If only to get something fresh posted to the blog, here are a few images I captured during my time in Angola (with some sporadic commentary).

The Baobab trees are freakishly large. This is far from the largest specimen I saw there. It’s just one I was able to get close to.

Little Women at the Well. This girls are surrounding a water well drilled by the ministry I was working with in Angola. Prior to this well being drilled, they had to dig holes in a dry riverbed in the dry season to obtain water.

Videographer Kyle Davis takes advantage of the wonderful late afternoon light. Off in the distance, a rock formation I dubbed (in my own mind) Mt. Viagra.

This is how Angolan kids line up for food. Orderly, obedient, patient. And very tightly packed.

We met a sweet young woman who lost the use of her legs to polio as a toddler. Her vintage hand-powered chair struck me as a piece of sad art.

One of the saddest situations I saw (and that’s saying something) involved a group of people whose village (hundreds of miles away) had flooded during the rainy season several months earlier. The government had relocated these people by helicopter to this strange place and left them there to fend for themselves. They cobbled together houses out of whatever they could scrounge.

Not sure how to describe the terrain of Angola. How about “beautifully severe.” Or perhaps “severely beautiful.”

Okay, it wasn’t really a vacation. Haven’t had one of those in about three years. But as they say, a change is as good as a rest. And my 10 days in Angola recently certainly qualifies as a change.

I was a writer attached to a video crew and still photographer documenting the work of a wonderful Christian aid ministry in Angola. Getting there required a 9-hour flight to London, a 7-hour layover, and then a 8-hour flight to Luanda–Angola’s capital city. We were traveling on a non-profit budget so the accommodations in Luanda were, shall we say, spartan. Here’s a couple of  shots from my hotel room window:

That water in the street . . . that would be a sewage leak. We only spent one night in Luanda. The next morning we drove seven hours south along the coast to the city of Benguela. A hotel there would be our base camp for the next six days.

Each day brought a long, arduous drive on bad roads to a remote village. I saw things I wish I could un-see:

There were lots of fun moments as well. For example, I brought my iPad and quickly found that I could use it to mesmerize the children of a village. For example, there were no mirrors in these villages. Outside of catching their reflection in a bucket of water,  these children there had never seen themselves. As a result, I learned that I could take the front-facing camera on my iPad and work some magic. Allow me to illustrate:

Getting home proved to be a challenge. Due to back to back mechanical failures with a British Airways flight, we ended up requiring about 70 hours of travel to get home, sleeping in airports and airplanes. I wanted to kiss the ground when we landed at Raliegh-Durham.

Nevertheless, one of my favorite things is traveling to a place and culture I’ve never experienced before. And this trip to Angola was rich in countless ways.

Traveled with Mrs. Blather and FOU#3 to southeastern Oklahoma last night to spend a few days with Mom at the old homestead. Mom will be 80 on Sunday.

As regular readers know, Dad passed away last October so Mom is in that cycle of sad firsts. First Christmas without Dad. First wedding anniversary. His birthday came and went last month. And now a major milestone birthday for her.

She’s doing well. Still very engaged in her church and community, in spite of some mobility challenges and an obnoxious hand tremor that has tried to rob her of one her favorite ministries–writing encouraging notes and cards.

A few months before Dad passed away–when the cruel ravages of Alzheimer’s had accelerated from a trot to gallop–I wrote a tribute titled, “May I Tell You About My Mother?” You’ll find it here.

For her birthday, we’re working through a fairly extensive “honey do” list of projects she needs done around the house; eating well; and were even treated with a rowdy thunderstorm and extended soaking rain that dropped the temps about 15 degrees in minutes–the first rain we’ve witnessed in a couple of months.

It was wonderful. We thanked God for the rain. But we’re grateful for much more than that this weekend.

Just finished watching a disturbing, powerful and brilliantly produced documentary on the National Geographic Channel called Hitler’s Hidden Holocaust.

It is heartbreaking profile of the little-known Nazi SS “Einsatzgruppen” (German for “action groups”) In the years before the Nazis hit upon the concept of the death camps, the various Einsatzgruppen moved methodically through German occupied Eastern Europe rounding up each village’s Jews–men, women and children–herding them to a freshly bulldozed ditch on the edge of town, forcing them to strip naked, and then lining them up by fives and tens to be shot.

Hundreds of thousands of unarmed Jewish civilians were murdered in Latvia, the Ukraine, and other Baltic States. If you’re not familiar with the Einsatzgruppen, I strongly recommend viewing the documentary and/or exploring the links on this page.

Watching it was particularly chilling with the mass killing spree in Norway as a backdrop.

