Elmo must die

Some time ago at the Philadelphia Zoo, when I was speculating aloud whether it would be better to see Elmo trampled by stampeding elephants or gored by wild bulls, a friend of mine commented that I put a lot of effort into hating the little freak.

After I got over my shock — I hadn't even mentioned the possibilities of having Elmo's eyes pecked out by birds, or watching a Burmese python hug all his ticklish parts until he bursts — I had to admit that my friend was right. I do hate Elmo a lot. My fantasy TV special would be to have Barney the Purple Dinosaur choke to death while he’s chewing up Elmo, just as he falls over onto the Teletubbies, whom Thomas the Tank Engine is taking someplace.

Elmo is a scourge from God, sent to punish us for inventing batteries. On Judgment Day, I fully expect God to throw the vilest of sinners — by which I mean politicians, used car salesmen and journalists — not into a lake of fire, but into a roiling cesspool of Elmo sing-alongs that go on and on day and night without stop.

Really wicked people — and by that I mean the lady who stiffed me for a tip when I was a pizza guy — will find themselves in a room full of musical Elmo toys that all play the same songs at slightly different pitches and speeds.

I've had the chance twice now to share my feelings about the Red Furry Monster Who Must Not Be Named with employees of Sesame Workshop. The first was perplexed that anyone would declare an Elmo-free zone around their house and insist that Sesame Street videos could be shown in the house only if Elmo were limited to a supporting role.

The second was more amused, and suggested that I try something therapeutic, like writing down my feelings on Elmo for their marketing people, who have come up with innovations like Tickle Me Elmo, Chicken Dance Elmo, and Beeping Clicking and Whirring Drive Your Father Out Of His Ever-Loving Mind Elmo.

I've given it some though since then, and I've come to accept that Elmo is the cash cow that gives the golden milk. As long as Elmo is marketed to the exclusion of the other Muppets, he's going to bring in the most money and no one is going ask him to step down from the throne of gold.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Here follow my suggested Elmo toys that can be marketed to adults, increasing the amount of revenue he generates for Sesame Workshop and its educational videos and products.

Beat Me with a Stick Elmo. This Elmo doll stands 18 inches high, runs on a 4.5-Volt battery and comes complete with a 12-inch wooden stick the owner can use to strike Elmo whenever he annoys them. Whenever he's hit, Elmo screams in that adorable little voice of his, phrases like "Ouch!" "Stop that!" or "Elmo doesn't like this game." Suggested retail price: $14.99.

Push Me Down an Elevator Shaft Elmo. Covered in soft red felt, this motion-activated Elmo lets out a piteous yet heart-warming scream as he plunges 80 feet into stygian darkness where he meets his doom. Elevator shaft with sharp metal spikes at the bottom, not included.

Urban Legends Elmo. A must-buy for anyone who has ever believed "reliable stories" passed on by their friends. Remove Elmo's kidneys before stuffing him in a bathtub filled with ice! Replace Elmo's hand with a hook, and send him out to terrorize teenagers at the local Lovers Lane! Squeeze his hand and hear him spread salacious rumors about Bert and Ernie! Legal disclaimer: Not responsible for lawsuits resulting from repeating those rumors.

Sopranos Elmo. Marketed especially to New Jersey consumers, who love the violence and family intrigue of HBO's award-winning mob drama, this Elmo offers to whack Kermit the Frog, says "badda-bing, badda-boom" when you squeeze him, and tells people to "Fuggedaboutit." Cigar is included only for decorative purposes and cannot be smoked.

Operation! Elmo. Produced in partnership with Milton Bradley, this Elmo is educational. Children and adults can learn all about surgery and anatomy by cutting Elmo open and removing his internal organs. Added feature: Elmo's realistic screams remind children about the importance of anesthesia.

Having shared all this, I'm amazed to discover the wisdom of the Sesame Workshop employee who suggested I write this all down. I do feel a lot better about Elmo now, and while I'm not likely to relax the Elmo Free Zone my wife and I established, I'm also not going to ask for Marie Antoinette Elmo, Hari Kari Elmo or Black Death Elmo.

Just don't get me started on Disney Princesses.

Copyright © 2004 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'danger unlimited'

Does anyone else have "Danger Unlimited?" It's a John Byrne series done for Dark Horse around the same time as John Byrne's Next Men, but it's a series that didn't work out very well.

I got in a collected format. It wasn’t that impressive or interesting, and as a series it probably wouldn’t have lasted long anyway at DC or Marvel. He explains in the back of the colleciton that it failed to get going because of the “John Byrne 40,000” — the readers who automatically will read anything by John Byrne. Comic distributors as a policy start out at an elevated number of copies for the first issue of a new comic, which they reduce incrementally for the next two issues. Since everything is ordered three months ahead of time, it’s not until issue four is going to press that they have a clear idea of what the actual readership will be.

Orders for issue number one came out to 40,000. Issue two was 35,000. Issue three was 30,000. So by that time Byrne’s core readers had discovered that he had a new comic out, but about 10,000 of them couldn’t find it anywhere. If the core group can’t get it, it’s a sure bet the marginal readers won’t be able to find it either, and there’s no way to expand the market.

So he killed it.

Like I said, it had a long set up — I think he wrote it near the end of his marriage, which always takes a toll on a writer and his work — but it had some interesting ideas, particularly with the scene he ended up cutting when it became obvious the series wouldn’t work. (The one guy from the original Danger Unlimited whose memory was being restored turns out to be someone whose memories are being overwritten with a new set so he believes he’s the hero in question. The real man is dead and has been for close to a century.)

Could have been a good comic, but it worked out to pretty much just a side note in Byrne’s career.

'the hulk'

The Hulk's origin was only one of the things I hated about the movie.

In all fairness to Ang Lee, he was trying (to an extent) to be faithful to the Hulk's origins and powers as developed over about 40 years of continuity.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby set out the basic template of the Hulk's origin, with the gamma bomb that exploded while Bruce Banner was saving Rick Jones. Bill Mantlo later developed that in the mid-1980s by making Bruce Banner's father into a research physicist with a streak of paranoia who believed that his work with radiation had caused mutations that his son inherited. If memory serves, he also added the touch that the elder Banner had murdered his wife.

Peter David, during his remarkable run on the series in the 1990s, put forward the explanation that the Hulk gets stronger the madder he gets because his anger actually is leading to heightened cellular reproduction -- more muscle tissue, plus healing so fast that it appears the Hulk is invulnerable. (I think he stole that idea from the Hulk TV show.)

The nanobots were just a stupid addition. They really should have stuck with the basic origin involving Rick Jones and the gamma bomb. Predictable, but there's a certain strength in sticking to the essentials. You don't need to follow it in every detail, but you shouldn't chuck out the whole thing just because it's dated.

blue's clues: steve

I still like the urban legend I tried to start about Burns: that the SWAT team had to kill him when he went postal at the studio after showing up at work and saying, "Hi, it's me, Steve!" before letting it rip with an AK-47.

The whole situation with Steve's "brother" Joe showing up unannounced, moving into Steve's house and taking over all of Steve's things reminds too much of that scene from "Unbreakable" where the killer steals the family's house. I imagine a series finale where Joe and Blue play a game of Blue's Clues to figure out why there's a smell coming from the basement. The clues are a bundle of rope, a handkerchief and a human skeleton. Joe suddenly gets a crazed look, announces a commercial break, and when we return, Blue is nowhere to be seen. Joe, whose shirt now has red spots all over it, calmly says that Blue had to take a little vacation, but children can tune in next week for an exciting episode of "Green Puppy's Clues."

When I first started working at WCN Newspapers, Eowyn was in the middle of a Blue's Clues obsession. The reporter sitting behind me is named Steve Reilly, and I swear, every time he called someone, he would say, "Hi, it's me, Steve."

The maddening seduction of power

There's an old saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't know if that's true, but power does have a funny effect on the people who get it.

Take for example a man named Glenn. A handyman and contractor, Glenn made a reputation for himself in a township south of here in 1991 by donating a sizeable chunk of his time to building a large playground at the municipal complex. The local Republican Party, which had had a monopoly on political power for about 15 years, knew a good thing when one surfaced, and tapped Glenn to run for township committee in 1992.

Not surprisingly, he won. And that was where things started to go wrong for Glenn.

The problems started to surface in 1995, in the third year of his first term on the Township Committee, when another resident, named David, did the unthinkable. He not only mounted a campaign for the township committee under the banner of the Democratic Party, he won.

The trouble between Glenn and David began quickly. During the four years they served together -- each man was elected to a second term -- Glenn, who frequently called himself a champion of bipartisanship, called the much-shorter David a "dwarf piece of garbage," and reportedly even jumped across the dais to yell at him while he was talking to a resident after the committee meeting had ended.

As time went on, things only got worse. By virtue of being in power so exclusively for so long, members of the GOP had fallen into the habit of making deals that helped one another's financial interests. Word got into the community of a major land deal in the western portion of the township that would make some of the old-time GOP faithful a few million dollars richer. Glenn, who considered himself a watchdog for the public, saw nothing wrong with it.

By the time I came into the picture, in early 1999, there were days Glenn barely seemed to be in the same reality as anyone else. Anyone who disagreed with him was a liar. Any critique of his voting record was a personal attack. He became incapable of telling political allies from political opponents, and slapped down fellow Republicans on the township committee when they disagreed with him.

