Liars' Club Poem by gershon hepner

Liars' Club



LIARS' CLUB

Ananias was a liar,
like Joe McCarthy, Lillian Hellman, Richard Nixon and,
another member of the choir,
Bill Clinton. Edmund Morris helps us understand.
that Clinton would have been elected in a vote
by JC, LH and RN
unanimously, clearly in these liars' boat,
and that of Ananias when
he lied to Peter, claiming he had given all
that he possessed to him, lying
to the Holy Spirit, as with Southern drawl,
this President did, too, denying
that he had given all to Monica, withholding
the fact that sex when it is oral
is sex. Like Ananias, he for this received a scolding,
plus Ananias's lie-laurel.

David Pryce-Jones reviews Edmund Morris's "This Living Hand, " in the 11/15/12 WSJ:
'This Living Hand' is a collection of essays published over a span of 30 or 40 years, and in the final and longest of them Mr. Morris does his utmost to make out that the idea of portraying Ronald Reagan from such a narcissistic point of view was a good one. Biography, he pleads, is an art form like any other. Truth doesn't have to be literal. As witnesses for the defense, he summons up at least 30 writers (by my rough count) , from Chaucer and Daniel Defoe to W.G. Sebald, who took liberties with reality in order to arrive at a higher artistic truth. Mr. Morris acknowledges Reagan's humanity, his bonhomie, his political successes and even his greatness as president. He nonetheless persists in calling him, in a 2003 review of Reagan's letters, 'a bone-cracking bore' and creates the disconcerting impression that he still finds himself more interesting than his subject…
[An] unqualified hero is Beethoven, that anti-social genius who suffered from tinnitus and deafness but was still the greatest composer of them all. Several essays in 'This Living Hand' discuss musical scores in technical detail, and the evidence is that Mr. Morris could have been a professional musicologist. His model is the great Donald Francis Tovey, the purest of the pure in his love of classical music. 'The Ivory and the Ebony' is a short and brilliant wrap-up of 19th-century Romantic music, finishing with a tribute to the eccentric Ferruccio Busoni, whom Mr. Morris considers the finest pianist who ever lived.
Writers come in for their share of praise. Evelyn Waugh is forgiven piggishly beastly behavior because he could write bewitchingly. Grand old-timers like Mark Twain, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Adams receive conventional bouquets. Among the moderns, he commends John Wyndham, on the grounds that his scary science fiction serves as a warning about technology; and James Gould Cozzens, whose painstakingly realistic novels, in Mr. Morris's view, don't deserve to be relegated to the critical limbo from which there is no hope of recovery.
He also himself shows the occasional pursing of the lips. James Thurber is 'dreary, ' and the artist Christo, who wrapped landscapes in cloth or paper, 'manufactured lifelessness.' When it comes to wind, Mr. Morris says, Norman Mailer 'knows what he's talking about.' There is just one display of true scorn. In the index, the entry under Bill Clinton reads, in part: 'gravitas, lack of; humor shortage; lies of; and marijuana; and Monica Lewinsky; sequitur, lack of; verbosity of.' In a jeu d'esprit published here for the first time, Mr. Morris imagines a meeting of 'the Ananias Club'—the name comes from a press term for 'liars club' back in TR's era. Joe McCarthy, Lillian Hellman, Richard Nixon and others discuss whether Mr. Clinton is worthy of membership—and unanimously vote yes. A man as versatile as Mr. Morris surely could have had a better idea when it came time to write up Ronald Reagan.
Here is the background to the sin of Ananias:
Acts chapter 4: 32 closes by stating that the first followers of Jesus did not consider their possessions to be their own, but they had all things in common to use what they had on behalf of those in want. Barnabasa, a Levite from Cyprus, sold a plot of land and donated the profit to the apostles.
As told at the beginning of Acts chapter 5 Ananias and Sapphira, following Barnabas' example but not willing to give all, also sold their land but withheld a portion of the sales. Ananias presented his donation to Peter claiming that it was the entire amount. Peter replied, 'Why is it that Satsan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit? ' Peter pointed out that Ananias was in control of the money and could give or keep it as he saw fit, but that he had withheld it from Peter and lied about it, and stated that Ananias had not only lied to Peter, but also to God. Ananias died on the spot and was carried out. As a result, everyone who heard the incident feared the Lord. Three hours after Ananias' death his wife told the same lie and also fell dead.

11/15/12 #11903

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