WHAT’S IN A HAND UP?

It’s instructive that our local newsweekly The Inlander published an angry letter to the editor (Amber Custer) about homeless adults which contained the standard conservative cliché, “get a job, go to school”, while in the same issue producing a feature on homeless children which confronted the angry conservative cliché with its answer. Let’s put aside the fact that many working Americans with low paying jobs are homeless under this Republican regime which refuses to raise the minimum wage. As your article demonstrates, out of homeless children arise homeless adults, the damage done long before an American reaches adult status.

Where would drinking, drugging seven to thirteen year olds get these jobs the angry conservative tells them to get? Where would street dwelling children get the clean clothes and the middle-class manners to successfully compete for jobs? Who’s going to hire a drunken ten year old? No American wakes up one day and consciously “chooses” to be homeless. It takes a long history of abuse and failure or a sociopath’s genetic makeup to create the self-destructive psychology with which many adult homeless persons undermine their own best interests.

People who scream about the homeless would better spend their time being grateful that they were born with the genes for a good IQ or helpful parents, or with the genes that make for mental and physical health, with a loving grandparent (like mine) or a school counselor or a middle-class upbringing or an economic status that helped prepare them to hang on when times were tough. Counting their blessings might soften the hardened hearts whose angry jibes only contribute to the indignities already visited upon the homeless. Grateful conservatives might offer a helping hand up rather than a kick in the teeth.
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"I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind.
The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building." —Charles Schulz

SO THIS IS AMERICA?

An ignored minority does live in America, the minority of the non-Christian, and it is evidenced by the fact that no non-Christian has ever been president of the United States. Our Constitution clearly states that our president need not pass any religious test, yet Christians have kept out all religions but their own from the presidency.

Our current president in his power hunger has no compunction about manipulating America’s religious prejudices to remain in power, and his power base of Christian fundamentalists is only too happy to go along with him. Recall that before the right wing fundamentalists approved George Bush to be their candidate in 2000, they required him to write a letter testifying to his religious beliefs. He had to pass their religious test before they would support him. Fundamentalists and conservatives have happily forced god onto our currency and into our pledge of allegiance even though that was not the intention of our founding fathers. Now we’re even fighting god’s war for democracy (according to a Bush press conference) against Moslems.

The bushmen have already disregarded so many Constitutional protections—can they be expected to respect any of them? If you ask me, the greatest threat to American freedoms which has ever existed is alive and active in the Republican Party under George Bush. Sadly, we can see how many Republicans who would normally be outraged at such disrespect for the Constitution gladly kowtow to the trend because they love being in power more than the Constitution.



WHERE WERE YOU ALL THESE YEARS? TANKS A LOT!

Heard today that the reason gas prices are rising is that China’s economy is demanding more and more resources to keep its growth on track. Not too long ago, the rapid expansion was in Japan. India is using ever more gasoline to grow its economy. Can Russia be far behind? What about Brazil?

Liberals anticipated these developments way back in the 60s. I suppose someday soon, the rest of America will come around to knowing what some of us have known for 50 years. That’s why some of us have always driven fuel efficient cars. Not only does that help our pocket books, it makes us patriots by helping America remain independent of foreign oil. Other Americans put themselves first, America and everyone else second. If we are ever going to have a global economy in which world wages are high so job out sourcing won’t be necessary, we’re going to have to support global growth by doing with a little less ourselves in the way of big cars and waste like Christmas lights on homes, etcetera. I suspect we can find thousands of ways to become a more fuel efficient country, but that’ll take patriotism and working together. Conservatives don’t like that because it isn’t their favorite dog eat dog thing to do and cooperation smacks of bleeding heartism.

Another possibility will be war and more war. And the irony is that nothing wastes gasoline more than wars to protect gasoline resources. Do you know how many miles per gallon a tank gets?

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"I have a new philosophy. I'm only going to dread one day at a time." —Charles Schulz

SWEARIN’ OFF

Today, I do abjure forever the name of “liberal Democrat” and assume only the small letter title “atheist”. (Unless I forget that today I swore off.) My wearing both titles, gives religionists who think only with their brain stems an excuse to attack liberal causes which are more humane, democratic and Christian-like than any fundamentalist cultural program I’ve ever experienced. Not that many Christians don’t get involved with the poor, but at bottom, they have the ulterior motive of making converts so all their efforts are self-serving rather than charitable.


A NEW PARTY? REPUCRATS or DEMOCANS

I’m sure liberals and conservatives of old have much more in common with each other than truly conservative Republicans have with fundamentalist Christians. Clinton’s Republican-like balancing of the budget added to a liberal’s natural tendencies to want to make society a fair and just place ought to be able to forge a new party with undeniable strength.


STALKING THE OPPONENT

At this very moment, I’m looking at a conservative male who doesn’t know I know he’s a conservative, and he doesn’t know I’m an atheist whose observing him. He’s eating lunch and visiting with his daughter.

He’s got a stony face and seems unable to have a real smile on his face. His eyes shift around, and he rarely makes eye contact with the people he’s talking to. He’s very guarded. This is not the kind of man I’d like to have guarding me in an Iraqi prison, if you get my drift. Anyhow, in twenty minutes, he’s not cracked a smile, even when he’s talking to his daughter. The funny thing is that I know his disability is all genetic, and I can’t take any more credit for my tendency to smile and clown around than he can for his genetic tendency to frown. The one difference between us is that I accept the genetic truth of our natures, and he doesn’t.

Speaking of the neocon smile—just take a gander at the VP’s smile on page 28 of the July 26, 2004 Newsweek. That smile is in the mouth and not at all in the eyes which is how you can tell a real smile. Neocons don’t know anything about traits like this, and if they do read or hear about it, they dismiss it as nonsense. Neocons just don’t know anything about human nature. All their info is based on moral and intellectual abstractions. They make their observations on how life ought to be rather than on what human nature.............

I’m tired of saying what I was just about to say. The truth may be that well-educated liberals and conservatives pretty much know all they need to know about human nature. It’s what they want to do with the knowledge that makes them different. A liberal wants to make society safer for the less-advantaged while the neocon wants to make the society more punishing.


ROUN ’N’ ROUN SHE GO AND ONLY THE PO’ ‘RAQIS KNOWS IT’SO

In a post some weeks past, under the title, “PREDICTION”, I predicted that Saddam’s police would soon be torturing Iraqi’s just as in the old days, only this time for a new regime. Man! I was right on. Turns out this Allawi guy is a real strongman, the kind of strongman that only a neocon could love.

“He [Allawi] has flooded the streets with cops, many of them from the old regime. He’s started a new General Security Directorate, otherwise known as the secret police.... There’s a danger that Iraqis may end up with a pro-American dictator, the sort of banana-republic despot that an American leader once famously called ‘an SOB, but our SOB.’ Then one of the last good reasons to have invaded Iraq will have proved as illusory as those long-lost weapons of mass destruction.” Newsweek, July 26, 2004, p.37

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"I'm astounded by people who want to 'know' the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown." —Woody Allen

MARTHA STEWART DON’T GET IT

Darling Martha, how can you say that, “A small personal matter has been blown out of all proportion and with such venom and gore.” (Newsweek, July 26, 2004, p.40)

I want to be on your side on this issue, but I can’t because you don’t get it, and you do need to get it. Otherwise, I condemn you to conservative hell.

