Megachurch

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of driving through the seemingly-endless nothingness that is the Texas countryside, you’d easily remember that the only thing that really dots the state’s landscape is yet another massive invention of our modern age: the Megachurch. Actually, these monstrosities are all over this Blessed land. They might even reproduce faster than the vermin who worship there every day of the goddamned week.

It’s very easy to pretend that these communities are off in some other world than your own, but they’re really not. I bet if you really looked closely, you’d realize that that shiny, tacky suburban edifice you see over there is actually a humongous church. Take, for example, myself. A dedicated scholar of all classes pertaining to the disruption of hegemony, I like to think that at least my community is free of Megachurches.

Unfortunately for the Keep Austin Weird campaign, though, there happens to be a rather sizeable Hyde Park Baptist Church lurking mere seconds on campus. Located at 40th and Speedway in the middle of one of those supposedly-funky little Austin neighborhoods, the church sticks out. Here, in this supposed blue dot in a red state, more than a thousand homogenous red-staters come to pray every Sunday. A friend and I decided on a whim that we sorely needed to take mega bong rips and check out a Sunday service.

Though this place seems huge to a casual non-religious person, the Hyde Park Baptist Church is probably considered a small Megachurch. It only had one balcony after all, and although the church does have a K-12 school, the complex did not boast a McDonalds. Still, the chapel boasts two projection screens, a full band, and a choir filled with people who look like they enjoy living worthless existences.

Now, the standard conclusion of works written about bible-thumpers is a declaration that these sincere people are entitled to live without our scorn. These people are just doing what they think is right to make the world better, you know. Far be it for us non-crazies to make fun of people just for believing differently than us.

Well, after enduring an hour and a half of mind-numbing idiocy, I can honestly say that I came away from the service thinking Evangelicals are much more crazy than we give them credit for. The congregants of this church are nothing more than sheep led around by a slimy, dramatic demagogue named Pastor J. Kie Bowman.

There were really only three activities going on at this service: camera time, passive singing time, and unabashedly-evil sermon time. None of them really requires any thought, but they all warrant description.

It seems that there are many distinguished Christians in this community, and, every now and again, Pastor Kie felt the need to recognize them. They were often asked to the front of the church, where he implored them to look into the camera and smile. This segment of the program seemed like a crappy reality tv show.

The singing should not really be called singing. It looked like there could have been a hundred members of the choir, but the age requirement had to be something like sixty. We all read the words of the songs off the screens, but we really weren’t getting into at all. I had to restrain myself at times because I was starting to get into the melody and therefore looking strange. Everyone in the church was mouthing the words and swaying whitely to the music, but they seemed to look down on the palms to the lord crowd motionings that are normal for megachurches. The songs gave a real trance-like quality to the service this way.

The sermon was most definitely the highlight. It centered on some verses in John 3:15, and I tried to follow along until I realized that the damn book wasn’t in alphabetical order and I didn’t know how to find anything.

That was alright because all the action was taking place on stage, where Pastor Kie was telling us all about what it really means to be “born again.” He first referenced a new survey which reported that the baby boomer generation is now 53% born again, the highest proportion of any generation yet. And, judging from the rest of the speech, this is no small commitment.

As Pastor Kie put it, being born again means taking the Lord’s medicine without questioning the way it worked. He said forcefully at one time, “It is not our duty to understand the way the Lord works! It’s not our job to question why he does what he does!” Apparently, we’ve been given the power to think, but under no circumstances should we use it.

We did make it in and out ok, and everyone there was courteous enough not to question the fake address I put down on the guest sign-in form. But the whole experience made me wonder about how these people act between their Sundays at church. Just what changes are they making to our laws, customs, and habits? And what the hell can we do to stop them?

What's up with Afghanistan anyway?

Luxury, previously the decided property of the elites, is expanding its reach. It is now a necessity, something we expect of our fellow man when we walk into his house. Where’s your television and how many hundreds of the same channel does it have? You have wireless don’t you, is it alright if I just go ahead and take out my paper thin laptop and check my email? And oh ya, do you have any superstore-bought gargantuan bags of chips? Sorry, but I just feel like I could eat a whole 50-piece Chicken McNugget if it were in front of me.

Just what the hell would we do if we didn’t have all this stuff? I honestly have no idea, because we take what we’ve been handed for granted on only a slightly smaller scale than a kid on MTV Super Sweet Sixteen. I like to think of myself as slightly hip with different intentions than your rank and file person, but I’ve eaten just as much deep fried ranch dressing as the next collegian. There’s really nothing any one of us could do to change the fact that we are the most pampered group of human beings who have ever lived anywhere in any time.

