7 deadly sins

 

TV

 Today is National Talk Back to Your TV Day. Tell the news what you think the news should be. Tell your TV you like car insurance company you have. Tell the TV you don’t want laugh tracks because you are smart enough to know when to laugh. Tell your TV you won’t be seduced by marching bands or celebrity influencers. Tell the TV you don’t want Kelly Clarkson in your living room, and you don’t need to ask your doctor about another medication. Be firm, be assertive, get it all out.

Sanitation workers

 Enough with love and beauty

Sanitation workers need a poem

Or even a statue in the park

Honoring them for lifting the endless 

Cans and poorly bundled sticks

That annoy the hell out of them

The stench too as they hop on

And off the truck, dancing to the music 

Of brakes and noisy lifts 

Anyone thank them or slip them

A crisp twenty dollar bill

So how many cans make a career

Or rainy days or tons of garbage

That disappears like they do

From our consciousness 

Normal

 Think about this. “Normal” is a brutal word. It spawns words like abnormal, subnormal and supernormal. It takes the complexity and mystery of a human being and turns it into a statistic. It becomes a boundary that classifies forms of mental illness, sexuality and social and creative behavior in destructive ways. Who in their right mind would want to be normal anyway?

Toxic masculinity

 Toxic masculinity has been a part of human civilization from the beginning—sometimes in the nature of men, sometimes institutionalized. Think: the pleasure of the powerful, primogeniture, slavery of women, physical dominance, John Wayne, motorcycle gangs, the lecherous boss, all that stuff.

Does this come from power, libido, evolution, opportunity, culture? What? Maybe all of these. Will toxic masculinity ever completely disappear? Unlikely. But more and more in recent years it is being called out and punished.

Like most behaviors, it must be addressed first in the family then in the larger social and educational processes. Name it for what it is. Provide alternatives, and live them.

Thomas Jefferson

 So, down comes a statue of Thomas Jefferson. Should we now take down the statues of all the presidents who were philanders, who sent young men falsely to war, who made their wealth off the backs of poorly paid workers or companies which invested in South African apartheid or the exploitation of African workers? Should we remove the names of philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie who grew great wealth off the misery of his workers? We put up statues to honor human beings not gods.

History’s truth must be understood in a fair and honest context. We fear climate change but continue to drive our vehicles and climate control our spaces. We seek equity but want cheap goods made in sweat shops. We talk about compassion but vote down tax levies for better schools and services for the poor. So would the statues of us stand the test of time?

Jesus

 Put aside the question of the divinity of Jesus. Put aside the miracles. What’s left is Jesus’ teachings, actions and courage in the face of suffering and his vision of the power of love and faith. Isn’t that enough?

Jesus didn’t create a religion. He preached a way of living in the world. The more an institutional religion moves away from this, the more it moves away from Jesus. He didn’t desire to be worshipped, but to be imitated.

Art piling up

 

Sheep

 Much has been written about the unhealthy diets of Americans—fast food, snack food, convenience food. That same thing is true, not just about what we put in our bodies, but what we put in our minds. Snippets of speeches, cliched interviews with sports figures, sound bites, political commercials, marketing slogans, news snapshots. This is our diet of information, the diet which generates flabby and uninformed thinking.

We live on the surface of complex problems, believing that’s enough to be able to make the life decisions that face us. We don’t ask to hear the poets or the serious thinkers. The seducers and the demagogues are enough. We don’t ask our leaders what their qualifications are or why they want to lead or how we can assess their integrity. We listen to them tell us what we want to hear.

If we don’t become informed, critical thinkers, we become sheep.

Celebrities

 Celebrities

We give attention to the life dramas of celebrities even when our own life dramas need it.

We buy what celebrities are paid to sell us even when they don’t use the stuff.

We listen to celebrity chit chat on TV when wisdom is all around us.

We seek celebrity advice even when they have less education than we do.

We support celebrities’ excessive salaries because they entertain us when we don’t pay fair salaries to policemen and firemen, who risk their lives for us.

