I genuinely forgot what day of the week it is so I have not got a radio play to post. I'll try to post one tomorrow. 

 Did one of the insurrectionists really kill himself by tazing himself in the pills while he was trying to steal a portrait thus causing him to have a heart attack?   I wasn't able to confirm it, though I did look up to see the person they're saying it about, at his age and in his shape he should have stayed home. He went to DC for violence.  Really what were these idiots expecting?  That it would be like in  a Clint Eastwood movie where they get up when they get shot or something and appear in another movie a few months from now?

I'm sorry, they asked for what they got, no one forced them to attack what is supposed to be one of the most protected buildings in the country.   They got what they came for.   I'd have advised them not to have done it, blame the ones who advised them to, Trump, Lil' Trumpster, Giuliani, Mo Brooks, Josh Hawley.  If their loved ones want someone to blame for their deaths, that's where the blame should start.

For The Civil Liberties Industry We Are Never To Learn Anything From The Most Terrible Things In Our History, "Never Again" For Them Really Means "Always Again"

This week a number of people have repeated the famous quote from Benjamin Franklin, probably the wisest of the prominent "Founders" when asked what kind of government the aristocrats meeting in secret had forged, "A republic, if you can keep it."  But I think the most important quote from him right now is the one about experience keeping a costly school but a fool will learn in no other.  It's notable that not only do so many not learn from even the hardest experience, many of those in the elite-university credentialed class insist that we are never supposed to learn from the worst experiences in our recent and, indeed, all of human history.  And that if we were to learn the lessons of the lynch law period, Jim Crow, even the Shoah, we are to pretend that nothing is to be done to prevent those who did that from being able to do it again.

If you think that's a wild exaggeration, I'd suggest you get a load of the worrying hand wringing of the lawyer-liars such as  Dershowitz who, on his YouTube channel has said Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are a greater danger to American freedom than Donald Trump.  I was curious to see what Trump's celebrity lawyer not named Rudy is saying in the aftermath of the Nazi slogan wearing Trumpzis attack on the Capitol and he literally is saying that.  

No doubt Harvard Law is proud of him.  

Since the dersh shares Trump's addiction to attention I won't give you a link, you can go look at it for yourself, it is truly one of the most disgustingly irresponsible things that I've ever seen from that tribe of grotesquely irresponsible lawyers, the "civil liberties" inustry. 

In the week when Republican-fascist including explicitly neo-Nazi insurrectionists attacked the United States Capitol and numerous state governments with the encouragement of the president* of the United States, Senators, members of the House, their cause supported by a majority of the Republican-fascist members of the House of Representatives it is a good time to point out that the "civil libertarian" position of Harvard end Ivy educated legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz, entities mistaken as liberal such as the ACLU is that Nazis, fascists, their indigenous American forms in organized white supremacy are always to be given the chance to promote themselves into power from which they can ONCE AGAIN put their programs and platforms in effect.  It is the "civil libertarian" position that because of the wording of the First Amendment that they are always to be given another chance to put their oppressive and discriminatory and murderous programs into effect. 

The ACLU-Alan Dershowitz type  position isn't "Never Again" it's ALWAYS AGAIN.  

It is one of the greatest instances of mass delusion and superstition that there is something good, something ethical, something moral and right in refusing to learn from the hardest lessons of history, the history of slavery-Jim Crow, lynch law, discrimination on the basis of race, of nationality, of other long standing and terrible forms of discrimination WHICH HAVE EXISTED NOT ONLY UNDER THE CONSTITUTION AS WRITTEN BY THE FOUNDERS BUT WAS ENABLED BY IT that we are never to act as if we didn't find out that all of those oppressive evils are not only possible but are deeply ingrained habits of thought and expectation of privilege by dangerous percentages of the American People and that to allow them free expression is to enable them to repeat that history.  

I am quite sure that Dershowtiz and the largely white, often children of wealth or at least middle-class, white-collar comfort believe they, personally and in their families and associates have little to worry about from America's indigenous forms of violent, oppressive hatred.  Not even the "Six Million Isn't Enough" wearing thugs have them worried enough to consider what their position boils down to.  I would put almost all of the members of the Supreme Court in that group of those comfortably confident in their safety.   Black People, Latinos, Asians, especially those without money certainly are before them on the list of those who are at danger from these people.  I'm sure that has more than a little to do with their equanimity, nay, their insouciant denial of real danger from the free speech of the KKK, QAnon, various other organized, violent Trumpsters and militias, yes, even overt neo-Nazis and fascists.  In that alone they expose themselves as dangerously stupid.  They are too stupid to have the influence they do, they should always have to answer for their policy of always allowing those groups which have a proven ability to get real power to get it once again.  

