Supplementing the Record I
What's been left out? To begin, the conflation of Jesus and POTUS on 1/6
Welcome to Paralipomena—an adjunct to The Book of Sean M. P.—for Wednesday, January 8th, Gregorian year 2025. I come to you from California Burning, where the air quality is an unhealthy 187 degrees. (Please note that neither the Fahrenheit scale nor the Celsius one applies in this regard.)
This past Monday, 1/6, marked the Christian feast of Epiphany, an English word derived from the Greek term for “manifestation” (thank you, Britannica—including for the darling image!).
In the good ole U. S. of A.—a country which many people assume is the center of the universe, contrary to all known physical law—the day also marked the certification of the 2024 Electoral College vote during a joint session of Congress.
It took me till Epiphany 2020 to put two and two together: That this ceremonial affair in Washington every four years matches the official recognition of the Messiah according to Christian theology.
And that recognition—represented by Jesus’s baptism and his audience with the three wise men, among other events—also marks the end of the Christmas season (as Starbucks knows, presumably following Shakespeare).
I don’t know about you, my friend, but I’ve been spooked by this knowledge ever since I discovered it.
An aside: Funny how learning changes your being. On that note, happy heavenly birthday to David Bowie, born on this day in 1947. Fun fact about me: One time during my stint as an editorial assistant at Interview, I hung up—accidentally—on Iman. Fortunately she called back and I successfully connected her to Ingrid on the second take.
A second aside: Another fun fact about me: My late nana, Josephine Henrietta Schwartz Kennedy, connected calls as a switchboard operator for AT&T for decades.
Now, where was I? Oh, right: Why I’ve been spooked by the conflation of the Son of God with the Founding Father: Because the separation of church and state is supposed to be foundational to the enterprise of American politics, as enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—and for which none other than my bête noire, Thomas Jefferson, lobbied.
Not only that: favoring a Christian origin story obviously excludes other faith traditions from equal status, again in contravention of the Constitution.
Maybe that’s why churches, libraries, and schools are ablaze here in Southern California, a region that once served as a model for the Jewish settlement of historic Palestine.
Speaking of Judeo-Christian nationalism, that great Judeo-Christian head of state Joe Robinette Biden (don’t let the door hit you on the way out, pal) awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to nineteen people this past weekend, fourteen of whom (by my count) showed up to receive the honor.
And this set of commendations followed the last round of Kennedy Center Honors, at which additional people I like and admire were recognized.
But I don’t like and admire them anymore because I don’t understand why they can’t see that Israeli nationalism mirrors American nationalism.
Indeed, I don’t understand why they can’t see that Palestinians are people too.
Because—like my namesake Paul before me—once I see something I can’t unsee it.
And what I see are willful ignorance, hypocrisy, and self-interest.
Just look at Hillary—whom I interviewed once, right here in the County of Angels—looking downright Republican in Nancy Reagan red.
How anyone could tell her apart from Liz Cheney, whom Biden also recently recognized, I have no idea.
Certainly Kamala was snow-blind in this regard.
As many people have pointed out since Luigi Mangione became a star, the most gobsmacking omission from last year’s presidential cycle was any talk of health care.
Forgive me for being reminded of “Hillarycare”—the Clintons’ reform of health care that wasn’t.
Here’s Wikipedia—the best first draft of history there is, I’ve found—on that controversial and failed effort:
But that’s not the description of the initiative I first encountered.
No.
Instead, the first Google result after I typed in “Hillary Clinton health care reform” was the following bit, via the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum:
My knowledge of SEO practices isn’t as strong as it could be, but I hazard a guess that this description was manually inputted, not automated from the text on the actual webpage, which is substantially different:
At any rate, though you can challenge the word “goal” in the sentence featured in the first exhibit—admittedly it complicates the meaning of the entire grammatical unit—a reasonable takeaway is that former president Bill Clinton succeeded in having “a comprehensive national health care reform bill passed within the first hundred days of his administration.”
Thus Leader of the Free World Copy 42 not only kept his campaign promise to reform health care but also played the historic role of the president who got the seemingly impossible done.
Of course that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Which is my point.
Propaganda comes in more than 50 shades of grey, only two of which are “disinformation” and “misinformation.”
