Texas’ John Cornyn, William Frist, Richard Scott See Red River Flowing Over ObamaCare.

By Cindy P. Lymanstein for CPW News Service

The future of healthcare under Republican leadership?
Sen. John Cornyn (l), Dr. Bill Frist (m), Gov. Rick Scott (r).

     Senator John Cornyn says the Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare is constitutional, but argues with the John Roberts' court preferring what one healthcare watcher said was “a need to embrace the Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath healthcare option.  Suicide."

     “The Supreme Court can decide what is legal, but it cannot set legislative policy,” said Cornyn whose state governor, Rick Perry, called the decision a “stomach punch” for conservatives.

     Noting that the policy is an economic failure from the get-go Cornyn said  “Most of the experts like McKenzie say that employers will drop their employer provided coverage."   Presumably that's Dallas Morning New's William McKenzie who says that Republicans had backed a wrong strategy, given Mitt Romney's earlier approval of an individual mandate in Massachusettes' universal healthcare coverage.  McKenzie's assessment given Justice Roberts' decision was correct.  Cornyn was admitting the obvious.  Much more is obvious, but no one in the political lime light is talking about it.
     Judy Woodruff  of PBS asked on Thursday night, June 28th, the day the Supreme Court announced the decision, “what would the Republicans do to replace it?”  Cornyn didn’t answer that question except to say that we should hone in on costs.
     Barry Sullivan, head of the 'Got No Damn Healthcare, Damn It', Party said he welcomes the Republican control of Congress if Obama is thrown out of office in November. "If Obama wasn't going to get the job done through legislation, then I welcome the Republicans getting the job done by bringing back jobs. Jobs. That's what we need. Good jobs. Jobs good enough to pay our healthcare requirements. And I don't mean one of those healthcare plans that give you a scalpel and points to your appendix. Why am I saying this? Why? Because I got no damn healthcare, damn it.”
     Sullivan noted, however,  that Cornyn’s home state of Texas is where conservative Republican Senator from Tennessee and a surgeon, Dr. Bill Frist, had united with the current Governor of the State of Florida,former Texas lawyer and healthcare entrepreneur, Richard "Rick” Scott, to pummel the medicare program with false claims bringing over 500 FBI indictments, clearly showing a Republican culture of greed and corruption and sending Columbia/HCA into oblivion, but launching Rick Scott into the political limelight with his $400 million Columbia/HCA severance package.  The $1.7 billion Medicare fraud fine paid by Columbia/HCA is the largest such fine in U.S. history.  "The election of Rick Scott as the Governor of Florida, but who got his start in healthcare in Texas, a state that shares with Florida the Bonnie Blue Flag of the two states' Confederate slaving histories, says everything about the idiocy of this whole line of reasoning.  The U.S. may have cutting edge medicine, but the majority of Americans don't live on the cutting edge of medical breakthroughs and the increased delivery of solid healthcare at a resonable price to a great number of people will be an economic plus....not a negative," said Sullivan who said that the cutting edge research will not be adversely effected in any way.
     “You want to reduce the cost of ObamaCare, freeze Governor Scott’s bank accounts in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands and make Dr. Frist do free surgeries from a state of the art surgical suite in Sing-Sing, or whatever Federal prison the Worldcom and Enron boys went to,” said Sullivan.   Sullivan said that sources close to Dr. Frist and Governor Scott were “seeing a huge source of windfall profits drying up like a discarded appendix on a Miami sidewalk in July or like a Texas Longhorn’s castrated scrotum hanging on a barbed wire fence near Big Bend in June.”
   "Younger members of the Texas medical community have followed Rick Scott and Dr. Frist's example.  In Dallas, dentist Richard Malouf, was also fined for bilking taxpayers through Medicaid fraud," said Sullivan who believes the practice of avowed capitalists sucking funds from a taxpayer program is like horse theivery in the 1800's.  "Republican's Frist and Scott were going to bring us through Columbia/HCA what they called the 'Walmart of healthcare,' but with Walmart under investigation for corruption and bribery in their business model, the Republicans offer only the Enron, Worldcomm and Columbia/HCA model of healthcare and that's just not good enough," said Sullivan.  "Why?  Because I've got not damn healthcare, damn it!  And an unregulated healthcare system is like an unregulated Wall Street or energy market with Enron at the wheel, " Sullivan concluded.



