I love our school district.  It’s probably the main reason that my wife and I planted our flag here.  The school district taxes are high, to be sure, but it’s probably the one tax I don’t bitch all that much about paying.  After all, if you want low property taxes, you might get Morrow County, Ohio, the Buckeye State’s own little slice of Appalachia, where every mayonnaise-sandwich eating mouth-breather north of I-70 parks his trailer and half a dozen cracker spawn.

Anyhow, our district represents a happy little medium, where the district is forward thinking enough to have the educational tools and opportunities that the larger schools have, yet it’s small enough that, when some kid fucks up, especially yours, you’re going to find out about it.  It’s small enough that the sounds  crumpling beer cans and breaking condoms are heard by someone, and parents concerned will hear about it.

I’m not talking about other parents concerned about my kids.  They can mind their own fucking business.  I’m talking about my concerns with my progeny; I don’t live in Linden, and I’m frank and honest with my children, so I’m not having grandkids until I’m grandpa-aged.

My son is going to be one of the new kids at his elementary school this year, as are all of the kids there, because the school itself is brand-ass new, as in just built, new as Lindsay Lohan’s daily pledge to sobriety.  Granted, the last levy to be on the ballot failed, so the district won’t be able to operate the goddamned thing, but that’s another story.   Who needs books and computers? Play Duck, Duck, Goose all day, the kids will likely learn more valuable lessons from that then they would having whatever political agenda the NEA monster has come up with this year.  Kids usually learn more on the bus, anyway, truth be told.

The grand opening ceremony was last evening, with a ribbon-cutting, local politicians, and a large crowd eager to check out the school that’s been under construction for the last year or so.  A lectern was set up at the school’s main entrance, damming the tide of eager onlookers, while the Superintendent of schools dazzled us with his silver-tongued oratory, which he apparently Googled under “standard+school+opening+speech+levy+support.”  He passed it off to our local US Representative, an Italian American whom I asked later, “hey Paison, are you going to be able to unfuck us or what?”  (I did not say that.  I wanted to.)

Being that the school is named after a prominent Civil War Union General that was born in the area, the local historical preservation society presented what I thought was the highlight of the proceedings (aside from the assortment of hot MILFS sprinkled throughout the assembly).  They fired the cannons that they keep near the town square, which was promptly followed up by half the 1st graders shitting themselves.  Then, an actor portraying the General himself rode towards the crowd on a white stallion (maybe, I didn’t check for horse balls), and strode toward the lectern, where he delivered a fairly passionate, if confused, speech, as though he were speaking from the grave (that’s okay, though.  There’s no way I could have kept the present and past tenses straight either).

By the way, there was a significant delay while the “General” was making his way through the crowd.  Some mom next to me asked out loud, “where’s the Civil War General?”  I answered, out loud, “probably clawing desperately at the inside of his coffin.”  That’ll get you a dirty look.  But, hey, my wife chuckled.

I enjoyed the entire thing, really, with one major exception.  The superintended surrendered the microphone to several different individuals, and acknowledged a few others, but partway through turned the lectern over to the minister (or pastor, or reverend, or whatever the fuck.  I don’t care what you call, and I don’t care to keep track of, each of the holy men and their respective cults) of the local Methodist church.  Now, the Methodists are generally less annoying than the Baptists or the Nazarene, but this guy runs a church  that is at the busiest intersection in my town, and every week has the most empty-headed message one could ever find on a church sign, each week’s message being dimmer than the last!

Boy, do I despise obnoxious church signs.  I know there are a few websites dedicated to them, but none like I’d put up.  I drive by, and the internal dialogue gets a shot of nitrous, and not in the way that the chief shaman intended.

Anyhow, this guy gets up to the lectern, and immediately starts in with a prayer.  In front of a public school.  He did start out with “god of us all,” which might be interpreted as being a multi-faith introduction, but then he peppered with the rest of his prayer with “Lord” this, and “Lord” that, and we all know what that means; the spooky ghostly father-figure story of Christianity.

Could my community be well-described as a majority Christian community?  Sure.  Easily.  Does that make it right that a Christian prayer, from a Christian shaman, ought to be a centerpiece of an opening ceremony for a public school, built with public fund?  No.  In fact, it was highly offensive.

What business has this man, who deals in nothing but superstition, in the opening of a public education building, a new school?  Before you christians start to even think about some muddled answer, um, community, values…let me stop you right here.  The answer is zero, none, naught.  He has no business being involved; you can take that to the bank, cash it, and take a trip out of our fucking educational system.

“Let us take an attitude of prayer,” began this guy, before he started in on his plea to Someone Who Obviously Isn’t Listening Or Isn’t There.  Why don’t we take an attitude of respect for our Constitution?  Freedom of religion also means freedom from religion.  That’s the heart of why there is separation of church and state.  This is a public building.  Paid for with local tax dollars!  Neither prayer, nor your Invisible Friend built the damned thing.  Thousands of hands working literally did; from every landowner in the community that works to pay their property taxes, whether or not they voted for the bond issue, to the last man applying caulk to the windows in the cafeteria.

I was right up front, with my wife and son.  I did not bow my head and close my eyes, because I am not in the practice of teaching my children hypocrisy, at least as much as any human can.  I was acutely aware that the look on my face was probably that of a local whose shoes were being pissed on by a tourist, so I did the simplest possible thing.  I turned around, looked up at the American flag that was flapping atop the pole in front of the school, and smiled.

