Storms on Cable News

As a footnote to my post upstream about the film Network, I have to comment on the news and weather organizations and their fight for viewers by scaring them to death.  I confess I saw no more than ten minutes of CNN, MSNBC, HLN, FOX and the Weather Channel, but I can say this:

These reporters and anchorpersons should pop some downers and stop drinking regular coffee.  Whoever pays reporters to spend eight or more hours out in a hurricane should be arrested and committed to an asylum.  The reporters on the beach/street/boardwalk wherever seem to enjoy what they are doing.  I can only imagine that they are paid well for it or perhaps only hope to score career advancement for risking their lives live on TV.

As a matter of fact, it occurred to me today that what this country needs is a human sacrifice of a weather reporter in the hurricane to appease the weather gods and the gods of commercialism and national exceptionalism.  And to appease the Christian God whom we are told is not accepting our prayers for deliverance from disaster.

Cable news seems to exist mainly to catastrophize everything and to be happy only when there is a crisis.  Let me take that back.  We have precious few crises.  They are happy to make every natural and normal thing, big or small, into a crisis about which we must pop another paxil.

Oh how I miss the Canadian Broadcasting System.  Even Public TV and radio lets me down, although they still know how to appear calm in the face of doom.  Cause the world is gonna end and we’re all gonna die terrible deaths and there is nothing we can do to stop it.  And as a matter of fact, yes.  Wait til I tell you what I think of 911.  Partly my views were formed by witnessing a tornado close up in Kentucky in 1994.  More about that later.  Meanwhile, people in the midwest and west coast wonder what else has been and is happening in the world besides this hurricane.

The Congressman Dances

Buck Bryan wrote an interesting letter to our Congressman, Chris Gibson last week, published in the Glens Falls Chronicle. I spoke with Buck so that I wouldn’t get him wrong. He is pretty moderate. But I have sent the following letter to Mr. Gibson and the Chronicle in response:

I thank you for two things: Voting not to defund the National Labor Relations Board, and your willingness to cut the military budget. (The Congressman is a retired Army Colonel and has a good voice on this issue.) But you had nothing to do with preventing default and you know it. You were part of the the group that took us to the brink and tripped the recent downgrade and the gyrations in the stock market. You want it both ways: You tell us that you support "cut, cap, and balance" and were willing to risk default to please the Tea Party folk . Then you tell us that you voted for the needed resolution to the debt ceiling crisis because if we had defaulted it would have been a disaster.

Buck Bryan says that DEBT and KILL have the same number of letters. This is completely irrelevant. Most people need credit (debt) to buy a house or car. I needed it this year for a new furnace. CREDIT makes GROWTH. (These words each have six letters; also irrelevant.) And to have credit, I need a job and income. For the government this means revenue from taxes. Trying to substantially reduce government debt has the effect of strangling growth.

The books Bryan recommends by Michael Lewis and by Gretchen Morgenson and Johua Rosner are good. But they don’t preach against debt by cutting spending, but explain how wall street recklessness and lack of government regulation of banks are the root of our problems. And of course they are about how both Democratic and Republican Congresses and administrations have been complicit in creating the boom and the bust we suffer. Don’t pander to the Tea Party, Mr. Congressman. Get busy on something that will make jobs and growth, not the populist party line.

End of letter. I have also been critical of the Congressman for scheduling only 2 or 3 "Town Halls" this summer, and those in very small out of the way towns. He isn’t unusual.  Majority of Congress Avoids Town Hall Meetings

Mostly he appears at events where he won’t be confronted. Here is what happened in the southern part of our district:

We still don’t have a Democrat to challenge Mr. Gibson next year, but I hope we can get Scott Murphy or someone of his caliber to run. Scott bravely faced the Town Halls in 2009 and calmed everyone with reasonable words about the health care bill, which he had obviously studied carefully.

Econ Not So Simple – Jobs

The Glens Falls Chronicle reports that Red Fox, the only independent bookstore will close.  Barnes and Noble is 24 miles away in Saratoga Springs.  The Borders there just shut down.  It is truly sad that a bookstore can’t make it in Saratoga or Glens Falls.  The owners say that the reason is the growth of e-books.  It is that and websites like Amazon.com, Abebooks.com, and even Ebay.com.  The editor of the newspaper comments that the big super book stores drove out the independents, and now Borders is gone, so even Saratoga Springs has no downtown bookstore.

