Normally, I hate newsletters, but . . .

this one from a combination restaurant and grocery store in a small town where people are very left of center and very filled with co-operation and brotherly love is always welcomed.

From Elmer's Store:

I’m here in New Orleans (for those of you who are new to this e-mail) for my annual job on the New Orleans Jazz Fest. I’ve been working this job every spring for the last 26 years"it’s been the most consistent thing I’ve done in my life, and besides getting out of Ashfield for Mud Season every year, it’s just glorious to get to be a New Orleanian again every year! True, New Orleans changes more and more every year, and it seems to be the only place in the country that is really growing and building, but I still love it. I stay with my friend Tracy every year and this year she’s moved uptown! In all my years of living in New Orleans, Uptown seemed far away and a little maze of tiny streets. As it turns out, after one actually moves there, one finds that it is indeed far away and a maze of little tiny streets. I know that Tracy lives in the area of the Streets that are Named for Trees"at the corner of two trees, and that’s how I find her house every day. Otherwise I’d still be driving around trying to find her house.

It’s also good to be back in the south. These are my people and I miss ‘em. Why, even driving down last week, during the hours of Only Music on NPR I listened to Jesus Radio and Rush Limbaugh Radio just to see what those guys were thinking. I’m interested anyway, but it’s only when I’m a strapped-down captive audience in a car moving 70 miles an hour do I actually have the patience to actually listen to it.

So this time I was listening to the Jimmy Swaggert Ministries network out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana where they were talking about how the passage of the Health Care Bill was definitive proof that we were in the End Times (that, they noted, had begun with Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations.) This is a station out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana and they were taking e-mails from listeners about the fix we seem to be in with this Socialist president and all. The first e-mail they took was from someone who was writing in to say that one way you could tell we were in the End Times was all of the underwater earthquakes we’ve been having lately. “The Bible says that there will be earthquakes in diverse places,” the e-mailer quoted, “and here is proof! We are having earthquakes in divers’ places"where the divers go! Underwater!!”

To their credit, bless their hearts, the three moderators on the Jimmy Swaggert Radio Hour did point out with earnest and straight radio voices that “diverse” means “varied and scattered about, not where the divers go.” But they added equally as earnestly that the fact that Obama was trying to put us all under one ruler was the real proof that we have moved into the days of the Anti-Christ.

Then Terri Gross came on back on the NPR station and I listened to her interview the guys who created South Park and that was equally as funny, especially when they were playing the clip of Satan’s assistant talking about how he spreads his message to the world through Republicans.

Meanwhile, up in Ashfield, we will probably be having dinner again this week.