Dear Ed,
The weather today and yesterday has been great. Walking both days was a delight. Tomorrow Jay promises increased heat and humidity and an increased chance of thunderstorms. So be it. That will be good too. Rain would be good. And serene heat and sunshine before that.
I'm watching The Key (1958), starring William Holden, Sophia Loren, and Trevor Howard. I recognized the music as being that of Malcolm Arnold. He composed the score for Bridge on the River Kwai. I like Arnold's Second Symphony, also his Dances (English, Irish, Scottish, Cornish). He has a lot of humor, some of it wacky. He ends one of the Scottish dances with the tune, "shave and a haircut, two bits." You may not know how that that tune goes, and you might not know what "two bits" means. You can't get a haircut for two bits any more, and you probably can't get a shave at all in a barber shop.
The Key takes place at sea, partly. Holden is apparently the skipper of a small merchant ship. Aha, it's December 7, 1941. Anybody know what happened then? Hint: the next day Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress saying that the previous day would "live in infamy" because of the "dastardly" deed of the Japanese air force at a place called Pearl Harbor, in what is now our fiftieth state.
Today was an especially good day for me. A vocational wish I've had for a good while is coming true--if I can believe it! I'll say more when I'm surer that it really is going to happen. For now, I can't believe my good luck. I am grateful, and at this point anxious.
My nephew was to go to college today, his first day at Indiana University. I recall a little of my first semester at college. It was the nearest to perfect autumn I can remember, day after day of dry, sunny days and crisp nights. I was planning on being an engineer of some sort and I took chemistry, math, German, and English. I liked the subject matter then, and I did pretty well--B's and C's, a 2.5 GPA. That was good for me. Looking back over nearly fifty years, I see that the most fitting course for me was English composition and my best teacher was a young woman who was the registrar as well as the teacher of the course. She taught me social conscience, logic, critical thinking, and how to recognize propaganda. I'd never had any experience with such elements of education up to then, or maybe it was just that I was aware of them for the first time.
The most popular form of propaganda today is argumentum ad hominem, argument "to the man," i.e. attacking the character, motives, associations, habits, etc. of a person rather than arguing a point on logical grounds. Your opponent says that she is grieving because her son died in a war you started, an unjustified war, and because of her son's death and nearly two thousand others, and your seeming indifference to all of this by going on vacation for a month, it is a great injustice to the the entire nation that you govern and it is time you put away your bicycle and chainsaw and get your ass back to your oval office and get to work on getting the soldiers home. Rather than apply yourself to the assertion the lady has made, your henchmen and mouthpieces get busy and start to Swiftboat the lady, slime her, trash her, say that she is unstable, she is in league with a fat, unkempt man (that he is fat and unkempt rather than that he has found you out is ad hominem) who has cast aspersions on you, she is really not sincere. The woman is the problem, not the injustice of your war. That's the ad hominem argument. Miss Duus taught it to me years ago. Nice to know what it is. Character assassination, sliming, and--a new term for it--swiftboating.
It used to be the folks on the other side of the pond that did the "dastardly" acts.
I long for people in high places with character, who argue a point on its merit, who are not smug and arrogant, who are humble, reflective, penitent, who are not liars.
Goodnight, dear, and amen. Here's hoping we meet now and then. It was great fun but it was just one of those things.
Old Blue Eyes
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Kids' Stuff
Dear Ed,
We went to the Children's Museum in Nap Town today and observed a water clock that was fascinating. It is truly a functional chronometer. We watched the hour change from two to three, and it happened all at once, and it was a joy to see. I wish I had a photo to illustrate it, since it is a complicated thing to describe. It looks sort of like a laboratory distillation device, with ascending glass balls on the left to indicate hours and smaller containers on the right to indicate minutes. At first glance I thought it was model that illustrated the mechanism of a petroleum cracking tower but then I observed the pendulum. Said pendulum is connected to a simple ladle pump, which is essential in the timely delivery of water. It is filled with blue-dyed water, and all parts which include tubes. It is in the lobby, which has skylights, and today was a beautiful sunny August day. The Children's Museum in Indianapolis. Great! The pendulum reminded me of the Foucault pendulum at the museum downtown, which uses the earth's movement to keep knocking over these little pegs all day long. Every kid, virtual and actual, should get to see that pendulum too. Those two items are the kind of phenomena that made Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. proud of his native Indianapolis. I like Nap Town (I insist on calling it "Nap Town" instead of "Indy," because it is still a great place to take a nap, in Indiana, the center of things--the dead center. Some kids from out of state came in a decade or so ago and tried to jazz Indiana up, and they were misguided, because Indiana's unjazziness is part and parcel of its charm. A red 1950 Studebaker convertible rolling over a covered bridge at twenty miles an hour--bring it back! And August is probably next to October in being the most charming month in Indiana--melons and corn and tomatoes and picnics and reunions and some of the best weather Indiana is capable of having. And, I concede, some of the worst.) I love you, Hoosier State! I wish sometimes Madison wasn't so damned Kentucky. I'm a Yankee, dammit, not a Reb. (And on that one, murder will out -- Grant was a better general than Lee. Just as Omar Bradley was a better field commander than Rommel. Go figure.)
