(with apologies to Klaus Voormann)

Aw, two of my favorite subjects brought together, The Beatles, and animals (not The Animals, sorry Eric Burdon)! I remember reading a review of The White Album in Rolling Stone Magazine’s 10th anniversary issue opining that not since Aesop’s Fables, or Toba Sojo’s rabbit and frog scrolls of the 11th century, had animals commingled their lives with humans so revealingly. Although that might be a bit of a stretch, it is certainly part of the legendary Liverpudlians’ charm and appeal that they spiced up their repertoire with such whimsical oddities as “Octopus’ Garden” and “Hey, Bulldog!” More so than other bands of the time, and perhaps before or since, they were fabulists at heart, and that is a key part of what has made them so endearing and enduring.

Dylan was cleverer. Hendrix rocked harder. Pink Floyd was weirder. And the Stones were just plain badder! But The Beatles captured the energy of their time better than any of their manifestly talented rivals. With titles such as “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Come Together”, they seem to have clearly, almost mystically, understood and embraced their roles as cultural guides through a period of mystery and excitement and wonder. The times were fraught with peril, but The Beatles, accompanied by their animal familiars, were charging out in front, wanting to hold our hands as they guided us on a journey that included herbs, gurus and revolutions.

So, here then, is my tribute to the Fab Four and their four legged (or eight tentacled, etc.) companions. Fans will have fun picking out the songs the critters are culled from, and will also be aware of what is about to befall poor Edgar Allan Poe!

One of the things I admire most about Bill Maher is the ability he has to make one think. He has a way with words – he would, having been an English major – that at first infuriates or intrigues a listener, but which then implants a thought in one’s mind that simply refuses to go away until the listener strikes obedience and thinks about the sense (or lack of) in the remark. It provokes an almost dichotomous thought pattern, because if you initially agree with something he’s said, by the time the next Real Time rolls around, you’ll be thinking otherwise; conversely, if you initially disagreed with his opinion, after a week’s cogitation, whilst you might not agree, you’ll certainly understand how he arrived at a stated conclusion.

I look and contribute to both Bill’s MySpace and Facebook pages, and I read a lot of the comments and criticisms made by other fans, and sometimes, they make me think too. This is what happened this week.

A regular commentator on the MySpace page criticized Bill’s handling of an incident which occurred during the panel discussion.

Amy Holmes was one of the panel guests on Bill’s show last week. She’s pretty much a dependable regular on Real Time, appearing at least once per season. I definitely get the impression that Bill’s having trouble securing panelists this season; as much as he had the same problem last year, this year it seems to be worse. Already, we’ve seen faces so familiar they probably have personal possessions stored someplace in the Real Time studios.

I’ve never been able to stomach much of Amy Holmes. Five minutes of listening to her regurgitate what amounts to rote-learned rehashings of whatever the current GOP talking points happen to be, drive me to embedding my fingernails into the fabric of the nearest wall. I find her, at worst, to be a snooty, entitled, walking advertisement for everything that’s pejorative about Affirmative Action – at best, to be the poster girl for Republican diversity.

But I always felt she had a bit of a crush on Bill Maher and that he had a thing for her also. He’s got form for conservative women, after all, considering his long friendship with Ann Coulter and his mommy-fixation on Arianna Huffington. (Look, she’s as Rightwing as Rush, only she hides it better. Leopards never change their spots). Whenever she appears on Bill’s show, she gets her points across in a sing-song-y little girl voice which reduces Bill to soft-peddling a retort which always begins with the exasperated phrase, “But, Amy, you’re so bright …”

That phrase always niggled me, whenever he used it, and he used it almost exclusively with Holmes. I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why it annoyed me. She certainly is bright. She’s articulate. She’s got a more than decent education. The fact that he constantly felt the need to refute her party political rhetoric with an allusion to her intelligence just irritated me to no end.

And now I know why.

The panelists on Friday were Holmes, Gary Johnson, the Republican former governor of New Mexico, and the actor Hill Harper. Bill initiated a discussion about global warming, concentrating on the Right’s constant denials about this trend and illustrating it with the conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard, depicting  a cover cartoon with a nude Al Gore in arctic surroundings.

Holmes immediately took up the baton of the deniers, jumping into the fray with both feet, employing her usual tactic of talking points, emphasized with facts, figures and fiction – speaking loudly, interrupting and muscling in on anyone who dared to speak. The whole argument lasted around 8 minutes, and consisted mostly of Holmes going into meltdown (pun intended), Bill trying to get a word in edgeways, Hill Harper briefly making a point so sensible it was rendered forgettable by the Holmes machine in overdrive, and the ineffectual Governor just sitting in silence, only once interjecting a mild point in support of the denialists’ theories.

Inevitably, the subject green technology and job creation entered into the equation, which introduced China into the discussion and the fact that they were leading the way in both green technology and jobs, as opposed to the United States dragging its heels and bogged down in debates as to whether or not the actual condition of global warming existed. Holmes refused to admit China’s progress.

“I’m not seeing any of that,” she maintained.

Then came the killer punch from Bill: “Then you don’t read.”

That wasn’t the end either. Later, whilst speaking with the fourth guest, author John Heilemann, Bill relayed an anecdote about an altercation on a plane between Presidential hopeful and Mormon, Mitt Romney and a rap artist, which resulted in the rapper being asked to leave the plane before take-off. The story illustrated nothing more than a third-class dust-up in the First Class section of a plane between two first-class pricks. As Hill Harper opined, Romney probably should have been asked to leave the plane as well, but Bill played up the racial aspect of it, bringing in – as always – a pejorative religious stance.

Remarking on the fact that Mormons allegedly view the black population as morally inferior, being descendants of Cain, their black skin evidence of the infamous “mark of Cain,” Bill tried to imply that Romney’s confrontation with the rapper had its roots in the Mormon belief of black racial inferiority.

Holmes made a back-handed attempt to defend Romney, and Bill’s verbal machinations resulted in her awkwardly defending the politico against racism as well. When she protested that she wasn’t wantonly defending Romney or Mormonism, Bill prissily sniffed, “I would hope you’d be defending black people!”

He almost sounded like a disapproving, maiden aunt.

Whilst I’ve no liking for Holmes and, in a purely political sort of way, I enjoyed the smackdowns, I enjoyed them in the sense of watching an articulate conservative being deftly and effectively silenced by a more articulate, intelligent liberal. I even commented as such on Bill’s MySpace page, and another commentator, also a woman, made a similar remark.

But someone else saw it differently. A male commentator, an ueber-liberal, himself, saw Bill’s behaviour toward Holmes as rude, citing her intelligence as deserving of respect, whilst at the same time, reminding Bill of his own chivalrous defence, the previous year, of Meghan McCain, in the face of a smackdown by Paul Begala.

The commentator went onto shame Bill for his rebuke of Holmes, whilst castigating him defence of McCain, who – he said – really was stupid and deserved to have her ass verbally smacked by Begala for making what was, essentially, an immature remark.

And that’s when I realised that Bill had essentially patronised and disrespected both women on this occasion, and that it was wrong of the commentator to chide Bill for what was two cleverly exhibited facets of the same type of behaviour: misogyny. Equally, it was wrong of the commentator to deem one woman deserving of respect because of her alleged intelligence and the other deserving of scorn because of her stupidity. In a curious way, he was being patronising too.

First of all, both Holmes and McCain have Ivy League degrees – Holmes from Princeton and McCain from Columbia. In fact, I’d go as far as guessing that both women each probably graduated with grade point averages superior to any accumulated by Bill Maher at Cornell. Bill’s grammar, syntax and spelling in some of his writing are nothing short of disgraceful in someone who got a degree in English.

Secondly, Holmes is a good decade older than McCain, who – at 24 – was the youngest panellist to appear on Real Time. McCain’s nervousness was apparent for all to see; in fact, she twittered in the hour before the show that not one of the waiting guests bothered speaking to her, except for the journalist, Joel Stein. It’s easy to imagine Begala and Katty Kay, the only other woman on the panel, cosying in a corner of the Green Room, exchanging whispered bitcheries about McCain.

When she made a particularly puerile observation in her nervousness, Begala pounced, but Bill’s over-exaggerated defence of her from ‘that bad, bad man” was not only patronising, it was humiliating. In one instant, she’d become the kid at the adults’ table, whose presence was suffered with great patience and forebearing, but who needed, now and then to be reminded of her rightful place. She was the dumb blonde, the bimbo.

This is a woman, who is an Ivy League graduate, an author and a columnist in her own right. She may have got a leg-up from her old man’s name and political position, but having got the leg-up, she’s managed to stay where she is and hold her own.

With Holmes, the treatment meted was more openly meaner and just as undeserved. The remark about reading, whilst linked to Holmes’s party line defence of the climate change deniers, also implied a wider stupidity. It bought into the standard attitude assumed by the Left that anyone who is on the Right side of the political fence is ignorant, benighted; that that ignorance is willful and, therefore, deserving of disdain.

In her previous appearances on the show, Bill’s reaction to Holmes’s rhetoric was weary bemusement. He was the kindly, tolerant liberal guide trying to ease her into seeing the error of her ways. Now she was just another soulless member of the Dark Side, and her cack-handed attempts to respond to Bill’s assertion that because Mitt Romney was a Mormon, he must also be a racist (as assumption any other conservative would have treated with the contempt it deserved) resulted in her being tacitly identified and exposed by Bill as being an oreo, ashamed and almost admitting to bearing that ubiquitous mark of Cain.

The treatment meted both these women was derogatory and a mixture of pity, revulsion and condescension, a view that both were ignorant creatures who needed either protection from themselves or exposure of their inadequacies.

Neither of these women deserved this, and it’s difficult to imagine Bill treating Tucker Carlson or Michael Steele the way he reacted to both these women.

I’m not surprised at the level of misogyny prevalent today, either in the media or in politics. After all, Bill’s fellow Cornell alumnus, Keith Olbermann, was recently taken to task by Jon Stewart for referring to Michelle Malkin, another obnoxious conservative voice, as having a face “like a beaten-up piece of meat with lipstick”. And if Bill ever bothers to read John Heilemann’s Game Change, so prominently displayed on the bookshelf behind his desk, he’d realise that the two most intellectually astute people in the Senate recently, besides Ted Kennedy, were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and the one most universally disliked and disdained was Clinton.

Pussy fear? More than just a bit all around.

