Because the Cotton Mather in me still believes that there’s a time for public humiliation, and chica here has richly earned it.

Her name is Ashley Todd. She claims mental illness made her do it. This should be an interesting trial.

Now I understand what I initially thought was a really lame Samantha Bee skit on “The Daily Show” the other night, where she was playing an economy reporter and came on-camera with a black eye and a G (for Greenspan, of course), etched on her face with magic marker.

All of this head-exploding stupidity is making me really, really want to eat a hamburger, ya’ll.

I replied to Benjamin that it depends how broad a scope of history one has. As a serious amateur scholar of the American Puritan era and of medieval Europe, my frame of reference here is different than that of the typical American. Many Americans do not even know that hundreds of thousands of women were accused of being witches between 1450-1750 by not only the Catholic Inquisition, but by the secular (Reformation) courts. In fact, the vast majority of the tens of thousands of subsequent burnings at the stake happened in the Germanic region where the torture was presided over by Reformed authorities. Not so reformed, eh?

Compared to the European witch craze, the hangings of 19 supposed witches in Salem, MA in the late 17th century (and the pressing to death of the infamous Giles Corey), was a blip on the map. But it was a “blip” that left lasting trauma to generations of New Englanders, and its lessons of neighbor-against-neighbor hatred and hysteria should not be forgotten.

I believe that hanging anyone in effigy is a hate crime. It is not a legitimate expression of freedom of speech: how is it speech in the first place? It is not art, it is not comedy, it is not an appropriate Halloween display — a holiday whose origins honor the spirits of the dead, and do not make ghoulish, violent threats against the living.

I would love to see Barack Obama and Sarah Palin join forces on this and sue the pants off the perpetrators of this outrageous, inflammatory stupidity. The entire nation should support them. Oh man, in my dreams! But really, from a community perspective, do you want to have to walk by a recognizable swinging corpse in someone’s yard? Do you want to have to walk your children past it and have it haunt their dreams and destroy their sense of neighborhood? Is there not something disturbing, distressing and more than a bit ominous about such a display — a silently threatening message of some kind being communicated?

Some things are not okay. Admittedly, I believe that Sarah Palin is a dangerously credulous fear-monger and absolutely unfit for any high office. I loved John Stewart’s recent lampooning of her and McCain’s positions during his recent “McCain and Palin: A Bridge To the 13th Century!” joke (actually, John, the 14th century would have made it even funnier, but that’s okay).
But I think that Mrs. Palin and I could agree that this interpretation of “freedom” stinks like a caribou carcass left out too long on a hot July weekend.

Read Jeff Jacoby’s article here, and keep reading until you reach the comments, where one writer says that the UUs were there, and names us “moonbats who are off the map.”

I hope to God the commenter is wrong. I sure as hell hope so. I don’t mean being called an off-the-map moonbat (that’s a great line, actually), but I do mind — very much — the idea of extending hospitality to the Iranian president, which is not to be confused with Barack Obama’s support of holding talks with him.

[Well, I guess we are moonbats who are off the map.]

Okay, I’m back to write more about why this appalls me. First and foremost, it is so monumentally naive as to be deeply humiliating. Look at what President Bill Sinkford said,

“Our governments and our cultures are very different. Given those basic differences, I would like to hear from you how the U.S. and Iran can best work together to find non-violent resolutions to our differences.”

Our governments and our cultures are VERY DIFFERENT?? Staggering understatement. Must we list the examples here, starting with the basic issue of religious freedom!!? I won’t bother. Iran’s record under Ahmadinejad is public and clear. He is dangerous. He is an ideological enemy. He wants to obliterate Israel. He has nuclear ambitions. He has been protested at the UNITED NATIONS, for God’s sake.

The starry-eyed, puffed-up spiritual ego of this meeting staggers me. Does this little group of Peace and Reconciliation representatives actually think that they can accomplish something with Ahmadinejad? What, exactly? That he’ll go home and say, “Gee, I had such a nice time with those peacenik Americans who fed me a nice dinner, I think I’ll change my foreign policy. I think I’ll reconsider my desire to acquire nuclear weapons, and now that I think of it, maybe Israel should be allowed to exist? And I think I’ll retract my earlier outrageously hostile statements about the United States of America?”

What this group did was give Ahmadinejad a chance to dress up and play nice-nice World Leader at the very same moment our Secretary of State is condemning him for his hostilities toward Israel. That they chose to do so on the eve of the Jewish high holy days brings this debacle to an even lower level of insensitivity and hubris.

