Volume 14

November 2004

14.10: MAGAZINES AND MEGABUCKS 11.29.2004

These days, with so much information and opinion available online, I have pared my magazine subscriptions down to a half-dozen. But there was in need of a twelve-step program to wean me off of a major magazine habit. Maybe it's because the pushers and their insidious way of hooking people have moved on, or they have just given up on me. I wrote and broadcasted the following piece nearly twenty years ago, when $10 million seemed like a lot more money than it does today.

Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson's durable straight-man, regularly shows up in my mailbox offering me instant wealth if I will just open up his envelope and make my way through a confusing mass of letters stickers, entry certificates, prize brochures, and mock checks for $10 million. If I follow all the rules of entry, sticking stickers in their proper places after hunting to find them, I have a shot at the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Ed maintains that I could win even if I don't order a magazine.

Of course Ed has me wondering whether I have a better chance if I do indeed take one or more subscriptions. That must be the psychological ploy in these promotions. There are those little boxes on the outside of the envelope that you must check to indicate whether you are subscribing or not. This gets me thinking that those envelopes checked “no” somehow get lost. There must be a lot of people who take the hook to allow Ed to give away all that money.

What concerns me is Ed and the other magazine dealers might just be turning us into a nation of magazine junkies who can't check “no” on the envelope. You see, even if you're addicted to the point of ordering every one of the 100 or so magazines he offers, that's only the beginning. There are literally thousands of magazines, and Ed can keep you strung out for years, subscribing away in quest of that $10 million. The magazine industry has discovered that there are many interests, hobbies, jobs, recreational pursuits, plus different age groups and life-styles, that eventually they can turn everybody into a magazine junkie. One gets some indication of this logic from Ed's magazine offerings. There are, of course, subscription stickers for the biggies: Time, Newsweek, Playboy, Reader's Digest, Better Homes and Gardens, and TV Guide.

But Ed doesn't want you to stop subscribing with these. Let's say you have children; not only is there a substantial market, but there's the long-term payoff of hooking the kids on magazines at an early age. Start the kids out with a subscription to Child Life, Jack and Jill, Cricket , or Humpty Dumpty, which will keep them busy with games, crafts, and fiction and non-fiction stories while you are catching up with the latest issues of Baby Talk, Parenting , not to be confused with Growing Parent , or L.A. Parent , which is designed only for Southern California parents. You can read about the kids even before they arrive in Expecting Magazine , and once they do, if you think they will be something special there's Gifted Children Monthly . If you happen to have twins you will need Twins, The Magazine for Parents of Multiples. And don't worry if this whole parenting business wrecks your marriage, there's always Single Parent Magazine.

But what if you don't have kids. Well, the magazine industry has virtually every aspect of your life covered by one magazine or another; there are scores of magazines for every age, sex, ethnic or racial group, hobby or interest, no matter how narrow or esoteric.

Now, I know you're thinking I exaggerate, so here are just a few examples. How about a subscription to The Arctophile , self described as the magazine “for adult Teddy Bear collectors who are interested in heartwarming tales about what Teddys mean to them.” Maybe you've been missing Buf Pictorial , subtitled “the only newsstand magazine devoted to Enormous Mammas.” I wonder what the subscribers to Fighting Woman News would think of that one. I doubt that Buf is too kinky for readers of Dungeon Master , a magazine that emphasizes “safety” in the use of sado-masochistic equipment.

But maybe you're a bit too reserved for that stuff, and would rather settle into a comfy chair with a copy of Pipe Smoker, The Journal of Kapnismology , or Post Card Collector , or Grandparenting . If you happen to like animals there are dozens for cats, dogs and horses, but have you caught the latest issue of LLamas Magazine , a bi-monthly for lovers of llamas, camels, alpacas, vicunas and guanacos. Still, you have to be careful: Moose Magazine is for a funny-looking fraternal order of bipeds, not lovers of funny-looking quadrupeds; Nibble Magazine is for computer buffs, not overeaters, and; Chain Saw Age is a hardware mag, not a movie spin-off.

Well I think you must have the idea by now. Anyway I see the mailman coming down the street with my latest issues of Octogenarian Romances, Edible Insects Review, Biker Gang Atrocities, The Nude Astrologer, and Mice Afloat . . . and, just maybe, I hope, I hope, I hope, Ed's check for $10 million bucks.

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14.9: EARLY AND OFTEN 11.26.2004

I have expressed opinions on democracy earlier in these pages, but mostly with regard to the dreamy ambitions of the Bush neo-cons about establishing (installing) oil-friendly “democracies” in the Middle East (cf. postings 9.6 and 12.8) The irony of such desires coming from an administration that installed itself by election theft should not be lost on anybody not from a “red state.”

Elections have always been subject to rigging, probably beginning when voters palmed an extra ostrakon or two in those first Athenian elections. Since then methods of diverting of the “will of the people” have taken on the machinations of the likes of Florida's attorney general, Justice (?) Antonin Scalia, Texas congressional, redistricting, or sleazy election officials. Alas, the people are governed more often by hypocrisy than by democracy.

