Faces

I'm an almost 60 year old white man, born into the heart of the Jim Crow south. I've lived within the bounds of the confederacy all my life but for 7 years, and those were spent in a still wildly racist border state, in a county that retained unwritten Sundown Rules into (at least) the last decade of the 20th century. I had one set of grandparents who never quite mastered saying "Negro" at the time that that was the preferred term. I attended a high school that was created by building a walking bridge over the street that had separated (but unequalled) the town's black and white high schools, just a very few years before I got there, by court order, of course.
I retain a cracker accent, despite of my best efforts.
And yet, I've somehow managed to never, ever dress up in blackface, brownface, or any other face than my own.
Never.
Not once.
At any age.
Just sayin'.

"Thoughts and Prayers" My Ass

There have just been reports of a mass shooting in...um...is it Philadelphia this time? I just can't keep up any more. 
But don't worry! The Thoughts and Prayers crowd is already on the job, ensuring that nothing will ever be done to stop this insanity!
If any of the myriad deities that segments of humanity worships, or has worshiped, was willing, or, more pointedly, able to do anything about human violence, don't you think that she, he, or it would have already done it? US mass shootings? Rwandan genocide? Vietnam? The Holocaust? World War II, generally? World War I? American lynchings of the post-Civil War period? Genocide against native peoples throughout the Americas? Crimean War? 
All the way back to the beginning of human existence!
Or, if there were anything to religion, don't you think that the various gawwds might be depicted by their own devotees, in their fairy tale books, as something more than bloodthirsty killers themselves?
Or, here in the real world, don't you think it might be time to stop crying out pointlessly to the sky for relief, and do something, ourselves, right here and right now, about our infinite capacity to kill ourselves?
But, then again, who am I kidding? There's WAY too much money in killing for what we willingly accept as our "leaders" to ever let go of the death and destruction.
But keep on praying! It just ensures that the gun manufacturers, the contractors for the Department of War, the private prison industry, and various strongman leaders around the world that have grown rich from stealing from their own minions will sleep on ever-growing piles of cash that we just can't wait to fork over to them.
Why?
To make us safe!

Shelby County Schools Promote Trump's (Utter Lack of) Ethics

We had a problem with math this year, and wound up in summer school. Kate Bond Elementary is the only site within a half hour of our house, so we went there.
The first week, a girl larger than my granddaughter tried to intimidate her by getting in her face and putting her finger in my granddaughter's face. We have taught our children, from oldest to youngest, that we do not accept bullying and intimidation, so my granddaughter pushed her hand away. The girl then hit her in the chest. When I met with her teachers, Stewart of Cordova Elementary and McGee from parts unknown, they saw it as an equal offense situation, and told me that my granddaughter must not put her hands on other students.
Last week, at lunch, a boy called my granddaughter a "dumb bitch." Earlier this week, the same boy asked her, "Are you a whore?" She is ten years old. I spoke with Stewart about this matter yesterday, and she ducked, passing me off to McGee. McGee, obviously a saintly person as she wouldn't say "whore," rather spelled it out to me: "H-O-R-E." This person is an English teacher.
She told me that it was a "he said-she said" situation, so no disciplinary action would be taken toward the boy. This response was, obviously, completely unacceptable.
Today, I went to school and met with the principal, Crutcher. She is not the person listed as principal on Kate Bond's website, so I don't know if that is her school, or she's just assigned there for the summer. Crutcher's position is that the real problem is that my granddaughter discussed what was said to her with a couple of the other children in the room. What I know is that my granddaughter came home and asked what "whore" means. She didn't know that word. She was trying to find that out in the classroom.
This elementary school victim of physical intimidation, bullying, assault, and sexual harassment was blamed by those in power for each of these incidents.
We are no longer in summer school. It is an unacceptable environment for a ten year old girl.
And we wonder how we wind up with a president who dismisses the 20th sexual assault/rape allegation against him by explaining, "she's not my type." And gets away with all of it.
We are training our bullies and future rapists and woman abusers in our public schools, and pardoning their behavior when someone makes an attempt to call them on it.
This country has already gone to hell in a handbasket.

