Sister Ethyl and the Antichrist

I grew up in small town Kentucky. When I was a kid the town was still alive and vibrant and on Saturday afternoons the two streets that comprised “uptown” were teeming with people, shopping, gossiping, going to the movies. Mr. Kelly, his body twisted from arthritis like an old, wind-blown peach tree, would sit in his red wagon, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and selling pencils.

Sister Ethyl (I’ll leave her last name out, but I do remember it) would stand at the intersection of Broadway and Main with an open Bible in her hand, preaching. The sermon I remember most vividly was a recurring one against the Antichrist. I was a kid so it took a few Saturdays of listening, some reading in my Bible and the library, and some questions to folks (most of whom seemed embarrassed by my questions) for me to figure out who she thought the Antichrist was.

It was the Pope.

It was a message that seemed well received. My town was filled with churches, but there was no Catholic church. There were no Synagogues either, but that’s another story. There were Catholics and Jews, in the town, who, I learned later, had to travel a ways to find their places of worship. I knew who the Jews were—worked for the Coopers and the Erskinds, who were very nice people and good employers—but only knew of one Catholic family. I learned about Jewish traditions at the Methodist Church. The subject of Catholicism never came up during my youth.

In the Wesley Foundation at Western Kentucky University, I found myself occasionally on a Saturday night debating (it never rose to the level of argument, I’m happy to say) whether or not Jews and Catholics went to heaven when they died. Believe it or not, these debates happened. My position was that my Bible said that Jews were God’s chosen people so why would they not go to heaven? Their response: “The Jews killed Jesus.”  My response: “No, the Romans killed Jesus.”

Luckily, my debate opponents did not get my well-intentioned but naively-counter-productive point here as we moved to the subject of Catholics. My position: “I’ve been to mass at the Newman Center and it seems not that different from the Methodist Church. Why wouldn’t Catholics go to heaven?” Their response: “Because they are not really Christians, they worship the Pope, they have their own Bible, and only Christians go to heaven.” In my ignorance I had no quick response.

Obviously, these were not the debates of theological scholars, just folks sitting around with ideas and wondering about them.

The debates were happening as John F. Kennedy was being elected as President, and as he was assassinated.

I have wondered about Sister Ethyl’s message and these debates for 50 years.

In 1970 I married a Catholic woman. When I took her home to meet family and friends, one of my best friends and mentors asked her, “Are you Christian or Catholic?” She, a military brat who did not share my stellar upbringing, was, to say the least, nonplussed.

Since then, I have worked in a Jesuit university and have come to have a deep respect for the works of Catholics, particularly in terms of social justice issues and serving the less fortunate of the world.

The Catholic Church is a large, well-run, powerful, wealthy organization with a specific, evangelical mission. The Church is compelled by its mission to recruit new members to its faith. The Church is compelled to uphold, and lobby for, its specific beliefs and tenets.

Its “CEO”, the Pope, is one of the most powerful men in the world, devout, and absolutely committed to the “rightness” of his beliefs and the church.

No one could expect this to be otherwise, except Sister Ethyl, perhaps.

I believe Catholics are Christian. I do not believe that the Pope is the Antichrist. I also don’t believe he is anything more than a powerful man in a leadership position. I don’t share his beliefs outside the social justice and service realm.

It is in this context that I’m wondering about the position of one of the GOP candidates in the 2012 presidential election.

I respect a presidential candidate who publically affirms his belief in the absolute truth of the tenets his church.

But when a presidential candidate states that Satan, in the form of folks whose ideologies and religions that differ from his, has infiltrated the U.S. using phony Bibles and theologies, I worry. When his response to these “threats” is to implicitly promise to bring the powerful evangelical businessman leader of one of the most powerful evangelical churches in the world, the political head of a powerful religious city-state outside the U.S., to the table as his partner in his presidency of the U.S., I worry a lot.

I see this candidate through the same lens I saw Sister Ethyl and my friends at Western. He has a right to his opinion, obviously. But I disagree with him just as vehemently as I did with Sister Ethyl’s Antichrist position, and my college friends’ “They ain’t going to heaven” stances.