Perhaps it is a pandemic of Republican electoral skullduggery that afflicts the world's democratic dreams, or perhaps it is the exposure that light brings to the dark and inveterate practices of subverting democracies, but elections everywhere see in disrepute and dispute these days. In no particular order and by no means exhaustive in number are the current throngs in the streets on Ukrainian cities in protest of questionable results of their national elections that installed a pro-Moscow toady as head of state. Not that Mr. Putin's own overwhelming victory could be held to even the lowest democratic standard, not when any real opposition is shown the gulag or placed in it. Not much protest there.

In spite of the “democratic” appearances it is almost impossible to conduct free and fair elections in almost any African, South American, and Asian nation. Even on the rare occasions when the results might approximate the will of the people, there is no guarantee the results will be respected by nations that have the power to meddle in the outcomes. In this regard America's hypocrisy toward others' exercise of democracy is a sorry record. Messing with Central and South American governments has long been a privilege America has arrogated to itself. Recently is seems that Haiti's Mr. Aristide, once a darling of Uncle Sam, fell into disfavor and was “urged” out of power and out of his country. Venezuela managed a free and fair election of a candidate in disfavor with the Bushies in spite of US meddling. Now Mr. Chavez has to hope he doesn't end up getting the treatment Nixon and Kissinger gave Chile's fairly elected Salvador Allende.

For a long time America's meddling other countries elections was “justified” by the putative purity of its own plebiscites. Any semblance of that notion is a joke after the 2000 presidential theft, and now an aftermath of grave doubt that the 2004 election was conducted in a free and fair manner. Missing ballots, disqualified voters, returns that are greater number than district voters, and a host of remaining irregularities have resulted in challenges, lawsuits, and the distressing necessity of bringing more judges into the process. A cottage industry of scrutinizing the electoral process at all levels of government now rivals the second guessing of the Kennedy assassination and UFOs in Roswell, New Mexico. The values greasing the moral slide down to the principle that winning justifies any means are conveniently excluded by the righteous right. Our republic is slipping on the banana peal of its own hypocrisy.

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14.8: CLICK CULTURE 11.20.2004

©2004 UrbisMedia

Much has been made (a lot of it money) of the supremacy of videogames over Hollywood movies. Sales of videogames exceed movie receipts by one third. So we have now evolved (devolved?) from the large screen movie palaces of forty years ago to the claustrophobic multi-plexes of suburbia, to the monitor-sized proscenium of the computer.

This merits a lead because what is usually absent from the adulatory, golly gee, commentary on the rise of videogames is that the environment through which we take our “entertainment” is both an index and an influence in the kind of culture, the kind of life , we are evolving. So, first, being there , is not being there, if you are there booted-up and on-line. Log on to a chat room and you will quickly appreciate that the “communication” is no more that mutual eavesdropping. Log into a videogame and “communication” is interactivity within the programmer's closed system parameters. In short, the popularity of video games is rooted in the rising acceptance of virtuality . It's a different life. Become Laura Croft in the Tomb Raiders game and you can have ample breasts and plush lips, and fly through the air dispatching evildoers with high-tech weapons; boot up John Madden Football games and you can be the Joe Montana throwing a game-winning bomb in the Super Bowl.

This segues nicely to the fact that these are video games . The life of the video game is competition, you against the evildoers, you against the games, you against other players. There is a lot of competition in life, but life is not all a game. Good and evil are not that nicely distinguishable, “winning” is usually a vacuous victory, although there are now a few professional video game players who “win” substantial incomes (but somebody, somewhere in Cyberville, must be losing, too.) Is the natural progression for this form of video game to merge with on-line poker?

So what. People are always pretending to be people that they aren't; people are always competing in some fashion or another with other people. Is this any different from fairy tales, comic books, and movies? Well, there is, but the difference may be disappearing (at least at the commercial level). In the end, aren't video games just a digitized version of who we really are anyway?

But this may take us into an epistemology that gamers may not want to bother with, unless somebody comes up with a game called Kill the Philosopher You Don't Agree With. That is to say, yes, video games do reflect a certain reality , not the reality, but somebody's version of reality. A new game advertised on television is set in the Vietnam War, and lets players jump into rice paddies from helicopters and fire their M-16s at the VVV (virtual Viet Cong). Is this a game? Or perhaps a perversion of political values and social sensibilities.

Again, this may seem to have little distinction from the feelings one acquires is seeing a movie like Platoon. But in the video game, you, as player/character , are always the protagonist, and often the subjective camera . Since it is a game, you are “determined” to try to win against somebody/something. You are not watching others play out their roles, but participating (interactivity), and this competitive engagement must involve different feelings from mere observation, even if, in movies we are moved to “identify” with certain characters (although they may not behave as we would have them behave if we were controlling their actions with a computer mouse).

So should we be concerned? Or should we get in on the action—and action is another operative feature in the success of video games—and get rich?

As to the first question the jury is still out on a number of concerns: does the prevalent violence in video games translate to the streets? Maybe kids who spend upwards of 50 or 60 hours per week with a mouse in the hand don't have much time to step outside with an automatic weapon in hand (although the perpetrators of the Columbine killings were reported to be video games aficionados). Maybe those that are logging on to subjective camera anime pornography are doing other things with their hands.

