Pilot's Log

I still dream of my mother just about every night. I guess she still weighs heavily on my subconscious mind.

Earlier this afternoon my internet connectivity refused to work properly so I decided to go to the area flea markets just to browse around. I pulled into the parking lot of one and in the slot next to Moonshine's there was a station wagon--and a helium balloon rested on its interior ceiling. Sure enough, I noticed a kid on his father's shoulder on his way back to the vehicle after their shopping.

Turns out today is Ascension Sunday, which commemorates the return of Jesus to Heaven following his Resurrection. Both it and Pentecost (next Sunday) are often excuses for church congregations to celebrate by releasing balloons and giving balloons to the children; since it usually coincides with the end of the secular school year it's often the end of the Sunday School year for the kids too.

I guess we're getting into a time of year I used to look forward to as a child, the transition from Spring to Summer. As an adult, that has lost a lot of meaning for me. Maybe that's the point of this "random encounter". For me, times need new meanings.

COVENTRY

Original premise: Based on the Heinlein "Future History" novellas. In 2012, a radical social ultraconservative man name of Nehmiah Scudder gets elected to the Presidency of the United States. He then suspends the Constitution, enacts the New Crusade to nationalize the Protestant and Evangelist Churches, and begins the totalitarian American Inquisition genocide against Catholicism, Orthodox Churches and non-Christian faiths. As First Prophet he rules America for decades, even after his own physical death. It isn't until well into the 22nd Century that his regime is overthrown and the United States is restored.

American society is radically different after the Second Revolution and subsequent Reconstruction. Two generations later, a young man named David MacKinnon is convicted of the crime of Simple Assault and given a choice of medical treatment or exile. He chooses exile, and is sent to Coventry. Coventry is an open-air megaprison in a reservation that had belonged to a Native American tribe that was exterminated by the Scudder regime. Now it's ruled by the misfits of American society, divided into three realms: New America (basically a parody of lawful order administered by organized crime lords), the Free State (run by fascists and skinheads) and the Angels (the remnants of the Scudder ideology). David, who had hoped to find a peaceful and solitary place to homestead, immediately gets into trouble in New America and is busted out of Death Row by Fader Magee, a professional thief. The New Americans are organizing with the Free State, whom they had been at war with up to then, in an attempt to break out of Coventry and start a rebellion in the greater U.S. Upon learning the news, Fader reveals to Magee that he is a spy for the Secret Service, and the two of them try to get out of Coventry themselves to warn the Army. They succeed, but only through the most hazardous of circumstances. MacKinnon is paroled for "good behavior".

Reimagined: The discoveries of possible inhabitable planets in other star systems and of faster-than-light space travel lead to the idea of exploratory and colonization missions beyond the Solar System. However, the first FTL space travel system available is too bulky and energy-dependent for practical multi-use starships at the moment--what is possible is a device that accelerates single-use, disposable craft on one-way journeys from Earth to the new planets. The governments of Earth decide that the best way to proceed with colonization is to send convicts out to the new planets as the vanguard and force them to do the grunt work of building the colonies. Coventry is selected as one of the colonies.

MacKinnon arrives at Coventry to find that the convicts have invented their own starship drive and have been building warships to attack Earth. He and Fader hijack one and there is an interstellar chase. Can they make it back to Earth before a nuclear war breaks out in the heavens?

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I still have the lingering crud in my throat and bronchi, so that limits things. But it isn't my last day on Earth anyway. When I worked for a hotel in Sevier County, I took Jesus' reservation for his Second Coming. He told me He couldn't make it before 2184, but keep His room ready as long as possible.

Link Given Without Commentary.

Just after dinnertime, we got an automated phone call--a recorded tirade from some fire-and-brimstone evangelist Christian pastor. The actual content of the message isn't worth repeating and he delivered it with so much anger and bile he could have melted down the phone's earpiece.

If we had Caller ID on the phone, we would have had the organization sued for hate speech. I mean, what if we were Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist? It is sectarian harassment! I find it particularly galling as my parents are active participants in their own church, and had they heard this lout themselves they would have been insulted.

I think I'm going to copy this blog to the local newspapers. I believe in freedom of religion more than I believe in religion itself, but this matter is way over the line.

FP

I did more "shopping" today...I put the word in quotes because I didn't spend any money and didn't get anything other than more depressed and angry. The weather is dreary and rainy. There are too many cars on the road and too many other shoppers in the stores. The songs over the Muzaks are too sentimental "standards", condescendingly cute kiddie ditties, or those "modern Christian" songs that seem to have a snobby undercurrent to them, to the effect that "if you don't love Christmas you aren't American". Ugh.

This holiday is our most forced, artificial and contrary of our folkways.

FP

After reading nick_101's entry for today, I was reminded of an element that has recurred in my dreams of late...

...Somebody drives around in a car with loudspeakers on top, and what blares out of those speakers are the barely intelligible rantings of some fire-and-brimstone Evangelist clergyman, railing about the sin of the moment. And the driver chooses the early morning, long-before-sunrise hours in order to do this motorized haranguing.

Who would want to hear the Word of a Rude and Boorish God? I thought God wanted us to act civilized.

FP

On the ABC News this evening, they mentioned an upcoming documentary movie called "Jesus Camp", which details the radical measures the Evangelical Christian movement is taking to indoctrinate kids into becoming "Soldiers of God".

This is so wrong on so many levels that I can't help but feel angry.

THIS IS AMERICA! We are supposed to be the great "melting pot" of cultures, with tolerance for all the peoples of the world. E Pluribus Unum. With Liberty And Justice For All. This "Us Against Them" attitude has got to stop and stop soon or else the rest of the world will be rooting for Al-Qaida.

I was already 90% driven away from Christianity; I think this will finish the job. I will not march with the sectarian brutes and racist hatemongers. I do not approve of their message, even if they say it comes from God.

FP

Quoting myself, because of something another LJ user said:

"On the Pledge of Allegiance: I'll try to remember all that I have 'said' in previous mentions of the subject...

"1) The idea of the Pledge in the first place was to indoctrinate the young of our nation into Federalist sentiment as opposed to state or region or RACE. It came out of the Reconstruction, as a way of reunification through ritualized socialization. The under God phrase was inserted in the 1950s as a response to the preceived threat from Communism. So I find it horribly ironic that many of the defenders of the under God phrase are in fact anti-Federalists and racists.

"2) In many Protestant churches, Sunday School children are made not only to Pledge to the American flag, but to the flag of their sect or their sect's youth organization. I consider this practice to be a method towards forced fealty rather than instilling or recognizing faith.

"3) Many of the radical Protestant faiths were forced out of Europe to America because their RELIGION forbid them from making loyalty oaths to the king. And these radical sects are the ones that eventually formed the Evangelical movement here. So I consider their attempts to enforce a fealty to God in secular America particularly hypocritical."

PS: In honor of the_gneech,

--Dr. Israel Khang