I've been seeing all these shows on tv talking about celebrities we've 'lost' this year. Like Richard Pryer, Rosa Parks, Johnny Carson, to name but a few. It's the 'lost' that gets me. Like maybe if we just look around that corner, we'll find them. We didn't 'lose' them, they died. We're all going to die some day. It's perfectly normal. What's not normal is 'losing' someone.

Do they shoot guns off at midnight on New Years Eve where you live? It's a frightening tradition here in the metro Detroit area. The idiots who do it just don't seem to understand that what goes up--the bullets--must come down. For all those who don't shoot off rounds of live ammunition at the stroke of the new year, and for the next hour and a half, we stay in the house and away from windows to lessen the chance that we'll get shot.

Tawny

Have you read Patricia Cornwell's newest book, Predator? I'm reading it now and I like it. I've pretty much liked all of her books, except for the one she wrote about Jack the Ripper. That went back to the library after about two chapters.

While I read a lot all year round, the cold days of winter are perfect for curling up with a good book and an afghan in the recliner.

Do you have plans for tomorrow night, New Years Eve? I'm staying home. I have a pile of dvds, some cds and my book to keep me occupied. Friends are going to a party at a club, but I've ever been fond of going out on NYE. I don't like the crowds, and I really don't like all the driking and driving. The only years I've been out on NYE have been when I was working as a bartender.

If you feel like talking tomrrow night, give me a call.


Tawny
248-615-1300
www.tawnyford.com

My plan had been to tell you about this incredible contest that Metro Times, the free weekly alternative paper in the metro Detroit area, was running, then suggest you enter it online. Then if you won it, what with you not being from around here, suggest that you give the prize to me (smile)! But the contest they have advertised in the paper edition of this week's issue, Big Ass Holiday Gift Package, is not the one shown on the contest page. Oh well.

But there is a really interesting article on the front page of the online edition (www.metrotimes.com)--Power Walking Down the Year by Jack Lessenberry. You might want to check it out.

Today has been incredibly dark and gloomy. I left the house around 9am to go run errands and had to use the headlights. It never got any better.

I seem to be affected by dark and gloomy days. I've gone through my house and painted all of the walls bright and cheery colors in an attempt to off set the winter lack of sunshine. And I bought a desk lamp at Sam's Club that is supposed to simulate sunshine. Neither are much help, although it would probably be worse without them.

Here's hoping it's a sunny bright day where you are.


Tawny

Was watching a borrowed dvd last night, The Brothers Grimm (doesn't qualify for even a half a thumb up, it was horrible!), and got to thinking about priorities. You know the message from the feds that starts each dvd off? About how if you copy a dvd you can get a prison sentence and a $250,000 fine?

It's a perfect example of America's priorities.

What sort of a sentence does a child molester get? Generally speaking, they get very little time. And they certainly don't get slapped with a monetary fine of a quarter of a million dollars. And this is despite the fact that they have wreaked havoc in a child's life.

But copy a dvd, wow!


tawnyford@webtv.net

Ran across this on the internet and laughed myself silly. Thought you might get a giggle out of it too.


Ten simple rules for dating my daughter.
Rule #1:

If you pull into my driveway and honk you'd better be delivering a package, because you're sure not picking anything up.

Rule #2:

You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her, so long as you do not peer at anything below her neck. If you cannot keep your eyes or hands off of my daughter's body, I will remove them.

Rule #3:

I am aware that it is considered fashionable for boys of your age to wear their trousers so loosely that they appear to be falling off their hips. Please don't take this as an insult, but you and all of your friends are complete idiots. Still, I want to be fair and open minded about this issue, so I propose this compromise: You may come to the door with your underwear showing and your pants ten sizes too big, and I will not object. However, in order to ensure that your clothes do not, in fact, come off during the course of your date with my daughter, I will take my electric nail gun and fasten your trousers securely in place to your waist.

Rule #4:

I'm sure you've been told that in today's world, sex without utilizing a "barrier method" of some kind can kill you. Let me elaborate, when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.

Rule #5:

It is usually understood that in order for us to get to know each other, we should talk about sports, politics, or other issues of the day. Please do not do this. The only information I require from you is an indication of when you expect to have my daughter safely back at my house, and the only word I need to hear from you on this is "early."

Rule #6:

I have no doubt that you are a popular fellow, with many opportunities to date other girls. This is fine with me as long as it is okay with my daughter. Otherwise, once you have gone out with my little girl, you will continue to date no one but her until she is finished with you. If you make her cry, I will make you cry.

Rule #7:

As you stand in my front hallway, waiting for my daughter to appear, and more than an hour goes by, do not sigh and fidget. If you want to be on time for a movie you should not be dating. My daughter is putting on her makeup, a process that can take longer than painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Instead of just standing there, why don't you do something useful, like changing the oil in my car?

Rule #8:

The following places are not appropriate for a date with my daughter: Places where there are beds, sofas, or anything softer than a wooden stool. Places where there are no parents, policemen, or nuns within eyesight. Places where there is darkness. Places where there is dancing, holding hands, or happiness. Places where the ambient temperature is warm enough to induce my daughter to wear shorts, tank tops, midriff T-shirts, or anything other than overalls, a sweater, and a goose down parka - zipped up to her throat. Movies with a strong romantic or sexual theme are to be avoided; movies which features chain saws are okay. Hockey games are okay. Old folks homes are better.

Rule #9:

Do not lie to me. I may appear to be a potbellied, balding, middle-aged, dimwitted has-been. But on issues relating to my daughter, I am the all-knowing, merciless god of your universe. If I ask you where you are going and with whom, you have one chance to tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I have a shotgun, a shovel, and five acres behind the house. Do not trifle with me.

Rule #10:

Be afraid. Be very afraid, it takes very little for me to mistake the sound of your car in the driveway for a chopper coming in over a rice paddy near Saigon. When those memories return, the voices in my head frequently tell me to clean the guns as I wait for you to bring my daughter home. As soon as you pull into the driveway you should exit your car with both hands in plain sight. Speak the perimeter password, announce in a clear voice that you have brought my daughter home safely and early, then return to your car - there is no need for you to come inside. The camouflaged face at the window is mine.


hugs, Tawny

Before you ask, the answer is no, no I don't celebrate Kwanzaa either.

Kwanzaa is just another one of those made-up days for people to celebrate. Do a google on it and you'll find out everything you ever wanted to know about its origins.

Kwanzaa is a way for Black people to have a celebration without it being a hand-me-down from 'Massa'.

After saying all that, let me tell you about this cd I bought. The Kwanzaa Album by Women of the Calabash. Distrbuted by Bermuda Reefs Reccords.

The music is great! It makes you want to get up on your feet and sway to the beat and the rhythms.


Tawny
www.tawnyford.com

This weeks issue of the Metro Times, metro Detrot's free alternative newspaper (www.metrotimes.com) has an interesting article about the death penalty written by Keith A. Owens.

Relax, I'm not going to make your eyes go all bleary and retype the piece in here. But I am going to touch on a few of the things Keith mentioned.

He broke it down to arguments that he has with himself when he thinks about the death penalty--fallibility, race and class, and redemption.

Under fallibility he mentions how the death penalty, as it currently operates, has too much room for error.

Under race and class, it's a matter of how it's the poor and the Blacks who populate the deathrows around the country. Black people are 12% of the population, yet they make up 43% of death rows population. Black people make up 50% of all murder victims, yet 83% of the victims in death penalty cases are white. While there have been over 18,000 executions in the US's history, only 37% of those executed were white people.

Under redemption, and this is where I'm going to quote him:

"On a moral level, wanting to believe that all human beings, no matter how misguided, possess the inherent potential to recognize and correct their failings, I want to sy that redemption does matter. If there is no forgiveness in the world, then we are all damned. If none of us is willing to allow for the capacity for growth and to allow people to atone for their missteps, then all of us need to be perfect from birth. And if all of (Tookie) Williams positive acts--and all of the additional positive acts he may have produced had he not been put to death--are
collectively not enough to signify sufficient redemption, then what would the proper amount have been? Schwarzenger said that Williams' refusal to admit his guilt and to accept responsibility for the ugly deeds of the gang he co-founded is all the proof he needs that Williams' is not a redeemed man. So does that mean an admission of guilt--whether or not he was actually guilty--is more valuable than the lives he
touched, and possibly saved, once he began his anti-gang crusade? How do you weigh these things?"


Tawny

Are you iterested in latex wear? If so, you may find this website interesting:

www.wearelatex.com



Tawny

If you haven't read my blog entry for August 30, 2005, or if the last time you read it was on August 30th, then you need to read it now, before you you read today's entry. Why? Because it's a companion piece to what I'm going to write today.

Okay, I am reprinting this from the most recent issue of A Little Good News, the publication of the Human Kindness Foundation. It was written by Bo Lozoff. If you would like to read more by Bo, here's the web address: www.humankindness.org

Any and all typing mistakes in this piece are mine. I am hand typing it in to the blog.

-----


Bad Joke, Great Punchline by Bo Lozoff


Dear Family,

In our last newsletter, I wrote about "finding the Kingdom of Heaven in profoundly negative times". We received a lot of response about that article, but most of it seemed to be agreeing with me about the "negative times", which was only half the topic. The part about "finding the Kingdom of Heaven" was not just a little fairy tale thrown in to make the reader feel better. It's really the only thing that can put everything else into proper perspective. The whole point of our lives--and I really mean the whole point, the only point--is to touch the Divine Reality, whatever we may wish to call the Ultimate Truth, Ultimate Intelligence, Ultimate Love, that exsists within, around, above, below, and throughout everything else. We can touch It. We can know It directly.


This is not just sweet mystical poetry. It is the only true success that is possible in life. Everything else is vulnerable to hurricanes and earthquakes and poitics, or to betrayal and greed and jealousy and decay and corruption and loss. Everything else gets ripped away from us in the end--even our own sight and hearing and the ability to walk, talk, or think clearly. Nothing is complete and lasting, nothing is final, excet the transcendent reality that most of us call God.


A prisoner in Corcoran wrote me recently that his life sucks. I wrote him back, "everyone's life sucks!" The ky is learning the Mystic's Way to move through this world where life generally sucks, learning how to "suffer gracefully", how to groan good-naturedly like you do when a friend tells you a really bad joke that ends with a great punchline. That's life on Earth: A bad joke that has a GREAT punchline.


What do I mean by the "bad joke"? Well, there's cartoonist Gahan Wilson's classic remark: "Life essentially doesn't work; that's why it's the basis of endless humor." Or the fact that cooked carrots are better for us than chocolate. Or the old German saying, "Too soon old, too late smart." Or my brother's saying, "No good deed goes unpunished." Or "nice guys finish last." Or why the girl you're in love with says "I just want to be friends." Or whywe lck children up in classrooms day after day and then we complain that they don't feel a connection to Mother Nature.


Countless ironies could be written to illustrate why it's accurate to call life a bad joke. Not just the cute stuff, either. Racism and poverty and injustice and fear, children dying, millions starving, all of it--a joke often not funny at all, a joke not in good taste. For countless millions of people, a sick joke, a cruel joke. The joke is Jesus up on the cross in what seems to be total failure, misery, broken
idealism, shattered hopes. And then--The Punchline: He comes back three days later and calmly says "Even death is not final in my Father's Kingdom." Not death, or blindness or imprisonment or capital punishment or any of the rest. Jesus really did die on that cross. Yet that death wasn't lasting. Nothing lasts except His Father's Kingdom.


So what's the deal about this Great Punchline? Well, the Ultimate Goodness, the Divine Love, that exists within, beyond, above, below and throughout everything else, is SO good, SO wonderful, SO impssibly joyful, that by comparison, even the worst, most horrible suffering we can imagine seems small, trivial. In his book The Great Divorce (the seperation between Heaven + Earth), C.S. Lewis uses the imagery of size to make this point.


Standing on the ground of Heaven, he shows a newly arrived soul a tiny crack in the ground near their feet, and says that all of Earth and Hell, all negativity and suffering and problems and ambitions and limitations, all our wars and famines--everything in the world of time and humanity--exists in that tiny little crack in the ground. Life in this tiny crack is compressed and stifling. The ground of Heaven is expansive and unlimited. The greatest joy or worst sorrow in worldly life only takes place in that tiny little crack in the ground of Heaven. Even the death of a newborn baby, the execution of an innocent man, the starvation of millions of people--these things are profoundly negative in that little crack, but that doesn't make them any bigger. They are part of the compressed world; they are contained entirely in that world. In that crack, we cannot even conceive of the vastness of the Divine
Goodness, the Divine Joy.


