It's Fundamental

Indulge me for a moment and consider this scenario. There's a community of Ultra-Orthodox Jews headquartered in Crown Heights, Brooklyn called the Chabad Lubavitch. It's a Hassidic sect that believes in strict adherence to the Torah, (the first five books of Moses), and the Talmud, (5000 years of rabbinical commentary on the Torah). Their outreach efforts to reach disaffiliated and non-practicing Jews have made it one of the largest and fastest growing religious organizations in the world, reaching seventy countries and forty-nine of the fifty United States. There's even a chapter in Memphis. Now imagine if the Hasidim and their return-to-roots philosophy picked up enough momentum to translate into political power and their leaders were elected into positions of authority. Then suppose they used that authority to declare the Torah as the "official book" of as many states as they could round up. Nothing wrong with that, right? Christians also believe in the Old Testament, so they would have no objection to following its tenets. But if we're going to do it, let's do it right and strictly observe the written law.

Jewish dietary rules come with a few restrictions. First, Kosher food must be prepared in accordance with Jewish law. Animals and birds have to be killed in a specific manner, so no more hunting unless accompanied by a Jewish butcher. All blood must be drained from meat and poultry, so if you like your steak medium rare, you'll have to cross state lines. Also, no grape products prepared by non-Jews may be eaten, so say goodbye to all non-kosher wine, Welch's grape juice, and Boone's Farm Grape Jelly. The Torah says it's forbidden to "boil a kid in its mother's milk," (Ex 23:19). Generations of rabbis have interpreted this passage as meaning that meat and dairy products should not be mixed, which means no more cheeseburgers or burritos. Then there are the animals the Torah mentions specifically as forbidden for supper. No pig means no more Bar-B-Que, so there goes our festival. Other no-no's include all shellfish, including lobster, oysters, shrimp, clams, and crabs- not to mention crawdads. But Leviticus 11:13 says its OK to "eat any animal that has cloven hooves and chews its cud," so that's a good thing. And the Jewish sabbath is from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday, so that's it for high school and college football. I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. Just as preposterous as it would be to impose Jewish laws, why do the right-wing Christians continue to attempt to codify their beliefs into state and federal law?

Tennessee made the wrong kind of national news when the State House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill making the Bible the state's "official book." The bill's sponsor, Rep. Jerry Sexton, is a former pastor from Bean Station, again proving the antipathy these country-ass rubes have for the big city. Fortunately, the State Senate saw the blatant unconstitutionality of the proposal and killed the bill. Rep. Steve Cohen said on MSNBC that "It's been a hundred years since the Scopes monkey trial and we have not progressed that far from Dayton, Tennessee." Perhaps Preacher Sexton envisions himself as William Jennings Bryan incarnate, but similar bills have been introduced in Arkansas, and Indiana, which has problems of its own. Their governor signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law. Even the title implies that if religious freedom needs to be restored, it must have vanished somewhere. The original RFRA was a 1993 Democratic initiative to "ensure that interests in religious freedom are protected," in all faiths. Now, however, the act is interpreted as payback for same-sex marriage and open season on gays whose existence offends the Christian beliefs of any auto mechanic or pizza joint owner. Didn't we settle all that, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone," business in the sixties?

The tomato is Tennessee's state fruit. The state mineral is agate, and the racoon has been designated as the official wild animal. But now that the Bible has been disqualified as the official state book, I have a few suggestions that may suit our faith-based legislators' mentalities. The obvious choice is "A Confederacy of Dunces," but there are so many other possibilities: "Of Mice and Men," Dostoevsky's "The Idiot," "The Sound and the Fury," "One Flew Over the Cuckoos' Nest," and of course "Fifty Shades of Grey Goose Vodka," which the House Republicans must have imbibed before passing this idiotic bill. I just don't understand why the evangelical Christians are so persecuted in this country. A minister in Tempe, Arizona recently preached, "I hope that God strikes Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy," thus proving that the problem isn't Christianity or any other religion- it's fundamentalism. We could argue about this but what's the point? Former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann recently predicted the return of Jesus due to Obama. "We have very little time left before the second return of Christ," she proclaimed. If Jesus comes to Tennessee, I bet He'll be upset to see the Holy Scriptures placed in the same category as "The Valley of the Dolls."