JT
We went to the Children's Museum in Nap Town today and observed a water clock that was fascinating. It is truly a functional chronometer. We watched the hour change from two to three, and it happened all at once, and it was a joy to see. I wish I had a photo to illustrate it, since it is a complicated thing to describe. It looks sort of like a laboratory distillation device, with ascending glass balls on the left to indicate hours and smaller containers on the right to indicate minutes. At first glance I thought it was model that illustrated the mechanism of a petroleum cracking tower but then I observed the pendulum. Said pendulum is connected to a simple ladle pump, which is essential in the timely delivery of water. It is filled with blue-dyed water, and all parts which include tubes. It is in the lobby, which has skylights, and today was a beautiful sunny August day. The Children's Museum in Indianapolis. Great! The pendulum reminded me of the Foucault pendulum at the museum downtown, which uses the earth's movement to keep knocking over these little pegs all day long. Every kid, virtual and actual, should get to see that pendulum too. Those two items are the kind of phenomena that made Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. proud of his native Indianapolis. I like Nap Town (I insist on calling it "Nap Town" instead of "Indy," because it is still a great place to take a nap, in Indiana, the center of things--the dead center. Some kids from out of state came in a decade or so ago and tried to jazz Indiana up, and they were misguided, because Indiana's unjazziness is part and parcel of its charm. A red 1950 Studebaker convertible rolling over a covered bridge at twenty miles an hour--bring it back! And August is probably next to October in being the most charming month in Indiana--melons and corn and tomatoes and picnics and reunions and some of the best weather Indiana is capable of having. And, I concede, some of the worst.) I love you, Hoosier State! I wish sometimes Madison wasn't so damned Kentucky. I'm a Yankee, dammit, not a Reb. (And on that one, murder will out -- Grant was a better general than Lee. Just as Omar Bradley was a better field commander than Rommel. Go figure.)
JT
Friday, August 19, 2005
My WIFE Likes this Movie?
Dear Ed,
I just discovered Flashdance. Never saw it before. Rosie didn't know the name of it but described it to me and after searching a half-hour I finally found it.
Here it is tonight on Bravo (which of course has a googol of commercials and the dialogue bowdlerized by the falsely righteous censors who are cowed by Falwell and Dobson -- no problem, of course, with a scene in which hoods break the standup comic's nose. It's sex, not violence, that's the problem. Violence is AOK. It's America, right? Capital punishment? No problem. "Make-my-day" gun laws for intruders (who are not born-again Christians anyway)? No problem. Film violence by people who have the right political beliefs (think Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson)? No problem. Just no "bad" words. Problem. Why? What would Jesus do? He would send the cussers straight to hell. Also, don't show any children's cartoon characters whose sex-preference is suspect to Jer-Bear and Jimbo, Homophobes for Jesus).
But I digress. Again.
I told Rosie I'd get the movie, our copy, uncensored and uninterrupted. Have a vested interest in it myself, now that I've seen a bit of it. Nothing to do with sex, of course. I like it when hoods break someone's nose to prove a point. There's no other way, right? Movies make that point over and over. Can't reason or plead or reinforce more constructive behavior. Just beat the shit out of 'em. That'll show 'em.
Looks like I'm going to tape a radio show for my favorite station. Don't know when it will air -- program director wants to work that out. But he isn't offended that I want to air "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" from O Brother, Where Art Thou? as a selection on a program of film music to be broadcast on a station with a 24-hour "classical" music format. It also includes Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, which was in Platoon and The Elephant Man. That music, by the bye, gives Rosie cold chills, she says.