Well, color me white with red shoes, but The Vatican seems to be getting a little more defensive than usual!  What?  Is the Catholic Church starting to fight back? Are they starting to feel it financially?  Between all of these kid-fucking priests, and declining congregations, and having to buy out whomever the latest colossal failure they’ve named head coach of Notre Dame football, maybe so!  It is a glorious thing, however, to see this monstrous organization on the defensive now, instead of being in the position to suppress the Western World.  Maybe we really are making progress.

The latest Pope, Pope Benedict XVI, aka Joseph Ratzinger, aka Joey Ratz, aka the Pope that was probably a Nazi when he was younger (which is actually not as frightening as someone being a Pope), spent his entire career as a Holy Bureaucrat shuffling around pedophiles in the Catholic hierarchy such that they wouldn’t expose the Church to any further liability.  In other words, he was probably the hardest working guy the Church has seen in a long time.

So anyway, As I was tooling past Old Navy and Target this morning (meaning I was somewhere in America), I heard yet another news report about some powerful bishop, somewhere in the Western World, blaming the internet, gossip, and media exposure for the Church being in so much trouble for child rape.  Now, it’s perfectly natural for a clergyman of ANY stripe to react viscerally to any sort of technology, advance in communication, or the light of day; after all, the internet represents the latest quantum leap in human communications, and the internet is where religion goes to die.  Blah, blah, blah, Bishop whomever.  But then, then, this fucking guy’s mouth runs on (because there’s no way that his lips could have still been connected to any sort of consciousness when he said this) to say that the Pope, the one guy who is the interlocutor between humanity and GOD, simply didn’t have the training to deal with the “sex-abuse scandal” when he spent years hiding and shuffling these rapists around so that they wouldn’t get caught.

Training?

What “training” would one need in order to recognize that molesting and fucking children is heinous, amongst the most vile of human crimes?  What “training” would one need in order to deal with subordinates that engage in such hideous behavior?  What “training” does one need to defend children?

Wait, why does the one man to whom God speaks directly need training in anything?!

“Holy Father” my fucking ass.  He’s a fucking creep, hands-down, don’t bother protesting.

And something that’s always confounded me is this; why is there any talk about “internal rules” to handle these “matters?”  Does the Kiwanis Club get away with handling felonies in-house?

For this, you vampires get cuffed, stuffed, driven downtown, and have your ass fucking kicked by the deputies in the interrogation room maybe if you’re lucky you won’t slip and fall, hurting yourself in the process.  Then, after getting the shit kicked out of them all the way during the holding process for trial, with a nice 20 years in the can to follow, cast down with the worst of the worst in State Prison, getting the shit kicked of them by Gen Pop for the rest of their miserable fucking lives.

In fact, “handling this internally” is what gets mob figures sent to Marion Federal Correctional for  40 years under the RICO statutes.  That’s organized crime, motherfucker, and not just in the conveyance of illegal gambling, narcotics, and prostitution, but the worst crime that a human being can commit, which is arguably worse than murder in some cases!

Personally, I hope Pope Ratzinger gets ass cancer.  I don’t want him to die from it; I just know it really hurts, and I’d like to see him live a long time with it, before expiring of something else that’s nearly as nasty.  And I’m not making light of that awful disease; I’m accentuating just how heinous the actions of these people really are.  Perhaps then, he might get an idea of what it’s like to truly suffer, and having his rectum fall out just might remind him of how much pain all of those kids went through, throughout the ages, as a result of his legion of pedophile minions.

I suppose I ought to say that, if you’re Catholic…I’m sorry.

For me, the city has lost all of it’s luster, and I can’t tell if that’s borne of my somehow maturing or if it’s the simple fact that I’ve been here so many goddamned times.  Since 1995, I’ve been there once a year, for a large convention in my industry.  The fact that I hate that convention more than any other work-related chore I’ve ever had to undertake probably has something to do with it, but I’ve also been out there another dozen times or so for fun, with my friends, my uncles, and my wife.

But I’ve had enough.  And, I can say with reasonable certainty that maturity isn’t a factor.

Vegas was fun, say, the first 15 times I was out there. I first went in 1992, when I was 21 and thought that dropping two rolls of quarters in the slots at the Flamingo was gonna break me.  Then again, in 1992, you could get any drink for 1.35, and a 20 oz. T-bone for less than $5.  The new corporate casinos were still wonders to behold, and I could drink a gallon of vodka with no ill effects.  There was a lot to see, and it was hard to gamble anywhere but Vegas at the time;  so, it really was a novelty.

Then, I started going out there for work in 1996.  The National Association of Broadcasters has it’s annual convention out there in the monstrous LVCC every April, and we have to drive our products out there perennially.  Back then, that meant not hiring Billy Bob Bigrig to drive our products out (our products are trucks), that meant us driving them out.  That was pretty cool the first time, taking the northern route through the Rockies and down through Utah, but getting the shit kicked out of you by crosswinds all the way across the country in April isn’t exactly sight-seeing bliss, and the convention is just brutal.

Somehow, during the 90’s and 00’s, I ended up going out there more than 20 times!  The convention trip was an annual and necessary evil, but the other jaunts were actually a pretty good time, up until a few years ago.  I am not sure what happened, truthfully, but I guess maybe I just got sick of the place that has everything to offer.  My wife and I went out there a few times just because we knew exactly what we were getting, and wanted to relax without having to explore.  Well and good.  But even that’s not possible any more.  I hate the fucking place.  The only things I’ve enjoyed out there during my last several trips were driving out into the desert to check out sights that are far removed from what you see day-to-day in Ohio, and playing poker, which you can do anytime with your friends.  Where once I saw man-made wonder, I now see facades and sausage factories.  The attractive locals are hardened service workers, and the tourists are walking in endless circles, looking for who-knows-what.

