Mack Hall
So thoroughly did our Puritan ancestors purge Christmas from the culture that in the New England colonies the observance of Advent or Christmas was a crime. Save for Anglicans and Catholics, Christmas was not much a part of the American tradition until the middle of the 19th century when Charles Dickens’ stories and Prince Albert’s Christmas tree generated the holiday as a secular fashion.
Advent isn’t much observed at all, not even as a generic late-autumn holiday. Instead, America is for its sins burdened with a wholly artificial construct called The Christmas Season.
That Season is upon us, That Season when folks talk about putting Christ back into Christmas and then skip divine services on Christmas day itself. And can a mere human actually put Christ anywhere anyway?
There are elements of The Christmas Season that make one despair of salvation: A Christmas Carol comes to mind, and Hallmark movies. Surely every time It’s a Wonderful Life is broadcast an angel rips its wings off. Maybe the Puritans foresaw all that, and that was why they banned Christmas.
Christmas is seldom without an adjective anymore. Even Dickens had the decency to leave the name of the holiday alone, but now the marketers of music and movies pile on the descriptors in order to peddle to niche audiences: White Christmas, A Muppet Christmas, Rocky Mountain Christmas, and, I suppose, The Ground Squirrels’ Christmas, An Ozark Christmas, An Irish Christmas, A Three (or is it four?) Tenors Christmas, A Country Christmas, Somebody’s Country Christmas, Somebody Else’s Country Ozark Christmas, Somebody Else’s Tennessee Country Ozark Farm Christmas, A Cowboy Christmas, A Cajun Christmas, An Ol’ Fashioned Christmas, A Victorian Christmas, Some Girl in an Amish Bonnet Christmas, A Down-Home Christmas, A Down East Christmas, and maybe even The Blair Witch Christmas Reunion Special.
I suppose three (or four) tenors for Christmas is nice, but why not The Three Electricians for Christmas? When the power fails, sturdy fellows in Nomex suits are indeed The Three Wise Electricians, bearing gifts of light and heat and running water.
Hospital workers, too, deserve their own Christmas movie, as do cops and firemen and plumbers and ambulance crews and soldiers and all the other folks who on Christmas do not get to snuggle in warm beds with visions of anything because they’re on duty. Wassail? Eggnog? No, gimme another go-cup of that hairy-legged two-in-the-morning coffee.
Waiters and retail clerks deserve combat pay, not just their own movie or song, for enduring the ungodly Christmas poutiness of all the unhappy Christmas shoppers in Christendom during The Christmas Season. And while I’m pretty much opposed to the death penalty, I’d make an exception for supervisors who require employees to wear Santa hats or elf costumes.
One wonders if that long-ago innkeeper wore plastic antlers and greeted the tired travelers Mary and Joseph with a forced “Happy holidays! Do you have a reservation? Visa? Or Mastercard? And what discount card will you be using? And how many days will you be staying with us? Hey, ya like animals?”
St. Luke, tell me the Story again.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Who Cleaned up the Park?
Mack Hall
Someone said that someone said that someone else said that the ‘net said that someone said that the sexiest accent in the world is Irish. Well, who could argue with that sourcing, eh?
Our own rural accents are admittedly pretty cool some of the time. A certain silver-haired cooking-show gal, for instance, has a lovely voice, but there’s just something de Medici about her intonation that makes one suspect that she knows where several shallow graves are located. But our East Texas accent, the sound of one long eyebrow whining, cannot be not recommended for public consumption or wide distribution.
Business people from East Texas should never do their own radio commercials. In the days of that “Iz iyit trewwwwwww? Iz iyit trewwwwwwwww? Iz iyit reelly trewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww?” thing my reflexes developed so efficiently that I could hit the OFF button long before the last syllable of the first “iz iyit trewwwwwwwwwwwww” faded away to die an agonized and prolonged Wagnerian death in some other sufferer’s ears.
One wonders how many professionally-made commercials with trained voices are missed because the radio listener kills the sound of an amateur’s unfortunate baying and doesn’t get back to the station until after he’s had therapy. If I were buying a commercial I would specify to the radio sales folks that my expensive and attractive commercial should never be positioned behind Nasal Bubba or Adenoidal Cletus lest the good commercial go unheard due to dead-air time.