Spring Fevers

You can tell it's springtime in Memphis when all the cars turn green- and everything else for that matter. It's not the welcome green of seasonal renewal, but those damn fuzzy worm-like things that cling to everything they touch. If you cross a parking lot, you have to make a break for shelter before they cover you like something from a horror movie. When you return, your car is blanketed in a layer of dust. There's no point washing it because it will just be filthy the next day. And it seems like it happens so all of a sudden. One day you're outside taking your first deep breath of fresh spring air, and the next day you can't breathe at all. It reached inside my house indirectly through my wife. She had lunch with a friend and it was such a nice day, they sat on the patio of a local eatery. Four hours later, she sounded like a lifetime whiskey drinking, chain-smoker. I thought I was sleeping with Clint Eastwood. Then the symptoms hit hard- sore throat, burning congestion, sneezing, and a head that weighs fifty pounds. We had suffered horribly through flu season, even though we both had the shots. (Thanks Obama). But since my wife and I pass illnesses back and forth like hippies pass a blunt, I woke up only to find I couldn't swallow. She said it was allergies, but how do you catch an allergy?

When Melody asked on social media if anyone else was sick, her phone nearly blew up. It seems like everyone else is sick. Pardon me, I had to step away to get a hit of Afrin. I don't care, I snort Afrin like Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet." And I insist on the menthol kind, not that lame beginners' stuff for people with their sinuses still intact. But back to the Memphis city-wide plague- our metropolitan nightmare is pollen. There, I said the p-word. Especially tree pollen from oak, birch, and willow trees. You know that song "Willow Weep For Me?" The lyrics say, "Bend your branches down along the ground and cover me." That pretty much sums up what's going on around here. Memphis is a city of trees, particularly oaks, which are the main culprit. Those furry green strings on your patio furniture are called oak catkins, in case you were curious. The foliage may be lovely in May, but according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation's annual list of the ten worst U.S. cities for allergy sufferers, Memphis ranks number eight. We're number eight! We rank just lower than Knoxville and Louisville, but higher than Baton Rouge. You'd think all that Spanish Moss would have kicked them up a notch, but I've heard Cajuns are made of alligator hide. Memphis is the perfect incubator for pollen- lots of trees, warm temperature, gusting winds. We should all start wearing those surgical masks like the Japanese and Michael Jackson.

Since we've just been sitting around wheezing, I've had the chance to watch a lot of television- a whole lot- and I noticed that just at this time, the airwaves are filled with so many commercials for Claritin or Zyrtec, or any of the hundred more remedies on your pharmacist's shelf, there's hardly any room left for programming. The drug companies tell you in their ads that their concoctions will relieve the symptoms, so you know they're bound to be right. Pardon me, I need a tissue. We've been going with Claritin, but the directions say to just take one pill a day. I eat a fistful of pills every day anyway. What's some microscopic tablet going to do for me? The only thing to do is tough it out for the next two months, stay indoors and watch TV, applying periodic doses of Visine. Watch that Scientology expose on HBO. That will take your mind off of your nasal cavities. Melody also has me hooked on a show called, "Chrisley Knows Best," about a Georgia family where everyone is a laugh riot. I find that watching too many news programs provokes wracking fits of violent coughing, so I've taken to a steady diet of Netflix revenge fantasy movies where the protagonist hunts down and kills the people who wronged him in some grotesque way. The earthquake was interesting. Not the one along the New Madrid Fault, but the Memphis quake when Kentucky lost to Wisconsin. I haven't seen so much schadenfreude since the Watergate hearings

The bad news is that it's going to get worse. According to the experts over at Pollen.com, the forecast for Memphis indicates pollen levels in "the extremely high range." This means if your one of the fifty million people suffering from seasonal allergies, it will be "difficult outdoors." So bust out the Benadryl and suffer along with the rest of us. There's lots of rain in the forecast. Some people believe that when rain pours down on the tree pollen, it somehow lessens the effects. It doesn't. It's allergy season and rain can't stop it, so get used to breathing through your mouth. Buy tissues in gross since you'll need them and try not to shout at the TV every time Ted Cruz appears on the news. Come back outside at the end of April and enjoy the trees in bloom, shed of their fuzzy creatures. It's been said that from tiny acorns mighty oaks grow. I think we've got about all the oak trees we can take. Maybe Ronald Reagan was right when he said that trees cause pollution. Those killer oak catkins are messing up the paint job on my car. You'll have to excuse me now. It's time for another Afrin hit.

