SILENCE

waterfall road rock formation

 

The woman in Kentucky dominates facebook today, eclipsing Donald Trump's narcissistic posturing. His face is like a caricature of a cloud blowing the winter wind. He illustrates an old mountain saying, a blow, somebody who is a blowhard. I see a picture of Trump and I see a blow. He looks like he's blowing wind in all the pictures, which is what he's doing, bloviating over vocal chords, rapping verbal graffiti of surrealist chance. I am awed to see Karl Rove's strategic mind has chosen surrealism for this election round. He's playing with confusion. It's not easy for a hawk to catch a bird flying in a flock. The corporate press the playing field. At the same time, we have this woman in Kentucky martyring herself to an egoic version of God's will with the promise of right wing talk circuit, a book, money and fame. She's a comic case of pointing the finger at somebody, three fingers pointing back at self. She's been getting three fingers of it, too. Rather than embarrass her, it appears to be stroking her ego, making her proud. Don't bother to pray for me, send money. She might even appear on Pat Robertson's 700 Club tv show. They will have to do something with the hair first. Two bad-hair people in the front of the news this week.

 

trees along waterfall road

 

I remember the song by Jane's Addiction, late Eighties, Idiots Rule. It is so true that it reminds me of the truth in a maxim I learned from Jr Maxwell, Stay away from important people. Why? The importance is all self-importance. It's ego. Only. Why waste my time around people who are all about themselves? I saw a video clip of the top dog in Australia talking to people on a sidewalk in NY. Most of them didn't know of him. He told them to remember him, move to Australia and vote for him. I thought, how does a man stand and talk to strangers telling them to remember him because he's important? This is something else I don't want for myself, the illusion of importance. It embarrassed me for him to see him talk about his importance, which is nothing at all but a mental script. It's what politicians do. It's why I stay away from them. When a politician comes to town, I stay home that day. I laugh at myself at election times for taking them seriously. Which of the self-important people do I choose to affirm as most self-important? When not one of them is somebody I'd want to meet. 

 

ferns beside waterfall road

 

A meme I found on facebook of a Byzantine-like painting of God with clouds all around him, a halo over his head, him looking downward with concern, saying, "Sigh. Why do I always attract the crazy ones?" Isn't it so. Several of the faces in the republican clown bus claim God told them this and that. The television fake preachers God chooses to talk to make me question their integrity. It answers the question before I ask it. I've an idea this vision of God amounts to a man's ego in spiritual drag, a wolf in sheep's clothing. This is God speaking. Not. It was during last election, this one and that one said God told them one thing and another. I can't help but see it as the ultimate in hypocrisy. It's speaking hypocritically. However, the people listening know it's hypocritical, but it makes a good story and they want to believe it. It's like children's make-believe games, little girl Vada giving her doll a drink of milk from an empty bottle.  Making a story to entertain self. Performing in her own play she makes up as it goes along, one gesture to the next. Dolls interact with other dolls, talk to each other. She knows it is make-believe. The game is the fun in it. 

 

 

rock beside waterfall road

 

It takes a willing audience to suspend disbelief far enough to go along with the God-told-me story and pay money to keep it going. Enough people want to hear such stories to give an awful lot of story tellers an abundant living. I feel like that's cool. They're in a round together, people of like mind gathered like birds of a feather, a circle of energy everybody benefits from in their own ways. I'm happy for them. They're not fooling anybody who does not believe God talked to them, which is almost everybody. The God of my experience is silent, as God could only be. To speak to us, God takes a human birth, grows up a human and speaks what he has to say when it is time. His words are kept in gospels to be twisted by interpretation until the life is squeezed out of them over centuries of filtering through the limitations of the human mind. It doesn't do any good for God to speak to us. I feel like silence is the voice of God. The spirit world has too many deceiving spirits for me to count on taking something from the spirit world for God. The ego is a trickster too. Nobody can fake silence. Silence doesn't make any money. Everyone has access to it. It's common as air and equally essential.    

