OZYMANDIAS

(The following is the text of an e-mail that was sent March 21, 2008 to Oklahoma legislator Sally Kern, a former public-school teacher, whose anti-homosexual rant was plastered on "YouTube" and provoked this missive.)

Dear Ms. Kern:

I listened to (at least a portion of) what was represented as your speech about the creeping "homosexual agenda" that you allege will destroy our nation because of its disregard for what you cite as "God's Word."
You don't reveal where "God's Word" is cited, presumably in the Bible, presumably because you consider yourself a believing Christian.

You further say that "studies show" that no society that "totally embraces" homosexuality has lasted more than a few decades.
You do not specifically attribute the "studies" to which you refer. You don't define what you mean by "total embrace."

Citing your experience as a public-school teacher, you assert that one of the main objectives of the "homosexual agenda" is to "recruit" children as young as 2 years old into the movement. You obviously imply that the point is to convert those children into becoming homosexuals, which disregards most of the known scientific information that homosexuality is not a "learned" attribute, although tolerance and respect for homosexuals' liberty is.

You equate homosexuality with cancer and terrorism and Islam. I am sure Muslims are glad to know your real attitude about their religion. Like many self-annointed pious Pharisee/Christians, I am sure your disdain for non-Christian religion allows you to feel superior. Whatever heaven you wind up in after death I hope I am not there with you. I would hate to have to spend eternity with a bigot like I think you are.

You alternate in that part that I heard between what is the nature of your opinion to what you "know" to be "fact." You claim to not be "anti-homosexual," but you asserted that merely making this public statement puts your life or health "in jeopardy," as if the homo's will put out a contract on you or something similar.

I think you are a liar.

I think you are a bigot.

I think you know that you are lying and are a bigot.

I think you don't care.

But, it makes no difference anyway. You made the statement, and you were apparently cheered by some of your Republican colleagues for doing so. That says a lot more about you and your Republican colleagues than you can possibly imagine, and it ain't pretty, either.

I doubt, however, that you care what the opinions of people like me are, but you should know that your comments have been widely disseminated as far away as Virginia, at least.

How does it feel to be so (in)famous for such remarks? I wonder.
How do you sleep with yourself at night? How does any husband or girlfriend you might have?

I am also really curious as to how so many professed Christians can be so hateful as you are. I am curious as to how you can seize on something you may (or may not) have actually read in the Bible somewhere and then deem yourself one of the earthly enforcers of what you claim to be "God's Word," making life as difficult and as unhappy for homosexuals and their families as you possibly can while wrapping yourself in the American flag, grasping the Bible in your paw, and piously declaring that you are not a homophobic bigot. That is hubris worthy of Bill Clinton or Eliot Spitzer.

Thank goodness you are no longer corrupting the fertile minds of public-school children as their warped, bigoted teacher, seemingly spreading hate and lies misrepresented as "fact" like the "facts" you cite without attribution.

You are a "piece of work," Ms. Kern, as some folks hereabouts say.

You really are.

You may be fretting about which societies get to last more than a "few decades," so I presume you mean that if America cracks down on the "queers," then we will last a long time. I think that is what you mean. Actually, I'd rather be dead than to have to honor you as one of our leaders.

Take a look at the poem, "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (see below) given that you are so concerned about societal survival. If you can even read anything other than what some half-wit Bible-thumper regurgitates to you, you may find it instructive.

Ozymandias

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

	I met a traveller from an antique land,
	Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
	Stand in the desart....Near them, on the sand,
	Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
5	And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
	Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
	Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
	The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
	And on the pedestal, these words appear:
	My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
	Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
	Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
	Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
	The lone and level sands stretch far away."

ASP-HOLES

… and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp….

--Isaiah 11:7-8 (KJV).

(The following story has been slightly fictionalized to protect the guilty parties, but it is based on real events long ago.)

This story is not for the faint of heart nor for the intolerantly devout. There were three teenaged boys whose parents allowed them to sit together in church so long as they attended church. That was the ultimate goal as far as the parents were concerned. So, too, was it the objective for those determined, if not devout, young men. It fed their comradeship, even unto miserable, shared conditions.

Paying attention to the Bible readings and sermons was a struggle for a lot of folks who despised those who did not attend a church but who were not particularly attentive or engaged themselves therein. Those three teenagers were typical of their kind. While the preacher was intoning eloquently about this or that spiritual aspect, these young men’s’ minds were usually focused like laser beams on pussy or cars. Life for teenagers was fairly simple back then. What? You say it is not so different today? OK. It is good that there are certain constants in this crazy world.

So as most are sort of nodding off during the run-up to the sermon, which usually involved a Bible reading first, upon which the subsequent sermon would be based, the preacher reads the above verse from Isaiah, Chapter 11. That was the beginning of the end of the church comradeship.

One of the teens, in particular, was a very funny, very naughty, very easily amused young man. He shall be called by the name of “Tom” here, not his real name, however. Tom was a prankster and a joker. He was also very smart, but he was not particularly restrained in his exuberant reactions to stimuli.

One of the most widely shared disorders among humans in America is a case of what a friend calls the “church giggles.” You know what that is. That is when something normally not very funny happens to strike a common funnybone among two or more persons in church or some other inappropriate place, forcing the suffering persons to get to giggling almost uncontrollably over basically nothing. Soon the inappropriateness of the giggles themselves becomes the amusement, forcing even harder giggling, all by now beyond the control of the afflicted persons. Most all of us have suffered the affliction at one time or another.