Benjamin Franklin is also frequently quoted as sayingthat a government of the wisest would be a very foolish thing.  If he really said that, I think he meant people like Dershowitz. 

I haven't been this shocked since my last breath.

I just read that celebrity ambulance chaser (killing husbands, a specialty) Alan Derswhoreitz is offering to defend Trump when he's impeached again.  

Alan, shouldn't you be "tucking your shirt in" with Borat's daughter? 

If I never come across what that attention seeking asshole says for the rest of his life it will be fine with me. 

SEDITION! - Randy Rainbow Is A National Treasure

 

Impeach Him Again, Bar Trump From Poitics, At 12:00:01 PM On January 20th, Arrest Him

A lot of people are understandably upset that the House calendar still, as I checked right before I typed this doesn't show the House of Representatives in session again until the 21st, we want them to vote impeachment right now and we need them to right now.  But if there's one thing anyone with the maturity of a mature 16 year old should have learned by now,  Nancy Pelosi is a master of the possible, a strategist of realism, a tactician of the doable, the person who no one should ever figure they can second-guess from a distance.   I think she will recall the House as soon as she knows that a. it will do what is needed, b. that her plans will be the least useful to the fascists she has held at bay for her entire time as Democratic leader in the House, having re-won it twice, something that is enormously impressive if not unprecedented in the modern period.  

What she, her leadership team, the Democratic caucus does is certainly based in what is possible, what is doable and what will be most advantageous to democracy and least useful to the Republican-fascists and the Trump crime family.  

Any choice that may have been entertained that it might be best to just let the Trump regime fade into the past was removed from the realm of the possible by his inciting an insurrection on the government of the United States while holding the presidency.   If he is not held responsible, whichever entity with the power to hold him responsible which shirks that, whether the Congress, the incoming administration, the once-again independent from politics DoJ or the Supreme Court will have transformed the Trump insurrection into the Julius Cesar Republic destroying moment QAnon and the Proud Boys proclaimed it to be.  

 If Trump is not held criminally responsible for what he has done American Democracy is already dead, the exercise of the past two months merely the death rattle of it.  That is especially true if the Supreme Court holds he can pardon his way out of answering for his crimes.   Imagine Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz knowing they're safe to pardon their way out of their criminal administrations, or, frankly, any likely Republican-fascist of the future. 

I Have Never Meant This More Than I Do Now

Note:  If the Supreme Court or the Department of Justice holds that the Constitution gives the President the power to pardon his family nepotistically empowered by him through his position as president, his criminal associates in office and who put him in office and, indeed that it grants him the power to pardon himself for crimes he committed, they are saying that the Constitution is too dangerously stupid for us to continue to have it govern the United States.  That we have to wonder if they will say that it does contain that power means, at the very least, that it is dangerously badly written, proving they are just black-robed lawyer-liars of the Rudy Giuliani type, looking for privileges for the worst of the worst as long as those worst are ones they want to align themselves with.

 

The Roberts Supreme Court, its members, and I mean the Democratic appointees as well as the Republican-fascist ones, should know that their so-called judgements in response to the Trump crime spree, the crimes of the Trump mob, the family, the appointees, the lackeys, the billionaire and multi-millionaire funders of Nazism American Style* perhaps most of all the media that is the life blood of the monster will be held responsible for its fatal effect on egalitarian democracy or even the hardly equal democracy that we have now. The court should know that its actions in permitting the guilty to get away with everything up to and including murder will be noticed and will be called what it is, their enabling of the worst.