Equally annoying is the endless repetition of a commercial. The public-service spot about two teen lads leaving a party when the drinking started was pretty cute the first two or three hundred times I heard it, but repetition, vain repetition, now sends my lightning fingers of radio death flying to the dial.
If you never listen to the radio, let me give you the exposition: two teens come home late at night, and are ambushed by Dad, who wonders why his sons are late and why they are wearing food (fathers are like that). They explain that they and some others wisely left an unchaperoned party when drinking began, and drove to a fast-food joint for, well, some fast-food. But they did not eat the food; they then motored to the park and, for reasons best known to teens, threw the food at each other. The wise father is amused at the narrative, proud of his sons for their mature judgment, and sends them upstairs for baths and bed.
Okay, fine, good message, cute presentation.
But upon hearing this fictional narrative several dozen times, one begins to wonder: who cleaned up the park?
Take-out food comes with layers of wrappings, a paper bag, tiny envelopes of salt and pepper, little plastic thingies with sauces, drinks in cups, straws for the drinks, a receipt, and so on. And then there’s the food itself, tacos and hamburgers in this story. All over the park, rotting and fly-blown and malodorous by the time the sun rises.
Littering is hardly to be compared to underaged drinking, but it’s still illegal in its own modest way, it’s not considerate, and someone has to clean up the mess.
I imagine anyone who grew up in the hungry 1930s latched on to the food wastage thing immediately. In a world in which there really are hungry children (I’m not talking about the fat boy waddling down the street with a bag of ‘tater chips in one hand and his cell ‘phone in the other), is this scenario a good idea? Will the lads keep a straight face as they help collect canned food for the genuinely poor at Thanksgiving and Christmas?
Well, we’ll leave the park cleanup crew to their work. Maybe they will enjoy listening to the radio while cleaning up the litter.
Someone said that someone said that someone else said that the ‘net said that someone said that the sexiest accent in the world is Irish. Well, who could argue with that sourcing, eh?
Our own rural accents are admittedly pretty cool some of the time. A certain silver-haired cooking-show gal, for instance, has a lovely voice, but there’s just something de Medici about her intonation that makes one suspect that she knows where several shallow graves are located. But our East Texas accent, the sound of one long eyebrow whining, cannot be not recommended for public consumption or wide distribution.
Business people from East Texas should never do their own radio commercials. In the days of that “Iz iyit trewwwwwww? Iz iyit trewwwwwwwww? Iz iyit reelly trewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww?” thing my reflexes developed so efficiently that I could hit the OFF button long before the last syllable of the first “iz iyit trewwwwwwwwwwwww” faded away to die an agonized and prolonged Wagnerian death in some other sufferer’s ears.
One wonders how many professionally-made commercials with trained voices are missed because the radio listener kills the sound of an amateur’s unfortunate baying and doesn’t get back to the station until after he’s had therapy. If I were buying a commercial I would specify to the radio sales folks that my expensive and attractive commercial should never be positioned behind Nasal Bubba or Adenoidal Cletus lest the good commercial go unheard due to dead-air time.
Equally annoying is the endless repetition of a commercial. The public-service spot about two teen lads leaving a party when the drinking started was pretty cute the first two or three hundred times I heard it, but repetition, vain repetition, now sends my lightning fingers of radio death flying to the dial.
If you never listen to the radio, let me give you the exposition: two teens come home late at night, and are ambushed by Dad, who wonders why his sons are late and why they are wearing food (fathers are like that). They explain that they and some others wisely left an unchaperoned party when drinking began, and drove to a fast-food joint for, well, some fast-food. But they did not eat the food; they then motored to the park and, for reasons best known to teens, threw the food at each other. The wise father is amused at the narrative, proud of his sons for their mature judgment, and sends them upstairs for baths and bed.
Okay, fine, good message, cute presentation.
But upon hearing this fictional narrative several dozen times, one begins to wonder: who cleaned up the park?
Take-out food comes with layers of wrappings, a paper bag, tiny envelopes of salt and pepper, little plastic thingies with sauces, drinks in cups, straws for the drinks, a receipt, and so on. And then there’s the food itself, tacos and hamburgers in this story. All over the park, rotting and fly-blown and malodorous by the time the sun rises.