One moment's experience of that vastness is millions of times more positive than the negative on Earth is negative! It's like the size of a planet to the ize of a pea. It's not like a "balance" to it or anything like that. What's positive is infinite and unceasing, and what's negative is comprssed and constantly changing. Goodness is an enormous mountain, and evil is no more than an annoying mosquito with the life
span of a few hours.


That's why, when some of us dirctly experience that mountain, or "Promised Land", as Dr. Martin Luther King called it, there is nothing--NOTHING!--in the tiny world of the mosquito that ever holds much fear for us again. Dr. King knew he was going to be assassinated, and it didn't change his mssion at all, because even an assassination is trivial after seeing what he saw. Once we have sen the Larger Reality, it is SO much larger than the compressed world of all of our hopes and fears, it holds no power over us anymore.Pontius Pilate screams at Jesus, "Don't you know I can crucify you or set you free??", and Jesus replies calmly, "You have no power over me at all."


Don't you want that to be true for you?


And so He gives us instruction: Don't focus all your time and energy, hopes and dreams, on the world that does not last. Focus instead on what does last. It may be very frustrating to want to touch that Divine Reality when it just doesn't seem to be happening. For some reason, tht's part of the bad joke--God doesn't necessarily reveal Himself the moment we say "Okay, I'm ready!" So when our patience wears thin, whether that takes a day or fifty years, we tend to give up and go back to focusing our main energies on the stuff that does not last. We think, "I'm just going to be a realist from now on! Enough of all this spiritual crap. It doesn't work!"


But is it realistic to look for our keys under the streetlamp becase it's brighter there than in the dark alley where we actually dropped them? Dark or not, even if it takes all night, the alley is the only place we have a chance of finding the keys. It doesn't matter how light the street is under that lamp, they will ot be found where they do not exist. Ou joy, or peace, will not be found in the mundane world even if we become the wealthiest or most powerful personin the world, or head of the world's largest charity, or the new Ghandi who brings peace to the Middle East. The eternal will not be found in the mundane. The absolute will not be found in the relative.


So I certainly did not intend for the last newsletter to simply lay out all the misery, point out how the world is fallingapart at the seams, and leave it at that. There is a Treasure awaiting each and every one of us, closer than our own breath. We're getting sick and tired of the Bad Joke within and around us, but it is vitally important not to lose faith in the Great Punchline. We have an opportunity to live in this world but not of it, as Jesus advised. We have an opportnity to respect and deal responsibly with the problems and limitations of this worldly life, without being run into the ground by them. And that's the only value of sererating "worldly' and "Divine", or as Jesus put it, "Mammon" and "God".


There is a point when we cease to see or talk about "two worlds" at all. Remember, Jesus said, "When thine eye be single, thy body will be full of Light." When we aaken fully tothe Big Truth, there are not two worlds at all; there is Spirit alone, no second thing. The mundane world is realized as a mysterious, shifting embodiment of the Divine. In The Great Divorce C.S. Lewis points out that once we arrive in Heaven, we look back at our lives and see that we were never anywhere other than Heaven. The whole thing--our tragedies, betrayals, depressions, suffering--ws all like a mosquito bite in the beautiful realm of God. Not just the future, but even our history changes when our vision clears and we see what life has really been about.


We experience this in little ways all the tie. You have a little car wreck that ruins your day and pisses you off, cursing your bad luck, but then later that week you fall in love, and when your lover asks you about the car wreck you say, "Oh it was nothing." And you really mean it, when you think of it from such a psitive state as being in love. Well, imagine being in God's Infinite, Unceasing Love! The past thirty years of imprisonment for a crime I didn't commit? Oh, it was nothing! My wife running off with my best friend? Oh, it was nothing! Being diagnosed HIV+ and Hep C+? Nothing. The world falling apart at the seams and about to destroy itself? Nothing.


So let's not let the world's ills make us completely lose sight of the Positive, of the Great Punchline. If we make it a high enough priority, we have an opportunity to walk through this valley of the shadow of death with a rod and a staf that profoundly comfort us, that empower us. We can be in the world of bad news and decay, but not of it. We must function in this world, it is our sacred duty. We're suppsed to help and comfort and solve problems and make peace and feed our famiies and all the rest. But we do not belong to any of that. We belong solely to God. None of that can harm who we really are, it can only affect the material world, it can only affect the part of us that is physical and temporary. That's why Jesus said that what is born of flesh must die of flesh, and we need to be born again in Spirit to find our eternal nature. It's right here, always waiting for us to awaken to it.


My deepest Christmas wish for you all is to discover even a shred of your Bigger Nature. A shred of that is bigger than this whole world with all its hurricanes and earthquakes and planes and bombs. Until you experience it for yourself, hold firmly to your faith in the experience and advice from the sages and saints who have directly experienced it. As one of my favorite elders, Father Murray Rogers, has put it, "Faith is not the most important thing; it is the only thing." This is not just wishful thinking or using religion as a crutch to help us cope with hard times. This is the only thing that really matters.

---------


hugs, Tawny
tawnyford@webtv.net
www.tawnyford.com

Back to the death penalty. Again, America oh so loudly proclaims that it's value system is based, is foundated in Christianity.

Redemption is a big factor, supposedly, in Cristianity.


Moses, raised up in the household of a Pharisee, was not a saintly man by any means. Until he found God and turned his life around.

Peter, one of Jesus' apostles, was not a saintly man either. Nor were any of the apostles prior to their becoming part of Jesus' crew.

These days Peter and John and the rest of the apostles are considerred saints. Moses too.

These men found God and changed their ways. They redeemed themselves for all of the filthy vile things they had done in their lives prior.

Tookie and Karla Faye, to name a few people who have been executed, redeemed themselves while in prison on death row. They found God and changed their ways.

If we go by previous folks who were bad and got good, then Tookie and Karla Faye are saints.

It sure does give you somethig to think about.


Tawny
www.tawnyford.com

If you or any one you know is a former prisoner and needs some understanding regarding their rights and how to overcome the baggage of a criminal record, check this site out:


www.sentencingproject.org/rights-restoration.cfm


Hope it helps.
Tawny

Although I'm a fan of country music, I can't say that I've ever purchased any music by Trisha Yearwood. Until today. I was at Costco this morning and some way some how her cd, Songbook, ended up in my shopping cart. Okay, I put it in there (smile), along with a double cd set by Reba.

But the Trisha Yearwood cd--oh my! I really like it! Especially the first song, How Do I Live. I've played that about a zillion times already. Such a beautiful love song.


Tawny

Look, I don't observe Christmas so I'm not going to give you ideas to make your shopping easier, okay? But for gift giving any other time of the year, here are a few places that have some interesting items:


www.frankencutters.com
This place sells cookie cutters. Yeah, I know, big deal, cookie cutters, but these look really nice. They're not those cheesy plastic ones that the discont stores try to pass off as cookie cutters. These are solid, sturdy and metal. Check out their online catalog or request they mail you one. The instock cutters are amazing, plus--they'll make cookie cutters to order. Look at their website, you'll be amazed.


www.cherryhutproducts.com
Homemade jams and jellies, etc., all produced here in Michigan.


www.thimblejerryjam.com
Homemade wild berry jam.


www.michiganwildflower.com
Michigan wildflower seeds.


www.Michigania.com
Michigan themed gifts.



Happy shopping.
Tawny
tawnyford@webtv.net

I don't know how you feel about the death penalty. I don't know if you're for it, against it, or oblivious to it. Me, I'm against it. Totally against it.

All the time you hear the people in this country, private citizens and politicians alike, flapping on and on about what a Christian country this is. Blah blah blah. That mess down in Alabama when they had to remove a big old stone thingie with the Ten Commandents carved in to it from the courthouse. The Christians acted like it was the worst thing in the world. Like hell fire and damnation were waiting just around the corner for anyone who didn't stand up and object to that thingies removal. Wasn't that a hoot? They acted like that was the only copy in the whole world. Like that was the very one God gave Moses. Like it wasn't in every Bible ever printed.

I'm not saying that fellow in California on death row, I don't even remember his name, Tookie, maybe (?), didn't do some very bad things in his life. He was convicted of killing four people. And to make matters worse, he founded the Crips, a nasty-assed very bad no good street gang that has managed to infiltrate almost every state in this country.

But. If this country is so doggone Christian, isn't redemption a really big Christian thing?

Surely Tookie redeemed himself in the years he spent on death row. He was a tireless advocate when it came to keeping kids away from the evil of gangs through books he wrote. By the time they executed him he wasn't the same man who had gone to death row all those many years before. He had grown. He had seen the errors of his ways. He had changed.

If this country is so darn Christian in its morals and ideals and principles, then he shouldn't have been executed.

The victims families always act, at least when they're interviewd on tv, like as soon as their loved one's killer is executed, they are immediately, miraculously, going to feel so much better. Ha.

They're always looking for that extra pound of flesh, that extra stick-it-to-them. Remember when Karla Faye was executed in Texas a few years ago? Tell me the husband of one of her victims wasn't looking for blood out of a stone. That crap he said about how he "knew" that when Karla Faye ran into his wife in the afterlife, his wife was going to kick Karla Faye's ass. What kind of Christian talk is that? Where did he learn that view of the afterlife? That's not in any Bible I've ever read.

Me, I've spent a lot of time in prisons. No, I wasn't a prisoner. I was a visitor and a volunteer, for years and years. If you really and truly want revenge on someone, what you do is get them sent to prison. Prison is the worst place in the whole wide world. Think I'm kidding? Visit a prison some time. There is no hope or true happiness in prison. None. Make them spend forever, their whole lives, life with no chance of parole. That's what you do to them.

Christians always go back to that eye for an eye thing when they try to justify executions. God, and only God, has the right to take a life. He gave life, He can take it away.

If Christians really and truly believed that the evil, the murderers should die, then you'd think they'd be storming the White House looking to get their hands on Bush. Through his actions, and his inactions, so very many people, both here in America and abroad, have died. His hands are coverred in blood. How come the Christians aren't going after him???

Tawny

I don't know about you but I love reading other peoples blogs. I saw these in an article in the most recent Metro Times:


info.detnews.com/weblog

tu-tutimes.blogspot.com

motorcityrocks.com

snowsuit.net

hamtown.blogspot.com

detroitblog.com

sweatymen.blogspot.com



I haven't had a chance to check them out yet so I don't know which ones are any good, nor if any of them even are worth reading. Let me know what you think.

Tawny
tawnyford@webtv.net

Shame on me for not sharing this with you sooner! www.tasteeapple.com These people make some wonderful apple chips. Apple chips, you know, like potato chips, but apple chips. They come in four different flavors--caramel, cinnamon, granny smith and red delicious. My favorites are caramel and cinnamon. First time I tried them was this fall at the cider mill and it was love at first taste.

I just orderred a case of them, 24-2.5 ounce bags, an assortment of each flavor for--get this--$19.95, taxes and shipping included!

Come Tuesday I am going to be one happy little camper!


Tawny

December 1, 2005

Friends,

I just thought we should all pause for a moment today to remember the simple act of courage, defiance and dignity committed by Rosa Parks when she refused to move to the back of the bus because the law said she had the wrong skin color. The greatest moments in history, the ones that have truly mattered and have taken us to a better place, are made up of scores of these singular acts by ordinary, everyday people who could no longer tolerate the crap and the nonsense of those in charge.

Today, whether it is a student who holds a sit-in to get the army recruiters off his campus, or the mother of a dead soldier who refuses to leave the front gate of the president's ranch, we continue to be saved by brave people who risk ridicule and rejection but end up turning huge tides of public opinion in the direction of righteousness. We owe them enormous debts of gratitude. It is not easy to stand up for what is right, especially when everyone else is afraid to leave the comfortable path of conformity.

Rosa Parks may have been alone on that bus at the moment of her arrest but she wasn't alone for long. The old order was shaken, the world was upended and, as a people, we were given a chance for a bit of redemption.

