Give me America

Give me America anyday because

I hear America bringing

politics gone mad

into process.

Just give it to me:

America.

Give me America anyday because

I see America clinging

to an old notion

of liberty.

Give me America anyday because

I still feel America flinging

the deadends of malice

into arcs of goodwill.

Give me America anyday because

I know America’s still singing

an old song, just with

a new beat.

You can’t beat

America.

Give me America anyday because

I can sight America winging

its way o’er terrains of pain

and strife.

It’s just life, y’all

to have to put up with

this stuff.

This stuff that’s goin’ down now:

them with their their guns and butter

vs. them with their lgbt muttering—

just give me America, you guys!

Give me America anyday because

I feel America clinging

to hope and justice

and even God

is still with us,

y’all.

King of Soul

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The Ancient Rime of Pandorro and Zuckaberq

Twas many and many millennia ago in a mythos by the sea

that Pandorro opened a magic jar and set the demons free.

For centuries upon centuries the humans attempted to correct

the myriad of maladies that Pandorro’s foolishness did eject.

Every now and then and by ’n by we’d find a way to block ‘em,

but always the little demons would scamper out to unlock ‘em.

By the time the twentieth century rolled onto the world’s time zone

them varmints found copious means to make themselves at home.

Along comes Marco Zuckaburq, some time in the early twenty-first,

flinging myriad platforms for vain fancy faces to they go forth and burst.

With all them billions of faces splattering themselves in cyberspace,

suddenly we had every kind of trolling vulture online in human race.

It all came down on Marco when he got grilled by political critics;

they badgered him  about unleashing all them demon analytics.

It seems every demon came trolling from Pandora’s ancient blunder;

Faceless faces and drooling trolls came ripping cyberworld asunder.

But let us face the facts of freedom, y’all, far-flung in facebook data.

Every deviant spirit’s now unbound to show its Face sooner or lata.

Glass Chimera

The Justice/Righteousness Struggle

Maybe it’s because I studied philosophy in college many years ago. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the deep south in the 1950’s-60’s. Maybe it’s because I was raised Catholic and then, at the age of 27 turned to the “born again” approach to spiritually.

Maybe it’s because I, like Jacob of old, have had to wrestle with God before I could let him into my way of thinking and doing. Maybe it’s because of Moses, or Paul, or Jesus himself that I had this wrestling session yesterday. For whatever reason, I spent yesterday, Sunday, wrestling with God.

Not literally, of course, but mentally, spiritually.

Let me try to explain this.

On Saturday evening, my wife and I shared an evening meal, and several hours,  with a small group of friends whom we have known and loved for a long time, since the early 1980’s. We are, as they say, Christians.

These are people with whom we have, on a regular basis, gathered, prayed, worked, laughed and cried, for most of our adult life. We have all raised our now-adult children together and released them into the great wild world.

My struggle yesterday was precipitated by an ethical dilemma. The problem was working through my mind all day because our host friend had shown us a video link. The half-hour online presentation introduced to us—and to the world, generally— a work of ministry that is being carried out by our hosts’ son-in-law, whose life and struggle is being worked out in his chosen hometown, Ferguson, Missouri.

In the video, Jonathan “JT” Tremaine presents some historical information along with some gospel enlightenment, and he then goes on to explain his vision for justice that is linked to a Christian call to righteousness.

As I ruminated all yesterday (Sunday) on what Jonathan had said, and the images he displayed, I became perplexed while wondering about this thorny question:

Just what the hell is justice anyway?

Is it equality instead of inequality? Is it income redistribution? How does this monumental concept of justice really play out in history, American history?

For many blacks, that idea of “justice” is defined largely by what color of skin a cop sees on the face of some citizen that he is trying to protect, or . . . protect himself against.

And how does justice relate to this “righteousness” thing that we so-called evangelicals like to claim for ourselves?

These are the two primary points—justice and righteousness—that JT raises in his podcast, and in his ministry in Ferguson, Missouri, which he calls “Meet me in Ferguson.”

