A Pilgrim’s Digression

http://www.philly.com/mld…ly/10299287.htm

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled Reporter quits at WHYY Over Message details what ought to be a “learning moment” for all of us liberals.

If you call a Republican to leave a hate-filled message on his voice-mail, don’t do it from work. And if you do it from work, don’t leave your name and work phone number.
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So this woman calls into the Neal Boortz program. She sounds like an elderly southern woman, and a little later she at least proves the assumption of southern heritage correct. Neal Boortz was on the subject of Wal-Mart today. His criticisms of the retail chain are that it owns millions of dollars in inventory purchased from China, and that it has no respect for private property rights.

The woman who called in wanted to defend Wal-Mart from a Christian perspective, so her argument went like this:

First, she made a point of explaining that she was a North Arkansas Presbyterian. I don’t know why she felt that was important. Maybe those South Arkansas Presbyters are a bunch of damned idolaters. Who knows.

The entire gist of her argument was that Sam Walton was a Presbyterian as well, and that makes Wal-Mart the only Christian corporation in the United States.

So there you go. The answer to the most pressing question in the Universe: Where would Christ shop?

Let’s see now … China is an atheistic, communist nation with little regard for human rights. That’s OK. Sam Walton was a Presbyterian. That makes us justified in God’s eyes when we buy from Wal-Mart.

http://www.sonnets.org/shelley.htm#300

Mike S. Adams is a professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. This morning, I read a column of his titled Georgia On My Mind and felt compelled to respond. Adams writes about academia from a Conservative perspective, and his articles have often pissed me off in the past, but I have never felt compelled to write him and express myself. Today, I decided to write him, for all the good it will do. I look at it now and it seems rather rambling, but maybe I adequately defended my point of view. Read the article first, then read my response below. (more…)

I’ll do a short fact check today based on Neal Boortz’s blog. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, there was an all-too-convenient story in the news about the Declaration of Independence being “banned” in a public school in California.
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Fair warning: I am going to ramble.

Wednesday, I threw away the cigarettes I bought on Sunday, having smoked maybe half the pack. I have not bought any since, and the urge has not been particularly strong. Maybe every couple years or so I need to smoke in order to keep from smoking.

I sound like Tom Waits and Iggy Pop from Coffee and Cigarettes. “We can smoke now that we’ve quit.”
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The turkey is now just sandwiches, the relatives are dispatched back to their homes and work, the Wal-Mart is cramped with cranky customers fighting over the $40.00 Gameboys and the dancing, singing Dora the Explorer dolls, and countless carcasses of dead deer hang lifeless in countless woodsheds all across Virginia and West Virginia. Thanksgiving is finished for another year.

For the first time, my wife’s family drove six hours to visit us for the holiday. Usually, we are the ones driving six hours to visit them; but I think we have now begun a new tradition. They enjoyed themselves, especially the part about not having to cook or clean the house, and so they promised to return every Thanksgiving for the foreseeable future.

As for my family, my Grandpa killed two bucks within the first hour of the first day of season last week. He went hunting on a friend’s property in Wirt County (near where Jessica Lynch was born and raised, if you’re interested). He shot an eight point soon after entering the woods. After dragging it out, he went back into the woods and shot a six point, too. His brother is unable to hunt this year because of a heart condition, and so Grandpa used his permit to kill the second buck.

Grandpa uses an old lever action .30-.30 Winchester (no scope) such as Chuck Connors used to use in one of my favorite western TV programs, The Rifleman. Grandpa’s rifle doesn’t have the Rifleman’s modification, though. Grandpa can’t fire just by working the lever.

As for me, this Thanksgiving I just ate a lot, and despite the fact that the verdict is still out on whether the tryptophan in turkey is really enough to induce drowsiness, from Thursday through last night, I fell asleep every night soon after dinner. There must be something in that turkey that can put in a man in a drooling coma minutes after eating.

Now that my week of “news celibacy” is nearly over, I must consider where to go from here in my writing on this blog. Do I keep it general, or do I shift to a more specific purpose, such as monitoring conservative talk radio. I am inclined towards the generalist point of view. It’s easier to write about a diverse range of topics, for one thing, but being jack of all trades also undercuts the effectiveness of any message. A site with a specific theme, purpose, or goal is better at garnering readers and attention to a cause.

To that end, I might be better off restarting my old blogger blog as my “media watch dog” website. Looking at all the categories covered by this blog, I fear that anything I have to say on the subject of conservative radio would be diluted by the number of words devoted to everything else that interests me.

So I have a lot to consider this week. I’ll probably write some on the news, as little as there is of it currently. And as always, I am going to be questioning what I believe, probing my understanding of events for holes and flaws. Unfortunately, I will never be a person who has “core beliefs” (the Republican catch-phrase of the day) which are immutable by time and circumstance. I’ve come to that conclusion after years of flip-flopping. I am who I am, and that’s all that I am, as some famous sailor once said.

In West Virginia, Thanksgiving is only partly about eating turkey until you pass out on the couch in a tryptophan-induced stupor. For most people, Thanksgiving is the first day of deer season. Even though the first day is actually at the beginning of the week, for working people Thanksgiving is often still the first day of deer season. In most parts of the state, schools close the entire week of Thanksgiving because of high absenteeism, not only among students but also among teachers. Same goes for Virginia. They don’t call it the Thanksgiving holiday; they call this week the deer season holiday.
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Interestingly, this shooting spree in Wisconsin is getting more press coverage than I would have expected. Slow news week, I guess.

A Laotian immigrant shot several deer hunters after a dispute over a tree stand the man was occupying. The Washington Post adds some interesting details to the story, some of which perhaps reflect the paper’s bias.
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Sinéad O’Connor?

I am listening to one of my long-time favorite albums on my iPod, O’Connor’s “Am I Not Your Girl?” It consists of covers of old songs made famous by other women singers, such as Billie Holiday, Loretta Lynn, Marilyn Monroe. I don’t even remember how I came by this album.
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Last night I dreamed that I was taking Brendan to explore the abandoned subway tunnels beneath New York City. We live in a fine home in the middle of an upscale New York neighborhood, but one day I take Brendan by the hand and we set off to see the underworld.

This is one facet of the dream.
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