A Season of Seasons, or, More Religionist Bullshit

Religionists may always be counted on to find a way to use the language to make sure that everyone within earshot knows that they are smarter than you, and think on A Seriously Profound Level far beyond your poor capabilities. What you should know about that absurdity is that it's precisely the bullshit that it sounds like it is.
The latest of these pseudo-intellectual pretensions is the use of the word "season." Not in reference to the portions of the year that we designate as winter, spring, summer and fall. Certainly not in reference to the period of games in whatever sport is ongoing at the moment. But, perhaps in some tip of the miter to the section in the old testament book of ecclesiastes that Pete Seeger used to prove that he could make something wonderful even out of the fairy tales book commonly called the bible, before Roger McGuinn and the boys turned Seeger's song into Turn! Turn! Turn!, a hit record for the Byrds in the mid-1960s. (McGuinn is also a story of a religionist nut, but that's for another day.)
I heard this abuse of season clomping into common usage like a Star Wars At At Walker tromping across the frozen tundra of some remote planet even before I grew up and got out of the church. It was tossed around, first, by The Ambitious, those that lacked the TV evangelist looks to get noticed, the work ethic of the true believers, or the depth of the able and well-educated. But, hey, as Tessie Tura, Mazeppa, and Electra tell the young Gypsy Rose Lee, "You gotta get a gimmick!" Intellectual Poseur is the only path to Religionist Leader that a certain percentage can come up with. So, go with what you know, and whatever your limited ability and con artist soul give you to work with!
Seasons has become ubiquitous. I ran into it again today. It was in a blog linked on a friend's page, written by someone I do not know. Truth is, his (I'm guessing...) blog is so well arranged that I can't even find a name on it. Anyway, he went to lengths to describe our current National Policy of locking up children, women, and men legally pursuing political asylum in concentration camps as "our current season of civic, social, and political madness." He had done a pretty good job of tracing the history of concentration camps, and tying in some work on Germany's descent into Nazism. But we are, according to him, simply in a "season" of this behavior in America.
Bullshit.
Whenever I hear this inanity, I am invariably taken back to Jerzy Kosinski's brilliant 1970 novel, Being There, which was spectacularly adapted into a 1979 film, by Hal Ashby from Kosinski's screenplay, starring Peter Sellers in his best film performance (along with Dr. Strangelove). This film presaged the rise of Ronald Reagan, and our political existence of the last 40 years.
Chance was a gardner. He seems to have been a bit slow, and Chance had been taken into the home of The Old Man (his illegitimate child?), the wealthy owner of the home and grounds where Chance lives, and works the gardens. The Old Man has died as the story opens, and the necessary steps are taken to close the house, which includes The Old Man's attorneys interviewing Chance about his intentions to file any sort of claim against the estate. Chance has no clue what they are talking about. He works in the garden, watches television, and eats the meals prepared for him by Louise, the maid. This is the only life Chance has ever known.
The attorneys tell him he must leave, so he dutifully packs his trunk and leaves. He walks out into a world he does not know and cannot understand. He finds himself mildly struck by a car belonging to one of the richest and most influential industrialists in America, and is then taken back to this old man's mansion to see after his injury, and prevent a lawsuit.
Over the course of just a couple of days, Chance becomes an Influential American himself, through a comedy of errors that includes his name being misunderstood (upon being asked his name he responds, honestly, "Chance, the gardner," but he groans in the middle of saying it as the doctor examines his leg, and he is misunderstood to have said, "Chancey Gardener," which then becomes his name), and, most significantly for my purposes here, his habit of answering any question that he is asked, but cannot understand, by immediately reverting to talking about his garden, and its seasons. These responses are taken as profound metaphor by Important People Dealing With Important Issues, and wind up being quoted by the President of the United States as an adviser's economic forecast for the nation. Kosinski uses "seasons" in Chance's mouth to demonstrate the idiocy of people who cannot recognize their own pretensions, their own arrogance, and their own stupidity. At the end of the film, as Chauncey Gardener walks across the lake behind the rich man's mansion, as any good savior would, the Important People Dealing With Important Issues are heard talking about him in reverentially whispered tones, at the funeral for the second dead old man, about the possibility of persuading such a popular, accomplished, and knowledgeable person as Mr. Chauncey Gardener to run for president as their next candidate.
Which perfectly summarizes the crisis in leadership from which religionists suffer today.

