Several ideas, and the title for this entry, originated in a piece I wrote in the spring of 2003.

For some time, I've been intrigued by all things apocalyptic, be they belief systems, or literature, or films, or even music. I find the general obsession we as a people have with the end of the world to be fascinating. Even amusing.

It wasn't always that way though. I remember those tense days in the autumn of 1988, when speculation was rampant among many faiths that the world's end was imminent. I recall being fairly spooked by it all, as I was not well-versed in religion or doctrine. Many of my classmates were spooked as well, even the more religious ones who'd presumably have nothing to worry about. One Tuesday morning, my English class was in the library doing research for a paper on ancient Greek playwrights and authors. I'd chosen Aristophanes at the suggestion of my teacher, who figured I'd enjoy his comedies. She was right, and later hipped me to Kurt Vonnegut, who would become a favorite of mine.

As we milled about in the aisles between the shelves of books, I'd occasionally hear someone nervously singing Bobby McFerrin's recent hit "Don't Worry, Be Happy" as if it were some sort of talisman.

Freshman year is tough enough. It's one thing trying to fit in, find your way around a strange new place, and adapt. It's another thing altogether trying to do these things while at the same time worrying that God was going to annihilate the planet any second.

My friend Clarence eased my mind a little bit as we discussed the whole thing before the start of Economics, Legal and Political Systems second period. He told me to come by, and we'd get out the lawn chairs and a cooler of beer, and sit and wait for God to show up.

Over time, I've come to not take any of this too seriously. I guess what ultimately helped were groups like the Heaven's Gate cult, the crazies who followed an elderly couple named Do and Ti, and all dressed in track suits and the lamest Nike sneakers ever made, and prepared to catch a ride on Comet Hale-Bopp. Sure, they were more extreme, but to me, it ends up equalizing it all. I end up wondering why any more credence is given to Christian scholoars who make apocalyptic predictions than to these fringe groups, when at the heart of it, one has just as much hard "evidence" to support their claims as the other does.

I'm more into finding an explanation for why we're the way we are. For all of time, we've had doomsday believers prophesying the end of time. In nearly every civilization, in nearly every time period. Just a decade ago, we were in the throes of the dawn of the millennium, and worries existed over everything from the typical apocalyptic suspects, to the infamous Y2K. The funniest part is that, contrary to what people thought, the new millennium didn't properly start until 2001, being that there was no year zero, and the first millennium started in the year 1, meaning the second started in 1001, and so on.

Now, on the horizon, the date December 21, 2012 holds significance, as it coincides with the "end" of the Mayan calendar. This has led to allegedly sane people propagating all sorts of theories ranging from a general shift in the priorities of mankind to an out-and-out apocalyptic event. I can't understand why people don't make the assumption that, like when our calendar reaches December 31st, we start it over again. But that concept doesn't create hype, or sell books, or tickets to the slew of apocalypse-based movies sure to come between now and then.

But that's not even the main reason we fixate on the end. Or even a particularly pertinent one. Sally suggested that the apocalypse is generally a means of control, of scaring those who don't believe into coming into the fold, or as a means of maintaining a grip on the faithful. I don't doubt that in many respects, that's a big part of the motivation of apocalyptic predictions. When I read Revelation, that's my general impression. If John's vision weren't intended primarily as an exhortation to remain faithful rather than a play-by-play of the end times, then why the personal messages for the seven churches at the start? That, to me, is the key. Revelation is often cited for its mystery, its denseness, and its symbolism, but to me, the key is the tone set in the early part of the book. I think that in this day, it's lost on most the circumstances of Christians of the time period of Revelation's composition. Eleven of the twelve apostles met grisly ends, with only John escaping in exile. Christians were being served up to the lions regularly in Rome. It would have been easy for many to say, "Hey, let's go back to worshipping Jupiter, or being Jewish." Revelation, however vague it is in places, succeeded because it gave Christians something that all of us seem to need in our lives. Yes, it gave Christians hope, but it was something else too.

It provided an end. A sense of resolution. Many would argue that's secondary, but to me, that's the basic reason apocalypticism is so appealing. It provides an ending. It might be disastrous, or blessed, filled with destruction, damnation, or salvation. All that matters is that there's a resolution.

We're just wired that way. We go to a play, and expect to see an Act I, II, and III. We read a book and expect a beginning, middle, and an end. Even in our music, we expect resolution. Schubert may have had an Unfinished Symphony, but in general, there aren't too many unfinished songs. We like closure. Why else would there have been so much hand-wringing after the relative non-ending of the series The Sopranos?

I wonder if it isn't because the notion of infinity is just too much to comprehend. The idea that things could just go on continuously, whether we're here or not. Maybe it even springs from self-importance. Think about what it says about the person who thinks, "Yes, we are the generation of people who are finally going to push God's buttons so that he cancels the human race." That strikes me as pretty arrogant.

The other flaw in religious-based theories and predictions of the apocalypse lies in the concept of time itself. We're forever putting emphasis on particular dates and particular numbers and whatnot, but all of that stuff is man-made. We made the calendars. We created these divisions of time that we've subsequently used to calibrate our predictions. God, such as we've come to view God, operates within the realm of infinity. God's not looking at our calendars, or glancing at a wristwatch as a means to know when to end it all. If that were the case, then it would seem almost as if God were acting according to our whims and suggestions, rather than the other way around.

This isn't to say that I don't acknowledge the very real possibility that it could all end tomorrow. Or today for that matter. But if it did happen, it wouldn't be because of some prediction someone made, be it a preacher, or Nostradamus, or the wacko down the street ringing a bell, holding a sign reading "The End Is Near," and urging everyone to repent.

Personally, though, I have to look at it this way. The world was here before us. I'd have to be pretty naive to assume it wouldn't be here after us.

Facebook has been miraculous in that it has done what all the previous years of internet access and the various social sites on the internet couldn't do. It's actually managed to get shy, retiring, antisocial Tommy to reconnect with old friends. Really old friends. Grade school friends.

I got a friend request from one of my classmates in kindergarten, all the way back in Mrs. Smith's 1979-1980 class. Her name is Tabitha.

We were friends all the way through school, all the way to graduation. She was in the advanced classes like me. Really smart girl.

What I remember most about Tabitha are a couple of things. One was that she was a Jehovah's Witness. I was never cognizant of this any time other than around the holidays. When we had Christmas parties or exchanged Valentines or anything like that, she was conspicuously absent. On days leading up to holidays, when almost any assignment had a holiday theme to it, she recused herself from the class and, I would assume, did some alternate assignment.

I didn't know much else about Jehovah's Witnesses back then, other than the not celebrating holidays thing. Well, that, and remembering the Saturday visits from JW's, and noticing the kids in the car, always in their Sunday best, and thinking that was a lousy way to spend a Saturday morning. Saturday mornings were made for multiple bowls of sugary cereals and a cavalcade of cartoons. I ended up with the notion that being a JW must entail having a grim, humorless existence.

Except that Tabitha was neither grim nor humorless. In fact, one of the other things I remember is how much she laughed. And it was never a measured laugh. It was full, infectious.

My only other dealings with JW's as a kid, other than watching Mom and Dad turn off the TV, and urge us all to be quiet so they'd quit knocking at our door, was my crush on a girl named April.

It was 1986. January, to be precise. I was in the 6th grade and had Mr. Robinson for homeroom. April was down at the other end of the long hallway in grade four, in Mrs. Duncan's class. She had curly brown hair and a face full of freckles. I thought she was cute, and had a crush on her.

She was, as was I, in the Academically Gifted program. Early that year, the AG classes for the whole school (grades four through six) took a trip to the North Carolina Museum Of Art. That was pretty cool. I remember buying an inkpen shaped like a paintbrush from the gift shop, and admiring April from a couple of rows back on the bus on the trips up and back.

A fellow AG member had told me that she was a Jehovah's Witness. I didn't really know or care what that meant, but had a vague idea that it was the sort of faith that might be problematic in the unlikely event a relationship ensued. I remember being pretty unfazed. I wasn't looking to get married. I was twelve years old. It was just a crush.

So I decided, religious beliefs be damned, to get her a card and a box of candy for Valentine's Day. It was a small, pink box of candy as that was all I could really afford. I had to give it to her on the change of classes between first and second, and I had to be quick enough to get down the hall to catch her as she crossed the hall between Mrs. Duncan's and Mrs. Aycock's classes. I handed them to her, but don't really remember how she reacted. It was all so fast. I think she smiled, but I can't really remember. I've often wondered if she took them home or if they stayed in her desk or ended up in a trashcan somewhere.

I never got up the nerve to seriously follow up on that day. I did ask her to be my girlfriend, and she did say yes, but that was pretty much the high point. I was terrified of calling her house, figuring her dad would answer and bless me out for attempting to corrupt his daughter with sinful celebrations of holidays. Even at that age, my impressions of JW's led me to conclude they were fairly insular, far more so than other faiths.

Once I got to the point where I was answering the door when JW's would come knocking (unlike my parents, I cannot fathom cowering in my own home, waiting for the knocking to stop), I was alternately harsh, interrogative, and downright mean. I once used a lawnmower to shred a copy of The Watchtower as a mortified carful of JW's backed out of my driveway. I was terrible.

I think I've gotten somewhat better. I'll never understand what could draw someone to such a cultic, pessimistic, downright apocalyptic group of people. I don't know how anyone could be in an organization that willfully attempts to subvert any relationships people might have with those outside the fold, even going to the level of encouraging families to disown the prodigal in their own clans. But I have mellowed in my treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses.

The last time one visited was last summer. It was a perfectly sultry summer day. I saw the woman emerge from her minivan, immaculately dressed and clutching the tools of her trade (a Bible and a copy of The Watchtower). I walked outside and out to the driveway to meet her, and engaged her in a theological discussion. I was wholly civil even as I disagreed with her on everything she said (especially her repeatedly insisting that we were in the end times...I've got a whole other entry brewing on apocalyptic beliefs to come). When pressed on my beliefs, I only offered that I was undecided about what I believe, that when I did decide that it was solely my concern, and that while I would take her literature, there would be no sale there today.

A few months later, Sal said she returned while I was taking a nap, looking specifically for me, and even remembering my name. My civility towards her probably has earned me a few more visits from this woman in the future, as she may have taken my willingness to be engaged as being open to her rhetoric (or vulnerable). I'm not bothered. I can say no as many times as is necessary. But unlike my attitude towards religion in general over the past few years, my "no"'s are not seated in the hostility I've often felt but in a respectful disagreement and decision to live and let live, and believe in belief.

I don't know whether Tabitha or April stayed in the fold, or moved beyond those beliefs, and that's fine. It isn't my place to know, or judge the validity of those beliefs. I just know it was neat to hear from an old friend.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080619/ap_on_re_us/religious_license_plate


I love it when I get something to go into a semi-extended rant about.

