Leftist Christian

Methods—First of all, there’s nothing I don’t like on this list, all the way down to Los Lobos. As people who make such lists often say, things could be placed differently on different days. As I was typing AIR at number 49, I thought that perhaps it could be higher. But if I were to be honest, I didn’t listen to it that much throughout the year. For me, that urge to listen to it figures in, and an album propelling an interest in an artist’s entire back catalog says something. I sort of group things by tens then weigh them against the things immediately around them. That way, I feel comfortable making an ordered list as opposed to the orderless ones I see here and there. Lists are subjective, but mine is best. 1. Modest Mouse—Good News for People Who Love Bad News This would be one of those aforementioned ones that made me buy everything else by the artist. And everything else shows that this is the breakthrough album. They’ve always had a bit of a Pixies vibe but have added a Tom Wa...

Somewhere in Florida, a Seinfeld appreciation society has placed a sign celebrating a “Festivus for the rest of us.” They had a responsibility to find a good aluminum pole to observe the holiday properly, though. I am amused, not offended. But I always hear a lot of people this time of year bemoaning the fact that the meaning of Christmas is being lost in the increasing use of “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” “They’re taking Christ out of Christmas,” goes the complaint. Many religions and cultures seem to have some important holiday around this time, though—Hanukkah and Kwanza being the foremost. There is, of course, also New Year’s Day on the horizon and Thanksgiving not long gone. So “Happy Holidays” seems quite appropriate. At root, this is probably a longing for somewhere we can never go again—and I strongly contend we shouldn’t want to. We are not in a majority culture any more; we shouldn’t stand for these attempts to impose a majority agenda on those outside of i...

We have few thrills these days. There was nothing but despair for us immediately following the depressing election. Woe is us. I wrote before about how at least the rest of the world seems to hold Bush responsible for his actions. We can work ourselves into a tizzy over a blow job, but can’t seem to trouble ourselves too much over corporate empire-building and the untold deaths that it costs. So I find it funny, one, that many have hopped off the Bush train. A soldier may be facing trial for wearing a shirt claiming “Like a cabinet member, I resign.” God bless the soldiers who resist when their consciences so convict. The hawks (or chicken hawks) would shame them for not following orders. But it’s about time someone stopped to question—and it almost looks like more soldiers are doing so than those who magnetize their support of the soldiers on their bumpers. Maybe those signs instead should read, “Support the status quo.” Rudolph Guiliani might have thought that by touting Bernard Ke...

George Bush is sort of the opposite of Christ (anti-Christ?), who remarked that a prophet is never respected in his own land. 51% of people like George Bush fine here, but when he goes to other countries he seems to run into problems. Mean-spirited Canadians held up signs that said, “Please leave.” The sensational story from South America was that he received a death threat, but the more substantial story was the massive number of protesters. I hope George has a demanding itinerary over the next four years. Shield him as his people might, I hope George gets a real sense of the resounding distaste for his administration that I suspect well over half the rest of the world shares. On the “Who’ll Jump Ship?” watch, add Tom Ridge to the list of Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, and others. Is it too much to hope that Rumsfeld will join this group? Unfortunately, I’m sure Condi’s not going anywhere. I’m torn, though. Do I want a slightly improved Bush administration, or do I want them to bury t...

Bootleg DVDs--they're not great, but they're not as bad as you'd think. My sister has quite a problem with them, though. A guy sits in a dark theater with a pretty good camera and cuts it off as soon as the lights go up (as a completist, I'm a bit annoyed that the credits always get chopped). I seldom go to the movies. I certainly wouldn't go to see "Friday Night Lights" or "Ladder 49," but sitting around on an odd evening, I might vegetate to them. Oddly, I probably won't even watch them when they come to cable. But I'm supposed to feel some guilt because some millworker got my five bucks instead of Joaquin Phoenix. For a dark image with distorted sound, where sometimes I can see the shadows of people getting up to use the restroom. It's a silly thing, bootleg DVDs, but its not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of crime. I had the good fortune to use Napster briefly before it was dismantled (the first time), and the...

