The Hanks

Maybe I overdid it not wanting Harbaugh to lose even against the Gators. Although 41-7 was not what I had in mind, after the Brady Hoke years I’m rooting for Harbaugh to out-win Bo Schembechler, resume Michigan’s rightful place at the top of B1G, smush the double devil Urban Meyer/Ohio State combo, go to the national championship and make elephant stew of Alabama. That’s my football dream, and I should live so long. Even so, Roll Tide, and Clemson is not honorary SEC, alphabet forget it.

Twenty-five or thirty years ago I realized that listening to hillbilly songs on my car radio was keeping me as morose as Snoopy weeping in his root beer, so I shifted to classical then after some years quit turning on the radio altogether as too distracting. But yesterday driving home from our walk (we park on Linda Avenue behind Cove School/HNES and walk in the Cove where we grew up) I turn on the radio and pres SCAN. A country music station comes up with somebody singing “Now and then there’s a fool such as I am over you,” which set me back three score and some years to Hank Snow warbling it out with guitars and a fiddle, and that babe strummin' a guitar and pattin’ her foot behind him. So last evening I browse country and western on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtJz_Wm-gG0 and don’t talk to me about Elvis, who did sing it, and sang it better than Hank, but Elvis wasn’t Hank Snow and I wasn’t a senior in high school. Elvis was my age and came along with his Cadillac convertible my senior year at UFlorida. Elvis the richest private in the U. S. Army would not drive a pink Cadillac today, trust me. I'm with the Hanks, Snow and Williams.

Still and always into C.S. Lewis, reading my book slowly to keep it from ending, watching a college online lecture series about him, and reading his three-lecture series published as “The Abolition of Man.” All came to mind this morning as I read my devotional that arrives email and is waiting daily when I rise. As their Greek and Hebrew are good, I enjoy it until I find something incomprehensibly stupid that betrays the close-minded ignorance of a literalist fundamentalist mindset. This morning the statement that Jesus’ “Golden Rule is only for Christian believers.” There are idiots who believe that if the Bible quotes Jesus as saying something, that it therefore per se, prima facie originated on his lips. The Golden Rule is at least as old as Confucius (died about 480 BCE), and there are other instances in the gospels of Jesus saying something that came from the treasures of human wisdom, that he would have been simply passing along, quoting from the culture around him or even from his own Scripture. The Summary of the Law is an instance; years ago a Methodist pastor in my CPE group spouted it starting, “Well Jesus said …” to be interrupted and corrected by the Jewish rabbi in the group, “That’s Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19” to which the surprised pastor exclaimed, “It is?” Jumpin’ Jiminy Christmas. At any event, I was thinking of Lewis reasoning about what he called the Tao, by which he means generally universally accepted human values of right and wrong, good and bad, kindness and evil. Such things as Hitler and Stalin set aside in favor of self, and Pol Pot, and some of the Caesars, and various kings, and today the ugly fat Korean with the bad haircut, and Taliban, alQaeda and ISIS — setting aside objective values of humanity such that no values remain and any values that they assert lack foundation.

If this blogpost seems even more jerky and disorganized, don’t mind me, it isn't my fault: this morning’s thinking and typing are being interrupted constantly and frequently, courtesy of FurosemideForty. 

Top, end of the first day of the rest of my life. Below, beginning of the second day of the rest of my life. 

Thos+ reporting from 7H in +Time+