Heaven and Hell Occupy the Identical Geographical Area

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No body to connect with
the body world external ––
pulsating distraction in its flashpassed day.
Consciousness engrossed
like (n)ever before.

Face (to soul) to face with
volcanic real eternal
Self, naked in the beaming ray
of death, and with the (un)Holy Ghost(s)
It hosted habitually (t)here.

In Reverse

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Your crack was, “You’re an a--hole.”
(Thinking the serpent on her side,
naive holy naked Eve left
holy Adam’s rear behind.)
You deposited your whole Ford Phallus
in one and one-fifth parking places.
So there were no leftover spaces
for my humble Coupe de Ballast,
But I packed the sole stretch I could find:
the four-fifths cleft you left on the left.
You had to pass through your passenger side.
.elohssa na em dellac uoy dnA

Self-images all wiped with glory,
Everyone who hears the story
Are assured they are the humble Coupe,
Never Driver Nincompoop.
If I am other than the victim
of the serpent, obiter dictum.
Never grunts a “Beg your pardon”
from Eve or Adam in the Garden.


-2003
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See you there.

Trent's Band to Perform in Tacoma March 25!

Hell's Kitchen
928 Pacific Avenue
Tacoma, WA

See: Hells Kitchen Online

I'll be there; Trent will be on the drums; See you there!

SEE
www.myspace.com/duelseattle

Epidemic Music presents
Showbox SoDo Lounge
1700 First Ave. South, (at S Massachuestts St), Seattle, WA, 98134
(206) 628-3151

www.showboxonline.com/sodo/

with Valium Stallion, Blood Shot Barrels, Level, and Duel
Day: Fri, Apr 2, 2010
Days until show: 15
Doors open: 8:00 PM
Ages: 21 & Over
On sale now
Ticket Prices*: $9.00 ADV-$11.00 DOS

My son, the "Rhythm Monster"

My son, the "Rhythm Monster"

Aardvark

Aardvark (n): A large, ugly mammal with grotesque ears who frightens the nocturnal, that is, those who are in the dark and want to stay there. It feeds on termites, that is, pale insects that feed on the vulnerabilities of others. It is both respected and detested for its tongue.

The Quadruped Position

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Dear God, I hereby acknowledge your superiority.
I respect your power. Believe me, I know my place.
You are the Supreme Being, I’m one of the lower creatures.

Forgive me for not using my time more wisely,
for sometimes wandering into places I don’t belong,
and for being a little more reclusive than is really necessary.

Please continue to provide food and water.
Give me a shady spot to lie down when its hot
and an enclosed area to keep warm when the weather changes.

Deliver me from children who want to make me their pet,
women who want to ride me so they can feel powerful,
and men who want me to do their work for them.

Deliver me also from hunters,
animal rights zealots,
hikers, campers and nature painters.

Preserve my niche.
Keep the flies away.
Let me get my fair share of females in heat.

And I promise that whatever you have put me here to do
that is not included in the above
I’ll try to do it better and more often.

For you made everything
and must have had a good reason.
And it’s not my place to figure everything out. Amen.

The Sower (audio to come soon, hopefully)

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You and me, everyone carryin’ on
Leading or following our way
Up or down, true or false, right or wrong
Someone somewhere maybe has something to say

God is not anything like we conceive Him
Religion aside, we don’t trust or believe Him
Our souls are filled up with our fathers and mothers
Bosses and presidents and preachers and brothers
Who can admit they’ve been cut into pieces?
Pharisees - they always crucify Jesus>>>

>>>Some fell on tangled ground, and some fell on rocky ground
Some grew and continued to grow
When the Sower went out to sow

You and me, everyone carryin’ on
What seems to be in our way?
Up or down, true or false, right or wrong
Someone somewhere maybe has something to say

We see it and touch it and worry and feel
Our calculations and perceptions tell us its real
All time, money, energy to work it and change it
To fix or destroy it or just rearrange it
Grace, friends and family all taken for granted
We’re like the heretic in tears who still never recanted>>>

You and me, everyone carryin’ on
Where is the end of our way?
Up or down, true or false, right or wrong
Someone somewhere maybe has something to say

