Disgraced evangelical ex-pastor Ted Haggard "reinvents" self to become Christian businessman and reflections on my own religious roots

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
--Denis Diderot

WWW--If you think there's any difference at all between an evangelical preacher or pastor from a "Christian businessman," you've already lost your ability to reason. Jesus would have laughed, then physically attacked these kinds of bastards, just as he's alleged to have done with the money-changers. Same kind of people.

The war between the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment that began in the 1700s continues unabated.

Why? Because some of us cannot--and will not--ever be able to cope with the fact that we have this short time on our earth, that life is a kind of "happy accident," and that we die and there's nothing after that. Why is this a bad thing? I don't get it and don't want to. Wanting to live forever sounds like vampirism. We die.

I can cope with it being that way, can you? Get a real goddamn job you bums, you liars, you assholes. Quit preying on the miserable, the vulnerable, and the lost. Leave them alone--there's your redemption, just leave people alone. My grandparents taught me that the preacher man has no more knowledge of God than anyone else. They taught me that these men--and very few women, even today--don't have any answers for your life or the meaning of all of this.

They were right. If a parish or a church helps people, that's fine, and that's all they should be there for. Otherwise, there is no point to their existence whatsoever.

In that sense, I can accept President-elect Obama's embracing of faith-based initiatives, because we're going to have to mobilize every single governmental and social institution to fix our economy and our world. But don't me or anyone else sing or pray for their meal as the Salvation Army and others do. Don't force your beliefs onto others for help. That's immoral, and you cannot change people, ultimately. When I look back at my family's history (the Blough-branch, the one I value the most), there's an impressive array of Anabaptism and Populism. They were people who fought "the good fight," the hardest ones, but the ones worth fighting for.

Nearly 500-hundred-years-ago during the Reformation, they arose in Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and much of Western Europe, to challenge the power of the union between Church and State, religious intolerance, and the conscription of young and old for wars fought for the powerful. Someday, there won't be a need for churches. Democracy breaks-out in every era in so many different forms.

In the earliest-days of Christianity, there was no "orthodox" canon, and women were often treated as equals in religious settings. When orthodoxy (literally, "right thinking") crushed the democratic diversity of Christianity, we lost the voice and wisdom of women. We're only now recovering from the mistakes from that time, something that should give us pause. Would there have been the witch-hunts and the untold murders of women and homosexuals over the centuries? Would there have been so many wars with the shaping of the sword-wielding Jesus?

We're coming to a watershed period here where the repressive structures of traditional and modern authoritarianism are falling away. Will we take-up these opportunities, or will be miss them when they're right in-front of our faces? The possibilities are breathtaking. No, there won't be some "workers' paradise" afterward, that's for other, secular religions of the Left. But we can improve things. We can improve our lives, and the lives of our children and their children. We can leave a legacy behind that's redemptive, the real thing. This life is all that matters.

Knowing that at least my own branch of the family has retained these Anabaptist values, and that my ancestors have tended towards being on the right side of history, I can only feel proud. How they were transmitted unconsciously through our family culture over the centuries is the real mystery, but it happened. That's all that matters. Ted Haggard should quit using Jesus as his crutch and go get a real job as the rest of us have had to our entire lives. If he has to push a mop, so mote it be, the bum.

My favorite photo, and the turning of the wheel...

This is a photograph of my mother and grandfather. He'd just returned from WWII, from the European theater, having served under that nut General George "Blood and Guts" Patton. My mother looks so thrilled to see her daddy coming home. WWII was necessary.

Military-style fascism had to be crushed in Germany and Japan and all of the occupied territories. But this same fascism still infects America, and it must be crushed. Luckily, it's extinguishing itself.

My grandfather never fully recovered from his experiences in the war. For the rest of his life, he was very nervous man with a hair-trigger temper. He couldn't connect very well with my mother because she had been born in 1944, after he'd left to serve in the Army. He wasn't a dumbass, he was drafted, he didn't enlist. I respect him for this greatly. He had sense. When he came back, the economy was far worse than it is right now (just wait). What can I say? He was a good man who found it hard to express his feelings to his family, but we loved him just the same.

Today, I dug-out some of these old photos to show to my three-year-old niece, Zofia, to show her what her grandma looked like as a baby (exactly like Zofia, since we have non-recessive genes). She's a precocious little baby with a big heart and a mostly peaceful temperment. She rarely cries. She's a joy. When I showed her this and other photos and told her "This is grandma," she said, "No--this is Zofia!"

