Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

For controversial comedian Bill Maher, formerly of Politically Incorrect and now with Real Time on HBO, the comedic documentary Religulous is his career memoir. It’s his ultimate search for the key question that drives his life and work.

And after all the years of watching him on TV, we find out why he is the heir apparent to George Carlin on the subject of religion in American life. In this autobiographical story, he intersperses interviews with his mother, who raised him as a Catholic until the age of 13, when he found out his father was a Jew. The family stopped going to church about the time the issue of birth control became such a political sin in this country after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.

Is that not a background with the makings for some serious religious-psychological baggage? It’s no wonder the subject figures so prominently in his art.

The title of the film is a literary device known as a portmanteau, a new word derived from two other words, in this case “religion” and “ridiculous.” The film examines and satirizes organized religion and religious belief, in a host of successful venues.

Maher’s story begins in Megiddo, Israel, where according to Biblical prophecy, the world will end when Jesus Christ is supposed to return to Earth. Of course Maher refers to the Bible, especially the Old Testament, as “that book of Jewish fairy tales.”

Director Larry Charles, who is known for the comedy hit Borat, mixes stock footage from movies, religious television programming and other documentaries to connect the dots and hammer home Maher’s points.

Maher travels to interview scholars at the holiest Jerusalem sites, and visits a Raleigh, North Carolina, truck stop church, a converted trailer, where he engages some of the South’s most mixed up Christians on the philosophical subject of whether God exists.

He managed to get into a mosque in the Middle East, where the head Muslim has him run out because “he is not a funny Jew.”

In Orlando, Florida, Maher interviews an actor who plays Jesus at one of the most ridiculous capitalist abuses of religion in the U.S., the Holy Land theme park. It’s the Disney World for Christians, and Maher has more fun engaging the people there than anywhere in his travels, with the possible exception of Amsterdam, where he shares a joint with a believer of legalization of marijuana on the basis of religious freedom.

Also in Florida, Maher meets up with a Latino named Jesus who claims angels visited him and proclaimed him as Christ reincarnate, a rare pastor who does not believe there is a such thing as sin and is certainly not apologetic for all the money he’s made in the name of God.

He has a long exchange with John Westcott of Exchange Ministries, a converted gay man who tries to convert other gays for Jesus.

Then the most obnoxious creature encountered in the film is a wild-eyed Jew who believes Israel does not deserve to remain in Jerusalem, who is shown in newsreel footage embracing Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Maher stepped on the dialogue with him more than any other interviewee in the film and cut his visit short.

Maher has quite a bit of fun with a devout evangelical U.S. Senator from Arkansas, Mark Pryor, who is unable to answer questions about evolution and faith, but admits, “You don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate.” (Nevermind that there’s no such thing as pass/fail on an IQ test. It’s a measure of basic intelligence with a score of 100 as average. On second thought, this guy fails : )

Then after all the comedy is done, after he is kicked out of the Vatican and visits the Holiest site in Isreal and pokes fun at Mormons, Scientologists, Southern Baptists, radical Jews and gay Muslims, Maher makes the point he wants to make.

“Religion must die if mankind is to live.”

Now can we stop voting in churches please?

He points out that at least 16 percent of the American population agree with him on religion. He calls them “rationalists,” not atheists.

Then of course there are at least 48 million pot smokers in the U.S., a point he fails to make explicitly, although it’s there. Both groups are larger than any other minority or special interest group in this country. If only they would get together in a political movement, imagine how they could continue to change America now that Obama has been elected president?

Henry Rosenbush of RosenbushCafe.com contributed reporting for this review.

Religulous Movie Trailer

Bill Maher On CNN’s Larry King Live Talking About Religulous

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

To people all over the world, there is an insatiable curiosity about the nature of the “American mind.”

A minimal perusal of the foreign press would bare this out. As would an evaluation of the traffic of news Websites, including this one, which shows about half the readers are from other countries.

In short, inquiring minds all over the world want to know why we are so, well, fucking weird.

The stories now swirling about Sarah Palin, John McCain’s last minute surprise pick as his Republican running mate, provide an interesting opportunity to evaluate this American psychology.

