Camp guards collected so much escape equipment that they established a “Kommandant’s Escape Museum”. Local photographer Johannes Langetook photographs of the would-be escapers in their disguises or re-enacting their attempts for the camera… Security officer Reinhold Eggers made them a regular part of Das Abwehrblatt, a weekly magazine for the German POW camps.

Oflag IV-C was the Celebrity Fit Club of German prisoner-of-war camps during the Second World War.  “Celebrity” because the camp hosted the VIP contingent of Allied POWs, mostly relatives of high-ranking Allied politicians.  “Fit Club” because the lengths to which the camp inmates went in their attempts to escape are on the level of the absurd physical challenges faced by the show’s contestants.  The difference, I suppose, being that they were POWs trying to escape to freedom, instead of rehab washouts trying to reignite their 15 minutes of fame performing dog tricks in front of a national audience.

[Continued...]

Anyway.  Oflag IV-C was also known as Colditz, after the castle that dominated the grounds.  Because most of the prisoners had important political connections (and could therefore be used a leverage in prisoner exchanges, or hostages if everything went to hell), the Geneva Convention was followed to the letter.  You didn’t get a whole lot of the summary executions that marked certain other German detention facilities at the time.  What you did get was an ad-hoc culture not terribly dissimilar from a modern liberal-arts college.

Prisoners had to make their own entertainment. In August 1941 the first camp Olympics were organized by the Polish prisoners. Events were held in football (soccer), volleyball, boxing, and chess, but the closing ceremony was interrupted by a German fire drill… Prisoners also formed a Polish choir, a Dutch Hawaiian guitar band, and a French orchestra.

The British put on homemade revues, classical plays and farces including: Gaslight, Rope, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Pygmalion, and The Importance of Being Earnest. Several prisoners even intentionally grew their hair long so as to better portray female roles. Prisoner Jock Hamilton-Baillie even used to shave his legs, rub them in brown shoe polish, and draw a line down the back of his legs in pencil to simulate the appearance of silk stockings. This allowed him special “bath privileges” in the German guards washroom, since the prisoner’s showers were unable to get the polish off his legs.

And in some ways, indistinguishable.

Another pastime which occupied much of the prisoners’ time was the production of moonshine alcohol. Initially started by the Polish contingent using a recipe of yeast, water, German jam and sugar from their Red Cross parcels, and then taken up by other prisoners, it did not take long for stills to be secreted all across Colditz (one of which remained undiscovered until a tourist trip in 1984).

Actually it’s really eerie.

Some prisoners would get black teeth or even temporary blindness from consuming this beverage — a condition known as “jam-happy” — as it contained many impurities. Although the German guards despised the drunken prisoners, they generally turned a blind eye to the distilling.

Tweets from Prison Camp

The camp was touted as “escape-proof”, in much the same way the Titanic was touted as “unsinkable”.  In fact the camp has the rare distinction of having not one but TWO entries on Wikipedia dealing with escape attempts from the facility.  The first page is a comprehensive list of attempts, notable mainly for its terse hilarity:

• Lt. E. Boulé, French, Attempted to walk out disguised as a woman. Detected.
• [10 British, Polish, and Belgian prisoners], “Toilet Tunnel”; Detected.
• Lt. J. Durand-Hornus, Lt. J. Prot, Lt. G. de Frondeville, French, Escaped into fog on trip to dentist. Successful.
• Capt. Dr. Le Guet Padre Jean-Jean, French, Ran away during private Sacrament of Confession. Recaptured.
• Lt. R. Bouillez, French, Sent for court martial in Stuttgart, jumped train but found unconscious next to tracks, sent to hospital, escaped from hospital. Successful.
• Lt. P. Storie-Pugh, British, Lt. F. Kruimink, Dutch, Over roof of Kellerhaus. Discovered by dog on ground.

Down and Out in Vienna

The second article details some of the inmate’s more over-the-top (HA!) attempts:

In late 1940, British officer “Peter” Allan (real name Anthony Murray Allan) found out that the Germans were moving several mattresses from the castle to another camp and decided that would be his way out. He let the French officers moving the mattresses know that one would be a little bit heavier. Allan, a fluent German speaker due to his schooling in Germany before the war, dressed himself up in a Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) uniform, stuffed Reichsmark in his pockets, and had himself sewn into one of the mattresses. He managed to get himself loaded into the truck, and unloaded into an empty house within the town. Cutting himself out of the mattress several hours later, when all he could hear was silence, he climbed out of the window into the garden and walked down the road towards his freedom.

