Easter Seder 1995

08 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Alan, Black Jew, Carl, CMU, East Liberty, Easter Sunday, Hypocrisy, Identity, Jeff, Judaism, Manischewitz, Mogen David, Passover, Pesach, PhD Dissertation, Point Breeze, Raw Horseradish, Redemption, Seder, Self-Reflection, Spencer Foundation, Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Program, Susannah, Whiteness

Matzo and a cup of wine in a Kiddush cup for first evening of Passover, April 7, 2015. (http://www.timeanddate.com).

Like most of my posts, this is a story of irony, sarcasm and identity. It may be a bit out of time, since the first night of Passover and Easter already occurred last weekend. But it’s still Passover week for those who do more than eat matzos and chicken liver paste with a glass of Manischewitz on the first night.

In all, I have been present, prayed, dined, wined and whined at four Passover Seders. Three of them were during the Hebrew-Israelite years, 1982, 1983, and 1984. All of them involved a roasted leg of lamb, bitter herbs, and chewing down raw horseradish while chugging super-sweet wine to chase away the five-alarm-fire in my mouth, throat and stomach. Endless praises to Yahweh, too many exhortations of Moses, and awkward snorts toward being strangers among strangers in a strange and oppressive land. That was my Passover experience in a lifetime and timeline determined by my Mom and idiot stepfather Maurice, before I turned to Christianity, before I gave up on the idea that I could be from one of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel.

My fourth Seder, though, came eleven years later, in mid-April 1995. I’d been a Christian for as long as I hadn’t commemorated Passover as part of my religious birthright. I wasn’t sure about the idea of attending this celebration, as it wasn’t even at sundown on that year’s first day of Passover, Saturday, April 15. My friend Carl and his/our respective Carnegie Mellon history grad school mates Alan, Jeff, and Susannah were holding their little Seder on Easter Sunday, April 16, as the first two rented a house together in the Point Breeze (really, the White end of Homewood-Brushton, which asked for a race-based divorce in 1961) neighborhood of Pittsburgh.

Picture of the Henry Clay Frick Mansion, or “Clayton”, located at 7200 Penn Avenue, Point Breeze, Pittsburgh, PA, March 21, 2010. (Lee Paxton via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via CC-SA-3.0.

They had invited me a week earlier, a few days before my Spencer Foundation Fellowship application went from no-go to a go. I thought about saying no, but generally, I didn’t do anything on Easter Sundays, anyway. Even as a member of Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, the one Sunday I didn’t attend church was Easter Sunday. It the holiest of days, like Passover, and for so many people, the only day all year they attended church. For so many, it was show-off-my-new-spring-clothes day, not Jesus’ Resurrection Day. I didn’t like the overcrowded-ness that came with an Easter Sunday or Christmas service. It smacked of hypocrisy, my own included.

So I decided for one Sunday to attend a Seder prepared by folks who’d only known themselves as Jews both ethnically and religion-wise their whole lives. Except the stern, orthodox, full of bitterness and tears, joy and triumph that were the Seders of my Hebrew-Israelite days was a lighthearted affair. It was as unorthodox a Seder as could’ve expected, with lots of conversation about grad school, about my dissertation fellowship, about life and sports and music in general. No raw horseradish, but lots of chicken liver paste. No Manischewitz, but some Mogen David, along with more traditional red and white wines, and an empty seat for Elijah.

Manischewitz wine, in bottle and a wine glass, September 11, 2012. (http://tabletmag.com/).

Carl and Alan, of course, expressed surprise when I did ask questions or make comments. Like about the kosher-ness of eating mashed-up chicken livers, or the differences in taste between the traditional Pesach beverages, or how peanut butter and jelly went well with matzo crackers. Alan, about to be a one-year-and-done CMU history doctoral student, did ask me, “Where did you learn about Passover?” I said, “This is my fourth Seder.”