In the end we are the ones who guarantee their salaries, put them on pedestals and make them celebrities.

Q's

 Miscellaneous questions

1. What percentage of American children are damaged before they reach kindergarten?

2. What does the magazine rack at the grocery checkout line tell us about ourselves?

3. Will the backlog of shipping containers in American ports teach us the difference between wants and needs?

Visual artists

 Think about this. Visual artists, of all the artists, are the most expansive and flexible in their practice. They study the body and act out of their bodies—mind, spirit, psychology, emotion and physicality. They can be carpenters, stonemasons, metal workers, draughtsmen, painters, quilters, knitters, some of those, all of those and more. They are after beauty and something true and enduring. What they say is personal, political, conceptual, mysterious and true to their voices. They are generally after money only to survive and make more art.

As a result, the public is suspicious of them and parents cautious about art as a career. 

DT

 By any measure, Donald Trump was a failed president and is a failed human being. He can only see the world around him in relation to his own ambitions and his own need to fill his vast emptiness as a person. And yet Republicans in Congress sit sheepishly at his feet. Chuck Grassley, currently the longest serving senator, kisses up to him at a recent rally. The holy trinity of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are worshipped by their party. Voters choose to blind themselves with the “big lie” and the “Make American Great Again” mantra, hoping these delusions will bring them the white, homogeneous America that never existed.

But how can educated Republican legislators think this way? First, because big money is more important to their re-election than voter concerns. Second, because voters don’t bother to educate themselves. They don’t demand truth, integrity and competence from their representatives. They don’t stay vigilant. A diet of empty campaign promises, negative ads and slick promotions is enough.

If every voter took the time they spend watching a football game or a couple of movies to research candidates, write letters or volunteer for a campaign, this would be a different country. As long as Donald Trump is believable to Republican legislators and to any American voter, we have to be vigilant.

Artistic moments of truth

 Artistic moments of truth

The cost to frame your work is more than its selling price.

Someone told you your work was very pretty and would look nice above their couch.

First, second and third place came with cash prizes and you came in fourth.

You were offered a one-person show, but you had to hang it, do the signage, pay for the postcard, the gallery rent and the booze.

There were lots of people enjoying the eats and drink at your opening, but none went in to see the show.

You got a write-up in the newspaper, but they misspelled your name.

Your gallery told you they are now taking 70%.

Manhood

In our legal system, we grant particular freedoms to young men at ages 16, 18 and 21, even knowing their brains have not yet fully developed. We are edging them to manhood without really defining what manhood means. On hitting the magic number 21, young men imagine manhood opens the door to all the vices.

With many professions—nursing, plumbing, electrician, teaching, cosmetology, real estate and more—there are exams which must be passed to qualify for a license to practice that profession.

I propose we should have a manhood exam--to be thoughtfully developed—that would qualify those who passed to exercise the privileges of manhood. (This would force us to really think about what manhood means.) Any man who passed would be given his manhood card, complete with discounts and benefits. Women would surely benefit from knowing a man was a manhood card carrier.

Personally, I think I would be grandfathered in. What about you?

3 Rs

 My three R’s

RITUAL   The way we affirm the significance of the important events in our lives

REVERENCE   The way we show respect for those who have earned our respect

RESPONSIBILITY    The way we show that we truly understand freedom

jbf-index

 After extensive research, statisticians have devised a numerical measure of the intelligence of individual opinions. It’s called the jbf-index. 

The jbf-index is the number of Justin Bieber fan opinions that are required to add up to the intelligence of your one opinion.

My jbf-index is calculated at 12,578,600. 

What’s yours?

Miscellaneous

 Miscellaneous things you usually don’t think about.

1. How a seed is turning into a flowering plant while you’re not paying attention.

2. You’re using geometry without realizing it.

3. All men are sex addicts for about 15 minutes a week, usually on weekends.

4. Once you see the pattern, you’ve solved the problem.

5. There are lots of good dramas but not so many good comedies.

6. It takes lots of stuff to make you pretty, but only character to make you beautiful.

7. Celebrities get lots of money to try to turn you into a sheep.

8. A lot of life is basically absurd.

9. Civilizing a child is not easy.

10. You could write a graphic novel by collecting images on T-shirts.

Monty Python

 I woke up one morning and suddenly realized that all I really wanted was to live the rest of my life as if I were inside a Monty Python movie.

