Speaking of Scams

I have had it with junk phone calls. About 3 in the afternoon every day all this week, I’ve been hit by a barrage of robocalls, one after another.

I don’t even have time to click them off or turn off the ringer. Two or three in quick succession, claiming to be from everywhere – but what are the chances of three people from everywhere calling me within one minute?

I really want to answer and tell them off, but what good would that do? “Kindly take me off your call list.” Right. They’ll jump on that. I’m already at the top of their call list, so I’m not getting off that easy.

I think my record was 10 or 11 on Monday. Lost count, especially after the numbers got blocked and the calls deleted.

These are calls from spoofed numbers. One, labeled “MENORAH MC,” didn’t have the right area code for Menorah Medical Center. One did leave a message: “This is ____ from the pharmacy. We have a question about your prescription.” As I recall, the area code was someplace in New Jersey. Where I fill all my prescriptions.

There must be money in this somewhere. Speaking of scams…

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Channel flipping on TV the other day, I came across a commercial that had former game show host Chuck Woolery shilling for gold coins.

Gold, the pitch goes, is the answer to economic uncertainty. How? The pitch never quite says. But, you know, it’s gold. GOLD! What can be more secure than gold?

Like so many TV commercials, this one plays on fear – in this case, fear of future economic collapse. First, buy gold. Then buy guns to keep away gold thieves. Then buy a bunker to keep you and your gold and your guns safe. You know how it goes.

They never tell you that the price of gold goes up and down, just like everything else. You can lose your shirt on gold just as easily as in the stock market or the casino.

They also never tell you that we’ve heard the same sad pitch for gold for – well, how long? Maybe a couple hundred years?

The gold standard is illusory, though I guess our currencies have to be backed up by something.

I have an idea. Instead of basing our currency on gold, I think we should base it on first edition Batman comic books.

They’re a bit more destructible than gold but, hey, even gold melts. And instead of sitting around and admiring your gold coins (seen one, seen ’em all), you could at least read the Batman comic books.

It’ll probably never catch on because too many people have a vested interest in gold. But if the idea does catch fire, remember that you read it here first.

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On second thought, maybe Superman comics. How about Archie?

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“Hawaii is a warning,” the Atlantic headline says. Yeah. What happens when we don’t have a sea to jump in to escape the flames?

Stern Reality

Say what you will about the movies of Christopher Nolan (I thought “Tenet” was a disaster), they have a way of getting into your head and sticking around.

I saw “Oppenheimer” a couple of weeks ago. I remain fascinated by movie and the man. It’s a uniquely powerful movie about a deeply conflicted man.

I saw the IMAX version, always a good idea with Nolan’s movies (“Dunkirk” especially). I sat toward the front of the theater, the better to be overwhelmed by the visuals. Alas, the AMC theater had the sound turned up so loud that even whispered dialogue came off as a shout. Nolan always cranks up the sound. No need to boost it any higher.

Maybe I could have understood more of the dialogue if I’d sat further back. Only two or three of us were in Row E, five rows back from where the floor starts to rise.

As usual, Nolan’s narrative jumps back and forth in time. It also moves between color sequences when Oppenheimer is the focus and black-and-white sequences when others carry the action. Despite its complexity, this technique is mostly seamless and more intuitive than confusing.

The acting is similarly flawless. Amazingly, the movie makes Emily Blunt appear almost dowdy most of the time. The last shot of her is devastating in showing the toll events have taken on her character.

As Oppenheimer, Cillian Murphy’s gaunt face and frame, and his hauntingly deep blue eyes, stay in memory a long time. His signature hat will probably start a minor fashion revolution the way Indiana Jones’s fedora did ages ago. It’s apparently a cross between a fedora and a porkpie. Whatever it is, it’s brilliant. With his crisp white shirts and perfectly matched suit and tie, plus the ever-present cigarette, the hat shouts his steeliness of purpose to a world that never marches to the same drummer.

You can interpret the ending as cryptic, or tragic, or both. “The man who invented the atomic bomb” thinks he has doomed humankind. Perhaps he has. You wish Vlad the Impaler and that pudgy goon in North Korea had even a smidgen as much conscience.

Some pundits have found a historical error in the film. It seems that in one scene you can briefly glimpse an American flag with 50 stars rather than the 48 appropriate to the time. Really? Who looks for such things? And how much of the bigger picture do you miss while focusing on such minutiae?

A personal reference: When I started as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, I was an English major. One of my creative writing professors was Nuel Pharr Davis. He was a National Book Award finalist for his book Lawrence and Oppenheimer. In the movie, Oppenheimer is the theorist and Ernest Lawrence is the practical thinker in rimless glasses whom he’s often arguing with. Friends and colleagues for a time, they were divided by the bomb they both helped create.

Summer Days

We have just returned from a weeklong family vacation near Nederland, Colorado, one of the garden spots of the universe.

We rejoiced in each other’s company, greatly enjoyed poking in town, even did some hiking (despite the National Park Service’s insane policies on trailhead reservations in the back country).

The photo shown here actually is a view from our cabin’s deck last year, but I did such a poor job of taking photos this year that I don’t have much to show.

I can remember coming back from Colorado vacations with hundreds of photos of mountains and trees and streams and moose. Are we seeing less these days, or have memories become more important to me than photos of them?

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I have been busy, though you wouldn’t guess that from my blog output. In the last year I wrote a book, titled Change of Heart: A Wesleyan Spirituality. I think it’s a needed look at our Wesleyan roots in this time of turmoil in Methodism.