 

trees beside waterfall road

 

 

*

 

 

 



UNTYING INTERIOR KNOTS

donkey jen at breakfast

Every day I see notice of somebody else who believes the planet is six thousand years old, like it matters. I know people who believe the earth is flat, people who went to school. I'd venture that most fundamentalists believe the earth is six thousand years old. It's fundamentalist popular theology. I have no problem with them believing they're right and everybody else is wrong, as long as they leave me out of it. In the 1950s, the time of Joe McCarthy and red scare propaganda, I sat in church hearing the preacher talk about wanting a fundamentalist theocracy, force everybody to walk the line, the very same republican talk of today. I would think while he was talking that if you want the church to go out in the world and join politics with the intent of taking over, it's the end of your church. I've seen the progression of that line of thinking unto the place now that the Congress and Senate are planted largely with "Christian" intolerance, bought cheap. They see things in black and white, missing the entire rainbow in between the poles where we live our lives. Pat Robertson is now the chief fundamentalist evangelist after Billy Graham sat on the throne half a century. I heard it said Graham was the greatest man of the 20th Century, and I thought: In what category? Slap-stick? I grew up in the choir of Billy Graham praise. 

jenny

Graham was too gross for me. He was a performer like Bob Hope or Red Skelton. Like them, he was in it for the money and attention. His performance of the appearance of piety worked for him. Though I disliked intensely that world to grow up in, seeing in the news the fundamentalist takeover of government, I have insight into where they are coming from. And now I see it every day. I saw then the only outcome will be the destruction of fundamentalism. I thought they would embarrass themselves out of existence. They embarrass themselves dreadfully and don't get it. Michelle Bachmann, for example. They don't get it because they're so popular. The billionaires club bought them a tv channel to manipulate them to work against their own interest and think they're doing something big. It worked. I've put their way of thinking so far in my past, I'm grateful for the review to articulate from memory the motivation that set me running for my life like the guy in Munch's The Scream. I don't know why it failed to take with me and not the other kids in the church. My childhood reading level got "God is love," memorized verses that said the kingdom of heaven is in the heart. Why didn't I ever hear this in church as something practical to live by? Why didn't I ever hear about compassion as a way to live? Hate the communists and justify hating outsiders. God prefers white people. The God in the church was the god of Fear, before whom we shudder, tied up in knots of guilt. Only the preacher was going to heaven for sure. The rest of us were guilty as all hell. It had me twisted up with guilt for any and everything. 

jack

Later, I had a friend in college who was Catholic and just as burned out by bogus theology as I was. Later had a Jewish friend burned out the same as I was. We found the religions we came up in empty shells found on the beach. Pretty. You can hear the ocean in them. There's something ancient and timeless about them. But the spirit is gone. It's off somewhere else with the living. My spirit was suffocated by the emphasis on fear, guilt, punishment. I found the people of my life whose intelligence I respected were the teachers at school. I wanted to be like them. They were somewhat rational, didn't live entirely in the emotional realm. I wanted out of the vacuum of an official belief system. First thing I did, like the dog let off a chain the first time, was run blindly in all directions unaware of dangers, unaware of the world outside that belief system. I wanted to sin, sin, sin. I wanted to indulge in everything I was told not to do because God didn't like it. God doesn't like anything else either. When everything is a sin, I'm free, I can do anything. It's all a sin. Guilt supreme. Control. A belief system built by the needs of the few to control the many. Then one day I came face to face, in the spirit, with Meher Baba and he told me what I already knew, God is love. This was the reward for the fifteen years dismantling, brick by brick, the construction in my head of Kansas fundamentalist theology. God is love is fun. The misinterpretation of God as fear is not fun. God is love allows me to see my donkeys with love in their hearts, embodied spirits, like humans. Under God is fear, I see the donkeys brute beasts devoid of consciousness or mind or heart. I'm able to enjoy the whole personality of my donkey friends, aware of their consciousness, mind and heart. They are aware of same in me, because I'm able to see it in them. One small example of how God is love enhances my life.

