Passing Through By Leaps of Faith

Passing Through
For the last five months, I have had the privilege of living in a colonial village in the highlands of central Mexico. Deferring the astronomical cost of heating oil for my home in Maine, made possible this journey south of the border. It has become far more than escaping the wrath of an elongated snow event, but an unexpected reevaluation of priorities and a much needed reaffirmation of life.

One of the things that I have loved about being in San Miguel de Allende is the often progressive, liberal attitudes of not only many expats but natives alike; the no holds barred honesty they imbue, particularly the locals, and the exuberant celebrations of both life and death – the enviable weeding out of false fronts and that of which is not necessarily important in order to focus on what is real – both joyous and painful.

I have found great pleasure in stumbling into small tiendas selling anything from paper products to piñata candy to fly swatters that also
have makeshift tables sporting “Pinche Bush” buttons and pins. “Impeach
Bush?” I would ask, incredulously. “Si!” they’d respond as if I had asked if an armadillo sh*ts in the desert.

The Friday before Easter was the annual Judas Burnings in the Centro jardin. Hundreds showed up and we were treated to life-sized effigies of some of the most despised persons on earth, strung up and systematically blown up with firecrackers and mini bombs scattering papier mache body parts across the ancient cobbled streets. Needless to say, the obliteration of the Bush and Cheney effigies got the loudest howls and applause of all the other traitors blown to smithereens. Somehow, in my gentle “reaffirmation of life” I found this rather endearing.

Politics aside, I have found that when I’ve let my defenses down, reluctantly back-seated my political frustrations and anger, I have opened myself up to life experiences however fleeting, that have had tremendous impact on my days and more than likely, my future as well. When the sun sets, there are hopes and dreams and desires that secretly we carry to bed with us and that have absolutely nothing to do with elections or misunderstood religions or geographical borders. Perhaps this is when personal survival mode kicks in, but whatever it is, it rounds us out, I think, balances the incongruities of life, and gives us a surprising glimpse into all that is being human. It does not mean we are uncaring or unaware. It means only that in order to fully process we have to be honest with ourselves.

In the jardin and on a few occasions, I ran into a tiny girl, all of nine or ten, working a dozen hours a day selling fabric dolls from a garbage bag. She was bright, alive and always smiling, but more so, cold and tired and hauling more than a trash bag of dolls, but the weight of the world. When she would see me she’d run toward, remember my name with a grin, asking for nothing other than the very miracle that I would remember her name and say it out loud. We gave Veronica loaves of cornbread, a warm sweater on a cold night, a bit of chocolate. She was a child. And then she disappeared.

Selfishly, it made things clearer. Sometimes the tragedies of others make our lives all the more transparent and our angst and scars, smaller and less tender.

The reaffirmation came again in the meeting and interaction with a young teen who had been taken from her family after her mother had doused her with lighter fluid and set on fire her face and chest. After multiple surgeries to her face, mouth and throat, this beautiful young woman offers nothing but smiles and hugs; she holds tight to her breast a stranger, even when I am unsure as to what she is clinging, but I do know that she is a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit – life itself – and somehow she knows that I love and admire her, and as good fortune would have it, she returns this gift to me. She’ll make it. Many do not.

Alongside these images of what is real and often painful, and at the same time as I learned of the suicide of one of my closest friends, entered an old friend from long ago who just happened to be living in this village with her family. This reconnection has only confirmed that hand in hand with our darkest hours of questioning, comes these unexpected gifts of light that remind us that we are not walking this path alone – there are others who want to join us on the journey.

The older I get I realize that living this life is nothing more than a series of leaps of faith. And while I am more skeptical to make these leaps, I continue to jump, and though some of the connections with old friends and new, as well as strangers, are frightening because we expose our vulnerable selves in ways that open us to being hurt all over again, in the long run I have found, and here in Mexico, these confirmations of life whether lasting or fleeting, with small hands gently shape us into being more accepting, alive and hopefully, grateful for all of those who pass through.

