What bloody percentage can Middle Class people see in voting for Republicans? Why would those people consider it in their best interests to return a codependent enabler like Alberta Darling - whose only talent appears to be in knowing what to kiss and when - to the state Senate? Can these workers be delusional enough to think that when Field Marshall Walker finishes with the unions he won't begin to diminish their prospects? It is a true thing that masters seldom invite servants to take a place at the table, no matter how loyal the servant has been.
Delusion is rampant today. Take the media for instance. Every large grin, small brain pundit on cable has been squealing about Labor's great loss last night. Really? Perhaps the idiots didn't pull all the news up on the wire service. The Democrats gained two seats last night after retaining a seat in an earlier recall election and with two elections coming up next week in fairly safe districts.
Labor got two-thirds of what they wanted. In the bargain taking one-third of what the Republicans had and reducing their majority to one vote. It was a great night because meaningful change often comes in increments. The Middle Class struck a blow for fairness last night. There are at least two Republicans in Wisconsin today who wish they had never screwed with us.
Today while various members of Congress go scurrying about like rabid squirrels trying to whip up votes for the debt ceiling compromise, I am more than a little apprehensive about what these weird brothers and sisters are about to do to this country.
A trillion or more dollars in cuts, with more to come, is not the prescription that economists of any political bent recommend for a struggling economy. In 1937 President Roosevelt was advised to make spending cuts as America recovered from the Great Depression. In mid-1937 the economy declined sharply. During a thirteen month period through much of 1938 the unemployment rate jumped from 14.3% to 19.0%. Today in addition to these penny-pinching cuts, there is no revenue engendering mechanism either in terms of tax reform or job creation to help reduce the deficit – if that is what they are really trying to achieve.
Between the infantile and moronic mantra of the Right, cut spending/no new taxes, and the impotent, faint hearted and posturing leadership of the Left, the majesty of Liberal values is sliding down the toilet. These are values such as: a belief in social and economic justice; a belief in the social safety net; a belief that all people have a right to a living wage, a home, food, health care and education.
I realize that Liberals are out of fashion - so out of fashion in fact that many of us hide behind the alias, Progressive which I don't use myself. Out of fashion or no, we still have a right to our cherished philosophy and a right to expect a president who ran on that philosophy to respect, if not cherish, it as well.
In my estimation, President Obama is not a Liberal, not a Democrat. He is, as Ezra Klein said, a moderate Republican. He has been telling the Left to sit down and shut the fuck up for three years. All the while moving farther and farther Right. As if snuggling up to John Boehner would make the 86 clinically insane tea baggers in the Republican House like him. Call me out of fashion, out of date, out of touch. Call me stupid – nobody has ever dared but hey, give it a shot – the excuses for this president are wearing thin. The idea that anyone who is losing or has lost faith in him is somehow betraying a Liberalism he does not appear to share is worn-out. People keep saying that we will have a Republican president if he doesn’t win. We have a Republican president now. It is just a matter of degree.
My grandmother believed as I do that St. Francis of Assisi – featured above – was an incarnation of the Horned God Cernunnos – the Celtic Lord of the Wild Places. The early Christians reviled Him as a symbol of the devil, but to us He is a symbol of fertility and love of the Earth and Her children. Even though Francis took the cowl and walked the path of the monk his love of our planet and all creatures on it expresses a Pagan’s soul.
In my tradition the God is not the equal of the Goddess. He is Her Son and consort, all power comes from Her. The Wiccans believe in the duality of the God and Goddess, and while this belief is both beautiful and profound it has no spiritual timbre for me. The idea that a Wiccan would condemn me or I them for what we believe is unthinkable. Don’t get me wrong there are jackasses in all faiths. However, by in large, it is the Pagan way to understand that the Goddess shows us each a different light, and we must follow that light toward our destiny. It is all we can do – it is all we have a right to do. Thus for us to engage in murder, mayhem or malicious treatment of another whose belief differs from ours is forbidden in the strongest possible way.
Like Frances we try to live with gentleness, love and tolerance toward all. Like Frances we are living in the Dark Ages. Heresy, a real or perceived refusal to accept Christian doctrine, deprived many of my maternal ancestors of their life at the stake during the first Dark Ages. The new heresy of today, a real or perceived refusal to accept a modern day perversion of Christian doctrine and/or to live according to certain restrictive standards, threatens to relegate a large number of people to the status of second class citizen by depriving them of their Civil Rights.
This has nothing to do with Marriage Equality – certainly not abortion since we are content to let children starve in this country – or any of the other sham social issues of the so-called Culture Wars. The real problem here is the frightened, ignorant people who must shove their God down the throats of others because He only appears in crowds. These individuals are incapable of waging a crusade. They are pawns. Like the soldier pawns of the first crusades they are being directed by the rich and the powerful bent upon becoming richer and more powerful. In Frances’ day it was the abbots, the bishops, the popes, the kings and the warlords. Today it is the corporatists, the free market pirates, the corrupt politicans and the malignant capitalists. They are all on the same line, centuries notwithstanding.