*

   

THE MYSTERY OF THE OBVIOUS

the hay barn

Perhaps the best thing for me to do is stop now. It may be best to just let it go for today. I'm in a rotten mood. Snowed in all day, didn't want to do anything. No music, no movie, no radio, little reading, minimal facebook, wanted to sleep all day and was interrupted just after I'd drifted into unconsciousness. No going back. Took grain to the donkeys in late afternoon, returning to the house immediately. I've laid about and laid about, watching my mood get moodier as the day went by. I turn on the radio and somebody is talking about cancer, turn the radio off. I don't think I have frustrated anger about anything in particular. It could be that I ate almost nothing yesterday and very little today. I tell self to eat something, have some Earl Grey tea, do something toward a new art project. I found some fir strips I did not know were here. This project will take some doing. It is nine six-inch plywood circles, half inch thick. Some plastic wood touches on each one will be necessary. Sanding them all too. Three rows of three circles held together by strips of fir three-quarters inch wide on the backside. The framework will run behind where the circles touch, rendering them out of sight. I'll have to fix each circle with screws in its place and make a system of numbers and letters to identify the locations on the framework where each circle goes. Take them off and paint each one of them, put them someplace to dry for a few months, then attach them to the framework with screws and glue. Doing anything toward it today was something I lacked the spirit for. I did find the sticks of fir, first step. 

mountain laurel

I'd so much rather put it together in my mind than get out the drill, the jigsaw, ruler, extension cord, paper and pencil. I have to be in a certain frame of mind for the construction. I need to see it clearly in my mind, and don't see this to the detail, yet, that I want to. This one is so labor intensive it stands before me like an obstacle course. It takes a certain mind to jump in. This is a particularly lazy day. Started a scrabble game this afternoon with somebody I'd played several games with. Forfeited the game this evening when I realized I really don't want to play scrabble anymore. I jumped in for a few weeks, but it took up too much time. My mind likes to make words out of letters, but it likes to do something else too. Comes a time I get tired of having all vowels. I used to search for the longest word and highest score I could get per turn. Today I put down the first thing I saw using no more than two or three letters, scoring 9 or 8 or 11, and not caring. Opponent scores 36, 28, 49, and I don't care. I see his score shoot way up past mine and don't care. Then say to self, if you don't care about any of it, why the hell are you wasting your time at it? I clicked on the forfeit button and left, promising self I won't be going back any time soon. At first, the game is about putting words together. Then it turns into strategies and numbers and scores. I can see the strategies are as endless as bridge strategies, I don't care to get that involved. I'd best stop playing it now that I see I don't like it anymore. I refuse to search for the highest score I can make per word. Knowing myself, I know when I'm done with something, it's over. No point in trying to force it, it will never come back. 

rhododendron

I have better things to do than focus my mind on making a higher score than somebody else. Why do I want to beat somebody at something? When I ask the question, Why?, it's over. I already know why. I've never taken an interest in competition. It may go back to my grandmother's wisdom she taught me with in childhood. I wanted to do something she thought foolish. She said, "What do you want to do that for? It's like a merry go round. You get on, you go round and round, you get off in the same place you got on. Where you been?" I didn't like the cold water that kind of thinking threw on what I thought was fun. But it never left me. Only heard it once and never forgot it. I don't even remember Bible verses that long I'd memorized for expectation in church. I remember Jesus wept. Woody Allen hit the nail on the head when he said if Jesus were to come back and see what all was done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up. It makes me laugh at these people who get their fifteen minutes of fame for some point of view devoid of compassion and call themselves Christian. I can only think they make Christian a bad name. Tell one that and be ready for the ensuing explosion of righteousness. I saw a funny clip yesterday on facebook of Pat Robertson, the wizened sage of the 700 (send me your money) club, warning that yoga is a Hindu trick to get us to praying, by way of mantra, to Hindu deities. We truly live in an insane society. When supreme ignorance passes for knowledge, the best place for me is at home. I'm doing facebook less, except for Daily Creative Practice page, bored by republican claims Obama is a Muslim. So what if he is. He has a Kenyan heritage. So what. The Bush family has a Nazi heritage and nobody complains about it. 