REGULATE OR DEREGULAT/APPROPRIATE/MASTER-BAIT.
Sullivan noted that in both left and right political ideologies a ruling elite develops, uses either
regulation or de-regulation as a catalyst for wealth accumulation which becomes the "bait"
for recurring revolution and change.  The Master-baiters have, in Sullivan's opinion,
an obligation to temper their ambitions with a solid humanitarian ethic. The masses
have a corresponding obligation not to recreate another bloody Peasant War as
in Europe's violent past.

      Sullivan explained that the problem of Republican corruption inherent in a deregulated culture and Democratic corruption inherent in a regulated one are the same.  "There are no truly free markets and there are no fully socialistic ones...utopia is out of reach of both....but the 'governing dynamic' needed by both is a solid core of humanitarian or religious sensibilities.  Communism tried to strip the nation of those sensibilities and the West uses the claim of those sensibilities to whitewash the realities," said Sullivan who provided the above sketch of his argument.

Joel O’Steen’s Neo-Paganism

By John Kingsbury Moltmann for CPW News Services

     Rev. Joel O’Steen’s simple, straightforward style is seductively innocent.  His dimpled grin and beaming smile are disarming, charming and communicate a great warmth and love.  You feel as if you have known him since grade school.   What’s not to love and admire?

     Dietrich Siegenfelder  of the Foundation for The Study of Neo-Paganism is of a different opinion.  The biggest criticism of O’Steen is that he is a theological lightweight who has built a feel-good church in one of the most powerful cities on planet earth.  Houston, Texas.  Appealing to an amazing cross-cultural mix of followers, the church offers a smorgasbord of community ministries, while O’Steen’s recurring theme is one of faith in God and personal empowerment with God being  the source of a never ending flow of spiritual and material blessings….especially material blessings.  It is here that Siegenfelder takes issue.

     “So last Sunday Joel tells the story of a football player who had given up hope of a pro football career.  He was selling pizzas to make ends meet when a 10 year old boy and his father answered the door for their pizza.  Recognizing the player the boy said ‘What are you doing delivering pizzas?’  With that question the player returned home, started working out, put on 70 pounds and not only made the pro team, but became a star.  In his summation Joel stirred the congregation to reach within themselves for the best that they can be and not to quit because they have the ‘DNA of God in them’.”

     Siegenfelder argues with this later point and uses it to unpack O'Steen's clear, but subtle descent into what Siegenfelder calls “the seductive power of neo-paganism.”  Siegenfelder understands the challenge of being all that we can be inspite of our limitations, but he wondered why O’Steen didn’t tell the congregation who the player was.  “Was it Lyle Alzado or Brian Bosworth?”  he wondered.  “How was he able to put on 70 pounds rapidly and would his methods stand scrutiny?”   Siegenfelder also reflected on the steroid-use acquittal of baseball pitcher Roger Clemens three days earlier and on Penn State's Jerry Sandusky who had just been convicted on 45 of 48 counts of child abuse at Happy Valley.

     "Happy Valley," said Siegenfelder.  "If I were the judge I'd lock up Sandusky and his wife together in a happy little valley......yes, together..... in a six by six foot cell.  For a pedophile that ought to be like hell before hell especially if there's no guard intervening to break up the inevitable fisticuffs." Siegenfelder toyed with the idea that if Bill and Hillary Clinton could share a cell directly next door to the Sanduskys it would make a hit reality TV show with great educational value.