I’m a small investor, myself, and the whole set of laws you’re supposed to honor is there to make it fair for my investments to have an equal chance in the market place with yours. Insider info makes investing unequal. Since I can’t fly around the country and be in personal touch with the presidents of companies I invest with, then you should not be allowed to profit from contacts with them either. If you don’t get it, then damn it to hell. Maybe you need to be a Republican. They don’t believe in fairness and economic justice for all. To them, it’s the Darwinian survival of the richest.


GANGS AND CONTROLLED SUB
STANCES

I must not read the right news sources. It should be headline news. It’s bleeding obvious that the mobs arose very much as a result of alcohol prohibition. Now, as our local paper in Spokane talks of increased gang violence (July 2004), we need to see that all those illegal drugs, those “prohibited” drugs, are the cause of this new arrival of gangs into our culture.

What would gangs do if all drugs were legal, controlled and dispensed along with advice for breaking the habit? Think of all the cops who’d be freed to pursue violent criminals, how much our prison population would shrink, the taxes we could raise, and all the money we’d save for other important social needs. Who’s against this legalization and why? We know the gangs are against it. They’d have to get honest jobs. So, who else is on the side of these gang bangers? And why?


THE HOMELESS 9/11

It’s good to know the recently released report says that we’re safer now than before 9/11 but that we still need to be safer.

Someone ought to ask the homeless how safe they feel in this culture. The average poor person, living in substandard housing in substandard neighborhoods or the homeless person, sleeping on a winter heating grate, most likely stands a greater chance of being mugged and murdered in the street by a criminal than he does of being harmed in the next terrorist bombing. Yet we spend lots of tax dollars to make New York and Washington safe while leaving the poor out in the cold, suffering 9/11 after 9/11. Again!


IDEOLOGUES AND THE CONSTITUTION

These religious ideologues just won’t give up in their efforts to destroy our American Constitution. The House of Reprehensibles, full of flaming neo-conservatives, has just passed an unconstitutional law to strip the courts of jurisdiction over marriage laws. They actually would turn the Constitution upside down and open it to further depredations just to do harm to homosexual American citizens.

The knowledge we must all hold close is that the Bible has no standing in the Courts of Law. The courts must be religion blind in all its dealings with American citizens. The neocons would do anything to destroy that impartiality which stands between them and putting the Bible above the Constitution in American law. (Spokesman Review, July 23, 2004, p. A1)

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"The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around." —Herb Caen

CHICKS IN GUN SIGHTS

Every once in awhile this old catfish comes across word of the Dixie Chicks and their continuing troubles caused by one’s belief in practicing “freedom of speech”. Their punishment is endless even though every advancing day proves anyone's anti-Bush sentiment to be justified. Everyone realizes that country music fans (mostly uneducated white males) are also Bush’s chief fan base (not counting the wealthy) and, with those types, freedom of speech is much talked about but not much practiced in the act itself unless, of course, it’s their own right to uniformed spewing. O—of course—and they charge hard for their right to own guns, but, being uneducated, they don’t like to protect the rights of speech of people who, unlike them, can walk, chew gum and reason all at the same time. In fact, they probably want their guns to shoot down those who practice free speech which doesn't agree with their ideas. Their vindictiveness is boundless. And Dennis Miller doesn’t think these guys are fascists!


IN THE SCHEME OF THINGS

Our president of the bushmen, when you take in the whole scheme of things, because of his religious fanaticism, probably has more in common with Islamic fundamentalists than he does with the modern peoples of America, Canada, South America, Russia, China, Japan, and eastern and western Europe. In his foreign policy, he’s also psychologically closer to the WWII Japanese and German Imperialists than with most Americans other than our own precious fundamentalists.


O! OF COURSE!

Get this header for short piece in the Spokesman Review on July 21, 2004: “US tells Sudan to end violence”.

“Yeah, right,” I can hear the Sudanese government saying.

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"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." —Mark Twain

A BIT OF NEWS WORTH REMEMBERING FOR US HOI POLLOI

I always get a kick out of it when the conservative establishment who either are the rich or the boot lickers of the rich calls us working stiff atheists the “elite” because...

In a “Spokesman Review” story on July 22, 2004, James Horrigan of the “St. Louis Post Dispatch” calls attention to where the neo-conservatives got their college educations and what Fascist-like, elitist premises may lie beneath some of their machinations. Horrigan points out that some of them, like William Kristol, neocon mouthpiece and columnist for the Daily Standard, were students of a Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago who taught his young students “that they were philosopher/kings who had to take action that the hoi polloi wouldn’t understand.” That's right! Strauss taught conservative American students that they were philosopher kings whose duty it was to take action without consulting the Constitution or the American populace.

If that isn’t a call for self-righteous prigs like Kristol to bend the Constitution and to do what they think is right, (for one, to start wars in far off lands), no matter what their “lesser” or fellow citizens believe, I don’t know what is.

By the way, fellow working stiffs, if you don’t know what the “hoi polloi” are, then you is one, and it’s your Constitutional rights that these “greater” peoples mean to tamper with.


SPEAKING OF US MACAQUES

In Jerusalem, Natasha, after a near death experience arose from her bed and walked and walked and walked....

“That’s nothing,” you say until you find out it’s a macaque monkey we’re speaking of. Not that macaques don’t walk upright some of the time but not all the time, and Natasha is just that, a macaque monkey, and now she only walks upright just like a little girl.

The supposedly humorous headline over the Jerusalem paper’s photo read, “Missing Link.” Trouble is that, of course, it don’t prove anything about missing links, but it does show that if the synapses in the brain of a primate are a little bit altered, then a primate becomes a permanently altered upright walker, just like humankind permanently walks upright. That’s the thing to keep our eyes on in the story as we walk around upright and reading. Standing upright leads to a whole bunch of things, even reading itself. Now that’s a point worth remembering!

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"Everybody should believe in something; I believe I'll have another drink." —unknown alcoholic

CAL THOMAS DESCRIBES EVOLUTION PERFECTLY

In a recent column (Spokesman Review, July 25, 2004, p. B6), Cal quotes the apostle Paul as to what to expect in the “end times”:

"There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of [their hypothetical] god – having a form of godliness but denying its power."

Thanks, Cal, for describing humankind as it has existed throughout time. Judging by Cal and Paul’s standards, the “end times” must be and always have been every day in every era of written history. I’ve come across similar kinds of denigration of humanity in every era of human history, in everyone’s national morality literature. Knowing this written record, I see exactly very little progress or regression from one age to another. So—when’s that piddling second coming coming again? Judging by the record, it should have arrived millenia ago.

Maybe Paul’s description of humankind has nothing to do with the mythological end times and comes from those who are never satisfied with their lot in life and who are always judging their fellow humans with the wrong measurement standard and, who, therefore, always see the bad rather than the good. For example, almost universally these days, people are against human slavery. An improvement over Bible morality, isn’t it? Or does Cal still believe in slavery? I could name many improvements in human morality in the now times, but don’t have space. Hey, should we go back to stoning?

