So Friends,

In my awkward prologue to this strange thing, I did more ranting than explaining, leaving even the idea of "video-theology" dreadfully unclear, so my work is cut out for me now. I will start at the end. I claimed that inspired video-scripture was coming, that we would soon have to deal with the Divine Word in unprecedented forms and have to find new exigetical tools for playing with and living through (or even around) it. Not only will people start talking about movies, hypertexts, and videogames as Bible, but I think they already have, if in hushed tones. First I guess we should think about why, later we'll deal with how.

My professor in Hebrew Bible told us, with no little touch of irony, that it was amazing that when few enough Jews could read Hebrew, God decided to give them an authoritative and personally inspired Greek version. And when few enough could read Greek, God inspired the Aramaic targumim [translations]. We can follow this amazing tendency of God to accomodate illiteracy further still, through the Latin Vulgate [meaning, of course, in "common language"], past Luther's German translation, and right up to the KJV1611, which so many Evangelical Christians with their apparently forgivable monoliteracy maintain is the inerrant Word.

And, yes, I am being facetious and a little snide. I am personally not convinced that God does this, for all I know God is really sticking with the lost and perhaps irreconcilable tatters of what was later shuffled into scriptures. There is no reason to believe that God is necessarily accomodating on this one. Consider how the first set of Ten Commandments had been written by God personally [Exodus 32:16], but when Moses smashed them, though God said more would be divinely inscribed [34:1], Moses had to write the second copy himself anyway [34:28]. And these new Commandments, the only ones the Bible calls "the Ten Commandments," by the way, are neither like those God wrote personally, nor like those which Dr. Laura and certain judges think all of us should take very seriously. Go and look at the Commandments which the Bible actually calls the big 10, friends, you may be surprised. In any case, there is precedent for God deciding that when we ruin the inspired Word it is mostly our business to fix it up, and sometimes that involves shifts which hardly scream "inerrant."

But what matters here is not what God actually does, what matters is that many people who talk about Bible, perhaps even most people who have done that since the first century BC, have thought that God is quite willing to do inspire translations, and with serious theological consequences. Leaving aside specific issues of what should be translated as "young woman" and what should be translated as "virgin" for the moment, consider how many Christian groups, even those who read more contemporary translations, use a distinct register of speech for prayer liberally peppered with thees and thines. And it was with translation into English that the Bible was peopled with unicorns [Psalm 92:10, among others], though the Hebrew certainly had its own menagerie of monsters which sometimes became creatures as docile as goats through the miracle of translation [cf. Lev. 17:7]. Going back further, consider the fact that some Jews have drawn inspiration even from the shapes of the Hebrew letters, which are certainly not the first script in which the Torah was patched out. Translation matters. And it matters especially when it is scripture, because the accidents of translation can gain the status of the earlier text.

So what? The so what is that the issue is no longer what people read, but whether people read, and if they read, how they read. Movies and videogames, textmessages websites and billboards give us most of what we think we read, but maybe we read more cereal packages and t-shirts in a day than all of those things combined. The book is changing.

Which not to say that the good old codex [the bound book, the "biblion"] is totally outdated. We are making more books than we know how to think about, but that is part of why the Bible as Biblion is becoming a problem. With the present glut of books, the canon is falling apart. We can establish a common literature only where powerful institutions tell us what matters; at school we read Huck Finn and The Scarlet Letter, at Church we read hymnals and Bible, and they give us things to talk about, and a language to talk about them in, but these institutions are competing with modes of media distribution like nothing ever seen before. The tools behind Fox are not like early modern pampleteering, or even like modern propagandizing. Our common language is being forged in a sprawling arms-race between organizations that can strategically unveil new idioms at will all over the world. And the biblion is only the smallest part of what they are doing, so increaasingly it is only the smallest part of what WE are doing.

We, friends, cannot be disentangled from those organizations that are each fighting to teach us first what we already wanted to say we knew. Once enough of us want media, edible media, watchable media, wearable media, it begins to exist. And if we do not yet want media that seems to follow from our current wants, we are given it anyway to see what we think. So, whether God is listening and whether God will give a world of movie-quoters a movie-Bible is hardly the question. Unless God intervened to stop it, it was going to come. Whether God has tried to stop it is something to think about later, but once a few thousand people to started wanting their Bible to be as shiny as their movies, it began arriving.