Also this: This man is a political leader, not a religious leader. WHY, when he is at direct odds with our political leadership– his colleagues, in essence — would this this Peace and Reconciliation group invite him to the table of fellowship? This smacks of power-playing and showmanship to me, like “Condoleeza Rice can’t handle this guy, but WE can! All he needed was to be fed and warmed up at our hearth, something the Bush Administration and those pessimists at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom just don’t understand.”

I wonder, did the Peace and Reconciliation organizers consult with Jewish leaders before they extended this invitation? I’m guessing not– although I have sent an e-mail to the Fellowship of Reconciliation asking them directly, and I can’t tell if there are Jewish participants in the World Fellowship of Religions for Peace — because it’s not nearly as sexy to pursue peace and reconciliation between yourself and your Jewish fellow citizens when you can step on their necks on the way to nabbing a real public relations coup.

From the UUA web site report of the meeting, I think President Bill Sinkford had one really good moment:

Reflecting on the meeting, Rev. Sinkford remarked, “Ahmadinejad presented an image of Iran as a peace-loving, progressive, ethical, sane member of the community of nations. One question I have is how the reality of life in Iran would match that image.”

This, however, was not a good moment, and exemplifies the kind of frustrated-with-the-big-boys showmanship to which I alluded earlier:
Rev. Sinkford remarked, “I could not imagine the current U.S. president taking the time to honor questions about his actions the way Ahmadinejad did today.”
Sure he would, on a foreign photo-op goodwill tour where he could evade questions and get away with it with an audience of people whose invitation to him was merely symbolic, and who don’t have to suffer under his regime. I don’t think that Ahmadinejad takes a whole lot of time to honor questions about his actions when he’s in Iran, if you know what I mean.

Related story on Democracy Now.
Bill Baar has a moving post here.
Chalice Chick isn’t happy, either.

So anyway, a couple of weeks ago I was standing in the church office on a Thursday night using the copier when some of my choir folk came in after rehearsal. I was so happy to see them after the summer months away from them, which may have contributed to the goofiness of what I did next. Someone mentioned Sarah Palin, asking me what I thought of her nomination, and I immediately piled my hair onto my head and said, “I LOVE her!” and we all laughed and you know what? That was not okay.

Part of the beauty and joy of being the minister of a church for six years and starting on your seventh is that you get very close to your congregants. You’ve shared so much life with them, many of you know each other very well, and joking is less dangerous than when you’re new. But I wish I hadn’t taken the easy, sloppy route when that question came to me. Yes, it was late, yes it was an informal setting, and yes, I don’t feel the need to Model Reverence all the time with my community (God love ‘em, they know I’m human and prefer that I be real with them). But what worries me is that I, or any other pastor, might be caught making a mockery of anyone, for any reason when we’re together. It’s one thing to make direct, pointedly negative comments about public leaders and to explain why. I think that’s fair. People know where you stand, they can disagree, and that’s that. When I’m standing around in casual conversation with folks I do not hesitate to make strongly critical remarks about leaders whose policies I find execrable, and I’ll not stop doing that. And of course I will continue to say exactly what I think on this blog, which is not associated in any way with my congregation.

But just mocking is not cool. It is not fitting behavior in a religious community. I am so glad that I didn’t go for such a thoughtless cheap shot while newcomers might have been around — but the fact remains that even on a hot summer night standing around with a few very close parishioners, I owed them better.

So what’s the moral of this little story? The moral is that I’m really grateful that only a few people saw me giggling with my parishioners that night, and I hope that when pastors talk about politics with their people this autumn (and I hope to God no one drags campaign speeches into the pulpit under the guise of “prophetic preaching” — it’s not, and it’s illegal), we’ll tend to our words and not speak unless we have something substantive to say. P.S. “She scares me” doesn’t count.

After his recent slamming around Jack McCormick in the dug-out, his antics in the outfield, and his unforgivable upstaging of Big Papi on what should have been Ortiz’s triumphant return to the game last night, this fan is OVER Manny. The team won’t be the same without him, but every time I see Johnny Damon at bat for the Yankees and think of the glorious season we won the World Series with him as one of our guys, I think, “Well, I got over Damon, I can get over Manny.”

For those of us who have a special life commitment to the concept of “team,” this really hurts. In my case, that hurt takes the form of acid burn in the stomach. I can only imagine what the other Sox, and the Sox brass, are feeling.

