Dear Diary: Life at Pope FM

EDITOR'S NOTE: Today, Revolution 21's Blog for the People starts an occasional series of dispatches recorded some years ago in the trenches of Catholic radio. The names aren't real, nor are the places, but the stories are -- and it's a snapshot picture of what happens when "Their zeal consumes them" meets "Sinners sacrifice for the institution, not vice versa."

In other words, there has to be a better way.

Here, then, is the first snapshot from Pope FM.

* * *

TUESDAY, OCT. 30, 2001

Dear Diary,

I was training some student "engineers" during tonight's Keys to the Kingdom, our teen call-in show at Pope FM.

The topic was vocations, and the archdiocesan vocations director was the guest. We received the following E-mail, which was not on topic, but was utterly foundational to the faith and to why Pope FM is supposed to exist (reprinted verbatim, typos and all):

Ok, number one, paschal access code? WTF? I just thought I'd 'shoot you an email'. Just heard about your program and thought Id give it a listen. I am looking for something more in my life, its either god or jack daniels and figured you could help. Before you tell me to accept god into my heart tell me, whats he done for you lately? He aint done jack s*** for me.

Oh the stories I could tell. So in short...here is a motto I love and believe in: If God hates you then just hate him back more . . . it works for me.

Rage Against the Machine

P.S. WHeres the cool music? No Butthole Surfers or Jesus Lizard? Break out the classics baby!

OUT OF THREE TEEN-AGERS and the vocations director, not one gave him a clear, simple answer. Indeed, no one answered his question at all.

I nearly was jumping up and down in the control room, holding a dry-erase board with "Jesus -- God -- willingly got on a cross and died for your sins, so that you might have everlasting life."

Then, I was holding up a sign with "John 3:16" on it. Still, no clear, simple answer.

The father of one of the student engineers was in the office, and I walked out to the lobby, despondent. Mr. Klause, a Lutheran, met me before I could say a word, saying "They didn't answer his question!"

I told him what my answer would have been, and he agreed wholeheartedly. And I told the kids they absolutely had to have a short, clear answer to that sort of E-mail, because it was utterly foundational. E-mails like that are why we exist as a Catholic radio station, and if we have no answers, we might as well unplug the transmitter.

I don't think Mona, the 20-something producer, appreciated that. I'll probably hear about my "attitude" from the boss.

Tonight, I am deeply ashamed to be Catholic. No, ashamed isn't the right word. Just heartbroken.

I told the wife that probably eight out of 10 evangelical youth-group kids could have witnessed cogently to this guy.

I JUST WANT TO CRY AND NEVER STOP. In 65 years, this guy will be my old man on his deathbed. Virtually the last thing my father ever said to me was to ask me how much money I made.

I refused to tell him.


-- Me

Alcohol and pills . . . and the mystery of life

ON THE LATEST REVOLUTION 21 PODCAST, Fred Eaglesmith makes an important point in his song, Alcohol & Pills:

Alcohol and pills, it's a cryin' shame
You think they might have been happy with the glory and the fame
But fame doesn't take away the pain, it only pays the bills
And you wind up on alcohol and pills

I guess that's what happens sometimes when the mystery of life switches to the "suck" setting, and we just can't make sense of it all. Of course, like the song says, we certainly can make things even worse.

But what if we're not SUPPOSED to make complete sense of it? What if we're just supposed to hold onto the cross of Jesus, endure the bad, rejoice in the good and learn from all of it?

I'm just sayin'.

Seems to me, there isn't any hiding from the pain of life's hard knocks or plain tragedies. You can embrace the pain as Christ embraced the cross, then plow through it with His help.

Or, alternatively, you can hide from it by crawling into the bottle. Or try to dull it through better pharmaceuticals. Or distract yourself from it through stuff, or money, or sex, or notoriety . . . or any number of things.

But it's still there. And how's that working out for folks you know? Really.

Alcohol and pills, it's a cryin' shame
You think they might have been happy with the glory and the fame
But fame doesn't take away the pain, it only pays the bills
And you wind up on alcohol and pills

Seems to me there's a harder -- but better -- way.

I'm just sayin'.

Jesus saves

Now, if Simon Cowell had been the bank teller in this remarkable story, it could have gotten real ugly real fast. From the Opelousas (La.) Daily World:

PORT BARRE — A kiss on the hand and Jesus are credited with preventing a bank robbery in here Thursday morning.

Police are currently seeking a petite black woman, roughly 20 years of age, standing about 4 feet, 6 to 10 inches tall, who attempted to rob the Port Barre branch of the St. Landry Bank and Trust on Saizan Street just before 11 a.m.

The brown-eyed suspect was last seen wearing a blue, zippered sweater with her medium-black hair pulled back into a ponytail.

The suspect was last seen driving a fairly new model, small, black, hatch-back car, possibly a PT Cruiser or Ford Focus.

“The car was full of dirt and mud. The teller couldn’t read the license plate,” said Port Barre Police Chief David Richard.

Richard is alerting neighboring communities to be on the lookout for the woman and her car as he doesn’t believes the suspect is from the Port Barre area.

“We are a small town. If she had been form here, the tellers would have known her,” Richard said.

According to Richard, police received a 911 call at 10:54 a.m. about a person issuing worthless checks at the bank. As a police cruiser was on patrol in the area, the first officers were on the scene within seconds of receiving the call.

“When we arrived, we discovered it was an attempted robbery,” Richard said.

According to Richard, the suspect approached a teller at the bank and presented her with a note that read: “Give me $100s and $50. I have a gun and I will kill you.”