I disagree for the same reasons: my faith, my research, my reason, and my continuing struggle against bigotry, mine and others’.

The U. S. Presidency, CEOs, and Acid Trips

I was reading The Economist (yeah, I know, another of my failings) a few weeks ago. The cover’s headline, “America’s Next CEO?”, made me wonder why we think the U.S. presidency is a chief executive position.

I also wonder when we as a country fell in love with chief executive officers. Is it the money they make? The power they wield? Is it the Don’s comb over and the way his “you’re fired” becomes a fantasy—we’d like to say this to a lot of people and have the same effect?

Why do we think that the answer to all our economic and social woes in this country lies in the election of a CEO?

Here’s an acid-trip dream I had last night.

CEO Trump is elected president. He believes that the biggest problem with the country lies in its “mission, vision, and values proposition” (good MBA concepts). As a good CEO, Trump calls his senior executives into a meeting and they recreate the U.S.’s  mission, vision, and value propositions.  “How are we going to make money unless we have alignment?” asks the CEO.

Secondly, in his first days in the White House, he calls for a summit in which he asks for a U.S. SWOT analysis (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats—another MBA 101 concept), and resulting short- and long-term strategic plan for the U.S.

The newly minted vision, mission and strategic plan related to the SWOT are then given to the Congress to implement.

CEO Trump is discouraged that Congress does not act quickly. He calls Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi into his office and says “You’re Fired.” Their heads droop and they file out. Then he throws a CEO tantrum and threatens to fire the rest of the Congress if they don’t act on his vision and strategy immediately. They hop to it, hoping for a win.

I woke up in a cold sweat, laughing hysterically, with a vow to stay away from whatever it was that caused this bout of late night flight fright.

Instead, I’m adding insult to injury by putting on my professorial hat. I’m not all that smart, but have had some smart students/CEOs over the years. So, I’ve been going over faded yellow legal pad sheets reflecting almost 30 years of professing about business in leadership and business strategy classes and in executive training rooms to soothe my wondering mind.

Here’s what leaked out.

Businesses: The mission of businesses is the delivery of the best goods and/or services in a particular industry. Bottom line: Businesses are to make the most money possible, resulting in the best possible returns and profits, while keeping the business healthy and growing over some specified period of time.

Businesses are run so as to not act against their best economic interests.

The United States: The mission of U. S. is to maintain its sovereignty and protect its citizens while upholding its constitution, as continually defined by a system of checks and balances. Bottom line: The U.S. keeps its citizens free and safe to pursue life, liberty and happiness.

The U.S. is not a business. The country has no specific, identifiable, goods or services that it delivers in or to any particular industry. Revenues and expenses, while important considerations, are not the sole, or necessarily primary, metrics of this organization. For example, in its history U.S. leaders have opted to wage war to protect its interests, and/or cut taxes and/or increase spending for this or that, even though it was clear that these choices were fiscally questionable. Greater good, or some such concepts, prevailed.

Chief executive officers are almost solely accountable for businesses’ successes. Although they may answer to owners/boards/stockholders, they are specifically, by nature of their positions, charged with keeping the organization fiscally healthy. By virtue of their positions, chief executive officers may make unilateral decisions about the business, and act on them. By the nature of their position, people in the organizations below them, whose jobs are dependent on doing so, say “Yes sir/ma’am”.

Chief executive officers are not elected by the people they lead. While there are political aspects to their jobs, politics does not define the job.

Presidents are responsible to the citizens of the U.S. for their decisions. Their decisions can never be made unilaterally. Even Executive Orders are subject to popular opinions, and the opinions voiced and actions made by the other two branches in relation to the decisions. 

Three branches of government are accountable for the organization called the United States of America, of which the presidency is only one.

Presidents are elected by the people they lead. By design, politics govern the positions.

While it would might be great to have a gunslinger chief executive officer in the White House to entertain old professors like me, I’m thinking that what we see on shows like The Apprentice are not really that entertaining when it comes to our life and liberty as citizens.