It’s already been rejected by Abingdon Press, the United Methodist publishing house. It says it has other similar works already in process. I’ve always given Abingdon the right of first refusal on all my book proposals, and I’ve always been rejected. I think it’s time to put some other publisher at the top of my query list.

And, in fact, my latest has now been accepted for publication by Wipf & Stock. Stay tuned for developments!

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Three KU profs are under fire for allegedly faking their Native American ancestry. Kansas City Star columnist Yvette Walker confesses that her family also had unconfirmed stories about a Blackfoot ancestor.

“For as long as I can remember, I believed I had Native ethnicity,” she writes. “I even thought I knew which tribe I supposedly belonged to because it was a part of my family’s oral history.” To test the family memory, she took a Family DNA test. Turns out family oral history was wrong.

My family also has an oral tradition that a woman several generations back was Native American. Not exactly the classic “Cherokee princess” story, but close enough.

I’m about all who’s left to carry on family oral tradition, and my searches on Ancestry.com have found nothing to corroborate this story. I once assumed that it was because racists in my family conveniently “forgot” about the Indian ancestor until it became more socially acceptable to claim her, but by then all details were lost in time. Maybe it was a myth all along.

I did have an uncle who was Native. He married into the family. Sadly, he died relatively young as an alcoholic.

Whether I have any “Indian blood” in me matters less than how I view and treat Native Americans. Since childhood I have been fascinated by various Indian cultures. The more I learn about the genocide campaign against Native tribes, the more I am appalled by the tragedy of racism.

If you’re interested in learning more, I suggest reading The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk. Actually, I wasn’t capable of reading all of it. I had to skim parts. It’s well written, but many parts will simply break your heart.

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Back to school time nears already. Where did the summer go? Weren’t summers longer back in the “good old days”? Granted, summer child care can be a chore for busy parents. Maybe advancing age fools me on the passage of time, but I wonder if today’s kids suspect they’re being cheated of days in the sun.

Linda and I just bought school supplies for a Spring Hill 9th grader. We deliberately did not keep track of how much it cost. I can’t imagine the expense of having two kids in high school right now, let alone one. Tell me: Why does any high schooler need five two-inch three-ring binders?

All Means All

A federal judge has struck down the Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for children.

The Arkansas law is part of a nationwide Republican drive to gain “evangelical” and other bigoted voters by attacking anything resembling fair play for transgender people.

It would have prohibited doctors from providing gender-affirming hormone treatment, puberty blockers or surgery to anyone younger than 18. It also would have prohibited doctors from referring patients elsewhere for such care.

The judge ruled that the law violated the due process and equal protection rights of transgender youth and families. He said the law also violated the First Amendment rights of medical providers.

What? Transgender people have rights? Doctors have the right of free speech? What kind of world do we live in!

Maybe, thanks to this judge, a world that is less harshly intolerant than the right-wing utopia envisioned by these Republican legislators – a world in which everyone knows their place, dictated by the sovereign state, and does not venture out of their place, at risk of drawing the ire of petty tyrants in state capitals.

We are approaching the annual observance of Independence Day, when many a would-be despot will stand in front of the red-white-and-blue and shout the merits of freedom without ever understanding the meaning of that word.

It is true that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and to preserve our freedom we must stand against the efforts of all dictators at the local and state and federal levels. No book banning. No attacks on “woke” thinking. (Again, ever hear of the First Amendment?) And so on.

The equation is simple. If you are not free, I am not free. If I am not free, you are not free. Real conservatives know this. Real Christians, too. If you want to be free, you must not try to restrict my freedom, because in “winning,” you will lose – and because you are so centered on yourself, you will lose far more than you ever may know.

It’s freedom for all or freedom for none. And all means all.

Just Like Us All

A stained glass window in an old church in Rhode Island portrays Jesus and other New Testament figures as having dark skin.

Black Jesus? Maybe. Definitely the window depicts Jesus as a person of color – not as the White person he clearly is in other windows in the same church.

The window was discovered during renovation of the long-closed St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Warren. The Greek Revival church building, which opened in 1830 and closed in 2010, was being converted into a home.

The two-panel window was commissioned in 1878 in memory of two women whose families had ties to the slave trade. One panel shows Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well. The other panel shows Jesus with Mary and Martha.

Experts know of no previous depictions of Jesus or the women as persons of color. Why this window is different from others in the church is also unknown. One clue may be timing. The window was commissioned right after the Compromise of 1877, which settled the disputed 1876 presidential election by ending Reconstruction and starting Jim Crow oppression of Black people.

Whatever the motivation for its creation, the window stands as a marvelous repudiation of efforts to whitewash Jesus. Jesus may not have been Black but no way was he White.

Why does it matter? Besides setting the historical record straight, it shuts down racist depictions of Jesus as Nordic, Germanic or Anglo Saxon. Blond hair, blue eyes and light-color skin are out. Black or dark brown hair, brown eyes and darker skin are in.

The distinction is partly about how a person identifies with Jesus. If you want to think of Jesus as White in your personal devotion, that’s probably OK. Just don’t imagine that this portrayal is historically accurate.

Yes, it’s important for you to know that Jesus is just like you in every way that counts. Yes, it’s also important to know that Jesus might not have been welcome in your circle of friends because he’s too “other.”

Jesus is both like you and not like you. He is human like you but also divine. He is like you as human yet he stands outside your social circle and beyond distinctions such as sex or race. If you are Christian, you devote your life to becoming more like Jesus. But trying to make Jesus more like you is simply idolatry.

Jesus is just like us all — all, without distinction.