Movies like The Ten Commandments and The Prince of Egypt are not quite the point, though. No large outcry pushed these movies towards canonical status so they were only on topic of Bible, not Bible proper. These are two totally distinct types of religious media, secondary and primary texts. Movies about the Bible are really only a matter of manuscript illumination, not really more interesting than The Precious Moments Bible (oh yeah, really), because the images cannot be unpacked for new scriptural data. Moses did not sing that song, but he is also not Charlton Heston, nor a doe-eyed Precious Moments hydrocephalus, and few if any are shocked or scandalized.

The first real sign which I can think of of the canonization of video is, strangely, The Last Temptation of Christ. When the movie was released in 1988 its depiction (though, everyone must remember, depiction of a dream) of Jesus having sex raised an uproar. It was driven out of several theatres for it, but most importantly Protesters (caps intentional, if a little unfair) marched around with signs that said "This movie lies!" Of course it lies! Jesus did not have that dream, like Moses looked nothing like Charlton Heston! The complaint is not interesting. The point is that somewhere around here, somewhere around the cable television boom, people began complaining about the lack of divine inspiration in movies. The complaint that this movie was not true, it seems, contains in it the notion that such questions are worth asking; that a True movie was thinkable. It took a few years, but of course it came. Of course.

We have no way of knowing whether the Pope really said "It is as it was" about the Passion of the Christ (though if he did we can only hope that the myth of him doing so in Latin is true too), but it cannot be denied that many Protestant churches did so. In groups that were talking about a "culture war" where the other side (yes, ALWAYS the other side. For now there is only one side in the culture-war, though maybe we should reconsider that too) was Jewish-inclusive and anti-Christian, the claims of antisemitism and anachronism actually bolstered the movie's truthiness to the point of Inspiration. It became scripture because it is shit. And it will happen again, because we still want it. Until the annunciation of Mary's surprising but less-than-mysterious pregnancy, it seemed that The Nativity Story was a real contender. Imagine if it had been canonized, friends. If not for teenage pregnancy, if it also had been "as it was," we would have to decide why the Temple service was in later Rabbinic idiom, why God spoke like a smug 30 year-old, and where all of that corn came from. The corn would have to be read as an unsung miracle. I say we should be ready with our shit-scraping tools close at hand.

So what? How did the translation change the text? How is pouring the old wine of scripture into the new skins of digital media changing that media? That is what I am trying to think about here, and what I am sharing as I think it. So, I guess there will be more later.

Cheers,
Vince(nt)

Friends,

So, I am in the middle of exams and cannot really write this blog as I would, but I thought I should say that I have found a place to begin a series of blogs that have been brewing in me. As some of you know, I am a Christian again after a long and mostly Atheistic hiatus, and have returned with no small amount of anger at both Christianity as I tend to find it, and at the options into which I had drifted.

The symbolic universe of Christianity offers endless possibility for relevant interpretation. The death of Christ was not only an explosion of redemptive blood. It is a fruitful analogy for the relationship of a symbolically rich human to their body, a foundation for radical politics, a poetic trope of incredible power, an image of war against God, an act of magic, and most probably a historical non-occurance. An incredible lie, a saving lie. Not to rant, but those are the first that come to mind.

To come back to Christianity convinced of the fantatic potential of its stories has been a disappointment, to say the least. Christian rock music, for instance, ruins my day. With its cloying obsession with salvation, its absolute illiteracy and its shared organs with American Republicanism, one need not say that their theology is wrong (and I am not really convinced that it is) to say that it is selling Christ short. There may be more, but for now Sufjan Stevens' album "Seven Swans," and maybe Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" are the only decent works of Christian rock I know of.

For the record, I locate myself as a soon-to-be member of the UCC's and part of the Emerging Church movement, for which one need not submit an application. In my spare time (when I find it), I want to begin thinking about popular culture and theology, and maybe sharing it here where you may or may not read it as you like. Time needs to be spent thinking about whether the symbolic traditions of Christianity can be rescued from their present tarnish. (Yes, Jesus saves, fine. But who will save Jesus?) What the emergence of an inspired video-translation of the Bible will be, and how we will deal with it, because the frequent public reception of The Passion of the Christ as "true" shows that it is coming.

