President’s Day Thoughts On The State of the World

How do you celebrate President’s Day? Other than mattress sales, I mean. Most holidays have a theme of some kind, something you’re supposed to contemplate as you go about your day off, but President’s Day is just celebrating these two vastly different men’s lives. It isn’t even their birthday. But what is the one thing they had in common? Politics. And so…

Three quotes that sum up our moment in history:

  1. “The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”- attributed to Davis X Machina, at Balloon Juice.  And the reason for this is…
  2. “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” (Origin unknown) (I would argue “Equality or even relative decrease of privilege feels like…”)
  3. And for the upper echelons of conservatism: “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and a king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything” – Bruce Springsteen

The lady in this next one lets the mask drop and shows what she really believes in. She says it was taken out of context, but what context she gives us doesn’t make it better.

Next, Fred Clark reminds us what true righteousness means:

Then we have an example of how White America has denied black Americans as much of the wealth of the land and the full benefit of being American as possible:

How The GI Bill’s Promise Was Denied to A Million Black WWII veterans

“Fun fact”, mentioned in the article: New Deal programs were also deliberately structured to exclude as many black people as possible.

And finally, something from back in the Fall, to remind us what “ready for school” means these days.

A Friend In Need

Fred Clark, the Slacktivist, whom I consider to be both a friend and teacher, has had an absolutely terrible June. His father passed away, and then…well, he experienced the string of events recounted at this linked post. Please help if you can, or share if you can’t.

Or even if you can. The farther this reaches, the better.

Spotlighted Link: Slacktivist

slacktivist-banner

I’ve been following Fred Clark’s blog, Slacktivist, for a very long time.  Back to the Typepad Days, as other long-running Slacktivites might say.  Nearly fourteen years now, almost since the very beginning of Fred’s famous deconstruction of the Left Behind books.

I chose Fred Clark to be my first Spotlighted Link, and the first link on my Links page, for three reasons:

  1. Fred’s Left Behind posts may be the best “What Not To Do” primer for writers on the Internet.  The Left Behind series is, as Fred himself says, “Instructively Bad”, and seeing their many flaws dissected (complete with suggestions as to how it could have been done better and even fix-fic in the comments) has aided the development of my own writing a great deal.
  2. Fred grew up in the White Christian Evangelical subculture, and remains a member to this day, though he is known in that subculture as “controversial” (which, if you were a reader of Fred’s work, you would know means “heretical”).  Reading Fred gives you an intimate view into this subculture, with all its traditions and shibboleths.  If you’re an American, you may think you know them.  You don’t.
  3. Last but not least, Fred has been a tremendous inspiration to me personally.  His compassion and hunger for justice, and his writings on those topics, have given me both desire and directions to be a better person.  His post LB: The Rise of the Anti-Huck (a post from his Left Behind critique) is probably the best example I can offer, as he analyzes the greatest moment of Salvation and triumph of love over The Rules in American fiction…and contrasts it with the “heroes” of Left Behind.

Check it out!  Before you go, check out my brand new Links page.

By the way, as we say in pretty much every thread on Slacktivist, Fred has a Patreon.  Support the artist.

And while you’re at it, consider picking up some of Fred’s books, which collect his blog posts.

There’s

Long March of the Koalas

…which discusses his opinions on Creationism (spoiler: not only bad science, but bad religion).

And of course, there’s what you really came for: the two-volume The Anti-Christ Handbook, which collects his columns on the first book of the Left Behind series.

Anti-Christ Handbook 1

Anti-Christ Handbook 2