Rollie and Billie, father and daughter, finally united--it was 1946, and the Cold War had yet to be invented by the politicians (mainly the utterly corrupt GOP). When the wars have ended, when tyranny has been smashed, when people finally learn to live amongst one another in relative peace, and when we realize that we're all a family, we'll have the same moment of love that Rollie and Billie lived 62-years-ago. That moment was--and is--love. Love for ourselves and each other, because it really is that simple. The circle is unbroken.

From the Blough family vaults: A dirty postcard to a mistress

Kansas, 1907--It seems my great-great grandfather liked to screw-around on his wife. This is close to 101-years-ago, when the dead are scarcely a memory any longer. If you want an idea of how much you're going to be remembered--if at all--this is a good lesson.

But be wise, dear friend, and be sure to destroy all of the physical evidence that might fall into the wrong hands of, say...a historian. Then, they, your descendants and others in the future, could accidentally discover what a fool, a coward, and a scoundrel you were. One ancestor forgot to burn a pile of his post card collection, the majority-of-which were written to his mistress. Oh, it was a very different America, and yet the it's still the same. There was Populism them with all its own internal-contradictions just as there is today. Some of my ancestors were prairie Populists.

As far as I can tell from the accounts, my great-great grandfather was a very wrong-headed small businessman who owned a hotel for a time. It burned-down around the time of this card. A petty bourgeois, some of the worst among us, and I believe his own father was a barber and leather-worker in the Old West. Since the Revolutionary War, some of the Bloughs have worked closely with horses, and we're a vast surname. I have my great-great-great grandfather's Old West Bible. You have to wonder whose hair he cut during his time living in 19th century Kansas. He died in the 1890s of poor health, possibly tuberculosis or pneumonia.

On December 25th, 1907, his mistress felt it important to mail him saying that her ride on the railways had gone well. Wonderful, at least they were satisfied, though I doubt Mrs. Blough was. If you think everything nowadays is new, unique, and that you're the first person to have sex...you must be under the age of 30. That's right kids, you're not the first people to discover illicit-fucking, I hate breaking it to you. Most of you are as boring as you suspect, so try to work on that one. Your parents are full-of-shit too, so why imitate them so much?

My point is, I reject a lot of things in my family history. Many people do, or like to think that they do. I'm not mistaken in my assertions, but all Americans of every color harbor bigotry and racist conditioning, it's inherent to our culture.

While these lily-white slobs were playing house, thousands of Native Americans were being herded into the reservations, thousands were being forcibly-sterilized for being "different" or troubled, millions of workers were being exploited and flogged like slaves, while blacks were being lynched from the highest-trees and still worked as slaves when they weren't being hounded under vagrancy laws; and while our military was slaughtering untold thousands of Filipinos, these ancestors--not the mistress--of mine were screwing in their ignorance. Such are the lives of the middle class.

It's a funny little card from an unfunny little era, not so different from our own. It was yesterday, and I reject the racism and the hypocrisies of that time and this era. Why is reincarnation necessary at all?

Postscript, 09.18.2008: There are what appear to be remnants of writing along the left-margin of the postcard. Yes, some of them are stains from deterioration, very perceptive. I'm guessing it's a reference to the spurned- wife.

My Garden, Our Garden

The Family Homestead--This is my first year cultivating a garden on the plot that my grandparents had for around 40 years. When they first moved to this house in 1963, the soil was sandy and rocky--almost barren. But for all that time, they enriched the soil in our 2 acres of land with their composting, giving it a richness to be envied. I miss them so, and so do our neighbors here who knew them. My grandfather died in December of 2003, and until this Spring, I was just too depressed and reluctant to start a new garden here.

But this year, it was time, and with a new life in our family (my niece), that time had come to bring more life into this world. There's something spiritual about growing your own food, it's a feeling that I cannot fully describe. It's not only emotionally-liberating, but it gives you a sense that everything is possible again, that life begins anew every year and that little else matters (except love and friendship). I know, what the hell is he gibbering about on a site that's filled with a lot of ugly themes about an ugly era?

Because: we all need to return to our own private gardens, a return to the arboreal, to our personal Edens. Plants have always held a fascination for me, and I sometimes have visions of a better life, and they're always there in the images. They're dreams of my childhood, when I used to wander through forests, through the ruins of the House of David in Northwestern Michigan (and its environs), and through nearby forests here in Indiana. Nature was always my asylum, a place of mystery and of joy. It still is.