I knew better than to fully unlock everything I knew about Pesach, Judaism, Jewish history, the Ten Lost Tribes, being a Hebrew-Israelite, and the racial privileging that I had observed growing up in Mount Vernon between “real” Jews and us “weird” (read “not White”) Jews. For a few hours, though, I had to confront a part of my past that I’d all but locked away by the beginning of ’90. Not just locked away. I’d taken everything from between April 13, ’81 and July 23, ’89, wrapped it in Saran Wrap, put that in a Ziploc bag, thrown it in a safe, locked it, and then built a force field to keep out intruders.

I was relieved when I finally left Carl and Alan’s Easter Sunday/Passover Seder and walked back to my apartment in East Liberty. I wasn’t ready yet to take a look back at what I lived through during the Reagan Years. I was all about moving forward, and the previous days and weeks of dissertation research followed by a major-league dissertation fellowship made me feel like the completely different person that I believed I actually was. At least ninety-five percent of the time.

In Finally Seeing Selma

24 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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Academy Awards, American Sniper (2014), Ava DuVernay, Bill Moyers, Carmen Ejogo, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Coretta Scott King, David Oyelowo, Double Standards, Film Making, Historical Accuracy, Hypocrisy, LBJ, MLK, Oprah Winfrey, Oscar, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Racial Quotas, Racism, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Selma, Voting Rights Act of 1965

Selma movie poster, January 2015. (http://www.freakinawesomenetwork.com).

My son had an extra day off from school this week, the day after MLK Day. To give him a break from his daily dose of manga and anime, I took him to the downtown Silver Spring cineplex to see Selma. I hadn’t planned to see it until after Selma had come out on DVD or streaming via Netflix or Comcast, because I knew my son would have questions. And he did — lots of them!

But I was also curious. Not about the history. As the historian I am, I really didn’t need to see Selma to confirm the brutality of Jim Crow racism and violence, that I’d in fact seen and lived much worse. I wanted to see how Ava DuVernay’s treatment of Dr. King, Coretta Scott King, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Bayard Rustin, George Wallace, J. Edgar Hoover and so many others would stack up against years of research, writings, lectures and discussions (some of which are my own) on the period. I wanted to know if the staunchest critics of the film were in any way accurate in their criticisms, or if they were just holding DuVernay and Selma to a double-standard.

Billy Drago as Frank Nitti in The Untouchables (1987), falling to his fictitious death at Elliott Ness’ hands in 1931 (he actually died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1943). (http://youtube.com).

In light of so many other films, from Mississippi Burning (1988) to Remember the Titans (2000), from The Untouchables (1987) to The Hurricane (1999), it’s obvious the art of film-making isn’t as exact as a scalpel. This may well be sacrilege, but I as a historian and educator do not expect movies to be 100 percent accurate depictions of historical events. A great film can educate as well as entertain, but education is far more than getting all the facts correct because some folks want to hold a “Black” film to a higher standard than Zero Dark Thirty (2012) or Schindler’s List (1993). Making a very good movie requires the right context for facts, whether the accuracy level is 50 percent or 98 percent. It requires the right language and words, the right intonations and inflections, the correct mood and emotions, not just accuracy levels only a scholar with 800 endnotes and 1,200 sources could meet.

Knowing this, I dismiss nearly all the critics who’ve been pissed that LBJ was portrayed as a racist. Well, he was! He grew up in rural Texas, ran as part of an anti-Black Democratic machine for Congress and the Senate. Still, he also cared about people, about eliminating poverty, and even about providing federal civil rights protections for Blacks. This may be a contradiction, but what else is new in human nature? We’re not simply black or white, evil or good. We’re gray and mercurial, obsequious and hypocritical. So yes, LBJ was a racist and a progressive and a warmonger, and as far as I am concerned, the best president since FDR.

