Radio turned to NPR. I listened to a 1986 Fresh Air interview Teri Gross did with Amiri Baraka, the richly talented and controversial writer who died last week. With infectious rapid vocal delivery, he talked about how he wished he was a musician, might have been one, had he not preferred writing. He liked the trumpet lessons he took from a man who wanted him to play Verdi. His heroes were trumpet players. Dizzy Gillespie. Miles Davis.
Music is omnipresent in my life as it was this man's. Part of the fabric. The seamless, unending culture. Up there with oxygen, food, sex, spiritual matters, driving a car, going to work, cleaning the bathtub. It's fitting that I'm writing this early on a Saturday afternoon. When I was a kid, American Bandstand came on at 11:30 a.m., signaling the end of the cartoons. (It would be followed by ABC Wide World of Sports.) I watched "Banstand" a lot at my Grandma Mac's house where I spent a lot of halcyon days in my hometown of Jett, Kan. (pop. 4,000) Around 1980, Grandma got cable TV and I saw Soul Train on WGN.
Funny, Dick Clark and Don Cornelius died in the same year. But music, like the other things of life, goes on. Here are some videos for your Saturday.
I was in a sad mood this morning, thinking about some stuff. This song by this band put me in a happy mood. Only Gram Parsons did decadence melded with poignancy better than the Stones.
I've totally been on a kick for this album, which Jed Beaudoin has been putting in regular rotation on local college radio's "Strange Currency." Wichita State's 89.1 KMUW. The album is a remake of an Everly Brothers album, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, recorded in the '50s. The songs were traditional country, hillbilly and folk classics then. They go back. I'm glad Phil got to see this before he passed on.
You can never have enough Leonard Nimoy and you can never have enough cheese. Some can never have enough Star Trek or '60s. For Nancy.
"Well, the talkin' leads to touchin' and the touchin' leads to sex and then there is no mystery left." So true. Great lyrics. Great hooks. Never saw any TV show this song was featured on, but I've heard stuff.
My friend Crowson raved about the Big Star documentary, Nothing Can Hurt Me. They came from his hometown of Memphis. Crowson was once Elvis's paperboy.
Here's his band, The Crowsons performing at Watermark Books, doing a song from the classic Rubber Soul album. I love the Beatles. Love the Crowsons.
I picked this video by a local band because there's a trombone player and my son plays trombone.
Jim Nabors recently "made it legal," marrying his long-time partner Stan. Good for them. The other gentlemen in this video, the late Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, weren't gay. This is just what entertainment was then. And it was great entertainment. We won't see it again.
Still sad about the loss of Phil. This song is from the brothers' 1968 album, Roots, one of the first roots and country-rock albums, a classic. A Little Less of Me was originally a hit for Glen Campbell, but the Everlys' version is my favorite. I love the steel guitar. And notice how they sound a lot like the Byrds. When my son heard me listening to this song, he asked me if it was the Beatles. I took advantage of a great teaching moment.
It's 5:23 a.m. and I've been sitting here with my coffee, contemplating life and where we all are in the universe. We're pretty small, and yet a single life can cast such vast a shadow. The book of Proverbs says "the memory of the just is blessed: but the memory of the wicked shall rot."
I know this lady, Jimna. She volunteered at the non-profit agency my wife used to run. She's the mother of my friend Adam. "Go to funerals," she's told him since youth. I think I know why she dispensed this advice. She wanted her kids to grow up with respect, but I think she also wanted them to think about life and death. We're all mortal. One day our entire lives will be summed up in one hour. What will they say?
I went to one funeral last week. My friend John's father died. I didn't really know the man, but I'd seen him around for years. John is good people, one of the few guys I know from high school who's worth a shit. As a gesture of respect, I attended his old man's memorial service.
"He wouldn't want everyone to be crying," John said. "He's probably up there, drinking a beer right now, laughing at us."
My dad grew up on a farm, just outside Lathrap, Kan., (pop. 150) There were three churches in town, the Baptist, Methodist & Disciples of Christ. Each had a membership of approximately 50 people so essentially the whole town was represented in the little congregations.
(There were two beer joints in town.)
Dad was baptized in Old Man Halbert's pond during a church revival when he was about 8-years-old. Some country preacher, his frock coat wet, dunked Dad in the water and he came up from it, changed.