For many people, especially honkies, neither of these issues is any big deal. Yet that unawareness—that insensitivity— is part of the problem.

The bottom line I’m working toward here is this. Both of these issues—justice and righteousness—are very important issues that we Americans must address if we are going to move forward in our great, historical experiment with democracy.

As the Hebrew prophet of old, Amos, presented a challenge to his people—and to all people throughout history. . .

“Let justice roll down like the waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream!”

This is a message of many prophets of old, and many modern prophets as well, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks . . .

And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

And Dr. Billy Graham.

Say what? Billy Graham? What’s he got to do with social justice?

You probably didn’t know that back in the 1950’s, Billy Graham insisted that the ropes be removed—the ropes separating blacks and whites at his very own gospel crusades. And when racist ushers of that day refused to do it, Billy himself did remove the damned things. So that blacks and whites could, together, participate in the work of bringing in not only righteousness, but also justice.

And we are, y’all, still working on it.

Let Jonathan JT explain. This thing goes way back . . .

  https://www.facebook.com/meetmeinferguson/videos/618272528508148/UzpfSTE3ODQxMTQ5ODg1Njc2NDoxODI4MzQ4NjE3MTk2MzY5/

I’ll finish this struggle session with a song:

Mountaintop

The Second Dumming

(with apology to W.B. Yeats)

Spinning, spinning on internet spires

the demagogues have lost sight of our foundation;

Polls spread apart; the moderates cannot hold;

Seared extremities are loosed upon the land,

The opiate tide is loosed, and everywhere

our old consensus urge gets lost in the noise

The worst gain all attention, while the best

Are mired in mediocrity.

Um, um, some revolution is at hand,

like, like . . . absurdity rules the land.

It’s ridiculous! Immediately as the tweets is tweeted

with some viral bizarrity from lala land,

it occludes our sight: somewhere in the pixels of the dream

a shape with venus body and head of man,

gazing blank and shiftless as The Cloud demands,

is moving its slow members, while all around

retweet droppings splatter from our  looney clowns.

The narco takes the cake; so now we reep

as two centuries of freedom deep

spin downward now to chaos bleep by bleep.

So what rough beast, its hour come at last,

slouches toward America to delete our past?

King of Soul

Derelictic Dialectics

While surfing the web today in the usual way

I stumbled upon a dispute in some political fray;

seems it was a matter of some current politics,

rendered hot and bothered by fringish  dialectics.

The dispute’s gravity has been magnified beyond repair

due to polarizing factions that foment both fair and unfair.

Populists spurt rants irresponsibly in fact-check neglect;

indignant apparatchiks would impose politically correct.

Who’s to say what’s a fact and what is not

in the midst of this politico-cultural polyglot?

Fact-checking technocrats want censoring rules

assuming the populist rabble to be unschooled fools.

If I had to choose between political correctness

and uninformed opinion  that’s incorrect  and reckless,

I’d opt for the unrestrained, the free and eclectic

instead of the censured, the tamed and restrained derelictic.

Some say democracy will end in chaos and confusion

with too many fringies spurting fake news and delusion,

but really, the slide toward our enslavement will commence

with self-appointed fake-checkers who in fact are quite dense.

Because freedom to think, to speak and to act, is the stuff of liberty,

more essential than cubicles of fact-checking drones who decree

that this or that fact is not fact but in fact it is fake

and thereby impose conformity that the people can’t take.

While surfing the web today in the usual way,

oh, let me stumble into some free folk at play,

where the ass and the elephant freely roam

to make fools of themselves ’til the cows come home.

King of Soul

New Robber Barons?

Somewhere back there, way back in time, we humans discovered how to make use of fire.

By ’n by, another great development happened. Somebody somewhere started using wheels to transport stuff.

The centuries, the millennia, of time rolled and rolled on and on, passing the past, penetrating the present and ultimately forming our future.

In 1439, Johann Gutenberg’s printing press changed, forever, the development of human writing and literacy.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the undeveloped Western continents that we now call America.

