The Scapegoat was part of the Just Before Midnight series of plays and broadcast on 2 December 1978. Late at night, a stranger knocks at a man's door. His car has broken down and he wants. . .
Saturday, August 26, 2023
Saturday Night Radio Drama Extra - Peter Whalley - The Scapegoat
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Peter Whalley - The Trial
Falling in love with a stranger has never been scarier: A gripping new thriller.
Vibrant, young, attractive, Mollie Spiers, signs up to internet dating. When the man she arranges to meet looks suspicious she spontaneously sits next to another man, Colin, and hurriedly asks him to pretend they're on a date. Molly and Colin fall for each other and what seems like serendipity turns into a chilling thriller. As Mollie falls headlong in love Colin is arrested on a murder charge. As we inter-cut between murder trial and action, Mollie's own life is in danger.
Mollie: Tracy Wiles
Colin: Graeme Hawley
Paul: Stephen Fletcher
Sarah: Natalie Grady
Prosecuting Counsel: Jonathan Keeble
Peter Whalley was a real master of this kind of unexpected endings. And unanswered questions.
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Simp says
"You see "books" anywhere on it? " Here's a clue, Sparky -- "Mein Kampf," "The Turner Diaries" and "The Camp of the Saints" are all books. :-)
Since the topic is what replaces actual truth in the minds of most Americans in 2023, if you believe the average American has ever read any of those books you are even stupider than I had previously believed you to be.
They may, may have heard of "Mein Kampf" the same way you did, it was mentioned in a movie or TV show or in some mid-brow magazine article. Like you and easily a majority of those who have been credentialed by a college, they never read it.
I would bet that fewer have ever even heard of The Turner Diaries, unless they were part of the American neo-Nazi cult and I'd bet you anything fewer than ten percent of those ever read it. If you think that even .05 percent of Americans have ever heard of "The Camp of the Saints," well, I said you've convinced me you're even stupider than I thought you were before.
Of course, since this graph is about where most Americans get what they mistakenly believe is information, your comment is entirely beside the point because books don't even make the list. I think they should require a course in basic statistics before anyone is eligible for a college degree, you wouldn't have passed. Any legitimate course in statistics WOULD START WITH WHAT THE STUDY WAS ATTEMPTING TO MEASURE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Tuesday, August 22, 2023
Simps is upset that I dissed TV and Pop Kulcha As The Major Source Of Our Degenerating Democracy
This is from the Media Literacy Clearing House. You see "books" anywhere on it?
"How Dare You Diss The Sacred Bill of Rights" - Hate Mail
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP in the early post-WWII years I heard a number of times variations on the claim that "it can't happen here." Which in my family was considered to be nonsense. The faith that the United States couldn't ever become something like the Third Reich or Italy under the fascists or other kind of "right-wing dictatorship" because of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was something easy for a middle-class or affluent white American male to believe because those things worked for affluent white males of the kind who comprised virtually all of the on-air and in print media producers. Young people now might find it hard to believe how few of those were even white women back then.
I never believed it, our WWII veteran parents didn't believe it, my grandparents who had experienced anti-Irish bigotry and witnessed other kinds of bigotry didn't believe it. I have never believed in American exceptionalism. I don't believe any human group or nation is exceptional. Perhaps it's being Vatican II Catholic in Northern New England at the very end of Protestant hegemony here but I have never believed that any People anywhere were reliably virtuous or reliably safe from their weakness and selfishness and our inevitable ignorance that "it" couldn't happen among them. Sin is a universal certainty. No one is safe from evil, anywhere, anytime. The closest thing there is to that kind of safety is to be found in actual equality, not in some daffy notion of absolute "rights" and "complete freedom" without mandatory responsibility for the results of actions and consequences under those.
It wasn't until much later that I read the statement of a Black Civil War soldier who made the point that whatever the Constitution said about freedoms and rights, Black People had lived as slaves under it for generations and he was not deluded that it was something under which Black Peoples' rights were protected. On the contrary, as was proved by the then recent experience of the Dred Scott ruling, as much Constitutional law as Brown v Board or any other act of the government, proved that the Constitution and Bill of Rights were more than merely implicated in the subjugation and enslavement of Black People, they had been quite comfortable with it for more than a generation, by that point. The Constitutionally established Supreme Court used it to deny the person-hood of Black People EVERYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES. And after the national baptism in blood, the Civil War, The Constitution was, in the post-Reconstruction period, intrinsic to the resubjugation of Black People under Jim Crow and lynch law and the dainty Supreme Court contribution to both, "separate but equal". Which rested on the Supreme Court told Constitutional lie that things were equal. "Equal Justice Under Law" should be the first part of the Supreme Court's hideous secular-pagan temple that is removed and put in an exhibition of official hypocrisy and legal corruption.