     “Here’s the problem with O'Steen's message,” said Siegenfelder.  “The Jews and Muslims ….and even Christians….have long maintained that God is God and humans are something else altogether.  Greek mythology takes humans and weds them to deities genetically giving them super human qualities...Achilles, for example.  Christianity does the same to one man, but not with the mythological superhuman qualities that we associate with bulked up sports figures, Herculean Olympians, or  a small, but buff, Brad Pitt sticking it to a much bigger baldheaded Incredible Hulk.   Jesus had a bulked up humanity and compassion but that does not translate well into the stereotypical macho warrior.   Children are now targeted for the the reintroduction of the god-within of Greek and Egyptian mythology in the writings of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter or Rick Riordan's The Lost Hero.  Judeo-Christian belief sees humans created in God’s image….whatever that means.   I tend to believe that it means that they have a capacity for a spiritual, ethical and moral dimension, but certainly not God’s DNA, nor a spritualized moral capacity that makes them capable of saving themselves from the abyss.  For Christians, the virgin birth of Christ deals with that issue.  It argues that  Jesus the God-Man is the only, the one and only, who has the DNA of God....which has led even some Christians to deny the virgin birth for what that orthodox belief does to their trust of the scientific method in life analysis.  Then there is  Jesus’ words….’that which is flesh is flesh and that which is spirit is spirit.’  Being "born again" is a spiritual experience, not a DNA injection.  Unable to live up to a natural desire for super-human anything, Christianity sees the individual driven to his or her knees in existential despair and receptive of a wholly-other means of salvation.  Jesus.  Then they lead others to recognize the existential despair and offer the same solution.  O'Steen avoids deeper analysis skipping the despair thus joining the mythological bandwagon," said Sigenfelder.  Siegenfelder believes that the power of Western Judeo-Christianity is the freedom given to those who don't have to be god....or a god.....but humans struggling to be fully human and using the natural world and it resources to cope with their humanity as people of faith often stretched between the poles of action and inaction.....Shakespeare's "to be....or not to be?".

     According to Siegenfelder, O’Steen strays into neo-paganism of the kind similar to Scientology when he argues that we carry within us the DNA of God.  “This sounds very close to the idea of our having a Thetan…..Scientologists’ name for the ‘god-within’,” said Siegenfelder.  “That would be an affront to the deepest held conviction of the Judeo-Christian and Muslim religions," according to Siegenfelder.

     Siegenfelder says that while O’Steen is more a “glass is half-full, rather than half-empty” kind of preacher, implanting the image of carrying the DNA of God in our person is to violate the prohibition of images that these dominant world religions have historically maintained. 

     “I prefer to say that I am a glass-is-half-full person, but the glass is cracked and leaking and in constant need of refilling by God’s grace because I’m not God…..never have been and never will be. ”

     People come to O’Steen because they want to be more than what they are, but according to Siegenfelder, O’Steen’s emphasis upon personal empowerment and monetary reward  opens the door to neo-paganism masquerading as orthodox religious belief or in O'Steen's case Mainline Pentecostal self-helpism....itself a recent amalgam of conflicting traditions.   “David Koresh believed that he was God and that he had the DNA of God in him….so he spread it around…..primarily in the vaginas of his female followers,” said Siegenfelder.

     Ironically, Siegenfelder sees the problems associated with O’Steen’s gospel primarily as a product of Western Capitalism married to a success formula that incorporates Christianity.  Houston is a drill-here-drill-now-get-er-done city that thrives on a brashness like that of Tom Slick chasing the Yeti across the Himalayas or George H.W. Bush attempting to finish the annexation of Central and South America that Teddy Roosevelt left dangling.  Oilmen like Roy Cullen or Howard Hughes rarely asked penetrating theological questions preferring the slickly lubricated and transportable self-help philosophy of petroleum wildcatters.   Generally, they want the benefits and rewards of the conquest without inheriting the long-term problems.  This is what the environmentalists are always pointing out as commercial exploitation devoid of humanity's deeper struggles.   In Howard Hughes' case this easily translated to his personal relationships, too, like to Hollywood starlets for which he often openly negotiated for drilling rights.  In these cases Christianity may act like a drilling slurry that helps move their agenda forward toward the deep wells of material payoff, but this is in essence the usurpation of the Christian ethic by pagan principles.  It is, after all suppose to be harder for a rich person to find heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle....and you can't make that stupid case that the 'eye of the needle' was some little door in the Jerusalem wall inside a larger gate that didn't exist when the Bible was written and that it can be negotiated with knee-bending humility.  That still makes salvation what O'Steen's message is also full of.  Work harder!  Nope.  That camel is going to be severely streamlined like a wayward space shuttle sucked through a black hole's vortex no matter the power of its reverse thrusters, but what's impossible for the camel is possible with God.   The Gospel is harder to swallow than a four foot flax seed muffin, you see, but that doesn't sell seats at the old Summit nor in Robert Schuller's Chrystal Cathedral where Windex is said to have a number of its sales reps in regular attendance," said Siegenfelder who also noted that O'Steen's tendency to splurge on his ministry, as with the Easter Sunday rental of New York's Yankee Stadium for $1.5 million, proves that he is a Keynsian in fiscal policy.  'Do it and they will come'....."Like with the loaves and fishes....just spread the wealth around and there will be more and more and more of it," said Siegenfelder who considers O'Steen a guru of cultural narcissism like Pulitizer Prize winning author, Chris Hedges.
     “It’s like when Apple’s Steve Jobs announced the McIntosh computer with the Ridley Scott commercial in 1984…..an Orwellian ad that indicated that because of the MacIntosh, 1984 is nothing like Orwell's 1984. Jobs shared with his supporters his favorite quotation from Henry Ford.  When Ford was told it was wonderful that he had given people what they want in automobiles Ford said “people don’t know what they want.  You have to give them what they want.  If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said ‘a better horse". 