dogwood

I see how the Fake news channel has twisted the minds of half the American population, the below average half, white men, the obedient people most susceptible to propaganda, easy targets, and I want revenge. I want the world to be a better place, but it's not, nor is it going to be. It looks like globalization brought all the cultures in the world close enough together to see they hate each other. Ideally, bring everyone together in unity, kumbaya, but what happens when they see each other face to face: conflict. Beware of them Hindu deities. The Reagan Trojan Horse brought us division inside of division, divide and conquer. We're conquered. A cop kills an unarmed black man, woman or child and the video goes viral, he gets a paid two week vacation. Our government legislates against us, the judicial system decides against us. The corporate takeover of our government throughout the land regards "we the people" the enemy. Our resources are being drained from us into Swiss etc banks, shrinking the middle class into the working class, all of us the peasant class, a Mad Max world. I see this happening and what can I do? Read a book, advance an art project, have a nap, write, watch a movie? I've come to a place where I laugh at hope in myself. I can see now that civilization as we know it really is going completely away. It is at once incredibly interesting and dispiriting. Democracy gone away is not the end of it. In my lifetime I saw the pattern of anti-intellectualism in American life go all the way to anti-paying attention and then to anti-democracy. Them people up in Washington, they got things under control. Like my friend Lorne Campbell never dreamed he would live to see the Berlin wall go down, I never believed I'd see popular police state in America, though saw it coming since LBJ. I didn't take into account the full power of television. In my lifetime, I've seen television become American culture. I've seen the obvious become mystery. I warned you. I'm not in a good mood. However, I'll wake in the morning with a new light. Fare forward, voyager. Just had to ride this one out.       

home on waterfall road

*

CONCLUSIONS

     backstage by tj worthington

I've been wondering all day today if I could cease the use of abstractions, generalizations and conclusions from my writing, speech and thought. It's a tall order and it may not be to the better. I can't see self clearly enough to look back over the recent past to see how much I have used abstractions and generalizations. I tend to try not to draw conclusions, yet continue to draw conclusions, though less than before. That's what I can look toward, using abstractions and generalizations less. I don't believe in stopping a habit by cold turkey. I guess it works if heroin is the issue, but I've found that in my own inner issues cold turkey invites a backlash. I like to let something drift away until it just fades out from lack of need. I've recently listened to a friend for three days who only talks in slang, abstractions and generalizations, draws conclusions unconsciously and makes my head swim. All the time he talks, my mind is continually translating what he says into what I assess he's trying to mean in the English language as I understand it. I don't want to drop slang, because I like slang in context. Slang is a private language for a given group. Like for a long time the word "cool" was only overused by the young. By now, the word had been in popular use since about the mid Fifties. The people that were young using cool are now old using cool. It has become a part of everyday usage. It's particular group has grown older.

Slang out of context is often meaningless. Then you have code words to avoid saying nigger and nobody outside your group (republican in this case) knows you're saying the N-word, so all can cheer, "We're not racist," believing nobody gets it but them. It's not that the right wing is newly hateful. It has always been hateful and now the right wing has a voice in the post-Reagan Party, so we get to hear it daily. With Rupert Murdoch's money they buy tv networks and now the middle ground is struggling against the step-by-step walk through legislation unto police state. Since the republican coup with the "sequester," not much has been going on except seeing the working poor progressively less able to make ends meet. I tell myself that hard times become good times. Muddy Waters sang about hard times like it was not something desirable. Ralph Stanley made a banjo instrumental called Hard Times. I still have a hard time with Obama bailing out the banks, rewarding the banks for fucking We the People. Nobody who lost hundreds of thousands and millions in one second was rewarded. You see, the banks are too big to fail. We individuals are too little to notice. We have no voice. Somebody lost his retirement. Tough shit. Too little to notice. This is how We the People became We the Nobodies.