According to the article, Americans United For Separation of Church and State have filed a lawsuit in South Carolina to stop the production and sale of religious-themed vanity license plates. These plates would be emblazoned with a cross and the words "I Believe." The organization filed the lawsuit on behalf of two Christian pastors, a humanist pastor (whatever the hell that is), a rabbi, and the Hindu America Foundation.

Now, anyone that knows me is thinking, "He's siding with the people filing the lawsuit."

But that's not the case here.

Come on. What's the big deal? It's a stinking license plate. If someone of faith wants to proclaim that on their license plate, what's the problem? All sorts of private groups are allowed to have their own vanity plates. There are plates for individual colleges, breast cancer survivors, Vietnam veterans, and myriad other groups. Why are we going to draw the line here?

But this is when the separation of church and state advocates say that by making the plates, the South Carolina government is making an endorsement of the Christian faith. But this is nonsense. Cannot the Hindus and the humanists and hell, even the athiests get their own plates? I just don't see how someone proclaiming his or her faith on a vanity license plate is unduly burdening someone else's freedom of religion or making the establishment of a state religion.

Besides, this line has been muddied too much anyway. If memory serves, South Carolina at one point did not allow alcohol sales on Sundays (that may still be the case). Now, any reasonable person can infer that the reason liquor isn't sold in the Palmetto State on Sundays is because the vast majority of Christian faiths mark the Sabbath on Sundays. I would think that Seventh-Day Adventists or Jews could reasonably argue that the ban on Sunday alcohol sales is a de facto endorsement of Christianity. I'm not sure if it is, or if it's more of a case of "community standards" prevailing, but then again, I'm not a First Amendment attorney. Our legislative and judicial bodies generally start off sessions with prayer, and a person getting on the witness stand is generally greeted with a Bible on which to swear to tell the truth (so help them God). Yes, the witness is allowed to not use the Bible or to merely affirm, but the fact of the matter is that the person has to request this. The person, one could argue is being unduly burdened in their quest for freedom of religion. But this is nothing. If you don't believe, it's just a book, right? Get over it.

Yes, I know this may stand in stark contrast to some positions I've taken on this in the past. But here's the thing. It's just a license plate. Any person with half a brain in his or her head knows that the sentiments expressed on the plate are the person in the car and not those of the state of South Carolina. It's just that simple. How should it offend you any more than a bumper sticker proclaiming someone's love for Christ would? Besides, the extra cost of the plate will no doubt benefit many non-Christians in the form of extra revenue for the state. Isn't this a good thing?

One of the pastors leading the lawsuit accused South Carolina legislators of pandering in an election year. So? This is news? All politicians pander, be they those of the religious right, or those advocating legalized abortion or gay marriage. It's all pandering. You don't think that the recent return of the gay marriage issue to the fore in California isn't the product of some politician on the left pandering to the vast liberal swath that resides in that state? This is how the game is played.

Another Methodist minister suggested the plates are "divisive" and create "religious discord." How so? If you're likely to get that riled up by someone driving a grocery-grabber around town with an "I Believe" plate on the back, maybe driving isn't your thing. I don't know.

Another minister suggested that the plates "cheapen" religion and compromise it. Really? How so? If that's the case, than doesn't any social endeavor that exists outside one's on prayer closet constitute a cheapening of the faith? This would mean that television shows with a religious theme, or Christian pop and rock music, or t-shirts that proclaim one's faith simultaneously cheapen it. I'm not buying that. This would become a freedom of religion issue in my eyes only if South Carolina legislators subsequently denied other faiths the right to their own specialized plate.

We can't possibly unblur the line that has been so thoroughly blurred. The White House lights a Christmas tree every year. I know that the tree is one of the more secular trappings of the holiday, but it is still called a "Christmas" tree. Municipalities all over the nation have "Christmas" parades every year, and the local governments are obviously involved in those. In terms of occurrences of the concurrence of religion and government in our country, I'd say these license plates rate as relatively insignificant.

The irony of this, I guess, would be that the plates are called "vanity plates." Vanity is one of the seven deadlies, isn't it?

My sister sent me a link the other night to what appeared to be an article in The New York Times. I clicked on it, and lo and behold, there was a picture of my uncle. In The New York Frickin' Times.

The article was dated April 3rd, and was about people who had survived being shot multiple times. I don't recall if I've ever told the story in any detail of how my uncle came to be shot twenty times, but this seems like as good a time as any.

It was 1995. I can't remember with any degree of certainty what month it was, but it was definitely summer, possibly late summer. Friday afternoon. I definitely remember that. Dad and Jamie were in New Jersey, doing a television installation job at a hotel called the Suisse Chalet (I think). I was sitting in my bedroom at the folks' house, talking to my then-girlfriend on the phone. Mom had gotten a phone call on the other line. I'd heard the phone ring but didn't think anything of it, until Mom came bursting into the room.

"Kenny's been shot," she said. At this point, a clarification was in order. I have two uncle Kennys. One is Mom's brother, and one is Dad's brother. And realistically, in 1995, with their personalities, either one of them could have gotten shot and I would have believed it, and moreover, that they had somehow precipitated the event.

As it turns out, it was Dad's brother. Though I tended not to get along with him at times and thought that he treated my father rather poorly, I instantaneously felt bad for all the bad things I had said about him, and went about calling as many people as I could think of for support and prayers and things like that. I was still attending church at the time, so the first person I called after I got off the phone with my girlfriend was my pastor.

Mom went about trying to get a hold of Dad, and did so in short order. Within the hour, Dad and Jamie were in the big white Ford Econoline van, zipping down I-95, desperately trying to get back quickly, as at that point, it wasn't really clear whether Kenny was going to make it at all or how long he might hang around.

I think Mom went on up to the hospital. I stayed at the house and fielded phone calls. Dad and Jamie made it back sometime that night, no doubt nearly killing themselves and/or incurring copious speeding tickets in the process. I got word that night that he'd been shot twenty times with a .22. I don't know much about guns or calibers or any of that crap. I do know that nobody should get shot twenty times and live to tell the tale. But what was the tale, anyway?

The details slowly began to emerge. Earlier that year, Kenny had a next-door neighbor that wasn't all that stable. Actually, he was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. The two of them had had words a few times over the course of the time they resided next to each other, but nothing more came of it initially, I guess. From what I gather, Kenny had just gotten home on Friday afternoon, and this guy pulled up behind him in the driveway, and got out with the gun and just started shooting as Kenny stood by his minivan. The story I heard later is that the guy insisted that Kenny and his son had been in the man's attic, plotting to kill him. No doubt the "attic" was his own head.

Kenny made it, which was definitely a miracle. Most of the shots he sustained weren't in the abdomen, but there were still enough shots that it almost certainly could have been fatal. A search of the man's vehicle apparently revealed a .357 Magnum, which almost certainly would have sealed the deal with a minimum of shots. When my uncle insists that God was with him that day, it certainly is hard to argue a plausible alternative. According to the article in the Times, two of the bullets were a mere inch from his heart. I'd never heard that particular detail before.

Kenny, for lack of a better way to put it, has always been a difficult person to deal with at times. I don't know how much of that is him, how much of it is me or anyone else who has expressed frustration or exasperation with the man. He's always been somewhat brash, and I think even he might admit that if he were candid enough. In 1995, there were still lingering resentments over the way the situation with my granddad's estate shook out. There were three parties who all generally didn't trust one another, and only one of them had the money it took to ensure that the whole estate didn't end up getting sold off. That person was my uncle, who pretty much got the lion's share of my granddad's property. I'm not going to get into the ins and outs of it, and whether or not maybe my uncle should have offered my father something. That's over. Dad, I know, felt very betrayed by the fact that he'd pretty much acquiesed to the notion of buying his stepmother out of the whole thing, thinking that he and Kenny would split what was left. This didn't happen. Looking back on it, Dad would have done well to let it be handled within the scope of North Carolina intestate law, by which everything would have been split equally in thirds after his stepmother had gotten the first ten thousand right off the top. Dad hated his stepmother, and wasn't having any part of that. They both harbored a fair bit of resentment towards her, even going so far as to have it pretty much guaranteed that she wouldn't get to stay in the house she'd kept for two decades in the event my granddad passed first. I think they also recognized that she had a drug-addled son and didn't want their dad's hard work chopped up and snorted off a mirror.

I don't know why Dad, if he was mad enough, didn't just pretty much be done with his brother. Actually, I know the answer to that. First is simple. Kenny and Dad were pretty much the last two left from the family, and Dad put a heavy premium on family. Also, Dad loved doing the TV installation thing, and Kenny had the capital to do it, and the connections. Dad bought in, hoping at some point that whatever they built together, he might get some of it. This too was a ridiculous notion, but Dad never lost hope though. When Dad hatched his notion of a satellite installation business the following year, he went to Kenny with it, only to pretty much see Kenny make off with his baby. Dad didn't really have much choice. Years of living with Mom had pretty much torpedoed his credit-worthiness. They had the house as collateral, sure, and they'd soon nearly mortgage that away as well. Dad only had credit at the Bank of Kenny. I think that had a lot to do with it. Whenever Dad found himself in a financial jam, which was constantly, Kenny would be there to bail him out.

I don't know how Dad and Kenny were near the end. Kenny paints a picture of two brothers more or less on good terms. Who knows? Mom still doesn't seem to be over the past, and there was a considerable amount of tension between them at the hospital back in November, though a lot of that was over the disagreement between Kenny and us about taking Dad off the life support. I'd sat down with Kenny the night before and laid out to him our stance on things, and while I don't think he agreed with me, he respected what I had to say, though he clearly was angered by the whole decision. The next night, in the minutes after Dad passed, Mom, Amber, a few other family members and relatives, and I were gathered in a room off to the side. Mom was talking with the attending physician, and was filling out a bunch of forms she no doubt wanted no part of filling out. Kenny suddenly appeared in the doorway. Mom beckoned for him to come on in, and was seconded by several others. Kenny just looked at us, and said, "Why?" and walked away. He was hurt, and no doubt thought that he didn't necessarily belong in there with us, or thought maybe we thought that. I don't know. It's hard to fault him too much, even though it seemed tacky and petty at the time.

Kenny stopped calling me back in January. I don't really know why. Maybe he found his own path to dealing with all of this. I suspect he and Mom still aren't getting on too well, but I don't know. I haven't talked with Mom in awhile either. It was hard talking to her the last couple of times we talked because conversation would go back to the accident and the girl, and Mom's bitterness and vindictiveness would manifest and I'd feel like hanging up the phone. Sally gets on to me for not calling, and I know that she's right to do so. Wasn't I just here five months ago lamenting that I never called Dad those last few months? Yep, that was me.

One of the quotes from Kenny in the article speaks to why some people live and others don't, and Kenny concludes that he couldn't even begin to answer the question. It's a question I think about a lot, I guess. I think about his sister who died at 16, or his mother who died in her mid-thirties. I think about his dad, who died two months before his first Social Security check arrived in the mail. Or his nephew who died two weeks before his 26th birthday. Or his brother, who was felled by an automobile the night before Thanksgiving. And I think about how he was able to withstand twenty gunshots on a sultry Friday afternoon and live to tell about it. That's him in that picture, wearing one of his trademark striped shirts. That's him, with his glasses, and his beard, now almost completely white. I read his words, and I can hear him delivering them, no doubt in the measured way that he always talked. I've never heard Kenny talk fast. Everything he's ever said to me seemed to be delivered in a very deliberate tone and with the standard central North Carolina accent.

