"The blog has made Glab into a hip town crier, commenting on everything from local politics and cultural happenings to national and international events, all rendered in a colorful, intelligent, working-class vernacular that owes some of its style to Glab’s Chicago-hometown heroes Studs Terkel and Mike Royko." — David Brent Johnson in Bloom Magazine
Yup. That’s the message attached to bags of candy being thrown into yards in Abbeville, South Carolina, these days. It seems the Ku Klux Klan is trying to recruit kids and, golly gee, we ought to do something about it! That is, after we go out dancing the Charleston tonight and then after we vote for Herbert Hoover for president tomorrow morning.
Jeez, have we been transported back to the year 1932 while we slept?
A chap named Charles Murray IDs himself as “the Imperial Wizard of the New Empire Knights” of Abbeville. The group, Murray has written, is to “build a legit pro-white organization and become the voice of White America.”
The site also carries news like the “fake” cross-burning a “Negro” pastor in Tennessee staged in front of his church not long ago. The author of the post, presumably the Imperial Wizard Murray himself, writes:
Negroes and Jews are known to hoax hate crimes daily. The Jewish Defense League for example, would bomb synagogues.
Betcha didn’t know that.
Bet you also didn’t know that, acc’d’g to Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a lot of guys start klaverns (KKK-speak for local groups) as a way to make a living — as in, they don’t want to do something as prosaic as work, so they crank up a new group of cranks and then live off the monthly dues.
Hey, it’s a tough job market out there.
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Evil By Degrees?
I’m asking for help from female Pencillistas again. I’ve been trying to understand how women feel about rape. Oh sure, that’s easy; they hate it. I don’t mean that, though. I mean what are the nuances, is there any moral relativism re: rape, and can men ever “get it” about the crime? While we’re at it, let’s get Pencil-loving lads to pitch in as well — but I’m really more interested in Double X feedback here.
Please answer this Q: Are some rapes less, well, rape-y than others? That is, does date rape, for instance, constitute less of a violation of a woman’s body and mind than rape at gunpoint or knifepoint?
I bring this up because an erstwhile hero of the secular, progressive gang (me, me, me!) has recently found himself in very hot — perhaps boiling — water for suggesting such a thing. Richard Dawkins, the planet’s premier spokesguy for evolution and non-theism, has Tweeted the following thought:
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Got that? Okay, Dawkins then wrote:
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Let’s put aside the pedophilia bit just now and concentrate on rape. That Dawkins observation stirred an Australian woman named Eleanor Robertson to pen a guest column in The Guardian asking, “Richard Dawkins, What On Earth Happened To You?”
She suggests Dawkins should have “retired from public speech when he had the chance to bow out before embarrassing himself.” She goes on to rip Dawkins as a “figure of mockery,” “an old man who shouts at clouds,” an Islamophobe, arrogant, bigoted, and narrow-minded. What she doesn’t do is explain why his statement is offensive to her.
She hints, of course, that women know instinctively why. Sadly, I wasn’t born with the proper genes so I need help getting this.
Ergo, I’m going to run two polls here, one for women and the other for men. If you count yourself a Q in the LGBTQ equation, fill out both polls. Here you go:
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As always, feel free to explain yourself in the comments section. Now, make us all smarter.
When I was a kid back in the mid-1960s, a woman named Madalyn Murray O’Hair was often in the news.
See, she didn’t believe in god and, rather than do the right thing and keep her mouth shut about it, she traipsed all over the country telling people she was an atheist. In fact, she even founded a group called American Atheists, a moniker about as contradictory as, say, Obese Marathoners.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair
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How she ever found more than one or two other like-minded spawn of Satan in the year 1963 in this holy land is beyond me.
At the time I was a second grader at St. Giles, a Catholic school, under the tutelage of a pack of the sternest nuns this side of the cast of a John Waters movie. The principal was Sister James Mary. When she’d taken her Holy Orders, she assumed the name of a male saint known as a “perpetual virgin” and that of the Virgin Mother of Christ, a double-whammy of the Catholic church’s bizarre sexual value system. Sister James Mary — or, as we referred to her, JM — was the toughest, scariest, most brutish, deep-voiced, flinty-eyed bully I ever knew until I was introduced to a gang tough named Little Willie in 1973. Little Willie once beat a guy in the side aisle of the Mercury Theater simply for liking the same girl he did. The poor guy was hospitalized for several weeks, having suffered a concussion, a broken jaw, broken ribs, and a broken arm. Yeah, Little Willie was tough, although I’d hedge my bet on him were he to be matched against JM.