But as I write those sentences, I realize immediately that I am way over the heads of Palin’s fans and could easily be lumped into a category of Americans that came under a direct attack from the podium of the Republican National Convention this past week, even though I don’t live in New York or Washington and never attended Harvard or Yale myself. And I’m certainly not rich.

That in itself reveals a certain rampant schizophrenia here.

Leading up to Palin’s address, and in an attempt to immunize her against the scandal stories now in the works about her tenure as a governor and mayor in Alaska, speakers such as former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani assailed the press as “elitist” for daring to question Palin’s qualifications for taking second place in the White House, “a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

For the next few weeks, we are going to be treated to sound bite after holy sound bite hammering this theme, by people who could only be described as elitists themselves. And therein lies a fascinating conundrum.

How could Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and a rich guy of considerable education himself, call anyone else an elitist? I suppose it is all part of Karl Rove’s voodoo for winning elections, expressed best by Lincoln’s line that “you can fool some of the people some of the time.”

Palin herself hit this theme hard in her address, to wild applause in the GOP convention hall in St. Paul.

“I’ve learned quickly, these past few days, that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone,” Palin said.

I should point out here that there are many ways to communicate a message. Perhaps the most effective in this mass media age is through short and often funny one-liners. So before I go into more detail, look at Bill Maher’s take on HBO.

Bill Maher On Elitism and the Bitter-Gate ‘Scandal’

The one line most used by bloggers who link to this YouTube video is this one, although it’s not the most important.

“If you think the Democrats are going to take away your bible, you’re an idiot. If you think they’re going to take away your gun, you’re an armed idiot,” Maher says. “And if you think they’re going to take away your gun and give it to a Mexican to kill your god, you’re Bill O’Reilly.”

Now that’s funny and says something about our psychology and how we communicate.

This press analysis in the Sunday New York Times takes a different tack, although it is far from elitist and even by title is merely a freshman-level take on the issue.

(For the uninitiated, 101 indicates a first-year or freshman-level course, while 501 is a masters-level course, thus the title of this column).

Media Bashing 101

The Times writer points out that we have “played this video game before,” and shows how Republicans often devote time and effort to slamming the “mainstream,” “elite,” “establishment,” “left wing” “Washington insider” members of the so-called “fourth estate” (the press).

Indeed, the Republican tradition of media-bashing goes back decades, at least to the convention of 1964 when former President Dwight D. Eisenhower called out “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators,” and the Cow Palace in San Francisco burst into jeers and catcalls at the reporters there. The sentiment was immortalized in Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew who memorably charged that many in the press corps were mere “nattering nabobs of negativism” — and for good measure — “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”

The piece ends with a quote from Karl Rove, who is described as “the former Bush political-swami-turned-Fox News-commentator,” who was asked how he could still bash the media since he is now in the media.

“I’m not in it,” Mr. Rove said. “I’m around it.”

The Times writer then concludes, “It’s not clear what the distinction is, or what he meant, but somehow it felt emblematic of the week in St. Paul.”

What that points to is a disconnect between reality and political spin, which is arguably a very American psychological and sociological trait. It simply does not work that way in much of the world, only here, where we pioneered democracy and capitalism. And that, my friends, is what we call “irony.”

To truly understand this, reading newspapers is simply not enough.

You could enroll in a Ph.D. program, sign up for a carrel in a research university library, check out hundreds of books, and devote eight years of your life to studying this problem, and you still might not understand it.

Or, you could simply do a few choice Google searches and spend a few minutes finding experts who have spent their life studying it — and believe in the power of Web publishing to illuminate the minds of those who truly want to know something about the truth of the matter.

This is just one example, but at a glance, it appears to be an interesting and worthy starting point to try and understand what the author calls the “dark sides of capitalism.”

The Moral Psychology of Capitalism

This is useful for starters because it takes a stab at going beyond a dictionary definition of elitism. (One of the things you learn in a Ph.D. program is that dictionary definitions are not enough. You often have to write your own).

Elitism is the view that some people belong to elites while others do not. People are ordered in in-groups and out-groups: Either you are in or not; either you are a Harvard alumni or you are not; either you have certain status symbols or you don’t.