I would say Dad's definite notions of what church ought to be were formed a long time ago, well before I was ever thought of, when he was of such tender years.
"They put a coffee machine in the front foyer," he said, adding derisively, "They take their coffee into the sanctuary."
For Dad, carrying coffee into church is nothing short of heresy.
"When I was a kid, Dad and Mother wouldn't even let us chew gum in church," he said.
It was a couple of days after Christmas and we sat in the den by the Christmas tree where my kids had just opened their presents. The light was drawing dim outside the window, the clean, sweet view of Country Club Lane descending for the evening.
Dad and my step-mom, Marcie, always in the loop, filled us in on all the intrigue, the backroom machinations that accompany church politics, how a faction who thought they owned the place wanted the preacher gone and got what they wanted. He resigned. It's not as if he slept with a woman who isn't his wife or something. Just a nice group of people showing the fruits of their spirits.
"When I was a kid, it was an honor to have the preacher over for dinner," Dad said, adding that people just don't do that anymore.
anymore
Not that the preacher has escaped Dad's critiques. Why did he have to put that center row of chairs in the sanctuary? Why even have chairs at all.
"It was a lot more comfortable with pews," Dad said.
"Especially if they're pure wood and no cushions, huh Dad?" I asked.
Then there's that modern church music. A worship and praise leader wearing flannel and skinny jeans, tattoos, thin-cut beard, looking like a mix of Rob Bell and early Elvis Costello as he strums his acoustic guitar. The rock band kicks in from behind as he sings, "And heaven meets earth when an unforeseen kiss..."
Not Dad's thing.
Dad spent his high school years with rockabilly. Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys. Carl Perkins. Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. That hillbilly blues music that sprang in large part from gospel. But you didn't find songs about a whole lotta shakin' going on in church. For Dad and my grandparents, now departed, it was "Abide With Me," "It is Well With My Soul," "The Uncloudy Day." Stuff like that.
"Oh G.G., what do you care?" Marcie said. "You don't even sing."
"That doesn't matter," he said. And at that moment, I found some commonality with the old man. It was a matter of principle for him. It's like I'm always telling my wife, Maria. Something may not affect me personally, but I weigh in because it's the "principle of the thing."
"Can you tell he doesn't like change?" Marcie asked us, then addressed Dad again. "G.G., you're showing your age."
I was sprawled over the beige carpet with my daughter Gabby as she perused Pinterest on her Android tablet, my son, Max, on the couch beside Maria playing his DS.
"Kids, Grandpa is describing the 1940's," I told Max and Gabby. "Kind of like how Dad goes on about the '70s. We had vinyl records and eight-tracks, watched 'Underdog' and 'The Grape Ape' on Saturday mornings, danced disco in PE class, drank Tang like the astronauts."
My hometown had 4,000 people and I could ride my bike all over town. Ten-thousand people now, traffic lights, the ever present possibility of child abductors.
I don't know what to think. Maybe Dad was right. Perhaps those cup holders where we stick our lattes at church are an abomination. But I'll be damned if they don't help somebody get saved.
I was driving ol' Bessie down the highway over the damn river and my friend McGill says people down there are happy to give.
Weekday mornings with the Breakfast Club. Jen Hansen & Rod Eric Tyler, resident Beatles fan, with the morning Wichita commute over KNZT-Classic Rock. You know, that station where they play the Eagles every 30 minutes every day, which seems to get so longer?
But not so much during the morning drive with the Breakfast Club and their discussion topics? "What slang terms do you hate?" "Was my boyfriend right in mooning my obnoxious uncle at the dinner table?" (Christ, you can't even moon someone anymore.) "Have you ever had a paranormal experience? " As I drove to work that day, I listened to callers weigh in on -
What is the best song to make love to?
People called in with suggestions. Many good, some bad. A fellow said he and his wife have a special song, "Just Between You & Me" by April Wine. I gotta' say, not a bad choice for an '80s song. If someone picked "Open Arms" by Journey and I'd have to drive over and kill them.
People came up with some fine and interesting choices. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue album. Smart. Mystical and abstract. "Maybe I'm Amazed" by Paul McCartney &Wings. Passionate number, I can see it. One smart aleck fellow called in. "My wife and I used to have fun with a little 'Afternoon Delight.'"
