ARMEY BELAYS DELAY WITH EXPOSE

In a Salon .com article by Mary Jacoby on past Republican House Majority leader, Texan Dick Armey, we learn that verbal abuse of opponents is just the way Republicans do business. Dick Cheney’s verbal abuse of Senator Leahy is only the tip of the iceberg. Armey called Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, Barney “Fag” and he’s called Hillary Clinton a Marxist. It, of course, takes a Fascist to recognize a Marxist. I wonder if Armey wants to take back his name calling?

Combined with verbal attacks is the Republican tendency to ignore facts in order to push their ideology. Tom Delay, another Texan not strong on intellect, ridiculed the findings of the conservative Heritage Foundation when it weighed in on the cost of the Medicare prescription bill. The Heritage Foundation’s figures showed that the Bush administration was low-balling the cost of the drug benefit. Delay told the vice-president of the Heritage Foundation that his work was “uninformed”. Turns out that Delay was uninformed and a man on a mission to hide the truth.

In the same Medicare debate, Richard Foster, Medicare’s chief financial officer, “revealed after the vote that the Bush administration had threatened to fire him if he informed Congress of his true, higher cost estimate: not $400 billion but as much as $600 billion over 10 years.”

Intimidation and threats, that’s the way these Republican guys work. American Enterprise Institute's Norm Ornstein reports that Delay, “has taken every norm the Legislature has operated on and shredded it.... On a scale of 1 to 10, Democrats abused their majority status at about a level 5 or 6. Republicans today have moved it to about an 11.”

Republicans are trying to pack lobbying groups with Republicans according to Jacoby. “For years, Norquist [Americans For Tax Reform president] and Delay have worked to purge the nation’s corporate lobby shops of Democrats; companies that fill GOP campaign coffers with money are rewarded with access to lawmakers. Enemies don’t get their calls returned—without access, they lose clients. Access is coordinated by the White House, often through the office of another powerful Texan, political strategist Karl Rove.” These tactics are politicians meddling in private enterprise, using the power of political office to extort business to favor the businesses they the Republicans favor. This is rich men using political office to enrich themselves. No wonder Cheney’s Halliburton is getting such a good deal.

Republican government is not and never has been government for the people; it’s government by and for the rich. On every hand, they stifle debate and democracy and encourage plunder. Any other time in history, when people were literate and read their newspapers and paid close attention to what was going on, this government would be in deep doodoo, but in another place I came across the fact that another of Bush’s largest support groups is among married white males with little education.

Now, look, I was once uneducated too and had to work very hard to become a literate, reading member of society, so I don’t take kindly to knocking men who aren’t interested in learning anything. Being an avid reader is an acquired taste. That’s their choice if they don’t want to do the work which to them seems a waste of time. If they didn’t think reading deeply and often was a waste of time, they’d be putting their time into it. But, this being America, we must honor their choice to be illiterate.

And these illiterate men can say they have facts, but it’s not just facts that count. Anybody can listen their way to getting some factual information, but the ability to read and digest long and complex arguments comes only with the skill of reading. Reading equals thinking. And with facts only, twisted by men who want to con you, you are at their mercy. Like a very smart man, once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” And, I add, that sucker doesn't read very well. Too bad for him and for us who do.

SOCIALISM LEVELS THE PLAYING FIELD

In a letter to the editor, titled "Conservatives trust people" (Monday, June 27, 2004, Spokesman Review) Robert Leach attempts to discredit democratic socialism. He points out quite accurately that “government does not give money to anyone, it only takes and redistributes wealth.” He calls that, rightly, “socialism”. He also points out that “the ‘rich’ earn their money”. Well, now there he goes quite wrong.

Many rich inherit their money or their families give them good educations which the poor can’t afford. All one has to do is look at the average earning power of an Ivy Leaguer versus someone at a smaller junior college to see the uneven start education gives citizens. Further, all studies show that impoverished, malnourished students can suffer brain damage from malnutrition and that hunger makes students less able to perform well in school. These are only a few of the inequities between the children of the rich and the poor when it comes to the capacity to "earn" and compete, not to mention quite simple things like the affordability of books in impoverished surroundings.

Also, most educated people understand that genetics plays a large part in how well any one individual will do during the course of her life. Many people of average or above average intelligence fail to be grateful that they got the gift of normalcy. Instead they act superior when faced with those who do less well than they do.

If we want to really believe that the “rich earn their money”, we must remove all the benefits which give the children of the rich a head start. A good democratic socialist would say that money ought not be allowed to be inherited and that a rich man’s money ought to go to making sure that all schools are excellent, a very expensive proposition. Then a socialist would say that with the playing field level and fair, we would truly see who “earns” what and how much. In short, a socialist does believe in the redistribution of wealth so that every citizen gets a fair start in life. Otherwise the rich and the supporters of the rich just need to shut up about “earning” wealth. A gift of education and wealth to the young of the rich is not earned.


PRE AND POST FREUDIAN TRIBES

The world is now divided between modern peoples and primitive peoples, between what I call pre and post Freudian tribes or those who live in the 21st Century and those who still lag behind in the 1st Century. Post Freudian peoples understand the psychology of the human animal, the evolution of consciousness, the ambiguity in reality and the relativity of religious belief. They inhabit Australia, New Zealand, Europe and eastern Europe and are also living in China, Canada and India and, increasingly, in South America. In America, the population is almost evenly divided by modern post Freudians and primitive, pre Freudian bushmen. Pre Freudian bushmen live in a religious unreality, believing in things which don’t exist in the substantial world in a religious miasma of superstition and dread. Almost all the trouble on our globe these days is caused by the pre Freudian bushmen.

Here in America, the pre Freudian bushmen support and carry out a war against the pre Freudian bushmen in Iraq and elsewhere. In Palestine, the pre Freudian bushmen, the Sharonites, fight the pre Freudian tribes of Arafatian bush peoples. Only recently have tribes of bushmen in Ireland and England given up killing one another over their religious superstitions. There’s some progress for post Freudians in that, but in Africa little skirmishes between bushmen break out all the time.

Looked at through one pair of glasses, an educated man or woman can almost make out the broad outlines of a kind of World War III because these primitive bushmen tribes are battling it out world wide while we, post Freudian, modern peoples stand aside in shock and awe at the viscousness of the religious wars of the pre Freudian bushmen. We can only hope they don’t destroy the entire world, us too, with their simple minded religious mentalities.

The strange aspect of this scene is that all these various bush tribes are united in one very common way—they are all fundamentalist religionists, they all believe in the most outlandish, primitive sorts of unreal fictions which supposedly happened in pre historic times and which found their way into history with the rise of the written word where they became more fixed in mind than the earlier, unrecorded beliefs of those religions. Not only that, their superstitions were all written down in a relatively short time span, there in the middle east. A good reading of some of Joseph Campbell’s work will enlighten us on the rise of religions around the globe.

You would think they would appreciate one another’s dedication to superstition and ignorance. But, alas, ignorant and violent, they fight on. We modern peoples can only hang on, spread intelligence with our genes and practice healthy, unsuperstitious activities. We must survive the idiocy of the pre Freudian bushmen and hope these primitives kill each other off as quickly as possible so the globe can be inherited not by the meek but by the intelligent and strong. In peace, modern peoples must find a way to continue our evolution so that the modern, post Freudian world can emerge even stronger at the end of this dark, primitive era in human history.

WHY NOT APPRECIATE BOTH INSTEAD OF ONE?

Hillary Clinton and Teresa Kerry: strong intelligent women. Laura and Barbara Bush? Well who knows? L. and B. aren’t out there risking much, allowing anyone to really get to know what they think as compared to their husbands. You gotta ask—are they or their husbands the weak ones? So the question remains: why are Republican males so angry at women who are strong and intelligent and able to get out there and mix it up with the men, to fight back rather than to be solely the helpmate of an insecure and sometimes unintelligent male?

I have nothing against housewives who nurture their husbands and are economically well off enough to stay home with the kids and hubby, cooking, cleaning, running the cab business, bucking up the battered male ego, etcetera. Good on them. But, unlike weak conservative males, I admire strong, intelligent women too. I don’t feel the need to be out there attacking women in the work force or strong political women with opinions and minds of their own. I’m a you go, Hillary, sort of man. Besides, many women can’t afford the luxury of remaining at home, and, of course, they gotta toughen up to be in the work force full of weak males who always need someone to beat up on in order to feel the least adequate themselves.

I think weak, conservative males are so fearful of losing their female props that they hate (i.e. fear) any woman whose life might encourage their female prop to get out there and do likewise. Sometimes that fear gets out of hand too. How many conservative males do each of us know who have felt it necessary to beat a wife who threatened to leave them? I know one right here in Spokane. It tires me to think of him.


THE EXCELLENT LIAR

We continually hear how Bush started his war in Iraq because he had bad intelligence. (Never mind that his intelligence is bad.) We’re told he didn’t have men on the spot, people on the ground, doing intelligence. This is another Bush lie to justify his war.

We had people on the ground in Iraq, people right at the source. We had weapons inspectors on the spot who repeatedly told Bush and the U.N. they could find no weapons of mass destruction. Now why didn’t Bush believe the most solid information he had, besides his ideological and irrational dislike of the U.N.?

I still don’t know why we actually went into Iraq. Do you? I mean, really, factually? Bush seemingly ignored the best intelligence he had, so this whole adventure he started us on seems ever more irrational, and the more I think about it, the more I think we’re in Iraq for the hidden religious purpose of a simple-minded fundamentalist president. I believe he’s trying to preserve Israel and, thus, do his part in bringing about the conditions that are supposed to prevail before Christianity’s imaginary second coming is to happen.

I don’t think Bush made a mistake that time he called his war a “Crusade”. It’s religious imagery. It was a slip of his hidden purpose into his conscious dialogue. Most of the time he’s lying to us and himself about his war, and, evolutionary psychology tells us, the most effective liar is the liar who believes his own lies. Bush is an excellent liar and fundamentalists are notoriously bad at seeing through a lie.


