the hospital or an inmate gets at the jail, that can’t be removed without scissors or a knife.

The passenger section of the plane would be behind a locked gate, like the prison bus, with an armed steward or stewardess on the other side of it, keeping an eye on everyone with the help of surveillance cams. Passengers seatbelts can be locked by remote control, but you could slip on the complementary handcuffs, if you’re into that. And in each and every barf bag, there would a complementary stale baloney sandwich, just like you get at a city jail. Beats a bag of peanuts, don’t it?

Air travel in the Age of Fear is already replete with restraints and indiginities. Think how glad you’ll be to get off that plane, when you are arrive at your destination, to get your own clothes and personal items back, to have that wristband snipped off, to step out into the open and take a big breath of fresh air. You’ll feel so free. For a moment, anyway. Just don’t make any suspicious moves, until you’re out of range of the cameras and the sniper towers.

FLARF POEM COMPOSED ON A GOOGLE OF “FOG OF WAR”

2006-08-08T16:19:00.000-05:00

The fog of war
conceals much more
than can be seen.

In the fog of war,
chips can fall
in different ways.

Why not
have surrogates
do the fighting and dying?

The fog of war,
of course,
is thick.

Clausewitz, and probably
every military theorist since,
has spoken of the fog of war—

The difficultly of telling
what’s happening
when you’re in the field.

The war happened,
and then what happened
happened, and the timing was just right…

Tragic mistakes happen
In the “fog of war.”
Soldiers have since time immemorial died

from friendly fire
and other lethal errors.
In war, stuff happens.

It is devilishly difficult to follow
the ricochets
amid the incendiary fog of war.

But I suppose
we shall have
to try

not to see it as a failure,
attribute the negative outcome
to the fog of war.

On the positive side…
defined goals have melted
into the fog of wars gone by.

Other consequences
of the invasion
are still shrouded
in the fog of peace.

Steal This Postcard

2006-08-07T16:20:00.000-05:00

CINDY SHEEHAN ASSESSES THE BUSH "PRESIDENCY"

GRENDEL'S LOST SOCK: THOUGHT FOR TODAY

2006-08-03T16:24:00.000-05:00

Human beings are not moved by facts. This is the closest thing to a true fact that you will ever encounter in your human existence. The facts, ma’am, just the facts are just too boring, too inconvenient, too depressing, too…factual—or as Mr. Colbert may already have said (Dr. Omed doesn’t have cable)—too facty.

We, as a people, as an allegedly sentient species, don’t want too much factiness. We do not want to be told the facts; we want to be told a story, a story with a happy ending; or at least a story with a good moral. I don’t blame us; the facts are hard. We want some factric softener added to the wash, so our thoughts will come out fuzzy and warm. “God” is our favorite brand of softener when it comes to the really hard facts. God comes in many brands, and each brand claims unique and exclusive features and offers periodic enhancements to keep the devotion of its customers, but mostly what we want to make those cold, hard facts fuzzy and warm.

Fuzziness is next to Goddiness. Is that so bad? There is a phrase that is invoked by journalists and commentators when a modern army is not performing as advertised, usually against a foe less well-equipped with the latest death technology: in wise tones the words "Fog of War" are uttered. Battles are lost or won in the Fog of War. On the battleground of Gott-Mit-Uns-Kulturkreig we must navigate the Fuzz of God. The hard facts are still there; you just can't see 'em.

Breakfast at Lammas

2006-08-02T21:26:00.000-05:00

Upon the fortieth day
under the enemy sun,
Yeshua,

if you are
bar abbas,
son of the father:

Tell
this
stone
to become bread.

It shall be written, Diabolos
By bread alone
may we ask for a stone.

A stone to move,
a veil to rent,
a trump to play,
women to weep,
dead saints to rise and walk,
choirs of angels to sing,
orisons to remember all our sins,
and the blood
of the lamb
to wash in the stain.

Enough to feed the multitudes
and seven baskets
of broken promises
left over.

Take this bread, Yeshua
but do not eat.
Instead, speak into it
as if it were the ear of God.

She will hear you.

Put it quickly in the coals
of the cooking fire
as if the crust were brimful
of your words.

She will answer you.

I am so hungry,
I am a bone gnawed by God.

Take, speak.

Dana Pattillo

Note: Lammas, or Lughnassad, occurs in late July and early August. It is marks the middle of Summer and the beginning of the harvest. It is the first of three harvest festivals and is usually associated with ripening grain. It heralds the coming of Autumn.

Please sir, may I have some more?

2006-07-31T21:28:00.000-05:00

THIS IS FUN

2006-07-17T12:11:00.000-05:00

The red indicates how much of Florida will be underwater if sea level rises 6 meters.

Create your own maps of sea level rise courtesy of the University of Arizona Enviromental Studies Laboratory:

CLICK HERE

DR. OMED SEES AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

2006-07-16T16:45:00.000-05:00

Yes, pilgrims and seekers, Dr. Omed hied himself to the megamulticineplex to see the movie starring the ex-next President of the United States, An Inconvenient Truth. I gave it to myself as a treat after a long, hot, tiring work day. When I left the workplace at 5:15pm the outside temperature was 103 degrees feloniously Fahrenheit. The A/C in my windowless cubicle in Hell is supposed to keep the temperature pegged at 72 degrees, but when all the equipment is running and the summer sun is blazing down on the flat roof of the building, it just can’t keep up. The idea of sitting in a dark, cool movie theater suddenly became very appealing when I got into my un-airconditioned car, and I yielded to the whim.

I arrived just in time to catch the 5:30 showing, paid eight dollars for the movie, and four bucks for a large diet coke, and was in my seat just in time to catch the last half of the last preview (for Who Killed the Electric Car), the kill-your-babies-and-turn-off-your-cell-phones-you-morons courtesy message, and then the film rolled. I think there were about 8-10 other people in the auditorium, all of them adults (by which I mean I think they were all 40 or above) and not one made a noise through the entire film.

Gore is a very bright man, and deploys his facts (and a light sprinkling of Micheal-Moore-ish factoids) very effectively, eloquently, and with passionate élan. This movie is not a partisan fuckyoumentary in the Moore style, tho’ Gore gets in a few jabs at the hunka hunka burning Bush et alia. It is a substantive and powerful presentation of Al Gore’s crusade, his quest to save his honor, American democracy, and human civilization itself, from itself, with his “slide show.” Gore is a modern Don Quixote with an Apple laptop instead of a lance, but Gore’s windmills really are giants.

The images, graphs, and graphics of this…ultimate hyper-PowerPoint presentation…have a visceral impact, even tho’ I knew most of the information contained in them. At the end of the film, Gore winds up and makes his pitch; he says (I paraphrase here since my verbal memory is one with the snows of yesteryear, like all those glaciers) that we—we, the American people, the greatest environmental sinners in the global passion play—already have everything we need, every tool, every resource, save the will, the political will, to do the job of reversing global warming. Gore says we can do it, we can summon the political will to save ourselves from ourselves in this “era of consequences” and he says it like he believes it.

But as the credits rolled and the soundtrack segued into a Melissa Etheridge song, I sat in the dark with tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes, not because of the sobering message passionately conveyed, but because I didn’t believe him.

I don’t believe we will save ourselves. I don’t think the American people can summon the political will to force the necessary changes on our government and our elites; I don’t think we have time if we could. Fred won’t let me believe it. The movie soundtrack playing in my head was “Man of La Mancha.”

LET THEM EAT CAKE

2006-07-14T06:25:00.000-05:00

BASTILLE DAY

On July 14, 1789, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille Prison, where the enemies of the regime of King Louis XVI were held incognito and without trial.

GRENDEL'S LOST SOCK: THOUGHT FOR TODAY

2006-07-14T05:09:00.000-05:00

It's only the middle of July, and it's beginning to feel a lot like August, 1914. Kaiser Willehm and Der Dubya are beginning to look like bookends. "The Gods have abandoned us like migrating birds; unburied bodies melt like rendered fat in sun," a Babylonian scribe wrote, once upon a time, 3000 years ago. Happy Bastille Day.

GRENDEL'S LOST SOCK: THOUGHT FOR TODAY

2006-07-13T14:23:00.000-05:00

The best liars are those people who think themselves honest and above board; indeed the best way to lie is by telling the truth, in the same way that the best way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone, including yourself.

DR. OMED’S VIRTUAL 24-7 SUNDAY SCHOOL:

2006-06-16T11:31:00.000-05:00

THEODICY 101: IF GOD IS GOD

Does God get personal?

Do you have a personal God?

Do you see your personal God often, or do you have to make an appointment?

Is there a waiting list to see God?

Do you have a personal relationship with God?

Or is God someone you read about in a book?

Do you consider your relationship with God deep and meaningful, or as a casual, whenever you drop by sort of thing?

How personal?—Live and in person, God Incarnate (in the flesh)?

How long has it been since you took your meds?

Or do you communicate with God by long distance, so to speak—by prayer?

Is that like calling a 1-900 line?

Does God whisper sweet nothings in your ear?

Does God charge by the minute?

Or is praying to God more like visiting a chat room, only more spiritual?

If praying to God is like visiting a chat room, how do you know He’s really God? He could be some sort of God-wanna-be, a rogue demiurge, or a registered soul corrupter…

If you asked God to do you a favor, would He do it?

If God (the really real God) asked you to do Him a favor, would you do it?

Would you do it no matter what it was (rape, murder, whatever)—after all, this is God talking—or would you tell Him I’ll have to get back to you on that?

DR. OMED’S SUNDAY SERMON:

2006-06-11T16:10:00.000-05:00

GAY MARRIAGE IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

I can almost hear the members of my e-congregation chorus as one: “Wait-one-gosh-darn-minute, Dr. Omed, there ain’t no gay marriage in the Bible!” Au contraire, pilgrims and seekers. Shall we examine the text of 1 Samuel 18? Young David has just slain Goliath in battle with the Philistines. He has just met King Saul and his son Jonathan for the first time:

And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.

And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father's house. (Like a new bride?)

Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.

And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.
1 Samuel 18:1-4

If you don’t want to call the covenant between Jonathan and David marriage, call it a civil union. However, later in the chapter Saul gives his daughter Michal in marriage to David, and makes a curious remark:

Wherefore Saul said to David, Thou shalt this day be my son-in-law a second time.
1 Samuel 18:21

The only child of King Saul’s other than Michal with which David has a contracted relationship—is Jonathan. Saul’s words certainly imply that he regarded David as already married to Jonathan.

Later, when Saul and Jonathan are killed, David sings a lament:

I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; you were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, more wonderful than that of women.

It seem that at least one instance of same sex… civil covenant between two of the Lord’s Anointed was condoned and even approved by no less an authority than the King of Israel.