Manny was recently quoted as saying, “My biggest dream is not to hit 500 home runs or 600, or 700, my dream is for God to give me enough health to watch my kids grow up, have a beer with them, watch them graduate. That’s my Hall of Fame.” You know what, Manny? That’s really cool. It shows that you have your priorities straight. But you’re making many millions of dollars to play baseball. That’s your job. Whether or not you dream of entering the Hall of Fame shouldn’t prevent you from doing your job as best you can. That’s called integrity. And right now, I doubt that you have much of that.

He rode in like an angel and we drove around the Common a couple of times looking for metered parking. Just as I was on my third go-round and hoping Max wasn’t getting car-sick going in circles (he seemed perky and fine; I, however, was getting green around the gills), I SPOTTED A SPACE! I drove toward it, just about to turn on my indicator signal when a BMW crossed two lanes of Charles Avenue and screeched in front of me to cut me off and steal the space. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, it just isn’t done. You usually don’t see this sort of thing until Christmas time, honestly.

I thought maybe they didn’t see me. I said to myself, “Surely they didn’t mean to do that. Surely they’ll turn out to have some manners.” I rolled down my window and yelled, “HEY! You cut me off! That was my space!” I realized right away this was going to fall on deaf ears when I saw a Patagonia -clad guy with an incredibly self-conscious haircut and super fashionable spectacles get out of the car and look my way with a glance of utter disgust. Mr. Privilege incarnate. “You don’t cut someone off and steal their space!!” How lame. Why did I bother? Like he cared! Mr. Haircut responded with an original remark that begins with an “f” and ends with a “u.” I responded with some of my own original remarks (unkind but not quite that charming) and drove off to look for a space. It just wasn’t my day. I’m also of the belief that even if someone passes a departing car, if they put their blinker on first it’s only fair for me to back up and let them have the space. They were before me in line, is how I see it. Call me a sucker, but I usually have good parking karma so I stick with my little rules.

I’ve heard people complain about the obnoxiousness of BMW drivers all my life and one doesn’t like to harbor prejudices, but today was a banner day for validating that prejudice. To be fair, I never saw the driver. The passenger was bad enough. I imagined him saying, “Gun it, man. Cut that broad off.” I was going the speed limit, silly me, because I had a BEAGLE in my back seat!

I finally gave up on finding meter parking and parked in a garage for $11. Max refused to ride the elevator on the way out of the garage (but he did on the way back in!) but was otherwise a champ, sniffing his way through the concrete underground like Sherlock Holmes’ basset hound. We had an excellent experience at the festival, he met lots of doggies, and there was only one mishap when someone scared him from behind and he got himself wrapped around a pole and almost pulled down one exhibitor’s pavilion. (I am right now making a face that expresses my total agreement with anyone who is thinking, or was thinking at that moment, “Beagle people are the BMW people equivalent of the dog world.”) I promise that we were profusely helpful and apologetic and didn’t leave until we were sure everything was sturdily in place again.

It was a beautiful day! We walked over to the Boston Garden and sat on a bench by the duck boat pond. I chatted with a friendly couple and hummed along with two fiddlers who were playing a few feet away. “You are my sunshine, la da di da da…” I got up to put a dollar in the musicians’ violin case when I realized who they were. Mr. BMW and his Friendly Passenger, Mr. Haircut!! Oh, how rich!! I told the couple about our little encounter earlier in the day and we all roared with laughter. “I was going to give them a buck,” said the man, “but maybe I’ll go take one out!”

By God, the two of them: playing peaceful folk tunes in their Keene sandals, collecting dollars on a sunny day, having mere hours before endangered my and my dog’s lives with aggressive driving. The name of the duo is “First Time Out,” and I enjoyed the look of profound discomfort on Mr. Haircut’s face as I stepped up to read their sign and jot down their name. Big smile for both of them. The driver, of course, had no idea who I was. He probably thought I was taking down their name so they could play at my kid’s bar mitzvah or something.

I’ve been late to gigs before myself. I’ve been frantic for parking while trying to make stage manager’s call or a guest preaching engagement. I know the feeling. It stinks to spend $10 or even $20 on parking, and it stinks to get a parking ticket because you don’t have enough time on the meter, but it happens. What kills me is that these guys were just feet away from the ramp to the municipal parking ramp when they skidded across the road to cut me off. They were on their way to a gig and could have written off the $11 as a professional expense! Was it worth whiplash to save $11?

