Is anyone else as creeped out as I am by the constant sight of the elder Bush and Bill Clinton glued to each other’s hips as they travel around the world on various missions of mercy and understanding? Get a room already, guys.

Every now and then you see Bush Jr. peek his patented smirky mug up between the two (much) taller men — cain’t fergit me, y’all! I’m the preznit now!. But doesn’t it seem like the two real presidents — uh, I mean former presidents — just can’t seem to stay away from each other? Or the cameras?

Now, I’m not saying it’s The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. We all know better, at least in Bubba’s case.

I’m saying it’s confusing. Here we are in the most viciously, absurdly partisan America since 1850, and here are the last two presidents — one of whom beat the other one, for Pete’s sake — palling around a few years later pretending like their country isn’t going down the toilet because of one of their idiot sons.

And this thing where the White House told Jimmy Carter he couldn’t be part of the official U.S. delegation to JP2’s funeral — that’s as low-class and petty as it comes, even for this bunch.

I’m not a particular fan of Carter’s, but to snub any of the living presidents of the United States of either party is simply beyond understanding and beyond forgiveness.

George W. Bush rules the freaking world. You mean to tell me he can’t arrange for two extra places for Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford? If Condi Rice gets to go, by God, Jimmuh and Gerry can go, too.

Speaking of creepy — what’s with Laura Bush looking like an extra from the Corleone baptism scene? Does Karl Rove get a focus group together to figure out how Republicans can suck up some more to Catholic voters? Hey, let’s dress Laura up like Carmen. That’ll go over real well with them Cat-liks.

Does dressing up a Methodist librarian from west Texas in a black dress and veil make her kind of Catholic? Catholic for a day? Can one even be “kind of Catholic?”

What’s next — Bush taking communion? How stupid do they think Catholics are? Pretty stupid, apparently.

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Wow! Who’da thought everyone in the world was Catholic?! When did that happen?

Judging from the 24/7 coverage of JP2’s death/lying in state/funeral, etc., you’d think there wasn’t a Pentecostal, Buddhist, Four Square, Jew or Hindu anywhere to be found anywhere on the planet.

(Oh yeah, I forgot Muslims. Anyone remember them? That Osama guy, you know? Osama Bin Laden. Anybody? Oh, well….)

Funny. My middle name comes from the first Catholic president, who had to answer questions from reporters and charges from opponents insinuating that he’d put the Pope over the flag, his faith above his country (oh, my, what a different time that was).

Hell, just five short years ago the current president campaigned at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C. The president of good ol’ B.J. U once famously insisted that the Roman Catholic church was a cult.

(Well, cultish, maybe, but certainly not a cult.)

Jeez, just two short years ago the conservative news media went into full smear mode when the very same Pope JP2 told his flock that the Iraq war was wrong.

There was a lot of bad stuff that happened on JP2’s watch, but boy you can’t fault the guy for doing his best on Iraq. Called Bush out to the Vatican woodshed and everything. Told Bush, in person, to his face, that he was doing the wrong thing. The morally wrong thing, to boot.

To no avail of course. Bush doesn’t speak Polish, never heard of Latin, and ain’t one a’ them Cat-liks anyway. If it ain’t Karl Rove doin’ the talkin, Bush ain’t doin’ any listening.

Anyway, it’s funny how things change when the political needs of the moment change. How a pope who opposed Bush on the number-one agenda item of his presidency can all of a sudden dominate Fox News.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the new unholy alliance of evangelicals and conservative Catholics will work out. They disagree on so much, really. It’s only a matter of time before they have another schism.

But for now, detente. As evidenced by the young priest I saw on Fox News this morning, talking about “it’s all about culture, really. Changing the culture.”

In other words, get set for more insane government intrustion into your private life. And we all know how responsible Catholic priests can be when they’re involved in someone’s private life.

Oops. Did I just write that?

I wrote a column about this right after the November election, saying that the religious right would force the Republican majority to forget about the war on terror and commence the war on internal dissent at home.