I also have a hard time figuring out why Frank Marino still has a job impersonating Joan Rivers.  Granted, he’s at the Riviera, and if you’re staying there, you’re either 80 years old, and thus a contemporary of Joan Rivers, or Asian, but how is anyone interested in a middle-aged cross-dresser impersonating an old lady that hasn’t been relevant since 1985?  Arsenio Hall is breaking news compared to Rivers, and I actually like her.  Hell, I have trouble understanding why people are interested in female impersonators on stage.  Drag queens are interesting on karaoke night, and are interesting to a lot of people when they’re alone in a hotel room with them, but doing a show or musical?  Watching someone put down mulch at a strip mall is more intriguing.

Another thing that’s worn me out on the place is that, for a city that seems to throw up a new billion-dollar casino every year, there’s actually little that changes (aside from the fact that drink and meal prices have gone up 1,000%).  For example, that motherfucker with the lobster from Rosewood Grille has been holding that thing at every bus stop since 1992.  And, frankly, Rosewood Grille ain’t all that good.

I’ve got a lot of great stories from that place; enough to fill a book (and get me divorced), but for this lifetime, I’m full up on it.  What happens in Vegas can definitely stay there; I sure as shit don’t plan on it any more.

Frankly, I think that the worst part of the video footage (not that you can find it now on the internet) was not the actual imagery of the guy flipping endo into the supports, but the footage of the officials/coaches/spectators standing by and reacting to what happened.  If you would have listened to the audio during that segment, you would have heard a metallic “BONG.”  That’s not a beer keg getting thrown off the back of a truck.  It’s not the swinging rear gate on a dump truck.  It’s the sound of the man hitting a vertical I-beam, head-first at 95MPH, or 140 feet per second.  There are pictures out there of the poor sonofabitch being attended to by EMTs, but he’s very obviously DRT (Dead Right There), 5 mile-eyes-wide-open stare and all.

Frankly, if you enjoy the “speed” sports showcased in the Winter Olympics as much as I do, that poor young man paid the price for all of us that tune in for just such events.  I can think of no other reason to watch the luge event other than the fact that flying down a tube filled with the slickest ice imaginable, on the north side of 90MPH on a fucking cookie sheet, is inherently dangerous.  There are an awful lot of sports for which that’s the main attraction, and a lot of those are found in the Winter Games.  In order for there to be an element of danger, some people have to get seriously injured, or die.  That’s what danger is, risk of death or serious injury.  There’s a good argument (mainly because it’s the argument that I make) that the difference between a sport and a game can be found in the risk of bodily injury.

BONG!

I do find it curious that NBC and the IOC have seen to it that all of that video has now been scoured from the internet.  If you search for it, you end up just linking to malware sites (of which I have no fear, striding into the interwebs forest in a MacBook Pro).  The day it happened, NBC had no problem replaying the footage again and again, in high def, slow motion goodness.  And now, interest in the Olympics is surely heightened, much as opposing traffic on I-71 is when there’s a wreck.  I’m just saying.

Instead, I thought “who?”  This is a small town, and surely if I didn’t know of the person, I’d know someone on the pot farmer’s road or street.

I checked out the Columbus Dispatch online first, foolishly, so I didn’t catch up to the story until this morning when I found it on Channel 10’s website. I was glad, even if slightly disappointed, that I didn’t recognize the name.   The news station, in keeping with their brilliant investigative journalism, left out any mention of where the bust took place, so I missed out on relating to the story that way as well.

(Say, didn’t I learn in 3rd grade, about what a news story is supposed to get across?  I am damned sure I remember Mrs. Moyer teaching us “what, who, when, where, and why.”  How hard is that?  Is there any possible way that journalism could be centered around other ideas, especially when you are talking about run-of-the-mill news splashes?  Maybe you can excuse a TV station, though I’d rather not, but the Dispatch is constantly guilty of missing themost basic vital components of what’s supposed to be a news story!  I suppose that’s what you get with a one-newspaper town in a city the size of Columbus.  I’d imagine that, as in many cases where there isn’t any competition, not needing to win will attract the retarded and the lazy like misery attracts clergymen.)

Anyway, this guy was growing up to 100 marijuana plants in his basement.  I can’t add anything further to that, because that’s what he was doing.  Was he selling pot?  Probably, but without guys that grow and sell it, where are people that enjoy getting high going to get it?

I’m looking for the crime here.

I do not like pot.  I haven’t smoked it in over 10 years, and I simply don’t care for it.  Frankly, I think pot is for pussies.  I mean, where’s the thrill?  You fire up your bong, or your bowl, or your perfectly rolled joint (once you’ve admired it, of course), and then, after raiding your stockpile of delicious snacks cache, watch TV, or listen to some music, or these days, evidently, play XBox 360 until you get sleepy.  That’s fucking weak.

I prefer a far more dangerous drug, as do most Americans.  We’ve all got our specific taste for it; for example, I favor a Canadian strain that’s imported regularly, along with some stuff from Europe.   Then, I fix at home, where I hit my stash until I pass out, not to be stirred for fire, burglars, or sex. But, you can also be served my favorite drug at any number of establishments set up just for that purpose, with loads of other users.  A few hits, and you’re just like everyone else that’s using right there with you, looking around at who needs punched, and who needs fucked.  Man, even those uptight home-schooling housewives, they get a few hits of the grape-flavored variety, and it’s legs-up in the taxicab time.  What a fucking push!!