That the Roberts Court is using the First Amendment to reimpose voter suppression, racial segregation and discrimination and other features of Jim Crow and expanding that to discrimination against LGBTQ+ People, reimposing the subjugation of Women at the same time UNDER THE CONSTITUTION proves that it is MORE USEFUL FOR THAT than it has proven in history to be useful for establishing equal justice, equal rights and equal freedom under equal responsibility. That we are seeing a national resurgence of police killings of Black People as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts are demolished is not any great surprise considering what else is happening, especially in the entertainment media and, yes, even the "news division" of media corporations. America has been led into fascism by Hollywood and TV shows, comedians who aren't funny and who replace racism and bigotry for humor, Trump being a product of that kind of entertainment as much as Reagan was.
Any Native American could have said the same thing, that the Constitution had been in effect as the American government had murdered their People and stolen their lands and tried to wipe them out. I have pointed out the conclusive documentation that it was still an active governmental policy during the height of admitted eugenics in the 1930s in even states like Vermont to wipe out Native Americans. It is an absolute historical fact that the Nazis were learning some of what they soon would implement from American eugenicists. The Supreme Court had, less than ten years earlier found that such involuntary eugenics was not banned under the Constitution with the Bill of rights, EVEN WITH THE CIVIL WAR AMENDMENTS ON TOP OF THOSE. Eugenics was, as established Supreme Court law by as lauded a Constitutional expert as Oliver Wendell Holmes jr, fully consonant with such a genocidal program. As his secretary Francis Biddle discovered to his certain discomfort when he was a Judge at the Nuremberg trials, the Nazis lawyers could cite Holmes SUPREME COURT RULING to excuse the genocidal actions of their clients.
Our national myth of freedom and justice for all has been a false front on the fact that our indigenous form of unequally applied fascism, white supremacy, has ruled us through a combination of voter suppression under a campaign slavery then of apartheid terrorism and murder and the Constitutionally set up inequality of the Senate and the Electoral College. Jim Crow and the return of de facto slavery was first accomplished under the Electoral College by a corrupt deal between Rutherford Hayes and the slave power and appointments by that regime to the Supreme Court. We are still living under that form of governance, today. American Apartheid ruled for generations in the former slave states and elsewhere for decades without much of any opposition under the Constitution. If the Civil War didn't wipe it out, the idea that the temporary fixes of the Civil Rights era would permanently end it without abolishing the mechanisms that empowered it from the star, is a delusion of college-credentialed People trained to not think about reality as opposed to the mythology of the Constitution and, even more so, the Bill of Rights.
I will point out that, in his more candid writing, John Marshall admitted that the adoption of the Constitution without the Bill of Rights was a close call for the document. The main part of the Constitution which gives us the Electoral College, the anti-democratically constituted Senate, etc. was very far from universally acceptable to those at the time of its adoption. One of the idiot Trumpers recently cited Patrick Henry to such stupid effect when he was among the more vocal skeptics of the thing.
I will also repeat that it is a fact that the most lauded of the Founders, Madison especially, was not enthusiastic for a Bill of Rights and it is not that surprising that as dedicated a group of slave owners and rich aristocrats as who governed the country and most of the states adopted a Bill of Rights that has proven to be so ineffective in guaranteeing equality. Madison's part in its creation under the First Congress was his reluctant keeping of a bargain he had to make with the Virginia legislature for them to adopt the scheme to start with. Do you think he and his fellow slavers really intended it to promote full equality and equal rights for all? He became ever more cynical about democracy as even poor-whites of no property were enfranchised in the Jeffersonian revolution. Though I don't suppose some Broadway song and dance guy is going to tell that in some pop music spectacle.