Richard said the teller told the suspect she couldn’t give her any money and that the police were on the way.

“The teller told the suspect that what she was doing was going to ruin her life,” Richard said. “She then gave the suspect a $20 bill out of her own pocket and told her Jesus loves her.”

According to Richard, the suspect then began to cry, kissed the teller’s hand and said she needed to hear that. She then left the bank.

And the Lebanese civil war begins . . . again

From MSNBC:

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Government and opposition supporters clashed at a Beirut university campus Thursday, battering each other with sticks, stones and even pieces of furniture in new violence spilling over from Lebanon’s political crisis. Four people were killed, security sources told Reuters.

Two opposition students and two other people were shot dead and 100 were injured, many by gunfire, at Beirut's Arab University, the sources said.

Other news outlets reported at least two deaths and up to 35 people wounded in the clashes. NBN, an opposition-run television station, said two of the dead were students loyal to the opposition, which includes the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah and Amal groups.

Black smoke poured into the sky from cars engulfed in flames as armored vehicles full of troops moved in to try to keep the two sides apart. But the riot spread into the nearby streets around Beirut Arab University as students smashed parked cars and battled for hours.

The battle grew out out of a argument between pro-government Sunni Muslims and supporters of the Shiite Hezbollah opposition movement in the university cafeteria, students said.

As the melee grew, Hezbollah supporters called in help, and residents from the surrounding Sunni neighborhood joined in. Dozens of vigilantes wearing blue and red construction hats and carrying makeshift weapons — chair legs, pipes, garden tools, sticks and chains — converged on the university and started clashing with the police.

The army was called in with armored vehicles and fired tear gas and live fire in the air to disperse the crowd.

Earlier, Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV reported one of the Shiite group’s supporters was killed. Security officials could not confirm the death.

The fighting already had been ongoing in Tripoli.

I'M NOT REALLY SURE what intelligent I can say about this, other than I wonder how long it will be before Georgius Caesar ignores the folly of Ronaldus Maximus 25 years past and sends American troops to Beirut.

Other than that, all I can say is the news goes down much better when you're listening to Diana Krall. Specifically, her When I Look in Your Eyes CD.

Declan MacManus is a lucky man. But then again, so am I.

Your call to Nineveh cannot be completed . . . .

Mark Shea writes today about the contratemps over Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Enemy At Home:

I likewise think it pretty obvious that what any sensible Catholic who considers the problem must really say is that you cannot fight an inflamed spirituality like Radical Islam with the watery anemic spirituality that constitutes, say, Andrew Sullivan's vision of the Faith. What is necessary is a healthy spirituality: one that fully embodies not only a right understanding of God, but a right understanding of Man. In the end, only the Faith revealed by the one who is both fully God and fully man can do that.

Yep.

IN OTHER WORDS, something beats nothing every single time. Yes, it does.

I blogged on the subject here -- before the D'Souza blow-up -- last month.

Perverted 'art' = Art perverted

The perfect take on l'affaire "Boys will be boys and livestock will be nervous" resides here.

I am become Death: 2nd verse, same as the 1st

As Saints fans get back home, the accounts of how they were treated in Chicago just get more appalling. As in, the only way it could have gotten worse is an all-out pogrom of "The Other."

It would seem that what blows through the Windy City is an ill wind, indeed. Or, to put it in language even Mike Ditka could understand: What a bunch of a-holes!

From a story Monday evening on WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge:

One Saints fan says she has a memory she can't bleep out. This is what she says a Bears fan had to say at her hotel.

Susan Joly says a Bears fan said, "'Oh yeah, you thought Katrina was bad' and just really not giving them any chance to say, you know, the man lost his wife and child in Katrina and they were ragging him over that and it was just terrible."

And here's the video.

Chicago: What a classy place. If you're some sort of clinically insane Klingon or something.

Really. When you're trying to instill in your children how to treat people, you might want to have them emulate that knuckle-dragger doing the Hurricane Katrina Rag to a man whose wife and child died in the storm.

And we talk about the wack jobs in the Middle East. As if we had any room . . . .

'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds'

What the hell is wrong with us?

Well . . . glad you asked.

I think J. Robert Oppenheimer didn't know how right he was almost 62 years ago, when he opened his mouth after the first atomic bomb blew its top in Alamogordo, N.M. Gazing upon the fireball and the mushroom cloud, Oppenheimer remembered a quote from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita:

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Today in the United States -- indeed, across most of what once was Christendom -- we have "become death, the destroyer of worlds." And that's without having set of a nuke in anger since 1945, though that well may change presently.

No, we kill babies in the womb. In our cities, we slaughter one another like market cattle. On our television and radio shows, and in our movies, we murder the human spirit and debase the human soul on a depressingly regular basis -- "reality TV" is one big freak show, and it has been for years.

Did I mention that a radio station in Sacramento, Calif., actually killed a contestant in one of its twisted contests?

According to the Talmud, the books of ancient rabbinical commentary on Jewish scripture:

"Therefore man was created on his own, to teach you that whoever destroys one soul is regarded by the Torah as if he had destroyed a whole world and whoever saves one soul, is regarded as if he had saved a whole world.

(Mishna Sanhedrin 37a)

WHAT DOES THAT SAY about us moderns, aborting and debasing and murdering right here in the USA? Or (to bring this around to the topic of the day) what does this Talmudic insight say about Chicago Bears fans who would taunt New Orleans fans about the destruction of their city during Hurricane Katrina in 2005?