IT’S FUN TO WATCH

Poor Jack Ryan, the Illinois Republican, who surrendered his Senate bid because he likes to watch, all because his personal libido gets a kick out of voyeurism. He took his wife to sex clubs all around the world and asked (pressured) her to perform sex while strangers watched. She refused or she didn't refuse (hard to tell from either report I read) and nothing or something happened. Even if something had happened, sex is not illegal. Yet, Jack has to give up a Senate bid because, like so many American men, hooked on advertising which sells everything with sex, Jack is a bit of a voyeur.

Well, Jack, that’s part of what you get when your base is fundamentalist Christians. I think many unimaginative, unlearned, emotionally dead Christians would be surprised at how many husbands get off on the fantasy of watching their wives do other men. More than likely, the more Christian a man is, the more likely it is that something like voyeurism might turn him on. Unable to imagine or accept anything but their own unimaginative, dead way of doing things, fundamentalists label anything “different” from their way as “evil” and turn on it like a pack of rabid dogs on a wounded rabbit. But in tearing up the poor rabbit, they get a taste for it themselves. Poor Jack rabbit. His dogged constituency bit him in the end.


"I enjoy dating married men because they don't want anything kinky, like breakfast." —Judi Rodgers

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY FLIPS OUT AT SENATOR LEAHY's COOL REJOINDER

Yep, those wonderfully moral Christian Republicans. Here’s what Cheney said to Leahy when his logical arguments couldn’t cut the mustard: “Go fuck yourself!” Yep, that’s a conservative for you. Reported in Spokesman Review, June 25, 2004. And Dan Webster wonders why liberals might need police protection from these fascists who call themselves Republicans. My sense of it, from studying conservative involvement all over the world and in South America is that conservatives quite often kill those who disagree with them. Cursing is only the beginning of Cheney's potential for bad behavior.

SAY WHAT?

What’m I to say? We’re on the verge of seeing into the great reality farther than we’ve ever seen before. Quantum physics let’s us know how insubstantial the supposedly solid world is. The capacity to extend life to unimaginable lengths is within our reach. We can glimpse the evolution of consciousness and are understanding the relationship between our bodies and the outer world with a scientific grasp we’ve never realized before. The relativity of all concepts and moralities by which individuals see and judge their world is now scientifically proven. Yet we live in an America in the grips of a morality and a world view unimaginably ancient and out of touch, some twenty centuries out of touch to be exact. It’s a reality which thinks it looks out at a solid and real outer world from an observing, cohesive self, or ego, to a reality of solid objects which is barely open to interpretation.

For an educated man of the modern world to view George Bush and his religious bushmen and the religious bushmen of Islam with which he fights is like being a Cro Magnon man on a rise, looking out over a plain in Southern Europe to watch a column of fumbling Neanderthals wending toward a swamp. It would be funny except we Cro Magnons might end up in their swamp with them. Let’s call modern men, “Freudian man” as opposed to those Cro Magnons who still live without full consciousness of what’s going on inside their skins.

Freudian man now knows that much of what he thinks he sees out there is only a projection of our synaptical selves into the world. Everyone knows the world is not really solid, for example, but we all act as if it were solid. We now know that no matter how hard we search the brain and body for a core being within us, an observer of the outer world, so to speak, this observer can be found nowhere in the brain/body landscape of ever changing, firing neurons and chemical reactions we call life, yet we all sense there is such a thing as a “me” inside of our chemical bodies even though none exists.

For some human beings, such truths about godlessness, projection and relativity are frightening, and they keep going outside themselves for answers. They keep projecting a god out there to which they appeal, not realizing that they are only appealing to an aspect of themselves they project “out there”. Bush keeps seeing his own “evil” out there in the world, for example. If only Bushmen knew, as Freudian men know, that they are the only gods which exist and to which they appeal.


SPEAKING OF PROJECTION!

On page 32 of the June 28 2004 Newsweek, we read, “The Saudi religious establishment has until recently almost always referred to almost all non-Wahhabis (including the Shia, Sufis and all other Muslim sects) in derogatory terms. Non-Muslims are, of course, rank infidels.”

As an American, I would take great offense at such ignorant non-Western nonsense except I have the example of so many American Christians under my very nose and feet.


HOW TO HANDLE THE ARABIC WORLD

First we need to force all six and eight cylinder cars off Western roads and get all the self-absorbed peoples who buy SUVs to see the error of their ways. (By the way, that’s exactly what the psychological profile of SUV drivers shows us—that, as a group, they are self-absorbed and fearful of their relationships.)

Once we’ve completely divorced ourselves from a need for most foreign oil, we seal our borders to the Arabs. We don’t trade with them, and we don’t ship movies to them, we don’t have any cultural commerce with them whatsoever. We keep all our citizens out of there. We let them run their own countries the way they want to run them. The rest of the world builds tighter trade connections. We make this old non-Muslim world prosper, and we make sure that we eliminate poverty and ignorance (that’ll be harder) and become shining examples of goodness and plenty.

What do you think would happen soon in the Arab world if we leave them completely alone? Whatever happens, they can’t blame us for it. They’ll have to take responsibility for whatever results. They’ll have no scapegoat to blame, and terrorists will have to terrorize themselves and blame themselves.

I say, let’s do what the Iraqis want us to do. Get out now!


"Now that I'm over sixty I'm veering toward respectability" —Shelley Winters

SHAKESPEARE AND JESUS

Under the title, Was Shakespeare a She? Newsweek (June 28, 2004, p.13) reports on yet another story of the search for the real Shakespeare.

I doubt the average American is aware that scholars over the centuries have had a hard time deciding just who Shakespeare is. Scholars know he had only a grade school education, and many scholars don’t think he could have written such powerful dramas if his education was so limited. Yet over the years, I’ve known a few geniuses, and I think that genius is genius and can accomplish much with little formal education. Once you’ve met someone with almost total recall, and memory is a big element in genius, then you know that she can read fast, retain a lot and connect many pieces of information together in webs of synapses. Shakespeare is a man of wisdom too, and wisdom is another entirely different animal than genius. Wisdom is discerning judgment about situations and people, and I once worked for a salesman who could read people like through an open window. Combine the two and who needs a teacher?

But this post is about none of the above. My point is that if scholars have such a hard time agreeing on who Shakespeare was who lived 1564-1616 CE and for whom they have a tombstone, lots of writing of his own, and some public documents, then how much harder is it to decide if Jesus existed, 0-30 CE, with no tombstone, no valid corroborating records, no writings of his own. And if he did exist who was he, really?

Think! Shakespeare was born in a time when records were a lot more common than when Jesus was born. More people were literate in Shakespeare’s time also, and in Jesus’s time, people believed almost anything and religions of all kinds abounded.

It’s hard for modern literalists to imagine the reality of the historical situation from which the Jesus story emerged. No one who wrote the New Testament was alive during the days of Jesus. The first writings of Mark appeared in about 80 CE, about three generations after the death of Jesus, and, obviously, Mark is only telling a story he has heard and not witnessed. Without written records nor photographs, who could remember much about a great grandfather in those days let alone about some rumored cultist from the Jewish tradition?

Further, the Jesus myth is made up of so many details borrowed from pagan sources and Jewish history (much of it mythological too) that it’s obvious that Jesus is a partly mythological figure if not completely a mythological figure. Resurrection, crucifixion, healing the blind and halt, reanimating the dead—all these miracles existed in other forms and in other religions when Jesus supposedly performed them. So it’s quite reasonable to expect that even if Jesus did exist, the stories that were told about him fifty years after his death might quite logically be made up of all these details from other religions in order to increase his importance and win converts.

In addition, recall the gullibility of the illiterate and superstitious people of those times. Desperate, impoverished, ignorant, suffering, they’d believe almost anything you told them about a better life to come. They could dream of that rather than accept reality. Imagine a life span of only 20 years in a tiny, dirty village with little contact with other villages, no newspapers or TV, little travel, no books or radio, no universal communication, no formal schooling, harsh unjust laws, and kingly disdain for his people. They could expect lifelong ignorance and hard labor and early death to disease or accident or war.

It takes quite a strong grasp of reality and an imaginative leap to understand just how unlikely the story of Jesus is or the likelihood that any real picture of Jesus (if he did exist) got passed on to the people who first wrote the letters and fictions that make up the New Testament. It’s so obvious his personal history is made up of a pastiche of other religions and traditions which existed during those days that only a desperate and ignorant believer would cling to such falsehoods.

Sadly, believers who are blinded by their own historical time can’t escape to understand the historical situation. And literalists are the least imaginative of people and so are usually quite unable to make the leap to understand history. That’s why literalists have such a saccharine, simpleminded , impossible picture of Jesus today. Their picture is all wish and hope and malarky. Again, if Jesus did exist historically, what modern people think of him is so far removed from reality that the picture of him is mythological now, even if it wasn’t then. Just the fact that Jesus is portrayed as a white man so often in the recent past shows us just how distorted the Jesus record is by modern believers.


THE TRUTH IS OFTEN SECRET

I’ve said what I’m about to say many times in the recent past in these post, but every time new evidence arises, I keep saying, “See! It’s so!”

Now it’s our boy, Clinton, who comes forth in his autobiography to discuss his dysfunction. (See this month’s June 28th Newsweek.) Through counseling and hard emotional work, Bill Clinton is joining the ranks of those in the know about themselves. To know thyself and to admit openly to what one knows is a wonderful freedom bringing act, an act which many liberals and few conservatives have performed. Limbaugh, for example, was caught being his addictive self, but he hasn’t really done the work to understand what happened to him. He went from food addiction to drug addiction without any real work on his dysfunction. He’ll fuck up again in the future or he’ll learn to be a little more sympathetic to other’s troubles by understanding his own. Let’s all hope he doesn’t stay locked in his destructive personality.

Clinton now knows that his dysfunctional childhood created in him a secret self which hid behind the surface he gave to the world. From that, he became a sex addict to the point of self-destructive acts that ruined his presidency and hurt others terribly. If he has done a better job of coming to grips with himself than has Limbaugh, then it’ll be good for all of us and for the country.