In 1781, James Watt’s steam engine changed forever the development of industry and technology.

But those advances were only the beginning. They set the stage for further developments.

We Americans got hold of these emerging technologies to convert a 4000-mile-wide continent into a New World. And we did it in a magnitude, and on a quickened time-scale, unprecedented in human history.

In the 1800’s, we Americans found ourselves in the right place at the right time to accomplish the largest expansion of commerce and industry in the history of the world.

As it developed, our Revolution morphed into something far more significant than the merely political implications of our Constitution could indicate.

We grabbed hold of Mr. Watt’s steam engine and proceeded to energize an entire continent. As the great zeitgeist thrust of our westward expansion reached full-steam, pioneers reached dizzying heights of exploration and accomplishment.

But a funny thing happened on our way to unprecedented Progress.

A few very smart guys took charge.  Our great, broad-based 19th-century industrial leap was eventually commandeered by a few very smart, very powerful business leaders.

You’ve probably heard their names: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan.

John D. Rockefeller was the “baron” of Railroads

Andrew Carnegie, baron of Steel

Cornelius Vanderbilt, baron of shipping

J. P. Morgan, finance

~ These men were smart enough to identify strategic developments in the expanding industries of their time period.

~ They then acquired manufacturing and/or distribution facilities that ultimately enabled them to assume control of vast swathes of the emerging industries.

~ They were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, recognize their advantageous positions, and develop those positions into incredible accomplishments.

These tycoons, through their respective working lives, assembled huge industrial assets by which they ultimately consolidated emerging industries into vast swathes of economic power.

Others followed. From the “inventor” category we find these names that you have probably heard:

~ Edison, electricity

~ Bell, telephone

~ Ford, automobile assembly line

By ’n by, as 20th-century civilization powered its way into history, other pioneers, not quite so high-profile as those already mentioned, blazed new trails of invention and progressive consolidation.

In the areas of merging electricity and telephony, new pioneers built upon the legacy of Edison and Bell. Marconi is the name we associate with radio’s transmission.  On the old Continent, German physicists Eccles and Lillienfeld developed the triode vacuum tube which further enabled emerging electronic communications.

By the 1940’s, scientists Shockley, Bardeen, Brattain at Bell Labs developed the transistor, which enabled solid-state circuitry.

Nanotechnology, Fairchild, Lucent, Intel—brought forth the computer and the IT revolution of latter 20th-century digitized lifestyle . . . which is now morphed into . . .

Cell phones, tablets, pads, pods, all kinds of miniaturizing, convenience-enabling “devices.”

Social Media.

And as we look back . . . not as far back as the consolidators of the industrializing 19th-century, not quite as far back as those old-time “barons”, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan . . .

As we look back at the in-our-lifetime pioneers of IT, who have now become the “barons” of Social Media . . .

Gates, Jobs & Wozniak, Zuckerberg, Page & Brin, Bezos . . .

we find that these men are human, just as we are, human and in some ways faulty, possibly unable to comprehend or anticipate the full consequences of their incredible accomplishments, perhaps culpable in matters of ethical ambiguity, maybe even “guilty” of . . .

“manipulating” people’s profiles, and thus

manipulating people’s lives?

Shall we now accuse them of being power-trippers? Will we judge them as predatory opportunists? Will we call into question their integrity, will we revise our hind-sighted historical assessments of them, as some have judged the barons of a former Era to be “robber barons?”

Zuckerberg a robber baron? I don’t think so.

Give the man a break. He has apologized.

He has done all you guys a favor! by presenting your pretty face to the the runways of this world. Everybody gets their fifteen minutes . . .

or fifteen likes, or 1500 likes, whatevuh

As for me, I don’t do Facebook . . .   well maybe every now and then.

Glass Chimera

The Castle Paradox

Once upon a time, and oh, so far, far away from these here United States, many of our ancestors lived and worked in the Old Country.