What follows does not draw heavily on Christian symbols, but it hit me as a pleasant way to begin thinking about things, and it falls heavily across the Pythagorean traditions that have motivated some generations of progressive and daring interpreters of Christianity. For the most part, though, I just liked it. And it seemed like something to place at the end of the above babble, none of which I would have written had I not been so exhausted that I could not write more.
Cheers and sorry for the pretention,

PS. I appologize for the sexist middle part of the song. It is ugly and vacant, but I am not able to remove it. I struggle to imagine for whom this video was made. Hipster ironists? I do not have time to talk about it, but I thought the total package, including the ugliness, was good to think.
Vince

.. width="425" height="350">..>


LYRICS:
When ink and pen in hands of men
Inscribe your form, bipedal P
They draw an altar on which
God has slaughtered all stability
No eyes could ever soak in all the places you anoint
And yet to see you all at once we only need the Â..
Flirting with infinity, your geometric progeny
That fit inside you oh so tight
With triangles that feel so right

(3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974 94459)

Your ever-constant homily says flaw is discipline
The patron saint of imperfection frees us from our sin
And if our transcendental lift shall find a final floor
Then Man will know the death of God where wonder was before

Yeah, I know this Pi shit backwards and forwards
Check it out

I did three chicks then I pointed at the door
A girl entered in so that made it four
I snapped one time in came another five
Add 'em all up and that makes nine
The average age 26.5
Now that's what I call gettin' some pi
Five of the chicks wore 6-inch heels
Two of the nine squealed like seals
514 was the area code
Quebec, Canada my winter abode
And my 1.3 million dollar chalet
Pi backwards, pi forwards, all night and all day

3. 141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944 5923078164062862089986280348253421170679
821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502 84502(fade out)

Friends,

Those few of us who braved the elements yesterday to get out and vote for Democrats now have serious obligations, responsibilities which cannot be ignored, tasks which will demonstrate whether we can rightly use our new political strength. First, we have an obligation to buy the Frenchest Champagne we can find. Then, we have an obligation to share it with the most homosexual friends we have while wearing our most "radical" party hats. This is work, this must be done, don't let me down.

And when that democratic party stops (give it a few days, it has been a few years), the Democratic Party must begin. My favorite Communist in the whole world has recently well said that this is only the beginning, and that though we can celebrate for now, having come at last to a beginning, we have work to do if this is going to matter. Though the coalition of which he is a member is not my own (I am attached to property and religion, and never really convinced by that anti-property religion), trying to find the great-progressive-common-ground is a pleasant task for the next few years. Let's make this one count, friends. Remember that we are a swing nation right now, if our leaders can show that we share a collective vision and that it works, we will have another chance in two years.

Fuck yeah,
-V.

[Friends,

On Oct. 17 Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) (2), was passed. A friend of mine recently made reference in her blog to section 1076 of this act as the "martial law" act, and was quite afraid of what it may mean for America. First of all, this phrase, which she did not coin, is a misuse of "martial law," so afraid or not, we need a better phrase for it. But here it is. I will not attempt to interpret it, because I think it may be the duty of every citizen to read it for themselves and really meditate on what it may mean. For the whole of it see: John Warner Act at Govtrack.]

SEC. 1076. USE OF THE ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES.
(a) USE OF THE ARMED FORCES AUTHORIZED...
(1) IN GENERAL...Section 333 of title 10, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

"§333. Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law

"(a) USE OF ARMED FORCES IN MAJOR PUBLIC EMERGENCIES...

(1) The President may employ the armed forces, including the
National Guard in Federal service, to..

"(A) restore public order and enforce the laws of the United States when, as a result of a natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or
incident, or other condition in any State or possession of the United States, the President determines that..

"(i) domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order; and
"(ii) such violence results in a condition described in paragraph (2); or

"(B) suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy if such insurrection, violation, combination, or conspiracy results in a condition
described in paragraph (2).

"(2) A condition described in this paragraph is a condition that..
"(A) so hinders the execution of the laws of a State or possession, as applicable, and of the United States within that State or possession, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State or possession are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
H.R.5122..323

"(B) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.