The crucial difference between an arch conservative dysfunctional and an arch liberal who has dysfunctional tendencies is that the liberal usually commits self-destructive acts which inadvertently hurt others in the process while the dysfunctional conservative is still in the bully mode, and he maliciously strikes out and hurts others rather than face his own painful dysfunction (see bullies, O’Reilly and Limbaugh). In either case, these pain-escaping and cowardly activities hurt other people (see untreated addict George Bush starting a war and killing Iraqis), but in the Clinton case, the damage is directed inward while in the other the damage is directed outward.

Pay attention to how the bullies attack Bill. His courage to face himself and to know himself scares them. Fear in a conservative comes out in attack mode.


"When confronted with two evils, a man will always choose the prettier." —Unknown

PREDICTION

The Iraqi interm government has vowed to get tough against the revolutionary forces opposing it. American authorities have now authorized former Saddam Hussein security forces to join the attack on the religious fundamentalists who make up a large part of the revolutionary forces opposing American dictates for democracy in Iraq. I predict that within a year of the handover we will learn that Saddam's security forces, now allied with American interests, will be torturing and killing Iraqi citizens in Abu Ghraib just like American security forces are torturing and killing Iraqi citizens. Everything changes but nothing changes for the little guy in the world when world powers want to force Bush's Manifest Destiny or Bush's Christian Crusade onto other countries.


MY INFORMAL SURVEY

After a lifetime living among and observing Christian males, I can say with full authority that 85% of all Christian males are control freaks and very political and opinionated. Ten percent of Christian males are gay and don’t know it yet, while 5% can claim to have their heads on straight, but these guys are so quiet, praying away in the closet and serving others, that they never appear on the political horizon. They work always beneath the scene and quietly vote Democrat.


ON COMING OUT TWICE

In “Sexual Personae” (p.89) Camille discusses the many puberty rites of the cultures of the world. Then she quotes Jane Harrison: “With the savage, to be twice born is the rule, not the exception.”

I just wish we could talk our American “born agains” to give up their savage passions and roots and join the rest of us in the modern world.


MORE CHRISTIAN BARBARITY EXPLAINED BY CAMILLE PAGLIA

Page 95 of “Sexual Personae” reads “The violent principle of Dionysian cult is sparagmos.... The body of the god, or a human or animal substitute, is torn to pieces, which are eaten or scattered like seed. Omophagy, ritual eating of raw flesh, is the assimilation and internalization of godhead.... The body parts of dismembered Osiris, scattered across the earth, were collected by Isis, who founded a shrine at each site. Before his arrest, Jesus tears the Passover bread for his disciples: ‘Take, eat; this is my body....’ At every Christian service, wafers and wine are changed into Christ’s body and blood, consumed by the worshipper. In Catholicism, this is not symbolic but literal. Transubstantiation is cannibalism.”

The point of all this is to show how Christ’s reported words were making reference to religions much older than the Jewish cult he was a part of. Or, more likely, those who made up the cult which would become Christianity were actually part of a primitive cult with their roots in unorthodox pagan religions. Or Christ was really trying to start a religion inside the pagan cults outside the Jewish tradition. Or, actually, there is no Christ. The people who wrote what became the New Testament were actually continuing a religion with roots in pagan cannibalism which, of course, would need to make up a sacrificial figure for consumption.

You see, people who think that Christianity sprang up already made and thought of as a modern Christian thinks of it just doesn’t realize how any human creation is always built on the past and changes slowly over time. Christianity is pagan in its roots, steeped in blood and human sacrifice. A modern Christian would be so uncomfortable if he or she were thrown back in time to early pre-Christianity that their skin would crawl. So all modern Christians are blasphemers and heretics when viewed through the lens of time. They are nothing like early Christians and have changed the Christ/lamb image all out of recognition.


YOU WANT MORE PROOF?

On Page 96, Camille adds, further, “Mystery religions offered initiates eternal life. Promise of resurrection was and is a major reason for Christianity’s spread.”

Christianity is a mystery religion, steeped in paganism. How often have you heard a Christian admit how puzzling so much of his religion is to her?


FRUITFLY WINGS TICKLE METHUSELAH’S NOSE

Brian Trent in his essay, “The Future of Immortality” in The Humanist (May/June 2004, Page 11) comments on the fact that we might be nearing a time when science will be able to give people an eternal life and the problems that possibility might create for ethicists and moralists. Think not? And where will religionists go when their afterlife seems a pale copy of real eternity?

“In 1980 [evolutionary biologist Michael R.] Rose managed to breed ‘immortal’ fruitflies by matching and mating long-lived specimens. While an average fruitfly lives several weeks, Rose possesses flies (albeit only a few survivors) that are still alive from his original experiment twenty-four years ago.” (Page 12)

Ain’t that somethin’? From a few weeks of life span to 24 years of life? That’s an increase of 208%. Now... my 80 years increased by 208% would be what? Sixteen thousand six-hundred forty year life span? Already, that’d seem an eternity to me. Please check my math. I could be wrong. Methuselah, move over.


IT WOULD BE SILLY IF IT WEREN’T SO CHRISTIAN

Does anyone but liberals see the absolute silliness of the situation? Here we have Bill Clinton IMPEACHED by Republican moralists for having illicit sex while Bush’s ignorance, incompetence and dishonesty have killed thousands, shamed America and dishonored her flag. These same moralists who make a sexual peccadillo the cause for a case of impeachment ignore rampant self interest and greed and Cheney inspired Halliburton corruption which will soon kill a 1000 American soldiers. They should be outraged! Imagine if Clinton had prosecuted this war? One good thing! We do get to see just what self deception the average Christian supporter of Bush is capable of and what lying citizens the Protestant and evangelical Christian church turn out. Add the Protestant dishonesty to the Catholic debacle and you and I can see what Christianity has wrought in America. Out with them all!


"Patriotism is the veneration of real estate above principles." —George Jean Nathan

COLIN POWELL’S COLON PROBLEM

Watching Powell correct Bush’s lies about last year’s number of terrorist attacks and fatalities last year, I thought, “Poor Colin Powell. He was an honorable man. Now, through association with the crowd of lying thieves in the White House, his own reputation is tarnished. They are giving it to him 'in the shorts' as the saying goes."

Personally, I still think Colin is an honorable man. He just needs to come home to the Democratic party whose plans for “equal opportunity” gave him his start in life and a hand up in his quest to reach the position he’s reached, and he ought to get out of that pack of cheats who tried in the past and who are still attempting to keep all minority peoples and the poor down. If he was a Democrat, I’d vote for Powell as president in a heartbeat. I wonder how many of his southern, Republican friends would do that?

"Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation." —Henry Kissinger


REPUBLICANS SUPPORT TERRORIST OBJECTIVES

I’m almost certain that our Islamic terrorist enemies are opposed to same sex marriage. I’m certain they’d call it just one more example of American corruption, of America being the Great Satan. What, then, are we to make of our President, most Republican members of Congress and so many members of the Christian churches in America offering aid and comfort to the beliefs of our enemies?

Next thing we liberal supporters of American freedoms know, these Republican traitors will be saying (Constitution or not) that a wife should be subject to her husband’s dictates as if she were some sort of a mule or other piece of chattel! Or they’ll say that the state can take control of a woman’s reproductive system, tell her what to do with her body. After that, how long will it be before Republicans begin to tell a woman she must cover her head in church or wear a long gown that reaches to her ankles or a mask to cover her face? Just how far will these Republican traitors to American freedoms go? How many of our terrorist enemy’s beliefs will they support before loyal Americans stop them by turning them out of office?


CELL PHONY MADNESS

Today, as I waited for a light at a downtown Spokane intersection, a grizzled man, looking a bit dazed, passed before my car with a cell phone glued to his ear. Eventually, I realized he was like the man who used to walk around downtown, talking into a walky-talky which was nonfunctional. He was delusional. I couldn’t help but think how much he stood for the madness of so many other cell phone users.

This morning a man with a cell phone glued to his ear, turned left in front of me as I drove straight through an intersection. I was on a green light and not pushing a yellow or red. He just was out of it, into his conversation. Later that morning, a young woman in a van smeared with the logo “soccer.com” turned left and through a crosswalk which I and two other people inhabited. I hope her conversation was worth it.

Not counting the tale of my friend whose toes were run over by a rich woman in a BMW as she conversed her way through a right turn and over his foot, never stopping to note what she’d done—yesterday, I witnessed a young woman behind me holding a cell in her left hand to her left ear and eating with her right. Not only was no one driving her car, she looked away from the road frequently to select tender food morsels to pop into her chewing, speaking mouth. Imagine! While she was talking with her mouth full, she was driving with her brain empty. Two instances of poor etiquette at the same time and both on busy Hamilton Avenue.

Although what happened to my friend occurred many months ago, the three instances I report here happened within days and two within hours of each other. The poor crazy having imaginary conversations can’t help his behavior, but what excuse do these other crazies have?

SPEAKING OF RELIGION:
HERE’S A TRANSHUMANIST

I don’t want to be the one to pin my tail onto any religious donkey. They have all proven to entertain the ravings of charlatans, but here’s an interesting take that a “transhumanist” has about Buddhism. In the May/June 2004 “The Humanist” (p.8) self-described transhumanist George Dvorsky writes, “I am also partial to how Buddhists encourage progress and the cultural harmonization of the observations of Western science. Like the humanists of the Enlightenment, Buddhists tend to see science and progress as a way to better comprehend reality and as a means to reduce suffering.”

Voila!


MENTAL ADJUSTMENT FOR A PAIN IN THE ASS

Sometime back Bill Moyers (or was it Alan Alda) was involved in a PBS show which pretty convincingly debunked chiropractic as a healing science, even demonstrating that colleges of chiropractic knowingly teach methods which have no effect whatever on the well being of the patient. An objective observer could not come away from that show without seriously questioning how such deception can be licensed by the state. What I observed and what was convincingly demonstrated was the teaching of fraud, though no one used that word in the show.

If chiropractic is a fraud, why do so many still seek the help of these charlatans? They claim to get relief. Of course they get relief, or they wouldn’t continue to go to these frauds.