The idea that we should completely discount Selma because DuVernay didn’t make rabbis obvious in the film is ridiculous. That argument has been based on the exclusion of one Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who was front and center in the third Selma march on March 19, 1965, from the images in the film. As one person who actually saw the film, however, it seemed no single actor portrayed Heschel or any other yarmulke and robe-wearing rabbi. There were at least two scenes, though, in which David Oyelowo (who played Dr. King) appeared to interact with men of Jewish faith. They were rabbis, but not dressed obviously so.

Co-Executive Producer Oprah Winfrey, Oscar Nominee David Oyelowo, and Director Ava DuVernay at AFI Fest premiere for Selma, November 12, 2014. (Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images, via http://variety.com).

So let’s put Selma right up there with Howard the Duck (1986)! Except that this outrage over historical accuracy is as false as American Sniper‘s (2014) depiction of Arab Muslims as blood-thirsty caricatures of real human beings. Long-ago released tapes (now at the Johnson Presidential Library) indicate that LBJ regularly used the n-word, and that he wanted to wait on the Voting Rights Act, with it coming so soon after the Civil Rights Act.

To complain about the lack of religious Jewish garb in Selma, though, would be like Blacks complaining about film directors not portraying them as liberators in holocaust films. And yes, there are at least two confirmed instances in which segregated Black Army units did in fact help liberate concentration camps in western Germany in the final weeks of World War II. When that film comes out about the segregated 761st Tank Battalion’s exploits and participation in liberating camps, then I will take much more seriously complaints about the lack of yarmulkes and tzitzits in Selma. As in, not seriously at all.

The only complaints about Selma that have made sense to me have come from Bill Moyers, press secretary under LBJ from 1965 to 1967. Moyers recently refuted the idea that President Johnson gave the go-ahead to J. Edgar Hoover to release the so-called sex tape to Coretta Scott King during the Selma march period, contrary to how this DuVernay portrayed this segment in Selma. Wow! Two minutes out of a two-hour movie! (The interplay between Oyelowo and Carmen Ejogo as Dr. and Mrs. King over the tape was as engrossing as it was gut-wrenching).

Preview clip screen shot of American Sniper (2014) with lead actor Bradley Cooper, January 23, 2014. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

I did enjoy the movie, found Oyelowo’s portrayal of Dr. King Oscar-worthy (if not as perfect as some believe), and actually found nearly all the characters real and truly representative of the times. It should be said, though, that excuses of inaccuracy are always made by those who really have no excuses for snubbing really well done films. Especially ones that aren’t White clichés. Like American Sniper. No question that the Academy Awards committee should’ve nominated Ava DuVernay for best director, but for their faux liberal racial sensibilities.

Je Suis Charlie – Non!

13 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Movies, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Boko Haram, Charlie Hebdo, Cherif Kouachi, France, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Homophobia, Hypocrisy, Islamists, Je suis Charlie, Jihadists, Journalism, KKK, Multiculturalism, Neo-Nazi, Nigeria, Paris, Racism, Said Kouachi, Terrorist Attack, The Interview (2014)

An estimate 1.6 million were part of Sunday’s unity march following the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the hostage situations in Paris last week, Paris, France, January 11, 2015. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images, via http://nydailynews.com).

Okay. So my French is horrible. But nothing should be lost in translation. I’m not for Islamists and other similarly motivated people murdering in the name of a religion. I’m not for the suppression of free speech, or free expression, or religion, or atheism. Like millions all over the world, I find it unacceptable that anyone would murder a group of Charlie Hebdo staffers and editors because of their work.

I also think that Charlie Hebdo’s work is only a notch or two above disgusting, meaning it could easily be the organ for the KKK, a neo-Nazi party or some other organization whose motto is hatred and intolerance. It’s not just about the prophet Muhammad. They’ve portrayed African politicians as monkeys, being gay as deviant, and immigrants as the scourge of Europe. All in the name of satire. Except that irreverence and satire is actually supposed to be funny, not racist, anti-immigrant, anti-religion and homophobic. Well, at least the French arm of the Neo-Nazi Party’s laughing every week!

