Welcome Liberal Christians, Deists and Agnostics. Fundamentalist Christians, not welcome, go away.

HOWL by Allen Ginsberg

2008-07-05T19:55:00.001-05:00

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection

2008-07-05T16:25:00.001-05:00

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.

It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much of what it says is open to debate.

Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.

Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the Jewish history of his day.

“Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional part of Judaism,” Mr. Boyarin said.

Given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding all Jesus-era artifacts and writings, both in the general public and in the fractured and fiercely competitive scholarly community, as well as the concern over forgery and charlatanism, it will probably be some time before the tablet’s contribution is fully assessed. It has been around 60 years since the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, and they continue to generate enormous controversy regarding their authors and meaning.

The scrolls, documents found in the Qumran caves of the West Bank, contain some of the only known surviving copies of biblical writings from before the first century A.D. In addition to quoting from key books of the Bible, the scrolls describe a variety of practices and beliefs of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus.

How representative the descriptions are and what they tell us about the era are still strongly debated. For example, a question that arises is whether the authors of the scrolls were members of a monastic sect or in fact mainstream. A conference marking 60 years since the discovery of the scrolls will begin on Sunday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the stone, and the debate over whether it speaks of a resurrected messiah, as one iconoclastic scholar believes, also will be discussed.

Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months.

“I couldn’t make much out of it when I got it,” said David Jeselsohn, the owner, who is himself an expert in antiquities. “I didn’t realize how significant it was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few years ago. She was overwhelmed. ‘You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,’ she told me.”

Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai.

Ms. Yardeni, who analyzed the stone along with Binyamin Elitzur, is an expert on Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died in 4 B.C. The two of them published a long analysis of the stone more than a year ago in Cathedra, a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the history and archaeology of Israel, and said that, based on the shape of the script and the language, the text dated from the late first century B.C.

A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts, has been submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to give details of his analysis until publication, but he said that he knew of no reason to doubt the stone’s authenticity.

It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, which Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation,” also the title of their article. Mr. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped, partly because he had no textual evidence from before Jesus.

When he read “Gabriel’s Revelation,” he said, he believed he saw what he needed to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in the latest issue of The Journal of Religion.

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

In Mr. Knohl’s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the stone’s passages were probably Simon’s followers, Mr. Knohl contends.

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet — “In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justice” — and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says “Sar hasarin,” or prince of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel text, speaks of Gabriel and of “a prince of princes,” Mr. Knohl contends that the stone’s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be resurrected in three days.

He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of King David.

“This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” he said as he sat in his office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story.”

Ms. Yardeni said she was impressed with the reading and considered it indeed likely that the key illegible word was “hayeh,” or “live.” Whether that means Simon is the messiah under discussion, she is less sure.

Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and emeritus professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the Hebrew University, said he spent a long time studying the text and considered it authentic, dating from no later than the first century B.C. His 25-page paper on the stone will be published in the coming months.

Regarding Mr. Knohl’s thesis, Mr. Bar-Asher is also respectful but cautious. “There is one problem,” he said. “In crucial places of the text there is lack of text. I understand Knohl’s tendency to find there keys to the pre-Christian period, but in two to three crucial lines of text there are a lot of missing words.”

Moshe Idel, a professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University who has just published a book on the son of God, said that given the way every tiny fragment from that era yielded scores of articles and books, “Gabriel’s Revelation” and Mr. Knohl’s analysis deserved serious attention. “Here we have a real stone with a real text,” he said. “This is truly significant.”

Mr. Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later followers because there was no such idea present in his day.

But there was, he said, and “Gabriel’s Revelation” shows it.

“His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his blood will be the sign for redemption to come,” Mr. Knohl said. “This is the sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.”

1968

2008-07-04T02:50:00.000-05:00

Barack the magic negro

2008-07-02T20:12:00.000-05:00

The Genius of George W. Bush

2008-07-01T19:48:00.001-05:00

Great Grand Daddy Obama

2008-06-30T10:52:00.000-05:00

New Obama book #1 on Amazon

2008-06-30T10:32:00.001-05:00

What a mess, a colored baby

2008-06-30T10:02:00.004-05:00

Parents say fertility clinic botched in-vitro & girl's got the wrong dad.

