Terror in the capital: sex?

Randall Tobias, director of foreign aid programs at the State Department, resigned Friday because his named surface on an escort service client list. Let's assume that he is guilty of nothing more than a massage with what is commonly called a "happy ending.'' Which may or may not be a crime, depending on the local laws. So he resigns, and the woman who runs the service he called is facing years in the hoosegow.
But my God, why are we prosecuting the D.C. Madame to begin with? There are real problems in the country, what with war and people wanting to kill us and everything else.
Not every sin ought to be a crime, and believe it or not, not every crime is a sin.
Certain drugs ought to be decriminalized, and certain sex workers ought to be free to ply their trade without winding up in federal prison.

A stone for Cho?

Christians are in the forgiving business. Seventy times seven, turning the other cheek and all that. And given recent press reports, the predominantly Christian community at Virginia Tech seems ready to jump into the forgiveness fray when it comes to forgiving the guy who massacred 32 people.
One of the memorials for the slain includes 33 small stones. One for each of the victims and one for the man who shot himself after he finished his crazed shooting spree.
That 33rd stone is nice and sweet and wrongheaded.
Forgiveness that comes too quickly isn't forgiveness at all, but denial, a short-cut through the valley of the shadow of death.
Easy forgiveness may just be too easy, cheapening the tragedy and the very concept of mercy.

Shameless plugs

It seems odd to me that I'm the sort of person who actually makes public appearances, but I suppose that is no more strange than the fact that some of you might be interested in said appearances.
On Saturday, April 28, at 1:30 p.m., I will be at the Neptune Public Library helping to moderate a community discussion of free speech issues with a local pastor, the Rev. Gil Caldwell. I don't know how much I can add to such a discussion -- "Free speech? I'm in favor of it'' - or what the whole thing will turn out to be. I figure we can be surprised together.
And then on Sunday, June 3, I'll be at the East Brunswick public library for two hours, from 6 to 8 p.m., with my little dog and pony show of stories and anecdotes, a little thing I like to call "Scars, Tattoos and the Funny Bone.''
Maybe I'll see you there.

Born to Run...or to audit a class at Princeton?

I think too many people skip the author's acknowledgments in the books they read. I know it's a chore, but I figure they are there for a reason and I owe it to the author to read them. And sometimes, you are rewarded in small ways for having done so.
Right now, I'm reading "The Shape of Things To Come: Prophecy and the American Voice'' by Greil Marcus. Marcus is most famous for his book "Mystery Train'' a work that weaves American history into studies of the works of Elvis, Randy Newman, bluesman Robert Johnson and others. There are connections between Melville and pop music, he maintains. The book, like most of his work, is a tour de force of wit, analysis and fine writing, and well worth reading.

So I turned to the acknowledgments in the new book, just getting it out of the way, and one of the people he thanks is none other than Bruce Springsteen.
Marcus was teaching a course at Princeton and tells this story:
"Bruce Springsteen attended the last class, on Ginsberg's 'Witcita Vortex Sutra'; he came with an idea he wanted to put across, about the poem as Ginsburg's claim that as an American he belonged to any part of America, but by making his argument only by playing off arguments others in the class were making, he made himself both a catalyst and nearly anonymous.''
Now most of us know that Springsteen and formal education didn't get along. The nuns in Catholic school, the high school estrangements and a semester or two at college, and that infamous line from "No Surrender'' : "We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.''
Now here he is at Princeton, using the Socratic method of asking questions and responding to questions to make a point.
Maybe all of us are born to run, or, as the Old Testament puts it, "born to trouble as sparks fly upward'' but it's good to know that some people run into ideas and books and good conversation.

Mirror, mirror, on the seat.

This may come as somrthing of a shock to some of you, but my wife Susan is widely considered the more mature one in the marriage. She is seen as the sober, responsible yin to my yang.
Ha!
The other day, I came home from work and pulled in next to Sue's car. I glanced over and noticed the rear-view mirror sitting on the front seat.
When I asked her about it, she said it had fallen.
"You mean, it just fell, just dropped from the window, just like that?'' I said.
"Yes,'' she replied, ''that's exactly what happened...''
I was about to take her at her word, for this is indeed a world of strangeness and anomaly, but perhaps she detected a note of skepticism playing across my face.
"...right after I accidentally hit it with my umbrella,'' Sue said, eyes downcast, a sheepish smile on her lips.
"What are you, six years old?'' I said, laughing. You couldn't just say that first?''
It's good to know that the mature one can slip into pre-adolescent responsibility avoidance now and again.
God knows, it's where I spend most of my time.