In his own eyes at least, it seemed Glenn was an unappreciated messiah. While his political opponents stayed at home watching TV and living the fine life, Glenn was wrestling with developers and fighting for the betterment of the community. He also considered himself an expert at everything, as he tried to demonstrate with one embarrassing display after another.

Not surprisingly, Glenn lost re-election in 1999, along with three other Republican committee members. For the first time in 20 years, the GOP had no representation in township government. It was an incredible upset, and contained for those willing to listen a warning against power-brokering and backroom deals.

Glenn wasn't willing to listen. While party officials opted to lay low for a while and plan for the next election, he continued to spout off rather publicly about the evil people afoot in the Democratic Party and how unappreciated he had been.

In 2000, he managed a letter-writing campaign against a Democratic committeeman seeking re-election, attacking his church attendance of all things, and penning some of the most poisonous letters I've ever read.

Not surprisingly after the Republicans lost the election that time as well -- the second year in a row, in a GOP-dominated township -- the party leadership apparently told Glenn to hit the trail.

I'd like to say that what happened with Glenn -- the slide from handyman benefactor to the shrill, embittered small-town politician -- is a rare thing, but I don't think I can. Politics, even local politics, can do strange things to the people who get involved in it.

Regardless of the party, there's an expectation among the party powerful that elected officials are going to toe the party line whether they agree with it or not. That's easy on issues where you
don't have a strong opinion, but eventually the choice will come of embracing the party position and betraying your conscience, or doing the right thing and standing by your convictions.

Very few people have the strength to be true to their principles when the pressure starts to sing the party tune. It gets lonely quickly, and power brokers usually don't get into those positions because they play nicely or fairly.

Most people start out with the small stuff, even if they don't realize it, by letting the party do their thinking for them. Some go beyond that and start playing games by voting for political advantage or to comply with what the higher-ups wish, a move that in time can lead them to abandon their own positions for whatever the party tells them. It's all the same sin, just in steadily growing degrees.

That's the path Glenn took. By the time he was through in politics, he saw nothing wrong with the Republican officers making themselves a few million dollars by adding sewerage to increase the land's attraction to developers, even though a Superior Court judge in Flemington had harsh words to say on the subject. Everything for him boiled down to a simple Republican-good, Democrat-bad formula.

That sort of simplistic thinking should bother everyone. By the time people start thinking that only good people are found on their side of the aisle, and that their side of the aisle is the only place good people can be found; that unless everything is done under their control, it's going to be done poorly; that everyone who has a criticism is a liar, a muck-raker, a troublemaker or a politically motivated malcontent; that the only view worth consideration is their own -- it's time for them to leave political life behind.

It's a shame politicians don't do that more often.

not really your problem

A friend of mine writes:

I haven't caught up on the news since last week, but last I heard there were 165 lawsuits pending from out-of-state same-sex couples who got married in Massachusetts, then went back home and are suing to have their marriage recognized legally.

So yes, it IS my problem.

The sanctity of your marriage, of mine, and so on, is not diminished at all by the existence of a civil union between two gays, even if that civil union is called a marriage and entitles its members to the same rights and privileges as a heterosexual couple as far as taxes, insurance, pool memberships and whatever else goes. Extending those privileges to gays and homosexuals in no way prevents you from filing as a married couple, from enjoying the benefits Sarah gets at her job, adopting another child, or from making important life-and-death decisions in the event of the other's incapacitation. With your marriage left intact, how is it your problem?

The church is not required to perform same-sex marriages because of the First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion. Although some groups likely will scream "homophobia" when a church refuses to perform a gay wedding, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of James Dale v. Boy Scouts of America that government does not have the right to dictate inclusionary practices to a nonprofit organization -- and the BSA is not a religious group. With your church still able to view homosexual behavior according to the dictates of orthodoxy, how is it your problem?

Doubtless there will be gay marriages in some neighborhoods that didn't have them before. A couple with a piece of paper indicating that their union is sanctioned by the state (and maybe a church) is little different from a couple without such a marker. With the only outward difference between before and after being a piece of paper and official sanction, how is it your problem?

I'm not a student of history, but as I understand, marriage has become much more formalized in the last few hundred years, with couples going to church to be married in a lavish ceremony. It used to be that the service was a small civil thing, and that couples would go to the church to celebrate Mass together. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that's the direction we're headed now as a society -- civil unions for everyone, with the church blessing those it approves of and not recognizing those it disapproves of.

On a side note -- and this really isn't related directly to the topic at hand -- the Scriptures don't say much about what's involved in making a couple married. Paul pretty much states that when a man and a woman have sex, they're joined together in the eyes of God, which is why the Lord gives us the option of one partner or none. (Note: Insert standard digression here, about polygynous relationships in the Tanakh and whether they even were expressly forbidden in the New Testament.)

If that's the case, then wouldn't my friend Josh and his girlfriend Hagar be married in the biblical sense, since they are living together, with all that entails? If I understand the word in the classic sense, "fornication" isn't sex between two unmarried people as much as it is casual sex. (The word comes from the Latin "fornix," which is a brothel.)

The Netherlands have had civil unions for gays for a while now and it has destroyed the family -- last stat I saw said 65 percent of the kids born there in the last few years were born out of wedlock. Sad.

Using that kind of reasoning, I should point out that as the number of pastors and other clergymen in New York has increased over the last few hundred years, the city has seen a growth in murder, drunkenness, extortion, prostitution and corruption.

There are a great many many more social dynamics at work in the Netherlands than just civil unions for homosexuals. I would think the legalized prostitution and generally casual attitudes toward sex in general would do more to erode the concept of family, and probably drove the civil unions for gays as well.

We're probably going to keep going around the mullberry bush on this one as well. If one of our goals as Christians is to preserve the traditional family, we would do better to focus our attention on the root causes of what has caused family to unravel and start finding new ways to bind the strands together so it will hold in the times ahead.

The problem is that we keep viewing this as a political or civil rights issue. It's not. It's a spiritual one. Those driving the call for gay marriages have some legitimate grievances in there, and those who oppose them also have some legitimate objections. Deal with it in the political arena, and we're going to continue to divide ourselves against one another and further inflame heated passions.

Our goal should not be to get people to behave in a certain way, but to get them to the point that they put their faith in Christ, whatever their situation, whatever their sin, whatever their involvement. Lead them to Christ, and then let him begin the process of changing their hearts, which in turn will lead them to change their behavior. Transformation begins on the inside and works its way inexorably outward.

Since, as you acknowledge, the carnal nature is at enmity with the nature of God, trying to get sinful man to follow God's ways is much like trying to teach a pig to sing. You won't have any success, and you'll irritate the pig. And even if you do somehow teach the pig to sing, you haven't really changed its fate. It'll still get chopped up and turned into breakfast for one person or another. Don't focus on changing society's behavior, because you're not accomplishing anything except driving most people away from the gospel for the wrong reasons -- they see Christians as a bunch of controlling moralists -- and possibly making a few people more secure in their own righteousness so they have a comfortable, well padded trip to hell.

Look at it this way. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul writes to the Corinthian church that he has heard of a form of sexual immorality among the church that is unheard of even among their pagan neighbors. A fellow was having sex with his father's wife, and instead of being ashamed of it, was actually bragging about it.

Paul was outraged, much as I expect you would be too, and told the church to throw the guy the heck out and not have anything to do with him until he had repented. Paul's got all sorts of harsh words for this guy -- but he concludes by saying an odd thing: "What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? Expel the wicked man from among you." In other words, "If this were someone outside the church, I'd say it's none of our business. But he claims to be a Christian, so I'm telling you right now to have nothing to do with him until he's repented."

What business is it of ours if people outside the church want to have same-sex marriages? It's not our business. It has no bearing on us; it's irrelevant to what we're here for. Share the gospel, encourage one another to follow Christ, and keep yourself living righteously.

As to prayer, I see no point in praying that the Federal Marriage Amendment go through. I think the writing is on the wall already that it will fail, and even if it succeeds, what is it really going to accomplish? Will it stop same-sex relationships, or will it simply stop same-sex couples in committed relationships from being able to extend insurance benefits to their partners, from being able to make critical life-and-death decisions for one another, and so on?

If you're concerned for people in same-sex relationships -- and I believe you are -- I would suggest praying for ministries like Exodus Ministries and Genesis Counseling (or whatever their names are). Those ministries aren't for everyone, obviously, but there are people who believe they have benefited from them, and there are people who have left the gay lifestyle and adopted a heterosexual one.

And if you're concerned about the country's growing acceptance of same-sex relationships -- and I believe you are -- then start praying for our cultural leaders, the arists, philosophers and other social architects who provide moral leadership to our nation. Pray for them, and pray that they will awaken to God's call on their lives. (Those leaders, by the way, don't live within the Beltway, by and large. They're concentrated in Los Angeles and in New York.)

You aren't going to like hearing this, but the truth is the "culture wars" are over, and the church lost sometime back in the 1960s. We failed to understand what the hippy movement was about and we were slow to provide the leadership our culture needed. We now live in a post-Christian society where our worldview no longer dominates, and where Scripture's testimony about God is no longer accepted as an authority.

