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Category Archives: Politics
KOCH Brothers hold Private Party for the Rich and the Right
Koch Bros’ Double Triple Ultra Secret Meeting of 300 Right Wing Donors
While we were all sleeping through June, dreaming the idea of democracy, the Koch brothers were busy on the podium of their biannual gathering to marshall the libertarian financiers who intend to determine the fate of the upcoming 2012 national election. That election, in brother Charles Koch’s opening remarks at the conference, will be “the mother of all wars” and, in a rousing emotional appeal for “partners” in the fight, Charles listed 32 donors who have come forward to commit at least $ 1 million each to the fight “for the life or death of this country.” That is, the Americans for Prosperity model of the life of this country. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded “grass roots” group that is supporting the efforts of the Tea Party.
Americans for Prosperity was founded by David Koch, the other brother. Most Tea Party members think that they are a part of an anti-establishment movement to reclaim the American way. The irony that this entire effort is funded by many of the nation’s billionaires — certainly the most wealthy citizens of the U.S.– gives me pause. When will the Tea Party figure out the game? They are simply pawns of the greater scheme that began long before there was a Tea Party to join. Undoubtably a similar “initiative” to those resulting in what Charles Koch refers to as outcomes at the most recent conference.
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When the Fringe Becomes the Fur: Dominionism and Politics
The Right Wing Envelops Us as We Sleep
In the late 1990’s, as I researched my Ph.D. dissertation, Sexes, Gods, and Southern Christians, I came across a group that was unfamiliar to me in name only. As a minister’s daughter from the Bible belt of Texas, I chose the topic of religion and the right wing in an attempt to understand my own confusing upbringing involving the intersection between professions of faith that swam around us and the pervasive behaviors of racism, discrimination and the male fascination with guns and domination of women’s bodies.
My departure from Texas was immediate upon high school graduation. I left the state for college and never looked back. I often quipped that “I left Texas to escape the Christians.” Ironically, I later found myself in Colorado Springs during the influx of the very Christians I had once left behind. Moreover, having established one of the largest relocation companies in Southern Colorado, our task became one of assisting with the movement into the city of various organizations, including the International Bible Society, Christian & Missionary Alliance, and numerous small organizations that followed. My interface with James Dobson and Focus on the Family is the topic of another installment on this blog titled “Oh, James, We Hardly Know Ye.” The experiences of those years once again baptized me into the thought system that left me spinning with the paradox it contained.
As the landscape of religion, culture, and politics in Colorado Springs began to shift like a tidal wave, we sold our companies and moved to California, where I entered graduate work in psychology, cultural mythology and religion — specializing in the intersection between the Christian Conservative movements and their impact on politics, culture and law in our country.
Seven years of graduate school led to my dissertation, where I focused on exposing the revisions of the Biblical stories and theological philosophy in order to foster dominion– specifically over women and children. During the journey toward completion of the work, the path led to a movement that was founded in the heart of my homeland, Waco, Texas. That Dominionist group was called Christian Reconstructionism.
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Missing the March
Feeling frisky after leaving Crawford, we bought our plane tickets to Washington, D. C., made our hotel reservations and planned for a reunion with the Military Families Speak Out, CODE PINK, and fellow demonstrators. Of course, being a Texas girl, my travel clothes were all laid out and ready We were abuzz with energy for our next phase of the fight of this war against an absurd war. Then the call came.
A different plane — one back to Texas to tend my elder mother through her husband’s heart surgery, and finding ourselves facing yet another hurricane — this time not Katrina, but RITA. 4:30 a.m. get up, flight, 2 hour Denver layover, flight, and evening arrival preceeding the next day’s 5:15 a.m. trek to the hospital to sit in the family room for 7:00 a.m. surgery. Long days, long trip.
Not exactly Air Force One. But then it didn’t cost $ 40,000 an hour either.
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Open Letter to the Bush Women Following Hurricane Katrina
Bush Women Misplace their Public Relations Staff
Where were Tom Delay’s comportment classes just when we needed them?