As to the second question the answer will be different for each of us. But it should take into consideration that video games and the virtual world they create do raise a couple of important concerns. We are people of actual physicality and location, in which we interact with people in consequence of real and not “game over” outcomes—realities that we can't easily click ourselves out of. Therefore we must construct a real society in which cooperation must counterbalance and countervail competition. The video game, of commercial necessity , must define society in terms of action and entertainment value. Games may be sophisticated in terms of technique and visual realism, but they cannot embrace the complexity of society, only extract what are often clichés and stereotypical.

The type of world that video games seem to be creating are increasingly reciprocal with other media , especially motion pictures and cartoons. We already live in an increasingly “virtualized” world . Shows about UFO abductions are made with “dramatic recreations” blended with some real footage, so that the viewer is not quite sure where the real reality and the fake reality leave off or begin. Real “live” cop shows recreate car chases and drug busts with a deliberate, jerky camera “news footage” look of the six o'clock news further blur the line. And, of course, the “game” feature is ubiquitous, as competitors for cash prizes plot against one another and eat bugs on Survivor and its imitators, families destruct before the cameras, and wannabe singers and stand up comics compete on their respective popular shows to be Number One,” the best, the last one standing, the Survivor. And over on the Academy Awards The Lord of the Rings, an aimless pastiche of computer graphics over a narrative desert wins the award for “best picture.”

If the video game designers did not provide the model for this form of “entertainment” they are undoubtedly watching and waiting, their mice at the ready.

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14.7: VISCERAL REALITIES 11.18.2004

World War I was supposed to be “the war to end all wars”. Then there was World War II. Both conflicts were responsible for thousands of books, movies and television programs about them and war in general. But the reality of war was really restricted to those who had been through combat. “War is hell,:” we are often told, but who wants to go to hell to find out, when you could go to a movie. War movies used to be relatively un-real , but when Steven Speilberg's Saving Private Ryan came along it seemed likely to be the war film that finally shows us about war like it really is: War is hell.

But maybe we've had too much experience with using our willing suspension of disbelief, to be able to really believe it. Can the director who made space aliens so realistically cuddly that kids want them as house pets make war so cinematically realistic that we will stop all this mutually-assured destruction? One might be willing to rent or buy Saving Private Ryan to get some clues to those rhetorical questions, but there's a cheaper way to do it: just turn on your TV. It's not just war that's hell; reality is hell.

“The evolution of hyenas has made them the most efficient killers of the African savanna: they hunt in packs.” So the narrator intones in that matter-of-fact style of animal documentaries. The video shows the pack taking turns hounding, chasing, finally exhausting the bounding gazelle. In the end they converge on it, tearing the life and the organs out of the quivering carcass. Their muzzles are red with blood.

It's nature in the maw a couple of channels over as well: “Shark Week” they call it. Tonight the voice-over almost gleefully tells us what magnificent “killing machines” (a hackneyed metaphor of shark documentaries) these Great Whites are. There's plenty of blood and guts in the water, and a teaser for the next show gives us a glimpse of the wounds of some divers who have survived being Great White Lunch; photos of the torsos and limbs of shark bite victims.

A few clicks on the remote and a woman forensic pathologist on a gritty British cop import is removing a pair of lungs from a cadaver. She holds them up in full view, dripping blood and ooze, and talks about them as insouciantly as if she were doing a cooking show. (“Now we'll just sauté these for a few minutes in white wine and garlic and . . . “)

Mind you, this is all programming during the dinner hour and now nothing on my TV tray is looking like what it's supposed to be. So I click on, desperate to escape more gore and its afterimage. But I stumbled on another “educational” cable channel just as a surgeon is opening up a thorax with a sweeping scalpel cut. No imitation lungs here; this is real viscera in a real surgical procedure. At least I think it is . Something catches in my throat.

I zipped past the news channels because I remember that last night the local broadcast dwelled ghoulishly on some bodies being removed from a freeway head-on. The national news was featuring Somalian machete carnage this week. I clicked onward but not before I catch the teaser for one of those “real stories of emergency room doctors” shows. Gurneys are pushed down corridors like shopping carts on that shopping contest show; chests are defibrillated; needles are shoved into veins; there's shouting, blood and adrenaline. I felt like dumping my dinner and dialing 911.

I finally settled on a program about “movie magic”; if the blood and viscera looked real at least I knew they were fake. Virtual reality is easier to take than the visceral kind. But neither is especially helpful in attempting to discern whether all this violent imagery is sensitizing us viewers to how “hellish” life can be, or de sensitizin g us, or just confusing the “hell” out of us.

Years ago I remember reading in a film book that the audience watching the 1903 silent feature, The Great Train Robbery , were horrified when they saw a man shot in one scene. Despite the clumsy, exaggerated fall of the man, many in audience thought he had really been shot. It might be argued that in the intervening years audiences have developed a better “willing suspension of disbelief” that allows them to view the most realistic portrayals of mayhem and almost reflexively encode it as just good “special effects”. But one is left to wonder whether the psychological effects of such viewing are merely restricted to the evolution of an efficient mental switch between identifying what's real, and what just looks real.