Littering is hardly to be compared to underaged drinking, but it’s still illegal in its own modest way, it’s not considerate, and someone has to clean up the mess.
I imagine anyone who grew up in the hungry 1930s latched on to the food wastage thing immediately. In a world in which there really are hungry children (I’m not talking about the fat boy waddling down the street with a bag of ‘tater chips in one hand and his cell ‘phone in the other), is this scenario a good idea? Will the lads keep a straight face as they help collect canned food for the genuinely poor at Thanksgiving and Christmas?
Well, we’ll leave the park cleanup crew to their work. Maybe they will enjoy listening to the radio while cleaning up the litter.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Remembrance Day: "Let Perpetual Light Shine Upon Them"
Mack Hall
In a happier the world the remembrances of Armistice Day / Veterans’ Day would all be old ones told in peacetime, jolly boot-camp stories for the kiddies and the civilians, mostly. A veteran eventually learns to keep other matters in his heart, and to change the subject or simply walk away discreetly when someone who got no closer to war than his dime-store camouflage and collection of John Wayne films begins some hand-me-down, second-hand, thousand-yard-stare yarn. He heard it from his buddy, you see, and his buddy was a Green Beret / Army Ranger / CIA commando / Marine / Navy SEAL / special operative in an organization so secret that blah-blah-blah, so he ought to know, eh.
But in the middle of a long, long war the stories of the long-ago, even the funny ones about some barracks buffoonery, somehow seem inappropriate. Soldiers are dying now, some shot in the back by a self-indulgent, emo ess of a bee whose duty was to watch their backs.
The Wall Street Journal, Fox, and other sources have told us something of the thirteen unarmed Americans murdered last week:
Lt. Col Juanita Warman, 55, of Maryland was a physician’s assistant with two daughters and six grandchildren. She worked her way through the University of Pittsburgh.
Major Libardo Caraveo, 52, of Virginia came to America from Mexico in his teens. He earned his doctorate in psychology at the University of Arizona and worked with special-needs children in Tucson schools before beginning private practice. He was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.
Capt. John Gaffaney, 52, of California was a psychiatric nurse who also was on base clearing for Afghanistan. He served in the Navy and then in the California National Guard as a young man, and two years ago managed to get back into the service to help the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan deal with the trauma. He is survived by a wife and a son.
Captain Russell Seager, 41, of Wisconsin joined the Army a few years ago, and was a psychiatrist who wanted to help soldiers returning from war adapt to civilian life.
Staff Sgt. Justin Decrow, 32, of Indiana was helping train soldiers on how to help veterans home from the wars with the paperwork. He and his wife have a 13-year-old daughter.
Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29, of Wisconsin told her mother she was going to get Osama Bin Ladin. Sergeant Kreuger’s mother told her she couldn’t take on Osama by herself.
“Watch me,” she replied.
And maybe she would have, if she hadn’t been murdered by an American Army officer before she got the chance.
Sergeant Amy was to have been posted to Afghanistan in December.
Spc. Jason Dean Hunt, 22, of Oklahoma had been in the Army for almost four years, including a tour in Iraq. He had been married only two months.
Spc. Frederick Greene, 29, of Tennessee was assigned to the 16th Signal Company at Fort Hood.
PFC Aaron Nemelka,19, of Utah joined the Utah National Guard as his form of service instead of going on mission for his church. He was to be sent to Afghanistan in January.
PFC Michael Pearson, 22, of Illinois had telephoned his parents only two days before his death to tell them he would be home for Christmas.
PFC Kham Xiong, 23, of Minnesota was a father of three whose family has a tradition of military service. Both his grandfather and his father fought against the Pathet Lao and the Viet-Cong, and his brother, Nelson is a Marine in Afghanistan.
Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21, of Illinois loved poetry and dancing. She had just returned home from Iraq, and was a career soldier.
Michael G. Cahill, 62, of Texas was a civilian employee, a physician’s assistant back at work after a heart attack two weeks before. He and his wife, Joleen, were married for 37 years. He was much loved for his many beyond-the-call-of-duty kindnesses to young soldiers returning from the war or on their way overseas.
Thirteen good Americans.
“Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.”