I don't know why some people live and others don't, and I guess at the end of the day, I really don't want to know. Most people chalk it up to "well, it's either your time or it isn't," but that reeks of Calvinism and predestination and makes us all merely pawns on a chessboard. It would seem to make prayer irrelevant, except for as a coping mechanism. If that were the case, then who would ever truly pray for anything? I'm not pretending to have the answers, or mocking anyone who thinks they do, nor am I questioning anyone's faith. This is just something I've come back to again and again over the past months, and staring at the article on my computer screen, and seeing my uncle, no doubt blessed by someone or something, very much alive there in the picture. He'd had a chance to pray as he lay there with his assailant reloading his gun. He said so. He'd prayed not to get hit in the head or heart. I think about my dad, who literally didn't have a prayer as his head made contact with the vehicle that felled him. I'm not crying about fairness here, even though I don't doubt that I have every right to do so. I think about my brother, who had nothing but prayers as his life slowly slipped away from him in his final months, and can't help but wonder about it. I hear about purposes and plans, and that's really of no use or comfort to me. I don't see the logic of a plan that rests on taking a 25-year-old man away from his young wife in the prime of their lives, and I don't really care to see said logic, if there is any. Some will say that the logic isn't mine to understand. Fine. It isn't. But if it isn't for me to understand, then don't patronize me by saying so. Knowing that I'm not supposed to know the supposed answers isn't going to help me feel any better for being blind and dumb and in the dark about the master plan. Knowing all of that isn't going to make me fondly acknowledge the gaping voids that are left in my existence for the sake of this plan.

I went way off the road here. Sometimes you start out writing, knowing exactly where your thoughts will carry you and where the prose will end up going. Sometimes you don't.

Though I grieve, and hurt, in reality, I think what hurts the most isn't that Dad is gone, and that I'm not going to see him again. What hurts the most is how hard he struggled and fought, and how he tried so hard to get over the hump time and time again, and got knocked back over and over, and kept trying, how he managed somehow to put our fractured family back together again 20 summers ago, how he tried so hard to give us the things we needed, and how he never lost hope that someday all the hard work, all the struggle, would pay off with some great reward. Some people will say that he's probably enjoying a great reward now. Perhaps. I just would have loved to see him bask in some level of comfort and security here on Earth though. He always told me he figured he'd never retire, and I guess he was right. But as hard as I saw that man work over the past 30-some years, I don't know of anyone who more deserved the right to get to that point.

I guess that's why I prefer to think of these events as just being events, random in nature and scope. God or no, it's just easier for me to reach the conclusion that what happened to my father just happened, and what happened to my uncle, miraculous as it seems, just happened. Because for me to get into looking at the events, and having to conclude that somehow my uncle found favor where my dad didn't is a notion that's entirely impossible for me to stomach.

Anyway, I guess I'm rambled enough. To those who read, thanks for enduring my rambling.

So a couple of gubernatorial candidates who attempted to make faith a cornerstone of their campaigns went down to defeat on Tuesday.

One, Ernie Fletcher, incumbent from Kentucky, lost after a hiring scandal marred his only term in office. He made a last-ditch overture to conservatives on Monday by ordering that the Ten Commandments be displayed in the Capitol building in Frankfort, alongside other historical documents. This also appeared to be in response to his competitor's touting of faith. In Mississippi, a Democrat ran against the Republican incumbent and lost, after wasting no opportunity to extol his faith in public, including clutching a Bible in his television ads.

Now, whether these men are sincere or not is not really relevant here. Do I personally believe that they are? Of course not.

Politicians of all stripes feel more compelled to make a show of faith these days, and frankly, it bothers me. I'm not anti-religion (well, yeah, I guess I am, but to each his or her own). I just get agitated with politicians who are almost certainly doing this for show.

There are people who no doubt believe that a man or woman who expresses belief in God and prattles on endlessly about it in public is more qualified to hold public office than someone who may not believe or may be more reticent to discuss these matters in the public square. These people are misguided. Professing belief in a deity of any sort does not automatically make a person more fit for office. I don't believe for one minute that what a politician does on Sunday mornings has any bearing on how they'll perform their job duties. It's insane. Yet here we have the likes of Hillary Clinton pandering to the masses, making a complete idiot of herself by going into a black church and trying to act like something she clearly isn't. Maybe she does believe. But anytime I see a snowy white politician in a black church on a Sunday, trying desperately not to look like the stiff white person he or she indeed is, I feel like people of faith everywhere should be insulted.

As for Governor Fletcher's order to install the Ten Commandments in the Capitol? I don't see it as much of an issue. It was clearly a pandering move, so to even consider it an affront to religious freedom or state endorsement of a particular religion is absurd. This wasn't about pushing one's faith, or attempting to use the government as a bullhorn to announce it. This was clearly an attempt to appear a certain way. And for once, the voters didn't bite on it. The incumbent went down by over twenty percentage points.

Still, as the primaries near, all these candidates for president will in some way, shape, or form attempt to convince us of how much faith means to them. Even as there are a million issues more pressing than this, it'll still be front and center. Republicans will attempt to paint any Democratic nominee as a godless and unpatriotic, while Democrats will naively take the bait and attempt to fit their square selves into the round holes lined up for them. All the while, the real issues will sadly be ignored.

I believe in belief. I don't have much of a problem with people of faith, and I don't even have a problem with those who proclaim it loudly. I've just always felt like faith is an inner thing, and the journey to faith is an inward journey. My dad is forever harassing me to "get right with God," because he assumes that I'm not just because my ass isn't in a church pew on Sunday morning. He assumes that if someone isn't on his program, that person isn't on God's program, and that's ultimately where politicians proclaiming to be guided by God get into trouble with me. I don't want a politician who is acting in a way that he or she claims is what God said to do. I want a politician who acts in the best interest of his or her constituents, who will do what is best for the people, not what necessarily will appease the voices he or she hears, which may be God, or for all I know, may be the voices of delusion. I also understand that Dad acts the way he acts because Christians are conditioned to spread the word and convert nations and whatnot. Fine. Maybe that's why I fell away from it all. You see, ultimately, I'm not much concerned with what someone else believes, or if they believe as I do. I'm not under any illusion that any of us will ever figure it out. All I have is the path in front of me, and if you come over with your map, you're probably going to get us both lost with your navigation. I used to discuss what I believed much more readily with people, but nowadays, that stuff is for me, my mind, and my personal consumption. If you ask, I'll probably give a vague outline of what I believe, but I'm not going to come up to you and start going on about what I feel is true. Besides, the chasm between one's actions and one's words often is so great that it's a waste of time to even speak in the first place.

Boxer Roy Jones, Jr., in an obvious statement of solidarity where Michael Vick is concerned, compared the disgraced quarterback to Jesus. Obviously, this comparison needs to be tested.
Here's the tale of the tape.


Circumstances of Birth and Early Childhood
Jesus: Born in a manger
Vick: Grew up in public housing in Newport News, Virginia

Nicknames
Jesus: Son of God, Prince of Peace, The Everlasting Father, the Messiah
Vick: Ookie

Miracles
Jesus: Walked on water, among many others
Vick: Beat the Packers in the playoffs at Lambeau Field

Respect for Life
Jesus: Brought Lazarus back from the dead
Vick: Drowned dogs

Knowledge of friends
Jesus: Sat at the table at the Last Supper and said, "One of you will betray me."
Vick: Defiantly proclaimed his innocence and never saw it coming when ALL of his accomplices flipped on him

Audience
Jesus: Attracted huge crowds numbering in the thousands for his sermons and whatnot
Vick: Sold out the Georgia Dome on Sundays

Condemnation by vocal groups of people
Jesus: Had the Jews clamoring for his crucifixion
Vick: Had PETA demanding that the Falcons cut him

Crime?
Jesus: Blasphemy
Vick: Dogfighting

Guilty?
Jesus: Not a chance
Vick: Probably

Pleabargain?
Jesus: Not a chance
Vick: Of course

Sentence?
Jesus: Death
Vick: Probably a year in the pen

Comeback
Jesus: Resurrected three days after death
Vick: Will probably make half-assed attempt to return to football after serving a year in the pokey


I'd say Jesus gets the slight edge here.

Procrastination always has a way of bringing me here.

It's been a messed-up couple of weeks. Work has been a constant. There's so much to do and so little time to do it. Sal and I are perpetually playing catch-up on the cleaning, and the place almost always has a "colossal dump" motif going. Add to this the news that I got earlier this week.

My sister informed me that the family is coming to visit. Next week.

Now, to be fair, if things had gone the way they were supposed to back in May, my sister would already be here visiting. That fell through. The original plan was for us to meet Mom and Dad while they were spending a weekend in the mountains of Tennessee, get my sister, and come back here. They would come out this way to pick her up in a few weeks. But that fell apart. Amber had told me that Mom and Dad planned to visit sometime in June. I assumed that any date chosen would be chosen near the end of the month, and announced with some advance notice.

All of this is compounded (and this is pretty much my fault) by the fact that my parents and I don't talk. I know. Wrap your head around that one. They're coming for a visit but we aren't talking right now. I figure they're coming to see their granddaughter, and hopefully that will be the case as I will pretty much be at work for the duration of their visit. I could have put in for vacation for next week, but I don't like having my hand forced. It was bad enough burning a vacation day today to do some much needed cleaning and making space for three more people in a house that does a poor job of containing three people and all their amassed crap.

Does it sound like I'm a bit irritated by this visit? I guess that would be because I am. While I am looking forward to spending time with my sister, I really have no inclination towards spending much time around the folks. I'm not actively angry at them right now. Things have just changed. They're different. In the past year and a half, I've just come to realize that they're them and I'm me, and there isn't much overlap.

For the newcomers in the crowd, I guess I should explain how we got to this point. Briefly.

My brother Jamie passed away in January of 2005 after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 25. His death, in the way family deaths often do, pretty much ripped the family to shreds. My parents turned on my brother's wife, and pretty much demonized her for everything she did, and that pissed me off to the point where I just stopped talking to Mom and Dad. After one particularly irritating October conversation, I just decided I'd had enough and quit calling. No calls at Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays. Nothing. I was able to get some distance from the situation, and just not worry about it. The aforementioned sister-in-law, however, still keeps in close contact with these people who have done nothing but question everything she's done in the aftermath of her husband's death, and desperately tries to maintain some semblance of ties with them. I think she's crazy to do it, but I guess maybe she does it out of love for Jamie.