Judging by the amount of reality cop, hospital, nature and news shows on television, audiences are gorging themselves on visceral reality. Even sports programming has found a niche: a feature on an ‘Extreme Games” show showed young skateboarders bashing into walls, falling off motorcycles at high speed, and what happened to one guy who bungee-jumped with a cord that was too long. Another show has videos of real people being attacked by real dangerous animals. Yet another show sweeps the bottom of the gene pool for people who will overcome their “fear factor” for money and dangle precariously from construction cranes while sending emails from their Blackberries and eat bugs and drink raw sewage. That's entertainment these days. (“I'm ready for me close up of castrating myself, Mr. DeMille.”)

The notion that we must be shown everything in as graphic detail as possible to appreciate the “reality” it represents is as fallacious for entertainment as it is when we make toys that are completely programmed, or over-design suburbs, shopping malls, and theme parks with no room for any form of genuine participation or interaction. The best places, programs and movies are those that draw us and our imaginations (not just the designers' and directors' imaginations) into them. Those who have seen Saving Private Ryan should go out and rent Johnny Got His Gun (no, it's not about some junior high kid from some small town in Alabama who thinks it would be fun to use his classmates for target practice) to see how hellish war can be when our imagination is engaged by a motion picture.

The purpose of our pursuit of reality is the pursuit of truth . But when that pursuit simply becomes one more version of entertainment commodity then that purpose is corrupted, the medium debased, and “truth” is measured in cheap thrills, or whether we buy some product. The antiwar message can become just another box office promotional gizmo, the “educational” nature program cheap titillation.

Commercials for many of these programs offer videos for purchase featuring footage of plane crashes, auto racing pile-ups, and the devastation of various natural disasters. Presumably these are for viewers who graduate from those humorous “home video” programs that consist of kids falling of bikes and skating into poles and walls, and for some curious reason, all manner of flying objects hitting fathers in their testicles. How real is all of this anyway? If these are just the incidents that happen to have been caught on home videos then we can only assume that a large percentage of the children in the country are brain-damaged and have emasculated fathers. Where's Freud when we really need him.

The real reality is that much of this video verité is faked. Shows about UFO abductions are made with “dramatic recreations” blended with some real footage, so that the viewer is not quite sure where the real reality and the fake reality leave off or begin. Real “live” cop shows recreate car chases and drug busts with a deliberate, jerky camera “news footage” look of the six o'clock news further blur the line.

Is it likely that audiences for these programs and those of World Federation Wrestling or the afternoon dysfunctional family feud shows are going the get the “message” of Saving Private Ryan? It would seem that they are likely to think that it has great special effects, but not lose their appetite for their popcorn, nachos and Big Gulps.

And to return to nature shows, last week I saw one that showed lions copulating. This documentary lingered on the scene with all the prurient patience of a porno flick. Stay tuned: the feeding instinct isn't the only audience appetite those reality show producers and programmers are eager to satisfy.

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14.6: BELLA NONNA, BELLA RAGAZZA 11.15.2004

I spent my youth very close to my maternal grandmother . Loreta was a saint to me, and to everyone who encountered her. She was beautiful, loving, strong and kind. Her legs had been badly burned in a religious bonfire back in Italy, but she gave no sign of the pain that lingered in them, preparation perhaps for the courage with which she faced a painful death.

I could do no wrong in my grandmother's eyes. I was her first grandchild, coddled and cosseted, and made to feel like I was being groomed for some special destiny. In the evenings, after the dinner dishes had been put away, she would sit in a soft chair in the corner of the darkened dining room. Only the light from the dial of the radio would cast a sepia nimbus around her face. It was 7:30PM and Fr. Ciccignioni, from Sts. Peter and Paul was leading the nightly rosary. If I happened through the dining room, which connected the parlor to the kitchen, she would summon me:

“Jeemee, Jeemee, vene qui , vene qui, mio caro. ” I would climb up on her lap for a few “Hail Marys” until I squirmed too much and she would release her embrace. My memory can still summon her earthy scent, and soft, warm flesh. Loreta was the Madonna incarnate.

Loreta Corona Bianchi

Too many years ago now, Patty and I were on a train from Venice to Florence. The only compartment that had space for the two of us was occupied by an elderly Italian woman in classic “widow's ware,” the black dress, hair in a bun, the severe look, even the stockings rolled into ankle doughnuts. It was our first trip to Italy and we were a bit timid. It was also very hot and humid weather. The lady sat by the window, facing in the direction the train was moving; we sat, a trifle timorously, opposite her.

I could see that Patty was a little intimidated by the old woman. She said nothing to us, not even a greeting, and mostly stared directly ahead. But she was so much of a presence that we decided against eating the lunch we had bought before boarding the train.

The window was closed and we both would have liked to open it and get some outside air circulating as the train moved along. However, the wind would have blown directly into the face of the woman. Since she had entered the compartment ahead of us we could only assume that she preferred having it closed.

It was Patty who got up and went to the window. She mimed to woman that she would like to open the window just a little. The lady just looked back at Patty, expressionless, and then looked over to me and motioned me to come to the window and open it. I complied, and we noticed that she turned her face to accept the breeze now coming in through the window.

