In praise of excellence

On this Labor Day weekend I am thinking about all of the hogwash we have been subjected to about “serving mankind”. I am asking: “Who is it that really serves mankind.?” My answer is this: Every person who daily labors to the best of his/her ability, with honesty, integrity, skill, competency and excellence is serving mankind as a living example.

Federal Judge Learned Hand, one of my heroes, had no superior in the jurisprudence of the English speaking world. In a commencement address at Bryn Mawr College he said this to the young graduates:

“Observe, I suggest no sense of service. More hypocrisy is poured out to youthful ears in the name of serving mankind than would fill a library of books. I can remember the droning on that score that I had to listen to, that I should become a drudge in some distasteful pursuit to assist a mankind not visibly affected by similar endeavors. If it be selfishness to work on a job one likes, and live as one wants, because one likes it and for no other end, let us accept the odium. I had rather live forever in a company of Don Quixotes, than among a set of the walking dead professing to be solely moved to the betterment of one another. Let us then do our jobs for ourselves and we are in no danger of disserving society.
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Big city religious columns

This may come as a surprise to you, but there are actually readers of this paper who seem to think that some of my columns are too strong. So, in the interest of enlightenment and information, I thought that today I would give you a taste of how the “big” religion editors in the “big” city papers write their columns.

Don Lattin is the religion editor and writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Several weeks ago for his Sunday column for the Examiner/Chronicle, he wrote about the violence that goes with the “religions of the book” (the bible), Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He wrote that there is a very, very thin line between cult violence and the religions of the bible. From here on, I am quoting from his column.

“Where do we get the idea that religion never endorses violence or terrorism? Certainly not from the Hebrew bible, which thunders: “I will send my terror in front of you, and will throw into confusion all the people against whom you shall come”. (Exodus 23:27)
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Homophobic trauma

have always believed in the evolution of consciousness. Especially from those who blabber every Sunday morning from pulpits about something called “love”. Ugly and vicious internal battles are going on today in Episcopalian churches, as well as Methodist, Presbyterian and others. And of course all fundamentalist churches are in homophobic trauma. .I am having doubts about the evolution of consciousness.

A roll call of the brilliant gays and lesbians of history who have made giant contributions to our evolution as a species and to our cultural heritage, would include the following:

King James (yes, of King James bible fame)..Plato..Alexander the Great…Leonardo Da Vinci…Gore Vidal…Michelangelo…Walt Whitman…Emily Dickinson…Gertrude Stein…Rock Hudson…Greta Garbo…W.H. Auden…Amy Lowell…Tennessee Williams…Thornton Wilder…Willa Cather…Jane Austen…Henry James…George Santayana…Babe Zaharias…Christopher Isherwood….Peter Tchaikovsky…Oscar Wilde…Clifton Webb…Ethel Waters…Frederick the Great…Liberace…Rudolph Valentino…James Dean…James Hormel…Ramon Navarro…Malcolm Forbes…Christopher Marlowe…Phillip Johnson…Van Cliburn…Edward Everett Horton…John Gielgud….George Gershwin…Adrian…Aristotle…Hadrian…Chastity Bono…Noel Coward…Agnes Moorehead…Montgomery Clift…Anthony Perkins…Virginia Woolf…Edward Albee…Andre Gide…Sumner Welles…Cole Porter…George Cukor…Marcel Proust….Rudolph Nureyev…Genet…Dag Hammarskjold…Martina Navratilova….John Chever…Aaron Copland….A.E. Housman…William Tilden…Greg Louganis…Ian McKellen…Richard Halliburton…Lawrence of Arabia….William Haines….Horatio Alger…Jean Genet…Sumner Welles…Ethel Waters…Leonard Bernstein…and space limitations preclude my listing thousands more of many of the most creative and brilliant representatives of our species.
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