Any progress towards equality from the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was through struggle against the order set up under both of those. As the Trumpian danger to even that Constitutional order proves, the right to lie as granted so stupidly under the absolute language of The First Amendment endangers even the peaceful transfer of power, the lauded fruit of the Constitution, itself. It's clear from both the Bush II and Trump regimes that the Electoral College is a corruption of that lauded practice of American Democracy, as well. It has worked to thwart the majority of voters more than twice in our history, always to terrible effect, perhaps the Jeffersonian example being the sole exception where it might, might have been better.
It may be easy for affluent white People to believe that the Constitution and the golden calf of the Bill of Rights protects us from "it happening here" but that is as big a lie as anything that comes out of Trump's mouth or thumbs twitting on any given day. It certainly has happened, constantly and consistently for Black People, Native Americans, other People of Color, LGBTQ+ People, Women (especially Women belonging to those and other subjugated groups) . . . And that's not to mention even white men in the economic underclass.
In just about every way it has happened here and it is happening here under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights right now. For Black People living under American apartheid it was always like living under fascist terror and it is still like that. Government actions especially police actions, the administration of "justice" by the judicial system has always valued Black lives, the lives of other targeted minorities and Women and the economic underclass as worth far less to nothing as compared to those of affluent white lives. That our government acts against us in a system of unequal or, really, any scale of economic valuation is proof of the failure of egalitarian democracy under the Constitution. I think it's dangerous to allow rich people to hire better or more lawyers than the poorest person can get, even in civil cases. If I were to write a new constitution, I'd put that into it.
The media certainly has contributed to it happening here, not only the alleged news and what they choose to put on but far more potently in the entertainment media which constantly streams that message to fill the minds of the large majority of Americans who get all of their ideas primarily from that. Or from the minds of their parents and associates who have spent decades absorbing that message. The media are free to do that BECAUSE THE FIRST AMENDMENT SAYS THEY ARE AS FREE TO DO THAT. That we may be free to promote egalitarian democracy in the outskirts of the media is of piddling significance because it is such a harder sell and will never have as much money backing it up. Of course the discrimination and devaluing of lives has an economic motive driving it, everything the media does is about money, in the end. EQUALITY IS FAR LESS PROFITABLE FOR THOSE WITH MONEY AND SO POWER, so it is in their economic self-interest to promote inequality and discrimination JUST AS IT WAS FOR THE SLAVE POWER AND THEIR NORTHERN ALLIES TO PROTECT AND PROMOTE THE ENSLAVEMENT OF BLACK PEOPLE. The media especially the entertainment media, has always devalued Women and objectified them, commercial culture, "pop culture" has been the main propaganda force doing that.
The Republican Party since 1964 when the Goldwater faction took it over sought to harness white racism as a means of achieving power, a trend which has only accelerated and swamped those of a milder oligarchic tendencies to the point where Trump and his Trumpzis now control the Rotten Old Party. So racism and other forms of bigotry spread through paranoid rantings on FOX Lies and its imitators serve a double purpose for those who really do control the media and, so, politics in the United States. The First Amendment with it's irresponsible, values neutral, pseudo-scientific objective language is less than no help in correcting that. How can it when even "civil rights attorneys" who get on MSNBC declare that Trump and his allies "have a right to lie?"
I could point out the role of the Republican Party, Republican women such as the putrid Phillis Schlafly, in thwarting the movement for gender equality, using anti-LGBTQ+ hatred as their major propaganda too. The media and "pop culture" made things much, much easier than it should have been considering Women outnumber men. I will remind you that the Constitution as it is in 2023 as it was in the beginning, does not establish that Women are equal, the actual majority of the American People does not have that explicitly pointed out in the actual governing document of the country. The attempt to put that in fell to the First Amendment permitted regime of lying that has governed us as much as anything. In America, one of the surest means of thwarting egalitarian democracy is through lying in the mass media. One of the less effective means of obtaining equal justice is through telling the truth in opposition to those lies.
So the complaint that I have told it plain, that it happens here (especially to targeted minority groups) and is getting worse BECAUSE OF THE CONSTITUTION AND THE BILL OF RIGHTS, as made worse under the Supreme Court and its extra-Constitutional usurpation of the power to nullify duly adopted federal laws giving "constitutional" excuses for it, is an expression of an entirely a-historical, white-supremacist parochial mythology which even a fairly cursory reading of American history refutes.