I thought God might be pleased with the Texas education board putting him into their textbooks (he likes to try to stay ahead of Paris Hilton in popularity) but he instead asked me to publish this blog for Him:

Okay, I may be Old Testament School but though I’m flattered that some Texans would rather have me in their schools than gravity, I’m not comfortable going back into the classroom. I can’t fit my legs under those desks anymore and…my teen years were a bit awkward, I’d rather not be reminded of them.

This situation’s made clear that there are a few misunderstandings about me so I think now may be a good time to clear up some of them:

a. I am not American

Okay, maybe I was the first and most primal American Idol but I’m not American. That doesn’t mean I have a Nigerian birth certificate either. It’s like that old joke about Lincoln being born in a log cabin that he helped his father build, how could I have been born in a country on a planet that I created? So if I wasn’t born in America and I haven’t married an American woman (you should see my eHarmony profile, “Seeking a married virgin to get pregnant but not looking to leave her husband.”) , I don’t even have a green card.

How could I be American? I mean, I’m supposed to be everyone’s God, you know? How would Americans feel if I told them I was Canadian and liked them best? I do like back bacon but the bottom line is that I can’t hold a passport from any nation because my head shot would be way too big to fit on one.

b.  I am not an advocate of capitalism.

Believe me, after I lost a bundle in the tulip crash, the stock market crash, the dot com crash, the housing crash, I’m capitalismed out. I really don’t know where folks got the idea that I favor any economic system. When you’re eternal, you don’t even have a concept of possession.  What someone owns right now will eventually be someone else’s after enough time passes. Everything that’s physical today will eventually be transformed into something else. Except Twinkies…those damn things last forever.

Are folks really asking themselves, WDWJII (What Derivatives Would Jesus Invest In)? Like lots of people losing their homes and buried in credit card debt, my son was totally down on the money changers. He didn’t have a single credit card, really.

He and I pretty much see eye-to-eye on this, economic systems shouldn’t be worshiped. They should just be tools for making the lives of the most people the best they can be. If they’re not working great to do that, they should just be changed until and so they do.

The way some down there are about capitalism is like insisting on wearing the same  bikini that fit 20 years and 30 pounds ago.   It really doesn’t fit America like it used to, it’s come apart at the seams and needs to be mended. And adding a bit of Spandex wouldn’t hurt.

c. I don’t want to be President of the U.S.

No offense to Pres. Obama or any presidents before him but for me, that would really be a bit of a job demotion from omnipotent lord of all creation, you know? And can you imagine the way I’d be attacked if I ran? “He doesn’t stop the devil, can we trust him to stop Bin Laden?” or “He’s almost as old as John McCain, his VP is just one Atheist’s argument away from becoming president”.

Actually, I have an appreciation for the separation between church and state…really miss that, anyone know whatever happened to it?

d. The Devil is not responsible for the things and/or people you don’t like.

Many people blame The Devil or demons possessing people for things that happen or are said that they don’t like. They would be correct more often blaming bad things on high fructose corn syrup.

The truth is that Satan’s been going through a bit of depression lately, it’s a bit of the Empty Nest syndrome. Enough little evils have grown up in enough people in the world, Satan just doesn’t feel needed anymore. I don’t want to say he’s become very needy but every time I see him he asks, “Do these horns make my face look fat?”

So, just try to think of me like your parents. Humanity has grown up, moved out and is living in its own apartment. It can stay up late and party without regard for the consequences, it can be conscientious and dedicated to doing well at its work, it can care about its neighbors and help them or steal their Sunday newspapers.

Humanity can always call me to talk, I know my advice isn’t always wanted and I’m okay with that. Other times, I know how appreciated it is.

I won’t interfere in Humanity’s life and I only ask one thing of it, please no more ties on my birthday, I’ve got a whole closet of them and honestly, I never wear them.

Peace!

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.

- Genesis 6

I’m an ape man, I’m an ape ape man, oh I’m an ape man
– The Kinks

Recently, I wrote a post (Sade and the Body)proffering the idea that the roots of sadism, and peoples’ fascination with it in films and literature, can be found in the nature of our consciousness, specifically that we humans are acutely aware of just how much our bodies are capable of suffering, under certain unwelcome conditions. In that essay, I referred to the mind’s “hatred” of the body, a kind of psychosis arising from the mind’s  awareness of this worrisome aspect of its nature. In the interests of fairness, I would like, with this essay, to consider the human body’spredicament, the raw deal it gets from being attached to a mind that operates like no other in the animal kingdom.

As bodies go, yours and mine are nothing more than variations on a theme. They are closest in form to the chimpanzees and other higher apes, of course, but in fact they are not so different from hundreds of species having vertebrae, internal organs held within a rib cage, extenders such as arms, legs,  fingers, toes, etc. Our pinkish pigmentation can be found under the fur of numerous animals, from pigs to guinea pigs to dogs to prairie dogs. In terms of design, I think it fair to say that we have more in common with squirrels, physiologically and stylistically, than a Model T has to a Ferrari, and than either does to a bulldozer or a city bus. Our bodies are just another example of The Mammalian Success Story that has been going on since ancient cataclysms laid the dinosaurs low.

If a chimpanzee were to wake up one morning, and find it’s body transformed, a la Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, into that of a homo sapiens, leaving aside the muscular strength it would be sacrificing, we can imagine that it would be able to find its way around its new contraption fairly easily. If it felt an itch, or an urge, it would pretty much know what to do about it. And the alternative would be true for us as well. All that chimp hair may take some getting used to, as would being able to effortlessly rip doors off their hinges, but on the whole we’d probably be able to master our new equipment, eventually. Learning to function in our chimp body would probably be considerably less difficult than learning to fly an airplane or navigate a submarine.

Now, on the other hand, stick that chimpanzee’s body with a human mind and tell me it wouldn’t freak out! “What are all these…things?” They’re called abstract thoughts. “WTF am I supposed to do with them?” Uh…, this is going to take some time. Our minds, with their abstract, logical, inventive, metaphoric, etc. ways of operating represent such an anomalous feature of evolution that if even our closest relatives were to suddenly come into the possession of one they would likely go flat out insane in a matter of seconds! We, fortunately, have had all of seven million years (since we broke off from the chimps, a mere blink of an eye in the history of evolution) to get used to our minds. We’re comfortable with them, or are we?

It’s not so much the minds themselves, which, unique as they are in the Wild Kingdom, nevertheless have clearly aided our survival and expansion over the various terrains of the earth. You don’t find chimps living in harsh, dry deserts or frozen hinterlands, after all. But what we havedone with our minds, how we have shaped our environment with them, has surely put tremendous strain on our poor animal bodies. Consider our eyes, hardly different than a chimp’s, which evolved while looking at relatively few color schemes, primarily the greens of the jungle, the blues and grays of ocean and sky, the browns of the earth and mountains, etc. Seeking out the sudden stimulation that comes from finding attractive fruit, or the sudden rapid movement that alerts us that prey or predators are about. This is what our close relatives see, what they use their eyes for, up to this very day. Whereas we, on the other hand, are constantly blitzed with a mad barrage of colors, flashing images, tiny backlit characters on a computer screen that we put together to make words, etc. Other senses are similarly blitzed; our ears, certainly, to say nothing of our taste buds! We are a hyper-stimulated species, made so by the downright freakish environments we’ve built and placed ourselves in.

We spend so much time in boxes; buildings, rooms, cars, and, perhaps, that most unnatural environment of all, fifty thousand feet above the earth, in airplane cabins. Our air is conditioned, our light is electric, our drinking water comes to us through pipes. Our contact with other species is extremely limited. Our natural patterns of sleep and movement are severely compromised by the demands of the unnatural world we’ve engineered for ourselves. Oh, the poor human body! So near, by its very structure, to the natural world, and yet so distant!

It’s bad enough that we modify our own bodies. We have gone further, employing our minds to mould oddities of biology that Natural Selection would have, er, naturally selected for extinction tout suite. Consider the poor pug, which sounds asthmatic as it manages to breathe through a flat apparatus that was meticulously squashed from a wolf’s long snout by generations of breeding. Consider as well ears of corn with husks wrapped so tightly around the seeds they can’t possibly be dispersed. Or bananas with seeds so useless the plants must be grown by cuttings. Cows with udders so huge, and geared toward milk production, they would possibly explode without human assistance. I wonder, if the beauty, vulnerability and exquisiteness of our own human bodies was fully appreciated and honored, would such manipulations of other creatures even be thinkable?

in 1968, Erich von Daniken published a book titled Chariots of the Gods. In it, he referred to certain passages from ancient literature, such as the one I begin this essay with, as indicating that human beings are in fact manifestations of an experiment of sorts, a hybridization of terrestrial ape bodies with highly intelligent aliens (the “gods” who came by “chariots” to the earth). Whether or not there is any truth whatsoever to the claims the book makes, the metaphor of “sons of Gods” (minds) mating with “daughters of men” (animal bodies) quite poetically describes our predicament, I feel. We are, by all accounts, an oddity of nature. Ours is an uncomfortable marriage of raw, animal senses and sensitivities, to abstract, intellectual sentience. For now, our minds have succeeded in constraining our bodies within an environment and lifestyle that no stretch of the imagination could argue they were evolved, over the course of millions of years, for. One can only hope that as the human mind continues to evolve it will work out a happier medium for the animal it lives its life contained within.

The Christian Right is a convoluted mixture of social, and religious based beliefs and they believe the way to solve the issues they deem to be important is to rule politically. They are Dominionist in nature and their belief system is centered on the idea they must control the world. They possess an “authoritarian” mindset that permeates all of their activities. In understanding them, you must understand that the basis of their particular brand of religion/social/political activity is basically a good v. evil philosophy. While they may not subscribe to it, they are what some modern scholars have suggested is Manichaean in their belief and social structure, but again not in the purest sense of the religion. In fact when Christians first encountered Manichaeism they deemed it as heresy. It had developed in a heavily Gnostic area of the Persian Empire, however Roman Emperor Theodosius I issued a decree of death for Macichaeans in AD382, declaring that Christianity was the only legitimate religion for the Roman Empire. Augustine of Hippo converted to Christianity in AD387 however Manichaean ways of thinking did influence some of his ideas such as the nature of good and evil, the existence of hell, the separation of groups into the elect, the hearers, and of course the sinners. Hostility to the flesh and sexual activity were added in to align with the Roman Empire religious philosophy. In these principles you can find the basis for attaching the title, Manichaean, to the Christian Right.The modern day Christian Right believe there are good forces constantly doing battle with evil forces and the battle will not end until all evil has been eradicated. Some would say, but hey isn’t that a good thing? Sure if you believe their rendition of Good and Evil is correct. The problem is their viewpoint is based on their own interpretation of scripture, mostly from the Old Testament. And is based on the idea that they are the ones who need to be in power to eradicate the evil. George W Bush was constantly reminding us of the utter evil in the world and based on the day of the week, any country could be included in his “axis of evil”. If you did not go along with his way of thinking(and the Christian Right) you were labeled as non-patriotic, subversive or a traitor. Paul Weyrich described evil in the following comment at a conference of Christian Right leaders in 1995:

“The real enemy is the secular humanist mindset which seeks to destroy everything that is good in this society. The fight that we are fighting, the battle we have joined, is one that encompasses our entire life span”

My question in response to that statement is: does becoming a Christian make you a better person than the secular person or does it just make you meaner?