Of course, the good times come to an end, eventually, because the drug I like give you liver disease, and are associated with various cancers, and that’s no fun.  But you gotta live for today, man.  Those pot-smokers lose in the end as well.  They end up forgetting where the remote control is.

Getting home, if you make it that far, is a problem though.  Charged up on my favorite drug, you kind of forget how to drive, but that doesn’t stop you from jamming on the accelerator and having a good old time!  A pot user, well, the only thing that they ever do is sit too long at a green light, on their way back from UDF with a bag of Funyons and a 2 liter of Mountain Dew.  Fucking pussies.

The funniest, and by that, I mean the most ridiculous and sad, part of the story is that there were two children in the home, so the grower of this supposedly noxious week was charged with two counts of child endangerment.  Really?  I have no idea if the adults in the home were fit parents, but if there is anything related to the growing of cannabis in the home that would have damaged these kids, I’d have to say that it would probably be trumped by having a dozen or so narco-stormtroopers, all surely clad in tactical gear, as enforcement agencies simply are enamored with militarizing themselves these days, crash into the house, shouting like vikings, and taking custody of the adults.   For growing plants.

Sure, one could point to seedy visitors, in and out of the house to buy their weed (if that was indeed happening at that house).  Of course, the people that usually buy pot are such pussies, and so lazy, that they probably wouldn’t be energized enough to case the joint for a later burglary. As long has one has hidden the Twinkies, there’s probably no ancillary crime to be committed.  Charged up on my favorite drug, there’s gonna be fightin’ and fuckin’ and who knows what else.

So, I’m going to rest easy tonight, knowing that this grower of plants the government doesn’t like is now safely away from the public.   If we’re going to do drugs in this community, let’s stick to the legal ones that kill and maim a few hundred thousand every year.

Well, that’s all just an illustration anyway.  I’m pretty confident I’ll live my whole life, and never, ever fuck a rabid goat…or go to Haiti.  The two ideas are equally appealing.  I’m just saying, if there were something I could do without jeopardizing my family, or if I had a specialized skill set that was in demand, I’d feel obligated to do it.  But, that’s not the case, so I transmit monetary credits to an appropriate agent, and that’s it.  I took a flyer on the Red Cross with my money, even though they’ve probably got a pretty big administrative overhead, and even though I’ve seen them waste money post 9/11, personally, though I would not be prudent in disclosing that colossal fuck-up, which took place because they were flush with money, and fresh outta disaster victims at the time.  I did the research, and sent the money. Beyond that, well, we’ll see what the wind does with those seeds.

Here’s what I could do, though.  I could take heed of the encouragement and admonishments of my Christian friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and those Christians that are just passing by on the interwebs.  I could pray for Haiti.  Pray for the victims, pray for the dead, pray for the people working there to save lives and counsel the bereaved.   Then again, as far as to whom I ought to be praying, and why, I can’t get a straight answer out of any of them.  Well, I can get a straight answer, but not an honest one.  It’s all convoluted, frankly, and I simply can’t reason my way through what they’d suggest.

For example, Pat Robertson says that Haiti had it coming.  They swore a pact with the devil (I’m trying to find the dates on when that meeting might have taken place, and I’m coming up with nothing.  Presumably the editors at most reputable news sites are looking too.  I also am wondering if the Port-Au-Prince Convention Authority might have any records of when that accord might have been reached between all those Haitians and The Dark Lord).  Therefore, there’s nothing that Christians can really do but raise money post-God’s-righteous-and-holy-wrath.  After all, those voodoo-loving, chicken-blood -drinking so-and-so’s had it coming.

I saw an interesting, farcical letter from the Devil to God/Pat Robertson that’s making the rounds.  In it, Satan really jumps on the two Holy Men for associating Haiti’s problems with some sort of deal they made with The Angel Of The Bottomless Pit.  After all, Satan says, when someone makes a deal with him, they get prizes!  Women, money, skyscrapers, mansions, the ability to play the guitar like Clapton; it’s all good in this life, you just have to pay up at the end of it.  No way, says Old Scratch, that he has anything to do with a deal that would subject Haiti to 80% poverty, AIDS, cholera, dictatorships, hurricanes, filth, shantytowns, and then a devastating thrust-fault earthquake!  He might be the Overlord of the Underworld, but he understands a contract, every bit as much as his protoges in the legal profession.

No, if someone’s going to subject the world’s most fucked-over people to a cataclysmic disaster, hundreds of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands dismembered, orphaned, homeless, bereaved, well, there’s only one guy, really, isn’t there?  And, it’s right up His alley, if you are familiar at all with the Old Testament, or Revelations, for that matter, and He’s done far worse.

The only problem is, how do you ask a guy that would do something like that for help in the matter now?  Honestly, I would be worried about irritating Him, and maybe that’s precisely what’s happened, given the 6.1 magnitude aftershock that occurred this morning!  At least you could say that He made the first quake so strong, that there wasn’t anything left to fall down this time around, which would make this morning’s temblor a really, really mean joke.  Then again, this is the guy that planted dinosaur fossils just to fuck with everyone that doesn’t believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old.  He is quite the Cosmic Prankster, I tell ya.  You could, indeed, die laughing.

Perhaps it really was Satan that did it.  Or maybe someone else did it, someone in Celestial Middle Management that screwed up, and caused that thrust fault running right through the island to slip.  If so, then maybe all these prayers are going in the wrong direction; perhaps asking who’s really in charge might be in order, and more productive, eh?

Maybe those prayers ought to be directed towards areas that are vulnerable to geological activity in close proximity to substandard building practices? A pre-emptive prayer flood might keep those nasty subduction zones and seismically active areas on hold?  But what kind of fun would that be for an all-powerful being?  Kinda takes the “Almighty” out of things.