I think the use of chiropractors demonstrates just how needy Americans are for being touched. I don’t doubt that people get some benefit from the “laying on of hands” and from being stroked in massage which, I think, is probably more beneficial to the psyche than is a spinal realignment which is just a huge joke according to the expose I watched. The relief, I’m sure, is all in the psyche’s being “stroked” and has nothing to do with real healing. Massage and spinal realignments offer placebo effects to the patient that stem directly from being touched.

Yes, but what of the claim that spinal realignments do offer relief? I ask, is the relief permanent or do the clients of chiropractors need to continually go back for “adjustments” for the remainder of their lives? What if the truth is that there is no fix for the problem? How many would choose to live in a lie if it meant they could get a day or two of relief from being touched on a regular basis? Now we’re getting somewhere.

To me, chiropractic relief is very much like taking a drink to relieve pain until drinking (temporary feeling good) becomes an addiction. Perhaps chiropractic touch is an addiction. There is also another possibility. What if a more scientific method, based in reality, could offer a more permanent fix for the problem? Perhaps, if someone who suffers with back pain or some other skeletal pain would accept the true facts of the situation, they could find ways in themselves to become healthier and much less expensive ways those would be, but it may take swallowing the awful truth that the pain you feel is permanent and no relief is possible except by what you can do for yourself with your own mind.

True believers will ask, no doubt, why skeptics like myself take such great pleasure in debunking the miraculous. Without the miraculous, they feel, there can be no solace in this seemingly pitiless world. I can understand the believer’s fears. I’ve been there myself and experienced fear too when confronted with truths which did not superficially soothe my ego. Yet through the years, as I’ve struggled with my issues and, at the same time, read ever more widely in the sciences, I’ve come to find a new solace in the truer and more reasonable vision of reality which science gives me.

I’m greatly comforted by a vision which clearly explains for me why suffering, cruelty, selfishness and good deeds exist in human behavior. No more need I shake my head and ask “why”. Whereas no sensible man could believe that a loving, all wise creator could create the seeming chaos we live in, evolution explains reality perfectly. I understand why justice is never perfect, yet why the human animal cries out for justice when he feels wronged and wishes, in vain, for a higher justice to make all right after he is dead. All is clearly explained by evolutionary insights and by the study of human and animal morality which are more parallel than most Americans know.

Finally, to give up the vain hope in the miraculous is to build up hope in one’s self and to fully accept responsibility for one’s actions, in short, to take responsibility for one’s own “pain in the ass”. In the belief and understanding of one’s own place in the animal kingdom lies the source of the greatest solace I have ever experienced. Human animal life is wonderful and sane and reasonable as hell. It explains so much! Now if we would all, permanently and consistently, view human behavior through the reasonable viewpoint of evolution and cast off the blinders of the miraculous explanation.... But—is that my vain hope for a spinal adjustment?


IT IS A REPUBLICAN THING

"Well, I would—if they realized that we—again if—if we led them back to that stalemate only because that our retaliatory power, our seconds, or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive that they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off." —Ronald Reagan (when asked if nuclear war could be limited to tactical weapons) The scary part of this is those who vote for men like Reagan. Do they think he's speaking sense here? Is there some sort of gobbledegook language being spoken in America that literate men can't understand? Or perhaps it's only, simply, that Republicans are mainly illiterate.

GOOD NEWS

Psychology Today's June 4th Issue on page 54 comes up with some well researched figures on religion and church attendance in America. In Brooke Lea Foster's article, "The Soul Searcher", the atheist can take even more heart from the figures. Supposedly, evangelical Christianity is the fastest growing denomination (and Buddhists) and Protestants are the fastest shrinking denomination, specifically, the Methodists. Though, if you ask me, evangelicals are just one branch of the Protestant category, so I don't think Foster is entirely conversant with her topic. In my history, there are two types of Christians: the Catholics and the Protestants. But what of Mormons?

The best news, however, is that a little over 29% of Americans list no church of attendance. Reason and good sense are continuing to spread in our culture. I won't live to see the triumph of reason over superstition, but it will happen. If these Bushmen evangelicals just keep starting enough wars, the rest of America will see that light. I suspect it may take a few more millenia though before reason fully emerges in the human animal. Evolution works at such a slow pace, doesn't it?


BUCK KNIVES SLASH LABOR'S THROAT

To repeat. I know I’ve said this in another post, but... Buck Knives is moving to Idaho from California and plans to pay its labor force 30% less than what it’s paying in California. Buck, the president dude, will stay competitive by cutting wages rather than by cutting his profits. That's the way it always works, eh? This means Idaho workers will continue to come over to my state, Washington, to get better wages and their coming here will, then, hold down our wages. It’s a nasty game the lone worker can’t win.

So, isn’t that a case for unionizing Buck’s shops? Well, I don’t know if that will do any good either because, if he goes out of business or moves elsewhere, the labor force is screwed again. Is there no way for labor to win? I’d say, no, not in a classic labor/management battle.

Currently, productivity is up by at least 40% but wages are down. Economic forces are powerful and without conscience. So if labor can’t win the wage battle, what can it do? They can run an end run. They can vote for compassionate liberals who long ago saw that there was a need for an effective safety net to take care of people when economic conditions are driving workers into the ground. That’s what Roosevelt was all about, and what we’ve forgotten in the modern world. Republicans hated and hate Roosevelt because he gave workers power by making sure that they weren’t so desperate during downturns that capitalists could screw them at will and get away with it.

Capital wants desperate workers. That’s why the stock markets go down when the number of unemployed goes down. It’s a cruel world out there so I suggest laborers gather together under the banner of united labor and vote liberal en masse rather than be that lone sucker out there in the rain, crowing about his all wet independence.


MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL,
WHO’S THE CRUELEST ONE OF ALL?

Sawing heads off is what I expect from fundamentalists of all religions. If they’re not sawing off heads, they’re cutting out tongues or burning out eyes with red hot pokers or stoning witches or spanking children until they die or bombing government buildings or killing abortion choice providers. Anyone who thinks their holy path or book is the “word” or “way” of some hypothetical god is already irrational and, therefore, dangerous. I don’t expect reasonable behavior from them. All that holds them in check is the fear of punishment in an imaginary afterlife. Once they decide that their imaginary god will reward them in the afterlife for killing living people they feel threaten their god, watch out! And if you don’t think Christians are every bit as capable of wild destruction and murder as any other religion’s fundamentalist, remember Paul Hill who was certain his hypothetical god would reward him in heaven for killing a doctor who offered women a choice.


"The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets." —John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) A Republican's favorite era, when worker blood was running in the streets.

MILTON’S “NO WAY, JOSE” SATAN AND “YESSIR, BOSS” CHRIST

In 1963 when I was a young man at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio, I read Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and was very impressed. I was impressed by the figure of Satan in the opening passages as, down in the caves of hell, giving a speech to all his demonic friends, he shook his fist in the face of god. He vowed eternal battle with the King of Heaven.

Later, as I wrestled with my own troubles, two divorces and many defeats afterward, I saw myself one night, in a sort of waking vision, as Satan, in that all my life I had been dedicated to battle. I was always shaking a metaphorical fist in someone’s face, judging them as lower than a snake’s belly and challenging them to debate. I saw myself for the first time as others may have seen me: angry, judgmental, controlling.

I was 40 at the time and at the lowest point of my life, facing failure on every hand and suicidal much of the time. I was giving up drink too. A good friend spoke to me about “opening up my fist”. Another friend described to me how her friends would get up from a table in the coffee shop when they saw me coming because I made them so uncomfortable with my intense anger.

Eventually, though, I gave up the religious idea of Satan. I gave up believing in demons and devils all together, and I found that giving up the hypothesis of Satan was the first step in giving up Christianity itself and, then, in giving up religion all together. I began to realize that for many Christians Satan and sin are the bases of Christianity rather than the “Yes boss, Christ” of Milton’s poem. They just don't realize it themselves. Some critics have pointed out that even Milton may have preferred Satan to Christ without even knowing it because he made Satan such a powerful intellectual figure (like Milton himself) and Christ such an obedient wimp.

Soon, I realized that it was Christianity itself which had made me feel lower than a snake’s belly and, thus, made me judgmental and angry and one who lashed out at others. Just last Sunday, on Father’s Day, I heard a minister judging the fathers in his audience, exhorting them to be better fathers, listing their shortcomings and sins. Judgment is so much a part of religion that I doubt the minister was even capable of realizing the effect he had on the self worth of those in his audience. Given that moralizing in all religions, how can any person escape religion with any sort of self worth in tact?

Later still, however, as an atheist, I took back some of Milton’s satanic behavior because I also realized that religious leadership is always trying to pacify people, to get them to bow their heads to authority and hand over the money to the priesthood. So now, I again shake my fist in the face of cultural conformity and in the face of conformist thinking. I always look for a better explanation than conventional wisdom.

Their conformity to powerful figures is why our American Christians have no trouble with a prig like Bush. They’re trained to bow down to unbending, rigid authoritarian types who feel comfortable to them, like their Biblical god in fact. They’re uncomfortable with human-like presidents and leaders who can admit to mistakes. They prefer an unbending sort of fellow rather than a Clintonesque type with human failings. They crucify the human and uphold the man who can’t recognize a mistake when he makes one. If there were a softy like Christ who did return, they’d be the first to crucify him, but, fortunately, none of that Jesus story is anything but wishful thinking. They’ll have to stick to crucifying their fellow men day in and day out for the rest of human history. As for me I’ll forever keep a little of the devil hypothesis in me and oppose the men who can recognize no mistakes and who seek to command us all to obedience.


BULLY PULPIT BUSH

As I read news stories about America’s influence around the world, I keep coming across the idea which some Americans express that America should pressure this country or that country to do as America wishes. Will somebody please explain to me why some Americans think we have the right to force any sovereign nation to do anything! I don’t see a written agreement in the world to abide by America’s will. We don’t belong to a world government that I’m aware of, and the Bush tyranny, as far as I can read, seems not even to believe in using the United Nations to any good effect so why should any member of the United Nations pay any attention to renegade American ideas?