I am the last of my bloodline and can trace the Old Faith back in ribbons of glory through the Burning Times, the persecutions and on to be lost in the mists of antiquity. I do not celebrate secular holidays – that is my faith, and my faith is my freedom which has nothing to do with the founding of nations. To all of you who will be celebrating the 4th tomorrow with hot dogs, the smiles of children and fireworks in the cool of the evening I wish you a happy holiday and much happiness on the path before you. There is an Enlightenment up ahead, and this Dark Age will fade into history as its predecessor did long ago.
I don’t vote for Popes. I don’t vote for Saints. I don’t vote for ethereal, mindless demigods with a pronounced inability to mind their own business. I vote for Democrats when they stand four-square on the Democratic platform. That platform used to be firmly grounded in the idea of a social conscience. The God of the Christians said it best, "Whatever you do for the least of them you do for me."
The Republicans and their “Christian Base” long ago gave up the charity, humility and decency that Christ spoke of in favor of the symbolic stoning, judgment passing and ritualized hate that He abhorred. The Democrats on the other hand seemed to have lost their taste for the social and economic justice that He appears, at least to this Pagan, to represent.
They are terrified of the word that used to identify the best of us - Liberal. Even more terrified are they at the possibility of being perceived by the Republicans and their “Christian Base” as doing for the least of us. For the Republicans have hung the word Socialism on the best wisdom of the religion they have usurped, and the Democrats hide from that word like hookers hiding from the Vice Squad on Saturday night.
It takes courage to speak truth to power. It takes dedication to fight money armed only with morality. I no longer believe that the Democrats have either, and I grow tired of spinelessness passing for compromise. I grow tired of moral cowardice passing for righteousness. I grow tired of the double-speak and slide-of-hand that passes for accountability. Mostly, I grow tired of being told that if my Democratic President or my Democratic Party fail to behave like Democrats it is my fault for noticing.
I am sixty-one years old and have followed the Liberal ideal all of my life. I come from good Liberal stock. My father was first generation Italian, working poor. My mother was Irish, working poor. They were union organizers. I am proud to say that I am a child of the ‘60s. I went to college at a time when a premium was placed on the intellectual life and the activist lifestyle. At my age and level of commitment I don’t whine. I shout. Crawl out from under your rock, pull your head out of your ass and act like Democrats – Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson Democrats! If you are Democrats.
We no longer have a body politic in this country. We have a bloody circus. There are lions and lion tamers, clowns and hawkers, freaks and trapeze artists flying high above reality with nothing but a thin net of lies below. Dogs dance, horses prance and monkeys chatter throwing peanuts at the crowd. We have become Barnum’s quip – the one that is born every day.
Yesterday I had a conversation with a man – if you can call it a conversation – in which I quickly realized that his idea of common cause, of finding the middle ground was to simply scare hell out of me and then engage in verbal battery. I am old now and after having seen many scary things in my life I don’t scare easily anymore. My vocabulary is six or seven times the size of his so it was difficult for him to land a punch. Finally, in desperation he lobbed the only insult he had left in his arsenal. He informed me that I am a far left Liberal. Well gee sparky, da-ya-think? That is when I realized that I was talking to an imbecile, and that I was an even bigger imbecile for talking to him. But, if we are all imbeciles and can’t talk to one another how do we solve our big, ugly, mutant problems?
Anthony Weiner’s penis is not one of those problems – it is a diversion. Don’t get me wrong his behavior was asinine. When Teddy Kennedy died several people had to pick up his mantel – it was too heavy for any individual. The raging Liberal, Anthony Weiner was one of those people. I did not expect him to drape it over the end of his organ, sending that image slip-sliding down the electron highway to Internet immortality. Still, Anthony Weiner’s penis is not our problem, and we are drowning in diversions.
It has been coming for a very long time in a vague and nebulous way. Yesterday’s trip to Stupidville – a place I know but slenderly as the Bard said – gave it form. I am losing my faith in humanity and in happy endings. I am having trouble believing in the a priory principles of right and wrong, honor and dignity, justice and truth. I don’t know how to be a Liberal without them.
This country suffers from a chronic, degenerative spiritual disease. Like cancer it has a first cause and then a series of symptoms. In particular the symptoms are hate, narcissism, cruelty, bigotry, deceit, fraud, misrepresentation and elitism. The first cause is greed. I believe without exception that every single one of these symptoms is born of a need to exploit and manipulate for gain. How else can you explain people on the right insisting that Christ was a Free Market Profiteer? That he did not believe in helping the poor, the outcasts and the sick.
