America by the heart

Sure I was a wayward youth, an ACLU loving tree hugger, but I’m older and wiser now. I’ve seen the light and the inescapable truth is that way in the deepest trenches of my soul, I am a hard core Buchanan-Bachman-Limbaugh loving Born Again conservative man.

For some time I’ve been secretly reading books by Pat Buchanan and other such American thinkers and I see that they make sense. Our Christian American way of life – the precepts upon which our Founding Fathers built and blessed this country – is under threat. We have a Muslim in the white house. The Obamanites have instigated a war on white people and Christian values. We have allowed socialistic terms like “diversity” and “tolerance” to incubate and systematically spread genocidal disease upon traditional White Anglo Saxon American, Bible-based, Constitutional American culture.

The unrestrained promulgation of this perverted disease is transmitted by the Liberal Media Establishment. A radical chic East Coast – a Godless Information cabal -- has a throttle choke on The Culture and its agents are raping our sacred values with the perverted glee of a Babylonian whore. The evidence is incontrovertible: Madonna’s satanic ritual during the Superbowl Halftime show; Lowes and Home Depot buying ads during the blasphemous Muslim in America on A&E, the surreptitious promotion of sexual impurity in the High School Musical movies and the war on heterosexuality waged by ESPN. Look at the liberal-instituted crucifixions of Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and Dr. Laura Schlessinger and the emergent --high-tech cultural suicide -- “hipster” status of left wing propaganda vehicles like PBS, NPR and the BBC and is it not a clear sign? Public radio? Public television? More like public toilets. Oh well, satan is ruler of the airwaves and he’s stinking up the crapper.

The Elite Media Establishment is in cohoots with a Godless educational system that outlawed school prayer and will place your children in concentration camps for reading the Bible. Remember when schools were just promoting “safe sex” and condoms even though thousands of evangelical teens have signed an abstinence pledge? (To hear the failed prophecies of “safe sex”, if Custer had been wearing a condom during the Battle of Little Bighorn, he would’ve lived through it.) NOW, our children are being taught how to masturbate and have perverted homosexual sex in the satanic laboratories known as the United States public education system.

Is it any wonder that my Christian voter friends in South Carolina are concerned that Obama is the anti-Christ? Barry Hussein Obama is the worst president we’ve ever had, even worse than that gay loving, socialist Clinton and his lesbian wife. Secretly Muslim? Hell, Obama-bin-laden has made no secret that he’s a jihadist-racist-Adolph Hitler loving Muslim. Why did he apologize to the Afghans when our God-fearing men burned the Koran? No gonads. If it were up to me and the right conservatives of this land, we’d see a Hiroshima-saki conflaguration of Islamist verses scorching every day.

I remember having a beer with my right-wing buddy Mr. Grissmachy at the Backwater Bar and Grill. (This was before I became a Christian and quit drinking.) Osa – oh, I’m sorry Obama was giving some Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery.

“I bet Ol’ Obama’s burnin’ up inside ‘cuz there ain’t no crescents on the gravestones there,” Mr. Grissmachy said, right before he raised his right leg to fart.

Also, like my good friend Glen Beck said, Obama has a “problem with white people.” They’re so thin-skinned, so bitter and desperate. If you have the slightest disagreement with Obama, you’re a racist. I love all my black brothers and sisters in Christ, but Barry Osa – sorry, Bama is horrible. Why do the black people keep falling for this liberal crap? Do they want a gangsta government headed by a food stamp prez who wants to turn their children into pimps and crackwhores? Maybe if the black people would pull themselves up the bootstraps, stop the illegitimacy and low education rates – perhaps through janitorial work by black school children as Newt Gingrich so brilliantly suggested --they would see through the black godfatha’ superfly’s liberal brainwashing.

We’re all one in Christ and we need to show our black brothers and sisters toughlove instead of giving them other people’s money. Like Gingrich, I also don’t believe slavery was a good thing, but that was along time ago. Get over it, Brother. Get off your welfare ass and stop bitching.