I confess that I contribute to the decline of small shops in our towns.  I do as much shopping as I can online because it saves time and money.  I shop a lot on ebay and buy a lot of small items directly from China because the government there subsidizes postage so that I pay $3.00 for something that costs $20 at Staples or WalMart.  Also, there is a huge used goods market in the US now.  Most of my clothing comes from resale shops.  I shop Craigslist and garage and yard sales, too.

Garage and yard sales fall into several categories: On the low end what you see is landfill.  On the high end at the McMansions, there are often 3 car garages, stuffed with expensive toys and household items that were bought when the economy was roaring.  These people often price stuff at 80% of the new price, so they truly know the value of nothing.

My shopping behavior partly causes “structural unemployment.”  The jobs that are lost are as the British say, “redundant.”  They are no longer needed and there is no way to bring them back.  It is difficult to fathom that Michigan lost half a million jobs in the past few years.  A report in the Albany Times-Union says that fewer and fewer retail workers are employed in the region.  So are a vast number of workers simply not needed, in fact redundant?

I search for economists who can explain what I have been seeing the past few years.  One I found is Dean Baker, who explains simply where all the money and jobs went.  (The housing bubble was $8 trillion of phony wealth and equity!)  Baker has some interesting recommendations.
Reshape the Economy: Shorter Weeks, Longer Vacations   Rogoff doesn't seem to have any proposals except higher inflation, and Robert J. Samulson must work for the Koch brothers.

But it is not the case that workers have been laid off from jobs that still exist or that will return.  The jobs are gone.  Computerization, the applications of new technologies, the movement of jobs to countries with cheaper labor have done this.  It has taken 30 years of the application of personal computers and the development of the internet to make this happen so strongly today.  We may have a society now that requires only 30-40% of its people to be employed.

When I was downsized in 1996 (from the PCUSA) it was the result of “re-engineering.”  Declining membership and funds meant a need for fewer staff personnel.  At that time there was a slew of books on everyone becoming an entrepreneur.  Much easier said than done, and few people can make a living income on consulting or Ebay selling.  (I do that, too.)










I remember Nixon promoting a “guaranteed annual income” in 1970.  Daniel Patrick Moynihan (dem. Senator NY) wrote a book on why it failed and why it was needed.  It was a failure of political will of various groups to “compromise.”  Sounds familiar.  Both Nixon and Moynihan saw that there would be time when there would be not enough jobs for everyone.  So how would people live?  Everyone needs a share of the U.S. for basic living.  If one has motivation to move beyond what would be poverty, go for it.  Oddly, this was a plan spelled out by my friend, George, in high school around 1960.


Turns out it is an old idea, and I can imagine a society where more justice reigns than now and everyone shares in the world’s wealth.  You know, like from each according to his ability; to each according to his need.  I look forward to reading Terry Eagleton’s book.  Wasn’t Nixon a conservative Republican?

In Praise of Gore Vidal

I have to mention She Who Should Not Be Named, Michelle Bachmann, because she has denounced one of my favorite writers: Gore Vidal.  “She” blames some of her switch from Democrat to Repubican on Mr. Vidal, specifically his book on the Founding Fathers, Burr.

I read it when it was published in 1973. “She” says it was “snooty.”  So now I am half way through it again.  Actually, I would now call it “snarky.”  Vidal was a realist about famous people in the past and this made him a bit cynical.  He did TEN years of research on Burr, and learned a lot that does not support a view of the holiness of those great men.  He does reveal a lot about how politics works and worked itself out in the late 18th and early 19the centuries.

E.g., many of the early patriots thought that John Hancock would have made the best commanding general of the Continental Army.  But John Adams, wanting to get the support of Virginians, decided to support Washington for the job.  Burr and others repeatedly remind us of the failures of Washington as a general and his oddness as a person.  Burr was outraged by Jefferson’s hypocrisies and wrote great detail about them.  Burr is outraged again when Hamilton supports the Virginians in creating a capital city in Virginia, in order to get Congress to pay the states’ debts after the revolution is won.

What is revealing in this [and another book I am reading and shall review] is the similarity to political debates and differences to today, and the origin of today’s issues in the distant past.  The debate between Hamilton who wanted a strong federal government and a national bank, and Jefferson, who envisioned a nation of small farmers and tradesmen, is at the heart of the debt crisis and the Tea Party fantasies of today.