The nature of evil

One of the issues raised in Ron Rosenbaum's compelling 1998 book, "Explaining Hitler,'' could be stated in the form of this question: "Did Hitler know that he was evil or was he convinced of his rectitude?''
Whatever side historians tended to come down on, the bottom line was this: "What difference does it make?'' In the face of the Holocaust, those distinctions become mere parlor games.
There are bloggers who claim that the massacre at Virginia Tech shows us that evil exists. Well, nobody with even one eye open in this world needs to be shown that evil exists. It's there and it's real.
As details about the shooter, Cho Sueng-Hui, come to light, though, a question parallel to Rosenbaum's emerges:
Were the murders a result of an evil heart or a diseased mind?
The guy seems to have been a few bubbles off-plumb for a long time. He was sunk into some kind of dark world where a smile, a look and a kind word from a stranger were all translated into a malevolent plot against him. And the more people who shied away from his vacant stares, the more he evidently became convinced that they stood against him.
He was crazy, if not legally insane. There seems to be no doubt there.
But the question of "evil/mentally ill'' does not have to be either/or.
One can be both at the same time.
And in the end, does it matter one whit?

Where was God when the shooting started?

The massacre at Virginia Tech -- 33 dead and more than two dozen wounded-- makes the world for now a colder, darker place. And among the prayers rising to heaven -- prayers for healing and prayers for the comfort -- there are surely other prayers, bitter and angry, so desperate that they are virtually incoherent. But the meaning is plain: "Why, God?''
Even those of us removed from the tragedy might ask that question.
It's a legitimate one, and an ancient one.
The problem of evil, as it is called, is really only a problem for believers, for those hold these three statements to be true:
1. God is all-powerful.
2. God is all good.
3. Evil (and pain and suffering) exists.
If God is all powerful, then he could presumably keep us from a madman with guns. If God is all-good, then presumably he would want to keep his children safe from a madman with guns.
And yet the bullets fly, the blood flows and young lives are ended.
There is a specific branch of theology that deals with this thorny issue. It's called theodicy, and the theodicy people are still in business because there is no single solution. And any of the partial solutions leave you in very strange places if you stop with just the one:
"What seems pointless and needless and senseless is all part of God's bigger plans.'' We may not know everything but the death of a child doesn't seem to be the necessary linchpin of God's plan for history. Nor does the Holocaust.
"Suffering deepens our faith.'' Sometimes, maybe, but this kind of Nietzchean Christian mishmash is cold comfort.
"Our free will is so important to God that He will not substitute his will for ours to prevent disaster.'' That did not seem to bother him in the Bible, where God was forever doing miracles no matter what.
All Christians can do is point to the tears of Christ, to his death and resurrection and say that no darkness, no evil can ultimately win out over God's redemptive love.
Is that a thin reed we grasp in our own pain and wonder, or the rock upon which we stand?

This is why 10-year-olds believe in God...

Sam had last week off from school. But unbeknowst to me, he was supposed to be working on a project for some subject. It slipped his mind until this morning, one hour before he was due back in school. To his credit, he was gamely trying to throw something together before leaving for school. Then his older brother noticed that there were no cars in the parking lot of the high school, went on the Internet and found that, due to, I don't know, rain or something, schools in town were closed.
It was like a reprieve from the governor right before the switch on Ol' Sparky is thrown.
Now, Sam has a whole day to do his project, a gift from the heavens.
But, as one of my co-workers asked me, "What do you think the odds are that he'll be done with the project by the time you get home from work?''
There may be no athiests in the foxholes of fourth grade, but 10-year-olds also believe in a little thing called Tempting Fate.

