A Rat Problem

The GOP talks about the poor:
As if they were a rat problem.
A scourge upon the estate.
Something to spoil the view.

The GOP cannot see people, but only problems.
Problems to be solved, with eradication.
Cruelty.
Death.

The poor are immoral, they say.
The poor are lazy and dirty, they say.
The poor are poor for their own fault, they say.
They say a lot of things.

And none of it is right.
They lie through their pearl-whitened teeth.
Admiring their prowess in a pitiful mirror.
Plastic surgery for the women and viagra for the men.

Slapping one another on the back.
Or grabbing one another in the nether parts.
Laughing all the way to the bank.
Grateful that so many rubes believe their lies.

The poor be damned.
Though we know the truth.
The poor are poor because of theft.
Wage theft and health theft.

Life taken away and hoarded by the few.
Because the few are really afraid.
Afraid of not having enough.
The death of the soul; the real scourge on the land.

The poor be damned.
Take away what little dignity they have.
Strip them bear in the public square.
Shame them all the more.

Why must it be this way?
What deformity of their DNA would prompt such lies?
Wealth has distorted their vision.
And for the rubes, the dreams of wealth kills the spirit.

The GOP talks about the poor:
As if they were a rat problem.

Jeremiah and the Benghazi Hearings

In today’s (Oct. 23) lectionary, Jeremiah the Prophet is confronted by “insolent” men who called him a liar (Jeremiah 43.2).

I think, too, of the young men who gave counsel to King Rehoboam (I Kings 12.6-11) ... while others urged the king to ease up, the young men, who had grown up with Rehoboam (mostly in the lap of luxury, I’m sure) told him to double down on the people. Out of the houses of their ease, they despised the people and couldn’t have cared less.

Who were the insolent men who called Jeremiah a liar?

Who were the young men who told Rehoboam to up the ante on cruelty?

Yesterday, catching bits and pieces of the Benghazi “hearings” - I didn’t hear a lot of “hearing” going on, but saw lots of grandstanding and insolence.

Watching Trey Gowdy yesterday, Mike Pompeo and Jim Jordan, the only words that repeatedly came to mind were “insolence” and “cruelty.”

I saw neither patriotism nor love of truth, but only a partisan hatred of The Secretary, a hatred that has deformed those who harbor it.

I was proud of Hillary yesterday ... she was in the hot seat for 11 hours ... and conducted herself with aplomb. 

When faced with insolence and cruelty, she responded with intelligence, wit and firmness. 

If nothing else, she proved herself a candidate for the Presidency. 

"There Must Be No Handouts"

So many of the GOP candidates echo the refrain: "There must be no handouts!" As if those crossing our borders are looking for a handout. Heck no, they're looking for work, for a future, for hope, for safety - they're looking for an honest job to feed their families.

Ride an LA bus for awhile ... handouts? Are you kidding? ... they toil morning, noon and night, washing our dishes, cooking our food, mowing our laws, hauling our trash, emptying our bed pans, fluffing our pillows. Yeah, right - all looking for a handout.

Frankly, the GOP reminds me of some doddering old man who believes his neighbors are ripping him off, stealing his apples, letting their dogs crap on his marvelous lawn, borrowing things and not returning them - obsessing about this into the late hours of the night and peering all day long from behind a pulled-back curtain.

Deep and dysfunctional paranoia.

Sadly, certain crowds in America lap it up like kittens on a bowl of cream. Screaming their approval: "Yeah, no one's gonna take advantage of us. No way. Deport 'em all. Build those walls. To hell with them; they're no good anyway!"

Meanwhile, the real rip off is going on 24/7 in corporate America and Wall Street, to the tune of billions, and now trillions, and to cover their larceny, point to the poor and scream loudly: "You're not gonna get a handout from us!" And scream it again and again and again, until everyone is numb, too numb to see the crime being committed by the powerful against our nation.

All of this would be bad enough, all by itself, but when silver-tonged preachers, well-greased with cash, mouth these alarmist remarks against the immigrant, the poor, and their children, the crime is magnified infinitely, flying in the face of the very Jesus they purport to worship.

But, then, let's not forget, Jesus was betrayed with a kiss and crucified with a lot of religious folks standing around nodding their heads in agreement as the Roman Soldiers drove home the nails.