Fundy Facts TM

Did you know:

Of the patriarchs in the Old Testament, only Issac(Gen 25-28)had just one wife reported, with no concubines mentioned. Abraham(Gen 25:6) was fairly conservative, limiting himself to one wife and several concubines. Jacob(Gen 30) had 2 wives and 2 concubines. King David(1 Chr 24:3) had 6 or more wives and 10 or more concubines (Not to mention his husband, Jonathan). Rehoboam(2 Chr 11:21) had 18 wives plus 60 concubines. Studly King Solomon (2 Kings 11:3) had 700 wives plus 300 concubines. King Solomon also flouted the ban on intermarriage, and "loved many strange women" including at least one Egyptian, several Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites. (1 Kings 11:1;14:21)

VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS:

2006-06-08T07:58:00.001-05:00

Thursday, June 8, 2006 · Last updated 5:11 a.m. PT

Army officer refuses to deploy to Iraq

By MELANTHIA MITCHELL ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

TACOMA, Wash. -- An Army lieutenant who refuses to deploy to Iraq with his Fort Lewis Stryker brigade said he's prepared to face the consequences, including a possible prison term.
1st Lt. Ehren Watada, who joined the Army in March 2003, said he researched the reasons behind the U.S. involvement in Iraq and concluded the war is illegal and immoral.
"We have violated American law," Watada said. "We can't break laws in order to fight terrorism."

Watada said he would be willing to serve in Afghanistan or elsewhere, but he said he believes intelligence on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was manipulated "to fit a policy that was already implemented prior to 9-11," and he cited "mistreatment of the Iraqi people," saying it was "a contradiction to the Army's own Law of Land Warfare."
Army officials said Watada's decision to publicly declare his intent to disobey orders "is a serious matter and could subject him to adverse action."

His unit - the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division - is scheduled to begin leaving later this month for a mission in Iraq.

Watada sent a letter to his command in January, saying he had reservations about the Iraq war and felt he could not participate, his lawyer Eric A. Seitz said. Months later, he resubmitted his request to resign, Seitz said.

The Hawaii native was told last month his request had been denied. The Army said it was because Watada's unit is in a stop-loss category, and he has not fulfilled his service obligation. His commission requires that he serve as an active-duty Army officer for three years ending Dec. 3, his lawyer said.

Watada said he would submit another request to resign but added, "I feel it is inevitable ... I will be charged and I will be punished." He said he could face prison time for failing to deploy.
Peace activists, veterans and clergy have come out in support of Watada, whose commanders barred him from attending a news conference Wednesday because it occurred during his duty hours.

Watada did not apply for conscientious objector status, defined by Army regulations as a "firm, fixed and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, because of religious training and belief." He said he objected only to the war in Iraq.

An Army fact sheet dated Sept. 21, 2005, the most recent available, said 87 conscientious objector applications had been approved and 101 denied since January 2003.

"I know that my case has brought a lot of attention and scrutiny on me by my superiors," Watada said. "I'm probably very unpopular, if not the most unpopular person on Fort Lewis. But I know out there are people who believe in what I'm saying."

DR. OMED’S VIRTUAL 24-7 SUNDAY SCHOOL

2006-06-07T11:29:00.000-05:00

THEODICY 101

It has been suggested that Evil exists because God loved us so much He gave the gift of choice (i.e., Free Will) which necessarily includes the freedom to make bad choices (do Evil).

Did God have a choice about giving us a choice—apropos of the anthropic principle— does God have Free Will?

If God’s greatest gift to humankind is our individual freedom of choice, wouldn’t restricting or limiting the free choice of any human being in any way, such as, say, by passing laws against abortion or gay marriage, be in direct conflict with God’s Will (presuming He has One)?

It has also been suggested that God gave us Free Will not only because He loves us because he wants to be loved back, and the endless adoration of little robots who can’t not love You back would be kind of meaningless and pathetic, as well as boring, after an Eternity or two. Did God create Evil because He was bored?

Does Shit Happen because God is Love?

Is Evil God’s version of Tough Love?

2006-06-06T12:24:00.000-05:00

GRENDEL’S LAUNDRY LIST: CASSANDRA READINGS

2006-06-01T11:34:00.000-05:00

THE FOUR FUNDAMENTALISMS

"I was in a profound state of grief about the world before 9/11, and nothing that happened on that day has significantly changed what the world looks like to me."

James Koplin

We lefties—trained to keep an eye on systems and structures of power rather than obsessing about individual politicians and single events— (are) missing the point if we accepted the conventional wisdom that 9/11 "changed everything,"

The so-called "war on terror," has provided cover for the attempts to expand and deepen U.S. control over the strategically crucial resources of Central Asia and the Middle East, part of a global strategy that the Bush administration openly acknowledges is aimed at unchallengeable U.S domination of the world. For U.S. planners, that "world" includes not only the land and seas—and, of course, the resources beneath them—but space above as well. It is our world to arrange and dispose of as they see fit, in support of our "blessed lifestyle." Other nations can have a place in that world as long as they are willing to assume the role that the United States determines appropriate. The vision of U.S. policymakers is of a world very ordered, by them.

This description of U.S. policy is no caricature. Simply read the National Security Strategy document released in 2002 and the 2006 update and review post-World War II U.S. history. Read and review, but only if you don't mind waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of fear.

Opposing the war-of-the-moment—and going beyond that to challenge the whole imperial project—is important. But also important is the work of thinking through the nature of the larger forces that leave us in this grief-stricken position. We need to go beyond Bush. We should recognize the seriousness of the threat that this particular gang of thieves and thugs poses and resist their policies, but not mistake them for the core of the problem.

One way to come to terms with these forces is to understand the United States as a society in the grip of four fundamentalisms. In ascending order of threat, I identify these fundamentalisms as religious, national, economic, and technological. All share some similar characteristics, while each poses a particular threat to sustainable democracy and sustainable life on the planet. Each needs separate analysis and strategies for resistance.

Fundamentalism. I use it to describe any intellectual /political /theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Such fundamentalism leads to an inclination to want to marginalize, or in some cases eliminate, alternative ways to understand and organize the world. After all, what's the point of engaging in honest dialogue with those who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong or even evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris, a delusional overconfidence not only in one's beliefs but in the ability of humans to know much of anything definitively. In the way I use the term, fundamentalism isn't unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in the mistaking of very limited knowledge for wisdom.

The antidote to fundamentalism is humility, that recognition of just how contingent our knowledge about the world is. We need to adopt what sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson calls "an ignorance-based worldview," an approach to world that acknowledges that what we don't know dwarfs what we do know about a complex world. Acknowledging our basic ignorance does not mean we should revel in stupidity, but rather should spur us to recognize that we have an obligation to act intelligently on the basis not only of what we know but what we don't know. When properly understood, I think such humility is implicit in traditional /indigenous systems and also the key lesson to be taken from the Enlightenment and modern science (a contentious claim, perhaps, given the way in which modern science tends to overreach). The Enlightenment insight, however, is not that human reason can know everything, but that we can give up attempts to know everything and be satisfied with knowing what we can know. That is, we can be content in making it up as we go along, cautiously. One of the tragedies of the modern world is that too few have learned that lesson.

Fundamentalists, no matter what the specific belief system, believe in their ability to know a lot. That is why it can be so easy for fundamentalists to move from one totalizing belief system to another. For example, I have a faculty colleague who shifted from being a dogmatic communist to a dogmatic right-wing evangelical Christian. When people hear of his conversion they often express amazement, though to me it always seemed easy to understand—he went from one fundamentalism to another. What matters is not so much the content but the shape of the belief system. Such systems should worry us.

The fundamentalism that attracts the most attention is religious. In the United States, the predominant form is Christian. Elsewhere in the world, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms are attractive to some significant portion of populations, either spread across a diaspora or concentrated in one region, or both.

But religious fundamentalism is not necessarily the most serious fundamentalist threat loose in the world today. Certainly much evil has been done in the world in the name of religion, especially the fundamentalist varieties, and we can expect more in the future. But, moving up the list, we also can see clearly the problems posed by national fundamentalism.Nationalism poses a threat everywhere but should especially concern us in the United States, where the capacity for destruction in the hands of the most powerful state in the history of the world is exacerbated by a pathological hyper-patriotism that tends to suppress internal criticism and leave many unable to hear critique from outside.

Patriotism is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Because a nation-state is an abstraction (lines on a map, not a naturally occurring object), assertions of patriotism (defined as love of or loyalty to a nation-state) raise a simple question: To what we are pledging our love and loyalty? How is that abstraction made real?

I conclude that all the possible answers are indefensible and that instead of pledging allegiance to a nation, we should acknowledge and celebrate our connections to real people in our lives while also declaring a commitment to universal principles, but reject offering commitment to arbitrary political units that in the modern era have been the vehicle for such barbarism and brutality.

That critique applies across the board, but because of our power and peculiar history, a rejection of national fundamentalism is most crucial in the United States. The dominant conception of that history is captured in the phrase "the city upon a hill," the notion that the United States came into the world as the first democracy, a beacon to the world. In addition to setting the example, as soon as it had the capacity to project its power around the world, the United States claimed to be the vehicle for bringing democracy to that world. These are particularly odd claims for a nation that owes its very existence to one of the most successful genocides in recorded history, the near-complete extermination of indigenous peoples to secure the land and resource base for the United States. Odder still when one looks at the U.S. practice of African slavery that propelled the United States into the industrial world, and considers the enduring apartheid system—once formal and now informal—that arose from it. And odd-to-the-point-of-bizarre in the context of imperial America's behavior in the world since it emerged as the lone superpower and made central to its foreign policy in the post-WWII era attacks on any challenge in the Third World to U.S. dominance.

While all the empires that have committed great crimes—the British, French, Belgians, Japanese, Russians and then the Soviets—have justified their exploitation of others by the alleged benefits it brought to the people being exploited, there is no power so convinced of its own benevolence as the United States. The culture is delusional in its commitment to this mythology, which is why today one can find on the other side of the world peasant farmers with no formal education who understand better the nature of U.S. power than many faculty members at elite U.S. universities. This national fundamentalism rooted in the assumption of the benevolence of U.S. foreign and military policy works to trump critical inquiry. As long as a significant component of the U.S. public—and virtually the entire elite—accept this national fundamentalism, the world is at risk.

Economic fundamentalism, synonymous these days with market fundamentalism, presents another grave threat. After fall of the Soviet system, the naturalness of capitalism is now taken to be beyond question. The dominant assumption about corporate capitalism in the United States is not simply that it is the best among competing economic systems, but that it is the only sane and rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary world.

In capitalism, (1) property, including capital assets, is owned and controlled by private persons; (2) people sell their labor for money wages, and (3) goods and services are allocated by markets. In contemporary market fundamentalism, also referred to as neoliberalism, it's assumed that most extensive use of markets possible will unleash maximal competition, resulting in the greatest good—and all this is inherently just, no matter what the results. The reigning ideology of so-called "free trade" seeks to impose this neoliberalism everywhere on the globe. In this fundamentalism, it is an article of faith that the "invisible hand" of the market always provides the preferred result, no matter how awful the consequences may be for real people.

