Between the Crusades, the Great Schism, the Thirty Years' War, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, and the Christian genocide of Native Americans, Christianity has plenty of black eyes to go around. Yet no major event of the past overshadows the rag-tag heresies of our time. Even as America has the "separation of Church and State," it has a problem.
Due to the internet and social media, millions across the world have met two world-class Christian clowns. The mindless rants from the local crazies of Topeka, Kansas and Gainesville, Florida are enough to make even the the most uncommitted Christian vomit.
In Topeka, Pastor Fred Phelps stoops to new levels of ignorance and profound blasphemy. The fanatics of Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church, known for their "God hates fags" mantra, protest American soldiers funerals, exacerbating human pain. This alone is a demonstration of all-out tomfoolery, but Phelps and cronies perform countless other actions.
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Who benefits when a pastor in a small town in Florida threatens to burn the Quran? Or when a proposal to build a Muslim cultural center in Manhattan erupts into a national controversy?
And what can those of us who believe extremism is harmful do to stop it?
Terry Jones, the Gainsville pastor who was catapulted onto the global stage by his plan to burn the Quran, said his action was about standing up to Islamic extremists. But General David Petraeus and others tell us that this action would play into the hands of extremists. Extremists need anger and hate to recruit and motivate followers; without images of outrage like this, people might revert to peace, respect, and tolerance, which, after all, come pretty naturally to a social species like ours.
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As individuals, you could not paint the members of the so-called Tea Party Movement with a broad brush, nor would you want to. As a journalist. I traveled from Arizona to Massachusetts, talking to the rank-and-file of the right-wing backlash against the Obama presidency in order to understand what was driving this angry and at times logic-impaired insurgency. And on that human level, the common denominator I found time and time again was fear -- whether it was folks whose jobs vanished when they were in their late 40s and early 50s who turned to Glenn Beck or a group like the Oath Keepers to figure out who to blame, or people seeking an outlet for their "discomfort" over a rapidly changing America that had so suddenly placed a black man with an unorthodox life story in the Oval Office. But in a group setting, raw fear can get masked by bravado crossing the line into hate.
And so you end up with the ugliest thing that I came across in my reporting, this portrait of hatred in black and white that was openly sold and circulated widely at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in West Point, Kentucky, on a Saturday night back in October of 2009.
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The first game of the NFL season plays in the background as I sit down to work on the talk I'll be giving at next week's Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association (PNNA) Conference. I'm just nursing a wicked throat infection as I sit back in my Los Angeles-area living room. I predict the Saints will take the game by seven on my Twitter feed. The holiday makes it feel as if its Monday despite that its Thursday. I think about whether I will be well enough for my 10:30am tomorrow, and what I'm going to wear for the event so that I'm prepared for the trip. It's a typical evening for most Power Girls I know -- a juggle between work, play, life and business, and of course, how to dress the part.
Content business is one that I've been familiar with for a long time. I worked concurrently in the market for nearly as long as I worked in internet telecom engineering and platform (TV, radio, phone, etc.) business, almost my entire adult working life. I founded a pioneering social media start-up, and currently work in cross platform content production (TV, media, internet) and business.
A lot of what I'll say at the PNNA talk may be things people haven't heard or considered.
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A Conversation With Slayer's Tom Araya & Kerry King
Mike Ragogna: You're on what you're calling The American Carnage Tour?
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When the Philadelphia Eagles take the field this Sunday, a familiar face will not be seen. After eleven seasons, Donovan McNabb will no longer be the quarterback for the Eagles.
As an Eagle, McNabb posted some impressive numbers. To see this, let's just look at the records McNabb set for the Eagles (courtesy of McNabb's own biography): 4,746 pass attempts, 2,801 completions, 32,873 passing yards, and 216 TD passes are all franchise records for the Eagles. In addition, he has more wins (92), postseason games (16) and postseason victories (9) than any other QB in team history.
Despite these numbers, though, McNabb was traded to the Washington Redskins. Trades in the NFL are certainly not unusual. But consider the following list of quarterbacks: Roger Staubach, Terry Bradshaw, Dan Fouts, Dan Marino, John Elway, Jim Kelly, and Troy Aikman. What do these quarterbacks have in common?
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So often the only thing stopping us from achieving a goal? Ourselves. We tell ourselves that we can't do something or that we are not good at something simply because we're not used to doing it or because we have never tried it.
For instance, for years I've been telling everyone--including myself--that I am not a morning person. I don't even know my name in the morning. I'm a night owl. I don't function before noon. Mornings are not in my genetic code.
I've organized my life around this belief. If I need to do something that requires a lot of creative thought? I schedule it in the afternoon or evening.
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When Lady Gaga added this week another sold-out concert in Washington, D.C. to her tour, her mix of flashy pop spectacle and outrageousness still didn't do much to bail out a troubled concert season this summer. She's taken the music industry's emphasis on dazzle and flash over great music that can last (despite her crafting danceable pop) to its ultimate extreme, when image trumps the music every time. Few acts these days are offering music that makes it worthwhile for people to pay the exorbitant prices that they're charging, abetted by the gouging by the leading promoter and ticket-seller, Live Nation, recently merged with Ticketmaster.
In contrast, there's another sort of showmanship that still endures, and it's grounded in great music delivered with passion and integrity by committed artists at reasonable prices. Bruce Springsteen, of course, is among the greatest live performers in the world, and he's done what he can to make affordable tickets available for his shows, even though it has inadvertently led to more scalping. Yet this summer, Lyle Lovett's tour especially offered a model of what a great show should be like, sweetened by the sort of sensible prices that were especially appealing on a recent August evening at Wolf Trap, the national park for the performing arts: lawn seats were just $25 and the covered orchestra seats $45, all under the warm summer sky.
All dressed in suits (who does that anymore?), his 15-man Large Band, including a four-man gospel quartet, put on a vibrant two-and-half-hour show that mixed the best American music can offer, from swing and folk ballads to gospel and blues to country and bluegrass. It was an eclectic gumbo of styles rivaled only by, say, Willie Nelson who also draws from across the American songbook. But even Nelson doesn't play those varied songs in such differing styles as Lyle Lovett does.
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