Our relevant professionals are not required to tell the truth and serve justice and egalitarian democracy. I'm talking about lawyers and the judges and other professions which are comprised entirely or mostly of lawyers. It is what lawyering turns into under any system which allows it, the highest end lawyers are largely in the business of gaming the law and The Constitution for the benefit of those who can pay the most and want inequality and the profits and psychopathic gratification they receive from feeling superior. Trump's use of lawyers and their diligent devotion to aiding and abetting their criminality is an example. The Constitution and its established order has let him get away with flagrant criminality almost every time. The one time it didn't was when he and his Nazi father were prosecuted for discrimination under civil rights laws which the Roberts type Court will demolish. They are under their use of the First Amendment for LGBTQ+ people, already. In a way lawyering is set up to favor those who serve the gangsters, those who break "the law" and those who have enough power to make the wrong they want to do unillegal, to use O Henry's brilliant neologism which describes that perfectly.
Trump as a political disaster happened UNDER THE CONSTITUTION BY THE RULES SET BY IT. Bush II happened under the Constitution as rigged by the five Republican-fascists of the Rehnquist court with the collusion of Bush family members in Florida and at FOX Lies. The vilely sanctimonious Republican lawyer James Comey, as head of the FBI and the New York Time under its Supreme Court granted "right to lie" made it certain that he would prevail in the last weeks of the the 2016 election, the New York Times printed its Sullivan Decision protected lies that Hillary Clinton was about to be indicted. And Trump gained office with fewer votes under the Electoral College. The same Electoral College he and his goon gang of lawyers and Republican-fascists in state governments tried to rig in 2020. If they had not done that it is very likely Trump would never have been president and the Supreme Court would not be dominated by Republican-fascists right now.
The fact that we are in real danger of Republican-fascists winning in 2024, AFTER the hard experience of the Brooks Bros. putsch of 2000 and the Trumpzi insurrection of 2021, the basic Constitutional corruption AND THE SUPREME COURT USURPATION OF POWERS not having ever been fixed no matter how bad it has gotten up until now is a guarantee that sooner or later MUCH MORE OF IT THAN ROUTINELY HAS HAPPENED HERE WILL HAPPEN IN EVEN WORSE FORMS. Never forget that the same Bill of Rights which got a right to lie for FOX and the NYT puts automatic weapons in the hands of the mass killing fascists and Neo-Nazis.
You can count on it happening here, the only difference now is that it is going to happen to a lot more White People than before, though a lot of those are obviously too TV and movie and internet addled to even understand who is doing it to them. They think it's Black People, Latinos and drag queens who are their oppressors, that's how easy it is for the media to sell lies. That is another thing that has gotten worse. The mass media allowed to lie, to tell any lie, to deny even the worst lessons from the past, THE SHOAH FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE!, is as free to tell those lies as the lies that the Nazis told and the fascists in Italy and the Imperial military establishment told in Japan and the Stalinists in the Soviet empire and the Communist Party in China or the Kim regime in North Korea are free to tell the lies that they depend on. Lying always will be the foremost danger to equality and democracy. Any First Amendment which does not explicitly say there is no right to lie is a guarantee of "its happening" under it. A first amendment that does not constantly have provide the incentive to get the truth right while permitting ever more lying is morally degenerate. Egalitarian democracy, legitimate and decent government is a product of morality, in the end. It cannot exist in moral relativism which permits lies and false witness to flourish. Democracy is equal or it cannot be legitimate government.
Egalitarian democracy depends, absolutely, on the voters knowing and valuing the truth or it is vulnerable to lies and those who lie. If even an effective minority of voters believe lies, democracy is damaged and endangered. Allowing the mass media to carry lies is one of the greatest dangers to democracy there is, allowing those lies to weaponize prejudice and bigotry is the proven tool of then enemies of egalitarian democracy and even any would-be democracy short of equality under the law. Ours is such a stupidly self-endangered democracy, I wonder if the reason that the slave-owners and land-stealers and financiers who adopted the Bill of Rights didn't fear the truth because they feared it would set Black People and Native Americans and Poor-whites free, to the cost of their own unequal wealth. It doesn't much matter if it was intentional because that has been the effect of it. They certainly set poor-whites against their natural allies in seeking equality through lies and targeted meager privileges.
