Maybe It's All Bullshit

I was born a “member” of the Catholic Church. I went to Catholic schools all the way through college, then walked away for good. It was without rancor or bitterness. I just had had enough. Around that time the Beatles went to India to meditate, and that seemed more meaningful to me. I have been involved in the meditative arts in one way or the other ever since.

Though I left Catholicism permanently long ago, it hasn’t left me. Because most of my relatives are still at least nominal Catholics, I end up in Catholic churches from time-to-time for weddings and funerals. The Pope is in the news on a weekly basis. I get calls from my alma mater asking for money, though I haven’t given a penny ever. My high school used to ask for money, but finally gave up. When I would get their alumni newsletters it would be depressing, the fake cheeriness about being Catholics and what a “success” everyone was.

What comes back most often, though, is news about the ongoing molestation scandals involving priests, nuns, and the Church hierarchy. Even the Madison diocese has hired investigators to delve into past crimes. I have always found these stories wanting. They focus on periphery. Some priests (and nuns) molested children, mainly boys, and the Church covered up. On to the next story. It keeps happening, we keep hearing about it. No context, no depth, no explanation.

I can give some depth. When I was growing up we were told repeatedly that the Catholic Church is the one true religion, and that all others were false. At best their followers were going to “Limbo,” but most likely “Hell.” We were told not to be friends with Protestant kids for fear of being contaminated in some unspecified way. Led to “sin” was of course the fall-back threat.

Sin was the overarching menace that lurked everywhere in a Catholic adherent’s life. Conform to the proscribed behaviors or else. When you do sin, confess to a priest. The priest has the power, derived from “God,” to forgive these sins. The absurdity of this admonition is hard to write about, hard to believe anyone would believe it, but believe it we did, and continued on our merry way, sinning and confessing in succession for years, decades, most often for lifetimes.

So a priest, officially celibate, forbidden to have sexual gratification of any kind, is given the power from “God” to forgive sins – or not forgive – and also to baptize, give “Communion,” “confirm,” marry and send one off to “Heaven” with the “last rites” – Extreme Unction, which everyone pronounced “extry munction.”

Over the centuries as Catholicism grew, it became doctrinaire, authoritarian and patriarchal. It had to resort to severe measures to keep the faithful in line. The threat of eternal damnation was wielded often, and excommunication meant temporal damnation. Corporal punishment took an increasing role, going as far as imprisonment, torture, burning at the stake, beheading and starvation. Heresy – disagreeing with Church doctrine or authority in any way, was a very risky endeavor.

In my own experience I was hit on the front and back of the hand with thick wooden rulers, had my hair and ears pulled, was forced to kneel on my hands in front of a statue of the “Virgin Mary,” had my head repeatedly knocked against that of another boy, was slapped in the face and head, and had my arm squeezed almost to the bone with a nun’s fingers. A priest in my high school would punch boys in the face with a closed fist, sometimes breaking noses. I was lucky to not be one of them. He also was a molester. I again was lucky not to be one of his victims. All I suffered from him were insults, known these days as verbal abuse.

In Yoga terms it is all about the lower chakras. Or Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – the deficiency needs of sex, power and money. In spiritual growth, or growth as a human being in general, these are the hardest obstacles to overcome. Having enough material security, an integrated sex life, or at least having the energy under control, and mutual, symbiotic relationships with other people are all necessary for a meaningful existence. They are also preconditions to advancement to higher levels.

Of course, if you are God’s representative on Earth, and the gatekeeper for entry beyond the gates of “Heaven,” there is no need to progress through these lower levels. You already have reached an exalted level. The unexalted are below you. In such a context they are fair game. Control their “salvation” and you control their lives. Pulling their pants down is within your power to, hmm, minister.

The molesting priest in my high school was named James Beatty, CSV. He had been the Dean of Boys, but his violence was too much for the wealthier parents of teenage boys, so he was farmed-out to the library. I saw him punch a boy in the nose for coming in to study hall about two seconds after the bell. The guy had a clean white shirt on, and blood all over the front. “Father” Beatty also had some kind of ministry at a high school seminary in a nearby town, and the State of Illinois, which is looking into priestly sexual abuse, should look into what went on there. I knew a few likely victims. The most certain was a guy who drank himself to death at age 30.

I have a question for the priesthood. If Catholicism is the one, true faith, and you are the vicars of, umm, the Lord, why is that not enough? You have a ticket to Paradise. You’re in. You have it made. You don’t need anything else. I have never had the need to molest little boys. Why do you, God’s representative on Earth? Maybe you aren’t God’s representative on Earth. Maybe it’s all bullshit.

So, the Pope can clean up as much as he wants, but it’s too late with too little. These abuses didn’t just happen. One case would be an aberration. Two, a problem. But thousands upon thousands? It is something endemic. Systematic. Integral. Intrinsic. Incurable. Give people the power, they will abuse it. It is in the nature of an authoritarian system that authority will be abused. It’s human. Priests are humans. They do human things.

