The killing of God

Just because the potentates of old Europe wrangled the Bible away from its Hebrew roots and turned it into dead religion doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist.

God did, after all, create humans with a free will. We are not programmed bots. Just because we homo sapiens screwed it up over the course of a few thousand years doesn’t mean that God wasn’t in the midst of it all somewhere, trying to break through our cerebral density, carnal shenanigans and political bullshit.

Actually, God did break through. But look what we did to him.

In the Middle Eastern crossroads where our wayward cruelties had taken advantage of 1st-century Empire-building power politics to nail him, a stake was driven in the ground. It turned out to be a bloody mess and a sacrifice of universal proportions.

So, as the centuries rolled by, the movers and the shakers among us took that bloody sacrifice and ran with it, transformed it into a first-class religious system that rolled on through time and continent like a runaway ox-cart on a roman road. A thousand years later, we’d manhandled that pivotal sacrifice into high-powered religion, through which men and women worldwide were either convinced or manipulated (depending upon your interpretation of it) into the mysteries of practiced religion.

Long about 1500 ad dominum, a few upstart readers who were paying attention to the original scripts started to figure out that something had gone wrong somewhere along the line.

So they raised some issues. Well, long story short, all hell broke loose.

That great institutional juggernaut that had rolled down through a millennium of pox humana religiosity suddenly was under attack from men who were trying to get to the bottom of it all, which is to say . . . trying to get through all that institutional religiosity to . . . the truth.

The truth? What is truth?

Haha glad you asked.

This little question became a matter of serious debate.

Now that the snake was out of the bag, everybody and their brother was trying to figure out what the truth really was and how it should be used to improve the human condition. People like Rousseau, Hegel, Engels and Marx, Lenin and several other notorious bastards.

As the movement to replace God with human wisdom and government gathered steam, human history heated up quite a bit. And the conflagration of it increased exponentially because this historic development just happened to coincide with the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. So we had a lot more fire power to implement all the big changes that needed to happen in order to get mankind delivered from the great religious debacle that had held us in bondage for so long.

Some guys in Prussia figured out that, since the great juggernaut institution of religion had been exposed to be the manipulative Oz-like empire that it was, the immediate conclusion was that not only had we killed religion, but we humans had managed to finally kill God! Voltaire, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche made this point perfectly clear.

Several bloody revolutions and a couple of world wars later, we are in the process now of finally getting our ducks in a row and ourselves straightened out, now that we’ve finally gotten God out of the way.

Even though we had already killed him one time before, but that’s another story.

Actually, it’s The Story.

His-story.

You can’t kill it, because that death-sentence strategy has already been implemented several times, yet without conclusive results.

We humanos insist on perpetually resurrecting that Story. We just can’t get enough of the un-killable presence among us. It refuses to stay dead. Might be worth looking into.

 

King of Soul

The lesser of two evils

I would like to show you an example of how public speech gets blown up to sensationalize everything that happens and especially everything that has anything to do with politics. First, watch this:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bernie-sanders-american-people-hillary-clinton-lesser-evils/story?id=39280278

In one of those split-screen talking heads interviews that you see on news TV nowadays, Bernie Sanders recently told ABC News' George Stephanopolous,

"We need a campaign-- an election, coming up--which does not have two candidates who are really very, very strongly disliked. I don't wanta see the American people voting for the lesser of two evils."

George Stephanopoulos, seeming a little surprised at Bernie's use of this phrase, sought clarification; he asked,

“Is that how you would describe Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump--The lesser of two evils?"

Bernie answered:

“Well, if you look– No, I wouldn’t describe it, but that’s what the American people are saying. . ."

This statement by Bernie is really no big deal. So he wants to be the Democratic candidate, instead of Hillary Clinton. He therefore wants to present himself as a choice that is better, more likable, and probably more honest than both presumptive nominees who presently dominate the party machinery of Presidential politics. And although his platform is too radical to earn my vote, he probably is more likable and more honest and probably even less evil than those other two contenders.

But here's what happens in the media; and it shows how things get blown up into hyper-dramatic sensationalism instead of informative, constructive dialogue among the candidates:

The next day after this little televised exchange between Sanders and Stephanopolous, an online political news site, DCCaller, reported on their question/answer dialogue by displaying a headline which read:

"Bernie Calls Hillary Clinton Evil"

Gimme a break, will ya? Is this what really happened?

