POETRY CONTEST: HOMILY OF THE FAMILY

Families are something shared by the high and the low. The richest and the poorest have a mother and a father.  But family is another form under frequent attack by the radical redefiners.  This contest is open until June 3rd.  Up to 40 lines.  The following poem is meant as a party starter.  Every contestant can vote for a winner, but it can't be for their own poem.  Voting will be on June 4th and end at 11:59 pm.


ADDAMS FAMILY




Uncle Fester blew a bulb,

and Thing came and went.

When the commercial came on

it sold us minty Pepsodent.



Lurch is what we were left in

while Wednesday played the tuba.

Gomez dug the tango,

Morticia was (?)  from Cuba.



What is a family? Love

joined with frustration, then

as it is now: Brady Bunch,

The Cosby Show, The Simpsons.



The Waltons, Batman fighting

for his dead dad, The Godfather

where Michael takes up

for his father and kills Sollozzo.



Later he orders a hit on Fredo.

Cassandra envisions her family’s death

While Paris sports with Helen.

Hector fights for Troy with Achilles.



Odysseus fought for Telemachus!

Aphrodite was against Hera,

Dionysos against Apollo,

Chaos vied against form



until, at last, form broke. Now

there’s Friends, Sex and the City,

Seinfeld, yet the nuclear family’s

still an order, like the church.



Can we go back to tin trash cans,

slate roofs, Dad mowing the yard,

Mom having a nervous breakdown

because macaroni is clogged in the sink?

ATTITUDES TOWARD CAPITALISM (AND LOVE) IN TIM BURTON'S DARK SHADOWS

I went to see Tim Burton's Dark Shadows at yesterday's matinee.  Color me purple with perplexity.

The film opens with a complaint.  Barnabas Collins' family has been shipped to Maine by the British crown to erect a shipping and fishing village. They do so admirably, but the scion (Barnabas) bangs a maid (who is quite lovely but apparently unloveable). Barnabas spurns the maid in favor of a well-born girl.  I'm feeling "under the weather" and can't remember the name of the maid (Angelique?).  But the well-born girl is Victoria.

The maid (angelique) is into the black arts and puts a spell on Victoria such that she sleepwalks to a heathy cliff's promontory and makes like a bird.  Ker-splat.  Barnabas is less than pleased, but when he confronts the maid, she shuts him in a coffin.

Two centuries later, Barnabas is discovered by construction workers putting in a sewer line, and they open the box. Barnabas comes out and drinks their blood.  The maid has turned Barnabas into a vampire so as to have repeated chances to earn his love over the centuries. Barnabas (played by Johnny Depp) goes to his Gothic mansion where a pile of misfits (led by Pfeiffer) is barely keeping the financial empire afloat while they deal with their inbred problems via a dysfunctional therapist (Helen Bonham Carter).  Within weeks, the cannery is going strong under Barnabas' renewed direction.  Barnabas has entreprenurial capacity.  His family was not aristocracy when they came from England, but this vampire (heh heh) is sucking the blood out of the ocean and feeding it to people across America. 

His rival is the witch (Angelique), who's still alive and is the CEO of a fish company in the same town, and is gobbling all the profits from Barnabas' company.  They make love, but she keeps ending up on top.  Barnabas doesn't see this in a good light. He dreams of the girl Victoria who has lept off a promontory centuries before.

Victoria (Vicky) knocks on his door and applies for a job as a nanny. She's a very thin blue-blooded girl.  She looks like she's 16 in some frames and like she's 30 in others.  She's ethereal.  But Barnabas also wants her for children. He says, "You have broad hips for child bearing."

She has it all, apparently.  She's ethereal, but made correctly.

I don't know what's the matter with the maid-witch.  She proposes to Barnabas that they team up.  Barnabas will have none of it. 

The attitude toward capitalism on the part of Tim Burton is that it's some kind of black magic.  And yet, Barnabas also has a work ethic.  And a certain fury, and an admirable drive.  The maid-witch firebombs his fish factory, which is a reference to union mafia activity, and their tendency toward sabotage, and toward monopoly.

Barnabas wins the capital war.  Ultimately, he also kills the witch (whose beauty is all on the surface), in an all-out furious (but very stupid and unnecessary battle) and gets the good girl, who exists through the centuries as a perpetually available type. Her only evolution is that she is no longer "Victoria." She now goes by "Vickie."

