Posts Tagged ‘hypocrisy’

A Medal of Honor hero died this week. He was a fighter in one of America’s segregated units during World War II. I often think America forgets that the “Greatest Generation” included men and women of all colors. Modern Americans too often like to gloss the racism of the past and pretend it not only doesn’t exist, but never “really” did affect American life.

But of course, it did. Although Vernon Baker was a WWII hero, it was not until Clinton was President that he was recognized fully with the medal. Nice gesture, but is late really better than never? Because I wonder what a difference it might have made in the lives of all African-Americans in post-war America to have a black man wearing the Medal of Honor walking the streets? Only seven black soldiers were granted this highest honor, and Mr. Baker was the only one alive to receive it.

America likes being a bit late at the gate, it seems. There is a lot of banter about how America is a sleeping giant, but, boy-oh-boy, once we wake up; look out! Right. If that was ever true, America is tossing back Ambiens at present.
The news mentions the passing of Mr. Vernon Baker and everyone says “Oh, what a brave man.”

The news still barely mentions heroes of the current wars, or the soldiers that die every day. I just wonder if it wouldn’t be better for our troops and veterans if someone thought a bit more about them before they are 75 years old, just for a change.

And since awards of the beautiful starry blue ribboned medal in the current wars have been so very stingy, one wonders if politics play a part? Do they hold back the awards to minimize the demands and costs of the war? After all, putting a hero up in clear view means this is some serious WAR, man! Do we still really want to play this one off as if we can do it with one hand tied behind our backs? Because we are losing men, bleeding money, and Humpty Dumpty is in pieces. All the CIA tricks and bigger bombs aren’t putting it back together again.

I just think Vernon Baker, and other Medal of Honor holders like him, would probably appreciate America noticing their brother and sister troops while they are still alive and struggling with the war and its effects.

And in line with the military and the nation being stuck on the “too little, too late” wagon, tomorrow will be “Suicide Saturday” a week earlier than usual.

I am not alone in taking issue with the so-called “automatic” excommunication of hospital administrator Margaret McBride. A quote from one such article:

“Imagine another headline: Catholic Hospital Refuses Emergency Treatment, Pregnant Patient Dies. Is this the same church that demanded Terri Schiavo stay on life support? ”

This gets to the meat of my argument with Sister Margaret being thrown out for her choice to save at least one of two imperiled lives. It seems to me that the Church is very selective in its insistence on the sacredness of life. It has more interest in lives that lie back, mouths shut/or as yet incapable of saying anything self-determining. Terri Schiavo couldn’t speak. A fetus cannot speak. A dying pregnant woman CAN plead for her life, a child of such a mother, a husband of such a mother….all of these living and supposedly sacred people can speak. Why are their words not listened to by the dogmatic pedants of the Church?

I would say because the Church has stopped looking at the actual people who are communicants. It looks to dogmatic pronouncements and self-protection, as a quote from another article in defense of mercy over dogma makes clear, a case in which the Church punished the victim of a crime and “loved” the male sinner and did not excommunicate him:

“It has, moreover, taken a position that punishes virtue and right action and promotes evil…..Last March, after it was discovered that a 9-year old girl in Brazil was raped by her stepfather and was pregnant with twins as a result, her mother arranged for her to have an abortion, as she was unlikely to survive the pregnancy. The Catholic Church excommunicated the girl’s mother and the doctors who saved her life. The stepfather was allowed to remain in the Church.”

So, I am the hypocrite? I am the one in error here in questioning why females get cast out even when they are the victim, while males get scolded but held to the bosom of the Church? Because a fetus trumps all….even, in Sister Margaret’s case, a dying fetus in a dying mother.

Even a Catholic priest defends the choice made by Sister Margaret:

“Although I cannot disagree with the bishop’s theology and support the Church’s protection of the sacredness of all life, I suspect he needs “medical” treatment himself: a strong injection of reality. If the mother of an 11-week-old fetus dies, the fetus will also die. It is too soon in life for the child to survive outside the womb no matter what the hospital might try. That means two deaths. Is there really a morally defensible reason for two innocents to die when one can live? It’s a hackneyed phrase, but what would Jesus have done?”

