Seems like a thousand years to go

Seems like a thousand years to go April 28, 2016

• A pair of Raw Story posts yesterday have me thinking of Bad Jackie — for two different reasons. “Deeply unlucky man gets bitten on penis by venomous spider” and “On Tim Robbins, election fraud and how nonsense spreads around the Internet.”

• “… but the studious avoidance of the insanity we’d all just witnessed was like churchgoers at coffee hour discussing the homily without mentioning that the priest delivered it buck naked.”

The rest of Paul Glastris’ post is worthwhile too — although I’m less interested in the particular complaint about MSNBC’s coverage than about the larger dynamic of what they’re not covering, what he describes as “the ocean-wide difference between how the two front-runners behaved in this crucial moment, how one of them is clearly a frightening lunatic, and what that means for the country.”

Mostly, though, I just really liked that church coffee-hour analogy.

• Culture warrior Larry Tomczak of Liberty Counsel is freaking out about Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album. He calls it “an outrage” and “idolatry.”

Pretty safe to assume, then, that Tomczak must be cheating on his wife. (That’s the likeliest and most charitable explanation. It could also be, of course, that Tomczak is just a big honkin’ racist just for some reason can’t fathom a self-confident black woman.)

WhenLifeGivesU
You don’t have to love it, but if you’re a married man who’s freaking out condemning “Lemonade” then, yeah, we’re all going to assume you’re cheating on your wife.

• Been reading about Steven Chase Brigham for years as pro-choice activists, feminist journalists and women’s groups have called for this irresponsible and predatory abortion provider to be shut down. Still kind of shocked that anti-abortion groups haven’t yet latched onto this guy the way they did with Gosnell a year or so after pro-choice groups, feminists, and the cops first went after him.

Eventually, that will happen. Anti-abortion groups will discover Brigham and try to paint him as a representative of all of the people who’ve been trying to shut him down for years. Then they’ll indignantly demand to know why no one has ever mentioned him before they broke the news to the world. Lather, rinse, repeat.

John Turner goes way back to provide some historical context for Mississippi’s new law allowing churches to hire armed guards for their services. Turner traces the history back to the Security Act of 1739 in Carolina, a law that required all the white men of the colony to carry guns to and into church on Sundays. This was due to fear of slave revolts. This was followed by another law forbidding slaves from growing their own food, gathering in groups, and learning to read.

I’m not sure what that history suggests about Mississippi’s new program to arm its churches, but it’s another reminder that white enslavers always knew it was reasonable to fear that slaves would want to revolt, which is to say that white enslavers always knew that slavery was odious and unjust for the slaves, which is to say that white enslavers always knew — without any real doubt — that slavery was evil. They knew that it was perfectly reasonable, predictable, and even justifiable to expect slaves to want to escape or to seek to overthrow their tormentors. They knew.

• I didn’t run into Booman at our local polling place Tuesday here in Chester County, but he’s got a good round-up of election results and implications from the Pennsylvania primary.

I waited in line with a Republican neighbor who was voting for Kasich with the strained desperation of someone who really isn’t sure what he’ll do come November when that’s no longer an option. I get the sense there are quite a few long-term Republicans in that situation. Some, alas, will likely gradually make peace with the Trumpification of their party and will allow themselves to be Trumpified accordingly. But I hope many others resist that.

Meanwhile, up in Luzerne County, Pennsyltucky, a longtime racist skinhead won re-election for a Republican county committee seat. Unlike my neighbor, that guy knows exactly who he’s voting for in November.

• Every once in a while I try to remind everyone that this world would be a better place if more people were introduced to the transcendent pure pop of late-20th-century Chicago trio Green. Here’s the Kinks-meet-the-Beach-Boys masterpiece you hadn’t realized you were looking for: “I Know, I Know.” (Yeah, this is from 1987 — from 29 years ago — but so what? If you’ve never heard it before, it’s still brand new for you.)

 


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