The postmodern society Gen X inherited and now is beginning to lead is a society where moral absolutes don't exist, and the superiority of one religion or one set of morals isn't a given. Try to justify your disapproval of gay sex without once referring to Scripture, and you might get a sense of why this is a lost cause. Society has moved on, and trying to get it to go back is like keeping away the tide with a broom.

penultimate

I was thinking about this word, and searching for a use other than its definition of “next to last,” when it occurred to me that the word has a great Arthurian flair. “Sign the contract,” quoth Sir Lancelot, “but use not the Pen Ultimate unless thou are worthy.”

insipid worship

The worship team at our old church used to lead us through the song, "I Can Sing of Your Love Forever." Lyrically, the first verse is not that bad, although it is too me-focused for my tastes:

Over the mountains and the sea
Your river flows with love for me.
I'm happy to be in the truth
And I will daily lift my hands
For I will always sing of
When your love came down.

I can sing of your love forever.
I can sing of your love forever.
I can sing of your love forever.
I can sing of your love forever.

The chief fault of the song is that it really does seem like you'll be singing of his love forever. The band usually played the chorus over and over again, and as you'll notice, there's not much variety to the lyric sheet at that point. Natasha decided at some point to spruce it up by singing, "But I can't sing this song forever."

Another of the popular songwriters whose work we sang in worship was Scott Underwood. Underwood seemed to have the notion that God was schizophrenic and would have an identity crisis if we didn't remind him who he was. Note the stunningly insightful chorus:

You are God of the heavens and God of the earth
You are God of our Saviour's virgin birth
You were God on the cross and God over hell
You were God before man and God when he fell

You
You are
You are God
You are God, God, God
You
You are
You are God
You are God, God, God

Underwood seems to love pointless repetition, as evidenced by this other gem we used to sing:

You are my shepherd, I have no needs
You lead me by peaceful streams
And you refresh my life
You hold my hand and You guide my steps
I could walk through the valley of death
And I won't be afraid
Because you are in control
You are in control
You are in control
You are in control

It's good to acknowledge that God is in control of the situation, but why do we have to repeat it four times in a chorus that is going to be repeated at least four times itself before the worship leader realizes that we're starting to depict God as a control freak with his booted foot pressing down on our heads?

Still, the all-time most meaningless praise-and-worship song I've ever encountered is this one:

Every move I make, I make in you
You make me move, Jesus
Every breath I take, I breathe in you
Every step I take, I take in you
You are my way, Jesus
Every breath I take, I breathe in you.
Waves of mercy, waves of grace
Everywhere I look, I see your face
Your love has captured me
Oh my God this love
How can it be?

It has a great, catchy melody, but I've never yet found a single person who can tell me what the song means. I like a good mix. The music has to be nice, but I want to be able to worship God with my mind as well. I have a hard time doing that with a lot of the praise choruses in circulation at the moment.

Okay. I feel better now.

Praise choruses are a reaction to the reliance our parents' generation had on the hymns to the exclusion of much else. Played on an organ as though they were a dirge, hymns exercise the mind but not the body. Praise music, with its much catchier tempos and updated instrumentation, allows us to worship with our bodies, but not as often our minds.

When I first became a Christian almost 17 years ago -- it'll be 17 sometime this July -- I took to praise music and CCM like a duck to water. It was alive, vibrant and everything the music at my parents' church wasn't.

I'm a little older now, and I want more balance. I still get bored to tears by the music at church when I attend with my parents, or when I attend with my grandmother-in-law, because it's so lifeless. And when it's just a catchy melody mixed with empty words, I can still only get halfway into it. Both my body and my spirit long for perfect worship and unity with God, so I long for even an imperfect fusion of the approaches to worship.

Give it 20 or 30 years, and I figure the bulk of the junk we sing today will have filtered out by then. Of course, we'll have new junk to contend with, but that's how it usually works.

'where's god when it hurts?'

Today I finally finished Philip Yancey's book, "Where's God When it Hurts?" It's a fantastic treatise on pain and suffering that remains refreshingly orthodox without settling for any of the pat answers we so often like to give people when they're hurting.

Yancey starts out by talking about the nature and benefit of pain, by looking at some leper colonies and what happens to people when their nervous system fails to convey pain messages. (I always had understood leprosy to be a condition that causes the flesh to rot and decay, but that's inaccurate. Leprosy deadens sensation so that the pain receptors no longer work. The damage to flesh comes from not noticing injuries and having them treated.)

He drew a compelling parallel between biological pain and the more exquisite forms of suffering we know. Pain is the body's way of saying that something is wrong; the suffering of the soul is the world's way of screaming that something is wrong and not working as it was designed to.

From there Yancey explores the traditional answers we have for pain; that God is using it to punish us for sin, to teach us something; that God is incapable of or unwilling to stop our pain, or that he just doesn't care; and so on.

It's interesting. Yancey never really attempts to justify the horrorific suffering we sometimes experience -- the death of a child, genocide, grief, paralysis, prolonged or terminal illness -- but he does steadily march toward the Incarnation and the point at which Christ identified with our pain so thoroughly that he cried out in despair that God had abandoned him.

He also makes the interesting statement I hadn't considered before, or at least not in that light, that suffering brings out what is already in us. A marriage where husband and wife lean on each other for support will be made even stronger by suffering, but one where that is not the case is more likely to strain under the load. Paul writes that suffering produces character; character, perseverance; and perseverance, hope. And hope will not be disappointed.

His conclusion is not that we're wrong to be upset, or even to scream and shout and demand an explanation why we're suffering, just that we're wrong to think that God is oblivious to what we're going through, because every suffering we endure, he's already endured with us and for us throughout the Incarnation and especially on the Cross.

For me, that's comforting, because it's nice to remember that God is a foster father who has lost his children at times, and so he understands that grief that overwhelms me sometimes from out of the blue. He was a man who lost his father, as I one day will lose mine, and I don't doubt Jesus groaned beneath the weight of the responsibility that dropped upon him before he was ready to carry it.

The penultimate chapter was about the CHristian response to pain -- not just our own pain, but the pain of others. Paul wrote about he wept over the losses of other believers, and how he burned inwardly when he knew of fellow Christians who were led into sin. The challenge for us as the Body of Christ is to feel the pain in the body's toes and fingers even though they're thousands of miles away, being tortured in the Sudan, Saudi Arabia or China. It's to feel the grief Indigo goes through with her situation at home, or to share the anguish of Respectfully Brian P., Victoria, Greg and Don, and all the rest of us losers who set sail upon the H.M.S. Naked Glittery Squirrel.

And of course, not just to feel their pain (to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton), but to share it and carry it for them. I pray every day that I can carry the pain inflicted on my son and on Evangeline by what DYFS did, and although I don't doubt that's what keeps the wounds fresh for me, I also don't doubt that it helps them, just as I'm sure it's helped Indigo, Cats, Greg and the others here whom I've prayed for.

The last chapter was about the Resurrection, because that's where it all suffering ends. If there is pain in heaven, at least it will be pain without grief and without tears, and it will be pain more wonderful than any joy we've known on earth.

It was a great book. I hope I've whetted your appetite to read it.

guerilla gardening gone wrong

Earlier this spring I planted a packet of morning glory seeds with the goal of planting them at various places around the yard. There's also a no-parking sign by the street that is kind of dull to look at, so I was thinking how neat it would look to have a morning glory tendril winding around the signpost and bursting into bloom.

So yesterday evening I'm planting it, when my neighbor comes down the street, sees me working by the post, and asks if someone knocked the sign over, as has happened before.

I explained what I was doing, and he said, "Um, Dave, you know this is my yard, right?"

I was mortified. It's about seven feet past the property line, so there's really no way not to think the sign isn't on his property. I don't know what I was thinking. It just flat-out didn't occur to me that I was digging a hole or planting a flower in someone else's yard.

I apologized profusely, and he was really cool about it. He even suggested other neighbors' yards where I could plant morning glories, suggested some work I could do in his back yard, and joked that he might come over to my yard and remove a few bushes that he doesn't like.

If there is an election held this year for Stupidest Neighbor on the Block, I think I would win hands down.

lloyd webber, adapted

Evangeline watched "Jesus Christ Superstar" again yesterday, and gave me regular updates on what was happening. "Daddy! There's a bus with a cross on it!" "Daddy! People just appeared out of nowhere!"

Afterward, I was walking through the room when she tried to wrap something around my leg, and started to sing, "Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. Grab Daddy's leg for Jesus Christ."

I can only hope she sang that at vacation Bible school today.

information too public

I believe in open records, and I believe in putting public information in the hands of the public.

I also believe it's possible to have too much of a good thing. That's what's happening now with the Quakertown School District salaries, which the school board is printing next week in its agenda, and which The Quakertown Eagle has printed in the pages of the newspaper.

The push to publish these salaries began last month, when school board newcomer Tim Lewis first requested it. In the two months since he joined the board, Lewis has been fairly aggressive about taking the board in the direction he wants it to go, and he's voiced a lot of rhetoric about making Quakertown into a "blue ribbon" school district and having "open communication" with the public, without ever really saying what he means by that.

Last month, Louis took the rhetoric a step further and, in the name of openness, pushed for a vote to publish the salaries of every school district employee in the board's June business meeting agenda.

