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God works in mysterious and largely inconsistent ways…We have recently beheld the spectacle of Pat Robertson, God’s Mouthpiece in these parts, and staunch, stentorian antigay antiabortion advocate, giving his Holy political imprimatur to Rudy Giuliani, progay proabortion former mayor of 9/11 town. Amazing.

It is this last bit, of course, that has turned God’s head (Robertson has been under the direct control of God via the workings of the Honorable The Holy Ghost, Esq., for most of his life, and therefore has no say in the matter). The attack on the world trade center was the high mark of every neoconservative’s existence up to that point and beyond, the moment of Endless Possibilities and Great Potential, the vasty storerooms of the Federal vault opened wide to the Pentagon and the Armed Forces – the first and last day their great Prophet-King Geo. “Burning” Bush looked like a competent person. It was a beautiful thing, from their perspective, a watershed event to outshine all others. No wonder Bush had bin Laden’s family flown out of the country, each burdened by the thanks of a grateful nation, and no doubt weighed down by a few million dollars in earnest money.

And so now it’s safe to say that the neoconservative world has let go of the convenient fiction of God’s unending opposition to abortion and same-sex behaviors. It was all a mistake, folks. The Absolute Inviolate Eternal Truth on gayness has turned another corner, thanks, perhaps, to Senator Craig, the Rev. Ted Haggard and sundry other True Believers out there. The Absolute Inviolate Eternal Truth on abortion may have simply been reimagined and reissued due simply to the fact that the next president may well be female, Democratic and named Clinton – a veritable Obscenity Trinity! God Himself gags upon hearing this! Or so one is led to believe. I tremble even to write this. Why oppose abortion, when it only leads to the diminution of your political power, and, in the same stroke, puts Hell’s Handmaiden on the American Throne?

In retrospect, however, it must be noted that the passing of the abortion issue casts a dreadful pall over Our Embattled Nation. However one may feel about abortion, it at least represented a group of (potential) humans that neoconservatives would not kill.

And that’s a goddamn shame. Think about it: People who would start a war at the drop of a cliché, who would gladly put developmentally disabled children to death for crimes of passion, who would stand up for Jesus and say, “Let’s assassinate Hugo Chavez” – these bloodthirsty hellions had, in the fetuses of the world, isolated one sort of person, one class of life, they would not exterminate. Imagine: something for conservatives to conserve!

But no more. Well, fare forward, Ye shooters of Baby Killers & Supporters of the (killing & dying but not the surviving) Troops, may your energies now be directed towards the oppression and domination of God’s next hateful target: Global Warming advocates. So be it. Such obvious and egregious evil must be opposed. God Has Spoken, and will remain in this post-declaration mode – until the Republican Party needs Him to say something else.

I was desperate the other night to hear news of the NBA Eastern playoff series; the Pistons had played their first game against the Clevland Cavaliers, and I had doubts as to the Piston’s ability to contain Cleveland’s front court in the absence of Ben Wallace, who was traded to Chicago.

I heard exactly nothing about this game on the 11 o’clock news. I went to bed, got up at 5 a.m., started flipping channels. I only get broadcast TV, so my choices were limited. I watched the WMTW Channel 8 broadcast — five minutes of world news, five minutes of local news, ten minutes of weather and human interest stories, respectively. Then came the sports.

They had a Red Sox story, naturally, a NASCAR roundup, I think, lots of high school sports — and then a story on a college softball game played somewhere in Nebraska.

End of the sports segment. Back to human interest stories: an update on the Lost Whales of California: God Save the Whales.

And what of the NBA Eastern finals? Playoff games in a national league, in a sport with a great history and a great interest world-wide, with superstars, with Galactic import, no less? Nothing; silence.

Flip the channel, just in time to catch WGME sports: Red Sox; high school sports; NASCAR; new high school baseball coach; cut to the news anchor. Hey, how about them Red Sox?

Well, how about them Pistons? But no. And why not? Could it be that Maine’s all-white sportscasting crews don’t give a damn about a sport dominated by African Americans?

You may like these people; you may think I am rude or hysterical or uninformed to suggest that they’re making decisions based on race; it doesn’t matter to me. I never saw anything clearer in my life.

You might even be one of these people. If so, please take note of this fact: I think you’re a racist.