If Bachman, Rick Perry or Newt can’t be president, then Rick Santorum is our country’s only hope for salvation. It could trigger instant destruction if that non-Christian, moderate, Obama-light Romney gets anywhere near the White House. Our hope rests in a true Christian American whose looking out for real Americans.

Santorum is the only one telling the truth about the politically correct, liberal indoctrinating factory systems known as the United States university system. Obama wants every child in America to be able to go to college. Freakin’ snob! Why can’t some children be sent to trade schools and education camps where they can be taught the tenets of America’s fundamental values? Why the liberal breeding grounds known as college? It’s socialist dictatorship 101. Obama wants to take your children and re-make them in his Kenyan image. And why would he want to do that? It’s because he doesn’t value God’s creation and is dead set on pushing life-killing contraceptives on people who aren’t even married.

Why would fuehrer Obama care about lives? Instead of my personal Jesus, he proselytizes an environmental theology, an orthodoxy with seeds in animism. Makes me want to vomit like a sick, yalping dog at a JFK orgy-fest.

Americans were born here by Divine Providence and proclaim God throughout the world. Jesus has elected representatives to have dominion over the Earth as they morally see fit. So we need to get the government out of our lives, let the invisible hand work its divine magic over industry and if you’re a soddomite, Islamo-facist or non-English speaker, you can go to jail.

Yes, I have disavowed my Godless liberal youth. I’m a gun wielding states’ rights lovin, Old Testament thumpin', Confederate flag wavin’, lay- the-smackdown Hard Core Conservative. All you monkey lovin’ Obama lovers , illegals, welfare queens and Cadillac pimps, Muslims, sodomites and other sandlot infidel cannibals of the devil’s world, watch out. Somebody might take up Michele and Sarah on seeking some second amendment remedies and I’d love to smoke a napalm-laced camel and send you back to the Garden of Eden.

By the way, April Fool.

Prayers from the Heartland

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do, it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”
-- President Barrack Obama at a memorial for the victims of the Tuscon, Ariz. shooting, Jan. 11, 2011.

What the hell is the matter with Kansas?

A man representing our state, its legislature and people thought it would be cute to forward an email, praying for the death of our president. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2009/1116/biblical-anti-obama-slogan-use-of-psalm-1098-funny-or-sinister Kansas Speaker of the House Mike O’ Neal said he had at last found a “Biblical prayer for our president.” He then quotes Psalm 109:8:

"Let his days be few; and let another take his office. May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes. May a creditor seize all he has; may strangers plunder the fruits of his labor. May no one extend kindness to him or take pity on his fatherless children."

What a sterling example of our Middle American Heartland values – faith, family and good old fashioned Kansas pragmatism. The man doesn’t like President Obama’s politics so he uses God and the Bible to justify wanting him dead. This compassionate, conservative Christian wants God to make Michele a widow and Sasha and Malia, orphans.

Invoking God and a religious text to wish death on a human being – I thought only radical Muslims did that. But I’ve found that many right-thinking Christian conservatives believe praying for the death of those evil, unsaved elements destroying America is under God’s umbrella. Take my fat friend, Mr. Grissmachy, for example.

Mr. Grissmachy, an old guy from my hometown, likes to seat his corpulent torso over the stools of the Backwater Bar and Grill and preach God, country and the American Way. Ever since the 9-11 tragedy brought Americans of all stripes together in a harmonious spirit of pride and patriotism, Mr. Grissmachy has been on the warpath against Democrats, liberals, Muslims and everyone else ruining America.

Like many common sense, regular average Joe Americans, Mr. Grissmachy believes Obama is Muslim. He’s not buying Obama’s calm public assertions of being “Christian, by choice.” Nor is he fooled by those falsified birth certificates. Barry Hussein Obama is a radical Muslim, born in Kenya, Indonesia or some such country. He’s not a real American.