If Bishop Olmstead had been in King Solomon’s place in the Bible where two women claimed the same infant, I suspect that baby really would have been sawed in half. Because the letter of the law is more important to him than the life of any real woman with already living children at home in need of a mother. I consider it suspect whenever anyone argues “doctrinal soundness” with me instead of talking about the living, breathing, speaking people involved.

The pregnant woman saved by Sister Margaret’s choice had followed the dictates of her Church. She had children, she obviously did not use birth control in spite of suffering a disease that made pregnancy very dangerous. So, because she “left her marriage open to the creation of children” as it was so quaintly put in my marriage vows, she is to be punished by death in Omstead’s opinion?

Oh, wait. I know; she and her husband should simply abstain from sex if getting pregnant is so hazardous for her, right? Because if you really pursue this, that IS where the argument goes. Some prim tight-lipped Churchman is going to say “Well, you knew pregnancy was dangerous. So you shouldn’t have had sex. So, hey, take your medicine (death in this case) like a big girl and quit whining.” Rather like some of the Protestant fundamentalists who do not want their daughters to be vaccinated against the virus that causes cervical cancer; because by a similar punitive logic, if they have sex they SHOULD get cancer and possibly die.

But men don’t have to die for illicit sex. They don’t get cervical cancer, nor do they suffer high-risk pregnancy. Nor do they risk excommunication, apparently. After all, all those Catholic priests should be abstaining, too, since celibacy IS the rule. A great number of them are not and further, are victimizing children for their illicit sexual gratification.

If Margaret McBride was excommunicated for saving a woman’s life by ending a pregnancy that by Church lights should not have happened; why aren’t bishops and cardinals being excommunicated for leaving priests on duty when they know that THEY are having illicit sex? How come it is women who pay….and with their lives…for forbidden sex. No “hate the sin, love the sinner” there, is there? When a woman’s life, literally (the mother) or professionally (Sister Margaret) is on the line the message seems to be “Well, you slut sinner, you should have known better!”

So, yeah, after further thought, I guess I AM calling Omstead and others like him hypocrites. If it all comes down to paying for sex with your life, and Sister Margaret upset that apple cart by saving a life; she is not alone. But then, those yummy altar boys don’t get pregnant or need abortions do they? So, male religious figures don’t take the same risks in decision making that the earnest and merciful Sister Margaret took.

So they are not only sinners and hypocrites, but chicken shit.

Sometimes I feel like a complete cynic. Today is a holiday and either last week or this week, school children will be deluged with the most superficial bits of Martin Luther King’s lifetime. I saw what my children were offered and it struck me as politically correct and unsubstantial, a human life rendered into something less than accurate history and less affecting than myth. The way to manage a man who would not BE managed apparently is to enshrine him in a holiday where people can sleep in and ignore the reason for the day.

And Gods forfend if the problems his movement attempted to address should be acknowledged to still exist, but with window dressing and euphemisms to soften the effect! I was a teen when MLK died, and I wept in front of the television that year—-twice, when King died and when Robert Kennedy’s life ran out on a restaurant kitchen floor. Racial tensions and economic hardship tied to race were acknowledged problems in 1968; now the perception is those are behind us, dealt with and over with for America. And that is BULLSHIT.

The only time America twitches and admits, tentatively, that it is not a “done deal” is when disaster strikes. Racism was obvious when Katrina hit a largely black city; Pat Robertson said God was punishing sinners. Yeah, Pat, black sinners is what you clearly meant; and if we had any doubt, your recent comments about it being the fault of those terrible Voo-doo praticing Haitians that an earthquake tumbled down what poor pathetic infrastructure they had, doubt was erased. If an island so near our coast was full of nice shiny white Christians, I am sure the level of suffering and misery that is the daily fare in Haiti would not be tolerated.