In a country of well over 60 million people, Charlie Hebdo‘s average weekly circulation was 160,000, on par with some newspapers in central Pennsylvania. Yet everyone who’s anyone has run to support them with “Je suis Charlie,” as if this is the equivalent of #BlackLivesMatter or something. The folks at Charlie Hebdo didn’t deserve murder, but they also shouldn’t be supported as if they were doing groundbreaking investigative journalism either.

Some of the 2,000 feared dead after Boko Haram massacred and burned down 16 villages, Baga, Borno State, Nigeria, January 8, 2015. (http://ww.w.mainstreamreports.com/)

Some of the 2,000 dead after Boko Haram massacred and burned down 16 villages, Baga, Borno State, Nigeria, January 8, 2015. (http://ww.w.mainstreamreports.com/)

So no, I am NOT Charlie. I am not Charlie because there have been close to a dozen other bombings and attacks all over the globe in the past week, in places like Pakistan and Syria and Nigeria, in Texas and Colorado and other places. I am not Charlie because I refuse to elevate the lives of a few French racists over the wholesale slaughtering of 2,000 in Nigeria by Boko Haram.

I am NOT Charlie because no Muslim should ever have to apologize for being Muslim, just because a small group of radicalized fanatics took their religion’s name in vain. I am NOT Charlie because I understand that anyone can commit a violent and senseless act based on any religion, any belief, and any philosophy. Including killing others based on the idea that there is no God at all.

I cannot nor will not be Charlie because while I believe in free speech and expression, I also believe in embracing a multicultural world. Something that these cretins — Cherif and Said Kouachi and the staff at Charlie Hebdo — obviously didn’t believe in at all. I cannot be Charlie because that would require me to live in a world without context, without understanding that there is a global economic and political context to radical Jihadists. A context that is as much about economic inequality, deliberate religious misinformation, and the political dominance of Europe and the US, that last one going back at least two centuries.

January 13, 2015. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/).

I refuse to be Charlie because though I believe we should defend even the most vile and incompetent forms of speech and expression, I also believe that we need to challenge such expression at every turn. I am NOT Charlie because I’m also NOT The Interview. I am also not a stereotype or a monkey or a caricature or someone whom Whites in Hollywood or White Frenchmen running a rag can easily define and pigeonhole. I am not Charlie because I’m not a commodity that can be bought or sold or taken advantage of. I am NOT Charlie because I refuse to support the idea that you should run three million copies of your weekly to take advantage of the deaths of colleagues because the eyes of the European world are on you this week.

I am NOT Charlie. I AM a man, though, who sees all sides of what many have all but oversimplified as a war between good and evil.

Bill Cobsy, The Nexus of Father Figure and Power Corruption

20 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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"Pound Cake" speech, Bill Cosby, Conrad Bain, Culture of Poverty, Diff'rent Strokes (1978-86), Education, Father Figures, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Jell-O, Misogyny, NBC, Racism, Rape, Robert Reed, Sexual Assault, The Brady Bunch (1969-74), The Cosby Show (1984-92), Violence

Jell-O Pudding Pops ad with Bill Cosby, circa 1983, November 20, 2014. (http://pinterest.com).

In the aftermath of my Mom’s second divorce in September ’89, she would sometimes engage me in conversations about manhood and fatherhood. It was as if she didn’t think of me as a man in really any sense at all. This despite years of handling adult responsibilities and running interference between her and my now ex-stepfather Maurice.

George Michael, “Father Figure” video screen shot, 1988. (http://vevo.com).

One Christmas holiday day in ’90, we were sitting in the living room at 616 watching a rerun of The Cosby Show on NBC, then the most popular show on the most popular network in the US. My Mom asked me, “If you could pick your father, you’d want it to be Cosby, right?” I stared blankly at my Mom, wondering where the heck that question came from. I didn’t say anything. But my Mom took that as me thinking, “Yeah, he would’ve been a great father for you.”