National Priorities: We Get What We Pay For

Some of you may remember the late-1980s PBS series Ethics in America. A distinguished moderator led a discussion by a panel of accomplished Americans on issues ranging from personal ethics, to medical ethics, to ethics in government, and everything in between. It was a brilliant group of programs, and I was always left with several things to think about after I watched it.
One of the brilliant moderators was Professor Charles Ogletree of Harvard University. He was a career academic, now retired, but his thinking was crystal clear for communicating with lay people, his questions invariably penetrating, his positions typically unassailable. I always enjoyed the shows that he led. I also enjoyed the times he made the members of the panel squirm a little bit. People like Newt Gingrich, Rudolph Giuliani, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Antonin Scalia, among many others. People who didn't normally have to squirm very much. Good for the soul, don't you know.
The next time I heard of Professor Ogletree was during the first presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Ogletree taught law to both the future president and the future first lady. No wonder they were each such effective attorneys.
I've seen Mr. Ogletree's name again tonight. The Cambridge, MA, police have issued a bulletin asking for the public's assistance. Professor Ogletree is now an Alzheimer's patient, and wandered away from his home tonight about 5:30.
It breaks my heart to learn that this man, who enjoyed such a formidable intellect throughout his life, is struggling with this dread disease. It scares me whenever I hear that a person with Alzheimer's has wandered away from home.
And I wonder how much farther down the road toward a cure or prevention we might be if we hadn't spent trillions of dollars fighting ultimately meaningless, pointless wars since the time Professor Ogletree was moderating those wondrous episodes of Ethics in America.
We owe better to a lost, confused man in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tonight. And a great many other Americans, too. Americans who are ill, hungry, homeless, unloved, and uncared for.

NOTE: Professor Ogletree was found, safe, and returned to his home about midnight tonight.

Warm Springs, Georgia, April 12, 1945: 74 Years Ago Today

I hold that Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president, for reasons that I assume to be obvious. I place George Washington second, because he had to take what the Constitution listed as his responsibilities, and put them into effect out of nothing. No precedent. No tradition. Just how his vision for America led him to set things up. 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt comes third on my list. He inherited the Great Depression from a republican who believed that the thing would eventually just work itself out. Hoover did nothing.
Nothing.
FDR, basically, did everything. He tried. If it worked, he kept it. If it didn't, he ditched that, and tried something else. He held the country together, did all he could to put it back to work, and worked to keep America's spirits up through one of lowest times we'd ever known.
Then, on the heels of the Depression, we landed squarely in the middle of World War II. He supported Great Britain. He inspired us to rise from Pearl Harbor. He fixed the vision. He led the fight.
But he didn't live to see the victory.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died 74 years ago today, in Warm Springs, Georgia, his retreat that renewed him throughout his years of struggle against the effects of the polio that robbed him of the use of his legs, six weeks before the war ended in Europe; four months before the war ended in Asia. But he had agreed to put on his fourth ticket a man, plain, plainspoken, simple, and direct, to lead the nation through to the end of the war in both theaters: Harry Truman.
We would not be the nation that we are today, the one whose institutions fascists are still working to destroy, had it not been for the strength, intelligence, persistence, hope, expectation, and sunny disposition, always believing in the future of America, that comprised Franklin Roosevelt.
We are a fortunate people that there was such a leader at such a time. We will remain profoundly indebted to him, just as to Lincoln and Washington, as long as this country endures.