They want a refund.

Colored Baby created. Loves Aunt Jemima pancakes and Uncle Ben's Rice.

Thomas Andrews and his wife, Nancy, got a surprise when daughter Jessica (l.) was born: Looks like Thomas wasn't the dad.

A Long Island woman and her husband are suing a Park Ave. fertility clinic for allegedly inseminating her with the wrong man's sperm.

After struggling to conceive their second child, Nancy Andrews and her husband, Thomas, turned to New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine for in-vitro fertilization treatments, according to a lawsuit.

Andrews soon became pregnant and the couple was overjoyed. They only discovered the clinic's "colossal blunder" after Andrews gave birth to her daughter Jessica, court papers charge.

"While we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her," the Commack couple said in documents filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. "It is simply impossible to ignore."

Thomas Andrews is white and his wife is Dominican. But Jessica, who was born Oct. 19, 2004, has darker skin than either of them as well as "characteristics more typical of African or African-American descent," the lawsuit states.

The couple tested their daughter's DNA using a home kit and later with two more sophisticated methods. All three of the tests confirmed their suspicions - the tot has a different father.

"We underwent a difficult and complex medical procedure for the sole purpose of bearing a child of our own," the couple said in court papers. "We were never informed that this type of mishap could occur, and frankly, this type of mishap is almost unimaginable."

In legal documents, the couple said they were "emotionally devastated" when they found out Thomas Andrews, who had donated his sperm to be inseminated in his wife, was not the girl's biological father.

"We fear that our daughter will be the object of scorn and ridicule by other children, both in school and as she grows up," they said.

In a decision made public yesterday, State Supreme Court Justice Sheila Abdus-Salaam threw out parts of the couple's lawsuit - including a claim that they had suffered mental distress.

"The birth of an unwanted but otherwise healthy and normal child does not constitute an injury to the child's parents," Abdus-Salaam wrote.

But the judge allowed the malpractice lawsuit to proceed against New York Medical Services for Reproductive Medicine. A previous court ruling already had found the clinic's owner, Dr. Reginald Puckett, liable for inseminating Nancy Andrews with the wrong sperm, documents show.

The couple is seeking unspecified damages for the error.

Puckett's attorney did not return calls yesterday.

The Andrews, whose eldest daughter was born on Christmas Day in 2002, declined to comment through their attorney.

Extramarital Sex among liberal Christians

2008-06-26T16:56:00.004-05:00

Incidence

Males: The United Methodist Church estimates that approximately 98% of all married males had some extramarital experience at some time during their married lives (p. 585, 587, Male).

Females: Among the sample, 96% of females had had extramarital sex by their forties. Between 4 in 6 and 8 in 10 females from age 26 to 50 were engaged in extramarital sex, (p. 416, Female).

Number of Extramarital Partners

Males:
Females:

Interracial Liberal Christians Kissing After Church

2008-06-26T14:19:00.001-05:00

Today we celebrate interracial love among liberal Christian men as they display their obvious affection for each other after church.

Gay US Senator John Cornyn (R-TX)

2008-06-26T12:10:00.001-05:00

Love is in the air

2008-06-25T21:35:00.002-05:00

Love is in the air as white liberal Christian women are now free to explore their sexuality by first voting for Barrack Obama and then entering into sexual love adventures with the black man.

BBC producer denies racist objectification of African penis

2008-06-22T23:54:00.000-05:00

Trevor Taylor, Producer of the BBC’s Gardeners Question Time, has defended a radio debate in which a plant is discussed and referred to as a 'black man's willy'.

The Radio Four show is the latest in a long line of BBC programmes to have disregarded the humanity and dignity of African people by perpetuating derogatory stereotypes.

Several people contacted the BBC to make complaints about what was described as ‘puerile innuendo’ and ‘unconscious racial stereotyping’. Trevor Taylor defended his decision to include the three minute segment claiming that there was no racist element to it because the term BMW in reference to a ‘black man's willy’ is in 'common' use and had not been created by the BBC.

He continued that he had consulted with a colleague on the matter and they had determined that the repeated, sustained sexual objectification of African male genitalia did not breach BBC editorials guidelines.