     “There was nothing humble about Henry Ford,” said Sigenfelder.  “The guy thought he invented the automobile.  Never mind that he didn’t, or that trains were running long before the automobile or that the real breakthrough discovery was the wheel.  He just routinized its reproduction.  Or that one day a horse may in fact be superior to a car....especially if they can be genetically engineered to fly like the ones in the movie Avatar.  Henry Ford created the assembly line for the same reason that Josiah Wedgewood used that same process in making porcelain china which he didn't invent either….to control the knowledge of production through compartmentalization and fragmentation along an impersonal assembly line.   Ford bemoaned the lazy worker, but depended on them for his fortunes and on the taxpayer-paid road system over which his machines traveled never admitting the obvious symbiosis between the citizen-paid concrete and asphalt roads and the reduction in broken Ford axels, wheels and motor-mounts.  The same for English taxpayer-paid canals that provided transport for Wedgewood's delicate china.  Ford wouldn't hire a job applicant who put salt and pepper on his meal before he tasted it.  "How would he know if he hadn't tasted it first?" Ford asked.  "But it was breakfast and I could see that my eggs weren't peppered," said the rejected Packard designer whose dreams came true at Harley-Davidson.  Meanwhile, John D. Rockefeller pumped oil worldwide, used petroleum's sludge as asphalt roads, gave away dimes, built churches and envisioned a world-wide oligarchy of Thetan-esque leaders atop a new world order all the while promoting law and order that protected their system of rule.

John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Joel O'Steen.

     "In this modern age of routine monotony punctuated by crashing buildings people want to believe that there is a God within them longing to break out and be free, but that’s not God in any organic natural sense.  That’s just them and many will traffic in this natural longing while giving it a spiritual definition devoid of the spiritual essense,” said Sigenfelder pointing to a woman in Ridley Scott’s MacIntosh ad as she is hurling a sledge hammer that explodes the image of the Orwellian Big Brother which for Steve Jobs was IBM.

     “And I’m not at all sure that the Tavistock-type Ridley Scott ad created for MacIntosh computers didn’t hide the reality of it when it was revealed at an Apple stockholder’s meeting that the software designer for the new MacIntosh was actually Bill Gates of Microsoft who was the power behind the monolithic IBM software programs….the very Orwellian scenario that Jobs said was overcome by his new McIntosh computer is today produced in Orwellian factories in China.  Who knows what Trojan Horse or tracking elements are already in the world's computers....like the PROMIS and PTECH software that was shown to have invaded our FAA and Defense Department computers or STUXNET which spread initially through Microsoft Windows?" asked Siegenfelder as he read a magazine article about drones in Afghanistan and reflected on the Children's Machine, a $100 computer offered to Third World children by Nicholas Negroponti, the younger brother of Iran Contra defender, National Security advisor and Ambassador to Iraq who succeeded L. Paul Bremer, John Negroponti," said Siegenfelder and asking "have they never heard  the saying...'beware the Greek bearing gifts'?"
      Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak has drawn the connections between IBM, its computer punch cards and the Nazi Holocaust which was dependent upon convincing the German people that they were gods….Aryan gods….but gods none-the-less.  O’Steen’s  little gods may be more culturally diverse than those of Twentieth Century Germany, but the principle is the same and given their indoctrination into the Houston culture they are as steeped in its lock-step-oil-ethic as Germans were in Hitler’s Reich.   Given that the Houston culture is an oil culture where even the Bin Laden family owned an airport within a stone’s throw of its many refineries, Houston Gulf Airport,  Joel O'Steen would do well to remind the sheep of his pasture that Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world," said Siegenfelder.