I should note that Vidal likes to use as a narrator fictional secretaries who can move about, hear, and report on the various words of different people.  He does this also in Lincoln and Creation.  Lincoln (1984) continues his search for truth in American history.  It focuses not on the Civil War, but the political battles in Washington and Lincoln’s personal life.

Even more impressive research resulted in Creation.  This is truly a marvelous romp through the axial age, that time in the ancient world when a Persian diplomat could have known Zoroaster, Socrates, the Buddha, Mahavira, Confucius, and Lao-Tze!!!!!!  Characters all living at the same time include Xerxes, Darius I, Pericles, Araxerxes I, Democritus, and Herodotus!!!!!! [Each deserves an exclamation mark.]   Creation is a short course in philosophy and religion.  Read the updated and unedited edition of 2002.

I was very interested in reading Julian (1964), which I discovered two years ago.  Alas, I have had difficulty finishing it.  It is promising because Julian was the last Pagan Roman Emperor (360-363 c.e.) AFTER Contstantine.  His love of Dionysian rituals and dismissal of the “Galileans” answers some of my questions – When did people give up on the Greek gods, why and how?  When does a religion “die?”  How did Christianity “win?”  What is the underlying connection between religion and political power?  I guess I have to finish it.

“She” has a lot to learn.  And so do I.  I want to read Vidal’s Empire (our entry into the 20th century), The Golden Age (the 1950's), and Live from Golgotha....

The Meaning of Life - A Sermon for Unitarians

I went “yardsailing” last week.  I saw a great many books, cds, videotapes, and dvd’s on every kind of spirituality and religious fad of the past 30 years.  I thought: Wow. There is so much hunger for understanding in times of confusion, so much searching for answers when they are none, so much anxiety and loneliness and desire to be part of something larger than ourselves.  And so much of the search leads nowhere.

At the last yardsale I heard a customer say something negative or discouraging to which the saleswoman asked “You know what’s coming, don’t ya?”  “Yes, I do,” said the other.  “I read the Bible.”  The woman said “Yup, the Lord is coming soon.”  I hustled away from them.  But I wish I had stayed and asked them about their beliefs.  Why do they believe such stuff?  Don’t they know that every time there is a political or economic or social crisis, someone cries out wrongly “The end is near?”

Recently I saw a fairly good show on the Maya calendar and the theory that the world ending in December, 2012 – because that’s when their calendar ends.  It must be that the world will end because the Mayans said so.  For some reason we tend to look for answers to our big questions by looking beyond and outside of our experience and the world that we know.

The show is called “Apocalypse Island” and features Jim Turner, who became interested and then obsessed by the findings of possible mayan like structures on an island many hundreds of miles south of mexico in the pacific ocean.  (Coincidentally, it is called “Robinson Crusoe Island,” because it was the basis for the Defoe novel.)  In the show Turner finds the island and the stones, but there is never enough evidence to prove his theory.  He continues to believe it to the end even when his colleague on the journey gives reasons for serious doubt.  I sure didn't see anything there.

As the show ended I suddenly realized what was wrong with his thinking and what is wrong with Christianity.  You see, the Mayans had this complex system, a construct about the world and how we should live in it.  And Christian churches built a system, a huge construct over many years.  Both systems are “pre-modern.”

Both Mayan apocalypse proponents and Christians are trying to apply myths and metaphors of the distant past to the present.  But what made sense to those early Christians and what worked for them doesn’t work so well today to our more scientific and rational world view.  What made sense to those early Mayans and what worked for them is over.  There are no Mayans today to live by the complex calendar that they created.  That calendar is simply an artifact of anthropology and history.  It means nothing.  It means no more than resurrection does to many of us.

About ten years ago I took my then boss, Bob Funk, creator of the Jesus Seminar, to a men’s Bible study group at a Presbyterian church in San Rafael, California.  They were very interested in what he said until a man started to figure Bob out the implications of what Bob was saying.  He asked:  “Do you believe in the virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ?”  Bob just said straight out “No one was ever born of a virgin and no one was ever raised from the dead.”  I really thought for a while that I might have to call a fleet of ambulances because several of those present looked as if they were going to die on the spot of strokes or heart attacks.

Richard Holloway, retired bishop of Edinburgh in the Anglican church of Scotland and author of Doubts and Loves, was in the US then.  He was interviewed for a radio program in Chicago and I was able to record it live from the internet.  The interviewer was shocked by what he was hearing, about how Jesus didn’t say or do most of the things the gospels say he did.  So in great frustration the show’s host asked in the last seconds of the program:  “Well, what do you think the gospel of Jesus was if you don’t think Jesus came to die for our sins?”