And Pat Robertson:

“It’s going to be a spiritual battle. There will be Satanic forces…. We are not going to be coming up just against human beings, to beat them in elections. We’re going to be coming up against spiritual warfare.”

Their activity, religious, political and societial, adheres to the authoritarian mindset and they are fanatical in all aspects. Erich Seligmann Fromm, a German social psychologist, humanistic philosopher and democratic socialist referred to fanaticism as any right wing authoritarian movement, usually a hothouse of dysfunction.  He wrote:

“Those who cannot endure the vertiginous new social, political and personal freedoms of the modern age, those who crave security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere, might be susceptible to the siren song of fascism.”

This description provides an eerie but accurate look at the Christian Right and consequently, the Republican Party. Their Jesus is the exact opposite of the Prince of Peace most Christians believe in. Their Jesus is a stern, manly, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword drawn against secular foes.  Their Jesus would not feed the poor and the Beatutides were never written because a Jesus who performs in the manner theirs does would certainly not put the people first.  Their Jesus is going to come back to earth and miraculously take them all up to heaven where they will sit on the “right hand of the father” and watch as the rest of us secularists are tortured in the most horrendous ways imaginable.  It does not matter that some of us are Christians as well, we are just not the right kind of Christian.  In fact it was not until the early 1820’s when the “Rapture” fairytale was established. Prior to that time, there is no mention in history of this story. The person who is credited with generating the story reportedly said that he was reading Revelations and although had read it many times, this time the scripture and interpretation just “jumped off the page” at him. That interpretation has proven to be their “cash cow” in convincing millions of people to convert to their brand of religion. It is more like a grim fairytale, than a believable story for those of us who feel a higher power is a kind individual who wants the best for the entire universe.  However, millions of people across the world have fallen into the belief that this story is real and will assure you it is real based on their “interpretation” of scripture. They claim that they have taken this fairytale straight from scripture, however prior to the 19th century there is no mention of this story in their history.

“When you start a war on false pretenses and then act as if your deceptions are justified because you are doing God’s will and that your critics are either unpatriotic or lacking in faith, there are some of us who have given our lives to teaching and preaching the faith who believe that this is not only not moral, but immoral”

Yet, the Christian Right will always claim the high road when it comes to morality and faith. Their “Family Values” tradition has been a failure over and over because even they cannot live up to the terms, yet they still cling to their ideas and will not enter into a civil dialogue with the rest of the nation. It is sad and that is the reason we must all remain vigilant. They are not going away, they will use tricks and deception to move their agendas forward. Be vigilant and I leave you with these words from Dr. Robin Meyers:

“It’s our country to take back, all of our citizens’ country. Don’t be afraid to speak out. Don’t back down when your friends begin to tell you that the cause is righteous and that the flag should be wrapped around the cross, while the rest of us keep our mouths shut. Real Christians take chances for peace. So do real Jews, and real Muslims, and real Hindus, and real Buddhists–so do all the faith traditions of the world at their heart believe one thing: life is precious.”

P.S. I would add real Atheists and real Agnostics to that equation, but that is just me.

Part three is coming up and it will cover the players on the Christian Right, their organizations and their prominent leaders. Suggested Reading Material and Websites to follow:

Clint Willis/Nate Hardcastle – Jesus is Not a Republican, The Religious Right’s War on America

Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage – Media Culture and the Religious Right

Esther Kaplan – With God On Their Side

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/9/5/114652/6239

http://www.religiondispatches.org/

** It should be noted that the Congress amended the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in 2009, however I have not found any information that the Presidential power was affected.

Keith Olbermann has lost his Dad.

Sad News,  I really feel for Keith and his family.  I have  lost my Parents also, so has my Husband.  We know this territory and fully value that Keith has shared some of his difficult experience with his viewers.

Keith’s remarks are below with a link to his blog where you can leave a message.

Something that I truly respect about Keith is when the Healthcare debates began heating up, some political commentators were using their air time to  frighten people
and further divide our country  for their own profits,
Keith used his time on air to raise funds for Free Clinics not only to help raise awareness of the need for Healthcare reform but also to help the many thousands that had no where else to turn.

Keith, your Dad must have been quite a man to have raised a son like you.

Certainly One of the Best Persons in the World.

My father died, in the city of his birth, New York, at 3:50 EST this afternoon.

Though the financial constraints of his youth made college infeasible, he accomplished the near-impossible, becoming an architect licensed in 40 states. Much of his work was commercial, for a series of shoe store chains and department stores. There was a time in the 1970’s when nearly all of the Baskin-Robbins outlets in the country had been built to his design, and under his direction. Through much of my youth and my early adult life, it was almost impossible to be anywhere in this country and not be a short drive to one of “his” stores.

My Dad was predeceased last year by my mother, Marie, his wife of nearly 60 years. He died peacefully after a long fight against the complications that ensued after successful colon surgery last September at the New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center. My sister Jenna and I were at his side, and I was reading him his favorite James Thereby short stories, as he left us.

I can’t say enough about Dr. Jeff Milsom and his team at the hospital, and all of those physicians and nurses and staffers in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit who looked after my Dad all this time, and kept him in their hearts. And I feel the same way about all of you who have expressed your best wishes and prayers to him, and to me, and to our family.

My Dad was my biggest booster. A day after I was hired by CNN in the summer of 1981 as a two-week vacation relief sports reporter, I traveled by train to my childhood hometown, and walked from the station towards my folks’ house. I was stopped half a dozen times before I got to my Dad’s office by people congratulating me on my impending television debut. There was, of course, only one way they could have known. My Dad, the press agent.

Of course it was he and my Mom who took me to my first Yankees games (even though my father nursed a delightful grudge against the team for trading away his favorite players, Steve Souchock and Snuffy Stirnweiss - in 1948 and 1950). But as my interest in the sport began to take the shape of a dreamt-of career, it was my Dad also sacrificed family vacations so we could buy ever more tickets to Yankee games. When we could afford both games and vacations, four times those vacations were to Spring Training.

He was my inspiration, and will always remain so. His bravery these last six months cannot be measured. He is as much my hero now, as he was when I was five years old.

Click for Keith Olberman’s Blog

Texas has just officially doomed generations of their children to ignorance and being oddities in their grasp of history and reality…because neither of those items supported the political views of conservatives and Republicans.

I normally keep my quotes to a minimum but there is so much outrageousness here, I couldn’t pare it down:

From the NY Times:

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

By James C. Mckinley Jr.
March 12, 2010

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

“Republicans need a little credit for that,” he said. “I think it’s going to surprise some students.”

Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include “how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.” The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States.

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.

“The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said.

Even the course on world history did not escape the board’s scalpel.

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?scp=1&sq=texas%20education&st=cse

Trying to refine these a bit..

lemme know what you think..

be BRUTAL!!!!

..

..

..

On SARAH PALIN:

She said she’d attend the Convention.

Old Sarah still craved the attention.

She wrote on her hand,

copped one hundred grand,

then “donated” it to her own pension.

= = = = = = = = = =

She calls for a new revolution,

“We must ply to the strict Constitution”!

When asked what that meant,

her knowledge was spent..

and the rest was just more noise pollution.

= = = = = = = = = =

On CHENEY:

There once was a V.P. named Cheney,

Whose “vision” was bitter & grainy.

He tortured & swore

that we needed a war

but he turned out much worse than Khomeini.

= = = = = = = = = =

(variation)

There’s a putrid old fascist named Cheney

who delights in the concept of pain, he

denies that the cries

that his try’s to baptize

reap just more useless lies than Khomeini.

= = = = = = = = = =

On RACHEL MADDOW vs AARON SCHOCK:

There’s a vapid young freshman named Aaron

whose worldview is woefully barren.

He was clearly miscast

and was tied to the mast

When “Rach” made his world Sub Saharan.

= = = = = = = = = =

There once was a Gooper named Schock

whose spiel was a typical crock.

It was almost a crime

he was given the time

to watch Maddow just clean out his clock.

= = = = = = = = = =

On JOHN BOEHNER:

There’s a GOP lackey named Boehner

Who, for all intents, looks like a stoner,

He’d forgotten his task

to top his hip flask

filled entirely of orange skin toner.

= = = = = = = = = =

The Minority Leader was shaken.

A finger wagging was taken.

So he hemmed & he hawed,

‘tho his snit was a fraud

‘Cause he knew he was no Francis Bacon.

= = = = = = = = = =

On the CPAC CONVENTION:

So, they’re holding a cute, little meeting

where Limbaugh will keep overeating.

Beck will chalk the same croc

Dick will stock an ad-hoc

with Uranium needing depleting.

= = = = = = = = = =

On REPUBLICAN OBSTRUCTION:

All they want is to block & obstruct

any progress they feel should be chucked.

They’d rather still stay

then betray their cliche

of a time when their “values” just sucked.

= = = = = = = = = =

They bleat & they fete for “more jobs”.

They lob “blobs of green gobs” at the mobs.

Yet when Bills are proposed

their minds stay clamped closed

so they’ll recommence humping Lou Dobbs.

= = = = = = = = = = =

On HEALTH CARE REFORM:

They strive for a new “Waterloo”

by giving our Health Bill the flu.

But their pale rail will fail

as this ship has set sail

so we’ll bid their stale milieu adieu.

= = = = = = = = = = =

The wingers were set to make merry..

Our Bill they were ready to bury.

But then came this “twist”,

Some new grain for the grist.

Punked AGAIN, were they?

“Yes indeed, VERY!”

= = = = = = = = = = =

On GLENN BECK:

There’s this broadcast bufffoon known as Glenn,

who prays to the DEV!L (amen!).

He insights racial fights

‘tll some fan kills non-whites

which come to pass not “if” but WHEN.

= = = = = = = = = =

On NEWT GINGRICH:

There’s a throwback right winger named Newt

whose delusions remain so acute

that he inks what he thinks

will prove links he thinks stinks

but his foot, in the end, he will shoot.

