Rompin' Stompin' Jesus

What's in a name?  Apparently that question requires more than most people really are willing or able to apply and when the name has religious significance, those who have the cranial horsepower will usually use it to run like hell. That leaves people like me to comment.

Florida Atlantic University finds itself in hot water on this cold Wednesday morning in South Florida.  Seems there was a classroom exercise in which students were asked to write the name Jesus on a piece of paper and "stomp" on it.  From media sources, it's still unclear what the context was and I can only recall reading about a similar practice in Japan a few hundred years ago where suspected heretics (Christians) were required to pledge their allegiances to traditional values by stepping on a picture of Jesus.  Refuse and you were beheaded.  But anyway, Full time gardener and part time student Ryan Rotelas, who identifies himself as a Mormon still has his head attached, even though he claims he was asked to leave the classroom for making a fuss about it, but he sure is mad and always quick to defend the real and proper faith, Florida Governor Rick Scott is demanding an investigation and an apology from the Boca Raton, Florida University.  I've been demanding that he apologize for ripping off Medicare for a few billion bucks and ask God for forgiveness for quite a while now, but that's a trifle compared with stepping on sacred and holy notebook paper.  I mean that piece of wood pulp is GOD!  Transubstantiation and all that.

But what a horrible offense, to ask college level students to explore religious intolerance particularly when it concerns Christian ideas of what is sacred - like pieces of paper with grossly mistranslated and mispronounced Hebrew names. Helped by Yahweh. After all we're talking about Joshua,  Moses' successor here.

The school of course promises never to desecrate such a common South American name again.  I don't recall Scotty having said much about the Koran-Burning Christian church in Florida, by the way, but of course that would require him to stomp on Jesus again, at least figuratively.

Too bad someone like Rick didn't get all Ezekiel on a college professor of mine who wrote books about how the Nazis didn't really have death camps or intervene when as a child I had to learn songs about Jesus in elementary school, but that was years ago and we've progressed. It's good to know that Christians, at least have not only God, but Rick Scott on their sides.

The Gospel According to Bloggingdino

Now, I know Senator Bernie Sanders is a self-declared soshalist and therefore must be ignored at all costs, but who else can you trust to bring up an indecorous subject like poverty in America?  Just as soon as you can find the time between sips of Chardonnay and truffle-bites, have a look at his Huffpost article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/is-poverty-a-death-senten_b_960598.html.  Nothing so sickens me as the virtual banishment of the very words "poor" and "poverty" from American political discourse.  The only class-based reference permitted is to "the middle class."  Now, most of us know that the term mostly refers to working-class stiffs who are merely deluding themselves about their true standing and prospects in contemporary America, but let's leave that aside since it's a commie idea and we don't want to upset the delicate feelings of any of our dear brothers and sisters the 'Baggery who might stumble upon this Marxist-sociopath den of intellectual iniquity that is the SWASH ZONE.

I'm not in the mood for windy analysis this evening as I just want to watch a Shakespeare DVD and go to bed alongside the Jurassic Watering Hole.  (By the way, director Julie Taymor – who has already done a brilliant modern version of the revenge play Titus Andronicus, has a new production of The Tempest coming out on DVD towards the end of the year, starring Helen Mirren as "Prospera."  That should be excellent – strangely, we don't have enough versions of The Tempest, which is, along with Twelfth Night, among the Bard's most beloved plays.)  So I'll just suggest the following as a dino-scriptum to Senator Sanders' much cleverer post; to America's fond supporters of the nearly taxless megarich and the infinite perfection of The Market, verily I say, 

"Everybody else loves you, but Jesus thinks you're an a**hole" (Matthew 19:24).  

How's that for the perfect bumper-sticker as a riff on the persnickety atheist ones that run, "Smile.  Jesus loves you -- everybody else thinks ..."?  I may be a simple-minded khaki dinosaur, but you gotta admit, I have flashes of almost human insight now and then….