A-a-a-a-af-afternoon delight. One of those train collisions of polite rock with pop. Camp and so bad it's good, but I could no more make love to that song than Louie CK could have sex without his shirt on. I love spinning the 45 on my turntable and having a laugh with the family, but sex? Sure it's about a daylight quickie, but I associate the song more with what I thought it was about when I was a child back in the '70s. Fireworks. "Afternoon Delight." Sounds like something Ron Burgandy would make love to.
"Linger" by the Cranberries. Is that song really 20 years old? Bullshit. Was I not put here to live and love like I'm perpetually twentysomething? I was in Dr. Williamson and Dr. Iorio's HISTORICAL and THEORETICAL ISSUES in COMMUNICATION(Sorry to shout, but it's the only way to say that class's name) at Wichita State University's Elliott School of Communication. A few youngsters in the second row - a mixed chorus of males and females - broke extemporaneously into song. "Do you have to, do you have to let it linger?"
Sweet as that little Irish lass. Her vocals, all I remember. And the cut-off jeans shorts. Skin so long and brown. She wanted to be on the nightly news and I could've watched the detectives with her 'cuz I had such heart. Oh, oh, long and brown. Oh to hit it like Jesse James.
Paper companies and sex
I shared the Breakfast Club topic of the day with my co-workers as I was apt to do at the coffee maker and water cooler, both stationed awkwardly by the one-holed male and female toilets. There was my friend, Braxton, a 45-year-old divorced single dad and ladies man. (I was 35 at the time and sort of looked up to Braxton.) One of Braxton's lady friends was a 60-year-old woman.
"Best song to make love to?" he said, repeating my question. "How 'bout 'After the Lovin' by Engelbert Humperdinck" I think I'm starting to understand that 60-year-old woman thing, I thought to myself.
I just had to hear Dwight's choice.
"Goddammit Halpert! You will rue the day!"
"Guess he found that KY jelly smeared over the handle and receiver of his phone," Jim said and retreated to his cubicle, whistling some tune. Or maybe he just went to talk to Pam at reception.
"Girl U Want. Devo," Dwight responded adamantly when Braxton asked him what the perfect lovemaking song was.
I was reluctant to ask Margie. She was a woman, she was my boss, I was new at the company and I'd had the life scared out of me watching that sexual harassment video during orientation with human resources. A woman about the size of Camryn Manheim from the ABC '90s legal drama, "The Practice" kept saying (in an un-Oscar-worthy monotone voice) things like, "Oh I wanna rub you in baby oil" to the scrawny man at the breakroom table.
Braxton, at 6-foot-two and 230 pounds, has a lot more derring-do than me and he simply asked Margie what she thought the best song to make love to was.
"Hmmmm, how 'bout that old country song. (She started singing.) 'He stopped loving her today.'"
Having sex to a song about a man who died. I love George Jones and Margie is a nice gal, but damn, she's weird.
My courage awakened like a morning tent, I suggested what I thought might be theee song - "Chevy Van," a 1975 hit for Sammy Johns. A guy is driving along, gives a girl a ride in his wagon. They made love in his Chevy van and he'll never saw her again.
and that's all right with me
"Come on," I said. "That song encapsulates everything the '70s were about."
By the time I got home that evening I'd changed my mind for about the third or fourth time. "I've got it," I told my wife, Maria. "The ultimate song - 'Whole Lotta Love' by Led Zeppelin."
"That's not a lovemaking song. That's a fucking song," she said.
Spoonful
She was brown and I was pretty green. The first time I heard songs like "I'm a King Bee" by groups like the Rolling Stones and Animals on the King Biscuit Flower Hour via classic rock radio KNZT, I had no idea what such songs were about. Didn't know the bee buzzin' round your hive might be what my English teacher Mrs. H called a metaphor.
well we can make honey baby, let me come inside
If there was ever a style of music made for lovemaking, it's the blues. For a people relegated to the back of the societal bus, here lies freedom - of body and mind. Black sexuality. Everything the plantation owners, Jim Crow dixiecrats and their modern heirs like Newt Gingrich are afraid of.