This garden has healed my soul in ways I could never have imagined, and has helped me understand what I'm capable of. It hasn't just been an empowering experience, it's been one of self-actualization. So has this blog, but it can never do the work that my--our--garden has.

I've grown: leeks, cauliflower, eggplants, peppers, red and green onions, maize, four varieties of tomatoes, cantaloupes, and yellow squash. Not only has this helped lower our food-costs, it's made me feel very whole, more alive than I've ever felt. The feelings of accomplishment are beyond words--it just feels good. I and my family aren't eating so much processed-food because of it. My German ancestors did this for countless millennia--my mother's maiden name is "Blough, which sometimes has been spelled "Plough"--and I have to wonder if this knowledge is somehow passed-down in our genes, because it was so easy, so natural.

That's not to say it wasn't a lot of physical work, but it came simply, without very much trouble. I literally only had to dust for insects a couple times, and don't believe in using pesticides that much. That's it. You can go now. Try growing a garden sometime if it strikes your fancy, I couldn't recommend it more highly.

You didn't ask for it, but you're getting it: Baby Zofia!

South Bend, Indiana--Here's an older photo of my niece, little baby Zofia (we had no-choice in the spelling of her name, I would have used an "S"). This is the first-time Baby Z played drums ever! She was just one, now she's two.

I didn't and still don't care about the death of my father's mother, who could best be described as an undiagnosed psychotic. Conversely, when my grandmother and grandfather died (my mother's parents), it was devastating to my family and still is. Family is family, and not purely by blood, but also through behavior. Cruelty has its price: alienation. "Lil" had no friends left before her final descent into madness and dementia, and she earned it.

But this baby is the best consolation we could ever have for those we have loved and lost, and she looks so much like a Blough--like my mother and brother especially--that it's uncanny. Babies are such a joyous occasion, the good-side of life, and her coming helped me understand that life goes on and that mortality is necessary. She's the sweetest little baby I've ever had the honor to know, and this blog is my humble contribution towards making a better world for her to live in. Getting your hands dirty is part of the job, and there's a lot of work to do. How do we begin making a better world?

A first-step means taxing the ultra-rich out-of-existence and ending the legal existence of corporations. It's our world too, including Zofia's.

All I can think of is this baby's smile and her giggles. A natural musician? We'll see, it runs on my mother's side of the family! My great-grandmother played barrel house and juke-joint piano, ragtime, etc., like a charm. And girls can play drums now, it's safe to come out! We're all going to live together or die together, and babies are why we must have peace in this world, forget the adults.

Revised 10.13.2008

My Mother's Father (1922-2003) Part I

My grandfather was such a good man, but he was troubled by the world that he lived through. He never found a good way to express this until the very end of his life, which I find sad. His was a life that is no more and an America that is long-gone.

In many respects, this is a good thing, but it's impossible to say that I don't miss him or the generation he was a part of, now receding into the twilight. I won't say that my grandfather's generation was the " greatest [American] generation"--it wasn't. Most of the racists who beat civil rights activists, and even murdered them, were of the WWII generation. They were as wrong as one can be, but they weren't the whole story.

There were and are many shades of racism, and it's a part of our basic anthropology, almost innate to us. This isn't to say that people cannot overcome it, but it's a tendency within all of us as human beings. I think of racism as the greatest tragedy of the human experience. Were it not for the fact that I was shunted into the worst classes with the Black kids, I might not understand this. I understand discrimination well, and Black Americans have my admiration and empathy for the crap they have to put-up-with. I hate most White Americans myself, they're generally pigs. That said, it doesn't excuse reverse-discrimination or a racist response.

My grandfather was bigoted to-a-point, and I lament this fact, but he still saw Black Americans (and other so-called minorities) as people. God, the times he would bait me with racial-comments--he was a teaser, he loved to pick. But he didn't hate Black people, and he was a friendly man for the most part. He worked with them at his factory job at a ball-bearing plant (Torrington) for decades and had a few Black acquaintances. For someone like Rollie, this was a very big step indeed.

His job was building the equipment and tools for the machinists, and he did it for about twenty years. Before that, he and my grandmother worked in other factories and munitions-plants like many in their generation. Interestingly, he was discriminated against at his job for a variety-of-reasons (some due to his personality!). South Bend is a town that is almost predominantly Polish and Hungarian, with the rest falling-off from there. However, with the influx of Hispanics, it's changing rapidly as it is in many places in the United States. Most of these ethnic groups had (and have) one thing in-common: Catholicism, and the cold, cruel, Old world exclusionary version of it. America is a very primitive and tribally oriented place. Tribalism is for the birds and needs to go the way of organized religion. It needs to die. If that's community, you can have it, and I'm glad that the modern world is crushing it.

