Saturday Night Radio Drama - Dick Riley - Middleman Out

 Middleman Out 

This was one of the first radio plays I posted and it's still one of the best. 

I'm always hoping to get back to posting every Saturday again but life is complicated.

So you are without defense, O man - everyone who judges - An Answer To What Do You Mean By "Long Argument"

IT MIGHT BE BEST to start with a short argument, or a short part of a much longer argument Romans 1:25-2:3

1:25 They who exchanged God's truth for a lie and adored and worshiped the creation rather than the Creator who is blessed unto the ages; amen.  Thus God delivered them to the passions of disgrace;  for even their females exchanged natural use for what is contrary to nature,  And the males also, in the same way, abandoning natural use with the female, burned in their longing for one another, males performing shameful acts upon males,  and receiving in turn within themselves the requital befitting their deviancy.  And as they did not deem it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God surrendered them to a reprobate mind, to do indecent things, Having been filled with every injustice, wickedness, avarice, vice; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, boorishness; whisperers, Slanderers, haters of God, licentious, overweening, braggarts, contrivers of evils, defiant of parents;  Witless, faithless, ruthless, merciless - Though knowing God's decree that those who do such things are deserving of death, they do not only do them, but give approval for those engaging in the same practices.

2 So you are without defense, O man - everyone who judges - for in that you judge another you condemn yourself; because you who judge engage in the same practices.  But we know that God's judgement on those doing such tings is in accord with truth.  And do you, O man - you who judge those doing such things while also doing them - reckon that you will escape God's judgement?

As an LGBTQ+ man who has heard a very small part of that passage used for my entire life to condemn gay men and Lesbians, two verses out of the entire complex describing universal behaviors, most of that catalog aimed directly at LGBTQ+ People by straight People, the directly following universalization of sin by Paul WHO IS PRESUMABLY ADDRESSING WHAT WOULD NOW BE CALLED HETEROSEXUALS when he says they're no less implicated in sin than those they condemn.  And he, himself was doing in that passage exactly what he condemned as indefensible, judging others.  Also, as some LGBTQ+ affirming scripture scholars and theologians point out, the reference to what Paul is accusing Women of doing is entirely ambiguous and the males he is accusing of "abandoning natural use with the female" has little to nothing to do with those of us who never had sex with a Woman, or were married to a Woman and who don't practice promiscuity or what would be called "unsafe sex" with another man in a committed, monogamous partnership.  

I would say they are guilty of what Paul says leads to depravity, exchanging God's truth for a lie.  As I have been pointing out, lying is rampant in the United States, especially on the right, in no group more so than the so-called "evangelical" and "trad-Catholic" cults, and as Paul more than  hinted at, you can expect those resulting sins to be found flourishing among them.  And you do.  There are no bigger liars in my country than those who share in hatred against LGBTQ+ People and who advocate discrimination and , yes, violence against us, up to and including murdering us.  

The Pauline literature is full of just such passages in which a line or sentence is dishonestly plucked out of a larger point to slander someone or some group while ignoring the point of the argument.  Or to distort the Gospels and the New Testament.  I accuse Martin Luther of doing that on his "faith alone" distortion and Augustine on predestination and eternal damnation.  The history of Christianity has frequently turned into a horror show because of those.  In each of those cases, by the fruit of their actions and statements you will know them.  

One of the things you can bet on with those who do that, they have absolutely no intention of applying what Paul said to their lives and are even less interested in applying what Jesus said to themselves.  The "white evangelicals" the "traditional-Catholics" what the American media has distorted Christianity into meaning are Olympic level practitioners of that kind of hypocrisy, that's not unusual.  

Lest it be lost on anyone PAUL WAS ADDRESSING THE SAME THING AMONG THOSE DEPUTED TO BE CHRISTIANS IN HIS LETTERS.  What is different now is that LGBTQ+ People are pointing out that our sexual orientation doesn't remove us from the possibility of doing better than the heterosexuals who Paul was addressing while being true to who we are.  Just as Women who insist on going beyond what Paul could imagine or, as I'd put it, what he could imagine would ever be acceptable or those who were and are held in slavery do the same thing, the substance of Paul's whole point is not only good but essential.  

Paul certainly didn't claim to be infallible, he didn't claim that his understanding in this life was perfect.  When he was wrong about something or somewhat wrong, the results are far short of what he intended.  When he was right he was right and it makes no sense to abandon everything he said for the few things in which he wasn't able to imagine something better and more broad than his own radical mind could encompass given that he, like all of us, had his limits.  When Paul is read in church some might say "The Word of God," but Paul didn't say that was what he was writing, at least I don't recall it without going through the entire corpus to check that point.  