That is what happened to Tom and his comrades.

When the preacher read the verse about the sucking child playing in the hole of the asp (what in the world was he sucking on, the boys also wondered?), Tom got to giggling and muttering about “asp-holes.” That is when the other two comrades became infected, and they all had their hands clamped firmly over their mouths while their backs and shoulders heaved rapidly in unison at the absurdity of the presence of “asp-holes” in the Bible, especially children playing in them! Adjacent worshippers were appalled.

WHEREUPON, at that very moment, there was yet another occurrence that drove the whole scene over the cliff like “Thelma and Louise.”

Tom farted. Loudly. In church.

It resonated like a foghorn against the wooden bench.

The dam broke. Whole villages were washed away, as was the comradeship.

The comrades could no longer restrain themselves, and as Tom kept repeating (loudly, by now) “Asp-holes! Asp-holes!” between guffaws, he was joined therein by open laughing from his weeping comrades.

That was the end. The parents of each boy were not amused. They were shamed and embarrassed. They probably had no idea what had started it all because they were probably not as attentive to the Bible reading as were the boys.

No matter. Thereafter each boy had to sit with his respective family under the tight, watchful eyes of the parents. Families worshipping together. Just like a Norman Rockwell painting. Or a George Lincoln Rockwell painting, depending on one’s point of view. Hitler Youth, come to Amerika.

No more “asp-holes.” Most likely the preacher, now deceased, never used that Bible verse again. The parents are now all dead, too. The comrades, long since separated by time and distance, have lost track of each other and are approaching their Social Security years. But they were tight as ticks once, and they were easily amused.

DEVOTEDLY

(The following was written in furtherance of recording a memory I have discussed several times recently.)

One of my teen years’ pastimes I fondly remember may give some devout patriots pause. My personal road to Hell is surely paved with all the spitballs I threw at the ubiquitous print of the unfinished Gilbert Stuart portrait of The Father of Our Country that hung in most every public-school classroom back in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

During mandatory morning religious devotionals.

I am talking about pre-Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

We had ‘em. Every morning, the select Brown-Noser of the Day would be invited to the Principal’s Office at my North Carolina high school, and before regular classes began at 9:00 AM he or she would read aloud over the school-wide intercom system the select religious message for us unwashed heathens, inclusive of Bible reading and prayer in the name of Jesus, Amen. I used to wonder what the few Jewish kids in our school thought about all that, but no one ever said anything, so neither did I. I now regret that, but that is all another story. I was never chosen. Brown-nosing came hard for me.

While my more devout brethren and "sistren" in my homeroom class would bow their heads in earnest prayer, I would be sizing up the ballistic distance to ol’ George, hanging on a nail over the blackboard across the room. At the appropriate moment (usually determined by the probable glue-like stickiness of the wad of notebook paper I was rolling around in my mouth), I would remove said sticky wad and hurl it across the room at George, then put my head down quickly in feigned prayer lest the teacher look up quickly at the gratifying sound of said hurled spitball loudly smacking the glass overlying the countenance of George and catch me admiring my work.

Of course, at such an obvious and well-known sound, most all of the students would simultaneously look up (so it was important that I look up, too, so as not to unduly reveal my guilt by being the only student whose head was still bowed) and observe the portrait of George rocking back and forth on its single nail by which it hung with its wire stretched across the back, the offending wad of slobber-saturated notebook paper stuck firmly to the glass over George’s face like some horrible three-dimensional wart erupting from the sainted face of the Father of Our Country.

Jesus wept. Or laughed.

The late stand-up comedian “Brother Dave” Gardner used to ask, quite reasonably I thought, “Do you think the Washington Monument looks anything like George?” Well, the offending spitball was about the same color as the stone in the Washington Monument, but that was as far as any resemblance would go. I was fairly good at this pastime, and Jesus must have forgiven me, because I kept getting away with it again and again until ….

I had started to branch out and take more risks, thanks to my rising successes. I was giving George the customary “facelift” in other classes as well, usually while the teacher therein had his or her back turned to us students while writing on the blackboard. I made the mistake one day of firing a nice, huge, sticky wad of notebook paper at George in Algebra class, and the teacher turned around to see me just as my arm was extended past my face directly toward George, and the simultaneous “smack” against George’s glass drilled the quiet of the moment. He had me dead in his sights! This teacher was regarded as one of the more sophisticated faculty members, and he was diabolical in his punishment of choice: I had to come back to his room after school and perform 100 pushups on the floor!

I hated pushups! I hated them almost as bad as windsprints, many of which I was required to do by the football coach who hated my guts. The feeling was mutual. The football coach was also my Presbyterian Sunday School teacher, and his patience had been tried many times by my suggestions that predestination meant that I could do anything I wanted since my fate (doomed vs. saved) was already sealed, according to his teachings. He did not approve of my irrefutable logic!

I did not want to do 10 pushups, let alone 100! But I did them, for I did not want to learn what the diabolical alternative might be. It was probably to my advantage that I was a good Algebra student, but that did not give me a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. I did every one of those stinking, miserable pushups.

Following my sweaty penance, I gave up providing George his warts. It was time for others to succeed to my coveted mantle.

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