One of the most remarkable characteristics of fallen mankind is the capacity to rationalize even the most monstrous acts as being necessary, and even righteous. As a matter fact, even less well known than the Nazi’s Einsatzgruppen is the reality that over the last sixty years numerous Arab-Islamic groups have used the Einsatzgruppen as inspiration and a model for their own approach to their own “Jewish problem.”

It is even more poorly understood that many of the late 20th Century’s Arab nationalists imbibed deeply of Nazi ideology and tactics. It is impossible to truly understand the personality-cult dictatorships of Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, or the Assads of Syria  without taking this “National Socialism” influence into account. (See here for example.)

Still, after getting a fresh reminder of of the horrors of Nazi expansion in the ’30s and ’40s, it’s important that we remind ourselves that Nazi Germany comes in third place behind the Soviets and the Communist Chinese among the 20th Century’s murderous ideologies. But for some reason Hollywood, the news industry, academics and documentary makers are less interested in telling those stories.

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Which brings us to the the horrific story that came out of Norway this weekend. There is much about the mass murder event that doesn’t make sense. (Of course, when do the actions of a deranged/demonized individual ever make “sense.”) But one thing you can always count on after an event that essentially everyone considers to be reprehensible or heartbreaking–some will not be able to resist the temptation to exploit the event to score political points against their favorite ideological enemy.

We saw it after the shooting of Congressman Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona. The attempts to link the acts of a psychotic individual to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, or the Tea Party represented a new low for discourse in our country.

In the case of the events in Norway. I have already noticed several left-leaning blogs and news sites making prominent mention that the shooter/bomber had recently set up a Facebook page in which he described himself as “Christian” and “conservative.”

Of course, for many in Post-Christian Europe, the descriptor “Christian” is more a cultural designation than an expression of faith. It simply means not Jewish, Muslim or Hindu. Here’s a pledge for you, if we learn in the coming weeks that the shooter attended church every Sunday and studied the Bible, I’ll eat my keyboard. And if he shouted, “Jesus is Lord” before pulling the trigger, I’ll  eat my laptop, too.

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The other big news of the weekend was the death of Amy Winehouse. As many of the news reports have pointed out, she now joins the pantheon of flamed out, self-destroying rock stars that includes Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain–each of whom died one way or another from self-inflicted lifestyle wounds. And amazingly, like Winehouse, all of these talented individuals were 27 when the flame flickered out.

I’ll not succumb to the point-making temptation I condemned a couple of paragraphs ago. But when I heard the repeated recitals of Winehouse’s drug and alcohol habits, I couldn’t help but wonder how old she was the first time she ever got truly drunk. I suspect she was quite young. (Binge drinking is even more of a cultural epidemic in Great Britain than here in the States.)

I wondered because I recall seeing the results of a study a few years ago that revealed a remarkable correlation. The younger an individual is when he or she gets plastered for the first time, the more the likely that person is to be an alcoholic as an adult. This seems intuitive, but the study revealed that there are brain wiring and brain chemistry reasons for this.

The wiring of the human brain isn’t fully formed until about age 21 in females and as late as 24 in males. (Yes, this explains a lot.) There is something about extreme inebriation that redirects the development of the immature brain–creating what we commonly call the “addictive personality” and impairing the centers responsible for sound judgement and risk avoidance.

We know about the trajectory of Amy Winehouse’s life because she was famous. But it’s a trajectory shared by millions of other addiction-prone individuals. And every time I hear about some group of 17-year-olds getting “hammered,” I wonder if they realize that the choices they’ve made today have very likely determined how functional the brain is that they will be depending on for the rest of their lives.

Back in junior high, I read George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World back to back. These weren’t assigned by a teacher. They were just part of my recreational reading I was doing back then–which involved devouring pretty much every science fiction book I could get my hands on. (Those covers shown above were on the versions I read. Seeing them again was like seeing a long-lost friend.)

By the time I entered high school, I had already read pretty much everything written by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clark and was moving on to the very “far out” and rather adult Robert Heinlein books like Stranger in the Strange Land, Time Enough for Love, and I Will Fear No Evil.

In the midst of all that, a friend recommended the two great dystopian novels of the 20th Cenetury–and I ate them up. Of course, that was the mid-to-early 1970s. The Cold War still very much defined the way everyone thought about pretty much everything.

Communism was on the march. The “dominoes” were falling in Southeast Asia. Soviet-backed insurgencies were undermining governments in Africa, South America, and Central America. And NATO stood guard lest Soviet tanks start rolling toward Western Europe.

Back then it seemed clear that Orwell’s vision of the future was the horse to bet on. But today that is not nearly so clear.

To be sure, people in North Korea have been living Orwell’s nightmare for six decades. And to somewhat lesser degrees people in Cuba, Syria, Burma, Belarus, Zimbabwe, China and Turkmenistan would recognize their lives on the pages of 1984.