Most of the conflict between the parents and me pretty much comes from the fact that, since my brother first got sick, my parents have become ultra-pious, while I have slowly drifted towards not really believing in anything at all. My parents' newfound religion has led them to categorically condemn pretty much anything anybody does. It led to my Dad castigating his daughter-in-law for having alcohol in her house. It led to Mom and Dad ripping on her for daring to move on into another relationship some six months after my brother's passing. It led to them constantly harassing me over whether I was going to church or not. I've consistently told them that I don't have the time or the use for getting up early on Sunday morning.

I'm not going to say to a man that my brother's illness eroded whatever faith I may have once had. In truth, I've been heading down this road for a long time. I understand that faith isn't something that you base on reason or logic. It's on another level altogether. At the same time, I firmly believe that God, or whatever it is that set the wheels in motion, has to operate on some sort of logic or guiding set of principles that keep things going. God doesn't get to be God by acting irrational, or emotional, or getting caught up in the personal lives of the six billion plus inhabitants of Earth. Logically, I have to believe this is the case.

I never bought into the notion that God was going to heal my brother or make him well. Because for me to buy that, I would have to consequently buy the notion that God had made him sick in the first place. It's easier for me to say that it happened. Things happen. A few weeks ago, the Pope went to Auschwitz, and lamented that God didn't listen or do anything about the Holocaust, and he asked God why "He" tolerated the atrocities that occurred there. But does that make sense? Who really tolerated the Holocaust? God? Or the millions of Europeans who stood by complicitly while the Germans filled the railcars with Jews? You'd think the fucking Pope would have more of a grasp on things of this nature. I guess that it's easier to say that God tolerated it than to acknowledge the deafening silence from Pope Pius and the Catholic Church during that time.

But anyway, it's just gotten easier for me to just accept that things happen. My brother got sick because of hereditary factors, likely coupled with an already compromised immune system that stemmed from his non-functioning adrenal gland, which he had dealt with since birth. I also think that, once he started listening to everyone telling to hand over the fight to God, and convincing him that God would heal him, he pretty much ceased to be the badass that I'd always known growing up, the kid who battled through multiple hospitalizations in his infancy, who survived head surgery at just over a year old, who never let his short stature, or his condition, or the fact that he was on medication his entire life ever compromise his ability to do anything. I think that if he'd made it his fight, he might still be here. I don't blame him for ceding the fight though. Maybe after 25 years of fighting, he was fought out.

Jamie told me a story a few months before he passed, and months later, I still don't really know what to make of it. He called it a near-death experience, or more to the point, that he was dead, and came back. He saw Jesus and Satan fighting over him. From what I understand, when he told the story to friends who were with him at the hospital, several cried, and a few had to leave the room. It was apparently pretty moving to them.

I listened and really didn't know what to think. Do I believe that my brother was on some unearthly plane watching the supreme forces of good and evil fighting over his soul, or whatever? No, I don't guess I do. Am I saying that my brother made it up? Absolutely not. There is no reason to think that. I guess I'm saying he dreamt it. My mom had told me the story before Jamie did, and Mom used it as irrefutable proof that God was at work here. I just kind of stood there, holding the phone, not really knowing what to say here. Well, I knew what needed to be said. Jamie was dying, and all anyone was concerned about was God and religion and pumping Jamie full of the gospel.

There was Dad, cajoling an increasingly infirm son to get out of bed and go waste an hour in a church, when any decent parent would have been spending what anyone could have seen as being the final days of their son's life doing more pleasant things with him. There was Dad, threatening to turn off the satellite he was furnishing for Jamie and Joy unless Joy cut it back to just the religious stations. I can understand there was a sense of desperation on my Dad's part. But here's the thing. Do you really think that God is stupid enough to fall for such an obvious ploy? God, if God is up there taking prayer requests, surely must realize an obvious attempt to trade in an exercise in faith for some sort of miracle or favor, right?

Obviously, all of this didn't work. Jamie's condition rapidly deteriorated between Christmas and his death not even a month later. I talked to him on webcam Christmas night, and he looked pretty good. The decline after that was so swift, I didn't have time to get my vacation in to visit before he passed. I was two days late. I have to live with that, but I've made my peace that I wasn't a bad brother.

The night of the funeral pretty much demonstrated to me how things were going to be. Dad already was acting as if he were going to attempt to lay down rules in what had been his son's house, going so far as to say there'd be no drinking in his son's house. Nevermind the fact that he didn't own his son's house. That's just Dad. He's pushy and self-righteous, and when he's convinced he's right, there's nothing you can say to persuade him otherwise. He'll have a fucking cow when he sees the amassed liquor in our cabinet.

Then there was Mom and Dad's attempt to have another child, which was probably the straw that broke the camel's back with me. My parents, respectively 53 and 50 at the time of the attempts, had decided that the one way to help my Mom through her grief and provide her some happiness was to have another kid. At 50. Nevermind those other two kids they had, or that grandchild they had. I said at the time when I wrote about this that I instantly felt orphaned. I still do. I'm guessing menopause or common sense struck, because I haven't heard anymore of that nonsense in awhile.

And now, I have to figure out how to welcome two people into my house when I have absolutely nothing to say to them. It's not that I haven't called on purpose so much as I don't really have anything to say. When I'd call them last year, I never felt like anything I had to discuss in my life out here registered with them at all. Everything was "We miss Jamie" or "Joy did this, and we think that's wrong." I understand missing Jamie. I miss him too. But if I go on about that all the time, I neglect what's still here. I still have one sibling. And even though there have been times when I've been irritated with her over the past few years, and I'm still really wanting her to get on her feet and make a life for herself, she's the only sister I have. And if I can't treat her with the same reverence in life that we have for Jamie in death, then I'm not much of a brother at all. I understand that this sort of attitude towards her runs completely counter to the way I view my parents at this point, and pretty much makes me a hypocrite.

I'm okay with that though.

I know I've already written a bit about the controversy surrounding the movie for Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, but after reading some of the editorial articles and hearing about the protests and attempts around the world to censor the movie, I felt compelled to say a little bit more about it.

The heart of what got me to writing this morning was an editorial that appeared in Friday's USA Today. It was entitled "Code Not Benign." And the arguments it makes for not seeing the movie are truly truly ignorant.

Our writer starts off by pointing out that some Christians and Christian scholars have suggested that seeing the movie and reading the book would be a good thing for people of that faith, because it might spur them to "engage the culture" and possibly use the episode as an attempt to evangelize those who may be more inclined to buy the premise of the movie than the premises presented in the Bible. Not a wholly unreasonable idea. I mean, if a Christian's faith is strong enough, what's seeing a movie going to do to it?

Well, this guy then says that if we're going to do that, we must encourage Christians to read other infamous works, like Mein Kampf by Hitler or Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. If there's a comparison to be made here, I'm missing it, because the previous two books are definitely non-fiction, and, as I've said before, I'm pretty certain Mr. Brown's book was a bestseller on the fiction lists. Comparing the book to works by two infamous dictators is more than a little misleading as well. I don't think Mr. Brown has any totalitarian designs on the United States.

Where the author really really messes up is when he says this:

"It would be wonderful to believe Christians can argue the facts to Dan Brown's hate-filled, fictitious attack on Jesus Christ, Christianity, the Bible, Christians and history. The truth is, however, that many people have not read a Bible or understood their faith sufficiently to counter the story's intricacies."

Well? Who's fucking fault is that? Better yet, why in the world would you believe in a religion where you haven't read the owner's manual? That's just stupid. This is basically saying that most Christians shouldn't see this movie because they're too ignorant to refute it or too easily swayed and might put some stock in it.

He asks if the average Christian knows what the Gnostic Gospels are, and how much familiarity the average Christian has with them. Well, again, who's fault is that? That's what the average Christian gets for taking for granted that the Council that got together and decided which books made the cut for the Bible are indeed all that needs to be said about God and Jesus. If you haven't read the Gospel of Judas, or the Gospel of Mary, or the Gospel of Thomas, how can you just assume that those books have nothing to offer in the way of a supplement to the books that already comprise the New Testament? I'd have to think they're at least as tangentially related to the ministry of Jesus as some letters written by Paul when he was in the Roman Hoosegow.

The man expresses dismay over the fact that the movie might increase prejudice towards Christians, what with its "virulent paganism," and "falsehoods and scurrilous conjecture." Again, can we get back to the premise that this is a novel. It is fiction. It only has as much credence as you are willing to lend to it. I've read The Wind In The Willows probably four or five times. I love the book. But I am under no impression that a frog could suddenly come careening by my house driving a car. I realize that it is a story, created by a man. Perhaps some of the seamier aspects of the book are rooted in rumor and whatnot, but if you don't believe it, isn't that good enough for you? If someone else is gullible enough to have their faith torn down over a novel, how much do you suppose that faith was really worth in the first place? Why are you going to fret over someone too fucking dumb to think for themselves in the first damn place?

The most depressing aspect of this is that there's this general assumption the world over, in all of the attempts to censor the movie, or have really unnecessary disclaimers added to the beginning stating that the movie isn't real (which should be obvious), that people are fundamentally incapable of critical thought. That's the disturbing part. Church bigwigs and theological pundits assume that if this movie is seen by the populace, they'll willingly swallow it without the slightest thought. The hypocritical part of that is that, by the same token, these same people want their flocks to just naively swallow a 2000-year old book as truth without the slightest thought. What's the difference?

I admire people who have faith that is rock-solid and is real. What I can't abide by are people whose response to anything that might hold some sort of critical light up to their faith is to stick their fingers in their ears and go, "La, la, la, la. I can't hear you."

Still funnier is the quote I read in another editorial. I don't have it at hand, but the gist of it is this: "The Da Vinci Code would have you believe that Jesus got married and had kids. Christian conservatives would have you believe that this man was born of a virgin, walked on water, and came back to life three days after being killed. Now, to the impartial observer, which story sounds more like fiction?"

Hmmm?

Two for Sunday. Wow.

Let's see what we've got.

I guess that whole "The Gospel Of Judas" thing is really causing an uproar in Christian circles. While I haven't read it, I have read enough to get the idea of what it's supposed to be about, and I have to wonder what is so unreasonable about it.

Now while I don't know that Jesus would have gone to Judas and said, "Look, you're the one. You've got to do this," I'm not going to say the idea is entirely without merit. My reservations about this particular text would be that if you read the four Gospels, Jesus generally talked, even with his disciples, in the most oblique of manners. He talked very indirectly, couching many of his teachings in parables and figures of speech. If you can take the four Gospels at face value (and given that they are pretty much the known record of Jesus' life and ministry, if you're going to take anything at face value, those four books would be it).

At the same time, this sudden need to demonize Judas misses a greater point. Was Judas that bad? I mean, consider it. Judas was a necessary piece to the story. You can bad-mouth him all you want, and Pope Benedict certainly did rip on Judas earlier this week, but here's the deal. If Judas doesn't hand Jesus over to the Romans, there's no crucifixion. No passion. And without that, there's no resurrection. It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it. For that matter, the demonization of the Jews in some sectors of the Christian faith is equally misguided. If you believe that the Jews had Christ crucified (and that really defies reality, because crucifixion was a Roman punishment for Roman crimes), then in a sense, you have to say that the Jews helped enable the salvation scenario. For that matter, you may as well send a thank-you card to Pontius Pilate, if you believe that he had a hand in it as well. If the plan was preordained, then all of these people were just reading their lines, so to speak.