- Roman Missal
In a happier the world the remembrances of Armistice Day / Veterans’ Day would all be old ones told in peacetime, jolly boot-camp stories for the kiddies and the civilians, mostly. A veteran eventually learns to keep other matters in his heart, and to change the subject or simply walk away discreetly when someone who got no closer to war than his dime-store camouflage and collection of John Wayne films begins some hand-me-down, second-hand, thousand-yard-stare yarn. He heard it from his buddy, you see, and his buddy was a Green Beret / Army Ranger / CIA commando / Marine / Navy SEAL / special operative in an organization so secret that blah-blah-blah, so he ought to know, eh.
But in the middle of a long, long war the stories of the long-ago, even the funny ones about some barracks buffoonery, somehow seem inappropriate. Soldiers are dying now, some shot in the back by a self-indulgent, emo ess of a bee whose duty was to watch their backs.
The Wall Street Journal, Fox, and other sources have told us something of the thirteen unarmed Americans murdered last week:
Lt. Col Juanita Warman, 55, of Maryland was a physician’s assistant with two daughters and six grandchildren. She worked her way through the University of Pittsburgh.
Major Libardo Caraveo, 52, of Virginia came to America from Mexico in his teens. He earned his doctorate in psychology at the University of Arizona and worked with special-needs children in Tucson schools before beginning private practice. He was preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.
Capt. John Gaffaney, 52, of California was a psychiatric nurse who also was on base clearing for Afghanistan. He served in the Navy and then in the California National Guard as a young man, and two years ago managed to get back into the service to help the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan deal with the trauma. He is survived by a wife and a son.
Captain Russell Seager, 41, of Wisconsin joined the Army a few years ago, and was a psychiatrist who wanted to help soldiers returning from war adapt to civilian life.
Staff Sgt. Justin Decrow, 32, of Indiana was helping train soldiers on how to help veterans home from the wars with the paperwork. He and his wife have a 13-year-old daughter.
Sgt. Amy Krueger, 29, of Wisconsin told her mother she was going to get Osama Bin Ladin. Sergeant Kreuger’s mother told her she couldn’t take on Osama by herself.
“Watch me,” she replied.
And maybe she would have, if she hadn’t been murdered by an American Army officer before she got the chance.
Sergeant Amy was to have been posted to Afghanistan in December.
Spc. Jason Dean Hunt, 22, of Oklahoma had been in the Army for almost four years, including a tour in Iraq. He had been married only two months.
Spc. Frederick Greene, 29, of Tennessee was assigned to the 16th Signal Company at Fort Hood.
PFC Aaron Nemelka,19, of Utah joined the Utah National Guard as his form of service instead of going on mission for his church. He was to be sent to Afghanistan in January.
PFC Michael Pearson, 22, of Illinois had telephoned his parents only two days before his death to tell them he would be home for Christmas.
PFC Kham Xiong, 23, of Minnesota was a father of three whose family has a tradition of military service. Both his grandfather and his father fought against the Pathet Lao and the Viet-Cong, and his brother, Nelson is a Marine in Afghanistan.
Pvt. Francheska Velez, 21, of Illinois loved poetry and dancing. She had just returned home from Iraq, and was a career soldier.
Michael G. Cahill, 62, of Texas was a civilian employee, a physician’s assistant back at work after a heart attack two weeks before. He and his wife, Joleen, were married for 37 years. He was much loved for his many beyond-the-call-of-duty kindnesses to young soldiers returning from the war or on their way overseas.
Thirteen good Americans.
“Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.”
- Roman Missal
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Death Lodge
Mack Hall
In an episode of the minimalist police drama Adam 12, two of The People burglarize a house while it is under a fumigation tent. Dragged out by officers in hazmat suits, one of the idiots…um…citizens dies from the fumigants. While being questioned the surviving dumb…er…victim of an oppressive society brags about being a draft dodger because he and his friend did not want to die for an evil capitalist system. A police officer, indicating the corpse, asks the salient question: “So what did your buddy die for?”
Several weeks ago in Arizona three people died from a spiritual (cough) retreat involving starvation, dehydration, humiliation, and, finally, several hours in what has been called a sweat lodge (it isn’t) suffering oxygen deprivation or toxic fumes or both.
Perhaps the death lodgers got to beat on some drums and chant gen-you-wine old-timey songs to the Earth-Mother-Goddess-Nature-Green-Spirit-Principle-of-Me, Me, Me before they departed this vale of bottled water, clutching icons of Al Gore to their hearts.
