new to the blogroll is shakespeare's sister, an intelligent and insightful political blog based out of bloomington indiana. there was some delay in adding it, as i struggled with whether to add it to "politiblogs" or "hoosierblogs"... eventually i decided on the former, as the blog's focus is on national politics and there isn't much actual discussion of indiana, indiana issues, etc.

anyway, shakes has a halloween treat for those of you who enjoy wacko fundamentalist propaganda like chick tracts: two posts featuring the adventures of christian singer carman in his crusade to defeat the devil!

Last Halloween, my nephew came back from Trick-or-Treating with two books in his bag o’ goodies, which my sister was appalled to discover (and removed from his sight before he read them). When she showed them to me, I begged her to let me have them, and she kindly agreed, looking at me like I was insane for wanting them, but they were simply too crazy for the rubbish bin. Apparently, some of their neighbors felt that kids didn’t need candy so much as a lesson on Christianity and Evil in the form of a demented little hardback comic book. I can't even imagine how many of these things were handed out to unsuspecting kids.

i'm almost inspired to blog about bibleman... but i'm sure i'll get to that eventually. probably sometime after i finally post about catman and "nin-ja" movies (cut and paste martial arts movies), which i was originally going to do... oh... last year or something.

back during my first two years of high school at cathedral, i rode the van to school. not the bus: the student body was too small (and too well-off) for a full-size schoolbus. (technically, i think the school did have a bus or two, but they were only used for field trips and transporting sports teams, not for bussing studends to school.) instead, there were two vans that bussed around those few students whose parents couldn't drive us to school in the mercedes or the lexus each morning (this was before SUVs were all over the place).

our van driver was a fundamentalist christian. i want to say her name was rita, but i could be off (i'm pretty sure it started with R). it seemed a bit strange for a fundie to be driving a bunch of kids to catholic school, but whatever. apparently she wasn't too fundamentalist or else she wouldn't have accepted work from those blasphemous catholics, right?

but she was a fundie all right. for one thing, she listened to gospel and christian music exclusively. we had many conversations in that van about how secular music promotes unwholesome and even sinful messages. of course, at the time i was listening almost exclusively to decadent hard rock and metal, while some of the black kids on the van were listening to gangsta rap like NWA, so us kids weren't convinced.

carman was her favorite. i remember this explicitly, as she talked about him all the time. once i even got some candy for knowing this: she was quizzing us for free candy, and i correctly answered the question "who is the best christian singer?" (quite an objective quiz, yes? i wonder whether cathedral knew she was trying to indoctrinate us like that.)

i didn't think i would ever have to think about carman again. and i definitely didn't think i would end up reading (or reading about) children's books starring carman and featuring phrases like "Guns are dangerous but have no power in the spirit realm."

take that, gun nuts! your guns have no power in the spirit realm! unless you're the saint of killers, that is.¶