Perhaps the best way to celebrate this most important day in American history is to ask yourself what it is that you can do today to make a difference. What risk can you take to move the ball forward? What is that one thing you've been wanting to say to your co-workers or classmates that you've been afraid to say -- but in your heart of hearts you know needs to be said? Why wait another day to say it or do it?

There is probably no better way to honor Rosa Parks -- and yourself -- than for you to put a stop to an injustice you see, not allowing it to continue for one more second. Do something. Then send me an email (contributions@michaelmoore.com) and tell all of us what you did (I'll post as many as I can).

Fifty years later, the bus we're on could use a few more people simply saying, "No. I'm sorry. I've had enough. I'm not going to take it anymore."

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com

Today is the 50th anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks sat down in the white section of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama and refused to get up.

The local news programs are all abuzz about how the INS center in Detroit is going to be renamed after her. The city of Detroit has issued an all-you-can-ride bus pass for the month of December with Rosa's name and likeness on it for approximately $2.50 less than a regular non-Rosa pass would cost. These are just some of the 'honors' being bestowed on the "Mother of the Civil Rights Movement".

Last Sunday's Detroit newspaper ran a story--"Marketing Rosa Parks: It's a fine line". In it they discussed how companies that market dead celebrities are eager to get going. While they don't think dead Rosa will bring in the amount of money dead Elvis does, it could still be a tidy sum. Enough to make it worth figuring out who owns the rights to her 'name'. Potentially, several hundred thousand dollars can be
generated from her name per year for years and years to come.

Rosa's relatives are suing her lawyer, retired judge Adam Shakoor, and her long time caregiver, Elaine Steele. Her relatives claim that when Rosa signed a will in 2003 making Shakoor and Steele representatives of her estate, it was because she was suffering from dementia and undue influence.

Obviously, whoever wins this lawsuit will end up with the 'rights' to the Rosa Parks name, and the opportunity to make some serious money over the long haul.

What makes it interesting, at least to me, is that a few years ago Rosa Parks faced eviction from her home, an apartment in Detroit, for unpaid rent. Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, not Rosa's church but one that obviously cared about her well-being, stepped in and caught up her back rent, then continued to pay her rent until her death.

This is just me, but, if her relatives cared so doggone much about her, or the judge and her caregiver cared so doggone much about her, how come it took a church that Rosa didn't even attend to keep her from being put out on the street?


Tawny
248-615-1300

Remember me telling you how that chocolate coverred apple from Godiva was a bust? Well, today UPS dropped me a package from Godiva. They sent a half-pound box of their fine chcolates to make-up for the lousy apple. Now that's a fine example of good customer service!

Tawny

Talk about wierd weather. Last week we had some days where the windchill was minus-somthing, the wind was whipping and it was snowing. Today it's 62 and the sun is shining!

I realized this morning when I woke up that I hadn't left the house since last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. So I was out of here by 9:30 am to get some fresh air and run some errands.

I went to the hardware store in town to buy a toilet seat. The hinges on the right side of the old one snapped off. Just shy of $30 is what it cost for the new one. I should have gone toHome Depot, I think it would have been cheaper, but I didn't want to deal with crowds.

Finally finished that book I was telling you about, so I dropped it off at the library. Picked up a new one by Faye Kellerman, as well as the newest by James Patterson. The librarian said they were both good, so I'm hoping......

It was so warm that I didn't need my coat which was so darn bizarre because the last time I'd been out (on Wednesday) I thought I was going to freeze to death.

Hope things are good in your end of the world.

Call me.

Tawny
248-615-1300

Are you as stuffed from turkey as I am? I love the meal on turkey day! I roasted a 20 pound turkey, made all the sides, and had a wonderful group of friends and family to dinner at my house yesterday. It was perfect.

Did you go shopping this morning to get those day-after-Thanksgiving-Day deals? I saw on the news where people got trampled at the Walmart in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And the police had to come out to a couple of other Walmarts here in Michigan. Is it as crazy where you are?

Me, I stayed home. My house was nice and cozy and I loved every minute of being curled up in the recliner with Kathleen, my beloved cat, on my lap.

I've been reading a book by Bebe Moore Campbell, 72 Hour Hold. It's a fiction story about a woman whose 18 year old daughter is manic depressive/bipolar. I've been struggling to get through the book. It's been a hard read for me. See, my mother was manic depressive and the book brings it all back to me. The author knows what she's talking about, it's all real to me.

hugs--Tawny

Happy Thanksgiving to you!

hugs--Tawny

It is definitely winter here. Brrrr. The last few days have been frightfully cold. We seem to have gone from fall to winter in a blink of the eye.

I have some new winter boots, really nice and warm ones, that I orderred from Landsend.com. If you need a pair yourself, take a look at their site. They're maybe a little pricey but they sure are nice quality.

Stay warm.

hugs--Tawny

I am a chocoholic!

Yesterday I was at the big mall and I stopped at the Godiva store (www.Godiva.com). They had these humongous Granny Smith apples on a stick, dipped in chocolate and rolled in toffee bits. $7.50. I bought one.

Later that evening I got that apple and a sharp knife and went to cut a slice out of it, and you know what happened? The chocolate cracked and fell off! I was left with a big old naked apple on a stick and a pile of chocolate!

I emailed Godiva and they apologized, said they'd send me another one.

Usually I buy chocolate and caramel coated apples from the Rocky Mountain Candy Company. They have their stores, at least around here, at outlet shopping malls. The apples are huge, increibly good, and run about $5 or $6 each.

I hope I just had a bad Godiva apple because their store is a lot closer than the outlet mall.

hugs, Tawny

Remember me saying how my Uncle Richard was dying? How he'd called his grown children to come to Mississippi so he could say goodbye to them? Well, Uncle Richard died about a week and a half ago, his funeral was on Saturday the 12th. No, I didn't go to it. I had been saying all along I wasn't making the trip, but then I came down bad sick so it wasn't an issue.

Many of my relatives from up here got on the highway headed to Mississippi. There was a whole lot of car pooling going on. My cousins Bob and Gloria Jean, they have a big camper and lots of family went south with them. A few took the Greyhound to Michigan City, Indiana, then hitched a ride with relatives from there. Uncle Robert, he and his wife live in California, but they were in Texas when Uncle Richard died so the ride wasn't nearly as long as it would have been. Their oldest son is in the military and they were in Texas to say goodbye to him because he was deploying to Iraq. Uncle Johnny, who lives in Kentucky, went to Mississippi by way of Indiana so he could give a ride to those who needed one.

Aunt Shug, my oldest aunt, Uncle Richard was one of her exhusbands, and the father of some of her children. Aunt Shug loves Mississippi. Every chance she gets, that's where she heads off to. She'd still live down there if she could but she's old and a little sickly and her children insisted she move up north so they could take care of her.

I have two other great aunts, Alberta and Big Gal. They live here in Michigan too. Alberta is the youngest, although she's still old. Big Gal, well, the less said about her the better. But Alberta, well, she's a bitter woman and she's known for being hateful. When they had that big birthday party for Aunt Shug, remember me tellling you about that? Alberta and Big Gal boycotted it. Why? Because they're hateful, bitter women and they couldn't stand to see their sister happy. I should say they attempted to boycott the party. Someone, and they shall remain nameless, went and whispered in their ears that it would be better for their health and welfare if they got their behinds to the party......

So anyway, everybody was in Mississippi for Uncle Richard's funeral. Turned out it ws also Geat Aunt Baby Doll's 90-something birthday, so lots of extended fmily that otherwise wouldn't have been in town, was. It ended up being like a mini family reunion.

Plus, because Aunt Shug has lived most of her life in that small Mississppi town, she has friends, lots of friends, and they all came to see her and to attend the funeral. Alberta, who doesn't have any friends anywhere, and I'm not making that up, she doesn't have any friends, couldn't stand to see all the love being shown Shug. It was killing Alberta. So you know what she did? She called back up north to her kids, told them Shug's kids beat her up, and she needed money wired to her so she could catch a Greyhound home!

I don't know what would make a woman, even one as bitter as Alberta, make up a lie like that, but she did, and her kids bought it hook, line and sinker. Western Union had some money for Alberta and she came back to Detroit.

Then Alberta's kids got on the phone to Shug and her kids and started threatening them. Telling them they were going to kill them and stuff them in body bags. And that's the mildest stuff they were saying. They called and called and harassed everyone so badly that Shug ended up in the hospital when she got back to Detroit. The doctor said her blood pressure is so high that he doesn't understand why her veins haven't exploded and she hasn't died from a series of strokes.

I don't know what to say about these people, I really don't. But if you see you and yours in any of this--change your ways now before it's too late.


hugs, Tawny
tawnyford@webtv.net

I have so much stuff to tell you about that I'm probably going to have to spread it out for two days just so your brain doesn't overload.

Thanksgiving is almost here, right? Well, my cousin, Miranda, is angry with my cousin Lanita because Lanita hasn't invited her to dinner on turkey day. Why hasn't she been invited? Because Lanita is angry with her.

See, Miranda is Lanita's mother's boss at work. And Miranda, well, she's almost always been on a power trip her whole life, and it's gotten worse since she made top supervisor at work. To hear my Aunt Gloria (Lanita's mother) tell it, Miranda is going out of her way to give her a hard time. At work, Miranda rides her ass and treats her disrespectfully.

Miranda's mother, Aunt Anniebelle, well, she's a trip herself. When Miranda and her sisters were growing up, Aunt Anniebelle was addicted to prescription medications. Aunt Gloria, despite being less than ten years older than Miranda, spent a lot of time raising Aunt Anniebelle's kids for her. So not only is Gloria her aunt, but she's also like her surrogate mother, so it makes her harsh treatment of Gloria even worse.

Miranda, who is almst forty and has two teenage children, has been calling everyone up in the family saying she doesn't know how she's going to feed her kids Thanksgiving Day dinner. Now it's not like Miranda is poor and can't afford to buy a turkey at the grocery store and cook it, or make reservations at a restaurant. The woman brings home close to 70 grand a year. She's just too lazy to cook dinner and too cheap to make reservations.

Miranda's older sister, Yolanda, is addicted to crack. I think Yolanda is going to die soon, she's in a very bad way. She was in rehab a couple of years ago, but it didn't work for her. So mooching a meal at Yolanda's is out of the question for Miranda. Yolanda will more than likely be doing her celebrating at the crackhouse.

Miranda's youngest sister, Lil, I'm not sure where she and her two children are having dinner that day. I know it won't be at her place because her gas is turned off. Yes, it's cold here, at night it goes down to the 20's, and no, Lil has no heat in her house.

What gets me is that Miranda is pushing forty and she's so lazy and so cheap. What kind of an example is she setting for her kids?

Me, I've been cookng Thanksgiving dinner for years and I'm considerably younger than her. I've got a bunch of friends and family coming for dinner and it's going to be a wonderful time. It always is.

I hope your Thanksgiving is a good and blessed one. We all have so much to be thankful for.


hugs, Tawny
www.tawnyford.com

Thought you might find this interesting.


hugs, Tawny

***************************************************


Dear Mr. Bush:

I would like to extend my hand and invite you to join us, the mainstream American majority. We, the people -- that's the majority of the people -- share these majority opinions:

1. Going to war was a mistake -- a big mistake.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=4924#mistake

2. You and your administration misled us into this war.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=4924#misled


3. We want the war ended and our troops brought home.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=4924#bringemhome

4. We don't trust you.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=4924#trust


Now, I know this is a bitter pill to swallow. Iraq was going to be your great legacy. Now, it's just your legacy. It didn't have to end up this way.

This week, when Republicans and conservative Democrats started jumping ship, you lashed out at them. You thought the most damning thing you could say to them was that they were "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic party." I mean, is that the best you can do to persuade them to stick with you -- compare them to me? You gotta come up with a better villain. For heaven's sakes, you had a hundred-plus million other Americans who think the same way I do -- and you could have picked on any one of them!

But hey, why not cut out the name-calling and the smearing and just do the obvious thing: Come join the majority! Be one of us, your fellow Americans! Is it really that hard? Is there really any other choice? George, take a walk on the wild side!

Your loyal representative from the majority,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com

Rosa Parks is back in the news. Her nephew has filed a lawsuit to get control of her estate. Apparently the family feels that Mrs.Parks may not have been in her right mind when she made out her will in 2002. They say she was suffering from dementia. The two people she chose to carry on her affairs after her death--a retired judge and her longtime caregiver--are fighting him.