"(3) In any situation covered by paragraph (1)(B), the State shall be considered to have denied the equal protection of the laws secured by the Constitution.

"(b) NOTICE TO CONGRESS...The President shall notify Congress of the determination to exercise the authority in subsection (a)(1)(A) as soon as practicable after the determination and every 14 days thereafter during the duration of the exercise of that authority.".

(2) PROCLAMATION TO DISPERSE...Section 334 of such title is amended by inserting ....or those obstructing the enforcement of the laws.... after ....insurgents.....
(3) HEADING AMENDMENT...The heading of chapter 15 of such title is amended to read as follows:

"CHAPTER 15..ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAWS TO RESTORE PUBLIC ORDER".
(4) CLERICAL AMENDMENTS...(A) The tables of chapters at the beginning of subtitle A of title 10, United States Code, and at the beginning of part I of such subtitle, are each
amended by striking the item relating to chapter 15 and inserting the following new item:
"15 Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order ....................................... 331".

(B) The table of sections at the beginning of chapter 15 of such title is amended by striking the item relating to sections 333 and inserting the following new item:

"333. Major public emergencies; interference with State and Federal law.".
(b) PROVISION OF SUPPLIES, SERVICES, AND EQUIPMENT...

(1) IN GENERAL...Chapter 152 of such title is amended by adding at the end the following new section:
"§2567. Supplies, services, and equipment: provision in major public emergencies
"(a) PROVISION AUTHORIZED...In any situation in which the President determines to exercise the authority in section 333(a)(1)(A) of this title, the President may direct the Secretary of Defense to provide supplies, services, and equipment to persons
affected by the situation.
"(b) COVERED SUPPLIES, SERVICES, AND EQUIPMENT...The supplies, services, and equipment provided under this section may include food, water, utilities, bedding, transportation, tentage, search and rescue, medical care, minor repairs, the removal of
debris, and other assistance necessary for the immediate preservation of life and property.
"(c) LIMITATIONS...(1) Supplies, services, and equipment may be provided under this section..

"(A) only to the extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession concerned are unable to provide such supplies, services, and equipment, as the case may be;
and
"(B) only until such authorities, or other departments or agencies of the United States charged with the provision of such supplies, services, and equipment, are able to provide
such supplies, services, and equipment.

H.R.5122..324
"(2) The Secretary may provide supplies, services, and equipment under this section only to the extent that the Secretary determines that doing so will not interfere with military preparedness or ongoing military operations or functions.

"(d) INAPPLICABILITY OF CERTAIN AUTHORITIES...The provision of supplies, services, or equipment under this section shall not be subject to the provisions of section 403(c) of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5170b(c)).".

(2) CLERICAL AMENDMENT...The table of sections at the beginning of such chapter is amended by adding at the end the following new item:
"2567. Supplies, services, and equipment: provision in major public emergencies.....
(c) CONFORMING AMENDMENT...Section 12304(c)(1) of such title is amended by striking ....No unit.... and all that follows through "subsection (b),.... and inserting ....Except to perform any of the functions authorized by chapter 15 or section 12406 of this title or by subsection (b), no unit or member of a reserve cobe ordered to active duty under this section".

[This is already law.
-V.]

Friends,

This is not a content-rich blog, not a bit. This is a journal entry, the account of a good day half done. Read it only if you are into that sort of thing. Today was only of philosophical significance because it was a quiet answer to the double bind of the binding analogy, a hundred tiny chances to stretch cobwebs out to new anchor points.

Most importantly, today was a chance to vote for Democrats. Of course, I understand any gripes people have with the party or with the very notion of two party democracy. I have spent most of my short political life grumbling about the binarism of it all, about the false conflation of gun laws and tax laws and abortion laws, and I certainly think that some better system could be conceived. All of that said, the goddamned Starbucks bashers have brought me to the point where I will put all of my support into the biggest, most liberal things I can find.

