Jesus Christ (in Blue)
Friday, December 10, 2004
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Business Ethics?
Yes, it is a valuable exercise to compare churches and corporations during this time of 'corporate religion'. The bottom line, in my opinion, being that corporations are not 'churches,' not true 'religions', not 'spiritual' and no, corporations cannot possess soul (sorry).
And at the same time, the church is not a corporation---despite the fact that the mainline denominations have adopted management and hierarchical strategies which in fact gave birth to what we call 'modern business'. At any rate, the church that equals corporation is not the true 'church'...and if it were, we could say that the corporations in fact are the great churches based upon their philanthropic efforts, and their sway over human minds and hearts.
Hence, according to my logic, there is either one church which is 'corporate' or that the true church is not represented in organizations and hierarchical, land possessing entities, but is "from above", "not of this world", and "it bloweth where it listeth."
This was once a favorite theme for me. I argue that the software business assumes a "spiritual" PR...angels, demons, biblical names (Oracle, Prophet, Word, Genesis, Prodigy, etc...). And that it does present an earthly goal, and ideal to reach heaven from the powers of earth and it will most likely rule temporal matters, as once the Roman Catholic Church did (Inquisition=surveillance at work, monitoring of communication, generation of morality and codes of behavior (ethics), promotion or normalized views via TV drama which teach people how to react and think about all sorts of phenomena---the Church was actually more mellow in its inquisitorial styles). And the ultimate power of God from which true ethics emerges is forgotten, and painted over so that it is the corporations who bestow ethical goodness, love, support, care and blessings to the human race. Like churchgoers employees are spiritually linked to their organizations, and 'believe' in them. They fail to see where the company often takes every financial advantage of their allegiance (again like Catholicism), nickel and dime them on benefits, and expect praise and worship for paying them their due wages; meanwhile the employees are happy to be part of the team! They fail to see that no company has ever made a move that threaten their bottomline, hence never in fact met the minimum requirement for an ethical act in its true sense which is self-sacrifice, turning the other cheek, giving all that you have to give (once again the Church!). So, we have the newly emergent corporate religion on one side, the morally ambivalent Church Inc. on the other, and there is on the side a tiny little deposit of free people who realize that ethics cannot come from corporations, because a)they are soulless, and b)they are exclusively out for themselves (and if they can afford to give a little why not, it beats taxes)!
There is the old expression: The Emperor's New Clothes. This represents the modern corporations attempt to paint themselves as 'ethical' and can easily be done as long as no one recalls what 'ethics' means or studies ethics in any serious manner.
It should better be: The ethics of Little Red Riding Hood by the Wolf!
Ethics it should be remembered for thousands of years meant self-sacrifice---how it has morphed into these myriad details of codes and behavior modification I can only guess.
And at the same time, the church is not a corporation---despite the fact that the mainline denominations have adopted management and hierarchical strategies which in fact gave birth to what we call 'modern business'. At any rate, the church that equals corporation is not the true 'church'...and if it were, we could say that the corporations in fact are the great churches based upon their philanthropic efforts, and their sway over human minds and hearts.
Hence, according to my logic, there is either one church which is 'corporate' or that the true church is not represented in organizations and hierarchical, land possessing entities, but is "from above", "not of this world", and "it bloweth where it listeth."
This was once a favorite theme for me. I argue that the software business assumes a "spiritual" PR...angels, demons, biblical names (Oracle, Prophet, Word, Genesis, Prodigy, etc...). And that it does present an earthly goal, and ideal to reach heaven from the powers of earth and it will most likely rule temporal matters, as once the Roman Catholic Church did (Inquisition=surveillance at work, monitoring of communication, generation of morality and codes of behavior (ethics), promotion or normalized views via TV drama which teach people how to react and think about all sorts of phenomena---the Church was actually more mellow in its inquisitorial styles). And the ultimate power of God from which true ethics emerges is forgotten, and painted over so that it is the corporations who bestow ethical goodness, love, support, care and blessings to the human race. Like churchgoers employees are spiritually linked to their organizations, and 'believe' in them. They fail to see where the company often takes every financial advantage of their allegiance (again like Catholicism), nickel and dime them on benefits, and expect praise and worship for paying them their due wages; meanwhile the employees are happy to be part of the team! They fail to see that no company has ever made a move that threaten their bottomline, hence never in fact met the minimum requirement for an ethical act in its true sense which is self-sacrifice, turning the other cheek, giving all that you have to give (once again the Church!). So, we have the newly emergent corporate religion on one side, the morally ambivalent Church Inc. on the other, and there is on the side a tiny little deposit of free people who realize that ethics cannot come from corporations, because a)they are soulless, and b)they are exclusively out for themselves (and if they can afford to give a little why not, it beats taxes)!
There is the old expression: The Emperor's New Clothes. This represents the modern corporations attempt to paint themselves as 'ethical' and can easily be done as long as no one recalls what 'ethics' means or studies ethics in any serious manner.
It should better be: The ethics of Little Red Riding Hood by the Wolf!
Ethics it should be remembered for thousands of years meant self-sacrifice---how it has morphed into these myriad details of codes and behavior modification I can only guess.
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Four Strands
1.
In a Summer swelter
Lime green trees
Splinter with diamond light
Against the August breeze.
The sighing moon silhouettes
Black roses
Beneath your proud street.
Dusted sparrow dips
Her yellow beak
Into the fat pool.
Soppy, shifting greens lap
At the granite tub.
Trolley cars slink along Beacon Street.
2.
Tawny fields of Summer’s grass billow
The sky is big with fate
Heavy clouds roll on like ships of state.
Another day drifts away
With refreshing mists wetting
The asphalt below.
Adjusting dreams---
Shredding corporate schemes.
3.
Beneath the haloed orange glow
And on the forest floor
Near the blue rushing stream
Spins a circle dance:
‘la fete Automnale’
Fire in the night.
Words rise like fallen heroes
Who never falter,
Firemen
Tearing down the flaming walls
To bring the broken child
To the healing water.
So many words have fallen,
Are hoisted up again,
But not resuscitated.
They are given place,
Collected and bound,
Standing in rows,
Lining the walls
Of the memorial Library.
4.
Poor, pitiful pigeon waits
On the church stoop crumbs,
His battered milky wing conjures
Golden days
Of youth’s effervescent, shimmering.
His light flickers and fades
Late into this day
Cracked claw clinging to the clay---
Linger no more,
Away
I must away.
.
In a Summer swelter
Lime green trees
Splinter with diamond light
Against the August breeze.
The sighing moon silhouettes
Black roses
Beneath your proud street.
Dusted sparrow dips
Her yellow beak
Into the fat pool.
Soppy, shifting greens lap
At the granite tub.
Trolley cars slink along Beacon Street.
2.
Tawny fields of Summer’s grass billow
The sky is big with fate
Heavy clouds roll on like ships of state.
Another day drifts away
With refreshing mists wetting
The asphalt below.
Adjusting dreams---
Shredding corporate schemes.
3.
Beneath the haloed orange glow
And on the forest floor
Near the blue rushing stream
Spins a circle dance:
‘la fete Automnale’
Fire in the night.
Words rise like fallen heroes
Who never falter,
Firemen
Tearing down the flaming walls
To bring the broken child
To the healing water.
So many words have fallen,
Are hoisted up again,
But not resuscitated.
They are given place,
Collected and bound,
Standing in rows,
Lining the walls
Of the memorial Library.
4.
Poor, pitiful pigeon waits
On the church stoop crumbs,
His battered milky wing conjures
Golden days
Of youth’s effervescent, shimmering.
His light flickers and fades
Late into this day
Cracked claw clinging to the clay---
Linger no more,
Away
I must away.
.
Monday, December 06, 2004
Sunday, December 05, 2004
Thursday, December 02, 2004
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Hollidaysburg
Like a river so many faces have flown beneath the branches.
The fruit of the labor of birth and the travail
Meets the passing of time in my hometown.
To think of the proud glory
Draws a tear,
Not only for the illustrious,
McKibben, Holliday, Brua and Gromiller,
The Schmidhammers, Gildeas, and Rileys.
But for the little days of my youth:
Dysart Park, Corney’s and Highland Hall.
Like a dream now
A motley parade of anonymity
Along epitaph street,
Clumsy stone windows
With dusted, plastic flower bunch,
A wind wakens to muffled cadences of drums
At the Senior High;
September afternoons with cheerleading squads.
I remember Principal Collins at Hollidaysburg High
And Uncle Donkel but most of all, geography
With Mr. Hooper.
Here’s to Hooper’s Troopers and teachers like that!
Must every day succumb to the kaleidoscope of the setting sun
Flickering through the oaks
Then rise up again
With the mist that lifts from the sculpted fairways at Blairmont Club?
All of the early days give rise to newer structures
As Altoona looms,
Clattering down Logan Valley Boulevard
To Lakemont like a green jewel
From which the murky creek issues
Like a crushed finger.
We swam in that water (no one would believe it sanitary today)
And caught rainbow trout---
Yes, rainbow trout!
And tied a turtle to a tree.
When the creek flooded the turtle drown.
Summer acquiesces to Autumn,
The cicadas restless chatter soothes me
And the passion of the green leave recoils into the fragile dusty earth.
I see them now on my dreamstreets.
Corney awake to the day
With his little coffee can of ice,
toiling to proffer a Cherry Coke™
Hammering and picking as if this little drink
Were prepared with such care as Harry’s Martinis in Manhattan.
“I’ll take the latest issue of Mad Magazine and some bottle top candy and bubble yum,”
counting out the two dollars thirty eight cents in change from chores.
Dr. Keagy taps on my 8 year old chest,
Listening with his cold stethoscope,
And Mr. Rubbe, and Mr. Treese.
Can you see them now?
Mrs. McCauley with her April shrines.
I can hear her now:
“Go out ‘n pick some daffodils
for Mary.”
And ‘Hey you’ and ‘Come Here’ that’s how she called
her fat tabbycats.
The parade streams along Allegheny Street
Past the Courthouse, past Pete the Greek’s.
Do you remember Central School?
I do.
Staring from St. Michael’s across the street
To the fenced in play
I see Walter Brenner playing kickball during recess.
Pool hops at Blairmont,
All of the furniture in the pool.
Early morning chilled water
Swim practice with Dean Patterson
And Eileen Smithe, The Sheedy’s, Dave Book,
And Alan Kleiner’s immortal lunging butterfly stroke.
I can see this clearly now, and smell the chlorine in the aquamarine lapping water
As well as the subterranean locker room painted in pale blue.
Can you smell the pool too?
Others say that we have come so far as to be of memory devoid
So self-sufficient that we no longer need
To dream this dream.
What ever became of Burkey the bum?
(Father Vago once gave him $5 and furtively followed him into the
The Pipe Room Tavern, where he demanded it back!)
Does anyone really know what happens to bums?
Do they receive funerals? Does anyone care?
The parades down Allegheny Street
blaring the fire engines shrill horns
make me cry.
The time The Jolly Green Giant came to the A&P and the kids
Rammed a cart into his legs to see if he walked on stilts.
Officer O’Leary (Blinky) and the other officer----the entire Hollidaysburg police squad close in on a Halloween trick or treater who has pounded somebody's station wagon with eggs, or smashed a dozen jack o' lanterns.
8 Track cassettes: “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “American Pie”, Big John Riley on WFBG radio from the big city. “Garibaldi” and his spaghetti eating contest, I wanted so badly to win, never got a chance to participate---the runner-up ate too much and had to get sick right there in front of the radio audience.
Early Summer strawberry picking at Baronner’s and walking home with a sore back, a couple of dollars, a chance to buy a teaberry ice cream cone at The Meadow’s.
Then in late August when St. Mary’s is hot and steamy, and Father Mabon leaves the doors open, his cat walks straight up the aisle to the altar before communion, nobody makes a move because it is father’s beloved ‘Milky’ you should’ve seen the look on Fr. Vago’s face! He said more than once that “Father Mabon loves that damn cat more than he does people.” Maybe that is true.
Hollidaysburg is no better today. All of it is flown away like a tattered kite and life’s banner hides death’s slow march, the present tense has an unfair advantage, since it is alive and kicking, whereas each day has been thrown down like a bandage to decay, thousands of days deep.
In the face of all this today is a pale dream,
And I would dive blind into the dark murk of memory
If I could lay hold of that red rubber kickball
and play with Gary Hamilton
And trap the creek with Paul Murray,
The spear and the knife, the raccoon pelt,
Salting the squirrel skins…
Steaks, whiskey and pictures of women.
And to all of the present day Hollidaysburgers
I ask simply are you alive or dead?
As for me it is difficult to say,
The dead hold more life than the living,
The living deal death in forgetting,
New styles betray the world I recall.
The fruit of the labor of birth and the travail
Meets the passing of time in my hometown.
To think of the proud glory
Draws a tear,
Not only for the illustrious,
McKibben, Holliday, Brua and Gromiller,
The Schmidhammers, Gildeas, and Rileys.
But for the little days of my youth:
Dysart Park, Corney’s and Highland Hall.
Like a dream now
A motley parade of anonymity
Along epitaph street,
Clumsy stone windows
With dusted, plastic flower bunch,
A wind wakens to muffled cadences of drums
At the Senior High;
September afternoons with cheerleading squads.