Carla Bley - Life Goes On

 

Carla Bley

Andy Shepherd 

Steve Swallow

Being mostly offline these days I hadn't heard that one of the greatest composers of my lifetime, Carla Bley, had died at the age of 87.   Thinking about what to post, this seemed right.  

I wish her eternal happiness, she gave me so much in this life.

I Am A Really And Definitively Never Again American Liberal American - Hate Mail

I HAVE NO COMMON GROUND with any "liberalism" or leftism which does not have as its explicit goal an egalitarian democracy in which ALL People get a good chance to  live out a natural, decent life, not on one more dedicated to some notion of "free speech" "free press" in which such proven dangers to humanity as Nazism, Communism, fascism and our own indigenous form of that, white supremacy are to always and forever have "a right" to try to get so many oppressed, enslaved and murdered again.  

In the context of my country, I am against anything and everything which carries a rationally cognizable danger of turning us again to that which we know can happen here, not only from our history, BUT OUR,TODAY, HERE AND NOW of apartheid, genocide, inequality, discrimination, impune violence and oppression of People of Color, of Women, of LGBTQ+ people who are not trying to oppress anyone or trying to advocate for the oppression, discrimination against or, yes, genocide against anyone else.  

That is the distinct difference between those whose who have real and important rights of truth telling and advocacy for equality and democracy.   I am entirely in favor of protecting the real rights to tell the truth and advocate the good.  Those who lie us into inequality and that traditional "American democracy" which has been not only compatible with but consonant with American apartheid, the subjugation of Women, the oppression of numerous other inequalities and oppression and, lest anyone forget, the genocide committed under and with explicit intention by the very American government set up by the Constitution, under the Bill of Rights practiced for the majority of our history under the Constitution and, yes, today.  I am certainly against those who want to lie in their promotion of foreign imports of Nazism or European forms of fascism or their own innovations in such things as the official "civil libertarians" are always ready to put other Peoples' lives on the line over as they have armed them not only with mass-media lying but, also, automatic weapons.  I include the various Marxisms only for clarity and not because those have or ever had any chance of taking real power in the United States. I count the "Second Amendment" libertarian fascism promoters with the ACLU and other "civil libertarians".  Indeed, sometimes they file similar briefs to the Supreme Court.   They are all libertarians.

I should make it clear that in 2023 even the "Communists" don't want Marxism as they turn to a particularly amoral and ruthless form of gangster capitalism in virtually every place where Communists hold onto power.  The idiot American and European Communists, those in politics - if there's anywhere they really are in politics - but mostly consist of academic nut-bags and sub-professional scribblers and babblers, are best considered in the same category as flat-earthers only flat-earthers are more likely to gain actual power here.

I have absolutely no common ground with People who put "principles" over the lives and the right to a decent life, up to and including the Supreme Court rulings that do that.  I have no common ground with any "liberalism" or "leftism" which does not hold that the lives and welfare and rights of People and the environment is always to be supported over any abstract "principle."  Obviously Communism, Marxism, has no such holding, many so-called socialism don't, the lunacy of anarchism doesn't - it will always inevitably devolve into rule by the most ruthless and stronger over those with less strength and some sense of morality.  It doesn't include the 18th century, laissez-faire crooks who stole the word "liberalism" or its even more terrible-two-year-old expression, "libertarians"  but who are only a somewhat more evolved a long the way towards gangster  rule such as dominates and has always dominated mainstream American politics and, even more so, its legal lore.  

The accusations made because I disavowed the old ACLU slogans and, in fact, the ACLU, itself, that I must somehow support what I explicitly reject as Republican-fascism, the indigenous form of American fascism, white supremacy, the patriarchalism of misogyny and LGBTQ+ hatred couldn't be more absurd or ironic.  My rejection of those was made explicit in one of the first things I ever posted and got roasted over, I Won't Be Fair To Fascists, I Won't Be Nice To Nazis.  The very first thing I ever posted as a blog post indicated that direction as I rejected the then high priest(in his own scribbling) of that position, the late and always annoying Nat Hentoff.

Contrary to the accusation that I've "turned my back" on the American left, I've become far more radical than that left because, as even a Noam Chomsky has said, "the Gospel is radical."  The Law of Moses, stripped of some of its patriarchal appendages (that I'm not convinced are authentic) is more radical in its economic justice commandments than anything in current Anglo-American law and far more racial than anything any Marxist government has ever practiced.  In my reviews of the programs of The Left Forum, I've never seen anything listed as more radical than The Gospel or even nearly as radical as The Law.  Marxism is a wrong-headed, pale imitation that has worked out to be as nightmarish as Nazism in practice.  Any "left" that has not faced that in 2023 is as denying of history as Holocaust deniers and the dangerous percentage of American idiots who have fallen for that organized Nazi front that uses our wide-open, "First Amendment" media in their increasingly successful moves to get another chance to do it again.  I've faced the truth about Marxism as it really is and the secular left that is its sucker.  

