Grandparents and other assorted old people have earned the right to criticize, reprimand and generally lay advice on young people. We old folks have the experience and the wisdom, and they have the still developing brains.
But we old folks must always remember to do this with a twinkle in our eyes.
Evolution gave me a penis and the hormones to tell me what to do with it. If I were only an animal, that would be all I’d need. But I’m not. I’m a human male in a family, religion, society and culture that all send me messages about how I should use this thing and the pleasure and purpose that come with it.
Of course, it’s not just me. It’s every one of the 3.5 billion men on earth, each finding his own solution to what to do with his penis. The evolutionary answer is the same for all of us, but the personal answer isn’t.
Each man has to figure it out for himself, but so does each society.
Sexual harassment. Rape. Sex trafficking. Pedophilia. Pornography. Prostitution. In the same society in which entertainment, marketing, attire and body image are stuffed to breaking with sexualized messages.
Any messages about healthy sexuality for men, women and young people are drowned by messages that make sex the driver of consumerism, body image and power. We speak against sexual behavior that we don’t educate against, that we don’t reject in our entertainment and personal lives.
All of the recent examples in the news of sexual misconduct must lead to a serious discussion of what makes a healthy sexual life for the individual and the society.
We often refer to faith, hope and charity as important human qualities. I was thinking about what they really mean.
FAITH: We live in a natural and human world which is driven by chance and randomness. We work to find meaning in life, fighting against gnawing thoughts of life fully out of our control. Faith affirms meaning.
HOPE: We have no certainty in our futures. Why plan? Why sacrifice? Why invest ourselves? Hope give us the courage to commit ourselves to life.
CHARITY: Humans depend on one another to survive. But to thrive and to learn to love requires charity. Charity is an action of love.
The form/image of a work of art is not the primary concern of a serious artist. It’s finding the passionate and uncompromising voice that drives the work from deep within. It may be a voice of sadness or protest or spirit or social justice or justified anger or any of the other things we confront as humans.
Some artists are born with this voice. Others struggle to find it. Some lose it. In the end, it’s the origin of their art and what makes the art endure. For young artists, skill, technique and talent must come second to listening for and nurturing their voices.
I want to take every flower—fresh, dying, rotted—left as memorials for murdered Americans and dump them into the chamber of the US Senate. I’d like to write the names of every refugee from violence who comes to the US border only to be caged or sent away and pile them on the desks of US Senators. I’d like to take every dollar donated by lobbyists to Senate reelection campaigns and use them to build habitats for anyone who needs them.
All of these issues affecting this country fester because of the failure of the US Senate to address them with serious purpose.
Prayers. But no serious gun control legislation.
Outrage. But no serious gun control legislation.
Mass killings. But no serious gun control legislation.
Policemen dead. But no serious gun control legislation.
Unctuous empathy. But no serious gun control legislation.
Extensive press coverage. But no serious gun control legislation.
Lots of commentary. But no serious gun control legislation.
Politicians chime in. But no serious gun control legislation.
Words from the pulpit. But no serious gun control legislation.
Citizens in fear. But no serious gun control legislation.
Flags at half mast. But no serious gun control legislation.
Families grieving. But no serious gun control legislation.
Staunch activism. But no serious gun control legislation.
The same old same old in America.
A recent article about Julie Merhetu in the New York Times on noted that she was now in the “canon.” I admire her work, so I wish the article had indicated who put her in the canon. The art dealers? The big NYC museums? The art critics? Who?
The whole idea of the canon makes no sense to me now. When I studied art history in college, the canon was Western art of white men. Grudgingly some native arts came in followed by some women artists. Then black, Asian, outsider, Hispanic, the art of the mentally ill and more.
The canon is a fluid thing because what art is is a fluid thing. Could you and I sit down and create the canon? Could we have a canon of artists who never made it to the art capitals. Let me know when you want to start.
Popularity is not excellence.
Power is not leadership.
Falling in love is not love.
Wealth is not integrity.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Spontaneity is not creativity.
Rigidity is not discipline.
Routine is not ritual.
Asking is not prayer.
Information is not knowledge.
Honesty is not truth.
Idolatry is not worship.