Visions of God

 In this secular and materialistic world, we don’t think deeply about God. When we do, it’s too often about a God who sanctions violence or retribution. Or a God who chooses one people over another. Or a God of fundamentalism who is the God of another age. Or a God of convenience. All these are false Gods, but we revel in them.

God is unknowable. Still, God wants to be known through love that is transformative. A rigid vision of God dismisses the varied and complex nature of humanity. God can be discovered in all the visions of God flowing from all the people of God. When we narrow our vision of God, we insult God in the ways God is made present to us.

Ordinary people

 It’s a fallacy that ordinary people live conventional lives. Life throws monkey wrenches at them, which they use to fix things and loosen the nuts and bolts of others’ lives. They tinker, build and invent. They come to people’s rescue with ability and energy. They come up with the novel solutions— from cupcakes to food drives to elderly care. They’re watching kids’ brains pop in the classroom and putting out fires—the combustible ones and the human ones. They’re putting hair into crowns and spirals and stocking the shelves and taking your crap in the bar. They’re the ones who make the ideas of leaders into something real.

Freedom

 What happens in a society when freedom comes with no responsibility?

People who endanger others while they drive drunk or texting get light sentences.

A young white college student gets a slap on the wrist for a rape.

Fatal hazing incidents continue to happen.

Covid deaths soar while people refuse to mask or get vaccinated.

The number of single parent households keeps climbing.

The January 6 assault on the Capitol was just a lovefest.

The list goes on. 

A striking story on the PBS Newshour described a small town in Mexico which resorted arming and training children as protection against drug dealers. We must help the drug addicted, but they are not all victims. Their choices feed the business that results in this small army of children.

We all make mistakes, big and small, and we must accept the consequences, big and small.In any society freedom is an empty notion without a clear understanding of responsibility.

Wisdom

 Only the few seek wisdom

Some, unprepared, stumble on it

Some are led by suffering

Children speak it out of innocence

Wisdom doesn’t need a white beard

But attending to the accumulation of experience

Helps wisdom test itself

It can be found in books and art and music

But it must be dug out and mulled over

It’s always easy to ignore

Because it demands that life

Be lived with the reverence it deserves

The gifting and getting of wisdom

Are never without rewards

Even the uncomfortable ones

Work of art

 A work of art is more than just itself:

(a) It’s a lesson in the artist’s chosen language.

(b) It’s a cultural artifact.

(c) It’s a measure of the artist.

(d) It’s a message about being human.

(e) It’s a cultural record.

(f) It’s an offer to talk.

(g) It’s a creative act.

(h) It’s the answer to a question.

(i) It’s an itch that needed to be scratched.

(j) ???

art

 So you went to art school to train for a career in art. Maybe you reached your goal or maybe you are a cabinet maker, electrician, chef, bartender, nurse or computer engineer. But, whether you realized it or not, you were in art school to explore who you are as a unique, creative human being. You think you made art, but art made you.

So keep at it, even in small spurts. Keep making art, and it will keep making you.

Map

 Make a map of your life. 

Where did it start? Where was the road smooth? Rough? How many forks in the road? Did you run a stop sign? Where did you get lost in the forest? Where did you break down and who came to your rescue? Did you go full speed ahead? Or stop to linger? Did you make it to the mountaintop? Who went along for the journey? How many detours when the road was closed?

Make a map of your life.

classifications

 We’ve got to get past unfair and unproductive classifications by race and ethnicity, and start using useful classifications: saint, hero, decent person, asshole, thug and villain. Unlike race and ethnicity, these categories allow people to change and to be measured by their actions.

And then, of course, we would have to initiate Assholes Anonymous, Thugs Anonymous and Villains Anonymous.