SHERMAN AND I IN SAVANNAH, GEORGIA

Arrived in Savannah, Georgia just a few mintues ago and sought out an internet cafe. I'm on the second floor of a building in old Savannah, in a place called BOBA'S, in the market district. Remember that BOBA'S name. Lots of windows around me and artists' studios all up and down the hallways. I passed two closed internet cafes just walking around the block to find this open place.

Humid, overcast a little, and tornados to the west of me in the direction I'll soon be heading. I'm ready to head home after a stop in Dayton and Carbondale, Illinois. I spent too much for my motel in St. Augustine last night, $77 dollars. I'll go north far enough to touch North Carolina then move west. I really don't want to spend the money to go all the way north into Massachusetts. I can see the cost rising as I enter the current play season for Americans who can afford to play. No more $30 dollar motels in that region. Think how expensive Nantucket would be? Ouch! I'm just not a rich American, and I won't use unsecured (by my own money) credit cards and go into debt. Besides, I miss my little inexpensive and comfortable life at home.


THE BAD THIN'K'G ABOUT MEMORIAL DAY

Celebrating the sacrifice of veterans is a two edged sword. The emotion that people can work up for the dead soldier is exactly the same emotional complex that leaders leverage to get young men to go off to die in the next war.

We're a manipulated country. THEY, whoever the powers that be are, manipulate our emotions to make us buy cell phones, to get expensive cosmetic surgery, to go off to war, to use underarm deoderant, to buy our presidents and to shave our legs (yours, not mine). I see us as a nation of robots, working and playing by the book of advertized capitalism.

The only answer is to guard the emotional circuits. Don't play, shut down and watch, a sober variation of turn on, tune in and drop out. Any other option and you're one of the manipulated. Evolution keeps ticking along in the emotional circuits, and we either take charge of those circuits (as much as possible) or they run us. So, it pays to be intellectual. If we're not intellectual then we're one of Limbaugh's ignorant ditto heads. Of course, to be that way, means to not be one of the popular ones. Cool and calculated people are not appreciated for what they are.

Study, study, study. Learn about the rise of consciousness in the human animal. Go into a library and punch up the subject heading of "consciousness". There you'll find all the best work. There is no more convincing argument for the relativity of belief, for evolution and for human falibility than a study of consciousness.


WINNER OF WORST DRIVER CONTEST

So far, in all my trip, I've never met worse drivers than Floridians. They go constantly 10 to 20 miles over the speed limit, tail gate on the highway, zip in and out of lanes like so many mad bees. In Miami, I felt my mortality approach on every hand. New Orleans is a close second, but that city is not the whole state. I'm talking about the whole state of Florida, east coast worse than the west coast.


BUSH PLAYS THE MEMORIAL WAR CARD

Three days and three speeches. Ain't that a little much? The Rove-robot, Bush, sure knows how to use the war dead to play on American sympathies to try and improve his image. Don't forget, he's responsible for all the deaths. Not you and not me. The only way that we and America become responsible for the Bushmess in Iraq is if we elect him or if he gets reappointed by his Supreme Court.

Well, I've had lunch, which also got me my entre to this computer. I'm going to walk around in Savannah a little bit, then head on up I-95 a bit further before heading west to my home and wonderful little wife. Where will I next pop up, I wonder?


OGLETHORPE (added after my return home)

Sir James Oglethorpe had a home in Savannah and one further into the Georgia colony which was a penal colony, if you recall your history. So there I stood in a Savannah square, looking at a plaque dedicated to Sir Oglethorpe who played a big hand in developing Savannah and Georgia. Whether or not it's true, in our family, we have a history which says that Oglethorpe is in our family tree because my dad's mother's dad's family name was Thorp. My middle name is Thorp. The story goes that we became Thorps by small steps, first dropping the "gle" to become O'Thorpe, then dropping the "O" to become Thorpe and, finally, casting off the silent "e" to become the Thorp family. Doesn't every family have a similar famous one in its lineage?

KEY WEST, YAHOO, BY GOD, FLORIDA: 4770 MILES OF DRIVING

And I did find the base this morning where I went to Fleet Sonar School though, now, it's a gated community. But back behind and through the gated community, Marines still guard a naval air station base. The sub base is now a state park. I talked to the guards and, despite the nasty looking rifles they now sport in addition to their side arms, they were nice lads. I was nervous parking my car near the gate and walking up to them. We Navy guys used to believe that the Marines wanted nothing better than for us to foul up so they get us in the brig and beat us up. That was a rumor among the sailors. Some of the buildings I lived in as a barracks are now converted into condos. Maybe even mine. Just ate breakfast at Pepe's. A good, dirty old sort of Key West experience. Good food and run down looks.


SIPPIN' IT'S WHERE IT'S AT

I'm logged on here at Sippin', a coffee shop on Eaton Street, just off of the famous Duval Street. 20 centavos a minute or $10 an hour.


A POOR BOY IN RICH MAN'S CLOTHING

Like the whole south along the Gulf Coast, Key West is now completely a play ground for the rich. It's definitely not the Key West I experienced 48 years ago. We sailors used to escape to Miami for fun. In this trip I've been forced to confront just how much America is a divided nation, but I don't mean by political party, I mean by wealth. I know so few people who can afford to live as they live in Key West and along the Gulf Coast.

I'm being treated like a rich man myself. Last night, after taking four hours to drive from Miami to Key West, all of 139 miles, traffic out the or up the ass, I drew into Holiday Inn of Key West and, tired and dusty and headachy, asked for a room. I was told it would be $180 a night. "Okay," I said, ignoring my budget, having decided I'm too extended to try to make it to Nantucket anyway, "sign me up."

I told the young woman, in passing, that, "I'm kinda on a nostalgia trip. I turned 18 on this island while at Fleet Sonar School back in the 50's." A young manager heard me and whispered to the clerk. She then told me, "Your room has been upgraded."

I am now spending two nights in a $565 per night suite (for $180) with three rooms and two TVs and a large balcony that looks out to the western sunsets and straight down to the water. I've never felt so privileged to be a veteran, though I also feel guilty to be where I am, since I'm a peace time veteran and not a vet of combat. Typical for me, I want to explain to the manager the whole circumstance, but, then, it is Memorial Day weekend, he must feel good for what he's done, I "am" a veteran and, so, why look the gift horse in the mouth?


STILL DAZED AND CONFUSED

After a couple minutes of hard thinking, I'm tired and can't think straight so I'm going to go buy my wife a nice set of earrings as a gift to take home to her. Tomorrow morn, I'm off, up along the North Carolina where I've never been and then over to Dayton, Ohio, my born and raised place, to see my old buddy Carl from the hippy daze. I feel OK about not making it up to Nantucket. I am just too tired to add that extra thousand miles or so. I'm still 5000 miles from home. The drive will add up to close to 10,000 miles as it is. Anybody paying attention out there in weblog world, Hi!

BRANDON, FLORIDA JUST OUTSIDE ST. PETERSBURG

With old friends, and just as in the college days at the University of Dayton, we debated the existence of god in a friendly and happy way. If only all Christians were as Christian as my friends here.

ON THE ROAD WITH JACK KEROUAC IN TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA

This time I'm on the campus of Florida State University. In the student union building. I'm 300 miles from my next stop in Brandon, Florida just outside of St. Petersburg, the city in which my mother died. I'm going to surprise old friends from my undergraduate days at the University of Dayton, back in the early 60's. They don't know I'm coming. We haven't exchanged any communication for about five years. For all I know they no longer live at that address. Last time I saw them they were living in Iowa and that time I also just showed up on their doorstep, and they took me in. They are wonderful people. They quit being Democrats over the abortion issue. I'm anxious to see how they feel about Bush and his war machine mess. I know they won't like that. What a mess for them. They may be like my father-in-law and vote for nobody, now that Bush has made an ass of himself. I think I'll modify the line from Streetcar Named Desire and say, "I've always been dependent on the kindness of strange friends," when they answer the door. Or I may just say, "What're we doing for Memorial Day Weekend?"


DID YOU SAY SWAT TEAM?