At the time, I certainly thought that Bill Cosby would’ve been an entertaining father, if I’d been lucky enough to have a near-billionaire as my dad. What I really wanted was my father, Jimme Collins, to get himself sober, to be lucid enough to talk to now that I was in my twenties. Beyond this, I didn’t give Cosby or my Mom’s question and comments much thought.

Over the years, I’ve watched TV dads come and go, frequently with some tragedy or controversy. Robert Reed of The Brady Bunch (1969-74) fame comes to mind, with his in-the-closet status and his early death from colon cancer and HIV complications. So too does Conrad Bain, because of the backlash Diff’rent Strokes (1978-86) received as a result of its dated way of treating issues such as race and poverty with his character Phillip Drummond as the father to two Black kids, not because of his personal life. But Bill Cosby as Dr. Heathcliff “Cliff” Huxtable, an obstetrician and gynecologist (talk about irony) and father of four daughters and one son, became for many “America’s Dad,” a title that the media has celebrated recently in the wake of The Cosby Show‘s thirtieth anniversary of its first airing earlier this fall. He was supposed to be above reproach.

Bill Cosby in midst of his “Pound Cake” speech (with Rev. Jesse Jackson in background), NAACP 50th Anniversary of Brown decision gala, Washington, DC, May 17, 2004. (http://blackpast.com).

I’ve long been disappointed with Cosby, though. For his culture-of-poverty arguments against welfare mothers, crack babies and pregnant teenagers. For his frequent need to chastise Blacks living in poverty for not knowing “proper moral behavior” (this from a person who purportedly holds a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts). Not to mention his double-standard on monogamy.

Now even the oblivious set has become aware of the growing number of accusations from women who’ve said that Cosby had allegedly committed rape and other forms of sexual assault going back at least thirty-two years. I’ve been aware of these accusations and rumors for nearly twenty years, in the wake of Cosby’s son Ennis’ death in ’97. I hoped that these accusations were false ones at first. Who would want to believe that “America’s Dad,” the Jell-O Pudding and Pudding Pop Man, was also drugging and raping women in his spare time?

I think what we need to recognize the most, maybe even more than systemic racism or our culture of imperialism and violence, is that this society of ours is somewhere between an oligarchy and a plutocracy. Bill Cosby’s stance on race, community and morals has only mattered because of his fame and fortune, not because of his expertise and certainly not because of his professional experience. Bill Cosby’s a comedian, an actor, a philanthropist and a philanderer, and perhaps a rapist as well. Americans all too frequently fall for the facade of father figures and others whom seem to say what we want to hear. When all those with power and money really want to do is to wield that power and money to their own capricious and narcissistic ends.

The ’72 Dolphins and Baby-Boomer Narcissism

01 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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17-0, 1972 Dolphins, American Narcissism, Baby Boom Generation, Baby Boomers, Civil Rights Generation, Elitism, Gen Xers, Generation X, Generation Y, Hypocrisy, Miami Dolphins, Millennials, Narcissism, NFL, Perfect Season, Self-Aggrandizement

For as long as I’ve been alive, America has confronted me with its Baby-Boomer narcissism. This idea that the Boomers were the generation that forever changed the country and the world, the folks who’ve shaped our popular culture — and the response of younger generations to it — has been around for more than sixty years. The Beatles, Watergate, Vietnam, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stone, Roe v. Wade, “I Have A Dream” — Boomers have taken credit for it all. It sometimes makes me wanna puke.

Bill and Hillary Clinton (nee Rodham), circa 1971, Yale University, New Haven, CT. (Charles F. Palmer/HuffPost via http://clintonlibrary.gov/photogallery.html?galAlbum=28).

Along with the arrogance of this constant supposition of their centrality to the sort-of-historical is the obvious factual ignorance that comes with it. It’s as if the ’80s didn’t happen and Generation X wasn’t born and didn’t grow up. Or the ’90s were only about Baby Boomers having kids of their own. Or that Boomers somehow didn’t vote for the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 — seven times in all!