Strong Women Mentors in My Life

I’ve been a professor since I was 23. My journey to these ivied halls of paradise was convoluted, with a wonderful band of conspirators serving mentor roles along the way. Somehow, in the first grade, I became involved with the Methodist Church in small-town Kentucky. The smells of Sunday school became intertwined with the smells of the first grade—crayons, new books, old musty books, and chalk intermingled with food and body odor—and these smells contributed to a sensual experience that continue to define my relationship with “things academic.”

The Methodist Church, as I experienced it in the 1950s and 1960s, was about personal exploration, not evangelism, or hell fire and brimstone. One of my first mentors, Rice Sutherland, through the Methodist Youth Fellowship, introduced me not only to the notion of foot washing, but also to the Passover Seder. Imagine an ignorant 13-year-old boy like me in a segregated southern town being exposed to a major Jewish tradition. This was part and parcel of a theme that began in the first grade and carried through my life—exploration of the world of ideas and beliefs for the sake of understanding.

Rice Sutherland also found money to support sending me to camp in the summers. At the time I was embarrassed about this and did not like the idea of being so poor as to need charity; it did not stop me from accepting it, however. The experiences at this camp were instructive and became part of another theme—getting out of my hometown and exploring the world.

If Mrs. Sutherland was instrumental in shaping the exploration of things spiritual and religious, Mrs. Rayburn, my school’s music teacher, offered me an opportunity that shaped my academic life. At 13 I was a big kid, fat really, but tall as well and not prone to things athletic. It caused a few fights. For some reason, when Mrs. Rayburn asked if I wanted to play the coronet in band, I really wanted to do it. My family had no money, but somehow my mother, another of my mentors, pushed the envelope, convincing my father (from whom I inherited my depression) that we should find the monthly rental fee needed for me to play this instrument. This was a turning point in my life.

In my early teens, I was very shy, preferring to spend time alone with a book to time with others. My father found this annoying and frequently yelled at me to “put the damn book down and go do something”.  With the acquisition of the coronet, I began to do things. My brother in law was a sergeant in the local Army reserve unit, and convinced his colleagues to let me play Taps on Memorial Day (Decoration Day it was called then) at the county court house. I was scared to death. In front of about 35 Army guys in the high school gym, I practiced one evening. It was awful; I missed every single note, and wanted to crawl into a hole, with my books, never to be seen again. No one laughed. No one yelled at me. One guy who had played trumpet and bugle before pulled me aside and taught me to use the valves on the coronet rather than rely exclusively on my armature. On Memorial Day, David Barnhill, an accomplished trumpet player, and I played Taps at the Webster County Court House in Dixon, Kentucky. Perfectly.

It was not the last time I was to dramatically fail in public, but the experience in the gym was the most dramatic failure I had had to that point, and the fact that I did not give up, took advice, and turned the experience around to a larger success, set me on a path. In high school, I forced myself to participate in debate and forensics, even though it scared me to death. Mrs. Hooks allowed me to travel with the team, and encouraged me even though I was not great. I owe her a lot.

I also competed in music even though both legs often shook so much I thought I’d fall down. Picture a fat kid with a Sousaphone strapped around his neck with violently shaking knees. In the eighth grade I was five feet seven inches tall and weighed 170 pounds. The Sousaphone player was graduating from high school. I was the guy most suited to carrying this very heavy old instrument. Mrs. Rayburn asked me to give up my coronet career in favor of the bass horn. I accepted, and in doing so set the stage for the rest of my life.

For reasons I have never determined, Mrs. Rayburn became more than my band teacher. When I was in junior high, she asked me to sing solos between the acts of high school plays. I accepted, and sang what I’m sure were painful to hear renditions of “Autumn Leaves” and such. Picture that same fat kid with knees shaking singing love songs. Usually, when I walked off the stage I had no memory of having sung—from the first look at the audience I “blacked out”. These were petrifying experiences, and ones that shaped me tremendously.