Ah, you know what, pray away.   You’re not hurting anyone, unless there are chores to be done, or if you’re doing it in front of gullible children, or if you are doing it loudly enough to irritate me.  Supernatural intercession is just like St. John’s Wort, really.  If you take it, you can make yourself feel better; really, you can.  I think that’s indisputable.  However, the evidence shows that it’s clinically ineffective.  Per Epicurus.  And donate blood and/or money to Haiti, if you can spare either.

The now-decomposing shaman was widely credited with being a trendsetter, the first real televangelist that ramped up the showmanship, with the healing, laying on of hands, and all of the drama that’s now part-and-parcel of religion-for-TV scams.  I don’t think that he ever spoke in tongues or handled snakes; he probably did a cost-analysis on those activities and there just wasn’t enough margin for those risk-reward scenarios.

He did come up with one of the Top 10 scams of the 20th century, though, because he’s also the guy that, back in 1987, told his congregation that God spoke to him, and told him personally, that if his viewers did not send in $8 million, that the Lord would call him home, that the Almighty would kill him.  I’ll be goddamned if that just didn’t work.  It’s almost as though good ol’ Oral was halfway through a bottle of Wild Turkey and said to himself, “what WON’T these fucking suckers eat up?”  Kind of like McDonald’s probably did when they came out with the Shamrock Shake and McRib sandwich (sorry Sam).  Sure as shit through an anemic Bolivian, his viewers came through with 8 big ones.

So, now he’s dead!  91 years this guy got to live.  Did he die of natural causes, or did the Almighty Christian God have a formula for allowing Oral another 22 years?  8 million, divided by 22…or maybe Oral lied about actually raising the dough, and God somehow got busy with locust infestations, famines, and tsunamis and whatnot, and forgot to grease Oral Roberts back in ‘87?  I mean, to God Almighty, 22 years ain’t but half a heartbeat, right?  All it takes is fumbling around with the stylus on the Great Celestial PalmPilot, trying to check Oral off, and he’s around ’till ‘09.  Is that scenario any more ridiculous?

Yes, yes, anyone that asks people for money in God’s proxy is stealing or scamming, whether they’re cognizant of it or not.  Of course, going through as much trouble as the televangelists do, they’re just as culpable as the thug that walks into a check cashing establishment with a sawed-off Remington 12 gauge.  In fact, they are far worse.  They not only know that they are stealing, but they’ve set up this huge bureaucracy within their religion…which in itself is nothing but a bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake, so they’re amongst the greatest of schemers.

Further to that, these clowns have gotten themselves set up to where they don’t even have to offer a product.  It’s the ultimate Ponzi scheme, bigger and more sophisticated than Bernie Madoff.  You pay now, through the nose, at a clip that God himself established of 10%, for a product (well, real estate, I suppose) that you can’t see now, and that you won’t see until after you are dead.  Kind of like Social Security.  Better yet, these religious guys have it set up so that they don’t have to even pay taxes…talk about God’s Perfect Plan!  That’s the first evidence I’ve ever seen of any sort of providential perfection.  What a sweet deal!

These guys are actually far, far worse than Bernie Madoff.  Bernie Madoff was a thief that ruined many a family, financially.  However, he picked on rich people that wanted to get richer.  There is nothing wrong with being wealthy, and wanting to accumulate more wealth, but it paints a contrast with what these blood-sucking scumbag preachers do.  These vampire evangelists pick on the people that usually can least afford to give away their money; the elderly, the infirmed, the sick folks that have no hope in this life, and a great deal of people that are simply unequipped to take care of themselves.  These human viruses, these Gucci-wearing chupacabres victimized people that have already been victimized by circumstance, and squeeze every last dime they can from them.

It almost makes me wish that there were a hell for them to go to.

These guys always make me think of my dead grandmother, Baba Florence.  “Baba” is the Macedonian word for “grandma,” so that’s what we called her.  She was the toughest person that I’ve ever known.  She died at the age of 58, when I was 13, of respiratory illness, and missed out on a lot of great years.  We missed out on more than she did; she was that awesome.  Baba Florence was incredibly generous, loved her kids and grandchildren fiercely, and only ever said anything bad about a person because cared about that individual, and wanted them to better themselves.  The older I get, the more I miss her.

Her illness was a long, degenerative one, so she was prime territory, good hunting for the televangelists.  Thing is,  she did not believe a word of what religion had to offer.  I remember her being asked about what kind of service she’d want, what kind of religious arrangement would work for her.  She replied flat out, “None of it.  I can’t believe any of that.  Doesn’t make a bit of sense.”  Being a person that was suffering so long for no good reason, I’m guessing she might have thought things out pretty thoroughly, and she utterly rejected the idea of the perfect plan, the omniscience of the christian god, and so on, and so forth.  To her, no, I guess it didn’t make any sense at all.

Thereby, according to a lot of religious people I know, she’s burning in hell, for all eternity, with monsters like Adolph Hitler and John Wayne Gacy.

Thereby, if you buy into that line of thinking, and believe that Baba Florence is in Hell, allow me to say, in the strongest possible terms, “Fuck you.”

I’ll be pleased to repeat that story and sentiment many times over, for as long as I’m alive.  And I’ll do so using such coarse language, as that way of thinking, eternal condemnation for such a dear person, just because she disagreed with a certain religion’s viewpoint (which has only been around for about a minute or so), deserves no more and no less.

