MPS begins this Blog Against Theocracy with a poem by our dear departed Xristi M. Xristi would have loved B.A.T., and so in her honor and memory, here is another poem that fits the occasion…

Domestication

Armed with the whip and chair
of our bigotries and self-righteousness,
we point to the flaming hoop of our desires
and shout the order, Leap!

But He answers to names
other than that by which we call Him.
He has a will of His own,
stronger than ours.
He will choose the ring
where He performs,
will fill what tent He pleases
with guests of His own selection.
God is not so easily tamed.

© Xristi Megas 2004

Folks –

For my first post in our blog against theocracy, I need to cite something from one of our own, Xristim who passed away in December. She was one of the bravest and best friends this blog or this boy could ever have. She was a Christian, but she was wary of the Religious Right. This is from a comment she posted in November, 2006.

CHANGE OF ADDRESS
Dedicated to the Absolutely Sure of Absolutely Everything
From Someone Who Isn’t
(c) XristiM 1998-2006

Into their Lazarus mouths they pop
God like round peppermint lozenges,
and with their resurrected teeth
grind Him small,
roll the bits with their tongues,
flooding them with saliva and
the exhalations of digestion.
Then they amble forth
to perform the work for which
they have anointed themselves
and each other,
breathing the judgment of an angry God strongly
into the nostrils of others.

We can hear them at a distance,
from close enough can detect the stench
of self-righteousness.
And a wary eye can detect them in our midst,
with coats that show glossy fronts,
but on their backs,
hidden from their view
and from ours
unless we trouble ourselves to look,
reveal scraps and patches
like bandages over festering sores.

We may protest, draw back in distaste,
alarmed to have God thrust upon us
smelling so pungently of mint
and the charnel house,
but they are relentless in pursuit
of fleeing souls.
They paralyze us with their certainty
that God lives in their mouths.

For myself, I think the God has filed
His change of address:
He resides
not in the mouth, but in the heart.

I attended XristiM’s memorial party in SF today. I wanted and needed to go, and I’m glad I went. Yes, it was a little strange explaining how I knew her, but her friends and family all understood. It seems she kept email relationships going with her friends scattered far and wide before she started her blog. One of the many friends explained to me that was why they encouraged her to blog.

I saw pictures of her as a child through teen and early adulthood, and then into her glory years. I read through some of the now-bound poetry (and there is quite a lot more than what was posted on Gadflying); I met her ex-husband, her beloved friends Tamsin and Allen, and the much esteemed DogDoc who now owns Miss Betsy Trotwood. Everyone I met was kind and smart, and everyone understood why I was there, from being just a flicker on the screen in XristiM’s life, to being at her wake.

I’m still processing it all, maybe there will be more to come.

The MPS tribute to our fallen comrad, Xristi, continues. Using her own words is the best way to remember Xristi.

Please note that there is now a “Xristi” category. Anytime you want a quote, you can click on that link and find the quotes.

Various scafflows within the Bush Administration were a favorite target. Small fry first to the big Kahuna.

On Mehlman

• I’ve always thought there’s a strong family resemblance between Mr. Santorum and Mr. Mehlman — I mean, apart from any other relationship they might share.
• Am I the only one who can’t escape the odd sensation that there is an almost familial level of resemblance between Mehlman and Tony Snow? Maybe it’s the carefully coifed hair and button-down-everything style of dress…or (sinister music in minor key here) is it “something else”?… Of course, it could just be that neither can construct a declarative sentence that isn’t a lie or temporization.

On Hadley

• He makes it from smarmy, rolling-eyed piety to fear of heavenly reprisals with stops in between at punctilious earnestness in almost certain error and ineffective discplinary efforts to quell dissent.
• But credit where it’s due: A man who can tell a different lie from each of his two faces simultaneously obviously has a great career ahead of him in politics or diplomacy. And if a “forked tongue” betokens a fib, this man is managing to talk with a shredded one.

On Condi

• Hmmmmm…gee, Condi, all that brown and green… I have the impression of a seriously confused tree.
• Notwithstanding that, I bite my lip and pronounce she is without scruple, without honor, without principle — and words cannot express how much I wish she were without job.
• The cacophagous, fawning bitch cur that slithers and crawls behind her master. A gourmand of whatever shit he deposits, she mixes it with her venomous digestive juices, then vomits it forth before the leaders of the world.