Tawny

Tell me what you think of this article from Rolling Stone.

hugs--
Tawny

*************************************************************************

Reverend Doomsday
According to Tim LaHaye, the Apocalypse is now
By Robert Dreyfuss


It might seem unlikely that the commander in chief would take his marching orders directly from on high -- unless you understand the views of the Rev. Timothy LaHaye, one of the most influential leaders of the Christian right, and a man who played a quiet but pivotal role in putting George W. Bush in the White House. If you know LaHaye at all, it's for his series of best-selling apocalyptic novels. You've seen the Left Behind novels everywhere: aboard airplanes, at the beach, in massive displays at Wal-Mart. In the nine years since the publication of the first novel, the series has sold 60 million copies. Next to the authors of the Bible itself, who didn't get royalties, LaHaye is Christianity's biggest publishing success ever.
LaHaye is a strict biblical reconstructionist -- taking the Good Book as God's literal truth. His books depict a fantastical, fictional version of what he and his followers think is in store for the human race. Not allegorically, not poetically, but word-for-word true. If the Bible (Revelation 9:1-11) says that billions of six-inch-long scorpionlike monsters with the heads of men, "flowing hair like that of women" and the teeth of lions, wearing crowns and helmets, will swarm across the globe gnawing on unbelievers -- well, that's exactly what LaHaye says will happen. And soon.

LaHaye's books, and his quirky interpretation of biblical prophecy that stands behind them, revolve intensely around Iraq, because LaHaye believes that Armageddon will be unleashed from the Antichrist's headquarters in Babylon. Since the 1970s -- when Iraq began a reconstruction project on the ruins of the ancient city, near Baghdad -- LaHaye has said that Saddam Hussein is carrying out Satan's mission. In 1999, LaHaye wrote that Saddam is "a servant of Satan," possessed by a demon, and that he could be "the forerunner of the Antichrist." Ultimately, says LaHaye, before Christ can return to Earth, Iraq, led by the Antichrist, must engage in a world-shaking showdown with Israel.

Of course, there have always been preachers on the margins of the religious right thundering on about the end of the world. But it's doubtful that such a fanatic believer has ever had such a direct pipeline to the White House. Five years ago, as Bush was gearing up his presidential campaign, he made a little-noticed pilgrimage to a gathering of right-wing Christian activists, under the auspices of a group called the Committee to Restore American Values. The committee, which assembled about two dozen of the nation's leading fundamentalist firebrands, was chaired by LaHaye. At the time, many evangelicals viewed Bush skeptically: Despite his born-again views, when he was governor of Texas, Bush had alienated many of the state's Christian-right activists for failing to pursue a sufficiently evangelical agenda. On the national level, he was an unknown quantity.

That day, behind closed doors, LaHaye grilled the candidate. He presented Bush with a lengthy questionnaire on issues such as abortion, judicial appointments, education, religious freedom, gun control and the Middle East. What the preacher thought of Bush's answers would largely determine whether the Christian right would throw its muscle behind the Texas governor.

Mostly preferring to stay out of the limelight, LaHaye has been the moving force behind several key organizations on the Christian right that have redrawn the boundaries of American politics. In 1979, at a time when ministers confined themselves to their churches, he prodded the Rev. Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority, a group that launched today's cultural wars against feminism, homosexuality, abortion, drugs and pornography. In 1981, he helped found the little-known but vastly powerful Council for National Policy, a secretive group of wealthy donors that has funneled billions of dollars to right-wing Christian activists. "No one individual has played a more central organizing role in the religious right than Tim LaHaye," says Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, calling him "the most influential American evangelical of the last twenty-five years."

When the meeting with Bush ended, LaHaye gave the candidate his seal of approval. For Bush, it was a major breakthrough, clearing the decks for hundreds of leaders of the Christian right, from TV preachers and talk-show hosts to Bible Belt pulpit pounders, to support the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000. "Bush went into the meeting not totally acceptable," recalls Paul Weyrich, the grandfather of the religious right, who has known LaHaye for thirty years. "He went out not only acceptable but enthusiastically supported."

More than half a century ago, as a student at Bob Jones University, Timothy LaHaye began his public ministry as a pastor at a small church in a tiny town in South Carolina, not far from the campus. He'd grown up dirt-poor in Detroit, peddling newspapers during the Depression. His father had died when he was ten. In 1944, after finishing night school and attending a Bible institute in Chicago, he enlisted in the Air Force at seventeen and served in Europe as a machine gunner aboard a bomber.

At Bob Jones, the Christian-fundamentalist college famous for being anti-Catholic, LaHaye met and fell in love with a fellow Detroiter, Beverly Jean Ratcliffe. The two followed the school's strict "no touching" dating rule, which required lovers to stay six inches apart; a year later, they were married. In 1958, they moved to San Diego. At that time, Southern California was a hotbed of former McCarthyites, neo-Nazis and the John Birch Society, a right-wing group so paranoid and extremist that it denounced President Eisenhower as a communist. They all muttered darkly about secret societies, the evil United Nations and one-world-government conspiracies, views that LaHaye would soon make his own. For years, LaHaye spoke at Birch Society training sessions, getting to know many of its leaders and building his ministry in the part of California that, twenty years later, would be the launching pad for Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential bid.

In the next dozen years, LaHaye built a veritable Christian empire: three churches, twelve elementary and secondary schools, a Christian college, an anti-evolution think tank called the Institute for Creation Research, the Pre-Trib Research Center to promote his views on how the world will end, and Family Life Seminars, a lecture program on sex, marriage and Christian living -- all while writing dozens of books. The Act of Marriage, a best seller published in 1976 and co-authored with Beverly LaHaye, is an explicit Christian sex manual, condemning "petting," abortion and homosexuality.

In the early 1970s, alarmed by laws and court decisions on abortion and school prayer, LaHaye began organizing the churches of Southern California for political action. In 1979, he established Californians for Biblical Morality, a church-based political group that lobbied in Sacramento. In many ways, it was the genesis of the Christian right. "I met Tim and Beverly about thirty years ago, while I was on a preaching tour of Southern California," says Falwell. "I found out that he'd done something no conservative minister had ever done before: He'd organized hundreds of churches into a political bloc. At the time, I'd never heard of mixing religion and politics." LaHaye persuaded Falwell to consider doing the same. "More than any other person, Tim LaHaye challenged me to begin thinking through my involvement [in politics]," recalls Falwell. Paul Weyrich confirms Falwell's account. "He encouraged Falwell to get involved in the political process," says Weyrich, who heads the conservative Free Congress Foundation. "But Falwell was reluctant to do so, because he thought it would ruin his ministry."

In 1979, LaHaye and Falwell established the Moral Majority, with Falwell as its leader and LaHaye as a guiding member of its three-person board of directors. The Moral Majority drafted tens of millions of conservative Christian voters into the culture wars, swelling the ranks of the Republican Party and serving as Reagan's core constituency. But while Falwell was catapulted to national prominence, LaHaye stayed in the background. "He flew under the radar, very behind-the-scenes, and didn't seek publicity," says Falwell.

Two years later, LaHaye founded the Council for National Policy. An elite group with only a few hundred members, the CNP meets three times a year, usually at posh hotels or resorts, going to extraordinary lengths to keep its agenda and membership secret. According to members willing to speak about it, however, the council unites right-wing billionaires with scores of conservative Christian activists and politicians, and these encounters have spawned countless campaigns and organizations. Its ranks have included prominent politicians such as Ed Meese and John Ashcroft, and among its members can be found an editor of the conservative National Review, leading televangelists such as Pat Robertson and Falwell, representatives of the Heritage Foundation and other key think tanks, and activists including Grover Norquist and Oliver North.

Supported by moneybags such as Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt, Amway founder Richard DeVos and beer magnate Joseph Coors, some in the group helped fund Oliver North's secret campaign to aid the Nicaraguan contra rebels during the 1980s and financed the right-wing jihad against President Clinton in the 1990s. (The impeachment effort was reportedly conceived at a June 1997 meeting of the CNP in Montreal.) In addition, the group has funded an army of Christian organizers. Falwell says that in the past two decades, he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his ventures, including Liberty University, through the CNP. "My guess is that literally billions of dollars have been utilized through the Council for National Policy that would not otherwise have been available," he says. Bush attended a CNP meeting at the start of his presidential campaign in 1999 to seek support, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took part in the group's gathering last April in Washington, D.C.

"Without [LaHaye], what we call the religious right would not have developed the way it did, and as quickly as it did," says Weyrich.

Besides the Moral Majority and the CNP, LaHaye established a third organization, Concerned Women for America, run by his wife, Beverly, which today claims 600,000 members. From the late 1970s into the 1980s, CWA, in coordination with Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, led a successful battle against the adoption of the feminist-inspired Equal Rights Amendment, and it thundered against gay rights, sex education in schools and abortion. While Schlafly organized the women in Republican clubs around the country, Bev LaHaye reached out to the women in churches, "the ones who were never involved in politics, who'd go to Bible-study groups," says Schlafly. "She reached a lot of people, particularly in the Christian churches, that I might not have been able to reach." Many of these women stayed involved, joining the ranks of religious-right activists.

By the mid-1980s, LaHaye was at the top of his game, powerful and well- connected, plugged into the Reagan administration and, through yet another of his groups, the American Coalition for Traditional Values, a pivotal factor in the 1984 election, registering Christian conservative voters through "pastor-representatives" in all 435 congressional districts. But he was also headed for a fall.

Lahaye's free-fall began in the mid-1980s, and by the end he'd almost been expelled from the political Garden of Eden. What set it into motion was his connection with the weird would-be messiah Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose Unification Church cult of "Moonies" was viewed by most Christians as laughably heretical. When Moon got entangled in legal controversy, LaHaye sprang to his defense, amid reports that he'd received substantial funding from the wealthy Moon. By the time LaHaye backed away, it was too late. His credibility was shot, and the American Coalition for Traditional Values soon folded.

Then it got worse. In 1988, LaHaye was bounced from the presidential campaign of former Rep. Jack Kemp when the media learned of LaHaye's anti-Catholic views (he considers Catholics to have strayed from biblical truth and has referred to popes as "Antichrists"). After that, he was deemed nearly radioactive in politics. When he showed up later that year for a campaign event at the elder George Bush's home, the vice president rushed to Doug Wead, his liaison to the religious right. "Tim LaHaye is here!" Wead recalls Bush saying in alarm. By the early 1990s, LaHaye had retreated to a small Baptist church in Rockville, Maryland, and the Moonie-owned Washington Times noted that he had "left the national stage."

Within a few years, however, LaHaye would ride Left Behind back to the top. As LaHaye tells the story, one day, about 1994, he was sitting on an airplane, watching a married pilot flirting with a flight attendant, and it hit him: What would befall the sinful pilot if the Rapture happened now? What if, as LaHaye believes the Bible foretells, God suddenly snatches up to heaven all of the believers in Jesus? And that is how Left Behind starts. Everywhere, hundreds of millions of people vanish, leaving the unbelievers behind, from insufficiently pious Christians to Muslims, Catholics, Jews and everyone else. What follows is the Tribulation, in which God visits unspeakable plagues on the Earth, amid a climactic worldwide battle waged by a band of new believers, called the Tribulation Force, against Satan and the Antichrist. Seas and rivers turn to blood, searing heat burns men alive, ugly boils erupt on the skin of the disfavored, 200 million ghostly, demonic warriors sweep across the planet exterminating one-third of the world's population -- well, you get the idea. And why does a merciful God visit such horrors on mankind? According to LaHaye, "God intends that the terrible plagues and judgments of the Tribulation might cause the people of the world to repent and turn to him."

Reviewers trashed the Left Behind books as "almost laughably tedious" and "unrelievedly vomitous badness," and prominent Christian leaders condemned them as "unscholarly" and a "perversion" of the Bible. But the series gradually blossomed in Christian bookstores, gaining readers by word-of-mouth. In 2001 alone, the books sold a staggering 15 million copies. The intent of the books is frankly evangelical. "Our hope is that some people will be persuaded," says Jerry Jenkins, who co-authored the series with LaHaye.