Does this mean that the problem will be “cured” by curtailing the power of priests? Hardly. It’s Catholicism. An authoritarian priesthood is part and parcel of the “faith.” Even if priestly power were to be reined-in, how about Catholicism being the one, true religion? Or true at all? What hold is there on the faithful? How do you keep them from straying? Without authority, what’s to keep people from becoming heretics?

Not much. Tradition. Culture. Identity. Friends. Family. Ritual. Pageantry. Words to live by. By themselves they aren’t enough in a complex and ever-changing mass system. The allure of pop culture, recreation, television, the Internet and other forms of excitement are threatening to any religion. To one that molests and threatens with eternal damnation the appeal can only wane. It was never the one, true faith in the first place. It’s just more obvious now.
__________________________________________

Two of the more famous heretics in Catholic history are Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno, both believers in the Copernican theory that the Earth rotates around the Sun. Galileo recanted, and avoided execution, but Bruno was not so lucky. His tongue was "imprisoned," he was hung upside down naked, then burned at the stake. Joan of Arc was another, wrongly convicted of heresy. A more recent heretic excommunicated was Fidel Castro. Burning at the stake was no longer an option. Here is a list of other famous excommunicated Catholics.

Here's a song. Here's another. Eddie Money. Joni Mitchell. John Prine. John Denver. More John Denver. Another from John Denver. Belinda Carlisle. AC/DC. Chubby Checker. Jimmy Cliff. Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. The String Cheese Incident. Santana and Everlast. The Grateful Dead. More from the Grateful Dead. Bob Marley. Nine Inch Nails. Frank Zappa.

Here are some songs written while the Beatles were in India: Across the Universe. Dear Prudence. Mother Nature's Son. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. Don't Pass Me By. Back in the U.S.S.R. Revolution. Why Don't We Do It in the Road?

Here's a story of the Beatles' time in India.

This song was inspired by the visit: While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

It Is Time For Trump To Go

On July 16, 1971 I was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, after three long years of enlisted servitude, spent mostly in Germany. What I remember most of that day was the ride in a van full of other newly freed men to the Philadelphia airport. The scene on the freeway in the city of brotherly love was anything but brotherly. It looked like a road race of enraged men. I had come home to a madhouse.

I never got over that sense of alienation and revulsion, never “readjusted.” By 1971 the “counterculture” had set-in, and that mass of alienated young people was attractive to me. I “joined,” sort-of, letting my hair grow, growing a beard, indulging in the recreations of the day. It was kind of half-baked. I still drove a car, went to graduate school on the G.I. Bill, even campaigned with a group called “Veterans for McGovern” in the 1972 presidential election.

It worked for a while, but eventually the whole thing soured, for me and millions of others. The maddening system didn’t change, and in fact gradually got worse. In politics we went from Nixon to Reagan to Bush I, then Clinton, then another Bush, a respite with Obama, and now Donald J. Trump (ancestrally Drumpf). The “hippies” didn’t take over, and if they had it would have been worse. The trajectory from Woodstock to Altamont, spanning four months' time, is the perfect metaphor for the illusion of the “revolution” that never was, except in a few songs.

I tried following a guru for a number of years, but that went sour too, turning into a dysfunctional morass of power abuse and sexual misbehavior. I haven't given up on spiritual pursuit, but shy away from groups, especially of Americans, which is mostly what I encounter these days.

It wasn’t inevitable that we would end up with a deranged criminal sociopath like Trump as our national leader, but the downward trend certainly has led us to this. We have a near-completely criminal organization – the “Republican” party, running 2 ½ branches of the Federal government. In Wisconsin, as well as other states, we have the criminal “Republicans” controlling the state legislature and the Supreme Court, 2/3 of the state government. They gained power through criminality, mainly in voter suppression and gerrymandering. Corporate money, though technically not criminal, is morally criminal, used by both “parties,” but more cravenly and abundantly by the “Republicans.” The criminal rich give more to “Republicans.” The infamous Koch brothers have taken a peculiar interest in Wisconsin, donating many millions to former governor Scott Walker and to “conservatives” running for the state Supreme Court.

What results, one might wonder, accrue when a madhouse run by criminals deteriorates over time? We need look no farther than the effects of climate change – floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, forest fires, drought, species extinction, reef collapse, ocean life reduction and heat waves – to see the environmental consequences. The social consequences are equally severe – mass shootings on an almost weekly basis, and a nationwide opioid (formerly opiate) epidemic. Suicide has also reached epidemic levels across the country, particularly among middle-aged men in the West.

The mass immigration at our southern border is largely due to our longtime meddling in the region – overthrowing democratically elected leaders and installing dictators. Our ongoing “racial” divide is a needless obscenity, exacerbated by over a century of legalized oppression, suppression and marginalization of various minorities. Politicians are the handmaidens, serving the interests of the bigoted ruling minority, identified by the erroneous proxy label of “white.”