Sisters
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Anyway, Sister James Mary visited our classroom one day in the winter of 1964 wearing her meanest look. We knew she was deadly serious. Even the class clowns, Albert DiPrima and I, refrained from making goofy faces at each other while JM visited that day. She had a message of great import for us. She looked around the room when she spoke and I swear that when her eyes landed on me, the radiant energy emanating from them raised my body temperature a degree and a half.
She told us that a horde of people in this dangerous, dangerous world were trying to rob from us the right to worship our Holy Father. We were to resist them at all costs.
A little background. A couple of years earlier, the US Supreme Court had ruled against school prayer. And then the next year, that same Court had outlawed the reading of the Bible in classrooms. (Never mind that these decisions affected public schools only.) The Court, clearly, was under the thumb of the pagans. At the forefront of this assault on all things godly and good, JM warned, was Madalyn Murray O’Hair. Sister James Mary grimaced when she mentioned O’Hair’s name, as if she was about to retch.
At the time I was still trying to be a good sport about all this Catholicism and god business. It would be another five or so years before I finally quit the Church. As an obedient Soldier of Christ at the time, I immediately counted Madalyn Murray O’Hair among the most vile humans on Earth. She, Castro, Kruschev, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Boston Strangler constituted my personal Axis of Evil in 1964.
Rogues Gallery
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I was not alone. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was, according to Life magazine that year, “the most hated woman in America.”
That was then.
In the year 2013, it would be an oddity to find a nun who is the principal of a Catholic school. If you do find one, it’s a sure bet she’s wearing a pantsuit as opposed to a habit and a wimple. And she sure as hell hasn’t named herself after a fellow whose claim to fame was his steadfast refusal to have sex.
And, although the world’s most famous atheist is still reviled among backwoods fundamentalists and politico-Christianists, he is not ranked among the likes of Bashar al-Assad, whoever the boss of al Qaeda is today, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and — oh, I don’t know, Miley Cyrus? — among the general populace.
As a matter of fact, Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist today, is one of the most respected thinkers on this crazy, mixed-up planet.
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Hey, the place has changed a lot in 50 years.
I bring this all up because I just learned that Dawkins’ memoir is due to hit the streets in a couple of weeks. The book is An Appetite for Wonder. One of the things I like best about Dawkins is his obvious impatience with theists. He’s about as tolerant of believers as he is of the object of their adoration. From his book, The God Delusion:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infantificidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
David Coppedge says NASA tried to discipline him for spouting his fairy tale.
NASA says he created a hostile work environment for his underlings by laying Intelligent Design propaganda on them.
This is perfect, kiddies.
It’s the Battle of the Century. That is, the 11th Century versus the 21st Century.
Standing Tall Against Knowledge For A Thousand Years And Counting
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Democritus, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, and Sagan are all spinning in their graves. Hawking would spin if he could.
It’s god versus man in a cage match. The brain against the heart. Want a hint as to where I stand (as if you needed one)? The brain is the seat of thought; the heart is not. It’s a pump, dig?
I hope this lawsuit turns out to be as dramatic as the Scopes Monkey Trial some 90 years ago. I hope there’s a mouthpiece as deft and elequent as Clarence Darrow was. I hope NASA’s attorney puts Coppedge‘s lawyer on the witness stand. I can’t wait for the hologram movie about it all to come out in 50 years.
Who knows? Perhaps by that time we’ll have progressed so far as to tax churches. We may even have open atheists and agnostics running for high office. Our generals might not feel compelled to invoke the almighty to help us blow the brains out of enemy soldiers.
Nah.
I forgot; this is America.
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COLLEGE MAN
My old neighbor Rod R. Blagojevich gave his last press conference as a free man outside his home in Chicago yesterday.
The former governor of Illinois now begins his long stay at the federal hotel in Colorado. Or, as Outfit bosses used to put it, college. — as in, “Paul ‘The Waiter’ Ricca is still da man in dis operation, but he’s in college right now. Curly Humphreys is workin’ his ass off tryin’ to get him paroled.”
It’s funny: that’s the one thing Blagojevich was never accused of — playing footsie with the Chicago Mob. That’s probably only because the Chicago Mob was finished by the time Blago took over the state. Over. History, baby.
All the old Mustache Petes were long dead. Those who had been known as the Young Turks were either dead, senile, or in college.