Jonathan Mould's Gift Molds Boston Reaction To Stradivarius

Benedetti Gift Fiddles With Ragged Dick Duet

by Sophia Nostra Damaston for CPW News Service

      Nicola Benedetti, Scotland’s renowned 24 year old violin virtuoso has been given a gift.   A very rare gift.  Jonathan Mould, head of the Bank of America’s European, African and Middle Eastern branches owns a rare Stradivarius violin worth more than $2,000,000.  To the younger Benedetti who won the 2004 Young Musician of the Year award, Mr. Moulds lent the violin over four years ago.
        Not to be outdone, Jason B. Priestly, Chairman of the Greater Boston Community Credit Union, a collector of rare historical musical combs and spoons has lent the hair comb of Horatio Alger and the solid silver teaspoons played by abolitionist orator, Frederick Douglas, to the Ragged Dick Duet, Mortimer J. Baughman and Ira G. Gravitz. 

Douglas' Musical Spoons

     The spoons were played by Mr. Douglas when he was running away from the Southern renditioners and was returned to Misery Plantation in the Alexander Brown influenced region of Maryland.  Horatio Alger played the Priestly comb when he was writing Ragged Dick and other unforgettable stories for young men and boys whose interest and confusion over the book's title sent sales of Alger's now famous stories soaring.  Valued in excess of $83,500, potentially more at auction, Mr. Priestly is delighted that the Ragged Dick Duet is putting the spoons and comb to such good use.  

Priestly's comb played
by Horatio Alger.

     "I was going to give the spoons and comb to the Smithsonian Institute until I learned that Dick Cheney and Bill Frist were on the board of the Institute whose Board of Regents is chaired by  Chief Justice John Roberts," said Priestly who was not happy about Cheney's support of extraordinary renditioning and waterboarding which contradicted the Geneva Conventions.  "Mr. Douglas would have played his spoons on Mr. Cheney's noggin' if he were living today," said Priestly who also said in an aside..."15 of the 19 World Trade Center terrorists were from Saudi Arabia and we invaded Iraq and Cheney can't see straight enough not to shoot his friend in his face."

Frederick Douglas (l), Rumsfeld's Misery Plantation (c),
Donald Rumsfeld (r).

     "Frederick Douglas also played the spoons just before his famous speech at Boston's Fenieul Hall which led African-American singer, Marion Anderson, to argue that she was not the first African-American musician to perform in the historic Boston landmark when she was denied the opportunity to sing the National Anthem there in 1939.  That incident led First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to resign her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution," said spoon impresario Mortimer J. Baughman who noted that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had dined together at Rumsfeld's Misery Plantation, the place where Frederick Douglas was renditioned following his attempted escape from slavery.  "Donald Rumsfeld bought Misery Plantation," said Baughman as he referenced Democracy Now's Amy Goodman's coverage of the Rumsfeld purchase and compared and contrasted this fact to Rumsfeld's handling of Abu Ghraib, the U.S. torture prison in Iraq.

Ira Gravitz playing Horatio Alger's musical comb

     At their concert in New Orleans last week the Ragged Dick Duet recorded their first  live album using the historic instruments. The album’s title song is “Give Us More Spoons, General Butler” a parody of a 1864 tune attributed to Civil War General Benjamin “Spoons” Butler and itself a parody of an early Mexican-American War tune titled "Give Them More Grape, Captain Bragg". 

     General  Benjamin "Spoons" Butler, a Union General during the occupation of New Orleans,  was nicknamed “Spoons” because he was always making off with the citizens' silverware, a characteristic that would be duplicated many times over during Reconstruction....."a prematurely ended artificial period after the War that could have been avoided had the Southerner's simply freed the slaves, given them 40 acres, a mule and a rifle and marched North in 1859 before the Yankees had marched South in 1860," said Baughman.   "What field slave wouldn't want a share in nice Springfield rifle arsenal or a little Park Avenue haberdashery?" he wondered. 

     "Boston's bullet maker, George Luther Stearns, one of abolitionist John Brown's "secret six" financial backers made both spoons and combs out of lead instead of silver and tortoise shell, but that business  went belly-up with the greater demand for ammunition to fight the Civil War," said Baughman.  Baughman also noted that the lead spoons gave soup a distinctively metallic taste and that the lead combs tended, like the lead spoons, to loose their shape quickly.   The lead  mining industry would not experience another such profitable era until World War I when the father of Prescott Bush and great grandfather of George W. Bush, Samuel Prescott Bush, was in charge of the U.S. military's small weapons production and after World War II when the U.S. Civil Defense plan folllowing the atomic bombing of Japan, called for Americans to paint their houses with lead paint if they hoped to avoid near instantaneous ignition during a thermo-nuclear war. 

