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.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
RAIN BIRD
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
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?
Friday, January 20, 2006
RAIN, RAIN, COME AGAIN?
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.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
ZEN JUDAISM
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
BEST OR (TENT) SHOW: LATE NITE SERMONETTE
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)
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)
Friday, January 13, 2006
BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: GRENDEL'S LAUNDRY LIST
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
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
Friday, November 18, 2005
BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: What is a Secular Christianist?
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.
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
I'LL SHOW YOU MY REALITY
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
BEST OF (TENT) SHOW: "CREATION SCIENCE"
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)
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)
Sunday, October 30, 2005
SUFFER THE LITTLE EPIPHANIES
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)
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?
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.)
Friday, October 21, 2005
GRENDEL'S LAUNDRY LIST: QUOTE REQUOTE
"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."
"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.
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.
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)
Thursday, October 20, 2005
COMMENTS UPDATE
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.
WHAT’S IT WORTH TO YA?
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)
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
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.”
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.”
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
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