I'm young and able to buzz all night long I'm young and able to buzz all night long When you hear me buzzin' baby, some stingin's goin' on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWLvm11MAaM
Let the good times roll. It's been the title of several blues and rock songs. I'm thinking of Shirley and Lee's song. The lyrics straddled the opaque line between rock n' roll as a slang for mattress spring knockin' and a beat you danced to on Bandstand. Listen to the lyrics.
Come on baby, just close the door Come on baby, let's rock some more Come on baby, let the good times roll, roll all night long... Feels so good when you're home come on baby, rock me all night long http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGLoPzllLNY
Thirty years before Slim Harpo sang about buzzin' round your hive for Chicago's Chess Records, thirty-some years before Shirley and Lee sang about rock'n all night long, beautiful black independent women sang about what they wanted and how they wanted it. In her 1922 recording of "My Man Rocks Me (with One Steady Roll)," Trixie Smith's wasn't singing about getting rocked to sleep.
A big brawny black woman out of Chatanooga, Tenn., a confident and two-fisted daughter of a Baptist minister of the gospel sang about being wild about that thing and getting some sugar in her bowl."Empty Bed Blues" by Bessie Smith is a bona fide classic, not only of blues, but of music - a song you and your lover can get down low to.
And when she sings, He's a deep sea diver with a stroke that can't go wrong, you know where she's going.
The ultimate lovemaking song? It's too elusive. Is there one song or is it all just music? Is it not appropriate that we would meld music - the food of life- with the very act that perpetuates life. Music is about life and life is about being born, eating, shitting, screwing and dying.
However, I think I've found out. The ultimate song to knock your boots off to. I have found it. Here.
I was working late at the paper on a Tuesday night with my friend Ashton. We were looking for AP filler for the inside pages when I came across this article: "KISS, Gabriel, Nirvana to be inducted to rock hall." It was a boring headline so I changed it to: "Smells like grunge spirit: Nirvana to be inducted into rock hall of fame."
For the up-page kicker, I wrote, "Nevermind," the title of Nirvana's ground breaking 1991 album.
The lame headline didn't bother me, but the contents of the story about made me hurl. Hall & Oates? WTF? Inducted? Yuk. Gross. Flush the toilet, please. I gotta' shower. I thought this was the rock n' roll hall of fame, not the Top 40 hall of fame. The Replacements, Sonic Youth and the Jesus & Mary Chain were around in the '80s. Are they being inducted? Didn't think so. You're corporate and have no soul.
You're nothing but pisswater over the tree of rock n' roll from Son House to the White Stripes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdgrQoZHnNY Damn you and fuck the stinking horse you so arrogantly rode in on, you watered down, corporate sucking slab of pablum.
And don't we all know? Hauling Oats suck big fat green ones.
But induct them into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame, why don't you? Stick em' on high with Bo Didley, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, the Beatles, Stones...Why? Because they had a bunch of hits in the '80s? There's no accounting for taste is there? Wasn't Phil Collins's "Sussudio" a hit back in '85? Max dickhedroom, a clown named Ronnie in the White House and all that crap. So a couple of guys have a string of hits in the lamest decade of the 20th century and you reward them with a place among rock royalty. Shit, why not put George W. Bush on Mt. Rushmore?
So whose to be inducted next year? Foreigner and Lover Boy? How 'bout Lionel Richie's "Lady" as sung by Kenny Rogers? Yeah, that deserves a special honor. What about Billy Ocean? He had hits in the '80s. Ever notice how in the '80s even a lot of black music was whiter than Wonder Bread with yuppified sugar on it? Hall and Oates - a plastic 1980s hand job.
Cleveland was chosen to be the site of the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame because that was the town, from which in the early '50s a white disc jockey named Alan Freed started highlighting this jumpin', black rhythmic music. He wasn't giving them the Hit Parade.
To be fair, there are some well deserving names among this year's inductees: KISS, the band that nearly perfected rock theatricality, Peter Gabriel, Nirvana and especially Randy Newman. His early 70s' stuff could hurt you, it was so scathingly satirical.
Although it seems a bogus cosmic joke, Nirvana's first album, Bleach turns 25 in the next year. This nasty, metallic-grunge little album came out in 1989, a year when big-haired-spray, spandex, faux-power ballad, cherry pie-in-a-female-crotch, lying assed bands were at their pinnacle as surely as disco - sanitized by crass commercialism - stood at the peak a decade previous.