I say, fuck "buy local" fetishism. We will not preserve worker's rights by buying squash at the farmer's market any more than we will hurt Coca Cola by buying curbside lemonade. I say, buy a carton of Liggets from 7-eleven [For reference: Buyblue.org]. My personal dream is of banding with progressives everywhere, buying stocks and socks, and turning Target into the largest most progressive company in the world. Prioritizing smallness over soundness will divide progressives endlessly among doomed causes. That is to say, "lesser of two evils" is the wrong metaphor. We must take control of the nearer of two morally neutral juggernauts. Yes, the Democratic party is soft on some serious issues, and unclear on most issues, but remember that the Republican party was once soft on religious issues. If we are going to beat those we hate, we are only going to do it by out muscling them. I don't care if it is ugly; what all of our factional "buy localism" has gotten us is uglier.

Whoo. Sorry about that, but it is not only serious. It is true.

Beyond this, I got to (yesterday I would have said, "I have to") present in two classes, once on the history of nativism in the United States, and once on my current research on the Kabbalah Centre. As I discovered in my research on the former, to propose only a disturbing and thought-provoking fact, not a genetic argument, perhaps it would interest someone to know that our present Republican party was born out of the ashes of the anti-immigrant, anti-intellectual, anti-Catholic, American Party (That is, the Know Nothing Party. This article is pretty terrible, but a place to start. If you want better sources and fuller details, I have 'em. ). Of course, the hard-line nativists wanted a 21 year probationary period for new immigrants before voting, and sometimes before owning land, but the Republicans only conceded two and only on voting, so there were few concessions made, but that party was prepared quite early to pander to racism and fear to forward its ends (see above).

At present, in fear of the fearful, my vote is almost exclusively a vote for sodomy. Let me say it twice: I vote for gay things. Once more: Queerness itself for governor.

Last, least, and maybe best of all, when I got home, not only was my dishwasher fixed, but the repair folk had washed my sinkful of dishes! I am alone, in debt, but feeling quite at home. The threads spin out slowly. Someday soon I will be exactly where I am.

Goodday, friends,
-Vincent

Friends,

This is lighter and happier entry than I have had or may have for a while. As always who can tell even what has been done? That said, last night Megan (friend/colleague/pagan pal) and I went around Carrboro and Chapel Hill dancing down the dying year furiously. Oh, witches dancing at midnight on Halloween. It heals. So, perhaps, do beer and drag.

For pictures beyond what is on my profile (although they are really only other poses of the same, so don't borrow the village computer to find them if you are already bored with the notion) are on flickr now: Enjoy if you like.

-Vince

Friends,
Consider the phrases "getting hitched," "the ball and chain," "tying the knot," "cutting things off," "hooking up," and "on a short leash." Further, consider the idea of "social networks," "mother's apron strings," (sometimes "umbilical cord") and "family ties." Consider too the practice of Wiccan hand binding, or a bride and groom tying a knot using their feet.

At the level of the social, these are metaphors representing some sort of mutual obligation varied according to the instance. Experientally, though, these are not metaphors at all. They signify an experiental reality which is spacial and not ethical ("religion" from the Latin religare, to bind back, is both). We know where we are because we know that there is a "cord" which ties us to those we love. We know where we are because we know to where we will return, and around which points we rotate.

This is felt less at close than over great distance, where returning along the line of connection requires conscious organization and sometimes real work, but for some and in some cases the "connection" can be felt even from quite nearby. The phrases, unlike the rituals, are largely taken to have a negative significance lagely because they usually are applied in cases when one member feels the "connection" keeping them somewhere they don't want to be, but this is not necessarily the most insightful use of the idea.

To lose a primary "cable" is the most potent reminder of its reality, and its power. One feels at the moment of loss, not only alone (a social issue) but lost, placeless. One feels quite separate from everything, discovering all at once how well or poorly the other "cables" in ones "network" give them spatial meaning. Even if the other "ropes" are robust, nothing can make sense to the separated, because the person has lost their placement and all other locations consequently lose their relative placement, and with it their meaning. Thus the recently unroped cannot read, because chains of signification pass by without binding at the ends to anything. The recently unroped cannot fall asleep because the golden thread that ties together the baffling turns of the subconscious labyrinth has line, but no location. Dreams are not suddenly nightmares, they are dreams without a dreamer.


That we would understand the binding analogy as a negative one is clearly a misreading, then. It is not good or bad to be bound, one binds for social reasons which have no immediate connection to the experiental/spatial role of the binding. The bound human is a human, the unbound human is Geertz raving "inchoate" monster.