Your fellating rag, Ed, had an editorial on the price of gasoline that was halfway sensible (because I had been thinking some of the same things) -- if it had just gone far enough. You pointed out quite correctly that there are too many gas-sucking SUVs and dualies on the road. "Weapons of Mass Deception," as my clever, beloved son has dubbed them. And you observed that driving habits are hardly conducive to gas conservation. True. The tailgating F-350's and Tahoes with drivers pissing their pants to pass me when I myself am exceeding the speed limit by, oh say ten or fifteen miles an hour, prove that point when I meet them a few seconds later while they're still sitting at the stoplight.
But what about mass transit? Even in this modest little city, we have vans that, besides making scheduled runs, operate as virtual taxis, and they are cheap. And we have taxis, for that matter. I doubt they're smoke-free, since things don't progress here all that fast, but I bet you can beat the pump prices by riding in them. What's a little secondhand smoke when you're trying to save your money on fuel? And wouldn't it be neat if people would car-pool? And ride bicycles? And walk? If you live in the same neighborhood and work at the same place, why not share a ride? But, I know, for Yanks to pool anything -- cars, expensive tools -- why, it's communistic! What are we, a bunch of hippies? Everybody wants -- needs -- private, portal-to-portal transportation, on demand, twenty-four hours a day. And, as some of the Freudian persuasion have speculated, people preoccupied with their machismo have to have their automotive prop under them at all times. Someone even postulated an inverse relationship between magnitude of the penis and the size of the vehicle. They call it Hummer's Law. And WTF is this business of raising the speed limit in Indiana? Nixon in the seventies signed an executive order lowering the speed limit to 55. Egads! A Republican actually decreed that Big Oil would lose some opportunities to profit. (Well, at least it seemed that way.) I note that a local car dealer has a revolving platform with a car upon it. No one is paying attention to it. What a silly waste of energy. That worthless contraption runs with electricity, no doubt, which is generated from burning fossil fuels. Near that in perpetuum piece of junk, stores stand open, virtually unoccupied, with God knows how many lights burning round the clock and the a-c blasting away, cooling no one but a handful of clerks? Do we know how to waste energy? Does a cat have an ass?
Enough. Wait 'til you catch me in a bad mood.
Good night, Mrs. Calibash and Scnozzola, and Bud, dear Bud, wherever you are. And Harold, Harold, be at the end of all our remembering. Here's a classical piece for tuba and brass choir. God, I love it! Who wrote the theme for Gunsmoke? A wind choir plays it at the end of the show, with a still shot of the big ole coffeepot. Amen.
JT
I just discovered Flashdance. Never saw it before. Rosie didn't know the name of it but described it to me and after searching a half-hour I finally found it.
Here it is tonight on Bravo (which of course has a googol of commercials and the dialogue bowdlerized by the falsely righteous censors who are cowed by Falwell and Dobson -- no problem, of course, with a scene in which hoods break the standup comic's nose. It's sex, not violence, that's the problem. Violence is AOK. It's America, right? Capital punishment? No problem. "Make-my-day" gun laws for intruders (who are not born-again Christians anyway)? No problem. Film violence by people who have the right political beliefs (think Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson)? No problem. Just no "bad" words. Problem. Why? What would Jesus do? He would send the cussers straight to hell. Also, don't show any children's cartoon characters whose sex-preference is suspect to Jer-Bear and Jimbo, Homophobes for Jesus).
But I digress. Again.
I told Rosie I'd get the movie, our copy, uncensored and uninterrupted. Have a vested interest in it myself, now that I've seen a bit of it. Nothing to do with sex, of course. I like it when hoods break someone's nose to prove a point. There's no other way, right? Movies make that point over and over. Can't reason or plead or reinforce more constructive behavior. Just beat the shit out of 'em. That'll show 'em.
Looks like I'm going to tape a radio show for my favorite station. Don't know when it will air -- program director wants to work that out. But he isn't offended that I want to air "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" from O Brother, Where Art Thou? as a selection on a program of film music to be broadcast on a station with a 24-hour "classical" music format. It also includes Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, which was in Platoon and The Elephant Man. That music, by the bye, gives Rosie cold chills, she says.
