A Gentleman at a Dinner Party Explained to Me That Secularism is More Just Than Religion

Yeah, I see what your Utopia looks like, chum.  Here's what happens when people practice the vicious and atavistic crime of...growing vegetables.

A family in Sugar Creek, Missouri has been given four days to tear out their entire vegetable garden or face a fine from their municipality.

An Orlando family was threatened with fines as high as $500 per day for their front yard vegetable garden—apparently they’d run afoul of a city ordinance requiring people to plant grass, shrubs, and other “traditional landscaping” options on their properties.

In Miami Shores, FL, a couple was forced to uproot their 17-year-old vegetable garden in the face of city fines of up to $1500 per month.

In Oak Park, MI, a woman was threatened with 90+ days of jail time for her vegetable garden. After she hired a lawyer, the case was temporarily dismissed, but could be renewed at any time.

In Tulsa, OK, city officials actually destroyed a woman’s garden for the “crime” of having non-tree plants taller than 12 inches in her front yard. She was out of work and had been relying on her garden for food while money was tight.

And then there’s Oakland, CA, where you can grow all the fresh vegetables you want… but if you want to sell any of them, be prepared to buy a pricey permit from the city to do so.

Some Random, Insomniac Pungency

My grandfather was born on a reservation.

He was addressed at work as "The Indian", rather than by his Christian name

As he married a Caucasian woman and their son, my father, also married a Caucasian woman, my physical features are Caucasian.  This is aided somewhat by some bloodline dilution back in the early 18th century when a Finnish settler realized that Shawnee women were rather desirable.  While I was taught to hunt and fish and track by my grandfather, have sung the "death song" for my father, and am immune to high cholesterol and the effects of poison ivy, I am a rather typical middle-class white.

This doesn't mean I've surrendered that portion of my identity, though.  While I do not look like the Lone Ranger's buddy, the one he would often send into town in order to get beat up, my world view is not entirely that of a middle-class white.  I intellectually grieve for the historic realities of my inherited culture and am sensitive to how invisible the aboriginal people of the United States have become, especially ironic in these days of heightened racial awareness and the political power that comes with claiming victimhood.

I'm disquieted when a white person corrects me when I use the term "American Indian", as happened the other day.  While it is preferable to refer to an aboriginal person by their tribal name, if it is not known, then A.I. is the accepted nomenclature.  Depending on my mood, I either find it amusing or infuriating when it is "whitesplained" to me that I should be saying, "Native American".  That term was invented to assuage white guilt and is also linguistically inaccurate.  I don't suffer from the former and find the latter to be illogical, which is a far worse trespass.

Imagine what it's like to sit with fellow Christians and listen to them prang on about "diversity" without them ever mentioning any race other than "white" and "black".  [Although I was amused that a rector in my diocese did not know what a "West Indian" is, so it appears that even these limited terms may be of a shallow definition.]  Imagine what it's like to know that fellow Episcopalians don't even realize that there is an entire diocese the size of New England that stretches across four U.S. states that supports a collection of Navajo [and also some Ute, Paiute, and Pima] tribe members who are communicants of the same church. 

Seems odd, doesn't it?  Especially for a church that prides itself on racial relevance.  It's almost as if this racial awareness and sensitivity is some construction of artificial virtue designed to be a tool for self-importance and bragging, best employed at cocktail parties.  Nah, that's not possible, is it?  That doesn't sound like The Episcopal Church of the 21st century.

It's Opening Day!

For the Cleveland Indians, naturally.  As a bonus, they're playing the Red Sox, so I'll be able to watch it on television right here in The Nut Nutmeg State.

There is a little snow in Cleveland [of course there is, it's April], but it was worse on opening day in 1977:

In fact, sometime in the 1990's, a perfect game was called off for snow in the middle of play.  The evil of it.

Update: Clearly, we were a lot tougher in the 1970's, as the game has been postponed.