But nothing, absolutely nothing, has demonstrated Baby-Boomer narcissism more than that annual rite of fall that has been the ’72 Miami Dolphins celebrating when every NFL team has lost their first game of a given season. The remaining members of that team get together with the hopes that no other NFL team finishes the season with a perfect record. It’s a sad sight watching elderly men long out of professional football show their glee on TV and in pictures when every team has at least one loss on the season. Every. Single. Year.

Yet it so represents this nation of Baby Boomers that have ruled this roost for so many years. Before most Gen Xers were old enough to vote, much less protest, Baby Boomers had coined us “slackers” and “apathetic” about life and politics. Heck, Baby Boomers took away Gen Xers’ right to drink — but not to die in war — just as the first Gen Xers turned eighteen! And for the past ten years, Boomers have turned their critical eye to Millennials, looking for flaws in their politics, voting patterns and vapid obsession with pop culture. As if Millennials didn’t cut their self-absorbed eyeteeth on a steady diet of Baby-Boomer megalomania.

President Barack Obama honors the Super Bowl VII Champions and their 1972 perfect season, East Room, White House, August 20, 2013. (UPI/Kevin Dietsch).
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/08/20/Obama-welcomes-72-Dolphins-to-the-White-House/UPI-27321377029133/#ixzz3HopWhqwX

So when Mercury Morris or Bob Griese or elder statesman Don Shula have gone on TV year after year after year to gloat about their perfect season, it doesn’t reflect pride in their 17-0 record. It’s a reflection of their desperation, a selfish attempt to hang on to a past that is irrelevant in today’s NFL. And yes, it’s their fault. Kind of like when civil rights Boomers who claim the blood and name of the movement, yet root for younger generations of social justice activists to not do so well as them. All while taking ginormous amounts of credit for every good thing that happened during their watch years and years ago.

Is there something to be done about this? Maybe. We could try to ignore these winners of yesteryear and the annual ESPN champagne cork-popping graphic in honor of the ’72 Dolphins team. Or, better still, we can say, “Enough!” Forty-two years is long enough to celebrate the so-called perfect season. Especially when it was on a fourteen-game schedule.

As for the rest of the elite Baby Boomers, you can continue to self-aggrandize, as if three million protesters and stoners could fully represent the other 76 million Americans born between 1945 and 1961. Just remember. Gen Xers and Millennials will be the near-final arbiters of your history. It will be one in which you were as responsible preemptive war as LBJ and Robert McNamara, as accountable for NSA and a virtual police state as Nixon was for Watergate, as culpable for climate change as Ford and GM. That’s as much your narcissistic legacy as the anti-war movement and free-love.

Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” (video screen shot), 1989. (http://denverlibrary.org/).

“Stupid Atheist” Meets Truly Stupid Christian

06 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Acting, Activism, AP American History, AP US History, Arrogance, Atheism, Atheists, Christianity, Contradictions, Doing, Evangelical Christianity, Faith, Giving, Hope, Hypocrisy, Jay Sekulow, Mary Zini, Masturbation, Pat Robertson, Prayer in Schools, Stupidity, Teenage Angst, Teenagers, Televangelism, Televangelists, Trust, World History

Screenshot from HBO show The Leftovers title sequence, September 5, 2014. ( yU+co via http://news.creativecow.net). Qualifies as fair use under US copyright laws — low resolution and relevance to subject matter.

I’ve written about Mary Zini and our classroom incidents before, here and in Boy @ The Window. It’s been thirty years since she was my tenth-grade World History teacher. Yet most of what I remember from this class has little to do with Plato, NATO, or anything in between. It’s mostly Zini’s condescending personality, my new Christian arrogance, and that people’s personalities and actions are often walking and talking contradictions.

It was the beginning of October ’84 when we had our first incident. It occurred after what was the first of an endless cycle of fill-in-the-bubble Scan-Tron exams.