The veil of the body with eyes wide and blind
Will tear off and roll back and reveal what’s behind
Every motive well hidden will rise to the call
Every word ever whispered is shouted to all
The true gods of our souls will embrace us forever
In radient glory all singing and warm
Or insults that sting like a bellowing storm>>>

The Southern Preacher

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The black-cloaked Southern preacher stands
Pitchfork held tightly in his hands
It worked all week -- he can't let go
Still room there for his Bible, though
He shouts of judgment and who it's from
to the children that were forced to come
And when he's told them how to be
they go back to their poverty
wondering if the truth was used
Does Jesus love me? I'm confused?
Yes, my children. Don't you cry.
It only sounded like a lie.

Tan Lines

.
.
.
HERE is a dry
hot
spot
of
sand
land
on which to undutifully lie.

HERE is a quiet orgy of mini–stoned
redundance;
little
upon
little
abundance
to stickstick on (a blanket for your bones)

with sweatskin glue
baring;
Staring
at s(h)ea creatures in the ogling sun,
ogling sun glaring
staring
staring at you

a gleaming distance from changeless
motion:
The moaning
monotonous tone of
folding
ocean
THERE is Shiviverfulness.

This is what happens when people who don't know how to do research want to join the Tea Party Movement-

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Cantstandthat

.
.
.
Little Foo from Earth found himself alone on a spacecraft. How he got there he could not recall. Also he could not guess where the spacecraft was going or why it seemed to be operating by itself. Foo felt quite unprepared for this trip, even though he realized he must be on an adventure, since he felt nervous and enthusiastic at the same time. At least it seemed he was not going to have to go to school, church or his room for a while.
Before Foo had too much time to become familiar and comfortable with his new life, the spacecraft arrived at its destination and began gently to descend. At first glance, the planet did not seem very different from his own. There were mountains there, a desert over on that side, rivers now and again, and at least one ocean; and as he got closer, he saw streets and avenues and roads and highways, two bridges, various farms that seemed to be doing okay, and all the different kinds of buildings that his perceptive eyes had learned to recognize back home.
He noticed some interesting differencesfrom Earth in some of the details, but they didn’t seem all that noteworthy. There were a few colors he did not recognize, there seemed to be something like snow right next to one of the deserts, and there were a few buildings that looked like obelisks turned upside down and sticking in the ground, which looked a little strange, but lots of the planet’s inhabitants were coming in and going out of them as if they were office buildings or luxury hotels, so they did not seem all that unique. In fact, as he thought of it, Foo figured that if anything, these slightly strange sights were happily instructive. They just served to confirm that indeed he was on a planet other than Earth, a nice bit of information of which to be certain. Other than that, he could probably expect most things to be rather familiar. That was a pleasant prospect. Indeed it was.
As he peaked through one of his little windows, he whispered to himself, “I guess I’m going to have to get out and do some exploring. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble for nothing if I don’t. I guess I could stay in here and wait for somebody to come to me, but who knows? Maybe a spaceship landing is no extraordinary occurrence here. I might just be sitting around waiting for an incurably dull period of time, missing my destiny, and then the spaceship would suddenly take off again and I’d feel like a real numbnod.”
Ordinarily, Foo would have been off that ship and running toward adventure practically before its engines had turned off. But there was that other rather strange thing that made him more anxious than he let himself admit. This planet's inhabitants – which he began to see for the first time as the spacecraft was completing its landing - seemed quite human in every way, except... Well...
Everyone seemed to be walking around with their hands pressed against their ears. Everyone seemed to want to keep their ears covered as much as possible. Everyone! It looked very strange indeed. At first he thought that maybe they were doing this because of the noise of his spacecraft’s rocket engines. But no. Even after the engines had turned off completely, there they were - all those hands, still covering all those ears for no apparent reason.
Foo got off the spacecraft and enjoyed a pleasant walk to the nearest town, noticing others walking here and there, but not conversing with anyone. He was still rather uncomfortable about the whole hands-covering-ears thing.