After all, America couldn’t watch the white folks of disintegrating Yugoslavia go on killing each other; but nobody blinked too hard about tribal genocide in Africa. Of course, most folks are not so blatant as the moronic Pat Robertson or the driveling sack of crap that is Rush Limbaugh; but an awful lot of folks just sit quietly or murmur something like “Well, you know THOSE people just don’t focus on cleaning up their own mess.” Right. Bit hard to do that when venal leaders grab theirs and go, when the world ignores you, when nobody really gives a damn what walls of impossible height block your progress. When a country’s first attempts at independence are beggared by bigger neighbors worrying about their own slave rebellion and make you pay off your former owners, it is a bit difficult to get off to a good start.

So, on Martin Luther King Day, what would Martin, Robert and John say, if they looked down on Haiti? And across the waters to an America that is still busy trying to grab all the oil, all the economic prerequisites for the top one percent of her population? I have this peculiar compulsion, probably because my spiritual life demands eschewing hypocrisy: I think a holiday (holy day) should retain something of the reason for its being. America should be looking at the suffering of black Haiti on the day we celebrate a black martyr who died for our sins.

Some could accuse me of posting a verbal self-portrait with that title! But I was actually thinking of the recent train of thought about my entire country. But I will begin with a confession of sorts. I AM self-absorbed at times; I get wrapped around the axle of self-examination to see if I am doing things “right”. When I say the majority of my countrymen and women are self-absorbed, I cannot, of course, know if they use that phrase the same way. I suspect not.

By insular, I mean that most Americans care little for what goes on beyond our borders; by self-absorbed I mean that most cannot be bothered to know the least thing about what goes on in the world outside their families and pets—as if ignoring it makes it incapable of reaching into their lives to monkey wrench things. And because I do believe most of my fellow Americans ARE people of good will and generous at heart, I believe in some deep recess of the mind, they KNOW this is what existentialists call “bad faith” and it depresses them.

I am sure most folks stopped reading right there, going “Oh God, another America hater.” I don’t hate America or Americans. I love my country and fellow citizens as I love my children or husband. But just as I can get pissed off when my grown children or husband do something remarkably stupid or self-damaging, I can get pissed off at my nation!

And I wonder how America got ISD’d to begin with? How does that happen?
When did reading the news about the celebrity de jour become more important than real news (like the ability to now create fake DNA at crime scenes, for one thing? How did America suddenly throw in the towel of involvement and retreat to pablum on the evening news? How did a nation like this become more involved in “comfort” that caring what is “right” in the world? When did our ideas OF what is right get skewed to mean “young, bouncy, thin, and sexy” instead of “honest, hard-working, determined, and fair”?

News pundits pounded President Carter over his “malaise” speech. But you know what? He had a very good point. We have lost something—and we are losing more constantly. I have to fight the tendency myself, I find myself in danger of retreating into some mystic and solitary condition instead of putting up my fists to take on the world. Sometimes I don’t want to read the news either; but if I don’t? I have no right, next time shit hits an American fan, to cry “Oh, why US?” Because if you are not paying attention and working to counter the downhill slide, you have no right to bitch. Yes, all us nasty mean people who grew up saying things like “If you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the problem!” had a point.

What problem are YOU solving? I know one friend fights against the bullshit stigmatization of fat Americans. I know a lady who takes on her local government when they do stupid land-grabby things. The “think globally, act locally” crowd is onto something. We live in a smaller and more crowded world than we ever imagined. Step out into it and CHANGE it; it will change YOU and suddenly the world will be your front yard, you will forget to worry if your crows feet are worse, and the depression will lift!

Say it has been a busy night with a religious group.

Say that after the official ritual was over, much alcohol was consumed by most attendees.

Say you are the officiant of the group.

Say your “significant other” had too much to drink and is hanging on you, unhappy and upset.

Say you are upset and ready to ‘blow your top’.

