Introducing The Porch's new advice column! Got problems? No need to call the A-Team - the Dolly Mama is here for you! Write to her via the Contact Us link on the menu.
Dear Dolly Mama,
When you write as the Dolly Mama, are you culturally appropriating the Dalai Lama or Dolly Parton?
Dear Department of Cultural correction and Appropriation:
No. I am appreciating them by imitating them. I am imitating the Dalai Lama’s deep calm, which I revere. Yes, I also envy it. I am not the Dalai Lama, not even close. I have some very public vices, one of which is envy, another of which is anxiety.
I am also imitating Dolly Parton’s irreverence and her appreciation of a good joke. I am not Dolly Parton, not even close. I go through whole weeks having misplaced my sense of humor.
Cultural appropriation is when you make your sad and sorry self look better by making believe you are better than the “other” you have borrowed for the day.
Imitation occurs when you have aspirations, bold and clear, of being better than you know you are. It is like me wanting to be more like Serena in my tennis game. Or to sing more like Madonna. Or dance like Ginger Rogers. The Dolly Mama has heroes and heroines, mentors and models. She imitates them, unsuccessfully.
Dear Dolly Mama,
What can we do to get people to wear masks? I am so angry they are endangering my safety and causing the pandemic to last and last and last, persist and persist and persist.
Dear Mask proponent:
You can’t do much. If you had started a couple of decades ago to challenge capitalism and its assumption that the point of life is to be better than everybody else or watched the public schools’ funding be decimated by previous administrations, resulting in a large and growing incapacity to think your way out of a paper bag or, better, saved democracy from itself, early enough to forge a civic consensus about how we belong to each other, not just to self or tribe, then you might have a fighting chance to talk people into wearing masks in order to protect self, tribe and other.
That triple protection is so biblical it gives people the heebs, which is short for the heebie jeebies. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love God more than you love either self or neighbor. Imagine. Love of God creates the energy to love neighbor and to love self. It multiples energy. Now we are so far downhill, so far gone, so lacking in consensus about anything but all seven of the original deadly sins, that we are devolving. We are in an extinction moment.
A lot of us are going to die. We don’t know how many. It is very sad. And it is not our fault.
All we who hope to be Darwinians can do is build for tomorrow, slowly, carefully, by building the time of God one earth, economically and spiritually. And we can get better at funeral, our own and that of others.
Who is The Dolly Mama?
The Dolly Mama is a spiritual version of Dear Abby. Her intention is to combine the irreverence of Dolly Parton with the surrender and non-attachment beloved by Buddhists. She wants to let go of what can’t be fixed – in either self or others – and fix what can by applying the balm of humor.
She is a spiritual handyperson, a soul mechanic, a repairer of broken appliances. Every now and then the combination of letting go and hanging on achieves sufficient balance for an improvement in spiritual posture, stronger spine, and personal peace. The Dolly Mama is not her day job. By day, she works as an ordained United Church of Christ and American Baptist pastor of a regular, if edgy, congregation.