Hurricane Isaac’s approach to Tampa and points west have piqued the deep recesses of my brain, stirring an interpretation angle that I don’t like to acknowledge. I’m gonna have some fun with it here. Let me start with David Letterman’s quip last week: Hurricane Isaac’s attack on Tampa proves to be, beyond doubt, that God is a woman!
Here is paranoid rant # 1 (from about a week ago):
The wrath of God is bearing down on Tampa and the Republican Nominating Convention. Clearly God is answering my prayers…and those of other Truth-believing, Truth-telling Democrats…and is gonna wreak havoc on those God-forsaken Republicans. God will not truck with those that believe differently than I do, He does not tolerate compromise with the Truth, and he is tired of these lousy people who never have read “Being and Nothingness”, “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, the “Kama Sutra,” and “The Huffington Post.” Oh, I should add, “He is tired of those who can’t read in the first place and who, only one generation back, were not walking upright.”
But, alas and alack, the path of Isaac was diverted and New Orleans is facing its fury. So, here is paranoid, insane rant #2:
So, God clearly had a change of heart and decided to spare Tampa and the GOP the brunt of his wrath, meting out to them merely a slap on the wrist. For, you see, god chose to answer another one of my prayers and take care of unfinished business from six years ago. You see, back then he gave New Orleans a scourging because of its sin and iniquity when he sent Katrina. But, he spared Bourbon Street, that bastion of perversity and degradation. Now, he has turned Isaac in the direction of New Orleans and this time he is gonna beat the hell out of Bourbon Street.
Now the scary part of this nonsense is that it does reflect the residue of the way I was taught. Anyone who can even think this way…even sarcastically as I have done here…has at his/her disposal a very skewed view of the world. And yes I was taught such a view and it is still present in some whimsical, capricious fashion though I give it no energy in the least.
Our view of God does not say so much about God as it does about ourselves, ourselves in the very depths of our hearts; not the selves that we present to the world but the ones that lie buried in our unconscious depths. I’m going to illustrate with only one of the right-wing crazies who have crawled out from under the rocks the past four years—Michelle “Deep Penetration” Bachman. In addition her recent paranoid fears about Muslim infiltration of our government, remember how she attributed natural disasters about a year ago to God’s judgment on our country, saying, “I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’”
I quote Jesus here, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” And anyone whose heart is full of this paranoid filth does not need to have the prominence in our government that she has. I gravely fear what direction our country will take if it is led by people of that ilk. (AND, by the way, I do NOT think all Republicans are like her.)
Bachman lives in a very rigid cause-effect, right-wrong, black-white world. Reality is much more subtle than that. Now we must have “cause-effect, right-wrong, black-white” world but we do not need to be consumed by it. We need to realize that there is another world “out there” which is paradoxically “in here” and the Presence of that world gives us pause and keeps us from getting too arrogant. That Presence gently reminds us that we always “see through a glass darkly.” Though wrongs in the world, i.e. “evil”, need to be addressed, the primary focus of our energy needs to be the “evil” that lurks within. And, contrary to people like Ms. Bachman, there is a lot of evil in good people. In fact…and this is getting far out I admit…but I posit the notion that the “gooder” you get the more evil you have to deal with!