Republicans descent into being a fascist party, its descent into Trumpism was greatly accelerated by rulings made against the BI-PARTISAN! campaign finance reform with the revelation of the crimes of Nixon et al. It was in the name of "free speech" that the non-democratically selected branch of the government not only continued but accelerated the attack of the billionaires and millionaires on egalitarian democracy. Being clever, elite lawyers and law scribblers they used that most overused of idols of 1960s era "free speech" and, to a lesser extent "free press" weaponizing those idolized and superficially thought about items in the First Amendment to allow the corporate media,its owners, its advertisers to lie us into a series of ever worsening Republican administrations, ever weaker Democrats who didn't dare do anything much that was audaciously egalitarian or democratic, ever worsening Congresses, especially the handing of the Senate to multi-millionaire hobbyists and gangsters through that most effective weapon against egalitarian democracy suckering an effective majority of voters. The early use of computers by Republicans made their lie campaigns more effective through their exploitation of voter districts, gerrymandering and targeted propaganda. Suckering, once an art of advertisers and other hucksters was turned into something like a science. You can't get an accurate view of what the Supreme Court did, perhaps naively by the liberals of the Warren Court but with ever deadlier deliberateness in the Berger, Rehnquist and Roberts courts without taking the full context of how those liberties have been practiced.

It all started with permissions that the Supreme Court either found within the anti-democratic parts of the Constitution, parts which are never admitted were put there by the ancestors of today's Republican-fascists for the purpose of protecting slavery and accepted by the Northern business interests that profited mightily from the economics of slavery.  Those things in the only sometimes accurately named Bill or Rights are not not necessarily held to be self-evidently absolute when the so-called "Justices" wish to find exceptions to them are absolutized when they like the results of that assertion and held to not be so absolute, especially when that is to the disadvantage of those who might use them to assert their equality or when there are financial interests in the non-literal reading of them.   

 

As I have controversially asserted almost from the first time I posted a piece online,  American democracy is being killed by the legal permission given to the mass media to lie with impunity, a very popular permission made popular even with people who are the victims of those lies because it is very much in the interest of the media corporations and its employees to have carte blanch to tell any lie that is to their advantage or to their liking or, as has been so effective in Republican-fascist success, it appeals to the bigotry, the envy, the fear and the cowardice of something they can cobble together into an effective margin of victory by the worst of the worst more than a hundred fifty of which sit in the Congress of the United States and are unchanged by the insurrection mounted by Donald Trump on the Congress.  Matt Gaetz is emblematic of them but so is the majority of the Republican caucus of both houses.

 

Until we make it unambiguously a part of our Constitution and our law that lies have no rights, that liars are liable for the telling of lies, that media companies that carry lies deserve the death penalty, that judges and "justices" that enable facism have earned their expulsion from positions of judgement and that they will be answerable, you can just start ticking off the days when the successors of Trump will succeed in destroying this democracy.  If they do, my prayer is that my region will leave the United States that wish to continue to play chicken with fascism and that our new Constitution will be written by those who understand how it was the sloppily written Bill of Rights and the terrible slave-empowering rigged system of the Electoral College and the anti-democratically constituted Senate that led America to outright fascism from the real era of democracy which began, not in the 1776 that the Trump fascists were playing at reenacting, but the mid-1960s as the post-WWII Congress tried to overcome the Constitution with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, Medicare and Medicaid, Title 9, etc. The real era of American Democracy which has been lost due to the Supreme Court privileging lies and the billionaire fascists that would use those privileges to stop that progress toward Democracy in its tracks. 

Until the things that were used stupidly by liberals or with deliberate intention by Republicans to destroy egalitarian democracy are removed from or changed within the United States Constitution this will happen again and more quickly.  The fascists learn a lot faster than ACLU types do.  Those people never learn anything from witnessing what they have caused.

* We should stop lying about Ameircan history.  The genocide against the Native People of North America, slavery, other forms of homicidal racism and bigotry practiced by The Founders and, in fact, the white population of the United States is only honestly considered to be the same thing as Nazism. It is certain that among the genocides that inspired the Nazis was the genocide against the inhabitants of North America, especially as practiced in the United States.   That Nazi slogans were seen on the chests of Trump's insurrectionists is certainly proof that it is the same thing.

The Shoe Is About To Be On The Other Foot

 I've been trying to cheer myself up thinking of all of the requests for information that Sheldon Whitehouse is going to be submitting to the Department of Justice, what Lindsay Graham must be worrying will turn up, maybe Grassley too  I'd love to see that old piece of crap know his name will forever be linked to Trumpism.  I'd love to have more of the stuff that they buried about Kavanaugh be known to the Democrats on the Judiciary Committees.  

I'm hoping Biden will have an early resignation or two from the Supreme Court to fill.  

These days you take what opportunities for good cheer you can come up with.  Hope I'm not jinxing things.