You needn’t be offended, though.  It’s the idea that I condemn, not the person offering it.  That’s dependent, of course, on how tight you and I are, and I offer the above anecdote about my dear grandmother in order to provide some perspective.

Anyhow, there’s a Christian I know very well, a person to whom I have a sense of loyalty (though he doesn’t really rate it), who is the type of Christian that’s what I call a rubber-stamper.  By that I mean he knows the Bible, studies it several times per day, has run youth-groups and hosts bible studies, but he’s the sort that thinks that if you say the magic words, asking Jesus to forgive you, then not only does it not matter what you have done to that point, but then you can do whatever you like after that.  It’s weapons-free with lies and your cock, wrecking relationships and breaking covenants, as long as you come to Jesus at the end of the day, and confess.  Another great deal, if you ask me, but that’s another story for another time.  Bring up these televangelists to him (and the subject does come up, as he definitely reminds you of one of them), and he actually has the audacity to agree that, yes, those men are liars and serpents, but they sure have brought a lot of people to the Lord, and that the Lord certainly does work in mysterious ways, using these charlatans to save souls.

I nearly swallowed my fucking tongue.  Isn’t this the same Creator that’s responsible for the billions of galaxies, atomic fire, and the miracle of DNA?  But to get his point across, he has to employ these TeleThugs?  This man honestly believes this.  It never ceases to amaze, the backflips and contortions that religious folks have to perform in order to make their worldview line up with how things actually are.

I’m not a Star Trek fan, but whenever I think about God’s cash flow problems, I always think of that one Star Trek movie where this vaguely priest-like character leads the Enterprise to this far off world, where God supposedly lives.  God has summoned this priest, and Kirk, and Spock there because, of all things, He needs a ride, and wants to commandeer the Enterprise in order to get off the moon-like planet on which he was living.  It was a Holy Mission, and everyone was filled with wonder, until, during the climactic scene, something occurs to Kirk, and in classic Shatner hackery, he exclaims “Excuse…me…but!…what!…does God?…want!…with a spaceship?”  Of course, the God-alien goes gangsta with lightning bolts, and kills the priest guy, and the crew of the Enterprise barely escapes, which is typical of Old Testament God behavior, except for the OT God was a whole lot better at murdering and genocide, and likely would have gotten the whole lot of them.

“Excuse…me…but!…what!…does God?…want!…with money!”

So went the song Hiroshima by Todd Rundgren’s on again/off again project, Utopia, from one their album Ra, which was released sometime in the late ‘70’s.  Todd Rundgren, who did a lot more than Hello It’s Me, was one of Mom’s favorites all throughout the 70’s and 80’s.  As I was growing up with her, a lot of his songs became the soundtrack of my youth.  I liked Todd too, and still do, even though he’s always had what I consider to be an oddly flat voice.  The guy has always been a musical virtuoso and pioneer, and if there’s one thing I really respect and enjoy when it comes to music, it’s technical proficiency and the ability to flat out write and play, which, evidently, no one that approaches the Top 40 (is there such a thing still?) does anymore.  It also explains why I like the band Rush so much and have no idea why they are the dread of so many people.

Anyway, this album Ra was certainly one of Todd’s lousier efforts.  I would give Todd the benefit of the doubt by assigning its mediocrity to that same drug-era hangover that afflicted so many artists during that same time period. It was a concept album in which he and his bandmates made a half-hearted parody of a concept album, by way of creating and slapping together songs that were semi-serious.  I liked it when it came out, but that’s probably because I was 8 or 9 years old, and it had a lot of synthesizer effects that were brand new technology at the time.  Being as this was released a couple of years after Star Wars, that was a big deal to me, and the few fanatical Todd fans that had the album.

Hiroshima was about, of course, the bombing of that city and Nagasaki, in which brand new technology at that time, nuclear fission, was used to incinerate, blast, burn, char, and irradiate two large cities and roughly 300,000 people.  It’s a sloppy piece, complete with sound effects (which I don’t believe belong in any song), and it’s completely corny and trite.  It paints a picture in which a battered people are punished by a nation that is technologically more advanced, out of spite and in a spirit of Christian revenge, for crimes that relatively few of their more fanatical countrymen have committed, and how this inhumane act of dropping the only two nuclear weapons must never be forgotten.

That all made sense to me…as a 9 year-old kid, who was living under the assumption that at any given moment, ICBMs and their multiple warhead payloads would come raining down on our cities, courtesy of our friends in the Soviet Union, and we’d return the favor simultaneously, and everyone would end up melting on the floor like candle wax.

However, as a somewhat literate, thinking adult, as a person that’s actually even gone so far as to try and learn a little bit about history, that scenario isn’t recognizable on the face of it.  I learned early on that during the Pacific campaign that the Japanese just would not quit, even when the outcome of the war was inevitable, and that while dropping Fat Man and Little Boy certainly visited horrors not yet known to humanity upon Japanese civilians, those acts spared the greater horror of invading the Japanese mainland.  Everybody knows this nowadays.

(Well, I thought that everyone did.  Apparently, there are grown-ups that do not understand, or most likely choose to ignore this.  I have no idea how these truths evade certain people, no matter what sort of revisionist history they might have read, no matter just how much their emotions reign over common sense and comprehension of facts.)

So this song, Hiroshima, which was and is completely forgettable, comes to mind these days for a couple of reasons.  For one, I’ve been watching the excellent 10-part series on The History Channel called WWII In HD, which follows the stories of a dozen men and women that served or reported on the war in both the European and Pacific theaters.

