The top Google searches give us an unfiltered insight into one aspect of the American psyche. What do you suppose Americans are most interested in at this critical juncture of history? Were people trying to find out more information about the ACA, the NSA, Syria or Iran? Not exactly. The number one Google search beginning with “what is” was “what is twerking?” The number one search for information about a person was, you guessed it, Miley Cyrus. Warning: don’t look at this list on a full stomach.
TOP GOOGLE SEARCHES BEGINNING WITH “WHAT IS?”
1. What is Twerking
2.What is Ricin
3.What is DOMA
4.What is Molly
5.What is Gluten
6.What is Sequestration
7.What is Obamacare
8.What is Lupus
9.What is Snapchat
10.What is Bitcoin
TOP SEARCHES FOR PERSONS
1.Miley Cyrus
2.Drake
3.Kim Kardashian
4.Justin Bieber
5.Beyonce
6.Rihanna
7.Taylor Swift
8.Selena Gomez
9.Katy Perry
10.Kanye West
Daniel Jose Older makes an interesting criticism of 12 Years a Slave in Salon. He loves the movie, but asks why the civil rights struggle is so often portrayed in terms of a white savior. When the story of civil rights is told in those terms, the struggle of black men and women is relegated to the margins. They are denied agency in their own narrative. He uses Lincoln as an example:
“Our myths reveal mountains about who we are as a nation. Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” erased Frederick Douglass, reinforcing the tired notion that a singular white man, through the sheer force of his moral conviction, brought slavery to an end. In “Lincoln,” as in “12 Years,” this cliché not only hobbles the film’s cultural relevancy, it is a narrative failure as well. The story begins with Lincoln already having formed his opposition to slavery. Without the history of his relationship to Douglass, we have no idea how this president is willing to risk so much to pass the 13thAmendment. There is no inciting incident, no motivating factor: We are left with just a determined man. And the story suffers for it.”
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/17/its_time_to_take_the_white_savior_out_of_slavery_narratives/
Last month Rev. Frank Schaefer was suspended for officiating his gay son’s wedding. When his 30 day suspension was over, Schaefer vowed to continue his work.
“My honest answer has to be: No, I cannot uphold the Book of Discipline in its entirety. In fact, I don’t believe anybody can…because it is filled with competing and contradictory statements.”
Schaefer was referring to the Methodist principle that pastors are to “to provide equal ministry to all people.” It is not uncommon for the traditions of a church to overwhelm and silence its core principles. At such time people of faith must be willing to disobey the church’s hierarchy in order to obey the church’s message.
“I cannot go back to being a silent supporter, I am an advocate. I must continue to speak for my LGBT brothers and sisters. I cannot repent [for performing the same-sex service]. I cannot make the statement that I will not do any more services.”
This Thursday, Rev. Schaefer may very well be defrocked by the Methodist Church. On the other hand, his judges may find the courage to do the right thing. In any case, this pastor’s courage has taken us one step closer to the inevitable day that the church will end its persecution of GLBT people and return to its true message of grace.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pastor-suspended-officiating-son-gay-wedding-vows-quit-article-1.1549478#ixzz2njk5vYEW
“While Obama referenced the Kennedy administration in his memorial, he made no mention of the multiple reports that the CIA, under Kennedy, tipped off the apartheid South African regime in 1962 about Mandela’s whereabouts. In 1990, the Cox News Service quoted a former U.S. official saying that within hours after Mandela’s arrest, a senior CIA operative named Paul Eckel admitted the agency’s involvement. Eckel was reported as having told the official, quote, “We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.””
-Juan Gonzalez
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20665-one-of-our-greatest-coups-the-cia-and-the-capture-of-nelson-mandela
The hoarding of the rich is often excused by pointing to their generosity in giving to charity, but according to the Congressional Budget Office, of the $39 billion given to charities last year $33 billion went to the richest 20% of Americans. And most of that ended up in the hands of the richest 1%.
“But a large portion of the charitable deductions now claimed by America’s wealthy are for donations to culture palaces – operas, art museums, symphonies, and theaters – where they spend their leisure time hobnobbing with other wealthy benefactors.
Another portion is for contributions to the elite prep schools and universities they once attended or want their children to attend. (Such institutions typically give preference in admissions, a kind of affirmative action, to applicants and “legacies” whose parents have been notably generous.)”
http://www.alternet.org/economy/rich-peoples-idea-charity
“So somehow we had decided on the left that religion belongs to Fox Television, or it belongs to some kind of right-wing fanaticism in the Middle East and we have given it up, and it has made us a really empty — that is, it has made the left really empty. I’ll point to one easy instance. Fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. And what America heard was really a sermon. It was as though slavery and Jim Crow could not be described as a simple political narrative; racism was a moral offense, not simply an illegality. And with his vision of a time “when all of God’s children” in America would be free, he described the nation within a religious parable of redemption.
Fifty years later, our technocratic, secular president gave a speech at the Lincoln memorial, honoring the memory of the speech Dr. King had given. And nothing President Obama said can we remember these few weeks later; his words were dwarfed by our memory of the soaring religious oratory of fifty years ago. And what’s happened to us — and I would include myself in the cultural left — what has happened to us is we have almost no language to talk about the dream life of America, to talk about the soul of America, to talk about the mystery of being alive at this point in our lives, this point in our national history. That’s what we’ve lost in giving it to Fox Television.”
Richard Rodriguez
“One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?”
-Noam Chomsky
What is so bad about repeating the pleasant myths of a nation or religion? What is wrong with focusing on the good our nation has done and avoiding the bad? Who is really hurt when we celebrate Columbus Day or picture the pilgrims as friendly to the native people? What is wrong with putting Vietnam behind us and starting fresh?
When we Americans refuse to fully face our past flaws, we build upon an inflated image of our own pure motives. The history of every nation is a mixed bag. We Americans are not worse than other nations, nor or we better. In the end, people are people. Patriotic versions of history build a false foundation upon which we base future decisions. Refusing to fully confront the lies behind the Vietnam War made it much more likely that we would fall for the lies behind the Iraq War.
No nation can be a decent citizen of the world that considers itself to be above the standards that would be reasonable for every other nation. We Americans see ourselves as superior to other nations based on the false history we recite. Believing our own inflated history makes it very difficult to be sane as a nation. Any who have looked honestly at American history would not want us to dominate the world any more than they would want any nation to do so. The only alternative to dog eat dog foreign policies is universal standards for all nations with no exceptions. The humility required for genuine peace will not occur until we can face the truth that frightens us more than any other – we are ordinary human beings.
Comfort is a terrible guide for the religious life. There are many beliefs and practices that make us personally comfortable but that numb us to the pain of our human family and to the demands of authentic living. If pious comfort were what Jesus had in mind, our symbol would not be a cross, but a pillow.
“Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn’t. You can’t unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons’ sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That’s just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that’s what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.” -Naomi Klein
Humankind will be in trouble if we are just clever enough to see through the mythological trappings of religion but not profound enough to feel its message that we are one family and the earth is our shared temple.