The earliest and worst sins of America may have been racism and the murder which always comes of racism. But along with that is the sin of lying, both of which are enshrined explicitly and implicitly in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Not least of all they are embedded into the fabric of the country but in the scheme of government set up under it. Even if lies can be overcome for a majority of the voters, the Electoral College and the usurping Supreme Court can overcome that to empower an effective minority of those who buy the lie and enslave us all. The Roberts Court is making that worse than it was after the Voting Rights Act was passed, nothing will ever be fixed until an even more powerful Voting Rights Act is adopted and protected from future John Roberts and his gangster "justice" cronies. But that won't even be enough until the "right to lie" is removed from the mass media and the idiotic idea removed from the collective lore of the lie-protecting lawyers.
Monday, August 21, 2023
It's Later Than We Are Led To Think - Time To Learn To Shoot
From today's Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Dateline Lake Arrowhead, California.
If you think I overwork that phrase "stochastic terrorism" think again.
Think of the "libs of tic-toc" psychos and everybody who has encourage hatred and distrust of the LGBTQ community like Ron DeSantis.
Friday night an as yet unidentified assailant went to fashion designer Laurie Carlton's Clothing Store in Southern California, ripped down the Pride Flag she had hanging outside and when she confronted him about it he shot her to death. She was the mother of nine. The murderer fled was confronted by police and killed.
This is a hate crime, it is hate encouraged by and often directed stochastically by the Republican Party. The sooner we start recognizing this the sooner we can do things to remove the threat that party and its cult represent, represent just to letting everybody not get killed.
--------------
Amen.
This is something that should be hung around the neck of every single Republican. I'd say from Susan Collins to Roger Stone but I don't really believe there is any difference between Susan Collins and Roger Stone, not now that she's probably never going to have to depend on duping the eminently dupable voters of Maine. The skank voted against impeaching Trump EVEN AFTER JANUARY 6TH, even though that would have permanently removed him from ever, again, holding public office. That is absolute proof that she is all-in with whatever the Republican-fascists do, a broken weather vane that always points whichever point to the right that she figures is as far right as she can go and still dupe Maine voters . Those of use who were never duped by her should never let anyone who was forget it. Every in-the-closet gay Republican-fascist, Lady G aka Lindsey Graham, every one of those whose names we don't all know should now and forever be outted and we should insist that the media not shield them as it has Lindsey Graham like forever. No LGBTQ+ person who votes Republican should ever not be called on it in public.
The use of Black People, Latinos, other members of minority groups and Women as targets for violent hatred, scapegoating and objects of fear by Republican-fascists before and during the Trump cult has always been stochastic terrorism just as it always has been, only it hasn't been this overt since the mid to late 1960s. There was a reason white supremacists left the traditional Southern Democratic party for the Republican-fascist party and it was because the majority of the Democratic Party and its national and many of its state and local candidates rejected that kind of thing. That is the reason that the Democratic Party is a truly diverse party while the Republican fascists are not.
The use of violence by and on behalf of Republicans is only going to get worse, it is already much worse than idiots in the media used to make believe it would never be. I always remember one of the smarmy NPR hosts on All Things Considered mouthed the cliche "The first person to say "fasist" loses." Such idiotic rules still rule such venues of the media, I doubt those who believe the New York Times, as I think of them, "NYT wits" will see much of it, probably not even as the fascists take control of the nuclear weapons. They are all in on it as certainly as Susan Collins always was in the absolute zero of her heart of cold hearts. I despise Susan Collins
I think it's time for us to consider preparing for the violence they will unleash. I'm considering doing things I never thought I would, like learning to shoot a gun. I remember reading Ida Wells Barnett talking about how in the face of lynch law she decided to
"I had bought a pistol, the first thing after Tom Moss was lynched, because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers. I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked."
and I am well past beginning to think that LGBTQ+ People should consider that as a realistic responsibility, now. Only they should practice regularly, probably together. If the cowards thought we might shoot back better than them, they'd cower or go after those they figured wouldn't fight back.
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Margaret Susan Thompson Preaches for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Have you ever been called a “dog”? That is what happens to the Canaanite woman in today’s gospel and, admittedly, the first time I read the passage, it came as a pretty big shock. This is not the sort of language we normally associate with Jesus. In modern terms, it comes dangerously close to calling her the “b-word” (which is, after all, the technical term for a female dog). And yet, by the end of the encounter they had, he is calling her a “woman of great faith” and granting her wish that he heal her daughter. Stated simply, the unnamed Canaanite woman—a foreigner, an alien—becomes one of only two women in scripture who manage to change Jesus’s mind. [The other, of course, is Mary during the wedding feast at Cana, but what nice Jewish boy is able to say no to his own mother?]
