Short People

They got little hands and little eyes

And they walk around telling great big lies

— Randy Newman

"Cancel culture" isn't new.

It's been around since Dicso.

In 1977, singer-songwriter Randy Newman was cancelled for "Short People," a novelty tune that rose to Number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart and became a gold record.

"Short People" so enraged the thought police, it was banned from the radio in major cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston. 

A Maryland legislator introduced a bill prohibiting the song's airplay statewide.

"'Short People' has run into a wave of protest almost unique in the history of popular music," The Washington Post wrote at the time. 

The composer even received death threats. 

"Newman will be lucky if he reaches April Fool's Day without rope burns around his neck," The Post wrote.

The song, of course, was a tongue-in-cheek condemnation of bigotry; but morons took Newman's satire literally.

"His real mistake was to give this particular poem a catchy melody and a bright, upbeat arrangement that won it a lot of exposure on radio stations that specialize in brainlessness and appeal to brainless people," The Post wrote. 

"There, amid the endless jangle of disco tunes, the song stood out like a giraffe at a convention of frogs."

"They got grubby little fingers and dirty little minds," Newman's final stanza concluded. 

"They're gonna get you every time."

Breach of Trust

Steal a little and they throw you in jail,

Steal a lot and they make you king.

— Bob Dylan

Shoplift a package of pencil liners, it's theft; take $600 million home from the office, it's breach of trust.

Elaine Chao, Donald Trump's Secretary of Transportation and Mitch McConnell's wife, took that amount home while in office, and hardly anyone batted an eyelash.

Chao exploited her cabinet position to double the worth of her family's shipping business, from $600 million to $1.2 billion (that's half a million dollars for each day in office).

She did so primarily by using the Transportation Department to promote the firm, encouraging international shippers to choose it over competitors.

Among other things, Chao took the company's chairman—her father—on 14 overseas junkets, all at taxpayers' expense. 

While on these trips, Chao would use her staff as personal assistants, not only for herself, but her father. She would also tap her pubic affairs office to promote daddy to the local media.

Whenever Chao spoke at a maritime conference—which she did, a lot—she'd strong-arm the sponsor to give her father an award at the event, and to buy a copy of Fearless Against the Wind for every attendee. The book was a syrupy biography of her father, ghostwritten by Chao's staff—again, at taxpayers' expense.

Ironically, to fund operations, Chao's family firm borrows hundreds of millions every year from Chinese banks—banks owned by the same Communist regime Chao's boss purportedly despises.

In 2019, an inspector general launched a full investigation of Chao's criminal acts, but William Barr tabled the recommendation to prosecute Chao the morning it was received. And because Trump couldn't, Mitch McConnell fired the inspector general that afternoon.

In an interview last week, Walter Shaub, former head of the Office of Government Ethics, told AlterNet, "This is the kind of thing you would use in a training class to teach government officials what misuse of a position looks like."

Meantime, the Tennessee supreme court has handed one Abbie Welch a six-year prison sentence for shoplifting from Walmart. 

The court's ruling makes no mention of the item she stole.

Probably a package of pencil liners.

Messiahs

It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all.

— William James

To empower them, our prehistoric ancestors anointed their leaders with fat from dead animals. When, thank goodness, animal sacrifice later became taboo, fat was replaced with olive oil.

For as long as there have been tribes, messiahs (Hebrew for "the anointed") have walked among us.

Some have been annointed; some, self-appointed.

As an example of the latter, take Cyrus Teed.

A medical corpsman in the Civil War, Teed earned a medical degree after the war and began to experiment with electricity, a hobby of his since childhood.

One experiment gave Teed such a jolt he was knocked unconscious. While out, he was visited by a shapely angel. She told Teed he was on a mission from God.

Once awake, Teed changed his name to Koresh and promptly announced to everyone he was the messiah. He also joined the Shakers.

Over the next two decades, Teed managed to persuade 4,000 people to join religious communes he had founded in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

Not content with a far-flung flock, however, in 1893 Teed led 300 of his followers to Fort Myers, Florida, which he calculated to be the center of the universe. 

