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Annual
State of Things Address
January, 2005 A.D.
January 05, 2005 (Wednesday)
Almost 54 years ago
I came spewing out
of my mother's womb,
a bloody, screaming mess.
It certainly wasn't my idea.
I had nothing to do with it.
It was all my father's doing, really.
Nine months earlier
I was just
a gleam in his eye,
as they say.
Yes, it was all his fault, I'd say.
After all, he was a white man -
an OLD white man, at that -
a DEAD old white man for over 25 years now.
Yes...yes, it's all THEIR fault -
Everything's their fault -
it's pretty clear by now -
history has shown that.
Yes, I came in
a screaming mess,
and ignorant as the day is long.
We all came in that way -
screaming, yelling,
completely uninformed.
And now here we all are.
And so, you ask me,
"What's the State of Things ?"
.
*******
I don't know.
That's the honest answer.
All of us came in that way -
even all the Greats -
Dan Weintraub, Dan Walters,
Arnold Schwarzenegger,
George Bush, Isaac Asimov,
Thomas Sowell, Moses,
Charlton Heston,
King David,
the Mormon kid who got
all the questions right
on Jeopardy.
*******
And that leaves you
kind of wondering
about the state of things.
I mean, if that Mormon kid
is the best we have -
if he knows more than anybody else -
and yet still doesn't get it
that his religion is just a cult,
a big scam by a clever con man -
well...how can you know so much
but understand so little ?
I just got a letter
from David Hosley,
President and General Manager
of KVIE TV,
Sacramento's PBS station.
I dissed him in a recent BLOG entry,
expressing contempt that this
husband of former Governor
Jerry Brown's sister
should presume
to take ownership of the phrase,
"intellectual rigor",
which so perfectly defines liberals
by describing what they are not -
intellectually rigorous.
A few years back, KVIE was running
a program called "The Mormon Trail" -
full of typical liberal gushy
feel-good stuff about how the Mormons
were VICTIMS and about their courageous
struggle, and so on -
but where was the intellectual rigor
questioning whether Mormonism
is just a fraud perpetrated
by a con man named John or Joseph Smith
or whatever who said some angels
led him to a bunch of golden tablets
with mysterious language that
only he could understand that said
that God wanted him to start a new church
and then the tablets disintegrated ?
The fraud interpretation seems like
a much more reasonable and believable
interpretation to me.
But, you see, Mormons are wealthy
and well-organized.
They're good with money.
Compare that with Catholics
who have it grained deep into
their psyches that poverty is good,
and wealth and money and the quest
therefor are evil.
So, it is because the Mormons
are well-organized and wealthy
and a potent political voting bloc
that David Hosley and KVIE
did a non-critical and sympathetic
series about them.
That's my interpretation.
Don't get me wrong -
I respect Mormons.
I don't LIKE them very much,
but I respect them.
It is because of the Mormon example
that, in 1985,
I gave up drinking alcohol.
Oh, I've had a sip or two of champagne
at a wedding or a Limbaugh fundraiser
or the first time I sang karaoke.
But, I used to actually struggle
with the idea that NOT drinking
was a fault. That comes from my
working class, Irish background,
I believe - that you can't trust a man
until you've gotten drunk together,
and so on. So now, I believe that
you can be a full and complete
and trustworthy person without ever
consuming any alcohol, and I think
the Irish would be a better people
if they came around to
that way of thinking, also.
So, anyway, David Hosley of KVIE
sends me a letter asking me for money,
and I say, "David, it's your turn
to send ME money. I've already sent
you enough." You certainly OWE ME
for the intellectual rigor that
I'm injecting into
your intellectually shallow life.
And it makes you wonder it that's why
the Catholics are getting slammed
with all this bad press about
pedophile priests and stuff.
Maybe if they were a
financial and political powerhouse
like in the old days
when they sold indulgences
and held the
ultimate political authority
by annointing Emperors,
maybe they'd get more respect.
I know I had 12+ years
of Catholic education
and there was NEVER A HINT
of sexual abuse, never the
slightest indication of it
from any priest or Catholic
clergyman that I ever met.
They were all honorable
and sincere men and women
who provided a very valuable
service to our country
by providing solid educations
for the masses and
by teaching good moral values
and citizenship.
And I thank them for it
sincerely and deeply
from the bottom of my heart.
But, I'm not a practicing Catholic
because they taught me to think
so well that I don't believe
in the rituals.
And, yet, I believe in God.
Because we have to admit
that the mysteries of Creation
and Existence are beyond us -
that we are infinitely small
and insignificant
(as we are reminded by the tsunamis).
It seems that all religions
are just scams - just fabrications
of men designed to control people
and lay claim to authority.
However, my mind compels me
to recognize Man's insignificance
compared to the entirety of Creation
and how vast Creation is
in size, power, and time.
Using the label "God"
to recognize how awesome
Creation is - that is a reasonable
thing to do.
The other side of the coin
is to say that all religions
are valid, or have some validity.
However, that leads to the illogical
conclusion of recognizing every
fabricated religion and cult
invented by man - whether
they're sincere or not.
So, on this side of the coin
we would have to say that SOME
religions are valid and others
are not, and then we are left
with the problem of deciding
WHICH religions are valid
and which are not,
and at the same time we have to
go to work and pay taxes,
and that consumes a lot of our time.