So my point, and I do have one, is to ask if any of you could design a little BEAGLE ON BOARD oval sticker in the style of “Baby on Board” or in the style of those location stickers (ACK for Nantucket, etc.). If I have the artwork I can order one from CafePress.com, and I’d like to put one on the car.

In my experience aggressive drivers don’t care if they imperil the lives of humans, but most people, deep down, have a soft spot for the dawgies. Maybe a BEAGLE ON BOARD sticker would have also reminded the teenaged girl driver who was tailgating me and everyone else as she zig-zagged madly down Route 3 southbound this afternoon to cool it.

Both of the animals are curled up sound asleep right now, grateful that Big Mommy Kitty Cat didn’t order them Cats/Dogs for Obama t-shirts from Cafe Press (yet).

I’ve been on Weight Watchers in December and have lost about 25 lbs. Nothing lately because of travel, laziness, love for fries, etc., but at least I haven’t gained (okay, I gained back 2 lbs.).

Meanwhile, SweetieBang stops drinking quite so much beer and cuts back on Coke and announces today that he’s lost 11 lbs.

*slap!*

I came very close to taking him to my WW meeting, announcing his loss and what he did to achieve it, and letting all the women there tear him apart with their bare hands like the Bacchae.

You’ll allow me a little rant, then, won’t you? I was, after all, the one who broke into applause at the first marvelous shot of Indiana Jones’ back. I was that excited to see him again.
But rant I shall, because in Lucas and Spielberg we have two of the great movie-making talents in the world, and for them to inflict such dreck on us is inexcusable. This film is a perfect example of what happens when you’re so rich, famous and well-respected in your field that no one will dare critique your ideas or your rough drafts. I imagine Spielberg’s pals viewing the first cuts and nervously backing their way out the door,

Oh, it’s great Steve, really great. I love the whole self-referential thing, it’s subtle and ironic. Harrison Ford looks great. Blanchett, great casting. Her, uh, hair is genius. It’s brilliant. And that scene with the waterfalls? That is SO the next big ride at Universal Studios. Gotta run, friend. Have an early shoot tomorrow.

No, Steve, it’s not great. The acting is atrocious, for one thing. It’s patently obvious that you never bothered to rehearse with your cast. But who has the time to rehearse when you’re overseeing a ridiculously bloated production and thinking up more racist stereotypes for all the brown-skinned extras to enact? I bet you just got your actors together to map out the action sequences and worked out all the character development over lunch at the commissary. It shows, Mr. Spielberg, it shows. Harrison Ford isn’t playing Indiana Jones, he’s stumbling around in a fedora trying to feel his way back into an archetype he hasn’t inhabited for twenty years. You could have helped him a bit there, dear — he seems angry and confused throughout the entire picture. And because of you Mr. Spielberg, Karen Allen, who was enjoying a richly deserved anonymity, will most definitely never work as a film actress again (not that she likely cares, but still… she should have been left with her dignity intact; an impossible thing now that she’s been forced through another entire action film in the hideous Marion Ravenwood Wig and made to shriek “Innnnndy” in exactly the same tone she used over twenty years ago when she charmed our pants off in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”). I want to meet the person responsible for that wig. I want to stare daggers into their eyes and simply ask WHY.

As for the brown-skinned extras, isn’t your penchant for characterizing indigenous peoples as the “ooga-booga primitives” getting tired? At least in the previous installments of the Indiana Jones series there was a non-white sidekick character who had a few brains in his head. Not so in this latest chapter: here, we’re all about White People Running and Ruining the World and the “native wisdom” comes from crystal skulled aliens who communicate by staring really hard at John Hurt, a fine British actor who manages to keep a straight face throughout this ludicrous role. I imagine him sharing the script around at a luncheon of British stage peers and saying, “Laugh all you want, you rotters, I’m making more money for this idiotic film than any of us could make playing King Lear for thirty years.” Carry on, John. We understand.
When all else fails your screenplay, plug in a distinguished old Shakespearean to redeem it. He’ll be able to deliver lines like, “Actually, they’re interdimensional,” without causing the audience to snicker uncontrollably.

Cate Blanchett is too good an actress to be this bad. She should have been sent to the Meryl Streep School of Dialect Mastery before stepping foot on the set; her Ukranian-Russian accent too often descends into something closer to Yiddish-Puerto Rican. She, too, appears unfocused and confused throughout the picture, wildly overplaying it in some scenes and obviously wandering about entirely undirected. Not fair for our marvelous Cate.