Racist iconography: Beauty and the beast scene from original King Kong movie, an enlistment propaganda poster.

The history of sexual stereotypes about Africans

The european propagation of sexual stereotypes about African people has occurred in all forms of media from the racist iconography of King Kong and the objectification of Saartje Baartman to the self perpetuated, self defacing posturing by individuals such as the entertainer Josephine Baker to the populist American music artists paid to perpetuate one-dimensional caricatures for the benefit of commercial entertainment businesses.

The sexless mammy, domineering Mandingo, exotic temptress, oversexed 'buck', noble savage, sassy vamp, jezebel and the insatiable rapist are all but a few of the eurocentric caricatures created in order to perpetuate the racist sub human inferiority of African people with a diminished capacity to express love.

These stereotypes were designed to justify the enslavement of Africans based on their perceived irrepressible animalistic drive to indulge in carnal activities without regard to morality. Ironically, the reality indicts the asiatic and european slavers for exhibiting sexually immoral, violent and abusive behaviour. Rape of African women, men and children was common amongst these groups.

During the era of colonial enslavement europeans feared the idea of helping arm collaborating Africans with weapons, one strategy used to warn of the dangers of African men enlisting in their armies was the promotion of sexual stereotypes demonising African people as sexual predators.

Posters, films, children’s books and even satirical medal spreading racist sexual stereotypes were produced. One such medal was made by the infamous Karl Goetz. It contained the head of a sexually insatiable African soldier and that of a nude european woman tied to an African phallus in order to protest the sending of African French colonial troops to occupy the Rhine territory.

The european obsession with African sexuality continues to this day.

Karl Goetz propaganda medal: Spreading racist colonial era anti-African stereotypes.

A Liberal Christian girl from our community with her black lover

2008-06-22T23:42:00.001-05:00

These two love birds, met at an Obama rally. They will enjoy their summer of love before she returns to school in the fall.

As a Liberal Christian I support interracial love.

2008-06-22T19:00:00.002-05:00

We must encourage our daughters to love the black man so that we can blend together in a carmel colored world which will be the new world under our leader, Barrack Obama. Tut tut.

America a white man's country

2008-06-22T18:53:00.001-05:00

Naked Dorm? That Wasn't in the Brochure

2008-06-22T00:03:00.001-05:00

By NEIL MACFARQUHAR

Finding herself assigned to what is often dubbed The Naked Dorm came as a shock to Martha Reicher, but now she would rather not live anywhere else. It took a while, though.

''The first week of school I would have said I live in The Naked Dorm, but now it would not be the first thing I say,'' Miss Reicher, a Wesleyan University freshman, said recently. ''Still, it is definitely the part that gets the most attention.''

This story, about how one well-choreographed rite of passage from high school to college life went unexpectedly awry, actually started last year. Miss Reicher, along with myriad high school seniors across the country, was eagerly awaiting a college acceptance letter. She dreamed of attending a strong liberal arts college in the East.

Naturally, she was ecstatic when Wesleyan accepted her, and doubly thrilled when she was assigned to her first choice of a residence hall, a place called West College. She had been particularly drawn to West College because it advertised itself as a diverse, multicultural, politically active dormitory for men and women.

Miss Reicher thought Westco (as it is known at Wesleyan) would be a welcome change from her hometown, Piedmont, Calif., an upscale community in the Oakland hills. Just how different was quickly evident.

''On the first night we had a dorm meeting, and the resident advisers said that it is a tradition of Westco that it is clothing optional,'' she said. ''Most of the people were yelling things like, 'That is awesome!' ''

But Miss Reicher doesn't recall yelling anything. Instead, she began considering everything she had read and heard about the dorm. ''I was shocked, thinking 'Is this really what diverse means?' '' she said.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Westco consists of four buildings housing about 175 students, most of whom stay clothed a lot. It's not as though residents shed their garments as they walk in the door.

Westco requires freshmen and sophomores to compete for spots in the dorm by writing essays about their interests.

Last year, the statement that students were supposed to work from said, in part: ''In the past, residents have organized musical and artistic events, planned mid-semester festivals and been committed to artistic expression, political and social activism and community responsibility. West College strives to improve upon its tradition by giving residents the opportunity and resources to express themselves and create new group initiatives.'' It mentioned nothing about clothing, optional or otherwise.