Yet, every now and again, even we can discern hypocrisy. Sitting near the back row of a lecture about how terrible everything is in Afghanistan, I noticed that there was a pleasant-looking brunette quietly playing a computer game. She controlled a fleet of warplanes that were trying to bomb cities into the ground. Judging from the notes I scribbled down about the speech, she was succeeding.

The trouble with tearing down infrastructure like a belligerent drunk who finds himself alone at the end of the night is that everyone has to wake up the next day. According to Jim Ingalls and Sonali Kohadkar, who have just returned from a trip to the country, the people of Afghanistan are in a real bind. They are stuck between foreign invasions, either from superpowers or fundamentalists. All they really want is to live comfortably with some say in their governance, but our short news attention span has moved on to the other quagmire we’ve created in the mid-east.

Kohadkar was impressive to behold. Dressed in a sari with her long hair draped down only her left shoulder, she rapidly alerted us of just the recent history of U.S. involvement in Afghan politics. You see, the Taliban only got control of the country because our government wanted to create a Soviet Vietnam. Back then, just as today, you could be a partner in the war on today’s terror against the homeland as long as you had a common enemy. Today, after our army has faced worsening violence for the past five years, I bet nobody in Afghanistan even has time to enjoy the massive amounts of opium being grown. There are addicts who need it, you know, and there’s not really an adequate couch anywhere in the country, let alone civil rights for women.

Not that we in America can get over what we’re fed about the world from sweaty-palmed fat cats, but isn’t it weird to trace our ideas on this desolate country? I myself can still remember, shortly after 9-11 came along and changed everything, how we had won a new victory for Good in the War to protect our civilization from the next global threat. The level of debate about this conflict reached roughly the same height as a post-game interview with a head football coach.

Shortly before our troops invaded Afghanistan, a friend of mine and I actually did talk about the merits of the conflict. I’ll leave both of our names out because nobody our age should have to answer for things they said when they were fifteen years old. The conversation went something like this:
Friend: You don’t have any problem with going into Afghanistan do you?
Me: Who me? No. How could I?
Friend: Well, you know it’s just I’ve heard a lot of liberals bitching about it.
Me: I’m always in favor of liberating the oppressed.
That was the end of it. We then turned around and did our best to sit through a boring chemistry class, the type an urban public schooler couldn’t sniff if he was two steps away.

Look, it’s really not our fault. We only did what our parents seemed to think was right. Some of us made them ever prouder by signing on to help vanquish this foe. We really thought we were tracking down the people who blew up the world trade center.

But now that we realize how ridiculously naïve it is to think America can waltz in and out of world conflict, we should maybe actually pay attention to what’s going on. The country is in violent chaos, and we don’t really care to hear about it anymore. I think it deserves just a brief thought before you start plowing through that double-meat, double rice, double-tortilla Chipotle.

We are behind for a reason

If you read the latest adult gossip about college in the New York Times, or if you are actually among tomorrow’s leaders in one of these fine institutions, you may have noticed that the female to male ratio on campus is becoming remarkably acceptable. It’s a result that I never could have imagined when my middle school friends and I used to thumb through the Princeton Review guide looking for the schools with the best odds. But the growing presence of girls on campus is a fact noted around the academic world.

The predominant male knee-jerk reaction to this fact is a claim of bias. This is the best defense mechanism of every powerful group in our society that feels its authority questioned. The bias argument asserts the reason males are falling behind in school is nothing less than a system of structured inequality perpetuated by man-hating subversives who call themselves teachers.

By placing the emphasis on supposed extenuating circumstances, this meathead attitude misses the actual source of this gender gap-the meatheads themselves. Boys have lost ground because of we get shitty grades, not because our teachers give them shitty grades.

From every direction these days, boys are given strong messages about who they’re supposed to be. Television commercials, just as they do for every ethnic group or gender, tell us who we’re supposed to be. According to the advertisements we see, we’re supposed to eat and drink massive amounts, think about sex every 7.8 seconds, and be either a juiced up athlete or a morbidly obese couch dweller.

Sports are a critical factor here because they are of central importance to the American male. We have been playing and watching sports our whole lives, and we tend to get excited about them in case you haven’t seen a stadium full of NFL fans. There’s no question that these activities do not make the world any better off, in fact, sports probably make the world much worse. If you’re a huge sports fan, as I am, and you don’t accept the fact that sports are part of the military-industrial complex, you live in a much too simple world.

You wouldn’t be alone in that ever-widening world, though. Men like things that are uncomplicated. We like to know the right answer as quickly as possible, and we’d rather not talk about the grey areas that inhabit every corner of our existence. That’s why we can do endless calculus problems but can’t comprehend why the hell we have to read all these damn women authors. It’s no coincidence that one of our own describes us as babies in Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

These observations might really only apply to a few of us, but it’s getting harder and harder to tell. Girls may go to the bathroom in groups, but guys travel in packs. There’s not a man around who doesn’t live in constant fear of locker room ridicule and the like. The thought of being laughed at by a room full of men more manly than yourself controls our actions like a screaming shithead high school coach. And right now, there’s nothing more girly than reading books.

