It's A Question Of Priorities

Greetings from the building that still has no heat. It’s raining now and it rained much of the night. I took a long hot shower this morning to get warm. Thankfully that is still working. We had Raison Bran for breakfast along with a fried egg and an English muffin with a lot of grape jam on it. But there were no seconds except on coffee I went for myself. We just edged on to page six. A lot of thoughts were going through my mind this morning. I thought of Joel Olsteen and how I’ve watched him more in the last few months than ever before and my life if the worst financially it’s ever been since that dark day on September first of this year when everything came crashing down. I remember one evening in late August where I went out for coffee about sunset and was praising God that Obama had been nominated. Contrary to what Joel Olsteen says, a lot of negative stuff catches you totally by surprise. The issue was raised about able bodied people “charging ahead” of people in wheel chairs to get in the door. Assuming that it’s true, how is my getting in the dining room more quickly in any way impeding the speed that he gets in the door with his wheel chair? This is a classic argument raised by Rush Limbaugh about Clinton raising taxes because “Well, at least the rich are getting it worse”. It’s raining harder now. I listened to Drive radio doing 1972 till they got to the Who song, then I started doing this. The bottom line is I’m sick of four months of economic extremity, being squeezed. I value people more who make me feel better about myself. Inversely, I lose respect people who are constantly de-valuing me and “Don’t know what I’m about” and are constantly trying to “put me in my place” or worse- , feeling dependant or even “obligated” to someone whom I despize.

Well Barney Frank was on Sixty Minutes last night. It’s all a question of priorities. Frank is a liberal on social issues such as being gay. But he’s a “pragmatist” on financial issues such as banking. Let’s examine this to see how “pragmatic” Frank really was. You’d think as a liberal and a democrat who heads up the banking committee he would be in a pivotal role when it came to constructing a financial bail out bill. He could put any stipulative provision in the bill he wanted. If he wanted he could demand that any recipient of the money climb a flag pole and do an Irish jig on the top. But now Frank comes back and says “Well, things just didn’t work out as I planned”. I expect to hear that sort of crap from God, but not from the chief liberal democrat on a key committee who could have been such a pivotal person in insuring that the down and out had their high mortgages renegotiated to terms they would pay. Now Republic Windows or that company from Illinois got screwed by the Bank of America, who didn’t pay them the money they thought was due them. The priorities of these republicans, and I’m not even going to include Bush here, is to screw over the auto workers of America who are part of the labor movement. These republicans want to bust the unions. They want to throw people out of work (it’s raining even harder now) and start a chain reaction of job losses in America. Now we hear that this “chain reaction” is going to occur in our economy from other causes. There are two other types of Real Estate loans whose “bubble” still hasn’t burst yet. The “Altier” or “Altey” loans, and some kind of “Arm” loan. These two classes of loans are set like a time-bomb ready to go off next year, so the economic crisis is not even half over. But even after real estate has run its course, there are a lot of other asset areas of the economy set for an implosion. Now they are saying that this recession could last the whole four years of the Obama administration, and I find that an overall bummer. Joel Olsteen would say by say of solution “Just don’t talk about it and don’t get socially involved with people who Do”. The trouble is if you carry this out to its logical extreme and unfortunately some people go for extremes, you end up either like George Bush, who walls out everybody and hasn’t a care in the world, or else like the pastor of Calvary, Anaheim. This is a fearful man. He’s afraid he might accidently talk to someone who will bring hin down and “rob his joy”. But he seems to spend much of his life just fearing that this “worst case scenario” will happen. I am a big believer in the idea of balance. The Tao Te Ching teaches that everything is in constant progress tword its opposite. So that while it’s true I regard “being positive” like that USC coach, as a trait so valuable I hold it as one of my Seven Golden Virtues. But on the other hand I don’t let “fear of fear” rule the day where you can’t come out and call a spade a spade. I believe the best way to resolve issues that bother you is to come out and hit them square on and deal with them right then, neutralizing their impact.

BUSH WAS OUR WORST PRESIDENT, EVER

Last night I watched Jeopardy and the Simpson’s and then Bill Moyers, who had a guest on who said George Bush was probably the worst President this country has ever had. He said Bush has a “tragic legacy” but Bush himself is not “tragic”. Indeed old George is one of the lucky, blessed ones of society who has been living high as a kite these past eight years of destroying the US constitution. He’s been as happy as a lark oblivious to that tragic legacy. Bush is a Manachian, who believes in extreme dualism. There is only black and white in bold relief with no shades of gray to fill in the rest of the image. To Bush’s way of thinking any attack on any Evil is inherently always Good no matter what extremes are pursued to those ends of eliminating the so-called evil.

"RAMONA" - REVISITED

I was going to write the Jesus Christ show. You know in any unguarded moment any pastor would say about [Marcus], “[Marcus] thought Christianity would give him a sense of identity and purpose and meaning. But Christianity can’t offer him those things and he’s too dumb to know that”. In other unguarded moments Don Halboth says things to me like “I’m sorry you didn’t hear the things you needed to hear in that sermon”. I used to on occasion critique a really Bad sermon saying how poorly structured it was and how poorly it represented any Christian truth he was trying to get out. But to quote Dylan “I can’t apologize for something you forgot to say”. It works just as well to say “I can’t forgive you for something you forgot to say”. Or again it can be “I didn’t hear something you forgot to say”. These people aren’t “sorry” that I came away empty. What they are sorry about is for themselves, that they are schlepping around a dead-weight theology that in reality does nothing for them or anyone else but they can’t face that. In the song “Ramona” by Dylan there is the line “I’ve heard you say many times that you’re better than no one and no one is better than you. If you really believe that then you know that you have nothing to win and nothing to lose”. The last thing Christianity wants to do is deal from this level playing field. The thought of not “winning” in the sense of looting the poor and down and out would be appalling to a George Bush. There are in fact outlets of pure Evil out there and the Bill Moyers guest admits that. But they are isolated, few and far between, like that black “skin of evil” blob on Star Trek. The best thing you can do with such evil such as a Bill Halliday is to avoid them, or it. As the line continues in Ramona “It’s all just a con babe, a vacuum, a scheme- - that sucks you into feeling like this”. Ie, depressed. Chuck Smith’s supernatural body may be suited to living in a vacuum but most people aren’t. If dogs in a dog pound had the power to escape they would, and when you’re in Church and the preacher begins talking and you feel as though the air is being sucked out of the room, you know that you are just another captive animal that was turned in by someone. (Selah) We can live our lives well and easily without having to worry about any of these things that Dylan used to have the good sense not to worry about, until he “learned how to be a human race drop-out”.