For Purple Leaf, peace,

Jan Baumgartner
Managing Editor, OpEdNews

When Religion Sleeps with Politics

Gr33ndata, Global Voices

Egyptian blogger Zeinobia attacks Pope Shenouda III in one of her recent posts here, for his Easter speech this year.

Still I feel so sad and angry from what the Pope Shounda said and did this Easter from praying for Mubarak to have longer life !! and warning his people from listening to those vandals over the Internet who will be sent to hell !!??

She continues:

For the Muslims this is something usual ,I know from long time that the speeches of the Emam in the Mosque in our neighbourhood are approved by the security , so I do not care much for what they said , not to mention that the religious men in Islam do not have this holy status of the religious men in Christianity.
But for someone like Pope Shounda in his position comes and says these nonsense about those facebookers who will be roasted in hell , then we need a stand here.

She ends her post with:

There is no excuse for the Pope or the for Sheikh of Al-Azhar in fact I will dare and say that they should fear the Lord not the President

Cyberactivism, blogging and the use of Facebook has recently come under the scrutiny of Egyptian officials, following claims that a nation-wide strike on April 6, which culminated with the Mahalla workers revolt. Several bloggers as well as the founder of a Facebook group named April 6 were among hundreds of activists, politicians and passer-bys detained by the authorities on the day and the days which followed. That said, the fact remains that it wasn't the Facebook group which has led to the strike and workers calling for higher wages and better salaries to meet increasing living expenses.

Can Stephen Colbert Save America?

By Louis Bayard, Salon.com

Asking an academic to explain humor to you is like getting Kenneth Starr to explain the sex act: The explainer has already waged war on the thing being explained. And so anyone looking for yuks in Russell L. Peterson's "Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke" will have to get past the following hurdles: extensive endnotes; a killjoy thesis, relentlessly iterated; and, most deathly of all, repeated references to Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson.

The funny bone, in most cases, is no match for the pointy head. Peterson's head, though, is something a good deal more: zesty and contentious and sophisticated -- and capable even of coughing up a good line or two on its own. An American studies professor at the University of Iowa, Peterson is a former stand-up comic and political cartoonist who wants to know how we're changed by the act of laughing. Not just any laughing, either, but the kind that happens late in the evening, when the Lenos and Lettermans and Stewarts and Colberts are making merry with the day's carnage.

The combined ratings of all their programs may be less than Johnny Carson in his heyday, but late-night TV matters now as never before. For all its parodic inflections, it has become one of the main news sources for Americans, particularly young Americans, and politicians of every stripe happily perch themselves in whatever dunking booth they can find for the chance of an uninterrupted 10 minutes with the 18-to-29 demographic.

Four years ago, John Kerry was so eager to ride his Harley onto "The Tonight Show" stage that he agreed to follow Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Arnold Schwarzenegger used the same forum to launch his 2003 gubernatorial bid. John McCain announced his most recent candidacy on "Letterman," and with every change of season comes Hillary Clinton, brandishing a new Top 10 list. These appearances tend to follow the same arc of humiliation. Candidate takes good-natured ribbing from host; host claps candidate on shoulder, ushers him or her offstage ... and then carries on joking about candidate as if person had never been there. Ain't America great?

Well, on that last question, Peterson is suggestively mum, but he's quite voluble on another subject: the jokes themselves. "In spite of the fact that comedy about politics is now as common as crabgrass, political comedy -- that is, genuine satire, which uses comedic means to advance a serious critique -- is so rare we might be tempted to conclude it is extinct."

Go ahead. Think back on the monologue you heard the other night on TV. Chances are good that, whether it was delivered by Jay or Dave or Conan O'Brien, it was nothing more than a theme-and-variations spin on the same old equations: Bush = dumb; Clinton = cold; McCain = old. Oh, boy, is he old! His Secret Service name is "Enlarged Prostate," and the two State Department employees who were looking into Barack Obama's passport file were also inspecting McCain's Civil War records, and John McCain is so old he remembers when Iraq was called Mesopotamia, and hey, have we cracked a Monica Lewinsky joke lately? No?