Legally, the board has the right to do it, and so does anybody else who wants to, including the newspaper. Unlike with a corporation such as Merck and Co., the salaries of district employees are a matter of public record. Essentially anyone can walk in off the street and ask for this information, and the school district has to provide it "as soon as possible," according to Alexander McGimpsey, an attorney for the Iowa Press Association.

That right is guaranteed by Executive Order 11, issued by former Gov. Brendan Byrne, and it extends to the names, titles and positions of school employees, copies of their contracts, their salaries and how much money they actually get paid.

It extends beyond the schools too. According to the state sunshine law, you can get the same information about the municipal employees who pick up your garbage every week, and about the nice young police officer who gave you a ticket when you were rushing to your daughter's dance recital.

So the information is public, and the school board is within its rights to put the salary information in the agenda, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why in God's name they would want to do it.

The information is public - but that doesn't mean the school board needs to rent airtime on a radio station to advertise it, and it certainly doesn't mean the newspaper has an obligation to print it.

There's useful data to glean from the salary information - median salaries, how the district compares to neighboring districts and statewide - but printing everything? How does publishing the names, positions and salaries of more than 200 people meet a newspaper's goal of advancing the public good?

I liken this to the genies in "Arabian Nights." It's much easier to let the confounded thing out of the bottle than it is to get it back in. In the meantime while it's loose, it's impossible to contain.

And this genie is going to cause a lot of problems now that it's loose, not the least of which will be resentment.

Teachers and other school employees, even though they acknowledge that their salaries are public information, are going to resent having the information being made so public. Longtime district employees are going to resent discovering that they make less, proportionally or otherwise, than colleagues who have been with the district a shorter time. And everyone's going to resent the board for starting the whole thing.

Then there will be the comparisons. Parents and their children will compare the salaries of teachers they don't like to the salaries of teachers they do. Other taxpayers are going to compare what they earn to what the district pays its employees. You can bet your boots there's going to be some anger about unpopular educators who make more than the person doing the checking.

What's worse is the timing. Even though Lewis has said time and again that this isn't about teacher salaries, the district is in the middle of negotiations with the union. I know how I'd take it if I were a negotiator working for the union.

I'm mystified by the perceived need for the salaries to be published in the first place. If this really is about openness, it's an unnecessary move, because the district's track record has been above reproach in my experience.

I've worked in this business for eight years, and I've never encountered a school district administration more open with the public than this one. When I asked Superintendent of Schools Paul Ortenzio for a copy of the salary list, I had a copy before I left the room.

Other times I've called him on the phone with a half-hour's worth of questions about a board policy or action, and he's always been patient and forthcoming with an answer to whatever I've asked him. The same is true for other members of the administration I've dealt with. In terms of openness, there isn't much room for improvement.

Ironically, since the whole issue came up last month, a host of people, including Lewis, have called me and begged me not to print the salary information in the newspaper.

It's not my decision, but to be honest, I'm not sure where they're coming from. If you start kicking stones down the mountainside, you shouldn't be surprised when it starts an avalanche.

And an avalanche is coming. It doesn't take a genius to see that.

God's politics

A friend of mine writes:

I agree that both parties are evil (to some extent) with some good people in them. But I believe God has a sense of priority, and ranks the death of innocent human beings in the millions over rich grinding poor (which has happened forever and ever and will continue till the end of time) or the destruction of the environment. A human is worth more than many sparrows, neh? And so I think He will allow the Dems to get their butts kicked until they get it together on this issue.

Alas, I believe he is laboring under a false supposition that these things exist in isolation of one another. History has shown that when left to itself, industry is not naturally inclined to clean up after itself, and will leave a mess of horrifying proportions in the earth and in the water, viz. Love Canal, the PE&G problems celebrated in "Erinn Brokovich," God only knows how many Superfund sites in New Jersey, and so on.

These aren't environmental issues that have little impact on humanity; they're environmental issues that have a direct impact on us and on our children. Serious birth defects -- including fatal ones -- can be linked quite often to what big business has done to the environment and then left alone.

The issue I have with the GOP on this score is that it's more willing to let big business off the hook environmentally and to relax the pollution standards than the Democratic Party. (Bush's decision to abandon the Kyoto Accord, his decision to relax standards for arsenic in drinking water, to lessen emission and mileage standards for gas-burning vehicles, the willingness of his administration to pursue an energy policy relying on coal-burning plants, yada yada yada.)

And yes, the poor you will have always, but take a look sometime at the amount of Scripture devoted to addressing injustice, the oppression of aliens and strangers in our midst, the exploitation of the worker, and the cruelty of the oppressor who hoards wealth for self-indulgence. It's a vast amount of Scripture. It's hardly right to wash our hands of the biblical mandate to care for the needy just because they'll always be around.

As to what sins are the biggest affront to God ... well, I'm not going to dispute that abortion is one of the greatest horrors of modern America, and I'll say for the record that I am flat-out opposed to abortion in just about any circumstance. (The chief exception that comes to mind would be when the mother's life is in danger.) I've felt that way ever since I understood the issue.

Using a stand on abortion as a litmus test for political power, though, seems really absurd. That would suggest that God was asleep at the wheel when the Democrats had a majority hold on the COngress during the Reagan years, or that he was busy elsewhere when Clinton soundly beat the elder Bush at the polls. And perhaps he was confused in letting Christie Whitman be governor for eight years in New Jersey, when she's a pro-choice Republican. (Not to mention that Jim McGreevey, a pro-choice Democrat, is our current governor, and he beat out Brett Schundler, a pro-life Republican.)

I try to be careful about saying where God stands politically, because when you get down to it, he doesn't really take sides. That would make him subordinate to an ideology. The best we can hope for is that we're on his side, which is something I don't think either party can really make a reasonable claim to be.

At best, the parties can claim that God has raised them up for some purpose, much as he raised up the Chaldeans, Assyrians, ROmans or any other empire in the past. And then he cast them aside and judged them when he was through.

May God show us mercy when it comes time for that.

Our toxic political zeitgeist is driving the national divide

Something to consider as we head toward the presidential election:

Barring some kind of paradigm-changing, cataclysmic event, [pollster John] Zogby sees the election and its outcome in almost apocalyptic terms.

"Welcome to the Armageddon election," Zogby says. "I've never seen anything like it. We're partisan and polarized and in two warring camps."

Zogby likened this year's election to the watershed election of 1800, which saw President John Adams lose to his vice president, Thomas Jefferson. That election was so divisive - Adams was demonized as a "royalist," while Jefferson was reviled as "an atheist and a whoremaster" - that Americans would call the presidency of James Madison, who succeeded Jefferson, the "Era of Good Feelings."

Today, after years of growing polarization, the next president - whether Bush or Kerry - will face another historic opportunity to reach out to the other side and attempt to begin a period of healing, if not "good feelings." But at this point it is difficult to see the losing side accepting such an olive branch.

But at some point we must find accommodation as a nation - even unity. I am as certain of this one thing as John Zogby is of the outcome of the election.

If we remain divided, we will fall. And hard.

This divide has been bothering me for years.

Much of the prevailing political divide has its roots in Bush's narrow win in Florida in 2000; much else of it has to do with the Republican attempt to impeach Clinton in his second term, driven by the pugilistic realpolitick of Newt Gingrich. Many liberals still dispute the legitimacy of Bush's victory and resent the Supreme Court for stepping in and ruling in such a way that Bush was able to take Florida, just as many conservatives still revile Clinton for his peccadilloes.

I'm not convinced that Kerry can win the election. So far, he has been unable to get a message across or even to appear as charismatic -- but the growing sentiment against Bush may be all that he needs to win.

We'll have to see what happens, but I do hope that the talking heads in both the GOP and the Democratic Party will be able to treat one another with at least the modicum of respect that's due them as human beings. I don't recall much nastiness in the Reagan races. Quite the opposite. When Mondale tried to make an issue of Reagan's age. Reagan responded with aplomb: "I see no reason my opponent's youth and inexperience should be held against him."

Despite his use of racial dog whistles and other shortcomings on civil rights, I don't recall anything in the Reagan campaigns like the loathsome and racist Willie Horton ads that Lee Atwater's team threw against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential election, or the negative tone of George H.W. Bush's re-election campaign.

The negative, personal and extremist language of the politics has to stop. It's divisive, it leaves voters disenfranchised and it discourages meaningful participation in a democracy. 

It's probably going to be even worse this year since neither major candidate is particularly inspiring to the general public, however they may appeal to the core constituents of their own parties.

Hopefully Kerry and Bush and their campaign managers will take high road this time around, instead of the win-at-all-costs road, and we'll be able to survive this election with our wits and nation intact.

And while I'm at it, I'd like a pony ...

your bias is showing

A couple weeks ago, the supervisor of Public Works in Quakertown died unexecptedly. To replace him, the mayor tapped his father. It's an appointed position that pays about $8,000 and no one really disputes that his father is qualified for the post.

But you know the media. We have to a big deal out of everything, and so we ran an editorial criticizing the impending appointment as inappropriate because a family appointment like that -- not even the mayor's in-law, but his father for crying out loud -- at the very least has the appearance of nepotism.

The mayor called me up today and reamed me out for about half an hour. It's okay; that's an occupational hazard.