What does it say about someone who, in the name of a flippin' FOOTBALL GAME, would ask a Saints fan whether he lived in New Orleans, then comment "'Well, too bad you didn't drown"?

What kind of human being -- to use the term loosely -- wishes a complete stranger dead to his face? Over a football game.

What kind of a country do we live in? What kind of society have we created? This kind of behavior -- at Soldier Field, or (to be entirely fair) among drunken LSU football fans throwing beer bottles and cursing Tennessee faithful in September 2005 -- doesn't come out of nowhere.

Again, what the hell is wrong with us?

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

And, mark my words, we are reaping what we have sown. And we will continue to reap that bitter harvest in spades.

(To see the WGNO video, click on the pictures.)

Learning nothing from Mrs. O'Leary's cow

"Well, I mean these guys have been taunting us about Katrina the entire time. In my section, somebody asked -- we had somebody ask me 'Oh, did you live down there?' I said 'Yeah, I had 11 feet of water in my house.'

"He said, 'Well, too bad you didn't drown,' and that guy has not been the exception. This has been going on before the game, during the game. I mean, these guys have been violent with our fans. You know, throwin' beers at people . . . ."

See the entire WGNO-TV report here on NOLA.com.

Da Jerks

Classy fans they got there at Soldier Field, as demonstrated by this picture from The Dead Pelican.

Go Colts!

You can't make this stuff up. I know. I tried to once, but it didn't work out.

Nope, not even a trivial matter like, uh . . . death can keep some people from being in that number when the Saints have a miracle season. Let's let the New Orleans Times-Picayune's inimitable Chris Rose tell all about it:

Wood Brown III was a lifelong Saints fan. The former president of the Louisiana Bar Association was the type of stubborn old codger who would stay in his seats, first at Tulane Stadium, then at the Dome, until the end of every game -- decades of crappy games -- despite the implorings from his two sons: "Please, Dad, can we leave now?"

"No," he would tell them. Something might happen."

We all know a million guys like this. The determined, delusional and unbreakable backbone of this community. Guys who stay in their seats and continue to believe against all odds.

As you well know, that elusive "something" that Wood Brown III -- who lived up to his name with his lifelong penchant for saying "knock on wood!" while rapping his forehead -- waited for all his life never happened over all those years. And now something has finally happened -- something big -- but it's too late for Wood.

Robbed of the ability to attend games several years ago because of Parkinson's disease, he finally succumbed to it this past May.

His body was cremated and his family planned to bury his urn in a plot at St. Joseph's Abbey in Covington last Saturday, Jan. 13, on what would have been Wood's 71st birthday.

"My brother and I had tickets to the game against the Eagles that night," Wood's son, Chuck Brown, told me this week. "I said: Wait a minute! We can't put dad in the ground while the Saints are still alive. He would have loved this!"

Thus, over their mother's halfhearted objection, the family did indeed bury Wood in his urn last weekend, but not before his sons dipped an empty tin from his favorite cigar brand -- Romeo y Julieta -- and scooped up a tube full of their dad's ashes.

"Mom wasn't real happy about this, but she let it happen," Chuck said. "The old man would have absolutely loved what is happening with this team. He waited his whole life for this moment. You can't discount that."

And so Chuck and his brother Clay brought their dad to the game last Saturday night at the Superdome. Wood Brown III was securely tamped into a cigar tube in Chuck's shirt pocket and when times got tense during the game, he and his brother would look at each other and say: "Knock on Wood!"

And that's what they would do, patting Chuck's breast pocket for luck. Other fans seated around them picked up on what was happening and pretty soon an entire section of fans was knocking on Wood and it must have worked because look what happened.

And here we are.

You just never know in what form you are going to encounter an American football fan gone crazy, in the back of a cab in Chicago or in some crazy dude's shirt pocket; the unlikeliest of people in the unlikeliest of places.

Currently, what's left of Wood Brown III is on the mantle at Chuck's mom's house, resting in the cigar tube on top of the playoff ticket stubs. He didn't make the trip to Chicago this week because, quite frankly, Chuck couldn't get the money together.

It costs a lot to do this, to be here. A whole lot. If I had known this story before I left, I would have offered to bring Wood with me because I'm pretty sure he's the kind of guy I would have liked -- although I do wonder how all that would go down at the airport security checkpoint.

Anyway. Too late now.

As for Miami, should that glorious day come, Chuck Brown says he'll see what resources he can manage.

"Maybe we'll hitch up the FEMA trailer and head south," he said. "That's something I could seriously consider. Because I sure would like my dad to see this."

OK, cher, dis is too much fun, yeah!

WHO DAT SAY DEY
GON' BEAT DEM SAINTS?
WHO DAT?! WHO DAT?!

How to tell the gifted 'You suck!'

Rod Dreher has a fascinating post over at Crunchy Cons surveying a series of OpinionJournal.com columns by Charles Murray on education and intelligence. I won't blather on about it here, for Rod does a more-than-reasonable job of blathering over on his blog.

HOWEVER . . . there's one point I'd like to make about Murray's last column, about the importance of properly educating America's gifted-and-talented students. Murray's right -- this is an incredibly important endeavor, and hardly a popular one.

It all goes back to populism. Populism has many positive attributes, and I'd have to (mostly) self-identify as a populist. It is, however, populism's pronounced Green Monster of envy that endangers any effort to allow the brilliant and the motivated to achieve their full potential as humans . . . or as future drivers of our economy, our sciences and our body politic.

