ARE YOU KIDDING ME RANT

      On today’s edition of National Journal, C-Span’s morning show, a caller told a story intended to demonstrate that Christianity is under attack. According to this man, a female employee at Abercrombie & Fitch was told, after five years of employment, that if she didn’t conceal the crucifix she habitually wore, she’d be fired. Rather than comply with this anti-Christian edict, she decided to sue the store, charging religious discrimination. Her suit worked its way through the federal court system, all the way to the Supreme Court, where she was finally vindicated. The only dissenting vote, the caller pointed out, belonged to Justice Thomas.

      The caller got the name of the store and lawsuit part right, including the vote and the dissent. But the plaintiff wasn’t Christian. She was a Muslim and the conflict was between her headscarf and the store’s hipper-than-hip image. Somehow, this caller had taken a few facts and converted them to a familiar narrative, the war on Christianity. The level of denial necessary to accomplish this psychological feat is almost beyond imagining.

      Are you kidding me?

SERMON FROM AN ABANDONED NOVEL #1

      Ryan turns suddenly. He takes a step forward to rest his hand lightly on the center table and leans out toward his audience.

      “I want you to imagine something for me. I want you to imagine that you’re God before the creation. That’s right. God before the creation. Now half of you are probably thinking, as Montgomery Thorpe, one of my old commanders, might have said, “The lad’s gone balmy. One too many blast injuries, no doubt.” Ryan uses his index finger to make a little circle near his right ear. “As for the rest of you? Well, you guys are probably saying, `Imagine God! Paul Ryan’s nothing but a Satan-inspired anti-Christ who should be burned at the stake before he brings on the end days.”

     The line produces a short laugh from Ryan’s appreciative audience. They haven’t come to criticize.

     “But the really hard part isn’t imagining God, but imagining at all.” Ryan taps his forehead. “You have to get this out of the way. I’m talking about the front part of your brain, the part that wants to file everything and anything in a proper slot where it can be conveniently forgotten. This is a neutering process – make no mistake. Just like horses and dogs are castrated to make them safe, the so-called intellect strips truth of its power, thereby rendering it meaningless.

      “So pardon my persistence, but I’m asking you again. Close your eyes, take a deep breath and imagine yourself to be God before His creation. Imagine yourself alone, surrounded by an infinity as dark as it is empty. No time, no place, no here and now, no past, no future. Nothing there, not even you. And yet… and yet you feel yourself, you know that you must exist. But how? As what?

      “OK, take a step back. Now, I want you to imagine something easier. Imagine that you’re a miner trapped in a cavern deep underground. The tunnels around you have collapsed and you’re the sole survivor. In this case, the mine owners have done the right thing and there’s enough cached food and water to last a hundred miners for six months, enough to last you for the next fifty years. But there are no flashlights or lanterns or candles. The darkness is absolute.

      “In the beginning, of course, hope reigns supreme and you assume control of your new world. You take the measure of your supplies. You explore what’s left of the tunnels, despite numerous collisions with low hanging rocks. Most of all, you listen for the scrape of shovels or the whine of a drill, for your rescuers, for salvation.

      “That eventually stops, all of it. At some point every single one of you will admit that nobody’s coming, that you’ve been given up for dead, that you’re permanently trapped in darkness, that you’ll never hear another human voice or see another human face. Never.”

      Carter begins to tune out at this point. He likes the part of his brain that files things away until they’re needed again. That’s how you survive on the battlefield. That’s how you survive when you’ve carried the battlefield into your day-to-day life, when you’ve embraced it, warts and all.

      But the men and women around him are enthralled. Most have their eyes closed, while a few rock in their chairs. So, what’s next? Amens? Hallelujahs? The peculiar thing, from Carter’s perspective, is that he’s been down in that cavern, that collapsed mine. As a foster child on an Indiana farm, he’d been about as alone as a boy can be.

      “The years pass,” Ryan says, “although you have no way to count them. Night and day have no meaning. Winter? Summer? Give me a break. Where you are, the temperature never varies by as much as a single degree. And your state of mind? Well, its first name is loneliness. Followed by despair, followed by madness.”