Empathy

I'm an old retired white man who was born here and lived here all my life, and I know how horribly I feel about where things are with my country. 
I can't imagine how I would feel about it if I were in a religion other than redneck evangelical (pardon the redundancy, and, I'm no longer in that religion, but that's the protected group), a woman, born in another country (especially one to the south of the US, or in the Middle East that doesn't do business with the Trump Organization), a teacher, a union member, a member or spouse of the US military generally, and a transgender member of the military in particular, a member of the LGBTQ community, an African-American, a Latino, a journalist-you know, a real journalist-one who doesn't work at Fox News, a child who is incarcerated after being taken from their parents at the southern border, a parent who is incarcerated or deported whose child has been taken from them at the southern border, a person of color who has had a loved one gunned down in the street by the police, a person who has lived every minute they can remember of their lives here but now been torn from their family and work because they were brought here by their parents 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago, and has never known life anywhere else, or any one of a thousand other groups that have had war declared on them by power.
But I'm trying to imagine.
I'm trying to understand.
Because that's the only way that any or all of this shit is going to be stopped.

The Longest-Lived President

I'm a bit skeptical whenever I hear the announcement of a new "World's Oldest Person." First, it means that someone else has died, and, second, it's not a lasting title.
It seems the same with American presidents.
That said, I find it remarkably satisfying that Jimmy Carter has become, today, the longest-lived president in American history. Mr. Carter surpassed George H.W. Bush at 94 years and 172 days. 
Jimmy Carter is widely adjudged to have been a failure as a president. This evaluation is grossly unfair and inaccurate, and betrays our general American emphasis on image over actual accomplishment, propaganda over fact. His character has been assassinated by republicans, beginning with the abominable Reagan and his lackies, for 45 years. Carter's basic human decency, over the issue of the Shah of Iran seeking admission to the United States for treatment after being diagnosed with cancer, led to the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, and the subsequent hostage crisis. He had the release of the hostages negotiated and agreed to when George H.W. Bush, acting for Reagan, communicated to the Iranians that a Reagan Administration would offer a better deal to Iran than Carter had. The Iranians sat on the hostages for additional time, until Reagan was sworn in. Reagan's people subsequently sold American arms, illegally, to the Iranian government, in order to illegally fund the Nicaraguan Contras' war against the Sandinista government. (Republicans have a long history of colluding with foreign governments against American interests. In addition to Trump and Reagan, Nixon killed an agreement over the Vietnam War in the same way, for the same purpose, in 1968, costing Hubert Humphrey the White House, and resulting in the only resignation from the American presidency. So far.)
Carter established the Departments of Education and Energy. He made both national issues. He installed solar panels on the White House (which Reagan had taken down). He preached and practiced conservation. He personally negotiated the only peace agreement between nations in the Middle East that has lasted: the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt. He and Walter Mondale remade the role of the vice president. He sought to dramatically decrease American dependence on oil from OPEC and other producers. He governed by intense study of the issues before him. And he was the only American president of my lifetime who actually practiced, in detail, the faith that he claimed to live by.
Jimmy Carter was a good president. 
He has been a great former president. He has made the eradication of the guinea worm one of his top priorities, and has very nearly gotten the world to that point. I will leave it to you to search out the horrible consequences of guinea worm infection. He has continued to this day to build housing, with his own hands, for low income people, through Habitat for Humanity. He has monitored more elections in more countries, and brought home more Americans held in other countries than anyone in my memory. Through the Carter Center, based in Atlanta, he has continued to advocate, forcefully, for human rights around the world. And particularly, since the days even before he left the Southern Baptist Church over its policies toward them, the human rights of women and girls. President Carter has never forgotten the remarkable guidance of his mother, Miss Lillian Carter, and has always treasured his astounding and full partnership of almost 72 years with former First Lady of the United States Rosalynn Carter. These relationships shaped President Carter's understanding of the desperate need for justice in education, employment, family planning, and rights, generally, for women. 
Jimmy Carter is a great man. He was an effective president, and has been the exemplar for former presidents. He has stood for what is right and just. He is just the man to be remembered as our longest living president.
I am proud, to this day, that the first vote I ever cast in a presidential election was for Jimmy Carter's reelection.

