Jesus Dreams of Egypt

 A strange thought occurred to me. 

About when You were in Egypt. When Joseph and Mary took You and fled to Egypt because of Herod and the massacre of the innocents. When You were there, on Earth, in the flesh, in the form of a small Child, in Egypt - what did You think about?

I mean, there You were, a helpless Child in the place You once...just, ravaged with plagues and death. More than once, actually. Egypt felt Your wrath many times. Maybe not always in the form of frogs and hailstones, but always in death. But that first time, the big one, the time everybody remembers, when You slew the firstborn of Egypt...and now, there You were, kept safe, harbored like a fugitive, by the people You terrorized.

It made me think about myself. We're like that here. You know that. I thought of You as a Child, stirring on a bed of straw or something, dreaming...did You ever dream of Egypt? Did You ever dream of when You turned the river to blood? 

Did You think about it when You were wide awake? Maybe when You were playing in a field or something. Maybe You saw some place, some barren little patch, and remembered some Egyptian child You struck down on that spot a thousand years before?

I thought about myself, like I said. And how You have the divine right, the sovereignty, to absolutely obliterate me if You saw fit. Just like You had the right to drown Pharaoh's army. Just like You had the right to slay the firstborn. You give power and You take it away, and You had the right to send the Persians and anybody else You saw fit to conquer Egypt. 

And there You were, snug and secure, safe from that madman Herod, safe in Egypt. Of all places. Knowing You'd broken them in pieces so many times. Knowing someday somebody might say You were the madman.

I think of Your right to destroy. I think of Your right to destroy me. Not just my body, but to send me to hell. I know they say I'm not supposed to say that, that You send people to hell. They tell me I'm supposed to say, "people send themselves to hell when  they choose to reject Jesus." And I get it, but it just makes it sound like I'm apologizing for You. Like I'm apologizing for the whole idea of hell. But I just can't bring myself to believe You're wrong. There are plenty of people long dead who it would make me very upset to know they're not in hell right now. 

So I don't apologize for You. And if You're not wrong, then You wouldn't be wrong to harden my heart and abandon me to evil. To just stop giving me strength, to cut off all Your help. 

The Calvinists like to talk about it a lot. About how You "predestine" some people for hell. Like they don't ever have a chance. I don't think I agree. But I know You'd have the sovereign right to do such a thing. 

I'd dread telling the Calvinists I think they're right. Knowing how they are, they'd probably tell me, "yeah we already know."

A guy told me once that when You drowned Pharaoh's army, the angels rejoiced, but You rebuked them. You told the angels that the Israelites could rejoice, because the Egyptians had tried to destroy them, but that You, You didn't want to rejoice over drowning the army - they were people You'd created, people You'd given life. And You mourned having to destroy them. 

Is that true? Or is it just some extra-Biblical thing, like a fable? I like to think it's true. After all it, it does fit You. You mourned a lot. You mourned on the mountains by Yourself, You mourned when they killed John the Baptist, You mourned when Lazarus was dead. 

And You mourned on the cross. Talk about sovereign choices. You chose to suffer and die for me. For everybody, even for Egypt. 

Did You weep while You slept on Your bed of straw? Did You dream of how many Egyptians You'd destroyed, and it knotted up Your guts, Your very human guts, to dream of those slain firstborn? Did You mourn when You woke up from the dreams, knowing what You'd do when You were grown up, knowing what they'd do to You on that cross, knowing it was the only way You'd never have to brutalize anybody again?

Unless, like I said, You send them to hell for rejecting You. In Egypt, did You dream about everybody, Egyptian, Jew, Gentile, that someday You'd destroy in hell? Did You dream of someone somewhere two thousand years later, screaming at the sky that You don't have any right? 

What did You dream? I wonder. But I know I don't really want to know. 

I'd go mad if I knew the things You had to bear in Your dreams.

Poem/Prose: "A Sight To Behold"

Yesterday was Christmas, and the king was in one of his moods. He lashed out and struck the archbishop on the head. The archbishop smiled to himself as he escaped through the corridor. He took it in stride, because it happens every day.

The king then took to the balcony to declare, for the fifth time this month, that he vowed to cut off the heads of all the court jesters; he claimed the jingling of the bells on their shoes were codes sent to the ambassador of Spain. He raved from his balcony for hours on end, as kings do when they go mad in old age.

Something happened in the Low Countries yesterday. A handful of peasants are weeping for Rachel and her children, for they are no more. 

What happened must be truly unspeakable - the king's decree is all anyone is talking about today, though they've heard it so many times before. 

They take Rachel and her children in stride, because it happens every day. But the king is fat, a jester himself in diamonds, as kings become when they go mad in old age. It's a sight to behold.