Your fellating rag, Ed, had an editorial on the price of gasoline that was halfway sensible (because I had been thinking some of the same things) -- if it had just gone far enough. You pointed out quite correctly that there are too many gas-sucking SUVs and dualies on the road. "Weapons of Mass Deception," as my clever, beloved son has dubbed them. And you observed that driving habits are hardly conducive to gas conservation. True. The tailgating F-350's and Tahoes with drivers pissing their pants to pass me when I myself am exceeding the speed limit by, oh say ten or fifteen miles an hour, prove that point when I meet them a few seconds later while they're still sitting at the stoplight.
But what about mass transit? Even in this modest little city, we have vans that, besides making scheduled runs, operate as virtual taxis, and they are cheap. And we have taxis, for that matter. I doubt they're smoke-free, since things don't progress here all that fast, but I bet you can beat the pump prices by riding in them. What's a little secondhand smoke when you're trying to save your money on fuel? And wouldn't it be neat if people would car-pool? And ride bicycles? And walk? If you live in the same neighborhood and work at the same place, why not share a ride? But, I know, for Yanks to pool anything -- cars, expensive tools -- why, it's communistic! What are we, a bunch of hippies? Everybody wants -- needs -- private, portal-to-portal transportation, on demand, twenty-four hours a day. And, as some of the Freudian persuasion have speculated, people preoccupied with their machismo have to have their automotive prop under them at all times. Someone even postulated an inverse relationship between magnitude of the penis and the size of the vehicle. They call it Hummer's Law. And WTF is this business of raising the speed limit in Indiana? Nixon in the seventies signed an executive order lowering the speed limit to 55. Egads! A Republican actually decreed that Big Oil would lose some opportunities to profit. (Well, at least it seemed that way.) I note that a local car dealer has a revolving platform with a car upon it. No one is paying attention to it. What a silly waste of energy. That worthless contraption runs with electricity, no doubt, which is generated from burning fossil fuels. Near that in perpetuum piece of junk, stores stand open, virtually unoccupied, with God knows how many lights burning round the clock and the a-c blasting away, cooling no one but a handful of clerks? Do we know how to waste energy? Does a cat have an ass?
Enough. Wait 'til you catch me in a bad mood.
Good night, Mrs. Calibash and Scnozzola, and Bud, dear Bud, wherever you are. And Harold, Harold, be at the end of all our remembering. Here's a classical piece for tuba and brass choir. God, I love it! Who wrote the theme for Gunsmoke? A wind choir plays it at the end of the show, with a still shot of the big ole coffeepot. Amen.
JT
Sunday, August 14, 2005
The Screwtape Emails
My Dear Wormwood,
Good to hear from you!
Papagena and I were watching an "oater" starring Glenn Ford as the marshal and Angie Dickinson as the saloon girl. Looks like they're sleeping together, and I don't think they're married, so this movie obviously postdates the strict censorship days. I recall the barkeep* from a movie by the National Council on Alcoholism, in which he played the chief of a detox-rehab place. Shows versatility. I used to show it when I was the "alcoholic coordinator" for the Athens City Court in the seventies. But enough of the nostalgia and chit-chat.
[*Lin Lesser. The movie was The Last Challenge (1967). Shucks, come to find out he was on Seinfeld!]
Our experiences with church (i.e. yours and mine) seem to parallel each other. You said your new pastor is "superficial and a Republican" and that wouldn't matter if he didn't come across as a "neoconservative evangelical." And what is worse, you said that he ignores, doesn't attend, and doesn't even mention the existence of your church study group to the congregation. You are the bastard group.
Welcome to bastardy.
Our experiences are strikingly similar, it seems. Perhaps I'm masochistic for doing it, but Papagena and I have been attending the Avis Megachurch in Forlorn River, and the pastor is a native Hoosier who spent twenty years in Oregon before coming to this church.
I see that he went to a conservative Bible college out there, and he said that his son attends an "evangelical" college in the Midwest. (By the way, I'd think that from the name of the college it would be a mainline church affiliation and would be notoriously liberal, like my alma mater, Cragmont College, used to be. Actually I think Cragmont is now pretty conservative politically, but they're more "liberal" than they were in the sixties on drinking, now selling beer on campus to 21-year-olds, and the gay students -- of whom there were "none" in the days of Animal House (Cragmont had the dweebs, jocks, and frat rats just like "Faber College", but of course "no" queers) -- have formed an out-of-the-closet, gay pride organization! The place is well endowed by country club Republicans (rather than religious right ones), who are very much well and alive. Cragmont, and, as far as that goes, the Republican Party, is a concoction of contradictions. My, that was a long digression. We call that circumstantiality, don't we?)