An Egalitarian Democracy Left Unprotected From Its Enemies Is An Egalitarian Democracy Which Will Be Killed

Ted Cruz of Texas, Missouri’s Josh Hawley, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Roger Marshall of Kansas, John Kennedy of Louisiana and new Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama  should be more than merely censured for their actions yesterday, Josh Hawley should be expelled from the Senate and charged with fomenting insurrection against the government of the United States, convicted and imprisoned for the full term that law allows because as a sworn, sitting United States Senator his sedition is even worse than the Republican-fascist insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and the Congress and, so, the United States which is bad enough that all of those who are convicted should also serve long sentences which will stand as a warning to their fellow future fascists.   Frankly, I think it's unwise to allow any of those who tried to ratfuck things for Trump to remain in office, they should be permanently banned from federal office for the rest of their lives.

But this was something which was inevitable when in 1964 the Supreme Court at the urging of the ACLU, the journalism industry, and meatheaded libertarians mistaking themselves as liberals started the empowering of fascists in the United States by allowing the media to lie with impunity.  It struck me yesterday, as it has struck me all along, that the media, the very recepients and champions of the free-speech-press absolutism that permits FOX and News Max, Sinclair, and other and lesser venues of hate-lie media to lie us into insurrections such as this most bold one on the US Capitol and, indeed has lied us into Trump.   

There is an insane disconnect between them recognizing that Trumpism, Republican-fascism stands on a plinth constructed of lies and their insistence that because the members of the First Congress - not a Congress elected by anything like a democratic majority of the people of the Country - opted for ambiguous 18th century epigrammatic poetry we must allow the fascists, the Nazis the Trumpzis and the Republican-fascists freedom to destroy democracy, giving them the chance to do that over and over and over again in perpetuity, EVEN NOW WHEN WE KNOW THAT IF THE HOUSE HAD A MAJORITY OF REPUBLICANS THEY WOULD HAVE SUCCEEDED IN INSTALLING TRUMP AS VIRTUAL DICTATOR OF THE COUNTRY.  

That is how you know free-speech-press absolutism was an upper-class affectation of white people who had every faith that they would never be seriously the victims of the actions of those who practiced and believed hate speech and lies. The white liberals who invented the concept, those in the media, especially but also in the legal profession, had nothing to lose and little skin in the game whereas People of Color, LGBTQ people, members of other minority groups who throughout the history of these United States under the Constitution and laws of the United States certainly knew that THEY could very easily be the people attacked, oppressed and murdered by hate speech and lies told by and believed by fascists and the American Nazis, the KKK, skinheads, etc. which the ACLU supporting liberals would piously pose and bleat must always be permitted to spout their ideas in the free forum of ideas from which people may choose whichever ones seemed most congenial to them.  Lies as well as truths, or, heavens forfend, someone, somewhere may be able to dissuade a Stalinist or Maoist from promoting their own brand of gangster governance, ignoring the fact that those people were primarily white-collar hobbyists who weren't the ones who would use their "Second Amendment rights" (also championed by the ACLU) to murder and attack and intimidate and foment insurrections.

There was some suggestion yesterday that the white fascist who had his picture snapped with his feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk looked a lot like one of the Bundy gangsters who got away with insurrection against a federal facility in Washington State, and for all I know, it might be the exact same criminal.  This was hardly the first act of insurrection from this bunch, there have been others and it won't be the last.  I have every belief that FOX and Sinclair and News Max, Twitter, Facebook, etc. will bring together a bunch of yahoos with the sponsoring of billionaires and millionaires, exactly what they did to destroy Barack Obama's presidency, turning him into less than a 3/5th president.  I wouldn't be surprised if Orly Taitz didn't reappear on them lying about Kamala Harris as the skank did about Obama.  

But make no mistake, all of this has been greatly aided by the ability of the mass media to lie and to carry lies with impunity.  Does anyone believe that if a Teaparty II were mounted that CNN, NPR, PBS wouldn't dutifully cover them giving their lies credibility with the gullible?  It would happen just as it did in 2009 and 2010.  It would happen just as they all carried every lie spouted about Hillary Clinton, what got us Trump to start with.  