One thing we do know is that their checks cleared before they died; one-with-nature spiritual guides want their money up front.
Religious frauds are as old as Delphi, and Chaucer makes fun of them in The Canterbury Tales: Get’cher red-hot relics right ‘chere! I got’cha a piece of the sail of St. Peter’s boat! Who wants to bid on Veronica’s veil, eh? Modern Oracles and Pardoners are given blessings by talk-show hosts and even by presidents, and make their little pile selling books and cds and dvds and magic amulets and handkerchiefs soaked with holy essences, and the world wags on. Occasionally, though, some, like Jim Jones, who posed with President Jimmy Carter, begin believing in their own detritus and then the dead bodies pile up.
This last lot of corpses in Arizona were apparently quite wealthy; according to the news they and some 57 other seekers after truth each paid $9,000 in order to be spiritually enlightened.
$9,000. If you had that much loose holiness jingling in your pockets what would you do with it? You could buy the really high-dollar lawn mower and have money left over for gasoline for the thing. You could take a really good vacation. You could pay off the car. You could stash it away in the kid’s college fund. You could find some genuinely poor people – not fatties with cell ‘phones – and help fund their job searches. You could help a museum with its bills. You could do lots of good things. Hey, you could give it me.
But would you ever pay some bogus holy dude $9,000 to starve you, deprive you of sleep, and humiliate you?
Sixty of your well-to-do fellow citizens did. $9,000 x 60 = $540,000 for a long weekend of one-ness with the Sky-God Vi-Sa’Card and the Earth-Mother Pi’n’Number.
You and I are in the wrong business.
Man, give me $9,000 and I’ll tell you whatever makes you feel all holy and stuff. I’ll even throw in a few fair-trade bagels and a sleeping bag made from recycled goat hair or something. For a sweat lodge I’ll stake out that blue FEMA tarp left over from Rita, and you can sit crossed-legged in there and chant mantra-rays or mantas or mantels to the Moon Goddess Tiffany. I’ll leave the sides open so you can breathe. In the meantime, I’ll be inside in the air-conditioning checking my account on the ‘puter to make sure your check cleared.
A human’s quest is not for some sort of vague, fluffy self-fulfillment, whatever self-fulfillment means. One’s quest is for the truth. Not my truth, or your truth, or some voted-upon truth, because there are no such things. There is only the truth. And you start from there. And there is no charge.
The police officer in the story asks a man what his friend died for. C. S. Lewis in one of his essays reminds us to ask ourselves what we live for.
In an episode of the minimalist police drama Adam 12, two of The People burglarize a house while it is under a fumigation tent. Dragged out by officers in hazmat suits, one of the idiots…um…citizens dies from the fumigants. While being questioned the surviving dumb…er…victim of an oppressive society brags about being a draft dodger because he and his friend did not want to die for an evil capitalist system. A police officer, indicating the corpse, asks the salient question: “So what did your buddy die for?”
Several weeks ago in Arizona three people died from a spiritual (cough) retreat involving starvation, dehydration, humiliation, and, finally, several hours in what has been called a sweat lodge (it isn’t) suffering oxygen deprivation or toxic fumes or both.
Perhaps the death lodgers got to beat on some drums and chant gen-you-wine old-timey songs to the Earth-Mother-Goddess-Nature-Green-Spirit-Principle-of-Me, Me, Me before they departed this vale of bottled water, clutching icons of Al Gore to their hearts.
One thing we do know is that their checks cleared before they died; one-with-nature spiritual guides want their money up front.
Religious frauds are as old as Delphi, and Chaucer makes fun of them in The Canterbury Tales: Get’cher red-hot relics right ‘chere! I got’cha a piece of the sail of St. Peter’s boat! Who wants to bid on Veronica’s veil, eh? Modern Oracles and Pardoners are given blessings by talk-show hosts and even by presidents, and make their little pile selling books and cds and dvds and magic amulets and handkerchiefs soaked with holy essences, and the world wags on. Occasionally, though, some, like Jim Jones, who posed with President Jimmy Carter, begin believing in their own detritus and then the dead bodies pile up.
This last lot of corpses in Arizona were apparently quite wealthy; according to the news they and some 57 other seekers after truth each paid $9,000 in order to be spiritually enlightened.