= = = = = = = = = =

On BIPARTISANSHIP, the GOP CAUCUS & the HEALT CARE SUMMIT:

“Can’t we all get along?”, asked the Pres..

but they couldn’t care less what he says.

They’ll admit they don’t fit

& will quit with a snit

just like Lucy & Desi Arnaz.

= = = = = = = = = =

(variation)

“Let’s discuss this out front”, said the Pres..

but they couldn’t care less what he says.

When they cease to transmit,

they just quit with a snit

just like Lucy & Desi Arnaz.

= = = = = = = = = = =

On RON PAUL:

There once was a looney named Paul

who would like-minded loonies entrall.

He’d replace the black race

just in case they’d erase

his delusional masquerade ball.

= = = = = = = = = =

On COLIN POWELL’S DISCLOSURES:

We had a great General named Powell

who needed to throw in the towel.

His supply of a lie

went awry (my oh my)

Now he’s paying Dick back with a vowel.

= = = = = = = = = =

On JIM BUNNING:

There’s a putrid old winger named Bunning

who feels unemployed people need shunning.

His crusade to cease aid

I’m afraid did cascade

to his running when people came gunning.

= = = = = = = = = =

On JOHN KYL:

= = = = = = = = = =

There once was a winger named, KYL

who was to all working people hostile.

He believes they are thieves

as he weaves his pet peeves

into a mountainous steaming coiled pile.

= = = = = = = = = = =

&.. last but not least.. BART STUPAK:

A Congressional throwback named Stupak

who constantly flacks through his butt-crack

his tack to set back

womens rights with a whack

is just merely a hack at his nut-sac.

==

 This the 3rd Temple Menorah, hopefully a fitting representation of what I am about to write.

               __________________________________________________

I will be writing this article from memory and personal experience in an attempt to provide an understanding of why there is a movement of Protestant embrace of the Old Testement by a portion of believers. 

             __________________________________________________

                                                 What would Jesus Do?

This question has become iconic in our society and each persons personal faith provides their answer.  Most of us would agree that Jesus was a Jew devout to his faith. So what would Jesus do? Would he eat pork? Consider the Sabbath as Sunday? Celebrate Christmas or Easter? What Law was Jesus referring to when he spoke ” I have not come to change the Law, but to fulfill it”?  

 Jesus was devout to the Laws of Judaism set down in the Old Testament.  Like most faiths there were different sects of his faith at the time and exactly which one he would be associated with is still being debated to this day. But it still would have been the interpretation of Old Testament Law. 

 Our modern views about some subjects are in direct conflict of this Law.  How one resolves this conflict is their own personal journey.

                __________________________________________________

                                                            Rejection of The Roman

Suffice it to say you can’t be Protestant and Catholic. To avoid stepping on toes I won’t go in to detail, but the journey that led me to more of an Old Testament based Faith was rejecting just about everything that had a direct connection to the Roman Catholic Church, including holidays, certain beliefs, narratives  and practices. There is a small segment or radical Protestants whose bigotry and prejudices are the center of their rejection of the Roman, but for many and for myself  it was more about how the Faith was founded, what it was based upon, how it’s doctrine was developed and it’s history.

                        __________________________________________________

                                                                     Revelations

To understand the End Times Evangelical World View and why they have moved into Politics and business with it, you need to learn about their interpretation of the Book of Revelations. After all without this little gem of a book there would be no Bibical End Times to interpret.  The symbols in this book  have entered our modern vernacular, Seven Seals, Armageddon and the infamous “666″.

 Numerous best sellers have been written about this book including Hal Lindsay’s “Late Great Planet Earth”. This book and it’s interpretation of End Times Prophecy could be considered the Flame that Lit the Fire. Basically the return of Israel as a Nation State is what got this ball rolling and it has been gaining momentum ever since.

So, The Temple is rebuilt, Jesus returns, the Jews accept him as the Messiah, The Anti-Christ and Satan are defeated and Jesus rules a perfect world for a 1000 years.  Being that he is Jewish by birth and faith my guess it will be based on Judaic Law found in the Old Testament. Jesus will be taking his Throne in a Jewish Temple rebuilt for the Messiah of the Jewish people. Thats New Testement for the Old Testement. 

                   __________________________________________________

When an End Times Evangelical or Protestant takes a stance based on Old Testament Scripture or Law and I see someone questioning that stance as how or why they use the Old Testament, I always think why not?  There isn’t a whole lot of Law laid down by Yahweh in the New Testament and Yashua interpreted the Old Testament Law by expanding it to the “thought police” version of Sin. The New Testament is mostly interpreted by believers whereas the Old Testament Law doesn’t leave much for interpretation. Most Christian denominations base their Doctrines on Homosexuality for instance on the Old Testament, mainly because it really isn’t approached in the New Testament.

Most people cherry pick scriptures for their point counter point, and I hope what little I covered helps with understanding the use of the Old Testament.

As for my personal journey I eventually removed myself so far from the Roman I became deeply involved with the “Messianic Judaism” movement.    

p.s. don’t knock dancing with snakes if you haven’t tried it   

I’m busy. We don’t want somebody sitting back saying you’re not holding the mop the right way.

Why don’t you grab a mop? Why don’t you help clean up?

“You’re not mopping fast enough.”

“That’s a socialist mop.”

Grab a mop! Let’s get to work.  ~~President Barak Obama

The American people by a popular majority of more than eight million votes selected as their President a candidate who had been attacked by his Republican foe as a radical who “began his campaign in the liberal left lane of politics and has never left it.”

If only. In truth, Barack Obama was never the Mao in pinstripes that the rightwing attack machine conjured up. His record on Capitol Hill was never “more liberal than a Senator who calls himself a socialist [Vermont's Bernie Sanders],” as John McCain wheezed at the last stops of a dying campaign. And he has never even been in competition for the title bestowed upon him by former Senator Fred Thompson during last summer’s Republican National Convention: “the most liberal . . . nominee to ever run for President.”

Thompson had apparently forgotten not just George McGovern but Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, all of whom sought the Presidency as more left-leaning contenders than did Obama in 2008. And, as McGovern, an able historian, himself reminds us: Franklin Roosevelt put contemporary Democrats to shame when it came to embracing and advancing radical notions.

For we Liberals and Progressives, who find ourselves moving from the easy opposition stance of the Bush-Cheney horror to the more challenging position of dealing with the first Democratic President elected with something akin to a mandate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, it is important to see Barack Obama for who he is and his administration for what it can be. The best way to do this is by hearing the President in his own words.

After he secured the delegates required to claim the Democratic nomination, Obama found himself at a town hall meeting in suburban Atlanta, where he was grilled about whether having run as a primary season Progressive he was now shifting to the center.

The Senator was clearly offended by the suggestion.

“Let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the center or that I’m flip-flopping or this or that or the other,” he began. “You know, the people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me.”

“I am somebody who is no doubt Progressive. I believe in a tax code that we need to make more fair. I believe in universal health care. I believe in making college affordable. I believe in paying our teachers more money. I believe in early childhood education. I believe in a whole lot of things that make me progressive.”

I believe him. Those were not casually chosen words. Barack Obama knows exactly what it means to say he is a “Progressive,” and he actually understands the subtle nuances of the American left. This is a man who moved to Chicago to be part of the political moment that began with the 1983 election of leftie Congressman Harold Washington as the city’s first African American mayor, who studied the organizing techniques of Saul “Rules for Radicals” Alinsky, who worked with proudly radical labor leaders to defend basic industries and avert layoffs, who used his Harvard-educated legal skills to fight for expanded voting rights, who was mentored by civil libertarian legislator and federal judge Abner Mikva, who discussed the intricacies of Middle East policy with Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, and who learned about single-payer health care from his old friend and neighbor Dr. Quentin Young, the longtime coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program. And, famously, Obama did not just make anti-war sounds before Iraq was invaded, he appeared at an anti-war rally in downtown Chicago with a “War Is Not an Option” sign waving at his side.

Barack Obama ran for the Illinois state senate as a candidate endorsed by the New Party, the labor-left movement of the mid-1990s that declared “the social, economic, and political progress of the United States requires a democratic revolution in America-the return of power to the people.” In those days, he was blunt about his desire to move the Democratic Party off the cautious center where Bill Clinton had wedged it. When he positioned himself for a 2004 U.S. Senate run, Obama said that he saw Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold-the lone dissenter against the Patriot Act-as the best role model in the chamber.

I celebrated Obama’s election as a victory for what the late Paul Wellstone described as “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” But knowing the ideals and values of the left is not the same as practicing them. As a Senator, Obama did not take Feingold as a role model. In fact, they differed on essential constitutional, trade, and Presidential accountability issues, with Obama consistently taking more cautiously Centrist positions. One of Obama’s first votes in the Senate was to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. Dr. Young wrote to his friend. “I told him I was disappointed in him,” the veteran campaigner for peace and social and economic justice recalled. “Rice was the embodiment of everything that was wrong with this Administration. So, he called me back and he said: ‘Why didn’t you pick up the phone and call me? Do you think Bush would ever send to the Senate a nominee for Secretary of State who I could vote for? I said: ‘You are the constitutional lawyer. It’s about advice and consent, right? You should have denied him your consent.’ ”

The lesson that should be taken away from the Rice vote, and from the disappointments that have followed it, ought not be that Obama is a hopeless case. In fact, quite the opposite. In that conversation with Young, Senator Obama outlined the relationship that the left ought to develop with President Obama.

Obama was nominated and elected in 2008 by Independents and by Progressives, both younger tech-savvy activists who made his candidacy an early favorite of the blogosphere and old-school liberal precinct walkers like me. The Senator won the Democratic nomination because he was the only first-tier contender who could say that he had opposed authorizing Bush to take the country to war with Iraq. In the Iowa caucuses that would define the 2008 race, those anti-war credentials, above all other factors, made the young Senator from Illinois a contender.

Similarly, as he campaigned in key states such as Wisconsin, Obama’s call for a new approach to free trade agreements and for massive infrastructure investments allowed him to secure backing from labor and liberal farm activists at critical stages in the process. The Progressives who committed to Obama early on were the essential foot soldiers of his long march through the caucuses, the primaries, and the fall campaign. These activists formed a base within the campaign and the Democratic Party, centered on –but not limited to –the Obama team’s open website and blog, www.MyBarackObama.com, which did not always cheerlead for the candidate. In June, when Obama broke with Feingold and other Senate Progressives to support Bush’s rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the Senator felt enough heat from his own and independent netroots sites that he was compelled to explain himself, making what Obama described as a “firm pledge” that he would revisit the issue as President to shore up privacy protections.