It seems that any time of the day or night we can turn on the news and hear stories of discrimination against Asian Americans, African Americans, Muslims, Jews, Hispanics, LBGTQs. It’s all hate, and hate is the headline. Commentators highlight the hate.
But where are the stories of love and its redeeming powers. These are usually at the end of a newscast as human interest stories. As humans, we need one another, but loving one another is not a human instinct. If it were, the world would be a very different place and we wouldn’t have needed the great spiritual leaders.
Love is hard work, demanding work. Where are we taught how to love? Where are we taught its courage and its rewards? It’s not in songs or Hallmark stores or TV dramas or even always in families.
Love is the solution, but it’s not our persistent and authentic cultural message. That has to change.
When I was took art history in college, we used a tome called History of Art. It was the history of Western art made by white men. No history of art written today could be so closed and narrow. And art is so much the better for it. We need to see religion in the same way.
Every god we’ve worshipped has exceptional powers beyond those of humans themselves—powers of creation, omnipotence, ability to reconfigure nature, for example. Human individuals and communities cling to their gods as one-and-only and see themselves the chosen ones.
This is the biggest heresy, to limit god to one form and one presence. To limit the message of god humans. To limit god to one historical time. To limit the way in which individuals search for and find god in their lives.
What is life without a passion that is focused, consuming, transforming and aims at the good of others?
Our lives are the only ones we live inside of. That’s why we tell stories—literature, art, dance, music, journalism, chitchat, gossip. That’s the way we determine how our inside life aligns with the outside lives around us.
Stories are the way we decide if we need to rethink ourselves, to see if we are living what we say we believe, to see if we are changing with the world, to see if we mean something.
Exciting new book titles on shelves soon
The Land of White Jesuses
A Moth in Melania’sCloset
The Sexual Behavior among the QAnons
The Proud Boys Cook Book
The Mitch McConnell Joke Book
100 Women: Seductresses Who Changed History
The Harry and Meghan Coloring Book
DIY Bunkers for the Climate Apocalypse
10 Ways to Sabotage Political Correctness
Why Teenagers Should Be Caged
From the time a child exits the womb, their task is to leave home on the way to becoming an independent, productive and responsible human being. Their first attempt to escape could come at age 5 or 10 or 15 or later, but escape they must.
The task of the parents is a contradiction. They have to hold on to the child long enough to get them ready for a successful adulthood, but gradually let them go, moving toward the final umbilical snip.
The teenage years are often the most problematic, yet crucial. The child wants to believe they are independent, but they still are being fed, clothed, housed and educated by their parents. They are itching to make all kinds of big decisions with a brain that is not mature enough to support them.
Parents are in the middle of their careers and don’t always have the ability to provide the attention, discipline and patience these years require. The dynamics of these years, though, can determine the quality of relationships for years to come.
The categories of male behavior
NOTE: These categories can be fluid
Good man
Nice guy
Semi-asshole
Asshole
Dumb ass
Dickhead
Prick
Flaming asshole
Major league prick
Thug
Brute
From: 100 Lives (Condensed)
Face it. She was born trailer trash. Kitsch city. No kind of learning ever interested her. From high school on she dressed like a prostitute, but was really quite selective in who she went to bed with. If it was shiny, red, yellow or soft to the touch, it was part of her wardrobe. Shoes were her passion, a passion she supported by her job as a welder. She aged gracefully, and assiduously avoided acquiring any taste. She died on her own terms in her own home. Shortly before she died, she allowed St. Vincent de Paul to pillage her house for anything they could use.
At the moment that homo sapiens buried their dead in graves, filling them with signifiers of life, human beings evidenced a yearning for the infinite, for something beyond life, for God.
The fundamental issue is not a belief in God or not, but whether and how we acknowledge and respond to this yearning in our lives.
We most deeply appreciate any of the arts when we have an understanding of the language(s) that underlies their creation. We think of ourselves as primarily a culture of the word and build our educational system on then. In fact, we are also a culture of the image. We are swimming in them daily.
Since American education is so thin on teaching the visual language, many people have a relatively superficial appreciation for visual art. They don’t ask more of it than that it be pleasant decoration. As a result, the visual world is not explored as a source of aesthetic richness or complex storytelling, but a means of seduction for commercial ends.
God is beyond us. The most anyone can say is that they know the extent of the God they have worked to understand through prayer, effort, study and life experience. In this way each of us carries a piece of God to rely on. The complete understanding of God can only happen beyond human life.