Their experiences are relayed in the first person, and are taken from either what they wrote down at the time, or as recalled later in life.  Not all of these veterans were still alive at the time of production, but the hardships that these people suffered are unimaginable, even when the recollections of them are supplemented by color film.  In fact, the sacrifices that these folks made are more evident in their faces, recounting these things as elderlies, than in any kind of footage.  This might seem to be a ridiculous observation, but these are old men that have lived entire lives, in their late 80’s, who have seen everything.  To see them tell of what they did and saw as kids, really, and to have the reactions that they do on camera is sobering, alarming and edifying.

Nowhere did American troops suffer more casualties than fighting island to island, atoll to atoll in the Pacific, pushing the Japanese military ever back.  Most of these deaths, disfigurements, and life-altering woundings had nothing to do with who was going to win or lose.  The war was decided fairly early on.  Japan was going to lose.  Yet, because of some cultural quirk, something in Japanese society that that devalued life relative to national pride, which was somehow mixed into their religion, the Japanese went about dedicated strategies to kill as many of the Americans as possible, and the only way to go about that was through self-immolation, island to island, atoll to atoll.

You don’t plan an invasion of the Japanese homeland over the course of a couple of weeks.  Those plans are years in the making, and at the time that the invasion would have come about, plans for the invasion of Japan proper involved over 5 million Allied troops.  Casualty estimates at the time for such an invasion were 1 million.  1 million!  1,000,000.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of self-immolation.

That’s been clear to me for years.  It was clear to Kurt Vonnegut, who’s emotional crippling during WWII became a wellspring of literary genius, and also resulted in unflattering opinions of his country, and being a far left peacenik in general (which is fine.  He served and earned the right to say whatever he liked).  Vonnegut said numerous times that, the only people qualified to answer the question of whether or not Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been bombed, were those that would have died otherwise, during an invasion.

Unqualified though they may be, my opinions on that question have been settled for sometime, but my emotional and philosophical attitudes towards the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have indeed changed, and very recently.

My Grandfather Kosta, is 88 years old, and is recuperating, as much as an 88 year-old can, in a nursing home with a bad hip, ostensibly, though he just seems to be wearing out in general.  He’s talking a lot about his youth, and has brought up what he did in WWII, which up until this point, I thought had not been very much.  This is not in judgment of anything he chose.  What does a 21 year-old get to choose when he’s in the military, in wartime?  He goes where he’s assigned.

For every man that saw combat in WWII, there were 5 that did not, instead supporting the war effort in other roles.  My grandfather Kosta was one of those in the latter group, spending the war as a cook in Greenvile, SC, at a training base, supporting not just the war effort, but the local economy by way of the local drinking and whoring establishments during the entire war.  Or so I thought, until he told me otherwise about two weeks ago.

In late 1945, my grandfather was nowhere near Greenville, or South Carolina, or the United States. He was on a military transport ship, halfway across the Pacific, halfway around the world from the Macedonia from which he’d emigrated 9 years prior, approaching the staging area for the invasion of Japan, in which he was scheduled to participate, along with 5 million of his colleagues, all for no other goddamned reason than the religious nationalism of the Japanese, which blinded them to the possibility of surrender and life after war.

About Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I used to think:

Hey, it’s too bad that war is so awful, and things came to that, but it had to be done in order to avoid countless more deaths.  The suffering that innocent people must endure is awful, and humankind’s only hope is to avoid such costly conflicts in the future.

Or something like that.  Now, my thoughts are a bit more specific, along the lines of:

Hey, it’s too bad that the Japanese mindset was so medieval and religious; it’s a damned good thing that there were such smart people working so hard to provide courageous men like Paul Tibbets, Jr. and his crew the tools they needed to end it in the Pacific.  Had there not been, then so much of what has happened since would not have had a chance to occur.  Army Corporals may not have had a chance to return to Columbus, Ohio, and rejoin the family restaurant, taking it over in 1951.  They wouldn’t have had a chance to raise three kids, including a daughter that was born in 1951, who then gave birth to me in 1970…

And so on, and so forth, right on up to my children that are now 10 and 7, and sleeping in their beds, in good health, and looking forward to long lives…so I might add to the above, would we have the will to do it again if we had to?

The Columbus Dispatch, that Grade-A daily that only a single-newspaper town could produce, ran a story today about the reaction amongst the denizens of said neighborhood, outrage over a business that has gotten zoning approval to open up in an empty building, right there on Alum Creek Drive.  The building, which in the last 5 years has been home to an electronics and appliance store, a charter school (home of the biggest financial crimes ever committed in the area), and offices for the Parole Department (by far the most appropriate use of the space), will now be home to a business venture that local citizens fear will now bring more crime, shootings, and general pestilence to this already smoking hull of a community.  A liquor store?  A pawn shop?  A mosque?  Nope.  The crime-generating enterprise that the locals fear is an indoor shooting range.

Talk about drawing guffaws from anyone that exhibits any sort of ability to reason or think clearly.  A shooting range, like a gun store, is the one place that crime is most certainly not going to occur.  Gun stores and ranges are to crime what strip clubs are to sex; there’s lots of hardware, but you can be 100% certain nothing of any sort of consequence is going to happen.  Vance’s Shooting Supplies, my favorite gun store, is located in an even worse part of town, up on Cleveland Avenue.  Yet when I go there, I’m perfectly at ease.  Everyone is well behaved, polite, and I could probably leave my truck unlocked, with a pile of iPhones on the front seat, and expect to find them there, unmolested when I return from inside with whatever new firearm that I didn’t need to buy.