Imus in a pink slip

Imus has been given the boot, and a couple of things need to be noted:
1. This is not a First Amendment issue. "Free speech'' in the Constitution prevents the government from gagging folks. Les Moonves of CBS can do anything he wants about the bloviations of those whose paychecks he signs.
2. It does no good to protest the firing by saying that those who cried the loudest for his dismissal have said offensive things. "He did it first'' carried no weight when my kids tried to avoid punishment by pointing out that a sibling got away with the same infraction. (Although it is a little chilling to hear Al Sharpton talking in terms of Imus being the tip of the iceberg and let's find everybody else who's said objectionable things and get them fired, too.)
3. The problem with a forum like radio is that, unlike print media, there are no editors. I have editors, a veritable phalanx of them, to make sure that I don't sneak the word "ass'' or "doody'' into my work. That's true even here in the Wild West of the blogosphere.

Goodbye, Billy Pilgrim

Kurt Vonnegut has died. The sadness of that, however, is leavened a bit by the fact that his stories live on. There are people who have banned his books, and at least one case where copies of "Slaughterhouse Five" were burned in a school furnance.
Those people hardly ever win out in the end, because good stories are good stories.
Vonnegut was certainly a secular humanist and an agnostic. Which goes to show you that believers don't have a monopoly on either the truth or decency.
I remember one of his nonfiction books, "Palm Sunday.'' The title essay was, in fact, a sermon he preached at a Unitarian Church. The crux of the sermon was that too often "people get in on the wrong end of a miracle,'' a message Jesus talked himself blue over trying to get across to his sometimes dim disciples. We all want the bells and whistles of a miracle, the water into wine, the clear skin of a cured leper, but we often miss the deeper meanings of the miracle, which in Jesus' case was a message about the Kingdom of God.
Vonnegut's writing was clear and simple, not necessarily black comedy but as close as you get to it. He made me smile, and he made me laugh.
When he gets to heaven, I'm sure he'll be surprised.

A one-day fling?

There's been testimony in the Melanie McGuire trial that her murdered husband had what has been called "a one-day fling with a co-worker.''
And my question is, "Is such a thing possible?''
I would tend to think not. A "consummation devoutly to be wished'' takes some groundwork, some flirting and some innuendo, not to mention logistics. And once the deed is done, do the parties just stop?
The only "one day'' affair I can think of involves hiring a prostitute and that's not a fling -- that's commerce. Or am I wrong?

Character witnesses....

I've been following the trial of Melanie McGuire, accused of mudering her husband, chopping him up, putting him in suitcases and trying to send him to Davy Jones' locker. It's definitely a circumstantial case, but now that the prosecution has rested, those circumstances are looking pretty grim.
But the defense is up now and has presented an array of character witnesses who swear that the defendant is a swell human being.
I don't see how this helps her. There is no logical contradiction in being nice to your friends and killing your spouse. You can do both.
Of course, the prosecution tried to make some hay out of the fact that these character witnesses knew about McGuire's extramarital affair, asking how could somebody be nice and an adulterer.
Well, again, no logical contradiction there, and there are a lot more adulterers than murderers running around -- unless you take Jesus' sayings about lustful looks being equal to adultery and anger the moral equivalent of murder as more than rabbinical hyperbole -- in which case we're all up Damnation Creek without a redemptive paddle.
I suppose I believe that, given certain circumstances, anybody is capable of pretty much anything in this world. But that's not saying much and not what courts of law are about.
On a personal note, if I found myself up against it, I could round up a few people who would stand up in court and say, "That Mike Riley -- he's not so bad.'' But I probably would have to pay them. A lot.

Selfish trees

The world is getting warmer.
The only question that remains is how much of that warmth is caused by human beings, their machines and their flatulent domesticated cows?
One silent ally in this battle to keep their earth cool is trees -- sucking in carbon dioxide and giving us oxygen.
Well, there's one in every crowd, and it turns out that some trees in northern latitudes are actually sucking in heat that would normally be reflected back into space.
Research reported in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that tropical forests do their jobs at sucking up carbon and helping make clouds that help us keep cool.
It's the woods up north, the ones we go through to get to grandma's house at Christmas time, that are adding to our problem by absorbing solar energy that would otherwise be reflected back out into space.
If you can't trust the trees, who can you trust?
For more info on the treacherous trees go to http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18027048/

The Sopranos, Imus and everybody else

The drunken Monopoly game on last night's "Soprano's" premiere was marked by one note of pathos by sad sack Bobby Bacala. Watching Tony and Janice hissing and striking like a couple of vipers, Bobby said, "You Sopranos - you always go too far.''
True enough, but they are not the only ones.
Don Imus went too far in his nasty characterization of the Rutgers women's basketball team.
And now clergy like Al Sharpton and Buster Soaries are going too far in demanding that he be fired.
We all go too far sometimes, although, unlike Imus, we're not paid to do it.
But if somebody goes too far, the answer is not going too far. It's ignoring the hateful or spiteful speech or countering it with good speech -- not bludgeoning the speaker into submission.