Anyhow, back to this pastor, Theophilus Tory, by name. I like him. He's a likable guy and a "people-person," I think. I believe I told you my aunt is a lifelong member of that church and pastors love her. She'll be 80 next year and she has been the volunteer Sunday school superintendent for decades now. After my uncle Chap died, leaving only Lula and me, I started attending the church with her. I regard myself as a sojourner there and in just about any church in Forlorn River.
Knowing what little I do about theology and the society of this town, my best fit is probably in St. Andrew's Episcopal, or Cragmont Presbyterian. But for some cussed reason, I keep going back to the church where my aunt who baby-sat me goes, where my father was a deacon, where I had the hell scared out of me by those brow-mopping, bible-wielding, hell-foretelling fire-insurance salesman called evangelists, and where my entire nine-year-old body was immersed in the baptistery one Sunday night when I "accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior."
Soon after I started back there, I got involved with Sojourners and God's Politics and I thought that, one of the objectives being to build a bridge across this chasm we have today, it would be logical to ask Theophilus if we could have a study group at the church.
Ixnay. He thought it was "too risky." He told me about a near-dustup between two deacons at a board meeting, one a Bushie, one a Kerryite, before the 2004 election. Besides that, I observed his deer-in-the-headlights reaction when I told him that I was "extremely liberal, certainly by Forlorn River "standards," and his flinch when I said that you-know-who "thinks he's the Messiah."
I secured the community center as our meeting place and went to several churches asking the pastors to announce the group or make a post in their bulletins. Twice more I went to Theophilus and asked him merely to get the word to his congregation. The second time, two days before the group began, he said he'd have to OK it with the deacons. I said I couldn't see anything "risky" in simply telling the members that such a group existed. (God's Politics isn't exactly a manual on Satan worship.) I sparred with him a little bit about it and then he said he didn't trust me. At last, the truth.
Papagena said she didn't want to go to the church any more and she didn't like the denomination. I continued to go to the damn church because I wasn't going to let a Bushie (I have no doubt he is) drive me off. Papagena stopped going for several Sundays and I missed a couple myself. But I went back last Sunday and this, and for some perverse reason I enjoy the place. Theophilus's sermons are not too bad. He uses Power Point for his outlines of his main points and does a good job, like a Sunday school teacher. Lula and I sit there and write his main points on the bulletin insert (Skinnerian programmed learning!). He refers to some books I like. He exhorts personal piety and assures people of salvation and peace of mind if they practice the principles.
Hell, I don't know. I just keep going there.
But no more has been said about the God's Politics group. Having the paranoid proclivities that I do, it occurred to me that he could have not only not informed anyone, but passed the word that it was a "subversive" group. If he did, however, he would be more two-faced than he seems to me. I have more faith in him than that.
We ended up getting one person (who got his info from the newspaper ad) who was to the right of our politics and religion. He is a good man and I had great hope for that "bridge" while he was there --which ended up being once.
I have become disheartened about building that bridge. I read an article in the New Yorker magazine by Hanna Rosin about Patrick Henry College in Virginia. A good many of the kids there were home-schooled, and they are not only taught that you can't be a Christian without being a Republican, all of them campaign for Republicans, and some of them do internships in D.C., where they conclude that Karl Rove is a "political genius" -- rather than a character assassin. He couldn't be the latter, they reason, because Turd Blossom is the right-hand man for that Godly man in the oval office. These kids learn debate -- but not critical thinking.
This morning we went to church to a youth-led worship. Some kids gave testimonies that because of "knowing Jesus" they (1) don't swear, (2) read the Bible and pray, and (3) stay away from "the wrong kind" of people. A young seminarian (in Bible camp T-shirt and shorts) gave a sermon reinforcing those behaviors -- none of them, by the way, having anything to do with the "social gospel." And there you have it -- stay away from the wrong kind.
I think that a lot of Paul's letters to the fledgling churches contain language about cloistering themselves in a like-minded community and avoiding worldly people, whereas Jesus encouraged his disciples by both precept and example to go out into the community at large and teach and heal and comfort, etc. Jesus was an activist, Paul a pietist, I'd say.