In the latest development, I found out today that the buzz around town is that the Quakertown Democratic Party has bought me off. (The Eagle generally has been regarded as the Republican paper for years.)

I find the notion of being in the pocket of a political party to be a thoroughly amusing one, and will be insufferably pleased with myself for at least a week. As I told the Democratic chairwoman, as long as both parties hate me, I can feel good about myself.

(As a side note, I wish that I would get something while I'm in all these pockets, but I don't seem to be having much luck.)

The irony is that I'd say if anyone has grounds to accuse me of bias, it's the Democratic Party. The GOP usually gets more coverage in The Eagle because Quakertown is a Republican community, and the GOP holds all the elected positions in the township (and most of the school board). It's a given that whoever in power is going to get more favorable press, quantitywise, by virtue of being the party in power doing things.

I'm short on righteous indignation anyway. I find it more amusing than insulting to be accused of stuff that's so far outside my character. It's like when a parent in my second year of teaching accused me of giving his son bad grades because he's black, or when I was accused by someone in Hillsborough of being racist. All I can do is laugh because it's such an absurd notion.

And laughter usually does more to deflate critics than anger would, anyway.

triumphs and setbacks

I'm torn between the feeling of tremendous accomplishment and tremendous disappointment this year where the yard and the garden are concerned.

I'm pretty sure I've stated on the forum before that I'm committed to the organic philosophy where my garden and yard are concerned. In short: no pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers. Everything is done the way God designed nature to do it itself.

First is the good news that makes me feel like I've accomplished something. We've come a long way. The guy who owned this house before me didn't share the organic philosophy. He sprayed weedkiller and pesticides everywhere, and bombed the yard with Miracle Gro and other chemical fertilizers. When we moved in, there was a token layer of top soil, the earth was compacted and painful to walk on in your bare feet, and there was virtually no grass. There were entire chunks of the yard where literally nothing was growing, and when I dug the ground with a shovel, I never found a single earthworm. (You kind of need them for healthy soil.)

Today, through the efforts of reseeding the lawn piece by piece and fertilizing with compost (plus some Milorganite, an organic fertilizer produced by the city of Milwaukee from its sewage), we have a lustrous green lawn in the back yard. You can walk on it and treat your toes to a trip across a spongy green carpet. There are flowers blooming everywhere, and some of the parts of the yard that never supported anything are bursting with life. (The back quarter of our yard is an area I haven't planted anything in at all. I'm giving it a sabbath rest and letting it regenerate on its own. All I do is pull up maple seedlings since I don't want it turning into woods.)

Every time I dig into the earth with a shovel, I find earthworms. They're everywhere again. We had a flea problem last year that I eradicated with beneficial nematodes, an organism that also kills lawn grubs and termite colonies without harming people, pets or the lawn. I actually want to get some more of them to make sure the termites we had in the back corner of our yard really are all gone.

Plus I see lots of ladybugs. Ladybugs, to the uninitiated, are one of the nicest insects God ever created. They eat other insects that we consider pests, such as aphids and ants. A garden with ladybugs is a garden that has a happy gardener.

Best of all, my daughters enjoy gardening with me. Now 4½ years old, Eowyn helped me plant sunflowers, corn, tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, morning glories and ornamental maize this spring before she got bored and went inside. She also has helped me turn the soil, stir the compost and dig holes where I don't want them. Ruth, being only 19 months old, has not been quite as big a help, but she's enjoyed digging holes, planting some sunflowers in the wrong spot, and pretending the turn the earth with the spade fork.

Overall, it's a good situation, and I couldn't be happier.

Except for one thing: There's a good chance our soil has some hazardous contaminants, including lead. A gardener down the street had his soil tested and found that it is so contaminated it is unsafe for children to play in, let alone to grow food in.

Things were looking so up, and now potentially to have some idiot rob us of some of the triumphs of gardening is just ... well, it really stinks.

We were fortunate in that we were able to rent a garden plot not far from the house for only $10 a year, and in time to plant some vegetables. The plot's even bigger than what I was able to squeeze out of our yard, but it's not as convenient as going out into the yard to pick lettuce, tomatoes or beans right before a meal. It's also a site that has never been farmed before, so the soil has less organic material than the garden I've been using for the last four years -- and therefore will not grow the food as effortlessly as I was hoping to get this year.

I'm sure that eventually life will clean our yard of any impurities and make it safe to grow food in -- if in fact it is contaminated, which we haven't established for certain yet -- but that probably won't be in my lifetime. Certainly not while we own the house.

too much public information

As you probably know, I work for a community newspaper. This differs from a larger metro daily or other major daily newspaper in that our focus is limited to one community. Quakertown is about five square miles, and anything that happens beyond those borders is of no interest to us unless it impacts directly on the township in some way.

As a result, the stuff that we report on matters to the community, and our readers can get quite passionate about the paper since it's "theirs." A good community paper shapes not only terms of the debate but the debate itself. Done right, the paper reflects the character of the community and defines the community. What we write about and don't write about is a big deal.

Last month, Tim Louis, one of the new members on the board of education, decided to go beyond his rhetoric about how he wants to make the school board have "open communications" and to turn the schools into "blue ribbon schools." He decided it would be a good idea to publish the salaries of the every school district employee in the agenda to the school board's June business meeting.

Now these salaries are public information, at least in Iowa. Under an executive order by former Gov. Brendan Byrne, incorporated into the state's 2002 Open Public Records Act, select personnel information of public employees must be released upon request -- including salaries, W-4s, contracts and in some cases (if not all) their resumes as well.

Personally, I think Louis is crazy for wanting to do this. The information is public -- but that doesn't mean the school board needs to rent a billboard to advertise it. Salaries are personal information, and even though teachers sign off on that privacy when they sign a contract with a public school, there still is an aura of confidentiality around this information that should be respected. The district should release it when asked to, but I don't feel they should be actively distributing it.

The part that really bites is one of the owners of the newspaper wants us to beat the district to the punch. Yes, that's right -- we're about to publish this information in the newspaper with our next edition. I've already received calls from four different people alarmed over rumors that I've requested the salary information and received it. (Both rumors are true.)

I don't see a need for us to print the information either. There's useful data I can glean from the salary information -- median salaries, how the district compares to neighboring districts and statewide -- but I don't see a need for us to print all 200-some salaries, which include the details for everyone from the superintendent down to the maintenance workers and secretaries.

But printing all of it? That's just crazy. We're going to be stirring the pot tremendously with this one. Students and parents alike are going to compare the salaries of good teachers and bad, they're going to compare what district employees make to what residents in the community make, and I don't doubt this is going to be a major point of contention with the teacher's union. Did I mention the district is in the middle of negotiations with the union?

The amusing part to this is that Louis is one of the people who called me, begging me not to print the salary information in the paper. What did he expect? This never would have occurred to the owner if Louis hadn't suggested it in the first place. He kicked the first stone down the hillside, and now he's aghast that there's going to be an avalanche. What's that Jesus said about counting the cost before you start building a tower?

So anyway, here I am entering all the information into an Excel spreadsheet so we can print it on Page Three of the paper next week, with an accompanying story to give it some context. I was talking with the superintendent about it when he gave me the list and I said, "They're going to kill me when this hits the paper." He sympathizes -- he knows I'm not the one driving this -- but he agrees with me. This has been done before, and he's never seen it work out pleasantly either.

The double irony to this is that today I wrote the first draft of an editorial explaining why it's so important that we publish these salaries in the newspaper. (The editorial will be reviewed and probably altered somewhat by the higher-ups on the editorial board.) Tomorrow, I'm writing a column saying what a stupid idea I think the whole thing is. The two will run side by side.

What happens in Quakertown isn't generally of interest outside its borders -- but the issue of Public Right to Know vs. Public Need to Know is something that should be of interest to anyone involved in the news business, including people whose only involvement is to read them.

Usually as journalists we equate the two, or even insist that the public right to know information can supercede classifications that ordinarily would place it outside the domain of "right to know." The most obvious example of that would be the Pentagon Papers published by the Washington Post under Katharine Graham.

My feeling is that sometimes the public need to know isn't there, and that we can do more harm than we do good in publishing the information. And unlike the salaries of teachers in the Quakertown School District, that is an issue of national relevance, at least in the news business.

delaware water gap

We went camping in Delaware Water Gap, Pa., for Memorial Day weekend with family. Had a great time too, despite the difficulty of sleeping on rock-hard ground in temperatures that were dipping into the 40s at night.

Saturday night in fact I awoke at 1:30 a.m. and ended up sitting by the fire the rest of the night with my older brother Herb, who also had woken up and was unable to get back to sleep. Nice bonding time between us, which is nice, since the two of us normally don't get much time together and have fairly different views on life. (He got a real kick out of it when he made us fried eggs and I got yolk in my hair.)

One of the highlights of the trip occurred Saturday afternoon. Herb, who is an avid fisherman, had brought about four or five fishing rods for himself, his two children and the other kids to take down to the pond and have a go at fishing with.

Herb spent a while getting the rods prepped, cast them out into the water and then let the kids have a go "fishing with them." Not surprisingly, within about 10 minutes, all the kids had lost interest and went off exploring with one relative or another, or were just finding other ways to entertain themselves.

All the kids except one.

