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y'all drive me to drink

Ohkeedoke.  I'm a digest subscriber so I haven't read much of what's been
said today, and I hope I'm not too far off base.  But somebody told me
I'm a-gettin' flamed.  And somebody (doesn't matter who) wrote to me, "i
am a STRONG believer in Christ as my personal lord & saviour.  for you to
make generalisations that christians don't smoke, is just plain
ludicrous."  Which indicates that I have quite possibly been numbered
amongst the heretics.  Or amongst the reactionaries?  Or both?  Who am I?
 (Jean Valjean.)

Umm.  Umm.  Anybody ever feel like suddenly you became Kyle and didn't
mean to?  

Lookee here y'all.  Read the original post, and please note the fact that
the sentence in question, re OtR drummers and toebackee, is a serious run
on.  Contrast with rest of post. Some sort of tone change there, eh?  Now
again, use your knowledge of the history of this list and the fisticuffs
that it has had over  the Otr-is-or-ain't-Christian issue.  Obviously
unwisely, I alluded to this in the sentence in question, just, I thought,
for a couple of eye rolls or giggles.  Note also the ironic twist in the
end of the line: something like "so maybe he got saved," which I
suggested would be indicated by the fact that he *left the band*.  Also,
the wording  makes the silly assumption that smokers cannot be believers.
 Thus in one sentence I ridculously claim/assume that OtR both is full of
Christians and aims to be a Christian band and is also a band that
encourages what I ironically imply is the most non-Christian of behaviors
but is actually just smokin', something that listies who love our band
that cusses now and then aren't likely to condemn as necessarily
un-Christian (even if it is unhealthy).  Seriously, friends, do we have
*any* losties who think of Christianity in such absolutely simple terms? 
Smokefree = Jesusfull?  I had hoped that this would undermine the whole
sentence and mark it as humor.  If nothing else I had hoped that my use
of the fundamentalist shorthand, "saved," would cue some sort of giggle
track.  And if that didn't work I had hoped that the fact that it was so
completely unthoughtful would mark it as different from other things I've
written, even recently.  But NAY.  P'raps I am not so thoughtful.

Last winter I wrote a satire doggeral poem about the opening of a new
coffee shop in town, which was read at the Eng dept annual doggeral
contest.  We needed (no, wanted) this new shop like nobody's bidnis, and
the old shop was really, really poorly run.  So I wrote a poem about how
I would refuse to go to the new shop because of how much I loved all
these bad things in the old shop.  And as the poem goes on it becomes
clear that the narrator I have created is a dunce.  What better way to
undermine a message, Jon Swift taught me, that to put it in the mouth of
a dunce?  A lot of people got it.  But I was really vexed to see some
people later in the new shop who said things like, "Wow!  I never thought
I'd see you in here after that poem!"  And they were serious.  And from
this I did not learn, apparently, that people don't get satire, or ironic
tone.  There are always people like the sophomore who comes to lit class
outraged--outraged!--that Jon Swift has recommended the eating of li'l
Irish babies.  People didn't get Swift in the 18th century, either, and
he was much better at this sort of thing than me.  Eh, bien.  

And so.  Let me clarify.  I think drinkin', smokin', cussin', and dancin'
have all gotten a bad rap from certain Christian movements over the
centuries.  I think they can even all--all--be edifying.  I think, like a
good liberal-thinkin' Christian, that the problems with these things come
not from their existence but from excesses in practice.  I think that
judging Christians based on whether or not they do these things is silly
and sometimes wicked.  I like hanging out in bars.  

I leap tall buildings in a single bound.  I'm a slut with a mission.

Hopefully, I have over-responded, but the suggestion that I was maligning
Jesus made my blood boil, as I, too, am I very firm believer.

i have eaten the plums,

Fred
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