There I've done a whole paragraph of generalization and abstraction. Didn't use a lot of those kinds of words, but it all came from a generalizing and abstract imagination. I see the whole paragraph was about drawing conclusions. Searching for meaning by drawing conclusions. That's the Western way, but I'm wondering if it is a productive way, if it really does come to understanding. What if it comes to just something else to draw a conclusion about? I see Alex Jones harping his paranoid madness like if you don't send him all your money now an asteroid will hit the earth, and I laugh at where drawing conclusions can lead one. Pat Robertson draws conclusions in favor of his agenda, because that's what we tend to do. He is recently on utube telling us that religious scam artists are everywhere and we're to beware of them. Of course, everyone but him gets it. Seeing different people with political agendas drawing conclusions that pave a path to their bank account, I fall into distrust of conclusion drawing. The republican use of 1-2-3-therefore has come up with some surrealistic conclusions, something like Duck + Water + Tree = Moose. If you're a party faithful, you'll believe it because you're supposed to, if you want to be a member.


I can't join a Christian church because of an article of faith to swear to is the virgin birth, which I cannot accept. First, I see no reason to. Too many people get adamant about I'm supposed to believe it because it's the truth. Well, I don't see any truth in it. I don't see it in the gospels. I'm not going to argue about it, because it's not a social thing for me. Somebody says I'm supposed to believe it, I say, Why? The answer comes back abstract, concluded, not first hand information, but belief because it's required to believe it if you want to be a member. I don't want to be a member for that and many other reasons. I suppose we have to draw conclusions on a regular basis. I go to jaywalk, look both ways, see two cars, conclude it's safe and cross the street after these two cars pass. That's a sensible conclusion in practice. The emperor of North Korea, whose name I'll neither attempt nor look up, is challenging American Intelligence. He's saying he's going to nuke USA. Everyone on earth knows if he does, he and his entire country will be nuked to desert in one minute. But that doesn't mean he won't. It is a difficult conclusion to draw on how to take it from the American end. You know he won't do it, but that's not necessarily certain. He's already proven himself to be a sociopath, starting with his own people. If his attitude toward the rest of the world is the same as his attitude toward his people, an attitude similar to Dick Cheney's toward the American people, there is no guessing what he might or might not do. Conclusions are being drawn in DC, and none of them are certain.


It's looking like I can't get far without drawing conclusions of some sort. Like, if it's midnight, it is reasonable considering where I live to draw a conclusion that it is dark outside. The conclusions I want to be careful of are the conclusions that affirm whatever my agenda may be at the moment. I see too many times conclusions drawn to support an agenda. That's what it is that makes me distrust conclusions. I don't deny that Alex Jones has his finger on something important, it's just that his Limbaugh style of hysterical presentation makes me suspicious. It's his performance that repels me and makes me distrust conclusion drawing. I believe I'd rather be open to see what else may come along. This is a world of ever-changing everything; a conclusion is like a file drawer. In the drawer, it is out of circulation, not being tested, just held for the sake of being held. I asked my mechanic why my tires were wearing on the outsides and not in the middle. He said I don't have them inflated enough. I said I'd been told to leave a little bulge on the side of radial tires. He said it's not like that any more. Radial tires have changed and that bulge is not a good thing now. Oh. How many years have we been told that coffee is bad for us? Now it's good for us. Conclusions are constantly subject to change. Maybe conclusions are something like ego, like ballast in a ship, necessary to keep the ship upright.