The headline does not accurately convey what the candidate was communicating. It is a deliberate attempt to sensationalize our contemporary political scenario by subtly distorting the intent of the speaker, in this case Bernie Sanders; this kind of distortion is otherwise known as putting words in his (the speaker's) mouth.

Such a headline might have reflected some accuracy if Bernie had flatly declared, "Hillary Clinton is evil." But that is not what the man said.

The term he used, the "lesser of two evils," is a figure of speech, an admissible exaggeration, commonly understood to mean something like

We have "two lousy choices" here.

People generally understand such exaggerations to be not literal, but figurative, which is to say, a figure of speech, which means. . .

I figure he's saying we should have better choices than Hillary and Donald.

He doesn't really mean that Hillary is evil, or Donald is evil, because as someone somewhere once said,

"We're all bozos on this bus."

Or, as the old Biblio states:

"We're all sinners."

And yeah, I say unto thee whenever we point a finger at the "evils" who strive to dominate us, whether they're the lesser or the greater, there are three other fingers on that hand pointing back at us. We all fall short of perfection in some way or another.

Disclosure: I will not be voting for any of these three candidates--not Bernie, neither Hillary, nor Trump. I'm hoping to write-in for Romney. He may be dull, and he may be too slick and Establishment. He's got some credible public administration experience. He's probably reasonably honest; although he surely is, like me, a sinner damned, except for the grace of God.

And my prayer for him and for myself and for Bernie and Hillary and Donald and every other damned person on this planet includes the phrase: "Deliver us from evil."

Whether they be lesser or greater.

Glass half-Full

We Boomers will have a Choice to make.

Well, the boys came marching home from Germany and France,

and the bomb had made a blast in Hiroshima,

We were driving brand new cars;

we were waving stars and bars,

and everywhere was another factory.

Back in in 1953, cruising with Dwight E,

Elvis sang the white-boy blues,

McCarthy looking under every bush.

In the home of the brave and the free, rolling on prosperity

and all the kids were going off to school.



Ten years down the road. . .

another dream had come and gone

and the power of one gun had made itself known. Then,

back in 1964, big Lyndon opened the door

for civil rights, and a bloody Asian war:

Young men on pork chop hill; young women on the pill;

at home they said don't kill, get a psychedelic

thrill.

But the dreams of a Woodstock nation

were just an imagination

when the boys came trudging home in '73.



And it's hey hey! ho--is there anybody home?

and it's hi hi hey!, seeking light in the night of day,

but the dreams of a Woodstock nation

were just an imagination

when the boys came trudging home in '73.



Well, it just don't pay to sob.

Guess I'll get myself a job

selling leisure suits or maybe real estate.

I'm not moving very fast,

just waiting in line for gas

and Johnny Carson gives me all my news.

Back in 1976, overcoming dirty tricks,

some were moving back to the sticks.

Some were looking for a fix.

Ayatollahs on the rise,

sulfur dioxide in the skies,

and the System makes the man that's got his own.



They say an elephant don't forget.

Let's play another set.

There's always another ghost on PacMan's trail.

Don't let this boom go stale.

Let's find an airline for sale!

or pop another tape in the VCR.

Back in 1989, we're living on borrowed time,

getting lost in subtle sin

eating oat bran at the gym.

But there's an empty place inside,

and I was wondering why

thèse vanities don't suit.

I'm going back to the Gospel truth.



And its hey hey! ho--is there anybody home?

and its hi hi hey, seeking light in the night of day.

Yeah, there's an empty place inside

and I was wondering why

thèse vanities don't suit.

I'm going back to the Gospel truth.



Put on your Sarajevo, Mogadishu, Kalashnikov and Columbine

shoes,

for the way is treacherous with ruts and rocks.

Yeah, we figured our digits out

before that Y2K could spoil our rout,

but that 9/11 call was in the cards.

Did you consider the question of heaven

before the wreck of '97?

Will you hear the trumpet call from the Ancient

of Days?

Our way is littered with freaks and fads,

from Baghdad through our mouse pads

as the reaper swings his steely scythe across

our wicked ways.



And its hey hey! ho--is there anybody home?

and its hi hi hey, seeking light in the night of day.

Its a dangerous world outside

and I was wondering why;

this world don't give a hoot.

I'm going back to the Gospel truth.