This anonymous seeker has a lot to teach us—ALL of us. How many of us find ourselves pleading with civil and ecclesial authorities, who tell us—as Jesus’s companions say here—to “shut up and go away,” because she (we!) keep shouting after them. [Actually, at that point, she’s spoken only once.] But as we might say about her today, “nevertheless, she persisted.” She truly is being “dogged,” isn’t she? So maybe Jesus’s epithet is not that problematic after all. And maybe we need to persist, as well.
Also, let’s not forget that the Canaanite woman is petitioning not for herself, but for her daughter. If today’s prelates are, according to Catholic teaching, the descendants of those disciples accompanying Jesus, are we not the daughters of the one for whom she is asking to be made rid of a demon? Does this mean that, if she’s told that “her wish will come to pass,” then we, too, are going to be rid of the demons that plague us?
The Gospel of Matthew is largely directed to the Jewish people, and historians tell us that the Canaanites were their traditional enemies. [When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, it was against the Canaanites, after all.] This is probably part of the reason that Jesus initially rejects the woman who calls out to him—though why he is in Tyre and Sidon, a region where there were no Jews, is never made clear. So when he eventually does respond to her plea, calls her faithful and promises to heal her daughter, he is opening up the promise of the Good News beyond the nation of Israel. And that, in turn is a fulfillment of the prophecy in today’s first reading, from Isaiah: “The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord… will be acceptable on my altar, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for ALL peoples.” As the response to today’s psalm proclaims: “Let ALL the nations praise you!” Paul, too, in his letter to the Romans, speaks to the gentiles and declares: that “God might have mercy upon ALL.”
ALL peoples. While this can be understood as referring to ethnic groups—to “gentiles”—there is nothing to suggest that it can’t be understood in other ways, too. God’s house is open to women, to the LGBTQ+ community, to the poor, to the stranger, to those of different abilities, and to so many more. Even to tax collectors, which Matthew was (and so he, too, like the Canaanite woman, was something of an outsider). Perhaps Pope Francis’s decision to invite women and other laypeople to participate in the upcoming Synod on Synodality is a step in the “all people” direction?
The words that the woman uses in addressing Jesus, “have pity on me,” can also translated as “have MERCY on me.” These are words we use in every Mass: kyrie eleison. At that moment, we are petitioning God in the same way that the Canaanite woman called out to Jesus. So, although we do not know her name, we commemorate her each time we gather. Her plea is our plea. She is our foremother and we express her petition in the same way she makes it: in hope and even expectation that God will respond. We do this, even when we are told by the successors to those who told her to “shut up and go away” that we ought to do the same.
Maybe it’s not surprising that this gospel reading is buried in the “dog” days of summer, because it truly is revolutionary. It resonates especially with me because I’m a woman, but it has much to say to all of us who feel like we don’t fit into a box, and who sometimes feel tormented by a demon, like the daughter in need of healing. In other words, it speaks to us all. And so it calls us all to be dogged, persistent—and, like the Canaanite woman, “of great faith.”
This is one of the stories in the Gospels that makes me think that preachers and priests don't read it right. I think Jesus was teasing the woman, saying that she and he both knew she wasn't supposed to be talking to him and he wasn't supposed to be listening to her. I think he was teasing his audience who certainly would have been inclined to think of her in those terms, both because she was a woman and outside of the in-crowd of Jesus and his disciples. I can't for a second believe he didn't intend to help her. I think he was making a point that would have scandalized many of his own followers and given his critics some material to use against him. I think reading him any other way makes him seem like a bit of a prick. Since she mentions Mary at the wedding feast telling him they'd run out of wine, I think Jesus's answer to his mother was probably some mother-son teasing of the same kind. What am I supposed to do about it? Probably said with a comic eye-roll and whatever expression of comic exasperation would have been appropriate for the occasion. A pious priest or preacher-man who cultivated a pose of piety is probably the least likely to get it though I'd imagine any number of mothers who had a son with a sense of humor and a good relationship with her would have gotten it.