Yes, Rachel had decided it was a lot of fun to pick up one of the fishing poles and move it back and forth gently. About 20 minutes into the trip, something started pulling on her line. Herb grabbed the pole and brought it in, and wouldn't you know, Rachel -- 1½-year-old Rachel -- had caught a bluegill. None of the other kids caught anything, even though their interest was suddenly renewed a thousandfold.

Incredible, isn't it? Here I am, 33, and my 19-month-old daughter has caught more fish than me.

scumbag, i never knew you

I just discovered that "scumbag" is a slang word for a used condom. I had no idea.

It makes sense, though, once you're aware of it. I mean, it never occurred to me, but it seems kind of obvious.

le petite francaise

My daughter not only in teaching herself to read and write, she is now teaching herself French.

Several months ago, I was playing games with her and changed the langauge options on one of her favorite Disney films. She found that fascinating, and started asking me how to say one thing or another in French. (I had to substitute Creole, since I don't parlez Francaise myself.)

Wouldn't you know that for the past two days, she's asked me to play "Beauty in the Beast" in French for her? She even calls it "La Belle et Le Bete," and I swear I heard her singing along with some of the songs -- in French.

Mon Dieu! Elle est une prodigie, ne c'est pas?

school memories

When I was in first grade, they started me out in the advanced reading group, probably because my older brothers had tested as gifted. Two weeks or so into the year, without being told, I was bumped down into a slower group, and apparently the teacher actually told my mother that she would have to accept that I would never be as smart as my older brothers. She and one of the other teachers/vice principals or something actually tried to tell my mother that I was at least semi-retarded. (It actually turns out that I had the highest IQ of the four of us.)

In all honesty, I can say that the only thing I'm grateful to Mrs. Hlavsa for is that she did teach me how to read. The rest of first grade was a nightmare where I would do anything to get out of class. I peed my pants so regularly that it was almost a drill; I lied and pretended to be sick on at least one occasion so I could leave school.

I guess I have to say I'm disappointed my parents never pushed to get me out of that woman's class, but to their credit they did make it absolutely clear that my younger brother was not to be put in her class under any circumstances two years later, even though that would have been the district's normal policy. (I think it had something to do with where children lived.) The only nice thing I can say about Mrs. Hlavsa is that she did teach me to read. She made me a nervous wreck and insisted I write with my left hand -- I'm right-handed -- so that to this day I still have a bad stammer when I get nervous or excited, but at least she taught me to read.

My big break came in second grade, when I got a decent teacher, and then was IQ tested, and then in third grade when Mrs. Cromer let us go at our own pace, as I mentioned earlier.

Something good about schools, to lighten the tone: In fourth grade, our teachers made an arrangement that involved rotating us to different classrooms for math, science and English. My math teacher was Mr. Ernett, a man who was generally good with students and didn't tolerate attitude or misbehavior.

One day as recess ended, Mr. Ernett saw me punching the boy in line in front of me, and pulled us both out. Darren Shumaker, who I had been hitting, claimed to have no idea why I punched him. When I explained that Darren had been picking on me nonstop all year, Mr. Ernett proceeded to chew him out for what seemed to me to be ages. His entire lecture to me was, "Don't ever do that again," followed by a stern warning to Darren that if he ever picked me again, Mr. Ernett was going to make him wish he had never been born.

That guy remains my favorite teacher to this day.

the antichrist

Let me pose this question: Must there in fact be an Antichrist? Many Bible scholars believe the term refers simply to anyone who raises himself to the level of a god, and that the beast mentioned in Revelation is simply Nero himself, that John was prophesying the fall of Nero and the end of the Neronian persecution.

That depends at least in part on the date Revelation was written. If it was written prior to A.D. 70, that interpretation is a possibility. Written after A.D. 90, as it traditionally is held, it can't be referring to Nero unless it's a "reverse prophecy"; i.e., the Johannine author made up the prophecy after the fact.

The European Union is the current bogeyman because the book of Revelation appears to be describing Rome, and the Roman Empire hasn't been a player in over a thousand years. Ever since the Protestant Reformation under Luther and others, the Roman Catholic Church has been a popular contender for the role now being assigned by lay scholars to the European Union. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was "prophesied" to usher the Antichrist in to power, remember? That was one of the reasons Gorbachev was seen as the Antichrist, because he was offering real peace between the Soviet bloc and the West for the first time in decades.

The Antichrist is also interesting because he's changed over the years too. Luther and other reformers were called the Antichrist because they were breaking the Church; before them, I'm sure Mohammed was called the Antichrist since many early Muslims had been Catholics. The papacy has been the leading contender for Antichrist under many generations of fundamentalism, although I've heard some groups insist the Antichrist will be Jewish. These days, with East and West seemingly headed toward collision, I'm sure there are groups claiming the Antichrist will be an Arab. (I've also heard some say that the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9-11 was the fall of Babylon talked about in Revelation, since New York is the cultural capital of America's global empire.)

We usually make the Antichrist whoever our demon of the moment is, whether it makes sense or no. It's a shame, really, since that also means that we blind ourselves to what the Bible really says about the ultimate fate of those who aggrandize themselves and defy the will of the Almighty, and miss how we can apply those Scriptures to our present lives and situations.

presidential requirements

There's been some mindless banter recently about amending the Constitution to allow naturalized citizens to run for the U.S. presidency. I doubt anything will come of that, so let me add this suggestion to the fire, since nothing will come of it either:

In addition to the current requirements -- born in the United States or to American parents overseas, at least 35 years old at the time the term would begin, current citizen who has lived at least 14 years in the country -- let's add one more requirement. Anyone who would be president of the United States also must have lived in another country for at least two years. Maybe we also should require fluency in English and a second language.

Think of what that would do for the country. We'd be led by someone who actually understands how other nations view the United States, who could see the ramifications of U.S. policy on those other places, and who probably would have a lengthy personal history with citizens of that other country.

And if the president can speak a second language fluently, so much the better for understanding the rest of the world.

Let it be so ordered upon my ascendance to the rank of world ruler.

Or maybe we should amend the U.S. Constitution to require that the president drink beer.

going deeper

This is going to be rather lengthy, so I hope you'll bear with my mental and verbal meanderings a bit.

Where should I begin? I suppose I should start by saying what a number of you already know about me. I've been disaffected with American Christianity for years for a number of reasons, but mainly because of its unbiblical preoccupation with the self. I've commented to several people that the big lie of evangelicalism is "God loves you, and has a wonderful plan for your life," because it has entirely the wrong focus. It's not about what God wants to do for us and how he wants to shower us with blessings, make us happy and fill our lives with cute frolicking puppies.

It's about how God wants us to be like him, the better to proclaim his glory before the nations.
A lot of noodleheads talk about all the neat stuff Jesus has done for them and how he wants to do neat things for us. While there is some truth to that — there always is — the big truths that Jesus reveals in the gospel aren't about making us happy. When he was grilled on which part of the Torah was most important, his response was this: "Hear O Israel, the Lord, the Lord our God is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your strength." From there he went on to say that the second greatest commandment is like the first: "Love your neighbor as yourself," which I've always understood as meaning you can't keep the first commandment unless you're keeping the second.

That also happens to be the message of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. That parable should be troubling to most evangelical thinking, because the distinction made between the sheep and the goats is what they did to do, and what they failed to do — not what they believed. The goats were believers, like the sheep, but they had failed to feed the hungry, visit those in prison, clothe the naked and so on. The message Jesus has for them is, "Whatever you did not do to the least of these, you did not do to me." Elsewhere in the book of James, that writer says point-blank that faith without works is a dead and useless faith.

What I'm getting to is that I don't believe Jesus wants people who worship him on Sundays and relate to him only in a vague and generally approving way. He calls us to a radical change in lifestyle that flies in the face of everything the world holds dear, that goes against every self-preservation instinct we have and involves a commitment to putting the needs of others before ourselves. He never promises us money. He tells the rich young ruler, "One thing you lack: Go sell everything you have, and give it to the poor. Then you can be my disciple." He never promises us happiness. He tells his disciples that they'll be persecuted, ridiculed and thrown into jail for his sake and the gospel's. What he does promise is pain and suffering, and he demands that we take him up on it. "Unless you take up your cross daily and follow me, you cannot be my disciple." Essentially, what he says is, "Follow me, and die, and I'll give you a life and a joy you never dreamed was possible."

I'm reminded once again of Ole Anthony, the founder of the Trinity Foundation in Dallas, Texas. A speaker once asked him to share what God had done for him lately, and Anthony pretty much ruined the service by saying, "God has screwed up my life today, the same way he has screwed it up every day that I've followed him, because he isn't interested in me as much as he is in seeing his son reflected in me."

Bingo. That's what it's about. Either I can screw up my life by going my own way and letting sin ruin everything around me, or I can give my life over to the Lord and let him screw it up for his glory. Of the two of us, I know who has a better idea what he's doing.

Of course you know all this. I've talked about it with several of you ad nauseum, even as I've tried to figure out what it is I'm supposed to be doing. You've watched, prayed and cried with me as I wrestled to save my foster son from the tremendous neglect he experienced his first two years, and you saw how it absolutely ripped me open when he went back to his parents and walked out of our lives.