The success of Left Behind gave LaHaye an enormous boost, returning him to prominence and making him truly born again. "At meetings of the Council for National Policy now, Tim and Bev are treated like rock stars," says Grover Norquist, perhaps Washington's leading conservative activist. Last fall, LaHaye released the first book of a new series called Babylon Rising, which takes his apocalyptic notions even further. Striking while the brimstone is hot, LaHaye has already received a reported $42 million advance deal from Bantam Books for the Babylon books, built around a swashbuckling, Indiana Jones-style biblical archeologist in the Holy Land.

Now seventy-seven, lahaye is considered rather scowly, even by his friends. A thin man who dyes his hair black, he wears a battery-powered earpiece and favors clashing polyester suits. "He can come across as stern and unloving," says Jenkins, especially when he gets up on his soapbox. "Then people say he can be too severe."

He is certainly gloomy about Earth's future. "We have more reason to believe that ours may be the terminal generation than any generation since Jesus founded His church 2,000 years ago," LaHaye told Rolling Stone via e-mail from his home in Palm Springs, California, citing not only biblical prophecy but weapons of mass destruction, incurable diseases, pollution and overpopulation. Despite Bush's election, Republican control of Congress and the success of his own organizations, LaHaye says that things are getting worse, and that "liberal, anti-Christian secularists still control government, media, education and other important agencies of influence."

That's a succinct summation of the tangled, conspiratorial mind-set conveyed in his books. In Left Behind, the "bad guys" just happen to be the same ones whom LaHaye, the Christian right and their allies usually demonize: the United Nations, the Europeans, Russia, Iraq, Muslims, the media, liberals, freethinkers and "international bankers," all of whom team up with the Antichrist, who ends up heading the U.N. and moving its headquarters to Babylon, Iraq. The "good guys," of course, are Christian believers, Israel and a phalanx of 144,000 Jews who accept Jesus. Another heroic force in the series is the right-wing American militia movement, which, as a world war erupts, makes a last-ditch, ultimately futile stand against the forces of Satan and the Antichrist in the United States.

According to LaHaye, civilization is threatened by a worldwide conspiracy of secret societies and liberal groups intent on destroying "every vestige of Christianity." Among the participants in this conspiracy are the Trilateral Commission, the Illuminati, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Organization for Women, Planned Parenthood, "the major TV networks, high-profile newspapers and newsmagazines," the U.S. State Department, major foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), the United Nations, "the left wing of the Democratic Party," Harvard, Yale "and 2,000 other colleges and universities." All of this is assembled to "turn America into an amoral, humanist country, ripe for merger into a one-world socialist state."

LaHaye professes no knowledge of whether President Bush buys into his views. "I have seen nothing from this president that would indicate that he is influenced one way or the other by my prophesy teaching," he says. But for Bush, an emotional, evangelical president who has repeatedly described the struggle against Saddam as a conflict between good and evil, LaHaye's views resonate with his. And though it's not known whether Bush has read any of the Left Behind books, he is a regular consumer of writing by other evangelists. Just recently, according to Falwell, Bush called a well-known born-again author, Rick Warren, to say he and Laura Bush had loved reading his new book, The Purpose Driven Life. Asked whether Bush is in accord with the End Times views of LaHaye, Falwell says, "My guess is that his views would differ very little, but that's conjecture." Jenkins, LaHaye's co-author, says only, "Every Christian ought to be happy that we have someone in the White House who says he believes what we do."

But the idea that Bush, in going to war against Iraq, might have been moved not by politics but by an apocalyptic vision is terrifying to some. Last October, the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance wrote a formal letter to Bush, saying, in part, "Please assure the American people that you are not developing foreign policy on the basis of a fundamentalist biblical theology that requires cataclysm in Israel in order to guarantee the return of Christ." So far, he has not received an answer, and the White House didn't return calls from Rolling Stone asking whether the president has read Left Behind.

The final volume in the Left Behind series appears in the spring.

(January 28, 2004)

(Posted Jan 28, 2004)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/rnd/1090028394515/has-player/true/id/5939999/version/6.0.10.505?rnd=1103998542781&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.872

There's been quite the hoopla in the Detroit newspapers, as well as on the local news regarding the images of the city of Detroit that the Sacramento Kings showed on the team's arena video prior to their game against the Pistons. Apparently they showed images of burned out cars, abandoned buildings, garbage strewn streets, etc. The other day there was a full page ad/apology letter from the Kings in the Detroit paper.

Okay, it wasn't polite to show pictures intended to embarass a visiting team.

But Detroit is acting like the Kings made those pictures up. It's the very same way they acted when 8 Mile, the film by Eminem, hit the theaters.

8 Mile was an accurate portrait of the city of Detroit. That's what Detroit neighboroods look like. The photos that the Kings showed? That's what Detroit looks like. There are thousands of abandoned buildings in the city. There are too many to count burned out vehicles littering the streets. And you want to talk about garbage? Lots of garbage dumped everywhere but where it's supposed to be.

If Detroit doesn't like the way their neighborhoods look, maybe they ought to do something to clean them up. Duh.


Tawny
tawnyford@webtv.net

On Tuesday the 8th we had a local election here in Farmington/Farmington Hills. The only thing to vote on was the mayor's position (only one person was running and they won by a landslide) and city council.

The city of Detroit had elections on the 8th too. The citizens were voting for, among other things--mayor, city council and city clerk.

Not that Farmington Hills isn't a happening place, because it is, but in the greater grander scheme of things, I don't think this election was one of those end- all-be-all events for us.

Now Detroit, on the other hand,.....


Accrding to the Metro Times (www.metrotimes.com), the weekly free alternative Detroit newspaper:

1. According to a survey done a dozen years ago, 47 per cent of the city of Detroit's population is functionally illiterate. That means they can't read or write well enough for ordinary, practical needs.

2. One third of their population lives below the federal poverty level.

3. Their property taxes are 73 mills, which are close to the highest in the state.

4. Their schools are unarguably terrible.

And these are just a few of the things wrong with Detroit.

Joe Harris, Detroit's auditor general, thinks that one of these days the city won't be able to pay its bills, and then the state will hve to step in and take control.

The last four years of fiscal mismanagement are the responsibility of Kwame Kilpatrick, the mayor. I've written about some of his excesses in previous blog entries. My best conservative guess, based on newspaper and tv news stories, is that he has personally jacked-off at least a million dollars of the taxpayers money for his own selfish pleasures. And it's probably more than that because the city is still stuck paying for a brand new Lincoln Navigator that he bought with Detroit's money for his wife. And then there's the stories of his clubbing, his limos, the big party he had at the mayors residence with the strippers (one of whom was later found dead execution-style), special contracts for his friends, etc.

The media has been busy exposing Kilpatrick's excesses at the expense of the city. When asked if he was afraid this coverage would hurt his attempt at re-election, he said no, his constituents didn't read the newspapers (?). And he must have been right because he won. Four more years.

On the one hand, I think if Detroit was stupid enough to re-elect this joker who spends their hard earned tax dollars like they're monopoly dollars while the citizenry lives in squalor and starves, well, then they deserve whatever happens to them and their city.

On the other hand, everything bad that happens to the citizens of Detroit ends up hitting the rest of Michigan right in their wallets.

Metro Times columnist Jack Lessenberry says we have to do like East and West Germany did after the Berlin Wall came down. East Germany, he said, looked like Detroit. West Germany, he said, looked like our wealthier suburbs. He said the rich half of the country stepped in and started rebuilding the poorer half, until today you can't hardly see the difference.

And that's nice, right? Who doesn't want to help people get on their feet and do good?

But doggone it, if they can't take some sort of responsibility for themselves--like electing officials who aren't out to fleece them....For example, what sense does it make for me to pay someone's enormous $800 shut-off notice electric bill, if the next time their bill shows up they don't pay it, or the time after that, and before you know it it's back to shut-off time again? And the reason they weren't paying their bill wasn't because they didn't have the money, but because they wanted to party instead? That's kind of how I see Detroit. I'm tired of doing without in order to pay for things that others could have coverred if they hadn't been busy living high off the hog and squandering.

Okay, I'm ranting now, I know it. But damn.


Tawny
tawnyford@webtv.net

No clue how the local news works where you are, but here, just about every worldwide news happening, they try to find the Michigan connection to it.

The hotel bombings in Jordan yesterday? Here's the Tawny connection.

My cousin Annie Ruth and her sister signed up with Annie Ruth's church to take a trip to the Holy Land. They wanted to walk where their god Jesus walked. Okay, everyone in the family tried to talk them out of it, to no avail.

Yesterday they pulled up to their hotel in Jordan just after the suicide bombers hit. When they called home, they were lying on the hotel room floor crying, wanting to come home.

My one cousin, her husband is a used-to-be official, so he was able to make arrangements with someone (if I told you who I'd have to kill you! just teasing) and he got them space on a plane. They should make New York in an hour or two.

Tawny

As my friend Judi pointed out to me the other day, it's been awhile since I've written anything here. I forget the reasonable excuse I gave Judi for not posting more often, but the more I thought about it--and since I've been sick (AGAIN!) I've had a lot of time to think--truth is sometimes I just don't have anything to talk about. And sometimes I have things I want to say, but I don't know how to express them. And sometimes I have just way too much stuff to discuss and can't figure out where to begin.

I'm assuming, because she was a national figure, that you know Rosa Parks died a week or two ago. And because of all the ensuing media coverage, you know that she died in Detroit. I had thought everyone knew she lived in Detroit, that when she did what she did on that bus, and then had to get up out of the south, Detroit was a safe haven for her.

In the metro Detroit area, her funeral was on television. When I spoke to Judi the other day she said she had wanted to physically attend Mrs. Parks funeral, but hadn't wanted to go alone, and almost called to see if I wanted to go with her. I told her we wouldn't have stood a chance on getting in, every one and their brother wanted in to Greater Grace that day. But Judi said we would have gotten in. And you know what? I'm sure we would have because when Judi puts her mind to something it gets accomplished. She's one of those people who just doesn't comprehend the meaning of can't.

I watched Mrs. Parks funeral on tv. Coverage began locally long beforethe funeral itself and, because I needed to make a trip to the mall and knew it would be empty whatwith the funeral on tv, I missed the first little bit and tuned in just as Bill Clinton began speaking. Did you hear his condensed remarks on CNN? That story of his about when Rosa Parks sat down in the front of the bus, he and his school chums decided that freed them up to sit in the rear of their segregated school bus.

There were so many people who spoke that I enjoyed, but I know I can't remember all of their names. Al Sharpton, I love what he said. I sure would have voted for Al for president. Even Farrakhan, he was right on the money with what he said, too.

Jesse Jackson, I don't know what to say about him. What sticks in my memory of him is him flapping his arms and saying 'fly away, fly away' repeatedly. And Aretha Franklin singing over the top of him while they got him back to his seat. Maybe the day was just a little too long for Jesse.

One of the many things I liked about her funeral was that folks set the record straight about that day Rosa sat down on the bus. For too many years too many preachers and others have been saying how she was tired that day, her feet hurt, and that's why she sat down. Lie. Rosa herself, in her autobiography, explained how she had been chosen to challenge the segregated busses. It was not a random act of tiredness on her part, it was a calculated move by the civil rights folks. Do some research on line, you'll find the truth.

Tawny

I don't know about you, but the goal here at my house in the fall is to see how long I can hold off turning the furnace on. Each and every year my target turn-on date is October 31st. And each and every year I have to crank the furnace on much earlier, generally some time in the first part of October. This year I managed to hold off until the 16th, today.

I knew it was time to turn the furnace on today when I had to go to the bathroom every half hour. The house was chilly, too chilly, and the local tv weather peson was talking lows in the high 30's overnight. That did it.

At my house, even in the worst part of the winter, I keep the thermostat set no higher than 60. Actually, my average day time thermostat setting is right around the 58 degree mark. At night when I go to bed I turn it down to 55.

Almost every year I catch flack from the gas company. They're convinced I'm doing something illegal (bypassing the gas meter) and that's why my monthly heating bill is lower than most folks. They've replaced my meter three times so far. I tell them, just come in the house, you'll see why my bills are low(er).

The media keeps harping that our winter energy bills are going to go up a good $50 or more per month this year because of the high price of gas. Experts give numerous tips to 'help' us conserve gas. Even though my monthly heating bill is traditionally considerably less than many folks, I'm still concerned that it's going to be too high this year. Other than buy new windows, which I could truly use but can't afford right now, I don't know what else to do to conserve.

