Mandate Upheld

The United States Supreme Court has upheld the Health Care Mandate and Law, although there is a subtle argument over the impact of the tax penalty. This is a very complicated decision – for one thing states do not have to extend Medicare as the law required. They can suffer no penalties in terms of losing existing Medicare funding. Perhaps this will get the residents of these states off their asses to demand the extension be honored. Roberts, Ginsberg, Sotomayor, Kapan and Breyer for - Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy and Alito against. Nothing surprising there, except that Roberts appears to be interested in being on the right side of history on this issue.

Time to Wake Up America

I find it astounding that the American people are willing to standby and allow outside third parties to extort consensus from our lawmakers. I also think it is astounding that these same outsiders, special interests groups, are clearly comfortable in the conviction that the American people are too lazy and/or stupid to care or know what is going on. Grover Norquist is but one of these cheap blackmailers, the NRA is another. The latter group of self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self promoting, public policy gangsters plans to score the vote in the House on holding the sitting Attorney General in contempt of a body that leads the world in dropping to its collective knees, opening its gapping mouth and issuing forth with “oral arguments” on behalf of every special interest on the planet, be they national or international. Such scoring has been known to damage the reelection efforts of politicians on both sides of the isle.

Dear Goddess, it is time for the American people to wake the hell up. We must stop following our genitals around like a divining rod looking for the fountain of youth. We must stop worrying about what Lindsey Lohan is doing; who Johnny Depp is doing; what the Duchess of Cambridge is wearing; what celebrity got knighted in England, drunk in New York, dumped in Malibu. While the media renders us dull-witted by feeding us this marzipan and tripe, we sadly are colluding in the process by lapping it up like puppies in a puddle of milk.

We the noble American people of freedom and justice for all are becoming grossly ignoble, willing raped of our freedom and justice by petty despot who have turned all of the great principles on which this country was founded into sound bites for election campaigns or slogans for groups and individuals working in their best interests only. Thus even though the majority of the American people support tax fairness, not abolishing taxation, and sane gun control not government by 2nd Amendment fiat, our elected officials openly and scandalously do the bidding of the Grover Norquists and the NRAs. This is our complacency as much as their chicanery.

Tell your friends, use Facebook or your blog, but tell anyone who will listen in any way you can. Wake the hell up – the throat of our Republic is being slit with the dull knife of corruption and our Democracy is pouring down the drain like spilled blood.

Revelation

I find myself in a dark place these days, not sweetly dark in terms of the mysticism of the Craft but an opaque and cold darkness that comes from the feeling of being pushed out of any kind of world that I recognize as sane, reasonable or even inhabitable. Like so many people, I am very angry and frustrated about what is going on in this country. In fact, you might even say that I am enraged. 

Take for instance the man of questionable morality whose dealings over the years are of questionable legality, and who bought his way into office and has just declared the Attorney General of the United States to be in contempt of Congress. I have asked before, and I will ask again. How can you be in contempt of a brothel? The Congress of these United States is a great whorehouse where legalized corruption, fee-for-service influence peddling, and the routine betrayal of the interests of constituents across this land are not only perpetrated but venerated. All of this is sanctified and ritualized in the name of the religion of Jesus Christ, who many Pagans, including me, view as the Bringer of Compassion.

The heart of this darkness that I find myself in is a perpetual spinning of lies and weaving together of idiotic, immoral and hate based conspiracies with an easy freedom and inexhaustible excess. These psychotic flights of fancy and mass produced, deliberate group delusions stand in the world for many people with the veracity and authority of revelation. The mainstream media’s sin of omission in not calling out this twaddle and the political gangsters who propagate it is a tacit agreement and validation which is, in and of itself, stunning.

The latest episode of diarrhea like conspiracy dumping asserts that a failed ATF mission, orchestrated by the Bush Administration and stopped by the Obama Administration, is somehow an organized strategy of the president’s to undermine the 2nd Amendment and take away the weapons of gun owners. In listening to Rachel Maddow talk about this I suddenly became aware of an insight that has lurked in my unconscious like a wraith for the last twenty odd years. The identification of guns, war, vampire capitalism and exploitation of workers and the poor with the Bringer of Compassion is a hideous manipulation of a people raised on fear, retribution and punishment through the distortion of Christianity perpetrated by a greedy and avaricious organized religious patriarchy going back to the Middle Ages and before. That patriarchy has been born again in the form of a malignant and sometimes criminal political system.

Thus, guns serve our God. Feeding hungry children – not so much. Praise Jesus. War serves our God. Peace in our lifetime – not so much. Praise Jesus. An unbridled and unscrupulous Free Market serves our God. Economic justice – not so much. Praise Jesus. On and on it goes and has gone for the better part of three decades.