She seemed to nod off for a few minutes. When she awoke she began rummaging through her purse, after some time coming up with a cellophane-wrapped piece of candy. She motioned for me to come and retrieve it, but also gestured that I was to give it to Patty. After I delivered it she caught my eye and said, “bella ragazza, bella, bella.”

She wasn't going to get an argument from me. “ Si, si, d'accordo.” I replied.

A few minutes later she was again rummaging in her purse and this time came up with what looked to be one of those little booklets of identity papers. She motioned for Patty to come over and sit beside her. With only slight hesitation Patty went to her and the woman started telling Patty about herself. I did as best I could to translate, calling out the English for any words that I recognized. The lady brightened some and began to smile. She then pulled up the hem of her dress to her knees and began talking about her legs. They were heavy and seemed swollen and discolored. All I could make out was that she was one her way to Rome to see a doctor about her legs. Then she went quiet and closed her eyes. We reckoned that she was in some discomfort. She seemed to doze and Patty returned to our seat.

A couple minutes before the train was to arrive in Florence the conductor came round, calling “ Firenze, Firenze ” into each of the compartments. The lady opened her eyes and motioned for Patty to come over and sit beside her again. This time she found a small religious medal in her purse and pressed it into Patty's palm. Then, to my surprise she took Patty in her arms and held her, holding Patty's face beneath her chin as though she were comforting a little girl. She held on to her until we were nearly stopped in the station. I could see Patty's eyes and they were neither surprised nor frightened and her arm rested gently on the woman's thigh. Something very ‘womanly' was being communicated that inverted pieta that was incomprehensible to me.

Could the lady somehow had a premonition that in a few years Patty would be mortally ill? That Patty was already experiencing some symptoms of the disease that we did not know then would take her life? I could have no such thoughts at the time; they came several years later when I pulled out my notes from that trip and began putting this piece together with my reverie of that curious day. What I was thinking at the time was that this lady reminded me of my grandmother, Loreta, who I had deeply loved and used to grab me and hold me just like this nonna had held Patty. Loreta died before Patty came into my life, but I had often spoken of her and of my regret that Patty never got to know her.

The train came to a stop in Florence and the lady relaxed her hold on Patty and took her face in her gnarled old hands and kissed her on the cheek. “Molte grazie, mia bella ragazza,” she said softly, her eyes wet and a sad smile on her face, “molte grazie. Arrivederci.” She released Patty as though she were entrusting me with someone with whom she had formed some bond, fixing an almost admonitory gaze on me as she did.

“I wonder what that was all about?” I said to Patty when were out on the platform and the train began to pull out. But I could see that she was quite moved. She didn't respond. Perhaps she thought I would not comprehend her answer. I don't think we spoke of the incident again, so I still wonder.

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14.5: HOLY HYPOCRITES! 11.11.2004

This Rev. Dobson was mouthing off on the radio this morning, reveling in the election of Republicans as though it were divinely ordained. He all bust said it is “payback time” for Bush because it was the evangelical Christians who kept him in office, and now it is time for some judicial appointments and other policies that can begin to redress the sinful nation we have become. If arrogance were piety this guy is a shoe-in for the Rapture. It reminded me of a piece I broadcasted almost 16 years ago when these guys seemed more interested in sex and money. I forgot how wrong I was at the end of this piece; they were interested in power, too. And now they think they have it. But maybe the fortunes of a couple of their brethren are instructive.

When Jimmy Swaggart simpered out his sins to his flock and a national television audience shock waves were once again sent through the evangelical fundamentalist churches still nursing the wounds of Jim Bakker's fall from grace. When the gods fall, said the Greeks of old, they do so with a great clatter. In Swaggart's case the worry, expressed by both the preacher and his colleagues, was that his return to earth would result in an absence of sound--the sound of coins in the collection box. However, Swaggert's teary lamentation, although presumably occasioned by the same carnal desire as Bakker's, carried with it the additional hypocrisy that what brought him to his contrition was not so much his "sin" but its disclosure by a vengeful colleague. This distinction seems to have evaded the elders of his church in their levy of a far softer penance than that given Bakker, who at Swaggert's insistence was railroaded out of the church altogether. Swaggert may end up losing the keys to the executive jet for a couple of years, making it a little more difficult to be "nearer to thee, my Lord"; Bakker's auto da fe , while rendering him unemployed, has at least resulted in a deep California tan. Such are the wages of sin for TV prayboys.