What Internet activists such as OpenLeft.com’s Matt Stoller did during the FISA fight was roughly equivalent to what Obama told Dr. Young to do back in 2005: “Pick up the phone and call me.” Netroots activists made themselves heard and earned a response from then-candidate Obama. And they can do much more with respect to President Obama. The netroots can get the public engaged, but instead, they have made the public demoralized. Instead of providing suggestions, they have only complained. They have been reactive and not proactive.

One way to influence Obama and his Administration is to speak– not so much to him– as to America. Progressives need to get out ahead of the President. Highlight the right appointees and the right responses to deal with the challenges that matter most. Advance big ideas and organize on their behalf; identify allies in federal agencies, especially in Congress, and work with them to dial up the pressure for progress. I am not seeing much of that at all—but I am seeing a daily barrage of criticism. I am not seeing any discussion of what has been accomplished or what we specifically want accomplished. Indeed, we could take a lesson from rightwing pressure groups in their dealings with Republican administrations and recognize that it is always better to build the bandwagon than to jump on board one that is crafted with the tools of compromise. Don’t just critique, but rather propose.

Sixty activists from The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, Physicians for a National Health Program, and Progressive Democrats of America and allied groups met one week after Election Day at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington with Michigan Congressman John Conyers, an early Obama backer and the chief House proponent of real reform, to forge a Single-Payer Healthcare Alliance and plot specific strategies for influencing the new Administration and Congress.

The point wasn’t to teach Obama about single-payer. Seven years ago, he told the Illinois AFLCIO: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody . . . a singlepayer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

Since then, Democrats have taken back the House, the Senate, and the White House, but perhaps in name only. We have learned since the election that too many who call themselves Democrats are only Democrats on some issues. Single-payer was never on the table, and in retrospect, I can see why not. The President’s statements, his strategies, and his appointments evidence a caution born of the political and structural pressures faced by every President. Whether the previous, more progressive Obama still exists remains to be seen. I still believe it does. But the only way to determine if Obama really is the Progressive he claimed in 2008 to be is to push not just Obama, but the public and the media. I am frustrated every day when I watch the political pundits –and not only those on the Right—claim that the public is opposed to Health Care Reform. Why do they think Obama won? It was the central item of his agenda!

The often quoted example of Franklin Roosevelt is still  good to remember. After his election in 1932, FDR met with Sidney Hillman and other labor leaders, many of them active Socialists with whom he had worked over the past decade or more. Hillman and his allies arrived with plans they wanted the new President to implement. Roosevelt told them: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.”

It is reasonable for Progressives to assume that Barack Obama agrees with them on many fundamental issues. He has said as much. It is equally reasonable for Progressives to assume that Barack Obama wants to do the right thing. But it is necessary for Progressives to understand that, as with Roosevelt, they will have to make Obama do it.

I have never worked so hard as a citizen to get what I voted for. That’s fine; this is the new reality. I can’t say how much difference the involvement of Progressive activists has made, because it is impossible to prove a negative. Where would we be if we’d never emailed and called our representatives? I believe HCR would have died last August. I believe there might not be a second stimulus. I think financial reforms would be forgotten–as well as a host of other mopping chores we still need to accomplish. Congress is cowardly and lazy, and if Progressives don’t push, be certain the Right will win. To paraphrase Roy Scheider’s character in the movie Jaws, “We’re gonna need a bigger mop.”

My first goal in this series is to define the Christian Right and provide some of their history.  The Christian Right has been insinuating themselves into public discourse since the late 70’s.  By the end of the 80’s it was generally assumed that the Christian Right consisted entirely of evangelical Protestants, however, many members of the Christian Right were not evangelical Protestants and many evangelical Protestants were not members of the Christian Right. The Christian Right drew support from politically conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons and sometimes secularists. While some people may generalize that all evangelicals were grouped in with the Christian Right, that is not the case. In fact, there are many evangelical Protestants that have showed little interest in the Christian Right’s political goals. At this point I bet you are becoming a bit confused, but I promise I will clear it all up as I go along.

In my research I ran across a paper written by Harvey Wacker, Professor of the History of Religion in America at the Duke University Divinity School.  I found his detailed description to be fairly hard to follow but I will try to translate. In the simplest way possible think of two circles over lapped.  On one side you have Evangelicals on the other side non-Evangelicals, in the middle that intersects the two circles you have the Christian Right.  For the most part the Evangelicals do share the religious views, but not necessarily the political views of the Christian Right.  On the other side you have the non-Evangelicals who do not share the political or religious views of the Christian Right.  However on both sides you have individuals who are more stringent in their moral views or have decided they no longer share the political views of their group and align themselves with the Christian Right.  Some famous examples of these non-Evangelical members are Joe Lieberman and Bart Stupack.  Their political party, while Independant and Democrat respectively, does not mean they share all the party political views and in some cases they more closely align themselves with the Religious Right/GOP.  In the past 25 years or so Evangelicals have flocked in large numbers to the mega churches of the Christian Right, however I have found no research to imply that Catholics have converted as well.  The Catholic church has a group that label themselves “Charasmatic” and they could conceivably be the people who align themselves with the Christian Right(see link below).  In the 1990’s the Christian Right’s numerical strength leveled off but it’s influence in grass roots, national, state and local elections, or in setting political policies has remained in the forefront.  With the election of Barack Obama, their numbers seem to have increased again, however I found this interesting report in The Telegraph from almost a year ago.  It states that the Christian Right conceded defeat when Obama was elected.  I would be skeptical of such an admission being entirely truthful from the Christian Right but it is worth a read.

Catholic Charismatic Renewal

US Religious Right Concedes Defeat

The Christian Right emerged from both long-range and short-range changes in American life. The long-range lay in the growth of biblical higher criticism in the seminaries, the teaching of human evolution in public schools, and, after World War II, the real or perceived threat of Communism, and when Communisim no longer became a critical issue, the GLBT community. The more immediate beginnings of the Christian Right lay in the enormous cultural changes of the 1960s—civil rights, Vietnam protests, the alternative youth culture, the women’s liberation movement, the sexual revolution, and the rise of ancient religions from obscurity.  On the subject of obscure religions, I like to think an enlightened generation became more open to customs that in the past were foreign to us, we began to question authority and that certainly did not fit in with the Christian Right’s doctrine.  These transformations seemed to play out in the Supreme Court decisions that banned official prayer and Bible readings in the schools, legalized first trimester abortion,  and regulated government involvement in private Christian academies.  The Christian Right responsed quickly to counter these developments led by figures like Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson, Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Dobson. The intention of these leaders was to defend their traditional Christian values. These values were; authority of the Bible in all areas of life, faith in Jesus Christ and the “born again” experience and biblical values in sexual and marital arrangements.. What differentiated these Christian Right leaders from other Christian leaders was their linking of traditional Christian values with a simpler small-town life, a life they felt was being pushed in to the past. The Christian Right proved so successful in translating its concerns to a wider audience that in 1976 the founder of the Gallup Poll pronounced that year the “year of the evangelical”.  National magazines(Time and Newsweek) ran cover articles on the insurgence of Evangelical Protestant Christianity, and even though many evangelicals did not share the goals of the Christian Right, as is usually the case with the national media they failed to note that distinction.

Then in 1979 Jerry Falwell established this major group of U.S. Christians into a political sledgehammer. As founding pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., Falwell had been meeting with theologians and lawmakers to plan how Christians could fight back. What were they going to base their fight against?  Liberals, Abortionists, the ACLU, Feminists, gay rights activists and the non-believing American population( In recent years what they term as “radical Islam” was added to this list).  In that year, Jerry Fallwell and his allies launched the Moral Majority. Falwell not only drew preachers from behind their pulpits into the world of electoral campaigns, but he also brought conservative politics into the church. He helped persuade thousands of pastors nationwide to conduct voter-registration drives in their congregations, contributing to a flood of new voters on the GOP rolls.  Sermons in his own church included instructions to his flock on how to spend their Sunday afternoons, campaigning against the Liberal Left.  He literally had his members going door to door with an anti-liberal pro-Republican message.  The Moral Majority platform mixed traditional Christian values with a strongly conservative world view:  They advocated for prayer in public school and more money for national defense.

After years of planning and consolidation the Christian Right helped Ronald Reagan win the 1980 presidential race, Falwell credited the Moral Majority and became the mouthpiece for these newly empowered Americans.  Up to this point they had felt their beliefs were disrespected and Falwell’s moral majority empowered them to rise up as activists.  However, they soon learned the limits of their political might, abortion remained legal and gay couples were continuing to gain greater acceptance, the ACLU was still strong, women continued to make strides in the fight for equality and Liberals did not fade away into that “dark night”.

In the late 1980’s, activists began to question Falwell’s ability to focus on politics and not fundraising for his religious work.  Critics to his right, who advocated old-style isolation from the broader culture, attacked him.  In the late 1980’s Fallwell disbanded the Moral Majority and concentrated his energies on Liberty University which he founded.  He did not completely disappear, and GOP political candidates continued to seek his backing and treated him as an elder statesman in the party.  And he opened the door for the Christian Coalition and others to take up where he had left off, continuing the political activism he started.  Liberty University may be the single most important contribution to the Christian Right movement.  With a reported 7,700 students, his Liberty University curriculum reflects the minister’s classic fundamentalist beliefs in an inerrant Bible and the imminent return of Jesus Christ(The Rapture) following seven years of tribulation to establish a 1,000-year kingdom. The school annually turns out young Christians who go on to become active in politics.

With all of this going on, the mainline Protestant establishment and the secular media were surprised by this conservative Christian insurgence and were asking who were these people and what were their ultimate goals?  To answer these questions, you need to understand the world-view of the Christian Right. As close as I could come, the following are four principles by which they operate, I found this description in the paper referenced above by Harvey Wacker, Professor of the History of Religion in America at the Duke University Divinity School:

The assumption that moral absolutes exist as surely as mathematical or geological absolutes constitutes the first. These moral absolutes include many of the oldest and deepest assumptions of Western culture, including the fixity of sexual identities and gender roles, the preferability of capitalism, the importance of hard work, and the sanctity of unborn life. More importantly, not only do moral absolutes exist, they are clearly discernible to any who wish honestly to see them.