I am certainly glad that John Ashcroft is leaving. The question is whether his replacement will be an improvement. I'm not necessarily glad that Colin Powell is leaving. While it would appear that he did not have any positive influence himself on the Bush administration, rather, he did what he would not have chosen himself, Condoleeza Rice is certainly not going to be an improvement. We know that Powell had some good ideas and was at least ill at ease with supporting the Bush agenda. All I get from Rice is that she pleads ignorance to everything she should be quite on top of. The new John Ashcroft will likely not look like the old John Ashcroft. He apparently diverges from the Republican party on some issues, like abortion. But there's that whole denial of the Geneva convention thing. Like the old John Ashcroft, civil rights might not be at the top of his list. On a completely unrelated note, observe a moment of silence for ODB. It seemed like Dirt McGirt was poised to return...

Okay, so I didn't exactly trust George Bush's call for unity in his acceptance speech, but I did agree that it is sorely needed. It seemed sort of like a nice, if obligatory, gesture at the time. It took him exactly one day, though, to show how utterly disingenuous he was and how credulous any of us were to believe him. The smirk returned. He confidently proclaimed that his huge win shows the people support his policy ideas and that we can look forward to the disastrous privatization of Social Security and the certitude that corporations can expect huge tax cuts for the next ten years. Privatization being a good way for the government to shirk its responsibility to us and ensure, well, further tax cuts for corporations. I'm feeling nostalgic for Bush I, who could at least get us out of Iraq shortly after he took us there and raise taxes a bit when he saw that not to do so would be to imperil our country. Understand me clearly on this point--it seemed a bit odd to me that a...

I suspect it all came down to moralism. At a time when we are suffering a record deficit, when unemployment hasn’t recovered from the first couple of years of Bush’s presidency, when Bush sells himself on an education program he won’t fund, when he starts a war for dubious reasons with a military he underfunds, when he removes any environmental and employment standards from corporations, when he hands these corporations huge tax breaks to diminish their work forces or move elsewhere, when he spends so much of his time on vacation so that he misses warnings that the country will be attacked, when we lose more and more of our civil rights under the USA Patriot Act, Bush seems to have won reelection on the looming threat of consensual adult sexuality. Ann Richards could have told us this would happen. I spent the hours leading up to the election watching a few movies—Outfoxed (about Fox News), Unconstitutional (about the Patriot Act), Bush’s Brain (about Karl Rove), and Control Room (abo...

Out of all the cable news channels, I would have to go with C-SPAN. I abhor Fox, and the others are too cookie-cutter and milquetoast. This one just runs footage straight through with no comment. If one is to pretend to be unbiased, this is about the only way to do it. Recently Jon Stewart confronted the hosts of Crossfire about their "debate" style--what I get from it is that to appear unbiased, networks feel that they must dish out their criticism entirely equally. Or they just don't at all. Aren't there some objective criticisms of the Bush administration that should be commonplace by now? On a program on Sundance channel called "Fahrenheit 9/11: A Movement in Time," Dan Rather discusses feeling as though his hands are tied in reporting on the current administration (the clip is from a panel of prominent network reporters). I've gotten this same impression watching Saturday Night Live the past few weeks. Do they feel they need to pretend to an unbiase...

Our president is a “compassionate conservative.” This week, it has been estimated that 100,000 Iraqi lives have been taken. We’ve been beyond 1,000 U.S. soldiers’ deaths for a while now as well. This, at least, is in the name of the Bush administration’s interest in Iraq. We were told this was because of the development of weapons of mass destruction there. Then we were told that it was to spread freedom. For those of us who don’t sense the ring of truth in these, we suspect that it has something to do with oil and Haliburton contracts. If so, God help them. Or as Bob Dylan said, “Even Jesus could never forgive what you do.” If Bush loses sleep over this as he claims he does, I hope it occurs tenfold. If you are planning on voting for Bush because of his position on abortion, consider recent findings that the number of abortions has increased under his administration. Further, it was found that the number has been higher under conservative administrations and lower under liberal admin...