Some of you know about the volunteer work I did at the Northampton County Jail when I was living in Easton, Pa., and I'm sure all of you know that I lived for two years in the Port-au-Prince area in Haiti, and how I first really started to deal with issues of poverty and human suffering and the church's willingness to pretend it's not there.

Where is all this leading? Well, after a long sleep, I think the caterpillar is finally getting ready to leave the cocoon, its chrysalis complete. (Sounds flowery, doesn't it? I'll have to remember it if I ever make a speech on this subject.)

It's been about two years since our old church fell to pieces. In that time Natasha and I have been to more churches that we have toes, put together, and while we've finally found a church that we're settling for, I don't think we've found a church we want to settle into.

No, I am not interested in starting a church. Nice guess, though.

What I am interested in starting is a community of believers, here in Nova Bastille. Think: Trinity Foundation. Think: Jesus People USA. Think: a group of people who are living in the same general geographic area, sharing all things in common (or pretty damn close to it, anyway) and doing what they can not only to help one another but to help the people around them.

Nova Bastille is a spiritually dark place. The high school dropout rate is about 50 percent. There are gangs that operate pretty freely, even in the schools; a police force where some of the cops were convicted two years ago of running a brothel; race problems among the city's black, Hispanic and white populations; and all the other various problems that plague inner cities. On top of that, our city administration is tearing down the affordable housing and replacing it with luxury apartments. It's abusing its eminent domain authority to shut down viable, homegrown businesses that people have owned and operated for years, just so it can redevelop the area and make it all pretty. I don't know about you, but I consider the gentrification of an area to be a spiritual issue — it’s the oppression of the poor to line the pockets of some guy who's already rich.

This is a city that needs hope. This is a city that needs Jesus Christ.

There are some ministries in Nova Bastille already that do good stuff. Elijah's Promise, for example, is a soup kitchen that feeds the hungry twice a day. That's good, and I intend to go down there Saturday to volunteer.

There's more to it than that, though. The sort of deliverance this city needs is going to come from a committed group of believers who are willing to put everything into the kingdom of Christ and live by faith. I can see a few things such a community could do: providing a newspaper to give the common people a voice and instill a sense of pride in what is good about Nova Bastille, providing English lessons or other tutoring to students and adults alike, repairing cars for just the cost of parts so that people don't lose their jobs because they can't afford to fix their cars, running a community garden to help build a sense of community, cleaning up litter and washing up graffiti, helping to build housing through the projects of Habitat for Humanity, and providing homes to foster children. (You knew that one was going to be in there, didn't you?) And of course, this is all done in the context of the gospel. There could be Bible studies, group worship, various forms of outreach and evangelism, and so on.

I've already spoken to a few friends of mine from my old church, and they were excited to hear what I'm thinking. I'll be honest: I have no idea if what I'm considering is coming from God. I know myself pretty well, and I know that I'm prone to running off on flights of fancy where I get an idea in my head, and then dropping it two weeks later when things don't work out quickly and easily. It might be that this is just such another mindless fancy, although I hope not. What I'm envisioning is something biblical, and I don't doubt it's the sort of thing that God would delight in — if it's his time.

I'd appreciate your prayer for Natasha and for me as we discuss this and reach out to other people to see if they're interested. I don't know how exactly this would take shape, whether it would involve people moving into Nova Bastille or us moving within Nova Bastille, or something else. It might also turn out to be some idle fantasy of mine that will blow over in a few weeks. I will say this, though: I'm tired of being where I am. I've been settling for mediocrity spiritually, and I'm watching as the world finds its place in me as more and more junk accumulates in my life, from a DVD player with a huge collection to a stack of comic books that could kill a mule to just about everything else in this room.

Jesus Christ has got to be the most radical, liberal man I've ever met. It’s time I started acting more like him.

being labeled gifted

My teachers in elementary school rarely had any idea how to handle students who were advanced. My third grade teacher actually let us advance at our own pace. By the end of the year, I was on a college reading level.

Then, I hit fourth grade and was required to stay on reading level. As a result I got so bored that my grades in reading started to slip and I was placed in an intermediate-level reading class. It wasn't until seventh grade that I had a teacher who realized that I was bored silly from being held to below my reading level, and I was moved up again.

I dunno. I've never been wild about most forms of entertainment that my peers embrace. I'm generally clueless about what's hot in terms of TV, and don't get much out of the popular stars and movies. I'm much happier reading books -- including well-written comic books -- than I am watching TV. Socially I'm a lot better adjusted than I was as a child, which is good, but I still feel out of place with most groups of people.

You know, this sort of reminiscence is convincing me more than ever that I want to keep Evangeline out of public school. She's only 4 years old, but she's already academically ready for first grade. She can write her own name and Rachel's, she's incredibly artistic, and if we applied her to it, she could probably learn to read by the end of the year.

Naturally the public school won't even let her attend kindergarten this fall, since her birthday is Oct. 30, two weeks after their cut-off date.

School easily can end up being a disaster for her

landover baptist

Satire is one of thos tricky areas, where you have to balance between pointed humor and just plain old-fashioned mean-spiritedness. Landover Baptist Church is a web site where I think the owners take their satire across the line quite a lot. It's especially bad when they get onto the issue of sex.

The church has had a lot of unnecessary histironics on sex, and it deserves to be lampooned for that, but I think the Landover people go too far. It just gets too vituperative to be effective. It's hard to quit, though, because the lowest common denominator is always going to appeal to a large group of people, as they found with their Jar Jar Binks sex toy article, and there is a perverse pleasure in raising the ire of your critics.

Smirkov and I had a debate on this subject with the Brothers Grinn one time. We were doing something with Jesse Helms, and I was going the same route the Landover people do -- take someone who's already a little loud and pushy, and turn him into a real fire-breather. As Smirkov pointed out, that's the easy road, and it's not particularly funny. Everyone does that with Helms, and it just gets mean after a while.

What I did in the end was to make Jesse Helms into a deeply sensitive man who always wanted to be an actors. It's his publicist who is so vicious, and scripts everything for him so that he has earned a reputation as a bit of a bulldog. As luck would have it, the interview with the Brothers Grinn was something he was able to arrange without his publicist's involvement, and our readers were treated to the rarely seen real Helms, including his soft tears over the people he's had to hurt because his publicist made him.

Much funnier, I thought. It'd be nice if the Landover people tried that too.

cultural illiteracy

Americans have a despicable lack of awareness of their own culture. I knew one guy who was amazed to discover that the Good Samaritan comes out of the Bible, and I talked with a reporter once who thought that Pharoah sent the Ten Plagues on Israel because they wanted to be let go. (She swore up and down that that was what the rabbi had told her for her Passover story.)

I essentially grew up in a very different culture from my peers because I severely lacked the social skills to interact with them and survive. It wasn't really until I was an exchange student in 11th grade that I became comfortable enough with other people to reach out and make friends, and even then I greatly preferred the company of books, which don't delight in making you feel miserable. (Well, Dostoevsky's books do, but that's a different sort of miserable.)

You can learn critical thinking skills by studying quality TV as well as by studying Shakespeare, but when we ignore our cultural heritage and forget our own history, we also forget ourselves and forfeit our future.

Personally, I blame Reagan.

tigons and ligers and bears, oh my!

And from what I was able to tell from the sites I read, all the great cats are interbreedable, although it's usually only the females that are fertile. Actually, even Felis domesticus, the common house cat, is interbreedable with the great cats, except primarily for difficulties involving size.

I find this terribly fascinating. It suggests to me that all the cats had a common ancestor, whether on the Ark on evolutionarily. If on the Ark, then speciation apparently can be a rather rapid process. Going with the young earth model, we're talking from one cat species into many in only 5,000 years or so.

Speciation would be fueled by adaptation and natural selection, as well as behavioral changes and various and sundry mutations and activations/deactivations of genetic sequences. Interesting, no? I've had to do some rethinking of my views on evolution as a result of this. Thank God my wife has a master's degree in it and can explain the different theories to me.

I find the whole thing interesting. For tigers, panthers, leopards, lions, cheetahs and so on to be interbreedable and capable of producing fertile offspring does suggest that they had a common ancestor. Evolutionarily that's what would be expected, but it's not exactly square with the standard creationist/young earth ideas, especially since it means that the species diverged that extensively in that short a time.

I'd also have to raise the question of whether this means the animals are evolving, or devolving. The Cat from which contemporary cat species are all descended presumably would have been one in which all the current genomes were present, which means the new species have lost a lot of their genetic diversity. It also means that the Cat was a versatile creature and spread to a number of very different habitats, and that many of its descendants or successors lack its adaptive ability. A panther can live in the rainforest, but a lion would have a hard time there, for example.

You can see a parallel in human development. We've settled into distinct racial or ethnic groups, but intermarriage is still possible among our many populations, probably because humanity has always been a free-ranging species and we're always going to other parts of the world and conquering the people already there. I mean, look at Europe: conquered by the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, the Huns, the Moors, and that's still just the Middle Ages.

liberal media bias

I was only 6 when Carter became president, and only 10 when he lost re-election to Reagan, but I remember quite clearly that he was viewed as a dimwit for several reasons, including his mangling of the pronunciation of the word "nuclear." Other great failings on his part:

• Iran hostage crisis lasted over a year, had a badly botched rescue mission and American handling overall displayed a poor understanding of Shi'a Islam. 
• Inflation was out of control.
• Gas rationing, energy crisis.
• Went by Jimmy instead of James or Jim.
• His wife, Rosemary, had dandruff.
• His daughter, Amy, read a book at the table during a state dinner.
• Boycotted Olympics in Soviet Union to protest human rights abuses.

