The Great Reversal

In a rather strange way, America may now be aligning itself with The Sermon on the Mount. One might say, “in a strange way” for it took a crisis of epoch proportions to catalyze the phenomenon. We may not see it again soon. It emanates from the Beatitudes, but is not limited to those profound pronouncements.

What is this Great Alignment?  Why grows from the common theme of reversal of values. It is not an uncommon one in either religion or literature. The Galilean himself would later say, in Matthew 20:16, "So the last will be first, and the first will be last." (NIV) More recently, author John Steinbeck observed, in remembering his friend Ed Ricketts, “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success.”

And then we have the Beatitudes, perhaps the most wonderful expression of the reversal in values ever expressed in western literature. They would foretell the later advice that, “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” (Matthew 25:40 NIV)

Yes, one could argue that America had drifted out of harmony with the teachings of The Sermon, or the teachings of the Galilean for that matter. Leaders mocked the poor in spirit, the peacemakers, the meek, and those out of harmony with the ruling elite, right on down the line. Those who achieved both their success in life and their worldly fortune from a slap on the rear by a pediatrician received praise, envy, and even worship. Those who rose by bearing false witness were rewarded. We even bore some into the highest seats of power. Those laboring in our fields by day or fleeing from vicissitudes which they had no role in instigating were reviled, shunned, and even imprisoned. The world was, as we say, “in sixes and sevens,” or great humanitarian disorder.

That has changed, hasn’t it?

It isn’t the hedge-fund managers or “trust-fund babies” for whom those laudatory aircraft were flying in formation for yesterday, was it? No, it was those we see teeming with love and grace when we peel back the pages of The Sermon on the Mount.

I think the Galilean would be pleased. Others not so much.

We Save America

We showed those immigrants a thing or two, Brenda and I. Showed them their place good and hard.

Here’s what happened. We received a call from a friend who shall remain nameless. She and her husband have a pea patch, (purple hulled, of course: only Yankees and the unenlightened would eat any other kind). Because of all the rain, the friends’ patch had taken off from them like a runaway train.

Would we like some peas?

Well hell yes.

Would we like to pick them?

Uh ….

Now we know that pea-picking is the job of loyal conservative Christians who labor in the hot sun so that unwashed hordes of immigrants won’t invade our shores and borders, taking jobs away from loyal Americans.

We looked and couldn’t find any such workers anywhere. Being about two purple-hulls shy of a bushel, I suggested we take on the job ourselves. “After all,” I reasoned, “we can’t be among those responsible for brown-skinned illegals swarming about forcing loyal Americans away from high-paying jobs with all those benefits.”

You do understand, don’t you?

Did I mention that the temperature was in the 90s and they wouldn’t report the humidity for it was well over 100 percent and the weatherchild didn’t want to face ridicule by reporting such an atmospheric anomaly?

So … you guessed it. Our allegiance to the flag (not yet lowered for the week’s massacre(s), won out and we saved the American way of life. We joined spirits with all those in the pea fields and orchards of America, saying, “Go back to where you came from, Jesus and Maria.”

Did I mention it was hot? We ventured forth anyway. We even broke the agricultural version of the “Draftsman’s Rule,” i.e. don’t draw (pick) more in the morning than you can erase (shell) in the afternoon (at night).

I shall not forebear telling you how good the air conditioner felt after we had loaded our afternoon’s harvest in the back of the truck and headed home. Neither shall I forebear telling you how good that frozen Margarita tasted when I was stretched out on the recliner and that first pea hit the bowl.

Let’s hear it for Brenda. She went back the second day and finished the job. I managed to find some work far away at my professional rate which is something like 13 times the pea-picking rate. I lied and told her I had it scheduled for a long time.

We did finish the shelling, though, and “I heyulpped” as the girl in the Shake 'n Bake ads used to say.

Last evening, for supper, we had our first “mess” of peas, along with cornbread made from a recipe Brenda found on the internet. The recommended wine for such a dish (referring to the meal and not the cook, here) is Roca Patrón. For those with other pallet-orientations, Four Roses Single-Barrel would work nicely. Its flavor is a bit less whimsical and more assertive.

 After all the sweating, bitching, muscle pains, and near-heat strokes, we were proud that we had done our little part to save our way of life. So, we would like to ask all other loyal Americans to share with us this final plea:

Jesus, please come back, and bring Maria.

La Jefa claims victory.

Growing Up Southern: March 6, 2018

Must go earn today. Will be fun to see my friends and associates in Searcy Arkansas. Not much time, but here's my favorite joke ever. It was told to me by my late Uncle Joe Henderson, who used more earthy language in the telling, so use your own imagination.

A guy walks into state headquarters in Alaska and says he wants to become a citizen.

Clerk sends him to the right place, a small cabin outdoors. He repeats his wish.

"Ain't that easy, another man says. You have to pass a test."

"I can pass any test you have," the applicant says."I'm from Texas. What must I do?"

"First, down a quart of Alaskan home brew."

"No problem. I'm from Texas, raised on it."

"Then  you must wrestle a grizzly bear."

"No problem. We grow 'em big down in Texas."

"Then make love to an Eskimo woman." (Here Uncle Joe told it better).

"No problem. I'm from Texas. You ever seen one of our homecoming queens?"

"Are you sure?"

"Let's get started. I'm from Texas and this won't cause me a sweat."

So he drinks a quart of Alaskan home brew. He wobbles a bit, but manages, "Next?"