(But you’re not alone. Get on the web, navigate to MaineToday, the web portal of the Maine’s largest newspaper chain, look for NBA stories on the sports page. See anything? No. No link to the playoffs, the NBA, nothing, zip. What good reason could there be to ignore a playoff series in the world of professional sports, this late in the season?)

Am I calling people names to no purpose? Nope. Just breaking a silence. These people are racists, in my opinion. Maine’s television sportsvolk may be very sweet, on other days, in other domains — kind to children and to dogs, smile at you each and every morning and evening, give you the local sports news in depth, on time, in the most avuncular and engaging manner.

Yeah. Well, I think they’re leaving pro basketball out of their newscasts for one reason and one reason only: pro basketball is a sport dominated by African American athletes — and nobody in lily-white Maine is going to care about the NBA. Except me and several thousand other people. But it’s not as if these stations depended on advertising for their survival, right?

Let’s just set the record straight here: regardless of what you might be watching on NESN, ESPN and other cable sports outlets, Maine’s broadcast community has made the editorial decision that you are not interested in the NBA.

When the Celtics were on top back in the ’80s, the league was not only covered, but the games were broadcast locally, and not just the Celtics. But the Celtics were fronted by Larry Bird, Danny Ainge and Kevin MacHale: White folks, in other words. Later, when Reggie Lewis was the dominant force on the Celtics and the Celtics were still in contention, their games were broadcast by WGME Channel 13 — but WGME chose to replace the Celtic’s halftime analysis with inane chatter, provided in copious commercial quantities by WGME sportscasters. Why would you want to hear Jimmy Meyers interview the coaches and players, when you can watch two white guys in Maine hand out NASCAR updates and sort out the high school football scene? Who, after all, wants to hear black people talk about basketball?

I have been told that the reason the sport is no longer covered in this state is that the Celtics no longer win games. Does anyone think those stations would stop covering football or baseball if the Patriots or the Red Sox were not doing well? Could there be something else going on here?

That pro basketball is not popular in some quarters is not news. A lot of people have officially marked the decline of the NBA in recent years; some blame the officiating, some the marketing, some the supposed disappearance of superstars, but if you talk to people who profess to dislike basketball these days, you will frequently hear the players described as “thugs.”

There is no more thuggery in basketball than there is in football or baseball — you disagree? How many times have you heard the phrase “bench-clearing brawl” lately? — but there is this critical difference: Spike Lee once said that he preferred basketball because you can really get to know the player. The TV experience is not that of seeing a shot of some guy in a uniform and a helmet, who might stand about two inches tall on your TV screen. You see the person, said Lee, you read the personality, see how he or she responds to adversity, triumph — but therein lies the problem, I say.

You see the person, check. That means all of those wonderful people in TVland can clearly see the gangster tattoos, the bling, the cornrows — and white America does not want to see cornrows under any circumstances. Keep it under your hat, your helmet, but for God’s sake, don’t be black. And do not be visibly angry, as there is nothing so threatening to white America than an angry African America.

And you will definitely see tall, angry black men — among others — if you’re watching the NBA. (Do I watch the WNBA? I would if it were televised on a consistent basis, so that I could get to know the players.) You will see basketball players at their worst moments — at work, for God’s sake, with people pushing and hitting them, half of them road teams, with the local fans spitting on them and calling them names, with crazy calls changing the course of their careers (Rasheed Wallace received a technical foul last year for smiling at an official; this is justice?), under very stressful circumstances, with stacks and stacks of sweet, green money on the line.

And so in markets like this, you get a lot of people looking at the NBA as if it were the Planet of the Seven-Foot Black Millionaires, a strange and forbidding place. Or some people, at least. Whenever I mention the absence of NBA coverage in public, I generally get agreement. People in Maine want to see basketball. There are exceptions…

The last time I had a serious talk about the NBA with anybody in Maine, it was with a former navy guy who had lately been dishonorably discharged for collecting child pornography. Apart from that, he was a very serious Christian, supported the troops and George W. Bush, a Good Man in all respects — said he wanted to be president one day. Southern, tall, good-looking, chiseled, fit: a stud.

So I asked him what he thought about the NBA. He cocked a clear, sparkling-blue eye at me and said, “I don’t watch the NBA.” He said this with great certainty and moral conviction, the way you or I might say, “I don’t watch child pornography.”

Well, I said, why not?