And the list goes on. Bush's problems with image and media treatment are hardly unique to him. Cast your memory back about six years and you might recall the media being accused of having it in for Bill Clinton in the way we covered the Monica Lewinsky affair. Clinton complained about a year into office that no other president had been picked on by the media as much as he had.

It's par for the course. Dring a president's term, he gets blamed for everything wrong and credit for little right. Most presidents come out all right in the long run once there has been time for the rabid partisans to move on to their next target or object of veneration. History's even been somewhat kind to Nixon.

There's a great scene in "The Paper" where a city bureaucrat is flipping out about the media treatment of his department as a total disaster. "I know it's a mess," he screams. "It was like that when I got the job. Why are you blaming me?" The reporter's answer? "Because it was your turn."

No, that's not really fair, but at least it's consistent.

apocalypse of the chaldeans

Taken from the Forum of Iniquity:
¹And as I looked, there arose from the sea a great dragon, and on the dragon were 22 heads. ²And the heads all lived in the basement of the dragon's mother.

³The blue head was made hip and with it, and it was given youth to taunt the older heads with their great senility, which flummoxed them to no end, because the older heads all believed they should be able to hold their own against a teenager.

⁴There arose against the dragon a host of trolls, and the trolls mightily assailed the dragon, but it cared not. ⁵And several of the heads tormented the trolls for their spelling mistakes and basic grammar errors, until the trolls fled in terror.

⁶And a voice from heaven said, "Woe! woe! woe! to the inhabiters of the earth. Behold! The heads of the dragon have eaten the fat of many nations, and still they are not sated!"

⁷And the people beheld it was true, as the twenty-two heads infiltrated the thirty-seven nations and there was defilement of the public forums therein ⁸and the stench did reach to the heavens.

⁹And a chartreuse angel came riding on a dappled horse, bearing with it a book containing the iniquity of the age. ¹⁰And the book was opened.

¹¹The dappled horse read from the book. ¹²With the voice of authority, from the book the dappled horse read.

¹³"Behold," spake the horse, "I tell you of the coming of Fred, that all nations may behold his power, and speak his name with reverence and fear."

¹⁴And on the foreheads and right hands of those who follow Fred and count his heads there was affixed a mark. ¹⁵And those who refused to take the mark could not buy or sell cabbages, newspapers, pet lemurs or escargot. ¹⁶The mark looked like a Nike swoosh, but upon those with blue-dyed hair, it was barely noticeable.

¹⁷Now this requires discernment, plus a moderately elevated blood alcohol level: You shall know the 22 heads of Fred by his number: 42.

¹⁸Blessed are they who do not take the mark, and blessed also are those who do not listen to ccm, for their promos shall be delivered from the hand of Gunter, and they shall know peace.

easter and pesach

A friend of mine and I today were talking about his visit home for Passover yesterday, and it hit me what a good thing the Jews have set up in the way they celebrate the seder.

The seder, as probably everyone knows, is a meal that is filled with structure, layered with meaning, and replete with teaching. The elements of seder, laid out in the book of Exodus and developed further in the Talmud and Midrash, remind children and adults every year about their Jewish heritage. Through the ritual, they remember the suffering of their ancestors in Egypt and the deliverance God brought them through Moses in exquisite detail. Each element of the meal from the horseradish down to the matzoh refers back to some element of the Exodus story. It's a fantastic way not only to educate children about the religion, but to keep the Jewish identity intact despite all the pressures to conform to a non-Jewish society.

By contrast, when we celebrate Easter this year, most of us are going to go to church like we do every other Sunday, although some of us might dress up a little more, and then we'll go home and eat an Easter ham with spend time with family.

That's nice, but I can't help but think what we're missing out on. When Jesus ate that final seder with his disciples on Maundy Thursday,1 he added new layers of meaning as reinterpreted each element of the meal to refer to himself, from the lamb to the glass of wine to the matzoh. I doubt the average Christian household would even know where to begin that process with our own Easter meals. Passover can tell the story of the Exodus and the Passion; my Easter dinner is mostly just a nice family time.

It doesn't have to be that way, though. When missionaries brought the gospel to our pagan ancestors, they used elements of the pagans' belief systems to explain the gospel. The renewal and new beginnings that the Anglo-Saxons looked forward to with the arrival of Easter met its fulfillment in Christ, and so the trappings of Easter celebration -- like eggs and rabbits, symbols of beginning and fertility -- were reinterpreted along those lines.

Last year, I turned the question of Easter eggs over and over in my mind and sought a way to use them to teach my children. I finally hit upon the egg as a type -- when we boil the egg, it changes from being runny to being hard. In the same way, Christ uses the trials of this life to change our inner being. And, just as dipping the egg into the dye changes its color, so we can be changed to look like Christ when we immerse ourselves in him.

The Easter basket I turned into a living parable. We search for Truth and when we find it we're glad and we treasure it, just as we search for the basket and are happy for what it gives us.

I'd like to do more with the Easter dinner, though. Some of the family traditions we have are nice. Eowyn likes to eat holiday meals by candlelight, just like I do; and there's the foods we "must" have or it's not Easter, like the ham and the mashed potatoes and what have you.

But I really want to see if we can do what the Jews do with Passover, and turn the day into more than just a family get-together and meal to feel good over. Easter is a different day for us too. It marks the day we were set free from slavery to sin and really experienced the joys of God's love and forgiveness. If Passover can be a meal to pass the faith down through the generations, so can Easter.

But I'm stuck for how to do it. Any suggestions?

1 I did point out to Josh, and he agreed, that Christians have much neater names for the individual days of Holy Week than Jews have for the days of Passover. Although we have the lame and predictable "Palm Sunday," we also have Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday.

Of course, as I also mentioned, Jewish holidays have much nicer-sounding names than Christian ones. Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and Advent just can't hold a candle namewise to Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana, Hanukkah, Sukkoth and Pesach.

Plus, if Constantine had converted to Judaism, we'd get three weeks of vacation every year, since Passover, Hanukkah and the High Holy Days each run about that long. We really shot ourselves in the foot by making sure that Easter always lands on a weekend. What management stooge thought of that?

mars in the news

1) What was Mars like when it had water?
Wet.

2) What happened?

Somebody pulled the drain plug and let the water run out. There was a terrible glug-glug-glug noise that caused widespread panic across the planet, and Osayra was forced to unbody millions of hrossa, sorn and other creatures, including the funny frog ones with the P name and the humanoids from Edgar Rice Burrough's "John Carter" series.

No, seriously, the world tree drained all the water resources of Mars, and nearly did to Earth as well, but for the quick thinking of Hanville Svetz. If you don't believe me, read Larry Niven's historical novel, "Rainbow Mars," which provides an in-depth account.

A troll over at CHRefugee is entertaining us with some proofs that Mars used to be earthlike planet until a meteor changed its orbit, and that people used to have advanced flying technology.

It's all because of the aliens. Naturally.

His argument cites the book of Ezekiel as one example of an ancient encounter with a UFO. UFOlogists love that book because Ezekiel details a vision of a wheel on fire in the sky. Clearly, a UFO sighting. Why? Because they want it to be. A pothead might look at that same passage and say that Ezekiel was smoking dope, just as someone else could look at the book of Revelation and say that St. John the Divine was eating psychadelic mushrooms. Each group is looking at the passage to see support for their own position, without stopping to weigh the passage on its own merits and evaluate the claims it makes about itself. This is the kind of logic that allowed Aristotle (?) to prove that women have fewer teeth than men and some Christian fundamentalists to prove that women have one fewer ribs than men.

That there have been flying machines long since before Jean Picard or the Wright brothers is pretty well documented, even if it's not something the average schmoe is aware of -- but that's a "machine" in the simplest sense of the word; i.e., a hang-glider. I'm aware of one myself from medieval Europem and I think Ray Bradbury wrote a story based on an old Chinese legend about a hangglider a few thousand years ago. The idea of a technologically advanced flying machine is an anachronism that is supported only by raping the text to see things not contained in it.

The UFO interpreation Ezekiel passage, for example, takes a pretty dim and condescending view of the ancients, that they would see something advanced and unfamiliar and automatically try to force it into a superstitious worldview. Come on, really. Are we honestly supposed to think people were so stupid that they couldn't tell an encounter with corporeal entities from one with incorporeal ones?

As for Mars being knocked out of orbit, well, I think what we're missing here is the notion of a cosmic billiards game. Picture it: God says, "Red planet in the corner pocket," and shoots a giant meteor through the solar system. It strikes Mars, knocking it into a highly eccentric orbit before ricocheting off the fifth planet. This planet it shatters, leaving a belt of asteroids, and then swings back and hits Mars again, giving it that second orbital thrust to stabilize the orbit again.

Unfortunately, God misunderstood the nature of a gravity well and failed to sink Mars into any such well but its own.

Game ends, God loses. A fight breaks out in the pool room, and we have a war in the heavens.