The pietists of today choose the message of insularity, with their own TV and radio, their own music, their own schools, their own book stores, and of course their own churches. I suspect Theophilus learned when he was a kid at his church to stay away from the wrong kind of people, and when I walked into his pastor's office his radar went blip! when I used "the L-word." If I try to build a bridge, they will blow it up for sure every time. Or so it seems right now. And that's why I'm just a little disheartened. So I'm ready for a good sermon from one of my kind too.
Reckon our main man Phil will be back from sabbatical after Labor Day, huh?
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
Good to hear from you!
Papagena and I were watching an "oater" starring Glenn Ford as the marshal and Angie Dickinson as the saloon girl. Looks like they're sleeping together, and I don't think they're married, so this movie obviously postdates the strict censorship days. I recall the barkeep* from a movie by the National Council on Alcoholism, in which he played the chief of a detox-rehab place. Shows versatility. I used to show it when I was the "alcoholic coordinator" for the Athens City Court in the seventies. But enough of the nostalgia and chit-chat.
[*Lin Lesser. The movie was The Last Challenge (1967). Shucks, come to find out he was on Seinfeld!]
Our experiences with church (i.e. yours and mine) seem to parallel each other. You said your new pastor is "superficial and a Republican" and that wouldn't matter if he didn't come across as a "neoconservative evangelical." And what is worse, you said that he ignores, doesn't attend, and doesn't even mention the existence of your church study group to the congregation. You are the bastard group.
Welcome to bastardy.
Our experiences are strikingly similar, it seems. Perhaps I'm masochistic for doing it, but Papagena and I have been attending the Avis Megachurch in Forlorn River, and the pastor is a native Hoosier who spent twenty years in Oregon before coming to this church.
I see that he went to a conservative Bible college out there, and he said that his son attends an "evangelical" college in the Midwest. (By the way, I'd think that from the name of the college it would be a mainline church affiliation and would be notoriously liberal, like my alma mater, Cragmont College, used to be. Actually I think Cragmont is now pretty conservative politically, but they're more "liberal" than they were in the sixties on drinking, now selling beer on campus to 21-year-olds, and the gay students -- of whom there were "none" in the days of Animal House (Cragmont had the dweebs, jocks, and frat rats just like "Faber College", but of course "no" queers) -- have formed an out-of-the-closet, gay pride organization! The place is well endowed by country club Republicans (rather than religious right ones), who are very much well and alive. Cragmont, and, as far as that goes, the Republican Party, is a concoction of contradictions. My, that was a long digression. We call that circumstantiality, don't we?)
Anyhow, back to this pastor, Theophilus Tory, by name. I like him. He's a likable guy and a "people-person," I think. I believe I told you my aunt is a lifelong member of that church and pastors love her. She'll be 80 next year and she has been the volunteer Sunday school superintendent for decades now. After my uncle Chap died, leaving only Lula and me, I started attending the church with her. I regard myself as a sojourner there and in just about any church in Forlorn River.
Knowing what little I do about theology and the society of this town, my best fit is probably in St. Andrew's Episcopal, or Cragmont Presbyterian. But for some cussed reason, I keep going back to the church where my aunt who baby-sat me goes, where my father was a deacon, where I had the hell scared out of me by those brow-mopping, bible-wielding, hell-foretelling fire-insurance salesman called evangelists, and where my entire nine-year-old body was immersed in the baptistery one Sunday night when I "accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior."
Soon after I started back there, I got involved with Sojourners and God's Politics and I thought that, one of the objectives being to build a bridge across this chasm we have today, it would be logical to ask Theophilus if we could have a study group at the church.
Ixnay. He thought it was "too risky." He told me about a near-dustup between two deacons at a board meeting, one a Bushie, one a Kerryite, before the 2004 election. Besides that, I observed his deer-in-the-headlights reaction when I told him that I was "extremely liberal, certainly by Forlorn River "standards," and his flinch when I said that you-know-who "thinks he's the Messiah."
I secured the community center as our meeting place and went to several churches asking the pastors to announce the group or make a post in their bulletins. Twice more I went to Theophilus and asked him merely to get the word to his congregation. The second time, two days before the group began, he said he'd have to OK it with the deacons. I said I couldn't see anything "risky" in simply telling the members that such a group existed. (God's Politics isn't exactly a manual on Satan worship.) I sparred with him a little bit about it and then he said he didn't trust me. At last, the truth.