In a curious subplot (the film is set in 1972), Barnabas meets with a group of hippies in the Maine woods.  Their leader says that war is going to turn to peace.  One of the chicks says to Barnabas, all girls want is love man, not money.  (This infuriates Barnabas, and he destroys the group in a Dionysian fireball and sucks their blood -- as he is apparently all about war and money.)  There was something reminiscent of Manson in all this, but it wasn't spelled out.

So ultimately, after centuries, Barnabas gets together with Vickie, who turns Goth in the last scene. 

I got my hair cut after the film while waiting for my daughter to come out of dance.  I asked the woman cutting my hair if she had seen it. She had seen it three times.  "It keeps getting better," she said.  "You  later see how all the details fit.  The daughter was a weirwolf all along!"

The movie isn't good enough to see twice.  The firebombs lack passion, and the plot is out of a screenwriting for dummies book.  But the attitude toward capitalism is one that I recognize.  There is a growing sense that all great fortunes have come from black magic and are therefore illegitimate.  The UN (which itself exists on land the US gave to the world inside of the world capital of capitalism -- NYC -- has asked us to return Mt. Rushmore to the Indians -- as if all property that is owned by the US is illegitimate since it is based on violence -- or -- property is theft -- as Proudhon wrote).

The only way we can redeem ourselves is to turn Gothic.  Which means to have an exquisite sensibility, and to live for love.  And yet, it means we will prey on others for their blood.  This is ok, because we are spiritual aristocrats.  Because we are aristocrats, we are entitled to treat the workers as our livestock.  So in a sense the world of the film comes full circle.  Those who were originally put down as mere working class people centuries ago, are now the new aristocrats.

We shouldn't have to make money, we should just make love.

The film annoyed me immensely, as does the mentality behind it.

MARRIAGE, MORE THOUGHTS ON

I am sick of the way marriage in general is treated in America. You have the strangest items: Anna Nicole Smith marries a billionaire 63 years her senior. Britney Spears marries someone in a drive-thru, and gets divorced in the morning. Michael Jackson marries Presley's daughter, even though he's really interested in little kids. Fatherless families are rampant. Many kids don't even know who their father is. People give each other lethal sexual diseases. Marriage is the cornerstone of society in the Christian framework.

But today people want the benefits of marriage without duties. Or they just expect the state to pick up the expense.

Massive social decay attends this. I want to propose ten new rules for marriage.

1. There should be a 30-year maximum age difference between parties.

2. A divorce should cost $500,000 per child, paid directly to the government (or 10% of salary for life). Adopted children count at the same price.

3. Before marriage, both parties should be checked for diseases. Only those completely clear of lethal diseases should be permitted to marry. Anyone who then gets or passes a lethal disease to the partner should pay 10 million dollars to the government.

4. Fathering or mothering a child outside of marriage should result in payment of one million dollars to the government.

5. Limit of two marriages per person per life except in cases of natural death.

6. All current laws regarding incest, etc., should be maintained. Gays should be able to marry, too. Only one partner at a time.

7. Divorce should cost 1 million dollars.

8. If you're superrich and want to continually jettison partners, it's ok. You can have a third marriage for ten million. A fourth marriage for one hundred million. After that, it's one billion dollars per marriage.

Philosophy: marriage is a social investment. People who marry without really thinking it through are costing our society billions. Children without fathers are more likely to end up in prison. Children whose parents have split up are miserable, and often end up in orphanages. People who abandon their children and leave them as wards of the state are costing us billions. People who pass on lethal diseases without even telling their partner are committing the equivalent of murder.

There should be penalties.

That said, I can't think of two other penalties I'd like to impose, even though I set out to put down ten. Any ideas?

GEORGE CLOONEY LOVES OBAMA (WHO'S FOR GAY MARRIAGE!)

In 2009, Obama thought his budget plans would cut the deficit in half within four years.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/mar/25/barack-obama/obama-promises-cut-deficit-half-four-years/

Ok, he still has another year, but this year there's no budget. Congress said some bipartisan committee would figure out what to cut. They couldn't figure it out, and threw up their hands. We're supposed to add a trillion dollars of debt this year at the minimum. That's now all President Obama is budgeting for. He just wants to add a trillion dollars a year to the deficit. It doesn't sound like much.

Obama's for gay marriage. That earned him 15 cool million in one night at George Clooney's Hollywood pad. It sounds like a big thing. Wow, he's for gay marriage. He said that he read about it in the Bible, and so he's for it.

China owns about a fourth of our debt. About a fourth is owned by Japan. Another big owner is Taiwan. Our status as a creditor nation declined from triple A to double A under Obama.