We Never Truly Know

It's been a pretty lousy week. A man that I'd known of for over 40 years, and known, lightly, for almost 20 years, died. I learned his name from west Tennessee high school basketball. He was very, very good. Good enough to be All State, and High School All American. Good enough to get an NCAA Division 1 scholarship. And play.
I wanted to be a basketball player. I stalled out at 5' 6 1/2". And I like pizza.
I made his acquaintance because he also became an incredible musician. He often told the story of how one of Memphis' legendary guitarists, Teenie Hodges, taught him how to play. He was signed to a national recording company. He had a legit top 10 hit. He made a couple of great albums. Then he got caught in the vagaries of the recording industry, his company going belly up, and leaving him unpromoted, with a contract hanging over his head, and needing years to get out from under it. He played around town, frequently, in the years when I was able to haunt most of the music venues. I heard him often enough he began to recognize me at his gigs. We talked a little.
I wanted to be a musician. I bought a guitar. I learned how to strum a few chords. OK, for playing along with the cd player, with only my ears in attendance. Never got any better than that.
He was a scholar. He did good, profound work on one of the Nobel-winning Irish poets from the earlier part of the 20th century.
I majored in history, then got diverted for 28 years.
I did some really stupid stuff in my high school and college years. The kind of stuff that would have caused me to take the car keys away from my children, permanently, if I'd caught them doing some of the same stuff I did. But, for whatever reason, I was lucky. I didn't hurt myself or anyone else. And I didn't wind up addicted. I don't know why. It just worked out that way.
He did some stupid stuff as a young man, too. Same kind of stuff as me. But he wasn't lucky. He wound up addicted. I don't know why. It just worked out that way.
He went through hell, but found a door. That door was faith, the church, and ministry. He moved through all of the required steps, and came up for ordination. He was four years older than me, but I'd already passed through those steps of the process a few years ahead of him.
I voted for his admission.
He'd been through hell, but he was determined that he wasn't going to leave anyone else there. He did the various kinds of work that ministry requires, but he put tremendous time, effort, and skill into reaching addicted people, because he knew what they were dealing with, and going through.
He was great at it.
I couldn't begin to estimate the number of people whose loads were made lighter, and lives were made better because he was there for them. He found a church, or they found him, or pastor and church found each other, where he could focus on that sort of ministry, and he helped lead that work into being a vital part of his church's life.
Then, apparently, his addiction reared its head again. The news reports said he was in a rehab facility. Today they reported that the coroner's autopsy said the cause of death was suicide by hanging.
We never truly know how it's going with someone else. Every time I saw the guy, or listened to his music, I thought to myself, what a guy! How I'd like to be like him, in any one area of his incredible talents! Much less, have all of them! But he, clearly, was hurting, and struggling, no matter the face that he invariably presented when you ran into him.
I'm grieving his passing. I'm heartsick over the circumstances of it. I wish that, in that awful moment, he could have found solace in his impact on the lives of so many people fighting addiction, no matter how his own fight was going right then. I wish that he could have found solace in the poetry that was so dear to his heart. I wish he could have banged it out on his guitar, and written another new song that would have spoken for him and to so many of us. I wish he could have picked up a basketball and hooped it out until things looked better. I wish someone could have been there to wade through it with him. I wish I'd been able to make the offer of help, myself.
But he's gone now. I don't know why. It just worked out that way.
And I'd like to think that I'll be a little more intentional, now, about trying to know what's going on in the people in my circle of acquaintance.
Because we never truly know.

Brain Function Speed, Where Does Roger Stone Live Anyway, and Lindsey Graham's Lost Head, or, The Old NFL Ball Game!