Tawny

Not only is today Sweetest Day, but it's also the day my cousin Kenneth had his engagement party. His Mom, my favorite aunt, threw it for the happy couple. She bought and cooked all of the food, and decorated the hall. The party was at Uncle David's hall and rather than charge my cousin for renting the place, it was decided that there would be a $5 cover charge for each guest and a cash bar. My cousin said cool, that would work.

As it turned out, I guess my cousin and his girlfriend don't have as many friends as they thought they did. Or at least none who were willing to come up off of $5 each to attend his party. Less than 20 people showed, and 13 of them were our (old) aunts and uncles. My aunt had tons and tons of food left over.

Day before yesterday, Friday, another cousin rented the hall to hold an after the funeral luncheon/get together. My cousin's husband's mother died. The day before the funeral the police arrested the deceased's husband (his father) for her murder. Seems he had a 30+ year history of beating her. He said he didn't beat her this time, he "just" pushed her. Apparently she cracked her head, and died.

Tawny

I don't know if this is a good deal or not. I've never usd the company, I've only just seen the web site listed in a magazine. www.yourmusic.com They say all cd's are $5.99 with free shipping and handling.

Tawny

Read this in an old copy of Rolling Stone. It's long, but well worth the read.

Tawny


Raya fashioned a sign in his barracks to express his growing hatred of the war


Marine Gone Mad


Andy Raya didn't kill anyone while stationed in Iraq. He waited until he returned home

By JEFF TIETZ


On Sunday, January 9th of this year, Marine Lance Cpl. Andy Raya left Camp Pendleton, took a one-way flight from San Diego to Sacramento, grabbed an SKS semiautomatic assault rifle he had obtained illegally, and made his way home to Ceres, a farming town in the Central Valley. Three months earlier he had returned from Iraq, where he had spent seven months driving supply trucks in the Sunni Triangle. Other than Marine Corps barracks, Ceres was the only place Raya had ever lived. He was nineteen.
At 8 p.m., carrying the SKS and several spare clips, Raya walked out of the night's drizzle and into the safety lights of George's Liquors, screaming that he hated the world. A toxicology report would later show that he had a "potentially toxic" level of cocaine in his bloodstream. George's is just a few blocks from the Camp, the migrant-farmworker projects where Raya grew up. The community is working-poor and encroached on by several white middle-class neighborhoods, but it turns briefly slummy around George's. Raya hadn't mentioned his homecoming to anyone. His friends and family thought he was at Camp Pendleton. In his long, hooded rain poncho, lustrous in the wet, he was not immediately recognizable.

Before walking into the store, Raya fired once at a nearby building. Inside, he said he had been shot at and asked the clerk to call the police. To the clerk, he seemed to be elsewhere. Another employee tried to calm him down. Both employees noticed the rifle under his poncho. Raya told them not to be afraid -- they were civilians and would not be harmed. Then he walked outside.

The employees immediately locked the front door. The clerk described Raya's behavior to the 911 dispatcher. Raya was pacing in front of the store, bouncing on the balls of his feet, scanning the street, waiting for the police to arrive, readying his rifle. The SKS is a Russian-designed, Chinese-made semiautomatic. It is similar to the M-16 Raya had carried in Iraq, but it fires bigger, heavier rounds, rounds powerful enough to pierce the body armor cops wear. Raya had bought it for that purpose.

One end of George's Liquors faces Caswell Avenue. The other end abuts Jiro Tire, which faces Central. An empty lot between them extends to the intersection. In Marine Combat Training, Andy Raya had spent a lot of time studying this kind of urban geometry.

Concealing himself behind George's storefront, Raya watched as Officer Sam Ryno and an officer-in-training, Chris Melton, drove up and parked in front of Jiro Tire. They walked cautiously to the front wall of Jiro's, which took them out of Raya's view, and began moving toward the building's plate-glass corner -- a straight diagonal across the lot from Raya. Raya listened and then stepped into the lot for a second to measure their approach. He pulled back just as Ryno glanced around the corner of Jiro's.

Ryno glanced again, and at the reappearance of his face, Raya shot two concentrated bursts. Two, he had been taught, is the optimal number in close quarters -- more and you risk compromising your aim. His shots shattered the plate glass and lifted Ryno fully off his feet. The SKS has a range of 1,300 feet, making the distance between Raya and Ryno effectively point-blank. Raya paused almost imperceptibly to register the effect of his shots -- there was no return fire -- and then stepped forward briskly and fired twice more. The bones in both of Ryno's legs were shattered; one was nearly severed.

From this fractional first pause until the end of his attack, Raya was in continuous textbook motion; what he had learned had become reflexive. After his second shot he ran straight at his targets, firing deafeningly in the echo chamber of the half-walled lot, his poncho rising capelike behind him and shining through the thin, hesitating smoke of his rounds. He knew that superior firepower affords great advantages and that unrelentingness preserves them.

Melton had dragged Ryno back from the corner, out of the line of fire. When Raya passed the building edge, he began side-stepping as he shot, forming a half-circle whose centerpoint was Ryno and Melton. Raya perpetually reoriented his body to this center point, never losing his preternatural poise: spine straight, gun rotating strictly. This tactic, called "pieing," gave his fire a double effect: It became both offensively overwhelming and defensively suppressive. He also remained a swiftly moving target. By this time, Raya had opened up two more big holes in Ryno's body, destroying his lower abdomen.

At that moment another policeman, Officer John King, pulled up and quickly opened fire on Raya with a high-powered rifle. King was able to protect Melton and Ryno only because he had arrived exactly when he did, with Raya about eight feet into the circumference of his circle, and because he had parked, by chance, in a good offensive position. Raya reacted to King's fire as if he had been expecting it: bolting, head down, back to the shelter created by the intersection of the buildings.

Raya stopped and listened; it was quiet. He was untouched. Eighteen seconds had passed since the beginning of the assault. Melton and King were concentrating solely on evacuating Ryno, which was very brave, because they had not neutralized Raya and had no idea whether he had accomplices.

More than a half million U.S. soldiers have now done at least one tour of duty in Iraq. The universal nature of combat there -- the war zone is the whole country -- damages every soldier who serves, regardless of assignment. Before January 9th, the violence committed by Iraq War veterans fell along a limited continuum: Soldiers came home and killed themselves; they assaulted people; they abused their spouses. Then Andy Raya came home and created an approximation of the combat environment he had just left, and the continuum seemed to lose its limits.

Before Iraq, Raya hadn't displayed any emotional instability or propensity for violence. He had the kind of personality that pulled people out of themselves and into common space. When his family and friends reminisce about him, they not infrequently jump up and act out things he did. He was one of the first kids in his class to realize that just before Christmas break you could say, "See you next year," and he drew out the confusion by saying it over his shoulder as he left. Every Easter he painted a raw egg and fake-hid it and broke it over someone's head. In elementary school he designed his own symbol, which looked something like a manta ray, and made tiny reproductions of it wherever he stopped. In high school he would walk complicated paths while eating oranges one after the other and dropping the peels at intervals, so you could track him. "Everyone was always waiting to see what he would do," his father told me.

Raya's parents, Tomas and Julia, picked peaches and apricots in the commercial orchards that begin at the edge of Ceres and extend for miles into the Valley. They lived in the Camp, which had been sheltering migrant farm workers since the Depression. By the time Tomas and Julia got there, in 1983, it had become a county housing project.

Back then, the Camp had sporadic problems with drugs and with the Nortenos, a street gang that originated in the California prison system in the 1960s. But it was basically a hardworking place, and the government-subsidized rent allowed many immigrants to take the transformative step from fieldwork to steadier employment. Tomas got a job at a canning factory; Julia became a nurse's aide. They bought their own home shortly before Andy entered high school.

Andy was proud of being from the Camp and proud of being Mexican. He visited his father's hometown, in Michoacan, several times, and it changed the way he thought about himself. He bought books on pre-Columbian Mexico and collected Mayan and Aztec iconography. When he was ten, the housing authority began a campaign of evictions in the Camp, which sharply reduced the Norteno presence there, but the gang had come to represent the Camp. Its name refers to Northern California, and every neighborhood kid knew Norteno signs and recognized the autonomy and power inherent in its name. If you were a kid in the Camp just coming into adolescence and proud of where you came from, you inherited a Norteno loyalty.

By the time he was thirteen, Andy was talking about joining the Marines and vowing to finish high school on time so he could sign up as quickly as possible. His father likes to tell the story of how, right after the graduation ceremony, Andy found him in the crowd and said, "See, Pop? I told you." Before he began his initiation into the Marines, he said, "Just wait, Pop, just wait. It won't be long before I have my honors" -- his first ribbons -- and the next time he came home, he had them.

Raya loved boot camp in San Diego, and he loved Marine Combat Training at Fort Leonard Wood, outside St. Louis. The discipline and suffering suited him. The setting of his life had never changed before. He had never before been anonymous. Submerged in Marine culture, he fashioned himself into a hard kid from a hard neighborhood. He called the Nortenos his "boys" and threw around pictures of himself and his childhood friends flashing Norteno signs. He showed off his tattoos like they were gang symbols; he was always listening to gangsta rap. He bragged about getting "locked up," but he was vague on the details -- he'd been arrested only as a juvenile, once for having a pot pipe and once for using a Piccolo Pete firecracker to blow up a mailbox.

Andy returned from his seven-month tour in Iraq in September 2004. He was posted to Camp Pendleton and expected to be shipped back to Iraq. His parents picked him up at the base on the day he arrived. He was still in his fatigues. He seemed totally disoriented. He never stopped examining his surroundings, and he remained in a silence that forestalled questions. He was "very, very quiet," his father says.

His parents stopped at a restaurant not far from Camp Pendleton. When they got out of the car and started to shut the doors, Andy yelled, "Don't close the doors! Don't close the doors!" He began rifling the car for his M-16. It took his parents a few minutes to convince him that he was where he was.

The restaurant was crowded, and Andy sat with his back against the wall, staring everywhere and at everyone. He looked, according to his father, "lost, just all lost." His father asked what was wrong. "I don't know, Pop," he said. "I don't know."

For the three days of his leave, Andy stayed in the house. He was not inclined to do much more than sleep and eat. When he sat he was always straight-backed, his knees making right angles, as he had learned to do in the Marine Corps. His attitude was usually that of someone concentrating hard on a problem. To questions about Iraq, he almost always said, "Well, you guys wouldn't understand." He had nightmares every night, but he didn't talk about them. He had photographs of his buddies in Iraq, and also of rubble and ruined vehicles and wounded soldiers. One picture showed the aftermath of an improvised explosive device that had almost killed him, but he wouldn't say much about it. Another showed him in his barracks holding up a handmade sign that read "Operation Send Me Home."

When he came home again for Christmas, he said he didn't want to return to Iraq. With no elaboration, he said the war was not right. "The only thing I think about is dying out there," he told his cousin Rebeca. "That's the worst thing that could happen to me is that my mom sees me die in Iraq." In public, he often said, unprompted, "These are all civilians." Many times he declared to family members, "You guys are considered civilians." He called men "males" and women "females" and sometimes spoke in Marine slang: zero-dark-thirty, gungy, deuce gear. His family kept saying, "We don't understand you," and he kept saying, "Oh, yeah, you guys are civilians," but he never really stopped. Sometimes he just sat and stared at nothing for four or five minutes.

One day, Andy pulled a metal ball out of his pocket and threw it hard at his cousin Alex. Before Alex had a chance to respond, Andy said, "How you felt it is how I felt it." It was a piece of shrapnel that he said had shattered the body armor covering his chest. Andy often carried it, holding it in his palm and metronomically tossing it up and down.

Andy was most like his old self when he was with his friends, hanging out smoking and drinking. One night they broke into the high school gym, tore up an American flag and used the strips to spell "Fuck Bush" on the floor. Andy said things to his friends he didn't say to anyone else. He said, "Bush is a fucking devil. People just don't realize how much power he's got and how much he's using it." He said, "You can't picture hell any worse than Iraq -- that is hell." He had known very little of the world before he went to Iraq, but the world, he said, wasn't right: There was no point in it; it was full of sin; it was going to end.

After a few seconds of surveillance in front of George's, Andy Raya threw his poncho over his shoulder and again stepped toward the lot, his rifle in firing position. He could have rushed and killed Melton and Ryno and King, but with studied caution he pulled back, paced, appeared to reload -- a three-second procedure -- and then seized up at the sound of another approaching officer, Sgt. Howard Stevenson.