___________________________________


Here's one. Tiger Woods got into some hot water with a British disability society over a comment he made after the Masters on Sunday. He was referring to his lackluster day with the putter, and said, "Once I got on the greens, I was a spaz." Seemingly innocuous remark. But no...

The society in question, Scope (formerly known as the Spastics Society), says that "spaz" is an offensive and derogatory word for people afflicted with spastic paralysis, a form of cerebral palsy. Well, it's an offensive word in a host of other countries. The United States, to my knowledge, is not one of them. A spokesperson for the group suggested that we were two countries divided by a common language, and suggested that Woods would be "devastated" to find out he'd use a term that would offend his fans, disabled or not.

And Woods, spineless little bitch that he is, apologized.

Really, now. Is this where we're heading? You can nail a guy for making an innocuous remark directed at himself, doing so in a place where the term generally doesn't have an extremely negative connotation, just because someone across the big pond acts like a spaz about it. If I were Tiger Woods, I would have replied, "Don't be such a fucking spaz about it." But he's doing what Jordan always did. Be bland and inoffensive as possible to keep those monster endorsement checks coming in. Which is stupid. Woods already has more money than any of us could ever count. Maybe it's easy for me to say because I'm not rich, but at what point does the sacrifice of any sort of personality become a detriment, even in the face of a mountain of money? I mean, doesn't the temptation to say, "Fuck it. What are they going to do? I'm bloody rich" loom large at some point. They would have gotten an apology from me at gunpoint, and only at gunpoint. Fucking spazzes.

I heard there was some sort of football game on this afternoon. Can somebody help me out here?

"Tommy, you've just been named MVP (Most Vapid Personality) of your latest journal entry. What are you going to do now?"

"I'm going to Disney World!"


We're going totally random here.

In the old Atari Asteroids arcade game (the actual black-and-white arcade game, not the version for the Atari 2600), the asteroids resemble nothing so much as they do mushrooms.

There's been a bit of controversy over the publication in a Danish newspaper of some cartoons that are a bit critical of Islam. What's truly disturbing is how no one, no one at all, will reprint the cartoons? Though some might say that this is out of respect for Islam and to not further disrespect the millions of Muslims who are fairly pissed off about the cartoons, I have to say that I disagree with this notion of capitulating to these people. For one, it smells like fear instead of respect for faith.

I have seen the cartoons, and frankly, I think they're pretty damned funny. In fact, I think anytime we as a society make fun of religion, the world is automatically a better place. And the fact that so many people got worked up over these cartoons is fucking hilarious. To those Muslims who are so pissed off over this, going, "This is an affront to our faith," just listen to what I'm going to say next.

Ready?

Are you listening?

Are you really really listening?

Okay. Here goes.

They're fucking drawings. Get over it.

I would also point out that the reactions of many Muslims has been to resort to violence, which, correct me if I'm wrong, would pretty much validate the premises of many of the drawings. And, offensive or not, the one where Mohammed (or however they're spelling it this week) has a turban shaped like a bomb was incredibly creative.

And anyway, how hypocritical are many of the people who are raising hell anyway? Do not many of the countries of the Islamic world openly do the same sort of thing to Judaism? Do not many of those countries openly teach their children how wicked Jews are and that Israel must be destroyed? Is not much of the rhetoric of more fundamentalist Islam steeped in the advocation of violence against infidels and nonbelievers?

For that matter, you can make the same sorts of claims about fundamentalist Christianity, minus the proclivity towards suicide bombings and whatnot. A literal reading of Revelation would suggest that Christianity is at least as inherently intolerant and violent towards other faiths as militant Islam is.

The bottom line here is that free speech should trump the right of Muslims not to be offended. Shame on the media outlets of this country for not reprinting the cartoons for fear of offending Muslims. Why?

Because this sort of behavior will empower the would-be terrorists who won't have any qualms about silencing you and taking away your right to believe and worship the way you would choose. Terrorists who won't have any problems with making fun of your Jehovah, your Buddha, your Jesus, your Zeus (there's gotta be somebody who still believes in him). People who won't respect the rhetoric or religion of others have absolutely no reason to expect likewise in return.


Perhaps you've heard about this guy who went on the warpath in a gay bar in Massachusetts. Well, he somehow found his way to Arkansas and got killed in a shootout with cops. But that's not what interests me about this story.

One of the people who frequents the club where the guy attacked patrons with a hatchet and gun said he wished the attacker had lived so he could be put on trial for a "hate crime." In fact, one of the charges the guy was to have been presented with was "civil rights violations."

What? Okay, in case everybody missed the episode of South Park where the guys made fun of the concept of hate crimes, here goes. If I commit a crime against you, particularly if it is a violent one, then it goes without saying that I didn't particularly like you at the moment that I did it. And anyway, like the guys said on South Park, the motivation for a crime shouldn't affect the sentencing for said crime. If I kill someone, I kill someone. But the fact that I killed them because of their race or sexual orientation shouldn't add any weight to that. Killing is killing. It's bad. Period. Charge the guy with attempted murder. Fine. But this piling on with "civil rights violations" is stupid. If I attempt to kill you, it would go without saying that I was violating your civil rights. I mean, come on now. Much was made of the guy being into Nazism. So? What does this have to do with the fact that he attempted to kill a bunch of people? It's immaterial. The crime itself is the whole issue. Trying to say that it's that much worse because of the man's personal beliefs is suggesting that the lives of "protected groups" in America are somehow intrinsically more valuable than others. And that's bullshit.

The mayor of New Orleans, Tom Nagin, recently declared that God was mad at the United States. He said that Hurricane Katrina, and the various other storms that hit the U.S. during 2005 were proof that God was upset with America, and the black community. He also said that New Orleans would be a "chocolate city" once again because that's what God wanted. Could you imagine that this disaster happened in, oh, Provo, Utah, and the mayor declared, "This town will once again be snowy white because that's what God wants?" That particular mayor would be strung up. Nagin also used the Hurricane to get in another shot at the Bush administration for the war in Iraq as well, saying that the Hurricane was partly punishment for that. Great. So it's punishment for the Bush administration and for blacks, but the only people who really lost anything were the blacks. Got it? Nagin later apologized for some of his remarks, saying, "I need to be more sensitive and more aware of what I'm saying." Really? Ya think?

Anyway, I thought this was hilarious. Here is a man who couldn't figure out, "Okay, Category five hurricane heading our way. Maybe I should get our citizens out of town." But now he claims to know what God's emotions (a ridiculous notion, an omnipotent being having human emotions) are and that God has beef with our country. Nagin didn't say if we were supposed to sacrifice any bulls as a sin offering or anything.

I'm discomforted, and yet oddly amused, by the fact that we have so many people in elected office and other prominent stations in our society who have a personal conduit to God, but yet all say that God's telling them something different. Now, I'm no theologian. I'm not going to attempt to persuade or dissuade using what little scripture I can quote because it's empty for me to attempt to use someone's holy writ against him or her when I'm not sure that I believe those words in the first place. Nevertheless, I think I have a pretty decent grasp on what God isn't and what God doesn't do.

God is no more on our side than God was on the side of the terrorists who crashed the jets into the Towers on 9/11. God doesn't take sides in human conflicts where objective right and wrong can't be established. Yes, the attacks were horrible. But more level-headed people in the Islamic world have grievances against America too. To suggest that we're wholly innocent in this is to delude yourself and to suggest that God is waving an American flag is just plain fucking stupid.

God doesn't care that we're in Iraq, and doesn't care if we "liberate" it. God doesn't strike down elderly Jews, like Ariel Sharon, for policy decisions. God doesn't have a "chosen land," and if God did, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be a shithole in the desert. God doesn't care if you have a foreskin. God doesn't want you to have sex solely for conception, and doesn't give a rat's ass about birth control. I know too many women who are on birth control simply because they'd bleed 28 days out of the month otherwise. I'm pretty sure God doesn't want these women suffering needlessly simply because the unintended side effect of the cure is a few prevented pregnancies. I mean, when you come right down to it, "Not tonight, I've got a headache" is a form of birth control.

God does not want your money, nor does God need it. God does not think the United States is great. I'm pretty sure God doesn't have an opinion on the U.S. one way or the other. God doesn't care about nations, which are man-made concepts. God won't deal with me as an American, if God deals with me at all. It will be as an individual. God does not appear in grilled cheese sandwiches, highway underpasses, or statues that cry, bleed, piss, shit, sneeze, et cetera, et cetera.

God does not send storms to punish people. Hurricanes are naturally occuring phenomena in warm bodies of water. If you build your house near the coast in a low-lying area, you may see your house destroyed. What happened to New Orleans was simply a matter of the odds finally catching up with them. You can build your house in an area like that, and have it destroyed, and chalk it up to God's vengeance, and repent of whatever imaginary wrong you've committed against God. Then you can rebuild your house and have it happen all over again. And when it does, it will reveal that your true sin is being stupid. Besides, all of this talk makes God seem like a little boy holding a magnifying glass up to the sun to burn all of us little ants on the sidewalk.

God doesn't care if you have sex before you get married. God doesn't care if you get married. Marriage isn't of God anyway. The state regulates marriage. And before that, marriage was simply a way of getting a bit of land or livestock in exchange for a daughter. God doesn't rest, nor did God need a breather after creating the universe. God isn't interested in destroying it all either. Destruction is a patently human impulse, one we've thoroughly mastered. We don't need God's help fucking things up.

God didn't write the Bible. Men did. Watch how a story changes in the retelling when it just goes through ten people, and that's just an infintesimally small fraction of how much "God's word" has probably been altered. And if God was going to build a heaven, it wouldn't be the Fort Knox-on-steroids described in Revelation. Gold and jewels have no value to God. We as humans put value on those sorts of things. God doesn't brand our infants with original sin either. I don't know about you people, but my child was PERFECT when she was born. Perfect. All of our kids are perfection when they are born. We fuck 'em up.

God may have a plan, but God didn't tell you or me what it is, and attempting to divine what that plan is is futile. If any of us were that smart, God would be out of a job.

And finally, God doesn't give a damn about sporting events or awards shows. And every athlete, musician, or actor who ever thanked God for helping him or her win a sporting event or an award greatly overestimates the importance of sports, music, and movies in the grand scheme of the universe. That Milli Vanilli won a Grammy once upon a time should be overwhelming evidence of this.

God didn't tell me to write any of this.