MLK Had a Dream - Not a Magic Spell

(EDIT, January 20, 2025: I hope this blog is re-read on the day we inaugurate a President who was literally endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, and who did nothing to disavow that endorsement.)

Each time an act of racial injustice or controversy erupts in America, a certain type of people will look at the chaos and fury of the protests and claim, "Dr. King would not approve. They should be more like Dr. King."

We often emptily invoke MLK's name in an effort to suggest racism isn't as big a deal as people think. We make him to be the great crusader who quashed racism, that the "I Have a Dream" speech was the magic spell that cured bigotry forever. We tell ourselves these things not out of reverence for Dr. King, but so we don't have to face the fact that racism and oppression are still very real and powerful monsters. We tell ourselves racism in modern America is an invention of the liberal media, or some other such boogeyman, designed to divide us. 

So, when protests turn violent, no matter who's at fault, we use a cliche we've invented that goes: "be like Martin Luther King!" 

Yet we have no idea what we mean by that. If it simply means, "be more peaceful and you'll cure racism," our ignorance is blatant as we forget that King, a peaceful activist himself, met his end in an act of racial violence - proving racism did not end at "Free at last, free at last..."

Poem: "Rebel Scum"

I searched the bars for my friend Billy Yank -

Maggie had been missing for days, and he might

know where to find her if he could only think.

I averted my gaze from the dancers and when 

I saw my blue bellied friend, I went to beg him

for answers. But to my horror, before Billy could

even belch, I saw beside him Jefferson Davis 

himself. 

"Billy Yank, you're in Union blue, in the sight 

of unbelievers! Chumming with a traitor in full 

public view, buying bourbon for the grayest of

Gray deceivers!" 

I dragged Billy to the stall, Jeff Davis not 

seeming to notice me at all; Billy threw up 

on my shoes and I reminded him again of

his sin, and that he wore the Union blue.  

"Captain, calm your fuse" Billy replied, "Old Jeff 

and I are both patrons here. We're just talking 

Predestination; who am I to refuse such sincere 

conversation?"

"He's Rebel scum," I insisted,

"his ears are deaf and dumb to reason -

he's Mississippi's son, unrepentant of his

treason."

"We're both Rebels too, you and me,"

Billy slurred; "we were born in Alabama

amongst that damnable Rebel herd. Our fathers

owned the men we died to set free. The 

only difference is," Billy wiped his bleeding 

mouth, and fell to the floor, "when Cain broke

loose in the South, we were gambling in

Baltimore."

I was indignant; I had no time for rebuke, 

especially by a man I'd once defended, 

now covered in fluid and puke.

"Either you know where Maggie's gone,

or you don't," I said real flat. "I've got to find

her fast." Billy Yank shook his head before 

he breathed his last, and that was that.

At HQ I shook off what Billy said. 

I'm no Rebel, I was born no such

thing; I would much rather be dead and 

swallowed by muck and mud, would

much rather hang, than admit there's 

treason in my blood.

I'll prove it any day  

I'll submit to 23 & Me

and provide my DNA, I told myself;

Then everyone would see I'm more

pure a patriot than Abraham Lincoln himself.

Poem: "True Crime"

"He was a slob. Did you ever see him eat? Starving children could fill their bellies with the food that ended up on his beard and his clothes. Dogs would gather to watch him eat. I've never understood gluttony. But I hate it. I hated that about you. He enjoyed disgusting people - being disgusting, the thrill of offending people and making them uncomfortable. He was despicable. He will not be missed."

-The Razor's Edge (1985)

Truth be told, you were despicable, Uncle Jack

Yet you cannot be replaced

You'll never come home, you'll never come back

The earth will soon forget

the shadows in your face.

I'll not pretend you were cavalier

I'll not pretend you were great

Your life was riddled with chances blown,

you left disgust in your wake

But your life was not your own,

it was not yours to take.

I wish I'd been there with you

in the empty Hotel Barringer

I could have listened to your sordid blues

and convinced you to drop your derringer

You were Jack the Terrible

You were no doubt insane

But you cannot be replaced

Your life was precious all the same.

When your friends drifted away,

ran away,

friends, the only thing a broken man has,

You said life was like prison, like Alcatraz

San Quentin, the Green Mile -

you hated to wake each day

To be born, you said, was to break into jail

To be born, you said, was to sail to Guantanamo Bay

But I insist you should have stayed

We were both decked in orange, locked behind bars

True crime is all the rage these days

You and me, alone and loathsome,

we could have been documentary stars. 

Poem: "To a Friend in Hell"

When you got there, did a one-eyed ferryman give you a tour?
Did he call it the River Styx? Do you breathe air?
I guess that's what keeps it warm. Do they stick you with needles
and make you do tricks?
Me, they just gently cuffed me,
gave me Thorazine and drove me away
in an unmarked car, for my own
protection they said. I pretended
it was a limousine, and the hospital lights
and pity confections were Hollywood
in my head.