Actually, Paul and Cal’s moral description of humanity is unsuitable for the human situation because the human animal was not born a moral creature. It has evolved to this point—an animal with consciousness. Evolution perfectly explains the human condition. What we see before us in every headline is evolution at work.

The human animal is one branching of the evolutionary tree. Humanity acts just as you’d expect animals to act which are concerned chiefly with winning out over their fellow animals, protecting their territories, and accumulating the goods which will guarantee their procreative success. Any honest intelligence must see clearly that evolution is the only suitable explanation for the current human condition. Evolutionary time must be our moral standard. The Bible idea is way out of date.

But we must give religions their place in our current view of history. Religions are the conscious animal’s first attempt at becoming human. Once the animal could think about his condition and his instinctual systems were no longer satisfactory, he tried, through language to codify his relationships. That’s where ideas of morality and justice come in. They’re a substitute for instinctual behavior which humanity is now afraid of. We’re in a transitional situation.

On the other hand, the trouble with religions are that they fall right into evolutionary patterns of survival, and they become just more fodder for fighting. Underneath religious people’s attempts to dominate the culture is the effort of weaker, more mental animals to try and give them a chance to accumulate women and have procreative success. That’s why they have all their rules about wives’ place in the family. It’s an attempt by religious males to accumulate and subjugate women for procreative reasons. I’ve sat with enough religious males to see that they are just as concerned with procreation as everyone else. I’ve watched them preen and posture and drag out their religious credentials with the sole purpose of impressing the believing females in their surroundings with their suitability for mating. Christian dating services are all about giving religious males a chance with the more susceptible religious females.

So, let’s begin to look at the human animal through sensible and unsentimental eyes and see us for what we really are—animals trying to become human. Only then can we quit fighting about morality and start making human decisions which will benefit the largest number of us as can be benefited. If we're lucky, maybe the Bible or Koran will no longer be heard of one million years from now. In evolutionary time, we’ll change, but not one of us can ever witness it. Evolution takes too long unless our genetic knowledge allows us to perfect ourselves—which is possible. The future of mankind is unknown and exciting. But....

WHY CHRISTIANITY REALLY DECIDED AGAINST HOMOSEXUALITY

Last night (July 16, 2004) on Bill Moyer’s “Now”, Cal Thomas (Old Testament Bible literalist) and Moyer (Christian) debated the “gay marriage” issue. What they had to say about that issue was not as important to me as when they began to frame the question of where final authority lies when it comes to human behavior. To Bill (a true American and Constitutionalist), it’s up to humans, guided by reason and experience and their personal morality, to make the laws which establish ethical limits. To Cal (who puts the Bible above the Constitution), a hypothetical superbeing is where final authority lies. He implied that without a god to make a final limit to human behavior, humanity will go mad and anything will be allowed in human behavior.

Cal’s argument is so historically false, I’m surprised any intelligent human could still believe in it, whereas Moyer’s observation most clearly describes what history shows us to have happened. The earliest humans everywhere, in every culture, in all times, have established codes of behavior (or taboos) for themselves whether their gods were river spirits, multiple gods or one, or no god at all. Moral codes arise out of the daily disputes which occur between humans and the ways in which they mutually decide to settle them and from the human interaction with the natural forces in their environments. Humans don’t need gods to set limits for humans. They do very well at setting their own limits and always have. In fact, it’s humans who have set the laws for god rather than the other way around. How else do we explain the almost universal abhorrence with incest if not by understanding that the abhorence arose naturally in human cultures without any one particular hypothetical god’s help?

The idea of god, far from being a creature above us handing down laws, arose out of daily, human experience during times full of superstition. To earliest tribal peoples so much was beyond their ken they had to believe in powers greater than themselves which ruled nature and their lives. They had no other explanation for what happened to them. Imagine what you would make of lightening if you had never seen or heard such a thing before? You’d naturally think it was a bolt thrown at you from out of heaven. Thus came into existence Zeus, tosser of lightening bolts and looser of thunder. By similar processes came into existence supernatural beings like Yahweh, Buddha, all the many Hindu gods, Thor, and Isis and Osiris, followed by the consequent moral codes (i.e. superstitions) by which humans could control and please their imagined gods and regulate social intercourse in a way pleasing to the gods.

It’s very clear in Bible codes that the way people treated one another was considered pleasing or unpleasant and as important to Yahweh as the way they treated Yahweh himself. People misbehaving toward one another were told that god disapproved and would punish sinful behavior. In that way social, legal codes also took on the power of moral or god-given codes. These last observations round us back to gay marriages. They show why being gay has nothing to do with god but only with how different cultures have treated homosexuality. In early Greek cultures, homosexuality was considered a part of life and adult male love for young boys was pretty common so you don’t have any Greek gods bothering to make homosexuality evil. In fact, homosexual behavior and bestiality are part of godly behavior on Mount Olympus.

So, then, how did homosexual behavior become taboo in Christian culture? It could be as simple as imagining that some young Christian who would later gain power in the earliest Christian culture suffered at the hands of a pagan pederast and, then, spilled his anger and hurt into the earliest Christian culture. But the common belief, I think, is that Christian culture had to displace what they considered pagan culture, and pagan cultures and religions were full of dangerous sexual practices that could subvert Christian piety. Thus many sexual practices were condemned, not because of inherent moral principles, but in the name of spreading Christian practice among the infidels.

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"Man is a god in ruins." —Ralph Waldo Emerson (Yeah, boy, if you only knew how right you were—almost.)

MAHABHARATA AND CHRISTIANITY:
2000 YEAR OLD PARALLEL MYTHOLOGIES

Last night my wife and I watched a video we got from the public library, called “Mahabharata”. It’s a three hour production based on Peter Brook’s stage drama by the same name. We were entranced by the production.

The play and movie are based on a 2000 year old Sanskrit poem, “The Great Story of Mankind.” The poem is a Hindu mythological tale about the origins of mankind and its ethical complications just like Genesis is the Biblical mythology of the origins of man and his moral problems. What leaps out to the impartial observer is the similarities between Bible mythology and the Hindu mythology of the poem. One can’t help but see that Bible mythology and Hindu mythology come from a similar preexisting source or tale.

The following list contains the most obvious similarities:

1. a world ending flood
2. a god who gives the miracle of sight to a blind man
3. an infant prince who is set adrift on a river edged with bulrushes to be found and raised by a stranger
4. a son from a virgin birth
5. and, of course, a virgin mother
6. a spirit who tempts a prince with the world
7. a world split between two brothers
8. a prince who fights and kills a giant
9. a promise that death shall be overcome
10. 12 is a magic number like the 12 tribes of Israel


POST-FREUDIANS RULE!!!!!!!!!!!!