That Green Monster, of course, produces the "Crab Bucket Syndrome."

The gifted are the crabs trying to climb out of the bucket and make it back to the water. The rest of our American society, by and large, is the majority of metaphorical crabs who find the bucket, all-in-all, mighty fine.

And here lies the rub. The "Bucket Is Fine" crabs resent the hell out of the "Must . . . Reach . . . Water" crabs, and they'll be damned if they're going to help the "Water" crabs reach their full potential of wetness.

As a matter of fact, they'll try their damnedest to pull the "smarty-pants" crabs back into the bucket.

I know this. To grow up academically gifted in Louisiana "back in the day" was to be well acquainted with the Crab Bucket Syndrome.

We who yearned for, and made it into, Baton Rouge Magnet High School universally were known to our "regular-school" confreres as "Maggots" and derided as freaks. Uppity.

We went to "The Maggot School."

I wonder how much of that kind of sentiment is at play nationwide. Says Murray in Thursday's column:

How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.

(snip)

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

I also wonder how much some version of the Green Monster, the "Crab Bucket Syndrome" -- whatever you want to call it -- might be at play in the long physical deterioration of my alma mater, Baton Rouge Magnet High, into Third World . . . shall we say dishabille? And, brother, talk about speaking euphemistically . . . .

Let's just say it's the ghost of Huey Long giving The Man (to be) the ol' middle-finger salute. Just a decaying community's way of telling The Elite "You suck!"

Let's just say that's an outlandishly counterproductive thing to do in a state that, according to all the pertinent statistics, is on the bottom and still sinking. Today's scorned and neglected "student elites" are the people Beavis and Butthead will be counting on to pull their chestnuts out of the fire tomorrow.

But the "maggots" either will be long gone (to places where things generally work and people generally care) or giving some "Fickle Finger of Fate" salutes of their own.

Lower. The. Boom.

The family of Jennifer Strange -- who died of water intoxication in a Sacramento radio station's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest -- is suing. I hope they take Entercom's KDND 107.9 FM for every penny the broadcast chain has.

The family's lawyers are right: Enough is enough, and a message must be sent.

Now, we just need the local district attorney and the Federal Communications Commission to fall into line . . . and lower the boom. Is it really too much to expect radio stations, for example, not to hold their "customers" in such contempt that they help kill them off?

LOWER. THE. BOOM.

NOW.

From AllAccess.com:

"This family has been devastated by a shameful, irresponsible and negligent act of premeditated recklessness," said ROGER DREYER, senior partner of the SACRAMENTO law firm of DREYER, BABICH, BUCCOLA & CALLAHAM. "The station knew this was a dangerous and potentially deadly stunt, but flippantly dismissed the dangers. Now three young children have lost their mother, and their father has lost his wife, because a radio station wanted to boost its ratings and increase its advertising revenue by taking advantage of a young woman who simply wanted to win a prize for her family."

DREYER said the suit should be a "wake-up call" for other stations sponsoring similar stunts. "Outrageousness at any cost has become the industry standard -- the trashier and more humiliating, the better," he said. "It's time to stop this recklessness."

As ALL ACCESS reported yesterday (NET NEWS 1/17) the SACRAMENTO COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT is launching a criminal probe and formal investigation into the death because of the now-dismissed MORNING RAVE's on-air comments, which seem to indicate awareness of the dangers of drinking too much water.

"Hearing the tape, it's very clear they knew of the dangers and could foresee that this could lead to JENNIFER's death," DREYER said. "They knew the health risks of drinking too much water, they knew JENNIFER was feeling ill, and yet they let her leave the station without warning her to call someone for help or seek medical attention. Their brazen disregard for her personal safety is numbing and inexcusable."

Once, in college, I saw 'Becky' drink a pint of Jungle Juice and freakin' pass out cold

(OK, there's an S-word in the video. You have been alerted.)


REVOLUTION 21 IS NOT "Safe for the Whole Family." Revolution 21 is not "Positive and Encouraging." Nor is Revolution 21 "The Positive Alternative."

If anything, Revolution 21's positioning statement probably could be "As Screwed Up as You Are, but Still Trying." I think that probably would be truer to the gospel than some of Christian radio's slogans . . . or Christian radio's on-air product.

And we don't claim to be a Christian radio station, nor do we play mostly Christian music. Revolution 21 is all about being both faithful to Christ and standing in solidarity with fallen humanity. Your humble Mighty Favog is not about being in the Christian-radio business; he is about being a Christian in the radio business.

Being a Christian in the radio biz is a hard thing to do. Particularly in an industry where the only bottom line is the bottom line, and where part of the job description is "living the lifestyle." And if you think the Christian/radio difficulty stops at the Evil Secular Radio (TM) border, you've got another think comin'.

In fact, for the Favog, trying to be a "Christian in the radio business" meant creating a whole new paradigm of committing radio. This after spending a few years in "Catholic radio" and having gotten a good gullet full of ensconcing oneself in an artificial Christian utopia.

Too often, the "utopia" of Christian radio -- at least in my experience of Catholic radio -- consists of pandering to people who too-often put piety over praxis -- and rubrics over redeeming love -- and then watching "utopia" become a dystopia where self-preservation and self-aggrandizement trumps living the gospel every time.

(And I say this as an orthodox Roman Catholic who loves punk rock but longs for a bit of chant, Latin and trancendance during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. If I want to hear music written by failed lounge acts, I will go to the nearest tiki bar and order a double of something.)