The assumption that metaphysics, morals, politics, and mundane customs stand on a continuum constitutes the second cornerstone of the Christian Right’s world-view. Specifically, ideas about big things like the nature of the universe inevitably affect little things, such as how individuals choose to act in the details of daily life. And the reverse. What one thinks about the nature of God, for example, inevitably influences one’s decision to feed—or not to feed—the parking meter after the cops have gone home. Contrary to the facile assumption of mainline Protestants, influenced by the Enlightenment, it is not possible for the Christian Right to draw easy lines between the public and the private spheres of life. (There is evidence that the Christian Right abandoned Jimmy Carter at precisely this point—when he announced that abortion should be legally protected in the public sphere, although he would not countenance it in the private sphere of his own family.)

The Christian Right further assumes—this is the third cornerstone—that government’s proper role is to cultivate virtue, not to interfere with the natural operations of the marketplace or the workplace. The Christian Right remains baffled by the secular culture’s apparent unwillingness, on one hand, to offer schoolchildren firm moral guidance in matters of sexuality, truthfulness, honesty, and patriotism while, on the other hand, proving ever-so-eager to engineer the smallest details of the economy. Why should conscientious, hardworking law-abiding citizens be penalized by mazes of government regulations? Why should the irresponsible, the lazy, and the unpatriotic be rewarded by those same public institutions?

Finally, the assumption that all successful societies need to operate within a framework of common assumptions constitutes the fourth cornerstone. Since the Western Jewish-Christian tradition has provided an eminently workable premise for the United States for the better part of four centuries, it makes no sense to undermine these premises by legitimating alien ones. The key issue is not so much what would be permitted as what would be legitimated. Many, perhaps most members of the Christian Right feel that it is one thing to permit dissidents to live in peace, quite another to say that any set of values is just as good, or just as functional, as any other set.

With the election of George Bush, the Religious Right surged again.  When you look at their principles and then evaluate the Presidency of  George Bush you can see the hand of the Religious Right guiding his decisions.  They felt that without their support, he would not be in the position he was in, they were ready and waiting for their just reward and reward them he did.  Bush appointed staff throughout his administration that were fresh off the Christian Right farm.  Most notably interns and such from Liberty University.  But he did not stop there, John Ashcroft, AG was a very devout “born again” Christian.  We all know how he covered certain statues at the DOJ.  Donald Rumsfeld, SOD had no problem adding religious cover sheets on his war memos to the President and many Christian Right believers were assigned to the newly instituted Office of Faith Based Iniatives in the government, a result of an executive order by then President Bush.  And they took full advantage giving preference to like-minded believers.  In her book “Kingdom Coming,” Michelle Goldberg devotes a chapter to her research on the Faith-Based program. While she confirms many positive outcomes with clients, she concludes that there were myriad abuses in the program.  The chapter is entitled “The Faith-Based Gravy Train.” Her evaluation concluded that the federal government has become a major funder for the recruitment programs of the Christian Right.

Professor Wacker describes the Christian Right in this way:

The Christian Right has developed this sense that they are constantly under siege and are always defending their civilization from outside attack. Perils posed by the “mainstream media”, public schools, enemies of traditional family values are particularly sinister. They feel they are attacked constantly by the media and they especially object to the “perceived” way their children are treated in our schools. Their children are manipulated with the teachings of evolution, while “creationism” is not a part of the public school ciriculum, they are not allowed to pray in school, unless they do so privately. They claim the old-fashioned academic standards have been watered down and schools do not “clarify values” but rather teach students that their parent’s ideals are replaceable at will. They feel the traditional family is beseiged on all fronts, the media, schools and the government whose policies encourage abortion. They also believe that the ERA encourages divorce and fatherless families as it denies security to woman and corrodes the tether that has kept men bound to responsibilities of home and family.

In Glenn Greenwald’s book, A Tragic Legacy he addresses this mentality in terms of George Bush and his declining popularity:

The same people who had previously been writing books praising his greatness as a leader were denouncing him as a weak and stubborn failure, claiming his was a “closet liberal”.  This so-called conservative movement is also not responsible for the destruction brought on by the Bush White House and republican congress.  They claim the conservative movement is actually a victim because it’s lofty principles were betrayed and repudiated by the President and Congress from 2001 through 2007.  This, from the same Conservatives who were cheerleading the Bush administration and their ideas and policies until the wheels fell off and their ideas were repudiated.  Then they became the victims of their own actions.  They acted as though they stood by helplessly while Congress and Bush destroyed the country while the whole time they were anything but passive.

The Religious Right would have us believe that while they touted their direct access to a president who appointed people from their organizations up and down the White House staff that they had nothing to do with the utter failure of the Bush administration.

I wonder if many of these Christian Right leaders are now lamenting, “if only we had had more time”.  When I think of all the damage done to our country in 8 short years, I shudder to think what could happen if they come in to power again.

If we let our guard down and let these people slip under the radar, they will be back at it again in 2012.  They will use all their influence on the right to establish another candidate like George Bush.  All I can say is I will be waiting, watching and speaking out when that happens.

The second part of this series, The Mindset of the Religious Right will be posted on March 15, 2010.

Suggested Reading:

Glenn Greenwald – A Tragic Legacy – How A Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

Michelle Goldberg – Kingdom Coming

Dr. Robin Meyers – Why The Christian Right is Wrong

Chris Hedges – American Fascists – The Christian Right and the War on America

Real Time with Bill Maher hit the boards running for its eighth season a couple of weeks ago, and I held out great hopes for my favourite fundit program, after a decidedly iffy season last year which ended in confusion.

However, I’m hoping I didn’t speak too soon, as it stalled in what it sought to deliver in the third episode of the season, which aired Friday evening.

A commentator on Bill’s MySpace page deemed the episode ‘caustic’, another friend of mine thought it was ‘quirky’ more than anything else. I thought it just oozed tension, and I’m at a loss to understand why.

To begin with, the guest list was a bit thin on the ground – three guests in the studio, including the one-on-one interview and a satellite interview with a dodgy connection. I think Bill struggles to get people to commit to appearing on the program, and whether that’s the nature of the host or the venue (Los Angeles is as long a flight time from the East Coast as New York is from London), I don’t know.

We’re three programs into the new season, and there’s yet to be a elected politician to appear. The result of this difficulty is that we keep seeing the same recurring guests, almost as ‘regulars’: most of the guests who’ve appeared already are repeat performers.

I approached this week’s installment reluctantly. Arianna Huffington was a panel guest, and to say I loathe this diehard neocon corporate media whore disguised as a Progressive voice only when it became openly fashionable to hate Bush is being kind. The last time she appeared on the show last season, in the cohorted company of fellow (open) Republicans Darryl Issa and Jack Kingston, that trio so railroaded the discussion sequence that Bill, the host and moderator, was reduced to looking like a cross between a bewildered child at the adults’ table and a confused spectator at a tennis match watching such a never-ending volley that he’d forgotten who had the serve.

I’m still at a loss as to why the media in the US continue to give this intellectual lightweight and parvenue airtime to spout her ridiculous talking points, made only to enhance her own publicity; but then, I remember when Mrs Huffington, minus the ex-husband’s divorce settlement and the Wall Street hedge fund, was merely Miss Stanisopoulous, the daughter of a corrupt Greek politician, trying desperately to be taken seriously as an arch-Right conservative by the truly Progressive, serious British media intelligensia.

They considered her a joke.

Bill’s guests this week, besides the Queen Mother of Media Whores, included Andrew Ross Sorkin, financial correspondent for The New York Times, Sean Penn and (from New York) Michael Moore.

Although his previous two monologues this season had hit the bullseye for which they were intended, Bill’s monologue this week fell curiously flat. He wittered on about Oscars’ week, with the inevitable Sarah Palin joke.

I know Palin was a particular target and bete noire for Bill during the campaign and he eviscerated her shallowness with brilliant panache; from time to time, she surfaced last season, but only when she’d done something to merit newsworthy comment – like resign.

This time, I’m getting the uneasy feeling that Bill’s baiting Palin, almost stalking her with continuous snarky comment and open ridicule, and for a curiously self-serving purpose. Of late, those whom Palin has targeted with her snide and ill-founded observations, have achieved almost victim status – Letterman, Rahm Emanuel, Seth McFarlane and Family Guy – all rose like phoenixes from the ashes of her ignorant remarks and misconceptions.

In short, Palin’s invective got publicity for both Letterman and McFarlane, and even Rahm was seen in a more sympathetic light as almost an arbiter for freedom of speech.

Bill’s not above promoting himself shamelessly, almost by any means. That he compromised himself greatly last season with a blatantly opportunistic editorial, slating President Obama for ‘not doing enough’ a mere six months into his Administration, was all too obvious, especially if one cared to remember that the week previous to that particular editorial (June 16th), he was roundly criticizing the GOP for saying the very same thing about the President. Still, it achieved the end Bill desired – he ran the gamut from Blitzer to Olbermann, starting the Obama-bashin’ fashion that the base of the Progressive Left adopted with a fervour unseen since they campaigned for the man during the election.

A lot of real Progressives today still blame Bill for sounding the hammer blow that created a very noticeable ructure in the Democratic Party.

I think Bill is baiting Palin for the same reason. He’s relishing a response from this woman. He wants her to target him, to point a finger, to Twitter a tweet or sully her Facebook page with a diatribe against big, bad Bill Maher, which would gain Bill a soupcon of sympathy and a gaggle of publicity. Thing is, I get the impression that Palin isn’t much of an HBO fan, and I seriously doubt she’s even heard of Bill. Were I he, I’d leave off Palin. He’s only feeding fuel to her fire, and besides, as a part of his monologue and stand-up, she’s becoming boringly predictable as a reference.

But after the monologue, the atmosphere began to become almost surreal.

Sean Penn was the first guest, booked to talk about his humanitarian effort in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti and to plug the relief organisation he had established for that purpose.

I found this odd, to say the least, especially since one of Bill’s ubiquitous tweets during his hiatus had criticised the continuous news emphasis on the disaster by the mainstream media, to the exclusion of any other news. I understood Bill’s complaint; he’d reiterated the media’s propensity to flog one news item like the proverbial dead horse, but the tweet did come across to many as the whiney complaint of a bored adolescent. The other thing I found odd about the interview was Penn, himself.

Penn, florid of face and neck, with a dull, dazed look in his eye, was clearly drunk. More than that, he was a woozy, rambling, incoherent drunk.

To Bill’s credit, his interview questions were flawless. Under normal circumstances, he would have been pushing the right buttons, with the questions he asked. but circumstances were anything but normal. The result was that Penn’s answers rambled on ad nauseam, and he never truly answered any question.

For example, when Penn finally got to the point of his first answer – that the United States needed to give more, more and yet more again to Haiti in an effort to rebuild a viable infrastructure there, Bill, rightly, countered by asking Penn why he sought to concentrate his efforts on Haiti, when there was ample evidence of infrastructural decay in the United States and a plethora of Americans suffering badly as a result of the dire economic crisis.