Stevenson had driven slowly down Caswell toward Central and pulled to within a half-block of George's. He unholstered his pistol and began walking along a white fence that partially screened him from the storefront. Raya dashed in a crouch to the side window of a car parked in front of George's, rose slightly to fix his target with his eyes and then drew his body downward and backward: a pretty, pendular motion that brought him to rest in a stable firing position. "Shoot me, motherfucker!" he was screaming. "Shoot me! Shoot me!" Stevenson had walked past the end of the fence. Aiming at the figure behind the car, he yelled, "Put down your weapon! Put down your weapon!"

Raya fired two bursts through the car window. As before, he was in constant motion after his initial shot -- he moved forward into a deeper crouch and shot twice over the car's trunk. Raya rushed Stevenson as soon as he began to fall, firing accurately. The officer was no longer moving when Raya reached him. Raya bent down and shot him twice in the back of the head, like a technician. Then he kept running, telling one woman to get back into her house -- she was a civilian and would not be harmed. After a half-block, he veered from the street and vanished into a residential grid of yards and alleys and houses.

By the time Raya got to Iraq, in February 2004, the Marines had invested scores of hours in teaching him how to kill other human beings and desensitizing him to the act. The military now excels at overriding the nearly immutable human instinct against intraspecies killing: In World War II, at least seventy-five percent of American soldiers under fire did not shoot their weapons; today, nearly ninety-five percent do. Five decades of military research has produced photo-realistic targets, complex and visceral virtual-reality scenarios, three-dimensional human mannequins that bleed and fall, and exercises in which live humans believably die when hit by simulated ammunition. Recruits kill in this way many hundreds of times, until destroying a manifestly fragile human form becomes automatic and affectless and associated with honor. They never have to label their marks humans or people or soldiers or even them. They shoot at targets or positions or hostile fire or the enemy. They are not killing; they are not even shooting: They are attriting, suppressing, returning, engaging.

After six months of training and conditioning, Raya was shipped to Ramadi, a shot-up provincial capital of cement and mud brick in the middle of the desert. Saddam Hussein had drawn most of his special forces from the city. When his army was dissolved, the country's best fighters went home to Ramadi. They brought a sophistication to the local insurgency that rivaled the American military's.

Insurgents in Ramadi plotted Marine troop movements and diagrammed ambushes in three dimensions. In street battles they sometimes stood and fought to the death, sometimes flanked Marine positions and sometimes re-treated in tactical sequence. They were good with rocket-propelled grenades and shoulder-launched missiles, and they had professional snipers: In a firefight in April 2004, two months after Raya arrived, five Marines died or were badly wounded by single shots to the head.

Weapons stockpiles and bands of disguised insurgents were everywhere. "The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind, " an American soldier told a reporter toward the end of Raya's tour, "would be to kill the entire population."

Raya's camp, like every other Marine camp in and around Ramadi, took rocket and mortar and small-arms fire almost every day. That March, bomb attacks in the city wounded nineteen soldiers in two days. On June 21st, four Marines died defending an observation post. On July 1st, one Marine was killed and seven wounded by a roadside bomb. Every Wednesday for the following three weeks, insurgents inflicted multiple casualties on patrols by coordinating the opening volleys of their attacks. One Marine company whose tour overlapped with Raya's saw more than sixty of its 185 soldiers killed or wounded.

Raya drove seven-ton supply trucks from Ramadi to strategic points all over the Sunni Triangle. During his tour, a driver in every twentieth convoy was killed or wounded. Drivers could expect to encounter hostile fire every fourth or fifth mission. One of the first times Raya went out, insurgents detonated an improvised explosive device under a truck in his convoy. The IED was in a dead dog. The explosion lifted the multi-ton truck several feet off the ground and left its occupants unconscious and bleeding in the road. Raya was temporarily deafened by the explosion; a military doctor later told him he would soon lose all hearing in one ear.

To hurt transport convoys, which tend to be big and have a lot of firepower, insurgents fired 120 mm missiles or rocket-propelled grenades from rooftops or palm groves or the far side of sand berms. They put mortar tubes in the trunks of cars and used the car battery to fire 82 mm or 122 mm artillery shells. By the beginning of Raya's tour, insurgents had begun filling cars with explosives -- sometimes more than a thousand pounds of explosives -- and driving them into convoys. Insurgents posing as road crews built median strips to house IEDs. They set IEDs under overpasses so they exploded downward. They planted fake IEDs to delay convoys, and they responded to radio jamming by using timed detonators.

Over a period of six months in Ramadi, insurgents planted more than 400 IEDs on a single stretch of road. Ramadi convoys often had to take or cross a 4.5-mile section of a major highway known as Route Michigan. Insurgent shelters -- a crowded market and a series of mosques -- line it. Drivers called it the "suicide train." One morning just after Andy Raya left Iraq, American soldiers found or were wounded by nine bombs on Route Michigan: an IED for every half-mile.

Serious ambushes took a classic form. They began with the detonation of an IED, or a daisy chain of four or eight or ten IEDs, and then proceeded to RPG and mortar fire. Injuring and pinning a convoy in this way made close-range rifle and machine-gun fire sustainable, and it pretty much guaranteed casualties. A convoy was ambushed in Ramadi on July 21st. When a rapid-reaction force arrived, it was ambushed as well.

Raya sometimes drove at night, when convoys moved fast, often without headlights. Visibility on moonless nights, even with night-vision goggles, was no better than a few hundred yards: At times, drivers saw little more than the chemical lights attached to the bumper in front of them. In daylight, roads were impinged on by sheep, immolated military vehicles, mule carts, fuel tanks, dead animals. Blast craters and sandstorms appeared unpredictably. Desert crevices cut into truck routes. Irrigation canals ran along raised roads -- driving on them was like driving on top of a wall. Quicksand could grip seven-ton trucks for hours. Drivers had not been trained to operate in these conditions, and there was no time to practice. Learning on the job, they killed and injured themselves in crashes and rollovers, and died because their mistakes made them good targets.

Iraqis wove in and out of American convoys as a gesture of disrespect and tried to get hit so they could file compensation claims. In narrow city streets, where potential enemy firing positions seemed absurdly close, traffic slowed convoys to a walk, or halted them. Insurgents engineered traffic jams and posed as traffic cops. As suicide car bombings became common, all traffic came to seem intolerable. Because children sometimes ran in front of trucks to halt convoys in advance of ambushes, drivers were ordered not to stop for children and not to look back. So they cultivated in themselves a readiness to keep driving.

Every truck driver in Iraq heard tales of what happened to every other driver: When Iraqis in a Baghdad street, resuming their errands and transactions minutes after an IED attack, inadvertently stepped on the brains of a dead driver; when drivers consciously crushed children; when IED explosions threw severed American heads into the air and soldiers had to go retrieve them.

Raya wrote many letters home, but he almost never called -- he had seen too many people get depressed afterward. An acquaintance had shot himself in the head after his girlfriend told him she was sleeping with someone else. "I could of lived happily," Andy wrote to his cousin Marisa, "without seeing what I've seen."

A number of people saw Andy Raya disappear from the street after he killed Sgt. Stevenson. Ceres police were soon able to identify the yard he had entered. An 11-99, which summons every officer who hears it, had been broadcast; units from all the surrounding counties were arriving. The police received several calls from residents as they glimpsed or heard Raya amid their houses. This information and a surfeit of manpower enabled them to rapidly establish a perimeter that was tight and wide enough to contain him.

High-powered spotlights on the roofs and doors of squad cars lit the sightlines from the perimeter into the cordoned area. A California Highway Patrol helicopter held at 800 feet, dropping sometimes to 500. The helicopter had a 50-million-candlepower searchlight that was impossible to look at directly and that illuminated -- like daylight, people in the neighborhood said -- several front yards at once. With a good approximation of Raya's position and this amount of movable light, the perimeter closed fast, stopping at one square block. Firepower had been concentrated wherever there was a clear view of the alley. Snipers climbed onto surrounding rooftops. Ten policemen with semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles stationed themselves about 300 feet from Raya's position, behind a black flatbed pickup parked in front of a house.

For the next two hours, no one inside the perimeter heard or saw anything. It later became clear that Raya never left a tiny region of three or four adjacent back yards near one end of the block. The back yards ended in a narrow alley, across which lay more yards and more cover, but Raya never crossed it; he never attempted to enter a house. There is no evidence that he moved at all. He most likely sat or lay under a large tree that shielded him from the helicopter's searchlight.

Then, with no warning, he leapt over a backyard fence and into the alley. The helicopter was overhead -- Raya had chosen to jump into a well of light. People in a house with a direct view of the alley said he was shirtless. They could see the contours of his tattoos: the Aztec sun on one shoulder, the Aztec moon on the other. Several saw him jump with his hands up.

Every cop behind the pickup started shooting: a continuous mutual burst that went on for what seemed like a long time -- fifty rounds, the people in the house thought. The house vibrated. On the door the noise acted like a solid object.

The silence after the shooting seemed unyielding. Raya lay prone and still, bleeding heavily. His left arm had been flung over his head and lay flat on the ground; his right forearm leaned in the air: elbow cocked, wrist limp, fingers dangling. Then his arm moved. To people in the house, it looked like a nerve running from his right hand to his shoulder, its impulse, probably the last live thing in his body, jerked his arm upward, marionettelike. Every cop who had shot before shot again, fewer rounds this time but with the same retributive sustain.

The Raya shooting had no precedent in Ceres. The community had remained, in essence, a country town, its organizing force still the fruit orchards that surrounded it. Gang violence had been increasing in the region, but in Ceres it had yet to become more than an irregular, small-time problem. No police officer had ever been killed in the line of duty. "One reason this affected us so much is it wasn't somebody who went into a bank to do a robbery and shot a cop," Lt. Bill Heyne, the lead investigator in the case, told me. "Raya just flat ambushed these officers. You can't anticipate that is ever, ever going to happen." Suddenly, the war in Iraq seemed surreally close. "If the military has guys coming back like that," Heyne wondered, "what do they have to do to make sure they don't go off?"

For several days after the crime, Chief of Police Art de Werk told the media that the shooting was probably a case of "suicide by cop," the act of a soldier determined not to return to Iraq. Despite the fact that Raya had set an ambush for the cops and shot one to death, the police spoke about him with a detachment that neared deference: He was a United States Marine who had just spent seven months risking death for his country -- he had earned, at least, a distanced respect.

But the Marine Corps quickly disowned him. Three days after the shooting, a USMC officer spoke to Heyne, telling him that Raya had never been in combat, and that his experiences in Iraq could not have influenced his actions in Ceres. In a Marine Corps report on the shooting, Raya's superiors and fellow soldiers all stated that the war had made no real emotional impact on him. Raya had taken the IED explosion he witnessed "in stride" and "did not seem 'stressed out' over the incident." He "operated in" a "combat environment," but that had "no discernible effect" on him. Raya was "always in a good mood around the barracks." The report also underscored the fact that Raya knew gang signs, was "obsessed with" gangsta rap and liked to show off his tattoos. At Camp Pendleton, he "related he was a member of 'nortenos' back in Modesto." It was his visits home to Modesto, not his tour in Iraq, that had altered him: "LCpl Raya's demeanor changed, becoming more confrontational, after spending so much time in Modesto."

The change in the investigation was instantaneous: Andy Raya was a gangster and a cop-killer. The image turned irrevocable when Ceres police found a safe in Raya's room containing home videos of "gang-type behavior." There was also evidence that tracked Raya's emerging politics and adolescent fascination with violence: a photograph of him throwing gang signs when he was fifteen, a weapons shopping list he had written when he was seventeen, another photograph of him burning an American flag.

The police were now certain that Raya's assault was a vanguard action -- a military-style template for gang attacks on cops. At the crime scene, along with improvised altars and spray-painted memorials, was a piece of graffiti that read "187 the pigs" -- a reference to the California penal code for homicide. Heyne and de Werk chose the morning of Raya's funeral, five days after the crime, to make their theory public. Heyne delivered a PowerPoint presentation and showed stills from Raya's videos. "Ceres police," the Los Angeles Times reported, "now point to the gangster milieu and hip-hop culture as the main reasons behind the attack. Raya, they said this week, may have been acting as part of an ongoing gang insurgency targeting law enforcement."