Thank you Mrs. Sutherland, Mrs. Rayburn, and Ms. Hooks and Mrs. Dorris. You taught me what strong women look like. I wonder where I'd be without you.

Saul Alinsky, Radicals, and Irony

 Been wondering about radicals, and why certain politicians have such burrs under their political saddles about this particular one.

What is a radical? Is a radical someone with whom I disagree, radically? Is it about values or behaviors that I find repugnant? Is it a word to label someone who goes against the established order of things? Yes, yes, yes, and yes, and more, eh?

I’m wondering specifically about that radical Saul Alinsky, and while I did not, and do not, agree with some of what he said and did, I do agree with William F. Buckley, who labeled him as "very close to being an organizational genius."

By the 1960s, Alinsky had been a community organizer, and self-labeled “outside agitator” for at least 30 years.  He wrote two books, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. He called for common people in communities to organize and overthrow people in positions of power (no matter what their political party was) who were oppressors, infringing on their rights.

Alinsky himself belonged to no political party.

Alinsky believed that when people moved from positions of the oppressed to positions of authority they became the oppressors. He organized European immigrants in South Chicago in the 1930s against their oppressors in the meat packing industry. In the 1960s he organized black folks in South Chicago against those same people he had worked with in the 30s, who had now become the “oppressors.”

In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky outlined a methodology for organizing communities for change. He espoused non-violence. I’m oversimplifying it greatly of course, but his rules were, basically: Bring in an “outside agitator” to help organize the people; identify “the enemy”—a person (not a corporation or organization but a person that personifies that organization); paint that enemy as being completely evil, with no redeeming qualities; find specific weaknesses in the person in relation to the organization or grievance; and creatively exploit those weaknesses.

For example, Alinsky: Organized black folks in Chicago who saw systemic discrimination in hiring practices in the city of Chicago in the 60s; helped personalize the enemy, in this case Mayor Richard J. Daley (who was Chicago); helped paint Daley as a completely evil person, with no redeeming qualities; and launched several successful initiatives aimed at the man, including the famous “leak in” threat at O’Hare Airport.

Fast forward.

I’ve been watching and wondering about those folks who honestly see Barack Obama as their “enemy”. I watched them organize his overthrow from the day he won the election—my main Kentucky peep Mitch O’Connell made the mission clear.  I watched “outside agitators” (the tea party and a horse-show-parade of presidential candidates) brought in. They systematically painted Obama as having no redeeming qualities, gave him no credit for anything “good” that has transpired during “his watch”, and gave him all the credit for everything “bad”, including gas prices. He was labeled as being an illegitimate president because he was not born in the U.S. He has been called a Muslim, Marxist, Socialist, Radical, and one of the biggest threats to the United States. He has been accused of espousing “phony theology”. He has been branded by Billy Graham’s boy as not being a real Christian.

Now each of these labels and charges can be refuted, and has been, just as charges against Daly were refuted. But people who see him as the enemy and the oppressor continue to sincerely believe these charges and labels that have been created by the outside agitators.The outside agitators have been successful.

But that is not my point.

My point is that those folks who rail against that radical Alinsky (as part of their anti-Obama paint job) are using Alinsky’s playbook to organize their forces against their oppressor, Barack Obama.

I have to smile as I light up a cigar and take a sip of sour mash. Human beings are fun to watch, are we not?

I also have to believe that somewhere in intellectual heaven William F. Buckley is smiling that smile of his that became so iconic. This is smile-provoking stuff.

Wondering About Novelists

I read L. Ron Hubbard novels as a teenager, and was pre-audited once, while depressed in Boston, but have been neither audited nor cleared by the Church of Scientology. I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in the early 1960s, and have engaged in heated arguments about value beyond their quality as novels for almost 50 years.

I’ve been wondering about these two novelists for a long time.

As I grew up in Kentucky in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, my family did not think much about novelists (although my sister’s middle name, Zane, came from a western novelist’s first name). They certainly did not say to me, “Jimmy, why don’t you grow up to be a novelist.”

Here are two examples of why Jimmy might want to consider becoming a novelist.