Then, like so many high school-graduates backpacking across Europe, he has a bad hitchhiking experience and ends up shit outta luck in Vienna:

Along the 100 mile way to Vienna via Stuttgart he got a lift with a senior SS officer. Allan recalled that ride as the scariest moment of his life, “To be vulgar, I nearly needed a new pair of trousers.” Allan had been aiming to reach Poland, but soon after reaching Vienna he found he was out of money. At this time the Americans had not yet entered the war, so Allan decided to ask the American consulate for assistance; he was refused. Allan’s stepmother Lois Allan (founder of Fuzzy-Felt toys in the UK) was a U.S. citizen and he felt that they would provide sanctuary because of this. Allan had been on the run at this point for nine days; broke, exhausted, and hungry, he fell asleep in a park. Upon waking he discovered he could no longer walk due to his starvation. Soon after he was picked up and returned to Colditz, where he spent the next 3 months in solitary confinement.

Taking a Mental Health Day

Then there we those who, like a fat kid in gym class, tried to get out with a doctor’s note.  Royal Army Medical Corps Captain Ion Ferguson falsely certified several POWs as insane, allowing them to be repatriated under the Geneva Conventions. And in a twist that I simply can’t believe no one was suspicious of, he then convinced the Germans of his own insanity, and was returned to Britain.

Of course, while we’re sitting here laughing, Wikipedia sternly reminds us:

However, there were also officers who went genuinely insane.

Going for the Extra Point

Taking advantage of a lapse in security, Mairesse Lebrun and Lieutenant Pierre Odry ran to the fence at the temporarily-unguarded back end.  Just before the fence, Odry knelt and cupped his hands.  Lebrun stepped into his partner’s hand, at which point Odry catapaulted him over the fence like he was serving a human volleyball.  Only after staring for a few moments in dumb silence did the guards unsuccessfully open fire.

Eight days and a stolen bicycle later, he made it to Switzerland.

Cock and Balls Story

But by far the most balls-out insane plan to escape what was by all accounts one of the most lenient POW camps in Germany at the time involved a device inexplicably known as the “Colditz Cock“. 

A group of prisoners, no doubt bored out their fucking skulls, devised a plan to use a, well, a glider to escape.  It was noticed that chapel roof was not only a) completely obscured from view from the ground, but b) really high up, making it, well, a good place a to launch a glider, if you happened to have one.  They didn’t have one, but they set about changing that.

In a bizarre twist of fate that’s really just par for the course for this prison camp, in the prison library was a book called “Aircraft Design“, which explained in detail how to – you guessed it – design an airplane (I guess I can sorta see how that book might have been considered harmless enough to include in the prison library).  Oh right, and one of the prisoners just happened to be an experienced glider pilot. 

They used bed slats for the ribs, floorboards for the wings, and sleeping bags of all things for the skin.  But they didn’t even stop at building a glider.  They built an electric alarm system in case guards got too close; a runway from tables; and a gravity-assisted propulsion mechanism that used a bathtub full of concrete on a pulley.

After all that effort, it had to be kind of a disappointment when the camp was liberated in April 1945, before the Cock ever got a chance to fly.

WordPress: Long-form essays, articles, rants, what-have-you. Things I have to sit down and think about as I write. Naturally, this will be updated not as frequently as the others.

Tumblr: Short-form. Longer than 140 characters, but which require an immediacy I can’t give a full-length blog post. Also, photos, videos, quotes, things that require little outside commentary on my part.

Twitter: Your daily dose of insanity. The great slush pile from whence may come tumblr and wordpress musings, but don’t hold your breath.

That’s how I’d like it to work, at any rate. Now to go snare me a muse and ride her til she bleeds ambition.

The project goes live tomorrow morning, and dies in the afternoon (by which I mean it’ll stop updating – I’ll leave it up for the johnny-come-latelys).  Enjoy: @BradleyLoganRDA

In this installment, Spigot, shown left, contents himself by singing a Frank Sinatra song, ignoring (willfully?) the pressing sexual desires of Deuce, shown right.

ALTERNATELY: Deuce, expanding upon the personification of Luck as a female, wishes to have good luck, expressed within the metaphor as being the recipient of oral sex.

The Clarksburg Inn, a one-story bar on Stagecoach Road in Clarksburg, NJ, burns down in the early morning hours.  The bar had been a popular drinking establishment with many local twentysomethings.

