This is not a political post, though it does involve people in politics. Think of it this way – if I wrote about the personal choices of a football player, that post wouldn’t be about football. I wouldn’t be saying that I like the team the person plays for more than another team. The same is true when I write about politicians. Writing about the choices and attitudes of a politician does not constitute a judgment on their political party. Now that we have established what should be a self evident point, we can continue.
Across party lines, we are facing corruption and cowardice in government like at no point in American history. A would-be dictator occupies the White House surrounded by yes men and women on a scale that would make Nixon blush. Politicians of all stripes are loathe to stand up against the nonsense that passes for leadership in Washington, making them complicit in the largest threat to democracy America has seen. The great unwashed have elected one of their own. Should we be surprised the whole thing stinks?
Remember when character mattered? Remember when John Kennedy wanted to sleep with every woman in sight but had the decency to know that it was wrong, and so had them slipped in the back door of the White House while Jackie slept and the press looked the other way? Remember when Nixon was regularly too drunk to function and so others ran the country? Remember Teapot Dome during the Harding administration, the corrective for which the current administration has undone?
Okay, maybe it has only been the appearance of character that has mattered. Still, qualifications did matter. The old adage that any boy could grow up to be President of the United States simply wasn’t true. Candidates for President and even Congress were expected to have a certain pedigree that suggested the educational and experiential foundations to effectively serve. We have a man who has made his living deceiving the public now in the highest office in the land, a massively unqualified con man who has very little idea of what he is doing – and was elected on that basis!
Not surprisingly, we now hear that there is nothing more important that pretending everything is normal during the worst mismanagement of a pandemic imaginable. We are told that if only we create the appearance of normalcy, everything will be fine. It doesn’t matter if grandma and grandpa die to create a lie; it doesn’t matter how many workers – most often in poorly paying jobs – risk their lives to open restaurants, bars, and beaches; it doesn’t matter how many teachers and students will get sick and die to reopen schools. This is true not because it will change anything, it will only change the appearance of our circumstances. It will seem like everything is normal if we can just slip the bodies out the back door in the middle of the night and send them to the mortuary without anyone noticing.
Does that make any sense to you?
Good Lord, I hope not. I hope there is enough decency and intelligence left in this county to know that, whether we like it or not, what happens to one of us impacts all of us. We have failed at education and are reaping the rewards of that folly. We have failed at morality and in exchange made money our God. Our politicians worship that God, and we are reaping the rewards of that folly as well. We have taken a deep dive into selfishness from which we may never emerge as a nation.
These days it seems like everyone with a cause wants us to believe that their cause is the only one that matters. Nonsense. There are many, many causes that matter, so many that if they all are the only one that matters we will never make any progress. The way out of this morass is for each of us to find a cause that matters to us and dedicate ourselves to it in the way that best uses our unique sets of skills and abilities. This will take both time and persistence. There are no magic bullets, there are no overnight fixes, but that makes it even more imperative that we start today. Rest assured we will encounter criticism in a country with no shortage of do-nothing armchair quarterbacks. Everyone has an opinion, but that doesn’t mean we need to take their opinion to heart. Don’t read your reviews, solve the problem.
There are only a few hard and fast rules in the life of faith. One of them is that you cannot be a person of faith and a racist. The two are mutually exclusive. You can be a person of faith who is working earnestly to eliminate the vestiges of racism in your life. The standard here is not perfection, the standard is progress. If you are in a church on Sunday while believing that some races are inferior to others, you are a hypocrite. Period. No exceptions. Your best course of action would be to skip church and spend your time getting education and attending workshops around racism and issues of diversity.
with.
The most important casualties of the current pandemic are those with COVID 19. They are the victims and they are receiving most of the attention – as they should. Then there are those who desperately want to be victims, the conspiracy theorists and those who feel their rights are being impinged upon when asked to wear a mask to protect their fellow citizens. They are the infantile cry babies, and should be ignored completely. In the middle are those of us with chronic conditions who have been unable to get treatment during this crisis. Some of us remain unable to get treatment because of irresponsible behavior on the part of our providers.
department. Neither of those places will treat someone with chronic pain, of course. They may order imaging or lab tests, but whatever the results we are referred to the still-closed pain clinic for treatment.
today, if not in history, first said that the corona virus wasn’t serious and then said that a death rate of one percent wasn’t worth harming the economy. In other words Ron Johnson’s greed, in his very tiny mind and non-existent morality, is worth the death of millions of Americans. His greed is worth minimizing the seriousness of a pandemic and lying to the American public. The truth is that while Sen. Ron Johnson is opposed to abortion, he clearly isn’t pro-life. If he thought for a second that being anti-abortion was going to cost him money, his tune would change dramatically and instantly. He is the worst kind of politician, one who would sell his soul for a dollar and ninety-five cents, the equivalent of a crack whore who steals your money without giving you syphilis.