America is exceptional to all other countries in history, a Christian nation granted divine providence. Obama is The Other – a man whose presidency possibly signals the end times. He might be the anti-Christ. For these reasons, righteous Americans who believe in Jesus, guns, limited government, state’s rights, Ann Coulter, Ayn Rand and the Tea Party can justify a Christian fatwa against the president. When Obama is dead and Christian sharia is the supreme law of the land, they should all rejoice at that city upon a hill.

Naturally, in a nation founded on laws, many feel wishing death on the president crosses a line. They might be wondering why the Secret Service isn’t knocking on O’Neal’s door. But maybe those people are mistaken and O’Neal is misunderstood.

His response to the backlash is that he was only referring to the first sentence in the scripture, the part about “another taking his office.” He’s only praying that God will elect a new president to the White House in 2012.

Okay, so was O’Neal only talking about first sentence of the verse, as he says now, or was he referring to it “word-for-word,” like he said in his email?

I don’t cut the guy any slack. Only days before his latest hate-mail went out, O’Neal was in the news for another mass email he sent, calling the First Lady, “Mrs. YoMama.”

It’s a bottomless sea of national embarrassment here on the Great Plains. Just when it looks like Texas, Arizona, South Carolina or some other state will become the laughing stock -- the model of bumpkin-ness and intolerance in America – Kansas comes back to claim its place on the throne of backwardness.

I would like to think that most Kansans are not as cruel and mean-spirited as our loud-mouth leaders would lead the public to believe. Then I think of the bumper stickers I’ve seen on the road, reading: “Prayer for Obama: Psalm 109:8.” Now I know what that meant.

O’Neal speaks for the clergymen and church-goers I know in this area who “like” a page calling for Obama’s death on their facebooks. For awhile, there was a preacher in my hometown who said he didn’t think anyone who voted Democrat would make it to Heaven.

I’m embarrassed to have yet another hate monger make the news in my home state, but Kansas is just a slice of Intolerant America. The sentiments of many here were expressed a few years ago by California Southern Baptist pastor, Wiley Drake. In a 2009 interview with Fox News, Drake said he was praying for Obama’s death. http://video.foxnews.com/v/3931975/

Blasphemous prayers that someone dies, crude racial caricatures in emails and Tea Party signs – that’s where we are in America in 2012 a year after the Tuscon, Az. shootings, a couple of days away from Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Biting the hand

Boeing is not your salvation.
--From the preacher's sermon this morning

It was a Saturday afternoon around 20 years ago. I was at the home of a friend of a friend. The man worked for Boeing in Wichita, Kan.

This guy, whose name I don’t remember, lived in an upper middle class home nestled cozily in a country housing addition outside Arkansas City. He had a luscious green sprawling yard and a stylish rock driveway, all of which the man worked hard to make presentable.

There were tees set up in his lawn, golf bags filled with clubs, golf balls and I was all over that shit. The three of us guys bantered good naturedly over a few beers. It was a fun day.

He had two elementary school-aged daughters. They had a croquet set in the lawn and (I shit you, not) asked their dad if they could go to the country club that day. Obviously, it was a place they were familiar with.

My friend and I were in our early 20s, when visiting that Boeing worker. We’re in our early 40s now, and I hope that guy is retired. If he’s not, well, I remember that Fitzgerald’s line from The Great Gatsby when only four people showed up for the lavish, party giving millionaire’s funeral.

The poor sonovabitch

Last week, Boeing announced it will close its Wichita plant at the end of 2013, leaving 2,160 people without a job. Over the past two or three generations, the union backed aircraft industry of Wichita, Kan. has launched blue collar workers into the upper ranks of the middle class. Wichita is the Aircraft Capital of the World and Boeing has long been the Big Daddy of all the aircraft plants that comprised this aviation kingdom and built this city.

On both sides of our families, my wife, Maria, and I have family members who work or have worked for Beech, Boeing and Cessna. It’s a cultural DNA aspect of this community, steeped in hope and anxiety.