I woke up to some interesting news this morning about Howard Stern confronting Michael Powell as a caller on a San Francisco radio show. Stern has of course had a lot to say about Powell over the past several months as talk of high indecency fines has caused considerable anxiety among broadcasters of Stern's show. Particularly, it seems that Clear Channel dropped him from its stations soon after such talk began. So this confrontation had been a long time coming, since Stern claims Powell has been unreachable and that the FCC has used racketeering-type tactics to avoid lawsuits. On the call-in show, Stern made such accusations as well as charges of nepotism (Powell is of course Colin's son) and selectivity in fining him and not other similar offenders. The climate during the past four years has been hostile to free speech, as this is an example. I was surprised during the final debate when Bush sought to defend the Patriot Act. As viewers of Fahrenheit 9/11 know, this has been ...

We've lost tons of explosives? This administration is incompetent, though we already knew that. What will it take, people? There is little question that this is the worst president in American history. An independent study (PIPA) recently found, though, that there is quite a difference between what Bush supporters believe to be true and what is in fact true. Perhaps you had heard before that regular viewers of Fox News are more misinformed than viewers of other media outlets and that the more they watch Fox, the more mistaken they are. This new study finds that Bush supporters still believe that Saddam had ties with al Qaida, that there are weapons of mass destruction, that the rest of the world is largely in agreement with our actions in Iraq, and that Bush supports the Kyoto treaty. All of which are incorrect, in case you don't know. I was heartened yesterday, though, to read my local paper's endorsement of Kerry. Only one week to go--will this latest issue bring people a...

I've picked up a trick in discovering where Republicans get their talking points. If they are discussing something, anything, such as problems created by the Bush administration, and they steer the blame to Bill Clinton, they probably get their information from Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh made his career on his obsession with the Clintons, and he hasn't stopped talking about them since. One conspiracy theory he purports is that the Clintons will not support John Kerry because Hillary would like to run for president in 2008. He might have wanted to let Bill in on this before his stellar speech at the Democratic National Convention, or Hillary herself should have known this before she called Kerry's performance in the last debate "masterful." Besides, I personally wouldn't have any problem with Hillary running for president; she'd make an excellent first female president. This, of course, seems to be about conservatives' fear of strong women. I've notic...

I saw the documentary "Stoked" over the weekend, which follows Mark "Gator" Rogowski from his height of popularity to the rape and murder of a friend of his girlfriend. I remembered hearing something about this, but it occurred around 1990-91. By then I wouldn't have been paying much attention to skateboarding anymore. The film also mentions that Christian Hosoi was in prison on drug charges, and Jeff Phillips killed himself. Tony Hawk has of course fared better, with video games and television appearances. Lance Mountain is in the film quite a bit, as is Steve Caballero. I guess they both still skate. This film might be sort of a companion to "Dogtown and the Z-Boys," which is mostly more positive but also ends by mentioning that one of the prominent skaters wound up in prison (I think also on drug charges). I have found that these films tap into a kind of nostalgia for me--am I going to be susceptible to such things, what with the Pixies reuniting? ...

Can it actually be that this country will elect George Bush (for real this time)? These polls are killing me--day after day, and they generally seem to show Bush on top. My hope is that November 2 will come out quite differently. After all, Jimmy Carter was not re-elected mostly for Iran's taking a couple of hostages, but we now have beheadings every couple of weeks. To talk to people, though, I won't be incredibly surprised if Bush is elected. Is this a dumb country? There's widespread agreement that Kerry-Edwards won every single debate. Kerry is a war hero; his actions during Vietnam are right out of an action movie. Yet Republicans are able to persuade the American public that up is down--Iraq's going well, chicken hawks are good for the military, making war is making peace, a war hero is a coward, and we're doing well economically. This spills over to the state level. Many states, especially my own, are experiencing budget problems (add one more to that previo...

I'm starting this thing, and I don't know the first thing about all of this except I like the concept. I've chosen where I'm coming from here in the spirit of the current times, feeling the importance of political awareness like so many others recently. So I'm an evangelical Christian who would love to get George Bush out of office. There have to be more like me. And now, for a brief anecdote: I e-mailed my pastor recently to ask him not to distribute "voter guides" to our congregants. I noticed a story about this in the news, that the Christian Coalition would be sending those out this week. There's certainly a decidedly right wing slant at my church. This is where I'm coming from--theologically conservative and politically liberal. But the "W04" bumper stickers can be seen in my church parking lot. So he responded that he didn't intend on distributing these but oddly proceeded to say that these seem unbiased to him, unlike politica...