BACK FROM THE CIRCLE

Been back from the trip for three days, and for a couple of days, I was exhausted. Didn’t know my 11000 mile, 31 day trip around the US had taken so much out of me until I found myself sleeping afternoons on the couch and not being able to reassume my cooking and cleaning duties around the house. Now, I’m getting back up to speed. The weeds in the yard are whacked back into shape, got the dishes washed, the financial books back into shape, the bills paid, and tonight, my wife and I got the shopping done. Today, also, I read this week’s Newsweek and that feels pretty darn normal.


GNOMES

I have no intention of reading all the back issues of Newsweek that stacked up while I was gone. I threw the back issues away, but I’m keeping the cover of the May 24, 2004 issue around the house for awhile. It’s the cover with the two dudes who write all the silly science fiction novels about being “left behind” when the imaginary second coming of that dead prophet, Jesus, supposedly happens. All great science fiction! It’s been the science fiction of so many over the centuries, lining up for the second coming, giving up all their money and possessions or killing themselves like the original suicider they worship.

What I invite thoughtful readers to do is to study those two masks that are on the cover of the magazine. SMALL PHOTO The grimace of the one, the fake smile of the other. The slitted eyes of both. It’s those sorts of faked facial expressions that I shrink from when I try to enter a fundamentalist church. Those are not smiles at all but fake faces that hide the men from the world. If you’re comfortable with them, then I pity you.

It’s a good thing they write only science fiction. Imagine if what they have to say was in any way true. The book upon which they base their fiction is filled with the ravings of a mad man. They, if they believe what’s in that book, are mad men too, and that’s what you see in their faces if you look closely.


IF HE ACTS LIKE ONE, HE IS ONE

Find Page 51 of Newsweek (June 21, 2004) and down near the bottom of the page read, “...President Bush had declared war on Al Qaeda, and in a series of covert directives, he had authorized the CIA to set up secret interrogation facilities and to use new, harsher methods.”

Of course, if you think simplistically, you can see nothing wrong with your president authorizing torture to get info from your common enemy, that is until you realize that the day might come when you, an American, for some reason we can’t yet fathom, become the enemy. Then you realize that if a president can authorize the torture of anyone he considers an enemy, then he can also torture you, if and when the Constitution is breached and useless to protect you.

The day might come for any of us when our church or our political party or the color of our hair or the books we read might become the reason that any Bush-like establishment decides that we are the enemy. And if Bush can so delude his conscience as to torture one man, then he has already committed the deed to you when your turn comes to be the enemy. We must remember that all that keeps us safe is LAW and Constitutional law specially, and if our president can forget the Constitution in one case then he has already forgotten it in any case he deems it handy to do so. Just hope you never become his enemy.


ALSO IN THE CURRENT ISSUE OF NEWSWEEK

Jonathan Alter gets it right when, noting Nancy Reagan’s interest in stem cell research, he says, “When it happens to you, everything looks different... a liberal on health issues is a conservative who has been mugged by an illness in [his or her] family.”


BLACK COLLAR CRIME BLOTTER. PROTESTANTS TOO!

Read any issue of Freethought Today. Every issue of Freethought always contains several pages of crime committed by churchly men which are sent in from newspapers around the US by its readers. It’ll open your eyes to read about the incest, murder, fraud and abuse common in the church today. Unfortunately, Freethought Today is not an internet publication. So you will have to get a hard copy to read the “Black Collar Crime Reports”. But at the following link, you can get some more information about relgious criminals of all types. Religious Criminals


"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied." Claud Cockburn (1904-1981)