As far as forcing the Saudi’s to oppose the religious people in it’s body politic, who are we to do that? Bush and his people want to force Christianity on all of us, so Bushmen, of all people, ought to accept that the Saudi government, for reasons known only to them, does not wish to oppose those religious elements within the Saudi borders which hate America and everything that America stands for. Saudis have every right to hate America if they want to, don’t they? Why should we expect their religious leaders to like Americans any more than our Robertsons and Falwells love Islam? Americans seem very arrogant to other nations because of this failing of ours to realize that we are just one nation in a globe of nations.

The main problem on both sides is the inability to be objective and to get outside their rigid belief systems to understand the other’s side of the story. It takes a really intelligent liberal to be that objective and peaceful, a real liberal to be that Christlike in behavior. It takes a really Christianlike atheist like myself to be that understanding of other positions.


I DIDN'T SAY IT. SHE DID.

"You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap." —Dolly Parton

I CAN'T SAY IT ENOUGH

Go see "What The Fuck Do We Know!"


BLOOD, SELF AND OIL

I've been driving 4 cylinder cars since 1964 when anyone would build them or ship them to the US. I figure, conservatively, I've saved $60,000 in gas, insurance, sales taxes and purchase price over the years. I don't feel the least deprived by driving energy efficient autos, and, also, I've got the good feeling that I've been saving our sons' and daughters' lives unlike the people who've been driving gas hogs all these years no matter how much American blood their selfishness spills. Are any more of us about to get wise? This Times article Conserve? About time! raises the question but isn't too reassuring about the compassion or intelligence of our current conservative leaning populace. Thirty-three percent of Americans call themselves "conservative" while only 25% call themselves "liberal". So I'd say the increase in illiteracy and selfishness go right along with the conservative upsurge in numbers, wouldn't you?


PUTIN, LIKE RASPUTIN AND GEORGE BUSH SENIOR, HAS GOT BLOOD ON HIS HANDS. WHO'D BELIEVE ANYTHING HE SAYS?

Bush Senior and Putin were each part of their government's secret intelligence services where mighty shady things go on. Bush Sr. has got more South American peasant blood on his hands than I'd like to think of. So why wouldn't Putin (ex KGB head, wasn't it?) come over here and lie for his soulmate, father of Georgie Shrub?


TORTURE'S COME A LONG WAY, BABY, BUT IT'S AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE

In Spokane, we have a fine little newsletter called "Handful of Salt". It's published by the Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane. Guys like George Nethercutt and other conservative politicos don't think much of it. It's always got some informative and interesting articles by people around the world and in the know which uncover and discuss the underside of the fascist, er, conservative movement in America. Now here's a little ditty that plays connect a dot between Chile, Abu Ghraib and the School of the Americas: TORTURE IS APPLE PIE ALA MODE

In addition, Newsweek gets in on the story of torture preceeding 9/11. See also APPLE PIE II

So you see, torture was in with conservatives long before the new world came along in 9/11. They've just been looking for an excuse. Liberals have been opposing and exposing these conservative horrors for a long time now. Will the rest of America ever catch on?


WELFARE SHMELLFAIR!

Every time I hear someone complain about welfare, I recall how the West was settled by welfare. First Congress gave the railroads all the lands and mineral rights along their rights of way in order to settle the West. Then, more than once, Congress gave men and women 40 or 100 or 125 acres of land for free and sometimes a mule. These caused greedy land rushes by lazy men and women who wanted something for nothing. Right? Yep, land and a mule. These people were set for life with welfare like that. Set for life....

Now—what could we give modern Americans to start them off in life with? Something that would set them up for life like their forefathers were set up? How about if we gave each American a million dollars (or $500,000) on the day they turned 21 and, then, indexed that amount for inflation? Or how about we give every American son and daughter a "good" college education. That wouldn't cost very much, would it? Wouldn't cost as much as Iraq, would it?


TRY THIS ON FOR SIZE. YOU'LL RECOGNIZE THE RHYTHM

God so flubbed the world that even he is guilty of child murder.


IT AIN'T ONLY REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS AND PRESIDENTS

"If Roosevelt was alive today, he'd turn over in his grave." Samuel Goldwyn

BACK FROM THE CIRCLE

Been back from the trip for three days, and for a couple of days, I was exhausted. Didn’t know my 11000 mile, 31 day trip around the US had taken so much out of me until I found myself sleeping afternoons on the couch and not being able to reassume my cooking and cleaning duties around the house. Now, I’m getting back up to speed. The weeds in the yard are whacked back into shape, got the dishes washed, the financial books back into shape, the bills paid, and tonight, my wife and I got the shopping done. Today, also, I read this week’s Newsweek and that feels pretty darn normal.


GNOMES

I have no intention of reading all the back issues of Newsweek that stacked up while I was gone. I threw the back issues away, but I’m keeping the cover of the May 24, 2004 issue around the house for awhile. It’s the cover with the two dudes who write all the silly science fiction novels about being “left behind” when the imaginary second coming of that dead prophet, Jesus, supposedly happens. All great science fiction! It’s been the science fiction of so many over the centuries, lining up for the second coming, giving up all their money and possessions or killing themselves like the original suicider they worship.

What I invite thoughtful readers to do is to study those two masks that are on the cover of the magazine. SMALL PHOTO The grimace of the one, the fake smile of the other. The slitted eyes of both. It’s those sorts of faked facial expressions that I shrink from when I try to enter a fundamentalist church. Those are not smiles at all but fake faces that hide the men from the world. If you’re comfortable with them, then I pity you.

It’s a good thing they write only science fiction. Imagine if what they have to say was in any way true. The book upon which they base their fiction is filled with the ravings of a mad man. They, if they believe what’s in that book, are mad men too, and that’s what you see in their faces if you look closely.


IF HE ACTS LIKE ONE, HE IS ONE

Find Page 51 of Newsweek (June 21, 2004) and down near the bottom of the page read, “...President Bush had declared war on Al Qaeda, and in a series of covert directives, he had authorized the CIA to set up secret interrogation facilities and to use new, harsher methods.”

Of course, if you think simplistically, you can see nothing wrong with your president authorizing torture to get info from your common enemy, that is until you realize that the day might come when you, an American, for some reason we can’t yet fathom, become the enemy. Then you realize that if a president can authorize the torture of anyone he considers an enemy, then he can also torture you, if and when the Constitution is breached and useless to protect you.

The day might come for any of us when our church or our political party or the color of our hair or the books we read might become the reason that any Bush-like establishment decides that we are the enemy. And if Bush can so delude his conscience as to torture one man, then he has already committed the deed to you when your turn comes to be the enemy. We must remember that all that keeps us safe is LAW and Constitutional law specially, and if our president can forget the Constitution in one case then he has already forgotten it in any case he deems it handy to do so. Just hope you never become his enemy.


ALSO IN THE CURRENT ISSUE OF NEWSWEEK

Jonathan Alter gets it right when, noting Nancy Reagan’s interest in stem cell research, he says, “When it happens to you, everything looks different... a liberal on health issues is a conservative who has been mugged by an illness in [his or her] family.”


BLACK COLLAR CRIME BLOTTER. PROTESTANTS TOO!

Read any issue of Freethought Today. Every issue of Freethought always contains several pages of crime committed by churchly men which are sent in from newspapers around the US by its readers. It’ll open your eyes to read about the incest, murder, fraud and abuse common in the church today. Unfortunately, Freethought Today is not an internet publication. So you will have to get a hard copy to read the “Black Collar Crime Reports”. But at the following link, you can get some more information about relgious criminals of all types. Religious Criminals


"Never believe anything until it has been officially denied." Claud Cockburn (1904-1981)

ONE MORE MORNING IN A CYBER CAFE ON THE ROAD BEFORE I GO TO BE OFF THE ROAD

I decided to look up the one other place called a "cyber cafe" in Missoula. Guess what? It's like that "cafe" on Nantucket island. No cafe, but internet access. And, except for free, it's the best deal I've come across yet. Only three bucks an hour, but it took me the better part of twenty minutes to find it. It's on Kensington, and Kensington is one of those streets that starts and stops several times to leap over railroad bridges and stone walls. It's called Mountain West Internet and Cyber Cafe on 800 Kensington, Ste 106. Even then, you go down a narrow corridor and make a couple of turns till you actually come to the door. Hidden like that 2 Union Street upstairs place on Nantucket.


WHAT. NOW I DON'T WANT TO STOP!?

Maybe Jack Kerouac is still alive in me after all. I thought I was ready to come home, and, yet, today, with this cool air, mountain viewing morning, sunshine peeking through the clouds morning, I'm resisting returning home. Last night I was so tired, all I wanted to do was be home. I even called my wife out of schedule to let her know how much I missed her. Now I'm getting used to the adventure just as it's ending. I recall how getting into the adventure was hard at first too.


HALLIBURTON AND CHENEY: PALS TO THE END

Senator Waxman is following the deals that were struck so that Cheney's old buddies could get the bid-free Iraqi business. Follow that as closely as you can, for it's that kind of dishonesty that will topple the President by appointment Bush regime in Washington.

Pius mouths often cover the worst sort of dishonesty. Just like wealth is at the root of the South's Bible Belt platitudes and god-beliefs, so wealth is at the root of that Southerner's, Bush's, dealings in the world. Texas (and many Southern states) are at least a century behind the rest of us in civilization. It's got to do with slavery.

Slavery put the South behind and made them cling to that Bible which justified their slavery. That clinging to chivalry and the high falutin' attitude they carry around in their psyches is what has put them behind. They don't dare face the falsity of their whole belief system, the self-righteousness and pomposity they live with. The most scary part of it is that for their defensive lie to be effective they gotta believe it themselves.

Most of us in the 60s and 70s saw the falseness of our moral and "holier than thou" pretenses. We saw that we were phoney. We saw that what others call evil is only the dark side in each of us imbedded in our evolutionary natures. We found we couldn't maintain an attitude of separateness from the bad that people do. We knew that we were the problem, not some other guy who "hasn't found Jesus" or some "evil culture" outside of our own. That's Bush's chief difficulty, seeing that he is no better than those he calls evil. When he sees that, he'll quit being a danger to the world. The whole American South is still waiting to do that. Until they do, they are a danger to democracy.

