WWH~~ Wake'N'Bake 101: The Rapture...

FLASH!: In case you missed it, "The Rapture" occurred last month, Apr 9, at 11 am, MDT. The reason nobody noticed is cuz nobody made the cut.

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Not-Douay/Rheims: The cover story on the latest # of Harper's magazine--out in print now, but not on-line for another month or so--is titled "King James, Revisited." Collected essays from a panel of poets, and assorted other literati, which repeat the accepted nostrums about the King James' version of the Christian "Bible," which turns 400 years old this year. I have only just begun it; I shall undoubtedly finish it sometime in the next month. But, frankly, except as an historical curiosity, I'm not much of an admirer of the Bible in any of its versions, other than the illustrated manuscripts of the late medieval/early renaissance.

For me, the so-called "Bible" is a compilation of myths and mores--a sort of Talmudic "Readers' Digest" or "Grimm's Fairy Tales"-- belonging to some related tribes of nomadic, long-gone, bronze-age herders (sheep, goats, camels) who nourished with it their cultural delusions of Imperial grandeur. It's usefulness as anything but an archeological artifact is extremely doubtful.

And, in addition, this melange of myth, custom and savagery has been appropriated, most strangely, by people who are almost the literal antitheses in world view, attitude, and morality, of the people about and for whom the original stories are told. Daniel Quinn, in his book "Ishmael" (Chapter 6? iirc) does a wondrous deconstruction of the provenance of the "biblical" narrative.

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Larry Faircloth, one of two Republican contenders for WVa gubernatorial nomination, has apologized to the West Virginia NAACP and anyone else he offended when he referred to President Barack Obama as “Sambo” and U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi as a “bimbo.”

The racist, misogynous cretin, and former Berkeley County (W.Va) Delegate insisted Thursday he was only "joking."

If you were in Dr. Woody's political discourse class, he'd point to this as a "paradigm case" of the famous/notorious, and astonishingly common-place "Non-Apology Apology," popularized by inflagrante delectants on both sides of the aisle throughout the Clinton years.

In this case, when the GOPhuk-stick Faircloth apologizes to "anyone I may have offended," this does NOT include an apology for actually MAKING the wilfully stupid, hateful, derogatory, racist/sexist remarks he made and was recorded making. He couldn't deny it, but he wasn't really sorry he said it. He's sorry "if" you were offended, if you were.

This way the shitwhistle is NOT apologizing to those of his constituency who were NOT offended by the remark, because they were the intended audience for the slur in the first place and "got the joke." We KNOW this without any doubt because the fuckwad Faircloth said it was only meant as a "joke." To whom, one might ask, would it have been a "joke?" Clearly not those slurred by the reference to "Sambo."

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