     "George Stearns' lead spoons had no musical resonance so he made two silver spoons that Douglas lost at Misery Plantation between whippings and water boardings," said Baughman noting their eventual recovery and that the steady clickety-clack of the spoons against the a man's thigh helped a runner to keep up a steady pace.  "Those spoons meant the difference between capture and freedom for Douglas," said Baughman.   Butler seemed motivated in his accumulation of spoons by little more than kleptomania," said Baughman as he began playing a rendition of Carry Me Back To Old Virginia.

"George Luther Stearns sold lead to Baltimore's Brown family who used it to make musket balls at the Merchant's Shot Tower in Baltimore where the first test case for the Fugitive Slave Laws was focused on runaway slave and bullet maker, James Hamlet," said Baughman. "This caused many to conclude that John Brown and Alexander Brown, progenitor of the National City Bank Boys fingered by two time Medal of Honor winner, Smedley Butler, for their "business plot" in the 1930's that aligned them with Hitler's growing Axis powers, were a tag-team.  John Brown and Alexander Brown's boys appear to have been in cahoots with a plan to use the abolition of slavery to ignite a lucrative, weapons-profiteer's civil war.  Kind of like using the high road of the threat of terrorism to invade Iraq while kicking off their civil war....a money mill for the weapons-makers," said Baughman.  Baughman then suggested I read General Smedly Darlington Butler's book, War Is A Racket,  before he joined Ira Gravitz in playing a zesty arrangement of New Orlean's song writer Randy Newman's Political Science.

ORDERED DIALECTIC MAINTAINED

Religious Award Maintains Delicately Ordered Balance

By Fabian Colbachi for CPW News Service

"I'll risk that this is not going to be redacted like your previous post, Winsip.  And if it is?  I'll just post it elsewhere."  -Fabian Colbachi

     It is not often that the carefully balanced relationship between the church and state under capitalistic and communistic cultures is so obviously revealed, but that is what happened in February, 2011 when a Texas Presbyterian seminary broke with tradition and awarded not one, but two of its alumni with recognition for their fine representation of the Christian Gospel.

     Carlos Emilio Ham, had been the moderator of the largest Protestant denomination in Cuba during the Castro regime that changed the island nation from a capitalistic economy where, as we have seen in popular films like The Godfather, life was riddled with the excesses of unrestrained free market engorgement that led to the Castro overthrow, not unlike the sale of opium in China that led to its Cultural Revolution.  The Castro regime change promised a new future for the small island nation, but as we now know it led to the “Missiles of October”, the “Muriel Boat Lift” and strained relations between Cubans, the U.S.,  and expatriated Cuban nationals clustered primarily in Florida and enjoying a standard of living that seemed justified in spite of the excesses inherent in the free market.  Socialism with freedom and Capitalism with justice remains an illusive dream.

     When a Corpus Christi, Texas church awarded Rev. Ham a scholarship to the seminary, some were surprised that such a kind and apparently open gesture would be made public. Religion and politics can seemingly make strange bedfellows unless they are seen within an ordered dialectic that seeks to maintain civility and decorum.

     Of course, the question of “whose civility and decorum” remains a carefully hidden secret while organized churches tap dance around the gold coins upon which is the image of Caesar.   The Caesar of the left and Caesar of the right are  always juxtaposed on the same coin.  It would seem to many that true religion would pay homage to those who have best reminded the world that all Caesars owe homage to God alone who has created ex nihilo….out of nothing….all that is.

     With his Doctor of Ministry degree in hand, Rev. Ham rose to the highest ranks of the World Council of Churches as a specialist in evangelism.  Presumably, from that position he would have first-hand knowledge of how world governments use and abuse evangelism for the sake of purely political objectives.  He would understand Capitalism’s tendency to varnish the most self-aggrandizing behavior with the hypocritical spiritual pronouncement by its religious leaders while understanding Communism’s resistance to any authority higher than the state…..in a word…..God.