A lot of religions
(like the Catholic church),
claim that they're the ONLY
valid religion
(One, True, Holy, Catholic,
and Apostolic).
So, my conclusion
is to believe in God,
and pray to God,
and to respect religions
to the extent that they
seem worthy of respect.
*******
Well, certainly,
as one looks back on 2004,
various things stand out
and the newspapers and weekly
magazines do a good job
of enumerating them.
The tsunamis are, of course,
in everyone's mind
because they were so recent
and took so many lives
so suddenly.
It makes us all aware
of our mortality,
and of everyone's mortality,
and gets us to thinking
of how we got here
and what it's all about,
as I've done here, today.
And, of course,
the War in Iraq
and the War on Terror
and the U.S. Economy
and the Global Economy
and Global Trends
and Immigration
and Bush's Re-election,
and the endless corporate
scandals and rip-offs -
a lot to absorb.
*******
To my mind come the deaths
of Reagan, Sontag, and Matsui -
because of their recency
and because they've been
recently mentioned
in the papers,
as 2004 came to a close.
Reagan's end was probably welcome
because of his poor health.
But, I loved Reagan perhaps
most of all because liberals
loved to hate him so much.
He represented the good,
clean-cut American boy and man,
and the perverted philosophy
and brats of the sixties
that loved degeneracy
and weakness and anything
weird, and that hated
white men - they loved to hate
Reagan. I, in turn,
love to love him,
and I love to loathe
sixties liberal brats.
I don't hate anyone -
it's a waste if energy.
But, I loathe sixties
liberal brats.
Loathing is more of a
CONLCLUSION and an ATTITUDE
than a feeling.
It provides me with
a sound operating base
and clear vision of the world.
Sontag I loathed as a shallow
New York City intellectual
who used big words put together
in a confusing manner -
like William F. Buckley -
but at least he's a conservative.
I remember I went to Prague
in 2000 and they had a writer's
conference there - I think
it was a yearly thing.
Anyway, there's a photo of Sontag
in the paper, with her cheek and chin
resting in her hand, her head tilted
in a contemplative pose.
The impression I got from the Czech's
11 years after the Velvet Revolution
was that they loathed Americans.
And, I guess 11 years of bratty
American kids partying there
and displaying their bad manners,
shallowness, and immaturity,
and 11 years of shallow writers
like Sontag prancing around -
I'd loathe them, too.
And, of course, the recent shocker
was Matsui's death, and I have to say
I respected the man.
He spewed out of his mother's womb
a bloody, screaming mess
a decade before I spewed out of
my mother's womb.
I came into the world
in Newark, New Jersey.
He came into the world
in a relocation camp
near Tule Lake in California.
I sincerely extend my condolences
to his family and friends.
I have issue with our educational
system and shallow media
and their lack of intellecual rigor
framing the debate of the
Japanese-American relocation.
But here and now is not the time
to delve into that. I am glad
that I can sincerely say
that I respected Matsui
and I respect the Japanese
and Japanese-American
for the dignity and
civility with which
they conduct themselves.
The American tradition,
in its finest,
USED to be
that we could ALL
air our honest opinions
and be respectfully heard.
I LOATHE the extremist liberals
in education and media
and the extremist conservatives,
right wing religionists,
who practice demagoguery
rather than respect
honest dialogue.
*******
Well, I'm thankful to be alive.
I have my dad and that
gleam in his eye to thank for that.
He was a good, kind and gentle man
whom I love and miss.
My life is currently
not without difficulty.
At work I have a mentally ill
old white man to deal with
who has created a hostile workplace
by verbally abusing my religion
and warning all of us new hires
that he is the number one "fucker"
who will fuck anyone who he
suspects of intending to "fuck" him
before they can "fuck" him.
He justifies this
pre-emptive "fucking"
because he says
he's psychic and he can tell
when someone wants to fuck him
and the Knights of Columbus
and the Catholic Church
are the most evil entities
in the world and it was
mother-god, not Mary,
who appeared to the children
of Fatima and made the sun
dance in the sky before thousands...
and so on...all this while he's
just supposed to be training me
to do the job.
Then, in Davis, on my day off
the night before last,
I'm reading in Border's Books
and this mentally ill
Davis white female
street person rips off my wallet.
The policeman (he reminded me
of Reagan - clean cut, brave,
full of integrity - I wouldn't
want his job) said it's small
in the big scheme of things.
I agreed. It's not like I got
hit by a tsunami. I agreed.
But, then again, it's the principle
of the thing. She committed a crime.
The manager of the store witnessed it.
Just becaue district attorney
Jan Scully let the murderer's
who kidnapped Patty Hearst
go free for so long
and then get a slap on the wrist
for committing murder,
doesn't mean we can't reverse
the trend.
The mentally ill white, female
street person who stole my wallet
(witnessed by the store manager)
should be arrested and prosecuted.
It's the principle of the thing.
*******
Finally, to our Governor.
Governor, you should read Dan Weintraub
religiously.
We elected you to reform things,
not just to gain ground
for Republicans.
Sincerely,
Dave Scully
Posted by dscully at 07:77 PM Top of Page
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David Scully
email
davidscully
@hotmail.com
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