THIS IS THE PERSPECTIVE I bring to Christian Music Today.com's ongoing series on the state of Christian radio, which I highly recommend.

The latest installment -- the second in the series -- is about Becky. What? You don't know Becky?

"Becky" is the late-thirtysomething, early-fortysomething soccer mom listening as she carts her brood to the day's Middle-Class Suburban Activities. Or on her way to her women's prayer group, I forget which.

"Becky" is the target demographic of adult-contemporary Christian radio, of "Safe for the Whole Family" fame. And much of Christian music radio falls into the adult-contemporary category.

From the article by Mark Geil:

The choice of a target audience is the result of many factors, and in this particular industry, the typical economic factors are mixed with the ministerial and the evangelical. Becky is certainly a good audience from the perspective of dollars and cents. She is in the car a lot, which means she listens to the radio a lot, which means she hears a lot of commercials. She also has buying power, creating a pleasing combination for advertisers.

Non-commercial stations like her too, because she recognizes the ministry of the station in her family's life and is quick to support it financially. Mainstream data support the choice. For example, during an average week, radio reaches 96.9 percent of women in Atlanta, far exceeding the reach of newspaper and television.

Still, some are dismayed that this singular attention to one demographic limits radio's ability to reach others for Christ.

"The gospel has no target demographic," notes Derek Webb, who has admittedly given up efforts to get his songs played on Christian AC radio. He further suggests that because radio is targeting Becky, songwriters are too. "Anything Jesus is Lord of, our artists should be writing songs about it. We're only covering about 2 percent of it."

Shaun Groves, another artist who has experienced more radio airplay in the past than now, fears the approach of non-commercial stations in fundraising efforts might even be hypocritical. "The bulk of listeners are Christians," he says. "This is music by Christians for Christians, and that's great. It's a valuable ministry. The trouble is, Christian radio tells stories to make you feel they're evangelistic, but they're not. Say what you are. Don't lie to me and tell me I'm saving teenagers."

Another consequence of this target audience is dangerous. "Christian radio is a microcosm of the church, and often reflects the racial segregation that's present in the church," says veteran radio promotions executive Chris Hauser.

Hauser recently helped promote the debut release from Ayiesha Woods, and had that perceived segregation in mind when developing a release strategy. "We circulated the single with no name and no photo, and simply called it the first single from the newest Gotee Records artist."

That song, "Happy," became the most added song on Christian AC radio on April 18. Although it is impossible to measure the impact of the promotion strategy, Woods is the first black female to hit with a non-ballad in recent memory.

Perhaps the most visible effect of Christian radio's choice of a specific target audience is the branding of radio stations.

"The 'Safe for the Family' message had a huge impact when the Salem stations adopted it a few years ago," notes an industry insider who wished to remain anonymous. At its most basic level, stations realized that Becky is often carpooling with the kids, so they made a point to ensure that she understands that nothing she hears on that station will offend her or negatively influence her children.

Salem's trademarked slogan for their Fish stations is "Safe for the Whole Family." K-LOVE calls itself "Positive and Encouraging." Air 1 is "The Positive Alternative," Tulsa's KXOJ is "Your Choice for the Family," while KCMS is Seattle's "Family-Friendly Radio Station."

(snip)

While many listeners applaud the unwavering shelter in what has become a dangerous radio landscape, it is the lyrical content implication that riles some in the industry. Groves has no qualms about stations that are safe for the family, but notes particular dissatisfaction with other branding.

"'Always upbeat and positive,' that's profaning God's name," he says. "Much of the Bible in neither upbeat nor positive. We can never make a station as big as God is, but we shouldn't limit him."Webb is equally outspoken.

"'Safe for the family' is a terrible and counterproductive slogan. If anything, artists are called to radical truth-telling, which can be very subversive, very dangerous. Artists should challenge what we believe. We can't be safe any more than Jesus was safe."

GOD BLESS Derek Webb and Shaun Groves, both for telling it like it is and for having integrity as musicians . . . at the expense of their checkbooks.

In an age desperately in need of evangelism, it would seem that Christian radio is about anything but. But to get that mammon rolling in, evangelism is what Christian radio is selling to the faithful.

And that's two barnyard epithets in one fell swoop . . . or is that one swell poop? It's both bull**** AND chicken****.

Neither represents "gospel values."

Finally, there are three phrases from my Catholic radio days that I never, EVER want to hear again:

1) "How can we do business here?"
2) "Catholic radio's not ready for that yet."
3) "Time to circle the wagons!"

(Who cares? The hell it isn't! Circle 'em yourself.)

Amen.

A corpse late and three motherless kids short

From The Associated Press:

SACRAMENTO - A Sacramento radio station fired 10 employees Tuesday, including its three morning disc jockeys, after a mother of three died following an on-air water-drinking contest last week at the station's studios.

The hosts of KDND-FM's "Morning Rave" - who go by the on-air names Trish, Maney and Lukas - were fired a day after the station announced it was suspending the show and investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of Jennifer Lea Strange.

Strange, 28, died after participating in a water-drinking contest on the program.

She was one of about 18 contestants who tried to win a Nintendo Wii gaming console early Friday by seeing how much water they could drink without going to the bathroom. The show's DJs called the contest "Hold your Wee for a Wii."

John Geary, vice president and general manager of KDND parent company, Entercom/ Sacramento, made the announcement Tuesday in an e-mail to reporters.

"Effective immediately, the 'Morning Rave' program is canceled and ten employees are no longer with the station."