Yes, I said "swat team". Last night, shortly after I checked into my motel room, the clerk called my room and told me to come down to the desk. I was on the third floor, the cheap rate. The clerk informed me he had to change my room because it was needed for a very special purpose. I was alread stripped down to my shorts and the room was cooling down rapidly. Begrudgingly, I put on my clothes and went down to see what was up. Once there, a young man with walky talky told me they were about to do a takedown of four young men in the room next to mine. One of them was a multiple homocide suspect. So I had a ringside seat to watch about 20 officers arrest and take away four young men. Rifles, pistols-the whole deal. To make things more interesting, just as four officers were ascending the stairs, the four guys exited the room and started down the stairs. I felt pretty tense. The man on the "talker" informed the ascending officers that the men were coming down to them. The arrest went off smoothly after that. Two young men tried to run, but they had to run the whole length of the building on the exposed third floor. Officers came from everywhere and pointed rifles and pistols at the young men who quickly lay down to be cuffed. Frankly, it made me sad to see four more young men in so much trouble. They didn't have a chance, outnumbered and, like myself, in a strange city. I don't know why, but I don't think of the victims. I don't act that way out of cruelty, you know, but I just always identify with the criminal as victim. I always think of Pacino's Dog Day Afternoon when it comes to criminals, small time, confused, and desperate.


YOU CAN NEVER RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

First off, in New Orleans I went hunting for Fitzgerald's, a fish house on Lake Ponchetraine [sp] where I'd sometimes eat when I worked for Brown and Root on the West Bank. What I liked about it was it's down home look, yet the people who came there to eat would be dressed in anything from dungarees to evening gowns. I had my first and only Lobster Thermodore [sp] there. Fitzgerald's was still in the phone book but no one answered the phone. I went down to West End Park to look for it, couldn't find it. It was always hard to find, so I asked some guys on the beach where the old place was. The biggest one said, "Some of it's over there," he gestured, "and some's out there in the lake," another gesture, "and some's that way." A head gesture. "It blew away in a hurricane some years back."

And the whole coast of Mississippi is transformed. Casinos everywhere, gaudy, interesting. A few quieter white sand beaches still to the west of the casinolands, but the Old South is gone.

Mobile, Alabama where I worked and married my second time was unrecognizable. I couldn't even find the road on which I lived out west of Mobile, on a shady lane. Like every city, the suburbanization has begun. Downtown, I could at least recognize Government Street and the overarching oaks that make the street a green tunnel. The underwater tunnel out of the city to the east is still there.

By the time I entered Florida on I-10 I was pretty depressed and thinking of going home. Why all this waste of my time to see nothing I remembered? I've traveled more than 4000 miles now, and I'm just shooting from place to place on four lanes, and I didn't plan well enough to give myself enough time to rest beside the road and do things. Plu, my budget is cramped. I think I may leave Nantucket out of the return loop and go straight from Key West to Dayton, Ohio.


ALWAYS A SMALL WORLD

As I checked out of my motel this morning, the new desk clerk and I fell into conversation about the precious night and the fact that I was right next door to the suspects. We discussed the changing Mississippi coast, and she said that she and her husband often went to those casinos to play around. We discussed growth and etcetera, then she mentioned she was from Ohio, from Navarre [sp] and, of course, I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. I didn't know of Navarre. She said she was somehow connected through relatives to the Amish communities up there, then another customer came up and that was the end of our conversation.


DAZED AND CONFUSED

Driving makes me dazed and confused. These entries are difficult to write. I can't focus, even after a night of sleep. I miss my little routine back home, the espresso at the Spike or the Coffee House, journal entries, writing letters to the editor, reading my books, my friends, my wife, making dinner for my wife, the dog, the gardening and lawn cutting, our little house. Yep? I'm ruin't as a travelin' man. The man on the go is done gone and I'm a happily married man. Still, I press on. We'll see what happens next. What if David and Monica no longer live in Brandon Florida and have returned to Xenia Ohio where they were born and were childhood sweethearts?

My biggest puzzlement over the whole Gulf Coast part? Why was Fitzgerald's still in the phone book and why didn't someone answer the phone?

ON THE ROAD WITH JACK KEROUAC IN TYLER, TEXAS

Hello, anybody!? I'm in Tyler, Texas at the University of Texas at Tyler Student Center. A beautiful campus, all yellow brick buildings and green lawns. Hot and overcast. The tornados that struck on Saturday struck north of me. Humid too, after days in desert and high country of Wyoming, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. The old feeling I recall of the South: that the average Southern women look tired, beat down and disgusted and the beautiful ones have that desperate look in their eyes, behind the fake smiles. Then there are the fed up women, the truly intelligent ones, the feminists, who are either riding around on the backs of Hells Angels' bikes or tied up with future Charlie Mansons in self-destructive patterns of behavior, or gay. It's a rare, intelligent Southern woman who can ever find herself within the short span of her life and become truly self-activated.

A nurse I knew from Mobile, Alabama once told me that half the women who came into her emergency ward were having psychosomatic heart attacks. It was the only way they knew to get attention.


THE ABUSED ABUSER

If you can get a copy of The New Yorker Magazine for May 26, 2003, you'll get a good picture of a conservative, a man who hasn't faced the abuse in his own family and so can't stand those who have dealt with their issues. Many psychologists will tell you that a man who hasn't dealt with the abuse in his family is likely to be very attached to them and to cling to abusive authority and so become abusive himself, i.e. conservative. Roger Ailes, the Fox news head and right wing mouth piece and Bush apologist is profiled in an article in that New Yorker.

Of Nixon, Ailes says, "He was socially uncomfortable. [Today] he would be allowed to go on Oprah and plead that he was an abused child. And the liberals would love him!" See Ailes' inability to get the point? Instead of honoring a man who might be willing to find out what really makes him tick, Ailes mocks him, because Ailes is not able to deal with his own insides.

Of his mother, Ailes fondly says, "You couldn't please her." Man, does he hear what he says? See, he really doesn't hear what he's saying. At age eight, Roger was hit by a car and had to learn to use his legs again. His father took him to a track to practice walking. Once when Roger fell into a pile of manure, his kindly dad, said, "Don't fall down and you won't get that crap on you." His father blamed his children for his life of toil and later abandoned them.

There is so much revealed in the article that Ailes doesn't want to deal with so, of course, he hates men who are willing to face the deepest emotions they feel. Such self knowledge frightens the hell out of conservatives like Ailes. He'd rather face a bullet and die than face himself. Which is why so many conservatives are in the military.

PS: How did I come across this old New Yorker? I got a sinus infection on the way to Tucson. Went to a urgent care center and found the old mag. there. Tore out the pages while waiting for the doc to come give me an RX for anti-bio.

SHOCK AND AWESOMER

Let me restate something which I don't like to think, but there it is, in my head. Americans speak of shock and awe and come up with simplistic, stupid ideas like that, because they're not in touch with reality. To us, shock and awe is throwing bombs long distances and rolling over opponents with the military superiority of tanks and guns and helicopters.

The Iraqis are our modern indians. Remember all the western stuff about savages who tied their opponents over ant hills to let them die tortured by sun and nature? Scalping, recall that? We're on Bush's crusade to tame these savages and give them the American way of life. Have we heard this before? It's called Manifest Destiny. Look it up.

So we "shock and awe" our the Davids with our giant war machine, and so the little Davids fight back with sticks and stones and slingshots. They cut off heads, and we act "shocked!" Isn't that we meant to do to them? Shock them? Didn't we call our little blitzkrieg "shock and awe?" So why are we shocked that they would do something to "shock" us? Lot's of hypocrisy here, folks. If you ask me, we were out-shocked and now we bitch and moan.


ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Near noon. Took me all morning to drive the 323 loop around Tyler and find the campus. Then I had problems getting this computer to work since I'm a Mac-eral myself. Now it's time to head across Louisiana to Vicksburg, Miss., then down along the Mississippi River into New Orleons where I hope I can find money enough to eat a meal at Fitzgerald's. I will have crossed the Mississippi in at least five different places in my life when I cross at Vicksburg, site of Grants great victory over the Confederates with siege tactics.

Pardon any errors. I was dizzy and felt out of place this morning.

STILL ON THE ROAD. TUCSON, HERE I AM, AND NOTHIN' CHANGES

Came down through Utah from Rock Springs, Wyoming and into Arizona and the gas prices immediately dropped 10 to 20 centavos as I entered Arizona. Lots of poverty in Utah (and Idaho) and things got better as soon as I entered Arizona. It was so visible, you couldn't miss it. Lots of run down trailers on patches of red dirt. Highways lined with junk. High prices and low wages in Utah, just like in Idaho, both states dominated by Mormons and right to work states. All the power is in the hands of the rich in those two Mormon states. Workers screwed in both states.