But he's for gay marriage. We should all be really impressed. Obama's for gay marriage. This earned him 15 million dollars in one night at Hollywood George Clooney's. He's not really going to DO anything about it, because he believes it should be left up to the states (39 of which have banned it).

He's not paying the Secret Service much though since they won't pay the agreed upon price for prostitutes in Colombia (200 dollars a pop). Obama won't let his Secret Service men have prostitutes unless they at least pay the agreed price (they wanted to pay 40). Isn't there something in the Bible about paying prostitutes the agreed upon price? Why won't the US government pay the whores of Colombia to sleep with our Secret Service men?

Gas prices are doubled from when the Big O took office. The debt soars. Our credit rating sinks. The Secret Service doesn't care any longer about Obama. They just want to focus on not paying their prostitutes the agreed upon price. Oh, ugly Americans!

I try not to pay too much attention to Obama. Instead of paying attention to Obama and his slippery selves: I attempted to take advantage of global warming and plant tomato plants now, so that in early June, I would have tomatoes while everybody else was just planting seeds. Everybody is talking about global warming! So I would plant a little earlier, because if it's in the papers it must be true! The little yellow flowers popped up and I was rubbing my hands. Then, four days ago, there was a frost. My plants keeled over and died.

So, now, I'm paying attention to Obama and watching his failures again. He has high approval ratings, but they're not as high as they were. Some polls (Rasmussen) has Romney ahead. Obama said he would cut poverty in half. He said he would cut the deficit in half. He says he's for gay marriage but read the fine print. He's also said that these issues should be left up to the states. North Carolina just passed a law against gay marriage, to make it the 39th state with a law against gay marriage. Supposedly Obama is letting the states decide. They can decide that issue but not other issues.

Take Arizona. They're not allowed to have a law that disallows illegals. That's a federal responsibility, like setting the national budget, which Obama is also working on day and night.

A new story pops up: Obama paid Reverend Wright 150,000 dollars to stay quiet. Shades of Edwards. Whose money was this? Is it illegal? Watch how carefully the MSM buries the story. Meanwhile, Romney bullied some guy in 9th grade. Front page news.

BIBLE PRIMER

It's time to order textbooks for my fall classes. I have three of the classes covered (comp and intro to philosophy). Intro to Bible, however, could use a different text. I use the King James Version of the Bible. I need, in addition, a textbook that covers the OT and the NT, or significant parts of it. I have several criteria. I want it to be readable, somewhat controversial so we can have conversations, and relatively brief. I want, among other things, to have a lively introduction to some of the contemporary problems surrounding abortion, gay marriage, and other issue on which the Bible is somewhat countercultural (Bam is now 100% pro-gay-marriage, while Romney is in the one man and one woman camp). It should be no more than 200 pages of lively readable prose. It doesn't have to be thorough. This is just an INTRO class, and more than half of the students in the class will be nonbelievers, and some will be thorough-going atheists, while others will be fervent believers. Any ideas for what text I should use? The one I used in the fall was terrible. We just stopped reading it because it was so dumb. I'd rather use nothing than something dumb.

DRESSING UP AND DRESSING DOWN

It used to be that men wore ties and women wore dresses.  This happened in colleges as well as banks.  Few people do this any longer.  I myself prefer jeans and a clean dress shirt with an open neck.  I have worn a tie on two occasions: the job interview during which I landed my current job, and during my wedding. 

In 1958, William F. Buckley lamented the dissolution of dress standards at Ivy League Schools.  By the time I went to college in 1975, everyone wore jeans and t-shirts.  

Buckley writes, "Does not insistence on a minimal standard of dress reflect a decent respect for the opinions of mankind?  ...I doubt furthermore that there is a Princeton undergraduate who would presume to call on Jack Kerouac without coat and tie.  ...Coat and tie is merely a symbol.  It could be courtesy; deference; reverence; humility; moderation: and are these not, all, the proper concern of a college administration?"  (Athwart History, a Buckley Omnibus, 390-391).

I wonder about dress codes. NY state has adopted a law that says that where men can go shirtless women can too.  Presumably this means if a man can mow his yard without a shirt, so can a woman.  Egalitarian? 

In my classes I from time to time have a student show up with their pants actually down around their knees and their only modesty is a relatively clean pair of underwear.  This is the prison style of dress gleaned from inmates given state distributed clothes with which they were forbidden to wear a belt.

It's difficult not to laugh in these instances. I suppose our profs laughed at our t-shirts and found it hard to take us seriously when we wore bluejeans. Perhaps I should wear a tie from time to time. Perhaps even a monocle. What ho!