Say you shove the drunk one hard enough to put this person on the floor, hard enough to bruise.

This is NOT justifiable anger.  This is not righteous indignation.  This is not self-defense.

This is domestic abuse, asshat!  I SAY you are a hypocrite to your group, pretending such communion with the Goddesses and Gods.  Those deities are going to kick your ass.

Today, going through the list of blogs I usually read, I found a story about a man in Michigan.  A man who was 93 years old, a widower with no children who fell behind on paying his electric bills.  So, his utility company sent out a guy to put a special box on his power supply—it only allowed so much usage and then turned off.  This would be his “ten day warning” system before they shut his power off completely if he didn’t pay up.  Apparently, they didn’t inform him how this worked.  One small problem, in this case—they didn’t get a check in the mail.  Their efforts to teach him to pay his bills or do without failed, because he FROZE to DEATH inside his 32 degree house.

Do you get that? A poor, lonely old man died of freezing.  But hey, surely that is just nature’s way of getting rid of old farts who can’t pay bills, right?  It isn’t like he is an innocent fetus in danger of being flushed or anything, is it?  Yeah….are you getting that I am plenty ashamed and pissed off about a country-full of people screaming about pro-life so long as it applies only to the unborn or those who WANT to die because they are teminally ill and suffering irremediable pain.

What lesson do I take away from this pitiable and contemptible example?  That those who are already living in this country are ignored, those who want to leave are forbidden to do so, and the only ones “treasured” are fetal lives that cannot speak or have any contrary opinions yet.  Am I smacking Christianity?  Well, yes, at least the parts of it who are so up at arms ready to tell everyone how to live their lives and how or whether they may die and the reason has jack to do with me being a pagan.  I am smacking them for ignoring the Book they tell me is so holy to them.

I don’t recall Jesus going around telling women what to do with their wombs. And don’t tell me there were no abortionists back then, EVERY society has figured out what to do with unwanted fertility issues.  But I do recall him saying to visit the prisoner and the sick.  An old man, impoverished and alone is certainly imprisoned.  And now, he is dead.  All you oh-so-pro-life sorts can put down your placards and quit screaming at television cameras; if you want to follow Jesus GO HOME to your community and check on the abandoned elders.  Make sure they are warm and have groceries.  Do not EVEN get in my face in the grocery store aisle where birth control foam and rubbers live unless you can show me you give a damn about someone already breathing on this planet.

I’d also like to smack the utility company which SHOULD know if electricity is the only heat in a home during a Michigan winter.  I’d like to smack whatever billing department bean counter simply didn’t give a shit if someone was cold or not.  I’d say the infrastructure that let this man freeze had better not try moral one-upmanship with any primitive society made infamous by putting elders out to die on the ice when they couldn’t feed them any more; because a 21st century American state just did the equivalent with the keystroke of a billing department computer.

At the very least, I suggest every one of you look at your electric bill.  Mine has a little block that says I can donate a few bucks to help old folks pay their bill.  At the very least, round up a bit; someone out there is sitting in the cold with nobody to defend their right to life.

Ok, first a tiny bit of confession—every time the GOP has had a sex scandal I have made sarcastic and caustic comments. Big woof, I am a Democrat. But did I follow each story, scream and yell for which ever idiot de jour it was to be publicly castrated? No, in spite of hearing of a couple cases involving children that made me WANT to do so. Did I make insulting comments about their wives? No, I did not.

But I am feeling a bit maxed on nerves this morning for purely personal reasons, so I am going to wade into this hoopla about the Governor (ok, ex-governor) of New York. Why is it our business? Do all those journalists get that seriously panty-bunched over EVERY “john” who hires a hooker? And make no mistake—-$50 or $5000, its a hooker, get the hell over it.