Long time ago, I went on strike against a Mormom shop in Spokane, Washington. All the Mormon employees refused to abide by the union vote and crossed our lines, except for one young Mormon guy who stayed with us, but he returned to the shop days before we voted. He was a spy. We lost the vote, the union was decertified and most of us lost our jobs. It was my one union action in my whole machinist life. I'm proud to have been part of it and to have stuck with the brotherhood.


BUCK KNIVES: IT'S THEIR RIGHT TO WORK FOR LESS, HE THINKS.

Buck Knives is moving from California to Idaho. Mr. Buck, according to a Time Magazine story, plans to pay his workers 30% less in Idaho. Since it's a private company, he has every right to do that, and since it's a private company, the whole 30% comes right out of the worker's pockets and goes into his. He just reaches in and steals it out. Since its a right to work state, workers can do nothing but suck it up and take it in the shorts. If workers could put some union power in that state, they wouldn't be treated like the third world workers they are.


A SOBERING THOUGHT WHICH I HATE TO THINK. SHOCK AND AWE, WHAT?

Berg's decapitated, and we call them savages. Yet we can go in with smart bombs and 500 pound bombs and blow hundreds of them up without ever getting close and having to take responsibility for our killing of them. Our killing is done at a distance and dispassionately. Their killing is down right up close and passionately. Whether to be killed by passion or dispassion is no real choice. Head cut off or head blown off-does it matter once you're dead? Remember, Bush had more peaceful ways to force Saddam to heel to the UN's will, and he chose this death course we're on. The responsibility for Berg's decapitated head is on Bush's shoulders. We spoke of "shock and awe" going in, but if you ask me, the decapitation of Berg is real "shock and awe". Which shocks most? Our murdering thousands or this murder of one?

ON THE ROAD WITH GEO

Pop up in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Lo! Hi! High, low jack and the game.... Ever play the card game, Seven Up? My great-great-grandfather taught me to play the game when I was five or six and he chuckled to watch me cheat. Then he taught me to play Big Casino, and eventually Cribbage. Is it the trip back through space in my checkerboard past that's making me think of my great-greats-?

Rock Springs is seeing a boomlet here where, Cheney's old employers, Halliburton is spending its war windfall in developing natural resource so that they can finance Bush/Cheney's campaign in the fall.


SPEAKING OF BUSHMESS'S MESSY MESS

Is Bush still president? Has there been a regime change yet? What country am I in? From grey rock montains to red rock mountains, all in the space of a couple of days and drives.


TRAVEL TIPS

Why are motels afraid to advertize their prices on their billboards? It'd help a guy like me find the cheapest prices. But I just walk in and ask their rates, then leave if not in my budget range.

Have you guys come across the latest trick by gas stations along the way? You see on one billboard regular unleaded advertised for 2.00 a gallon and on another billboard you see unleaded advertised for 2.10 a gallon. Then, of course, you choose the cheapest station, but when you get to the pump, you find that the unleaded price is for 85 octane while the 87 octane is, you guessed it, still 2.10 a gallon. The honest company, which is telling you that the 87 octane you've always bought is still 2.10 gets cheated by the company which now has for four grades of unleaded gasoline. They've just added a new octane rating two points lower than we've ever had before. So watch the flim flammers along the way.


AN AMERICAN THING

America equals Route 80 in upper north-east Utah, east of Salt Lake. To the left, me heading south-east, almost close enough to scrape my elbow on, the beautiful Wasatch[?] range. On the right, miles of junkyards, specially the company that advertises, "We got anything you need. If we can find it." At first, I was going to be insulted, then I decided to relax and enjoy the dichotomy of American the beautiful and the ugly. My friend tells me that Utah's a place that really rapes the environment. I ask is it because conservatives own the state? Like in Idaho?

I know! I know! Idaho brags about its beauty. They think it won't run out. Most of them haven't lived in the east. The east still has beauty too, but it's the beauty of a small gemstone and not the beauty of a large canvass. Eventually, when it's too late, the average Idahoan will see the beauty become rarer. By the time they call in the liberals to straighten out the mess, or Bushmess, it'll be too late.

Eventually, I'll be back in the east, after a jog along the Gulf Coast, in the land of the hardwood fores... excuse me, hardwood "woodlots" all divided up by roads, highways and housing plats....

A SHORT HIATUS: LOOK FOR A GREETING!

Today I’m heading out on a lengthy Travels With Charlie episode, sans Charlie, back through time and space to revisit many of the scenes of past crimes and misdemeanors. Will get as far as Key West where I went to Fleet Sonar School in the Navy way back in 1955 and could reach as far as Nantucket, Massachusetts, but these damn gas prices are impoverishing me even as I plan on setting out. Damn them and every SUV driver in the world!

If I can, I’ll make a few entries along the way, but my fervent hope is to pretend I’m in a strange country and know nothing of the politics, travel the blue back roads and just observe and be at peace, visit a few friends along the way. I’m going to drop my calling cards as I go, in any odd place I think is fit. Maybe someone reading this will find one along the way with my blog address on it. If you do, let me know.

Meanwhile, some parting thoughts in the usual vein...


PAGLIA’S CRUEL ART’S PERSONAE

Paglia (Sexual Personae) is fascinating. Her bullshit is of the highest order. Even as I read line after line of sublime nonsense for what it is, a part of me wants to read her book to the end. Anyhow....

A long time ago, I was working on a novel set in the Thirteenth Century in the area where Switzerland would come into existence. In fact the book was about that period when Swiss mountain men fought battles against the Hapsburg Empire to establish their national identity. In the story, a young son is physically beaten by a drunken peasant farmer who has returned home after spending his own youth as a mercenary soldier, fighting for one of the Italian city states.

I describe the beating in great and loving detail, then the farmer lifts his boy and tosses him into the briar hedges which surround the hovel they live in. The boy is in extreme pain, but as he looks into the sky toward the stars, I found myself describing the scene as being quite beautiful and uplifting; the star vision takes the boy out of himself and his pain.

Later, however, I realized that passage and much of my writing was actually a reaction within myself to cover my own days in abusive situations, and I began to think about a lot of creative work I’d read over the years which had the effect of taking quite ugly things and transcending them with great writing and soaring ideas rather than confronting the real pain.

I thought about comedians who routinely surmount their personal pain with humor. I remembered a Richard Prior comedy piece in which he describes a switching his grandmother gave him. He holds one hand above his head and dances in a circle with those big, pleading eyes of his while he tries to protect his behind with the other hand, and, in the past, I roared with laughter. Then in the middle of that remembrance, I suddenly realized I’d been laughing at the sight of a child dancing in mortal terror, and the bit stopped being funny.

Looked at with my new viewpoint, a great deal of some of the finest world art, which doesn’t face pain directly, but which only beautifies the pain, is actually an exercise in denial, an escape from truth rather than a facing of it. I recall some of the exquisitely beautiful pain I’d feel when I was a young man while reading certain works of art, and just this morning, I came across a Paglia quotation from Nietzsche: “Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty.” Bingo!

On another head: on page 53 of "Sexual Personae" (Vintage Books, Sept. 1991) Paglia brings in some interesting thoughts from Frazer's Golden Bough: "The most brilliant perception of 'The Golden Bough', muted by prudence, is Frazer's analogy between Jesus and the dying gods. The Christian ritual of death and redemption is a survival of pagan mystery religion. Frazer says, "The type, created by Greek artists, of the sorrowful goddess with her dying lover in her arms, resembles and may have been the model of the Pieta of Christian art.'"


SPEAKING OF CRUELTY:
THE PRICE OF ARROGANCE

I urge you to read Fareed Zakaria’s piece in this month’s Newsweek magazine May 17, 2004, p.39.

Zakaria has been a firm supporter of the Bush Iraq war, yet he writes, ‘Since 9/11, a handful of officials at the top of the Defense Department and the vice president’s office have commandeered American foreign and defense policy. In the name of fighting terror they have systematically weakened the traditional restraints that have made this country respected around the world.”