Following the devastating Hurricane in New Orleans and the disastrously slow response by her husband’s administration, Laura Bush finally held a press conference in a squeeky clean refugee center in the city which was . . . the only word that comes to mind is CHARMING! Laura showed her genuine gentle side, smiling so sincerely when talking about her visit with one mother who had lost her daughter, another daughter who had lost her mother, and how both expressed how “glad” they were to find refuge in the Cajundome. Nothing like a warm cot, a port-a-potty and a lot of company to get the grief process started right off without delay! But the death and danger would come later, when Laura was no longer there. When things got filthy and forgotten, and when the cameras were gone. When will we care as much for the conditions of the poor and homeless when we are not in the spotlight?
Laura’s awkward assessment of those still stranded in New Orleans, the fact that they are mostly poor and black. “That is just the way it is… The poorer people are usually in the neighborhoods that are the lowest or the…most vulnerable… And that is just always what happens.” Oh, dear Laura. Let us be comforted that what has always been, will always be. How enduring. As long as the “them” is not “us.”
One tiny flaw revealed the detachment that was characterized by the interview with Laura. She mispronounced the name of the hurricane not once, but twice during the two minute CSPAN interview. The storm was named KaTRINA, not KaRINA. The most violent hurricane in modern history to hit the coast, and Laura Bush could not nail the name. But the media was gentle to her and did not replay the interview incessantly. But then, “that’s just the way it is.” Karina, Katrina. Whatever.
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Comportment in Texas
The Peace and Justice buses rolled out of Camp Casey, Crawford, Tx. on their way to Washington, D. C. They stop along the way to rally the people, and rally they are!
However, while Cindy Sheehan ended her vigil and rally in Austin, Tx. attended by 2,000 supporters, she set out to meet with Tom DeLay, who declined, citing that she did not “comport” herself well enough for him to fit her into his very full schedule. I spent a week with her, and I also completed endless comportment classes in Texas when I was a pre-teen/teen,and I have some serious questions for Tom Delay.
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Soul Rubbings upon leaving Camp Casey
What Have We Given?
Now that we have left Camp Casey and are perched on the porch of my mother’s serene home on a hill overlooking Kerrville, I will explain my choice for the name of these musings — “Soul Rubbings.”
One way of finding one’s lineage, one’s “place” as it were, involves rubbing thin sheets of paper over the gravestones of ancestors in cemetaries and family plots and, using pencil or charcoal, making an impression of their markings. Reaching back and touching the ancestors brings them more alive somehow. By rubbing the ancient grave markers, I name them and find a visceral knowing of their existence — when they came, and when they went. Through that physical act, I have identified my people, finding clues to who I am at the deepest level. The simple effort involved in making contact through rubbings with those who have come before allows me to access those lives that informed mine through their very being on the earth plane, whether or not they actually held me in their laps, rocked me for afternoon nap, or cupped my face in their hands.
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Crude, Cotton and Killin’: The Black and White World of George W. Bush
Article First Published in The Mississippi Review, 2004
Local BBQ Hut dating from the 1950′s and still in downtown Midland, TX
George W. Bush has planted our world into a deep hole of black and white – evil versus good, sinner versus saved, them versus us. In his abhorrence of all things gray or nuanced, George has created a narrow-framed world that is both small and dangerous. To catch a glimpse into the roots of his mind view, we must travel back in time to 1952, Midland, Texas, for there we all found ourselves –
George W. with his family and me with mine.
Midland was a flat, dusty landscape with nothing on the surface to recommend it, but harboring a dark underground as promising as any in the world. There, in the barren cotton bowl of West Texas, men flocked to pierce the soil and harvest the black gold that lay beneath. And my Daddy arrived to save their souls and bring them to the Lord. He set out to build a new White congregation in this stronghold of conservative America, rigidly segregated by both race and gender.
And I, a 3 year old female, first encountered the enduring contradiction between the lightness of Texas hospitality and the dark undercurrent of violence that lingered just below the surface – a dangerous brew that simmered between the roots of the above-ground white cotton crops and the black rivers that snaked beneath.
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