Everybody now...to the tune of "Jesus Just Left Chicago" by ZZ Top

"Jesus Just Left Dover"

Jesus just left Dover, PA
And he's bound for Virginia Beach
Well now, Jesus just left Dover, PA
And he's bound for Virginia Beach
Working on getting there
Got holier-than-thou televangelists to reach

Took a jump into the school's science class
Darwinism turned into intelligent design
Took a jump into the school's science class
Common sense turned into intelligent design
Yeah, yeah
To teach science is to err, but to teach dogma is divine

Ah, take me with you Jesus

You might not see him in person
But you'll see him just the same
You might not see him in person
But you're going-to-hell-evolution-monkey-to-man-believing-ass
Might see him just the same
Yeah yeah
You don't have to worry
That the idea for this song was pretty fucking lame

I'm Tommy and this is what's in the news for the Sunday program.

The Nashville, Tennessee NBC affiliate pulled the new show The Book Of Daniel after getting complaints from people who were too fucking stupid to turn their televisions to another channel. Well, that's the way this reporter sees it.

WSMV, the affiliate in question, says it received so many calls to its voice mailbox that it shut down. There were also shitloads of emails and regular letters, many of them written on church letterhead.

WSMV is the seventh station to pull the show. Most of them are in the South, further adding to the reputation we Southerners have of being fucking morons. I don't really have much of a defense either. One of the stations is in Little Rock, which firmly indicts Arkansans as being unable to find another channel on the TV either.

What I don't get is why people don't just turn the station. Don't like the show? Quit your bitching and turn the channel. It should be noted that the show won its time slot in the Nashville market. Whether people were watching out of sheer curiosity or because they liked the show, the fact of the matter is that more people in Nashville were watching that show than any other show that was on at that time. This to me says that NBC is catering to the evangelistic whims of a handful of people who want to force their own notions of morality and whatnot onto everyone else.

For those unfamiliar with the show, apparently it deals with an Episcopalian priest and his gay son and his pill-popping daughter. Jesus actually shows up and talks to the priest from time to time. Which really, is that unusual? Pat Robertson claims to talk to God all the time, and you don't hear religious types disputing that. Is it unusual to think that maybe a man of God has conversations with Jesus?

The big objections are to the language used on the show, the rampant sexuality, and the actual personification of Jesus. I don't get it. There's sex everywhere on TV. And bad language as well. A good Christian would do just as well to turn off the TV entirely. It sounds to me like the show is trying to make a simple statement here. That everyone, even people of God, have these sorts of problems. I think that's probably the part that irritates most Christians who are bitching about this show. It portrays a Christian family as being prone to this sort of thing, having gays in the family or drug abusers. Most Christians would like to think that these sorts of things don't happen to them, but the fact is that anybody can be born gay. Anybody can be born with a predisposition towards addiction. And I've heard more than one preacher say that a church shouldn't be a country club for saints, but a hospital for sinners.

I also think that these people are bitching about this show just to have something to bitch about. Like I said, it would be so much easier to just turn the television to another channel, or just turn it off altogether. I think a lot of these people just want to bitch and complain. It gives their lives purpose. It's like parents who rant against violence in video games or foul language in music. Having a protest to organize or people to harass gives their lives meaning, and keeps them from having to deal with the more mundane issues of everyday life. Writing letters, spearheading protests, handing out petitions. These things all beat changing the diapers or washing the dishes.

I'm Tommy, and that's the news. Good day.

When Pat Robertson made his latest inflammatory statements, this time regarding Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, my initial reaction was, "What an asshole. Can you get any more callous?" I was going to write about this that very night but I decided instead to hold off a couple of days and then write this piece. I didn't want it to just be a bash of Robertson or a rant about the story. That's just too easy.

This is at least the third time since 9/11 that Robertson has felt the need to weigh in with the notion that God was judging someone and punishing them for something. In this area, Robertson fancies himself an expert. 9/11? He sat there nodding his head while Jerry Falwell blamed every left-leaning group in the country for the attacks. Dover, Pennsylvania? Robertson suggested that if something bad happened to the town, God wouldn't come to help because the school board had shown some common sense in putting God out of the science class. And now, Robertson shows so much class in saying that a 77-year-old man suffering a massive stroke is God's punishment.

And he wasn't the only one. A few militant Palestinian groups called the stroke "a gift from God." When do you ever see diehard right-leaning Christians and Palestinians agree on anything?

My take on this is simple. Ariel Sharon is an overweight 77-year-old man. That he was going to eventually have something go wrong was inevitable. On top of that, he has a hole in his heart that has been there since birth and contributed to the stroke. Meaning that the road to this stroke started a long time before Sharon started dividing up "God's land." Infirmities happen to elderly people. This isn't God's punishment. This is the body inevitably breaking down. Besides, he's 77. I'd say that he definitely got the better of this life. My brother probably would've preferred that kind of "punishment" as opposed to dying at 25.

We are playing with ourselves when we attempt to discern which bad things are punishments for which bad acts we've committed in our lives. If there is a God, and that God is into that sort of thing, then you still have to account for the fact that God might not bring immediate punishment for an act. Even if I were going to entertain this lunacy, I could say that the stroke could be punishment for something else completely. And while we're here, let's look at some other angles.

Robertson was no doubt a big fan of Ronald Reagan. A person could say, "Well, he got Alzheimer's as punishment for repeatedly lying to the country saying that he didn't recall things about Iran-Contra." I mean, in terms of karmic retribution, that's a veritable Twilight Zone plot right there. But you never heard good ol' Pat say anything like that. Likewise with the Palestinians when Yasser Arafat passed on last year. They weren't likening that to any gift from God, nor were they asking themselves what they or Arafat had done to displease God.

It's easier for me to just say, "Shit happens," and be done with it. I can't sit here and believe that God had a reason for taking Jamie, be it for good or for ill. Because either way, it doesn't make any sense. It's easier for me to believe that he died just because. Because if we get into the notion of punishments for bad deeds, then it becomes clear God's grading on not a curve, but a damned parabola or something.

And then there's the meat of Robertson's comments. This notion that there is a "God's land" is garbage. God doesn't favor any piece of land any more than any other. And while we're here, if you look at the various faiths around the world, many of them have what they consider to be sacred land. You know, like the Native Americans? In fact, many of our homes are built on what they considered holy land. Perhaps even Robertson's sprawling complex in Virginia Beach. And if Israel is "God's land," God chose one shitty piece of real estate to have.

I know, I know, Robertson gets up here and says these things to garner attention and to stoke his souped-up acolytes into sending him more dough. And I also know that the next time he said something crazy like this, if we were to just all look at him, roll our eyes, and just turn the other way, maybe he'd stop this ridiculous bleating about how he knows what God is thinking. Robertson says he talks to God. I can't disprove that, even though I most certainly don't believe it. Because if I believe that Robertson talks to God, then I have to believe that God is crazy.

I'm not going to finish the credits. In the process of doing that last entry, I was sitting there thinking, "Damn, I name-check a shitload of people in the course of writing this journal." It would have been like listing each individual in the scene in The Ten Commandments where the Israelites finally get outta Dodge...er, Egypt.

Christmas has come, and mostly gone. Katie was pretty geeked about her haul. You name it, she got it. Sally was very happy with her present. And I'm loving my Satellite Radio, so everyone's cool. Katie is with her aunt and uncle seeing Christmas lights over in Blytheville, while Sally is in the bedroom watching movies on Katie's portable DVD player (which I thought was pretty neat). We visited with Sal's family earlier today and I got my customary presents (Wint-O-Green Lifesavers and more lighthouse figurines...I'm pretty much out of space for those sorts of things, too). I felt like shit (sore throat, headache) but I was a decent soldier and made it through. Now we're home.

And in the true spirit of the holidays, here is a story about those wacky Catholics. Okay, not all the Catholics. Just a few Catholics in Missouri.

Marek Bozek, a Roman Catholic priest, led what the St. Louis Archdiocese called an "illicit" Mass on Christmas Eve, and said anyone who attended the Mass was committing a "mortal sin" and risked all sorts of trumped-up Catholic penalties. I'll explain further.

St. Stanislaus Kostka Church is a church that caters largely to Catholics of Polish descent in the St. Louis area. The church has been fairly autonomous for years, due to an arrangement with the St. Louis Archdiocese that dates back over a hundred years, that allows St. Stanislaus to maintain control over its own property. Though it is nominally a member of the diocese, St. Stanislaus has seldom needed or asked for help from the diocese.

The current Archbishop, a guy named Raymond Burke, has been trying to make Stanislaus conform to the structure the other parishes conform to. That being that the bishop controls the finances and property of the churches. St. Stanislaus' assets are estimated to be worth about nine million dollars.

In the summer of 2004, Burke removed the priests from Stanislaus, meaning that until the current priest, Bozek, came in, the church had been without a priest for 17 months. That means that no one who attends church there had received the sacraments for a year and a half. Bozek came in feeling like he had a duty to make sure that these people, his people (Bozek is Polish) received Communion and all that other stuff. Burke contended that Bozek had left his other parish without permission and had taken over at St. Stanislaus without the okay of the Archdiocese. This led Burke to excommunicate Bozek and the entire church board. Excommunication, you may recall, is how Catholics throw each other out of the clubhouse. It makes the absurd claim that because you aren't in church, you can't receive sacraments, and that your soul is in mortal danger. You'll also recall that this is the same organization that branded people who had the audacity to use their brains and study scientific phenomena as heretics, sold indulgences as a means for people to buy their way into heaven, and believe that it matters whether a priest is gay or not when they're all supposed to be celibate (meaning they wouldn't be fucking anything, animal, mineral, or vegetable). It's also the organization that held the nonsensical mumblings of a senile old man to be Holy Writ for the past few years.

Theologians and scholars are divided over what all of this means. Some scholars have suggested that any sacraments administered by Bozek would be "valid, but illicit," since he hadn't been assigned to the particular parish he's working. What? This guy is a scholar? How are they illicit but valid? The guy is doing what he sees to be a holy duty, to give these people their sacramental hookup. While he's getting on with things, the Diocese is caught up in rules and regulations. Does this remind anyone of Jesus dealing with the Pharisees? Anyone at all?

The members of the board at St. Stanislaus see this for what it rightfully is. It's a power grab. The Archdiocese wants the church grounds and the assets. Given that the diocese has already prodded some Polish parishioners to another church in the area, is it unreasonable to think that the bishop intends to take control of the church and its assets and pretty much liquidate it, and then pretty much reap the spoils?

Burke has gone on record as saying to St. Louis Catholics that to "participate knowingly and willingly in the celebration of the Mass by a suspended priest is gravely sinful." Are you serious? That's what cracks me up about Catholics. They think a lot of times that they have more power than God, or that they're smarter than God. You think God wouldn't be able to see through something like this? That God's sitting up there going, "Oh, my. Those people sat in a Mass with a priest suspended by the bishop. Man, are they going to hell?" That because a man excommunicates another man, for whatever the reason, that God is obliged to back that up? Give me a fucking break here.

I just don't know. When everywhere you go, you see people doing stupid shit and then going, "God told me to do it," or "I'm doing this because it's God's word," it just makes you wonder why God is so remarkably silent about it. Actually it doesn't make me wonder. It just makes me more certain.