"Topical comedians," says Peterson, "keep finding new ways to tell us what we already 'know' about politicians." And because they harp so remorselessly on candidates' individual quirks -- ignoring the hard, complex, often maddening substance of policy -- they declare, in effect, that every choice is equally bad and that the system itself is "an irredeemable sham." "Election after election," Peterson writes, "night after night, joke after joke, they have reinforced the notion that political participation is pointless, parties and candidates are interchangeable, and democracy is futile."

There are good and sound economic reasons for this, of course. Someone as focused on numbers as Jay Leno is not about to sacrifice half his viewers for the sake of bringing down George W. Bush's immigration policy. Johnny Carson never even mentioned the Vietnam War. True satire can take root only in the exurbs of cable, where comic pioneers smoke out the vipers in democracy's den. Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert -- in Peterson's cosmology, these are the true heroes of late-night, because they ground even their harshest commentary in "a faith in the political process." And on that score, nobody has ascended higher than the "Lincolnish" Colbert, whose Gettysburg Address coincided with the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association dinner, a normally inane and self-congratulatory affair prodded into fretful life by Colbert's assault. Afterward, the dragoons of the press corps (Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, Richard Cohen) fell over themselves declaring that Colbert had bombed. In fact, he'd been throwing bombs. Right into their laps.

"Here's how it works," Colbert explained. "The president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home ... Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction!"

Colbert's address perfectly meets Peterson's criteria for genuine satire: It causes its targets either to take umbrage or to "adopt a studied silence." Pseudo satire, by contrast, is often embraced and even co-opted by its purported victims. Think of Bush père inviting Dana Carvey to the White House, Janet Reno bopping around with Will Ferrell, Al Gore competing with David Letterman to tell the best Al Gore joke. The lampooned pol can safely join in the bloodletting because no blood is actually being let. "Real satire," growls Peterson, "means it."

So, under all this funny and not-so-funny business, a decidedly moral argument is being advanced. And yet I would argue that personality and aesthetics enter into it, too. Dennis Miller meets at least some of the criteria of true satire: real, albeit retrograde, convictions declaimed without fear of offending. Peterson slams him for being too beholden to GOP talking points, but it really boils down to this: He doesn't like the guy. "Like Holden Caulfield, [Miller] is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is too full of himself to notice."

No one, though, comes in for quite as much scorn as the glad-handing Leno: "more of a salesman than an artiste ... less like a political joker than a politician in his own right ... willing to stoop to almost anything." If you've ever wondered why Leno's production company is called Big Dog, Peterson says, just watch him bounding onstage every night. "If he had a tail, it would be wagging."

This is spot on, and part of the fun of "Strange Bedfellows" is matching up your own likes and dislikes with the author's. For my part, I think he undervalues Conan O'Brien, and I'm not sure why he feels the need to pound on performers like Sasha Baron Cohen, who have only a tenuous relation to the late-night world. Shock comedy, in general, brings out a latent strain of sniffiness in Peterson. Sarah Silverman, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, "Family Guy," even "Married ... With Children" are all lumped into the same unsavory stew of poo-poo jokes and mindless iconoclasm. "A society that has no taboos left offers nothing for humor to challenge," thunders Peterson. "If nothing is sacred, nothing is at stake." I would guess Lenny Bruce, back in his day, was whacked with that same dead fish.

As the late-night landscape continues to evolve, Peterson may well have cause to return to the subject, and if he does, I hope he'll explore the tension that lies at the heart of his thesis. By his own reckoning, the democratically chosen entertainments of the masses are also democracy's enemy, and the only ones who can save us from ourselves are a small and brainy elite that in fact looks less and less like modern America. It's a strange irony that late-night comedy, at least since Dave Chappelle's abdication, has become one of the most lily-white enclaves in TV. Are we still looking to white men to save the day? Is the rest of America, in Peterson's estimation, just too dumb to be trusted with democracy?