Example One: A major new religion, Scientology, was created in 20^th Century New Jersey by a novelist.

Novelist L Ron Hubbard CREATED A NEW RELIGION that has attracted thousands of followers from around the world. Think about that. In my lifetime, while Billy Graham, Joel Osteen, and other preachers preach about religions that were established thousands of years ago, this novelist created a new one.

Hubbard wrote science fiction novels (Battlefield Earth and Final Blackout being two of them) that sold well. Springing from those novels came self-help books, including Dianetics, a manifesto/prescription of sorts. From that scrip came Scientology, which is, I believe, the only religion invented in the late 20^th Century by a novelist.

John Travolta and Tom Cruise are just two beneficiaries of this new religion.

Example Two: A major new personal/philosophy, Objectivism, was created in my lifetime by a novelist.

Novelist Ayn Rand CREATED A NEW SCHOOL OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. While other philosophers espoused philosophical tenets created thousands of years ago, related to epistemology or ethics, to students in academic institutions, Rand created a new philosophy related to the value of selfishness, preached in social and political marketplaces from the political pulpits of neo-conservatives and libertarians.

Rand wrote two major novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. From these novels, with the help of her lover Nat Branden, she created a new school of philosophy, Objectivism, which has thousands of followers around the world.

Barry Goldwater, Karl Rove, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and the tea party are some of the beneficiaries of this new philosophy.

So, the next time your kid asks you about possible jobs as miners, teachers, doctors, lawyers, factory workers, athletes, and the like, I wonder if you’ll say:

“Honey, why don’t you choose an exciting and rewarding career? Become a novelist so that you can create a new religion or political party. Money, power, fame, and self-fulfillment will surely follow.”

Or maybe you’ll tell your honey that you are about to start that novel you’ve been meaning to write?

Anger

I wonder why there is so much gut-wrenching anger spewing forth from religious people. Radio talk show hosts who espouse religious views, and many major religious leaders these days are filled with hate and vitriol. Why? It seems to me if I truly believe that I am among the saved, the blessed, the righteous, I would have no reason to be angry at gays, Muslims, Baptists, Papists, the Lakers, Nancy Pelosi, the NRA, heathens, infidels, or anyone else.

Seriously, why the anger?

If I truly believe that I am among the saved, the blessed, the righteous, why would I have reason to be afraid of things of the world?

I remember reading Marshall Frady's biography of Billy Graham years ago. The one section that stuck in my mind is the one dealing with a minister in the hills outside Nashville. The man drank a bit, smoked a bit, drove a beat up truck, and lived in a very modest home that he made available to anyone who stopped to talk. KKK or Black Muslim, Baptist or Quaker, atheist or deist--it did not matter. This man did not seem fearful or angry. This man opened his home. I wonder why?

I am an angry man. Haven't always been so. Don't like it. But I am. I am not a religious man.

Wonder why I'm not religious and angry?

Most religious folks I run into these days, on the streets, on TV, on Facebook are as angry as I am, or so it seems. I wonder why they are religious and angry?

And the number of guns held, and bragged about, by religious folks in their homes speaks to mass fear. I wonder why?

I wonder what it takes to get rid of the fear and anger. Are these natural states of human beings? Why would religion not help?

It hasn't.

Introduction

I grew up in KY, left when I was 21, and have not lived there since. Like most old people (turn 68 in September), I do have deep and positive feelings about where I grew up. My father was a coal miner and my mother and sister worked in factories. How much have I changed since leaving KY? I wonder about that. Are my values still in any way connected with the values of most folks living in KY today? I wonder about that. I wonder about the future, wonder about the past, and wonder about right now.

I have created this blog to provide a venue to talk about these things I wonder about, things that may be more personal, or more focused, or more in depth, or more controversial than something on FB. Politics, religion, books, movies, drugs, rock and roll--they are all fair game.

This is a new thing for this old man and I'm hoping it will stimulate my thought and educate me just a bit.

If anyone's out there, feel free to respond, and to post your own wondering, or wonderment.