Listen to it:

Boomer's Choice © ℗ Carey Rowland 2004



Music and Books

Ideal Academé

To stroll beneath this leafy green
beneath a sky so blue,
while contemplating beauty, truth, and the dream
of concepts that are true,
perpetually engaged in pristine pursuit
of knowledge--this is bliss,
until the real world plops its bitter fruit
upon your idyllic blissful tryst.
Oh, these perfect roses have inspired us
with such rare beauty, exquisite perfection;
and our winding paths of conceptual trust
lead to groves of virtual subjection.
But if ever we should stumble,
and forsake the pure ideal,
perhaps it's then we will be humble
and think the way we feel.

Glass Chimera

Parabola

Neither life, nor anything in it, is just a simple straight line. Even crystals, which grow along straight mathematical forms from the elements and minerals of this world, have to be cut before we value them.

There's nothing really simple out there. It all confuses. That is why, I suppose, people have such trouble accepting the idea that there is some kind of absolute truth in the universe.

Nothing in this life ever just jumps on a straight-line path and goes forward, without vectored influence to push/shove it to the right or left. In experience we are, like, all over the place. Here one day, there the next, trying to make up our minds about what to do, how to approach this or that person about something-or-other problem, or how to solve this problem and ignore that other one, hoping it-he-she-it will go away.

So if there is any truth in this life, in this world, universe, we access it only after discovering the nugget from some obscure hiding place, and then we are proud of ourselves because we've uncovered some precious truth, like treasure in a field. Eschewing the common good and beauty all around us, we prefer to dig for rare booty. Then finding something good beneath all the crap that goes on becomes a triumph of sorts, and we can feel good about ourselves for a while.

Jesus explained to his disciples that he speaks to the people of this world in parables, because they do not see really what something is when they are looking at it, and they do not really hear what's going on here, even though they think they are listening.

I think that's why writers like me like to veil our visions in allegory, metaphor, nuance, and literary B.S., hoping that the world will dig through our fabric of symbolism and story to discover some truth in it. We could say that, parabolically, we are a little bit like the master story-teller of all time--the one who spoke truth in parables. In truth, however, our vain musings can not hold a candle to his wisdom.

Glass Chimera

The Two Trees

I took just a few bites of it--
a few chapters--
and already I knew too much,
more than I can handle now.
To know the truth
if it is the truth
(for who can you believe?)
To know that terrible truth,
to hear the dark pinochet ricochet
even now
thirty years later--
that the so-called chicago boys
put those chile storm troopers up to it?
This knowledge is to terrible for me,
if it is knowledge,
And that sinister suharto shock
heard round the world
Am I supposed to feel
like responsible for this mess?
like I can do somethin about it?
Am I supposed to go out
and clean up all that shit
thats going down?
still going down?
Take up the jacobin club?
--start down that lenin road
that leads to the stalin road
the mao path--
cultural revolution, because of classified wikileaks
because of class-war hijinks
what kinda revolution do they have in mind
when the mob turns impatient
starts to turn
to occupy what? the human condition!
schmoccupy!
a fruit stand in Tunis?
a flaming vision of hell on utube.
There's no end to that burning.

A plague upon your houses!
There must be a better way
than pissin in the ocean
or in the park.
There must be a better way
than jerkin' cia strings
and coup d'etat blings.

I can eat no more from this tree now.

I just need to find something else
now,
because all my yankee hope
was sunk into that american dream
and if that dream of hard work bootstraps and get ahead of the game
turns nightmare behind the ugly scenes
with shock doctrine and torture,
i just cant...

I know now why the other tree
satisfies.
Its not too late for the other tree
the one that brings life
not guilt.
I'm not responsible for this stuff.

Come out of it my people.
Because of what Jesus did
I will eat from the other tree.
That's a better choice than Abraham had,
and sure the hell better than Mohamet
or Mao.
That's my story and I'm stickin to it.
Merry Christmas from the Garden,
Gethsemane, that is.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

On the limitations of humannness

Law built his kingdom upon a foundation of strength,
hefting beams of order upon discipline length
while
Progress made her society of perfectible members
teaching reason and freedom among liberty timbers.
Then
Love set up a clinic of hope and of healing
upon sacrifice and sweat and their warmfuzzy feeling
till
Truth tore it down, and sent all of them reeling
'neath a sky that is falling and a chicken in every debt ceiling.

Cluck cluck Selah
whadya think about that
Thanks for the doughnut hole, so long.

Glass half-Full