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That Old Black Magic

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For the most part, I try not to get political in this column, but sometimes ... sometimes I just cannot resist. Anyone who reads Astro-Weather and has paid attention to the Overviews connected to it or has read my interviews has been able to read, perhaps not all that subtly, between the lines to see that I do have a political preference. Thinly veiled does not do it justice and I’ll come out right now and say that the coming election is as important as any in our history. But what prompts this piece is not the fact that we need a landslide result mirroring or eclipsing the Reagan landslide of 1980, which we really do, but a news item I ran across last night.

It seems that James Dobson’s evangelical organization, Focus on the Family, posted a video on their site asking members to pray for rain, and not just rain but torrential rain, rain of biblical proportions, to fall down on Barak Obama and the DNC at Invesco Field during the evening of August 28th, the last night of the convention, when Obama was to accept the Democratic nomination for president. Immediate and overwhelming negative reaction prompted them to take the video down and to try to pretend that they were just kidding, and to take the stance that liberals should develop a sense of humor. Leaving aside the stunning irony of the last part of that last sentence, there is something to seriously consider.

Ask the atheists and they will tell you that prayer is an example of what they call magical thinking, and they are right, it is, but they do not understand either prayer or magic. Very briefly, magic is the knowledge of and purposeful utilization of natural laws that most people don’t know about or understand. It is not being understood that relegates something to the realm of magic, and science has rendered mundane most of what once would have been thought of as magic. Prayer remains in the realm of magic as it is not well understood, even by most who seek to employ it, but more on all of that another time. There are arguments back and forth about the power of prayer. In the strictly scientific sense, prayer is hard to prove, but anecdotally, the evidence is undeniable. It is in either case an attempt to use magic to obtain a desired end.

Magic is often classified by those interested in it as white or black, white magic being that which is used for good while black magic is used for harm. While I’m sure that any of those praying for the deluge would think that they were using the power of prayer (magic) for a good cause, a more sophisticated view of magic holds that using it to thwart the will of another or to determine the outcome of something to one side’s benefit or detriment falls on the darker side. Simply put, praying for rain on Obama was inarguably an attempt at black magic.

Now, anyone who really knows anything about magic will tell you that intention is exceedingly important, and that inadvertent consequences can easily and often occur, especially with an inadequate understanding of the workings involved. Just ask Mickey as the brooms marched with the buckets of water. Any attempt at black magic carries the grave danger of bounce back, as one can only do to another what the other already has created the conditions for, that is, what they already have coming anyway. When the intended target has no place for the bad intent to connect, the result can only be a rebound to the sender. I have often said that the vast majority of those who fancy themselves practitioners of the dark arts are akin to children playing with matches. In almost all cases, they end up burning their own little pinkies, only rarely managing to burn down the family home or worse, but payback is a, well, you’ve heard, and karma will not be denied.

Irony piles on when you remember that in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, fellow travelers of Dobson, such as Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Hal Lindsey and Charles Colson came out and announced that the destruction visited upon New Orleans was “God’s wrath” and punishment for what they view to be the sins of liberality. How perfect is it that, as Dobson’s crew tries to literally rain on Obama’s parade, hurricane Gustav shows signs of repeating Katrina’s landfall on New Orleans ... right when the Republican National Convention is in full swing.

Now, will that be God’s punishment on Republicans for the excesses of the religious right? Is it the inevitable karmic payback for magical mischief? Is it all just coincidence, or more accurately, synchronicity? I’ll leave you to answer that for yourself, and I’ll go further and advise prayer that Gustav dissipates and causes no further damage. But I wonder if in some circles the lyrics are switching from Onward Christian Soldiers to That Old Black Magic has me in its spell.

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