Those who have been branded sinful secular humanists and others who have endured the self-righteousness of evangelicals are doubtless taking some satisfaction from these tumbles in the motels of concupiscence; but Swaggert and Bakker are hardly the first of those who have doffed the clerical cloth and hopped into vibrator beds that rent by the hour. This sort of thing precedes them by a length of time that recedes to the very origins of religion. What would not be admitted by those who have given up selling roofing and siding for saving souls (and whose theological scholarship consists principally of memorization of chapters and verses) is that religion and sex have been locked in a symbiotic embrace for millennia. Many of primitive man's religious rituals were either derived from or meshed with sexual behaviors, its physical urges and mysterious powers conveying such force as to elevate the sex act itself to a form of religious observance. In ancient pantheons gods and goddesses, representing forces of nature, coupled to bring on the crops (the "rites of Spring" are not the invention of college fraternities), and ritual often involved the mimesis of their earthly representatives as well as members of the congregation. In some ancient religions the brothel and the temple had the same address. Religious ecstasy and sexual ecstacy were often indistinguishable, and the deities of primitive and ancient man—Ishtar, Aphrodite, Baal, Venus, Pan, and Priapus, among numerous others in many religions the world over--were and are yet worshipped and propitiated largely for their representation of sexual prowess and fecundity.

The emergence of monotheism, and particularly Christianity, turned sex and religion into contending forces for the sovereignty over souls; but it bound them inextricably together with a web of guilt, a factor that ever since has added profound tensions between the genders, church and state, and the spirit and the flesh. In their discomfort with carnal desire religious authorities have elevated celibacy and chastity to divine levels, presented us with an asexual Christ, reduced his mother's sexuality to a fairy tale, and branded his companion, Magdalene, as a hooker. Protestantism has shunned much of this a dogma, but retained its essences, confining sex to procreative purposes, or the marital state, but always regarding the sensual as the archenemy of the spiritual.

Preaching this stuff has been good business for a long time, and those willing to open their wallets and checkbooks to help still the passions of others, purchase some protection from their own libidos, or assuage their guilt from giving in, have been in good supply. The formula predates Swaggert and Bakker: no guilt, no gelt. None of this has prevented a good deal of hanky-panky in papal palaces, monasteries, meeting houses and revival tents.

What also seems to have evaded Swaggert and Bakker is that the wealth, celebrity and admiration they have earned with this simple formula exacts a price: consciously or not they have portrayed themselves as above the sinners they minister to or are out to "save". In the final analysis what has led to their sins of the flesh, hypocrisy, and lack of charity, is the greater sin of pride.

When all is said and done some of us may owe Mr. Swaggert a debt of gratitude. That is, it appears that his contribution to the old relationship between religion and sex may prove to be an antidote to a far more worrisome relationship--that between religion and political power. If so, Mr. Swaggert will have finally done something for which we can truly "praise the Lord". _______________________________________________________________

14.4: THE CRETIN COALITION 11.06.2004

From E. Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1983)

As the information about voting motivation and behavior in the presidential election are teased out by forensic journalists and political analysts it appears that a critical factor in results was the so called ”moral issues.” More voters than expected were energized to go out and protect their marriages from the assaults of gays and lesbians, more felt a compelling need to create laws to meddle in the bodies of women (while declaring out of the other side of their hypocritical mouths that government should not interfere in their lives), and by protecting our nation by making sure that “under God” is not removed from the “Pledge of Allegiance” that school kids lip-synch while listening to hip-hop on their iPods. Preaching to the bigots brings them to the polls, and Karl Rove knows how to do that better than anybody.

“Moral issues” means, of course, Republican Christian Evangelical “moral issues” and not included on this list are the poor (lazy bastards who don't want to work), women who want to control their own bodies (wanton Messalinas); the sick (sorry no stem cells for lepers); the environment (just a bunch of birds and rabbits who never contributed a cent to the RNC) and; gays and lesbians (they choose to be that way; God would never create a queer). There is no discernable Right wing moral outrage over thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens in the way of Bush's obsession to get Saddam Hussein out of the way so he can ram “democracy” down their throats (kill ‘em all and let God sort it out), no outrage when uncharged prisoners are stripped, abused, bloodied and photographed by Americans. (Blood! You want blood? We Christians have seen The Passion of the Christ. Now that's blood.) Why spend moral concern on such things when gays and lesbians are sundering the “solidarity” of the American family. Maybe such distinctions are easy if you come from a red state where the average IQ is lower than the number of electoral votes. Go figure: almost two-thirds of Americans felt the country was going in the wrong direction and the incumbent wins. Somebody in Alabama must have been polled; don't pollsters go to NASCAR races?

There are a number of directions we might go from here, but one that sticks out is that this facile division of what's moral and what is not is made by people who are nominally “Christians,” nominally followers of a Jewish rabbi who called upon his followers to love the very sorts of people his contemporary “followers” abhor. “Love thy neighbor,” “turn the other cheek” “it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven . . .” . Where did all that stuff come from? Christ had some cool things to say; but he didn't count on some Christian Evangelical spinmeisters pimping for votes in battleground states with wedge issues expressing who “Christians” should hate, not love. Doubtless they, too, think their victories have been earned, gratia dei .

I haven't been a “Christian” for decades, but I still like a lot of Christ's ideas, none of them very “electable” ones then, or, it seems, now. Christ wouldn't have made it onto a city council seat in any Bible Belt city in the country. Not with notions like “blessed are the peacemakers, and the meek” (“Freakin' liberal” I can hear the attack adds bellowing). I think that Christ's message distills down to one precept: you love God to the extent your fellow humans. Those who have appropriated the term “Christian” today, much to the consternation of true Christians who abide by that simple, but difficult, precept, fail miserably at living and conducting their insurgence into political life in practicing it. Theirs is a doctrine and demeanor of hatred and intolerance that would have rode The Galilee Kid right out of their red state on a rail (“Yeaah, and you can take some of those limp-wristed ‘disciples' along with you, Jew Boy; we don't do same-sex unions in this town!).