Valid question; in fact, one many people have been asking in light of this.

This elicited another incoherent and torturously twisted reply from Penn, the gist of which being that by giving – yes – more, more and more again to rebuild Haiti, the US would be a better nation and benefit and learn from the Haitian people. Learn what, exactly, he never specified, and it’s doubtful that he knew. By that point, Penn was just phoning in his replies.

The interview wasn’t without controversy, however. Finally, Bill brought up the subject of Hugo Chavez, a particular ‘friend’ of Penn’s and one whom the actor has defended vociferously. The ensuing reply on Penn’s part is a testimony to the fact that, just because one is an extremely talented actor and icon for a generation, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the person has any great intellect, or even basic common sense.

Bill referred to Chavez, the dictator.

Penn quickly took umbrage. Chavez, he replied, in a pique, was most definitely not a dictator, but a legitimately elected head-of-state. In Penn’s mind, that’s not a dictator.

I disagree. Hitler was legitimately elected. So was Mussolini. So was Bush, allegedly. And elections can easily be rigged to favour the strong man who wants to rule. Look at Italy’s Berlusconi. Again, look at Bush and the Republican techniques. I’m sorry, Sean, this dude’s a dictator and a dick.

Bill then pointed out the fact that Chavez had shut down television and radio stations and newspapers who were openly critical of him, but Penn would have none of that. In fact, he declared, anyone in the United States, and especially in the media, who insisted on calling Chavez a dictator, should be put in prison.

From where I’m sitting, it looks as though Sean’s close association with Hugo Chavez hasn’t been for nothing. That’s a blatant denial of First Amendment rights - so are we to infer that the humanitarian and Academy Award-winning actor approves of a suppression of Freedom of Speech? What a walking advertisement for the Left in the face of the Right. And a blatant one as well.

The other interview came midway through the panel discussion with Michael Moore. It was beset by satellite difficulties, as Moore was attempting to be broadcast from New York City, outside Goldman Sachs. Bill was clearly frustrated by the delay, and Moore was frustrated as well, although by what, it was unclear. It was a tetchy, almost irascible interview, from the beginning, done to publicize the fact that Moore’s latest cinematic offering, Capitalism: A Love Story, was now available on DVD.

As the impending Oscars ceremony served more as a veritable Banquo’s ghost than as a backdrop to this episode, Bill began the interview by reminding Moore that it was Oscars weekend and that Moore’s film hadn’t received a nomination – although he couldn’t imagine why, Bill added for good measure. Clearly a joke between friends, but Moore failed to see the humour and tetchily remarked that, for what it was worth, he thought Bill’s documentary Religulous should have won the Oscar the previous year. (It wasn’t nominated).

Moore then went into a diatribe about the evils of Wall Street and the sufferings of the ordinary citizen in the wake of that, which – for some reason – elicited an irritated response from Bill, in which he noticeably raised his voice. Thereafter, the four-minute clip tailed off with Moore remarking that he’d written a letter to President Obama – understanding that Rahm Emanuel was about to leave – offering him his services as Chief of Staff for the salary of $1 per year and a bed in the White House basement.

In the moments after the interview had ended, Bill made two rather snarky allusions to ‘St Michael’ and ‘the spirit of St Michael’, obviously on the tail end of what amounted to a locking-of-horns encounter, no matter how unintentional that was.

The surrealism of the episode was heightened by the fact that almost nothing of any newsworthy event referenced in the panel discussion. It was patently obvious that the panel was there only as a prop for Huffington to publicise her ‘Move Your Money’ movement in an effort to cripple the four big, bad lending banks.

I find Huffington faintly ludicrous at the best of times.  She usually manages to muscle in on any discussion and dominate the proceedings, and this time was no different. Bill began the panel discussion by singling out her ‘Move Your Money’ meme, adding a bit of self-promotion for himself, considering that she asked him to do the promotional video which was released on YouTube.

Now we get to the funny part.

Bill asked Andrew Sorkin, author of the book Too Big to Fail about what he thought of the idea of a mass movement of people taking money from the big four bad boys and placing it in locally-owned banks and credit unions. Sorkin remarked that he thought, in principle, Huffington’s idea was a good one; however, there were drawbacks to her idea:-

First, if everyone ‘moved their money’ from the big guys to the small fry, the banks that formerly had been too big to fail, would … fail, and that wouldn’t be good for the economy. Secondly, many of the so-called local banks weren’t actually independent entities, themselves. Many were part and parcel of the very organisation Huffington sought to scupper.

(Huffington’s always out to scupper someone or something which effected a perceived slight on her fragile ego. Her vendetta against Clinton in the late 90s came as a result of her husband having lost a Senate race to Barbara Boxer; her vendetta against Tim Russert came from Russert’s wife having outed Michael Huffington in an article years before his sexuality became common knowledge; her vendetta against newspapers arises from the newsprint media failing to consider her a viable and reliable journalist, in her own right. So I can only surmise that her vendetta against the big banks comes from some kind of cashflow problem, which they can’t help her remedy – or at least more from that than out of any concern for ordinary people).

Thirdly, Sorkin concluded, these small local banks and credit unions weren’t entirely clean, themselves – that they employed a stringently vociferous group of lobbyists, whose job it was to nobble Congress, and were, in fact, more opposed to the President’s idea of regulating the banking industry than the big guys were, themselves.

At that moment, Huffington chose to suffer from a bout of selective deafness, because later, in her internet newsrag, she trumpeted the fact that Sorkin had given a pontifical blessing to her ‘movement’ and agreed with her entirely, although he actually didn’t … such is her arrogance.

That moved the discussion onto the plight of the middle classes, where Huffington held forth on the fact that anger directed at Wall Street was a unifying factor between the middle class and the Teabaggers (and, in doing this, somehow managed to make Michael Moore sound like teabagging material). There followed a five-minute discussion between Huffington and Bill about the sufferings of the middle class and how the government and financial crisis was failing them.

I’m sorry, but I was mightily offended by what amounted to a dinner party discussion between two faux liberals talking about a demographic of people of whom one had actually forgotten he was ever a part  and of whom the other had no real contact in her daily dealings. It was a moment straight out of a grotesque Goya painting of two narcissistic egoists paying pithy lip service to the plight of the little people and giving themselves congratulatory pats on the back for having noticed that a problem exists.

Frankly, it was insulting.

This led further into an unusual discussion about an American reality television program, Undercover Boss, which Bill, in a rare moment of realising that he was born a son of the working middle class, found insulting to ordinary people, and which Huffington, surprisingly in her Zsa Zsa-plays-Lady-Bracknell mode, found enlightening.

The whole discussion was pointless, with respect to current events. It was an exercise in publicizing Huffington’s latest venture, an opportunity for Bill to reiterate and reinforce the fact that he really, really did like President Obama, but he wished he could have acted tougher last year – the same old same old complaint he’d whined about since June 2009, only not as forcefully. (Earlier last month, in an interview clip with Joy Behar, I noticed the best-seller Game Change on the shelf in Bill’s office. He’d do well to read and digest the content of this, because ‘No-Drama Obama’ is the President’s schtick).

The New Rules weren’t Bill’s best, and the editorial was a bit of fluff, which, in other circumstances, might have been funny; but in these current times, came across as Bill’s Marie Antoinette moment.

It was an extollation of  Hollywood’s virtues as an industry that was entirely American and didn’t come cap-in-hand to the government asking for help. (Of course, it never dawned on Bill that the film which won the Oscar last year was not an American film, or that most films aren’t actually made in Hollywood these days, mainly due to excessive costs). He excoriated the Republicans’ current triviality of promoting their two rising stars (yet another reference to Sarah Palin) as having been a local beauty queen and a nude male centrefold. Hollywood deserved the big party that accompanied the Oscars, as ribald, rambunctuous and excessive as it could be, and the public be damned in its criticism. (‘Let them eat cake, anyone?’)

One of the core messages of the editorial was the fact that any celebrity in the town who openly admitted to being a Republican, was usually of the naff, z-list variety: the late Sonny Bono, Fred Thompson or Fred Grandy, whose chief claim to fame was having played Gofer in The Love Boat.

Amongst the ueber-cool A-listers, only Democrats could be found.

Forty-eight hours later, that left me wondering on what list Bill, whom I love dearly as a fundit, when he’s thinking for himself and not aiming to please others for his own plaudits, could be found … not the ueber-cool A-list, if this tweet, made in the early hours of Monday morning, whilst moving amongst the exalted at an Oscars’ after-party:-

“Actors are just the bestest people in thw world! We are so lucky to be sharing the earth with them!! Fuck!!!” (Typos are Bill’s).

Sarcasm? Heavily laced. Bitterness? A smidgeon. Jealousy? More than just a bit.

Billy, I love the bones of you, and for that, I’ll rate this episode 7 out of 10, but – damn! – it must be a heavy chore being Arianna’s Gofer. You’re much better than that.

I was originally going to write this series of articles in tandem with a partner however I have decided to  move ahead on my own.  I hope I am up to the challenge.   What I will attempt to do is provide some history to understand the Religious Rights beliefs and behavior, but will concentrate more on current activities of the people and organizations of the Religious Right so that you will be able to identify them and their players.  I have found this to be extremely beneficial when watching various newscasts.  It is amazing how many people who have a hidden agenda in any given subject are brought in to the discussions as “subject matter experts”.

It is my hope that when I have finished, I will have shown you a comprehensive picture of all the different factions and how they are ultimately connected.  I will give you a bit of history because that is important in understanding their beliefs and practices but will also help to unravel the secretness of their current day plans.

Their plans really started to gel back in the 70’s with the Moral Majority and The Christian Coalition and their push to insinuate themselves seriously into the political arena.  While The Family has worked the political scene for over 60 years, the religious right is fairly new to the scene in comparison.  While they came on to the scene at different times, their beliefs and intentions are one and the same.  At best, there is a very blurry line between them, but make no mistake they are working in conjunction to dominate the world at large.

What I plan to do is to break it down in to several mini articles, and these articles will be:

The History of the Christian Right

The Mindset of Christian Evangelicals

The Players, Their Organizations

How these Organizations Impact America and the International Community

The Consequences of their Influence/Reference Material

Wish me luck as I try to relay to you all I have learned through months of research and clicking on link after link to dig deeper in hopes of uncovering the truth.  And that truth is that these people are insinuated into every facet of our lives with a mindset of Dominionism and forcing their brand of religion on ultimately the Global community at large.  My first article of the series will be out this coming Wednesday, March 10, 2010.