If Bleach were the only album Nirvana ever made, if they had not "broken through" with their 1991 album Nevermind and "Smells Like Teen Spirit," I don't think they'd get a snot's worth of notice by the hall of fame judges. Almost as surely as God won't know the hypocrites on Judgement Day, those judges in high places wouldn't know Nirvana from the Meat Puppets.
In 1967, The Velvet Underground and Nico must've sold all of 86 copies. Somehow, though, word of mouth got around and the RHF could not ignore one of the most influential bands in rock history. That's how a band that never had any hits gains entrance into The Establishment. It may never come again.
The Sex Pistols won't be back. Man, it was a show of testicles, the likes of which are likely never to be seen again. Appropriately enough, the RHF inducted the Pistols in 2006. When Johnny Rotten got the news, he faxed a hand-written letter.
Next to the SEX-PISTOLS rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. We're not coming. We're not your monkey and so what?
Well it's 5:55 a.m. as I write this. Drinking the Starbucks coffee I got for Christmas from my in-laws. The kids aren't up yet, but soon will be. We don't have a crap load of presents under the tree, but we're all right. My kids will be happy no matter what. They're getting older. Both stopped believing in Santa Claus a while back. Actually, my son was skeptical of Santa from about age 3. My wife, Maria, is the one to thank for wrapping presents and making holiday dinners. What have I done but write Christmas letters and act like a goofball?
Went to church with the family yesterday. Heard guitars, keyboards, violins, cello, drums, singers. Mom looked happy. I brought her along. It was me, Maria, the kids - Max and Gabby, Mom, Maria's mom and her aunt. Afterwards, we had a late lunch at Spangles. Most us had the kid's cheeseburger meal. Christmas Eve night, I watched It's a Wonderful Life with Maria and the kids. They retreated to their rooms and started reading books before the movie was over and I fell asleep on the couch while Clarence was showing George Bailey what life would've been like, had he never been born. It's okay. I know how the movie ends.
To all my peeps out there, I wish you a merry Christmas. Here's a Christmas song by Irish Celt punk band, the Pogues. It's a beautiful song about an Irish immigrant spending Christmas in the drunk tank and going into a reverie about Christmases past.
"For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." - Nelson Mandela
If I could sum up Nelson Mandela's life in one word, it would be
this: courage.
The thing I've admired most about him is
that Mandela survived all those years in prison. He not only survived, he
became edified, strengthened, almost as if he gained sustenance from all those
uncertain years spent behind prison bars.
Mandela was sent to prison on Robben
Island, South Africa's version of Alcatraz, knowing he would probably be there
for life. Originally, he was sentenced to death. He was forced into hard labor,
chipping at limestone on the rock quarry. Through it all, he stood
pat, never faltering. In fact, Mandela was a source of strength and
encouragement to other men imprisoned there.
It is far more strength than I or the
average person could muster.
"I am fundamentally an
optimist," Mandela said. "Whether that comes from nature or nurture,
I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed toward the
sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in
humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to
despair. That way lays defeat and death."
No doubt, Mandela was sustained by the
force of ideals stronger than the most oppressive of prison bars. If Mandela
was a beacon of hope for people, it is because the principles he stood for were
his guiding light.
Mandela came to embody not just South
Africa, but the entire continent of Africa. Ultimately, we see him as an
international presence. Like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
he was one of those individuals who transcended national boundaries. He had that
rara avis gift.
Along with his perseverance, the other
quality I admire was Mandela's ability to forgive. In this sense, I also feel
he shared qualities with some of the great, progressive leaders in history.
Here is a quote from Mandela: "If you want to make peace with your enemy,
you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner."
That reminds me a lot of Abraham Lincoln's
quote: "If I make my enemy my friend, then haven't I defeated my
enemy?"
Through kindness and just treating people
like human beings, Mandela actually befriended several of the captors who were
paid to guard him in prison. When he came to political power, he took the rare
course of seeking reconciliation with his enemies - a trait he shared with
Lincoln and MLK.
Last August, the first time Mandela seemed
at death's door, I took my kids to the library. I read them Kadir Nelson's
beautifully written and illustrated children's book, simply calledNelson Mandela. We saw pictures
of segregated people, then came to the part where Mandela was freed from
prison. He spoke to a "colorful sea of people," the book read.