How much worse to be one who has cut ones own cord, how much worse to have sacrificed meaning for the non-signifying silence of space. This happens, though. The negative rope analogies emerge because one sometimes becomes, not necessarily negatively, but persistantly, aware of the ropes that give space space, and words words. In this state one is freer than the unroped, but will never believe it. Consider the raccoon gnawing off its leg. We must be a wordless, placeless thing before we can become a wordless placeless thing. Silence is the antecedent of silence.

From this point, upon entering the maddening silence, many people immediately desire new rope, new points of reference, if only to return to the semantic universe that some part of thier flesh remembers. But what of those who have come to fear "rope," realizing that their own need for periodic "untrammeling" always means releasing those holding onto the other end into the same void? These, not surprisingly, are few, and most are able to forget the silence once the words begin again, but with repeated exmersions into this no-place, one begins to remember. The unroped remembers that they are an unroper, and what that means. A non-semantic sympathy is hard to map onto what always seems like a social, and thus semantic, way of experiencing another person. But it happens, and when it happens, perhaps those people adapt to silence, like the first dreams of cyborgs breathing outer-space. Such speculation, however, belongs in a separate essay.

>--------------------------------------------------<

(I miss her so much. I had to leave facebook because she removed me as a friend. It is silly, but that is a place too, and I cannot be there always aware that I have mock-ropes and play strings, like yarn between cans, but to see always that I have nothing making that "network" work. I can face alot of things, I am facing her present absence here in my house, but I cannot look at it. And I can't stop crying. I feel like such a monster. That is all, I have work I have to do, goodbye friends, Vince.)

Friends and Fellow Citizens,

Now more than ever, given the still-growing political power of those who equate American values with their particular and quite recent visions of Christianity, we must remain vigilant in our defense of the anti-establishment clause and other measures established by the founders of our country to prevent church-state fusion. Maintaining this separation has long been only a theoretical drive among progressive Americans of their several faith affiliations (in which I of course include the venerable faith in progress and reason which orients progressive Atheists and Agnostics), but now, given the recent shocking statements of our vice president which clearly allude to the involuntary baptism of suspected terrorists, the time has come to take action.

For those of you who have not been following the news, this last Tuesday at a White House photo-op, conservative radio host Scott Hennen (WDAY, Fargo) reported that his callers endorsed a practice obliquely referred to as "dunking in water." "Please, let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves lives."

Asked by Hennen whether he supported that this life-saving practice of dunking in water, vice president Cheney replied, "Well, it's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture," Cheney said. "We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in." If not torture, then what is this administration "involved in?"

In defending Cheney, presidential spokesman Tony Snow said the question put to Cheney was vague and could refer to many practices. Snow's only clarification as to the dunking was to say, "It's a dunk in the water."

This ambiguous endorsement has drawn the attention of several human rights groups. Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, for instance, has understood this as an endorsement of torture: "What's really a no-brainer is that no US official, much less a vice president, should champion torture." While Mr. Cox's sentiment is absolutely correct, his, like other human rights groups seem to be missing the fact that this "dunking" was explicitly endorsed as a life saving measure, and thus, given the ambiguity, is more likely to refer to baptism than any torture practice.

Cheney, a Methodist, would certainly endorse baptism as a life saving measure on three important counts. First, Methodism unambiguously discusses baptism, often administered by "a dunk in the water," in these terms. Article XVII of the Methodist Confession of Faith, for instance, calls the sacrament ..a representation of the new birth in Christ Jesus and a mark of Christian discipleship... Second, the recent blurring of Muslims, terrorists, and fascists in official statements from the president and his administration (see, for instance, http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/08/10/washington.terror.plot/index.html) may indicate that making Christians of terror suspects is increasingly seen as a life saving measure for Americans at large. To this should also be added the fact that Hennen is deeply enmeshed in the networks of popular media which have recently coined the barbarous neologism "islamofascism," making it quite likely that dunking terror suspects into Christianity was the intended meaning of his question. Third, a life-or-death issue of a different sort may be at hand, given that it is unlikely that clergy members are available to baptize the suspects. In most Christian denominations including Methodism lay baptism is only allowed in cases of in cases of a genuine emergency. However, in life-or-death circumstances, that is, in circumstances like those created in our international network of torture facilities, any Christian may perform the rite. Which, we must ask, is the real motivation? Is it not possible that this administration has begun to risk lives in order to "save" them by this, their preferred method?