PICKING UP
At the end of last week I published my latest origin story, in which I detailed my historical geographic connection to Panama. At the beginning of this week Trump started talking about repossessing the Panama Canal again. Though he’s spoken about this desire before, the new attention from the media was just in time following the death of Jimmy Carter, the president who undertook the end of U.S. control of the canal.
Meanwhile, I saw nary a reference to Trump’s past involvement in Panama.
And by the way, I don’t know why anyone takes this nonsense from Copy 45-cum-47 seriously. For example, today I unfollowed Zeteo on IG after this ridiculous media hit by Mehdi in a mind-meld with Joy Reid.
Why air Trump’s junk?
MSNBC breathes it to survive, I know, but why does Mehdi have to inhale?
It’s like, choose a lane, dude.
Either hold the media accountable or don’t.
BOTH/AND
In another update on fake news, the lawyer for Justin Baldoni and company, Bryan Freedman, appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show to further the group’s smear campaign against Blake Lively. The alliance with Kelly—whom Freedman has also represented—emphasizes the reactionary politics at play in this story.
Nate’s post today and my professional experience as a fact-checker at New York magazine—in which role I regularly consulted with the same attorneys who reviewed The New York Post’s famed “Page Six” column for potential litigation—remind that the determination of truth has always been a matter of individual responsibility, perhaps now more than ever.
That’s why it was so easy for me to see through Team Baldoni’s lawfare.
Presumably the Times piece was lawyered as well, but I’m too fatigued to double-check because of the real news I just saw about the fire situation here, where the Palisades inferno is now the largest in L.A. en historia.
WILDCARD
On the matter of politics—whether political or cultural—this photo of Marjorie Taylor Greene on the phone with Susie Wiles (captured during the Speaker fight) amused me:
In part it amused me because it’s such an obvious giveaway, and in part it amused me because—as ever—context matters. While Taylor Greene may be a bigwig in MAGA Land and a power broker in the Capitol, outside those precincts she’s a spineless bully who can’t take a joke.
I mean, just look at how uncomfortable she was at Reagan National Airport last May (and stick around to hear her interlocutor’s testimony to Roland):
To me the gap between these two realities—the fun house of Washington on the one hand, and the reality of everyday social relations on the other—reflects the larger decline of the political class in the face (literally) of everyone else who can give emperors with no clothes like MTG a taste of their own medicine and then broadcasting it to the public.
Indeed, the more people hold our unaccountables accountable in this fashion, the more things might change. (Recall it’s Ziggy Stardust’s HBD today.)
WHAT I’M READING
Finally for this number of Paralipomena, Chris Corsini recommended fellow healer and helping professional Brown Intuitive on the ’Gram recently. I loved the video Chris reposted and I’ve been loving everything else I’ve seen on her feed.
In particular, I was excited to see her reference Don Miguel Ruiz’s framework of the “four agreements” from his self-help classic The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (1997), which I’ve been meaning to read.
The Google Books preview of The Four Agreements opens to the second page of the first chapter, but I’m going to quote the first four paragraphs of that chapter, titled “Domestication and the Dream of the Planet.” They immediately captivated me and perfectly reflect the book’s “vibe.”
What you are seeing and hearing right now is nothing but a dream. You are dreaming right now in this moment. You are dreaming with the brain awake.
Dreaming is the main function of the mind, and the mind dreams twenty-four hours a day. It dreams when the brain is awake, and it also dreams when the brain is asleep. The difference is that when the brain is awake, there is a material frame that makes us perceive things in a linear way. When we go to sleep we do not have the frame, and the dream has the tendency to change constantly.
Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity. The dream of the planet includes all of society’s rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events, and holidays. [Emphasis his.]
We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams. The outside dream has so many rules that when a new human is born, we hook the child’s attention and introduce these rules into his or her mind. The outside dream uses Mom and Dad, the schools, and religion to teach us how to dream.
I love this passage for so many reasons but especially for how it connects to the two texts that frame the broadest scope of my creative nonfiction project, Química Divina: A Testimony of Sexual—and Spiritual—Healing: from the composition course I taught on stop-and-frisk back in 2013 at the City University of New York to the novel I’m currently reading by my fellow Aquarian Norman Mailer, Harlot’s Ghost (1991).
And on that cliffhanger I’ll have to leave it for now, my friends.
Ciao for now,
Sean M. P.