Papagena said she didn't want to go to the church any more and she didn't like the denomination. I continued to go to the damn church because I wasn't going to let a Bushie (I have no doubt he is) drive me off. Papagena stopped going for several Sundays and I missed a couple myself. But I went back last Sunday and this, and for some perverse reason I enjoy the place. Theophilus's sermons are not too bad. He uses Power Point for his outlines of his main points and does a good job, like a Sunday school teacher. Lula and I sit there and write his main points on the bulletin insert (Skinnerian programmed learning!). He refers to some books I like. He exhorts personal piety and assures people of salvation and peace of mind if they practice the principles.
Hell, I don't know. I just keep going there.
But no more has been said about the God's Politics group. Having the paranoid proclivities that I do, it occurred to me that he could have not only not informed anyone, but passed the word that it was a "subversive" group. If he did, however, he would be more two-faced than he seems to me. I have more faith in him than that.
We ended up getting one person (who got his info from the newspaper ad) who was to the right of our politics and religion. He is a good man and I had great hope for that "bridge" while he was there --which ended up being once.
I have become disheartened about building that bridge. I read an article in the New Yorker magazine by Hanna Rosin about Patrick Henry College in Virginia. A good many of the kids there were home-schooled, and they are not only taught that you can't be a Christian without being a Republican, all of them campaign for Republicans, and some of them do internships in D.C., where they conclude that Karl Rove is a "political genius" -- rather than a character assassin. He couldn't be the latter, they reason, because Turd Blossom is the right-hand man for that Godly man in the oval office. These kids learn debate -- but not critical thinking.
This morning we went to church to a youth-led worship. Some kids gave testimonies that because of "knowing Jesus" they (1) don't swear, (2) read the Bible and pray, and (3) stay away from "the wrong kind" of people. A young seminarian (in Bible camp T-shirt and shorts) gave a sermon reinforcing those behaviors -- none of them, by the way, having anything to do with the "social gospel." And there you have it -- stay away from the wrong kind.
I think that a lot of Paul's letters to the fledgling churches contain language about cloistering themselves in a like-minded community and avoiding worldly people, whereas Jesus encouraged his disciples by both precept and example to go out into the community at large and teach and heal and comfort, etc. Jesus was an activist, Paul a pietist, I'd say.
The pietists of today choose the message of insularity, with their own TV and radio, their own music, their own schools, their own book stores, and of course their own churches. I suspect Theophilus learned when he was a kid at his church to stay away from the wrong kind of people, and when I walked into his pastor's office his radar went blip! when I used "the L-word." If I try to build a bridge, they will blow it up for sure every time. Or so it seems right now. And that's why I'm just a little disheartened. So I'm ready for a good sermon from one of my kind too.
Reckon our main man Phil will be back from sabbatical after Labor Day, huh?
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Moral values and the Awl Bidness
Saturday 08/13/2005 8:24 a.m.
Dear Ed,
Marion started the choral part of the Ninth by Beethoven—where the baritone sings, “O freude!” and Rosie began frowning and shaking her head. I turned off the radio—I’m not hip on hearing the Ninth at this hour either. The silence was then tomb-like.
Nor am I hip on hearing two shouting heads wrangling about punishing or offering a suspended sentence and therapy to a woman who is accused of having sex with her sixteen-year-old pupil. I would like to send an e-mail to MSNBC denouncing their new Rita Cosby program which uses the format of facing off two shouting heads and letting them go at it between commercial breaks, which come all too often. But I’ve got it on to break the silence.
Got to fix my oatmeal and get going. It’s almost nine and the heat index is getting close to 90 already.
Rosie has gone to ready for the day and I turned off MSNBC News. Pat Buchanan was going to come on and say that the mother near Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch protesting the death of her son in Iraq is “reaching a point of diminishing returns” in trying to call attention to her plight and that of other sons in harm’s way and their grieving mothers. Thus, Pat reasons, the woman’s concerns are trivial. As Rummy says, yuh fight the war with the army yuh got, not the one yuh want—what’s left of it. Rather than fuming in sufferance of Bukey’s mouth-flatus that is sure to come in billowing clouds of mouth-stink, I switched to Turner, to a black and white movie with Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Charles Coburn, and Marilyn Monroe. It’s a farce that is meant to be one, whereas MSNBC is an unintended black comedy of horrors.
And then there’s the Fox News Network. Like death by torture, I don’t want to think about it.
Well, I’ve finished my oatmeal and need to get on my way. I think I’ll take the same route I took yesterday only backwards. Amen and may I go with God.
