The Free Seeker
E-Newsletter of the Unitarian Fellowship of Huntington
Issue No. 28; July 21, 2010
Jack Wilkinson, Editor
Program for Sunday, July 25, 2010
Open Discussion
The program on China has been cancelled. The cause for this is obscure. Rumor has it that Chinese secret agents paid our Program Director a visit and talked him out of it with the help of bamboo under the fingernails. Another rumor says that the water torture machine with which he had planned to regale us has broken down. In lieu of our being imbued in oriental inscrutability I have a topic closer to hand, just south of our border, in fact, which I shall be discussing in my column "Light from Jack's Lantern."
Future Sunday Programs
August 1st: Bill Patten, "Afghanistan, Part II"
August 8th: Open Discussion
August 15th: "The Great West Virginia Textbook War and its Relation to the Radical
Fundamentalist Elements of the Tea Party Movement" If you loved the
book, then you'll adore the movie.
August 22nd: Jack Wilkinson, "The Cycle of the Year and Its Eight Festivals"
August 29th: End of Summer Potluck Feast
Retrospective of Last Sunday
We saw a movie directed and starred in by Jonathan Miller. The title, I was told, was "The Elusive Thing: Reason." Miller is a British physician who became a movie maker. Some twenty years or so ago he filmed some Shakespearean plays, which he directed. In these earlier cinematographic forays he succeeded in flattening out Shakespeare as with a steamroller. In "The Taming of the Shrew" he turned John Cleese's Petruccio, whom we have seen Richard Burton portray with verve and humor, into a pussy-footing, neutered fop. As for his "Antony and Cleopatra," he clothed the Queen of the Nile in a pretty English party dress with puffy sleeves and had her bantering like a British school marm. There is a place for theatrical restatement, but this was ridiculous!
Now Miller, having already destroyed Shakespeare, is intent on doing the same to religion. The older Miller has acquired a certain charm and grace which he previously lacked, so he is easy to listen to, and his directorial touches are brilliant.. He takes us on a guided tour of the magnificent ruins of medieval church architecture. His point is that these are the empty irrelevant dinosaurs that once served as houses of worship, their gothic beauty being totally beside the point. By contrast we see the world into which he is leading us, a sprawl of concrete bunkers with no aspirational vaulted spaces overhead. He uses a string of materialistic philosophers as stepping stones to sanity, among them Hobbes and Hume. As for Newton, he dared not lean heavily on him, because he had in addition to a teeming mind a rich life of soul. What Miller's presentation lacked so conspicuously was an intellectual argument that might serve as a refutation of soul and spirit. His simple dismissal will not do.
There is one thing on which religionists and secularists agree and have agreed on for the past two millennia: the viability of Plato and Aristotle. These two have leapfrogged across the centuries as the darlings of both camps. The reason for this is that they were the last philosophers to be inspired before the waning of the power of the Spirit, the reinvigoration of which lies in our future but, alas!, not in our present. Therefore, Plato and Aristotle preside over a moribund Religion and a moribund Science, keeping them both weakly alive.
Light from Jack's Lantern: "Immigration"
This is to expand on a letter I just sent out to the Herald Dispatch. Illegal immigration is one of our national concerns. Wave after wave of Mexicans are crossing over. We are awash in wetbacks. Some century and a half ago plus a few extra years our western border was part of Mexico. Then we took it from them. 'Manifest destiny' we called it. So now they're taking it back. Slowly or quickly, legally or illegally they are taking back their land, and (guess what) there's not a damn thing we can do about it. We can fuss all we want, but they're here to stay, they're not going back, and they'll keep on coming. Wait: there is one thing we can do, just one. We can annex Mexico and make it our 51st state.
That's crazy! Really? How crazy was it to annex Alaska and make it a state? How crazy was it to annex Hawaii and make it a state? Both are hundreds of miles away. How crazy was it to annex Puerto Rico, and how crazy will it be when we make it a state? How crazy is it to have air and sea bases all over the globe? We're already in the crazy business. What's one more lunge at lunacy?
With one bold stroke we can stop the flood of Mexicans (because they'll no longer be Mexicans), we can shorten our southern border (Guatemala and Belize are not as wide as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California), and we can equalize wages. Furthermore, it will give us a new hopeless cause closer to home. At the moment our main hopeless cause is the civilizing of Afghanistan. Now we'll have a new one of breaking the drug cartels that will suddenly appear within our own borders, and in the struggle it is my hope that we shall have an epiphany: it will finally dawn on us that the only way we can defeat the illegal drug traffic is to legalize it.
Two bold strokes. By annexation we can beat the Mexicans at their own game, and by drug legalization we can topple the drug lords. Then with the new tax money from the newly legal drugs we can draw down on the national debt, which will be an overture to the Chinese. How crazy is that?
Keeping up with our members
* Bob Williams: get well soon. You are in our thoughts and prayers.
* Jack Wilkinson: good luck with your cardioversion procedure on Friday, August
23rd and happy 82nd birthday on Saturday, July 24th.
* More autobiographies have been requested, for which volunteers are needed. Also,
we could recycle.
* I suggest we open each program with a Joys and Concerns like other societies.