* 

MANIPULATING ILLUSION

It feels good to have the temperature up in the 50s for a change from in the 20s. Some people are talking like this is the end of winter, but I'm not going to count on that. Though global warming is ending winters sooner than before, still this is early March. Our blizzards come in late March. However, as we change toward warmer weather, when the blizzards happen will change too. I would like to see early March be the end of winter, but don't think I'll count on it this year. Maybe in a few more years winter will end this early. Winter is already ending a month before it used to. I'm grateful winters don't get as cold as they used to, start later and end earlier. As the people who study weather conditions are saying, the heat is set to go way up real fast in the near future. Is this why the rich are moving underground? Through Faux Noose the 1% keep the 99% fooled, at odds with each other and completely unprepared to save ourselves from the condition created by the 1% in process of draining resources from the 99%. We the American people have been plundered unto peasantry in my lifetime. It's weird to see, considering what I was taught in school about American government is every bit as irrelevant as evangelist Pat Robertson. In the time of Reagan I saw him making us into a Third World country. We are there. It has happened.

In this new century I see Latin America passing us by. Asia already has passed us. Europe is way out there beyond us. Africa will be passing us too. The wheel of fortune is turning, "What goes up, must come down, spinning wheel, spinning round." The Reaganista strategy of funnelling the money of the working people up to Cayman's Island bank accounts that are tax free, has pulled the rug out from We The People. Our whole nation is on the downward run. I can't help recalling CIA director with the Reagan Junta, William Casey's quote, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." So far, the Republican half of the population has fallen for the disinformation. With Faux Noose the Republican tv network, they ought to keep their idiocy to themselves. It looks really bad from outside the fold. They have become the "party of stupid" by believing their own disinformation. That's the funny part. I'm not going to tell them they have become self-defeating. They wouldn't listen anyway. I like seeing the party itself destroyed from within. The Republican party has become a cancer in American life. I'm glad to see the cancer they created is consuming them first. I'd like to see McConnell and Boner both put out in the next election. Of course, they'll be replaced by even worse than they are, but I won't have to see their ugly faces anymore and their deer-in-the-headlights eyes.

The party of stupid is holding back the rest of the country like the dumbest kids in class hold the class back for everybody else. The Republican party has become a ball and chain around the ankles of our country. If we have that many really dumb people, we don't have a chance. They want us uneducated so we'll be easier to manipulte. Plus, the uneducated tend not to vote. Working against education is Republican strategy to further block voting. They know as well as I know that voting doesn't matter, but it keeps the population believing in Santa Claus. Whoever wins an election is ruled by the 1%. All allegiance to the voters is over the moment the ballot count is announced. Running for election was playing pretend, and upon winning, the game continues to be pretend. Manipulating illusion. I question myself paying attention to them, and answer that I need to know that they are working against me, not for me. They hype that they're for me, but their actions show quite a different purpose. Again, white man's belief that he is superior to black man, Asian man, Latin man and all women is what is behind the Fall of America. The Reagan Junta was the puff of wind that started the fall of the tower of cards.

Herman Melville was writing in the 1850s that white man racism will bring down the ship of state. No one paid attention. The Civil War happened. Moby Dick wasn't read at all in this country. It was read and appreciated a little bit in London. It applies again today, again in a population that hasn't read Moby Dick and doesn't intend to. A century and a half later we're at the same place again, a nation divided unto civil war, the racists creating the problems and blaming the non-racist half of the white population called liberals. We, as a nation, do these things over and over because we, collectively, have no regard for history or education. To paraphrase Gore Vidal again, when the American people can't recognize stupid, we're done for. I've come to see it that alas, we do recognize stupid. It's what the majority wants. It's the Land of Oz, color tv round the clock, a hundred channels, only misinformation coming through the corporate media "news." Everything on television is saying: Stupid is beautiful. They say it's a big dumbing down of America, but I see dumb is what the population wants. It's American culture. White man is in crisis. White man has shown himself with no bottom to how low he will go to keep power over all other races and women. This is what I'm seeing happening in Congress and Senate, white man hysterical in crisis, so hysterical that they let their stupid hang out, like when you get so mad you start blubbering. Going by the pictures I see of Teabaggers, white man is very angry unto freaking out.