From “Freedom Evolves” by Daniel Dennett (p.55):

“I suspect we find it natural to keep track of the complexities of atoms and the stranger denizens of the world of subatomic physics by treating them rather like tiny agents because our brains are designed to treat everything we encounter as an agent if possible—just in case it really is one. In the early days of human culture... we found it useful to overuse ‘animism’, treating all of nature as made of gods and fairies, malevolent and benevolent sprites, imps and goblins in charge of all the natural processes we observed. It was ‘intentional’ systems all the way down, you might say. [But] now we are quite comfortable thinking of atoms as just little ‘mindless’ bouncing grains. They don’t quite act but they still do things—repelling and attracting, wobbling in one place or dashing off.”

There’s no disputing the fact that early peoples did imagine that almost everything that moved outside of their craniums was motivated, moved, by spirits. Everything we learn from paleontology, history and anthropology builds up a picture of superstitious people who lived in a world haunted by spirits. You can also see, I hope, that most modern religious people (PS. I include astrologers among them.) still think of the world as those primitive pre-Freudians did, as a reality full of gods and demons, witches and devils. They still project their inner reality on the world, just as the primitives did, without reference to the objective world that science tries to supply to our reason. This is at the root of my claim that religious people are dangerously out of touch with the modern world and with reality too.

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"It is the final proof of god's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." —Peter De Vries

THINGS SLIP IN WITHOUT ANYBODY NOTICING

In a recent Newsweek article (July 19, 2004) entitled, “The Dots Never Existed”, we learn once more that pressure from above created the impetus for the intelligence community to falsify the report which the White House eventually saw. In the article, we learn of an intelligence source who was called “Curve Ball" because so much of what he reported was considered suspect. Seems a Pentagon intelligence analyst wrote an urgent e-mail to a top CIA official which warned about the unreliability of Curve Ball. The CIA man wrote back, “Let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn’t say. The powers that be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he’s talking about.”

Is it clear, now, how pressure from the Bush Grayhouse forced a distortion of the truth so that Bush could have his war? Let us also never forget that America and the world did have intelligence sources on the ground and openly in Iraq to report on WMDs. They were called U.N. weapons inspectors, but Bush didn’t want to hear what they were telling him—i.e. that no WMDs were to be found. So was it Bush’s pressure from above that forced a false report to come back up to him from intelligence officials? You can’t tell me that a lower level intelligence official is going to lie to the boss on his own initiative.


POOR LITTLE NEW RICH GUY

I’m constantly amazed at how easily we believe rich people who tell us that they deserve to be rich because they’re smarter than the average Joe. That belief clearly comes through when a conservative tells me that if you give every American a million dollars, in the end, all the money will end up back in the hands of the rich.

It seems to me that we have an adequate mechanism to check out this conservative belief. If only I were a strong man in research, I’d find out. We now have thousands of lottery winners. All we got to do is do some research on them and find out how many average Joe’s have lost all their lottery winnings back to the rich, how many are still about even, and how many have increased their windfalls. Hey, somebody, get busy on that research! Please?


DIVORCE IS AS CHRISTIAN AS APPLE PIE

Again, it comes up—this time from an interesting source. In discussion with Bill Moyers about gay marriage (Public TV’s “Now”) Cal Thomas, the fundamentalist columnist, let slip that Christians are divorcing at a higher clip than are non- or, at least, un-churched Christians. I’ve heard it before from other sources. I’m beginning to believe it myself.

Some people would like to claim it’s a failure in Christian or American morality. I’d like to say it’s a healthy dose of reality for evangelicals which signals the emergence of a higher and more modern morality than that old fashioned Bible yoke of marriage. Christian divorce is the result of living in a nation in which “all men” (and women) are created equal and in which both sexes enjoy equal rights to freedom. Like so many Bible truths which enforce the unjustified power of one group over another, the unfair power of men over women in the Christian marriage yoke is falling by the wayside. What woman, raised in a free America, would voluntarily put herself under the boot heel of an insecure, childlike male animal who needs the Bible to prop him up in place? That Christian women are seeing through this farce is to be cheered rather than cursed. Increased Christian divorce is a healthy sign that American freedom is alive and well rather than a sign that the Bible is not being honored.

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"How can I believe in god when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?" —Woody Allen

god’S EVERYTHING THAT IS, THEREFORE NOTHING

I’ve always been a seeker after truth, but I fear admitting to it because the super-religious always think my “seeking” means I’m open for their kind of a conversion experience. I’m far beyond a born again emotional manipulation. I’ve had more than one of those in my sixty-six years, and I’m familiar enough with them to know that they are psychological displacements (new synaptical patterns being formed) rather than spiritual or transcendental happenings. They don’t prove a god exists; they just show me that I can experience strong emotional feelings that transform my beliefs which are habituated in the synaptical patterns of my brain.

However, let me add that if a mythological Jesus should turn out to be real and come down out of heaven and show me the wound in his side and give me a snapshot of the pearly gates, I might be open to a conversion experience, but it would be a non-emotional, scientific, rational acceptance rather then a born again one. If definitive scientific evidence for a spiritual world should show itself in the form of something I could touch, taste and smell, I’d be right there to believe. I’m open to a conversion experience of that nature. The other kind? Sorry, “I’ve been there, done that.”

Another thought provoking thing is that the religious always want to say that science is also just a belief, like any belief. Okay, let’s accept their premise. All that I ask is that they use the same idea to undermine their faith. If science is just a belief and not to be given credence above faith, then, also, spiritual life is only a belief and has no more credence than science. But most faith people will not bring their faith into question with the concept of relativity. They just use relativity to undermine scientific findings which undermine religious beliefs. If evangelicals will say that their faith is as doubtful as they think the findings of science are, then I’ll give them a new respect. Until then—get outta here with that!

When I was at another place in my seeking, a woman friend once told me to think about god in a new way. “Why don’t you just believe that god is whatever is,” she suggested.

I found that quite interesting. I could believe in the whole universe as a stand-in concept for the hypothesis of god. In other words, when I was thinking about the universe and everything in it, I was thinking about god. God could be every thought, emotion, discovery, process and piece of scientific knowledge, every thing (animal, vegetable and mineral) within conceptualized human experience. That, of course, easily tied into the Deist idea that god created the universe and, then, withdrew from the creation. The Deist’s only way to find god (think: our most intelligent founders) was through studying the creation with science. Again, that fit, so for awhile, I was a Deist and, sometimes, a pantheist.

Eventually, however, my study of science led me back to atheism, specially the study of consciousness which gives me the truth of how we apprehend reality which shows me that almost everything in the universe is made up. To the brain there’s no difference between an imagined event or thing and a real thing if, indeed, we can speak of any “real thing” outside our perceptions of "it". We, actually, have no idea what lies outside the inputs of our sensory equipment and our own thoughts (i.e. our synaptical patterns) about what's out there. We are truly prisoners within our own senses. Our sensory data is all that we know of the outside world and each sensory machine that is each of us is similar but different.

Reminds me of a character in a novel I wrote when I was in my thirties who thought of himself as a prisoner in a pigeon pooped statue in a park inside of which he lived. He could crawl up and look out his eye holes from time to time. Other than that, he was trapped and helpless. Some of those ideas were pretty true.