After reading Fareed, move on to the other stories in Newsweek that reveal the abusive prison situation in Iraq and elsewhere, specifically page 30: “...all [Paul Bremer among them] warned of mounting problems in the prisons.... A 24-page report delivered to the Pentagon in February tells of systemic ‘use of ill treatment’—most graphically, seven shootings of unarmed prisoners, sometimes from watchtowers. The abuses were ‘tantamount to torture,’ the report states.... The fact that at least 25 prisoners have died in U.S. custody since 9/11 was pretty strong hint that something was going wrong.”

I think Newsweek has been pretty fair in its coverage of the situation.


EVOLUTION! CAN WE TOP IT?

After thinking about the cruel abuse discussed elsewhere in this post, you should consider reading Pinker’s “Blank Slate” and the evolutionary truths contained within that book which also shed light on cruelty in the human condition. Only by recognizing the dark places within all humans can we have any chance of transcending it. It’s no good to call others "evil" (a word I don’t believe in) like Bush-league does and exempt ourselves when that animal of evolution is within all of us.


TRAVEL IDEA

"The town was so dull that when the tide went out, it refused to come back." —Fred Allen (1894-1956)

TERRORISM MAKES CONVERTS IN AMERICA

Terrorism is winning converts among America’s most powerful leaders. A recent convert to terrorism is Oklahoma’s Republican Senator James Inhofe. He’s enraged at the rage of Americans who can’t stomach terrorism of any sort by any side and the actions that flow from the rage of terrorism. In fact, he’s quite the rage-aholic because his Bushman’s got us in a Bushmess which gets deeper by the day, but the only Bushmess of Bushmess is Bushmess so what does an intelligent man like Inhofe do when faced with his president’s ignorance? Of course! Aim his anger at the people who long ago saw Bush for the fool he is. Don’t aim it at the junior who got us into his mess.

Inhofe wants us to ignore the Geneva Conventions and permit any means to torture information from prisoners. He admits to his conversion to the world of terrorism when he clearly states, “We’re in a different kind of world than we’ve ever been in before, and I believe we need to be tougher than we have ever been before.”

The different world Inhofe speaks of is, of course, the “world of terrorism” from which he now gets his terrorist ideas. Fortunately, some of us are resisting being terrorists and remain in the sane world outside the “different world” Inhofe now lives in. I refuse to become a terrorist or to bend my democratic standards. Terrorists will not convert me to terrorism’s tactics. Unlike Inhofe, I’ll remain a law-abiding American, if you don’t mind.

Find more about Inhofe and terrorism on Page A4 of USA TODAY, Wednesday, May 12, 2004.


NADARFACTS [See Citizen Works.]

In a March/April, 2004 article, “Corporate Supremacy and the Erosion of Democracy,” in The Humanist magazine, Ralph Nadar points out that the ratio of labor dollars to business dollars dedicated to political activism has declined for labor from 3/1 to 14/1.

Nadar also writes, “Despite all the indictments over recent scandals, not one CEO has yet been sent to jail. The settlements for ten Wall Street firms were a laughable slap on the wrist. They weren’t even required to admit wrongdoing and their $1.4 billion assessment fee is deductible—we’re all sharing in it. That was considered the toughest fine in corporate history and it isn’t even one day’s revenues for firms like Citicorp.”

[Both passages are on page 9.]


BUSHIFACTS

From the same issue of “The Humanist” comes Fred Edwords’ article, “The Democratic Ideal Versus the State of the Union” which concentrates on three ways that Bushocracy falls short of the ideals of democracy. In that article is the following scary observation by Christy Todd Whitman, another of the fairly intelligent people who made the mistake of disagreeing with her not so bright Bush-league boss.

“...Christine Todd Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, had never heard Bush ‘analize a complex issue, parse opposing positions, and settle on a judicious path. In fact, no one—inside or outside of government, here or across the globe—had heard him do that to any significant degree.’” (Pages 13-14.)

If you ask me, Bush’s inability to do those things is a sign of his mental deficiency rather than a conscious decision about how to handle complex intellectual issues. It’s also a sign of his tendency to put ideology ahead of rational process. He just gets things in his head and runs with them like a bull in the Iraqi shop. Jeez! Keep him out of the China shop. Imagine what China is thinking while watching this naked display of stupidity by an American president?


IS IT JUST A REPUBLICAN THING?

“Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.” —Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969)

SEXUAL PERSONAE IS SEXUAL, PERSONAL

Finally getting around to reading Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae. Okay—so I’m 14 or 15 years behind. You know how many books there are to read. I doubt I’ll read more than .09 percent of all the books every published in all my eternity of lifetimes. I’m falling behinder and behinder... aiyee!

Don’t I remember when I was so Apollonian as Paglia and sought to get everything explained in huge, overarching generalizations. Hey—I enjoy reading an intellectual’s book, but when every other line is a generalization, I know I’m reading bullshit, but, say, most of what all of us say is just that—all bullshit, all the time. We know this from the scientific evidence which has demonstrated that the left brain is a constant bullshitter, struggling to make a cohesive personal reality out of sensory data that has no meaning except in instinctive, evolutionary terms. So Camille’s left brain’s spinning is okay for her, if that’s how she wants to see the world, but I have my own take on things.

Let’s just take one of Paglia’s generalization and dissect it: “When prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves, through drugs or depression.” p.3.

Camille’s referring, of course, to the now defunct hippy days, but for all her generalizations, I’ve got a few facts to share. I just happened to be teaching high school in the 60s as all this stuff started coming down, and the state and religion were the problems, but not in the way that Camille tries to show us.

I recall the first kids showing up at high school with the colorful clothing. I took special interest in those students and their friends. I felt kindred spirits alive in them. I was struggling with our government and with religion too. The colorful ones sometimes had to swallow physical abuse at the hands of the more conservative kids. Almost universally, those students were the products of unreal homes and conservative or fanatically religious parents who abused them verbally and physically. One girl came to school with bruise marks on her body from a father who beat her. Another young woman described her father coming home with a woman other than his wife and having sex with the strange woman while her mother was in the house. Two white girls I knew, tight with black revolutionaries, hid guns in the attics of their molesting father. Many of these students also lived spartan, self-denying lives, rejecting all the comforts of their middle class upbringing. Other students, with less home damage, were bright and curious, and their conservative culture had done little to explain the mysteries and allure of sex so they went out and experimented. Same with drugs.

If you're wondering why I didn't report some of the things I was hearing and seeing, you will understand how those times were before students had any personal rights. It was just the way life was for many of us. I came from an abusive home myself. The father who beat his daughter, in fact, tried to get me in trouble with the school because she'd always quote things I'd say in class against things he said at home. I only taught one year. That was enough for me. You couldn't win.

Paglia is misguided in assigning these students' depression and their use of sex and drugs to a fear of freedom. Quite the opposite, those symptoms were a direct result of living in dishonest households where freedom was not an option. Such repression and dishonesty would depress anyone. They knew there was a better way to live than the way they saw modeled in church, state and home, and they sought it out. If they were free with drugs and sex, it was an attempt to kill the pain of living in dishonest and repressive homes that modeled the dictates of repressive church and state.

As for myself, pardon me, Camille, but I feel pretty free, for a man who knows he’s a robot, directed largely by synapses and chemical reactions, from being manipulated by church and state, and I find freedom to be quite nice and invigorating too, if you don’t mind. I must assume that you don’t feel very free, and, if freedom depresses you and causes you to be an addict, speak for yourself but not for society as a whole, specially nor for me.


“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.” —H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

IT'S A CRIME TO BE POOR

In the sleepy little town of Spokane on the eastern border of Washington, governmental forces, led by local wealthy conservatives, are again making it illegal to be poor and homeless, shutting down hobo camps and burning what little property they find in the camps. I suggest we return back a hundred years to other conservative times and build debtors' prisons once more, make the whole idea of being poor and in debt a crime. Then a latter day Dickens can find all sorts of Micawbers to caricature, and the economic problem inherent in capitalism will be swept off the streets and out of sight. The criminalization of poverty can be expected in conservative times; it's what they call compassionate conservatism.


BOOK REPORT BY A ROBOT

My current reading is the novel in progress, “The Greyhound Bardo”, another mystical trip to the dream world we all live in but don’t know about, by Geoff Peterson and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”. (I apologize for the using quotation marks to set off book titles, but my blog site doesn’t have full editing tools so I’m stuck with what I have.) Just finished "Bardo" and began Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae". I can already see she's full of hot gas and farts.