He looked at the floor, chewed his lip, scratched his head a bit, then fixed me with that bright-blue presidential gaze.

“Because I don’t like the players,” he said. “They’re rappers. They’re hip-hoppers. They’re gangsters. They celebrate criminality. They’re immoral.”

I dropped the subject; one does not want to be lectured on morality by a pedophile.

But I sure miss my game.

The world was saddened recently to hear of the passing of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and architect of the culture wars. That is, a few people in this world were saddened to hear of the Rev. Falwell’s passing; the rest were just tickled pink.

While I cannot celebrate any person’s death, I can understand why people were not happy with Falwell. He presided over the transformation of American Christianity from a charitable institution to a sinister political power, from the possibility of salvation to the certainty of condemnation.

Falwell condemned social sins at home while embracing dictators around the world. He defended apartheid in South Africa, supported Marcos, called Mohammad a terrorist, applauded every bomb America ever dropped. There was no conservative cause, past or present, that he didn’t embrace; there was no advancement of civil liberties that he did not condemn. He condemned abortion on the basis of the sanctity of life, yet there was no one on earth he wouldn’t kill — through the intermediary of the American military or the American justice system.

His followers have retained many of his bad traits, and seem to have eschewed any good that had ever come to them through the life and ministry of Jesus. While in this world, Jesus denounced orthodox religious intolerance and spiritual legalism; while in this world, Falwell promoted orthodox religious intolerance and required his followers to adopt the strictest codes of spiritual legalism.

When you go to a church and hear a sermon that refers to the words of Jesus without exploring the implications of those words, you are witnessing Falwell’s legacy. These days, American Christians don’t want to hear about loving and praying for their enemies; Jesus is just so passé, as far as the Christian right is concerned.

This is not an exaggeration. Jesus told us to love God with everything we have, and to love our neighbors as our selves. This is The Great Commandment. Jesus also gave the church the Great Commission: Go preach the gospel to every creature. Do these still pertain to the American church?

“That’s all over,” said one conservative Christian to me recently. “The mission is no longer, ‘Tell everyone,’ but, ‘Establish My Kingdom.’ ” He was quite serious; he was very glad to take up this new commission.

The love thing is “all over” too, of course; can’t love people and spend your waking hours listening to those all-important Talk Radio personalities mock and vilify non-Christian non-Conservatives hither and yon. The Rev. Falwell was quite fond of talk radio, they say.

Yet Falwell preached the Gospel; he was kind to disabled children; he loved his people. One should not speak ill of the dead.

And if his maleficent legacy had not survived him, we wouldn’t have to.

Thank God for technology. Or some technology. Or in any event, this technology. Sometimes.

I am speaking to you today with the help of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I talk, it types. Sometimes. Sometimes I just go off my cams repeating the same word over and over in ever louder, more strident tones until I realized that the damn thing is just not going to get the word that I keep repeating, and then I stop and peck it out one-handed.

The reason I have to do that one-handed thing is that I came to my doctor with a little problem: Doc, I said, there is this little thing on my finger. It hurts to play the fiddle. Can you help me?

He could. So I showed up a week ago for my outpatient surgery, and was met by a surgical team that included three nurses, an anesthesiologist, and of course the surgeon himself, all arrayed in medical whites, the light of duty burning in their eyes.

Thirty minutes later, I was being transferred from a wheelchair to my car by a nurse’s aide. I was somewhat stoned, and somewhat surprised to find a bandage the size of a loaf of bread on my left hand. My pinky had been fixed, apparently.

I suppose this trip was necessary. I mean, my finger did hurt, I really am a musician, I needed a fix. But what I had imagined was a local anesthetic and 10 minutes of sweaty forbearance on my part — of not whacking the doctor while he removed this bone spur with his jackknife — and not the medical circus that briefly transformed my life early last Wednesday.

Maybe 20 years ago, the doctor would have done the jackknife trick. Maybe not. I mean, back in high school I broke the big toe on my right foot, and had to be admitted to the hospital for three days while the thing was rebuilt. That seemed like overkill to me at the time, this seems like overkill to me now, but then again I’m not fighting off lawyers. Yet. Perhaps my day will come.

Meanwhile my finger hurts. Can’t wait to get better. Thank you God for technology. Or some technology. Sometimes.

Dear Brad:

I thought I’d lost you, boy. I thought you were gone.