A corresponding tenet of the market fundamentalist view is that the government should not interfere in any of this; the appropriate role of government, we are told, is to stay out of the economy. This is probably the most ridiculous aspect of the ideology, for the obvious reason that it is the government that establishes the rules for the system (currency, contract law, etc.) and decides whether the wealth accumulated under previous sets of rules should be allowed to remain in the hands of those who accumulated it (typically in ways immoral, illegal, or both; we should recall the quip that behind every great fortune is a great crime) or be redistributed. To argue that government should stay out of the economy merely obscures the obvious fact that without the government—that is, without rules established through some kind of collective action—there would be no economy. The government can't stay out because it's in from the ground floor, and assertions that government intervention into markets is inherently illegitimate are just silly.

Adding to the absurdity of all this is the hypocrisy of the market fundamentalists, who are quick to call on government to bail them out when things go sour (in recent U.S history, the savings-and-loan and auto industries are the most outrageous examples). And then there's the reality of how some government programs -- most notably the military and space departments -- act as conduits for the transfer of public money to private corporations under the guise of "national defense" and the "exploration of space." And then there's the problem of market failure -- the inability of private markets to provide some goods or provide other goods at the most desirable levels -- of which economists are well aware.

In other words, economic fundamentalism -- the worship of markets combined with steadfast denial about how the system actually operates -- leads to a world in which not only are facts irrelevant to the debate, but people learn to ignore their own experience.

TGIF. Everyone in the United States knows what that means: "Thank God it's Friday." The majority of Americans don't just know what TGIF stands for, they feel it in their bones. That's a way of saying that a majority of Americans do work they generally do not like and do not believe is really worth doing. That's a way of saying that we have an economy in which most people spend at least a third of their lives doing things they don't want to do and don't believe are valuable. We are told this is a way of organizing an economy that is natural.

Religious, national, and economic fundamentalisms are dangerous. They are systems of thought—or, more accurately, systems of non-thought; as Wes Jackson puts it, "fundamentalism takes over where thought leaves off"—that are at the core of much of the organized violence in the world today. They are systems that are deployed to constrain real freedom and justify illegitimate authority. But it may turn out that those fundamentalisms are child's play compared with U.S. society's technological fundamentalism.

Most concisely defined, technological fundamentalism is the assumption that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations are often said to be "anti-technology," which is a meaningless insult. All human beings use technology of some kind, whether it's stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should be evaluated on the basis of its effects—predictable and unpredictable—on human communities and the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge.

Our experience with unintended consequences is fairly clear.

This technological fundamentalism makes it clear why Jackson's call for an ignorance-based worldview is so important. If we were to step back and confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed—out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate to control the consequences of our science and technology -- I doubt any of us would ever get a good night's sleep. We humans have been overdriving our intellectual headlights for some time, most dramatically in the second half of the 20th century.

The deeper we break into the energy package, the greater the risks we take. Building fires with sticks gathered from around the camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly earlier material of the universe—such as fossil fuels and, eventually, heavy metal uranium—is quite a different project, more complex and far beyond our capacity to control. Likewise, manipulating plants through selective breeding is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings of the gene—the foundational material of life—takes us to places we have no way to understand.

We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we have created. The answer is not some naive return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have created and a systematic evaluation of how to step back from our most dangerous missteps.

We have to learn to live with less, which we can accomplish only when we recognize that living with less is crucial not only to ecological survival but long-term human fulfillment. People in the United States live with an abundance of most everything—except meaning. The people who have the most in material terms seem to spend the most time in therapy, searching for answers to their own alienation. This "blessed lifestyle"—a term Bush's spokesman used in 2000 to describe the president's view of U.S. affluence—perhaps is more accurately also seen as a curse.

A world that steps back from high-energy /high-technology answers to all questions will no doubt be a harder world in some ways. But the way people cope without such "solutions" can help create and solidify human bonds. In this sense, the high-energy/high-technology world often contributes to impoverished relationships and the destruction of longstanding cultural practices and the information those practices carry. So, stepping back from this fundamentalism is not simply sacrifice but an exchange of a certain kind of comfort and easy amusement for a different set of rewards.

Articulating this is important in a world in which people have come to believe the good life is synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated technology. To miss the way in which turning from the high-energy /high-technology can improve our lives, then, supports the techno-fundamentalists, such as this writer in the Wired magazine:

"Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life. No wonder the movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world's wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance is naive at best."

Naive, perhaps, but not as naive as the belief that unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely. Let's ignore our experience and throw the dice. Let's take naiveté to new heights. Let's forget all we should have learned.

The problem goes deeper than the most exaggerated versions of these systems. If there is to be a livable future, religion as we know it, the nation-state, capitalism, and what we think of as advanced technology will have to give way to new ways of understanding the world and organizing ourselves. We still have to find ways to struggle with the mystery of the world through ritual and art; organize ourselves politically; produce and distribute goods and services; and create the tools we need to do all these things. But the existing systems have proven inadequate to the task. On each front, we need major conceptual revolutions.

I don't pretend to have answers, nor should anyone else. We are at the beginning of a long process of redefining what it means to be human in relation to others and to the non-human world. We are still formulating questions. Some find this a depressing situation, but we could just as well see it as a time that opens incredible opportunities for creativity. To live in unsettled times—especially times in which it's not difficult to imagine life as we know it becoming increasingly untenable—is both frightening and exhilarating.

What is that path? Tracking the four fundamentalisms, we can see some turns we need to make.

Technologically: We need to stop talking about progress in terms that reflexively glorify faster and more powerful devices, and instead adopt a standard for judging progress based on the real effects on humans and the wider world of which we are a part.

Economically: We need to stop talking about growth in terms of more production and adopt a standard for economic growth and development based on meeting human needs.

Nationally: We need to stop talking about national security and the national interest—code words for serving the goals of the powerful—and focus on people's interests in being secure in the basics: food, shelter, education, and communal solidarity.

Religiously: We need to stop trying to pin down God. We can understand God as simply the name we give to that which is beyond our ability to understand, and recognize that the attempt to create rules for how to know God is always a failed project.

Most of the world is complex beyond our ability to comprehend. It's not that there's nothing we can know through our rational faculties, but that it's essential we recognize the limits of those faculties. We need to reject the fundamentalist streak in all of us, religious or secular, whatever our political affiliation.

We need to stop mistaking cleverness for wisdom. We need to embrace our limits—our ignorance—in the hopes that we can stop being so stupid.

When we do that we are coming to terms with the kind of animals we are, in all our glory and all our limitations. That embrace of our limitations is an embrace of a larger world of which we are a part, more glorious than most of us ever experience.

When we do that—if we can find our way clear to do that—I think we make possible love in this world. Not an idealized love, but a real love that recognizes the joy that is possible and the grief that is inevitable.

It is my dream to live in that world, to live in that love.

There is much work to be done if we want that world. There is enormous struggle that can't be avoided. When we allow ourselves to face it, we will realize that ahead of us there is suffering beyond description, as well as potential for transcending that suffering.

There is grief and joy.

And there is nothing to do but face it.

Robert Jensen

Note: I have freely edited the text above. Read it all at: http://www.counterpunch.org/jensen05302006.html

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

GRENDEL'S LAUNDRY LIST:

2006-05-08T21:06:00.000-05:00

TODAY'S RANTLET

God is not dead; He's in a coma—a persistent vegetative state (No, children, that does not mean He lives in Florida). Patriarchal monotheism is the respirator that keeps the Sacred Heart beating and the Holy Spirit breathing. Men (Sorry, ladies, I'm leaving you out) don't need a reason to believe. They don't need reason to believe. They need to believe in order to have a reason—to exist, to justify their existence and their actions. Let me rephrase that. Men don't need a reason; all they need is an excuse. Rape, pillage, and murder go better with God. Now go out and pick some flowers and love one another.

THE MIRROR HAS BEEN EMPTY FOR TOO LONG

2006-05-02T19:12:00.000-05:00

THE SAYINGS OF DR. OMED

Order is sterile. Chaos is fecund. I got my arms up and my knees tucked under the safety bar as the coaster train clanks up the first hill.

The breaking of symmetry, the invariant and unimaginable null, no-thing, or tao raggedly split into 1 and 0, yin and yang, is both genesis and fall, the coming of light and original sin, with pain, toil, suffering and death in its wake-but also joy and insight-is the first creative act of the mind. Truly is the prideful angel of our intellect in its cognitive disobedience called the light-bearer, Lucifer.

The question is (for the moment positing the existence of deity) not whether we have a choice (i.e, free will), but whether or not God has a choice. Cf. Einstein: "God does not throw dice."

There is but one God, and his Name is Legion.

God is not served at this establishment. Do you serve God? Supersized, with a biggie fries and a half gallon soft drink? Or as Jesus Tartare, perhaps with a nice Chianti?

While I enjoy the imagery of the Book of Revelations, I do not interpret it as a guide to history, past or future. When I do meet people who claim to be born again, saved, and what-all Christians, and hear their opinions on such matters, my conclusion has to be that all the best people go to hell.

Re: "all the best people go to hell." I don't believe in Hell, either. All the hell we create around us is self-evident; all the hell we create in the name of God.

And when in Hell is the Rapture going to remove all the revelatin' Christians from the Earth and let all us hopeless sinners get on with our tribulations without these busybodies mucking about in everyone else's beeswax? It's about two millenia late, this Parousia that Paul speaks of. "We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed..." Ya, right.

A trickster creator seems inherently more believable than a just god, a god of love. That our race commits theodicy with such abandon is the greatest of the Coyote God’s ort ort ort hey moe eye pokes.

"Revealed Truth" is a toxic material. Just say no to "TRUTH." As Bill Burroughs said, "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."

The process of evolution, biological or cultural, is not an onward and upward march of progress; it is contingent and value neutral, has no inevitable direction; we assign values and directions to it. As the historian Micheal Wood has said, in fundamental ways we are still stone age people. Still living out the archetypes of the first half million years or so of our specie's existence as stone tool using animals living in small "hunter-gatherer" troops. Nature is essentially female. That is why we call her Mother. The "matriarchy" in our genes generates female archetypes that represent, protect, and promote the biological evolution of the species by Darwinian natural selection. "Male" consciousness and ego rebels against the female surround and overleaps the biological world to dwell in the Lamarckian realm of ideas, propagating memes from mind, that will o'wisp in the wet, cthonian splat of brains, to mind. The archetypes of the "patriarchy" that have driven "civilization" for the past ten thousand years began as an unconscious psy-ops against the domination of the Goddess. I respect and venerate the Goddess, but also value the tools developed by the "patriarchy." Jello Biafra said "If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve." I'm an outlaw. I choose to evolve. What was your question?

I wonder how you say "We are Devo" in Arabic?

Sometimes it is not hopelessness, but hope that defeats you. The truly hopeless have no fear.