The clerk points toward the woods and the man stumbles out. Soon, there is the awfullest commotion you ever heard. There were sounds of screams, thrashing about, trees breaking, and dirt flying. After awhile, the man emerges all scratched and bruised, with his clothes in tatters.

"Now," he says, "Where's that Eskimo woman you wanted me to wrestle?"

Well, when you're fourteen and on your first fishing trip with the grownups, that's funny. I don't care who you are.

Morning Thoughts: January 25, 2018

Spent a wonderful evening last with a young friend of Mexican heritage. Largely abandoned here at age 12, he persevered and survived. Brenda and I were blessed to help him get an education, and Green Card. Then, on what was one of the most wonderful days of our life, we watched him raise his hand and become an American citizen.

 If you’ve never done that, watched people become citizens of our country, you ought to do it sometime. It will put some pride in your heart.

We talked of so many things. I was struck by his love of people and of his two countries. His work ethic is beyond reproach and a great future stretches before him. I always feel a little closer to the Galilean my after my friend and I get a chance to sit and talk.

 He told me one very interesting thing about Mexico and other countries south of our borders. I had always halfway believed in what I call “The Ernest Hemmingway-Jimmy Buffett” mythology. It posits that natives of other countries hate all Americans save the two of them. Everyone else belongs to a group called “The Ugly Americans.” Except for their money, those in this group are despised and ridiculed.

Not so, says my friend. His opinion is that people in those countries respect Americans who come to their country and treat them as equals, even those who move there to live.

That’s comforting to know.

 

 

 

 

Morning Thoughts: January 21, 2018

Lot of posts these days talk about how some immigrants have “broken the law,” and should be punished. There’s something odd about it.

In my opinion, and this is just one person’s, these posts would carry more weight if they weren’t posted, in almost every instance, by the same folks who would totally exonerate the woman in Kentucky, who refused to obey a lawful requirement because of her (a woman with multiple marriages) so-called “religious beliefs.”

Now, I’m not a biblical scholar, but unlike most evangelicals, I’ve read the whole Bible, not just the parts that support my embedded beliefs. It’s tough going and takes you through so many nooks and crannies that forming a consisted belief system from it is tough without severe selectivity.

My readings have convinced me, though, that there are more requirements therein for us to love one another, to show mercy on one another, to comfort the afflicted, to treat aliens well, and to care for the weak and helpless than there are to keep two men or two women who love one another from engaging in a lawful wedding.

By lawful, I mean one that has been amended in modern times from the original biblical allowance for men to have as many wives as they chose, or for the woman to hold only a supporting and grossly unequal role in the matter. Geez, if we truly believe that, we wouldn’t even allow our sisters to preach the Gospel.

Yes, our definitions have changed over the years. By the time the Galilean came along, there were two people involved in marriage and he was more vocal about divorce than he was about who the two people were.

He didn’t like it, divorce that is. I haven’t found, though, where he suggested deportation for the offense.

But back to the law. Yes, certain things are illegal, sexual harassment being one of those. So far, there hasn’t been a national outcry for deporting the guilty, quite the contrary in at least one case.

Hiring illegal aliens itself is, well, illegal. I’m trying to get a count on how many employers have been departed so far for the offense, but no luck so far.

Hiring contractors and not paying them is, I think, under certain conditions, illegal. If the one doing the hiring and shafting has enough legal resources, though, deportation doesn’t follow. Filing bankruptcy seems to be a cheaper way out for the contractors involved than bringing lawsuits against billionaires.

Lynching and other forms of murdering African-Americans should have been illegal at least since shortly after the end of the Civil War. Not only did our country not make it illegal, we didn’t even deport a single guilty party. One can probably still smell the cloud of guilt on a hot summer night at Ninth and Broadway in my city of Little Rock, Arkansas where whites once burned a black man. A white man in the crowd then publicly directed traffic with a charred and severed arm. Deported? No. Arrested? No. A local hero? Yes, among many. Do any of his descendants now post offensive things on Facebook about minorities? In all likelihood. Acorns don’t fall far from the tree.

A woman recently admitted that she lied when she made comments that initiated one of our country’s most infamous lynchings, that of a black child. Has she been deported? Not to my knowledge. Would our country be better off if she never had lived within its borders? You decide.

I’m not trying to foment divisiveness. I’ll leave that to our president and his minions. I just choose to follow the path of one who said, “let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

I think, if I remember correctly, that same person, it is written, said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” I don’t recall a word therein about our deporting one another.

Further, I believe that if we have national problems, and we do, they can be solved better with love than with hatred. I also believe that if we do have laws, and we must enforce them, we can do so in the least restrictive, damaging, hurtful, and vengeful way possible. If a person’s church or political party doesn’t believe that, I have suggestions for that person. I, for one, think the Galilean would agree.

Damnation

There are things one has read dozens of times that suddenly pierce like lightning on a late evening reading. From the ending of “Heart of Darkness,” Marlow lies to Kurtz’s lover about the details of Kurtz's death:

"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!'

"'His last word—to live with,' she murmured. 'Don't you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!'

"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.

"'The last word he pronounced was—your name.'

"I heard a light sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it—I was sure!' . . . She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether. . . "

 It dawned on me to compare that passage to the immortal one from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” in which Huck makes the (soul-damning) decision not to send a letter turning the slave Jim in, as he is legally and, by the code of the times, morally, bound to do.

“I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”

 So, one wonders, how would Conrad and Twain feel about tormenting young immigrant children? Would it free our soul from damnation or, would we find comfort in believing that, “The heavens do not fall for such a trifle?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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