The cause of the fire was “an act of God.”

One man refused to take this sitting down.

I hereby present to you the first installment of my comic DEICIDE: The RPG Drama.  For the sake of not uploading a shit-ton of .jpegs I threw them all into a Powerpoint and posted it on Scribd (I recommend full-screen and zooming in!).  If I don’t get lazy or whatever there might be three of these in total.  After the jump!

I don’t actually advocate beating up all pro-lifers, but I do find them (whether they realize it or not) to be misogynistic apologists for superstition and mysticism.

Later, Internetz.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she suffered a dangerous pregnancy complication called a placental abruption.  The complication put not only my life in serious danger, but hers as well.  The doctors counseled an abortion, as they always do when a pregnancy puts the life of the mother at risk.  My mother faced a difficult and painful choice. 

She decided to continue with the high-risk pregnancy.  The doctors worked very, very hard to keep my mother and myself healthy and alive.  Fortunately, they were successful.  My family was very lucky.  Many others in that situation aren’t.

Since then, I’ve tried to see every day of my life as a gift.  I’m blessed to have the support of my friends and family, and everything I’ve accomplished on the field and off has been a reflection of their love and devotion.

Recently, my family was approached by a large right-wing political group, asking for us to tell our story as part of a larger initiative to turn public opinion against the currently legal practice of abortion.  My family and I obviously have strong feelings on the subject, and as Christians we have a special fellowship with the organization in question.

Nonetheless, I have declined their offer, and I’d like to tell you why.

My family’s story is real.  It is the story of unimaginable agony, sleepless nights, countless tears and silent prayers.  It is a story of the beautiful, fragile triumph of hope over a despair that seemed insurmountable.  It is a story shared by many people, repeated countless times over the globe, every day.  Many times these stories don’t end happily.

So I cannot in good conscience allow any organization, however well-meaning, to manipulate my story into a cheap morality tale for the furtherance of a political cause.  How could I?  How could I look my mother in the eye, and tell her she made a “right” choice as opposed to a “wrong” one, as if it were a simple binary equation?  To look my mother in the eye is to see a woman whose love was so strong, she was willing to sacrifice her life for a child she might never meet.

I wonder if Focus on the Family, nominally a Christian organization, is familiar with a certain individual who made a similar choice, some two millennia ago.

————————————-

In a perfect world, perhaps.

The actual Focus on the Family Super Bowl commercial was tame (ironic when a FotF ad is among the least overtly misogynistic ads in a given time slot), erring on the side of vague flufferies and subtext.  I haven’t bothered to see the continuation of the Tebow story on their website, partly due to fear of driving up their web traffic, and partly as a self-preservation measure designed to stop me from throwing up.  I doubt I’m missing much, but if you’ve a stronger constitution than I, let me know if I’ve missed some startling plot twist.

So what should we do with you, Tim Tebow?  It’s cute that FotF thinks your ability to accurately throw an oblong ball over long distances somehow qualifies your conviction that 50% of the American population should be stripped of their reproductive sovereignty as “worthy of consideration in the public discourse”, but… but YOU, Tim Tebow.  You you you.  What should we make of you?

It’s easy now, +2 decades after the fact, to reflect and think “My mother made a moral choice in accordance with God’s will, and she was blessed because of it.”  Easier still, perhaps, because the situation turned out in your favor.  The storm passed, the clouds broke, everyone survived.  Hosanna.

But to acknowledge the danger of the situation is to acknowledge that people frequently perish in said situation.  Did they all make the “wrong” choice, Tim?  Would you tell that to my aunt and uncle, holding their stillborn daughter in their arms for the first and last time?  Would you tell that to a would-be father coming home to a silent house and a sweet-smelling depression in the sheets where his lover used to lay?

And are you wondering, Tim, why Focus on the Family isn’t talking to those families?

There were a million reasons to say no when Focus on the Family came knocking, only some of which I mentioned in my idealist counterfactual exercise above.  All of the reasons valid, not all of them pro-choice, some of them even *GASP* biblically sound!

But no.  You hocked your family’s suffering to the highest bidder; you allowed them to commodify that suffering and sacrifice it on that high altar of mass consumption – a Super Bowl commercial break.  Which, I suppose, was the Christian thing to do.

This one’s for you, Apollo 11.

It’s an image, one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen – less for its aesthetic merits, and more for what it symbolizes.

More after the jump.