Oil to aviation boom
Wichita’s aviation history is descended from the discovery of oil in nearby Butler County. In 1915, a huge gush of oil was drilled on land three miles northwest of El Dorado. A few years later, the oil field was producing 29 million barrels of oil per day and eight refineries were operating within the county. Oil production in that field helped the Allies win World War I.
http://www.kansastravel.org/kansasoilmuseum.

Jake Mollendick, a Wichita businessman who struck it rich in El Dorado’s oil boom, invested his fortune into the neophyte airplane business. During the 1920s, his company employed Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman, who later started their own company with barnstormer Clyde Cessna. By 1933, these men had all gone their separate ways – the result: Beech, Boeing and Cessna. http://home.iwichita.com/rh1/hold/av/avhist/wichita/aircap_x.htm The Depression years were terrible for local plane makers. Then in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt summoned the Wichita aircraft leaders to Washington D.C. and told them he needed 50,000 aircraft for the inevitable war that was brewing.

Military-Industrial magnet
Wichita employed around 600,000 people in its aircraft plants during WW II. More than 26,300 military planes were built in Wichita and production in the rest of Kansas made the state’s total output 34,500 aircraft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita,_KansasPresident Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, known as “Toot” worked as a night shift supervisor on the B-29 assembly line. http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/united-states/120104/boeing-closing-wichita-factory-b52-b29-kansasWar production transformed Wichita from a bucolic cow town into an urban center. The aircraft plants brought in further industry and thousands more workers, adding to the population of the city and the suburban towns that were also booming.

During the Cold War, Wichita’s aircraft industry, its employees and the community benefitted from the Millitary Industrial Complex. Periodic layoffs and labor strikes, over the years, have hurt the local economy.

The end of the Cold War, 9-11 and globalization have left the aircraft industry in Wichita more uncertain than ever. All the aircraft plants have cut back. Boeing -- if a person could hold on to a job there -- offered an excellent wage and benefit package. A Boeing worker told me a few years ago how there were people in his department who had earned master’s degree, but preferred to continue working at the plant because it paid better.

Also, two people from his department – distressed over being laid off – committed suicide.

No doubt conservatives are already using the Boeing closing as an excuse to bash Obama for cutting the Defense Dept. budget by $450 billion. (Winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bringing our people home, I would say, is a good thing.)
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/story/2012-01-04/boeing-plant-closing-wichita-kansas/52377688/1 Naturally, the complainers will be the same conservatives who blame the president for the deficit, which they helped create.


Hit and Run
The state and community have rolled over and given Boeing a good time for decades. The company has benefitted from decades of industrial revenue bonds – more than $3.5 billion since 1979 – and has received $650 million in property-tax relief.

This past year, Kansas lawmakers moved heaven and earth to ensure that a $35 billion contract to build an aerial tanker for the Air Force went to Boeing and not a European competitor.

“If Boeing wins the contract, the company promises, it will create 11,000 jobs in Washington state and 7,500 jobs in Kansas,” the Lawrence-Journal World reported last Februrary. /http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2011/feb/17/senators-jerry-moran-and-pat-roberts-join-groupsu

Boeing gave verbal assurance that it would stay in Wichita, but apparently the company’s word isn’t its bond. State Rep. Jim Ward D-Wichita, called Boeing “a poster child for corporate tax incentives."

After 85 years in this town, Boeing bit the corporate welfare hand that fed it.

A thing called free speech

Even if it’s true that Sarah Palin inquired into banning library books in Alaska, even though I find her repellant, I would never want a book she has authored (or had ghost-written) to be banned. I am a diehard First Amendment advocate and I support wholeheartedly Miss You Betcha’s right to freely express her uninformed opinions and make a fool of herself all she wants.

I support free speech even for people, who given the power, would deny that right to others. The Islamic extremist, the Christian extremist, whatever, they have a right to speak their minds and publish their opinions over the print, broadcast or digital medium.