Without a pause Holloway exclaimed excitedly:  “Life before death, for everyone!”  This is what Christianity should be about, but isn’t.  Christians could construct a new version of their religion on the enjoyment of life, the end of sacrifice and violence, and helping each other.

Holloway made a statement in a lecture that year that astounded me for its simplicity.  When speaking about the Christian beliefs, he concluded “We made it all up.”  Well.  If we made it all up, we can make it all up again.  And that is what we do as a practical matter.  We make up our own answers to the questions of the meaning or purpose of life.  That is my point.  There is no meaning of life that is pre packaged that one can find by looking for it.  So the epigram I saw on a church’s sign board in the ‘60's was true:  “Life is not a puzzle to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.”

John Shuck, my favorite Presbyterian minister, has written 72 entries on the meaning of life on his blog shuckandjive.org.  One of the last is about Lloyd Geering (photo at right), whom John and I first met ten years ago at the Jesus Seminar.  Lloyd who is now 91 has a new book on Ecclesiastes, Such Is Life.  My text today is from his translation of something repeated several times in the short biblical book.

After trying to live by all sorts of goals and rules, the preacher or teacher says:
Let me tell you what I’ve come to realise:
It’s good and proper simply to eat and drink,
and take satisfaction in all the work
we do on the face of the earth.
After all, this is our human lot
during the limited days of life that Nature gives us.

No one can give us a meaning to life.  Christian churches proclaim that a providential, transcendent, supernatural God  gives meaning and purpose to our lives.  That might be, but we don’t know and can’t know.  All claims of revelation are suspect.

Humans eating around a table is the meaning of life.  Good work is the meaning of life.  As a good Presbyterian I learned that “the chief end of man is to glorify god and enjoy him forever.”  Now I would say, “the chief purpose of human life is to enjoy life and make life as pleasant as possible for others.” [I’m not very good at that.]

So here we are and in the UUA you covenant to “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.”   Brothers and sisters – there is no meaning to life except what we make of it.  Beware all who tell you what the meaning of life is.  But you already know and live it.

I make meaning by playing my saxophone, writing poetry and other stuff, enjoying my family, working in my woods, rebuilding things.  I find the meaning of life in the great American songbook from 1910-1960.  I find meaning in the snow peas and tomatoes that grow in my garden.  Where do you find meaning?  How do you make meaning of your life? [discussion followed]

Remember Monty Python about The Meaning of Life:  "Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations."

The Truth about the LAMESTREAM MEDIA!

If you haven’t seen it in the last year or so, you must see the film Network with William Holden, Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway, directed by Sidney Lumet.  Made in 1976, it looks and sounds too much like today.  Also, I think that Madmen has taken some of the feel and setting of this story.  There are so many good lines and speeches I hesitate to mention one, but mostly I like it when Ned Beatty as the head of the network reads the riot act to Howard Beale:  http://youtu.be/v3vbCxj2ifs  Think about the attack on corporations here.

For all of it we have to thank one of the truly great writers of the 20th century: Paddy Chayevsky.  Famous for Marty and lots of great TV drama in the ‘50's, he also did Hospital, a gritty film starring George C. Scott that obviously inspired a number of TV hospital dramas.  He was a big contributor to Paint Your Wagon and The Americanization of Emily.

I have to plug Netflix here.  We get it through our Wii and at first the picture quality wasn’t very good and there wasn’t real widescreen.  In fact, films seemed squeezed from the sides.  It is broadband download through our cable making me wonder how do they get all those pictures in the little wires?  In the past week we suddenly have full widescreen and near HD quality.  Now we just need more films, but notice all the better quality made for cable TV shows they provide.  And the wonderful documentaries that otherwise are unnoticed and unseen.

To accompany the film, you need to listen to Don Henley and Dirty Laundry, from 1982.  It was originallly dedicated to – Rupert Murdoch.  http://youtu.be/46bBWBG9r2o  What makes the media most lame is their unwillingness to dig into things that would yield some truth and understanding.  In the '90's we received Canadian Broadcasting Corp. news, and a channel of different world news outlets and I sure do miss them.  Thank someone for the web.

My sermon to the Unitarians comes Friday.