I finally finished “Synaptic Self” by Joseph LeDoux. I’d say that if we were brutally honest with ourselves, we’d have to admit that at the very bottom of our actions, emotions and motivations we’re just complex chemical/electrical robots, but it doesn’t really matter because, as we experience the moments of our living, we feel as if we’re free and can easily imagine we’re free agents. In fact, our whole justice system is based on the unproved hypothesis that people are responsible for their behavior, but at the very deepest, most hidden levels, our actions are triggered by chemical surges and synaptical activities that we have no control over.

A zillion things are happening at the synaptical level in an angry moment. The fist that flies out from one drunken man’s intake of data that triggers fear and releases chemicals that tell the muscles to swing away and results in the death of the object of his fear, in another man is stopped by a rush of chemicals caused by the fear of punishment. Why the chemicals released by the fear of punishment in one man stops the fist in mid swing while in the other man it doesn’t stop the fist is a chemical mystery not yet solved.


RED CROSS, RIGHT CROSS

It seems the Red Cross has been telling American authorities and others about the prison abuse for a long time. And according to the Red Cross, "Still the American reaction was far slower than that of British officials."

I take that difference in response time to demonstrate that the liberal and more mature British government is more sensitive to violations of human rights than is the more conservative and immature Bushite government. Granted, Bush, once the abuse was made public, pretended that he hadn't heard a thing about it, and, once exposed, he made hurried apologies. No one is ever responsible for anything over there in Washington D.C. anymore, are they? Things happen, and then, they find out. Kind of like the angry fist swing of the previous section, isn't it?

I wrote the preceding paragraph yesterday, before news of the beheading came down. The more I read about this whole mess in Iraq, the more my views before Bush's war started are vindicated, and I'm just furious that we let a dummy like Bush be appointed president and then a majority of you, my fellow Americans, followed this ignorant appointee into war.


PAYING THE ILLITERATE PIPER

Americans are getting exactly the quality of intelligence in their leadership that they deserve. How many Americans have read a book this month? Language is the basis of the whole thing we call human intelligence. The human animal's brain evolved as it did through it's mastery of language. Our increase in brain size was because of language. But listening to language is different than reading language. Listening is a social act whereas reading is a reflective act. Reading developes one's capacity to reflect and be reasonable, to have a strong identity thoroughly one's own. People who get their information only by listening are not doing half as much reflection as those who read and who sometimes pause in their reading to think about what they're taking in. The non-reader is America's weakest link in the modern world.


THE WAY OUT

Iraq is still Bush's mess. It's not America's mess yet. If we repudiate Bush by putting a new man into office, we will have more freedom of action. But, if we elect Bush, we say that Americans accept the Bushmess and support the Bushmess. We'll be locked into Bush's don't-mess-with-Texas course of angry over reaction for another four years. OK—so I've said this before in another post. Can one get too much of a good think?


AND NOW FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY NONSENSE:

"When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room." —Woody Allen

NOT ONLY ATHEISTS, BUT BIBLE SCHOLARS...

For many years I’ve known that fundamentalists are people of little faith. If you take their paper and ink Bible from them and could prove to them that evolution is the fact it is to the more reasonable world, their faith would crumble like dry sand because it depends so much on the physical world conforming to their faith in the invisible world. It’s why they speak more about Christ than about their invisible god, and, in fact, have been forced to make god and Jesus the same person.

Jesus is at least mentioned in one other place than in the Bible and that’s in the history of Josephus, and some scholars charge that even that reference is a spurious insertion. Still, by pointing to the collections of writing called the Bible as proof of Jesus and then by calling Jesus, “god”, Christians hope to give some authenticity to the existence of god. But, more and more, Christians speak of Jesus as lord and ignore the concept of god itself which has no proof, and, paradoxically, without god, Jesus is no more than another death cult madman like David Koresh.

The fundamentalist’s literal interpretation of the Bible has been questioned by studious Christian scholars for a long time now; they realize that “the attempts by literalists to reconcile inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible [are] little short of ridiculous.” Further, serious Bible scholars reported forty years back that “the excitement a few decades [1920s] ago over ‘the war’ between science and religion evaporated when it became apparent that the only conflict was between science and the doctrine of inerrancy.”

Someone should tell the fundamentalists they lost because they certainly don’t know it, and in fact, are back, like the Popes of old, claiming something like Papal infallibility when it comes to Bible truths. When Magellan circumnavigated the globe and gained a day, proving without the shadow of a doubt that the world is round, the Pope of his time declared that when Bible truth was contradicted by facts, the Bible truth was to be adhered to. A fundamentalist’s imperviousness to facts was as frightening then and is as frightening in the Moslem world now as it is in America’s supposedly modern culture.

Finally, a fundamentalist’s very literal mind makes them least likely to be people of deep faith. As another scholar points out: “One recent author, writing from a different angle, states that the language of religion, including most of the Bible, is necessarily figurative or symbolic and therefore the literalist, who by definition lacks imagination or poetic insights, is the least religious of men.”

The quoted passages in the paragraphs above are from the Dartmouth Bible (1961 edition), p. xl, which is a study Bible of great authenticity.


CRONY IS AS CRONY DOES

You can never separate cronies in the Bush administration even if it makes a mess for us in the world. Sticking up for your buddies in this case is putting your pride ahead of U.S. interests in the world.


TAKE A LITTLE FROM THE POOREST, GIVE TO THE RICHEST AND SEND THE REST TO IRAQ

HUD ain't a crony so it gets left out in the cold and so do lots of seniors, handicapped and anyone who isn''t rich enough to have a seat at the Royal House of Bush.


SPEAKING OF CRONYISM

"Ignorance is the mother of admiratiion." —George Chapman (1599?-1634)

FOX SAYS,
EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO LEARN I LEARNED IN JUNIOR HIGH

At first I don’t get it, the thing Fox has for CNN, the Fox billboard in Atlanta across the street from CNN that taunts CNN with insults. Then I get it! It’s grade school emotions come into the professions! It’s the people who can’t get grade school out of their systems so they join Fox and carry their battle into the adult world. It’s the dummies who still think like 12 year olds who taunted and teased those smarter than they were in junior high. Fox boys are the guys who pulled down the school average and made life hell for intelligent students.

Used to be that someone with something on the ball could leave behind the dummies and make a better life for themselves in the professions. Now, with America’s decline in literacy, with illiterate TV standards helping them, with the usual growth of conservatism that illiteracy evokes, the schoolyard bullies can make a living in the bigs too. They tailor their news to those who still think at the level of a 12 year old. Well, I suppose, since most writing is still at the 12 year old level, someone has to represent the schoolyard dummies too.


MORE DANGEROUS SCHOOL YARD FOX PEOPLE

These gang children who write on walls, who mark their territories like dogs or foxes—what do we make of them? They’re about two years old emotionally; that’s when children write on walls at home too. But just because they’re emotionally retarded, animal-like children doesn’t keep them from being dangerous. They’ve got the strength of adults and the aggression of Fox people and so they can do tremendous damage when their aggressions get out of hand. I think those kids are just one more sign, like the decline of news standards at Fox, of the decline of American standards in conservative times. Fortunately, such things are cyclical.


SPEAKING OF FOX BARKS

When I get my perspective right on talk radio, I can get a laugh. Suddenly I see all these conservative talk guys in the kennels of their time slots, side by side, barking furiously and angrily from the concrete cavern of their Fox boarding kennel. They’re barking at the ghosts in their heads and stirring up the fearful barkings of their listeners. All is sound and fury, signifying nothing. Aarf aarf aarf, yip bark, bark, aarf aarf aarf, yip yap yoiks! They and their listeners—they’re hilarious.


SPEAKING OF FOX NEWS FAILURES:

"An author's first duty is to let down his country" —Brendan Behan (1923-1964

MANY PEAS IN A POD, A SUNDAY SERMON

Schonfield’s study, “The Passover Plot”, draws the picture of Jesus’ plot a little too fine for my liking, but he does, I think, demonstrate pretty well that Jesus (fictional? or real?) knew what he was doing when he chose lines from the Old Testament to add prophetic power to his words. I don’t think that Jesus planned every last detail of what happened to him, as Schonfield suggests, but I do think that Jesus, through his reading of Jewish history, believed it was his purpose to die, as a holy one, so that the expected kingdom of heaven could realize itself on the earth in a timely manner and that he did everything possible to insure that he would die, and he succeeded. Just as Jesus interpreted Jewish texts to give himself the idea that some holy person must die in order for prophecy to be fulfilled and the kingdom to come, many Christians, through the centuries, have followed Jesus' example, feeling they must die to bring about some final end. They're all copycat suiciders.