The search for God by humans has resulted, like all human endeavors, in a rich and diverse collection of God images. At this point in human history will still live with the idea of a whole bunch of gods fighting it out in heaven for supremacy. So that’s how we let it play out on earth.
Why don’t we ask ourselves what all these gods might have in common? What does the god beyond all our humanly created gods want for us? Expect of us? Why would god not embrace the richness, beauty and strangeness of all human creation? What could we possibly lose by loving god through all the God personas we have created.
No God who loves humanity should be the source of hate and prejudice. Every God should calm the yearning that calls us to stretch our humanness beyond itself to meeting with God. Every culture’s authentic search for god has wisdom for us.
Being retired and being at home a lot during covid times, I’ve been watching a great deal more TV news than in the past. One of the things that I’ve appreciated is the shift away from so much focus on celebrity and the shift to the accomplishments of ordinary individuals, those I call “extraordinary ordinaries.”
The cult of celebrity in news, late night TV programming and social media leads us to believe that our models of behavior, success and enjoyment are through them. We don’t really question the nature of their accomplishments or why we are attracted to their lives and antics.
With covid affecting our lives, we now hear the heroic stories of first responders, medical professionals, service and charity workers. We could be them. Maybe we should be them. Effort, compassion, hard work and courage begin to bump celebrity as the stuff of news.
We look in the mirror of the accomplishments of “ordinary” folks, not in the mirror of celebrity.
The upcoming Oprah interview with Harry and Megan is a prime example of what’s wrong with our media diet. How much money will this poor couple get from this interview to help maintain the royal lifestyle they don’t want? In a world of such inequality, poverty and brutality, why do we care about Megan complaining about her life difficulties? How could Harry--whose military accomplishments are admirable--get so sucked into the family squabbles? Is all this really any different from what happens in many contemporary families? Why 2 hours? Are we prepared for the empathy voices, the whining voices, the gossip voices and the fierce warrior voices.
The answers to these and other important questions will take up two hours of the lives of many of us. At the end, it will be one more feather in Oprah’s cap and one more experience of empty entertainment.
A viewer can fall in love at first sight with a work of art. But there’s no guarantee that this love will last.
The viewer owes the artist attention, an open mind (and eye) and the willingness to be challenged.
The artist owes the viewer a work of art that challenges and doesn’t relent in asserting itself as art.
As a result of the engagement of viewer with art, the viewer finds things pulled out of themself they didn’t know were there and the artist finds their art has succeeded in its mission.
National Enquirer: Special Trump Family Edition
Headlines
Melania Promises Donald: If You Run Again in 2024, I’ll Go Back To Nude Modeling
Ivanka and Jared Agree To Mutual Sex Change Operations to Save Their Marriage
Rudy Says in Next Borat Movie He Will Go Full Monty
Don, Jr. and Eric Caught Wife Swapping, Say Why Not?
Donald Trump Says Ambulance Chasers Make Best Lawyers
This is just one man’s perspective, but it seems to me than any circumstance in which abortion is considered has to come with a nest of important questions about the health of the mother, the reliability and concern of the father, the moral compasses of mother and father, the psychological impact on both, the future of the child if taken to term, the nature of any support system and who knows what else I have forgotten.
There seems to be wiggle room in the law for tax dodgers, crooked CEOs, upper class white drug users and young white rapists. But abortion law, written mostly by white men, simply say, “Sorry, you can’t do this,” then puts roadblocks in the way, making any decisions that much harder.
I wish I were enough of a King Solomon to have an answer. But I don’t. The current system of laws doesn’t make sense to me for the mother, the father, the child or the society that often must deal with the consequences.
Now on sale at CPAC
Donald Trump Golden Idol Piggy Bank: start saving for 2024
Ted Cruz Talking Doll: talks and talks and says nothing, imported from Mexico
Q-tips: hints on how to channel the elusive Q in your life
Kevin McCarthy Puppet: your hand fits up his butt
Two-headed Mitch McConnell Doll: pull the string and he’ll have it both ways
Lindsay Graham Programmable Cupie Doll: make him say whatever you want
Proud Boys Toy Soldier Kit: plan your own assault on the Capitol
