Divinest Sense

I love to read essays written by people who take themselves way too seriously. My favorite wackjob Mormon, Orson Scott Card, disturbed by widespread reports that Star Wars III is a big long anti-Bush sermon with swordfights and cool outfits, argues that we should all be ashamed of ourselves. The Jedi, our so-called heroes, are a bunch of relativistic yet preachy elitist bureaucrats who have the galactic republic in a mystico-socialist stranglehold. The Sith, on the other hand, are refreshing new upstarts with a bold vision and a commitment to R&D. Why aren’t we rooting for Darth? Card also offers a full critique of the Jedi religion, which, he soberly informs us, is catching on as a serious religious faith:

It’s one thing to put your faith in a religion founded by a real person who claimed divine revelation, but it’s something else entirely to have, as the scripture of your religion, a storyline that you know was made up by a very nonprophetic human being.

OK, Orson, point taken. Now what was that thing you mentioned about the golden tablets presented to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni? And why couldn’t the supreme being come up with a better name than “Moroni 2″ for Moroni’s incarnation in human flesh? Sounds like a Lucasfilm production to me.

….somebody please stop the madness. Not that it isn’t a beautiful song - this is that Tears for Fears song that Gary Jules covered for the soundtrack of “Donnie Darko”.

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going no where, going no where
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very very
Mad world
Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday
Made to feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher tell me what’s my lesson
Look right through me, look right through me
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you
I find it hard to take
When people run in circles its a very very
Mad world

But wait! Things aren’t ALL bad, I did win a free Whopper Jr. at Burger King. Yesssss! I wonder if they will put cheese on it for free.

Rep. John Conyers sums up the ridiculous right-wing squelching of the Newsweek Koran story pretty well in his open letter to White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

Third, the public deserves to know what precisely the White House is asserting with respect to the mistreatment of the Koran by interrogators: are such reports categorically false or are they, in the words of one publication, “manifold?” For example, a May1st New York Times report indicated that a Koran was thrown into a pile and stepped on at the Guantanamo detention facility and “[a] former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans.” The incident where a Koran was allegedly thrown in a toilet was also recounted by a former detainee in a March 26, 2003 article in the Washington Post, and corroborated by another detainee in a August 4, 2003 report by the Center for Constitutional Rights. The question is: are you categorically denying that the mistreatment of the Koran occurred, or are you simply denying the Newsweek report is accurate on hyper technical grounds?

Update: Now we’re up to 137 cities. A list of the participating cities and their mayors.

Hooray - I’m excited to hear that my home, Alexandria, Virginia, has joined with 131 other cities in agreeing to meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. My bet is that hundreds of other cities will soon follow suit. Memo to Bushies: No matter how much you squawk on about free markets and all that, you can’t ignore common sense: noxious emissions are just not good for the air we breathe and the climate we live in. Just as you make your children into better people by teaching them not to hit other children and not to throw stuff on the floor, you can make corporations into better “people” by requiring them to clean up their messes.

Yesterday A. and I went on a nice drive in the Montgomery County (Maryland) agricultural preserve and took a look at some interesting eco-projects. First on the agenda was a tour of the Resource Recovery Facility, where they incinerate Montgomery County’s garbage and convert it into usable energy. Right next door is the Dickerson Composting Facility, which turns fallen leaves and grass clippings into really nice compost for your garden. If I had any gardening ability at all, I would be very excited by this compost - it’s dark, rich, peaty, and chock-full of stuff that’s good for your tomatoes. The last stop was the Jehovah Jireh Farm, a beautiful little farm run by a Mennonite family. Their specialty is eggs from pasture-raised chickens, and they also provide grass-fed, certified organic meats. Farmer Myron Horst explained to us that since factory farming became the norm, almost all knowledge about traditional farming methods has been lost. Such wisdom was generally passed down from parents to children, and not recorded anywhere. In order to guarantee the best and healthiest environment for their laying hens and other animals - without using antibiotics, growth hormone, pesticides, and heavy feeding and processing equipment - the Horsts had to learn by trial and error.
This experience resonated with similar thoughts that have crossed my mind lately. A few years ago I picked up an interesting-looking old framed picture at a farmstead auction for about $5, and on closer inspection, discovered that it was a collage that someone had pieced together out of lithographs of fruits and vegetables from seed advertisements and packages. Behind the collage, serving to date the picture as well as to fit it snugly into the frame, was a community newspaper from 1927. A page of letters from readers offered tips on such things as making a chick feeder out of cracked (and ostensibly useless) pots and jars; tending a garden plot on church grounds and selling the vegetables to make money for the congregation; and clever ways to irrigate one’s strawberry patch without turning the rows into a nasty mess of moldy straw.
A sharp and saddening contrast to today’s culture - country or city - where we throw out our jars even when they’re not cracked, our chickens and eggs come from massive, dirty, and cruel factory farms, and the things we manufacture are destined to live short lives. People still have vegetable gardens and keep animals, but these are hobbies, not life- and community-sustaining activities. And lord only knows where your vegetable seeds came from and how they were made.
I’m certainly no farmer myself, so I won’t be solving the problem anytime soon. But I’m interested in learning more about lost arts and lost ways of life and in opening my (and others’) eyes to the often-ignored structures and processes that sustain us.

According to broadcast news, East Waynesville (North Carolina) Baptist Church has forced anyone who supported John Kerry or voted democrat to repent of their sins and promise to vote republican, or to leave the church. About 40 members have left in protest. If it’s anything like the Baptist churches where I grew up (Texas), those 40 people represent about 5% of the total membership. A harmless minority.

I guess we might all gasp in horror at this incredible assertion of religious authority over the secular, but trust me, this is about par for the course in southern churches. Wackos in churches can exclude whomever they wish to exclude, and make whatever obnoxious claims they wish to make, (and they will, oh, they will) but far be it from me to stop them unless they are doing something that is against the law. Be free! Shower great affection on your chosen deity/political figure! But what happens in Vegas, i.e. your neon-clad megachurch, stays in Vegas, y’hear? Once you cross that threshold back into the reality-based community, you must abide by the law of the land.

So, the Baptists are exercising their joyous religious freedom in their own adorably tacky environs, what could possibly scare us so much about that? To me, it’s the fear that this church’s actions will catch on - that they’ll become the focus of a rallying cry by the actual persons in power to clear the Democrats out of all the churches, then all the schools, then all the jobs, then all the public places… alarmist? Sure. Maybe people will look at this church and laugh. But maybe they won’t.

I fear that at the least, we will lead increasingly separate lives from each other, each claiming our own provinces and spheres of influence, until the divide is so deep that it cannot be mended.

The FDA is about to implement a rule that prohibits gay men from being anonymous sperm donors. There is absolutely no scientific basis for this - it’s purely based on the FDA’s vioxx-induced hallucinations about the supposed “promiscuous” nature of homosexuals. In fact, studies show the incidence of AIDS rising fastest among heterosexuals.

The FDA has rejected calls to scrap the provision, insisting that gay men collectively pose a higher-than-average risk of carrying the AIDS virus. Critics accuse the FDA of stigmatizing all gay men rather than adopting a screening process that focuses on high-risk sexual behavior by any would-be donor, gay or straight.

"Under these rules, a heterosexual man who had unprotected sex with HIV-positive prostitutes would be OK as a donor one year later, but a gay man in a monogamous, safe-sex relationship is not OK unless he’s been celibate for five years," said Leland Traiman, director of a clinic in Alameda, Calif., that seeks gay sperm donors.