Threats to Social Security

Social Security, one of the hallmarks of America's greatness, and one of the anchors of a strong middle class. 

The far right-wing, which has now hijacked the GOP, has always hated Social Security, the only reasons being ideological, favoring a Social Darwinism, the winner-take-all version of economics.

Privatizing, even a small portion of SS, would reap billions for Wall Street, and in the end, speed up the transfer of wealth in this nation from the many to the few.

And if Wall Street fulfills its own nature, the billions given to it will mostly be lost, and we'll see again Hoover's poor houses and the further collapse of the Middle Class. 

Romney/Ryan/Rand - their perverted view of things will prevail, and the rest of America will be reduced to third-world status. 

Did Jesus Teach Us What to Believe?

Jesus said very little about belief, and almost everything about behavior.

Fundamentalism, on a whole, is all about belief and getting to heaven upon death, with a heavy prescription on individualistic behavior; Evangelicalism would like to style itself a bit more progressive, but it's a tough road for Evangelicals because they tend to share the same belief- and behavior-systems of fundamentalism, though they may hold them a little more loosely.

Jesus comes to us with a message of social compassion - the Kingdom of God, "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." It didn't take long, in the history of the church, for the Empire (Thank you Constantine) to gut this message and turn it into an eschatological device, leaving this world to the Empire, and the next world to the church (nothing could have been further from the mind of Jesus).

Evangelicalism, whatever it really is, and fundamentalism, and Lutherans (with Luther's two-kingdom theology) perpetuate this arrangement. Paul's message on giving and care (e.g. 2 Corinthians 8.10-15) and the early church's practice of communal ownership hardly dovetails with the fiscal message of the current GOP (less of everything except business, and let nature take its course, which is a form of radical social Darwinism, if you will; I find it fascinating that those who reject biological evolution welcome it with open arms when it comes to "survival of the fittest" in society).

Fundamentalists and Evangelicals are pretty much peas in the same pod; I have yet to hear any one of them offer a clear and working description of who they are, though the Fundamentalists have an easier time with their Fundamentals.

Frankly, Evangelicals remind me of the guy who passes gas at a party, and then when folks smell it, quickly looks at the guy next to him. Sorry about that, but, in reality, if you want to spark a fight among Evangelicals, ask them to define it.

How much better for "Christians" to set aside belief-arguments and begin to look at the Sermon on the Mount, the Book of James, the Prophets and the deeply ethical passages of Paul. Jesus of the Gospels (not the Reformation - see N.T. Wright) can revolutionize the church, and the church can then be "the salt of the earth" and "the light of the world," as it practices the kindness of God (Matthew 5.43-48).

I realize that quoting Scripture rarely helps; we all have our favorite passages that we haul out of the closet when needed.

The above note was posted in a FB thread, June 27, 2012.

Street-Level Southern Sensibilities

Street-Level Southern Sensibilities are defective, founded as they are in a hatred for the Federal Government (this is Civil War stuff still moldering, like John Brown's body), a hatred of unions (an invention of the North and a tool of Communism - alla Billy Graham and other right-wing sorts) and the need for a permanent underclass to make the ruling elite feel powerful and good.

Right now, our nation is locked in a Civil War of ideas, and what with Reagan and his cheery smile, and before him, Nixon and his cynical use of Christianity, the South has clearly won enormous territory in the American soul.

It's war that no one can afford to lose, not even the South.

As much as the South fought to retain slavery, it was a war they couldn't afford to win. Had the Union disintegrated and the Confederate States perpetuated the institution of slavery, the cost to all is unimaginable - the balkanization of America and an economy built upon forced labor, an economy that would have been doomed to fail.

Romney and Gingrich and all the rest are held in the grip of Southern Sensibilities.

They look to the past for guidance.

They fail to see the future!

Why I Support Obama

A friend recently wrote that Obama is no different than the rest - he's owned by big money and has us in six wars.

