Tag: jesus

Taking Names

jono55

“They are fighting with Jesus.”

Comedian John Fugelsang came up with an awfully good shtick recently regarding the hypocrisy of Cluck, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson arguing that the Pope should stick to popery and let the three of them interpret the Bible. Here’s a couple of quotes from an interview published in Good Faith Media recently.

Fugelsang believes the U.S. media frames recent social media skirmishes between the pope, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and House Speaker Mike Johnson in an unhelpful way.

“I don’t think [the pope] is fighting them,” he said to attendees in Alexandria, Virginia. “He’s showing us all calmly and with no anger or visible outrage how to delegitimize and expose these frauds. He’s making them fight Jesus.”

and

Fugelsang also noted the challenge of what to call those who use Christianity for authoritarian goals, whether “conservative Christians,” “fundamentalists,” or “Christian nationalists.” He said he prefers the simpler term: “fake Christians.”

Couldn’t have said it better my own self.

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If you’ve been wasting your time reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I am a fan of Richard Thompson. Based on nothing, really, except that the man is capable of some of the best songwriting and guitar playing available on the planet.

I was late to join his fan club, because I hadn’t paid any attention at all to him until I read a review of the album Shoot Out The Lights back in 1982. The review made it sound interesting and when I sought out and listened to the music … I was gone, daddy, gone. I never came back.

There is a large selection of playlists that I listen to when I am involved in that most absolutely boring of activities – walking on the treadmill at the rec center. All of the music on those lists is from stuff that I own, but once in a while a piece comes on that I never actually heard before. I had bought an album for a particular cut or cuts and totally ignored the rest. I have no excuse for this reprehensible behavior but there you are. Mea culpa.

This happened just the other day, when the tune Her Love Was Meant For Me penetrated the standing fog in my brain as I was going into minute 22 of a 30 minute slog at incline #12 on the treadmill at 3 miles per hour. Whoa, said I, what kind of a fan can I be when a song this great is news to me? Especially since I own it? (Rhetorical question)

Here, take a listen, just to see what I’d overlooked.

Her Love Was Meant For Me

So what does all of this mean in the scheme of things? For dolts like myself? I dip into the past for the answer.

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When John F. Kennedy was murdered I didn’t know what to do with such horrific news. For days I was running on half my cylinders trying to make some sense of a world where one of its most important people could simply be blotted out by a nobody with a scoped rifle. Lots of water has flowed under that particular bridge since then, so when I learn that yesterday another bozo with a gun invaded a White House party I don’t miss a beat and continue eating my cereal. Life goes on, at least on the surface.

But deep down in there somewhere in my own personal dark web there is a pool of anger, cold as death. If I could learn about the murder of 20 children at Sandy Hook and still do what was required of me the next day I can certainly do the same when a group of celebrities and politicians are briefly menaced. But that lake just deepened, even with this relatively minor episode. Numb? Don’t think so. Furious? Absolutely.

If the moment comes during my lifetime when we realize we don’t have to allow this particular insanity to continue and that we have the power to stop it whatever the difficulties may be, I plan to march while carrying my end of the banner in one hand and a taser in the other. You may have heard that there are men going ’round taking names … well, some of them are ancient souls. Like me, for instance.

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Taking Names, by Josh White

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The Sound of Both Hands Clapping

jono55

May all sentient beings praise Senator Cory Booker. He is a good man who has now broken the record of a very bad man (Sen. Strom Thurmond) and delivered a more than 25 hour-long speech in the Senate. All of it directed against the destructive and corrupt Cluck regime.

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This is not right or left, it is right or wrong. This is not a partisan moment. It is a moral moment. Where do you stand?

Cory Booker

Not every man or woman can do something as strenuous and public as what Booker has done, but every man or woman of conscience can now see where we are and what is happening and be disgusted on the one hand and encouraged on the other, because if sacrifice is called for we don’t have to hunt for the reason – it is there right in front of us.

Easy for me to say? I am only a coot in the corner with little to lose? Not true. Each one of us has only the day in front of them to do what is right. Only that moment. In that way we are all alike, as not one of us can see tomorrow.

If anyone in America can be arrested by masked men, thrown onto an airplane, and transported to a foreign country, all without due process, we are all of us vulnerable and should not be fooled into believing otherwise. These are the tactics of despots, of tsars and fuehrers. No one’s life or liberty is safe in such a country. A man called Martin Niemoller put it so very well, back in 1946, as he described Nazi Germany.

“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”

As you read this they are already coming for Hispanics, for Asians, for Muslims. We’ve had our wake-up call, folks.