It is no longer enough only to oppose torture, though we must continue that fight as well. We, as Americans who oppose the union of church and state, must stand together and oppose this practice!

Esteemed friends,
As part of the total life transformation which I am undergoing, I have recently rescued a dog from the shelter (rather a less dramatic rescue than I would have hoped, frankly). This has something to do with the biological compulsion to raise children which I have mentioned in earlier postings, though I am not sure exaclty what. I think that a dog is either a replacement for, a milder simulation of, or a early training for having a child, but it is certainly somehow related to my growing desire to clean up feces and make helpless things eat food which I would personally refuse. Perhaps which of the above trials this new custodianship represents will be determined by how it all comes out. If cleaning up feces is like recieving wasp stings or using latex gloves (that is, mildly uncomfortable at first but with disasterous cumulative effects) this may turn out to be a replacement, but if it is like crab pinches or dandruff (that is, mildly uncomfortable, but you deal with it), my dog may be a voice in the wilderness, preparing the way for some later monstrosity. Who knows.
The issue at hand is that I have named my (good) dog "Sam." This name was chosen for many reasons, not least of all because it is easy to write backwards or in Morse code. As a rescue dog, I think it is only fair to expect that my dog would rescue me should the need arise, and I want to be able to send her a message in a great range of circumstances. Also, Sam[antha] is the name of the barbarous (beard having) projected next-girlfriend with whom Laurie has cursed my later love life. This imaginary woman was a combination of what Laurie sees as all of my former lovers' worst attributes. That is, a romantically depressed, obsessive compulsive Ren-Faire bimbo. So, the naming of Sam' the pooch was also a way of corraling that name and making it harmless (though empowering it to shit in my bedroom, a problem previously undiscussed). But I digress.
The issue is that having named my dog "Sam," I have been innundated with false allegations about this dogname. For instance, that "all dogs" are named "Sam." I have checked friends, with the dillegence of earnest science, and it is just not true. The second frequent claim, that dogs named "Sam" are evil, however, deserves some further treatment.

Allegedly Evil Dogs Named Sam:
1. "Sam"
This is "Sam," the late World's Uglist Dog. Yes, this Sam is an ugly dog, but by no means an evil dog. This Sam is even claimed (by samugliestdog.com) to have done great good by teaching people that it is okay to be fantastically ugly. Perhaps that we can even become famous for being so goddamned ugly, a lesson we can all take to heart in exact proportion to our outlandish hideousness.

2. "Sam"

It has also been alleged by some detractors of the Sam name, that a dog named Sam drove David Berkowitz to commit the infamous Son of Sam murders. This is, again, a grevious factual error. Yes, perhaps, "Sam loves to drink blood. 'Go out and kills' commands father Sam" but the Sam in question was not a dog at all, but Berkowitz' very human neighbor. And for the record (though defending all humans named "Sam" is not our task here), this Sam was not evil either. Sam Carr's love for blood was a lie spread psychically by his dog Harvey, who was himself posessed by an ancient demon. Lest anyone think that I am denying the potential evil of dogs, let it be known that demon or no, I hold that Harvey must be held accountable for his actions, and through his Sam-slandering, partially accountable for the crimes to which Harvey drove Berkowitz. We must demand accountability from the demon posessed.

Other "Sams:"

3-4. "Sams"



Now we must ask, "Can we say nothing about the character of dogs named 'Sam?'" From the above photos it should be clear that there is in fact a certain consistency to the character of dogs named "Sam." These Sams, of unimpeachable moral fortitude, are not only good dogs, but detectives. Yes, friends, it seems that not only are dogs named Sam not evil, they help prevent crime. And, should, heaven forbid, the need ever arise, they will rescue me.

And so, my dog Sam[antha]:

5. "Sam"

She is a good pooch, about a year old, a mix of lab' and something or other, and can already sit and fetch.

Cheers,
Vincent

Hey friends,
Notice that the next two posts (the previous two posts) are one big, one far too big, thing and the second part is at the top. That is all.
Cheers,
Vince