To hold that such anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic ideas and their supporting lies "have a right to free expression" is a form of insanity encouraged by the popular lore of, in order of descending importance, popular media, "journalism," lawyers and judges and academia.  To hold that those who want to not only abolish the rights of people to tell the truth, of media to tell the truth, to promote equality and democracy retain some "right" to lie them out of power and themselves into it is sheer lunacy that, in the United States flows directly from the truncated, careless language of the First Amendment.  That language was perhaps issued out of the knowledge that in the ambient culture among those with power in the new United States, in the disempowered status of those who favored equality and democracy to prevail, though I doubt that considering who could vote with any power to elect someone to office, propertied, white males with some access to a polling place on the one day of polling, my conclusion is that it was just them feeling poetic and general instead of specific.  

To always give white supremacy another chance IS TO ENSURE THAT THEIR HISTORY WILL BE REPEATED BY FASCISTS, NAZIS AND OTHERS.  Communism in the United States, there is absolutely no chance of that happening now or ever, the greatest danger that communism and Communists have been to any Americans it is to those who favor egalitarian democracy as they have attached themselves to us like poisoned limpets.  The American left, largely in the hands of academics and others like them, have cared far more for the "rights" of Communists to impotently push their own brand of gangster governance than they ever did for the rights of racial and other minorities and the rights of people who actually work for a living because they, the ACLU among the worst of them, have knowingly made common cause with anti-democrats which damaged the real struggle for economic justice and equality on the most absurdly abstract of "principles".   That the ACLU and others like them champion the rights of Nazis, white supremacists, other flavors of fascism even as those are resurgent and empowered in so many places on the same "principles" proves how treacherous they are, unreliable except in the fact that you can rely on them and their "principles" to work to destroy what they claim to promote as they preen in their "principled" purity.  I went from a financial supporter of the ACLU to despising it on that basis.  

If there is one thing any real American style liberals or any realistic, egalitarian democratic left can count on, it is that without seriously addressing and changing our ideas and actions on the basis of what the long history of liberal and leftist disempowerment shows us about the folly of previous holdings and actions, there is no prospect for the United States to become a real democracy, an egalitarian democracy in which economic justice, environmental protection and even basic rights and freedoms ever happening.  The American left, American style liberalism, among just a few of us is beginning to understand how deep that change has to be.  The First Amendment as written and as understood by us today, has to be among those things which are clarified to exclude a "right to lie" a "right to express racism, antisemitism, misogyny, hatred of LGBTQ+, and other tools of traditional American fascism.  And that has to be explicit, as explicit as the laws in Germany banning Holocaust denial and the promotion of Nazism.  As explicit, perhaps more so, than the anti-hate speech laws in Canada.  Lying in the mass media certainly has to be banned or at the very least made actionable, even by those who hold political office.  We got Trump through the media lies told about Hillary Clinton, we got Bush II by the lies told about Al Gore and the Supreme Court putsch that colluded with Jeb Bush's Florida and FOX Lies.  That putsch was a bigger success than Hitler's first try.  Th at American democracy permits they to try again is a guarantee that future insurrections will succeed, anyone who doesn't admit that is wasting our time with whatever they say or pretend to stand for.  

The ACLU is one of the most effective tools to disempower the struggle for equality, economics and democracy as they preen in their "objective" "even-handedness."  In an "even-handed" consideration between the struggle for equality and inequality, even one win by those who favor inequality is too much of a price - for those who pay that price, that is, it's not going to be the lawyers or judges or "justices" who do.   They have suckered us far too long, I'd like the thing to face a real egalitarian democratic rivalry and for it to be crushed by people who believe real lives of real people are more important than abstract "principles."  The lawyers in that organization certainly don't believe that.

I certainly have nothing much in common with any Republican, though all of them now, in the wake of the Trump insurrection attempt and the Republican-fascist Congressional delegations are rightly called what they are, Republican-fascists.  