Honestly, I had no idea at that moment why I said what I said. I supposed that a summer of Jay Sekulow and the American Center for Law and Justice, all via Pat Robertson and The 700 Club had done the trick in making me a one-time prayer-in-public-schools advocate. I knew that Zini was raised a Catholic, so on some level, didn’t that make me a stupid Christian for calling her a stupid “atheist?”

That incident was also the beginning of seven months of starting to figure out how to be me and be a follower of Christ at the same time. I approached it the same way I approached how to be me in my first few months of seventh grade and Humanities at A.B. Davis Middle School in the fall of ’81. With the naiveté of a child, the hubris of a teenager, and the callousness of a human with alien superpowers.

Jay Sekulow lecturing, Regent University, December 15, 2006. (Juda Engelmayer via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via GFDL.

It was evident in my outward actions. I packed my red-pleather-covered King James Bible every day. For school. For Subway trips down into Midtown Manhattan when me and my older brother Darren worked for our father Jimme. For when we washed clothes every Saturday or Sunday at the laundromat on the Mount Vernon-Pelham border (it’s a yoga studio now). The Bible was my constant companion, my shield protecting me from this mad world of almost bottomless sin.

In the process, I read everything from Genesis to Revelations at least twice. (some books, like the Gospels, as many as four times). I learned a lot from reading all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. That the Israelite God Yahweh was stern and pretty unforgiving. That Jesus was a radical, not just spiritually, but politically as well. And that Paul was not exactly the most enlightened of the apostles when it came to women, children and slaves.

Mostly what I learned was that readings and understanding The Bible wasn’t like living out my beliefs at all. I was still a teenager, a fifteen-year-old living in the midst of welfare poverty, at 616 with an abusive womanizer, a wounded mother and a gaggle of siblings between the ages of eight months and five-and-a-half years. Not to mention my alcoholic cuss-factory of a father that I had to hunt down for money nearly every weekend. What all that meant was feeling lust for a young woman one minute, hate toward my idiot stepfather Maurice the next, and imitating Jimme’s slurred language and mannerisms the minute after that.

This new walk was very confusing, so much so that I often hid my emotions in much the same way I’d already been doing to protect myself from yet another abuse episode with Maurice. My emotions couldn’t stay bottled up, though. I frequently humped my way to sleep once our living room at 616 had become my bedroom during and after the months in which Balkis Makeda had lived with us.

By the spring of ’85, when Zini granted me her full support in getting me into AP US History for eleventh grade (this despite my 84 average in her class at the time), I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t stand being in the same room with Zini much of the time. Yet she did for me what few in my life had done — she opened up a door for me to walk through, albeit a relatively small one.

Hands of God & Adam, fingers about to touch, Sistine Chapel ceiling, Vatican, Michelangelo, 1508-1512 (via Wikipedia). In public domain.

What did it all mean? That devoutness is meaningless without action, without giving and receiving, without trust, without taking risks. That even supposed atheists can act and give in ways that should shame many arrogant Christians. That Christianity isn’t a transactional relationship or process, but a journey with many pitfalls and lots of contradictions along the way. That who I/we say God is, well, at best an infinitesimal guess, because God and this universe is so much more that I as a human male living in the context of Western culture can only begin to understand.

Most of all, I had just begun to learn that spiritual liberation wasn’t supposed to be a yoke, but an opening to see the world and myself stripped bare of narrative and pretense. A strict adherence to the principles of Pat Robertson would bring me no closer to enlightenment and no further out of poverty than wishing on a star or avoiding cracks on Mount Vernon’s blue-slate sidewalks. Work, trust, opportunities, and not just Romans 8:28, was the beginning of the key for me.

US Intervention Issues, Easy To Predict & Do Nothing About

09 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

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Erbil, FRONTLINE, Gaza, Genocide, Humanitarian Intervention, Hypocrisy, Interventions, Iraq, ISIS, Israel, Middle East, Military Intervention, Nation-Building, Oil, Peacekeeping, Predictability, Predictions, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Quagmire, Resources, US Foreign Policy, US Interventionism

An F/A-18E Super Hornet takes off from the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush in the Persian Gulf, as US air strikes in Iraq begin, August 8, 2014. (AFP/US Navy via http://images.smh.com.au/). In public domain.