People like me, raised to another faith tradition with guiltless and nonjudgmental rules that derive from the phases of the Moon, the cycles of the Earth, the wheel of the Seasons, seeing this have ask, who is this Jesus? Is he a sociopath? His followers appear to be. So yesterday, I read the New Testament. I didn’t see anything about guns or the good of War or the Free Market. I did see a lot about empathy, charity, peace and caring for those in need. Could it be that Jesus wasn’t a conservative as the harbingers of self interest claim, but a socialist? In any case it seems that Pagans understand Jesus Christ the Bringer of Compassion better than some Christians.

What then of the other Christians, the ones who know Christ? Where are they? Why aren’t they storming through the halls of power – the Temple if you will – running out the modern day traders who are sucking this country dry like a pool of leaches. Why do they tolerate these sycophants of wealth who claim to be the moral spine of this nation, who follow both the Old and the New Testament – two books that seem to be stuck together like marshmallows on solidified jell-o?

In the early days of Christianity a chauvinist hegemony of church fathers in attempting to select the books that would be part of the New Testament and support their swelling power, summarily disallowed the Gnostic Scriptures and in doing so took it upon themselves to transform Mary Magdalene, first among Christ’s disciples, into a common prostitute. Accordingly, the panders and pimps of Congress have seen fit to turn the true religion of Christ into a common whore serving in the brothel that is the Government of the United States of America. When you have taken a faith, the cobblestones of a life path, and denigrated it in this way any lie, distortion, misrepresentation, manipulation or maltreatment of a person who deserves better is acceptable. I tell you this Christians, Pagans would never stand for it, and we have many fewer options in this society than you do.

Backlash

“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we're free at last!’”...Dr. Martin Luther King

When Dr. King spoke to us about freedom and equality I believe now, as I believed then, that he was demanding these things for his people, but insisting upon them for us all. He got it – a society that disenfranchises anyone, disenfranchises everyone and is rotting from the inside out. It will eventually die from spiritual gangrene – you can almost smell it today.


Some years after the heady idealism of the sixties vanished into the mists of history, and Dr. King was taken from us by another gun without a brain, the cult of the Cadillac Liberal reared its ugly head. Not unlike the hardcore Conservatives of today these people were intractable, intolerant of disagreement or any suggestion of compromise, smug, and egotistical beyond description.


They took up the cause of the disaffected and made it a cause-celeb. They postured and pretended and projected a watery compassion that had very little to do with real world solutions to social grievances. When they began to make rules and set standards – they could because they had money and loud voices in the media, the entertainment industry, higher education and government – like their Conservative counterparts today they too accepted the idea that some people matter and some people don’t. In the Cadillac Liberal’s worldview the way to address social problems was to turn the system upside down. Thus, the people who mattered and had once been on the bottom would be on the top. The people who didn’t matter and who were once on the top would be on the bottom. Since most of these “Liberals” – like the fanatics on the Right who talk of doing away with the social safety net today – were insulated from the ramifications of their actions by their money and social position, they had no skin in the game. Perhaps that is why they never did address the authentic issue, Dr. King’s issue, of equality and freedom for all.


Eventually, like all tyrants these peacocks and clowns found that they had to shut people up to avoid being hoisted on their own petard, humiliated by their own hypocrisy and betrayal of the humanity that they never stopped bleating about. Enter Political Correctness which is not only a disgrace in terms of the language and the life of the mind, but a real threat to people who are prevented from seeing the haters coming.


Accordingly, certain words were taboo, certain phrases were off limits, certain writers who lived decades even centuries ago, Goddess help us all, could not be taught no matter how important they were to the art form or the lexicon. From my own experience I once threatened to rip the tits off of a woman who vociferously and belligerently objected to my teaching “The Merchant of Venice.” In her estimation it was anti-Semitic. Suffice it to say I stood my ground with only a thinly veiled contempt. She still has her tits. I completed my presentation of the play with great delight, as I am always delighted by the Bard no matter his subject. That sums up my feelings on both political correctness and the cult of the Cadillac Liberal.

Except for places like Hollywood, where reality is only a part-time job, these masqueraders have largely lost their influence on the Left, although their stain remains on the cause, their specter haunts our public image and those of us who had no use for them are often identified with them. In their wake a festering pustule of rage and bitterness waiting to rupture and backlash came slamming home in 2008 when President Obama was elected. He was not the reason for it, only the catalyst. Even though he is often the object of it, the power with which it crashed into the body politic in the form of the Tea Party, for instance, attests to its long existence and exponential growth over the years. Of course the rising repercussion had its complement of parasitic, opportunistic and cynical politicians who will ride the wave for as long as it carries them to power.


Hence, as I write this the Right is endeavoring to create more backlashes, from women, minorities, disenfranchised voters – more rot, more potential for gangrene. Will we never learn, never change, never grow up? We are like children playing at tug-of-war and dragging one another through the mud and toxic filth of a polluted river.

A Light Out of the Gray Mist

I feel overwhelmingly sad about the world in which I live. No one can be trusted it seems. Our idiot leaders place business over people, money over the needs of the planet, and even the ones who claim not to agree pay lip service to the people who benefit from the policies that support this twisted agenda.

