Sunday, August 29, 2010

It's alright, Ma...

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked




Saturday, Glenn Beck brought about "tens of thousands" of people to the Lincoln Memorial to not talk about politics, but to tell the audience that he is channeling La Grande Fromage and that his holiness is telling him that this country is his, whoever HE is. I keep asking myself how people can be so stupid but, like Zimmerman sang, it's blowin' in the wind.

Out of the dream, out of the sky
Into my heart, into my life
And you were just a face in the crowd
Out in the street, thinking out loud



Thinking back, it was sinful... Sue Lyons, Carol Lynley sinful. Lee Remick. Ouch. Ga-Ga can't hold a candle to that kind of hot. Elia Kazen, Budd Schulberg, Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick... oh, and Anthony Franciosa. A Face in the Crowd truly is a movie for the ages. Like a sped-up version of yesterday, and what will happen tomorrow. The truth will win out. Sooner or later.

The whole enchilada makes me somewhat happy or relieved I guess, that I'm in relatively rural Oregon and not the middle of Los Angeles. It's not 2012 I'm worried about. No apocalypto. More just the slow and steady grinding down of our moral and spiritual fiber. The very thing they are trying to win over is being lost to lowered expectations and mass disillusionment. I would like to think it is a matter of time before the vox populi come to their senses and topple Mr. Beck like the false idol he is.

Or we can sit our days out under the shade of a gently swaying pine tree, overlooking the rolling hills and carrying shades of the plots of land. The gold of the just cut wheat. The distinct rows of green meandering over the green hill. The blue skies and the ever present hints of "real America"-- not the words on bumper stickers or on Fox, but at the ongoing State Fair and the farms and ranches of the mid-Willamette Valley, the folks in Salem working on encouraging the diversity of the population. What Beck and his loud and mostly ignorant ilk are doing is stepping up the "blandification of the whole situation," (as stated by Greg Brown). The postings on his own website indicate the disparity and divisiveness of his followers:

Facebook User11:27 am
It was a very inspiring event. America to turn back to God and American values.

Mahilena Dianz10:53 am
It is always a good thing to see a great number of Christians and spiritual people together rejoicing in Love,....and this is good, but the messenger who brought it all together is not a true leader, he is camouflaged into a peace maker which he is not he is a conservative extremist which we do not need as a leader.

Hmmm, maybe they're not so ignorant, after all.

Mahilena Dianz10:51 am
This event will be forgotten pretty soon!!! ...this has and will not have any significance in our Nation...

Facebook User10:50 am
This event is a turning point for our nation.

Facebook User10:00 am
Blessed, honored, and oh so privileged to have attended Glenn Beck's rally on a sunny Saturday afternoon in our Nation's Capitol. From the people we met, to witnessing 'God's Fly-Over', to listening to His word (God's through Glenn), and praying among the masses, it was an awe-inspiring/glad to be there/God loving proud to be American kind of afternoon. God bless Glenn Beck for doing this, God bless all of us who are in His service (God's, of course), and God bless America ♥ If we haven't been doing it before, now is the time to go out and say the right thing, do the right thing, and get on our knees and pray to God for His Divine Providence in helping to get all of us back on track.

Oy, vey. I feel your pain but your blind allegiance to a gold coin huckster who proclaims on the top of his web home page that he combines entertainment with enlightenment. Well, I suppose he's half right... and all wrong.

Mark Burak9:37 am
Mahilenduh, please go away. This is a wonderful place right now and does not need to be infected by your mean ignorant spirit. Hava a great day... somewhere else

Mary Annette Nicholson Weeks9:29 am
I was truly amazed as I looked around me on Saturday and viewed the diversity of the attendees. The Spirit of God moved in Washington,DC on Saturday and we prayed as ONE for the restoration of the founding pronciples (sic) of this country!

Glen Beck, formerly a Roman Catholic, divorced his first wife, who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. He and his healthy second wife joined the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Why, if there is a Big Kahuna, would he decide to channel him or herself through such a flawed and transparently hypocritical "entertainer." This is the same man who has a bestselling novel that he didn't write. Beck is a deejay who stopped spinning platters and switched to selling himself and his self- taught deluded thinking.

If such a man has been chosen by the Big Kahuna to pass down the big words, what exactly does that say about BK? That He (or She) is a really bad judge of character? Perhaps. And perhaps His or Her lemming followers won't know what hit them when they fall from the metaphoric cliff.

I am glad that the blind and those void of original thought/incapable of thinking for themselves found solace, strength and revelation in Saturday's restoration event. Nothing was in today's (Monday's) paper about the "event." A blip on the screen. An aberration of less significance that the reflective interpretation of the Madonna on a recently washed office building window. Just as Lonesome Roads was found out for what he was, so too, will Glenn Beck. The sheep-like throng of drooling semi-literate Bible-thumpers will either wake up and smell the lack of veritas or find another phony huckster to follow.

What was attempted to be restored Saturday was neither hope nor honor. The masses should be praying to P.T. Barmum. There's a sucker born every minute, which is what people like Glenn Beck pray for.

"shhh! don't tell them!"

Thursday, August 5, 2010

TRUST NO ONE

Today's paper carried an AP article headlined, Looking for the oil? NOAA says its mostly gone." The article began with " ...the government said Wednesday that the mess made by the BO oil spin in the Gulf of Mexico is mostly gone already.

What's left in the water is still almost five times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez in 1989."

Remnants of that spill continue to show up... over 20 years later. The big point, though is... what happened? Didn't we all vote for the "YES, WE CAN" candidate? This report, in combination with its consistent support of the BP lies shows emphatically that the candidate of change is the president of same old same old. The handling of this felonious disaster by the administration has been fairly abysmal, but the explicit supporting and publicizing of such a ludicrous and obvious PR lie drops the administration to another notch on the believability scale.


"'I think it is fairly safe to say ... that many of the doomsday scenarios that we talked about and repeated a lot have not and will not come to fruition,' White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said at a briefing with NOAA's top scientist." (AP article)

Yeah, right. I suddenly feel like I'm reading about Ron Ziegler again. But with a nasty twist. Even beyond Tony Snow or Ari Fleischer. More like Dana Perino, who is now a pundit on Fox. Does that rate as an oxymoron?

But I digress. The point is, I will never be able to erase the broadcast scenes during 9/11. And I don't think I will forget the video on the news of the plumes of black smoke in columns spewing out of the surface of the ocean. There's something clearly apocalyptic, Blade Runner, Mad Max about the world we're living in. I just ordered a copy of Children of Men. I've only seen it once but it (god, I hate this word... ) resonated with me. Lately, I've been thinking about the Michael Caine character. We live in the country, surrounded by rolling hills and pine forests. An hour from a respectably sized city. But tonight, we're within earshot of an outdoor Pat Benatar concert at the Gardens. I guess you could call that comic relief.