Of course Saddam was a bad dude, but in his own mind, he was only defending his regime from evil men who wanted to topple him and his cronies from power. That all Bush is doing too. He's defending himself and his capitalist cronies from losing power in the world. He's protecting his turf. And to do that, he's justified the killing and maiming of thousands of innocent Iraqis.


WHOREALDO IN AFGHANISTAN

Saw Whorealdo covering one soldier doing good work in Afghanistan this morning, and I could identify with what the soldier was doing. Only thing, one fine soldier in one place does not a successful policy make. And on top of that, I thought, "What am I to make of this? We're spending all this wealth and life in foreign countries while in my very city of Spokane, where 22 percent of the people live below the poverty line, Bush is cutting housing subsidies by cutting HUD funding. Not only that," I thought, "we're still dumping women and children off welfare here."

What are we to make of this, eh?

LEWIS, CLARK AND THOMAS IN MISSOULA

Missoula, where the wonderful poet, Richard Hugo taught. I'm at CyberQuest for $4.00 an hour at 821 S. Higgins Ave. I'm within 200 miles of home, but I'm too tired to make the last push. If I did try to get home tonight, my wife would be asleep anyhow, so I'm resting another night at a Super 8. Just ate at The Bridge. Ate eggplant with goat cheese, spinach, pine nuts, tomatoes and more trimmings. Ate Morel mushrooms, lightly sauted in white wine sauce and butter. Everything was so good that my driving dizziness is almost abated, but not quite.

Also found a cyber place in Bemidji. Called Cyberbug. They get $5 an hour for using their computers, but since I made my entry at Super 8's computer, I didn't need to make another entry this morning. I didn't intend to make this entry tonight. I intended to do it tomorrow, but this place doesn't open until 11 or noon every day and I want to be gone by eight tomorrow morning.


BETTER DRIVING THROUGH MONTANA

Well, I finally got what I expected of Route 2. Just west of Bemidji the road became four lanes for awhile and, then, when it wasn't four lanes, it was wide open sailing even on two lanes in Montana, just as I anticipated. Today's drive was wonderful, but from the moment I entered Glacier Park until I arrived Missoula, the drive turned damned bad. Slow drivers, rain, wet roads, dry roads, but the mountains on my left were wonderful. So good to be back in the Mountain West.

This morning though, the drive was through wide open country, piled high clouds of white to gray and blue skies peeking between the clouds. Three rain fronts appeared before me, left, right and center. Somehow, my route skated the edges, and I hit very few heavy rains until the mountains. Eighty to eighty-five mph for hours.


DON'T THEY KNOW?

Caught a glimpse of a household tip on the Weather Channel. The guy was recommending alarms to detect smoke and carbon monoxide. I could just see the poorest of us poor Americans being able to afford things like that. Then you gotta have batteries too. I remember when rich Americans were building backyard bomb shelters, and I knew that I couldn't even begin to afford such a thing. At the time, I noted that the rich were the ones pushing their weight around at the Russians. "What do they care," I thought, "if an atomic war starts. They've got their shelters!" I was pissed.


AIN'T WHORERALDO THE SHITS!

Caught a bit of Whoreraldo Rubyerrearo on Fox, live from Iraq. He was giving us news like, "We're doing the job here...." and "You know things aren't perfect...." This is what passes for news on Fox? I can hear opinions like that in any coffee shoppe in Des Moines or any city in America. And I wonder who arranges for the troopers to stand in a semi-circle behind him to give him an heroic backdrop for his bullshit? Goodness sakes, no wonder Fox watchers were caught by surprise by the happenings in Iraq! Is anybody but fools watching Fox news anymore?


BOWELS

I sure do know why many older folks become so very conscious of their bowels.


GODSTUFF

Compared to most churches in the north (except Mormon ones), southern churches look very rich. The Protestant priest caste down there sure have a vested interest in keeping the hypothesis of god alive in the imaginations of their followers. Man, religion is big business in the South. Those poor fools.

As I search through radio stations while I drive, I often come across religious stations. You always know when you hit one-the voices are so fake. And the ministry is always full of judgment, judging this bad or that good, and always exhorting people to become more and more perfect. No wonder southern religion creates so many folk who can identify with the paranoid scyzophrenic [sp-I suddenly can't spell it] who wrote the psalms. You always gotta feel bad about yourself, about your falling short of that damn Jesus guy. Yes, what would Jesus do? How can you act more like Jesus? Poor folk. Poor damned Bible reading folk.


RECALL DEER KILL, PENNSYLVANIA? NOW COMES CHRISTIAN KILL, MONTANA

If god did exist, it's obvious he doesn't like his followers in Montana. All along the highways are crosses, marking the spots where god killed his Christians (or allowed them to be killed) in auto accidents. As far as I can see, not one Jew or Moslem or Hindhu, not one agnostic or atheist or member of the Church of Divine Man has ever died in an auto accident in Montana. Nor any Wiccan or anyone of any religion but Christianity. Maybe we all ought to move up here where we'll be safe as can be in our cars while the Christians are killed like flies of a summer.


UNTIL THEN....

My next entries will be the normal kind, political and atheistic. Drove about 12000 miles, and I did the trip in 30 days and for close to three thousand dollars. I could have done better financially, but I got lazy toward the end and craved comfort. I needed to have planned better. Maybe next time....

SUPER 8 MOTEL, BEMIDJI, MINNESOTA

You are reading this correctly. I'm staying at the Super 8 here in Bemidji, and they have a computer up on a little balcony in the lobby where I'm blogging in. They've only had it for awhile. I got the last room here as a Convention of Western Dancers is flooding the town. It's a beautiful resort town and I paid premium price for it.

Today drove through the threat of severe weather, maybe tornados, and got a nasty surprise on Route 2. I thought Route 2 would drive like secondary roads in Montana-lots of open road and little traffic. Well it was a day of curse and pass and pass and curse and fuss and dash. But I'm seeing some different country than I've seen before. Water, of course, everywhere, here, in the land of a thousand lakes, as they call it. I lived in both St. Paul and Minneapolis as a junior high kid, but I'm north of those two cities now, though I came through the edges of St. Paul to get on I-35 North.

Talking to the two young ladies at the desk, and it turns out that one of them has a Bachelor's degree in Creative Writing from Bemidji State College. She wants to visit Maine and travel too.

Got to touch Lake Superior in Duluth before I took Route 2 to get out of there. I'd never seen Lake Superior or Duluth.


MADISON, WISCONSIN AND UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

Passed through Madison on my way north. They'll never live it down. I wanted to stop there and make a blog entry at the university where some real campus revolt went down all those many years ago. Have you ever seen "Days of Rage" which is a documentary of that action when the student body nearly took over the campus? The last time I saw it, I cried. It was during a time when I was beginning to get over all the trauma of those days, and I recall thinking, "I'm so glad it's over and the violence leaving the country."


FOREST PARK IN ST. LOUIS

Stopped in St. Louis on my way out of Carbondale to try and find and photograph the apartment we lived in when I was 3 and 4 and where my folks decided to divorce. 0F course, the row of apartment buildings were gone, torn down to make way for a bank. So I photographed the bank and ate a taco at a little place across the street and told the manager all my story. Well... not all of it. I'd still be there. Forest Park is one of the most impressive inner city places I've ever seen. And as one of the guys at the visitor's center told me, "The St Louis Zoo (which is located in it) is the largest free zoo in the whole world!" Or did he say, "in the United States"?


AGAIN... IN THE NAME OF TRUTH

How often have I heard the saying, "America... the only place in the world where anybody can grow up to be president. The land of opportunity." How true is that? Not very.

The same could be said for a lot of countries. Even about Russia, under the commissars. You see... people of force and will with a little luck always manage to rise up in whatever circumstances they find themselves in. It's in their genes to rise up or at least to make the attempt. Those who succeed can't help themselves any more than some people can't help being on the bottom. It's the reason we need welfare. Some people just always find themselves screwed. Some will be born more docile than his or her neighbors. Some will just be born dumb too. The only way you get a fair and just society is to make sure that there is some leveling mechanism in the economy. That is why we have a graduated income tax and inheritance taxes, to keep leveling the field. It's that or revolution.

The one difference between rising up in a socialist dictatorship and a democracy are the rules of the game one must follow to get ahead. Even in the ghetto, the rules of the game remain. I can't see much difference between a gang banger who succeeds in filling the drug needs of his customers and the activities of cigarette makers and sellers. Some always succeed better than others.

Of course in the good old days when you had to be born into royalty to become king not everyone could be king, but that's the only case.


ENOUGH ALREADY WITH THE LIBERAL MEDIA

In the first place, on the average, the more intelligent and educated you are, the more likely you are to be liberal. That's statistics. So you're likely to have a discontinuity between opinions held by the mass of men and the opinions of those who are better educated. The wealthy, often conservative, are often not the best educated. They get the "Cs" in school. Men of "action" are not men of intellect on the whole.

One thing that concerns me is those people who think that the news is being liberal just because the facts presented in news' articles present information which make the conservative uncomfortable. He would rather have the news distorted like a Limbaugh does. If the facts support the liberal view that's no reason to call the media liberal. For one example, evolution is no longer a theory. It's all but proven as the most reasonable explanation of what makes the world, the universe and the species tick. Yet a conservative Christian wants to hear news which is untrue when it comes to that subject. He calls the media liberal for presenting the facts when it comes to Evolution.


DOPPINESS ON THE TRAIL

I get so dizzy and spaced out driving that when I write these blog entries, I know sometimes I'm not expressing myself as well as I'm able to. I'm just gunslinging the words onto the blog space and am not able to formulate my thoughts as well as I can when I'm in my normal leisurely life at home. Gonna quit now. I'm really tired after fighting two lane traffic all afternoon.

THE DRIVE TO CAIRO TURNED OUT...

