Narrowly missing the end times

I remember watching Sarah Palin at the during the debates on TV. We had gone to a sports bar because, you know, they have a dozen TVs all with huge screens, and all on all the time. Why they call them sports bars instead of TV bars is beyond me, but anyway…… Sarah looked as dumb as a stump and Joe Biden seemed gracious, like a grandfather humoring one of his granddaughter’s thick headed friends. After it was over I found myself in the men’s room next to a 30 something fellow who was saying to his friend, “She impressed me. She seemed kinda smart.” There was silence, so I said, “She’s a creationist, isn’t she?” “Yes,” he said. “That’s not smart.” “Yes it is.” “No it’s not.” “Yes it is. It’s emotional intelligence,” he said and walked out of the room, thereby having the last word. Emotional Intelligence? That’s a new one on me. Sarah Palin, being a Creationist, doesn’t believe in dinosaurs – she thinks the earth was created whole cloth about 6,000 years ago, including all the fossil evidence. No dinosaurs, no Pleistocene era, no evolution. No DNA evidence. No science. If this is emotional intelligence then she is emotionally stupid.

Damn………….. That was a close one, wasn’t it? We could’ve gone down the Holy Toilet with that one. But we were saved by our evolved frontal lobe! I was on stage when it happened. I had been invited to an election night jam session – a whole bunch of players getting on and off stage while the results were displayed behind us on a big screen hooked up to CNN on the internet. I had just finished my second song – Petroleum Bonaparte – when the crowd began cheering wildly. I thought, Jeeze thanks, I didn’t know you liked me that much – then I realized they were all looking over my shoulder, and I turned around to see “Obama elected president” running across the bottom of the big screen. All I could do was sit and watch. Moved to tears, as I thought of all those generations of Black people neutered and stolen, all those years of Martin Luther King and the anti Klan rallies, the fire hoses and police dogs, the promise but never fulfillment of emancipation. All of it. And now, America has elected its first Black president, and I had lived to see it. At long last, I am no longer ashamed of my passport.

Now we go forward. Maybe now we can find the inspiration and creativity to do the work. And what a blast! Wouldn’t it be great to travel in a touring theater troupe performing for loggers and steel workers? To get to sing to truckers and their friends at the places where they rest between drives? To be encouraged to write and sing of the great human progress we are capable of? But I am ahead of myself……….. Things are to early yet. Too soon to tell. Still, I believe that Americans are a good people, capable of great generosity and laughter, great leaps of invention. I think we can be better than we have been. We have been held hostage by a cabal of nitwits. Finally we can break free. And as we struggle out of our idiot shackles maybe we can realistically discuss what is to be done with the availability of power, how power should not be given to stupid nasty people. Bush used to blow up frogs when he was a kid. No power for him. Palin doesn’t believe in dinosaurs, no power for her. Maybe we can put them all in a nice pastel-colored room with soft walls and regular meals. They can listen to music and watch the Cartoon Channel on television, and no one will contradict them when they say crazy things about Muslim-headed demons coming to blow us all up, or the wonderful golden places that we can go when we surrender ourselves to The One True God. And they will have pillows, great scented pillows – pillows with radios in them, tuned to the subliminal Prozac that exists in-between stations. The static songs of the Bliss Angels, lulling them to an eternal floating dream, almost asleep but awake enough to have deep personal relationships with their hallucinations.

So let’s talk about religion for a minute. I saw Religulous last night, the Bill Maher movie. It was wonderful, I recommend it! Talking snakes and virgin births. Comic book heroes and invisible police departments, really crazy stuff. I was raised agnostic so I was spared a lot of indelible training, the fear implants that make it so hard to see straight. My only criticism of the movie is that he didn’t give credit to religious evolution. Just as the Catholic Workers are the hands-on almost humanist branch of that faith, so there is now the Mormon Workers. And if you check out the Buddhist press you will see the feminist movement asking why there’s so much patriarchy. I guess what I’m saying is that eventually religion will disappear as we are more allowed to present atheism in the public sphere – and intelligent alternative to magical thinking – and as the religionists themselves are allowed to break through the confines and narrowness of their theologies.

Anyway, enough of that. I’m looking forward to getting some work done and making some much needed progress. I’m getting pretty busy on the musical front – booked all the way into the spring. Hoping to go to China in the summer! That would be interesting!! Got to write more songs and play more guitar. The rain helps, and it’s raining now. Good old rain. Everything becomes a mysterious secret when it rains.