*

FUNDAMENTALIST WARS

b. tomlin, untitled

Did I ever give myself a tough assignment. I watched to completion a documentary, With God On Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right. Made in 2004 for television. I supposed it would be something on the order of investigative reporting. I suspected irony in the title. Not. Turned out it was an almost 2 hour long infomercial making the case that W was God's chosen candidate, that we finally had a born-again evangelical believer in the White House. It started with Billy Graham and Ike, then Billy Graham and Nixon, until Nixon bit him with the Watergate scandal. The film gave a history of fundamentalist religion moving in on politics in America with purpose, to take over and rule the nation and the world by their belief system.



Almost immediately I saw this was an infomercial for fundamentalist thinking and regretted ordering the thing. However, I pay so little attention to that mind, having grown up in it, the very way of thinking that made me want to be an atheist, made atheism desirable, I had to flush my mind of it over a period of 15 years. My issue was with religion, not God or Jesus, though I didn't know that for a long time. Rejecting the falsehoods of religion I took to be equivalent with and approved by God, I threw the baby out with the bath water.



I took God to be the hoax created by the human mind to advance power of the few over the many. Turns out, it was religion I found muddied with the false, hypocrisy created by the human mind. God is still here/ there/ everywhere. The sayings of Jesus continue to resonate with one's truth center. I had found religious expression largely hypocritical at the core, unable to see through it to the other side that's been obscured by all the smoke-blowing going on in religion. Smoke gone from my head, I was suddenly able to see that Jesus really did have the real thing; it's just that religion smeared it over with hypocrisy.



This made-for-tv infomercial on the religious right under the names of Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell and all the other evangelists who didn't fall so well, therefore left out of the film, like Jim & Tammy Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart, who liked to sniff without scratching. There was a moment of Jim Bakker telling he'd had an inappropriate relationship with a woman other than his wife for 20 minutes. All they needed to do to tell Swaggart's story was show his face, which they did for maybe a second. I felt revulsion all the time Pat Robertson talked about the Lord with Geo W Bush, and the other religion bureaucrats (evangelists) talking like W was next to the 2nd Coming, if not the thing itself. Every time I heard Jerry Fallwell's revolting mind expressed in his jabberings about moral majority, I felt a turning in my guts, the kind of feeling that I can understand where stomach cancer comes from---years of revulsion. I've felt that revulsion all through the last 40 years of the political rise of American fundamentalism.



My one hope where the political fundamentalists are concerned is that they will ally themselves so deeply with the political party that is only interested in their money and numbers, they will become identified with the party and bring it down under the weight of their own falsehood. Then again, falsehood does very well in the political arena. That's getting awfully close to sounding like preaching. I apologize if it appears that way. Maybe it is. Hearing a Rush Limbaugh parrot last night squawking corny jokes about liberals made me want to say to him, "I'm as liberal as Amnesty International." Only problem, he might not get it, so I'd have to edit before saying it, "I'm as liberal as the ACLU." Now, them's fighting words. Most of all, I just wanted him to go on talking to somebody else, not me, so I kept out of it.



Perhaps five minutes into the documentary I recognized it an infomercial and made the decision to go on watching it, already knowing where it was headed. I don't pay any attention to the "religious right," because I saw where they were coming from before they were political. I've come to see what the propagandists call the Terrorist war is more aptly called the Fundamentalist war. It's American fundies vs Islamic fundies. The people of Islam are saying their fundamentalist terrorists are not acting on the teachings of Islam, but a perversion of Islam. It's the same with American fundamentalists playing politics. It was notable that Rummy and Cheney were left out of the story. Sanitized. Lots of clips of W raving about the Evil ones, but never showing the evil ones with him, the birds of a feather.



From time to time I like to see something that goes totally against my grain. Like I know and like a lot of people who go against my grain politically. In the post-Reagan divide-and-conquer times we've become intolerant of each other politically. In the old ways when people didn't talk about politics, it was because a man's politics was his own. I've known a lot of old-time hillbillies in agreement that I differ from them politically. It's no problem. I don't push my way of seeing politically in their faces and they don't do it to me either. We get along very well. Today, if you disagree with somebody politically, it's the same as being of another color. It's something I've observed in myself and others.



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