Born Again

As Marcus Borg said a couple of years ago in Hartford, we need to reclaim the phrase "born again" from conservative interpretation only. I tried to do this in my sermon February 20.

Godspeed, Hunter Thompson

An exotic bird was lost last night when Hunter Thompson shot and killed himself. Our environment is poorer for the loss. Thompson was among a very small group of people who told the truth in ways that the royal consciousness would consider utterly distasteful, even depraved, and who attained prominence despite their eccentricity. Who else can we think of? Jack Kerouac. Lenny Bruce. John Lennon. All dead before their time.

One of Thompson's unique values, I think, was that his gonzo-eccentric form was the perfect extension of his content. His voice was powerful because it told the truth in a way that embodied R.D. Laing's aphorism that (pardon the paraphrase), "in an insane society, only those considered insane can possibly be sane."

In the end, his exoticism was too fragile to be sustained in the pressures of our times. He took too much on his own shoulders. I'm sorry he didn't receive the help he so clearly needed, and I will pray for him.

According to The National Ledger, Thompson "was particularly dejected with the results of the 2004 presidential election and wrote this in his Page 2 column for ESPN on November 9th:

"The Summer is over
the harvest is in,
and we are not saved."
-- Jeremiah 8:20

Well, the election is over now, and I was pitifully wrong on my public prediction about the outcome. George W. Bush won handily; and my friend, John Kerry, lost by three percentage points -- which was every bit as big in a vicious presidential election as it was on the football field last night when the low-riding Indianapolis Colts kicked a last-second field goal to beat Minnesota 31-28.

I am no stranger to the anguish of losing a presidential campaign, and this very narrow loss with John Kerry is no exception. It hurt, as always, but it didn't hurt as much as that horrible beating we took with George McGovern in 1972. That was by 22 points, the worst defeat in any presidential campaign since George Washington ran for a second term in 1787.
And the winner that year was a conquering hero named Richard Nixon, who got whacked out of office two years later because he was a crook. We had a very angry Democratic majority in the Senate that year, which is not the case now.

No. Today, the Panzer-like Bush machine controls all three branches of our federal government, the first time that has happened since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. And that makes it just about impossible to mount any kind of Congressional investigation of a firmly-entrenched president like George Bush.

There's a decent obituary in the Washington Post. Michelle Malkin's blog has a memorial roundup.

And we all know how this turned out...
Thanks to Bill for this awful déja-vu:

"United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam."

- Peter Grose, in a page 2 New York Times article titled 'U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote,' September 4, 1967.