The usual suspects said I was crazy, controversial, “out there”, etc., like they generally do when I write columns like that.

But was I wrong?

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There’s an old story about Joseph Stalin — probably apocryphal — in which the Soviet dictator was told that the Pope strongly objected to one of old Joe’s invasions or purges or various crushings of dissent.

Stalin’s reply, or so the story goes: “Screw the Pope. How many divisions does he have?”

Of course the RC church got the last laugh on Stalin, as his empire crumbled under the watchful eye of Pope John Paul II, for whom the fight against communism was a spiritual cause of the highest order. History will show that JP II was a key part of the dissolution of communism in general and the Soviet empire in particular, and rightly so.

(Both men, though, lived to ripe old ages, thus confirming that the Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.)

After the mourning, grief and attendant media circus around John Paul II’s death fades, however, we’re left with some cold, hard, uncomfortable facts that a tough-minded pragmatist like Stalin would himself be quick to point out:

1) Under John Paul II’s watch — or non-watch, as is nearer the truth — the Roman Catholic Church engaged in a shameful cover-up of global proportions, turning a blind eye to repeated, massive pedophilia by its priests. I believe there is no worse sin than traumatizing children sexually. The Catholic church, and by definition its head, the Pope, Christ’s representative on earth, bear full responsibility for these awful acts and the subsequent cover-up.

The pedophile priest scandal is not only the reason I became an Episcopalian, but in my opinion one of the worst human tragedies in recent history. As undisputed head of the church, John Paul II was a key part of that tragedy, and we should not let that fact get swept under the rug with the inevitable white-washing of his career in the wake of his death.

2) Under John Paul II’s watch, tens of millions of Catholics around the world left the Roman Catholic Church entirely. If he were CEO of a corporation, his board would have pushed him out of the plane with a healthy golden parachute a long time ago. His stubborn adherence to old-school ways — oh, hell, let’s just go ahead and say it, his friggin’ misogyny — was a large part of the drastic drop-off in Catholic identification all over the world.

Except in Africa, where their numbers grew. Except in Africa, where a huge percentage of the population has HIV.

So what does the RC church do to show its gratitude to the Africans for sticking by them? Why, it renews its attack on condom use. In Africa, where everybody and his brother has AIDS. Brilliant.

3) Under John Paul II’s watch, the Roman Catholic Church became a strictly partisan group. Now, I’m not naive or stupid — I realize the RC church has been heavily involved in politics pretty much since Peter and the boys got together in that upper room. But never before in living memory has the RC church become so deeply involved in specific political campaigns, specifically endorsing one candidate over another.

The church’s decision to deny communion to John Kerry over abortion was another stain on the church’s already soiled robes. It was not a principled stand, either morally or spiritually; it was purely political and the church made little effort to hide that fact.

Communion was not denied to pro-choice Catholic Republicans, like Rudy Giuliani or Arnold Schwartzenegger. Nope. Just Kerry, the Democrat.

This kind of gutter politics is not only beneath a church, but beneath contempt entirely. I don’t know what John Kerry thinks about it, but as for me, I will always hold it against the Catholic church.

And this Schiavo thing — what can you say? What can you say when the Vatican injects itself into a purely political American domestic situation? At least Congress, when it did the same thing, had the excuse of being actually American. For the Vatican to involve itself in the Schiavo case made it, for all intents and purposes, just another loud and petty activist group making a cheap, short-term play for publicity. Sad, really.

So while of course the death of a Pope is always a time for mourning, reflection, and prayer, we also must remember that all God’s children go home to their father at one time or another.

JP II lived a long, active life and had an enormous impact — pro and con — on the world around him. We all should be so lucky.

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They were variously called “one of the best bands in the country” (by Savannah Music Festival director Rob Gibson) and “the best band in the world” (by guest mandolinist Tony Williamson), but in any case the David Grisman Quintet displayed one freakin’ amazing amount of musical talent this past Saturday night at the Trustees Theatre — almost too much talent to digest in one sitting.