Never mind the ludicrous reaction by some very obviously stupid people.  What I wonder is, exactly how does one become a “community leader?”  I missed that one on the ballot during the last election.  I looked for it, too; I scanned every page on the magical touchscreen ballot that my precinct employs, looking for the office of “community leader,” but no dice.  Then again, I live in a rural, somewhat well-to-do area.  “Community Leaders” seem only to exist in the rectums and armpits of cities, the parts of town that are featured on the 11 o’clock news in at least 3 out of the top 5 stories. If you’re driving through the city, and suddenly feel compelled to lock the doors, or in my case, rack a round into the chamber, chances are that neck of the woods has more than one “Community Leader.”

I wonder how news organizations find “Community Leaders” for comment? It’s actually probably easy enough, given that “Community Leader” is probably a euphemism for “local loudmouth.”  When Amalgamated Consolidated  Standard Energy holds a public hearing on their plans to build a new open-air slag heap facility in whatever downtrodden neighborhood they’ve victimized for generations, the local news hyenas just show up at the meeting, listen for whomever in the crowd stands up the longest and screams the loudest and most incoherently, and that person, standing out like a turd in a punchbowl, is your community leader, bonded, sealed, stamped, and sworn in.

You won’t find such folks in neighborhoods or areas that are populated by reasonable, responsible people that actually take care of themselves and understand the complex idea that, when you live somewhere, it’s probably a pretty good idea to take care of that place.  No community leaders needed.

I thought Martin Sheen did an excellent job with the narration, despite being handicapped by the fact that he’s not Edward Herrmann, and unlike a lot of narrators, I really think he injected emotion and emphasis at exactly the right times, which is probably pretty hard to do.
This series is colorized, which is alright, I suppose, but, “The Color of War” was better in that regard, because it was actually composed of real and rare color footage. Somehow, watching a colorized version of the doings makes it seems like footage about WWII, rather than footage of WWII. What interested me more about “Apocalypse”, aside from the fact that it was one of the few I hadn’t already seen, was that it spent a bit of time on how the war actually commenced in Europe. Most accounts are that Hitler attacked Poland, and then everyone else. That’s not terribly far from the truth…probably…maybe…because truth in historical matters is about as solid as Ed McMahon’s last bowel movement. I graduated with a B.A. in History, and the big takeaway for me was that Voltaire was right, that “history is a collection of jokes upon the dead.” (I think Voltaire said that. Whenever I can’t think of who might of said something, I go with Voltaire. He’s a good default.)

“Apocalypse” focused mainly on the European theater of operations, and the moves that Hitler was making, or trying to make, throughout the war. There was actually a time preceding the German invasion of France where Hitler was considering a political end to hostilities at that point, coming to an agreement with England and France to cease hostilities. The series didn’t say so, but my immediate thought was that Hitler would have done that only to replenish and recharge before attacking them anyway; he would have done it just to buy time. he had a peace agreement with Stalin, so that only makes sense. Despotic regimes have no problem signing treaties, bartering, and negotiating just to arm themselves and marshal their forces…sound familiar?

My wife actually sat with me for a couple of episodes, and of course it’s impossible to view or read any account of the German atrocities committed without having a visceral reaction to them. Almost everyone knows the significance of the word “Auschwitz” in human history, fewer know what the words “Treblinka” and “Dachau” mean, hardly anyone knows that the Germans executed more than one million (1,000,000) civilians in Ukraine, and almost no one knows that there were more than 100 concentration camps throughout German-occupied Europe. I suppose I may only say this in reference to my fellow Americans, but the ignorance of what the Germans did is almost certainly true here. There’s the figure of 6 million that people attach to the Holocaust, something about a phrase like “never forget,” which can be attached to any attack or spasm of bloodshed, but beyond that, it’s something that happened to the Jews a long time ago, and that’s it.

That’s terribly frightening. My wife, a highly intelligent, well educated medical professional and business owner, asked probably half a dozen times over the course of 20 minutes, “did they really do that?” Without going into how the victims of Germany were not just exterminated, but used for industrial products upon their murder, there’s really no atrocity that you can invent that the Nazi Germany did not carry out. The fact that SS Officers routinely used the skins of their human victims for lampshades was not something my wife had heard of; meanwhile, the shrunken-head paperweight made from what was once a real, live, human being, well, that was a new one on me.

There are two thing I don’t like to do when discussing the Germans in WWII. One, I don’t ever purposely confer a pronoun to Hitler, referring to “him” as a “he,” because that infers humanity. I also don’t like to say that “Nazis” were responsible, because a “Nazi” might as well be a creature from another planet, or a ghoul from the underworld. No, it was a whole nation of people that did what they did. Granted, there certainly was dissent, but a few crazed Nazi fanatics didn’t carry out the destruction of a continent, and a radical armed political faction wasn’t responsible for a war that resulted in roughly 60 million deaths. It wasn’t even just the nation of Germany. They had plenty of help from like-minded people in Romania, Hungary, Bosnia, and even the aforementioned Ukraine.

That’s the scariest thing to me. There’s no end to the cruelty that people can invent and carry out at the individual level, but how does an entire nation of people behave this way? That’s the difficult bit, and while billions of words have been written on the subject, I haven’t read or heard of any sort of answer that is satisfactory in any way, shape or form. Somewhere, below the waterline, there’s a capacity for atrocity that’s a part of humanity, period. In how many people, or what type of person, to what degree, no one has any idea, but it would seem that there are certain situations where there’s a perfect storm of righteousness, obedience, political organization, and the illusion of divinity that coalesces into human fuckery on a massive scale.

It really happened. You can be certain that schools-at-large in this country won’t teach any bit of it, and for as long as people still think that God talks to them, it will more likely than not happen again.