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From The New Yorker

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Comic relief. Josh Johnson.

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Saturday afternoon Robin and I participated in a political rally/march here in Paradise that was directed against the Cluck administration and its policies.

It was part of a demonstration by worried, frustrated, appalled, and just plain fed up people across the country, and which was coordinated by Indivisible.org. Robin and I were amazed at the turnout, 1200 people in a small town. It seems that there are few things that make people angrier than an attempted coup being prosecuted by an incompetent delusional.

The signs on the street today ranged from really imaginative and attractive to my own blunt message scribbled with a fat black marker on a hunk of white poster board: IMPEACH.

A guy can dream, right? Here’s a few pix.

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From The New Yorker

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We don’t eat many casseroles here at Basecamp. That’s okay with me because they were constantly on the menu in my family of origin. But a ripple of nostalgia moved me this week and I decided to make a salmon loaf, which turned out not to be half bad.

What one does is take a single 16 oz can of salmon and throw a bushel of bread crumbs at it. It’s probably the back story for that famous episode in the Bible.

Matthew 14:17-19 KJV

And they say unto him, We have here but five loaves, and two fishes. He said, Bring them hither to me. And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the disciples to the multitude.

My own guess is that they made salmon loaves. You could definitely feed a multitude this way. And there would be plenty of leftovers because of that irreducible group that always says in such instances: “It tastes fishy,” and won’t eat it.

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For What It’s Worth, by Lucinda Williams

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A friend sent along this gem of a link. We liked it very much. It is entitled “Twenty Lessons.”

https://snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-lessons-read-by-john-lithgow?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

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Alarum!

jono55

There are way too many alarmists working in the weather service. We were told to expect 1-2 feet of snow in the mountains above 8000 feet along with sub-zero temperatures. None of this sounded good to Robin and I as we tried to plan our Thanksgiving journey to Durango. We hunched over the weather app on my phone on Wednesday, waiting and watching, finally calling the pet sitter at mid-day to tell her “Game On.”

Predicted driving conditions

Our wills were in order, we had food for two days survival, enough warm clothing, and a reliable vehicle. We said our prayers and climbed into the Outback, looking tenderly at our little home for perhaps the last time. Off we went, anticipating treacherous patches of glare ice, hard drifts across the highway that could make you lose control, and trucks skating sideways right at us coming down a mountain two-lane road.

What we found was no snow at all on 99.4 % of the road, and temperatures in the thirties. The countryside was beautiful under a couple of inches of new and trackless snow. It was a breeze.

Actual driving conditions

I tried to imagine the home life of those prognosticators, how each flutter of a leaf or errant drop of moisture must send them into fearful spasms where they rush their families into basements or attics, handing out stored hardtack when their little ones cried out from hunger.

Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once.

William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

I’m looking for a hive of valiant meteorologists. Growing less interested in what the Chicken Little variety has to say.

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Elon Musk is naming people that he might recommend to be fired when the new administration takes over. Naming people might be thought of as reckless of life (by uncharitable folks like me) when he and his new orange BFF have a large following of blackshirts and brownshirts who like nothing better than than to be given an excuse to hit people.

The richest man in the world publicly picking on ordinary citizens … anybody see a problem here?

Where’s my dictionary … let’s look under “bully” … ahhh … there we are. Perhaps that should be the name of his Musk’s new quasi-official-department: The Office of Cravens.

He fits right in with his new pal, President-elect Bonespurs.

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(Ran across a line from this poem, and just had to look it up.)

When Great Trees Fall

by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory,suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die
and our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

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There are those who speak our language, this English we trample on and murder daily, in such a way as to ennoble it. Or perhaps to show how innately noble our mother tongue really is. Maya Angelou had one of those voices. Each syllable ringing clearly as any bell. No mumbling. No idiosyncratic elisions. Poetry.

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If We Make It Through December, by Phoebe Bridgers

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So it is December. I must now join the consumer herd in search of some small remembrance for a handful of people. It is a dangerous thing, this entering a large and crazed group of people which has already been in motion for at least a month now. The herd slavers as it passes, every pupil dilated, every nostril flared, every breath labored. They have only just left one of the seemingly endless Black Fridays behind, and are looking desperately over their shoulders at signs reading: Only (X) shopping days till Christmas.

I will do my duty. I am no shirker. If overconsumption is required of me, overconsume I will. I am a full-blooded American, after all, and once I am galloping with the rest of the swarm it pays onlookers to be cautious of those sharp hooves and horns!

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