From Wikipedia:

Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977. [Carl] Sagan had pushed for Voyager to take a photo of the Earth when its vantage point reached the edge of the solar system.  On February 14, 1990, having completed its primary mission, NASA commanded the spacecraft to turn around to photograph the planets of the Solar System.  Between February 14, 1990 and June 6, 1990, one image Voyager returned was of Earth, showing up as a “pale blue dot” in the grainy photo.

Carl Sagan later used the title for one of his books.  From the introduction:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

I leave you with this:

“Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand.”

The bottom line: Many poor Americans are, effectively, living in a poorly managed third world country.

You’ll note red states – states least likely to back universal healthcare – are the hardest hit.

Which is part of the reason I was surprised to find this little nugget buried in yesterday’s update:

Some group that claims to represent atheists has decided that now is the perfect time to start advertising on buses. (City Room).

Whoa, snarky much?

Yes, who would have thought that a marginalized segment of society – a segment that comprises just under 20% of the American population and growing – would choose now of all times to launch a publicity campaign?  Now, when previously-demonized groups like homosexuals are having their basic humanity recognized by an entire region of the country?  Now, when we’ve elected open socialists to Congress?  Now, when the first African-American President specifically reaches out to us in his Inaugural address?

In the short time I’ve been reading it, the blog’s authors have demonstrated a certain degree of nostalgia for past eras in American history.  It’s that kind of longing that forms the backbone of many of our nation’s more regrettable political and social ideologies (remember a time when them uppity Negroes knew their place?).  I’ll be the first to admit, however, that an article about demolished train stations is pretty weak evidence for anti-atheistic sentiment.  In fact, by the authors’ own admission, they’d been travelling for much of the previous week, and if they’re anything like me after a long journey, they’re probably feeling just a little bit cranky.

So, Infrastructurists, if your snarkiness is an unthinking slip-up born of exhaustion, I’ll be the first to forget it – your blog’s an interesting enough read for me to forgive the foible.  If, however, it’s evidence of something else, I humbly suggest you shove it – after all, you wouldn’t want to be outclassed by the likes of Ray Comfort, would you?

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,’
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

–W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939

Why this poem matters after the jump.

[EDIT: Shit!  Andrew Sullivan beats me to it!]

W.H. Auden hated this poem.  His frustration was centered around one line:

We must love one another or die.

The problem?  It’s a lie.  Auden knew better than most that love offers no protection from death.  Later collections of his work have the entire offending stanza cut out; only in 1955 did Auden consent to put it back in, with the line changed to:

We must love one another and die.

Emphasis mine.  Apparently unsatisfied with the more honest yet considerably more dour revision, Auden allowed the poem to be reprinted only once more in his lifetime, alongside a handful of other poems to which he attached the postscript “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”

The poem has remained popular, however, even amongst those who don’t consider themselves fans of Auden.  Since 2001, much of the renewed interest in the work can be traced to its circulation, largely over e-mail, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The poem’s few superficial similarities – the New York City setting, the month of the events – are enough to snare in those who might otherwise reject poetry that doesn’t even rhyme.  And to be sure, there’s a lot in the poem for the post-9/11 reader to sympathize with – the overwhelming uncertainty, the lack of individual agency in matters of life and death, even the end note of solidarity in the face of tragedy. 

But the poem just didn’t fit the nationalistic, increasingly-jingoistic tempo of the weeks that followed.  You can’t rally a nation for war with lines decrying “The windiest militant trash / Important Persons shout”, and sardonic remarks about “blind skyscrapers” being the hollow victories of the “The strength of Collective Man” did little for a people who had lost their two most iconic skyscrapers and were already making plans to rebuild.

And then came Iran.

As an American watching the revolution in Iran unfold, I feel a strong sense of camraderie with Auden’s persona (there’s something to be said for letting a poem exist in its own historical moment; but then again, poetry that is barred from making emotional connections across generational/national/etc. lines is impotent).  I am no closer, in terms of geography or kinship, to Iran than Auden was to Poland.  But coming of age as I did in the twilight years of the 21st century, I know something of existential dread on a national level, and the narcotic effect our culture can have, insulated as it (usually) is from destabilizing crises.  And as I hourly catch up on Andrew Sullivan’s updates, I’m forced to ponder my own helplessness each time.  This is history.  This is revolution.  This is as close as our generation will likely get to a black/white, good guys vs. bad guys showdown for freedom.

And the closest I get to helping is changing my Twitter icon.