The whole evolution versus intelligent design fight is really really depressing to me. Are there that many people in this country that are willfully ignorant and stubborn and insistent that their children grow up without the basic underpinnings of a scientific education and doomed to fall behind the rest of the world in regard to science? Based on much of what I read, I guess the answer is yes.

Most surveys suggest that somewhere near half of the people in the United States do not believe in evolution, despite the ridiculously absurd amount of evidence to support it. I can only assume that this number is so high because of assumptions and misunderstandings regarding Darwin's basic principles. Most people hear the word evolution and go, "I didn't come from monkeys." Sad to say, but according to an article I read recently, human beings are essentially 98.77 percent chimp. The main difference between the human male and the chimp male? The brain? Nope. The testicles. Honest.

But hearing this goes against most people's tendency towards self-importance. Belief in a God isn't about relying on a higher power. It's about believing that the universe was created solely for our benefit, solely for man by God. This is extremely arrogant, and paradoxical. Even this push to put God in science class doesn't have anything to do with God. It has to do with the fact that most people can't accept the fact that we are not the be all-end all. That perhaps in the vastness of the universe, we really are insignificant. Most people can't handle that.

The people pushing Intelligent Design are particularly sinister. Though most will try to portray this as a non-Creationist, non-Christian theory with legitimate scientific backing, this couldn't be further from the truth. Pat Robertson's outburst last week regarding Dover, Pennsylvania's embracing of common sense regarding the teaching of Intelligent Design in science class pretty much demonstrates that the people pushing Intelligent Design have a religious agenda. While evolution proponents pretty much just want a science that is actually based on scientific methods and neutrality, Intelligent Design activists want science based on faith and mere speculation without having to account for methodology.

The tactics are really fucked-up. ID proponents have a tactic they call "Teach The Controversy." This is misleading because the only controversy here is the one that they are stirring up. They try to suggest that there is widespread dissent in the scientific community regarding evolution, which simply isn't true. The only people ID supporters can trot out in support of this so-called "controversy" are pseudo-scientists. They suggest that evolution is rife with holes and that it is a "theory in crisis." This simply isn't true. Are there parts of Darwin's theory that didn't pan out? Sure there are. That's science. You don't junk a whole theory based on one or two missed notions. You revise the theory based on the new data.

Another notion that ID people put forward is the idea that evolution is "just a theory." This clever bit of semantics plays on the fact that most people are really dumb and don't understand the scientific meaning of the word theory. It doesn't mean merely a hunch, one developed without any accompanying evidence to back it up. I mean, gravity is a theory. But we're not going to start teaching our children that instead of the earth acting on objects with gravitational force to hold them to the surface that there are giant vacuum cleaners just beneath the surface that hold us all on the ground. That's not very parsimonious. Neither is Intelligent Design.

Then there's the idea that, hey, since evolution is so full of holes, let's give the kids an alternate theory on the origins of species. This is flawed all over. For one, we've already discussed that evolution isn't just a crapshoot. It is legitimate and backed up by myriad evidence. For goodness' sakes, just open your eyes and look around. Look at the similarities between reptiles and birds, and consider that one of the dinosaurs, the pterodactyl, looked pretty much like a cross between a reptile and a bird, and it's pretty easy to consider that birds and reptiles have a common ancestor. Consider how there are different insects with different-sized beaks to accommodate all the different flowers in the world, and that one of Darwin's predictions he made was based on an orchid that would require an insect with a really long beak to be able to pollinate it. That particular insect was later found in Madagascar. That's science. Darwin made observations on things, and then made a hypothesis, and it was true.

And that's where Intelligent Design can never be science. Okay, you have a hypothesis. The universe is too intricate to have just happened. There must be some sort of "designer." Fine. Now prove it. Scientifically. See? You can't do it. How can you gather evidence of the supernatural? How do you quantify God or whatever you want to call this designer? The question of whether the universe was designed or not certainly isn't a ridiculous question. It's valid. It just isn't science. It's philosophy or religion. But it isn't science.

When I talk like this around friends or relatives, they automatically assume that I'm an athiest. Which isn't the case. I believe there's something out there, but I'm loath to call it God, or give it a distinctly male identity the way most theologies do. I don't really know what I think it is, but I don't think that the idea of a Higher Power and evolution are mutually exclusive notions. Wouldn't a really smart God create a universe that would perpetuate itself so that God could just stand back and let it take care of itself? Why would God create everything as is so that it would just be static? That just seems to fly in the face of reason. I mean, if nothing is supposed to happen, if we're not supposed to grow and (yes) evolve and use our brains and learn things, then what's the point? As columnist Leonard Pitts said recently in a column, I too have a hard time believing that a God would create us and give us brains and deign to have us not use them and remain willingly and willfully ignorant.

The part that bothers me the most is that the people who are pushing ID are supposedly very religious, but the tactics they are using to attempt to indoctrinate kids (and that's what's going on here) are dishonest and reprehensible. If what you're saying is valid and true and will hold up to scientific scrutiny, then why this need to obfuscate and misrepresent what's going on? On top of that, do not the tactics that ID proponents are using violate the principles that most so-called Christians purport to live by? I'm no theologian, but the statements that ID supporters trot out in criticism of evolution reek of breaking that whole "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" commandment. They talk of giving kids "a choice" but the statements that some schools are requiring science teachers to read before teaching evolution don't give kids that choice. They don't give kids that choice because the statements are blatantly biased against evolution. When a Georgia school district decided to put stickers on biology books that read "Evolution is a theory, not a fact," that is a blatant attempt by the creationist lobby to put doubt in the minds of pupils before they've read the first word on Darwin's theory. That is simply not consistent with the type of behavior that is supposed to take place in studying science.

It's time for people to wake up and realize that if ID activists are successful on any size scale in implementing this agenda in schools, we're all in trouble. If the religious right can start legislating science and what gets taught to our students as science, there isn't anywhere they can't infiltrate in an educational setting. Not to mention the fact that, while we attempt to dumb down our kids in one of the most crucial aspects of their education, kids around the world are going to be taking huge leads on our kids in the area of science. If we allow all our students to be dumbed down to the pre-Galileo days, where superstition and religion ruled the day, who's going to make the discoveries and innovations that have led to all the modern-day conveniences we have? Who's going to eradicate AIDS and cancer and other terminal illnesses? Who's going to solve our dependency on fossil fuels and create a better way to travel and heat and create energy? The ones who believe the earth was created in six days? The ones who take the Biblical account literally? An account that has God creating plants before God created day and night?

The designer may be intelligent, but obviously many of the designed aren't.

Happy Sunday. Let's see what's going on here.

In case you were wondering how long it would take before someone would invoke God in regards to Hurricane Katrina and its pummelling of New Orleans, the answer is "about a month." Congratulations to those who won their office pools, and better luck next time to the losers.

Billy Graham's boy Franklin decided to attempt to tie the devastation of New Orleans to God and religion without directly saying that God had somehow bitch-slapped the Big Easy for spiritual reasons (though he implied the hell out of it).

Here's a portion of a Yahoo news story on the subject:

Evangelist Franklin Graham said Tuesday that Hurricane Katrina could lead to a spiritual rebirth of a sinful New Orleans.

Graham, the son and designated successor of the Rev. Billy Graham, said he doesn't believe the devastating storm was a punishment from God for what he sees as the city's ties to satanic worship and sexual perversion.

"I'm not saying that God used this storm as a judgment," Graham said.

But he said the city's Mardi Gras revelry and ties to voodoo were adverse to Christian beliefs.

"New Orleans has been known for years as a party town," Graham said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from his office in Boone, N.C. "It is a city that has strong ties to the gay and lesbian movement, and these types of things."

On Monday, Graham delivered a similar message in an appearance in Lynchburg: "There's been satanic worship. There's been sexual perversion. God is going to use that storm to bring revival. God has a plan. God has a purpose."


Now if that's not saying that God destroyed this city for its so-called inherent wickedness, I don't really know what it's saying. If it were a matter of satanic worship being offensive to God, storms would hit all sorts of places. If it were a matter of the gay and lesbian movement being the big culprit, San Francisco would have a major earthquake every year, and most college towns would have constant natural disasters. It just bothers me when someone suggests, even as subtly as Graham is attempting to here, that somehow a place is getting punished by God for the activities of some of the denizens of that place. I mean, assuming there's a God that is somehow interested in knocking us down a peg when we fuck up, how could we ever know that that's the case? I mean, if everyone has fallen short, then why is the amount of "punishment" disproportional and disproportionally distributed? I see people that I deem to be rather unsavory who never have any sort of calamity befall them. But maybe that's just my subjective view of the situation. It's awful easy to sit there and say, "God's punishing you" until it's you on the end of the so-called "punishment." My brother was a faithful servant of his God. Yet all he got is what some of us (those who say things like disease is punishment from God for immoral acts) might say is "punishment" for some misdeed. We could sit here and speculate as to what sort of macabre plan God had for smiting a 25-year-old in the prime of his life, or we can chalk it up to what it really is. Bad things happen, and we don't know why. People like Franklin Graham, however well-intentioned they may think they are, are exploiting the pain and suffering of the people of New Orleans to make some sort of evangelical point. If God doesn't give the smackdown for that sort of thing, I'm not certain that God even exists.


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It is here that I unveil my wacky idea for my novel for the National Novel Writing Month thing.

Consider this. A novel whose plot is advanced almost completely by song titles.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Well, it is. And it's what I've decided to attempt.

I'm tentatively calling it Songbook.

I haven't decided exactly how I'm going to do it. If I'm just going to reach for song titles as they become necessary, or if I'm going to try to adhere to some sort of pattern. I'd thought about taking a specific artist and starting with them, and after exhausting possibilities with that artist, jumping to another one. For example, if I started with the Beatles, it might go a little something like this:

"I had to drive my car down the long and winding road to meet the girl named Michelle. She worked eight days a week as a paperback writer, under the pseudonym Eleanor Rigby. The drive felt like it would take forever, as if I were driving across the universe or something.

I saw her standing there, outside a club called Revolution. I asked her where she was looking to go.

'Nowhere, man' she told me.
'Hop in,' I told her.
'Why?'
'Because.'

We drove back to my house. She came in through the bathroom window. I was hoping that after that we might come together, but I just came everywhere else. I woke up and turned towards where I expected her to still be lying and said, 'Good day sunshine' but she had already departed. So I said to myself, 'This bird has flown.' We've had our problems from time to time, but I'm confident in the two of us and think that we can work it out."

That's eighteen Beatles titles in that short passage. I'm sure astute musical scholars will have no trouble finding them all.

Anyway, that's my plan. It'll result in an absolutely awful story, but the point is to get the pen moving on a long work of fiction, and my hope is that this goofy exercise will ultimately mine something greater. This isn't really the grand idea, but a means of maybe unearthing the grand idea. It'll be fun in any event.

That's all I've got.

I don't really have a guiding topic for this today, so let's take a look at some of the latest news, shall we?