His discomfort increased considerably when, upon his arrival at the town, he noticed other curiosities related to hearing. Whenever they could not avoid using their hands – for pumping fuel into a vehicle, or carrying groceries, or some such – they would immediately make sure that their hearing remained artificially impaired. They would pull down the sides of long, tight hats that looked like they were made of something like rubber. Or they would stuff any helpful material into their ears – tissue paper, cigarette butts, bits of food and the like. He even heard one old gentlemen ask a kind lady to cover his ears for him while he placed some packages into the trunk of her car. She complied as if it was no strange thing. What made this doubly strange was that the two were trying to carry on a conversation during the whole process, and had to practically scream at each other – even though all they seemed to be discussing was the nice weather.
And these two were not the only ones screaming. Because everyone was jamming up their own hearing, anyone who wanted to be heard had to really work at it. At certain junctures, the boy had to cover his own ears just to get relief from the noise.
Then he began to notice other distinctive characteristics of the culture. Everyone’s shoulders and arms were unusually muscular, evidently from constant use. All voices were rough and harsh. The most prominent citizens seemed to be those who could talk the loudest and the most aggressively. Many of the wonderful things that delighted the boy seemed unavailable to these people: the sounds of gentle breezes, crackling fireplaces or waves striking a beach; whispers between friends, private conversations. Human interaction was characterized by a certain rudeness or defensiveness. There were severe limitations placed on the simplest delights, like joy, love, family life, or learning. Many potentially rewarding activities were simply not attempted.
How strange this is, thought Foo. And being a bright boy, he thought more about it: How in the world could such an impractical custom arise? Did they start yelling because their ears were covered? Or do they all cover their ears because everybody’s yelling? Or is there some other problem that I have not yet discovered? Can’t they see how complicated they have made their lives for seemingly no reason? Can’t they analyze their predicament logically and come up with a reasonable solution? Or are they even aware that they are in a predicament?
But analytical thought requires some degree of physical comfort, and the poor boy’s ears were ringing, and his arms were beginning to hurt from having to put his hands to his ears continuously. He decided to walk back to his spacecraft to think about it.
What the boy did not know was that he had landed on the planet Cantstandthat. Less than a hundred years before the boy’s visit, the planet was called Goodenough and was a rather pleasant place to live, as planets go. But then some huge, horrid-sounding object, hurling through space with a great scream, was drawn in by Goodenough’s gravitational pull. Indeed, it had come dangerously close to crashing on to Goodenough and destroying all life thereon.
Happily, it missed. But sadly, the many years it took for it to approach, just miss, then move on had changed the lifestyles of all the Goodenoughians. That's when they became the Cantstandthatians.
The memory of the horror of that sound became the driving force of Cantstandthatian civilization. All music stopped, since it could not be easily heard. All conversation became shouting. The tissues and muscles related to speech became large and strong and hard out of all proportion, as did the muscles for raising hands to ears, just as Foo had noticed. Political forums and government actions became completely unrealistic, since it was so hard to really talk and work together over differing viewpoints. Marriages suffered. Confused and frightened children grew up to be passive, resentful adults. Religion, rather than nurturing the soul, had been reduced to various rival factions too weary to try to understand each other.
But the greatest tragedy was not that life had become a grievous shadow of what it had been. The greatest tragedy was that this grievous shadow had come to be what everyone thought of as normal. For no reason other than unnecessary but habitual deafness, terrible things had eclipsed pleasant things, and nobody knew it.
How difficult the boy’s visit to Cantstandthat was. How disappointing to try to communicate, let alone to make friends. How strange he seemed to all who observed him; strange precisely because he was not deluded by the common delusion, precisely because he was truly normal. And how terrified he was at the response of the Cantstandthatians when he inquired about their strange ways, then tried to help them rediscover normalcy.
His strange behavior was disturbing enough to the others: speaking so softly that he could not be heard, resting his arms at his sides, even trying to pull their hands away from their ears at the most inappropriate times! But then, when he began to speak up and be heard, that was simply too much. Some labeled him mentally deficient and ridiculed him; some sought to help him by taking him to an asylum; some were frightened of him as of a criminal. The boy’s visit would surely have ended in tragedy had he not escaped back to his spacecraft and left the planet completely.
To this day, he sometimes wonders if anyone on Cantstandthat ever thinks about him and what he tried to communicate.