I’ve never seen a single conglomeration of almost freakish musical talent in one room to compare with the DGQ. That’s not to say that it’s necessarily my kind of music, or to say that I rushed to my computer to order all their CDs. It’s not and I didn’t. Their sheer virtuosic force was so overwhelming it kind of left me numb.

Which is not to say they played without feeling — far from it. They had Feeling O’Plenty, taking an almost childlike visceral joy in playing their instruments. That’s saying a lot considering most of the core members of the DGQ have been together for most of the band’s thirty-year existence.

They opened with a long, snaky and inventive solo by standup bassist Jim Kerwin. Multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Joe Craven — the single most talented all-around musician I’ve ever heard or seen — came out and began a “Stomp”-lite percussion improv with a Dixie cup, including a very good human beat-box thing.

(Indeed, Craven cracked me up all night with his persistent, over-the-top vocal percussion. He has no cymbals, so he even does that vocally, going “pssshhhhh” every time he needs a cymbal crash.)

But fiddle is Craven’s thing, and he is a true master, with a firm grasp of both bluegrass style and Grappelli-style jazz violin. The dude even mimes electric guitar feedback on a violin. Stopping with the Dixie cup and picking up his fiddle, he signalled the metamorphosis of Kerwin’s initial improvisation into a full-blown funky jazz version of Mancini’s Pink Panther theme.

Genius woodwind guy Matt Eakle and the sadly miscast guitarist Enrique Corria entered the stage one-by-one, followed of course by the triumphant entry of the leonine Grisman himself.

While three hours of mandolin playing is just too much mandolin playing, Grisman brings a joy to the instrument that makes it not as overbearing as it would be in lesser hands. As if his own mandolin weren’t more than enough mandolin, Grisman brought out two guest mandolinists from the previous night’s “Mando Madness” performance to sit in.

Tony Williamson can flat-out shred on a mandolin, folks. He plays the thing like Angus Young plays a guitar. It was fun. Even Grisman enjoyed getting completely blown away by the guy.

I felt bad for guitarist Enrique Corria, who completely wastes his time fingerpicking a nylon-string Spanish guitar amidst his much louder and more aggressive colleagues. If you’re going to play rhythm guitar, man, play some rhythm. If you’re going to go Latin, amigo, go Latin. But I couldn’t hear his accompaniment, and when he took a solo it was so whitebread and lame that I was embarrassed for the guy. Oh, well, I guess we all have to have a steady paycheck. I do look forward to hearing one of Corria’s solo CDs to get a feel for the Latin style he is known for.

Another highlight of the evening was the second-set performance of “Man of Constant Sorrow.” While Grisman on vocals is nowhere near as poignant and inspiring as Garcia himself, it was nice to hear a human voice amidst the wail and scream of the flute, violin and mandolin assault.

It’s ironic that despite the almost unbelievable level of musical talent on display Saturday night, it took a poor singer like Grisman to elevate the entire performance to a more enjoyable level. I guess it’s true what they say about the power of the human voice.

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John Gibson, one of the Fox News Channel’s resident knuckle-draggers, had this to say yesterday about Jeb Bush and the Schiavo case:

But for me the big one is the judicial tendency to say, as long as the law and the process has been followed correctly and justly, doesn’t matter if she lives or dies.

Strikes me that that’s adherence to law to a fault.

I know lawyers and judges don’t think that way, but real people do.

Oh John, you’re not saying judges aren’t real people, are you?

Well, judging by what happened here, I’d say yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

So Jeb, call out the troops, storm the Bastille and tell ‘em I sent you.


We now live in a country where the leading cable news channel is openly calling for mob rule in defiance of the law. We now live in a country where a TV anchorman can suggest that judges “aren’t real people” and hence deserve whatever happens to them.

Can anyone now doubt that violence will come in the wake of this Schiavo thing? Can anyone now doubt that a large number of people in the fundamentalist right wing would like nothing better than to see Michael Schiavo and/or a judge or two get physically hurt as a result of this thing?

And Jesus wept….

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