A Man Who Acts As His Own Editor Has A Blogger For A Client

those who don't even do that comment or tweet.

THIS TURNED OUT TO BE A FLOOD OF IMPIETY on the foremost of Imperial American religious holidays even as it started as an answer to someone who doesn't like my writing.

I am pretty immune to being shamed as to the flaws in my posts. Certainly those I can prove are not flaws but, also, those that are a product of a combination of rapid typing and inadequate editing.  One that I had to go back to see if I was remembering correctly was when I typed "seven plagues" instead of the ten that are narrated in Exodus.  I've got no explanation for that one and it has stood uncorrected for weeks till I sort of remembered typing that as I've been reading another translation of Exodus.  Maybe I should be a little ashamed of that but I can't notice I am feeling it.

I am not a theologian. I am not a writer.  I am certainly not a very good editor.  Being so much offline as I wait to get reconnected, I can say that especially the fact checking I used to try to keep up on has suffered.  I, like most people of my age cohort who grew up fact-checking by ink on paper with its myriad of inconveniences and slowness have gotten rather lazy at the ease with which that can often be done online. It's so easy online that you wonder why as that ease came about its practice has almost disappeared.

Not that it's as important as getting facts right but I have long announced my indifference to standard English spelling and am almost as indifferent to the many and hardly uniform rules of punctuation. I'd guess that my use of commas is often more by ear as a rhythmic device than it is the memory and application of the many rules as to the real, right way to use them. My professional training and a lot of my education was in music, after all.  Sometimes the stray word or comma is a result of an incomplete edit that I don't catch.

As to the modern a-grammatical nonsense that came in with the stupid little book of Strunk and White that is so stupidly and incompetently promoted by college-credentialed idiots who are so ignorant of English grammar as to fall for those two frauds, as much so in the absurdly distilled and insisted on idiocy of those who once skimmed it and imperfectly recalled a few of their stupider rules, after a fashion, or, more likely heard some other mid-brow who skimmed it and pontificated from their memory of it. If I were going to write by rules those would come from something like the much thicker and so less amenable to the TV trained-mind Warriner's English Grammar and Composition, not that piece of shit.  I do have some standards and the first one is that Strunk-White is crap that I won't see cited without pointing that out.

I don't think it was any accident that it was just as TV was really beginning to make Americans really stupid that E. B. White wrote his stupid praise of his Cornell prof's self-published little book and his revision of it was successfully marketed to pretentious mid-brows.  And the lazy teachers who figured teaching a legitimate book on composition and style was too much like work. Though given how much mind-time TV took from their students, it would probably have been hopeless.  That book being picked up by a publisher whose motives were, first and foremost, making money and its widespread promotion  and the rise of the idiot-box making Americans stupid for profit happening at the same time is not a coincidence.  One more or less goes along with the other.  

It also gave rise to the bullshit of such as William Safire, Edwin Newman and other incompetent language cops who could rely on such for-profit corporations as the NYT and the publishers to never fact-check their ignorant and often baseless pontifications on the subject.  Any publication that figured the Nixon-hack William Safire could be trusted to fact-check himself shows that their professional standards weren't really any higher than those of your less-than average blogger.  And these days they aren't even much using copy-editors to check if they're doing anything more important than whether their hacks are following their own "book of style."

I'd meant to forego the temptation to impiously work in the concurrent rise of the American gladiatorial spectacle on its high holy day, perhaps I've said about all I've got to say on that moral atrocity. American football is the proof that America is a Christian nation with generally little use for the Gospel of Jesus. Sports are not compatible with the Golden Rule, the Golden-Rule is all about not having winners and losers and, especially, not trying to be winners. And it isn't about merely mouthing it as a rote saying, it's about doing that.  That is especially true of a sport in which fatal and permanently maiming violence is not incidental and outside the rules but the whole point of the thing.  A  sport invented by the indolent college-attending rich-boys of the late 19th century and which the morality of conventional, institutional Christianity has not much seen it fit to critisize.  Far from it, some of the earliest and most degenerate yet mawkishly pious manifestations of the degeneracy are with the sponsorship of Catholic priests and bishops and other clergies of other denominations. If the game were not bad enough, the cloying, amber-tinted, fuzzy-hallowed commercial-sanctimony of its cinematic and media presentation and publicity should be enough to make a real adult puke. That more don't is probably revelatory of the scarcity of real adulthood in a late-stage imperial culture.

The Christian colleges and universities are as in on it as the most -secular ones, getting money is their motive,  which is an indictment of their Christianity as well as their educational function.  That they would credential people with such a twisted view of an educational institution is proof that they are just handing out degrees to a lot of them.  I think it's entirely legitimate to judge churches' theological validity by its presence in their educational institutions and so many of them are castles built on sand in that regard.   American football is proof of a morally degenerate culture.  It can't be made anything else just as the Roman gladiatorial industry wasn't able to be anything else.  Its presence in the "Republican" period of Rome was a good indication that it would eventually turn into something far worse, which it did in Imperial Rome. It should be no great shock that football rises as America's imperfect democracy falls to Republican-fascism.  The extent to which institutional "Christianity" maintains schools with extensive football programs, Notre Dame, Boston College, etc. myriads of Protestant schools, too, they prove that they have transformed the Gospel of Jesus into something far more like the Roman paganism which was, for Jesus and his followers, what Pharonic Egypt was to Moses and the Children of Israel.  I would guess that easily 4/5ths of the time the words "Christian" "Christianity" are used in the media, even religious media, that it is to that imperial pagan "Christianity" that they are referring.

OK, so I didn't exactly forego it. I was trying to think of the most anti-Superbowl thing I could do today.  Maybe I'll dig out the old Warriner's and do a few exercises from it.  Though, as I recall, even its authors gave in and figure football is part of the American educational experience.

I know from my past criticisms of football that some college-credentialed dolt is going to say, "Sports is good exercise," to which the best answer is for exercising nothing beats intelligently  planned exercises.  Though that might be a novel thought for the seldom to never-exercising, chicken-wing guzzling couch-potatoes who watch them, even jocks know that.  Maybe I'll do my usual morning exercises again, maybe I'll take a long walk away from media.  Perhaps exercising is the most anti-football thing there is, it's the opposite of what the NFL promotes for its viewers to do, sitting there watching commercials and eating junk.