To which I wrote:

The differences, in both vision and character, are never absolute - one has to weigh and assess, and with that said, make a choice. Neutrality, or mutual dismissal of the options, is a choice, as well, but hardly productive; neutrality, or mutual dismissal, has always seemed to me a luxury I cannot afford. Anyway, I'll continue to support Obama, not because he's perfect, but because of the general trajectory of his values and vision, and not just Obama the person, but the party itself, the Democratic vision of We The People, which, I think, is morally stronger than the GOP's vision at this point in time, simply because the GOP has reduced individuality to "survival of the fittest" - the GOP doesn't recognize the common wealth we enjoy and share. a common wealth that we support, as Lincoln did in the hard decisions of the Civil War. Some things cannot be lost, lest we cease being who we are - "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

From Huffington Post on Greece

From Arianna Huffington: 

Until I went over and witnessed what's happening, I too had become convinced that the real issues were the ones the media were obsessively covering: the effects of a potential sovereign default on the Euro and worries about the crisis spreading to other European countries.

But here's the bigger issue: Can a truly democratic movement break the stranglehold of corrupt elites and powerful anti-democratic institutional forces that have come to characterize not just the politics of Greece, but most Western democracies, including our own? Greece is only an extreme example of an unfolding seismic social shift that is challenging democracies the world over.

Ms. Huffington looks at the issues and reminds us that more is at stake in Greece and in the Western nations than austerity.

The wealthy want tax cuts, so that more cash can flow into their coffers, so they can fund their corporate jets and lavish life-styles.

But taxation is what makes nations work well. 

Adequate revenue insures medical research, education for our children, fighting wild fires in Texas, helping folks who've lost their homes in flooding, building and maintaining our roads and water-delivery systems, and a million other things that only a nation can offer. 

Democracy is clearly at stake in Greece and throughout the Western world.

The South Has Won the Civil War (of Ideas)

The April 17, 2011 New York Times takes a close look at the GOP's effort to redesign the American landscape, or as I put it, to undo everything done by FDR and liberal northeastern establishment.

Is this really the death of kindness in America?

When it comes to the social compact, it's clearly the death of kindness.

On a personal level, any of the current GOP conservative leaders might be good and decent and even kindly. But the failure is occurring at the point of the COMMON good; the conservative world has always focused on the power of the individual to rise and shape her world; this is intensified in evangelical circles where salvation is a "personal" thing and everyone has to find his or her own "personal relationship with Jesus."

In many ways, the conservative view of America is still a reflection of small southern communities out of which this philosophy grows: rugged individualism, charity (but not social change), religion that's deeply personal and emotional (if it's emotional, then it must be good), small government, low taxes, anti-union sentiments (because unions are socialistic and deny individual initiative and freedom) and social division along the lines of race (determined by God) - as long as a person of color got off the sidewalk, even the lowest of the whites enjoyed class privilege.

The failure of evangelical christianity is its loss of the social heart of Scripture - we are our "brother's keeper." The New Testament is read through spiritualized eyes, translating everything into spiritual principles, thus avoiding the social context in which the New Testament was written.

The medieval church did much the same thing, turning Jesus into a savior, to avoid his ethics, and preserve the social order of the day. Victorian England and its opposition to Darwin was aimed at preserving the social order of landed gentry and the working poor; anything that suggested change was anathema to the church and its patrons, the aristocracy.

The current philosophy of the GOP is an image of the ante-bellum south. With huge migrations of people form the Deep South and West South, all of this was brought to SoCal and the West Coast in the 20th Century - it supported Goldwater's failed campaign, reworked itself and give us Nixon and Reagan, and has since revitalized southern politics and touched the heart of many Americans in the midwest and far west. The movement remains determined to undo the America created by FDR - a "welfare state" and unions, gov't regulation and appropriate taxation, along with a strong middle class. All of this is "the enemy."

As I put it, the South won the Civil War of ideas! And the current GOP has embodied these ideas perfectly! 

Far Right hates Public Education

I do not believe that the right has a genuine interest in PUBLIC ed. 

They're too quick to demean teachers and attack the systems that work pretty well in giving us a level playing field for millions of American children, a playing field growing increasingly uneven for want of fair funding. 

Are things wrong with the system? I've learned that one can make a good living out of criticism of what may be wrong; but what we are need are people who are devoted to lifting up the system, even with its flaws, and celebrating the millions of teachers who are devoted, who are successful, leading our children to a better life.

Ragged individualism, combined by hyper-induced parental anxiety, fueled by the far right and driven by a sales culture needing anxious parents to seek and to purchase nirvana for their little prodigies, America is shredding its public institutions, much like a mad dog biting its own legs in frustration and fear.

Oh well, just some ramblin' thoughts from an ol' retired guy!