Hell, Labor Day was barely over before the big box stores started setting up the tinsel and candy canes. We're not exactly inundated with menorahs. Americans spend $3 trillion a year on Christmas. It's pearl jam in the Big Pants of the commercial industry. Nobody's coming after Christmas with an Abrams tank or M110 sniper rifle. Not even with liberal propaganda.
Not everyone's buying that, though. They believe there's a war on Christmas just as surely as they believe global warming is a myth and Noah placed two of every kind of dinosaur on the ark. No, if that Target cashier wishes them a "happy holiday," it's a full barrel assault on everything they hold dear. The secular clown posse' is pissing all over their Christmas parade.
I celebrate Christmas, love it. But if the clerk tells me "happy holiday," it's the same as if that cashier wishes me a "merry Christmas." I appreciate the sentiment and thank the person behind the counter. Heck, I even say it back.
This is the holiday season. That means there's about 10 different holidays going on. (Isn't it cool - Thanksgivingkah?) "Happy holiday" is simply an inclusive, all-embracing phrase that spreads the joy of the season to people of all faiths, cultures and races.
But the paranoid Christmas-fascist crowd isn't cool with that. For them, their whole world is hanging on those two words. You better wish them a merry Christmas, dammit, and you better like it. They're like the band geek girl from American Pie, exclaiming in a moment of carnal abandon - SAY MY NAME, BITCH!!!
They spot a plot to destroy Christmas every time that innocuous happy holidays phrase is spoken. This Big Tough Thin Skinned Conservative Crowd feels scared and threatened, all their little feelies hurt 'cuz someone didn't wish them a merry Christmas. It's as if all Western culture is hinging on...OMG, they called it a 'Holiday Tree'! You Bastards! They're insecure with their $3 trillion industry. They are spoiled little children who don't want to share their toys.
Of course they fear these other holidays want to move in and destroy them. That's what they - this American Taliban - would do to them if they had the power. It sucks for them that we live in a country with religious freedom - where other religions besides their own are respected, where their religion isn't the only one.
Isn't it interesting how the bullies like to spin it to make themselves out as victims? Oh, they're so oppressed. They have a martyr complex.
There are children living in poverty who won't have a good Christmas. Homeless people. Suicidal people on the holidays. But oh no, you're the victim.
I figure we're all all right so why not have a cup of holiday chill?
"If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal."
John F. Kennedy
Recently I asked someone who was alive when JFK was assassinated if she thought the country would be in as deep of mourning if Obama were killed.
"I don't know, but I'd like to be the one pulling the trigger," she said and laughed, slapped me on the back, grabbed my hand. (She's a handsy person.)
She was an old lady - in her late 80s or early 90s - and I wasn't going to spar with her so I said nothing. Had she been a younger person, I would have felt morally obligated to say something about the inappropriate nature of her comment
That's the climate in America today.
Hatred.
A few years ago, I took my wife and kids to the Texas Book Depository building in Dallas. We looked at the pictures and read their captions along the walls of the museum. The day Pres. Kennedy would be riding in the motorcade along Dealey Plaza, handbills were circulating:
"Wanted for treason" the words read underneath pictures of JFK, resembling a wanted poster. The handbill derided the President for encouraging "communist inspired racial riots" and appointing "anti-Christians to federal office." Does any of this sound familiar?
Not surprisingly, the handbill was printed by a John Bircher who led the resistance to the University of Mississippi's inclusion of James Meredith as its first African-American student.
Is this the legacy that endures 50 years later? Hatred. Racism. Violence. Arrogance. Bigotry.
Nowadays, too many people are revealing their true selves on Facebook and Twitter. The politics of George Wallace prevails. Much of the hatred against JFK was rooted in racism for his support of Civil Rights. Today, this pathological hatred on the right for Barrack Obama, is, regardless of how much they deny it, a product of racism.
JFK was pilloried by "good Christians" with Catholicphobia. They believed that "papist" would be ruled by the Vatican. Today, the Christian Right use Islamaphobia against Obama. He's not Muslim; they just think he is, and if he were, that would be perfectly all right.