Remember this guy? Back in the glory days of televangelism he was simultaneously most successful, most derided, and most criminal of the lot – and there was a lot of competition for that title. In a crude distortion of the Jesus story these con artists claimed to be hawking, was eventually betrayed by colleagues in the televangelism racket and lost everything, going to prison for his crimes. Along the way he had an affair with his surgically enhanced church secretary, who later sold her wares in a skin mag,
would be wrong. After his release from prison we wrote a book called 
Now the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission have ordered his to stop selling his latest nonsense that claims to have killed previous versions of the corona virus and so surely will kill this one – complete with a book and DVD, of course. He has forty-eight hours to comply or the fines will begin, no doubt accompanied by his claims of being persecuted. He is the lowest of the low, preying on the very people Jesus told us to protect. Of course, it’s never been about Jesus, has it? Neither for Jim Bakker nor his like in the evangelical, televangelist racket, it has always been about the money.
Jimmy Swaggert masturbating into the panties of a twenty dollar prostitute while he told her how dirty she was, Robert Tilton opening envelopes sent to him with prayer requests and a check but removing only the check, Eddie Long grooming young men to be his sex partners while railing against homosexuality, Ted Haggard blowing his prostitute cum meth dealer, or any of the dozens of other disgusting crimes committed by these frauds, they almost to a person refused to criticize one another. Why?
The only reason I can think that a preacher would not be critical of another preacher caught in scandal would be that they all know things about one another that they don’t want revealed. Even a cursory investigation into a few of these people reveals practices that would make Caligula blush. It seems that nearly all of them are profoundly wounded individuals who have spent so much time preaching against the very behaviors that compulsively drive them and have hidden those behaviors behind a code of silence that now compels them to protect one another by maintaining the cover up. The result is that anyone still electing to wade into those waters does so at their own peril – likely at the cost of their bank account.
From the Huffington Post:
but seriously? This isn’t a guy who is a few bucks short and so skims ten bucks off the fund to get McDonald’s. It’s not even a guy who has always scrimped and slips up and decides to finally take the vacation to Disneyland he never could afford. This is a guy screaming at the top of his lungs at every American taxpayer: “Fuck you!”
You might be wondering, “whom does it hurt?” It hurts everyone. Perhaps most importantly, it hurts the people who run around frantically doing whatever is necessary to grab on to the appearance of wealth and it hurts their family. It hurts the family because they are the ones who really pay the price in terms of the absence of the wealth worshipers. They are also the ones who will pay the biggest price should the family scammer get caught and do time.
When did it become acceptable in America for a man to mistreat a woman? When did it become acceptable in America for an American government official to take a woman in a back room and scream profanities at her? How does it come to pass that an American Secretary of State, a position that traditionally seen a diplomatic, is reduced to profanity laden back room thrashings of not only a woman but an educated woman with a Master’s Degree in the very field he then presumes to demand a pop quiz on, which she of course passes with flying colors – and then the Secretary of State turns around and lies about it? When did integrity become a thing of the past? When did honesty become optional? When did it become 1952 again?
elected or appointed to national office? When did guys like him start calling the shots in national elections? When did people who claimed to be people of faith start trading that faith away for a chance to grab temporal power and then still have the audacity to show up at a place of worship on Sunday claiming to be a believer? When did it become acceptable to slap on your snazzy Nazi uniform and stroll down to the park for a festive rally with your Nazi friends? When did the ability to burp slogans in an alcohol induced haze become more persuasive than informed discourse?
There are two versions of this practice that break down along sexual orientation lines. Gay and bisexual men will tend to tell stories about straight, or at least publicly straight, men who tried to have sex with them, but they declined. Straight men will claim that they had sex with a woman known to those present for discussion. Perhaps Dice Clay parodied this nonsense best when he joked, “Mother Goose? I fucked her!”
bit of difference. The very fact that the claims are made reveals quite a bit about the claimant, and the revelation is not flattering. There is no healthy, mature motivation for one person to share stories of sexual conquest or continence with another. It’s even worse when the story telling occurs in a group context.