     Standing, as he did to receive the seminary award with Lt. Col. Gilley Richardson, U.S. Army retired, one seminary alumni who wished not be identified said of Ham….“I wonder if the former General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, God rest his soul, is feeling the pain that Rev. Ham is surely feeling?” 

     When asked to clarify he said simply, “the shoes of the fisherman are crusted with bovine defication.”   Whatever that meant.  It was later learned that one of the seminary’s professors had been the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches and that he had also been instrumental in a U.S.  Senatorial race in Connecticut that put the more liberal, William Benton, over  the top in a bitterly fought contest between Benton and Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two U.S. presidents.   Prescott was implicated in the historic fascist-leaning “business plot” of the 1930’s that was made public by two time Congressional Medal of Honor winning Marine, General Smedley Darlington Butler.  That Connecticut senate race employed the brutal smear tactics of “Red Scare” progenitor, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who viciously attacked Benton's civil rights record which McCarthy saw as subversive.

    The anonymous alumni referred to a type of imposed tension and dialectic in the giving of the double-award.   The ceremony came at a time when the seminary, a Presbyterian seminary, was under fire from Methodists for  a poor record of minority inclusion.  He said that he believed that the  dual-award was carefully crafted for its apparent public relations message and redemption value.  "Madison Avenue’s best spin-meisters could not have done a better job of it," he said.  The outspoken, yet veiled, alumni said that it was his impression that this seemingly local event provided a bird’s eye view of a fascinating puppet parade being  meticulously orchestrated. 

     “You remember that America’s leading nuclear scientists, Einstein and Oppenheimer, were stripped of their effectiveness as peacemakers…. 'Oppy' literally divested of his national security clearance by the efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Rice University’s Kenneth Pitzer and Yale's  William Liscum Borden?  Oppy refused to make bigger bombs. That was while Pitzer was developing high octain fuels for the petro-chemical industry.  Oppy argued for the peaceful use of nuclear energy for powering the world. The petro-boys said it was far too risky.   So what do they do?  They powered the U.S. Navy’s most explosive weapons, gigantic aircraft carries and submarines with small nuclear reactors while the U.S. lead paint and varnish companies employed former U.S. military officers to sell the lobotomized American public on the survivability of structures during a nuclear holocaust... if only they’ll follow the Civil Defense plan and paint their homes with lead based paint.  Meanwhile, telling everyone that we live in  a Cold-War age of mutually assured destruction, they at the same time were lacing gasoline with lead, too.  That was a boon to the lead mining companies whose mainstay has long been musket balls and bullets.  Lead miners Moses and Stephen Austin would be proud. George Luther Stearns, a Civil War backer of abolitionist John Brown, attempted to  corner the lead market during the Civil War. He would likewise have marveled at the resources gone up in gray smoke into the upper ozone layer....for a nifty profit.”

     “Yes,” said the anonymous alumni who added definition to the ceremony...  “It wasn’t exactly like they're giving the award to St. Francis of Assisi and Mother Theresa, or even to a some creative contemplative cross between Thomas Merton, Frederick Buechner or Eugene Peterson  and John Muir, is it?” he asked.

     “There they are, the religious representatives of two historically warring governments who had missiles aimed at each other, now being led at the same time as the seminary’s need for a redeeming photo-op to shake hands while seeming to elevate the very group that recognizes them following a recent public embarrassment.  The dialectic is maintained.  Whatever rises does converge…but I’m not really sure what that has to do with the Gospel.  Sometimes these things have more to do with the physics of a septic tank.  It might be different if we weren't at the same time waging unjust wars, exporting attack helicopters to undergirt unjust regimes while denying it and pronouncing blessings on war from America’s pulpits,” he concluded.  “Good grief.  It is my understanding that the Muslim Brotherhood who is poised to reclaim power in Egypt was actually doing our CIA’s bidding in years past if not created by us for the purpose, else why did they not rebel against Mubarak long ago?  And the former Soviets continue to support the Syrian bully? You see what I mean when I talk about the bull shit on the shoes?  It appears to me to be an RCA, a random copulative assembly.”

     “A what?” I asked.

     “A random copulative assembly.  You know," he said.  "A cluster fuck....religiously speaking."
     "But you say this isn't a random at all, but planned," I retorted.

     "Okay, then, a planned copulative assembly.....a PCA where the real winners are the musket ball makers.  Will we never grow up?" he asked.