I am not a brave man, I am clinically fear-impaired. As part of my bipolar disorder, I simply do not feel fear in situations in which any sensible person would be terrified or at least a bit nervous. I do not mean I am fear free, I have learned some proper fear over the years, but mostly I feel fear in entirely innocuous and inappropriate situations. The only time I am truly afraid is when something bad is happening, or about to happen, somewhere else to somebody else. I had the fantods about two weeks before the London bombings, but I only knew it was about returning, in a new form, to the barbarism of human sacrifice like the Aztecs cutting the hearts out of thousands of victims to feed their gods. I didn't know the stone knife would rise and be plunged into our hearts so soon again. The suicide bombers have fed their god. Now, in what ritual of death shall we feed our god in return?

Ask not for whom the black helicopters land, they land for thee.

Lex orandi, non lex credenda: Listen up, Pilgrims. Religion is applied ignorance. Righteousness is applied insensitivity. Perfection is a kind of hatred.

Faith in God is heresy. The infinite has no will, no intention, no desire, no thought, no speech, no action—yet there is nothing outside of it. Attributing mind and will to "god," attributing divinity itself, and the name "god" is heresy. Limiting your awe of the infinite by any conception or definition of "god" is spiritual idolatry. Unsheath your soul and cut away the heresy of God's existence.

Melancholy is certainly a much more satisfactory word than depression. Melancholy is what you feel when you have experienced the truth of life, depressed is what you get when you can't face the truth. Melancholy is not debilitating. It impels and informs the act of creation. Out of great sadness melancholic imagination creates great mercies, and gives grace.

Poets, our hearts are full of holes to let the tears run out, so they won't burst.

The last illusion is disillusionment.

I think of regret as a kind of hubris, laying claim to what properly belongs to what I shall refer to for the sake of brevity as "God." Not that I'm necessarily against hubris, it's taken the human race a long way.

Don't you think all kingdoms are first kingdoms of the eye, which always seizes more than it can grasp? Sandcastles, pryamids or hermit's hovel, the ouroboros circles them all. It is not God the Father's house but the eye which has many mansions.

I don't know about you, but I begin to get the wind up when someone starts talking about what poetry really is. Poetry, like life, has no meaning. The poet (from the greek word “maker”) creates meaning. Trivial or profound. Like most everyone else who calls himself a poet (or for that matter the degenerate verseslingers who call themselves “spoken word artists”) I think I'm writing the really real poetry.

In poetry or art I don't think you can say anything more than once, no matter how many times you (or somebody else for that matter) repeats it. Unless you create anew, at least a new tin can tied to the tail of the metaphor, you are merely borrowing a cup of froth from the cataracts of true download, to produce the sort of doggerel any noncognitive plagiarist can excrete.

The discourse of politics and religion demonstrates the mastery of rhetoric over reason; no "scientific" reform of this discourse is possible, nor perhaps desirable. I.e., if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen.

One hangover from being injected with Baptist memes as a child is that I believe the words really do matter, their content matters, and meaning matters. It's herpes of the mind.

Writing for a blog is the first time in my life I ever thought about having an audience for what I do. I can sort of pretend I'm a very idiosyncratic journalist for the purpose of producing parody and satire and commenting (ranting) on current events, but I can't write poetry or make art that way. For that, I have walk down the dark alleys of my mind praying for a lurking muse to mug me.

The cosmos envelopes us, but goes on without us, in cycles that we cannot change (except in an extremely local way) and have very little or nothing to do with us. We are neither cause nor effect, we are a byproduct, a second order phenomenon. The weather that passes through our souls but for little eddies we make is larger than us.

The Lakota have the word: "Hokahey." This is usually translated as "It is a good day to die." but the literal translation is "Stand fast." The day that we will run is not yet come. Stand fast.

Rule #7: Nobody said it would easy.

That'll do to go on.

THE REVENGE OF THE WHALES?

2006-03-05T00:01:00.000-06:00

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Years ago, the sound of a boat sometimes spelled death for the heavily hunted sperm whale. Now, some of them have figured out, it means dinner.

Scientists recently realized that sperm whales in the Gulf of Alaska zero in on boat engines to locate miles of fishing lines hung with valuable sablefish.

"That's the whales' cue," said Jan Straley, an assistant professor at the University of Alaska Southeast who since 2002 has helped lead the study.

Sperm whales don't tune in to just any engine noise to track what are essentially miles of sablefish shish kebabs. The endangered whales key in on the engines' sporadic bubbling as fishermen turn them on and off while hauling in longlines, the ongoing study said.

The work has led researchers to recommend some low-cost ways for fishermen to hoodwink the highly intelligent cetaceans.

The researchers estimate there are 90 male sperm whales feeding from longlines in the eastern Gulf of Alaska, part of the world's largest sablefish fishery.

The sweet, flaky flesh of the sablefish, long prized in Japan and Hawaii, is gaining popularity in the mainland United States, where it is listed on menus as butterfish or black cod. About 12.8 million pounds (5.8 million kilograms) of sablefish were hauled in last year from the eastern gulf, with dock prices that sometimes topped US$4 a pound (euro7.50 a kilo). Consumers pay $18.99 a pound (euro35.40 a kilo) for the fish at the upscale Fresh Direct food delivery service in New York.

Scientists found the sperm whales tend to feed on longlines in the late spring through summer, during the height of the sablefish season.

Sound receivers attached to the longlines recorded the loud clicks of chattering whales. Using the recordings, scientists found that whales dive shallower than normal when near boats hauling up the bottom-dwelling sablefish.

"The whale doesn't have to dive as deep to get its food," said Aaron Thode, an associate researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who is also leading the study, which is funded by the federally established North Pacific Research Board.

Sperm whales in the gulf have been plucking sablefish off the longlines - which are up to 3 miles (5 kilometers) long - for at least two decades. They also take halibut and, in one instance, lingcod.

Killer whales in the Bering Sea and Prince William Sound also plunder sablefish longlines. Sperm whales and other toothed whales, such as pilot whales, cherry-pick fish catches all over the world.

No one knows how many of the trendy gourmet sablefish have been snatched by the snacking leviathans. Fishermen and fisheries managers say the overall economic loss to the gulf's 410-boat sablefish fleet is probably low, but has increased in the past decade.

"A couple of times they completely cleaned us out, but usually they take just a few," said Steve Fish of Sitka, who has fished for sablefish in the gulf for 27 years.

Fishermen fear the problem could intensify as the endangered marine mammals increase in number and teach each other the techniques of sablefish rustling. Once a prime target of whalers, scientists suspect sperm whales are recovering in oceans worldwide, although there are no definitive population numbers.

"You didn't used to see them at all in the gulf, but they started showing up in the late '80s, early '90s," Fish said. "Now you can hardly make a trip without seeing sperm whales."

Thode and Straley's suggestions for fishermen include fishing earlier or later in the season, hauling in the line without changing engine speed, or making decoy noises with the engine to draw whales to a different area.

Fishermen said they will try the methods this season, but many believe the large-brained whales are just too smart.

"We try to get creative, but there's only so much you can do," Fish said.

Sperm whale study: http://www.seaswap.info/index.html

Via Spike, my personal news clipping service. He got it from peoplepc-online, an outfit I’ve never heard of… Truth or psy-ops?

WHALE SUSHI OR SOYLENT GREEN?

2006-02-26T13:46:00.000-06:00

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - The chained Farley Mowat floats under police guard in Cape Town harbor, out of reach of the whaling ships its captain seeks to destroy.

For seven weeks, the crew of the tiny activist ship harassed Japanese whalers in Antarctic waters, chasing the hunters through icy seas.

Now, the Canadian-registered ship has been forced to rest.

Last month, it was detained on arrival in South Africa by marine officials who say it does not meet safety requirements.

The crew talk of a diplomatic conspiracy to shut their campaign down -- and as they wait, they muse on their latest high-seas battle.

The 657-ton Farley Mowat -- flying the skull-and-crossbones like a modern pirate ship -- stalked Japanese ships hunting minke whales through the huge waves of the Southern Ocean and eventually sideswiped the fleet's cargo ship.

"Every time we approached them, they ran. We kept them running for 4,000 miles and 15 days," captain and activist Paul Watson told Reuters from the deck of his black steel ship.

"We couldn't catch them, so it was constantly a hit-and-ambush type of thing," he says, proudly recounting tales of the whalers he has helped to sink and the damage caused to those that escaped.

A founding member of Greenpeace, Watson now heads the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which broke away from Greenpeace and believes in action rather than protests.

The Farley Mowat, named after a Canadian author known as an environmental champion, is Sea Shepherd's standard-bearer.

Article Continued ...

The Japanese are still hunting whales. For food. Whale sushi. In my book whales are sentient beings, and killing them is murder. Killing them for food is the same as killing a chimp or gorilla for food (as poor Africans are still doing) and is morally equivalent to cannibalism. Hell, it is cannibalism. It would be far healthier for the planet if there were a lot more good old fashioned mano a mano Homo Sock Puppet cannibalism. There's more humans on the hoof by weight than any other animal but ants and termites. Ants and termites are high protein but in most people's minds they do not qualify as the other white meat.

Excuse me for a moment.

“SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!”

I feel better now.

Benighted creatures such as chickens and cattle only exist because we, the human race, created them, by selective breeding from wild ancestors over generations, and by genetic manipulation since yesterday. Their degenerated races continue only because we find them tasty and expeditious with biggie fries and a 42 oz pop, at the drivethru--and because the Agricultural-Industrial Complex makes billions of dollars selling the flesh of their carcasses to us. Also, they've got to do something with all that corn. The Green Giant can only sell so much creamed corn. If we as a race stopped eating domesticated animals, Tysons, The American Beef Council, et al., would stop raising them. Their populations would crash, leaving only remnant populations in zoos, and farm museums, and possibly some feral pigs and chickens. So remember, if you give up the nuggets and the Big Mac, you're on the road to genocide--genocide most fowl.

I've never raised an animal for food, but I have killed, cleaned, cooked, and eaten fish, birds, and small mammals. It is strange to make a living animal dead, have it die at one's hands in one's hands, and to divide a whole body into pieces of meat and waste. But the Bible lies; the mark of Cain is on the heart, not the forehead.

JAM-PACKED PLANET: THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

2006-02-25T09:53:00.000-06:00

Planet's Population to Hit 6.5 Billion Saturday

By Leonard David LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 24 February 200612:38 pm ET

A population milestone is about to be set on this jam-packed planet.

On Saturday, Feb. 25, at 7:16 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the population here on this good Earth is projected to hit 6.5 billion people.

Along with this forecast, an analysis by the International Programs Center at the U.S. Census Bureau points to another factoid, Robert Bernstein of the Bureau's Public Information Center advised LiveScience. Mark this on your calendar: Some six years from now, on Oct. 18, 2012 at 4:36 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the Earth will be home to 7 billion folks.

snip snip

On average, 4.4 people are born every second.

snip snip

Remarkably, despite the many new developments over the past 50 years, one fact looks very much the same: Populations are growing most rapidly where such growth can be afforded the least—an observation that has changed little over time.