Eventually, when we are honest about what we do know about human consciousness, we must admit that our ideas about the “outside” world are mostly concepts, i.e. synaptical patterns, which exist only in our brains. What is out there is almost completely made up of and arrived at by temporary agreements between populations which are constantly being born and dying. This is why reality changes, why an Egyptian in the time of the pharaohs lived in a totally different reality than we Americans of the 21st Century. Different synaptical patterns arise from new realities all the time.

The concrete world is less subject to misinterpretation than is the abstract, immaterial world and imagination. If you and I are talking about “that” specific cliff out there, we’ll both be talking about an almost similar (we can't both occupy exactly the same space) pattern of shadow and light coming into our eyeballs. We might disagree about the shade of color we’re jointly describing, or we might disagree about the deepness of the shade, but we know that we’re each experiencing the same incoming sensations we call “cliff face”. We may be having different feelings about the cliff on any given day, but we’ll agree that there is a cliff out there in the fading light of day. Generally, we’re talking about the same phenomena. You might be bummed out, and I might be ecstatic, but we are both receiving the same information about a cliff being out there which we can talk about.

However, when it comes to the immaterial, abstract world of imagination, then we start to really disagree, which is why we know that god is not the same as the real, concrete world of sensation, because there is so much disagreement about this hypothetical god stuff. We can’t stand side by side and discuss god as a specific phenomena of light and shadow out there in the world beyond our craniums. The hypothesis of god remains outside of the concrete (or somewhat concrete) world which we experience sensually (i.e. with our senses).

God’s a bit of our imagination, we might say, about as real as any character in a fiction piece. This hypothesis of a super being out there somewhere has to take it’s place alongside of the ideas of unicorn and Santa Claus. Whether or not a super being called god exists, it has no more substantiality than either of those. It does have an emotional reality because of all the feeling we tie into it from within ourselves, but so does Santa Claus until we suffer that terrible traumatic moment when we’re told that particular hypothetical being doesn’t exist. Of course, someday, we may discover that there is a Santa Claus after all. Still, we must await more concrete evidence before we can say that.

Therefore, I put the thought of god in a category outside the world of the sensual which any two people can agree exists outside ourselves in the world which both our senses experience. When we both walk to a stone and heft it and agree it’s heavy and there to be experienced, we are in the world of science. The hypothesis of god does not exist in the world of science at all. We can’t both go out and pick up god and agree we’re having the same experience. There’s no weight in the hand we can agree on is god. It has no texture. So I divide the world we share into at least two kinds of existence—the world experienced through the senses and the world of imagination, the made up world which is unavailable to the senses.

A stone is of the first existence, and the god concept of the second. Language is a third reality because words written and spoken are real, in that they come in through the senses of sight and sound, but they are unreal in that they stand in for other things in my brain and are not the thing itself. When I use the word, “cliff”, the word is not the same as the cliff itself, out there, but it can indicate to the guy or gal standing beside me that I want to draw her attention to that “thing” in front of us we jointly call, “cliff”. We can both use the word “unicorn” too, but no unicorn exists in the universe that we know of. We can use the word “justice” also, but no such thing as “justice” actually walks and talks in the universe although we can describe an act or decision or person as being just or unjust.

The idea of god is much more like the idea of justice than it is the idea of a rock which is why I can say that god does not “exist” in the real world. The existence of god is only an idea like the unicorn or justice is an idea. Maybe someday we’ll discover god and heaven in a concrete way, with the same finality that we can both stub our toes on the same rock. Until then, god remains a hypothetical idea which only exists as far as we know in the realm of word reality, of language.

Finally, I still like the idea that god is whatever is that we can agree to stub our toes on. Anything we can’t stub a toe on is only an idea like the idea of a unicorn. God is not what we imagine god is in our thoughts (synapses); they’re cut off from the concrete world and only exist in our imaginations. Looking at the concrete universe through science, we can say that if a god did create it, then, like the Deists, this handiwork of god is the only thing we can know about god.

As we learn more and more with science about the concrete world, we are uncovering what it is that god is not. Any guesses about anything beyond the physical world is only a guess about some power in the Universe bigger than ourselves. We may never know what this hypothetical god’s intentions are, but we may know a god’s real world (if that’s what you want to call it—god’s world), and that real world may be all we’re supposed to know. So we need to keep learning about the physical world, to see if it can tell us anything about a creator, if there is a creator.

An interesting complication to this scientific search for god is that, eventually, we may know all there is to know and then god will disappear because at that point we’ll hold the entire world within our thoughts inside our craniums; we’ll be gods ourselves, equal to the hypothetical god in every way. For now, it’s enough to say that what we do know is not god, and the less you know, the more you believe in god.

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"I'm as pure as the driven slush." —Tallulah Bankhead

TOUCHING THE VOID

I just saw "Touching The Void" on the shelves of our local Safeway Store. Let me tell you to run as fast as you can and rent that film. My daughter and I saw it while I was visiting her in Tacoma not too many months ago. "Touching The Void" is a spine tingling re-creation of an actual mountain climbing experience. I know! Mountain climbing! What fun is that unless you like to do it yourself? I wasn't expecting too much when we went in, but I was greatly mistaken in my initial judgment. Not only was I spell bound by the action adventure, but so was the entire audience. It was a small art house where we saw the flick, and during the film, I looked around, and I have never seen such an intent, intense response to any film in my life. I swear we were all holding our breaths.

Anyhow, "Touching The Void" re-creates the true experience of two mountain climbers in South America who nearly lose their lives in a series of accidents and mistaken judgments. One of them leaves the other behind with a broken leg. How that man gets down the mountain by himself is all the adventure you'll ever need in a movie. Take my word for it, it's a breath taking adventure. And the filming is a magical re-creation of the adventure.


HOMELESSNESS—A CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY

The issue of homelessness dovetails nicely with reports of Bush’s cutting funding for Housing and Urban Development next year which will put even more people on the streets permanently. The Inlander (an excellent Spokane, Washington weekly) reports 8500 people are homeless in Spokane. Spokane Housing Authority numbers 4000 people on their waiting list for help to affordable housing. These figures arise in a long time conservative city and are only the tip of the iceberg which awaits a conservative America in the coming century if we don’t get our priorities straight and end the Republican plan to destroy every vestige of Roosevelt’s liberal America. Conservatives hate everything about Roosevelt’s vision of a nation in which no one is hungry or ill, wears ragged clothing or is homeless.

The problem of low wages and consequent poverty and homelessness in 21st Century America will be even worse than it was in late 19th Century America which is the target era Republicans aim to return us to by creating horrific wartime budget deficits which can only be met by cutting social programs. In 19th Century America, 90% of citizens lived on farms. Even when they couldn’t meet mortgage payments, they could at least garden, can, hunt and fish and keep starvation from the door. They didn’t have to dress up to go out to jobs either, and their heating needs were met by the wood lot on their own properties. Nowadays, only 3% of Americans farm. Most of us are entirely dependent on wages to keep the wolf from the door and cold from the hearth. Without good wages and social programs, America will flounder into terrible poverty.