When she found out, Miss Reicher, 18, called her parents. Her dad laughed. Her mother called the school and suggested that her daughter be allowed to move if she wanted. (Her cousin, somewhat later, called a reporter.)

The students soon learned that aside from residents who developed a habit of leaving the stall doors open while they showered in the mostly coed bathrooms, not that many people wanted to go naked. But they can if so inspired.

''I just sometimes feel the need to be nude; I have body piercings to show off,'' said Jacob Z. B. Goldsmith, a 19-year-old who neither volunteered, nor was asked, where the body piercings might be, but did strip off his pants as he talked. ''There's an exhibitionist part of me. If I feel the need to take off my pants, I take my pants off. It's kind of cool that there is a place you can do that.''

That is the point of Westco. It encourages students to expose all their interests in the theory that everyone will be enriched. If a time traveler wanted to find a place where the ethos of the 1960's still flowered, Westco would be a holistic choice.

Take the concept of time. Nothing officially starts on the hour -- or even the half-hour or quarter-hour -- in Westco. The regular wine-and-cheese social hours that rotate among the various hallways are supposed to start at 9:13 p.m. ''Guidance,'' the name for weekly Monday night meetings, sort of open town halls where decisions about running the dorm are made, begins at 10:07 p.m. The odd times are intended to jog the memory.

Not a lot of students show up at Guidance, but its deliberations are considered worthy of tracking for posterity. The freestyle minutes are kept in a series of journals called ''The Book of Love,'' kept in the head resident's room.

Amongst prodigious doodling, the books brim with notations of resolutions taken in recent years, like, ''Make people aware of injustice on and off campus.'' Another entry recorded a discussion weighing a collective hair-dyeing session just before parents' weekend ''just in case your parents thought you were normal.''

At least once last fall the weekly telephone messages summoning all students to Guidance trumpeted that particular meeting as clothing optional. (The dorm's term of choice.) This tactic had mixed results, however, with some students avoiding the gathering and many present clad in just towels. (For those of you skimming this article looking for the naked bits, you are here.)

''People have realized that having a clothing-optional Guidance is not the best way to have a meeting,'' said Christopher C. Connor, 22, a senior and the head resident for all of Westco. ''A lot of people don't want to participate, and a lot come just for the spectacle.''

Aside from Guidance, there are other random moments when nakedness is encouraged, like one corridor's periodic ''Naked Hour,'' when anyone in the mood can show up.

Of course, if one resident objects, Mr. Connor asks the naked to dress. He said he never encounters flak.

The university, for its part, sort of denies.

''There is folklore that it is a clothing-optional unit, but that is not true,'' said Freddye Hill, the dean of the college and the the administration's senior representative for students. ''We tell students that nudity is offensive to some people and we have to tell people not to engage in it.''

University officials said the written rules did not specifically ban nudity, out of concern that anything so specific would only encourage it. But they said anyone habitually walking around in the buff in public areas would risk being hauled in front of the Student Judiciary Board. No one could recall such a case.

Tamara Raimundi, a senior administration official for residential life, said one woman in Westco asked to be moved out this year, citing nudity as one reason. ''Westco seems to be the place that people try to do that sort of thing because they hear the folklore and want to grab onto it,'' Ms. Raimundi said.

Westco has a more assertive student government than the other dorms, so naturally the very idea of letting a reporter visit had to go before the student government for a general discussion and vote. Then someone alerted the college newspaper, The Argus, which wrote a front-page story about the visit. Its reporter asked questions like, ''Is it true that you wanted to write an article about sex and drugs and nudity at Westco four months ago but the university president wouldn't allow it?'' (The only idea there that is vaguely accurate is that it took four months for the dorm consensus and the reporter's schedule to coincide.)

Parties at the dorm, understandably, are among the most popular on campus. And some students living elsewhere either find a way to move in or just hang out. Katrina E. Nordine, 19, moved from nearby Clark Hall. ''There is no life there other than beer,'' she said. ''It was not about being alive and creating things, it was about being drunk.''

When it is warm enough, some Westco students take their clothing-optional selves outdoors. (At least the guys. It is usually the guys.)