Outside Fort Myers, Teed directed his followers to build a tropical utopia he named "New Jerusalem." The small town soon had its own general store, bakery, restaurant, post office, saw mill, boat works, power plant, mattress factory, college, playhouse and newspaper, The Flaming Sword.

Like the Shakers, Teed's followers believed in celibacy. 

They also believed in reincarnation, alchemy, and "Cellular Cosmogony," a metaphysical system Teed had concocted based on his study of electricity. 

Cellular Cosmogony held that the universe exists within a gargantuan womb and that Earth is the "great cosmogonic egg.”

If that's not whacky enough for you, Teed's followers also believed in gender equality, socialism, and farm to table. 

Teed was said by a Chicago newspaper to have "a mesmerizing influence over his converts.” But he was also shrewd, raising money by claiming he was Christ reincarnated and starting his own political party to avoid paying Florida taxes.

When Teed died in 1908, his followers refused to bury his body, insisting he'd rise from the dead. The Fort Myers coroner finally ordered that the pungent body be removed from the bathtub it was being kept in and buried. 

Teed's failure to reappear led to the dwindling of his followers and the eventual abandonment of New Jerusalem. 

Today, the abandoned town is a state park.

If Cyrus Teed's chosen name sounds familiar, you might recall another self-appointed messiah, Teed-follower David Koresh.

But that's a story for another day.

Feast of Fools

It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.

— Charlie Chaplin

You can thank the French for April Fool’s Day.

They invented the Feast of Fools—the Festum Fatuorum—in the 12th century.

A one-day celebration, the Festum Fatuorum came about because the lower French clergy at the time—the curés, vicars, subdeacons, and choir masters—demanded their own feast day, separate from the ones already declared to honor priests and deacons; but the church refused to grant one.

Undaunted, the lower clergy created their own, a Christmastime celebration of buffoonery during which they played dice and gobbled sausages; dressed in mock robes and sang obscene hymns; and paraded the squares, drinking ale and performing burlesque acts. The church fathers were appalled: they condemned the yearly antics as "blasphemous" and "pagan" and, in the 15th century, banned them outright. But the antics continued until the Feast of Fools finally ceased to be seditious and became, more or less, a secular street festival, sometime during the 16th century.

Then, in that very same century, Pope Gregory shifted New Year's Day from April 1 to January 1. People who continued to celebrate New Year's on April 1—mostly county bumpkins—began to be called "April Fools" by the French. They were also made the butt of mean tricks, such as receiving an invitation to a nonexistent party, or having a donkey's tail secretly pinned on them. Pranking on April 1 soon became an annual ritual, reminiscent of the medieval lark, the Feast of Fools.

Pity the fool who never plays one. April 1st must drive him crazy.

Boulder to Bear

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

— Thomas Merton

This week, as we await word of the Boulder shooter's motive, millions of Christians will devote thought to the Passion of Christ.

Catholics, in particular, will recall the crucifixion, Christ's tortured body nailed to the cross.

Catholics have venerated that image for over 1,600 years, often to the point where—pun intended—it crosses with porn. (They weren't always so literal. For 400 years, Catholics simply interposed the Greek letters tau and rho to depict Christ's crucifixion.)

Catholics' intention has always been to display front and center Christ's self-sacrifice, believing it will sustain you on the hard road to glory.

"The crucifix reminds us that there is no resurrection without the cross, and that we are called to pick up our own crosses and follow after Jesus," says the contemporary theologian Philip Kosloski.

But the 20th century monk Thomas Merton warned against such a violent image. "You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image," he wrote.

Emptying your mind of images is a noble, but "vain task," Merton said. "Only pure love can empty the soul perfectly of the images of created things." And pure love is impossible.

Nonetheless, you must try—and violent images like that of the crucifixion are good ones to start with. 

"The delicate action of grace in the soul is profoundly disturbed by all human violence," Merton said. "The most dangerous violence is that in which we seem to find peace."

If you can't empty your mind of images this week—and who can?—forget the crucified Nazarene's suffering and think about Boulder, lest we forget and find peace in violence.

Christ sculpture courtesy of John Sheridan. The artist donates half his online sales proceeds to Oakland, California's Ceasefire.