A 14-year old girl was killed in what the news deems a "shark attack" off the coast of Florida yesterday. They call it an "attack" but let's be real here. The only tragedy here is that people continue to think that they can swim in an animal's dinner bowl and not expect any sort of repercussions. One of the witnesses to the so-called "attack" said it best: "He was determined to finish lunch." That says it all right there. You stray into an animal's habitat, you have to condition yourself to the fact that you may become part of the menu. If it sounds as if I'm being callous and insensitive, I can certainly handle that. I'm just bothered by this notion that we view these animals as being hostile. If someone encroached upon your domicile, you wouldn't just stand by and do nothing, would you?


I watched game seven of the NBA finals on Thursday night and I have to say it was the ugliest display of hoops I have ever witnessed. David Stern can talk all he wants, and try to put a good spin on things, but he has to be nervous that the two best teams in the league put on such a clueless display of basketball. 81 points from the champs? I don't think either team was aided by the extremely tight officiating, as both teams are more used to the mugging-type of defense that served Detroit so well last year. But when the officiating tendencies became apparent in the early stages of the game, neither team attempted to adjust. If I was Larry Brown, when Billups got his second foul, I would have called a time-out and said, "Look, our game isn't going to happen tonight. They're calling it too tight. Let's get some movement on offense, and do more screen-and-rolls and drive hard to the basket." This never happened. Only in the fourth quarter did Billups seem to realize that if you drove hard to the hoop, the refs would inevitably blow the whistle. Meanwhile, in the third quarter, the Spurs finally got it, and realized that in a tightly-reffed game, Tim Duncan could not be guarded conventionally by one person, leading to the Pistons dropping off perimeter shooters, who absolutely killed them. The sad part is that it took nearly three-quarters of the game for the Spurs to make this realization.

David Stern doesn't want to hear this but the age limit isn't the answer to the NBA's woes. Contraction and abolition of the salary cap are the answers. Seriously, has the salary cap helped any of the also-rans of the league get anywhere? All it has done is made it impossible for any team to put together a complete ensemble with a bench to support it. The dilution of talent from having 30 teams hasn't exactly aided that either. Put it this way. Elden Campbell saw playing time for the Pistons in the playoffs. I was watching Campbell playing against my Wolfpack when he was at Clemson when I was in frickin' junior high. He's 37 years old.


I was reading where Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger (and of Gargamel on The Smurfs) died Friday. He was 82. Even more than that, he was an inventor, and held several patents. Among these were patents for a disposable razor, a flameless cigarette lighter and an invisible garter belt. And one for an attempt at an artificial heart. A man of many talents, obviously.


My letter finally appeared in the Jonesboro Sun Monday, about a week and a half after the editors called to let me know they would use it. Seeing your words in print never gets old, and this letter had the added bonus of pissing off one of my least favorite co-workers. He got really really worked up over my dismissal of the notion that church and state shouldn't be separate. He's one of these people who is nominally a Christian, but nothing in his character embodies this at all. He is openly dismissive and/or hostile to any employee he perceives to be less than his equal. He will gesture to you to move out of the way dismissively if he's walking through without ever bothering to say "excuse me" or anything like that. He constantly talks down to everybody, meaning he doesn't say much to me because I don't suffer that sort of thing too well. I missed his histrionics over my letter as I was off Monday, but some of my friends said he was livid. They, realizing that my letter was more or less on the money, defended my side of the argument and told the guy he was wrong. I really wish I could have witnessed this.


My wife was talking to a friend online a few nights ago, and when the friend said his dad was an athiest, my wife replied, "So's my husband." I looked at her and said, "No, I'm not." She said, "You run down church and The Bible all the time. You don't believe in God." I was insistent that I do believe that something put all of this here, but the concept most people have of that thing, that being, is just way way off. Then I pretty much put it the way I have for the past couple of years when anyone presses me for a statement on my beliefs. "I believe in the God of Common Sense." This is simple. You don't need a book to tell you when you've done wrong. You know it. And when you attempt to use scripture to cover your own self-interest, you're doing wrong. People attempt to use the word of God all the time to mask their self-interest, and that bothers me. Hence, the concept of the God of Common Sense. If I'm doing wrong, I will know I am, and you'll likely hear me admit it.


Billy Graham is giving what is generally believed to be his last Crusade sermon tonight in New York City. I have gone on record before as saying that Graham is, in my estimation, the real deal when it comes to Christianity. I read his column in the paper daily, and am generally impressed at how he manages to stay on message, and avoids politicizing that message. He keeps it really simple. He avoids making overt judgements, preferring to keep the emphasis on Christ. It's pretty admirable. Even when asked about issues where he could at the very least cite the Scripture of his faith and, while possibly coming off as intolerant, at least be true to his beliefs, Graham has demurred, preferring simply to say he avoids "hot-button issues." He said that when asked about gay marriage. I admire that because with his history and his generally being revered by Christians and non-Christians alike, he could have made a statement condemning gay marriage and been well within the parameters of his holy book. But he chooses to accentuate a theme of God's love instead. Anyway, he has earned his rest. From what I gather, his wife is bed-ridden, and Graham himself has numerous maladies, ranging from Parkinson's to prostate cancer, and has to use a walker due to a pelvic fracture. Still, the man looks astonishingly well for his age (86) and his numerous conditions. I'm sure it's going to be quite a show tongiht.

Anyway, that's all I got.

It was rather discouraging to open up my Saturday edition of The Jonesboro Sun, and see an op-ed piece written by a high school junior. Even more discouraging because this kid was getting his write on despite a complete lack of ability. Oh, sure, his subjects and verbs agreed, and the writing wasn't tedious or marred by stylistic problems. His problem was that nothing he said made any sense.

The guy was going on about separation of church and state, and how it didn't exist. He tried to portray Christians as a persecuted species, and made all manner of nonsensical arguments. Naturally, I had to fire off a missive to the Sun to try and set this boy straight. It's bad enough to watch a kid get his own byline in a newspaper when you're 31 and could absolutely own this kid in a literary sense. I keep telling myself, "He has to be related to somebody. That's the only way this tripe could get published."

He compares Muslims and abortion advocates with people who attend GWAR concerts, and complains that the aforementioned groups get protected by civil liberties groups while people like anti-abortion advocates, judges like Roy Moore, and kids who want to pray in school are regarded as unlawful. And he never ever backs this up with any sort of proof, or rationale for the comparisons.

He defies the reader to find "separation of church and state" in the Constitution. Of course it isn't there. But this argument is so flawed any reasonable person would see right through it. There are myriad things that we hold as law that are not specifically addressed by the Constitution. Personally, I think any idiot would be able to infer that the separation of church and state is necessary to be able to guarantee the religious liberty that the First Amendment in fact guarantees. This is a no-brainer.

That's the thing about teenagers. They get just a little bit of book knowledge and think they know it all. This guy can't even rely on his own reasoning, and resorts to wholesale regurgitations of things he's no doubt heard on Fox News Channel.

He says he heard about teachers reprimanding kids for reading the Bible during free time in class in Jonesboro area schools, but offers absolutely no proof that this occurred. Didn't Newsweek get into some trouble over shit like this? He insists the kids were blameless, but you don't hear anybody's side of the story. It's all hearsay, and he uses this to build a case of this notion that Christians are pretty much being tossed to the lions by the godless secular folks of America.

But really, isn't it just the opposite? Don't we have a president that pretty much makes no bones about the fact that he makes policy decisions based on his religious beliefs? Is he not the most evangelical president any of us has ever seen? Have we not had state after state pass laws outlawing gay marriage and civil unions? Laws that have their basis in Biblical teachings, and have the full backing of the Christian establishment? Do not many states still have blue laws, and ban the sale of liquor on Sundays? Yes, because Arkansas is one of them. Is this law not in place due to the fact that Sunday is the Christian Sabbath? In effect, isn't this a law passed solely for religious reasons? Would anyone argue that we're closer to a godless totalitarian government than we are to becoming a conservative theocracy?

Anyway, this kid's column gives me hope. Seeing that this guy can get on lets me know that my fortune is made. All I have to do is keep knocking. The letter I got published in Saturday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was some pretty nice affirmation, and it was pretty sweet getting to show that off to my co-workers today, and having them go, "You wrote this? What the hell are you doing out here?"

Sadly, I sat at work all night thinking the same damn thing.

This episode of the Sunday program is brought to you by my phlegm. Ask for it by name.

Every now and then, I get worried that I'm just going to run out of things to say and write about. Then I read a newspaper or check out Yahoo's news page, and everything comes into focus. There will always be one more idiot out there. At the very least.

Today's first item comes from New Jersey. And I dearly wish I was making this up. A state assemblyman in the Garden State wants the New Jersey Devils to change their mascot. And I think you know why.

Craig Stanley (no relation to Lord Stanley, one would presume) says, and I quote, "This is an age where symbolism is important." He goes on further to say, "I've always cringed when people say they're going to see the Devils. The merchandise, the paraphernalia is based on the actual demonic devil. Personally, it causes a little bit of an issue with me."

Naturally, the assemblyman is introducing legislation into the Jersey House next month to change the name. If there were enough moronic legislators to go along with this, and assuming they actually could do this (I question the legality of it), the new name would be picked in a statewide competition. I'd suggest the New Jersey Hockey Team That Thinks Craig Stanley Is A Fucking Douchebag myself. All of this is even funnier given that, hell, it's not like they're ever going to play hockey again.

This is right up there with the Washington Bullets being goaded into changing their names and the uproar over Native American mascots. Get over it. If you're offended, don't be a patron. Isn't that what this country is about? Freedom of choice?


Earlier this week, a preacher at a small church in a pissant town in North Carolina made headlines by placing the following words on his church's outdoor sign, and then later retracting them under pressure: "The Koran needs to be flushed."

I don't know what I find more disappointing about this one. That the guy was moronic enough to do it, or that, when faced with media scrutiny, didn't have the balls to back it up, and wilted under pressure. Come on, hoss. If your God has the bigger dick, surely you aren't worried about coming across as an intolerant dickhead redneck Baptist from the sticks, are you? Are you?

But let's look at this. People like this preacher are Dubya's constituency. When they say things like flushing the Koran is okay, they are illustrating the fact that people on Bush's side of this whole "War On Terruh" thing have no respect for any views save their own. They have no respect for the people they're supposed to be "liberating" or helping out. Though the story hasn't been substantiated, given the average American's views on Islam and Muslims, am I supposed to not believe that this kind of thing has been going on down in Cuba? Hell, look at what our soldiers did in Iraq in the prisons. That's right there in the Middle East, not thousands of miles removed from the action like Guantanamo Bay is.

Am I indignant about it? Nope. A book is a book. I would also point out that in many of the countries where the biggest protesting is going on over our supposed desecration of the Koran (pick your spelling, I've got mine), there is no tolerance for any other religious text. Having a copy of a Bible in your possession in Saudi Arabia can bring about arrest, deportation, or even worse. So those people can stop it with the hand-wringing. Respect is a two-way street. Muslims have more leeway to practice their faith in America than they do in any Middle Eastern country. Can Christians say the same about the inverse? Hmmmm?