A company spokesman, Charles Sipkins, confirmed the three DJs, as well as two other on-air personalities, "Carter" and "Fester," were among those fired. Five other employees who worked on the "Morning Rave" also were let go. All 10 were fired, the spokesman said, for violating terms of their employee agreements.

The "Morning Rave" had been on the air for about five years and was one of the capital's top-ranked morning drive programs.

During the contest, participants were given two minutes to drink an 8-ounce bottle of water and then given another bottle to drink after a 10-minute break.

Fellow contestant James Ybarra said he quit drinking after imbibing eight bottles, but Strange, who placed second, and others kept going even after they were handed even larger containers.

In all, according to witness reports, Strange may have drunk nearly two gallons. Afterward, she appeared ill when she went on the air, one contestant said.

Following the contest, Strange called in sick to work. About five hours later she was found dead at her home.

OK, WE HAVE ESTABLISHED that excrement rolls downhill. We also have established that the GM is not falling on his sword, nor is Entercom (thus far) demanding that he do so.

Now . . . will the Federal Communications Commission take action when one of its licensees is pretty much acting as a Jack Kevorkian for the Dumb, but Not Yet Ready to Croak? If the FCC can't nail "The End's" end to the wall over this, why should anyone in the radio biz even try to obey the law?

From Sacramento's KXTV, News 10:

Geary would not say which 10 employees were fired. However, a source at the station told News10 the program director, promotions director and the three morning DJs are among those who have lost their jobs.

"We're going to pull through," a woman who works at the station said. "(The mood) is pretty somber around here. The whole thing is just a tragedy."

Jennifer Strange, 28, was found dead in her Rancho Cordova home Friday. A preliminary coroner's report indicated Strange's death was consistent with a water intoxication death.

Strange had taken part in a contest at 107.9 titled "Hold Your Wee for a Nintendo Wii." The contestants drank bottles of water at 15 minute intervals. The last person to go to the bathroom would win a Nintendo gaming system.

Judy Linder, a nurse practitioner, said she was listening to the contest on her way to work on Friday. "I know how dangerous that is so when I got to work I asked if anybody wanted to be on the radio."

Linder said she and another co-worker called the station on speaker phone and were put on the air.

"She (her co-worker) told them it was dangerous and you could die from water intoxication."

Linder says the disc jockey "pretty much blew that off and said well they've signed a release.

"It wasn't until Sunday that Linder heard Strange had died. "I was totally shocked because they (the disc jockeys) had been warned but they should have known better anyway, they should have checked with someone before they did that, you know."

Linder says she wishes she could have done more to prevent Strange's death. "It's just a terrible, terrible thing. I feel terrible."

Strange's husband, William, did not want to comment about the firings but did say he has set up a fund to help with funeral expenses for his wife.

Donations to The Jennifer Strange Memorial Fund Account 3151089345 can be made at any Washington Mutual branch.

Former federal prosecutor Bill Portanova said Strange's family would likely have a solid case against the station. "On the face of it, the radio station has some serious liability exposure," said Portanova.

Portanova said the February 2005 death of a California State University, Chico student may be the station's undoing.

"Every newspaper outlet and radio outlet reported on it repeatedly where a young man at Chico State University drank himself to death with water so it's clear this radio station had some institutional knowledge that that was a possibility," said Portanova.

Portanova said if a lawsuit is filed, the station will likely settle quickly.

After the prophets . . . comes the deluge?

The audio of this -- the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s April 30, 1967 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church -- is on the previous post, on the YouTube video. This is the uncut, unsanitized, politically incorrect MLK.

This is the prophet Martin Luther King Jr.

This is preaching the likes of which many of you have never heard, being that King was the last American Christian leader of comparable stature who I can remember preaching like this to power. And he met a martyr's death 38 years ago.

What has happened to America's prophets? In the Bible, after the prophets had their say and Israel ignored them, bad things happened.

Have America's prophets been silenced? Were Dr. King's entreaties our last warning?

Now comes the deluge?

HERE, THEN, are the "money grafs" -- MLK, April 30, 1967, Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta:

Let me say finally that I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against this war, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and, above all, with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world. I speak out against this war because I am disappointed with America. And there can be no great disappointment where there is not great love. I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. We are presently moving down a dead-end road that can lead to national disaster. America has strayed to the far country of racism and militarism. The home that all too many Americans left was solidly structured idealistically; its pillars were solidly grounded in the insights of our Judeo-Christian heritage. All men are made in the image of God. All men are brothers. All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from the State--they are God-given. Out of one blood, God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. What a marvelous foundation for any home! What a glorious and healthy place to inhabit. But America's strayed away, and this unnatural excursion has brought only confusion and bewilderment. It has left hearts aching with guilt and minds distorted with irrationality.

It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home, America. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on." I call on Washington today. I call on every man and woman of good will all over America today. I call on the young men of America who must make a choice today to take a stand on this issue. Tomorrow may be too late. The book may close. And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, "You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God."

Now it isn't easy to stand up for truth and for justice. Sometimes it means being frustrated. When you tell the truth and take a stand, sometimes it means that you will walk the streets with a burdened heart. Sometimes it means losing a job...means being abused and scorned. It may mean having a seven, eight-year-old child asking a daddy, "Why do you have to go to jail so much?" And I've long since learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear. Let us bear it--bear it for truth, bear it for justice, and bear it for peace. Let us go out this morning with that determination. And I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right: "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we're free at last!" With this faith, we'll sing it as we're getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don't know about you; I ain't gonna study war no more.

Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin?