In one particularly frustrated exhortation, Auden declared his poem to be “self-flattering”.  This, I feel, is too convenient an excuse.  The act of writing is, almost by necesseity, an act of self-flattery (Hey, Society.  I got some ideas of such import I have to make them tangible objects. And you are going to take time out of your life, time you could spend reproducing or securing more of the food supply, to take in my ideas through this tangible medium and let them evoke an emotional response in you.  Why?  Because I’m a badass).  And Auden was smart enough to know that.

But I understand Auden’s frustration, even if I don’t agree with his stated reasons for it.  And I think he was right to center his criticism on the “love and/or die” line.  Can love protect a sleepy Polish hamlet from a Luftwaffe firestorm?  And if it can’t, then what’s the point?  Moreover, what can poetry offer?  There’s no verse I know of that will take the bullets out the Basij’s guns.  At moments like those, the wisest words from the most accomplished poet seem no more useful than an epitaph on a mass grave.

There’s no easy answers here.  Auden, a man much smarter than I, never found a satisfactory one either.  In one of literature’s uncomfortably-tidy little ironies, perhaps the best response I’ve found to Auden’s dilemma is Auden’s troublesome stanza itself: 

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

When poetry seems useless, poetry becomes its own justification.

Yet, dotted everywhere, 
Ironic points of light 
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

I don’t mean to build “religion” into some monolithic straw man here, but for the purposes of examining theocratic governments, it’s hard not to draw broad conclusions across a range of orthodoxies whose individual tenets may bear little resemblance to one another.  Catholic Medieval Europe, Afghanistan under the Taliban, Imperial Japan - the history of nations ruled by those to claim to be “God’s Inner Circle” is a depressingly familiar narrative of repression, war, and/or genocide.

And so as much as I stand behind the Iranian protestors, I find myself fighting an instinctual cringe now and again as I read the updates coming in.  One need only to listen Mousavi’s recent speeches, his constant references to upholding the values of 1979 Islamic Revolution, or hear the crowds chanting “Allah O Ackbar” to know that a successful revolution here does not mean the (usually) secular, classical-liberal democracy we’re used to in the West.  An Iran under Mousavi would still be subject to a council of ayatollahs (though likely less so, given the level of corruption apparent in their ranks in the aftermath of the “election”).

But, what we’re seeing in Iran is the rejection of the idea that an Islamic government is necessarily an Islamic dictatorship.  Certain tenets of an Islamic government may be abhorrent to people like me who reject religion outright and who believe that any mixture of religion and government, Islamic or otherwise, is a volatile and unsound compound.  But you know what? 

I’m not an Iranian.

And that means I don’t get a say.  And that’s something Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz et. al. didn’t understand, and still don’t.

At the heart of democracy is not liberty or freedom or any of those words we build monuments to in our national capitals.  At the heart of democracy is the idea of self-determination – that a group of people, gathered together in a social contract for mutual betterment, have the right to draw up for themselves the terms of that contract.  And what we’re seeing, for the first time in the modern history of the Middle East, is a people rise up to demand democracy on their own terms.  We are seeing millions of human beings making a collective decision independent of the will of autocrats or the threats of foreign guns.  If they are successful – and I hope that they are – we in the West might not like all of the aspects of this new Iranian Republic.  And that’s OK.  We won’t have to agree with Iran – but we will have to respect them. 

And a working relationship with a Islamic republic based on mutual respect?  That would be historic – not to mention possibly al Qaeda’s worst nightmare.

Her name was Neda.

This is the first of a weekly installment where I’ll feature some topic of religious or otherwise spiritual nonsense interest.  We’ve got stand-up comedy this week, so videos are after the jump.

We start off with Dwayne Kennedy discussing the Bible’s two most prominent themes.  As befitting a hungover Sunday, the first one is wine. (You’ll have to click the link – embed is not working, for some reason).

Bill Hicks thinks we’ve run out of ideas on this planet.

And then there’s Lenny Bruce, the John the Baptist to Bill Hick’s Jesus.

Finally, an old interview with Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation; not funny, but important, especially for his trenchant observations like:

If you think the world is going to end in 50 years, and it is going to end gloriously, and its ending is going to be the best thing that could possibly happen — that is a bad piece of software to be running if you have to make decisions about [for example] nuclear first strike policy…

Happy Sunday!

Iran will not be so lucky. We have cameras now. And there is nothing subtle about the images of their revolution.