Shia LeBeouf, the lad who plays Indiana Jones’ greaser sidekick has been identified in the entertainment press as the new young hope for the franchise. Well, I can see why: he’s unattractive, unappealing and untalented. I cringed with embarrassment as he swung through the trees on vines a la Tarzan and straddled two jeeps in an overly-long shoot-em-up-in-the-jungle-scene that would have been cute at five or six seconds but became I-have-to-look-away-bad at forty seconds or so. He’s simply awful but has been named the new It Boy, so we’ll be seeing lots more of him — more’s the pity.

I won’t bore you with the plot details here but will say more about how sloppy, lazy and cheap this movie feels. One reviewer wrote that after the first action sequence (memorable to me mostly for Harrison Ford’s pronunciation of the word “nuclear” as “nuke-ular” — what, has he been taking diction classes from George Bush?), he felt as though he was being hit on the head with a lead pipe. I couldn’t agree more. The film isn’t paced, it’s slammed at you — one arduous action sequence after the next, sound and fury signifying nothing. And while Indiana Jones the archeologist once seemed to care about the treasures he was seeking, he now bashes about with a rock desecrating ancient graveyards and ripping open mummies with his switchblade. There’s no reverence in his discoveries anymore, just crass smash-and-grabs for a chance at the next clue or simply to further the plot. A perfect symbol for America in 2008, this new, wantonly destructive Indiana Jones. The screenplay provides a grabby double-agent played by Aussie Ray Winstone who’s supposed to be a villainous foil for Indy and his noble friends but that’s a smokescreen; when all is said and done, you realize that they’re all tomb raiding thugs.

As for the crystal skull of the title, prepare to stifle your derisive snorting. My God, I waited in line with my father for opening night of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in 1980-whatever and left the movie theater full of awe at the mysteries of the ark, as did my father (who was exactly as old as I am now when he saw that film). Back in the day, Indy was searching for the ark of the g–damned covenant!! From the Bible! And later he was looking for the Holy Grail! As SweetieBang pointed out, there was nowhere to go from there but down. And in the Crystal Skull (a prop that looks like a hunk of plastic filled with tin foil and is tossed around as though it weighs about as much as a whiffle ball), Indy and his creators have indeed gone down, right down the road to Schlocksville.

May I tell you how it all ends? I’m going to, so if you want to see the movie and be (not very) surprised, stop reading now.

The film ends with a WEDDING SCENE, of course — the wedding of Indiana Jones and his irrepressible lady love with the big toothy grin, Marion Ravenwood. At which point my jaw dropped and I groaned. Please tell me no. Please tell me that Marion Ravenwood, the woman who could run a tavern in Nepal and drink men twice her size under the table, smash Nazis over the head with perfect precision, escape from burning buildings and jump off of moving vehicles, and get pregnant before marriage in the 1940’s would need to wear a white gown to her second wedding as a middle-aged woman? Marion was WAY too much a free spirit for that! But this is a Boomer generational fantasy, of course. We can go out and have our big, cataclysmic adventure, blow up an entire Peruvian village and then go home and have a pretty, white wedding with all our friends. Because really, it’s all about saving the world from the bad guys and setting free the Cosmic Truth at whatever cost to the third-world folk, and restoring the fantasy nuclear, white, heterosexual family by the closing reel.

(”Were we going to rehearse this scene, or should I just get in there and slash at valuable ancient paper-mache artifacts with my knife?”)

We have played Inclusive Nice Guy for so long that when one of us dares to speak in tongues of fire in the true liberal prophetic way, we can neither protect or defend him.

And so he has been cast out by one of the only men who should have had the courage to say, “Yes, this is my church. It is a church of free thought and dissent, where we rage with as much passion against ignorance and injustice as the hellfire and brimstone preachers whose theology we utterly reject.”

The teaching moment is over, and it’s politics as usual.

[This just in: Thanks to commenters Philocrites and Melody who have tuned me into a part of the story I wasn’t aware of, which is Rev. Wright’s discrediting of Obama to the National Press Club. I’ll have to read about that and catch up. But I know that I’ll still be heartbroken when I’ve done that, just adding another layer of complexity to my emotions. - PB]

[Thank you all for your interesting comments. I find that I agree most of all with Rev. P’s assessment. After having read the entire transcript of the talk at the National Press Club, I do not consider his remarks a denunciation of Barack Obama, nor do I hear in him an out-of-control ego. After all, he never asked for all this attention to be focused on himself. That’s all I’ll say now, but to add this, too, which does not surprise me. - PB]