Finally, we are not only turning our backs on Roosevelt’s vision for a fair America, we’re failing Jefferson too. Jefferson’s chief hope was that universal education and literacy would yield an electorate which could meet any difficulty. Bush’s conservative supporters are fundamentalist Christians (many home schooled and ignorant of modern science) and poorly educated white (specially Southern) males who are not readers or happy in a modern, progressive America. Sadly, they’re discontent and reactionary, dangerous to themselves and to America’s future. Without knowing what they ask for, they support Bush’s return to an old fashioned America where economic inequality was rampant and social injustice commonplace. Illiterate, they’re easily duped by the unscrupulous rich and their talk radio and Fox lackeys.

A recent National Endowment for the Humanities’ report in Newsweek projects from recent trends that in 50 years no one will read for pleasure. Only reading stimulates the synapses for extended and expanded capacities to reason through complex problems. Picking up a few facts on TV and being emotionally influenced by talking heads will not lead to citizens who are able to meet their obligations as “informed” voters who understand complex issues.

One sign of conservative times in history is a large, illiterate populace unable to see through the false claims of their “betters” who use their own superstitious fears against them to keep them down. (Today, think of the gay issue with which the rich conservatives in Congress distract fearful, ignorant white males and evangelicals from the really important issues in America.) Unless, we rededicate ourselves to being a literate, scientific, fair and just, fearless modern society, I don’t see anything but a gloomy, Taliban-like, Christianized intellectual and economic impoverishment for all of us.

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"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." —Voltaire (1694-1778)

INSPIRATION, TOP TO BOTTOM

Read below....


CAMILLE PAGLIA HITS A HOME RUN

I am inspired to reread some of Shakespeare’s plays (who I haven’t read since undergraduate days in the early 60’s) by the following passages in Paglia’s "Sexual Personae". You can’t expect anything better from another’s writing than inspiration:

“Every time I open Hamlet, I am stunned by its hostile virtuosity, its elusiveness and impenetrability. Shakespeare uses language to darken. He mesmerizes by disorienting us.... Shakespeare’s language hovers at the very threshold of dreaming. It is shaped by the irrational. Shakespearean characters are controlled by rather than controlling their speech.... Consciousness in Shakespeare is soaked in primal compulsion.” (p. 196)


ANOTHER INSPIRATION FROM SCIENCE

For a couple of years now, I’ve been reading in the sciences and have been very interested in the evolution of consciousness and what that process tells us about the human animal’s plight on earth. The book which originally fired me up was Daniel Dennett’s, “Consciousness Explained”. From there, my reading has expanded and inspired me even more than my early interests in literature which led me to get an MFA in Creative Writing.

I’m now beginning his “Freedom Evolves” and am immediately inspired by the opening passage which goes to the heart of my thinking, which has been delineated in other posts, that the human animal is less free than it thinks it is:

“One widespread tradition has it that we human beings are responsible agents, captains of our fate, because what we really are are souls, immaterial and immortal clumps of Godstuff that inhabit and control our material bodies rather like spectral puppeteers. It is our souls that are the source of all meaning, and the locus of all our suffering, our joy, our glory and shame. But this idea of immaterial souls, capable of defying the laws of physics, has outlived its credibility thanks to the advance of the natural sciences. Many people think the implications of this are dreadful: We don’t really have ‘free will’ and nothing really matters. The aim of this book is to show why they are wrong.”
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"I only like two kinds of men; domestic and foreign." —Mae West

IS THIS A WASTE OF TIME?

For those who can read, let’s go over the facts again:

“Neo-conservatives and other hawks within the Bush administration expected that the United States would win respect in the Arab world through a massive show of force, and that Israel would be more comfortable making peace with the Palestinians once Saddam was gone. Instead, the region now seems to be growing more violent and America’s image in the Arab world has been badly tarnished. ‘Not only have we validated and emboldened our enemies, but we have shamed our friends’, says an embittered U.S. State Department official. ‘Arab moderates who trusted our ideals feel betrayed and abandoned.’” (Newsweek, May 31, 2004, pp. 34-5)

Since I was knee high to a grasshopper, I’ve heard that power earns respect. Most of us who live in the 21st Century C.E. and not the 1st Century C.E. where Bush lives, have moved beyond that. All Bush and company prove is that they (not others) “respect power” above reason and diplomacy. Evidently, Bush and his kind are the only ones still stupid enough to believe that might earns anything but contempt from reasonable people. I wish that Bush’s illiterate voter base could read well enough to read this.


WHERE FUNDAMENTALIST IDEOLOGUES
ALWAYS TAKE CIVILIZATION—ALTERNATIVE REALITY

“‘I’m just watching as this administration spins off into some alternative reality where Sharon is a man of peace, where rising insurgency [in Iraq] is a sign we are winning, where we bring back Saddam’s generals to quell the anger of the people we liberated from Saddam,’ says one veteran diplomat. ‘The true casualty of this war of choice is American credibility—not just the credibility of our intelligence... but the credibility of our values, our principles.’” (Newsweek, May 31, 2004, p. 36)

Please note the words, “alternative reality” which in my view means the total disengagement from reality the Bush people, his core supporters and, yes, even America’s terrorist enemies suffer from. Their absence from reality begins with their insane belief in a hypothetical superbeing which no one can touch, taste, hear or smell and spreads from that non-sense into everything they do and say. From the hypothesis of god to violence is always a short step in the minds of these ideologues.



"Which is it, is man one of god's blunders or is god one of man's?" —Nietzsche

MAJOR CHRISTIAN HERESY

Why do the Christians so emphasize Jesus? Isn’t it a heresy to honor the son above the father who supposedly created it all and whose plan it is that’s being worked out on this globe? Why so much emphasis on the son who only did what his father ordered him to do? Is it that modern Christians are so full of self loathing that they honor people who also are so full of self loathing that they let the state commit a form of suicide on them? The myth of Jesus is like the story of the boy with the gun in the school who wanted the police to kill him.


A SILLY ARTICLE WITH A SILLY PREMISE

In a July 12, 2004 Newsweek article, “The Secret Lives of Wives”, married women are supposedly demonstrating a new willingness to cheat on their husbands. Husbands shouldn’t worry too much. When I looked carefully at the statistics, I didn’t see too much to support the claim. A lot of the evidence was innuendo and personal observation—not very strong evidence. But my point has nothing to do with the subject of the article. I’m more interested in an observation by the authors which, according to recent scientific studies may not be true.

The writers write, “Women have suddenly begun to give themselves permission to step over the boundary the way that men have.” (p.48)

I think we need to look at the idea of “permission” expressed in this sentence. It’s almost as if the authors say that women give themselves permission to cheat, and, then, go look for a man to cheat with. Does anyone really believe that sort of scenario? Like all sorts of behaviors in this life (alcoholism, drug addiction, infanticide) the concept of choice is so far from the truth of the human animal as to be nonsensical. Darn it—just think about it realistically!