Raya's attack, with its Marine precision, now engendered another professional assault. De Werk inaugurated the counteroffensive by dispatching a dozen unmarked police cars to tail mourners from Raya's funeral back to the Camp. The department also spent $18,000 on military equipment -- chiefly AR-15 assault rifles -- for its forty-five officers, and it primed the public for its actions. "We're in a new age now," Sgt. Patrick Sullivan told the Modesto Bee. "I hate to tell you," de Werk said at a press conference, "but the days of Mayberry are over."

Police patrols in the camp became so frequent they amounted to a permanent presence. Cops searched people and cars and homes nonstop. Police appeared on lawns and doorsteps in groups of three or five or ten, rifles out, demanding to be let into homes. Detentions and friskings were slightly hysterical: multiple semiautomatics cocked and aimed, shirts lifted, legs spread, crotches patted, all in front of neighbors and friends and family. Residents who witnessed searches say it was routine for two AR-15s to be pointed at the temple of a single suspect.

The cops seemed to be stopping every male between fifteen and twenty-five. Parents began locking their kids inside. The police paid particular attention to Andy Raya's friends, who had been hanging out in the same places, unnoticed by the cops, since they were little kids. Now they were being searched as many as six times a day. One officer became notorious for walking through the neighborhood with his gun drawn, clicking the safety on and off, smiling. Residents said policemen threw suspects around and yelled a lot, and they didn't seem to care what they said. "Everyone who knew Andy Raya has a fucking target on their head!" one cop reportedly yelled.

While being searched at gunpoint, a neighborhood kid said, "You're just out for revenge. You'd shoot us right now if you could."

"You know what?" the cop searching him said. "You're right."

The Ceres Police Department is mostly white, and few of its officers are bilingual. One time the cops pulled up alongside a friend of Raya's just as his cell phone rang. On previous patrols they had heard him speaking Spanish to his parents. "Don't answer it!" one cop yelled. "Don't answer it! I could arrest you for obstructing justice for talking Spanish!"

During one search, the cops pulled aside a strikingly light-skinned kid named Jorge Acosta. They asked why he was hanging out with gang members. Was it for protection? "No, officers," Acosta said. "These are my childhood friends."

During another search a cop asked a resident, "If I touch you, will I explode?"

"What am I, a terrorist?" the kid said.

"Well," the cop said, "are you?"

On January 17th, Ramona Flores was watching TV with her kids when three cops showed up on her doorstep. Two had drawn their pistols; one held an AR-15. Flores doesn't speak English. Her teenage son, who had been acquainted with Raya, asked for a warrant. Ignoring the question, the cops told Mrs. Flores that denying entry would mean greater suspicion and possible arrest. She relented, and the cops searched her son's room. They found a lot of Oakland Raiders gear.

The questions the cops repeated over and over during searches -- Where are your guns? Why did Raya do it? Who worked with him? What was his position in the gang? -- yielded nothing, the residents of the Camp said, because everyone who knew Andy Raya knew he wasn't in a gang, and no one had any idea why he did it. By the fifth or sixth futile rifle-point frisk, kids started to mouth off. They would point to a day-care center and say, "Yeah, that's my meth lab over there" or, at the end of searches, "Another bad bust, officer?" Some started lying, saying, "Yeah, I'm a gangbanger. Why don't you do something about it?"

To the police, the taunts became admissions of guilt. Sgt. Sullivan told the press that officers freshly trained in gang identification were relying on clothing, tattoos and suspects "admitting to being a gang member." "Many gang members," de Werk said, "are more than happy to declare their gang affiliation." By the time police activity in the Camp began to wane, a month after it had begun, no accomplices had been identified. No stashes of guns or drugs had been found. No evidence of any criminal enterprise had been uncovered. The police had arrested one person, for cocaine possession. The suspect, Heyne told the press, was "associated with Raya." A friend of Raya's said the suspect was his cousin, and had known Andy only to talk to.

Several weeks after the shooting, I met with Heyne and de Werk in the featureless conference room of police headquarters. I asked Heyne to describe his investigation into Andy Raya's motives. Heyne is a deliberate guy who speaks in full, lucidly enunciated sentences. "Raya wasn't in a combat unit," he said. "He never saw combat. He never shot or killed anybody. No one close to him was killed. But he conveyed to people back here that he'd gone through all this stuff -- he's seen babies killed and legs blown off and his buddies killed. Didn't happen. All the ribbons Raya received are standard -- there's no combat stuff, no Silver Star, none of that. And then we uncover all the gang stuff."

Heyne had not found anyone who thought Raya was a gang member. "But, as per usual," he said, "most people are very leery of speaking of the dead." The evidence in Raya's safe, however, was "quite revealing." He had found a novel called Midst of My Confusion, by a rapper named Sir Dyno. The book, Heyne said, was the story of a Hispanic kid who joins a gang, becomes an enforcer for drug traffickers, kills people and escapes to Mexico, where he witnesses the army, using American-made helicopters, brutally suppressing an indigenous uprising.

"But what you don't get by me telling you all this is there's a lot of things that Raya underlines in this book," Heyne said. "Give you an example. Here's page forty-two. Says, 'You really think you're tough, huh? said the cop. You just look like a punk to me.... He was trying to provoke me. I just stared at him with total hate. If looks could kill he would be dead, buried and forgotten....' And then he underlines this: 'I knew that someday, I would have my payback.' And you know if you read a book for pleasure and you don't underline anything it's just a pleasure read, but when you underline or highlight something -- "

"You're studying it," de Werk said.

" -- it has significance to you," Heyne said. "It's impacted you in some way. Here he says, 'I was sweating with adrenaline just knowing that the cops were going to find us.' You know -- highlighted."

On the night of the shooting, Heyne said, Raya was carrying a CD called Seasons of Da Siccness, by the rapper Brotha Lynch Hung. "It was a very violent CD," Heyne said. "Some of the titles of the songs were 'Dead Man,' 'Return of Da Baby Killa,' 'Datz Real Gangsta,' 'Dead Man Walkin,' 'Welcome 2 Your Own Death.' Pretty disturbing." Heyne had devoted a slide in his PowerPoint presentation exclusively to the CD: the name of the artist and album at the top, the title of every song bullet-pointed.

Chief de Werk, who is six-seven, earnest, ungainly, bespectacled and huge-jointed, said, "There's a lot of music where these kinds of words are so common that it actually trivializes it -- it's just like two friends getting angry with each other and saying, 'I'll kill you.' But with this event, it changes everything, and now, as far as we're concerned, we can't dismiss those as simply being colloquialisms or just comments."

Heyne turned off the lights and played a montage he had made from Andy Raya's home video, most of which had been shot a few months earlier. There was scene after scene of drinking beer and talking shit and smoking dope out of Pepsi-bottle bongs. There was a long shot of Mrs. Raya cooking tamales. There were so many of these family scenes on the tape, Heyne said, that it had been impracticable to edit them all out. Andy and his friends threw gang signs, mainly "XIV," the Norteno number, but also "420." I asked Heyne what 420 meant. He said he didn't know. The guys signed "Campo" a lot. After one stretch of dialogue -- "Bitch had this big ol' ass, fool! Bitch put so much pressure on me: 'Go go go go!' " -- de Werk looked disgusted. "And a local reporter went and actually visited some of these people," he said. The camera paused on the design Raya had been making since elementary school. Heyne said, "That's his personal sign, his mark."

At one point Raya seemed to be showing his friends how to make signs. "He's teaching them how to properly throw a gang sign," Heyne said. A moment later, Raya was setting his fingers at various angles, frowning. It looked like he was trying to remember how some of the signs went.

Raya showed his biggest tattoo: large calligraphic words from shoulder blade to shoulder blade that read SOLO DIOS ME PUEDE JUZGAR. "Now what does that mean again?" de Werk said.

Heyne said he wasn't sure.

"What does that juzgar mean?" de Werk said. "I never could figure that out."

When Heyne didn't answer, I said juzgar meant "to judge," and then translated the phrase: "Only God can judge me."

Heyne and de Werk turned and looked at me. "You speak Spanish?" they said, in near unison.

One weekday afternoon, a day or two after talking to de Werk and Heyne, I walked into the Camp. It was like a lot of California housing projects, a little subdivision of one-story bungalows. The houses were in decent condition; the streets were clean and empty.

After some ambling around I saw a young guy in a G Unit T-shirt and 49ers beanie leaning against a sedan in a bungalow carport. There was a new day-care center across the street. With almost tender hospitality, he asked me what I needed. His name was Esteban Diaz. Andy Raya had been one of his best friends.

Diaz is a big, vocal guy who often made benign exclamatory gestures. He told me a lot of stories about Andy, and they conjured up the image I already had: kinetic, extemporaneously funny, steadily tending toward the center of every gathering. Diaz's perplexity about Andy's crime was as absolute as everyone else's.

Two young women pushing strollers left the day-care center. I asked Diaz about the police sweeps and the theory that the Camp was a hub of gang activity. "Aw, there's no gangs here," he said. "I mean, yeah, there might be a few members or people affiliated or whatever, but pretty much everyone just goes to school or work or whatever. I mean, just look around. Ten years ago or something, it was bad, it was a lot of gangs -- and back then the cops never even came in here. And if it was like that now, there would be some dead cops. But until all this happened it was, like, one of the safest neighborhoods in the U.S."

Diaz had recently graduated high school and was looking for a job. Right after the shooting, he said the cops had impounded his car on the theory that he had driven Raya to the site of the crime. Diaz had been in Arizona visiting family at the time, a fact that, combined with a fruitless scouring of his car, had caused the cops to return it with no comment a week later. Diaz hadn't learned of the crime until he got back to Ceres. With no car, he said, he'd missed a job interview.

Diaz was waiting for his friends -- Andy Raya's friends -- to get back from school. "We got locked in, fool! We got locked in, fool!" a kid named George Flores said as soon as he arrived. He was around sixteen; his new Tommy Hilfiger polo and handsomeness and the gel-shine of his black hair made him look like he could be in an actual Tommy Hilfiger catalog. He said a school security guard thought he'd heard seven rounds of gunfire in the street. Within minutes, a dozen cops had arrived, and the students were either locked in or evacuated. Hours later, the cops still hadn't found any evidence of gunfire.

Diaz was cracking up. "That was my friend, that was my friend!" he said. "He had just put cherry bombs on his car and was testing it out like right around there. The cops are scared of everything now!"

To Andy's friends -- several of them were in Heyne's montage -- the gang motive was not even worthy of discussion. The cops thought you were in a gang if you lived in the Camp and knew gang signs, wore baggy jeans, had a tattoo or knew Raya. "You're in a gang if you know signs?" someone said. "How could Andy be in a gang if he was in the Marines?" Diaz said. "He always wanted to be in the Marines. He just came back from Iraq!"

Ever since the sweeps began, someone said, the cops had been videotaping suspects. In response, the kids in the Camp had started using their cell-phone cameras to take pictures of the cops conducting pat-downs. The police would then turn the video cameras on them -- creating the spectacle of the cops filming the kids taking pictures of the cops filming the kids.

Several hours before andy Raya's funeral, Chief de Werk asked the officiant, the Rev. Dean McFalls, to come to the police station. After looking at the evidence, McFalls decided to deliver a sermon about divisiveness -- the fracturing force of gangs, colors in symbolic opposition. He told the mourners that they had to face the shocking truth: Andy Raya was not the person they thought him to be. In a difficult time, he said, they might look to the united colors of the American flag.

After the service, to reassure themselves of Andy's character, some of his cousins got together to recall their adolescence in the Camp. Most were college students or professionals. They talked about throwing Norteno signs as teenagers. They had all, at one time or another, shown gang colors; they had all had some experience -- extensive or fleeting -- hanging out drinking and smoking dope. These things had constituted a requisite gauntlet, and had been left behind.

Andy Raya seemed to have made it through the gauntlet. His parents had lived narrow lives so that he could broaden his. "We're the ones who are gonna make it out of here," he said at his high school graduation. He used the GI Bill to save money for college. He talked about becoming a firefighter. He received America's greatest benedictions, and suffered its worst curses. If, in the course of his brief life, he came to revere the forms of violence that America has nurtured since its inception, he remained a son of his country as surely as any American ever was.

(Posted Jul 28, 2005)