Why I Am Not a Unitarian

Why didn’t I become a Unitarian?  Well I grew up Presbyterian and didn’t realize until recent years what a fluke that was.  Here is how it happened.  My Mother didn’t care much about churches.  Her Father who died in 1933 had been a “freethinker,” a devotee of Robert Ingersoll, who lived many years in Peoria IL where I later worked.  Now I am doing genealogical research on my Grandfather, because I realize that he lived not far from Peoria in the 1880's and 1890's.  I guess my maternal Grandfather was my spiritual Father.

I need to say here that I am still a Christian.  I understand that the language of religion is myth and metaphor, and although I am not a “supernatural” Christian, I think that the myths and metaphors of Christianity still have some utility, although they have been and are grossly misused.  Much more about these things later.

My Father had an Irish Catholic Father and a German Lutheran Mother.  This Grandpa liked the ladies and my Grandmother threw him out around 1927. [His Father, my Great Grandpa Maher left home for work in 1893 and didn’t come back.  A postcard a year later revealed he was bandmaster of the Ringling Brothers circus, but THAT is yet another story to be told.]

My Father’s Mother was disowned by her Father for marrying a Catholic.  [Her Father forbade her siblings to ever speak with her again, but one sister secretly kept in touch.  Another story to be told.]   She wanted her children to grow up with good Protestant religion and sent them off to a Presbyterian Church within walking distance (the working classes didn’t have cars), in Sioux City, Iowa.  I now realize that all my Father’s siblings remained Catholic.  Dad took me to the church he had known as a child.

I enjoyed singing in the choir at Westlawn Presbyterian Church from the age of 8 to 12, but left church in seventh grade before confirmation, because I thought it a class of bullies and the minister was quite severe.

In high school I read some Bertrand Russell and attended a Unitarian Church once.  Quite interesting, for they had installed an art exhibit in the entryway the week before.  Some of it was suggestive and so when I attended the hour was given to a debate on esthetics and censorship.  Some wanted the paintings removed, but the larger group decided to keep them.  I was impressed with the discussion.  Where else would it happen?

In Iowa City I attended the Unitarian Church once.  It was old and musty smelling.  When people liked the dry words they heard they stamped their feet on the wood floor and when they didn’t like what was said they hissed.  I was not welcomed and didn’t go back.

I still need to explain how and why I went to seminary and continued as a Presbyterian.  For now I will say that I learned a lot about church and academic politics in the ‘70's and ‘80's, earning a D.Min. and working for the then great Presbytery of Chicago (none are great now).  Seeing the corruption of all things in the midst of teaching about a caring God (much more about this to come), I went to the Unitarian "Unity Temple" (by Frank Lloyd Wright in all his glory) in Oak Park where the minister was a gay, ex-Presbyterian minister.  I checked into this and there are no records of how many Presbyterian ministers have left the denomination to the UUA.   This is because the PCUSA doesn’t recognize the UUA.  A minister leaving in that direction just disappears.  But I have met several.

In 1993 I applied for and was a finalist for a fund raising job with the UUA in Boston (down Beacon Street from the State House on the north side of the Commons.  I met John Buehrens, then president, and many fine individuals there.  They treated us well, putting Carol and me in the famous Union Club on the east side of Boston Commons.  They were honest and told me finally that the trustees preferred to see a lifelong UUA in the position.  I understood that.  We enjoyed a service at Arlington St. UU on the west side of the Commons.

While there I spoke with the “settlement” officer and asked what it would take to transfer and become a UUA minister.  “You would need another masters degree,” she said.  “You would have to do it as a resident for two years in Boston, Chicago, or Berkeley.  I told her that those were high requirements for someone with three degrees already.  She said, “I’m sorry.  If we didn’t have really high requirements we would be overwhelmed with ministers like you from other mainline denominations.”  So I was one of many, not a few.  So the answer to the title question is "they wouldn't have me."  I was employed instead at PCUSA headquarters in Louisville. [Yet another story that might be told about my knowledge of where a few bodies are buried, so to speak.]

Once years before in Duluth, friends who were Unitarian asked if I would be interested in mediating a dispute at their church and counseling them about church growth.  I thought about it and said “The problem is that I don’t know how to relate to an organization that is built around what they don’t believe.”  That was sort of true in the ‘70's.  In the ‘80's they developed a positive “covenant” and doubled their membership.  Of course, I can’t join or I would have to give up my “honorably retired” status in the PCUSA, which entitles me to a small tax break.  And I still have things to preach in Presbyterian churches that will have me.