No happily married women decides on the spur of the moment to cheat, puts on her coat and heads out the door looking for a man. I’m sure a married woman drifts into an affair over a period of months and, more likely, years, driven by emotions, half noticed thoughts, unconscious drives, hurts and fears, most of which she’s not even fully conscious of. Like most of us, she’s probably well into the deal before the consequences start to well up in her, like feelings of guilt and remorse and fear of being caught. Cheating is not the act of a moment’s choice; it’s an ongoing, dynamic process, driven basically by pressing human emotions. By the time the actual “act” transpires, the decision was long since unconsciously decided upon.

And even those who we might say “choose” not to give in to the temptation to cheat are driven by emotions, not by rational choices. Perhaps, they’re just too afraid, constrained by shyness, by fear of husband killing her if caught, by fear of breaking some hammered in moral code and, thus disappointing someone or her parents, the church, or friends, by tenderness for a spouse’s feelings, by fear of punishment by one’s hypothetical god, etcetera, etcetera. At root of all supposed “choices” are haphazard, emotional triggers, often not clearly realized in consciousness.

Reason is what comes in later to make excuses for why we did or did not do what we felt like doing. We pretty well now know that reason is a myth, that the left brain follows after the act or prepares for an act by making up a rationale for what the whole body does or does not want to do, that under any superficial reason is an emotional trigger. Basically, the human animal is irrational and instinct driven and does not “choose” anything, in the strictest sense of the word.

I do believe that atheists, agnostics and Buddhists are making progress in human “choice”, first by accepting the reality of how the “body” thinks and acts, accepting the basic irrationality of human activity and, finally, by bringing the concept of “mindfulness” into their vocabulary. Ironically, those with the least freedom of choice are those religious types who refuse to accept evolution and the underlying concepts about human behavior that flow from it. It’s obvious by their irrational fears and angry intolerance of evolution that they are still pretty much under the influence of their instinctual desire for self preservation which they imagine will come to them in the afterlife.

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"Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult." —Charlotte Whitton (1896-1975)

DIS ABOUT IS FAIR PLAY

I can understand Republican conservatives’ distress with Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11”. Moore Limbaughed them pretty good. He outFoxed them, he did; O’Reilly, he did. Pat Rubbertongue never fact twisted better. I wonder if they've Hannity enough?


BUSHBITS

When Bush says he stands behind all his misstatements, he leaves us in a quandary. Does he mean that all his misstatements are true and not misstatements? Or, when he misspoke, did we hear correctly what he meant with his misstatements? Did we mishear him? Was our mishearing more accurate than his misspeaking? Or he misspoke, and we misquoted his truth behind what we actually heard?

Ah... well... gee... whatever he missaid and we heard or misheard, and confabulation aside—maybe Bush did say, “con passionate conservative”, and we misheard him as saying, “compassionate conservative”. The truth is so dissimilar to what we thought he said that we are dumfounded to explain his duplicity. I guess we need to pay more attention to what he’s doing as his priorities continue to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor. Maybe the truth is in what he does rather than in what he says, after all.


LIBERAL IS NOT THE NEWS

Uneducated white male conservatives (by far the largest number are uneducated) suffer under a misconception. They universally think that the media is liberal because they don’t hear their world view in the media very often. But this is not because the press is liberal; it’s because most (not all, but most) of the facts reported in the news prove that the liberal view of reality is more accurate than a conservative view. A responsible press will report the most reliable facts and data available to it and if those facts happen to support a liberal world reality, they let the chips fall where they may. The facts don’t make the media liberal; the facts are liberal so whatever the media reports, of course, sounds liberal.

For example, these uneducated conservatives hear a report about how spanking is bad on kids, and they don’t want to hear that. They want to hear that what their dad did to them is perfectly okay. Otherwise, they might have to be angry at their dads and that would be scary as hell. They want to keep thinking that their dads hit them because that’s all they know about love from their dads. So rather than look at their real emotions, they displace that anger toward the “liberal” press for threatening the idea of “good” daddy in their heads.


CONSERVATIVES DON'T EVEN WANT THE NEWS

Poor Bush must falsify documents in order to support his conservative base’s conservative ideas. He removed all the information about birth control and the lack of success from abstinence only teaching from Department of Health documents before release. He removed all the data showing bad news for the atmosphere from environmental documents. Bush altered intelligence documents so that he could make a case for his war in Iraq. Bush altered financial documents so that the true cost of the drug benefit wouldn't be known until after the vote. Bush’s blatant altering of documents is why responsible scientists have written two public letters which point out that Bush threatens scientific integrity. Now, if a man must falsify documents and distort reality in order to make a document more conservative, then how accurate is the conservative’s judgment that the media which reports these facts truthfully is liberal? If the truth is liberal so be it. I just want the facts, ma'am.


IS GARAGIOLA A REPUBLICAN?

"O, well, half of one, six dozen of another." —Joe Garagiola

CONSCIOUS VERSUS UNCONSCIOUS HUMANS

I can't repeat these things enough. This difference between liberals and conservatives is so central to whether America will move on into the future or die back to the past or be so stupid as to start the end of the human race.

In the study of animal groups much like ourselves, evolutionary psychologists have uncovered value systems at work in the non-human animal world. One such value system is how the truth is honored and/or revealed in animal and human groups and the evolution of truth detecting systems in the brain. Steven Pinker, in one of his books, discusses the arms race between liars and liar detectors. Mental sophistication is the sign of a brain which is well advanced in detecting lies. There's an arm's race between the brains of liars who lie to achieve their aims and the brains of those who can detect those lies. Some researchers say that human sophistication is based on this arms race in brain power over millennial time.

Sad to say that Bush's largest two groups of supporters, besides the rich (his small but powerful group), are uneducated white males and fundamentalist Christians. Neither of these groups is very sophisticated when it comes to thinking or awareness. They aren't very apt at detecting liars, understanding science or apprehending the truth. For example, most liberals realized that Clinton was or, at least, might be lying, but they also understood that a President and husband might try to protect his honor through lying, but liberals didn't see any harm to the country in what he was lying about. That distinction shows a sophisticated or flexible thinking power. Also liberals easily see that Bush and Cheney are liars too and that they have some religious or economic motivation behind it. I'm not completely sure what they're covering up with their lies.

Now Bush's supporters, my guess is, don't know that Bush is lying or that his motives are fouled up. They don't see through him as liberals with their better lie detectors do. Religious folk trust Bush, maybe they even trusted Clinton and that's why they were so incensed with his betrayal. Anyhow, the difference between Bush's lies and Clinton's lies are that Bush's lies have alienated America from the world, created thousands of additional terrorists, killed nearly a thousand American soldiers, killed thousands of innocent Iraqis, split the country in two, and brought the Constitution into grave danger of being breached.

I must point out the difference between Bush's pre-Freudian peoples and the liberal post-Freudian peoples. Another way of naming them is to call them the unconscious and the conscious peoples. I tend to see bushmen as being still under the control of evolutionary, animal instincts, to still be acting from animal motivations and instincts, in short, to be under the sway of their evolutionary and unconscious motivations. Whereas, liberals have seen counselors, gone to groups, read self-help books, spent time learning about the science of the mind/brain, thinking about consciousness. In short, liberals have spent valuable time becoming more literate and more conscious of what motivates them so that they can live more humanely conscious lives.