Via LiveScience.com. Read entire article HERE.

THE UBER-GEEK YO-MAMAS

2006-02-25T00:25:00.000-06:00

Yo mama's resting energy is her mass times the speed of ugly squared.

Yo mama so fat, her blue mumu looks like a red shift.

Yo mama's like an mp3—she's free, and everyone just passes her around.

Yo mama so fat, neutrinos stop and go around her!

Yo mama so fat, Stephen Hawking found three extra dimensions in her panties!

Yo mama so fat, she sat down at the Periodic Table—and Uranium got pissed off and left!

Yo mama made of Ugly quarks.

Yo mama so fat, when she go to the beach, Greenpeace tries to tow her back out to sea!

Yo mama's so fat, she's afraid that if she runs into Auntie Matter, they'll gravitationally collapse and create a black hole!

Yo mama so dumb, she thinks the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction is what happened right before she had twins.

Yo mama's so fat they have to draw her world-line with a paint roller.

Yo mama's so fat we can't even ASSUME she's a point mass.

Yo mama's ass is a quantum phenomenon—more wave than particle.

Yo mama is so fat, she don't have skin; she has an event horizon.

Yo mama so dumb, her IQ is an imaginary number.

Yo mama's so fat, her DNA is a TRIPLE helix.

Yo mama so dumb, she STILL thinks voting for Bush the second time was a good idea.

Note: Dick started it.

DR. OMED’S LATE NITE SERMONETTE

2006-02-23T09:34:00.000-06:00

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND STATISTICS:
WHY THE HUMAN RACE CAN’T DO THE NUMBERS

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

Le superflu, chose tres necessaire—Voltaire*

Estimated number of people killed in the 9-11 attacks:
2,986
Average number of people killed
in auto accidents in the United States per year:
42,000
Estimated number of people killed instantly
in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945:
80,000
Estimated number of people dead
from the after-effects of the Hiroshima bombing by 1950:
200,000
American soldiers killed (so far)
in the invasion and occupation of Iraq:
2,280
American soldiers wounded (so far)
in the invasion and occupation of Iraq:
16,653
Estimated number of Iraqis killed (so far)
in the invasion and occupation of Iraq:
28,000 to 32,000
British soldiers killed and wounded on the first day
of the Battle of the Somme in WWI:
58,000
Estimated rate of species extinct per year:
50,000
The total human population of Earth
projected to 02/23/06 at 03:39 GMT (EST+5):
6,499,416,902
Total increase in the human population of Earth
since the day before yesterday (2/20):
621,648
Total killed in six natural disasters aka Acts of God
(Southeast Asia tsunami; Sumatra earthquake;
Hurricane Katrina; Hurricane Stan mudslide in El Salvador;
earthquake in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India;
mudslide in the Philippines)
occurring between 12/26/04 and 2/17/06:
491,120
Percent of total human population of Earth
represented by the 491,120 aforesaid victims of Acts of God:
1 five thousandth of 1 percent
Human population of Earth in 1918:
1,800,000,000
Estimated number of people dead in the 1918-1919 flu pandemic:
Lowball: 20,000,000
Highball: 40,000,000
(1.1 to 2.2 percent of the then current world population)
Number of people dead from AIDS since 1980:
25,000,000
(A much smaller fraction of the current world population)

If the H5N1 bird flu virus morphs into a form as virulent to humans as the 1918 influenza pandemic, killing the same percentage of the current total world population, the number of dead flu victims would be approximately 71,500,000 to 143,000,00. At the current rate of population increase, that number would be replaced in less than a year in the case of the lowball number and in less than two years in the case of the highball number. As I said in Dick Jones’ comment box;

We are the Plague.

But, collectively, the human race can’t do—or face—the math. We’re past due for the herd to be thinned. Speaking entirely metaphorically (Okay, Dick?), the H5N1 virus is just a little something Mother Gaia has simmering in a petrie dish on the back burner. Disease, natural disasters and the effects of climate change are not killing us fast enough. We aren’t killing us fast enough. Only a real bastard of a cataclysm, perhaps combining several factors will provide the economy of scale required. After all, it takes four horsemen, according to Revelations. Supersize that Armageddon.

Our species, except for termites and ants, is, pound for pound, the largest, most wide spread terrestrial source of protein rich food on Earth. I don’t actually believe in the Gaia Hypothesis, but I do put some credence in the process of natural selection. The founder mutation that creates a bug that can eat us wholesale will likely be very successful. We are not privileged to sit at the top of the food chain and root, hog, root ‘til Jesus calls us home. We are all tomorrow’s food. Soylent Green is people.

My simulacrum of the facts, ma’am, just the facts; my heapin’ helpin’ of lies, damn lies, and statistics may not be tasty with fries and a shake; feel free to collect your own, more palatable set. But you have to able to count past one...two...many. I do not regard my assessment, such as it is, a counsel of despair. I certainly don’t think we can kill the biosphere; I think maybe we should stop trying so hard to do it. We can..will…have impoverished the diversity of the biosphere to the point of creating a major extinction event, like the Permian or Cretaceous extinctions. Life on earth has all always come back, even from the worst extinction events, but tell that to the trilobites and dinosaurs. I don’t even think the human race will go extinct, but our descendents will likely live in an impoverished material civilization and culture, unless we make some big changes, right now. There are things we can do every day to make the future better, and to save what we haven’t already lost. I love the smell of burning bridges in the morning.

*"The superflous is very necessary."

Note: Dr. Omed would to thank Dick, Karen, and Meg for their inspiration.

ON SALE NOW

2006-02-21T12:39:00.000-06:00

BUYING ARMAGEDDON

We're buying Armageddon because it's on sale at WAL-MART.
We're buying Armageddon because it only takes a couple of minutes in the microwave.
We're buying Armageddon because it has a three car garage and a Jacuzzi.
We're buying Armageddon because it whitens our teeth and freshens our breath.
We're buying Armageddon because it kills with one shot.
We're buying Armageddon because Jesus loves us yes we know.
We're buying Armageddon because it's made out of recycled materials.
We're buying Armageddon because we want to keep up with our Jones.
We're buying Armageddon because it has a lifetime guarantee and we'll never have to buy another one.
We're buying Armageddon because you can use it again and again and again and it never wears out.
We're buying Armageddon because you can download the free trial version from the Internet but you have to pay for the full version.
We're buying Armageddon because you can get it at the drive-thru and it comes with a free action figure.
We're buying Armageddon because we're collecting the set.
We're buying Armageddon because the extended version has just been released on DVD.
We're buying Armageddon because it's part of any good investment strategy.
We're buying Armageddon because it's wrinkle free.
We're buying Armageddon because it's not just for Christians anymore.
We're buying Armageddon because revenge is sweet but God's wrath is sweeter.
We're buying Armageddon because Armageddon means never having to say you're sorry.
We're buying Armageddon because we don't want to die

alone.

ARF!

2006-02-18T21:01:00.000-06:00

CONFESSION

Speak, Grendel, speak.

Though my tongue has been cut out,
my native language beyond recall?
Its words, like the blows of a knout
in the hands of an expert sadist,
have left no outward mark;
no least bruise of palimpsest
on these old parchments,
that I wear like skins,
my costume for the auto-da-fe.

Speak, Grendel, speak.

My heart is full of owls;
my mother cached them there,
a chest full of knickknacks, paddywack,
she bequeathed to unsuspecting posterity.
My back is full of leather straps;
my father laid them on, hope he’s glad
he made the proud flesh so strong.
I am a monster. Wolves run in circles,
and bite themselves when I howl.
I gnash down the marrow
of long bones a song too large
for narrow ears.

Speak, Grendel, speak.

Dana Pattillo

DR. OMED’S SHORT FORM SERMONETTE

2006-02-18T20:10:00.000-06:00

DO WE LIVE IN THE SHORT ATTENTION SPAN UNIVERSE?

Did you know, if your attention span was shorter than the Planck time, roughly equal to 1x10 to the -43 seconds, the smallest measurement of time with any meaning in our universe (the time it takes a photon the travel the Planck length, the smallest measurable unit of length in our universe, roughly equal to 1.6x10 to the -35 meters…lost you already, huh?) Anyway, if your attention span was shorter than the Planck time, you would disappear into a self-created black hole.

Trust me. This occurs when the neurons of your brain, due to a violation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, begin absorbing high energy addion particles (an addion is the fundamental quantum of distraction); when the wavelength of addion irradiation becomes shorter than the Planck length, your brain collapses past its Schwartzchild radius into a quantum black hole, and takes the rest of you with it down the wormhole, which is so improbable that it promptly evaporates. Essentially, you shrink wrap yourself into non-existence—at least, in this universe. Talk about collapsing the wave form.

Is that why we’re here? Is this the short attention span universe? Did we, as allegedly sentient beings, so abuse our intelligence that we developed attention spans shorter than the fundamental quantum of time in our home universe, and thus suck ourselves down the rabbit hole into this universe? It would explain a lot of things, you have to admit.

What was I saying just then?

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: THE CONSERVATIVE QUESTIONAIRE

2006-02-03T15:26:00.000-06:00

Please try to answer the following questions as honestly as possible.

1—What do you think caused your conservatism?

2—When and how did you first decide you were a conservative?

3—Is it possible that your conservatism stems from a morbid fear of ambiguity?

4—Is it possible that your conservatism is just a phase you may grow out of?

5—Conservatives have histories of failure in personal relationships. Do you think you may have turned to conservative politics out of fear of rejection?

6—If you’ve never had an open mind, how do you know that you wouldn’t prefer that?

7—If conservatism is normal, why are a disproportionate number of mental patients registered Republicans?

8—Have you disclosed your conservative tendencies to your friends? How did they react?

9—Your conservatism doesn’t offend me so long as you don’t try to force it on me. Why do you people feel compelled to seduce others into your socio-political orientation?

10—Should you choose to become a parent, would you raise your children with conservative values, knowing the mental, emotional, and spiritual poverty they would face?

11—The great majority of child molesters are conservative Republicans. Do you really consider it safe to expose your children to conservative Republican teachers?

12—Why do you insist on being so obvious, and making a public spectacle of your conservatism? Can’t you just be who you are and keep it quiet?

13—How can you ever hope to become a whole person if you limit yourself to a compulsive, exclusive, GOP political orientation, and remain unwilling to explore and develop your normal, healthy, Goddess-given liberal potential?

14—Republicans are noted for assigning themselves and others narrowly restricted, stereotyped sexual, social, and economic roles. Why do you cling to such unhealthy role playing?

15—Why do conservatives place so much emphasis on sex and money? Do you support prostitution?

16—Shouldn’t you ask the fringe conservative types, like anti-abortion terrorists, NRA wingnuts, Limbaugh dittoheads, and Southern Baptists, to behave? Wouldn’t a little decorum improve the overall conservative image?