Now, I am apparently a very unnatural woman. I believe prostitution should be legal. It is going to exist, it is my idea of a victimless “crime” if you insist on calling it criminal. I think legal prostitution is more easily regulated and kept both clean and UNcriminal. But obviously, the many Puritanical ideas about sexuality that still hold sway in America make that quite unlikely to occur. So when someone like Eliot Spitzer gets caught with a hand in the cookie jar, Oh My Gawds…..do you all see my eyes rolling here?

And all the lacrimose on-carryings about his wife and how she could stand by him—-some “journalists”(AH….yes, the LEGAL whores!) going so far as to say it was for purely ambitious political reasons of HER own. You know, that is just SO very classy, folks. Dwell on the poor wife. Cause you know, everyday women never have to deal with what she has on her unhappy plate, right?  And most of what is on her plate, because of “journalists” isn’t because of her husband at all. Here is a big clue for you camera-jockeying harlots: the fidelity or lack of it between a man and woman is THEIR business, not YOURS.

I have been a military wife for 30 years. I was military first. I was disliked by other wives, because I seem to have had an invisible scarlet letter on my forehead that meant “She is a WAC, one of those whores that is at work with HIM.” Now, I didn’t sleep with married men while single, and I never slept with ANYone  except my own husband after my marriage. This is not because physical fidelity is a big deal to me. It is NOT. I think it is the most shallow view of marriage one can possibly hold. I think it is as silly as swearing to never eat outside one’s own kitchen, even if starving. I have been physically faithful because it is important to my husband….but if he needed a piece of ass when I was not around, you know, I just don’t see that as the first sign of the marital apocalypse. See, obviously unnatural, me, in a field of women prone to making comments like “If he comes back from this exercise and I think he has been dipping his goddamned wick, I am gonna leave and take his damned retirement pay with me!” I also knew Army wives who ran around. Who wrote “Dear John” letters. But gee, if the guy does it, well, back to the “Oh my gawd” chorus we must surely go.

Get the hell OVER it America. It is their business. Oh, and you GOP MFs? You can kiss my unnatural ass—you of the multiple divorces, you who didn’t hound Vetter to bits, or Craig, you who do classy shit like serve divorce papers on cancer-fighting wifes, you who like Rudy of New York. What a bunch of silly tight-assed hypocrites! Personally, I don’t think Eliot was getting laid by a high priced call girl for sexual reasons at all. I think it was a power game, mostly—-not too different from the guy in the hotel bar who orders the Scotch that costs $78 bucks a shot. And his wife looked very unhappy, shame on journalists who make CERTAIN it gets worse because of lots of play. Kudos to Spitzer for quitting to give those vampiric assholes less cause to continue dogging their every move.

But honestly, America, this is the BIG deal? This matters? We have an economy trying to do a 1929 retro hell, we have a war on two fronts, we have civil rights being violated right and left (btw..that is how they nabbed Spitzer–watching his bank transactions as if he wre a member of the Cosa Nostra), we have a President who wants to go for number three in Iran in the next nine months and THIS is what you are getting your shorts up the crack about? A dozen US soldiers have died in the last week, tell me, do you know even ONE of their names off the top of your head? Why don’t you ask those journalistic watchdogs why THEY don’t get any goddamned play in the spotlight? Because if THIS kind of shit is what you all get your news hour rocks off about, well, then maybe we don’t bloody deserve anything better than what is happening to us.

My cup of disgust runneth over.

Trying to get back into some sort of regular writing habit again….let me know how I am doing, lol!

I have been listening to a while now about how “good” the economy is/how bad the economy is and it seems to me that the goodness or badness is relative to your place in the economy. America used to talk less about economic classes than Europe, at least that was my general observation living both places off and on. And I wonder if that time of relative quiet on the subject is over?

What makes me launch into this today is the continual effort by my son, medically discharged from the Army with two pretty totaled knees, to find a job that will support him and pay his child support payment again before the State of Washington cancels his drivers license. (I am still trying to figure how that plays to any kind of sense…without a license how would he reach a job if he found one?) He has been applying for two to thee jobs a day for months now. He has had only one call to come be interviewed. And when he got there, it was not, as it was slyly presented, a job per se, but a temp agency.