You’re one of a short list of people I’ve always wanted to sit down and have one more talk with, a list that includes my father, my mother, my grandfathers, grandmothers. And Kurt Foell, that kid I told you about with whom I’d hitched to Florida back in college, who was killed hitching in California, reportedly while coming to see me. Coming to see us, Brad, remember? And what a time that would have been.

You would have liked him. He would have liked you, too.

And I’d hoped all these years to have another round with you, and maybe smoke a little something green, and to have one more good, deep, honest, fearless laugh, one more moment of perfectly irrational irresponsibility, one more moment of sharing the planet with someone you love, someone who gets it, someone who’s seen your movie and then sat gladly through the credits: A Pal. One more round with Brad, I thought, before the big fade.

But that was always the trouble, wasn’t it? The habit of having habits, of stoking those habits, of celebrating them…and always, always, always looking for new places, new experiences, new people – new habits, new fun. New trouble. Investing hope in total strangers, usually over a drink, and maybe she’s going to come home with you tonight, but then again maybe you’ve had a few too many and maybe she thinks she’d better not…

Or maybe she says yes, and says it with a slur and a leer – a nice girl, or not all that nice, out on the town for the 4,568th time. You can live and die that way, trying to make it to the next party, trying to keep the buzz going, trying not to think of the years and the dollars and the people gone by…

A postcard of us, back then. We had fun, and sometimes we had too much fun. We usually had too much of everything. There was not a bottle bought that wasn’t soon emptied. We always dealt with temptation by yielding to it, and that was the extent of our discipline.

We often stunk, we often got hurt. But we were there for each other, and we were good to each other, and that was very good. We could look each other in the eye and know we were forgiven, know that we were valued, that there would always be one more crazy afternoon with somebody you were safe with. But the road called, rose like a serpent to meet us — split us, sundered us, led us away from each other.

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This should be obvious.

Consider my immediate family: my wife (female), me (male), our son (from this union of male and female).

Consider my dog: dam (female), sire (male), dog (product of union of male and female). (Female, since you asked.)

Consider the entire animal world. Consider the entire plant world.

Tell me: Is there any creature in nature, high enough on the chain of being to be measured and quantified, that is not the product of the union of two genders, two sexes, two distinct and complementary compass points? That is not demonstrably or at least predominantly from one of those two compass points? Is it not clear that harmonious nature is something that is clearly and definitively female and male?

And you say god is a trinity, god is a nuclear family that contains a Father and a Son, but no Mother?

What planet are you from?

***

This should be obvious.

You are a person; you have a personality; your dog is a person; your dog has a personality; every creature large enough on the chain of being to be measured and quantified is known to possess personality, personhood, predilections, preferences…

And your god is not a person? Your god is a nameless, unknowable nonentity, whose reality is like unto the 60 cycle hum in my speakers, hmmmmmm?

***

This should be obvious.

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph, the creator-of-record, the muse of the pews, invested a certain amount of time in the making of animals. When God reportedly sent a flood to punish the Earth in the days of Noah, God saved a few people — and made sure that every kind of animal was preserved, that every breed, every insect, every toad, survived — says right here, brother. It’s in the scriptures. At the end of the book of Mark, when Jesus is being assumed into heaven, he says, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”

And you say animals have no souls? You say that you can abuse nature in the name of “dominion”? You have no trouble with the statement, “God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours’ “?

***

This should be obvious.

You say that God has sent destruction into this world because of the sins of the people — the thoughtless slip-up, the choice of lover, the moment of anger, the soul in torment, the mind broken, the wrong word spoken, the wounded heart.

Really? It seems very clear to me that the trouble all creation now endures has largely been brought into the world by people who believe that they (and only they) have a handle on religious truth.

And I have trouble believing in a god whose sense of justice is inferior to my own.

Please join me now at the low end of the FM dial, where Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Ode To Joy, is being performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. We will stand rapt, hands folded as if in prayer, swaying gently while the Chorale moves us in a great romantic swelling and ebbing. O, hear the angel voices!

As the Chorale recedes and the announcer sonorously pronounces the name Carl Ruggles, we await the angelic choir of yet another age in the same beatific posture and bid the soft pipes to play on.

But the soft pipes do not play on; we hear instead the grinding dissonances of a sci-fi movie score, the scary part where a monster resembling an animated blob of vomit bites the antagonist’s face off. Eyaaah! Modern music! Quick, change the station!