Ms. Reicher recalls an early fall visit by her boyfriend, ''He walked in and said that he hadn't seen anybody naked, and he didn't know what I was talking about, and then he looked to his left and there were 10 guys playing Frisbee naked.''

The tradition, according to Adam D. Hurter, a sophomore and onetime resident, stems from the fact that in the late 1960's the dorm was devised as communal housing for students and faculty where they could delve more intensely into issues of the day. That particular experiment ended in 1974, he said, but some of the wackier traditions prevail.

''People aren't just generally wandering around naked just for the sake of being naked,'' said Matthew D. Lerner, 18, one of the dorm's five elected presidents. ''It's the idea of not judging anyone, of respecting one another's beliefs. It does not have sexual undertones.''

That last idea takes some acclimatizing. But residents swear that the disrobed gradually become part of the background tapestry in a dorm teeming with musicians, painters and political organizers.

''It's not all for attention, ooooooohhhhh, let's get naked and have fun,'' said Ms. Reicher, who has never joined in the dorm's unclad life. ''I guess it's normal to me now. It is part of being not judged at all, I can be who I want to be. But I guess when I try to describe it to my parents or relatives, they can't see how it can be an acceptable thing.''

Bad Boy Bush

2008-06-21T15:08:00.002-05:00

I call your attention to the narrow eyes. It is axiomatic that those with narrow eyes have a smaller brain, thus they are marginally functional. Just look at the guilt written on the face of Bad Boy Bush.

Report: Ohio teacher burned cross on kids' arms

2008-06-20T22:24:00.000-05:00

Report: Ohio teacher burned cross on kids' arms

Jun 20 02:58 PM US/Eastern

MOUNT VERNON, Ohio (AP) - A public school teacher preached his Christian beliefs despite complaints by other teachers and administrators and used a device to burn the image of a cross on students' arms, according to a report by independent investigators.

Mount Vernon Middle School teacher John Freshwater also taught creationism in his science class and was insubordinate in failing to remove a Bible and other religious materials from his classroom, the report said.

School board members were scheduled to meet Friday afternoon to discuss the findings by consulting firm H.R. On Call Inc., hired by the district to investigate. The report was released Thursday.

School Superintendent Stephen Short wouldn't comment on the report before Friday's meeting, his office said. A message seeking comment was left for Freshwater's attorney, Roger Weaver.

The report comes one week after a family filed a federal lawsuit in Columbus against Freshwater and the school district, saying Freshwater burned a cross on their child's arm that remained for three or four weeks.

Freshwater's friend Dave Daubenmire defended him.

"With the exception of the cross-burning episode ... I believe John Freshwater is teaching the values of the parents in the Mount Vernon school district," he told The Columbus Dispatch in a story published Friday.

Several students interviewed by investigators described Freshwater, who has been employed by the school district for 21 years, as a great guy.

But Lynda Weston, the district's director of teaching and learning, told investigators that she has dealt with complaints about Freshwater for much of her 11-year term at the district, the report said.

A former superintendent, Jeff Maley, said he tried to find another position for Freshwater but couldn't because Freshwater was certified only in science, the report said.

Freshwater used a science tool known as a high-frequency generator to burn images of a cross on students' arms in December, the report said. Freshwater told investigators he simply was trying to demonstrate the device on several students and described the images as an "X," not a cross. But pictures show the images depict a cross, the report said.

Other findings show that Freshwater taught that carbon dating was unreliable to argue against evolution.

The disease of masturbation

2008-06-20T22:08:00.000-05:00

Dating a black man.

2008-06-14T13:52:00.002-05:00

One of the best ways to escape your fundamentalist church and family, if you are a white women, is to date a black man. Not only will you enjoy a marvelous sexual experience, you will be excommunicated from your fundamentalist church and shunned by your family. Thus you will be free to leave the backward south and move to the liberal north, northeast so as to begin a new life as a liberal.

Biologist Ken Miller On Intelligent Design

2008-06-13T21:38:00.000-05:00

Obama's high school graduation

2008-06-13T18:59:00.000-05:00

Cat Carrier

2008-06-13T18:56:00.000-05:00

The Conjugal Rights Guide

2008-06-13T18:42:00.000-05:00