Cathedral City, California
December 21, 2023
Greetings to my faithful readers--the few, the proud, the indiscriminate. As you're all well aware, the number of posts to this blog has been diminishing over the years to practically nothing. I got a shot to the gut when Trump was elected, because his chicanery easily eclipsed the most roguish and absurd political theater I could have imagined up to that point. It left me without much to say about politics that couldn't already be imagined based on real events. And the post-Trump administration antics of the nation as a whole and the Republican members of Congress in particular have beggared belief.
At this point I was about to say that the Europeans could more easily understand this insane turn toward fascism than we Americans, having been through it not too many decades ago. And that's true to a great extent. However, when we look back on U.S. history and the bargain with the devil we made at the very inception of the country to allow the continuation of slavery in order to have a "union" of colonies we could call a country, and then the post-Civil War countenancing of a century or more of apartheid, I don't know that we can claim the moral high ground regarding right-wing craziness, except for the fact that we did help win a war against worldwide fascism. Now of course we are in the midst of a mass-media spate of false conspiracy theories that easily rivals the anti-Semitic European hysteria that arose between the two World Wars, although one hopes it won't result in millions of people being rounded up and exterminated. Certainly if the Christian right and the other Trumpian fellow-travelers get their way there will be far less tolerance of many already-marginalized people in the country.
But all that bad news isn't why I'm writing to you today, folks. Instead, it is to announce the beginning of a new show I will be putting on YouTube, to be called The Bizarro Gospel Hour, with your host Bishop Pete. For those of you who knew about my earlier broadcasting antics on public access cable TV, this will look familiar. The difference is that the new show will be accessible to a worldwide audience through the magic of YouTube. So look for it over the next few weeks. Right now I'm waiting for Amazon to deliver my bishop's hat, and after that I'll start recording and posting shows, if I'm able to navigate the editing process and get them streaming. I'll have the advice of my grandson Jacob, who has his own show on YouTube called The Shed Productions, so I should be okay if I run into any technical glitches.
I wanted to get the word out here on the blog so that you, my faithful readers, can see more of yours truly. You may address me as Your Excellency. Or not, what the hell. Whether or not I continue the blog remains to be seen.