This is going to happen until those idiotic rulings by the Supreme Court, starting with the Sullivan Decision and everyone up to and beyond Buckley v Valeo, Citizens United, etc. are overturned and lies are definitively listed as not having the right to be told in the mass media.  Unless those lied about could sue for punitive damages that would discourage the media to lie and carry lies, mass media being licensed with requirements that they not lie or allow themselves to be used to carry lies, this is going to happen over and over again until the Republican-fascists or whatever fascists arise after them will destroy egalitarian democracy.  

A democracy is only as secure the extent to which a. The People know the truth and b. The People have a sufficient level of good will to put their own optional desires behind the general welfare of all people and c. the law holds that both of those are superior and swamp the desire of others to lie and to spread hate and bigotry.  Ours is not a system that protects egalitarian democracy from its opponents OUR BILL OF RIGHTS STUPIDLY ENABLES THE OPPONENTS OF EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY SO THEY CAN DESTROY EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY AND A DECENT LIFE FOR ALL OF US.  

This isn't the end of this, this is just a high water mark for the sewage that Republican-fascist media has undammed to poison the United States.  Until we hold the truth to be self evident that We The People have the right to protect egalitarian democracy against its enemies and that those enemies do not have an equal right to deny equal rights to others, this is just a prelude to what's to come.

I Live On The Mental Image Of The Trumps Being Perp-Walked Preferably In Orange With Leg Irons

I read a piece that says that if Trump won't leave the White House, Biden will work from Blaine House.  I don't know if it's true or not but I certainly hope Biden and his administration consider the possibility that Trump and his gang of criminals allowed someone to bug the White House.   I wouldn't work from there on anything they didn't want known, though if they used the possibility to confuse our enemies, that might work.

I'd advise Joe Biden to take a lesson from Pope Francis when he opted to live modestly in an apartment and avoid working in that nest of intrigues, the Vatican. I'd find a bunch of offices somewhere which probably no one ever noticed before and work from there as much as possible.  I'd certainly have as many expert agencies go all over the White House and other places to find out if they've been bugged and I might not even trust it then.   A little paranoia isn't a mental illness, it's wise under the circumstances. 

If Trump wont' leave the White House, good, the easier to serve him with papers.  I'm hoping to see him perp-walked out in the traditional way of handling his type. 

"Jesus said you shouldn't use vain repitions" - An Objection

IN looking up the translation of Matthew 6:7 where the variations on "vain repetitions" comes from, it would seem that that particular word choice might have started with the King James version.

But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

Other translation traditions talk about heaping up lots of babble or vain words as if you stood a better chance of getting pagan gods' attention by doing that.  

That's not what I advocated, to start with, what I advocated was thinking about the meanings of the word as a meditation on their meaning and in context.  Using beads to measure the duration of focus on the different parts of the prayer is just to keep those ideas in mind for a time instead of just reciting the words.  St. Teresa of Avila talked about the futility of merely saying the words by rote, not thinking about the meaning of it - the way some of the more insipid mindfulness meditations focus on meaningless sounds or feelings or images to deaden the mind instead of engaging it.  If you want to do that it's less of an abuse of the Scripture to get yourself a white noise recording or try one of those weird binaural things they post on YouTube.  Though Pauline Oliveros' "deep listening" recordings are more congenial and more interesting as to sound.  I still wouldn't find it had much to do with what I'm talking about.  If it's relaxation you want, watch some ASMR vidoes of people getting a massage or their heads whacked around by an Indian barber.

I'm not really interested in that kind of meditation as mind numbing. To tell you the truth, when I tried "centering prayer" as in The Cloud of Unknowing I didn't go for it much.  Nor do I find the kind of Orthodox centering prayer where you constantly declare yourself a sinner (as if God didn't know that) and beg God for forgiveness over and over again, for hours and days and years and lifetimes to be particularly healthy or founded in the instructions of Jesus when he was asked how to pray.  I think it's got more to do with an obsessive fear of sex than it does anything useful. It's certainly not anything I've found in scripture. By their fruits you will know them, Jesus said, I would trust someone who fed the hungry, clothed the naked, took care of the sick, visited those in prison more than I would someone who spent their life bewailing their sinfulness when they never risked much in life to do good things for our fellow creatures.

