Facebook vs. King Condom

It is a battle of the Titans on WWF? No. Just Factbook against the Pope!

Don’t get too excited and don’t reserve any pay per view channels. It is just the average guys and gals in the street not bowing to the worn out, obsolete PR of the western establishment slowing crumbling before our very eyes.

History and the demise of the RC church in out lifetime may match the timing or go quicker than Bear Sterns went belly up on Wall Street.

The nameless people, the peasants, do not want to be talked down to anymore by a bubble wrapped religious emperor who thinks that every word dripped from his lips should be applauded. Hey Joe, there is a real world outside the Vatican.

Condoms do stop some transmission of the AIDS virus. Read my lips Joe! - or Benedict or whatever name you wish to go by. Truth is not in a name or a title. That is so passé, royal and 12th century.

The people in the streets don’t buy the Cable TV, MSM talking heads, or papel bullshit about forty years of birth control misinformation coming out of the festering corrupt pile of the hierarchy of the RC church.

Real people with real sex lives know how to conduct themselves in bedrooms, between consenting adults, and know how to be informed about safe sex. Sex and the propaganda about condoms did not pour so wonderfully over the pope’s lips in the in-flight news conference where he used the word condom but had possibly never really seen or touched one. Faking it Joe? An 81 year old virgin?

Nameless people change history. Kudos for maybe not nameless people on Facebook who are making their contribution to the continuation and survival of our civilization and secular world!

There are names that escape history. There was a name they dug up for the Abolition movement in the mid 19 century US culture and later refound for the Civil Rights movement in the US 1960’s. The name of Crispus Attucks was one of the first five Yanks that got killed by British “friendly fire” at the so-called Boston Massacre. Being a free black man and 20% of the collateral damage made his example a useful tool to illustrate how blacks had been present all along in American history, though many times swept to a back page as a footnote.

So too Muntadar al-Zaidi’s name is not a famous name in the western world but his throwing his shoes at the Authoritarian President Bush makes him a household name among the world’s billion plus Muslims.

Facebook, an Internet hangout for whatever, has now taken up the challenge. Like nameless peasants with torches and pitchforks, they are ready to storm the Vatican Castle of Ignorance in reference to Scientific Misinformation about Condoms. They “are mad as hell and do not want to take it anymore” in regards to the Papal Misinformation about Condoms and AIDS.

They are proposing to send condoms to the Pope in the Vatican. Oh Joy!

Facebook users wage condom campaign against Pope

A good step – in the right direction? I hope nobody starts throwing those little packets/things at his Holiness. Despite his gross Ignorance, he is defined by his role, stupid as he is at times, and deserving to a measure of old fashioned respect – does the younger generation have any clue what I am talking about. You cannot or should not advocate the change of the world by anything other than non-violent means. Gandhi and MLK in the modern age have demonstrated that.

Remember that Crispus paid with his life for his contribution to the American Revolution and Muntadar got sentenced to three years in jail for his actions and after being tortured and having had his teeth kicked out in the jails of our freedom loving allies – the Iraqi government.

There is always a cause and an effect. That is a law, energy, of Physics.

The peasants with the torches and pitchforks precipitates an end to the monster in the old 1930 Horror flicks – they do not necessarily kill the monster.

The monster within, the beast, the cause of the ghosts of millions of medieval violence victims, harnessed and or orchestrated by the RC church should be a thing of the past. Otherwise, the pope would be on his knees, apologizing and praying for forgiveness for his corporation until the end of time.

That being said. Hip, Hip, Hooray to Facebook!

And also to Joe the Pope - to cause a massive surge worldwide in the sale and use of condoms for safe sex and as a preventative effort to ward off the AIDS virus.

The Force be blessed!

Saint Joan - a Real Woman in Real Pants

-



There is a confusing piece of political and church history going back to when the RC church was the power behind many thrones in Europe.

I have heard the story of Joan of Arc all my life. It was the name of my grade school in Philly now defunct. There used to be a life size plaster statue of Joan in her armor in the lobby outside the Principal’s office. That statue had no feminine features in the face. The statue looked like a man and not a woman.

When one heard the tales of Joan of Arc from the nuns, I do remember them saying that she was a woman. Some of my male classmates went with the visual of the statue in the lobby and were confounded when I told them that Joan is the not the French word for John and that Joan was a girl thing.

There are a number of Hollywood movies over the years that tell the story in what seems to be a completely different manner with each new production.

History seems to trip over itself about the national heroine of France and the heretic burned three times at the stake to prevent any relics from being retrieved from the ashes that were dumped into the Seine River.

Joan had visions of saints as a young teenager. She somehow manages to bring a weak French prince to the throne and to believe in her mojo. She leads disheartened armies to victory after victory until she is captured. She was no longer of any use to the French King who would not ransom her from her captors. Her captors sell her to the English against whom she has been striking blow after blow in battles.

The English turn her over to the English bishops who in turn put her on trial and find her guilty of heresy, a forgone political, I mean religious, verdict. Heresy is not a capital crime in that ballywick and the one last crime that warrants her death is the crime of dressing in men’s clothing. Very confused story on all levels.

Eventually the Pope, under control of the French King, reverses the English verdict of Heresy. Joan gets a “free get out of hell card” there. Then it takes another four hundred and fifty years until she is declared a saint in the RC church in 1920.

George Bernard Shaw in his written introduction to his play Saint Joan calls her the first Protestant saint because she used her own conscience as a guide and not any catholic rulebook logic in her definition of herself as a person, a woman, and a national hero.

Other than Shaw’s kind words, Joan of Arc, on all levels, has been maligned, misunderstood, trashed over the centuries and resurrected for RC PR reasons in the beginning of the 20th century.

No doubt the fact that she was a woman in men’s clothing and with a man’s spirit and successful in the realm of what men were supposed to do exclusively is part of the reason for her fall in life. After many centuries the facts continue to be muddled and the French fresh with a victory in WWI wanted a papal blessing of sorts and recognition for French accomplishments and not necessarily for Joan’s effort in the geopolitical thing.

The French conveniently forgot her for over four centuries. Frenchie gratitude is an unknown quality kind of thing.

The British who are kinky anyway on the underwear or drag thing, they would eventually disappear in the Joan Story as England breaks with Rome a century later.

It is kind of strange or is it queer how Joan is a hero on one side of the channel and a heretic on the other side? The one universal catholic church does not always fit into a one size fits all political or religious framework or corporate mission statement.

Misogyny or the hatred and contempt of women or girls would appear to be at the heart of this strange political and religious story.

Joan of Arc felt comfortable in her own skin, about who she was as a person and about her purpose in life. She, after five centuries, still defies any false labels that can stick in the long term. She truly was the first Protestant Saint.

It is amazing how in the beginning of the 21st century of the common era, that the west or the big western church thingy in Rome still is locked into Neolithic times with the Dinosaurs on its handling of female talent and energy that is it gladly discards in the favor of boring pot bellied middle aged men in various colors of medieval dress.

Of the movies about this great soul of Joan of Arc is a silent film by Carl Dreyer from 1928 and starring Maria Falconetti.

Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

I have seen this silent film and was greatly moved about the passion, stamina and inward strength of this great French Woman and Saint.

The film was thought to be lost for several decades until a full version of the film was found in a janitor’s closet in Oslo in 1981. Miracles do happen.

Joan of Arc was one such miracle to the human race and an unforgettable universal example of womanhood.