He will not work for temp agencies after his experience with them at the last warehouse job he had. He was not a temp there, but a supervisor who saw the temps treated like virtual slaves by their accompanying temp agency supervisors. They were routinely forced to extend their ten hour days to twelve or fourteen hour days, told to report for work on their break days or be fired, forced to grovel for permission to do things like use a bathroom, and screamed at by noisy little men with tiny dicks and nasty interpersonal skills.

They look an awful like a whole new class for America—at least to this amateur philosophy student. Karl Marx would recognize them—he called them the proletariat. They were the class of abused workers he thought would rise to rebel against their masters. Looking at how the temps are treated, I don’t know why murder doesn’t ensue on a weekly basis. Their unpleasant supervisors apparently think they are another class entirely and scarcely treat the temps as human beings.

Ancient Rome had three major class divisions: patricians (once every citizen of Rome), plebians, and slaves. The patricians came to be not every citizen of Rome, but the old families often engaged in priestly or senatorial life of the city and usually well to do. The plebians were the commoners of Rome, but in the early years not necessarily poor. They could be tradesmen or craftsmen and quite well to do, though usually they didn’t own large areas of land in or out of the city as the patrician class came to do. The slaves were the property of the other two classes, of course and didn’t even own themselves.

In America, we have a corporate class of patricians. The plebs of America, aside from new underclassmen at military academies, are the middle to lower middle class. They are shrinking like arctic ice beneath polar bears, too. No doubt, the supervisors who scream at temps, and the companies who hire 75 to 80% of their workers ONLY as temps (Yes, Target is among these in their warehouses), are holding on for dear life to their membership in this shrinking and embattled class. The corporate masters have patrician tastes, but little of the responsible attitude that once marked Rome’s upper class: they make money off stock holdings and not by the sweat of their brows, they don’t care how that stock dividend is earned by the labor of others.

I got to wondering what America’s “patrician” class dreams of in regard to the rest of America. I note there is much media effort to make every American aspire to the things only these new patricians can afford. For instance, this week, north of here much news and film clippage was wasted on the burning of the famed “Street of Dreams”….four houses that would have sold for over a million dollars each. ELF left their signature sheet at the site taking credit. Now, mind you, for someone supposedly doing “war” for the environment, who willfully puts that much toxic smoke into the atmosphere, not to mention burning that much prime lumber, is a complete idiot. Stupid way to “protect” the environment, ELF! But the drivel of “pity us, pity us” from the builders didn’t inspire much sympathy in me either. Street of Dreams? A bunch of houses costing over a million bucks? Whose goddamed dream IS that, anyhow? Not the common American, that is for sure. More Americans would be happy to dream of owning ANY house these days as subprime loans tank. My veteran son can’t even afford rent and groceries. His street of dreams is any job that would make a livable wage and provide some health benefits.

We are becoming a nation fractured into economic lines hardening into fortress-like configurations. We are being routinely lied to about the need to be good consumers who don’t ask exactly what it is we routinely consume. American workers are losing jobs to other nations where workers are treated worse. And those left here who can’t buy stock or occupy shrinking zones of professional life? Well, they are being funneled into the ranks of a new proletariat: the temps. Temps are NOT only illegal immigrants (tho’ many are) or racial minorities and legal immigrants; they are also many of the storied “working poor” and active duty military trying to make ends meet.

There is a more modern example of this kind of class division, and not one that requires reading Marx or playing socialist-communist philosophical games. Remember France, anyone? Remember when those silly spoilt aristocrats lost their heads? America talks equality, and spews rhetoric about respecting veterans; but when it comes to hiring—-well, they want you to work for starvation wages and no benefits. People will only lose so much, men and women will only watch their children hunger for so long. And if I am still alive when all this greed and bullshit hits the fan, yes, by Gods, I will say “I told you so!” and Marx will laugh, possibly in French!