The idea of praying isn't for us to try to change something about God, it's to change us, how we think and how we act.  We can ask for things, "Give us this day our daily bread," "Forgive us out debts (or trespasses) "don't let us fall into temptation but deliver us from evil."   I'd even say the beginning of the prayer which is more properly considered worship, "Our Creator who is in heaven, hallowed be your name" is for our information not God's.  "Your Kingdom come, your will be done," is a request as much as "give us this day our daily bread."  Who wouldn't rather be ruled by the justice of God than the best human devised system of government that, even in the best of times, relies on human frailty and propensity to evil or just mere ignorance.  

I, actually, don't prefer any of the traditional or inclusive language suggestions for getting around the gendering of God, "Creator" which is close to what I like sounds too remote from the idea of God as a loving parent, "Maker" is closer in terms of familiarity, it seems to me.  "Father" works if you keep in mind that God isn't a human male and that that choice of words said to the people Jesus first gave the prayer to meant to evoke the kind of relationship they would expect to have of their father, tied up in obligations of conduct and aspirations to goodness, on the part of humans and the hope of if not obligation to be provided for.  "Mother" might be closer for some modern people,especially those of my age group whose depression-WWII experiencing fathers may have been too remote and the number of homes in which the mother was the sole parent. But Jesus didn't give our age cohort in our time the prayer, he gave it to 1st century people whose mothers were not anything like enabled, empowered or endowed with authority and the ability to provide for a family.  And the whole thing is filled with metaphors, "Kingdom" is a human invention as certainly as bread is. Debts are a human invention, too.  Those certainly stand in for a more general category, the reason I don't have any problem with using the traditional Catholic translation of "forgive us our trespasses," which I grew up with and is a more general category of things for which obligations are taken on, obligations we may not be capable of fulfilling and for which we might need forgiveness as well as forgiving. 

As to the hate mail,  No, I'm not going to feel embarrassed or be inhibited from talking about this, I'm done feeling embarrassed by the enforced inhibition that keeps liberals or lefties or college credentialed people from talking about these things explicitly.  This is the kind of thought crime I'm announced as intending to commit.  

Update:  Geesh, when I think "Matthew" and type "James"  I think it's time to take another antihistamine and go back to bed.  I've had a really hard time shaking whatever it was I had last month, it lingers, ebbs and, unfortunately, doesn't much flow.  Blocked ears (the thing I hate the most) cough, sore throat, fatigue.  I'm hoping to get done with it by New Years II (2021) when Biden becomes president.  This coda to 2020 has been as bad as any of the actual year.  

 

Update 2: You know, ALL of the scripture is talking about things beyond human experience, talking about, hinting at things that are outside of human experience and you can only make that communication in terms human beings can deal with.  The discrepancy between the necessarily limited and inadequate terms used and what is being talked about isn't any great shock. The exact relationship between things talked about by the physical sciences and the mathematics which is the language through which those things are comprehended is no more understood and the things that the real sciences deal with are a lot simpler than the things the Scripture talks about.  To think that the words have some absolute status is to willfully misunderstand that state of affairs.  I think of Isaiah 55: 8-11:

 “My thoughts,” says the Lord, “are not like yours,
    and my ways are different from yours.
As high as the heavens are above the earth,
    so high are my ways and thoughts above yours.
“My word is like the snow and the rain
    that come down from the sky to water the earth.
They make the crops grow
    and provide seed for planting and food to eat.
So also will be the word that I speak—
    it will not fail to do what I plan for it;
    it will do everything I send it to do.

The Bible is written by people in language people can understand, it has no choice but to be metaphorical when it addresses things past human experience. And metaphors can be used to bunch ideas together based on general characteristics.  Debts are like other trespasses, fathers are like other caregivers, God is our maker just as our parents are our begetters and, for better or worse, caregivers and influences.  No, who's afraid of metaphors are just not thinking hard about what human language inevitably is.  It's all metaphors, right down to the bottom. 

The Prayer And A Way To Pray It

A while ago I mentioned meditating on the Lord's Prayer, the "Our Father" taking it phrase by phrase, sometimes by individual words, other times sentence by sentence and sentences in groups.   My basic method is to use it with beads, twenty-five on the loop of them I'm using and repeating the words, thinking about their meaning in those groupings one at a time, coordinating with my breaths. I do it while lying down with my knees bent and my feet flat on the floor to save my back.  I don't see any advantage to meditating in an uncomfortable position in which you're going to spend more time thinking about your discomfort than on what you're supposed to be concentrating on.