The fact is that both the intelligence and the morality of so-called “Christians” has been plummeting like a Boy George candidacy for Governor of Alabama. Mind you, there have been a lot of smart Christians around in the past and present, but you'll not likely find many in red states. But historically, Christians were often regarded as people who were a couple of cans shy of a six-pack (and this was before they had Monster Truck rallies). In Medieval times “Christian” became synonymous with “idiot.” “Cretin” was the derivative term from the Middle French. Needless to say, there were many great Christian intellectuals and humanitarians, then and since, but there must have been plenty red-state evangelical Christians around to conduct the pogroms and witch-burnings, too, and they are back in numbers and force. The Neo-Cretins are composed of your basic Bible-belt Protestants as well as large numbers of Roman Catholics, and come from most every racial and ethnic group. They're everywhere; throw a rock into a Baptist revival tent, a Cathedral, a Wal Mart, or Congress, and you will likely bean a Neo-Cretin. But your chances of raising a lump on the head of a true Christian are probably no better than they were in the Middle Ages and, if the “moral issues” that decided this election are any measure, such chances worsen by the day.

But be careful about throwing anything at Neo-Cretins, even facts. Remember, it was their Medieval predecessor Cretins who ended up giving history The Inquisition (sort of a religious version of the Patriot Act). These are not people who are given to “love thy neighbor.” So it's advisable not to “turn [your] other cheek.” Instead, keep a rock or two handy; things could get ugly.

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14.3: AZURE LIKE IT 11.06.2004

The morning after the election I did what I often do when something gets me down: I sat down at the piano and start noodle-ing some blues dirges, the kind that were (still are) played at funerals in New Orleans. I love the blues, nothing in our musical idiom is more “American.” The blues allow musical improvisation and individual expression like no other music; fast or slow, lugubrious or felicitous, plan or subtle, its forms facile and exotic, the blues can make us laugh or cry, or dance, and make us more of who we are.

I was playing with a lyrical line in my head, something about being from a “blue state,” you know, those indigo borders around a bloody expanse of Republican red in the middle. I was urging myself toward some theme that expressed my pride, no, not pride, satisfaction, at being from a blue state; two actually, since I was born and raised in New York. (Sure, both those state have dorks for governors, but I wasn't thinking of that.) I'm a blue stater all the way, I thought, as my thick, dark dirgey chords began to give way to lighter tone, and the meter gained a couple of extra beats.

I like being from a state that has a view outward, toward other shores and other peoples, that is enriched in its colors and languages, and faiths, by those who have washed up on those shores. New York might be the geographical , and if Woody Allen is to be believed, the cultural reciprocal of California, but not when it comes to being “blue.” I tried to find a way to layer in a New York melody line, like “New York, New York; It's a Wonderful Town,” into a blues phrase, then maybe segue into a bridge phrase from “California, open your Golden Gate.”

How could New Orleans go “red state” when the blues were born there? They've gone from the Birth of the Blues to Birth of a Nation. But that's an aside about those red states with their small pinch-minded people, afraid of so much—afraid of terrorism, afraid of modernism, afraid or liberalism, afraid of lesbianism, afraid of intellectualism, afraid of globalism, afraid of –isms. So afraid that they would rather pray than think. Oh, the terrorists really did a job on these folks, and George plays like a penny whistle. So now I really feel better about being a blueser, about not being one of those red-staters; they don't know the blues, they never apprehended the meaning of the gospel blues, the joy, the brotherly love.

Now the chords are jumping, pushed by a base line that wants to drive the dirgey blues away and open up new melody lines, get discordant, dig for odd notes in chords, surprise, take chances, but more than anything, look for something new, not be afraid of the new, tonal pleasures that might border on the erotic, that are suggestive, exploratory. The idea is to try to give the blues every chance that pinch-minded people fear and abhor because it doesn't have their imprimatur. Any blues player knows just what I mean; a conservative blues player is an oxymoron, a red-stater wherever he lives.

The blues actually made me feel better, the way they should. The blues come from a people who were enslaved and marginalized (the same ones whose votes were challenged and lost in two elections now), so the blues are inherently rebellious, they way they now make me feel. Blue is what I am and what I want to be. Blue is edgy, blue is coastal, blue is liberal, blue is urban, blue is improvisational, blue is cool. Republicans are none of these things, and cool is something they definitely are not.

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14.2: REVEILLE FOR BIGOTS 11.4.2004

In 2000, from Hong Kong, where I watched the election being stolen, I emailed many friends (it's not the same list of friends now) that “now the stealing from the national cookie jar will begin.” I'm not much of a prophet, but that was an easy one. Since then, with tax cuts for the rich, sweetheart deals for Halliburton and other corporate buddies, running huge deficits and rollbacks on environmental regulations, the stealing has exceeded all expectations. Now, as lame duck administration they will really go at it, and maybe even the dunderheads in Ohio who delivered this election to the Republicans because the majority of them can't see their own best interests through their bigotry against gays and lesbians, their Taliban attitudes towards women, or their well-massaged fears that Osama bin Laden wants to blow up some of their precious Buckeyes, will figure it out (but I doubt it).