What Durst Thou?

HBO struck gold with the six-part documentary, "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst." Especially during the jaw-dropping finale when the alleged triple-murderer was heard off-camera, muttering to himself into a hot microphone what sounded like a confession. Durst's arrest the day after the show's finale created such white-hot news coverage that I don't think I'd be revealing any secrets to offer a short synopsis. Durst is the estranged heir to one of the richest real-estate firms in New York, which manages 1 World Trade Center, among other high-rent properties. His personal wealth is estimated at $100 million. In 1982, Durst's first wife disappeared and her body was never found. Though suspected of murder, Durst remained untouched until the investigation was re-opened in 2000. The day before Durst's closest confidant was to be interviewed about the case by prosecutors in Los Angeles, she was found murdered execution-style in her home. Fleeing to Galveston, TX, Durst rented a $300 a month room disguised as a mute woman. In 2001, Durst was arrested for killing his seventy-one year old neighbor and dismembering the corpse, which he placed in several garbage bags and scattered in Galveston Bay. Celebrity attorney Dick DeGuerin, who not-so-successfully represented David Koresh during the Waco standoff, admitted that Durst cut up the body, but said that it was postmortem after a struggle over a gun. The jury decided that Durst acted in self-defense when the gun went off, so the slicing and dicing was moot, and he got off. They never found the head.

Durst agreed to take part in hours of interviews with filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, ostensibly to deflect blame and set the record straight. Jarecki had directed a 2010 fictionalized account of the events called "All Good Things." In the series final episode, after being confronted with damning evidence, Durst retired to the men's room, forgetting he was still wearing a live microphone and said, "There it is. I'm caught. What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course." Durst didn't seem to be regretting the murders so much as agreeing to do the documentary. The day after the final episode aired, Durst was arrested in a New Orleans hotel with 40k in cash, a loaded 38. caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, his passport and original birth certificate, an over-the-head latex mask, and five ounces of pot. He will most assuredly be arraigned in Los Angeles for murder, so if you enjoyed the documentary, just wait until the trial. Some of the greatest entertainment L.A. produces comes from their live broadcasts of criminal trials. Just look at what they've given us over the years- OJ, the Menendez brothers, the cops who beat Rodney King, Phil Spector, and Dr. Conrad Murray. But the Robert Durst show will be the trial of this early century. This will be too salacious not to televise.

HBO's ratings were far too good not to continue this series. We know that we live in a violent country and that there are killers who walk among us- some of them mass murderers. The Durst case took over three decades to unravel, which proves that justice is sometimes late in arriving, but you never know when it will come knocking at your door. The authorities already know the identities of some of those who have committed terrible atrocities, and yet walked free. And their names are Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, and Tenet. They met in secrecy, concocting a story to sell to the American people about why the Iraq War was absolutely necessary on the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction- a term of their own invention. They invaded and occupied a nation that had not harmed us, then sent over the U.S. Viceroy, "Jerry" Brenner, who disbanded the Iraqi army and barred former members of Saddam's political party from government, thus throwing hundreds of thousands of men out of work. These two dumbass decisions led directly to insurgency, chaos, sectarian civil war, and the birth of ISIS. The cost of the Iraq War is immeasurable in both dollars and human life. Nothing Obama has been accused of by his enemies could ever amount to a crime of this magnitude.

So where are all the warmongers now? They're all wealthy and serve on corporate boards and think tanks. Some are professors at prestigious universities. "Jerry" Brenner lives in Vermont, painting rural landscapes while dabbling in French cuisine. Cheney made a fortune in "blind trust" stocks from no-bid contracts to Halliburton and its subsidiaries. The rest advise the current Republican Party. No one but Cheney's flunkie, Scooter Libby, ever faced criminal charges concerning the war, but rumblings about legal recourse have been growing louder across the globe. In 2012, the Malaysian War Crimes Tribunal convicted Bush, Cheney, and six others in absentia for war crimes. Torture victims told of mistreatment by U.S. soldiers and contractors who used some of the same practices that Japanese were executed for after WWII. Transcripts of the trial were sent to the International Criminal Court, which may never act, but the Durst case proved there's no statute of limitations on atrocities. Then, when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream, I know of a cozy, tropical prison down in Cuba that's just perfect for detaining war criminals. Imagine the ratings if they televised that trial.