But in the soft, free, decadent, declining West, it is Huxley’s vision that is becoming our reality. The other day I came across a “cartoon” by a talented illustrator named Stuart McMillen that beautifully depicts this truth. In the cartoon below, McMillen illustrates a passage from Neil Postman’s very important book, Amusing Ourselves to Death:

By the way, my good friend Casey Cook turned me on to Postman’s book several years ago and I am in his debt for doing so. I strongly recommend it.

Came across this remarkable pair of photographs today over at the BoingBoing blog. A father and son who had been present at the very first space shuttle launch back in April of 1981 made sure they were together for the final one last week.

There is something quite extraordinary about the juxtaposition of these two images. They obviously posed to recreate the original picture. But as I studied it, I felt a wave of melancholy wash over me.

It wasn’t just passing of the space shuttle era with America in serious decline as a world power.

There was something about looking at what the blur of the last 30 years had done to that father . . . something about the fact that 1981 doesn’t feel like all that long ago. Perhaps the fact that my own father recently passed away . . .

Whatever the factors, I found the pictures sad and sweet. Then I thanked God for fathers. And for the reminder of the biblical truth that this life is but vapor.

I’m still looking for an online iteration of that massively offensive AT&T spot in which the all-wise wife and kid attempt to explain the concept of wireless internet to Unfrozen Caveman Father. The child ultimately tells him there’s an “invisible cord” but he remains bewildered.

In the previous post, I suggested that one reason Doofus Dad/Hapless Husband is an ever-present feature of advertising these days is that Madison Avenue believes women want to be flattered with ads depicting them as consistently smarter, wiser, cleaner, and more sophisticated than the men in their lives. While this is certainly a factor, it isn’t the only one. In fact, I think there are three additional reasons:

1. Copywriters are basically lazy. I know because I are one.

2. Most advertising agency creatives are between the ages of 25 and 35. As a result, they grew up in the era of Tim Allen (Home Improvement), Ray Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond) and the countless imitators that those wildly successful shows spawned, including King of Queens, According to Jim, Still Standing, and so on.

It is no accident that all of these sitcoms are built around the Doofus Dad/Hapless Husband paired with the all-knowing, all-wise wife. This generation of advertising creatives has been trained since childhood to think that if you want to create a humorous family situation, this is the only formula available.

3. Finally, there is our current tyranny of political correctness. The rarest of all creatures is the advertising executive with the courage to write a commercial that touches the buttons of one of the perennially aggrieved identity politics groups.

You may have noticed that in all of the those home security alarm company commercials, the creeper trying to break into the house is a white dude. Always.

I understand. I’ve been in those creative meetings where we’re trying to decide who to cast for what part in the television spot. In the current environment, you fall all over yourself to avoid playing to any stereotypes.

Everyone’s worst nightmare is being called a racist or sexist.  So when it comes to cooking up humorous, slice-of-life family scenarios for commercials, the only “safe” play is making men the butt of the joke. There’s no downside. Or is there . . . ?

Google the term “AT&T invisible cord commercial” and most of the hits link to discussion threads filled with comments by men deeply offended by the spot. Some are so angry, they’re considering dropping AT&T.

The last thing the nation needs is yet another aggrieved group launching boycotts. But what the nation desperately does need is honorable men and a culture that esteems them.

Mrs. Blather and I have a running joke now. Whenever we’re watching television, at least once during every commercial break we’ll look at each other, smile, and say in unison, “And there he is.”

The “he” is the most ubiquitous character in television advertising–the Doofus Dad/Hapless Husband. And he is always accompanied by a wise, patient, all-knowing wife and/or bemused, eye-rolling children. Oh, here he is now . . .

And here he is again . . .

Indeed, once you become sensitized to his presence, you’ll see Doofus Dad/Hapless Husband everywhere! Of course, this is no accident.

Madison avenue knows that most of the consumer buying decisions in this country are made by women. And they appear convinced that the fastest way to the American woman’s heart (and therefore pocketbook) is to assure her she’s intellectually superior to her husband. An equally ubiquitous theme is the sage and savvy child patiently explaining things to Doofus Dad.

One of the most offensive examples of this I’ve ever seen is on display in a fairly new AT&T U-Verse ad. Here the All-Wise Wife and the Tech-Savvy Daughter try to explain the concept of wireless Internet to a husband/father who is apparently dumber than Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.

{Looking for link to ad}

Okay, I take it back. That AT&T ad is only the third-most-offensive of this crowded genre. Here are two that cast away all subtlty and nuance and just go ahead and calls husbands and fathers “horse’s behinds” and jackasses.

More on this subject in an upcoming post. I have some rant left in me on this.

READ PART II HERE.