$9,000. If you had that much loose holiness jingling in your pockets what would you do with it? You could buy the really high-dollar lawn mower and have money left over for gasoline for the thing. You could take a really good vacation. You could pay off the car. You could stash it away in the kid’s college fund. You could find some genuinely poor people – not fatties with cell ‘phones – and help fund their job searches. You could help a museum with its bills. You could do lots of good things. Hey, you could give it me.
But would you ever pay some bogus holy dude $9,000 to starve you, deprive you of sleep, and humiliate you?
Sixty of your well-to-do fellow citizens did. $9,000 x 60 = $540,000 for a long weekend of one-ness with the Sky-God Vi-Sa’Card and the Earth-Mother Pi’n’Number.
You and I are in the wrong business.
Man, give me $9,000 and I’ll tell you whatever makes you feel all holy and stuff. I’ll even throw in a few fair-trade bagels and a sleeping bag made from recycled goat hair or something. For a sweat lodge I’ll stake out that blue FEMA tarp left over from Rita, and you can sit crossed-legged in there and chant mantra-rays or mantas or mantels to the Moon Goddess Tiffany. I’ll leave the sides open so you can breathe. In the meantime, I’ll be inside in the air-conditioning checking my account on the ‘puter to make sure your check cleared.
A human’s quest is not for some sort of vague, fluffy self-fulfillment, whatever self-fulfillment means. One’s quest is for the truth. Not my truth, or your truth, or some voted-upon truth, because there are no such things. There is only the truth. And you start from there. And there is no charge.
The police officer in the story asks a man what his friend died for. C. S. Lewis in one of his essays reminds us to ask ourselves what we live for.
Death Lodge
Mack Hall
In an episode of the minimalist police drama Adam 12, two of The People burglarize a house while it is under a fumigation tent. Dragged out by officers in hazmat suits, one of the idiots…um…citizens dies from the fumigants. While being questioned the surviving dumb…er…victim of an oppressive society brags about being a draft dodger because he and his friend did not want to die for an evil capitalist system. A police officer, indicating the corpse, asks the salient question: “So what did your buddy die for?”
Several weeks ago in Arizona three people died from a spiritual (cough) retreat involving starvation, dehydration, humiliation, and, finally, several hours in what has been called a sweat lodge (it isn’t) suffering oxygen deprivation or toxic fumes or both.
Perhaps the death lodgers got to beat on some drums and chant gen-you-wine old-timey songs to the Earth-Mother-Goddess-Nature-Green-Spirit-Principle-of-Me, Me, Me before they departed this vale of bottled water, clutching icons of Al Gore to their hearts.
One thing we do know is that their checks cleared before they died; one-with-nature spiritual guides want their money up front.
Religious frauds are as old as Delphi, and Chaucer makes fun of them in The Canterbury Tales: Get’cher red-hot relics right ‘chere! I got’cha a piece of the sail of St. Peter’s boat! Who wants to bid on Veronica’s veil, eh? Modern Oracles and Pardoners are given blessings by talk-show hosts and even by presidents, and make their little pile selling books and cds and dvds and magic amulets and handkerchiefs soaked with holy essences, and the world wags on. Occasionally, though, some, like Jim Jones, who posed with President Jimmy Carter, begin believing in their own detritus and then the dead bodies pile up.
This last lot of corpses in Arizona were apparently quite wealthy; according to the news they and some 57 other seekers after truth each paid $9,000 in order to be spiritually enlightened.
$9,000. If you had that much loose holiness jingling in your pockets what would you do with it? You could buy the really high-dollar lawn mower and have money left over for gasoline for the thing. You could take a really good vacation. You could pay off the car. You could stash it away in the kid’s college fund. You could find some genuinely poor people – not fatties with cell ‘phones – and help fund their job searches. You could help a museum with its bills. You could do lots of good things. Hey, you could give it me.
But would you ever pay some bogus holy dude $9,000 to starve you, deprive you of sleep, and humiliate you?
Sixty of your well-to-do fellow citizens did. $9,000 x 60 = $540,000 for a long weekend of one-ness with the Sky-God Vi-Sa’Card and the Earth-Mother Pi’n’Number.
You and I are in the wrong business.