The Annointed

Sometimes I think I get a general sense of what's about to happen. I'm no Edgar Cayce or anything, but I can often imagine the effect that results from the cause. If you disregard my absolute certainty that Al Gore would be president in 2006, my predictions have more often been right than wrong. Even back then, when Hillary Clinton was all but being coronated as the next Democratic presidential candidate, I wrote that two years was an eternity for another candidate to emerge to challenge the presumptive nominee, and one certainly did. The historical inevitability of Barack Obama couldn't be stopped, even by the ugly campaign the Clintons ran against him. Hillary's failed campaign left a lingering resentment among certain Democrats over her scatter-shot tactics and baseless accusations. Her term as Obama's Secretary of State revived her reputation for competence, regardless of the fake "scandals" the GOP tried to lay at her feet. Hillary is probably the most qualified, best informed candidate to seek the presidency in decades, and polls have shown the country's willingness to elect a female president. So let me go out on a limb and make a prediction, then two years from now, you can check back and see if I was correct. Hillary Clinton will not only fail to win the presidency, she won't even get the Democratic nomination.

When I was an adult student completing my journalism degree at the U of M, I was given a classroom assignment to cover a campus visit by Mrs. Clinton, then the First Lady of Arkansas, who was campaigning for her husband's election. She delivered a speech that I described at the time as "flat," "uninspiring," and without the rhetorical gifts that came so easily to the Governor. I also said that although I agreed with most of her stands on the issues, she was badly lacking in communicative skills. And she still is. A lightning rod for controversy, Hillary can instantly become so exasperated that she unleashes a public barrage of ill-inspired, instant quotations that only provide ammunition for her enemies. It's been pretty much settled that the entire Benghazi witch-hunt was merely a concoction of right-wing operatives out to do her damage, but frustrated by idiotic questions over whether to call the tragedy a "terrorist attack," or a "spontaneous protest," Hillary spouted, "At this point, what difference does it make?" Although stripped of its context, right-wing pundits have found her remarks to be pure gold, and the almost defunct House Select Committee on Benghazi has become suddenly re-animated, subpoenaing thousands of her newly-controversial emails.

Hillary has a history of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Remember when she said she wasn't going to be a typical First Lady, sitting home and baking cookies or "standing by her man," as the popular song went. The accompanying outrage forced her to go out and profess her love of country music and apologize to Tammy Wynette and America's housewives. When the Jennifer Flowers scandal came along, she did stand by her man after all. While in the White House, she was accused of everything from murder to drug smuggling, as well as being "secretive." Then she did herself no favors by having her previously requested Rose Law Firm billing statements, said to be long lost, turn up one day in a White House office drawer. Hillary parlayed Bill's inexcusable sexual betrayal into a senate seat from New York, where she learned the art of "triangulation"- taking the absolute middle ground between two opposing points of view. In this capacity, Clinton voted her approval for the Iraqi War; co-sponsored an anti-flag burning amendment, even though she's a lawyer and knew that the Supreme Court had already ruled the act was a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment; and voted for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, opening the door for U.S. attacks on Iran. During Hillary's senate career, every controversial vote seemed to be made with a political calculation.

This latest kerfuffle about Hillary using her own private email account to conduct government business is just another stink-bomb attack by her adversaries that won't amount to much, yet she insists on making it worse for herself. Already believed in certain quarters to be someone who cuts corners or makes her own rules, Hillary set up her own private server, registered to a fictitious name and routed back to her New York home. She didn't break any laws, just bent the rules a little. The former Secretary has announced that she is eager to turn over her emails for scrutiny, but only those pertaining to the business of the State Department. This allows her to exercise more control over physical access and furthers the perception that she has something to hide. At some point, Hillary will also have to justify accepting donations by foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State. It's enough to give you a case of pre-Clinton Fatigue. Two years is a lifetime for a presumptive nominee to coast, and there are bound to be more gaffes and temper explosions. When Hillary alienates enough members of her own party, the Democrats may be forced to turn to someone else. The GOP will likely nominate a Tea Party extremist as their candidate. Why shouldn't the Dems offer a true liberal and a fighter for the underdog instead of another blue-dog? Elizabeth Warren insists she's not running for president. So did Barack Obama before he was finally convinced that his hour of destiny had arrived.