Fear and Loathing Among the Semi-Literate

 

Photo by Anthony Garand on Unsplash

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” ― Eugene Victor Debs

The First Amendment to the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Read that first part again. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."

Michelle Bachmann didn't read that part. It's the First Amendment. I can only wonder if she has read the rest of them. 

“If you want take away my religious liberties,” she once said in a radio interview with Lars Larson, “you can advocate for that but you do it through the constitutional process and you don’t intimidate and no politician should give away my religious liberties or yours.”

Somehow, in that muddled brain, she equates the call for gay rights as a move to take away her religious rights, and then assures us that her religious rights are esconced in the Constirution; that human rights are a violation of her interpretation of the Constitution. Can she perceive why the term "batshittery" was invented to describe her incoherent ramblings?

Some of the more conservative elements within the Christian religion have translated Bible verses in any manner that they feel promotes their views. It doesn't matter what the scripture in question actually says, it only matters how it can be twisted, spun, bent, and mangled. That same thinking drives those Christians into reworking the Constitution, our history, the words of the Founders, and the pronouncements of political figures. Anything can mean anything to semi-literate, and it does. 

Michelle Bachmann and her current cronies-in-kind-- Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, among a legion of others-- thrive on fear and hate, the two-sided coin that drives the reactionary right.

A wise man once told me, "Do not ever-- ever-- make a crucial decision when you are in the throes of fear or hate. Nothing good can come of it. Wait until your senses return, and then decide."

It's unfortunate for our country that many of our right-wing politicians have not had a wise man or woman in their lives.

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The Aristocracy and the Rest of Us

 

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction." --Erich Fromm

Fuck Congress.

A little dramatic? I suppose, but then, without drama, what? Treacle? There is always the danger of carrying drama into purple prose, but purple prose at least displays a level of effort and confidence. I'll have to watch out for that tendency to be heavy-handed, though. It comes, partly, from my current reading of James Joyce- now being tempered by John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

I once read of a prominent author (I have forgotten who he was) who avoided reading contemporary writers for fear of contaminating his work. Wouldn't reading only the classics put the author in danger of being influenced by them? Did he, for fear of sounding like Joan Didion, come across like Herman Melville?

We live in a litigious culture in which it seems everyone wants to get rich from everyone else's labor- a trait drilled into us by our elected officials and corporate executives. I suspect the author's reluctance to read copyrighted work came more from a fear of accusations of plagiarism than from concerns about influence on style and voice. A charge of plagiarism is a burdensome shame for a legitimate writer, though all of us carry phrases, voices, and styles in our hidden memories from works read, dramatizations seen, and music heard. All writers live with the danger of these suppressed memories coming to life on paper. I see in my own scribbles the influence of, say, Joyce's phraseology. Might I have also inadvertently used a phrase or a sentence? Modestly, I am not of the caliber of writer to work in the words of that kind of genius; but of a lesser writer or one who engages a more vernacular style, there is certainly the possibility of a string of words belonging to another showing up in my pages.

I like to believe that if I were to see a bit of prose rightfully mine but appearing in someone else's work might be handled- and corrected- without my resorting to the theft of his entire work through subpoenas and demands for obscene amounts of cash, but then, my Congress- votes to give themselves yet another pay increase, and I've got to pay That bill, don't I?

Members of my congress force their ever-increasing wealth on the public with no thought of the burden it places on others.

Pay for their insatiable need, I will; in the same spirit it was fostered onto me--with contempt for the greed of the officials who make themselves wealthy beyond the common working person’s imagination.

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Congressional Salaries and Allowances: In Brief

Updated November 3, 2021:

https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/2021-11-03_RL30064_302197ea1def9558e2ef1420c3d51c8957b4e526.pdf

For Want of a Theme

 

This blog has suffered through abandonment and fresh starts, indecision and neglect, and the lack of a theme. It is that need of a unifying theme that has had me stop and start so often. I began with politics, but soon saw that meant dealing with idiots, so I changed to religion and philosophy. That won’t work as a theme either. There is only so much I can say about the incredulity of religious claims.

I considered a “How to Clean” theme but, though a clean freak, I am no expert on the subject.

Architecture. That would be great. I do love the fields of art and architecture, but there is a problem: the cost of graphics. I cannot at this time afford the cost of images of those works on the internet.