It was a feudal society over there. The royal houses would feud among themselves while their servants labored to bring home the bacon.

Back then, the countries had not even assembled themselves into nations yet. The lands of the Old Country were divided into kingdoms and fiefdoms. Vast estates were owned and ruled by kings and queens, princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses. In the domain of each royal arrangement, lords and ladies would call the shots, while their loyal serfs and vassals would toil every day, out in the hinterlands amongst the hedgerows and fields where they produced a bounty of crops and goods. In this manner, everybody—the royals and the peasants— were fed and housed, and even in some cases fat ’n happy.

Or so the story has been told. . . once upon a time, in a land far, far away.

By ’n by, the times they were a-changin’ and all things became different from what they had been before.

Fresh breezes of liberty swept through the hearts and minds of men and women. Notions of liberty and equality arose among the people. These zeitgeist winds of change compelled many a former  vassal to cast off the ancient bonds of indentured servitude. Many a craftsman forsook the security of the royal house, to move into town and set up shop. Striking out on their own, many a blacksmith, many a weaver, butcher, baker and candlestickmaker established paths of industrious productivity of their own, apart and independent from the Old Order.

And a New Order arose in the Old Country.

Long about this time, folks heard about a new place called America, and . . . well, you know the story. All this  American stuff that you see around us now rose up in about two or three hundred years, whereas the heavily stratified infrastructure of the Old World had taken two or three thousand years to develop.

By ’n by, here in America, we got fed up with King George and his taxing shenanigans. We threw his red-coated soldiers out, sent ‘em packing back to Britain with their tail between their legs.

Our American revolution was no small accomplishment. A lot of our people, having caught a whiff of that Enlightened wind, got inspired toward liberty big time, and so we took up our muskets and fought our way to independence. Many a minute man and backwoods farmer died while defeating them redcoats at Bunker Hill and Yorktown and Valley Forge.

But really it was a walk in the park compared to the bloody French Revolution, which came a few years later in the Old Country. Those madcap peasants chopped the king’s head off and the queen’s head and a lot of other royal heads, heads of privilege, heads of power, even a bunch of innocent heads, because the rabble crowds, so caught up in their egalitarian frenzy went plum crazy once the blood started to flow in the streets and sewers of Paris. Those furious French shocked their way into the 19th-century, whereas we merely fought our way into it.

You see, those French revolutionaries were dealing with ancient bands of power that went way back in time; there was huge institutional baggage that they felt they had to throw out with all those bloody royal heads.

Whereas, we here in America only had to send the king and his army packin’ back to England. Once we had gotten rid of them, we only had a vast, undeveloped virgin contintent to deal with.

We had four thousand miles of opportunity stretched westward before us, whereas the proletarians of Europe had thousands of years of old habits and old baggage to try to reconstruct in order to usher in a New Order. Those former vassals found themselves with a lot of unpleasant work to do before they could see their way clear to this new thing called democracy and/or republic. (Actually the liberating notions were  very old, but that’s another story, a Greek and Roman one.)

Well, by ’n by, the times were a changin’ . . . but sometimes things have to take a few steps backward before the forward motion cranks up again.

Whereas, in the Olden days Once upon a time, all the peasants were gathered around a castle, now it seems we’ve found, in our modern liberty,  ourselves a new castle to gather around. . .

Now that every man is a king, every woman a queen of her own destiny, now that every son is a prince and every daughter a princess, the New Order has morphed into a revised version of the Old Order. What goes around comes around. Take your place on the great Mandela. Millions of us from all over the world congregate at a New Castle every year, yearning for something special, hoping to find something magical, wishing upon a star . . .

What is it we’re really wishing for?

King of Soul

The New Opiate

You may have read somewhere that Karl Marx, the chief promoter of early communism, said that religion is the opiate of the people.

During the time that he wrote of such things—mid-1800’s—industry was rapidly progressing in the modern European world. Things were changing so fast that industrialists and capitalists were able to take advantage of poor working folk who did not understand the cataclysm of enslavement they were themselves getting into.