There have been countless commentaries on the Lord's Prayer, short passages to entire books by eminent scholars, great thinkers and saints, high and brainy and lowly and simple - some of the best I've seen are by the simple saints.  It's  a temptation to go over one after another of those,  such as the one St. Teresa of Avila included in The Way of Perfection or John Dominic Crossan's fairly recent book on the topic or, well, I'd guess there are thousands to choose from.  

For a beginner like me I don't think that's an especially productive way to go because, as you can see from looking at different ones, different people find different, though generally related things about the petitions and praise, some not so related.  I read one of the evangelical critics of Crossan leveling the old accusation against his egalitarian economic interpretation of the prayer,  that it was "agenda" driven, as if a conservative-evangelical one which didn't talk about egalitarian economic-justice would be without the opposite agenda.   I make that distinction of "conservative evangelical" because there are actually liberal evangelicals, not that you'd know that by the use of the word.  Some of whom I suspect share in Crossan's general  view of the prayer.  

It's my experience that for real depth of thought, there's nothing like having to come up with an idea on ones own, knowing that anything you think of, almost certainly someone else has thought before. 

There are certainly the obvious issues such as the gendering of God, the context I mentioned of a first century person who would have been the recipent of Jesus' advice having a far different view of what a "father" was, the idea that I was surprised to see St. T. noticed too, the idea of God being "in heaven".   I thought it was a rather strange thing to think of God being contained in something larger than God - though I quickly thought that a house wasn't greater than the persons living in it, and that the resident might also be the builder of it.  

One particular problem is the translation "and lead us not into temptation" which implies God is a tempter to evil.  Pope Francis a few years back said he thought that was a bad translation, I use the alternative "let us not fall into . . . "which is close to the literal translation of the original in some scholars' opinions.   

I have found that for me the phrase "your will be done" was comfortingly passive, a passive act of submission until I thought that seemed inadequate because if God's will being done comes after "Your Kingdom come (passing over the implications of "Kingdom" what would that be but people agreeing to do God's will, forgiving our debts (or trespasses) and being delivered fromevil.  

I've also started keeping a list of various ideas that come to mind under the heading of the various phrases, clauses, sentences and, at times, individual words of the prayer.   That isn't meant to be an orderly thing, though I've got it on loose leafs that could be arranged into some order.  

I think in the end it's better to come up with your own readings of the prayer, first, then to question your conclusions, looking for your own agenda and challenging your own conclusions, or testing them.   I did note in what I said a few weeks back that there is no singular first person anywhere in the prayer, the petition and attribution is always "Our" and "Us" and "To Us" and that first person plural isn't limited to a particular group, sect, nation, race, or species.   I think if you start with that observation in mind you're less likely to go seriously wrong.  I do think it's quite easy to go wrong on even such a simple thing,most of that will come with considering God to be excluding some others in "his" proper concerns.  Getting past the gender exclusion in concept and maybe in language is helpful too.   One of the things I read pointed out that Jesus wasn't so much teaching those who asked him how to pray a prayer as a method of praying,an attitude of it, avoiding counterproductive aspects of it.

Random Thoughts Tense As An E String About To Snap

I'm having a hard time keeping up with Trump's criminality, the leaked Georgia Perfect Call will be met by something soon, probably as bad if not worse.

I think he's probably going to take it on the lam just as his term is ending, I read somewhere there's a rumor that the air force base in Scotland has been notified to expect one of the planes Trump has used before will be landing there the day before our second New Years Day that starts at noon, not midnight.  2020 being so bad it's fitting that we get a second start on a new year.  

This years elections have worn me out entirely, the run-off in Georgia has me so nervous that I've started grinding my teeth,  something I don't think I've ever done before.  I won't even speculate on the possibility of a second miracle there for fear of jinxing it.   

I would guess Trump's more likely to go to Saudi Arabia than Putinia.   I wouldn't be surprised if he gets his Trump Moscow deal for services rendered to the Putin mob. Especially if Vlad is given a penthouse, rending the lower stages of it even more lucrative.  I think he'll let Trump keep some crumbs but only if he's useful for laundering money.   

Hate Mail

Better to be a heck of a hick

Than a hack who's a dick.

 

Anyone who liked Girl With A Dragon Tattoo was just another man who hates women and loves really bad writing.  Anyone who writes that kind of stuff wants to do it himself.  The fans of it get off on it.  It's snuff porn.