You know, I wanted the Saints to win the NFC Championship, too. 
But, really.
The Conspiracy Theorists have now come up with the utterly meaningless factoid that four members of last week's refereeing crew live in southern California. Sure, if you care nothing for sports, or were on the moon, or, like Lindsey Graham, had you head completely buried up Trump's ass, there was a totally blown pass interference foul that should have been called on the Rams late in the game, that would have put the Saints about as deep in Rams' territory as they could get, with a guaranteed touchdown mere seconds away. 
At least that's the way that Saints devotees see things.
But here's the thing: do you really think that the referees are SO skilled that in that split second, the guy could process Pass Interference...but it's the Rams...and I'm from SoCal...so I want the Rams to win...so I'm not going to call what I saw!
Really?
Newsflash: nobody's that good. Or that quick. The synapses just don't flash that way.
It's just like the JFK Assassination Dependents. If the NFL was going to conspire against anyone, it would have been the Patriots. Because the NFL offices hate the Patriots, and the Patriots hate the NFL offices.  Hello! Spygate! Inflategate! You know. The Patriots always get away with everything.
Except when they don't. 
But even if you want to believe this stupidity, do you really think that the CIA, or, in honor of Roger Stone's indictment and jailing, if you think Lyndon Baines Johnson somehow ran from his vehicle in the Dallas motorcade, shot Jack Kennedy in the head, and ran back to his car, without anyone...ANYONE...seeing him do that, as Stone pretty much claimed in his idiotic book, do you really think that the government could keep that quiet for 56 years? We know by 2 pm when Trump throws a fit over not getting an extra-large fry with his Big Mac at lunch! The NFL conspired to send 4 SoCal refs to rig the Rams-Saints game? Need I ask your opinion of the moon landings?
I suspect not.
If you're on board with this nonsense, well, just keep on MAGA-ing!

Captain Bonespurs And All His MAGA Tough Guys Need Their Blankie

Captain Bonespurs took to the airwaves tonight. The same networks that couldn't find the time for the legitimately elected to two terms President Obama to give a speech on immigration had plenty of time tonight to let the treasonous professional liar spew forth his terrifying fantasies.
I didn't watch him. I can't watch him. Whenever he appears on my television, I immediately want to Elvis the tv. 
I can't afford to replace our televisions on a daily basis. 
I have read some of what he said. He did not declare the rumored "National Emergency." This was his one shot to make the case for such a fascist, authoritarian, Nazi action. He cannot come back later and make that case. 
This was it.
He seems to have simply regurgitated, one more time, the same bullshit he's been peddling since the campaign, laced with some bizarre appeal to the "humanitarian" circumstances, as though there has ever been one moment of his increasingly pathetic life when he has given even the most minuscule shit about what's happening to anyone other than himself.
He doesn't care about the two children who have died. He doesn't care about the families who were in such fear for their children's lives in their home countries that they would make a multiple thousands mile march to a foreign land that is being run by a sociopath, simply to try to protect their children. He doesn't care about relations with Mexico, or crimes against humanity, where agents of the United States government, acting on his orders, have repeatedly violated Mexican sovereignty by firing tear gas and bullets into their country. He doesn't care about the circumstances of our troops, as he ordered thousands of them to the border. He doesn't care a whit about American law, which makes provision for people who approach our borders to make a lawful appeal for political asylum. He doesn't care about the damage that this entire charade and fiasco does to our standing amongst the family of nations around the world.
He just doesn't care.
I don't either.
But what I don't care about is the way this fascist manipulates his willfully ignorant supporters. I don't care about his cowardly stance toward people who are asking our help to save their lives, and their children's lives. I don't care what lies he tells to try to sell his stupid wall. He cannot have one single dollar to build a wall that announces to the world that the United States of America is afraid. Afraid of poor people. Afraid of brown people. Afraid of living up to our laws. Afraid of living up to our principles.
Afraid, afraid, afraid. The sum total of 21st Century American conservatism.
We cannot live that way.
The cowardly Captain Bonespurs, and his disgusting brand of cowardice, must be utterly and finally rejected over this idiotic fantasy of a wall that would keep all the scary, scary people away from our door.