Like in most American cities that have ethnic enclaves, each group really just takes care of its own. South Bend has been, and is, no different in this. Each group tended to discriminate, especially when one wasn't Catholic. In truth, my family has probably been discriminated-against on this basis more than we'll ever know. This is ironic, since I was baptised a Catholic! My grandparents weren't very active religiously, which I still admire. They taught me from an early-age, "Don't ever trust the preacherman, he doesn't know anymore than you do. He just wants your money." This is pure prairie Populism, a tradition I am more-than-proud-of. After being forced to attend congregationalist churches with my father, this belief was only reinforced, what hollow, meaningless-crap. If Jesus showed-up, they would turn him away because he would be in-rags, they wouldn't recognize him if he was glowing.

My grandparents didn't trust authority of any kind, a lesson for us all, because they saw authority abused during their lives. I believe that the time has come again for prairie Populism's resurrection, only this time it won't be agrarian, and just a simple expression of the will of the people in different times. What could be more beautiful and sacred than the unprompted assertion of humanity by ordinary people? My family comes from this tradition, and our familial culture extends-back to our Anabaptist ancestors in Germany and possibly Switzerland. Somehow, it survived organically within our family's culture.

The Anabaptists were the first religious group in Western Europe to call for a separation of Church and State. I suspect we've always been anti-clerical, and anti-war (excepting defensive wars of survival) in some ways, but WWII was necessary. Few would argue this, and fascism had to be stopped. It really was the good war to my mind. It was the aftermath that the politicians and big businessmen screwed-up, and keeping them in-check is the role of the people. The "world's greatest generation" tried to do this, but I believe the postwar economic-boom caused many of them to lapse into forgetfulness--they forgot who the enemy really was, namely concentrated wealth.

My grandfather was from Kansas, while my grandmother was from Arkansas. Her family were literally dirt-farmers, and she was a mountain-girl, and such a lovely and warm woman. She was a real-life Cinderella. When she died, I nearly went with her, the shock was so overwhelming. She was literally my second mother. My grandfather's family moved to Arkansas (Marshall, I believe) during the late-1920s, and this is how they met.

His father was insane--he was both a Freemason (Masonry teaches universal brotherhood!) and a member of the KKK during the 1920s (probably because of the movie "The Birth of a Nation"), and one of the earliest Jehovah's witnesses. He'd had a good-paying job with the railroad as an engineer, but he was basically an abusive asshole who felt he was always right. So, he quit his job, and moved his family to start a farm during worst period in American history to start one (except now), right before the Great Depression! I was told many stories about the dustbowl and the dust storms that blanketed parts of the South, Southwest, and plains states, as a child.

They were stories of an apocalypse, a wall of death that smothered everything. Entire families were found suffocated-to-death in their shacks and farm houses according to my grandparents and the historical record. The Bloughs nearly starved-to-death, and eventually the hothead had to get another job. He was also a physically-abusive man, and rarely spoke to his children.

Things got better for them, gradually, in Arkansas. My grandfather was one of the only young men in his town with a car (a 1929 model A Ford with a rumble seat--I've ridden in a rumble seat! Fun!). My grandparents met at a dance that could have been out of a John Steinbeck novel, and they knew the life he wrote about intimately. They were poor, but luckier than many. They had food. My grandparents met at a public dance in Arkansas in the late-1930s.

There wasn't much work to be had, so my grandfather joined the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps, public works jobs provided by the New Deal). He always talked fondly about his experiences with the CCC and said that we should do it again as a nation. This was no Leftist firebrand, no radical, but a unionized worker who slaved his entire life. He was no fool, which is what America has been overpopulated with for some time.

I heartily agree with his sentiments about public service, and I think that it should be compulsory in our society, and mandatory for all economic strata. This goes for war. The draft should be reinstated as a first-step towards ending our love affair with overseas meddling, and our bloated military budgets must be slashed for all time. The time for beating our swords into plowshares has come. We should look to past wars as they're instructive of what not to do.

The invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939 dragged the world into a global conflict. The world was aflame. This takes us to 1940 in the lives of my grandparents...

Revised 10.13.2008