None of this means that the burgeoning group of females accepted to college is a reason for alarm. I would argue that the meathead’s absence from many of my classes is enhancing my experience in several ways. With more females around, discussions are more engaging, professors feel a lot more comfortable, and the class is a lot more enthusiastic overall. Also, they’re very easy to find beautiful.

The world might be changing this way. The more women who graduate college, the more who will begin to inhabit positions of power in our society. Hillary Clinton might become President. And the meatheads will look back at high school Friday nights as the best time of their lives. In the meantime, we should do absolutely nothing to encourage their presence anywhere in our lives.

Cele

Whenever our president doesn’t like something, even if it is an inanimate object or an abstract notion, we declare War. It is the job of the diligent American history student to learn and differentiate between these mostly-unresolved conflicts. LBJ had a War on Poverty that has obviously eliminated any improprieties in our society. Bush launched the War on Terror which seems to be going great. In between these two jihads, President Nixon brought War on those substances we love to hate in public but snort behind closed doors, drugs.

No president since has declared this war won, which is pretty remarkable in this era of spin. This one just keeps on Truckin’. It’s almost as if America doesn’t have the resources to scour every corner of the globe for every one of the evil plants.

None of this should be a surprise for anyone who knows how much people who like drugs will do to get those drugs. Yet, it’s tough for even the most dedicated student to know the true story of the war on drugs. It’s a story that many in Latin America know all too well, a tale of American-led coups, death squads, and even CIA complicity in the drug trade. As part of this war, America, while not even approaching the stated goal of stopping the sale and use of drugs, committed heinous crimes we still don’t know about.

This is where Cele Castillo comes in. A former DEA agent, he spoke free of charge last Tuesday to an audience full of people who wanted inside information on this escapade. The brochure read, “CIA. Drug Running. Torture. Negroponte. Death Squads. Reagan/Bush Sr.” and we were all licking our lips for the type of knowledge that brings a sardonic smirk to your face when you hear warped Bush voters talk. There was a policemen posted in the audience to make sure we didn’t all go nuts and declare war on him and his kind.

Cele lived up to his billing, though. A round Latino man who said he only wanted to “educate the students,” he talked for more than two hours as fast as he could. He had realized early on in his service that something strange was going on, so he decided to start snapping pictures and keeping a diary.

He told of present-day Bush staffer John Negroponte urging the organization of death squads and the teaching of torture to counterrevolutionary forces. He remembered the actions of Oliver North, who gets to host an exciting Fox News show while his multitude of crimes go unpunished. And he certainly did not forget the well-known fact that the CIA used the Contras to introduce crack cocaine to LA.

If you don’t believe any of this stuff, just check into it. All the official documents are online in various places. Don’t let me be the one to educate you about it.

Besides, the facts and history of the war on drugs were not even the most interesting aspect of the presentation. Castillo informed us early in his lecture that he suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and he seemed to be speaking to us from some type of trench. He spoke fast because, he said, “I’m living on borrowed time.” He has determined that the Feds will be coming for him any day now, and he’s awake in his McAllen, TX trailer home at 5 a.m every morning. He knows from experience that 5 a.m. is when they come knocking at your door.

The most peculiar moment of the evening came when Cele asked himself the rhetorical question of what we should do to stop this injustice. He implored us to “lock and load a 30-round magazine.” Curiously, without missing a beat, the audience exploded into applause.

Later, during the question and answer session, Cele admitted that he wasn’t advocating violent revolution. I don’t think the audience was either. The queries coming from the crowd confirmed that these people are just looking for release from the various issues weighing on their minds. Very, very few people asked Cele about the war on drugs. Instead, they asked him about September 11th, massive voter fraud, and concentration camps possibly being built in New Mexico.

The night was a little disheartening this way. The audience wanted to group the war on drugs together with all the other theories they had on their minds. It was as if Cele’s story wasn’t juicy enough for them to contemplate.

For his part, Cele communicated a message of inspiration. He recommended that we read more, saying in his Rio Grande valley accent, “Instead of spending money on a 12-pack or a big mac, buy a book.”

That’s great advice. What we really need to do, though, is force all these perpetrators of human rights to come forward. John Kerry chaired the committee that confirmed the link between the CIA and crack cocaine, yet he’s as silent about that issue as he was when he voted for the war. Until we know all the details that are buried, the truth will be classified as a mere conspiracy theory.