We’re back at it in Iraq again, albeit on a limited basis. Humanitarian food and medicine drops, airstrikes on ISIS positions near the US consulate in Erbil (also an oil depot, by the way). The saga that has been the twenty-three year quagmire of Iraq, one entirely of our own making, continues. That President Barack Obama has called this intervention one in prevention of “genocide” doesn’t impress me and many others, considering the actions of Israel in Gaza over the past six weeks. I guess one nation’s genocide is another nation’s defense through indiscriminate killing and wounding. The hypocrisy stinks from here to Pluto and back.

I digress. Americans now loathe the words “Iraq,” “Middle East,” and “intervention.” Yet after Vietnam, and especially after the end of the Cold War, we should have held our government accountable for any interventions without clear causes, clear interests, and clear objectives. Instead, we’ve been stumbling all over the place, like a drunkard with a car full of bombs and shells, careening from one conflict to another, blowing up people, places and property all along this wild and disgusting ride.

But let’s not act as if this was unforeseen. The most astute foreign policy experts withoutPhDs in Soviet studies (e.g., Condoleezza Rice) knew that any major intervention in the Middle East, whether to protect people or US energy interests, would mean intervening over and over again. All with the potential for geopolitical instability as the interventions would stack up over time.

FRONTLINE logo, PBS, August 9 2014. (http://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/art/bigfl.jpg).

And no, I’m not talking about a 1993 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies or a 1999 conference hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That would be far too obscure and inside-expert to be clairvoyant. Try PBS’s FRONTLINE series of documentaries between 1990 and 2000. They did at least three documentaries predicting this gradual but steady destabilizing of the Middle East with the help of an increasingly interventionist American foreign policy, starting with Operation Desert Shield in August 1990.

Below are the three FRONTLINE documentaries that I watched during the period in which experts predicted the infuriatingly unstable world wrought by capricious US foreign policy, economic dominance and military interventions (all from the website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs):

The Arming of Iraq: Frontline Special (aired September 11, 1990)
FRONTLINE examines how Saddam Hussein built Iraq’s massive arsenal of tanks, planes, missiles, and chemical weapons during the 1980’s. Correspondent Hodding Carter inve[s]tigates (sic) the complicity of the US, European governments, and Western corporations in creating the Iraqi military machine the world is now trying to stop.

Give War A Chance (aired May 11, 1999)
FRONTLINE explores the bitter divide between military and civilian attitudes about where, when, and why America employs military force. In examining the gulf between what American diplomats want and what the military is prepared to deliver, correspondent Peter J. Boyer follows the inevitable collision from Vietnam to the Balkans between diplomat Richard Holbrooke and Admiral Leighton Smith. Their careers, and ultimate clash, represent the most vivid example of this critical foreign policy dilemma.

The Future of War (aired October 24, 2000)
The U.S. Army is experiencing an identity crisis brought on by the end of the Cold War. As it heads into the 21st century, the nation’s largest military service is struggling to keep pace with changing technology, changing enemies and increasingly global missions. FRONTLINE examines the Army’s internal debate between those promoting change and those resisting it, and how todays decisions may impact the outcome of wars fought decades from now.

Emaciated and dead cow in desert, Australia, 2009. (Government of Australia via http://www.nsf.gov/news/).

The last one actually included examples of possible future interventions going into the late-2010s, with a particular focus on Iraq.

So to those millions of Americans who don’t want to dwell on the past and only talk about the vapid and the positive, I say that’s hard to do when we let our past fester like carrion in the middle of the Sahara Desert at high noon. The stink is too obvious to ignore, and apparently was so easy to predict that most Americans ignored it. And all to our peril, past, present and future.