Guess what? Because of flooding, I couldn't get down to Fort Defiance State Park to overlook the joining of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. My drive would have been been spoiled except that I stopped at the historic Cairo Public Library to use their Gateway to enter some more blog stuff. It's a beautiful old building in the heart of Cairo with lots of mahogany wood and friendly librarians and many old old books, plus the smell that only libraries had hundreds of years ago. Of course that smell was the smell of mildewing books which presaged the end of those very books.


MET A YOUTH TODAY

Met Jared at the Admissions building at SIU. He has the distinction of being a man who transfered out of computer science into music.


ABOUT ALL THIS VETERAN STUFF AND CONSEQUENT WHOOP AND HOLLER

Look, I don't want to be a wet blanket, but we must realize that for every one vet who saw combat, nine men supported him with behind the lines efforts. So very few veterans actually experience the Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers stuff. In my own family, two of my dad's brothers were in the military and two brothers were war workers. One military brother became a parachute instructor while the other one was 2nd in command of a destroyer who saw no action even though he arrived on scene after a battle or two. I don't want to be a spoil sport, but I do like reality and truth to be part of the equation at all times. I don't mean to belittle anyone's contribution to war, but neither do I want us to forget that the actual combat falls only to the few.

HERE I IS AGAIN: CARBONDALE, ILLINOIS CAMPUS OF SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

I'm using a computer in the school library to make this blog entry.

Yep, it's here that in the mid-60s I drove my VW around campus in the middle of the night on the sidewalks and carried around a fifth of whiskey in my briefcase and met my students in the student union coffee shop rather than my stuffy office in a tiny building which, by the way, is still here. In the coffee shop, I could sip my whiskey in what I thought was more freedom. 1964-1966: I was so cool. Yep, this was the place where my precarious life turned rather dark and continued dark for about ten years afterwards, yet I wouldn't trade a minute of my life. It was all good experience. But in those days, you couldn't convince me of that.

Like everything, the change here is immense. I lived in Cambria while I attended graduate school in Carbondale. I should say I parked my poor wife in Cambria, alone without a car, while I struggled with graduate school and eventually left one quarter shy of a degree, a pile of incompletes in my dosier. Anyhow, I could drive out to Cambria on Route 13 and I was in the country. Now, there's almost nothing but traffic and business lining Rt.13 from Carbondale to Marion, Illinois. A stretch of road does pass through Crab Orchard Lake which is still nice. This morning, however, a four car pile up kinda spoiled the sight of the lake as I drove into Carbondale from Marion. Nothing serious, just four cars and trucks with dented fenders beside the road. Probably, one or another of them made the mistake of glancing at the beautiful lake while traffic was bumper to bumper going at 55+ mph.


RONALD REAGAN SUCKED AS PRESIDENT

Let's give credit where credit's due. Reagan was the one who set off the process by which the rest of us balance our national budget by cutting programs for the poor. Don't forget, he tripled our national debt. He gave us the Savings and Loan scandals which the average tax payer had to save us from, and also, the poor. Remember Milliken? Also, recall all Reagan's little invasions! He discovered that if you spend money on military adventures, you can leave later presidents, like Clinton, the task of screwing the poor of America in order to get us out of hock. It's the unspoken Republican plan to return most of us to the poverty which existed before the Roosevelt era. Republicans have never stopped hating Roosevelt for creating a national safety net. With Roosevelt's safety net in place, Republicans could not use economic necessity to drive down the wages of the average working stiff. Do we working people feel the economic pinch now, when the whole world is undercutting our wages? Where's the safety net when you need it? It's being squandered in Iraq, that's where!


IT WAS THE AGE OF AQUARIUS THAT DID IT, STUPID! NOT REAGAN.

Heard some stupid journalist the other day try to give Reagan credit for the tearing down of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Not so. Recently, some former members of the Proletariat and other Soviet leaders admitted that the Beatles caused the collapse of Communism. Even Gorbachev said so. Remember him with the continent mapped on his forehead?

It was Gorbachev's generation which smuggled western rock and roll and Beatle records into the Soviet Union. They smuggled in the American openness of the 60s and 70s. They admired things like the Freedom of Information Act (which Bush hates). They grooved on the spirit of the hippies, just as we did.

Conservatives, whose main thrust is always secretiveness and force are incapable of inspiring such an idea as "glasnost" or transparancy. By the time the Russian "age of aquarius" people came to power, they could no longer believe in the conservative, i.e. authoritarian, state of things, the oppression of the generations before theirs. They craved freedom from authority. Like our "baby boomers", they were ready to open up, to turn on, tune in and drop out.

Never, never, never let American conservatives take credit for the change that our Age of Aquarius people created in the world. Peace did it, the ideas of Thoreau, Gandhi, King and Whitman did it, not the force and bombs conservatives so very much believe in.


EATING POOP

Every time I use public facilities and watch guys leave the stalls without washing their hands, I realize that with these new blow dryers, I don't have paper towels to use, and I am handling shit when I pull a door open, that I have nothing but my shirttails to use to get out without touching shitty door handles, and I realize that we humans are always handling each others poop. It's just like we liberals always have to clean up the human mess that conservatives leave behind in every age. Sorry, el Squeamish!


MODERN CONESTOGAS

Got a glimpse, driving yesterday, of a long line of semis ahead of me for a half mile or so and realized they looked a lot like lines of conestoga wagons, heading west.


NOT A FLORIDIAN AGAIN!

Yesterday, heading across Indiana on I-70, I was doing the usual liesurely 15 miles per hour above the speed limit that goes for lawful driving all over the US nowadays. In short I was doing about 70 to 75 miles per hour when up behind me comes somebody doing 90 to 100. Passed me on the left like a shot. At first, I can't believe my eyes, then I do, as I acknowledge the reality of my eyes. It is a Florida license plate on the speeder of speeders among speeders. Stands out like a sore thumb among a road of thumbs, he does.


WITHER WEATHER NEXT?

Today I head down to Cairo to watch the Ohio enter the Mississippi and tomorrow rest in Marion before I start the final leg of my journey home via Route 2 at the top of the US, about 2350 miles by a longish route. Will I discover any public computers to blog from up there? Any Internet Cafes? The Shadow knows, not I. So far I've escaped all bad weather except for heat and humidity. Now heavy weather thunderstorms are projected between me and my trip home, at least until I get farther north. We'll see. We'll see.... Adios anyone who might be reading this blog'a'mine.

IN DAYTON OHIO WITH ORVILLE AND WILBUR WRIGHT

Well... finally made it into my home town and am at the Dayton Public Library to use their computers to blog in. Spent some time around the University of Dayton where I got my BA and then went into the Oregon District to try and find a web cafe of some kind. Found one, but I'd need a wireless card to use it. I considered installing a wireless card in my little i-book before I left Spokane but didn't do it, more shame on me. I also found a cafe where I could plug in, but I always hate to do that because I'm so stupid about computers, I lose my link to my ISP when I get back to Spokane. I know-that's no big deal to most, but it is to me.

The Oregon district is a sort of upscale, revitalization project just off the edges of Dayton's downtown and only a few blocks from Stivers High School from which institution I graduated.

While there I met Eric an artist/philosopher and Dustin, a philospher and thinker. Standing out in the sunshine in front of their local cafe, we talked for a couple of hours and it was mighty fine. Hi, guys! Later, I hooked up with my talented, longest-running friend, Carl Tropea, and in a couple of hours we got the world straightened out between us and then decided that, according to what we know of consciousness, we really can't be sure of anything.

Tomorrow, it's off to Carbondale, Illinois where I more than once drove down the sidewalks of the campus in the middle of the night with a little too much booze in my system. I think I passed George Bush going the other way, one night, but he didn't inhale. Had the balls of brass monkey, he did.


INTERSTATE RIVALRY

North Carolina and Ohio are arguing about their places in aviation history. North Carolina motor tags say, "First In Flight" because the Wright brothers took their Dayton, Ohio built and developed plane to Kitty Hawk to fly it for the first time. Dayton Ohio has always billed itself as the "Home of Aviation". It is true that the Wright brothers couldn't fly their plane in Ohio because they needed a lot of hot air to fly their plane in, and they needed to find a place full of blustery, windy hot air. That place, full of hot air, was North Carolina. If being full of hot air is North Carolina's claim to being part of aviation history, then let's not be selfish about. Hats off to the hot air in North Carolina!


DEERKILL, PENNSYLVANIA

I've never seen more deer slaughter than I did, traveling across central Pennsylvania into Ohio at Youngstown. Every twenty-five miles or so, there'd be another deer carcass. I never saw more deer kill than in this area.

By the way, in State College Pennsylvania, I did find the Yogurt Express where the internet with computers supplied was only $3.95 an hour.

In the afternoon as I drove over to Ohio from State College on I-80, a car flew past me at about 90-100 miles an hour. I had just almost changed lanes in front of him. The car was from Florida! Yep, Florida.


A BUSHMAN HONOR

Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Hirohito, Saddam Hussein and George Bush? What do they all have in common? They all invaded other countries which did not attack them first. Now do you understand why liberals have only contempt for George Bush, and why we don't trust conservatives to do what is best for America? Look at how he and his henchmen have dishonored America's reputation by aligning our ways of doing things with those of other dictators. If I repeat myself, sorry.


ENEMIES AND ENEMIES AND MORE ENEMIES

Was watching a movie yesterday and found one in which the Russians are portrayed as courageous. Had something to do with a Cold War incident in which a nuclear sub's reactor goes bad and the Russians lose many men, trying to stop a meltdown which could have led to WWIII. Harrison Ford starred. Yes, a sympathetic portrayal of former enemies, like in "All Quiet On the Western Front", eh?

I thought back over my life and found the Nazis flowing into the Russians flowing into the Iraqis, flowing into Chinese. Why do we peasants keep letting these paranoid schizophrenics, called world leaders, lead us from one conflict to another? When do we take control, be calm and say no more?

WOWEEE, BOY, PENN STATE CAMPUS!