Just Another Day at the Rectory

While we are having a snowstorm, it is so light that the landscapers stopped by and cleared the walkways around the church with leaf blowers.  The last time they used them we received a semi-literate message from someone in the neighborhood about how unnecessary they were.  Standing by for some pure, Caucasian, know-it-all-ness in 3...2...1....

"A Literary Guide To Our Orwellian Nightmare"

The individual has been voted off this island, Earth. In place of the individual is now the group to which you are assigned based on politics, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, or whatever other way we can possibly divide ourselves into a tribe armed with Internet war paint. Twenty-four-hour mass media has led to an inculcation of groupthink, so the difficulty is merely finding your group and then telling everyone about it so that you can have the pre-assigned political argument. With our technology we have turned outward, looking out into a world that is suddenly at our fingertips and searching for truth, community, and significance through that technology. But it is a fruitless search. All we find is the faceless mob and pre-fabricated answers to questions that solve nothing. We have become alienated from our selves.

The tendency of contemporary, mainstream Protestantism is to promote this anti-individualistic world-view, although I doubt most of the leaders and laity notice or care.  This is why Protestantism is dying, and it may be a deserved death.

And Christian Martyrdom

Washington Post: Obama’s Syria legacy: Horrific genocide

Sunday's Bookshelf

The biography of one of the 20th century's most influential religious thinkers:

The only authorized biography of Merton-a New York Times bestseller and a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize-this book was based on interviews as well as Merton’s unpublished writings. New Afterword by the Author. Index; photographs.

Merton was profiled in The Coracle a few years ago, a post that may be found here. 

Stop Assigning Homework, Please

How Sputnik Created Homework and Hurt American Kids

It's time for kids to start being more physical and aware of things beyond chairs, desks, and computers. In other words, to be incarnational.

Glasgow was One of the Most Violent Cities in Which I've Lived [and I grew up in Cleveland], So I'm Glad the Police are Finally Grappling with Important Crimes

Think before you post or you may receive a visit from us this weekend. Use the internet safely. #thinkbeforeyoupost pic.twitter.com/xNiDMf3jPA

— GreaterGlasgPolice (@GreaterGlasgPol) April 1, 2016

Here was the best response:

.@GreaterGlasgPol or else

T - totalitarian cops will
H - haul you away
I - in
N - Nazi
K - kilts

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) April 1, 2016

Space Archaeological News [Yes, There Are Now Space Archaeologists]

View From Space Hints at a New Viking Site in North America

Jesus Sighting!

On Easter, Arizona fountain takes shape of Jesus

Not Strictly Biblical Archaeological News, but Still Neato

Exclusive Pictures From Inside the Scan of King Tut's Tomb

So Much for the Myth That Surfers are Calm and Terminally Laid-Back

While neither localism nor disputes over beach access are anything new, the Federal Class Action Lawsuit aimed at the group of Palos Verdes Estates locals known to impede access to Lunada Bay is unprecedented. Accusations of assault, vandalism, and police negligence have attracted national media attention, and the issue of restricted access has drawn the ire of the California Coastal Commission. Plus, there’s a gang injunction being brought against a group allegedly composed largely of third-generation millionaires.

For Those Who Enjoy English Poetry, an Essay

Shakespeare’s rotten weeds, Shakespeare’s deep trenches

Friday's Obscure Artist and Song

Jim Steranko

It isn’t uncommon for young people to become bored or unfulfilled with their first career.  After all, it is during that first career that we learn to refine our strengths and reverse, or at least identify, our weaknesses.  Often, during that process, one realizes that the original career has been outgrown and new challenges are desired.

Now, imagine that your first career is that of escape artist.  Yes, just like Houdini or someone.  In addition to that pursuit, you also dabble in magic and fire eating.  Yet, somehow that isn’t enough; the niche you seek is still elusive.  So, you become a musician, a rock and roll guitarist, even befriending early rockers like Bill Haley, and that still doesn't seem to be it.

Then, one day, after experimenting with some free-lance work as an artist for an advertising agency and a third-rate comic book company, you are approached by the publisher of the fastest growing, and increasing popular, “intellectual” comic book company, Marvel.  Suddenly, being an escape artist seems rather bland.