On Lynne

• Tengrain, at my post of “A New Creature in Eden”, you were speculating on young Brando for Adam, Ms. Bissett for Eve, but confessed yourself stumped by casting for the serpent. In the spirit of bipartisanship to which Mr. Bush is giving such lip-service lately, we might consider Lynne. I don’t think gender was much of an issue in the Eden scenario.

On Blam-blam

• Mr. Cheney, if his claim be true, will have discovered a new physical law as important as that of Archimedes: It is possible to be above the law and beneath contempt… And it has a corollary: It is possible to preach duty while attempting to avoid responsibility. Conclusion: My dear ol’ mum was wrong. It isn’t true that there’s some good in everybody.
• Would I invite [Lieberman] to dinner at my house? Oddly enough, yes. I am one of life’s truly wretched cooks, notorious for kitchen disasters involving firemen and emergency service personnel. But, of course, the first invitation is to Mr. Cheney.
• You’re supposed to leave the horribly disfigured portrait in the dark in the attic and wear the forever-nice-and-young face in public!… I just knew this would happen when he skipped school to go baby-seal clubbing and missed the lesson covering Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray.
• A crapulous sack of rotting guts, maggot-bait, conceived in madness, spawned in filth in the bowels of the earth — cacophagous, anthropophagous, a walking plague!… And I’m not crazy about his tie, either.
• I suspect he was a boy of evil tendencies whose manhood is fulfilling the dire promise of his youth…
• I also hope eventually to starve the Veep into disclosing his true colors…familial cannibalism. He could start on spouse and offspring. And I personally have no objection to his beginning on the Bush ankles.

The MPS tribute to our fallen comrad, Xristi, continues. Using her own words is the best way to remember Xristi.

Please note that there is now a “Xristi” category. Anytime you want a quote, you can click on that link and find the quotes.

Xristi on the elections:

• How sure are we that Ohio is legally part of the United States? Come to think of it, given its recent record, how sure are we that Ohio is legally anything?
• My God, I’m sure there weren’t many guests, but even so — is it possible that Denny ate them ALL?
• Honesty obliges me to add, it’s whip and chair time, to make sure the Dems don’t lose sight of their obligation to this nation and the rest of the world.
• I keep trying to cure myself of the tendency toward bias against “heartland” folk and the South — but all those Goobers, Gomers, and Bubbas really are beginning to make my head throb. Maybe the headache is part of my penance.
• Increasingly I am persuaded that the GOP is not a political party; it’s a mental disease.
• Someplace there are 39% of 300,000,000 people next to whom I don’t want to find myself seated at dinner.
• Though I’m sure corruption and nepotism aren’t confined to the GOP, they do seem to have raised both to an art form.
• Katie [Katherine Harris] the Wannabe Harlot must be a lot for all those GOPer wives to swallow — you know, the ones chained to the backyard trees except during rutting season.
• I suggest outsourcing Katrina reconstruction to Hezbollah … they appear to have made more progress in Lebanon already than the Administration has managed in New Orleans in a year.
• I think of Hastert as a prodigiously bloated minnow rather than as a manatee. On his merits as a human being, not puffed by public office, he’d have been flushed down the toilet a long time ago.
• ‘Scuse me…there’s a brick wall in the backyard against which I need to go bang my head a few times.
• Crackers belong in boxes — a nice pine one for Mr. Allen would not be totally inappropriate.
• I think I finally identified the butcher shop that removed Mr. Specter’s spine. When I inquired, they assured me that they do NOT do the reverse procedure.
• I have recently cleaned out my sock drawer and have a plentiful supply of un-mated socks. I am donating one for stuffing in Newt’s gaping maw.
• Diogenes would be creating an oil shortage of his own if he took his lamp on his search for an honest among this Adminisration, its appointees, and their hirelings.

The best way to remember Xristi is to use her own words. So I culled through her comments and tried to pull together her wit and wisdom into some easily recongnizable categories.

Please note that there is now a “Xristi” category. Anytime you want a quote, you can click on that link and find the quotes.

The first family was a favorite target.