Oak trees here much much taller than an elephant's eyes. Thanks to a wonderful student who served me a pizza down on the main drag of State College, Pennsylvania and who shared his password with me, I am able to log on at the Student Union building of Penn State University, home of my hero coach, Joe Paterno. Why should we all like Joe? Back in the 60s and 70s when college coaches wouldn't let their players grow afros or long hair, Joe Paterno said he didn't care how an athlete wore his hair as long as he could play football. He was one of the first coaches to do that. And he won a lot of games by letting his players be free men instead of lock step slaves. And his teams had discipline too. Of course I was born in Ohio and an Ohio State fan, and Penn is now part of the Big Ten, but I didn't like Woody Hays. He thought discipline came out of the barrel of a gun. Now I'm mixing Woody up with another strict disciplinarian. Mao who?


ANOTHER YAHOO. I'VE GOT A MAC HERE TO WORK WITH!

Enough said.


WHAT CLASSLESS SOCIETY ARE WE SPEAKING OF?

There really is something to my observations as I've traveled around about many of the beautiful places now being taken over by the rich. When I was in some of these places 40 to 50 years ago, I was not so aware of the rich. They fit in and enjoyed the rusticity of places of escape, like the gritty Gulf Coast and Hemingway's Key West. They enjoyed the local flavor for what it was, I think. Now they take over, build million dollar homes and change the atmosphere until it relects them. Rather than being just part of the scene, they are the scene. One place for the rich becomes very much like any other of their places. A poor man like myself becomes ever more aware of his "place" in society, surrounded by such opulence.

The ferries from Hyannis to Nantucket now have a "first class" cabin for those who want more opulence in their two hour trip. We peons get to sit on slate board seats while they lounge in air conditioned comfort on plush blue cloth seats. Of course the difference in price is not so much that an average Joe with a union job wouldn't shell it out just sos he could say he'd traveled first class. And you know, really? The rich, knowing the value of a buck, might not actually be the ones to travel in that first class comfort. So... as I peeked in to see if any movie stars were aboard and hiding in first class, who was I really seeing in there? Eh?

But, remember the Gilded Age in America, when the wealthy were very rich and the unions struggled to get a decent wage for themselves? When several were rich and few were middle class and most were poor dirt farmers? That's the age that the Republicans want to return us to—before the DAYS OF BIG GOVERNMENT. If you don't believe me, check out their think tanks. See what the intellectual underpinnings of their "shrink the government" philosophy comes from. They want to make the working stiff powerless again to fight back. That's why Republicans support the right to work, why they oppose lawyers for the poor, why they want to undercut the National Labor Relations Board, why they want to stop the little guy from easy bankruptcy. Hey, it's okay for the rich to go bankrupt, why not the poor? I'm tired again after a day of driving, and I have to stand at this computer (Mac though it is) so I just can't muster a long list of the ways in which the capitalists are trying to put down protections for the average American laboring guy. Not tonight.


A MEMORY RECALLED IS A MEMORY ALTERED FOREVER

Now that I've reexperienced a few of my old haunts, they will never be recalled the same. Recall—my reading in brain chemistry tells me that every time I bring up an old memory, I must make new chemicals in order to store the memory in my current brain. That's why we mix things up when we recall them. Now, I'm sure I'll never quite be able to separate what I just left from what I left 50 years ago back there in Nantucket. I know I'm repeating myself.


ONWARD

Now on to Ohio and old buddy Carl from my hippy days. He was a student in a high school class I taught and, later, after my first divorce, I roomed with him and a couple of other people and began my Johnny-come-lately hippy days. Should arrive in Dayton by tomorrow evening.

WALKING AROUND TOWN WITH AHAB

Sun was out when I exited the Even Keel. I walked out on one of the piers, found public restrooms, relieved myself, and stepped back out onto the pier to bask in the sun. I think this would be the ideal place to live if I had the money. I remember that the winters weren't too bad. Key West is too hot in the summer, but Nantucket isn't bad in the winter, as I recall. But, of course, the additional factor is being unable to drive to the mainland when you're on Nantucket. However, after that nasty drive the 140 miles from Key West to Miami, maybe a ferry ride is preferable.

I counted three sets of accents soon after coming ashore on the island. South African, Jamacian and German, plus I ran into three Russian young women in Hyannis while out walking in the evening. This feel of multinationality is something you forget when your poverty confines you to an "Inland Empire" residence such as my Spokane, Washington home is. Not only that, I've already talked to three people who summer on Nantucket and live in the Florida Keys in the winter. Here I am, reveling in my travel, only to meet people who travel immense distances twice a year. I bought a Nantucket hat to go with my Key West hat.

One of the people I talked to who lives both in Key West and Nantucket was also a member of the Nantucket Chase family, another family with whaling roots. She knows of Sally Coffin, my old bud from my early 50's days on the island, but she doesn't know her. Of course, she's one generation behind Sally's so they would have no reason to associate.


THE INTERNET CAFE AT NANTUCKET: A BETTER DEAL

Come here, to 2 Union Street, just off Main, for your internet needs. It's upstairs and cool and quiet, not like the noisy restaurant. Here they charge only $10 dollars an hour, and they charge by the minute. At the Keel, they take the whole $15 dollars; if you don't use all your time, you lose the left over. But this isn't a cafe, even though it says it is. Something about not being able to put in another bathroom and one unisex toilet isn't sufficient for a cafe?


JOY

This is the best day of my trip, relaxed and easy in the coolish day with warm sun. An excellent combination.

AHAB AND ME IN NANTUCKET, MASSACHUSETTS

Change of plans! Change of plans!

Man, is it expensive here to use the Internet at The Even Keel on Main Street in Nantucket. Fifteen dollars an hour.

Anyhow, last you heard from me I was in Savannah and planning to head home. Here's what happened instead. I drove from Savannah to Charlotte where I spent the night. Awaking, I found a cool morning rather than a sweaty one, unlike in Florida. Then I realized that it was still cool in the north and that storms were still prowling the Northeast. It wouldn't quite be tourist season yet, maybe I could still find cheaper housing on Cape Cod, so off I set in a northern direction. I found a way to drive north and shoot over east above the New York traffic. It worked and I got to Hyannis where I secured two nights lodging for about $50 a night.

Now I'm on the island after a two hour ferry ride. Met Karisa and Cody working on the boat. We discussed my life and their lives as they think their lives might turn out. They are uncertain, uncertain. Bright and intelligent, they look at the world through caring eyes. It was refreshing to talk to them. Cody likes philosophy but can't think of way to make a living with it. Karisa is studying childhood education. She thinks she might like psychology. They give me hope about America. Karisa, if I mispelled your name, forgive me.

Jeez, guys, as I passed through New Haven Connecticut on my way to Hyannis, I almost stopped in to, hopefully, make a blog entry at the Yale student union. I thought that would have been very hoity toity of me, but I was in a hurry, so skipped the chance.

TRAVEL IS FARTHER THAN YOU THINK

I have traveled the United States now to meet the peoples of India. Anyone traveling a good deal and trying to find inexpensive motels will know what I'm talking about.

I ate fishcakes at Persy's in Hyannis Port this morning and met a waitress who wants to move to Tucson (that's right, Tucson, where Dave the artist is), and two people from Maryland who are motorboating up and down the Atlantic Coast for a few weeks, then back to work for them. They recommended an even better deal for me as a place to sleep, but I'll be gone soon.

Met a woman as I walked along the street on Nantucket. Cars stopped for us so we could cross the street. I asked her if cars always stopped. She said, "Yes. If they don't, they're from Florida." I told her I found Florida drivers to be terrible too. She said that she should know because she was from Florida. Isn't that amazing? We parted very near where the Rope Walk used to be on Main Street.


NANTUCKET, THE BEGINNING

It was here that I first started to drink and black out. This was a great place to party down in the summer. Now, of course, like everything else I've revisited, Nantucket is a place for the rich to live. It costs a minimum of a million to buy a place to live here, and that's a tent out on Nevers Head.


STAYING IN TODAY

Today it was drizzly as my ferry, the "Great Point", pulled into Nantucket Town harbor, but it promises fair later. I've found the Main Street where I spent so much time in the late 50's, but it's changed too. Couldn't find the Quahog and The Rope Walk has moved about a thousand yards west, I think.


I DON'T KNOW HOW TO TELL YOU THIS BUT....

I'm a bum, a no good, a louse. I almost ran over a kid who was getting out of a school bus. Arriving at Hyannis, after a busy 390 mile drive in a glaring sun, with a sinus headach, dazed and confused, I immediately got lost trying to find the harbor where the ferries depart from before finding a motel. I had driven around for more than twenty minutes when I turned right and came smack up against a big yellow bus which had just turned left and come to a stop in front of me. It was to the left of the street, and I was to the right. I was thinking about directions I was so lost. I did note that it was a school bus, but it was so far to the left that I thought it was making a left turn. It did eventually do just that. I looked for the "STOP" paddles that fly out from the side of the buses in Spokane and saw none so, again, I thought the bus was just making a left turn. So I edged around the bus on the right side and began to accelerate when, pow, the bus door flew open and out popped a couple of kids right in front of me. I just missed one boy by about three feet.

It was a close call, and I felt terrible. I pulled up beside the bus and talked to the driver, trying to explain about tiredness, headache, confusion. I never did tell her about my thinking that she was making a left turn. Nor did I ask her why she was on the left side of the road, nor why she dropped the kids in the middle of the street, which she did do. Instead I apologized and apologized again. As I drove off, I felt like a criminal. And another lady whose car was stopped and heading in the other direction, yelled out with a foreign accent, "I report you. I report you." I was so guilty feeling and upset, I pulled into the nearest motel I could find, and, luckily, it was fairly cheap.

Call me a coward, but I didn't drive my car the rest of that night, and that's part of the reason I walked the mile to the ferry terminal rather than drive there this morning. I think I feel like I'm a criminal and that the Hyannis police must be looking for me to arrest me. Or something.... I did save ten bucks in parking fees by walking to the ferry, and it certainly doesn't hurt my health.


JAPAN TOO

Read in today's paper that the Japanese woman doesn't want to marry and become a housewife. Where have we heard that before? Go, Japanese women! Now if only Laura Bush had such courage. Free women will eventually free men. Yes, to all free men out there. Welcome aboard the Future. We can only hope the Bushmen can hurry up and catch up with the rest of us.

Got to hurry and get this done before my time is up.