Man, give me $9,000 and I’ll tell you whatever makes you feel all holy and stuff. I’ll even throw in a few fair-trade bagels and a sleeping bag made from recycled goat hair or something. For a sweat lodge I’ll stake out that blue FEMA tarp left over from Rita, and you can sit crossed-legged in there and chant mantra-rays or mantas or mantels to the Moon Goddess Tiffany. I’ll leave the sides open so you can breathe. In the meantime, I’ll be inside in the air-conditioning checking my account on the ‘puter to make sure your check cleared.
A human’s quest is not for some sort of vague, fluffy self-fulfillment, whatever self-fulfillment means. One’s quest is for the truth. Not my truth, or your truth, or some voted-upon truth, because there are no such things. There is only the truth. And you start from there. And there is no charge.
The police officer in the story asks a man what his friend died for. C. S. Lewis in one of his essays reminds us to ask ourselves what we live for.
In an episode of the minimalist police drama Adam 12, two of The People burglarize a house while it is under a fumigation tent. Dragged out by officers in hazmat suits, one of the idiots…um…citizens dies from the fumigants. While being questioned the surviving dumb…er…victim of an oppressive society brags about being a draft dodger because he and his friend did not want to die for an evil capitalist system. A police officer, indicating the corpse, asks the salient question: “So what did your buddy die for?”
Several weeks ago in Arizona three people died from a spiritual (cough) retreat involving starvation, dehydration, humiliation, and, finally, several hours in what has been called a sweat lodge (it isn’t) suffering oxygen deprivation or toxic fumes or both.
Perhaps the death lodgers got to beat on some drums and chant gen-you-wine old-timey songs to the Earth-Mother-Goddess-Nature-Green-Spirit-Principle-of-Me, Me, Me before they departed this vale of bottled water, clutching icons of Al Gore to their hearts.
One thing we do know is that their checks cleared before they died; one-with-nature spiritual guides want their money up front.
Religious frauds are as old as Delphi, and Chaucer makes fun of them in The Canterbury Tales: Get’cher red-hot relics right ‘chere! I got’cha a piece of the sail of St. Peter’s boat! Who wants to bid on Veronica’s veil, eh? Modern Oracles and Pardoners are given blessings by talk-show hosts and even by presidents, and make their little pile selling books and cds and dvds and magic amulets and handkerchiefs soaked with holy essences, and the world wags on. Occasionally, though, some, like Jim Jones, who posed with President Jimmy Carter, begin believing in their own detritus and then the dead bodies pile up.
This last lot of corpses in Arizona were apparently quite wealthy; according to the news they and some 57 other seekers after truth each paid $9,000 in order to be spiritually enlightened.
$9,000. If you had that much loose holiness jingling in your pockets what would you do with it? You could buy the really high-dollar lawn mower and have money left over for gasoline for the thing. You could take a really good vacation. You could pay off the car. You could stash it away in the kid’s college fund. You could find some genuinely poor people – not fatties with cell ‘phones – and help fund their job searches. You could help a museum with its bills. You could do lots of good things. Hey, you could give it me.
But would you ever pay some bogus holy dude $9,000 to starve you, deprive you of sleep, and humiliate you?
Sixty of your well-to-do fellow citizens did. $9,000 x 60 = $540,000 for a long weekend of one-ness with the Sky-God Vi-Sa’Card and the Earth-Mother Pi’n’Number.
You and I are in the wrong business.
Man, give me $9,000 and I’ll tell you whatever makes you feel all holy and stuff. I’ll even throw in a few fair-trade bagels and a sleeping bag made from recycled goat hair or something. For a sweat lodge I’ll stake out that blue FEMA tarp left over from Rita, and you can sit crossed-legged in there and chant mantra-rays or mantas or mantels to the Moon Goddess Tiffany. I’ll leave the sides open so you can breathe. In the meantime, I’ll be inside in the air-conditioning checking my account on the ‘puter to make sure your check cleared.
A human’s quest is not for some sort of vague, fluffy self-fulfillment, whatever self-fulfillment means. One’s quest is for the truth. Not my truth, or your truth, or some voted-upon truth, because there are no such things. There is only the truth. And you start from there. And there is no charge.
The police officer in the story asks a man what his friend died for. C. S. Lewis in one of his essays reminds us to ask ourselves what we live for.
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