National Pie Day

...seriously, it really is National Pie Day today according to the American Pie Council.  Today is not to be confused with National Pi Day on March 14th.

We'll see just how long the copyright lawyers let this stay up on YouTube:

The Inaugural Poet

Richard Blanco, an openly gay Cuban American poet, was President Obama's selection for the inauguration poem.  The choice was extraordinary, as remarkable as Obama's embrace of the gay rights movement into the broader struggle for human freedom and dignity as manifested in feminism, in the struggle for African American civil rights, in the labor movement, and in numerous other such movements by the marginalized to stake their claim upon the promise spelled out in the Declaration of Independence.

Richard Blanco has a life story that a lot of us who are not Cuban can identify with.

I am seven, I think. My grandmother tells me I eat wrong: "Don't use a straw, ever. Los Hombres don't drink soda with a straw. Now throw dat away and sit up." I look wrong: "Dios mío, you nosin but bones. Dat's why the boys at school push you around. Even a girl could beat you up. Now finish your steak, or else." My friends are all wrong: "I no taking you to dat Enrique's house neber again. He's a Mamacita's boy. I don't want you playing with him. I don't care what you say, those GI Joes he has are dolls. Do you want to play with dolls; is dat what you want señorita?"

I play wrong: "I told your mother not to get you those crayons for Christmas. You should be playing outside like un hombre, not coloring in your girly books like dat maricón Juan Alberto." I speak wrong: "Hay Santo, you sound like una niña on the phone. When is your voice going to change?" And I walk wrong too: "Stop clacking your sandals and jiggling like a sissy. Straighten up por Dios--we're in public." I am wrong ("I'll make a man out of you yet . . ."), afraid to do or say anything (". . . you'll see . . ."), scared to want or ask anything (". . . even if it kills me . . ."), ashamed to be alive.

Substitute grandmother for mother and that could almost be my life's story.  I came to the same conclusion about my mother that Richard Blanco did about his grandmother.  They both loved us the best they could and the best that they knew how.

I am so grateful to be alive to see Richard Blanco and all he represents stand in the same place on Inauguration Day as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou.

The Capitol Dome Just Got A Little Bigger and a Little Higher

Just wow:

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

 ... from President Obama's Second Inaugural Address today.

I never ever thought I would here my kind mentioned by a President of the United States in an inaugural address together with the struggle for women's equality and with the long fight for the Civil Rights of African Americans.  For the first time in my life, I feel like a part, and a historic part, of the United States.

There were a lot of shout-outs to Philadelphia architect Thomas Ustick Walter's US Capitol dome from Senator Chuck Schumer and from Myrlie Evars today.  The cast iron dome which almost did not get built, was finished 150 years ago this year in the midst of the Civil War.

The unfinished US Capitol dome looming over Lincoln's first inauguration, March 4, 1861


As Myrlie Evars said in her invocation, the US Capitol dome represents the unity of the American people and their collective sovereignty.

And it was an ex-slave who cast Thomas Crawford's statue of Freedom in bronze on top of the dome.

"It Ain't Necessarily So."

... from a recent school textbook in Texas.

I can remember when good earnest Bible believing people used to quote the Noah and his sons story to convince very young me that racial segregation was ordained by God.

The Bible says all kinds of things.

Hat tip to Joe.My.God.

"Now Is The Time!"

From Dr. Martin Luther King's sermon to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, March 18, 1968:

You know, Jesus reminded us in a magnificent parable one day that a man went to Hell because he didn't see the poor. And his name was Dives. There was a man by the name of Lazarus who came daily to his gate in need of the basic necessities of life. Dives didn't do anything about it. He ended up going to Hell.
But there is nothing in that parable that says that Dives went to Hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came before him talking about eternal life. And he advised him to sell all. But in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery, and not setting forth a universal diagnosis.
If you will go on and read that parable in all of its dimensions, and all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between Heaven and Hell. And on the other end of that long distance call between heaven and Hell was Abraham in Heaven talking to Dives in Hell. It wasn't a millionaire in Hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn't go to Hell because he was rich. His wealth was an opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus.
Dives went to Hell because he passed by Lazarus every day, but he never really saw him. Dives went to Hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible. Dives went to Hell because he allowed the means by which he lived to outdistance the ends for which he lived. Dives went to Hell because he maximized the minimum, and minimized the maximum. Dives finally went to Hell because he wanted to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.
And I come by here to say that America too is going to Hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell. I will hear America through her historians years and years to come saying, "We built gigantic buildings to kiss the sky. We build gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships we were able to carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. Through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths."
But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, "even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness." This may well be the indictment on America that says in Memphis to the mayor, to the power structure, "If you do it unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me."…
Now you're doing something else here. You are highlighting the economic issues. You are going beyond purely civil rights to questions of human rights. That is distinct…
Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know now, that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger? What does it profit a man to be able to eat at the swankest integrated restaurant when he doesn't even earn enough money to take his wife out to dine? What does it profit one to have access to the hotels of our cities, and the hotels of our highways, when we don't earn enough money to take our family on a vacation? What does it profit one to be able to attend an integrated school, when he doesn't earn enough money to buy his children school clothes?
So we assemble here tonight. You have assembled for more than thirty days now to say, "We are tired. We are tired of being at the bottom. We are tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. We are tired of our children having to attend overcrowded, inferior, quality-less schools. We are tired of having to live in dilapidated, substandard housing conditions where we don't have wall to wall carpet, but so often we end up with wall to wall rats and roaches.
"We are tired of smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society. We are tired of walking up the streets in search for jobs that do not exist. We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life. We are tired of our men being emasculated, so that our wives and our daughters have to go out and work in the white ladies' kitchens, cleaning up, unable to be with our children, to give them the time and the attention that they need. We are tired."
So in Memphis we have begun. We are saying, "Now is the time." Get the word across to everybody in power in this town that now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to make an adequate income a reality for all of God's children, now is the time to make the real promises of democracy. Now is the time to make an adequate income a reality for all of God's children, now is the time for city hall to take a position for that which is just and honest. Now is the time for justice to roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Now is the time.