As the Western world industrialized at a whirlwind pace during the 19th-century, millions of people (the masses) got left behind in the rush.

Economically, that us. They got left behind in the money and wealth part, while the the fat cats and movers and shakers ran roughshod over them with a burdensome industrialism that slowly robbed the poor working-stiff proles of their only real precious asset—their labor—and nullified the workers’ ability to prosper and get ahead of the game.

Marx wrote in 1843 that religion was the opiate of the people. He explained that religion allows oppressed workers to be be inappropriately consoled, comforted, while they are being taken advantage of. The fulfillment that religion brings people cultivates a  false comfort among the masses. Such stupor enables an old autocratic system—or a new capitalist one— to justify its uncaring abuse of the masses.

This idea was used in a very big way when the Bolsheviks took control of Russia in the early 1900’s. Those rabid revolutionary communists worked relentlessly among the people to eradicate religion, because, according to developing communist doctrine, clueless Orthodox faith was the opiate that allowed the rich people to take advantage of everybody else.

But things have changed since then.

Now here we are, a hundred years past the forced imposition of communism on this gullible world, and we see that everything has morphed into a quite different scenario. Communism—at least the official version of it— appears to have been tossed into the dust heap of 20th-century Berlin Wall history.

And now Religion is no longer the opiate of the people, because it is way out of fashion. Who the hell believes all that old stuff anyway?

Well, there are still a few of us around, and we are noticing a thing or two about the present state of affairs.

We find ourselves mired in a new opiate: entertainment. It’s all around us. Can’t get away from it. I confess that I, too, have at times succumbed to this counterproductive opioid.

Being overtaken by Entertainment is, as some promoters love to proclaim—addictive. And it has an agenda.

Can you figure out what the agenda is?

Some media pushers promote product  this way: “It’s addictive!” as if that that’s. . . something good!

Habit-forming, bingeful, cringeful, winkin’ blinkin’ and nodding as we in our tickee-tackee nests drift off to sleep in front of the screen only to drag ourselves to bed and then to work the next day. Talk about your opiate of the masses.

But hey, sleepers Awake! The infamous opiating old-time religion’s got to be more productive than this.

Picture it: bunch of seekers gathered in a room reading out-of-style scriptures, singing songs and praying, maybe even proseletyzing other wandering souls.

Seems pretty to active to me, maybe even subversive—downright vitalizing and invigorating compared to the passivity of comfortably numb binge-watching video and obsessively tapping our tickee-tackee deviant devices as we scrunch down the manufactured munchies.

Something needs to change. We need to take back the means of fulfillment.

Believers of the World Unite! because

He is risen! and I ain’t talking about Marx.

King of Soul

The Perfect Curve

If you depart the city of Charlotte driving northward on I-77 toward Virginia, you will, about an hour later, cross over US highway 421. The traffic interchange there consists of a typical cloverleaf-type interstate-highway overpass with a looping exit ramp on which your vehicle descends from the overpassing I-77 down to the underpassing perpendicular US 421.

As I am a frequent sojourner between Charlotte and my Blue Ridge mountain home, I have performed this little maneuver many, many times over the last 39 years or so. Possibly hundreds of times.

Over the years, there is something very special I have noticed about this exit ramp, by which I steer the Subaru, veering slightly rightward and onward down the ramp, decelerating slightly and moving in a steady arc along a quasi-circular path to the destination highway below, on which I have then been redirected westward (although the sign says US 421 N) toward my domicile in the mountain town of Boone.

I say I have noticed “something very special” about this exit ramp, although this unique speciality is probably common to most every overpassing intersection that we’ve ever crossed o’er; and it is this:

As I turn the steering wheel for exiting onto the ramp, there is a point to which I can—less than halfway through the turn— adjust the wheel and cease its turning, having set the steering mechanism to a precise degree. This adjustment is sufficient to complete the onward arcing of the vehicle’s path as it egresses with no further turning of the steering wheel, until the turning maneuver is completed as I have redirected the Subaru, now on a westward vector instead of the northward one we had previously sped.