      Ryan straightens. “But your suffering – and you do suffer - is nothing alongside God’s. You can bang your head against a rock and feel the pain. You can scream into the void and hear your voice echoing back. You eat every day. You urinate and defecate. You have a body that makes demands. And when your food eventually runs out, or your body’s had enough, or you just stop eating and drinking… you’ll escape.

      “Not God. No body for God and no escape. God’s on His own in an empty universe, contemplating an infinite amount of time. He yearns to know Himself. He yearns for something instead of nothing and the only raw material at His command is Himself. He must tear Himself apart, split into trillions upon trillions of infinitesimally small pieces. He must become His own sacred universe.”

       The tearing apart image gets to Carter and his thoughts drift back to his years in the United States military, from raw recruit to Delta Force warrior. The Special Forces warriors he counted as his comrades were super patriots, Carter included. He’d believed himself part of a great moral tradition, heady stuff for a kid who’d never been part of anything.

      That had ended when he left the Army to work for a private contractor in Iraq. To be sure, he’d carried his love of country to Coldstream Military Options, had even convinced himself that he hadn’t changed uniforms solely for the money. No, he was simply doing what he’d done before, escorting convoys, ambushing villains, executing the nation’s enemies.

      An officer named Montgomery Thorpe too him aside when his comrades in arms eventually grew tired of his pitiful rationalizations. Coldstream, he told Carter, intended to extract as many dollars as humanly possible from the nation of Iraq and they didn’t give a flying fuck who they had to kill.

      “Face it, Carter. You’ve graduated.”

      “From what to what?”

      “From a cog on a wheel to a warrior.”

      Paul Ryan interrupts Carter’s train of thought when he slaps his hands on the table, causing the ex-military in his audience to jump to full attention. Some among them bear the scars of war on their faces. A woman seated off to his left has lost an arm. Crutches stand beside several chairs.

      Not Carter, though. Carter journeyed from Afghanistan to Iraq to the bloody coast of West Africa without incurring a serious wound. A matter, in his opinion, of pure luck.

      “I wonder how many of you have felt a longing….” Ryan pauses to draw a breath. His gaze climbs to the ceiling and he folds his hands at his waist. “How many of you feel that there’s something you’ve missed? Not something big, not necessarily. But just this one little…. Well, you don’t know what to call it. An idea, a fact, a detail, an element, a deed, an event. But something, a small item that would change your lives if you could only bring it to mind.”

      Ryan doesn’t wait for a show of hands. He folds his arms across his chest and begins to pace the length of the aligned tables. “God creates the universe out of Himself. Now there’s something instead of nothing. A benefit, to be sure, but one that comes with a cost, especially to beings with the capacity to yearn. Where once we were one, now we are many. Through no fault of our own, we’ve been exiled, set adrift on an incomprehensible sea. And what we long for, when all the other wants and needs are stripped away, is simple reunion. We yearn for it as a baby yearns for its mother’s arms, for the smell and the taste of the breast, for the comforting lullaby. We yearn to be healed, to be finally made whole.”

      Carter finds Ryan’s tone as sincere as it is soothing. Apparently, the man believes what he says. But Carter’s not buying Ryan’s reverent persona. Carter fought alongside Ryan. In Iraq where they killed for a paycheck. In Liberia, where they mowed down the boy soldiers for a sack of blood diamonds. Even then, Ryan was as much a talker as Carter a listener.

      “There’s no one way,” Ryan explains, “and there might not be any way, back to God. So, beware. Maybe the whole seeking thing is a dumb-ass scavenger hunt with no prize at the end. Maybe the world’s restless pilgrims are mad treasure hunters following a map to nowhere. And there are treasure maps aplenty out there, everything from Tantric yoga to Opus Dei, from Salafist Islam to the spirit world of the Yorubas to the Ethical Culture Society. Oh, yeah. You want a map, you won’t have far to look. But which one do you choose? Careful now. Make a mistake and you’ll be wandering through the wilderness for the rest of your life.”

      Ryan’s audience has become restless and he knows it. A shifting of chairs, a cough, a whispered comment, the indicators are obvious. He slows to a stop, standing once again behind the center table with his fingertips just brushing the surface. The expression on his round face becomes grave for a moment and he appears, to Carter, exhausted. But then he brightens, flashing a brilliant smile.