Copyright Donald L. McIntyre 2003

The Unexpected Jesus

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Should I not be allowed to do what I want with my own?


-Jesus (Matthew 20:15)
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The Tyrant and the Blade of Grass

Yesterday,
The Tyrant rumbled into the city
On tanks and soldiers and wanton laughter
Fire burned everywhere

Yesterday,
the grass that did not burn and burn, up and up
was trampled trampled down down
all pointing in the right direction

Yesterday,
The Tyrant stood at the microphone with his medals and his Proclamations
And murdered in the street
All those who did not scream with joy

Yesterday,
within the dull clamor
one blade of grass remained
in the brown gray wind

Today,
a children’s jingle giggles a tyrant’s name
the red-cheeked peasant woman carries apples
and the city is a pea on the vast green plain

Throw off the wicked god

Throw off the wicked god that breathes
the raging lie-dark dragon fire
that dams the soul from rising higher -
Witch god whose blood-red hatred seethes

Make war upon this black belief
once embraced to empty breast
giving spirits never rest -
Make war upon unholy grief

It is better – even eternally --
To drown in godless ecstasy.
Or chance, or hope beyond no hope,
To crumble in the hand, lost hand,
of the Silent One who waits
Beyond these cruel enormous gates.

The Failure through Excellence Tour

"Water Park"

Wrong Righteousness

It is difficult to observe our society in any depth without noticing that there is an abundance of individuals and groups that identify themselves, to one degree or another, as victims of some other group. Many people of color have certainly been victims of white bigotry, many women have certainly been victims of an oppressively patriarchal society, many people of low income have certainly been victims of corporate greed.

It is all so tragically true; the facts are clear. But now what? Traditional Capitalism - that is, economic competition - is being replaced by a kind of victim capitalism: a competition, based on the saddest story possible, to receive the most special treatment. The handicapped, single mothers, homosexuals, the homeless, native Americans, sufferers of certain diseases, undocumented immigrants, even witches - they all have champions or advocacy groups that press their interests against oppressors.

It is assumed by some that the only people who are not victimized are healthy, wealthy, politically conservative heterosexual white males – especially if they are members of the Religious Right. But some members even of these categories are now feeling unjustly attacked – even if we limit the discussion to so-called “institutionalized” mistreatment. There seems to be no limit to victims and victim causes.

Broadly speaking, there are ways of interacting with the habitual victimhood phenomenon. Some seem to minimize the fact that some people or groups really are habitually cruel to other people or groups. This is the Get-over-it-you-bunch-of-whiners” response, and can lack compassion even when compassion is warranted.

The more compassionate among us take a different route. They choose which victimization claims are legitimate, and then join the fight. Of course, such decisions are extremely subjective, based on one’s own background, psychology, race, ethnicity, gender, income, occupation, religion, physical health, citizenship status, etc. So it’s hard to imagine our very diverse culture ever arriving at a consensus in such a sea of possibilities. If such a consensus is ever achieved, I’m sure we all hope our own group does not get named the primary trouble makers, as the Jews were in Hitler’s Germany.

I for one am nowhere near intelligent enough to decide what the pecking order should be: which groups legitimately belong at the top of the list, vs. which groups should just be ridiculed for their silliness. To me, the better questions to ask are: Where does this eagerness toward self-identified victim status come from? And is it common to all cultures throughout history?

Perhaps a more preliminary question needs to be asked first. What if there’s no deeper psychological or sociological meaning behind self-identified victim status? Blacks were once slaves, women historically really have been treated as economic second class citizens, some people really do fear and hate homosexuals, the homeless really are marginalized. What if people feel like victims simply because they’re victims? What could be simpler?

This is too simplistic an analysis, for three reasons.

First, there is no necessary relationship between how much a given individual has suffered, and how much they self-identify as a victim. Everyone is familiar with the stories of people who have endured great agonies while retaining great peace, optimism, love, and appreciation for life. Two of my heroes, George Washington Carver and Anne Frank, are two wonderful examples. Conversely, we are familiar with real life examples of those who are habitually angry and complaining even though their daily life has always been quite comfortable and nourishing.