Easter thought

Whoever it is that we want or hope or believe Jesus to be -- defender of traditional morality or radical iconoclast, we Christians can all agree that on Easter Sunday he got up from the grave and changed, if not the whole world, at least those who believe in him.

I'm goin' down, down, down...

I'm as big a Springsteen fan as you can be without actually being nuts about him. (Although my wife would say that the jury is still out on the crazy subject.)
The man puts out a record, I'm going to buy it. He goes on tour, I'm going to see it at least once.
I'm not going to proselytize here. You either think Springsteen is a great singer/songwriter and a great performer or you don't.
But the news that Springsteen is releasing a third album of his latest project is a little disheartening. How many times is the guy going to the well. First came the album "We Shall Overcome'' and then "The American Land'' version of the same album with a couple of additional songs. Now, in two months time, a live album from the same tour will be released. True, it is live and will have massively reworked tunes from his catalog on it -- songs I have seen performed live and own copies of, thanks to a bootleg given to me as a gift.
But, I'll buy it. And the question is, does that make me one of those of whom one is born every minute, or someone who appreciates the nuances of studio quality live performances?

This is my (chocolate) body which is broken for you

When it comes to the uproar over Cosimo Cavallaro's 200-pound sculpture of a naked Jesus made out of chocolate, I'm not sure whether it's the artist's choice of medium or the nudity that's got everybody's loincloths in a twist.
Either way, it seems to me that some Christians have easily shocked sensibilities. A chocolate Jesus sculpture is no more an assault on Christianity than it is an assault on the battle against tooth decay.
Christendom is not going to fall and folks were not going to be struck blind if they gazed upon it.
In America, after all, sacrilege is not a criminal offense. That's a good thing because, if it were, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would be cellmates in Leavenworth.
I remember the brouhaha years ago over a photograph called "Piss Christ,'' which showed a crucifix in a bottle of urine. Now, there was a theological statement: If Good Friday means anything, it means that Christ died for even those who humiliated him, even those who nailed him up on the cross.
When it comes to odd or even offensive artwork of Christ, I have to believe that Jesus can take it. And maybe he expects us to as well, without a lot of sturm und drang, the upshot of which is to make more people want to see what the big deal is anyway.

Is Iraq a welfare queen?

The problem with liberals, we're told, is that they give poor people stuff. This saps their initiative, makes them dependent on government largess, and leaves taxpayers on the hook for this legislative underwriting of indolence.
It's the old "give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime'' gambit. (Although among your more rabid conservatives, teaching a man to fish costs money, and if it doesn't come from the private sector, well, -- trial and error was good enough for Cro-Magnon man, it ought to be good enough for single moms in Camden.)
Seems rather strange, then, that the neoconservatives haven't figured out that as long as our brave soldiers are doing all the heavy lifting in the civil war-torn, terrorist-incubating land that is Iraq, they have no incentive to pull themselves up by their own sandal straps.
How long before they take responsibility and pay the freight for all this freedom we've given them?

What else God isn't....

In a recent blog, I implied that God was neither a Republican nor a member of the NRA.
Well hang the implication....let me just say it: God is not a Republican. God is not a member of the NRA.
Here are some other things God is not:
A Democrat
A member of the ACLU
A conservationist -- if there is one thing that the universe reveals about the nature of God, it is that God is profligate, creating a universe that's mostly empty space and making way too many sperm cells, not to mention cockroaches.
Actually, this list could be as long as you want it to be. By and large, God transcends categories of any sort.
But it's all right if we happen to be a member of a political party or the NRA.
(The Second Amendment , despite that muddled phrase about a "well regulated militia'' has always in our history been interpreted to mean that individuals can own guns. The First Amendment says that we can shoot our mouths off and the Second says, that except for tommy guns and bazookas, we can pretty much shoot off anything else.)
God is ineffable and inscrutable, and when it comes to interpreting his word, you pays your money and you takes your choice. I just hope people have good reasons for what they believe.