      “Mama always told me I talk too much. Anyone for coffee and doughnuts?”

SOOOOOOOO HISTORY RANT #1

      In 1948, after the Democrats inserted a modest civil rights plank into its platform, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina led a walkout of southern delegates. Thurmond then formed the States Rights Democratic Party (aka Dixiecrats) and ran for president. He won four states: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Though he received only 2.4% of the national vote, he garnered 87.2% of the vote in Mississippi. (African-Americans were unable to vote in most of the South.) Curiously, another independent candidate, Henry Wallace, who refused to disavow the endorsement of the Communist Party, and who campaigned with African-American candidates in the South, also received 2.4% of the overall vote. But Wallace’s votes were scattered and his effort was deemed a failure.

      In 1964, Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act, one of only six Republican Senators to do so. “We ought to forget the big cities,” he told his fellow Republicans. “I would like to see our party back up on integration.” That same year, the Republican National Committee created the Southern Strategy, a blatant appeal to southern segregationists, before Goldwater’s eventual nomination. Although Lyndon Johnson garnered 61% of the overall vote in the general election, Goldwater won six states. He won his home state, Arizona, along with five southern states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. In Mississippi, where African Americans were still excluded from the polls, Goldwater received 87.1% of the white vote.

      In 1968, George Wallace ran for president under the banner of the American Independent Party. As Governor of Alabama, Wallace stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama in order to prevent four black students from soiling that sacred institution with their presence. He was also the man who famously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Wallace won five states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. (More about Wallace in a future rant.)

      In 1972, Richard Nixon employed a toned-down Southern Strategy to win seven southern and border states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia and South Carolina. At the nominating convention, he denounced an agreement between all-white construction unions in Philadelphia and Black Civil Rights organizations as a quota system antithetical to the American way, a quota system that his own administration brokered in 1969.

       In 1976, the Dems made a southern comeback when they nominated Jimmy Carter, a born-again Georgian. That flirtation ended abruptly in 1980 when Ronald Reagan made an appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi on August 3. Extolling the virtues of states’ rights to an appreciative audience, Reagan promised “to restore to states and local governments the power that belongs to them.” At the time, Neshoba County had only one claim to fame. Sixteen years before, the bodies of three civil rights workers, Michael Schwerner, James Cheney and Andrew Goodman, had been dug out of a levee. Ronald Reagan won nine southern states in the general election: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

      Game, set, match. The solid South was solid once gain.

Question Of The Day

     In a very poor family, an impoverished family, is an out of work husband just another mouth to feed?

How Stupid Do They Think We Are Rant

     How stupid do the creators of House of Cards think I am? Or we are?

     Actually, the degree of their contempt for me and every other viewer seems beyond calculation. From the jobs program, American Works, to Petrov’s kissing the first lady, to the inclusion of the Russian protest group, Pussy Riot, at a State Dinner, to the convenient hurricane that appears after Frank appropriates the FEMA bucks, to the predictable veering away of said hurricane after Frank agrees to return whatever money’s left.

      Michael Corrigan must have been the stoic of the age to slowly strangle without making enough noise to wake Claire. Claire’s outburst at the press conference made me cringe. No kidding, I wanted to take a bath.

      Does anyone out there understand the Jordan Valley subplot? What did Frank hope to gain, even assuming the operation went smoothly? And why would anybody in the administration want Russian forces on the ground in the first place, must less give a damn if they pulled out? The U.N. has peacekeeping operations in 16 countries, to which the Russians have contributed 83 soldiers. Worst of all, the Jordan Valley – the border separating the West Bank and Jordan - has been occupied by Israel since 1967. There are now 26 well-established settlements in the Valley, but Willimon expects us to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu leave their security to a U.N. peacekeeping force.