“The Last Supper” Photo Of Chicago Outfit Bosses (c. 1978)
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Rod could have cleaned up had there been a lively Outfit to support him in his duties to the people of Illinois. The Outfit generally had county, state, and, on occasion, federal prosecutors in their back pockets. Judges and cops, too. Old Man Mayor Daley, the first pharaoh of Chicago, never made any bones about it — he had no choice but to work with the Outfit.
Now, thanks to the wonders of competitive capitalism, a Chicago mayor may work with any number of disciplined criminal organizations. There are, to name a few, the Latin Kings, the Vice Lords, and the Black P Stones. None of them, though, is as thorough and effective as the old Outfit.
None can point to their rolls and boast of a fixer as capable of gaming the political and justice system as Curly Humphreys.
Fixer Extraordinaire
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I’ll bet Rod Blagojevich rues the passing of the good old days.
Anyway, Blagojevich met the press and a passel of chanting supporters on Francisco Avenue yesterday. It was a circus. And Rod was the clown.
You’d expect a guy facing a stiff prison sentence to act somewhat contrite. Hell, most people would have the good sense to fake it if they still harbored thoughts of the unfairness of it all.
Not Rod.
He sounded more like a man running for another term in office rather than a convicted felon about to start a term in the joint.
What — Me Worry?
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“I believe,” he told the crowd, “I always, always, thought about what’s right for the people. And I am proud as I leave, and enter the next part of what is a dark and hard journey, that I can take with me the sense of accomplishment and a real belief that the things that I did as governor and the things that I did as a congressman actually helped real, ordinary people…. One thing I had a lot of was a desire to help average, ordinary people.”
Later, as he climbed into the car that would take him to O’Hare Airport and his flight to the federal pen, he said he had “a clear conscience and I have high, high hopes for the future.”
Wow.
Not a hint that he might have done one or two things differently during his term as the top influence peddler in Illinois. Not a breath that he even should have tempered his language, that maybe his faux tough guy, street wise lingo could have been misinterpreted. No.
“I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing. I’m gonna do it. And, and I can always use it.”
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Blagojevich spent his last day as a free man telling reporters, neighbors, and supporters what a terrific servant of the people he’s always been.
Man.
I’ll tell you one thing I learned yesterday. Blagojevich’s defense attorney, Sam Adam Jr., blew his best shot to get his client off. He should have advised Rod R. Blagojevich to plead not guilty by reason of insanity.
“By all means, let us be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” — variously attributed to Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, James Oberg, and others.
Oberg
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YOUR LIDS ARE BECOMING HEAVY….
I wonder if hypnotists still dangle pocket watches before the eyes of subjects they’re trying to put in trances.
More to the point, I wonder why there are still hypnotists. Then again, I shouldn’t wonder at all, considering we live in a credulous near-theocracy whose citizens largely believe in angels, a 6000-year-old Earth, and alien visitations.
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Unbelievably, the ancient art of hypnotism is in Indiana news today. It seems a Christian woman who makes it a practice to visit Loogootee High School to pray for teachers and students is up in arms about the school’s Saturday fundraiser that will feature, yep, a hypnotist.
The fundraiser will benefit the school’s baseball team. Loogootee is a speck on the map in the southwest corner of the state, total population as of the 2010 Census: 2751.
Lots of schools around this holy land hire hypnotists to entertain at fundraisers. It’s all in fun and every once in a while some kid or parent can be seen lurching around the stage, clucking like a chicken. I’m sure such a sight reaps scads of money.
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Geneva Yoder, on the other hand, takes her medieval belief systems seriously. Yoder used to have kids at LHS and still cares enough about it to go there, kneel down and implore her BFF in The Sky to smile kindly upon the place.
When she found out the organizers of the baseball team’s fundraiser had hired a hypnotist, she lodged a complaint with the Loogootee Community School Corporation.
Yoder told radio station WBIW that it’s “not morally or ethically right to hypnotize children” just to raise dough for the baseball team.
Not that Indiana has a sterling reputation as a land of forward thinkers but this mini contretemps, coming on the heels of Ft. Wayne Rep. Bob Morris claiming the Girls Scouts are a radical organization, makes us look worse than usual.
The sane among us can only hope our fellow state residents will someday bring their thinking in line with more modern 16th Century ideals.
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THE RAW AND THE KOOKED
All my life I’ve been a contrarian, so much so that at times it’s been to my own detriment.
My operative philosophy is, don’t get swept up in group think. The bigger the group, the dumber everybody in it becomes.