In capitalism, there is no welfare system which secures an egalitarian social structure, thus capitalism directly or indirectly supports social hierarchy. If we believe that all human beings are of equal value, how can we accept the elitism of capitalism?

When the economic differences in a society are so great as in the USA, people want to move upwards on the social ladder. This seems to create elitism, because it is when you belong to the elite that you can have privileges and material comfort. Elitism says better-than not being-with; it is a most destructive value.

Elitism is one of the most subtle kinds of evil that exist, it means looking down on other people because of lack of money, social status or lack of education. Elitism is a key trait of racism, fascism and nationalism, and if I am right in claiming that capitalism reinforces elitism, this in itself gives reason to be skeptical to capitalism.

The article goes on to evaluate egoism, competition, the idea of “taking possession of,” and dehumanization in society. But that should be sufficient to peak your curiosity, and leads to this conclusion.

Despite what Palin and C-students such as George W. Bush and college drop-outs such as Karl Rove, and many of their followers, believe, this is not just some elitist jibber jabber.

If we have not learned anything else over the past eight years, this lesson should be crystal clear: If the voters put the dumbasses like them in power — I mean those born to elitism but who did not read the books and learn to cheat instead — we end up with a government and a society that resembles the place in the movie “Idiocracy.”

In other words, there is nothing elitist about advocating the election of educated, qualified people for public office.

It may be time for all those unemployed and underpaid workers in this country with no health insurance who may lack the education to understand this complicated world to stop listening to the elitism argument, and realize it might be a good idea to elect some smart people to govern for a change.

We tried it in the 1990s. What was the result?

A government that worked to give us what we all want: peace and prosperity. It also gave us a balanced budget. Remember the peace dividend?

I do. And I want it back. You?

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

Today I am revealing for the first time why I am giving up playing golf for the good of the country. I’m not making this up.

I will not play golf again until George W. Bush moves out of the White House permanently.

Bush gives up golf?

In case you missed one of Bush’s latest lies, check out Mike Allen’s interview with him for Politico.com.

“For the first time,” The Politico reports, “Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.”

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” Bush said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights, according to the Washington paper.

Bush warns of Iraq disaster

This assertion was not challenged by the reporter or any other national news organization. So let me fill you in based on information from inside sources who have played golf and other sports with Bush.

If you watch the video clip from the link, you will see that Bush’s body language reveals that he is a pathological liar. He is incapable of telling the truth about anything, apparently.

Bush quit playing golf because he was not any good at it and it was taking too much of his time. He took up mountain biking in 2003 and that has been his sport of choice since, that is until he crashed into a Scottish police officer while attending the G8 summit.

Bush bruised in bicycle crash

Now, sources say, Bush mostly mounts the White House treadmill with Condi and they like to take a “hot tub” together while talking about foreign policy and other things, like how the spamming operation is progressing in Paraguay designed to shut down all the liberal bloggers in the world.

And, they like to talk about how they can plant the seeds for John McCain’s victory over Barack Obama for president. Like going before the Israeli Knesset and, without naming Obama, attacking his willingness to open negotiations with Syria and Iran.

In case you were busy playing golf or something this week and missed the story, Bush said, “some seem to believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

Bush went on to compare a willingness to meet with “terrorists and radicals” to the pre-World War II “appeasement” of Nazi Germany, which makes absolutely no sense at all as a comparison - unless you understand the Karl Rove doctrine of saying the opposite of what you mean to confuse the masses.

Obama Strikes Back at Bush On Diplomacy (Lie)

It’s not even the word Bush should have used if he had any idea what he was talking about. Appeasement means giving up something to get something in politics, like John F. Kennedy did with during the Cuban Missle Crisis - or like Ronald Regan did with the Iranians during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

Of course, Reagan is the one who supposedly established the U.S. policy of not negotiating with terrorists - all while his envoys negotiated with Iran to sell them arms in their war with Iraq at the time, all to help fund the U.S. war against the alleged Communists in Nicaragua. As you may recall, another George Bush was involved in that transaction - as vice president.

It’s a classic case of misdirection and double speak. But considering Bush has the lowest presidential approval rating since pollsters have been asking the question, it does not appear to be working anymore.