It was as if someone handed Jim Steranko a multi-million dollar toy.  He served as an assistant to some of the leading, and most innovative, comic book artists of the 1960’s, was given a rather minor title on which to work as both artist and writer, and then took comic book art and storytelling to a level that had not been imagined.  Although it may not seem so to those who have never experienced high-minded graphic novels and their manner of re-working and re-imagining classic archetypes and tropes, the moment that comics made a jump into the realm of literature was with the advent of Steranko in the late 1960's.

[Steranko's story may sound familiar to those who read Michael Chabon's novel, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which was on the New York Times' list of bestsellers and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction back in 2001; Steranko was the inspiration for one of the protagonists.  Clearly, I'm not the only one to find his life and art interesting.]

While he started cautiously, he soon began to take elements from the burgeoning synthesis of surrealism and op-art, images familiar to the fans of Peter Max and Andy Warhol, and created something that had never been seen before.  Even to an eleven-year-old member of the Marvel fan club, it was clear that, as innovative as those comics had been, this was something shockingly new.  What was a minor title became a sensation; and its artist the one that was always sought out at the corner pharmacy’s comic book section.

He didn’t stay with one comic title very long, but continued to serve as an artist, writer, and inspiration to all subsequent writers and artists in the milieu.  The reason that he remains in my memory is that he revealed just how accessible art in all of its forms could be; and how an embrace of the new could inform even the most tired of forms.

More of him may be read and, more importantly, seen at this website.

Originally published on November 16, 2012

Welcome to the New Criminal Class

My name is Melanie and in seven days' time I will become a criminal....

And I’m cynical about the real reasons for this law. It’s more about feeding the addiction which politicians and civil servants have for making rules. Controlling us in a thousand trivial ways. Forcing us to register to continue doing what we have always done, peacefully, harmlessly. Governments seem to have reached the state where if anything moves, it must be legislated, exploited, regulated, chipped, and the data stored.

The "Hey, Don't Blame Me" Game has Begun

After all, it wasn’t some Klan newsletter that first brought Trump to our attention: It was Time and Esquire and Spy. The Westboro Baptist Church didn’t give him his own TV show: NBC did. And his boasts and lies weren’t posted on Breitbart, they were published by Random House. He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fundraisers at Karl Rove’s house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo. He owes his celebrity, his money, his arrogance, and his skill at drawing attention to those coastal cultural gatekeepers — presumably mostly liberal — who first elevated him out of general obscurity, making him famous and rewarding him (and, not at all incidentally, themselves) for his idiocies.

If you think that sounds stupid and smug, imagine how it sounds to people out in the rest of the country. Liberals were sure the devil would come slouching out of Alabama or Texas, beating a bible and shouting about sodomy and sin. They didn’t expect him to be a businessman who lives on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. Rick Santorum was a threat, but your run-of-the-mill New York tycoon just couldn’t be, not in the same way — because even if the latter was unlikable, he was known, he was covered, he fell within a spectrum that the morning shows and entertainment press are comfortable with, much more so, anyway, than they are with what the slow learners among liberals still blithely call “rednecks.” When, a few years ago, Trump started going on about Obama’s birth certificate, no one said, “Hey, maybe we don’t want to associate with this guy anymore.” Instead, the Washington Post invited him to be its guest at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Its editors wouldn’t have extended the same backslapping generosity to David Duke or Alex Jones or any of the other rustic zealots with whom Trump is now, unquestionably, on all fours.

Ohio Man! Eats Pizza with a Fork and Frightens New Yorkers

Cleveland-style pizza is so lush in ingredients that the only way to eat it, unless one is brainsick, disordered, moonstuck, gaga, barking mad, or a resident of New York City, is with a fork.  Myself, I eat it with a knife and fork, so feel free to faint on your sofas, you miserable twinkle dips.

Sooner or Later, the Greater Church is Going to Have to Deal with This Reality

I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces....