"Don't Forget The Nazz"
The Nazz
for release 03-28-05
Washington D.C.
Easter is the only day in the year when this writer is anywhere near what can be described as religious. It's the one day of the year when I try to suspend my native skepticism and at least listen to the story of The Resurrection and while I can't literally believe it because it is beyond the limits of my credulity, I at least can appreciate the beauty and the hope represented by the myth. It's a great story. The Nazz taking on the big D and winning.
So, this is the day when we celebrate Life's triumph over Death. It's when Spring overtakes Winter. It is the day that we can imagine thumbing our noses at the Reaper. Sprouts roll the rocks aside and emerge from the grave of night. It is a day that we can accept that anything is possible. An illiterate carpenter from Nazareth can raise the dead and penetrate the grave and put all your sins on his credit card, and Terri Shiavo can suddenly sit up, after fifteen years in a persistent vegetative state and ask for a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, or George Bush could tell us the truth once upon a time, it could happen. On this day I'll even believe in the Easter Bunny.
I used to make a tradition of consuming some psychedelic substance on Easter, a sacramental bud of cactus or a tender purple corpus christi mushroom or an amber windowpane. It was my method of religious foreplay. It got me in the mood to consider the big questions. These days I contemplate the miracles of emergence and rebirth and continuation, the delicate intersection of possibilities that allows for life to be more persistent than death.
But I don't think I could handle an acid trip this Easter. There is too much sanctimony in the air. That always bums me out.
I am not anti-religious. If you want to believe in the Shroud of Turin or full immersion Baptism or that spacemen are sending us psychic messages or that the stars rule our fates or that it's a sin to eat cows or that preachers can heal the sick with one hand and pass the collection plate with the other, I support your right to do it. I once worked in an occult bookstore and one thing I learned from that experience was that no matter how crack-pot a religion or belief might be, there is always going to be someone out there who is going to read the book, buy the t-shirt, subscribe to the newsletter, go to the meetings and in general swallow the whole scam hook, line, sinker and purple cool-aid. The Poet's Eye sees that most of us have a deep seated need to believe in something.
The world is conquered, not with great armies, but with great ideas. The world's great religions are called the world's great religions because no matter how mired in dogma and myth and ceremony they may be, they still contain great ideas. But here lies the dilemma. When a teacher begins expounding great ideas, pretty soon he develops a fan-base. Then he needs a fan-club and a president of his fan-club and bodyguards and puplicists and thus the bureaucracy begins to accrue. Do you see what I mean? I don't care if you are the Son of God or the King of Pop or the Sultan of Swat or Colonel Sanders, if your act is successful, then at some point your message will not be coming from your lips but from the lips of lawyers and intermediaries and spokesmen, people like Johnny Cochran and Scott McClellan and Saul of Tarsus, and the essence of the original teaching is submerged in organizational minutia. At that level we're not talking about forgiveness and compassion and love of life and good fried chicken, we're talking about burning heretics and whether marriage is between a man and a woman or a priest and a boy or whether abortion or Wal-Mart is the bigger sin.
The quickest way to kill a good idea, is to make an organization out of it. Take Freedom for instance. It's a good idea in principle, just like Christianity. But somewhere along the way, even pristine ideas like 'love thy neighbor' and 'liberty and justice for all' have become secondary to the means of their distribution. Evangelical Democracy might be an easy idea to sell in the Red States, but in the Middle East it looks like a neo-crusade. From their point of view, the infidel is invading Muslim land for the purpose of stealing oil in the same way that the Spanish Catholics stole Inca and Aztec gold, under the banner of saving the heathens. In this case the Gospel is Democracy.
Happy Easter.
But I'm gonna put a cat on you
was the coolest, grooviest, swingin'est, wailin'est,
strongest, swingin'est cat that ever stomped on this jumpin' green sphere.
And they called this here cat "The Nazz."
He was a carpenter kittie.
Now, The Nazz was the kind of a cat that come on so cool
and so groovey and so with-it
that when he laid it down,
WHA-BOM, it stayed there.--
The Nazz
Richard "Lord" Buckley, 1906-1960