To hell with all the usual morning after bonhomie and bullshit about bi-partisan working together. This is a deeply polarized nation with the most pronounced and rancorous division in social values since the Civil War. Those guys never wanted to work together; Delay's House routinely excluded the Democrats from such meetings (perhaps so they could bribe their own members), and an Executive Branch that ignored national and world opinion on its road to preemptive war has no such intent, and now needs it even less. Congress is even more extreme right conservative than before the election. The South has won this civil war and “Dixie” and “The Eyes of Texas” should replace the national anthem and God Bless America.

Analysis will show, I believe, that what was he deciding factor in this election, was good ole American bigotry and intolerance, the very attitudes that this nation was supposed to be fighting against with the noble notion that “that all men are created equal.” That will prove to be more of a hollow promise for those “men” who are women, those men (and women) who are gay, those who are not rich enough to receive a huge tax break, those who do not have Halliburton-like access, and those who are not evangelical Christians. Analysis will show that it is they, fired with their new-found intolerance of those who would like rights to social unions, intolerance to those who wish to control their own bodies, and their of terror they equate with a faith with for which they have no tolerance. They were mobilized from their pulpits (one of which had the seal of the president on it), and their bigotry was greater than the revulsion of the opposition for their leader.

I cut my list short with evangelical Christians because they, as I have said before, are the new American Taliban. They are not the followers of Christ I was taught about in Catholic schools. These “Christians,” many of them “Catholic,” care little for the poor, they shun lepers, they provide the grease to allow rich men to “pass through the eyes of needles,” and they have already decided who will receive their “rapture” and who will go to hell. They are bigots, and they made the difference in Ohio, and now they want to make a difference in our lives. Well, it is they who can “go to hell.”

So I think we should declare a new “war on terror” a war that needs to be fought against the terror that this administration and its faux-Christian minions has waged against the poor, the Middle Class, the Seniors, those without medical insurance, workers, people of color, women, the environment, and homosexuals.

Just as George Bush has made uncounted new violent terrorists from the lands of the Middle East we must now enlist from ranks of the newly politicized of this election “political terrorists” who must (hey, I writing allegorically here, Mr. Ashcroft) plant “roadside bombs” to take out plans to repeal Roe v. Wade; that must use rhetorical RPGs to destroy plans to rape Social Security. Congressional Democrats need to check in their drawers and see if they have the goods to use every parliamentary means at their command to stymie, frustrate, filibuster and otherwise harass this administration and its legislative minions. It's time, too, to throw not just the moneychangers out of the temple, but its high priests bent on tearing down the separation of church and state.

This was an election in which the (barely) winner played on the worst emotions and attitudes of its constituency—fear and loathing. They were made to fear an enemy that was the wrong enemy, but believe that they were being made safer by a swaggering coward who stirred their bigotry under the guise that that's what God has anointed him to do.

The up-side is that John Kerry will not have the burden of pulling us out of the mess the Bush administration put us in, and now we must count on the growing rifts among Republicans and the arrogance of their leader to bring the house down upon us all. It is an unfortunate way for a once great nation to heal itself, but it seems the only way the morning after.

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14: 1: MYSTERY SOLVED 11.02.2004

UrbisMediaProductions

Prevarication seems to come as easily to Republican politicians these days as does gullibility to their constituency. The willingness of the latter to believe that their leader's implication that it was Iraqis who flew those planes on 9-11, that Saddam had WMDs at the ready to use on the rest of us, that the mission was “accomplished,” that giving the rich a big tax break helps the poor, that a big break for Big Pharm is a health program, and on and on.

The problem is that the Big Lies work. Goebbels knew it, and Karl Rove knows it. And if enough people are willing – out of gullibility, stupidity, or just plain moral laxity – to accept enough of them to give Bush 270 electoral votes, then Goebbels/Rove will be proven right again. Of course, on this occasion, a host of blatantly dirty political tricks have been added for good measure—purging voter lists, losing registrations of Democrats and lost absentee ballots, and intimidating minority voters at polls—to Republican ethics.

So it was so easy for the administration to lie when at all three debates the cameras disclosed a curious formation on the back of George Bush. At the first one it was a T-shaped bulge, then on the latter two debates the formation had gained so padding. When asked about it the administration replied at first that it was “nothing” (always start out with flat-out denial). But, like Abu Ghraib, pictures were a problem, so the answer became that it was a bunched up shirt, then a badly-tailored suit jacket. Sure, even Bush isn't stupid enough to wear such a shirt or jacket three times!

This invited all sorts of speculation about what “the bulge”. The mainline press didn't seem very interested in it, but the internet burned with speculation about the most likely explanation: that Bush was getting his debate answers wired in to him, added to by the curious lengthy pauses in some of his responses. But there doesn't seem any real need to phone in Bush's answers. We already know what they are. So they probably just give him his lies, wind him up, and send him out there.

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