Nowhere is the old Pagan maxim, “As above, so below,” more clearly demonstrated than in politics. The corruption, incivility and gluttony of our elected officials flow up and down the vertebrae of this society, and the new Golden Rule – those with gold rule – is a blindly and religiously accepted principle. We persist in slenderly defining self interest, although not always our best interest, then boxing our representatives into narrow corners, forcing them to forfeit any ethical or moral impulse they ever had just to stay in office. That and the need for more and more gold compromises the integrity of many of the best of them.


For me the struggle doesn't seem to be worth it anymore. The American people by-in-large have exactly what they deserve. For instance as Wisconsin proved, they don't seem to understand that if the unions are destroyed all the things unions have done for workers, union or not, might be destroyed as well. The forty hour work week, overtime, sick time, minimum wage - unions were instrumental in bringing these things about, not to mention the child labor laws. If the unions are gone these rights may well be rolled back; they never were nor are they ever likely to be extended out of the kindness of management’s heart.


Perhaps people in this country don't care if their children work in sweatshops so long as they save $0.26 on the income tax. Perhaps they really believe that electing a Romney, a Bush clone, will please their masters well enough that they will be invited to share in the wealth - to eat at the great table of the rich rather than serve. Goddess help the poor deluded fools.


Yes, Wisconsin was a turning point for me. The national Democratic machine demonstrated all the spine of a used condom when it came to showing up and aiding in the effort to win one of the greatest Working Class struggles in the history of the Republic. Lopsided, money saturated media advertising was a direct result of the legalized corruption inherent in Citizens United and served only to prop up a Rightwing stooge with his own criminal defense fund and a possible indictment hanging over him –how bloody weird is that? A labile and apparently oblivious electorate presented itself in record numbers feeling resentful and inconvenienced enough to reject the recall initiative. Even more pathetic were those who felt the codependent need to treat the unethical Walker more ethically then he has treated them by resisting the recall on the grounds that it was not proper. Give me a break.

Still beyond all the disappointment and sorrow a light begins to break through the gray mist. I am realizing that so many things that have heart and meaning for me have simply been pushed aside because I was a true Liberal believer for nearly fifty years, girl and woman. Well, I have lost my faith, realizing that people are usually stupid, generally lazy and almost always choose and willing swallow poison if it is wrapped in enough sugar. I want the things I have pushed away back again.


Currently, there is a novel that has been sitting unfinished on my desk for some three years. I seldom touch it because I write so much on Facebook and in my blog about the political environment. A book of poetry over five years neglected sits in the drawer of that same desk. I want to read good books again – not just round-in-a-circle-preaching-to-the choir political polemics. I want to enjoy Shakespeare, Poe, Twain and Bronte in my rose garden while listening to Puccini’s operas, Mozart’s concertos and Bach magnificent fugues. I want to go to the Denver Art Museum and lose myself in the work of Monet and Lautrec, unmindful of the self administered miseries of the world around me. Most sane people require a certain amount of beauty and the comfort it brings to their life. Politics blots out beauty and destroys all consolation because it is as sordid as homicide, as cruel as rape and almost as despicable as child molestation. Simply stated, politics make people sick.


Bottom line is there comes a time when for the good of your own survival and the quality of your life you have to step back and say, “This isn’t my problem anymore. I have done all I can for the cause, and I am finished” Then hope for the best, but in the interests of self preservation for you and your loved ones, batten down the hatches and prepare for a possible nightmare, a tidal wave of indifference, greed, foolhardiness and stupidity to wash across this country like a hurricane.

A Sad Day in Wisconsin for the People

We the unwilling,

Lead by the unknowing,
Are doing the impossible,
For the ungrateful.
We have been doing so much,
For so long,
With so little,
That we are now qualified,
To do absolutely anything,
With almost nothing. (Not original)


WELCOME TO YOUR GESTALT WISCONSIN, WELCOME TO YOUR NIGHTMARE. I understand that there were people who were so incensed at having to leave their television, barstool, bedroom, sports event or fast food restaurant and participate in another recall, that they voted for Walker in protest. To those people I say, whatever happens now is on your head. Suck it up and with your mouth shut, the rest of us have problems too.

I really am not very impressed by the argument that Obama didn’t go to Wisconsin or the Democratic leadership, for that matter. Anyone who is just learning that politicians are always motivated by vested self-interest needs to put down the pipe and get a grip. Don’t bother me about the money. Anywhere a whore is for sale there is a John with the jack – increasingly the electorate has become whore like and the pimps are taking over the world. Anywhere some dolt can be lead around by slick commercials or smooth lies or resentment satiating malice and convinced that their best interest, their glowing future, rests upon their bending over and grabbing their ankles there will be a Walker, a Rove or a Koch. Barnum was right, one is born every minute, and money is just green paper, man. It rules because we let it rule.


For all those who worked their hearts out in this people’s struggle, Goddess I feel for you. I cry for you. I raise my voice and demand justice in your name. For the rest of Wisconsin, do the body politic a favor suppress your own fucking vote.