Second, even the compassionate among us don’t give equal weight to all claims of victim status. The most zealous champions of “gay rights” are usually far less zealous when it is the traditional family which is under attack, and vice versa. Those who scream from the rooftops about white-on-black or black-on-white crime are usually much less zealous when the order is reversed. The most strident advocates of leveling the playing field in education are also the most strident opponents of school vouchers, even though the majority of poor inner city parents want them. Clearly, even the most compassionate among us need to choose their priorities; they simply must ignore, or even repudiate, the pleas of some victims.

Finally, we can not ignore the fact that, once someone defines him/herself with a victim self-identity, the intensity of negative emotion often remains high or gets worse – even when their circumstances improve, or could improve, significantly. The lot of black Americans, notwithstanding the serious problems that remain, has improved profoundly since the early 1800’s, or even since the 1950’s. But the rhetoric of some prominent black leaders is far more inflammatory than Martin Luther King ever was. And there is a host of other examples: the woman who persists in a pattern of choosing men who are abusive, but rejects the kind and caring man who truly wants to love her; the homeless person that constantly rejects offers of life changing assistance; the oppressed ethnic minority of a third world country that pleads for mercy, then gains political power and becomes the oppressor.

Indeed, the victim mentality, when it finally obtains power, very often leads to the creation of more victims. The abused child often grows up to become an abuser. Feminism has led inevitably to the destruction of viable human life. The victim rhetoric proclaimed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf led to the Holocaust.

The fact is worth dwelling on. Regardless of the degree to which one's sense of victimhood is justified, if there is not some sort of forgiveness, some sort of healing and moving on, the victim producing cycle will perpetuate itself.

So, to ask the question again, where does this eagerness toward self-identified victim status come from?

The beginning of an answer comes from a growing body of theologians known as Girardians, after the teacher and writer Rene Girard. The viewpoint is most helpfully introduced by the left-leaning Gil Bailie in his book Violence Unveiled.

Ignoring traditional Christian theology, the Girardians have opened wide the anthropological meaning and power of the crucifixion of Jesus. They have shown with exquisite thoroughness how human beings tend to bind together most effectively when they share a common negative energy toward a common scapegoat or enemy. It seems that nothing produces social solidarity so solidly as a shared contempt. What holds together the tribe on this side of the river – what keeps their everyday squabbles from becoming culturally destructive – is that tribe on the other side of the river. Surely that other tribe has always victimized us, or is inferior, or evil, or poised to attack at the slightest provocation.

Did the Soviet Union not serve our nation well by giving us a common fear and loathing? And did we not do the same for the Soviets? Watch how a family get-together becomes united and filled with mutual love when some “black sheep of the family” or some agreed-upon undesirable political movement is discussed.

According to the Girardians, this “scapegoating mechanism” was the very foundation of culture. Primitive mythologies celebrate the victory of “Us” over the expelled wicked one; primitive religion enforces those behaviors that will keep “Us” from becoming like “Them”; and primitive government is established and maintained by those who control and manipulate these largely arbitrary standards of moral rivalry and judgment.

Whole religious or political ideologies are built and justified solely on the self-righteous conviction NOT to be some other religious or political ideology.

The prophetic tradition of the Old Testament is the beginning, in history, of questions about this pattern. For the first time, the mythologies, the religious practices, the authority figures are all confronted with the issue: If “We” are better than “Them,” then why is there so much injustice, and so many victims, even among Us? What good are our stories if we ourselves can’t get along with each other? What good is our religion if, after we worship, we go home miserable and resentful? What good is our government if it arbitrarily favors some citizens over others?

The shining moment of this prophetic tradition, say the Girardians, comes in the crucifixion – the victimization – of Jesus. For in the New Testament assessment, the perfect, perfectly loving child of God was cruelly executed by the combined religious and secular guardians of “right” and “law.” Once and for all, the essential delusion, arbitrariness, cruelty and injustice in the foundations of human culture is laid bare. Anyone with the courage can look and see. There is no longer any absolute that human beings can’t twist to their own advantage. There is no power that human beings can’t turn to savagery. Human culture, by definition, creates victims. And even when it defends victims, it can only do so by creating a different set of victims.

Thus this "Kingdom of God" that Jesus preached and demonstrated, by definition, if it is anything meaningful at all, is an attempt to deliver us from this self-justifying victim-making machinery.