"Bikini Girls With Machine Guns"

Well, it looks like the battle is joined over gun regulation.  Kudos to the President for really trying this time.

I'm all for tighter gun regulation.  I've always said that guns should be regulated at least as much as cars.    And semiautomatic military weapons should be off the market for the same reason tanks and missile launchers are off the market.

And yet, I think the real problem is that in this country we really love to kill things and blow shit up.  It makes us underpaid disposable drones feel powerful and in control somehow.







EXTRA:

EJ Dionne wrote a good essay in today's WaPo pointing out the scope and ambition of the President's proposals while reminding us that by international standards, they are very cautious.
Those who are invested in perpetuating the status quo on weapons are going ape this morning.  I think what they are really afraid of is not Obama, but that Newtown was finally that step way too far, and that the general consensus of opinion on gun violence really has shifted in a big way this time. 

Perhaps I am cynical about these things (remembering the less than charitable public reaction when AIDS first appeared), but it seems to me that something horrible has to happen to affluent white people before something gets done.  Kids, even little kids, have been gunned down in inner cities for decades, though usually one at a time, and frequently unintentionally.  Still, what happened in Newtown really was excruciatingly horrible in its size and savagery.  But then, so was Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tuscon, Aurora, and the hundreds of other gun massacres that have happened over the last 20 years.

Will there ever come a time when "American as Mom, apple pie, and random gun violence" will ever be a thing of the past?  I don't know.  We are a violent people with a violent past who love revenge fantasies about as much as we love money and sex.  To paraphrase the Marquis de Sade, we yearn in all our pores for bloodshed.

"Time ... To Die"

I've been following the arguments on Thinking Anglicans over the Church of England's latest tone deaf blunder as it finds itself more and more out of step, and alienated from, its own countrymen over the gay issue.  Its position as any kind of moral conscience for the nation becomes ever more untenable as the larger public, especially its younger part, discards the condemnations of homosexuality as but another archaic ancient superstition that cannot survive the tests of evidence, experience, reason, or justice.  Demonization of same sexuality belongs in the dust bin along with slavery, the subjugation of women, and the Ptolemaic cosmos (all of those things once defended by the churches as necessary for salvation).

Christ famously said to Peter that "upon this rock I shall build my church."  Homophobia is the stone that the builders should have rejected, and has now been made the chief cornerstone of Christianity.  And upon this rock, the Church will wreck itself.  Christianity is now all about policing sex lives.  All of the other issues such as social justice, hospitality, generosity, charity (in the fullest sense of that word), and trying to live life consistent with the concept of an all loving self sacrificial God simply fall by the wayside.
Christianity is now all about trying to rationalize and impose legal order on that one part of life that most successfully resists all rationality and law.  "Love conquers all" said the ancient classical poets, including law and reason.  The best and only rule we could possible impose on our animal ids is "Do No Harm."  The absolute best thing we could possibly do is to sublimate our selfish animal passions into selfless spiritual ones, as the best saints in Christianity and all other religions have done before, but few people are really capable of that.  All of us, even the best of us, live life as we can, and not as we should.  Indeed, to try to excise that passionate part of us that causes us so much harm and grief in life is to cut out the very force of life itself.  As the poet WH Auden reminds us in his homage to Sigmund Freud, Eros the same god who brings grief and humiliation to both gods and mortals also builds our cities.
The Christian faith denies any body versus spirit dualism.  We don't believe in spirits trapped in fleshly prisons or in any "shedding of this mortal coil."  The animal that plays host to our souls, the same one that always fears for its own safety, the same one that eats and shits and drools and lusts and pukes and eventually decays, dies, and rots, will see salvation along with us.  "If only my soul is saved, then I am not saved for I am more than my soul" said someone I can't remember.  "I am the dust and ashes of the Temple of the Holy Ghost, and what marble is so precious," said John Donne.

Historic institutional Christianity will die over the gay issue.  Those who cling to the Clobber Verses as central articles of the Christian Faith up there with belief in the Incarnation and the Resurrection will find themselves  marginalized in wilderness compounds along with the last true believers in racial supremacy.  By that point, historic institutional Christianity will have lost all credibility and will effectively be dead.   On the one hand, as someone who loves that whole spiritual and cultural legacy, the prospect of that death fills me with grief.  On the other hand, as someone aware that at the heart of the whole religion is a person who willingly chooses to die so that others might live, I accept that dying as necessary.

Perhaps it is necessary and even welcome for institutional Christianity to die.  Historically it did a lot of harm to humankind as all movements and institutions founded upon the impossible demand for absolute certainty always do.  The Great Commandment to spread the Gospel became a license to conquer both individual souls and nations.  Christianity became, together with Islam, an imperial religion.

That faith that says that Love is stronger than death, and that our dying may be an end but not a conclusion, may survive the demise of the institutional framework that sustains (and inhibits) it.  It must survive if those of us who identify as Christian really believe that the God of Love is too great to be contained by any religion or any institutional framework, and that same God keeps His promises and keeps faith with us.
We are a Resurrection people.  It is necessary to die to be reborn. 

Nothing is forever.  Only God endures (if we believe in Him).

William Blake, "Albion Worshiping Christ" from Jerusalem, 1804