On Chimpy:

• On the other hand, I have a debt of gratitude to [Texas]. Until it gave us George W. Bush, MY state (California) had been guilty of providing the nation with its most crooked (Nixon) and its dumbest (Reagan) President. With one election, Texas got us off the hook for both.
• For Mr. Bush I can easily visualize a three legged stool in the corner, along with a tall pointy hat.
• Shouldn’t that yellow stripe be down Mr. Bush’s back instead of adorning his chest?
• Every word the man utters invites assassination. For his own sake, he should be advised to shut up. From my perspective, on the other hand, let him rant on.
• In his 1597 essays, Francis Bacon said: He that is used to go forward, and findeth a stop, falleth out of his own favor, and is not the thing he was…. It is presumptuous to argue with the great Bacon, but in this case I must. Mr. Bush is still the thing he was: An arrogant, pietistic, delusional, doltish poltroon.
• And taking advantage of the alternate possible reading of the line “There’s a higher Father that I appeal to”, I have to add, “No, GW, I don’t think you appeal to Him very much at all.
• To the current lexicon of political jargon, and by analogy to Stephen Colbert’s truthiness”, I would like to offer “assiness”… If anyone is uncertain of what “assiness” consists, one needs only to know that George W. Bush represents its ultimate.
• Mr. Bush is, I think, the only President we’ve ever had who might actually confuse Stephen Hawking and Sadie Hawkins.
• I’m torn…I’d love the entire Bush clan to be elswhere, but I can think of no nation I dislike enough to wish the Bushes upon it. I suppose I’m still opting for the 9th Bolge of Dante’s Inferno.
• Three hundred million people in this country, and we have a President who didn’t win, place, or show in the human race.
• Of course, the US Fiscal year runs October 1 through September 30, so Mr. Bush would be in his usual state of error even if February had 30 days… I suppose it’s just a matter of time before it becomes Clinton’s fault that it doesn’t have 30 days.
• A grimacing gallimaufry of gammon, a bumptious buffoon, a jabbering jackanapes…and we’re letting him play with the world!
• Just keep digging, George…you’re not at the bottom yet, but you’re getting there.
• Notwithstanding the old aphorism that resorting to profanity bespeaks a paucity of vocabulary, I, who am certainly capable of expressing my vituperative views in sesquipedalian terms so arcane that opponents are obliged to call for “time out” to consult reference volumes to confirm they’ve been insulted, firmly believe that there are occasions when only the homelier language is able to convey with any degree of precision exactly what I intend…. Thus, while I sometimes refer to Mr. Bush as the ambulatory portrait of a petulant prat or a pontificating prevaricator or a pestilent poltroon, my favorite soubriquet for him remains “fuckface”.
• Palavering, prevaricating poltroon … he’d require lessons to achieve drooling idiocy.
• Okay, so I can’t threaten the President’s life. Since he threatens not only mine, but that of every living thing on the planet, I consider that vastly unfair…but okay, I’ll live with it…But is it anywhere written I can’t suggest putting Rumsfeld and Bolton in a gunny sack and thwacking them both with a very big stick till they don’t twitch any more?
• I wonder how often White House staff has had to extricate Mr. Bush from the laundry?
• I think the military shows great restraint in not peeing on him.
• I continue to believe at some level that if we just quit watering him, he’d wither from the root and die.
• Though female, albeit an old one, I can conceive of no circumstances in which how Bush is hung would be a factor in my deciding to aim a knee at his groin…and even if I were young, that, I assure you, is the ONLY interest the area could hold for me.
• But evidence is certainly strong that Mr. Bush functions at the intellectual level of my kitchen soap dish.
• Head on a pike. That’s all I ask. Head on a pike.

On Laura:

• …Soon nose length will be the most reliable indicator of the credibility of her statements — though a good interim rule of thumb remains, “If she’s talkin’, she’s lyin’.
• I have difficulty believing MizLaura is at all lust-driven — even do-it-yourself lust…. Though if she does have the occasional urge, I can see why she’d prefer a dildo of any configuration to the one she married.
• Nobody, but nobody, buys a sack of flour wearing lace.

On the Twins:

• SAVE AMERICA, SPAY THE TWINS.
• I may have to re-assess my thinking about the Twins. I’ve always called them the Lint Twins because, like that annoying stuff, they are neither useful nor decorative. But in this photo, they verge on being over-decorative.
• Of course, Webb could just have countered with, “And, Mr. President, how is that career change working out for the Twins? They made a good decision, moving off streetcorners into a house. Most johns want fresher goods when the shop on the street. Is your Mom still handling their schedules?

Scissorheads -

I just got the sad news that Xristi passed on yesterday.

We’ve lost a kind and brave soul, and we are all better people for having known her, even if only virtually. Please hold her “in your heart.”

Peace and love,

Tengrain

PS – because I know she would want this: “May his tongue blacken and fall from his mouth, may his limbs wither and become a burden to him, may his stomach feed on his liver, and may birds of prey nest in his hair!”