And so we spin the dial in a blind panic until soft tones and swelling strings waft once more from the speakers and we are again translated into a state of grace. Relieved, grateful, enraptured, we listen to the Lush Strings of the Hollywood Symphonette rendering, as it were, Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” symphonically. Ah, you say, classical music. The way I like it, the way it oughta be: diabetic sentiment, historical significance. God, how I love culture.

You know, I think if we just left the old Walkman on this here “classical music” station, we might never again have to listen to that modern crap they sometimes play on MPBN.

Boy, would that be a relief.

Listen: they’re playing “Dinner In Rio.” Isn’t that nice?

Yes, that’s nice. Incidentally: classical music is dead.

“The second thing we do, let’s kill all the editors.”

– William Shakespeare, deleted from Henry IV, Part I

Editors exist to make writers look good, and should be tolerated for that reason. Editors buy stories, and should be allowed to tinker with them, if ever so gently.

There are three good (justifiable) edits: (1) grammatical errors, (2) factual errors and (3) textual errors. If a thing is wrong, false or misplaced, then it should be fixed. Much is owed to editors who do, in fact, make writers look good. If an editor makes a stylistic change that is somehow more true to the writer’s voice, or does something to extend the piece’s thematic unity, then the editor should be humbly thanked.

(A really nice editor will allow the writer to do the rewrite, deadline permitting. Such editors should be cultivated and, if possible, cloned.)

On the other hand, if an editor makes a change because he or she “wouldn’t put it that way,” the writer should be permitted to chop off one of the editor’s fingers, preferably with a plastic knife. If an editor’s change introduces a grammatical, factual or textual error, the writer should be permitted to bury that knife in the editor’s throat.

In conclusion, editors make good companions, but should not be fed at the table. Also, they should be bathed at least once a week.

If there’s one thing that can be depended upon from year to year, it’s that Americans wouldn’t think of going to war without God, and that God wouldn’t miss an American war for love or money. War after war, police action after police action, operation after operation, God is always there to enforce American foreign policy and extend it into the spiritual realm.

Or at least, that’s what some people believe. Tune in to any of the several televangelists who expound daily on the Iraq War, and you will be told that Jesus Christ Himself is currently cruising the skies over Iraq in a white-hot rage, furiously grinding His teeth at Osama bin Laden and his followers for messing with His favorite country, and that He will, at any moment, swoop down in a fiery F-16 and blow them all straight to hell.

There are other churches, of course, and other views, but those people don’t get the coverage that neoconservative zanies do, because “consumers” fail to respond to them with the same intensity.

I tell you a marvel: There are people in this country who say 3,000,000 sane, intelligent, insightful, quotable things for every lame, hateful statement Ann Coulter makes. They will never be heard.

Therefore I declare that the Christian Left should get in the God War. We should find our own idiotic firebrand, some loudmouth who has no conscience and no prospect of acquiring one. We need someone who can stand up and say, with a straight face…well, what?

See? Here’s the problem. If you’re not convinced by Those People, if you avoid conservative talk radio, if you don’t see Jesus carrying a machine gun to Calvary, if you don’t believe that God is right now ramming around the Middle East in a Holy Humvee, looking for the shit, you’re at a loss: you’re helpless, essentially disarmed in this conflict. The best you can do is repeat things Jesus said: “Love your enemies and pray for them”; “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would fight…”

As foreign as these statements are to the Christian right, as otherworldly they might sound in the ears of jaded and distracted newsdrones, they still bear repeating. They just don’t command the same attention.

And so what? Jesus is just alright with me, bub — more than alright. Jesus may not get the press that Ann Coulter gets, but he’s a lot smarter.

I lift mine eyes; the cloud grows thin;
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smoothes
Since first I learned to love it:
The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart,
A fountain ever springing:
All things are mine since I am His—
How can I keep from singing?

It is with some trepidation and not a little pride that I reach into my past and haul out two poems that, I believe, will one day be noted as the works that defined a generation. I offer them here in chronological order of their composition.

“Declaration (The Sun)” 1996

Pizza, pizza, pizza,
Bow-wow, Bow-wow,
Look what I got.

“Modern Love” 1997

My love
Is not unlike a
Spermicidally
Lubricated
Condom with
Reservoir
End