I have no idea whether Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty or innocent. I don't know whether the "Free Mumia" types are prophets, dupes or fools. You only have room for so many fights in your time here on earth, and this one ain't mine.

HOWEVER . . . even as a stopped clock is right twice a day -- and even if Mumia Abu-Jamal is the most evil, lying, nefarious cop-killer on the face of God's green earth, he has issued a challenge well worth taking up:

Few will dare air his remarks made at Riverside Church in New York City, where an older, wiser Martin spoke, not of dreams but of realities -- of social, and especially economic injustice -- of rampant American militarism, and yes -- the nightmare of white racism.

AND SO I DO, on this commemoration of the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. An excerpt from Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence, delivered nearly 40 years ago -- April 4, 1967:

Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

TODAY, ON THE 78th ANNIVERSARY of King's birth, some things aren't much different than they were in 1967. Others are.

But, it seems to me, the thing to do when a country discoveres that it has embarked upon a wholly unjustified war of aggression is . . . to stop it. Quit.

When you find you have dug yourself into a hole, CEASE DIGGING. When you figure out that the bunch you've installed to replace Saddam Hussein is as intent upon killing Sunni Muslims as Saddam was upon killing Shiite Muslims, QUIT PROPPING UP THE SOBs.

Lest, of course, you make the original toppling of the old tyrant look even more ridiculous than it already was.

When we have American cities (New Orleans, for one) approaching Baghdad levels of murder, mayhem and malaise, perhaps it is time to ask ourselves why, exactly, we're throwing more cash we don't have onto our present half-trillion-dollar Iraq bonfire. After all, if you're going to spend money you don't have anyway, isn't it a far better thing to spend it trying to do good for one's own citizens?

The hubris of America and her tragically deluded leaders blinds the nation to the flatulent elephant in the family room: We now live in a house of straw and -- as we fight the Muslim hordes half a world away -- just a little huff and a little puff where we least expect it . . . could bring the whole damn thing down upon us.

AND AS GEORGE BUSH pounds our miltary into the desert sand for no good reason, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her new, improved Democrat majority decide one of our most pressing needs is to fully fund cannibalizing the tiniest of human beings in some Dr. Frankenstein quest to fix what ails us.

Has anybody here seen my old friend Martin? Can you tell me whether anybody today -- particularly our U.S. religious leaders -- might be willing to put it all on the line and speak the gospel truth to power?

Particularly when we have so much power so little acquainted with Truth.

(sound of crickets)

It takes all kinds to make a world

And that's generally a good thing.

GO, SAINTS! GO!

Please, can the FCC wee on The End?

The name of the radio-station contest was "Hold Your Wee for a Wii." Here's the Associated Press account of what happened:

Assistant Sacramento County Coroner Ed Smith said a preliminary investigation found evidence "consistent with a water intoxication death."

Jennifer Strange's mother found her daughter's body at her home Friday in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova after Strange called her supervisor at her job to say she was heading home in terrible pain.

"She said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad," said Laura Rios, one of Strange's co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento. "She was crying and that was the last that anyone had heard from her."

Earlier Friday, Strange took part in a contest at radio station KDND 107.9 in which participants competed to see how much water they could drink without going to the bathroom.

Initially, contestants were handed eight-ounce bottles of water to drink every 15 minutes."

They were small little half-pint bottles, so we thought it was going to be easy," said fellow contestant James Ybarra of Woodland. "They told us if you don't feel like you can do this, don't put your health at risk."

Ybarra said he quit after drinking five bottles. "My bladder couldn't handle it anymore," he added.

After he quit, he said, the remaining contestants, including Strange, were given even bigger bottles to drink."I was talking to her and she was a nice lady," Ybarra said. "She was telling me about her family and her three kids and how she was doing it for kids."

IF IT'S STUPID ENOUGH, degrading enough or, now, fatal enough, you can bet it originated in the addled mind of a modern-day radio promotions director. American radio thinks it's making a living off of the fact that morons exist -- and reproduce.

What American radio is doing, though, is slouching off into irrelevance. Run the numbers from the past 15 years.

I sooooooooo hope either the feds or the trial lawyers nail the slimeballs of Sacramento's The End to the bathroom wall.

I've been waiting 40 years for this . . .

If New Orleans were a city in Iraq, maybe it would be worth a 'surge'

I procrastinated like hell in putting together this week’s Big Show because, frankly, I’ve been at a loss for words. Plenty of being pissed. Not so much of being able to string words together intelligently.

On the show, we play the music of The Troublemakers, a band from New Orleans. Its lead singer and guitarist, Dr. Paul Gailiunas, got shot . . . shielding his two-year-old son from a fusillade unleashed by some feral being who also shot his wife, filmmaker Helen Hill. Paul was shot up but survived. Helen died on the spot.

And their child, Francis Pop, is now motherless. And Paul has left that dying, dysfunctional, violent, flood-ravaged city . . . has left New Orleans, where he dedicated his career to treating the poorest of the poor. He went to bury his wife in her native South Carolina, and he ain’t going back.

As I say on the podcast -- and this was the first time I've gone into a show absolutely furious -- I say that I have no idea whether Paul, the doctor to the poor, or Helen, who spent countless hours teaching people how to make their own films (and just being a friend to, apparently, everybody), ever thought that they, in their own ways, were being imitations of Christ.

But they were. And, Helen’s imitation of Christ led her all the way to Calvary.

In New Orleans last year, there were 161 insane, senseless murders in a city less than half the size of Omaha, Nebraska (Omaha's population: 420,000). And Helen Hill’s murder was one of eight murders there in the first week of the New Year.