I also want to give a big thanks to Adlib for helping me to name the series.  I am not having problems with content but was stuck on what to name the series.  Anyway, thank you Adlib, I knew your creative mind would come through for me.

Holi (pronounced ho-lee), also known as Phagwa, is marked at the transition from the Hindu months Phalguna to Chaitra. The Hindu calendar being lunisolar, this date changes every year. In 2010 it fell on March 1st. Besides India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, it is observed by the South Asian diaspora in all its regional varieties throughout Europe, America, Canada, Australia, in New Zealand, South Africa, and of course, Suriname, Trinidad, Mauritius and Fiji which are notable countries where South Asians were brought for labor and now constitute a significant proportion of the population.

Background.

Vaishnava

In a timeless past of the Satya Yuga, a ruler from a race of giants, known as Daityas, held power and riches unrivaled, except by his own attire. Thus, he was known as Hiranyakashipu, or, ‘Golden-robed’. After performing austerities (tapas) and being granted a boon by Brahma which had made him nearly invincible, the ‘Demon King’ attacked the Heavens, lorded over earth, demanded people worship him, and squandered his wealth on destruction and his own greatness, even challenging Lord Indra.

This all was at odds with his own son, Prahlada, a pious devotee of Lord Vishnu; a Vaishnava, whom sought to correct his father in the right virtues of a Maharaja and to guide him in Bhakti realization of the Supreme Soul by renouncing avarice and absorbing his thoughts on Him. This only made his father furious,

[T]he daitya ruler daunted upon seeing how the attempts ran futile, devised with determination for a variety of ways to kill him. Crushing him with an elephant, attacking with the king’s poisonous snakes, with spells of doom, throwing him from heights, conjuring tricks, imprisoning him, administering venom and subjecting him to starvation, cold, wind, fire and water and with piling rocks upon him, was the demon unable to put his son, the sinless one, to death… (Srimad Bhagavata Purana, 7.5.42-4)

And yet, the boy through his devotion to the Lord was protected from his father’s persecution time and time again. At long last his father’s wrath brought him before the court, and challenged to see this God who could challenge his own deific powers. He would try to kill his son himself this time, but before the boy’s head could be severed by his father who scoffed that no one could save him, God made his omnipresence known to all assembled from a pillar. The universe cracked open, and a cacophony of sounds and kaleidoscopic dimensions could be seen; the omnipresence of God within everything.  Narasimha, the fourth avatara of Vishnu, a hybrid with man’s torso and lion’s head then appeared from this pillar and mauled the Demon King Hiranyakashipu to shreds. The king had used a boon from Brahma gained by devotion for evil; thus God had to manifest himself in earthly form to correct this terrorizing and subjection of earth and heavens alike.

Among the schemes Hiranyakashipu hatched against his son was when he asked his sister to have Prahlada to sit in her lap in a bonfire. Hiranyakashipu’s sister had received a special boon that gave her immunity to fire. However; she was burned to death and Prahlad saved. There are numerous accounts as to the reason for this, but suffice it to say, the sister of the king died and good triumphed.

Hiranyakashipu’s sister was named Holika, from which Holi is believed to derive. It is this event that Holi celebrates in Holika Dahan (the burning of Holika), in which bonfires are lit, primarily in North India, the day before Holi. Originally these included effigies of Holika, but in most parts this is now replaced by a simple pyre. Comparisons to their fellow Aryans’ (if only common traditional heritage; I have no intent of opening the Aryan Invasion Theory can of worms here) celebration of Cheharshanbe-Souri in Iran and indeed, bonfire spring festivals in Indo-European cultures throughout Europe, are readily seen. The triumph of light over darkness.

Shaivite

The main story as recounted and summarized above, can be considered by some to be a Vaishnava polemic, with Hiranyakashipu representing Lord Shiva. As such, given where you are, an alternate account is of Kama and Shiva.

As recounted in the Saura Purana, there was another daitya called Taraka whom had achieved a boon from Brahma after severe austerities. He asked for the boon of being invincible to the gods; and like Hiranyakashipu, effectively immortal. Of course, Brahma thought this too much so asked for an exception. The wily Taraka made the condition that only the child of Shiva could kill him. Shiva was doing penance and lost in himself after losing his first wife, Dakshayani (which is the subject of another famous myth which is the source of the practice of sati; Sati being another name for Dakshayani), therefore Taraka had reasoned that Shiva would be unable to produce a son.

Of course, Taraka does what demons granted boons of immense power by Brahma do, he terrorizes the universe of gods and men. He battles Vishnu for 30,000 years alone, but Vishnu has to retreat in confusion and hide. Beleaguered, the gods meet with Brahma, who tells them of Taraka’s weakness. They hatch a plan.

Parvati, who had realized she was the reincarnated Dakshayani from a young age, and had performed severe penances for Shiva’s hand in marriage, was put before Shiva. The only problem, is that Shiva was absorbed in yogic asceticism, having renounced the world after the loss of his first wife. So, Kama (yes, as in the Kama Sutra; and, counterpart to Greek Eros; Cupid) is enjoined to put lust into Shiva and wake him from his trance to produce the progeny that will defeat Taraka.

But, when Shiva awakens from his meditation after being immovable by either Parvati or Kama, he sees Parvati there, and then, sees Kama with his five flowered arrow drawn in its bow and aimed at him. Shiva’s third-eye shoots forth a fire accumulated in his tapas and incinerates Kama by its own power independent of Shiva’s will. Parvati is now distressed, and rebukes Shiva. It is now that she asks for her boon from him, having suffered as an example to all yoginis past and present. She asks that Kama be revived. Consenting, Shiva replies, “Let [Kama] be without a body in order to please you, lady with beautiful eyes. In that form he will be able to shake the world.”

Long story short, Shiva and Parvati beget Skanda (the Hindu ‘Ares’), who destroys Taraka. In South India, Holi is thus referred to as Kama Dahanam. But of course, the larger lesson was the victory of love, for now the disembodied Kama, with his wife Rati, could flit from one corner of the earth to another like the wind. In this context, Holi is like an Indian Valentine’s Day.

Radha Krishna

In this spirit, the Ras-Lila is celebrated (literally, ‘Passion Play’ and quite different from the Christian form, of course!); particularly in Mathura and Vrindavan, where Lord Krishna (the eighth avatara of Vishnu) was born and the place of the Ras-Lila, respectively. The Ras-Lila is the all-famous tale of the gopis’ (milk maidens) love and adoration of the perfect youth Krishna, who playfully teased them mercilessly in the 10th Book of the Srimad Bhagavata Purana (not to be confused with the Bhagavad Gita of the Mahabharata), and the tryst between him and Radha, whom is never actually named, in chapter 30, where she is only a mystery woman held in awed jealousy by the pining gopis who follow the couple’s footsteps into the forest. This story with elaborations is a staple of bhajans and Indian poetry, drama, and naturally, today’s transmitter of myth, Bollywood (here’s an example).

A word of warning. To suggest anything unchaste about Radha, or to reduce Krishna to a Casanova, to suggest anything sexual at all beyond romantic metaphor, is extremely offensive to devout Hindus; particularly Vaishnavas. It has an invective history with the Christian missionaries and continues to this day on Christianist supremacist websites. Having said this word of warning though, of Holi, the entry in A Dictionary of Hinduism says,

A spring festival dedicated to Krishna and the gopis. It took the place of an earlier kind of Saturnalia, ‘the survival of a primitive fertility ritual, combining erotic games, “comic operas” and folk dancing’. Some of the earlier elements remain, such as the singing of suggestive songs, the throwing of coloured water, and jumping over bonfires, the ashes of which are believed to possess magical powers.

Indeed, I tend to take this view, and see the other myths as later accretions or adaptations to an earlier Indo-European fertility festival, as do I see the Radha-Krishna relationship a sublimation of an earlier myth. During Holi, caste distinctions are suspended, and the sexes may mix freely; likely customs surviving from the ubiquitous “safety valve” many early cultures observed at least once a year -- just as modern ones do to this day.

Playing

In a 7th century play, Ratnavali, it was said,

Witness the beauty of the great cupid festival which excites curiosity as the townsfolk are dancing at the touch of brownish water thrown from squirt-guns.

They are seized by pretty women while all along the roads the air is filled with singing and drum-beating.

Everything is coloured yellowish red and rendered dusty by the heaps of scented powder blown all over.

This is the first recording of Dhulhendi, the day of Holi most recognizable today. Let me set the scene. You know nothing of Holi, you are a visitor in India. This delightful scenario is played in this scene from the 2006 film, “Outsourced”:

Instruments of Fun:

Abir and Gulal -  colored powders

Originally made from natural dyes, some with Ayurvedic properties, there has been concern over toxic ingredients in recent years, and a move towards organic products. The symbolism with spring, of course, is self-evident.

Pichkari -- soaker type of syringe

While many of these still retain their traditional design, many more kids can be seen with super soakers and custom pichkaris with Bollywood actors and actresses, cartoon characters and other themes, even in shapes like elephants or one designed as a bow and arrow (like the ancient Hindu heroes).

Bhang

Bhang, made from grinding cannabis leaves and flowers into a paste is mixed into chilled drinks and munchie snacks alike. The signature drink of Holi is thandai, a milk based drink flavored with pistachios, almonds, and, of course, marijuana! But, a bhang lassi can also be whipped up, as seen above. Oh, and if you happen upon a sadhu in Varanasi, see if they will pass the chillum. This is one of a few times where social use of marijuana is acceptable, though generally not by women (patriarchal societies’ ‘designated drivers’). Watch this Bollywood song with the information and vocabulary you have just gained!

Hola Mohalla

Although not widely celebrated in Pakistan, in India Holi is now a secular holiday celebrated by all: Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Jew, Parsi, Sikh, atheist, etc. The day after Holi, as well, is the closely related Sikh holiday of Hola Mohalla, most visible in the Sikh homeland of Indian Punjab. In warrior-saint Guru Gobind Singh’s martial tradition, Sikhs will mock fights, sing, play music, recite poetry and kirtans, and eat communally, as is per Sikh practice.

So, alas, to explain my title. It is common to say “Holi hai!” which means “it’s Holi!” as a greeting. Unfortunately, due to timing, I fell off on writing this, and thus added the Hindi ‘was’, tha, to reflect the belated nature of this article.

To end with, I only chose one Bollywood Holi song among a plethora of possibilities, as this one clearly lays out several elements outlined herein and brings it to life! (plus my crush on Rani Mukerji didn’t hurt the selection process)

Holi Mubarak! -- Happy Holi!