For many years, I wondered if perhaps I was — oh, I don’t know — anti-social. Imagine how thrilled I was, then, to read George Carlin’s critique of teams. Here it is:
Teams suck! I don’t like ass-kissers or team players. I like people who buck the system. Individualists. I often warn kids: “Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you ‘There is no I in team.’ What you should tell them is, ‘Maybe not. But there is an I in independence, individuality and integrity.’ Avoid teams at all costs. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name. If they say, ‘We’re the so-and-sos,’ take a walk. And if, somehow, you must join, if it’s unavoidable, such as a union or a trade association, go ahead and join. But don’t participate; it’ll be your death. And if they tell you you’re not a team player, just congratulate them on being so observant.”
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Yay! I wasn’t alone. The great George Carlin agrees with me.
Despite mainly being an independent writer since 1983, now and again I’ve worked for a private company. I worked in the Education Department at Whole Foods Market for three years not terribly long ago. This was at the time when companies were spending gobs of cash on foolishness like team-building getaways.
I’d ask, Why do we have to do this junk?
Everybody would say, Oh, so we can all get to know each other and spend quality time with each other. It’ll really make us unified.
Oy, I had so many objections I didn’t know where to start. Here’s a couple. First, if I wanted to get to know my co-workers better, I’d go out with them. Since I haven’t asked certain ones out, that means I don’t want to know them any better.
I mean, the company pays me to spend eight hours a day with people who, by and large, I would never want to be around unless there was remuneration involved. Once that eight hours is up, I wanna go home or to the places I hang out and see people I really like.
Second, why do we have to be reminded we are a team? “Well, it’ll put us all on the same page,” they’d say. For pity’s sake, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Of course we’re a team! Of course we’re on the same page!
They sort of told me when I was hired, This is whatwe do here. Now you’re going to be doing it with us. I had no illusions that I’d be able to, say, work on my great American novel while I was at work — well, at least not where I could be caught at it. By definition, all our presence in this building makes us a team. We’re trying to sell groceries here, for fk’s sake!
None of these arguments went over very well. And when I couldn’t come up with any credible excuses not to go on team-building functions, I’d go and I’d spend all my time with people I liked and avoid those I didn’t. Just like the regular work day.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about all this because of raw milk.
Huh? Raw milk.
Yeah. WFIU ran a report on the morning news the other day about people who strive to circumvent Indiana’s raw milk ban. See. the state outlaws the selling of raw milk for health safety reasons. Pasteurization destroys most of the microbes that can cause food-borne illnesses.
Raw milk advocates, on the other hand, think pasteurization adversely affects the flavor of moo juice (sorry, I got tired of typing milk.)
When it comes to food fetishists, though, Bloomington often seems the center of the world. Almost immediately, Facebook lit up with people claiming raw milk is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
One person posted that since his family has switched to raw milk, his kids have suddenly been relieved of all their allergies.
Another said that he, his wife, and none of his kids have had so much as a cold since his family turned to raw milk.
I suppose they can believe what they want. What harm does it do for someone to believe raw milk is a miracle substance?
Now, I consider myself an advocate of fresh, healthy, wholesome foods. I try (although I occasionally fail) to minimize my intake of hydrogenated oils, red meat, excessive salt, and other iffy comestibles. I eat spinach every day. I gobble my fruits. I do my best to buy foods that aren’t laden with chemical preservatives or artificial flavors. I restrict my visits to White Castle to once a year.
That puts me on the health food team, I imagine. But remember, I hate being on teams. And the reactions of those Facebook posters is a prime example why. They’ve elevated a personal preference to an almost philosophical imperative.
So, I posted something myself. I wrote, “Look,if you dig the taste of raw milk that’s cool. But it ain’t no magic elixir, folks.”
Aw, that’s one of the 10,000 reasons why I hate Facebook. It too often turns me into a pain in the ass.
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ROAM
Hey, Cindy Wilson is 55 years old today. The B52s were the pride of Athens, Georgia and middle America’s intro to punk/new wave pop.
Wilson
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Wilson and her brother Ricky were two of the four original members of the band, formed in 1976. The B52s were sailing along in terms of popularity when Ricky suddenly died of AIDS-related complications in October, 1985. He hadn’t told anybody about his illness and his death was a shock to the other band members. Cindy, naturally, was hardest hit by his death. The band went on hiatus for three years.
When they came back and hit the charts in 1989 with “Love Shack” they achieved their greatest success.
