Who Can Ordain, Who Can Marry, Who Can be Senator, Who Can Be A Lutheran Surrealist?

A lot of firsts coming down the pike. First black president.

How long before we get a gay president? I don't think we've had a major contender who has been gay.

Some point to the precursor to Lincoln, as an actual gay man. What was his name again? Polk? Not Polk. Pierce? No, not Pierce. Starts with a B. Bum? No. Buchanan. If you check B's Wiki page it says at bottom that back then there were more presidents than there were beds. They had to sleep in stacks. Contemporary historians see that and think it was by preference, but it was actually an exigency based on the dearth of beds or too many sleepy presidents without a Booth.

Who knows?

Let us think of the many firsts. Caligula appointed his horse as a senator. That was a first.

Being first doesn't necessarily mean best. I want a ladybug for president. Ladybugs for president!

I like nature, and therefore I like the country, but I prefer acid rock to country music.

Who wants to go back to country music? Not eye, said the blind man.

Many people still like country music. It's often about fidelity, and about families.

One of the things that has surprised me is how well the conservatives have actually held their side. They listen to country music. They like the myth of the cowboy. Reagan openly played on this, as did Bush 2. Lincoln's hat was too high to be called a cowboy hat. But even if the hats have shrunk, they still mean something, and are similar to the hats of Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I think that Scott Brown in his Massachusetts run often wore a stocking cap. It's hard to make those look authoritative.

Whatever we can say about politics is often old hat.

I'd like to see a presidential candidate with a basket of fruit on their head in a Carmen Miranda type of hat.

The last important conservative poet was Marianne Moore. She wore a triangular hat that recalled Washington. In Brooklyn, where she lived, Washington fought a battle with the British and lost three thousand men in one go, almost as many as we've lost in Iraq. But Washington took it in stride. Marianne Moore wore a hat similar to Washington's. She wrote only one hundred poems or so that she kept in Complete Poems. She did of course write more but she wrote them off as losses.

Moore appreciated people like Reinhold Niebuhr (they were friends). It's more a liberal German and Scandinavian thing, and maybe an old English thing, and maybe there's some kind of watershed in James Madison. I love Madison. He was a mainline Protestant. They were all mainline Protestants.

Moore was anti-communist, but she wasn't anti-liberal. She wasn't a racist. And she was also a mainline Protestant. Everyone should be a mainline Protestant. If you want to be happy, become a mainline Protestant. When everybody is a mainline Protestant, however, what would there be to protest?

I think it's important to get back to Moore's hat.

Not only of a kind of a poet, but as a kind of political thinker, and as a person, and as one who believed in military action. She was for the war in Vietnam, she was for the war in World War II. This is not to say that she was an all-around nut for war. You don't have to ride roughshod over people. Should poets wear a star?

There has to be law. People who break the law have to be called outlaws. They don't get to wear a star. They should wear the black hat.

The Evangelical Lutheran church of America accepted gay ordination last fall. It takes a long time to break out of the church because of a lengthy two-tiered voting system. each vote requires a super-majority of 66.6%, same as it took to accept gay ordination. About 300 congregations out of ten thousand are going down that route:

http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/02/24/355838/lutherans-seeing-fallout-over.html

Some things are make or break, but I wonder how many individuals have already left ELCA churches. That is something I see. And once people leave, they take their votes with them.

Some Romans found it appalling that Caligula appointed his horse as a senator.

Some might herald Caligula's appointment as the beginning of animal rights.

It's important for animals, if they want rights, to wear hats. Beavers should wear hats. Squirrels should wear hats. Hats with stars. In some cartoons, animals wear hats.

I don't want to see any particular group not wearing hats. It will be hard for insects to take off if they wear hats. So perhaps an exception can be made.

Anyone not wearing a hat should be excluded from the system of rights.

All Lutheran Surrealists should wear hats. We want to put the hatters back to work.