I have nothing to do with that monument of poison and depravity, Clarence Thomas.  His fantasy of what overturning the Sullivan Decision would lead to is truly hilarious due to the fact that that power given by the Warren Court has primarily been used to thwart not only Democrats but liberal Democrats.  The ones who, unlike the play left, have the ability to accomplish something.  If he had his way among the first and biggest losers would be FOX Lies, the other lying right-wing and Republican-fascist media, and the likes of Donald Trump, who would have long ago been ruined if those he had lied about and slandered, including the very paid-for ads carried by the New York Times that the Sullivan Decision allowed to be published with total impunity, could have sued him.  If Hillary Clinton could sue the media and people like Trump for the decades of lies told about her, she'd be enormously rich and they would be ruined.   That Clarence Thomas doesn't get that doesn't surprise me, he was never very smart and he's always been rather clueless about reality.   As willfully stupid as many an ACLU lawyer is.  I loathe them as much as I do him.

Arthur Berger - Partita (1947) for piano

 

Geoffrey Burleson, piano 

I love Arthur Berger's music so much, still.

Use Opportunities Handed To You

If the Republican-fascists want to go with another sex-abuser scented wrestling coach for speaker, we should take full advantage of that.  No Democrat should ever talk about him on TV again or the Republican-fascists in Congress without mentioning the multiple accusations against him.   They should make that what the Republicans and the media did for White Water and Benghazi and everything else combined for Hillary Clinton.   Hell, she even got blamed for being the wife Bill cheated on, right up through and after the 2016 election.   It's a crime for a Democrat to be the victim according to them while Republican-fascists get a free pass on being the criminals.

By the way, being told by a former professional scribbler for a recording industry ad-flyer, city boy, blog rat that I've got no "work ethic" is somewhat amusing.   I'd just got done stacking a cord of fire wood when I opened up the ol' laptop and read that.   Put up my writing production against his and Duncan's put together and one of my short posts is more than they write in a month. 

Answer To Simps By Something Like Popular Request

Not a single word in the above about movies, TV and rock music being responsible for all the ills of contemporary society? Man, Sparky -- you're slipping. Seriously -- you used to have a work ethic.  Simps

WHEN I FIRST started doing this, writing things and posting them, first on comment threads then on my own blogs, I was often surprised at things that got a strong negative reaction.  Not so much the big controversial issues on which I knew I was not hewing to secular-lefty convention but the merely ephemeral and things not central to an effective liberal or lefty agenda.  One of those was the night I innocently observed that the worst thing about America's experiment with prohibition was that it didn't work.  That it didn't produce a sober society and nation.  And that's all I said, at first.  It got an immediate and impassioned reaction on what was then one of the major lefty blogs. A blog which had reached its high point around the 2004 election and had already started on its long and continuing decline.  It featuring a link for "Drinking Liberally" on the side panel perhaps had a bit to do with that decline.  One guy who I knew was a professional journalist angrily said that I'd deprive working men of being able to unwind with some drinks after a hard day at work.  To which I said if they didn't drink they could probably be in better shape to organize to make their work less arduous and more satisfying. As the brawl developed, I listed the glaringly obvious benefits of having a society or even a country where no one drank alcohol.

No alcoholism, no accident caused car and other accidents, no alcohol related violence up to and including murders, no drunks rolled and robbed sometimes killed, no alcoholics having to resort to prostituting themselves (no pimps using alcohol to gull young idiots into it), no women or children gotten drunk and talked into sex they wouldn't have otherwise,  none of the large number of unmentioned diseases that even moderate alcohol consumption causes and exacerbates,* no drunken husbands beating their wives while drunk, no drunken parents neglecting or abusing children, no children getting started on addiction in their early teens or earlier, etc.   

Other than food and housing assistance and medical care and perhaps, arguably, the chance at an education, I doubt there is a single social or governmental program ever dreamed up by a social worker or lefty scribbler that would produce as much good in the lives of the community and the nation than would have come with an actual abolition of the consumption of alcohol, if that had proven to be possible.  When people wonder why those who adopted the prohibition amendment to the Constitution could have done it, they could certainly see many if not all of those benefits, women who were regularly beaten and abused and raped and neglected by drunken men, who saw their children being abused and neglected due to alcohol could see those possibilities, those weren't things to be shunned and despised.  Unfortunately, due to the corruption of those who would have had to enforce it, the organized crime who immediately took advantage of the national appetite for alcohol and the pop culture which romanticized and made fashionable drinking and getting drunk, those good, even wise and well meaning intentions were quickly turned into a crime wave.  That wasn't the fault of those who wanted to end the nightmarish reality of life in pre-prohibition times, especially as electronic media and the newly mass media popularized drinking and getting sloshed.  It was the fault of those who profited from subverting their intentions.   You would think the ease with which the ease with which those things enslave People, causing them to destroy their lives and the lives of others would make those exactly the opposite of what an American style liberal or a real lefty dedicated to making lives longer and better would favor.