I remember Principal Collins at Hollidaysburg High
And Uncle Donkel but most of all, geography
With Mr. Hooper.
Here’s to Hooper’s Troopers and teachers like that!
Must every day succumb to the kaleidoscope of the setting sun
Flickering through the oaks
Then rise up again
With the mist that lifts from the sculpted fairways at Blairmont Club?
All of the early days give rise to newer structures
As Altoona looms,
Clattering down Logan Valley Boulevard
To Lakemont like a green jewel
From which the murky creek issues
Like a crushed finger.
We swam in that water (no one would believe it sanitary today)
And caught rainbow trout---
Yes, rainbow trout!
And tied a turtle to a tree.
When the creek flooded the turtle drown.
Summer acquiesces to Autumn,
The cicadas restless chatter soothes me
And the passion of the green leave recoils into the fragile dusty earth.
I see them now on my dreamstreets.
Corney awake to the day
With his little coffee can of ice,
toiling to proffer a Cherry Coke™
Hammering and picking as if this little drink
Were prepared with such care as Harry’s Martinis in Manhattan.
“I’ll take the latest issue of Mad Magazine and some bottle top candy and bubble yum,”
counting out the two dollars thirty eight cents in change from chores.
Dr. Keagy taps on my 8 year old chest,
Listening with his cold stethoscope,
And Mr. Rubbe, and Mr. Treese.
Can you see them now?
Mrs. McCauley with her April shrines.
I can hear her now:
“Go out ‘n pick some daffodils
for Mary.”
And ‘Hey you’ and ‘Come Here’ that’s how she called
her fat tabbycats.
The parade streams along Allegheny Street
Past the Courthouse, past Pete the Greek’s.
Do you remember Central School?
I do.
Staring from St. Michael’s across the street
To the fenced in play
I see Walter Brenner playing kickball during recess.
Pool hops at Blairmont,
All of the furniture in the pool.
Early morning chilled water
Swim practice with Dean Patterson
And Eileen Smithe, The Sheedy’s, Dave Book,
And Alan Kleiner’s immortal lunging butterfly stroke.
I can see this clearly now, and smell the chlorine in the aquamarine lapping water
As well as the subterranean locker room painted in pale blue.
Can you smell the pool too?
Others say that we have come so far as to be of memory devoid
So self-sufficient that we no longer need
To dream this dream.
What ever became of Burkey the bum?
(Father Vago once gave him $5 and furtively followed him into the
The Pipe Room Tavern, where he demanded it back!)
Does anyone really know what happens to bums?
Do they receive funerals? Does anyone care?
The parades down Allegheny Street
blaring the fire engines shrill horns
make me cry.
The time The Jolly Green Giant came to the A&P and the kids
Rammed a cart into his legs to see if he walked on stilts.
Officer O’Leary (Blinky) and the other officer----the entire Hollidaysburg police squad close in on a Halloween trick or treater who has pounded somebody's station wagon with eggs, or smashed a dozen jack o' lanterns.
8 Track cassettes: “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “American Pie”, Big John Riley on WFBG radio from the big city. “Garibaldi” and his spaghetti eating contest, I wanted so badly to win, never got a chance to participate---the runner-up ate too much and had to get sick right there in front of the radio audience.
Early Summer strawberry picking at Baronner’s and walking home with a sore back, a couple of dollars, a chance to buy a teaberry ice cream cone at The Meadow’s.
Then in late August when St. Mary’s is hot and steamy, and Father Mabon leaves the doors open, his cat walks straight up the aisle to the altar before communion, nobody makes a move because it is father’s beloved ‘Milky’ you should’ve seen the look on Fr. Vago’s face! He said more than once that “Father Mabon loves that damn cat more than he does people.” Maybe that is true.
Hollidaysburg is no better today. All of it is flown away like a tattered kite and life’s banner hides death’s slow march, the present tense has an unfair advantage, since it is alive and kicking, whereas each day has been thrown down like a bandage to decay, thousands of days deep.
In the face of all this today is a pale dream,
And I would dive blind into the dark murk of memory
If I could lay hold of that red rubber kickball
and play with Gary Hamilton
And trap the creek with Paul Murray,
The spear and the knife, the raccoon pelt,
Salting the squirrel skins…
Steaks, whiskey and pictures of women.
And to all of the present day Hollidaysburgers
I ask simply are you alive or dead?
As for me it is difficult to say,
The dead hold more life than the living,
The living deal death in forgetting,
New styles betray the world I recall.
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