      I won’t bore you by continuing this tirade indefinitely, but I do want to have a closer look at one element the show asked us to swallow. Apparently, Frank intends to finance his jobs program by eliminating Social Security. What would that entail? At present, Social Security’s trust fund contains 2.6 trillion dollars in Treasury bonds guaranteed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States. You might think Frank aims to snatch the 2.6, but that wouldn’t work unless he somehow convinced the Congress to redeem them – they’re bonds, remember, - which would increase that year’s budget deficit by about 500%. But maybe Frank’s got his eye on the revenue generated by the payroll tax? Maybe he plans to use the revenue stream generated by the tax to create jobs. If so, he’d be, in effect, asking current workers who pay the tax to purchase their jobs through the federal government. But what would he, a Democrat, tell the voters who paid into the trust fund for decades and are now too old to work. Don’t feel bad, I’m takin’ your Medicare, too?

      If it was only House of Cards, or one of those mindless network cop dramas where the resident computer geek waves his hand and a giant monitor appears in midair, I’d probably settle for a regretful shrug. Beau Willimon could have – and should have –done better. House of Cards - like The Wire or The Borgias, to cite just two examples - might have been convincing without sacrificing any of the drama. Willimon decided to go in another direction. The End.

      But it’s not just House of Cards. In a recent speech, Rand Paul said, “When is the last time in our country we created millions of jobs? It was under Ronald Reagan.” In actuality, our economy has created more than two million jobs 13 times since Ronald Reagan left office.

      When I read the quote in Paul Krugman’s NYT column, I felt like someone had spit in my face. I can live with people who try to get over on me, as long as they’re sneaky. But when the lie is so brazen that it speaks for itself, I know that I’ve been demeaned, that the speaker has claimed a superior status. I can disrespect you whenever I want, he or she proclaims, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

      Last night, I paused my DVR on a car commercial: Lease an Audi A3 for thirty-six months at a cost of $299 per month. Three  hundred dollars a month? I can afford that, right? But then, in smaller letters, the ad when on to inform me that an additional $2,194 dollars was due upon signing the lease. This raised the total outlay from $10,764 to $12,958, or $359 per month. That’s a pretty steep jump, but it was only the beginning, because the next line informed me that “taxes, title and dealer charges” were still to be added. The first two slices go to New York State and New York City. This I know. But what exactly is a “dealer charge”?

      I found the answer in a paragraph at the bottom of the screen. The print was so faint and tiny that I had to don my glasses and squat down a few inches from the screen to read it, but that paragraph was why I’d paused my TV in the first place. No human being could possibly have read it in the few seconds it appeared on the screen. That’s because it wasn’t meant to be read, despite the FCC deeming the paragraph to be full disclosure.

      As it turns out, the dealer sets the actual price, which might be anything. And by the way, this is a low mileage lease, so if you drive your Audi more than 10,000 miles a year, it’ll cost you an additional twenty-five cents a mile.

      Maybe I should stop playing the curmudgeon. Maybe I should settle down and get used to it. Nobody likes a grumpy old man and golden age theories are soooooooooo boring. Yes, there once existed a militant consumer movement. And, yes, they did convince the politicians to create full disclosure laws. But that’s soooooooooo history. Deception is part of the new game and nobody objects to the fake videos on YouTube as long as they’re well done.

       The idea is to win, as all those bankers, those CEO’s who walked away from the crash with hundreds of millions of dollars surely did. As Rand Paul surely has. As Beau Willimon laughs all the way to the bank. And Ted Cruz wins, too, when he tells voters, despite there being, at most, 25,000 agents at the IRS, “There are 110,000 agents at the IRS. We need to put a padlock on that building and take every one of those 110,000 agents and put them on our southern border.”

       Everybody loves a winner. Right? 

Question Of The Day

 Is a homeless person, under the broken windows policing theory, a broken window?

Life's Not Supposed To Be Fair Rant #1

      Believers get all the breaks. They’re comforted throughout their lives by their faith in a Supreme Being who will come to their aid in a crisis, and who, following their deaths, will reward them for their good behavior while alive. The best news, of course, is that if they’re wrong, they’ll never know it.

      Compare this to the unenviable fate of the atheist. There are no comforts for atheists, no divine interventions, no omnipotent creator to heed their prayers. Instead, they’re offered the prospect of personal extinction. And if the atheists are wrong? Well, if the atheists are wrong, they’ll burn in hell forever.