17—Could the human race survive if everyone became conservative and joined the Republican Party, considering the accelerated potential for world wide-cultural and ecological collapse, not to mention the menace of preemptive use of weapons of mass destruction?

18—There seem to be very few happy conservatives. Techniques have been developed with which you might be able to change if you really want to. Have you considered sex therapy?

19—Why do conservative Republicans hate or distrust so many other people? Is that what makes them Republican?

20—Why are conservatives so promiscuously religious?

21—Polls indicate that conservatives engage in sex less often than people of any other political persuasion. Isn’t possible that all you need is a good lay?

Dr. Omed prays for the conversion of Infidels and Republicans every day.

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 6.21.04)

SIGN OF FOUR

2006-02-02T14:17:00.000-06:00

I don't normally succumb to such memes, but Anne Penkill has seduced me.

SIGN OF FOUR

Four Jobs I’ve had:
1. Ice delivery man
2. Projectionist at an x-rated movie theater
3. Reading newspapers and tagging articles at the Denver Press Association clipping service
4. Journeyman (artisan) baker

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire
2. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
3. Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus
4. Evil Dead II (or Army of Darkness, either one)

Four places I have lived:
1. Oklahoma City
2. Denver
3. Colorado Springs
4. Tulsa

Four TV shows I love to watch (not counting the news):
1. House
2. Twin Peaks (on DVD)
3. Millenium (on DVD)
4. Firefly (on DVD)

Four places I have been on vacation:
Baltimore
Washington, D.C.
New York City
Telluride, SW Colorado

Four favorite dishes:
1. My mother’s fried chicken and gravy (the gravy could be considered as a separate dish, but as my mother’s been dead for 28 years I feel I can sneak it in)
2. Vietnamese soup
3. Fresh shucked oysters on the half shell as served at Faidy’s in the Lexington Square Market in Baltimore
4. Whatever’s in the fridge at 2AM

Four websites I visit daily:
1. Salon recently updated blogs page
2. Salon rankings page
3. Referer rankings page for the Tent Show
4. (in aggregate) all my blogging boyfriends and girlfriends (as my wife Elspeth calls them) via my blogroll

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. The Burgess Shale fossil site in the Canadian Rockies
2. The Library of Congress rare book room
3. Central Park
4. On a four man raft on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon

RAIN BIRD

2006-01-21T20:26:00.000-06:00

This is a frottage I did in Denver about 1992. I was wandering around talking to myself, making rubbings of anything that was relatively flat and had raised or incised shapes, patterns, or texture. The "rain bird" was a rubbing of the top of a lawn sprinkler. I offer it as the blog-image equivalent of a rain dance.

WEATHER UPDATE

2006-01-21T20:10:00.000-06:00

Those promisingly dark clouds blew away. The temperature dropped enough that it felt like winter for a few hours. Today Tulsa had another sunny, breezy, warm Not-Winter day. We don't have Winter in NE Oklahoma anymore. We used to have Winter for about three weeks, but now we're down to a few days of half-hearted snow and sleet. Kyoto has some rain in its forecast, why can't we?

RAIN, RAIN, COME AGAIN?

2006-01-20T08:34:00.000-06:00

I don't know that it matters to the wider blog-o-sphere, but it looks like it might rain here in Tulsa this morning. Oklahoma has been in a drought so long we can barely remember what rain is. Little drops of water falling from clouds in the sky, right? Makes the earth smell good. Yes, that's it. There's poetry in it, too.

ZEN JUDAISM

2006-01-19T17:54:00.000-06:00

A bit of flotspam (or is it jetspam?) just washed up in my Inbox via the esteemed Dancing Elder Brother Dave:

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

Drink tea and nourish life.
With the first sip... joy.
With the second... satisfaction.
With the third, peace.
With the fourth, a danish.

Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

Accept misfortune as a blessing.
Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems.
What would you talk about?

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single "oy."

There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have? Bupkes.

The Tao does not speak.
The Tao does not blame.
The Tao does not take sides.
The Tao has no expectations.
The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao is not Jewish.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.
Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud.
Let your stillness be as the wooded glen.

And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.

Be patient and achieve all things.
Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

To Find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.

To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance,
do the following: get rid of the motorcycle.
What were you thinking?

Be aware of your body.
Be aware of your perceptions.
Keep in mind that not every physical sensation
is a symptom of a terminal illness.

The Torah says," Love thy neighbor as thyself."
The Buddha says there is no "self."
So, maybe you are off the hook.

The Buddha taught that one should practice lovingkindness to all sentient beings. Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain,
though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away,
yet shall you meditate and not stir
until you have attained full Enlightenment.
But, first, a little nosh.

BEST OR (TENT) SHOW: LATE NITE SERMONETTE

2006-01-18T21:40:00.000-06:00

On the Appeal of Fragments and Loving Shakespeare Too Much

Fragments are often more tantalizing and evocative than an entire work. Many ruins look better bleached and broken than they did when new and whole. I think this is why reconstructions and restorations are so often unsatisfactory even if absolutely accurate. Restoration robs the ruin of its power to conjure the ages it has withstood, to ensorcell our imaginations as we walk among the the scarred reliefs and tumbled stones. Rock of ages, cleft for me.

Sappho beguiles us so because her work lives in fragments. In little mysterious phrases. "[ ] to melema tonon* [ ]" The transcriptions of papyrus and vellum fragments from classical times often have more brackets than words. All that austerely beautiful pentalic marble in the Parthenon was painted in bright primary colors, after the sculptors and stonemasons finished up. Giantess Athena tricked out in ivory and gold like a right tart.I say this even tho' I know our ancient heritage is being degraded by pollution, defaced or destroyed by fanatics and thugs, and loved to death by tourists. Preservation and restoration are absolutely essential. But when I held a broken piece of Etruscan pottery in my hand, or when I was walking down a little sandstone canyon in Nevada, and suddenly saw like a blind man regaining sight the petroglyphs on the walls all around me, weathered by time and defaced by vandals, that is when the ghosts began whispering up my spine.

Fragments appeal because we ourselves are great jumbled collections of fragments. The unity of human personality and memory is an illusion, and the part is often greater than the whole. The pseudonyms we adopt for ourselves in our blogs are the little fictions that belie the greater fiction that we are integrated unambiguous whole persons. If we don't have multiple personalities we have multiple personas, and we rearrange our mental furniture to suit the current passion play. Sifting the detritus and mementos of a stranger's life, whether at an estate sale or in the pages of a blog, is a way of trying on another history, playing all the parts in someone else's miracle play.

Our brains are built for pattern recognition, to an evolutionary fare-thee-well. Human beings are as overspecialized in this regard as cheetahs or impalas are for speed. This hardwired trait to seek meaningful pattern and integration is the driver of all religion, art, poetry, conspiracy theories and physics. It is a cruel joke we play on ourselves due to an endowment of natural selection, a gift of survival from our hominid ancestors. That is what I say, until I doff my reductionist's pith helmet, and put on my mystic's sombrero.

Since our nerve tissue extends to every part of our bodies, it seems to me that our minds are most likely conterminous with our bodies, and that congress of the confederated states of consciousness known as the self receives not just sensory impressions but thoughts from all parts of the body; not just the cerebral tissue, but from memories from muscles, meditations from the marrow in the bone. Most men have been accused of letting their private parts think for them at one time or another.

I have a weakness for using fragments, lines and phrases from Shakespeare (and other venerable bards and bardettes) as a kind of poetic shorthand for a particular mood or idea, and also a weakness for employing bible verses as a kind of punctuation, often at the end of a poem, as with the quote from the prophet Micah at the end of Lachesis. It's old fashioned to say so, but Shakespeare and the scholars who translated the King James Bible virtually invented the English language as we now have it, between them. Eradicating their pervasive influence from our language would be like removing the oxygen originally created by ancient cyanobacteria two and a half billion years ago from the air we breath. There are, however, several problems with my working tidbits of these titans into my poetry like a bowerbird insinuates foil and bits of ribbon into his palace of grass and twigs. The first difficulty is that people for the most part do not read Shakespeare or the Bible anymore. Many Xtians I know are surprised and appalled to hear some of the things I can quote chapter and verse from their "Good Book." I have been to many a poetry reading at which I heard a "pote" read a "pome" stuffed with tropes or conceits from Shakespeare or even Chaucer that said "pote" when questioned insisted that he (and mostly they were he) had just thought up himself ten minutes ago or the day before yesterday. I consciously write in these borrowed words as if I thought my reader or listener would immediately catch the reference when I know perfectly well it's not true in most cases. The second difficultly is that they are borrowed. Unless I can put a new twist in the tail of a scavenged word, phrase, or metaphor, I don't think I'm doing it poetic justice or my job as a poet. But I love my shiny bits of language I have stolen from the trash heap of human culture. That's third difficultly; I love them, too much.

*"The beloved one"

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 11.7.03)

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: GRENDEL'S LAUNDRY LIST

2006-01-13T07:54:00.000-06:00

Readings from Martin Luther King:

Nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. "I must be first." "I must be supreme." "Our nation must rule the world." And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I'm going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.

God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.

But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. The God that I worship has a way of saying, "Don't play with me." He has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, "Don’t play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power." And that can happen to America. Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening.

The Drum Major instinct, 4 Feb. 1967

I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.

We must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?"

I'm not talking about communism. What I'm talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn't come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn't come from Engels; my inspiration didn't come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn't come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn't follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism.

Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

Where Do We Go From Here, 16 Aug. 1967

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us…

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the "Vietcong" or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions: We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."

A Time to Break Silence, 4 April 1967

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: What is a Secular Christianist?

2005-11-18T22:30:00.000-06:00

GRENDEL’S AZTEC BAPTIST CATECHISM:

What is a Secular Christianist?

A Secular Christianist is not a Christian per se, but a particular kind of Christian; a political Christian rather than a spiritual Christian. Not all Secular Christianists are what my Grandma would have called good Christian folk, if you judge them by their public behavior. I don’t even want to think about their private lives. But the Gospel and my Granny have told me that I have no call to judge. They certainly stridently identify themselves as “true” Christians, and they prefer to be in the judgement seat, not before it.

Secular Christianists are people who cross the line drawn by the First Amendment, because they think have a direct line to God Almighty, and seek to impose God—their idea of God, their “bible-based” morals, their particular version—and their peculiar interpretation of—the Word of God, on our designedly secular government, and our religiously—spiritually—diverse society.

Secular Christianists would like to teach the children of our country that United States of America is a Christian Nation, established from the very beginning on Christian principles by the Founding Fathers. The small t truth about our founding fathers and our nation is a whole lot more complicated than that, but Christianists don’t like complications. Their political principle—if not their motto—is “Keep it simple, for stupid”—for the credulous, the gullible, and the self-deluded.

White, black. Good, evil. Right, wrong. With us, against us. Secular Christianists like to feel that they are surrounded by enemies, and they want us, their fellow citizens to feel that way, too. I think it can be fairly and balancedly said that Secular Christianism as movement, with an assist from Al Qaeda, has succeeded in achieving that goal.