So, I’ve chosen to blog with no theme. I have a wide variety of interests on which I think I have something to say. With no unifying theme, I can write about cleaning hacks, post-modern architecture, the current political climate and its threat to the democratic experiment, the military, books and literature, my own short stories and essays, and even the adventures of an amateur cook. The field is wide open.

In the coming days I will post a short story centered on illicit sex, another, a historical fiction featuring the Joseph McCarthy political with hunts of the 1950s, and a bio and review of one of my literary heroes.

I hope that the freedom to write a themeless blog will be as entertaining and informative as it is liberating.

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God's Graffiti

Photo by Alonzo Skelton

All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach. --Adolf Hitler

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A disclaimer: Readers who have some psychological need to convert others to belief systems involving supernatural characters will be offended by some of the contents of this essay.

 I’m almost finished reading Revolutionary Characters, by historian Gordon S. Wood, and have recently read biographies on George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. I intend to squeeze in Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton as soon as I can acquire the books, and I’ll look up the others on the internet. I look especially for information on their religious views. So far, I have found nothing to indicate that the founding fathers were religious men. They were deists, the prevailing sentiment held by the educated upper classes of the time, and they held in varying degrees of indifference and contempt the evangelical Christianity of the masses.

 The religious right in this modern age like to point to references to God in the founders’ letters and documents as proof of the religiosity of the framers of the Constitution, but the God of the deists bore no resemblance to the angry meddling God whose words contemporary evangelist would have inscribed on every surface of every federal facility on the planet and taught as science in the classrooms of our public schools. Appeals to God in those letters and documents were appeals to Providence, not to some denominational creator who heaps beneficence on the faithful and severe judgment on those not obedient to His authority as expressed by one or another interpretive branch of His dictates.

George Washington, ever aware of his public image, attended church to display his affinity with his constituency in much the same way modern politicians, steeped in corruption and self-interest, cater to a religious constituency to appear as one of the people. Alexander Hamilton used Christianity to achieve political ends, and did not express any adherence to the faith until the early nineteenth century, decades after his prominence in Revolutionary politics. John Adams openly expressed in belief in deism, but thought church attendance essential to man’s morality. Thomas Paine’s masterpiece, The Age of Reason, promoted deism and criticized Christian doctrine. Benjamin Franklin considered himself a deeply religious man, but in his writings he often refers to “the deity” and “providence,” without mention of Christianity. He endeavored to virtue, but of course, virtue does not rely on religion for its practice or existence. James Madison rigorously defended and promoted religious freedom. Of the founding fathers, only John Jay and Patrick Henry attested to orthodox Christianity. They did not belong to the class of educated men who adhered to the prevailing theology of deism among the landed elite in the northern colonies. Evangelical Christianity was, to those who aspired to a republican aristocracy in the Age of Enlightenment, the religion of the unenlightened masses.

 Proselytizers and enforcers of religious have only the motto “In God We Trust” as a wedge and as justification for their attempts to force fundamentalist Christianity on an entire nation, but that motto did not appear on American currency until nearly a century after the signing of the Constitution, at a time of religious revival in the United States and was not adopted as the national motto until the Eisenhower administration in 1956, when the aristocratic values inherent in the Age of Enlightenment ceased to have relevance.

The most militant atheist quarrels with inscriptions of the national motto on currency and the Ten Commandments on the face of federal buildings, but most Americans view those allusions to religion with ambivalence. The motto refers only to “God” and does not promote the god of a favored group, and the Decalogue represents a historical event and is not the sole province of any particular philosophy. The exact wording belongs to the Judeo-Muslim-Christian heritage, but identical admonitions come from multiple cultures and religions ranging from the code of Hammurabi to definitions of proper behavior in Scientology. It does not require religious thought to know that rules set forward in the Commandments represent common-sense applications for an individual to live by if he is to live at peace in a society. The problem many deists have with religious graffiti on taxpayer-funded property lies in the rigid enforcement by brown-shirt religious leaders to limit those inscriptions to their particular faith. Why not include Buddhism’s Eightfold Path, and the Sutras of Patanjali? Buddhism and Hinduism, are, after all, well represented in American society, as are Wicca, Paganism, Scientology, and any number of groups and doctrines that have sprung up to challenge the rigid and chauvinist dogma of Christianity and its history of torture, mass murder, and denial of reason and free thought to enforce its adherence.

If I sound critical of militant religiosity, it is only because the Flying Spaghetti Monster (www.venganza.org/) has not received equal billing with Christian thought.