I have noted here before how bizarre it was for the secular-play-left to champion alcohol use and, later, drug use, things that are guaranteed to enslave a large percentage of those who used them far worse than wage slavery could - the part alcohol played in that kind of voluntary, duped and induced enslavement doesn't seem to figure at all in the huge amount of lefty lore I ever saw or read.  I think the opposite is true as I found out that night and subsequently.  No amount of reasoning could cut through that pile of bullshit or maybe the rip-roarin', bar room atheists who were always ready for a fight (a virtual fight, that is, not one that risked a black eye among that genteel college-credentialed crowd) were too afraid of being shunned out of the clique that sits on the high school stairs.  One of the things I learned from frequenting the lefty blogs of the 20OO's and beyond, reading the quick and unfiltered thinking or what counts as thinking among them,  is just what a bunch of soft-handed, scaredy cat cowards and slaves to conventional thinking they are.   I wrote here once how I came to understand how, for example, those legendary and great heroes of such a left, The Weavers, could present a song glorifying those involved in illegal liquor production as some kind of good, only once I looked more deeply into the actual history of them and their predecessors, The Almanac Singers, they always had feet of clay.   

And, as I mentioned, what was true of the place of alcohol in such pop-secular-play-lefty bullshit was as true about drugs.  What drinking and drug use ever had being mistaken for a legitimate issue for a genuine American style liberalism or its actually daffy and impractical and often deranged wing of secular-leftism has been of enormous use in coming to understand how the American left got sidetracked and distracted and deeply damaged into destroying their effectiveness.  

The real lesson of prohibition was that whatever sweeping attempt at changing such a deeply entrenched habit which carries its own falsely-positive reinforcement on a personal level is extremely hard.  Making that habit into some kind of stupidly adopted cause celebre of any liberalism or genuine leftism is not only not helpful, it's guaranteed to make things worse.

At the very least, the left could admit that alcohol and drugs are not only bad for People, they are intrinsic to their enslavement, disempowerment and misery here as they have been in in Czarist, Communist and now Putin-fascist Russia.  And every Supreme Court, ACLU promoted permitted liquor ad on TV, every product placement in movies (don't get me started on Nick and Nora) and on TV, every song that promotes alcohol use contributes to that as much as a methyl-tainted bootlegger or 1920s gangster did.  Think of that the next time you hear ol' Pete and Ronnie and the gang beltin' out  Darlin' Corey.  

------------------------

I could mention things like prostitution and other sex industries, the promotion of irresponsible sex, especially at very young ages as Hollywood, TV and pop music has done, reckless driving, the "anti-political-correctness" fad that began with the promotion of what I called fascist chic during the late 1970s and into the Reagan years - what Bill Maher, among the least funny comedians of all times still lives off of as he tries to catch the same cresting wave as the more overt Republican-fascists do.  In my attempt over the past seventeen years to find out why "the left" has failed so abysmally in the United States, in Britain and Canada I have found that the actual left that can be depended on to even pursue things that might work is much smaller than I had thought.  The play-lefts here and elsewhere are actually far bigger and far less interested in actually doing something that will work to produce real and lasting change.  And, as I have been railing about for quite a long time, we are up against the anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic features intentionally embedded into the body of the Constitution by the friggin' founders and those baked into the Bill of Rights, likely by sheer stupidity by the First Congress through their inferior 18th century poetics than intention.  The corrupt Supreme Court more than they did, though, used their terse wording and tacit explicitness to make those much worse.  That's another thing you're never supposed to mention as an American liberal or lefty, the actual corruption of that document, including the idolized First Amendment.  I would note that the history of the distortion of the much better written 14th Amendment by the Supreme Court, which is not only continuing today but is reaching new depths of intentional dishonesty and evil brings into focus some of the other prohibited truth telling among the self-declared free-speech-press absolutists.  

I have to say it's my experience that I've been told I can't say those things by civil libertarians even more often than I was ever told I couldn't advocate LGBTQ+ equality, even back before Stonewall.  I think the prohibition on telling the plain truth about such things, supported by enormous confirming evidence is at least as strong on the play-left as it is in the commercial media or even on much of the less drunken, less violent right.  

* In my looking into the consequences of alcohol use, I'm convinced that the health and other damage caused by "moderate" alcohol use is probably even a worse public health issue than that caused by the minority who become alcoholics.  Yet I have never, once, heard any discussion of that in the media or among my fellow lefties and American liberals.  It's as bad as the decades of cover-up and silence of the health consequences of tobacco use.