Secular Christianists believe in unity through fear and demonization of the other. They believe in terrorizing wayward souls into the arms of Jesus. Christianists believe in soul searching, but not their souls; they want to search your soul, your hard drive, your bedroom. Many of them are what I call Soul Arsonists, who work on the principle of destroying souls in order to save them. Secular Christianists find solace as well as salvation in the thrill of hellfire and the comfort of myriad enemies hugging them close.

Do you want to live in fear? They do.

I'LL SHOW YOU MY REALITY

2005-11-16T12:25:00.000-06:00

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW SERMONETTE:
I’LL SHOW MY REALITY IF YOU SHOW ME YOURS
OR REALITY SHOWS VS. THE GROUND OF BEING

Dr. Omed has been venting his spleen in other blogger’s comment boxes. Dick Jones (Patteran Pages) and Sam Mills (feral) have suffered my remarks very kindly, and Sam provides His Loveliness a second home when my PC or my software is fubared. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Forgive me my numerous sins of commission and omission.

Here is Dick’s post for October 4th:

“All art is abstract. Only reality isn’t because it isn’t art”. Emil Nolde

DISCUSS.

This quote has netted 23 comments last time I checked. One of my comments was:

"Reality" has suffered the same degradation and decay as "Irony."* "Reality" now exists only as fodder for the cameras of the Industrial Delusional Complex; dead soldier, starving brown baby, or spoiled celebrity, all feed the lazy eyes on the sofas of the world and support the feudal pyschopathy of the "Ownership" class.

Like I said. Vent. Spleen. I would slightly revise that last line to read:

…support the feudal pyschopathy of the Owners of the “Ownership society.”

“Reality” is one of those troublesome words, almost as troublesome as the word “love” (We’ll be getting to that). People tend to assume they know what the really real reality is, just as they think or rather feel they know what love is. People have no idea. I don’t mean that they have no idea what reality or love is; I mean they have no idea. Reality is whatever they see in front of them; whatever they choose to see. A lot of people have a TV or computer screen in front of them. Their reality, your reality, my reality, are all a combination of our perceptions and our creative apperception. The latter is the senior partner. We all have our little kingdoms of beholding. In our individual dominions our writ is absolute, but for the weather of the world, and the fruitful operation of chance.

Our reality is an artifact of our perception and self deception, what it is depends on how or through what we’re looking at it. To steal a phrase from Tom Stoppard, reality is its own alibi. Sort of like God.

From the ether I hear a question; something whispering this way comes: “So, what’s your alibi, Dr. O?” In the midst of the comment string appended to a bit of flotspam I posted to Sam’s Safe Haven for Broken Blogs, I generated a concise coda or creed that expresses my current alibi:

Many paths; one Way. The word may be god, but the word that is the word, the one word, the true word, the eternal word, as Lao Tzu said, cannot be spoken. It cannot be believed or disbelieved, because it is beyond belief. It cannot be acted because it is outside of action or inaction. It cannot exist or not exist, because it surpasses existence and nonexistence. As Meister Eckhart said, the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. Yet it encompasses us, and everything that was, is, can, or will be.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "Be passers-by." I have given a lot of thought to that phrase, to me perhaps the most important saying attributed to Jesus (certainly the most mysterious), as I have watched the terrible merciless beauty of "God's" creation and destruction go by as it carries me down the years to the terminus ad quem, the way station that is my particular destination.

Remember, I’m cherry-picking from my own comments (which is inherently unfair: click the comment string link above to read it all) but what I said made Meg feel besieged and invoke love as her defense, and also caused Sam to take me to task:

Doctor O, such responses as you give are analogous to flak bombs that deflect enemy radar. You quote and cite and lead astray while never addressing the issue at hand. All you say here is surely so. Who can say nay? Yet the issue is a professed lack of compassion which, as expressed, differs little from outright hostility toward an entire population of a region experiencing a dire emergency. So Lao Tzu me that, why dontcha?

My answer:

Sam, make that outright hostility toward an entire species, experiencing a dire planet-wide emergency due to its own collective bad behavior. A lot of us will have to die before the planet can get well again. That is not a wish, that is a fact.

There are many "me"s, the human personality is not unitary. One of me, out of the many, is an angry misanthrope. Having compassion for one's fellow creatures and loving one another as much as is possible is a great good thing, but we are not saved by our love and compassion nor can we save anyone else. All the love and compassion of the Human race put together is not saving the planet as far as I can see. What many people think of as compassion is a misapprehension of this waking world and its inhabiting spirits.

St. Paul at the end of Corinthians I chapter 13 says "Faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is love (agape'). I have no faith, and don't think we have much hope. That leaves love. I think detachment is more necessary to true love than compassion. Detachment is necessary to true love because true love is foolish, betrayed, hopeless, lost. True love is, as Galway Kinnell put it, "tenderness towards existence." The beauty of this world is without mercy, and I chose to live and love in it not only because it is beautiful but because it is merciless. I was not merciful 27 years ago when I lowered the barrel of the revolver from my temple and decided not to blow my brains out. Love is the most useless thing in the world, and the most necessary. Here's my combination: Compassion plus detachment equals love(agape'). Beauty plus the ruthlessness we call passion equals love(erato). Love(agape') plus Love (erato) equals Grace.

Sort of like singing Amazing Grace to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. I've heard Willy Nelson sing it that way.

Well, Sam thought I was still pumping blogiston on the fire, and posted a picture of a panda pissing up a tree to put it out. Among other things, Meg said:

Dr. O, I have to confess, and this is exceedingly difficult for me, that I don't really know what you were saying up there. It sounds like you see love and living differently than I do on such a grand scale that I can't quite wrap my brain around it.

Sam and Meg, I cherish you both. I want you to know that I expressed myself as honestly as possible without any intent of wounding either of you. The reason I am rehashing all this is because I have lived almost five decades knowing that the vast majority of people in this world, if not left breathless with giggles at the things I say, do, and believe to be important, interesting, and true, are either bored, puzzled, nonplussed, dismissive, or regard it as an assault on everything that's good and holy. Or it just makes their heads hurt. It’s always when I’ve said something that seems to me to be perfectly clear and straightforward that no one gets it. I might as well be a squid squirting ink.

I started writing in the first place because words failed me. Words could not carry the meanings, the reality of what I wished to express. Every poem succeeds if it succeeds through the failure of words that comprise it. The word that can be spoken is not the word. This is an important truth to me.

In my twenties, long before I was diagnosed as Bipolar, during periods of mania I would often wander about in what amounted to a state of religious or spiritual ecstasy. I literally had waking visions. I saw streams of color emerging from and returning into people like a stream of smoke from a cigarette exhaled and re-inhaled. I saw “angels,” numinous entities that would descend and inhabit trees or dance on telephone wires. When the moon was full I thought I could see the man in the moon talking, but I couldn’t hear him, and would try to read his lips. I saw other things I won’t talk about right now. Call them visions or hallucinations; neither term is adequate to describe the reality of the experience. To speak of these things at all diminishes the reality of the experience. Words fail. My blog is the one place I can have it my way, a place where I can make my stand. As I am a party of one, I have become an army of one, rhetorically speaking. I wage war with words on words. I commit poetry, satire, and parody, not pillage, rapine or murder. I leave the latter violences to the literal minded thugs which almost all creeds or sects no matter how high-minded contribute at least some few to the world. My words “are but warriors for the working day”

Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'dWith rainy marching in the painful field;There's not a piece of feather in our host-Good argument, I hope, we will not fly—
Shakespeare, Henry V

*Irony has been so abused, misused, and overused by so many of slight talent and suspect intents, that the rapier bequeathed to posterity by men and women of great wit has been pounded by the popular posterior into a timeshare of ubiquitous of infra-insincerity. Modern irony has become a kind of language infarction, a dead zone where advertising ghouls dig for their gold and faux-rimbauds go to sell their souls.

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: "CREATION SCIENCE"

2005-11-15T19:48:00.000-06:00

Probability, credibility, credulity abide,
but for the greatest of ease
on the high moral trapeze
credulity puts God on your side.

All the explanations of "Creation Science" seem to be based on the concept that God is a senile delinquent running some sort of shell game on creatures he devised in his image; or else is letting Satan run it, having delegated the details of the divine Ponzi scheme to those bright boys in the Dept. of Evil.

This idea goes back a long way. In the book of Job, Satan says to God, look at your faithful servant Job, he's got it pretty good, nice life, makes it easy to believe in you. Why don't we kill everyone he ever cared about, take away everything he ever had, and torture him until he cries uncle. I bet it won't take long before he curses you. And God said, what odds will you give me?

Why this is an appealing idea is a mystery to me, but it might explain why fundies keep voting for guys like Ronnie Raygun and Howdy Dubya. The Creationist attempt to suborn science to their cornfed inbred theology is what H.L. Mencken called "An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it in terms of the not worth knowing."

Well, I think they have alot of explaining to do. P.S. The branch of theology concerned with explaining why a good God allows evil to exist is called "Theodicy." Nuf said.

"If Evolution is outlawed, only Outlaws will evolve." Jello Biafra

As an Seventh Day Atheist Aztec Baptist, I'm quite as fundamental on the question as the Godlicking creationists. If you truly understand and accept the hypotheses of physics and evolutionary biology there is just no way you can believe in a personal god who creates the kind of parochial universe retailed by these poisonously and willfully stupid nimrods. They've gotten really clever, aping the rhetoric of the skepticism they oppose, making a charade of the scientific method, and employing the trappings of science to decorate the altar of their patriarchal, tribal, Bronze Age War God.

The truth is not in them. They are liars and fools. Shame on them. Yes, I do judge their belief system, and find it wanting. Of course, I was tortured by Southern Baptists as a child. "The vast majority of the unwashed masses," the Noncogs as my friend Julian calls them, are what I call turbideists (turbid+deist). They run their belief "systems" on the go along get along principle, and can believe any number of impossible (and contradictory) things before breakfast, and are indeed mostly harmless, unless you make them think, the only real "thou shalt not" in their moral compass. They "believe in belief" as E.M. Forster said, as spiritual vitamins, an uplifting placebo, a sort of mental insulation against the cold facts of existence.

The fundies by and large are a different matter. They really do believe in something. They do have a belief system that is coherent and internally consistent to the believer no matter how stupid or insane it seems to an outside observer. This provides the fundie, of whatever stripe, with a coherent program and consistently causes them to do bad things, particularly to people who don't agree with them, in word, deed, or just by having the effrontry to exist. True believers commit atrocities. Without strong belief there is no reason to act. Weak believers, turbideists who attend the chinese restaurant church, one from column A, two from column B...etc., just shrug their shoulders, smile, and think about something else.