People who call themselves ‘casual users,’ in the minds of law enforcement, are deluding themselves into believing they are not affected by this drug. They compare it to the drunk who believes he can actually drive better with a few drinks inside.

The bigger question is how to stop marijuana use. The DEA agents who raided this home, could raid similar homes everyday, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and still the marijuana would grow. Which is why there may need to be a huge strategic change in our so-called drug war. Anti-smoking campaigns work for tobacco. Why won’t they work for marijuana?

That should really be the focus of our efforts. We shouldn’t be laughing at the lame jokes from comedians talking about harmless weed; we shouldn’t allow rappers to glorify the wonders of living high. If nothing else, we should be telling our children that no matter what it is, putting smoke into your lungs is unhealthy, uncool and in the case of pot, a first step towards a life of a loser.

In college (One year ago, for those keeping score), I had a 3.88 GPA. I graduated summa cum laude with distinguished honors in English, having completed a novella-length collection of short fiction. In addition to being editor of the literary magazine, I was vice-president of the school’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the international English Honor Society and I was inducted upon my matriculation into Phi Beta Kappa.

I smoked weed then. I smoke weed now. And when I die, bury me with a blunt in one hand and Fritos in the other.

If this is the face of a loser, then I don’t want to win whatever game you’re playing.

I’m listening to all my favorite music. I even want to dance to a few songs. I always wanted to have very narrow eyebrows. Yes, maybe I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow! There are a few great movie scenes that I also have to see. I should drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read the poems of Forough and Shamloo again. All family pictures have to be reviewed, too. I have to call my friends as well to say goodbye. All I have are two bookshelves which I told my family who should receive them. I’m two units away from getting my bachelors degree but who cares about that. My mind is very chaotic. I wrote these random sentences for the next generation so they know we were not just emotional and under peer pressure. So they know that we did everything we could to create a better future for them. So they know that our ancestors surrendered to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender to despotism.

Via the ever-vigilant Andrew Sullivan.

Using Focus on the Family’s brand of logic, though, this slight bit of caving in will soon lead to Naked Tuesdays. I’m sure of it.

I know you’re kinda cut off from everything that isn’t Twitter right now, but 140 characters just isn’t going to cut it in this case, so here goes.  I’m sure you know there are a bunch of people in my country (point of clarification: America) that, since about 2001 (and since 1979, in some cases), have kinda wanted to blow you off the map.

I’m not one of those people.

Which isn’t to say, though, that I’ve always held your country in the highest regard.  I was 15 when the World Trade Center came down, and my home is only about an hour away from New York City.  My part of the country felt the aftermath pretty strongly.  People I know lost friends.

So I’ll chalk up to youthful ignorance and regional prejudice the fact that yeah, I drank some of the post-9/11 Kool Aid.  When President Bush told us that he had credible information that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, I believed him.  When he told us that Saddam Hussein would only respond to force, I believed that, too.  When he told us that North Korea, Iraq, and your country were part of an “axis of evil”, I sincerely believed that those three countries were – well, evil.  The trappings were all there – charismatic leaders espousing fiery rhetoric, denouncing Western values as their fawning personality cult looked on.  Hitler, anyone?

I’ve grown up since then.  I’ve seen the misery my country brought to the people of Iraq, the same people we so piously wanted to “free”, and I’ve heard the curses uttered by the lips who in 2003 sang at the toppling of Saddam’s statues.  I know you’re not evil, Iran.  But even as the whole world turns its hopeful eyes on you, there are some of my countrymen who still haven’t worked the Kool-Aid from their system.  They eye you with paranoia and fear.  They hate you for your nukes, your religion, and maybe just because they’re used to it.  Their grumbles aren’t loud – but they’re there.

Iran, I need you to know that those people don’t speak for me.  I don’t give a shit about your nuclear program.  I don’t, because when I see the cell-phone videos coming out of your country, I see people I could have eaten lunch across from a year ago in my college cafeteria.  I see flesh and blood and hope and misery, and there’s nothing more humanizing than that.  There’s no going back now to the old way of thinking.  No matter how my country treats yours from now on, we all have to look you in the eye and know that you’re human.

I believe in your cause.  I think you’re right.  But as Howard Zinn once said, the “right” people armed with the “right” ideas don’t always prevail in history.  I hope you win, but I have no idea if you will, and no idea what it will look like if you do.

You’re right, Iran, but that doesn’t guarantee you anything.  But you’re something else too.  You’re strong.  And that counts.