Poll Shows Bush Ratings At All-Time Low

So my giving up golf has nothing to do with the price increase at Roebuck Golf Course and the elimination of the twilight special, or the fact that I am so out of shape from living in the Birmingham suburbs that I can’t walk 18 holes anymore.

I am swearing off golf until Bush is out of the fucking White House. What are you giving up?

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

It is almost too nice a spring day outside to be sitting in front of a computer writing a column, but there are a few things I have to say today besides talking about watching the revolutionary garden grow.

The tomatoes, collards, green beans and corn are coming up fine and will help offset the rising food prices this summer in Bush’s recessionary world.

But that’s not all that’s going on in the world, not that you would know it by reading the corporate news media and watching the public relations that passes for news on the local television airwaves.

The state of the economy seems to be affecting the news media as it often does in hard times. It is becoming harder and harder to find real news stories worth reading even in the national papers. Every news organization in the country is still talking about the Reverend Wright today, even as presidential candidate Barack Obama went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” for the full hour this morning and still sounded like the smartest, most reasonable candidate in the race.

While Senator John McCain continued to support Bush’s surge this week and made a strange appearance in Selma, Alabama last week, as if any African-Americans were ever going to vote for him, Hillary Clinton was showing her support for Israel with language much like Bush when she talked about “obliterating” Iran if they ever launch a nuclear attack on the Jewish state.

Of course what the American masses who barely keep up may not realize is that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and will most likely never obtain one. Dick Cheney and the Israeli military will see to that - if Bush doesn’t send in the U.S. Air Force soon and start World War III.

Obama pointed that out for Tim Russert, who just had to raise the issue - even though he should know better.

Even Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of NBC’s “Nightly News,” pointed out in a blog column the other day that the New York Times circulation is down and said this:

“I must admit that on Sundays it becomes a tough paper to figure out. While (last) week’s paper featured an op-ed piece by Elizabeth Edwards bemoaning the lack of serious, in-depth coverage of the political race, it’s tough to figure out exactly what readers the paper is speaking to, or seeking.”

What Times Is It?

I’ve been wondering that myself, since I check out the Times Website a couple of times a day looking to see if they might be breaking another story on the illegal surveillance program being run by the Bush administration - or something. The paper is credited with breaking a big story on that back in 2005, even though we had been talking about it on the blogs already, but where is the followup?

The Washington Post has done some fairly interesting stories of late, especially Dana Milbank in his “Washington Sketch” column, which by the way is online only and not in the print edition of the newspaper. Here are a couple of examples.

Anniversary of ‘Mission Accomplished’ Draws Laughs

The Incredible Shrinking Presidency of George W. Bush

The fare was so weak today I turned to The Nation magazine, where at least I found this:

Our Lapdog Media

But even that is not as strong as what you can sometimes find here at the little old Locust Fork Journal, when we have the resources and the motivation to go out and find the good stories.

I mean the Birmingham News is focusing all it’s guns on going after another African-American Democrat these days, the poor new mayor of Birmingham, instead of focusing its investigative attentions perhaps on a big story like why Birmingham has some of the most polluted air in the country. Was that story on the front page? Of course not. It’s “bad news,” not PR or manufactured news designed to bash Democrats.

Birmingham in Top Eight Polluted Cities

I mean we know what causes the bad air, mainly Alabama Power’s coal-fired power plants, along with the lack of an automobile inspection program that would help get the old polluting cars and pickup trucks off the roads. But I guess all that Alabama Power advertising money keeps them focused on things like doing the PR for the State Troopers in their “Take Back the Highways” campaign to keep drunks off the road (and everybody else who might like to have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner out at a restaurant).

If the local press had put as much effort into investigating the causes of the bad air and potential solutions as they do drunk driving, we could have already solved the problem.

Here’s a simple suggestion no one in the press or the presidential race has thought about. What if every car on the road and every house in the suburbs had a white roof? That would reflect sun light back into the atmosphere like the glaciers that are now melting due to global warming.

And what if the federal and state governments switched the tax incentives to putting solar cells on houses instead of investing in oil exploration and bio-fuels, which is one of the major factors leading to high food prices.

If you are also disgruntled with the fare in the newspapers or TV news stations and want to help us chase those headlines and investigative reports, please consider making a donation today. You will be glad you did.