Learn From It

First, yesterday, I read an unofficial transcript of when Ann Coulter was on the Phil Donahue show. It came to me by way of my sitemeter.com stats, where someone did a search on “coulter conservative crazy bitch” and found my page (score!). This is the exact searchpage. I went back and looked at the other results of that page and found the Phil Donahue transcript.

There was a bit of a disconnect with the contents of the transcript and the title of it. The title was Ann Coulter mops the floor with Phil Donahue. Now, knowing that Donahue has been around forever, and knowing he's rather headstrong, I wondered how she might have gotten the likes of him over a barrel.

Turns out, she didn't. Turns out, she screeches things like “I'm here to sell my book!” and “I'm not a namecaller, why are you?”, and that's all she has to offer. Go read it yourself. In the spirit of Al Franken and providing refutable references, it's linked above. And here, if you're too lazy to scroll up.

Then, last night, I got a private-spam from people who I grew up with, people who are like family to me. I get these kinds of things sometimes from my mom and from some others; usually they're pleasantly funny, but this one was a long, bitter “prayer” about the current state of “godlessness” in schools, and it was bitching about how you're no longer allowed to say “God”, even.

Imagine.

The first person to pass it off, starting this chain of pain, makes the demand that us godless types prove that the less that god is mentioned, the better the child's education. Specifically, he says: “OK, so tell me just one more time......we need to continue removing God from our schools because it has been proven that the less we mention God, the better our children's education has been?  Or is it because with God out of our schools, the children are safer?”

Well, those pesky universal negatives are a tough lot to prove. And by that I mean logically irrefutable, which makes them useless (see Ayn Rand).

Just for kicks, here's the body of the prayer:

Now I sit me down in school
Where praying is against the rule
For this great nation under God
Finds mention of Him very odd.
If Scripture now the class recites,
It violates the Bill of Rights.
And anytime my head I bow
Becomes a Federal matter now.

Our hair can be purple, orange or green,
That's no offense; it's a freedom scene.
The law is specific, the law is precise.
Prayers spoken aloud are a serious vice.

For praying in a public hall
Might offend someone with no faith at all.
In silence alone we must meditate,
God's name is prohibited by the state.

We're allowed to cuss and dress like freaks,
And pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks.
They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible.
To quote the Good Book makes me liable.

We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen,
And the 'unwed daddy,' our Senior King.
It's “inappropriate” to teach right from wrong,
We're taught that such “judgments” do not belong.

We can get our condoms and birth controls,
Study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles.
But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,
No word of God must reach this crowd.
It's scary here I must confess,
When chaos reigns the school's a mess.
So, Lord, this silent plea I make:
Should I be shot; My soul please take!
Amen

Ain't that a peach? So the judgy stuff in it includes: pregnant teens (and teen impregnators) shouldn't be allowed to wear tiaras; god loves guns but hates vampires, witches, Native Americans and “birth controls”; god must love liars.

It's not shocking that there are a whole mess of people out there who are only shrill and not substantive. There are a whole mess of people who ridicule gravitas instead of attempting to identify and understand it. It's just when one of your own near-family members assumes that a) you're a christian and b) trots out unfounded anecdotes (bordering on urban myth) that you start to wonder exactly how great the cosmic/karmic impedance mismatch is between people who are generally in the vicinity of my way of thinking, and the rest of country. I just don't think that culture scales to the size of the United States Entire.

That email “prayer” finished off with these lines:

Nope...I'm not ashamed at all to pass it along, though I suspect the lack of a semantic web is going to get all kinds of jesus-crazies landing on my page. I'm guessing I won't be anything like what they're expecting.

So no, San Francisco isn't really very American in its ways. But it does speak to the Divine. To quote Tony Kushner, about Heaven: ”Heaven is a City much like San Francisco.“

To quote Herb Caen, about Heaven: ”It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.“

See? We aren't completely godless. We just don't pick one way above all others to express our widely varying spiritualities.