From Out of the Sun...

I keep coming back to Yeats, and The Second Coming:  "The best lack all conviction/While the worst are filled with a passionate intensity...".  Of course "best " and "worst" depend on where you stand--my "best" may be your "worst," and vice versa.  I see what I'm doing in these posts as an attempt to keep my best passionately intense; others just see my posts as angry, ranting polemics.  What to do, what to do?--it's the liberal dilemma.

Now that Isaac has safely blown past Fla., Mitt Romney tonight will realize his long-held dream and officially receive the Republican nomination to become The POTUS (that always sounds somehow vaguely dirty to me).  While--shocking revelation coming up--I've lately found myself becoming more receptive to spirituality in some form, organized religion still makes me squirm, as I think that far more bad than good has come from it over the centuries.  And while pretty much all religions have weird origination stories, it sure seems that Mormonism is front and center in the weirdness department.  Angels in America (Tony Kushner took his title at least partly from the Mormon story); golden tablets buried in upstate New York which an angel named Moroni (a feeble-minded Italian, evidently) led Joseph Smith to; angelic writing on said tablets which only Smith was able to decipher; and the disappearance of those tablets before anyone else saw them.  Oh yeah--and the revelation that the ancestors of Native Americans were the Lost Tribes of Israel (of which Isaac was one of the three patriarchs; cue spooky sound effects) who Somehow found their way to these shores in pre-history; and, finally for this rendering, a visit to America by Jesus, sometime between the Resurrection and the Ascension, which apparently no one else knew about.  Or maybe the media were just kinder back then and didn't want to get all up in his grill about what he was doing and where he was going.  Why couldn't they have done the same for Mark Sanford and John Edwards and on and on?

So we're gonna entrust our country to a guy, all of his other strengths and faults aside, who can give credence to that story. There's probably something to be said for unquestioning belief, but sheesh!  Then again, I guess when the only alternative is a Kenyan-born Muslim intellectual who's going to use UN troops to take our guns and land, even that choice looks reasonable.  Anyway, in honor of Moroni and all of the other angels in America, merrily dancing on pinheads, I'm playing a show of "Angel" songs, of which there are an enormous number in my collection.  Hope you can join me today, noon till two on 100.1 FM or www.wool.fm on the webs.

Wonder what Pat Robertson and his ilk would have said if a hurricane had forced postponement of the Democrats' convention?

...come Angels with guns."