Break, Blow, Burn, Blog

Carla Bruni Criticizes Pope Bendict XVI Concerning Condoms

Looking good, Carla Bruni, looking good.  See just how good here!

And I’m referring to your brain and your heart, Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy.  You’re certainly looking a whole lot better than the most recent version of (all I know is the stuff I heard growing up and I haven’t had any time to develop a critical facility while I was messin’ with my hair and frettin’ over my nails), that is, “Miss California,” Carrie Prejean.  Watch out, Sarah Palin.  Carrie Prejean may decide to run for the White House!

Dear Vatican Officials:

Dear Vatican Officials:

Does this mess come to a close at some point?

After centuries of throwing vitriol at all forms of sexuality, please get this straight.  There are those of us who care about stopping human suffering more than we ever could care about your club, no matter what claims you make for your tribe.  We are outraged about the well-documented number of cases that show abuse of children in the church.  The millions and millions of dollars your Church has had to pay to victims of sexual abuse is public knowledge.  We are not outraged about homosexuality; that's your obsession.  We are not impressed by your peculiar ideas that advocate squashing all forms of sexuality.  Your celibacy rules are laughable.  You refuse to acknowledge the problems already waiting for those who submit themselves to that bizarre, unnatural restriction.   

The great Joni Mitchell has a very intelligent and spiritual song (provided here through video) that addresses a problem in the church that does not go back far in history.  That is an appalling part of the history of the Catholic church, yet you choose to attack homosexuals?  What two adults of the same sex freely choose to do together in private is one thing: it's not my business, and it's not your business either.  (Freedom for all, as far as we can manage it, is, in part, my business.)  But what an adult in a holy robe chooses to do to someone--whether male or female--who isn't even of legal age is another thing entirely: a crime.

Vatican "Forgives" John Lennon

Get this: the Vatican has "forgiven" John Lennon for his remark about the Beatles being "bigger than Jesus."  The response time here is lightning speed for the Vatican.  What year was it--1989 or 1990 or 1991?--when they finally admitted that Galileo had been right?  Unfortunately, though, they still missed the point about Lennon.  And how insulting that in their defensiveness they can only see his remark as the boast of a young man.  They should go back to the press conference where Lennon explains himself in order to address the PR mess.  (You can see the clip on my Vodpod.)  Pay attention, in particular, to his tag at the end of one sentence: "...or whatever it is."  If Lennon weren't dead, he could tell the Vatican to stuff it.  But they've forgiven a dead man, and since he can't respond, I had to say something.

John McQuaid Gets it Right: On the Obamas & The New Yorker Cover

Recommended reading:

John McQuaid (of THE HUFFINGTON POST) offers intelligent commentary--amidst all the stupidity--concerning the "controversial" cover illustration on the latest issue of THE NEW YORKER.  

Please tell me the American electorate is smarter than so many think who are wringing their hands over this cover.  Please tell me we haven't become a nation of morons with teddy bears.  If this cover ends up "hurting" Obama, then everything was already lost because too many of us cannot think or aren't even the slightest bit aware of what's going on. 

I, in particular, appreciate McQuaid's last two sentences.  I've seen enough of that fear of self-expression concerning "what words can be uttered and images can be shown": that fear comes from uneducated conservatives and uneducated "liberals" (that is, people who like to think of themselves as liberals but do not really believe in free expression).

Concerned Censor

    I take a cue for my title from a 1992 episode of The Simpsons: “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love.”  Bart, well accustomed to using the telephone for mirth and mischief, turns to it this time to inform on his friend, Milhouse, who has met a new girl in school, Samantha Stanky, and gone gooey in love, even up in the sacred zone of Bart’s tree house, making Bart sick and leaving him without the companionship of his best friend.  During Bart’s phone call to Samantha’s father with the “shocking news” of the promiscuity in process, Bart is asked, apparently, to identify himself.  Bart says, “Who am I?  Let’s just say...I’m a concerned prude with a lot of time on his hands.”  Surely the creative minds at The Simpsons were dealing out a little payback; they must have received many complaints from the easily offended--whose numbers are legion, even, alas, in the academy--concerning the usual censorship issues: sexuality, the state, the deity (or, perhaps better said, “one of the ‘only’ gods”).
    I’m thinking today of a “concerned censor” I watched in a college library day after day as I read such giants as Milton and Wordsworth and Faulkner and Sartre, preparing for a major exam in my field of study.  Of this man I knew one specific, telling detail beyond the general word concerning his extreme conservative leanings in politics and religion: he had refused to watch his own son perform in a production of Inherit the Wind because the word “damn” would be uttered in the play.

Mencken On Artists and Puritans

Perhaps a New, More Specific, Commandment?

If the hierarchy of the Catholic Church won't post a sign for its own clergy, then I suppose I'll have to do it.

Huckabee's Religious Revival: A Sign of the Times

    Governor Mike Huckabee proposes that we abolish the Internal Revenue Service.  However, he has pledged that if he is elected President of the United States, he will mandate that signs exactly like this one [pictured above] be erected "in town squares all across the country so that we might ignite a religious awakening in the people of the land."  The governor spoke last Tuesday to an assembled multitude from a neighborhood outside a home where school had just let out.
    "This public and permanent reminder of hell and the high price to pay for immorality will surely solve all our problems.  The people will straighten up and fly right.  In fact, once these signs are up and serving as scolds across the country, we'll be able to abolish the Department of Education, too.  The people will know all they need to know."
    When the governor was informed that not every city has what might be construed as a "town square" the way we used to see them in rural America, he specified that each sign is to be situated within a stone's throw of at least three Baptist churches in what the "city fathers" would agree on as the "heart of each hamlet, village, Sodom, or Gomorrah" in America. 
    "If three Baptist churches don't already exist within a stone's throw of each other," Huckabee proclaimed, "they shall also be erected." 
    Skeptics in the press wondered where the government would find the money for such an idea.  "Believe me, faith-based groups," Huckabee claimed with a confident smile, "will sing hosannas as they rush to contribute to the cost of all these signs and all this new construction, the production of which will create many new, much-needed jobs; and if their tithe only adds up to the widow's two mites, then whatever these groups cannot pay toward these costs will be taken up as an offering from the people of the United States." 
    "Mike Huckabee [as his new bumper sticker has it]: Ready On 'Day One' To Live In The Past."

HUMOR: Sister Maria

    Sister Maria lives in a very strict convent where the nuns are allowed to say only two words every ten years.  After ten years, she goes to see the Mother Superior.
    "Bed hard," she says.
    Another ten years go by, and again Sister Maria meets with the Mother Superior.  This time she says, "Food bad."
    Another ten years go by, and it's time for the third meeting.  By now Sister Maria is so unhappy that she blurts out the words, "I quit."
    "No wonder," comes the reply.  "You've been here thirty years and all you've done is bitch, bitch, bitch."

--from The Big Book of New American Humor, ed. William Novak & Moshe Waldoks.