...
Fifty-nine minutes of trek, the first twenty of it really booking. Beautiful sights and sounds—chirring locusts and cooing doves. And sunny and steaming hot. This is day 225 of the year, with 140 to go—should anybody care. At the Swifty gas and convenience store at State and Cragmont last night, regular unleaded gasoline was $2.559 a gallon. God dog. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, just love the hell out of ‘em. The boys in the awl bidness are running the country. You voted for "moral values," people. Moral values this.
JT
Dis and Dat, as Dey Say in Da Region
Dear Ed,
Slept three hours this afternoon, so up late for an old man. Friday night (actually Saturday morning) now. Piano concerto on WUOL (Prokoviev?). I like it. Rudy is scratching himself. Rosie has gone to bed. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world. Posted a comment on Dr. Nat Sue's latest blog entry. Poor girl is starting her overnights in her internship. She was on call and busy for thirty hours! She is made of sterner stuff than I am.
Rosie and I went downtown tonight, noticed there was a concert in the Broadway Fountain Park, and stopped by too late. We sat a while on a park bench. It wasn't too warm and humid. I feel great physically and emotionally. Walking every morning for an hour after oatmeal and have got off the NaCl and FaT in my daily diet. Quit half of my blood pressure medicine and three readings since doing so are 100/60, 125/80, and 100/70. The two lower ones are after walking.
Trying to bridge to the religious right, or thinking about trying again. I know a pastor, a man I like very much and enjoy hearing preach his sermons of comfort and empowerment, who I want to engage in dialogue, and whose flock I want also to engage, who has avoided my incursions so far, and I'm thinking of sending him a Sojourners message from one who has tried to engage those to his right and has been frustrated by his attempt. I wonder if he'll read it or even acknowledge it. He seemed quite fearful that I might tell him something he doesn't want to hear. He finally trusted me enough to tell me he doesn't trust me. Progress!
Am nearly finished with a script for a radio show on film music. The work I've put into it has been its own reward. I'm finding out more about the topic and am continually delighted by the endeavor. I hope it will make some folks happy for the hour it's on the air. (I hope, before that, that the program director will want to air it when he hears the finished product.) Rather than trust myself to ad-lib in comments between selections, I've written a script. The last time I spoke to a group of people about my own recovery from addictions, I wrote out what I wanted to say and read it rather than speak impromptu. It worked much the better, I think.
Good grief! It's one in the morning!
Dat's all for now, Ed.
JT
Slept three hours this afternoon, so up late for an old man. Friday night (actually Saturday morning) now. Piano concerto on WUOL (Prokoviev?). I like it. Rudy is scratching himself. Rosie has gone to bed. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world. Posted a comment on Dr. Nat Sue's latest blog entry. Poor girl is starting her overnights in her internship. She was on call and busy for thirty hours! She is made of sterner stuff than I am.
Rosie and I went downtown tonight, noticed there was a concert in the Broadway Fountain Park, and stopped by too late. We sat a while on a park bench. It wasn't too warm and humid. I feel great physically and emotionally. Walking every morning for an hour after oatmeal and have got off the NaCl and FaT in my daily diet. Quit half of my blood pressure medicine and three readings since doing so are 100/60, 125/80, and 100/70. The two lower ones are after walking.
Trying to bridge to the religious right, or thinking about trying again. I know a pastor, a man I like very much and enjoy hearing preach his sermons of comfort and empowerment, who I want to engage in dialogue, and whose flock I want also to engage, who has avoided my incursions so far, and I'm thinking of sending him a Sojourners message from one who has tried to engage those to his right and has been frustrated by his attempt. I wonder if he'll read it or even acknowledge it. He seemed quite fearful that I might tell him something he doesn't want to hear. He finally trusted me enough to tell me he doesn't trust me. Progress!
Am nearly finished with a script for a radio show on film music. The work I've put into it has been its own reward. I'm finding out more about the topic and am continually delighted by the endeavor. I hope it will make some folks happy for the hour it's on the air. (I hope, before that, that the program director will want to air it when he hears the finished product.) Rather than trust myself to ad-lib in comments between selections, I've written a script. The last time I spoke to a group of people about my own recovery from addictions, I wrote out what I wanted to say and read it rather than speak impromptu. It worked much the better, I think.
Good grief! It's one in the morning!
Dat's all for now, Ed.
JT
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