But you, when you got there, did you see
anybody we know? Can you see anybody's
face at all? Are you alone in a cell and
pecked at by crows? Do you get
passes on Sunday to purgatory? Do they
make you watch one-woman shows off
Broadway? Is Andrew Jackson there?
Is my uncle Mike?
Do you get treated fair? Did anybody at
the gates feel sorry when they told you
what the routine was like?
Me, I just lost an ear to a wrestler named
Beulah Storm, because I said women are
ladies; you don't say that anymore, or
they make you confess to NPR how sorry
you are and beg them not to take you to
Hades.

Have you met Hitler yet? Do they string you
up for a demon dogs' dinner? I feel stupid
asking, but did you forget? Do you ever
think of me? We were both sinners, remember?
I think about you all the time, and how I
wish you were free. Everybody asks me
how you are, and I lie and say you're on
Cloud Nine. I tell them you were rewarded
for protesting the war with Edwin Starr
and you're playing a harp and feeling fine.

Before they take you to netherworld N.A.
I just want you to know I tried. The doctors
in Hollywood in my head remind me how
I told you not to go away. I'll always wish
we were together like before, on gurneys
side by side, though they say you're not
worth it anymore. Maybe I'll recognize you,
you'll say something strange and slightly off
and I'll be able to tell. Maybe you'll hear
my nasty hacking cough and remember me,
if you ever leave hell.

The Forgotten Murder of Alberta King

Bafflingly, few Americans realize that Alberta King - mother of Martin Luther King, Jr - was shot to death just six years after her son, as she sat her Atlanta church's organ, on June 30, 1974. She was 69 years old. Her killer was Marcus Chenault, a member of an extremist wing of the Black Hebrew Israelites. When I first learned of this event, I was stunned that I hadn't previously known it. Upon reading of this murder, I assumed that the heinous nature of the act, and its high-profile victim, would have seared it into American consciousness as much as the assassination of her son in 1968.

In the wake of the chaos that's erupted (that is, simply re-awoken from its troubled, fitful, one-eyed sleep) in the past two weeks after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, I think I've figured out why the murder of Alberta King is not a more widely known crime, unjustly relegated to an obscure footnote in the history of American race relations.

Every time a high-profile injustice is committed against a Black person, and the unsolved issue of racial oppression again rises in heated debate, violence, or social uprising, there are invariably a vocal number of Americans who dismiss racism as a dying issue. There are countless people who, whether too cowardly, too weak, or too deluded to face such a remaining struggle, have developed the revisionist notion that, with two events, racism in America was forever destroyed. Those two events being:
the Emancipation Proclamation, and the "I Have a Dream" speech.

Any further escalation of tensions or oppression is labeled by these kinds of thinkers as liberal agitation designed by some unseen blue-haired septum-pierced boogeyman out to divide the country. And to prove their point, these people will almost always quote from Martin Luther King's famous speech. They will cherry-pick their favorite lines or exalt the speech as if it were a magic spell Dr. King cast on the country that forever ended racism.

Despite the fact that King was later shot and killed - by a racist.

And it's in the recent inevitable rekindling of these revisions to history that I've realized why the murder of Alberta King is such an obscure event in the grand picture of racism in America.
It's the same reason so many white people often fail to mention her son's murder - simply put, it doesn't fit their narrative. That narrative being that Dr. King crushed all prejudice with his marches and his speeches, therefore there's no need to talk about it anymore, not again, never.

The addition of Alberta King's murder to her son's story is too awkward of a detail, too lengthy and dark of an afterword. The story of Martin Luther King works better, revisionists may reason, if it ends panning away from his lifeless body on that balcony in Memphis to an epitaph of hope, despite his murder. A story is strange when there are too many more events to absorb after the climax. The flow of the story is affected. Maybe the shooting of Alberta King dashes the hope otherwise found in the coda to the life story of her son. It's too painful. It rends the heart. It's a reminder we're too fragile to take, a thought we're too ashamed to consider: that a mother's death at the hands of racial madness would suggest the work for which her son died was left incomplete, despite how amazing his work truly was - a telling sign that even with all that the Civil Rights Movement accomplished, minorities are still blatantly oppressed in the United States.

We've left the murder of Alberta King as a footnote. We might even have the audacity to say, "but she was shot by another Black person, therefore it's not the same kind of racism." But her violent death, like the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, must be remembered as another bloody and horrific day in the history of American race relations. We must unearth this woman's death from the archives to which we've relegated it, and display it as it is - a glaring reminder that racial division and the bloodshed it causes is alive and well, breathing fire, no matter how many MLK quotes we handle with carelessness once every January, twice every February.