To one degree or another, this myth dismantling spirit – for it is a spirit (in the broadest sense of that word) more than a consciously held doctrine – invades all individuals and all cultures that receive the Gospel. And thus, to be Christian means to question myself, my sense of my own righteousness, by sense of moral superiority over another. The reader of the New Testament has not yet begun to understand its central message until he or she recognizes, on every page, a conflict between two ways of being righteous – of “feeling good about ourselves” in the phrase of the day.

The traditional way – the old, religio-political way – focuses on external behavior and involves being better than someone else. It is self-justifying, manipulative and argumentative. It creates victims, usually with incredible subtlety, even as it worships its god or government and sites its scriptures or legal codes.

The radical new way – and we can not now even fathom how radical it was when it burst upon history – begins in an ocean of forgiveness, and focuses on what’s really felt, desired and intended in the hidden inner self. It is self forgetting, trusting and eager to serve. It relieves one of his/her burden of repressed resentment, thus leading to a new habit of thankfulness. Far from making victims, it truly understands, and so loves, its enemies.

Is our own society not trapped between two kinds of righteousness? On the one hand, it can not be comfortable in the old righteousness. We are eager to be “progressive,” to “question authority,” to ridicule “puritanical religion” or “fundamentalism,” to guard against hypocrisy, and expose the holes in everyone else's self-justifying arguments.

But on the other hand, our society doesn’t understand or doesn’t care for the new righteousness, which smacks of being someone’s doormat - forgiving when we’d rather “get even,” serving when we’d rather “empower” ourselves, trusting people who might hurt us, confessing our faults when we need to be “looking out for number one.”

It's a tremendous psychological and social dilemma.

What persists is that human beings desperately need to “feel good about themselves.” We have a ravenous fundamental longing to be – or at least feel – righteous, or right, or justified, or vindicated. But even most of the non-Christians in our increasingly non-Christian society are still too infected with what that gospel tradition has revealed about what we might call the problem of being righteous.

So what are we to do? Are let's pose the question this way: How can I retain my feelings of rightness or moral superiority, without becoming vulnerable to the label of self-righteous hypocrite?

The answer that seems to satisfy many is to self-identify as a victim. If conventional righteousness has been exposed as hypocrisy because it makes victims, then I do not share in the hypocrisy if I myself am one of its victims. If Jesus did this great work in human history by portraying victimization on a grand scale, then I – in my devotion to the New Righteousness – will also be a victim. And I will prove my righteousness in a non-hypocritical way by defending other victims; anyway, the ones with whom I most naturally identify.

To consider the plausibility of this use of victimhood, one need only look honestly at the privileges that victim status stands to earn for us. If I am a victim, who is going to hold me accountable for the bad things I’ve done? If I am a victim, look at all the people who make a fuss over me. If I am a victim, I automatically have a family that will welcome me in – all others who share my particular brand of victim status. Even if I am a pretend victim, I may be able to wheedle my way into some of the special government programs, protection or resources that are intended for the truly unfortunate, the truly victimized.

And even if I get no special treatment from others, there’s one more big bonus. If I fail to get the job or income I want, I can satisfy myself that it was the employer’s problem. If no one wants to be my friend, I don’t have to question my own social skills. Whenever I’m in a bad mood, even if its because of something as basic as poor eating habits, I can always take it out on those who are victimizing me. If I feel vulnerable, or frightened, or ashamed, or hopeless, I never have to examine my own life choices to see if I am my own worst enemy. For the “worst enemy” is “out there.” I can go months at a time without having to look at myself with an apprehensive eye.

In short, rhetorical victimhood might just be the last gasp of religious hypocrisy, the final hope of those who want to feel righteous without engaging in the messy business of repentance.

This is a vicious judgment indeed if it implies that no one is ever actually ill treated by another. But it implies no such a thing. Every single person who has ever lived has been victimized in various ways. Yes, some more than others; and some, terribly so, more than any reader of this document has even imagined. But as has already been noted, this fact in itself does not explain or excuse the eagerness of many to live in a perpetual self-defining prison of victimhood. Do we really desire a culture in which everyone is competing for the right to be the real victim?