I've been told that arguing with fundamentalist Christians is like shooting fish in a barrel. I think there are some sharks in that barrel. I heard about the "miracle car" scam on the BBC World Service. At least one of the people arrested was a fundy prot in good standing, with her own "ministry." I don't think that most of the fundies are stupid because they were born with defective equipment; I think it's nuture, not nature. Fraud, whether conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious, is essential to fundementalist belief; these sects could not exist without it. These people are inculcated to accept fraud with complete credulity from childhood on. These true believers are strong in their faith, and therefore have no trouble swallowing lesser lies, so long as they come from their brothers and sisters in Christ.

I can remember very clearly getting up in front of the congregation of our Baptist church when I was six years old, testifying and praising Je-sus just for the sake of the attention it got me, understanding, without being able to put it into words, that I thought it was all a crock of shit. I was a precocious lad. And the Sundaygotomeetin crowd just lapped it up.

Much later in my career I had a torrid affair with a married fundy woman, who told me, often, and with complete sincerity, that I was going to Hell, sometimes while we were still screwing. She believed in predestination, and thought she was among the elect of god, so she wasn't. Going to Hell, that is. This woman was not congenitally stupid. She was, in fact, maybe the brightest person I have ever met;.she was so smart she was scary. By the way, if your scruples allow it, I recommend married fundies as lovers: since they really believe in sin, all that transgression and betrayal makes the sex really hot.

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 5.7.03)

SUFFER THE LITTLE EPIPHANIES

2005-10-30T17:24:00.000-06:00

Dr. Omed suffers from numerous petit epiphanies. Some say I suffer from mental illness, but I say I don't, I enjoy every minute of it.

Once upon a time, Dr. Omed spent a day in March, driving alone through the great desolation of the basin and range terrain of Nevada. It felt like driving over the bones of God. The rental car was on autopilot back to Las Vegas, where I was staying with my wife, Elspeth. I was sleepily telling the beads of the car lights strung on the highway in the deep dark of desert night when I topped the last ridge. Suddenly the lights of the Strip appeared like a shake snow scene, a bauble plucked by a magician from the vast blackness laid over God's bare bones.

I felt a strange fond pride at the little lamp the gangsters, moguls, grifters, and marks had set in the darkness. Dr. Omed did not expect to become fond of Las Vegas; he is not much interested in gambling or glitz. But, Pilgrims, Dr. Omed had an epiphany in that moment. I realized that Las Vegas is a Holy City like Jerusalem or Mecca; a sacred place where true believers go to worship everything the America the commercial sells them. The Axis Mundi where people whose dreams are bigger than their imaginations come on pilgrimage, to tithe to Mother Luck, shake hands with the holy one armed bandits, and bow down to Mammon and mammaries. Las Vegas is one great, wholehearted, mass delusional neon fuck you to an uncaring Cosmos. It embodies the religious impulse in a pure and uncorrupted form.

That is, dear pilgrims, why Dr. Omed has a sneaking fondness for that seven-come-eleven wet dream to this very day. Be sure to visit the Shrine of St. Liberace when you make the Haj to the American Mecca. The relics of this Saint are very efficacious in provoking healing mirth.

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 6.26.03)

WORKING FOR YA?

2005-10-30T17:03:00.000-06:00

I have a question for all those who still support George W. Bush:

HOW'S THAT WORKING FOR YA?
(The comment box is open. The Doctor is IN.)

MOM AND APPLE PIE

2005-10-21T22:51:00.000-05:00

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: SCISSOR DANCE

MOM AND APPLE PIE, OR, PANDORA'S ARK

RANDOM THOUGHT

2005-10-21T17:26:00.000-05:00

I wonder how you say "We are Devo" in Arabic?

GRENDEL'S LAUNDRY LIST: QUOTE REQUOTE

2005-10-21T13:04:00.000-05:00

"No one quotes scripture better than the Devil." Dr. Omed

From a sermon by Meister Eckhart, a Dominican monk and prior of the 13th and 14th century anno domino:

"I have occasionally spoken of a light in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable. . . . This light is not satisfied with the simple, still and divine being which neither gives nor takes, but rather it desires to know from where this being comes. It wants to penetrate to the simple ground, to the still desert, into which distinction never peeped, neither Father, Son nor Holy Spirit. There, in that most inward place, where everyone is a stranger, the light is satisfied, and there it is more inward than it is in itself, for this ground is a simple stillness which is immovable in itself. But all things are moved by this immovability and all the forms of life are conceived by it which, possessing the light of reason, live of themselves."

Meister Eckhart also said: "God is not a being; God is absolute being." This absolute unqualified being Eckhart calls "unnatured nature." God is not"good" or "bad; all finite things are present in, and part of, God, exalted and reconciled in a manner beyond the comprehension of a finite being. Finite being is the negation of God; God is the negation of the finite, the negation of negation. The Kabalists call this "Ein Sof," the unknowable existence of God. It also reminds us of Keat's phrase: "negative capability."

"All positive religion rests on an enormous simplification of the manifold and wildly engulfing forces that invade us: it is the subduing of the fullness of existence. All myth, in contrast, is the expression of the fullness of existence, its image, its sign; it drinks incessantly from the gushing fountains of life. Hence religion fights myth where it cannot absorb and incorporate it. It is strange and wonderful to observe how in this battle religion ever again wins the apparent victory, myth ever again wins the real one."

Martin Buber, Legends of the Baal Shem

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.

The voice of the Devil.

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.

1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.

2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.

3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrain'd it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of this is written in Paradise Lost, & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah. And the original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is call'd the Devil or Satan and his children are call'd Sin & Death. But in the Book of Job Miltons Messiah is call'd Satan. For this history has been adopted by both parties. It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil's account is, that the Messiah fell, & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss."

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 4.13.03)

COMMENTS UPDATE

2005-10-20T21:04:00.000-05:00

I am still learning this blogware. However, I can now delete comments, and I have turned on the letter identification feature, a slight inconvenience which will thin out the spambots but not deter too many of my nonautomated visitors. I hope.

DON'T BOTHER TO SPAM MY COMMENTS

2005-10-20T19:48:00.000-05:00

I will delete offenders as many times as necessary.

WHAT’S IT WORTH TO YA?

2005-10-20T19:41:00.000-05:00

BEST OF (TENT) SHOW SERMONETTE:
DR. OMED ASKS: WHAT’S IT WORTH TO YA?

Everyone, whether they realize it or not, has a set of core beliefs—Core beliefs about Life, the Universe, and Everything: How we came to be (since this is all about us); by way of a creator, a God or gods, made by the Maker of all things, or by a series of random events occurring over a vast span of time (just happened). We have core beliefs about our place in the universe (all about us): Central, at the Right Hand of God; or insignificant, less than, infinitely less than, a flyspeck. What’s it all about? Does Life have meaning? Does existence exist? Even if you sincerely state you don’t believe in anything, you believe that. Personally, I’m coming to believe that we’re all a figment of our Collective Imagination. I know morals don’t exist, but I’m filibustering the Collective about that one.

Core beliefs: Right, wrong. What is a good work? What is a crime? Do you believe in true love; love at first sight; the love of God? Or do you subscribe to the idea that you should love the one you’re with? But I didn’t climb onto my bully blog-o-pulpit to ask you what you believe, essay due on Monday. What I want to know right now is what it’s worth to ya.

To a suicide bomber, his belief is worth his life; your life, the lives of a whole lot of other people, and the maiming, wounding, post traumatic disorder, and grief of even more people.

To President Bush, his belief is worth waging an illegal war, killing tens of thousands of people, converting the constitutional democracy of which he is the chief steward into a proto-fascist state, accelerating the ecocide of the whole planet, and, well, that’ll do to go on.

So. What’s it worth to ya, your cherished or unconsidered belief?

Is it worth your life, or somebody else’s?

Is it worth everything you own, or spare change in the collection plate on Sunday?

Is it worth striking, perhaps without warning, someone who fundamentally opposes you and your belief, or is it worth turning the other cheek?

Is it worth a leg? An eye? Big toe? Yours or someone else’s?

Is it worth taking the risk of arrest engaging in an act of civil disobedience?

Is it worth going to jail?Losing your job?

Putting your family at risk because of the consequences of the above?

Is it worth going in harm’s way in a foreign land and killing people you never met and who never did you any harm?

Is it worth being killed in a foreign land by someone who never met you?

Is it worth getting up in the morning?

Is it worth expressing your honest opinion to any one other than your close friends?

Is it worth one thin dime?

This is not a rhetorical exercise. I really want to know. It’s important. Because I am having to make this decision on what I shall do on a daily basis, in this present crisis, this slow motion catastrophe of the first half of the 21st century, and whether I and those I love can afford the consequences when I take action in accordance with my beliefs. I now believe it is possible that I may live long enough to see, and I say this with absolutely no irony whatsoever, the end of civilization as we know it. Living as I do in Red America, behind the Fox Curtain, every time I see an SUV with a “W” sticker go by, every time a co-worker regurgitates a tidbit of Rush, I want to strike back at the Evil Empire, tho’ the only weapons I have at my disposal are my big mouth, my art, and an aging mortal body. I want to act. I can’t always do that. I have to ask myself, “What’s it worth to ya?”

I await with bated breath (You don’t have to breath in the blog-o-sphere.) your comments and emails.

(Originally published in Dr. Omed's Tent Show Revival 7.14.05)

OH, BY THE WAY

2005-10-20T17:51:00.000-05:00

I already have a blog. A Salon Blog called Dr. Omed’s Tent Show Revival. Why would I need another? That is a long and wearisome story. My wife Elspeth talked me into starting a blog, and further recommended that I get my blog at Salon, because of the community, which I did. The Tent Show will be coming up on its third Blogday next April. Some few faithful pilgrims have joined the congregation, and some of my fellow bloggers have become close friends even tho’ I’ve never met them in person. Elspeth was right, I do enjoy blogging and I feel very much at home with the blogger community at Salon. I’ve done a lot of writing that I would not otherwise have done, and gained an audience I would not otherwise have.

There is, however, a monstrous big fly in this otherwise soothing ointment: The Radio Userland software that is part of the Salon package. I am not a terribly savvy software person, and some problems I’ve had with the blog I caused through my own stupidity or ignorance, but Radio blogware is not forgiving to a person like me. As a co-worker is wont to say, “There is much suckage here.” I’m not the only Salon blogger who has had problems. The ether has been seared with the flaming of our discontent, particularly since we are paying for the privilege of using a defective, poorly supported product. I don’t want to be mean. Userland’s designated go-to blogmeister Lawrence Lee can be helpful, once you get his attention and he actually reads your email, but I get the impression that he has a day job, and supports Radio in his spare time. I do not regret my choice. I plan to stay at Salon and continue using Radio. However.

I have started this new blog, Dr. Omed’s Mirror, as a back-up to the Tent Show. I will use it to repost the “Best of” Tent Show, and as a home away from home when the snafu is fubared, and I can’t post to the Tent Show. Sam will no longer have to provide me a haven. Blogger is free, and it will give me an opportunity to learn how to use blogware that does not define the phrase “user-unfriendly.”

2005-10-19T18:46:00.000-05:00

Would you buy a used eschatology from this man?