Jesus, if he existed, was mad, of course, like David Koresh, like any of the leaders of the death cults we witness century after century and in our current world who pray for and hope for the end of their lives of misery and the imagined coming of something better for themselves. According to Schonfield, Jesus thought the kingdom of god was nigh and so fulfilled his part in Jewish history, imagining that as he did so, god’s world would quickly arrive on earth. How else do we explain his words in the gospels which foretold that the kingdom of god would arrive before many who knew Jesus met their own deaths?

Mark 9:1 “And he said to them, ‘I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.’”

Mark 13:30 After Jesus describes the last days and what will happen at that time, he says, “I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”

There’s no explanation for his words if what Schonfield says is not true. Those are pretty plain spoken words from a plain spoken carpenter, turned prophet. I believe that Schonfield is correct when he explains that Jesus certainly believed his own words but was, of course, like so many after him, quite wrong. He died, like so many cultists after him, for nothing.

[I employed only Mark’s words because whoever wrote Matthew, Luke and John, as so many scholars have shown, copied from Mark's story and added details to suit their own political purposes.]


BANK ROBBERY OR WORSHIP?

Our local paper, the Spokesman Review, is trying its damnedest to add numbers to the Christian faith. I’ve never seen a major city paper in my whole 66 years of life and travel which puts religion on the front page so often (unless the paper was an arm of the church). But my question is why does its pictures always make these little groups of Christians seem such fools? Time after time, Christians are shown with eyes closed, hands in the air like terrified victims of a bank robbery. To skeptics, like myself, such a posture is too symbolic of people of faith not to be remarked. Eyes closed symbolizes that they are shut off from reality and shut their senses down which is the only way that science and reason gets in, through that which can be sensed. Hands in air toward empty space, still believing there is a heaven up there in directionless space. Hands up as if being held up or conned into believing in that which does not exist. I think the Spokesman would do them a favor if they weren’t shown in that ridiculous pose.

The Spokesman article was about very small groups of people who are starting their own churches without buildings or expenses. One sign of an unhealthy mind is the impulse to shut oneself off from mainstream culture. Those little churches in private homes, shut off from the healthy influence of mainstream church life, are easy pickings for pedophiles and cultists. I know of at least one case here in Spokane where people met in each others homes and in which one of the chief members had incested all his own children. Incestuous groups and families like that are often shut off from the larger culture because the authoritarian figures who take charge in small groups of course want to keep their secrets in the group. Those shut off, isolated house churches are probably the most unhealthy sorts of environments possible.


WHAT DID WE EXPECT? ARE WE BRAIN DEAD?

As far as abuse goes—to understand a behavior pattern is not to condone it, but what do we expect when we send young men and women into situations where killing is a normal way of life? Do we expect normalcy? If the normal job is to kill or be killed, why would torture and humiliation seem abnormal? You take young people, separate them from their normal way of life, isolate them from their normal values, put them into an “us versus them” situation, and you are bound to get abnormal behavior. You can’t get any worse than the environment of the killing ways of war.

This prison abuse was another thing anybody with a smidgen of info about psychology would expect to come along, so I hope no one is surprised. I’m sure that anyone who’s seen a little combat would know exactly what to expect. Of course, that wouldn’t be Bush and his chickenhawk cronies. Now Kerry, McCain, Max Cleland and Gore would know something about what goes on in a war. They’ve been there. That’s why you expect them to be able to show a little restraint when it comes to starting wars. They know that war “is the last thing in the world” you want to resort to in order to achieve your objectives.


“I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.” —Jane Austen

CHARITY IS AS CHARITY DOES

I keep hearing that liberals are uncharitable compared to conservatives and their Christian allies. Here they go again!

I contribute to many charities, but most of the causes I contribute to are those whose goals are to extend democracy to people normally shut out from full participation in our democracy, to end poverty forever and to build a just society in which charity will not be called "charity" but "justice". The society liberals envision will no longer require charity as it’s been understood since as far back as capitalism first created an impoverished class. When we’ve achieved that in America, then, perhaps, we can reach out to places like Iraq without so much hypocrisy clinging to our deeds.

Conservatives and Christians, on the other hand, don’t mind charity at all. Their charitable aims are to use other people’s distress in order to build up their church attendance.


PART OF SOMETHING BIGGER

How often have I heard Christians speak of being a part of something bigger than themselves? And I’ve heard that from military and other sacrificial types who are into obliterating themselves in order to escape who they are. The human animal is a selfish species. If the human animal were not selfish, she would have long ago ceased to exist as a species. I don’t know what to make of people who want to be part of something bigger than themselves. If I could imagine ants or termites who had consciousness, I’d imagine that "groupiness" is what they want because that’s what they have. They’re part of a greater whole, their lives sacrificed to group purposes.

I guess there must be something different about me because I never fit into the ant hill mold. In the military, I came to resist authority and eventually it caused me some minor troubles. Some people can be bees, I guess, but some can’t, and there’s no shame in either. Not that I don’t do things sometimes for other people, but I’m always honest enough to realize that I do things for others because it makes me feel good and I want to. Any sacrifice I make is entirely for me and not for others. In fact, those who I’ve met along the way who feel some sort of duty to be part of something greater than themselves, usually are codependent types who, eventually, deeply resent the things they do for others. My goodness gracious sakes alive, who hasn’t met the long suffering type and found them unpleasant to the max? I suggest that If you’re going to be unselfish, make sure you get a big selfish pleasure out of it, otherwise, you’ll regret and resent everything you do.


WILL THE REAL WILL STAND UP?

In Will’s latest column (Newsweek, May 10, 2004, p.102), he writes, “You, valued reader, probably can barely imagine how unlike many—actually most—of your fellow Americans you are. Here you are reading a news magazine which is a minority taste. Stranger still, you are reading the back page, a habit that is, in the eyes of most Americans, weird.” Will goes on to charge that there are so many things that would surprise us literate types.

How little Will truly knows us “elitist types”, another word his nonreaders throw at us. George doesn't realize that among us literate people are men like myself with advanced degrees who read widely and steadily and who are machinists and laborers and who, unlike Will, have hobnobbed with the proletariat all our lives. Speaking for myself, I damn well do know the ignorance arising in American life among the blue collar men I work with, the ignorance that throughout history has been a hallmark of conservative eras which allow for the dominance and enrichment of the arrogant rich and their snobbish, elitist, boot lickers like George Will.

My questions are. Does Will also mock himself in what he says? And why does Will continue to throw in his lot with the conservatives who are taking advantage of the uninformed opinions of the proletariat? I invite him down into the trenches with me, if he has the courage to stand with the mass of men in their quiet desperation against the economic forces which are overwhelming them. If he hasn’t the courage to do it, then may his own words flay him alive.



“I have already given two cousins to the war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife’s brother.” —Artemus Ward

SADDAM’S PLACE BECOMES RICK’S PLACE

The furor about American abuse of prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison is a sign of progress in American moral values. The same conservatives who defended the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam era have learned from American liberals that you cannot win wars and hold your head high if your actions are no better than those of your antagonists. If we act like our enemy, even if we win a war, our enemy has been victorious by making us a carbon copy of himself. We liberals welcome Bush into our camp.


ON THE OTHER HAND—
CARBON COPIES OF SADDAM

Tuesday’s violent attack on antiwar protesters at Mission and Hamilton in Spokane, Washington shows how Saddam is winning American converts to his methods. Saddam’s fear of free speech lives among the right wing conservatives in America, and, strangely familiar—just as it was in Franco’s Spain—the fundamentalist Christians are in cahoots with those of the fascist spirit.

Free speech is at the core of democracy. Open debate gives us all hope, for it is only by free speech and open discussion that a minority of one in a hundred can hope to become a majority of 51. We must always protect the views of the minority, no matter how loathsome to us personally, from the tyranny of the majority. Those who would shut down the free exchange of ideas are those who would destroy the true hope of democracies, the hope that anyone’s lonely idea could become a majority view someday which has often happened.