In an address before Protestant clergymen - my favorite JFK speech - he made clear that religious freedom was contingent on the separation of church and state. That was the speech that right wing gay bashing 2012 GOP Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said made him want to puke. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WdgjS5j2po
Forget that Santorum is a Catholic whose road was paved by JFK. But Santorum, like Palin, Rush, Fox "News" and everyone else of that ilk are heirs to the hatemongers of the past - the Dixiecrats, McCarthyites, the John Birch Society.
I know from history that JFK was not the liberal reformer he has been mythologized to be in death.
But if the things he did were not always great, the ideals he expressed were sublime. Kennedy's galvanic power to inspire a generation with those ideals was illustrious. Young people joined the military, the Peace Corps, fought for Civil Rights, fought against poverty and tried to improve their communities on the weight of these words: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLmiOEk59n8
Something was lost the day JFK was assassinated. A lot of hope and optimism died the day.
I guess it was naivete', but in the '60s, people actually believed they could end poverty, racism and war. To try and eliminate those cancers, to have a social conscience, was fashionable. Maybe we won't create the world John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted, but why stop trying?
I learned about the love of Jesus, the rock of ages and old rugged cross, from going to church with my grandparents.
When I was a little boy in the '70s, attending Sunday school at the Bible Baptist Church in Jett, Kan. (pop. 4,000), you never EVER heard about politics mixing with religion. It wasn't done. People respected that essential line that separated church from state, preserving the purity of both and preventing each from corrupting the other.
A person's politics were one thing and religion was something else. A Democrat could sit next to a Republican in the same adult Sunday school class and it didn't matter. Nobody gave thought to it because politics didn't matter. That was part of civic life, something apart from one's church life. People didn't get into divisions over politics the way they do today. To my grandparents' generation, the important thing was just to vote and exercise one's Constitutional right.
Nowadays, the words "Christian" and "Republican" are considered interchangeable. If you're Christian, you have to be Republican, right? When I was a kid, the Republican party was the party of Rotarian-Babbitt styled businessmen, not the self-righteous standard bearer of "traditional values."
It is highly unfortunate that sincere Christians have bought into the manipulative rhetoric of glory-seeking politicians and worldly, politically meddling celebrity clergymen. They have failed to see that just because someone talks a good game about being a Christian, it doesn't mean that person possesses that sterling character, becoming of a Christian.
In fact, the people who make the most noise about what great Christians they are show the least amount of Christ-like love and humility. It is a sad waste, the way so many church-goers have abdicated their God given powers to think and reason. They can't recognize a pharisee when they see one.
I've read the Gospels. Stuff like "Love thy neighbor," "He who is without sin, cast the first stone," (The Golden Rule) "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them," "Whosoever would be first among you, shall be servant of all."
Jesus did things like feed the poor and hungry, heal the sick and diseased and hang out with the outcasts of society -- thieves, prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, the poor. He gave hope to those whom society rejected. On the other hand, he was severely critical of those who make a show of piety, the respected religious leaders who "lord it over," who love their power and authority.
Is Jesus not the antithesis of the Religious Right today? Isn't this right-wing element that has hijacked and poisoned our churches the spitting image of first century Pharisees? Yet so many who call themselves Christians today flock toward mean-spirited, judgmental, hate-spewing media figures and websites. And the more hateful they are, the more "conservative Christians" love them.
They don't see that Fox "News" heads like Hannity and Steve Doocey (who I'm embarrassed to say is from my home state of Kansas) are smug and arrogant. It's even in their facial expressions. How can people not see? Are they the same way?
Christ is called "the prince of peace." He said, "My kingdom is no part of this world." How does that square with the jingoistic images I see in religious right facebook pages? They demean the cross by coloring it red, white and blue. I thought Jesus died for the world, not just the United States.
The fb page Christian, Conservative, Patriot and Not Afraid contains images of handguns and assault rifles. It "likes" what I guess are like-minded pages, one of which has as its profile picture an image of Pres. Obama with a noose around his neck. There are "likes" for militia groups.
Those are the fruits of their beliefs.
When I was a kid, Christianity had a good name. The word "Christian" called to mind someone kind and loving, possessing those qualities Paul talked about in the book of Galatians. Nowadays, say "Christian" and it has connotations of bullying and arrogance.
This counterfeit Christianity in the mainstream today, I don't get it. This is not the faith I remember.
I learned about church from my grandparents. I learned about hippie
music from my mom's record collection.