Recently on one of my trips homeward, I realized that the reason this maneuver can be performed so smoothly is this:  some engineer designed the exit ramp on what appears to be a perfectly constant curve. Cool! The perfect curve, thought I.

So now I take back everything bad I ever said about freeways and modern vehicular transportation systems.

My new theory is that there is probably no curve on earth more perfect than that one.

Except for one— the curve of my wife’s hip, which I noticed while we were dating many and many a year ago, when I  first visited her family in Charlotte.

Now that’s what ahm talkin’ about! The Perfect Curve.

King of Soul

Man’s Fantasy

Maybe you feel that somehow we are all spiritually connected. Perhaps there is a spirit-world out there somewhere; it could be up there in the clouds, in the great beyond.

You’re not the only one. People on earth have felt this for a very long time. The story of Man reaches deep, far back into our history, and it is full of evidence that humans have always related to spirits, maybe the souls of dead men and women, maybe aliens from somewhere else, nature spirits or gods, or the One God, or maybe all these notions are just the ghostly products of our overactive imaginations.

If there were, in reality, no spirit world out there, I think we would make one up. We would, if we haven’t already, imagine a pantheon of gods or spirits that sort of hover around and make stranger things happen that we can’t explain.

Our ancient cultures have throughout history brought forth plenary evidence that something freaky is going on out  there, whether it is in our minds, or otherwise.

The myths of ancient Greece presented a scenario of multiple gods who were, in some ways, very much like us. The movers and shakers among them strove to gain attention and favor from the potentates who seemed to be in charge, like Zeus and Hera, or Poseidon and Athena. Although they were thought to be somehow supernatural, those deity wannabees were generally chomping at the bit to outdo each other.

Just like, you know, us schizoid homo sapiens.

Age after age, we love to get off by summoning them up from the pit of our imagination or the abyss of wishful thinking.

Now our long postmodern 3.0 world-narrative has generally relegated these old fogies of the spirit world to the back pages of your garden-variety goggle search.

On the other hand, our historicsl narrative presents testimony from multiple fronts that the spirit world is actually created and headed up by One God. Yet we argue about what the correct name is. Is it allah or jehovah of krishna or lady godiva or whatnot, and who is the true prophet and so forth and so on.

Our postmodern  pervasive intrusive web-babel of electronic media has now given us humans a host of bandwith opportunities to bandy this thing around and make a big deal out of it. Our overactive imagination can now have a field day of competing gods and goddesses, a plenary plethora of super-heroes and heroines, to whom we give our attention and in some cases even our devotion and veneration.

But hey, you won’t catch me fortifying any fan-fixation with the Ba’al or Dagon; I won’t be doing hocus-pokus with the Wicked Witch, nor will you find me hobnobbin’ with Darth Vader or joking with the Joker. Nosiree. I’ve got too much going on to waste time on those misfits. Let Superman and Obie-wan and Wonder Woman and Spiderman handle them. They can waste all the time they want chasing those villains all around the solar system.

Let ‘em play their game of thrones ’til the cows come home. I don’t care if you drag all the dungeons and dragons this side of Hades out to array themselves in full battle paraphenalia to take down whosoever’s in charge at the moment. They can pokemon forever for all I care. They’re probably a bunch of gropers and pedophiles chasing fairy tails in hell anyway.

All this fantasy fluidity is about as useful as a freakin’ fentenyl freeze-pop on a free ferry to fairy land. Something’s rotten in fandom. The likes don’t tell the whole story, y’all. We gotta find a way outta here.

I really think all these dreamed-up deities have been, just like us, screwing things up all along. They don’t know what they’re doing, don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground. When God finally did show up to get us straightened out, they nailed him up on a cross.

I believe somehow we’ve got to rise above all this fantasy.

 I recommend an alternative: faith in Christ resurrection, which would be a better use of our time, and it would solve a deadly problem for you and me.

Glass Chimera