As an atheist myself, I know that my hope is that someday, maybe a thousand years hence, the evolutionary growth of the cortex and reason will prevail over the instinct-based, religious superstitions and dogma of the amygdala. My hope can never come about in a nation in which debate is silenced as it has been silenced so often in the past by fearful religious authorities who know that dogma is weak when faced with the facts or who want to force their religious ideas over the facts of science.

Authoritarian types most fear the challenges to their authority that free speech creates. There is no more authoritarian psychology in the world than the religious temperament which looks above itself for answers rather than into its own humanity for guidance. If one cannot find compassion in oneself first, then all appeals to a greater power in the heavens will bear no fruit within. This faith in human compassion is the belief of the humanists, secular and believing, among us.


HATRED BREEDS CARBON COPIES

Does anyone else notice that the increasing polarization of the American public, the increasing hatred and ill-will between us, coincides with the rise in power and influence of “evangelical” Christianity? Doesn’t history tell us that we can expect hatred and suffering to increase wherever one religion grows politically dominant? Just look at this National Day of Prayer in state houses and the capital which shuts out atheists.

In some cases, atheists are truly citizens who are taxed without representation. In Georgia (or Alabama), legislators literally told atheists who wanted to attend their little prayer session that atheists had no representative within that state house. This is an abominable repression of the Constitutional rights of American citizens, perpetrated by the heinous actions of a religious majority. The Saddamites in control of that legislature are truly undemocratic and foul. It’s abhorrent that American soldiers are dying in order to defend religious tyranny in America!

If any reader wants to get an inside glimpse of the fundamentalistic Christian psyche, he should read Psalms with an open mind and experience first hand the kind of sensibilities that hide behind the Christian smile. Modern Christian fundamentalists are not Christ guided people but Old Testament Taliban types just like the writer of Psalms.

As you read the Old Testament psalms, ask yourself what psychological profile comes to mind: one that sees itself as lower than dirt, sees enemies everywhere on every hand, sees a black and white world divided between the good guys on his side and the “evil” guys on the other side, and who wishes his enemies dead, crushed out of existence by a god who is on his side against his enemy? Do you recognize it? (See Psalms.)

Reading stuff like that which divides your world into two camps—the insiders (us) and the outsiders (them)—and learning to judge others like that, how could you not become an angry hateful person? The psalms are the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic. How often have we encountered the extreme madness of his type on a streetcorner, disheveled and dirty, hollering at us from the untreated madness of those imagined religious persecutions that still live in his ancient Bible mentality? Someday, let us hope, reason and facts will activate the human brain and not the instincts and violence of the animal which still control the religious sensibilities of the fundamentalist.


“In Ireland, a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.” —author unknown

CHICKENHAWKS ROOST IN THE BUSH

Now is a time of great shame for the American people. Never in the history of America have the men who fought our wars been so badly treated as currently. From Gore through triple amputee, Vietnam vet, Max Cleland to John Kerry, the men who fought are being trashed by the men who ducked and covered—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz. The list of Republican cutan’runners is endless, and even John McCain, a Republican, is largely without honor in his own party.

These chickhawk Republicans are without honor and without compassion. That’s why it’s so easy for the chickenhawks to send our sons and daughters off to die—they lack compassion. Compassion is the capacity to feel another’s pain, to be able to walk in another’s shoes, and we all remember how much fun conservative’s make of that saying, don’t we?

I was fortunate to have served in the Navy from 1955 through 1958, a time of peace, and so I could later oppose the war in Vietnam without tarnish to my reputation, and I opposed the Vietnam war because I had compassion. And so when I tell you that the Bushites don’t have compassion, you can believe me. Their lack of compassion is why America is beginning to sink into a permanent depression for so many who live in poverty without the safety net which sustained Americans since the days of Roosevelt.

The Bushites are not the men of the Greatest Generation who fought, died and built America to its greatest times. Those people, my fathers and uncles, aunts and mothers, had courage and compassion. The Bushites have neither courage nor compassion. That America honors chickenhawks with high office is a tremendous disgrace to America’s name.


Subject: In Memorium
Date: April 21, 2003 3:49 PM
From: george thomas
To: INLANDER (a local weekly of great esteem)

Dear Editor,

You can argue or pray. You can espouse Christianity, Islam or Judaism and hate/love your neighbor for his beliefs. You can exult or be depressed, you can be pro or anti Shrub, Saddam or Sharon. You can support the war vigorously, wave flags, decorate your cars with them, give your neighbors the finger, honk horns at one another, pray, meditate get together your packets for the troopers—you can do all of that you want, but to the ones who are dead, what you do or say now—it don’t mean a thing. They no longer take sides.

The dead are passed into silence. They no longer hear and they no longer care about us or what we believe. They don’t care if America’s the most feared nation in the world or whether, like the “elated” Shrub after a Texas football game, you hook your pathetic ego to America’s victory to give meaning to your meaningless existence. The dead won’t hold a child again or make love to a mate or dance or sing, breathe the air again or lift their faces to the sunshine on a beach or mountainside or toil over a lathe, drive a gashog, own guns, or sit behind a banker’s or a president’s stupid little desk. They don’t care!

Quibble on, O, mankind! Death enjoys your contests. Your fear of death gives life to death. It awaits the next contest and says, “Bring it on, baby! I thrive on your victories.”

Sincerely,

Geo


"Keep breathing." —Sophie Tucker (1884?-1966)

FREEDOM DON'T RING ON THE RIGHT DOOR:

Mrs. Bush (What's her first name? Barbara, Laura...? You know? The president's wife?) is the typical suppressed woman a conservative marries. Remember Martha, Mitchell's wife, in the Nixon era who conservative's actually drugged to shut up? That's a conservative marriage for you. Anyhow, when you measure the gutless actions of Laura Bush who censored her own poetry gathering because some of the poets didn't agree with her husband's war in Iraq as compared with Teresa Kerry who openly states her anti-abortion views, Americans can see for ourselves the oppression in a typical conservative marriage. Not only that, you can see that Cheney's gay daughter hasn't openly opposed her father's position on gay rights. In conservative households, it isn't safe for a woman to disagree so most of what we see is the censored view of womanhood.

What fundamentalists just don't get is freedom. They can say the word, but they can't walk the talk. That's because their chief philosophy book, that collection of fiction mixed with a grain of history, the Bible, doesn't recognize freedom or liberty or democracy or the freedom of women. It honors only obedience. It's a book full of kings and princes more suited to 2000 years ago then now.

Here's how a lively Democrat speaks, and I love her for it. Any other kind of woman is a bore: "I refuse to be censored... the moment I start to control my deepest beliefs and my actions, I lose who I am.... I don't want to be bottled. I'm not ketchup." —Teresa Kerry

We all know what it's like to lose ourselves, don't we? Whoops—guess I'm speaking only for people free enough to know who we are and to fight against those who cherish only obedience.


BUSH STIFFLES HIS EDITH WIFE
BUT BUSH'S BUDDIES CAN'T SHUT MICHAEL UP

It's okay to get a huge piece of fiction like Gibson's "Passion" on the screen, but see how the Disney (dizzy?) powers are out to silence Michael Moore's true, "Fahrenheit 911"! Boy, are they afraid of an alternative view! CENSORED


WHEN THE HYPOCRISY'S ON THE OTHER FOOT

How many anti-choice (supposedly pro life) people are pro death penalty and pro Bush's war which is slaughtering thousands of women and children in Iraq? The Democrats didn't hesitate to throw out LBJ for his expansion of the Vietnam War. Do the Republicans have the same courage to do what's right? I don't think so! It's not in them to be free men and women.


"Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become." —Mary McGrory

OFFICER, WE WAS LOOKING THE WRONG WAY
WHEN THE TRUCK HIT US

The omens are gathering. The Carrier Corporation in Connecticut closed its factory this week and moved some jobs to Georgia and some offshore where labor is cheaper. In recent weeks I've heard layoff numbers of 4500 and 6000 in two other major companies. No—I can't recall the names of those companies; I'm 66 for Pete's sake! My wife, who works for a government agency reports layoffs coming her way too.

Locally, in Spokane Washington, both our major hospital groups report major leaps in their costs for charity care—"major" leaps.

The world had a huge jump in carbon dioxide levels in the upper atmosphere this year. Many point to increased industrialization in China and India as the culprit, and those two nations have only just begun. And many other nations are preparing to move forward with industrialization. Everybody wants to be an America.