Cancer is caused by a cellar disruption of one kind or another. Greed is the result of obsession. I once had a man tell me that he had a right to be greedy in America. I answered that he could exercise his right providing he did not trash my life or my planet. He looked at me like I was out of my mind. That’s when I got it – the man was a bloody junkie. The more greed gets, the more it wants. The more it has, the more it needs. Heroin has a similar effect on people. After the first blissful pop the heroin addict is on the same treadmill – the more they get, the more they want. The more they have, the more they need. As Sherlock Holmes said, “The parallel is exact.” There is only one way off the treadmill, save death, you give up the Jones.
Considering the fact that heroin addicts are primarily engaged in killing themselves, but greed addicts are killing the world we might be much better off with heroin users in Congress and heading corporations. It is appalling and despicable that we are in the hands of lawmakers sick with greed and gluttonous corporations that daily devour our economic freedom only to crap out public policy that works for them alone.
I am told that greed is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pagans don’t believe much in sin. We believe in stupid, and greed is stupid. I am not talking about wanting to earn a decent living and provide for your children. I am talking about taking one-half out of the middle to earn a gargantuan living while leaving little or nothing for anyone else. Even though greed is supposed to be a sin, in this most Christian of all countries it is venerated, extolled and worshiped as a cardinal virtue. Like a heroin addict who has five-thousand reasons why they can’t get off the needle, the greedy in this country have five-thousand and one reasons why greed is a good thing. It keeps the Free Market running, creates jobs, gives us the edge internationally, provides incentive for entrepreneurs, whitens our teeth and will replace Viagra.
I am a student of the English language. I have studied it all of my life from its grammar to its syntax to its literature to my beloved Shakespeare. I am disgusted and horrified with the fog of flimflam and trickery that passes for civil discourse in our society. English is a powerful and beautiful instrument that can in its plainest and most unadulterated form sweep away cobwebs and build bridges all in the same moment. It is time that we begin to use it the way it was designed to be used – to make clear our world view and our personal reality unambiguous and succinct. What follows is plain English.
Greed is not good. Whether you view it as a sin or just stupid, it is not good. It destroys lives. It hurts people. No matter what some two-for-a-nickel-Elmer Gantry-sleazy-politician or carnivorous corporate executive tells us, it is not a virtue. Greed is killing this Planet and her children. There is such a thing as right and wrong. Profit cannot make wrong right.
In many religious traditions, including mine, Christ is the bringer of compassion not commerce. To an outsider it seems that he is being crucified all over again by people who use the Bible like a bludgeon and his teachings to shackle millions. He has been spun, sold, bought, bartered and bargained. He is big business and good politics. He is a curtain of righteousness for the wicked to hide behind. He is, in point of fact, everything but what he was a good and decent man who healed bodies and souls. I won’t speak to his divinity because I am not a believer. I will say this, it is time for Christians of good faith and conscious to stand up and fight back openly and loudly and stop letting the children of Mammon costumed as holy warriors hijack and maim their religion. Pagans have been doing it for centuries. We’ll be glad to give them some pointers.
This assertion that greed makes holy the acquisition of wealth is putrid. No face of any Deity is seen on U.S. currency, unless you consider the eye of Horus, which the Christians call the eye of Providence. It is the All Seeing Eye. It could be the eye of Jehovah, or Osiris I suppose. Then again it might be the eye of the Security and Exchange Commission, or even Ralph Nader. Whoever is watching they haven’t been watching very well. It is up to us to cure our disease and realize that wealth is not the only indicator of success – it isn’t even the most important. Money is certainly not more valuable than people or than the Earth. It is not more precious than integrity, dignity or veracity. Faith for hire is no faith at all. Anyone who doesn’t understand these principles should check into rehab like any other junkie – and quickly.
I give you Virginia Foxx, North Carolina, 5th District, I.Q. two points above plant life. This creature vehemently denies the phenomenon of climate change, but then again she hates science like so many members of her cabal. I have come to suspect that their distrust of all things scientific stems from a primordial stupidity. That is to say that they are genetically too thick to understand anything other than their own self-interest.
I don’t pretend to clearly understand aberrations like Virginia Foxx or how she got into office. What I do understand is air, wind, sun, soil and water. I am a master gardener. It is May, but the air is not May air - cool and sweet. It is Rocky Mountain cold like the end of November. The sun is weak, barely able to compete with the intermittent heavy clouds. A furious wind gusts from cold to frigid. I stood in my tulip bed this afternoon and watched ice crystals scatter across the ground. Ice crystals - not the soft, wet snow of May. I am Witch. The practice of the Craft of the Wise goes back in my maternal line farther than anyone can remember. I know the Earth. She is a friend of mine. I know the air, the sun and the water as well as I know the touch of my husband’s hand. Something is wrong, very wrong. So, who the hell do we see about that, Virginia?