It’s true, I spoke critically of the “gay bashing” right-wing evangelist in my last column. Even if what these preachers say is abusive, however, they still have a right to say it. If that’s how they exercise their freedom of religion, fine, and I have the right to accept or reject what they say. As long as they don’t act on their intolerance and violate someone else’s rights, they’re in the clear.

Also, what I call “gay bashing,” someone else may interpret differently. Merely condemning or calling such lifestyles “sinful,” doesn’t, in my view, make someone Fred Phelps. Now the leaders who go around beating a dead horse and inveighing ad nauseum against the “homosexual agenda,” a term I first heard as a young, small-town newspaper reporter in the ‘90s, I would call bashers or Phelps-lite. Yet even Phelps should enjoy his right to free speech; of course, it should be tempered with the rights of funeral mourners, a sticky constitutional issue.

Then if some straight-gay alliance or patriotic motorcyclists assemble to counter-protest Phelps’ bigotry, it’s all cool. We need parameters, in which to protect everyone’s rights, while maintaining order, but the Supreme Court has defined a method for keeping those safeguards in place.

No doubt most people of the right-wingnut philosophy don’t share in hatred as incendiary as Phelps’s. Or at least they won’t until they do something stupid like electing a Michel Palin-Perry-I-don’t-masturbate-Obama-has-666-in-his-haircut to the presidency. Such a demagogue would stir their shit faster than you can say mob rule.

It would be a shit-storm of cyclonian proportions. Like a grand wizard at a KKK rally. Much like that scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou? where Ralph Stanley’s haunting O Death played and the broom-sweeping gubernatorial candidate, along with the midg – er height-challenged person and their lynch-mob brethren chased George Clooney and his friends (such as the African-American blues guitarist who may have sold his soul to the ol’ prince of darkness) into the woods before a falling lit cross thwarted their plans.

Oh, I am a man of constant sorrow.

Anyhow, as I was saying, most people aren’t that incendiary, barring any nuclear pushing of their emotional hot buttons. Many sincerely believe they are protecting children from bad things.

A lot of people have had good intentions behind their desire to censor. It’s just that their remedy would cause more harm than the problems they seek to cure. Of course, we want to put the kibosh on racism. It’s a vile, ugly, evil thing, but banning The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not the answer.

Mark Twain had his main character say “nigger” because that’s the way a white boy living in Missouri during the 1840s would have talked. (By the way, J. Guy does not use pussified phrases like “the n-word.) One who actually reads the book will find that Twain produced probably the most morally indignant social critique against slavery created by a dead white man in all of American literature.

Sadly, a high school English teacher recently told me that Huck Finn, you know the Great American Novel, would likely be above her students’ comprehension level. Maybe the well-meaning people wanting to censor the book don’t get satire either.

I don’t know. A school principal told me that reading – books – are the life preservers that will gets kids out of poverty, you know, some Godsend that will open up to them a world beyond their cramped apartments, set them on a learning path and save them from a life of economic inequality?

When your whole life, from the time you were still in the womb, has been a “controversial issue,” maybe some “un-godly”, “un-American”, “sexually explicit” book will speak to you in a personal way. Isn’t controversy what great art is about, anyway? Aren’t writers, like composers, painters and all other artists the antennas of the race that look at war, religion, sex, love, politics, philosophy, family…and say, “Whoa, wait a minute. Let’s take a look at what we’re doing. Are we so sure we’re right? Could we be wrong? Let’s have a dialogue.”

Such abstract concepts would be beyond the comprehension level of a Sarah Palin. However, if unlike her, we respect that the marketplace of ideas is not a gated community and that Palin’s America by Heart and Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope can exist side-by-side on a book shelf without heralding the apocalypse, then we can promote a quality learning environment for all kids in America.

Kids who will grow up to have a good comprehensive grasp on a thing called freedom.