Some conservative loudmouths love to proclaim the United States a Christian nation. But we alleged "Christians" -- ex-Christians? post-Christians? hypocritical Christians? -- have no problem that New Orleans was drowned because the levees broke during Katrina . . . because the feds built them, in effect, to fail.

We have no problem -- as a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" – that we left that city to die -- literally -- right after the storm.

We have, apparently, no problem that we have left it to die a slow death of decay, dysfunction and deviance après le déluge.

When Iraqis kill one another like madmen amid George's bloody little conflict, we send a “surge” of troops to fight a futile holding action in the middle of a foreign civil war.

When the same thing happens in an American city . . . .

Third World poverty and Third World mayhem are completely acceptable in Louisiana, but we’ll smash our military to bloody hell in Iraq to "bring order and freedom." Where is the order and freedom for New Orleans? For Detroit? For Washington, D.C.?

Any last words, President Kurtz . . . um, Bush?

"The horror. The horror."

***

Also on the show, we hear from the Hot 8 Brass Band, which lost its snare drummer, Dinerral Shavers, just before New Year's. He was driving down the street with his wife and stepkids when he took a slug to the back of the head, allegedly gunned down by some genius from the 'hood gunning for his teen-age stepson.

Apparently, it was a schoolhouse squabble. And a talented musician is dead because gangsta can’t aim straight.

This is New Orleans. This is America.

***

"Tell me, sir. What did President Kurtz . . . um, Bush, say before his presidency imploded?"

Your name.

This . . . is New Orleans. Is this . . . the United States?

Read this and weep. An op-ed piece by lawyer and writer Billy Sothern from the Dallas Morning News:

Last Thursday morning I received a call from my friend Kittee. "I have awful news," she said, and then, very quickly: "Someone broke into Paul and Helen's house. Helen was shot and killed. Paul was holding Baby Francis and was shot three times. He's still alive. Francis is OK." Paul Gailiunas – Dr. Paul, I call him – had been my physician for several years at the Little Doctors Clinic, a health center for poor people that he founded in Treme, one of America's oldest black neighbor-hoods.

I had started to see Paul after my previous doctor mocked one of my colleagues about our work representing people on Louisiana's death row. When I met Paul through a friend, I asked him directly, "Are you in favor of the death penalty?" He responded, with a smile, "Eh, I'm Canadian," clearly feeling that was answer enough.

And it was, coming from the founder of our local chapter of Food Not Bombs and the front man for the Troublemakers (a band whose songs celebrate Emma Goldman and the idea of universal health care) in such a lighthearted tone that it would scarcely have alienated the most ardent conservative.

Helen Hill was Paul's perfect match – a kind and generous woman who made award-winning animated films and taught art and filmmaking to children, adults, anyone who was interested. She'd spent much of the last year restoring reels of 16-millimeter film on which she had drawn by hand, and which had been damaged when their house took 4 feet of water during Hurricane Katrina.

She had a new film under way, inspired by discarded hand-sewn dresses, made by an elderly New Orleanian, which Helen had found in the trash after the woman's death. The film interwove the story of the old woman and her dresses with Helen's own flood-torn life, which took her, Paul and Francis to Columbia, S.C. – Helen's hometown, where she will be buried today – for almost a year.

Helen had longed to return to New Orleans, despite Paul's concern that crime and potential hurricanes made it too dangerous for their family. So Helen campaigned, sending Paul's friends in New Orleans blank postcards, addressed to Paul, for us to write and mail to him. In mine, I pleaded with Paul – "We need you" – the way I do with anyone who is thinking about leaving, coming to, or even just visiting New Orleans. After what I am sure was a flood of similar cards, Paul relented.

I saw Paul and the baby a day after their return to the city, at a parade on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Francis had on a little railroad conductor's hat, a T-shirt depicting a cartoon love affair between red beans and rice, and a little sign pinned to his back, in Helen's hand: "New Orleans Native. I Got Back Yesterday!"

The day of the anniversary was solemn but optimistic. Everyone still had a can-do attitude. Paul, for one, could help make the city's people well and improve health care for the poor. Helen could make art depicting the city's life. Others could rebuild schools, demand better levees, reconstruct their homes. It still felt as if our grassroots efforts, along with some real help from a government finally forced to make good on its obligations, could create a more just, fair and safe city. It might have been naive, but it really seemed possible.

After wandering this beautiful, falling-over city the afternoon after Helen's murder, forcing myself to remember why I love it here so much, I came back to my garden and picked flowers, those hardy few that had weathered the recent cold. I put them in a vase, wrote out the verses to Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Dirge Without Music" – "I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground / So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind" – and drove to the couple's house, which my wife and I had recently visited for Helen's open studio. On the steps leading up to their old shotgun house I set down the poem and the vase, just feet from where Paul had been found by the police, shot, bleeding, holding his baby.

On the way home, I stopped at my neighborhood bar to try to eat something. A picture of Paul and Helen, followed by one of the baby, appeared on the television in the corner. Oh, my God. The bartender was kind. She asked me whether I knew them, and talked to me about her fears living with her new baby in a city with no functional schools, no real plan for redevelopment, and spotty or nonexistent basic services.

Yes, I did think of that

AND, OF COURSE, I pray to God that the parable from Luke ain't about your Mighty Favog.

Will no one, however, rage against a society overrun by cynicism, blinded by B.S., and deadened by social Darwinism?

Lord, have mercy on us -- sinners all.