The “charter” school movement to publicly fund private schools is a “Republican” scheme. The effort to privatize the veterans health care system is also a “Republican” gimmick. They would prefer to shut down the VA system completely, but for political reasons they settle for the second-best solution of creeping privatization. A publicly funded and well-functioning health care system is anathema to the crony capitalist “Republicans.”

Something should be clear. The name “Republican” is not the essence of this criminal organization. Abraham Lincoln was a member of the “Republican” Party, and ended slavery. The organization devolved over the years since then to being a conduit for the interests of corporations and the wealthy. They could have the name Tiddlywinks Party and still be criminal. The “Democratic” Party is not the repository of goodness and decency, either now or in the past. Its minions are in general less criminal, but the human condition in any mass system is for the seeking of power and wealth by any means for enough of us to make corruption the rule rather than the exception.

So now, with such an obvious criminal as Trump at the head of the most powerful country on the planet, we have both a crisis and an opportunity. The decline of our society is obvious, and Trump has made himself the symbol of that decline. His “base” is a collection of religious and political crackpots, and while it is a formidable segment of the population, real power rests with the moneyed elites. The mob is useful for manipulation and incitement, but not much else.

The question remaining is what next? I’ve been saying for years, to no avail, that our infinite-growth, planet-destroying economic system is unsustainable, meaning that it won’t last. If we don’t change the system it will collapse. That time, I believe, is near. The artificially sustained “boom” is just about over. Signs are already emerging that a downturn has begun. No fiscal, monetary, trade or industrial policy is going to make infinite growth continue as it has since really the beginning of human civilization. The Industrial Revolution kicked growth into high gear, but it also brought with it the seeds of its own ruin, as Karl Marx predicted in 1867 in his landmark book Capital.

In one of the strange ironies of the current age, “survivalists” – people who retreat to remote locations to live sustainably and free of government intrusion – are seen as “right wing.” For sure there is a mix of crackpot religion and conspiracy theory among the survivalists, but they hardly fit in with what is normally seen as “right wingers” – people actively involved in securing reactionary and bigoted political control over the entire country.

My view of survivalism, though, is good luck with that. There’s no escape. Climate change will drastically affect every living creature on the planet. The collapse of the worldwide infinite-growth economic system will reach everyone but the most “primitive” tribal cultures in the most isolated regions of the world. Maybe. They will likely be affected too.

So, change is on the way. Donald Trump will be gone soon. In the grand scheme of things he is a momentary blip, a buffoon and criminal sociopath who symbolizes the trouble we are in. We can take him as a lesson, not just in how not to be, but how not to settle for crap, in what happens when you do. He can be a catalyst for change, an inspiration in reverse. We have to do better. Much better. Now. Forget the formality of impeachment. It plays into the corruption of the day. Let’s just run him out of office. A mass uprising is what is needed. Non-violent, of course, and legal, but let us make no mistake. It is time for Trump to go.
_________________________________________________

Here's a song. Here's another.  And another. Jefferson Airplane. Tracy Chapman. 4 Non Blondes. The Beatles. The Beatles again. Pokey LaFarge. Reckless Johnny Wales. Steppenwolf. Jimi Hendrix. Peter Tosh. Another song from Peter Tosh. Peter Tosh again. And again. One more. Bob Marley. Another from Bob Marley. Stir it Up. Bob Dylan. Another from Bob Dylan. The Grateful Dead. R.E.M. Ry Cooder. Bruce Springsteen. Another from Bruce Springsteen. David Bowie. Steve Miller Band. More from Steve Miller. Canned Heat. Santana. The Flying Burrito Brothers. Jefferson Airplane. The Rolling Stones.  Brewer and Shipley. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Another from Creedence. More Creedence. And this. Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana, Babatunde Olatunji. The Fugs.

Here are some Trump theme songs: Stevie Wonder. Warren Zevon. Jimmie Rodgers. The Grateful Dead. John Prine. The Steep Canyon Rangers. Humble Pie. Creedence. Bob Dylan.

Here's a movie example of how to run Trump out of office.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has a great new book, Hate Inc.: How, and Why, the Press Makes Us Hate One Another, on how the news media are making polarization worse. I have one simple suggestion for resisting media manipulation: don't listen to ANY pundits, no matter the political persuasion. They are all about themselves.
________________________________________________

R.I.P. Dr. John. Here he is doing an iconic Mardi Gras song.

R.I.P. Leon Redbone. He opened for John Prine in Madison in 2003. I was surprised at how he stayed in character, but made it real. Here's a mix of his songs.

R.I.P. Tony "Little Sun" Glover. I saw Koerner, Ray and Glover at the legendary Triangle Bar in Minneapolis in early 1967. I was too weirded-out at the time to appreciate them, but it sunk in. Here's my favorite song of theirs, featuring Dave "Snaker" Ray, also now deceased. It's an old Leadbelly song. Here's a documentary of the band with some songs of all three playing.

R.I.P. Doris Day. I liked her movies. I used to donate to the Doris Day Animal League. I still have some of the ballpoint pens they sent me. Here's my favorite song of hers.