Get Down, Get Down

What on earth is going on in Al Gore’s head?

Conservatives all said he was nuts back in 2000, when he tried to run George Bush off the debate platform. Are we being proven right today?

The massage story is horrendous. It suggests the man has completely lost his mind. The lust, I can understand. The alleged whining and groping and the “second chakra” reference sound symptomatic of heavy-duty mental illness.

Maybe none of it is true.

I don’t know how to react to the story. Christians are not supposed to listen to gossip, and we are not supposed to pass it on. But is it gossip when it involves a major political figure who has power over our lives?

It occurred to me yesterday that no matter how wacky we accuse the left of being, we nearly always turn out to be understating the case. This is literally true. On the other hand, a Republican was forced out of office for going to a sex club with his own wife, and another was crucified for saying the nonsense word “macaca.” It’s like we view Republican sins with a microscope (and Photoshop and audio dubbing and LSD, if necessary), but when the offender is liberal, we turn the microscope around so everything shrinks down to nothing.

Gore is now claiming he’s innocent. Maybe he is. But the accuser says she has a certain type of physical evidence which is irrefutible and impossible to fake. What will he say if she turns out to be telling the truth? Lies have a lot of power, but there are some problems they can’t fix. He lied about the polar bears and all that other environmental stuff, and he protected his lies by shutting out the press. You can’t shut a grand jury out. You can’t tell a prosecutor you’re not taking calls.

Some public figures get so full of themselves, they essentially force the press to go after them. Like John Wayne Gacy taunting the cops. The press will work very hard to protect a liberal, but eventually, they get fed up. It becomes a matter of pride with them. They start to feel used. Then you end up with Tom Fiedler waiting in the bushes to catch Gary Hart and Donna Rice. Or the John Edwards story. To a liberal politician, the press is like a forgiving parole officer. Sooner or later, they get out the cuffs and slap you down.

If the press gives up and realizes it has to eat Al Gore, things could get very messy. There is so much candy in the pinata, it will be raining for years. When you’re on top, no one will touch you, but once you fall, everyone has a dime to drop on you. All the cheesy things Gore has done over the decades will fall on him like the bail of a rat trap.

It is a sorry spectacle. Of course, we should pray he gets right with God and gets past this.

Things are going well here. Guitar practice is going great, and I am learning about amps and effects. I’ve decided to keep my cheap Chinese Epiphone, and I’m considering getting a pedalboard.

I’m frustrated by the left-hand work. I’m studying Fretboard Logic, and I’m studying the electric blues, and I’m getting into all kinds of stretches I never had to do when playing bluegrass. The progress is actually pretty fast, but because I have to have the stretches and bars down before I can really accomplish anything, I sometimes feel like I’m stuck in hardening cement. Thank God, the flatpicking is going quicker.

I’m starting to wonder if the blues is appropriate for worship music. I’m beginning to believe it is. Satan took sex, which is very close to God’s heart, and he turned it into something God’s people tend to malign. Maybe he did the same thing with blue notes and rhythm. The word “blues,” itself, is a deception. Blues music tends to be extremely upbeat and joyful, but because of the name and some of the lyrics, people think of it as depressing music. Go to a B.B. King concert and see if you see anyone sad in the crowd. WAKE UP. Labels don’t create reality. You could call it “pineapple-flavored music,” but it wouldn’t make it true.

I heard a blues worship tune in my head this morning. I may write it down. It would pep things up between bland tunes where people wave their arms and murmur “You are good oh how good wow you are good” over and over.