Some scientists point out that our bodies are programmed to eat during times of plenty to prepare for the famines that their evolutionary ancestors used to experience. Obesity is increasing worldwide in all the industrialized nations. Maybe our bodies aren't being tricked during a time of plenty; maybe are bodies anticipate something that we aren't consciously aware of. Perhaps America's dropping sperm count is another sign our bodies know something we don't know.

Here, in the American west, drought conditions are shrinking our water supplies everywhere we look as snow packs diminish and glaciers melt.

Americans continue to purchase and drive tanks that consume and pollute world resources.

[The American Christian lunatic fringe is hoping and praying for the end of the world soon. They could be right for the wrong reason. OK, ignore this lunatic fringe.]

Prediction: Americans are in for a catastrophic drop in their standard of living as other nations take over the world's manufacturing chores and their standards of living increase. We could be facing double digit unemployment figures within the next 25 years. America's life expectancy rates will begin to drop for the first time in history. Infant mortality rates are already increasing. As more nations industrialize, our globe will not be able to withstand the onslaught on its resources. Within the next 100 years, the whole globe will feel the environmental pinch. Standards of living will change for everyone and not in a nice way.

Now to this idiot Bush who was appointed to America's presidency: he's not looking the wrong way—he's got his head so far up his ass that he's not seeing anything. America faces huge health care issues and issues of pollution and issues with jobs and declining standards of living, and that idiot is wasting America's dollars and the world's natural resources on a war in a foreign land that we do not need to be fighting. That stupid male bimbo is so short sighted that he has no vision for America nor any idea of what's going on in the world and no idea of what's really important to America's interests.

We need to be directing all America's mental resources and wealth to building America's capacity to meet the future without a dismembering social upheaval. We need to be dropping Medicare and Medicaid and establishing a national health care system for all. It won't be perfect, but it's better than the nothing zillions of us already have. We need to prop up the job market with government jobs, not to be cutting government jobs. We need to aim those increased government jobs to rebuilding the social safety net because we're going to need it and soon.

Yes, we need to increase taxes to do this. Poverty is undermining jobs and pay everywhere we look. The better off worker is going to pay one way or another. He's going to lose his job to poorer workers here and abroad, or he's going to pay a little higher taxes to maintain his job. The only segment of society that benefits from poverty is the capitalist class which can wring ever higher profits from the work force by decreasing pay and benefits. And, yes, the wealthy should pay a higher tax rate than the rest of us because they benefit from the pain of the rest of us.

Finally, Americans need to look toward one another as brothers and sisters in common cause rather than down or up at one another as we all struggle to keep our lives together in a world which is not friendly toward the loner.

THE CHEMICALS THAT MAKE THE HUMAN ANIMAL
IMAGINE
HE HAS A SOUL

“Our abilities to see, hear, remember, fear danger and desire happiness all involve excitatory (glutamate) synaptic transmissions regulated by inhibitory (GABA) synapses and modulated by peptides, amines and hormones.” —Synaptic Self, p.63


THE CHEMICAL THAT'LL MAKE HIM WISH HE HAD A SOUL

Of course:Carbon Dioxide Warming


HIS TORTUROUS WAR COMES HOME TO ROOST IN THE BUSH

OK—so now the fruits of war come home to America, and now we see that some men go crazy and torture captives as a result of war. Did anyone expect differently? Does no one read history? Do so few understand the reality of the psychology of war? Bush is a Texas dumbass, and we know that he knows nothing, that he’s dense as a wild turkey in heat.

We must never blame the soldiers driven mad by war for what they do. This is all to be blamed on Bush’s war. It’s Bush’s mess. We need to say that over and over until we can turn him out of office. If we don’t turn him out, then the world will see that it’s not just the doings of the man that German Chancellor Schroder called, “insane”; we’ll all be responsible for continuing Bush’s madness.

I am yet to be surprised by anything going on in Iraq. Again, I say, if you’ve had any surprises so far, then you need to find a different news source and read different history books. If you’re not reading history books or at least some ot the greatest war novels ever written, then I don’t want to hear anything you’ve got to say. If your sources of information are Hannity, Limbaugh, Savage, etcetera, then you “don’ knowa thing” so shut your trap and find a different source for your news! Sorry if I sound like a talk show, nut case, conservative, with my angry talk, but sometimes they get under my skin, and I act just like them.



“During a carnival, men put masks over their masks.” —Xavier Forneret

BLOOMSDAY

Okay, so I finally went and done it. I did a Bloomsday and got my tee shirt. Now I can never again claim, with an air of disdain, that I've never done a Bloomsday. Notice, I didn't say "ran" Bloomsday. I was a walker with my wife, and I really hated to have people pass me, but my wife slowed me down. She's a bit younger than my 66 years so what can you expect?

I'm serious about being bothered when people passed me. Still have that stupid male need to compete instead of enjoying the walk through beautiful scenery with crowds of nice people all around. It was my wife's first Bloomsday also, and at mile 6, she said, "I think once is good enough for me." But, passed or not, we can claim we never stopped along the way and kept plodding mile after mile start to finish and finished in just under 163 minutes.

One nice thing about spending a good part of the day walking, eating out and riding buses to and from downtown (another first for me in Spokane was the bus ride) is that I didn't have to hear or read about Bush's Iraq folly. One thing I was thinking yesterday is that if this were 1950s America, Bush would have a 20 percent approval rating for his wild hair up the butt invasion of another nation. Americans were much more peaceful and wise in those days. They weren't paranoid and confused. You had to attack them first before they invaded and occupied you.


WILL THE REAL BLOOM'S DAY STAND UP?

How many have ever read James Joyce's "Ulysses" whose main character is Leopold Bloom as in Bloom's day? In Joyce's largely autobiographical novel, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", his main character, Stephen Dedalus proclaims, "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some form of life or art as freely as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning."

Ah, goodness, if I were young again, I'd go into exile like Joyce.... Bush is everything wrong with current America—violence, pride, cruelty, ignorance and illiteracy. He is so un-American and Nazi-like, you could almost imagine he comes from Texas, that strange, murderous patch of tumbleweed located in northern Mexico.


"Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles." —Roseanne Barr

A nice sunny morning in Spokane Washington on the day before Bloomsday, and I'm off to give a talk to the Humanist Group of Spokane about writing letters to the editor and to read a few of them also. Having been a machinist the past 15 years, I'm a little nervous. It's been 17 years or so since I stood before people and tried to demonstrate anything except sobriety.


EXIST? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

God doesn't exist. Now that hurts some people when I say that, but I don't mean to. In a very limited sense god doesn't exist. Look—if I tell you that the United States exists, you'd agree. We'd have maps to look at and satelite pictures and lists of presidents. If I say a Ford Taurus exists, you'd agree because we could see pictures of it and hear people talking about it and even watch TV ads. If I said knights exist, we might quibble a bit because some people are still knighted, but if we thought of grail seeking creatures in armor on horses, we'd say that they once existed, but no longer exist in exactly that way. We'd have descriptions of the armor and maybe drawings of it.

Now, what if I said, that "cakatophaniasis" exists, you'd probably stop and ask me what language that is and tell me that you'd never heard of it. Well, I just made the word up so, as far as I know, it doesn't exist. And the proof would be that we could find no definition of the word and no picture of it, no eye witness evidence, nada, nothing. But I could go on to fool you and tell you it's something in another language and even describe it and its uses. Then you and I would share the belief in this thing in our imaginations, at least, until you figured out my deception and called me on it. Which is what this brief posting is about.

Now, in that sense alone, I mean god doesn't exist. There are no pictures of a god thing, but there are people who claim there is one and various prophets, like Christ and Mohammed, have tried to tell us there is a god, but there is nothing but a supposed burning bush presence of god reported in the Bible and other manifestations of this god, but no physical, concrete thing named god that anyone can sketch or take a picture of.

So when I say god doesn't exist, that's what I mean. The hypothesis of god only exists in the imagination, but does not exist in real life. If we can agree on that much, at least, believers and non-believers can find a common ground. Then, at least, we can agree that god is a figment of imagination in the human psyche and try to discover just what that means for all of us humans with our different imaginings about god.


"Two can live as cheaply as one. Take the bird and the horse, for example." —author unknown