Liberals are the modern, more sophisticated men and women while the conservative fellowship still bows down to the silver backed male in their group as god or president or head of the household. Doesn't matter whether it's to the head of household or to the president, conservatives still look outside themselves for leadership and are still under the sway of their instincts, primarily because they don't honor their instincts or their unconscious. The irony is that they think they are free men when actually they are still enslaved by their evolutionary natures. We can only hope that the bushmen will hurry and catch up with their mental armaments against liars.



"Like all self-made men, he worships his creator." —unknown

FIFTY FIFTY IS OUT OF BALANCE

The Bush administration continues it’s compassionate attacks on truth and on the poor. This morning (July 9, 2004), NPR Section 8 Housing Changes.... reported on the cuts to housing subsidies of almost a billion dollars and the men and women in wheelchairs protesting the cuts in D.C. If someone doesn’t come to their compassionate senses, we can expect homelessness to increase in the United States.

Further, the Bush administration has consistently pushed the idea that outside groups in Iraq are causing the most trouble because that view supports their invasion excuse that there were ties between Saddam and al Qaeda. Now we learn that people in and out of Washington with facts to the contrary all along “have encountered political opposition from the Bush administration” which can’t afford for the truth to be told. (Spokesman Review, July 9, p.A4)

Bush again refused to speak at the national convention of the NAACP, but when he was first running for office he didn’t hesitate to speak there. Why the duplicity?

Next (all this is one day’s news) we discover that the Republican’s religious right and the Bush administration are “undermining the integrity of science”. Nominees for the national “science advisory panel” are being rejected because they didn’t vote Republican. They are facing political questions rather than scientific ones. One Nobel laureate in medicine (Torsten Wiesel) was rejected because he signed a letter critical of poor little old Bush’s science policies. Can’t help recalling the Nazi regime which put teachers and scientists out of jobs because they wouldn’t adhere to Hitler’s false beliefs that Jewish blood was different from Aryan blood and that Jewish craniums were different from Aryan heads. These dogmatic bushmen tendencies also remind me of medieval days when popes and cardinals made decisions based on religious dogma rather than on the facts.

These men out of touch with reality who are currently leading us make an intelligent person wary. The bushmen currently in office are the least compassionate most dishonest ones I’ve seen (Nixon aside) in my 40+ years of voting. It has no integrity. Fortunately 50% of us can’t be fooled all the time. Sadly, 50% can be and are.


"Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these." —Ovid (43 B.C.E-C.E. 18)

CONSERVATIVE’S 19th CENTURY VICTORY

Thanks to our local weekly newspaper, The Inlander, for bringing us Jim Hightower’s weekly commentary. This week, July 8, 2004, Jim reports on yet another conservative victory in returning the American economy to the 19th Century:

Evidently, the Timken Company in Canton, Ohio which makes steel products (ball bearings for one) is closing three of its plants and moving them to places which offer lower paying jobs. One plant is moving offshore. Hightower notes that Timken president, Tim Timken, is a Bush supporter who allowed his plant to be used as a photo op for Bush to tout his economic policies which, supposedly, are making America strong. Then, shortly afterward, he announced the plant closings. “Making America strong”? Humn—is this done by destroying good paying factory jobs for the least educated Americans? Since Bush’s chief supporters are the least educated white males in America, you gotta wonder why they’re so self destructive. Vote Republican and see if your job goes south in the near future.


PAGLIA’S PROJECTION OF SELF ALL OVER THE STATUARY IN SEXUAL PERSONAE

When I say that Camille Paglia’s arguments are many times just a projection of her own prejudices, an emotional smear of words, all over the objects of her ruminations, I mean the following:

In speaking of Michelangelo’s figure of Giuliano de’ Medici, Paglia writes, “Gender in the Giuliano is barely held in balance by the male military regalia. The foursquare male chest of resolute western will is disordered by the serpentine disengagement of the curvy neck.”

The “foursquare male chest of resolute western will”—what the hell does that mean? It’s no wonder that in my later life, I’m easing away from my MFA in Creative Writing toward the sciences....



"Humankind cannot bear very much reality." —T.S.Eliot (1888-1965)

MINDFULNESS: HAMLET VICTORIOUS

In other postings, I’ve discussed our world as being divided between post and pre-Freudian peoples, between those who still act and feel like bushmen 20 centuries ago might have and those who live in the modern world with a modern consciousness of the implications of the unconscious. I don’t mean to imply that Freudian psychology is the answer, but I mean to separate people who really do get it (like Jung) that the human animal lives in an ambiguous reality, complicated by the split between conscious life and an unconscious, more animal, life and the bushmen who don’t get it and who still judge behavior as moral or immoral. These last only vent their animal emotions and get us no closer to truly improving human life than sparrows dropping guano from a Hemlock. That’s all I give Freud credit for is the awareness of the unconscious. So much more flows from that first insight, so much that the bushmen know nothing about because they are still locked away from the light and still responding to their animal, evolutionary impulses.

The canyon between bushmen and modern peoples is real and is at the root of all our problems and political divisions. I believe the black and white pre-Freudian peoples are losing ground, but they still have enough control to bring us to the brink of destruction and to lead us in the path of violence. They see their world entirely through fearful moral lenses, and morality has nothing to do with how the human animal acts and reacts to his environment. Not that people don’t do terribly destructive things to one another, but what they do is not EVIL. To call an act evil is to remain blind to its real causes. The causes of self- and other-destructive acts lie in the mostly unconscious behavior patterns of the human animal.

The answer to our troubling human behavior which I hope will prevail over our destructive behaviors is a growing acceptance of the idea of “mindfulness” which is the process of becoming ever more aware of the real impulses that drive human behavior. Jung had it right when he told us that the chief aim of humans ought to be to become ever more conscious. All around us in the world, in Buddhism and in self help meetings, group therapy meetings and in psychologists’ offices, individuals are working toward uncovering the hidden drives for their actions both good and bad. I find little of this hard honest emotional work going on in the churches who still want to blame forces outside themselves for their troubles, rather than confronting the beast within.

In a very old issue of a magazine called “The Sun” (July 2002), Eckhart Tolle makes very clear the process of achieving mindfulness, “If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so if there is an apparent conflict between the two, look at the emotion—or rather feel it in your body. The thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth: not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind.

“You may not yet be able to bring your unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will always be reflected in the body as an emotion, of this you can become aware. To watch an emotion in this way is basically the same as listening to or watching a thought. The only difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion has a strong physical component and so is primarily felt in the body. You can then allow the emotion to be there without being controlled by it. You no longer are the emotion; you are the watcher, the observing presence. If you practice this, all that is unconscious in you will be brought into the light of consciousness.”

LEAPING LIZARDS! IT’S THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE

Liberals and conservatives so pride ourselves on our values and thoughts, yet recent research shows us to be little more than the sum total of our genetic make up and synaptical firing patterns. We can’t help our lucky stars it seems. Pres. Bush can’t help it that he acts without thinking while liberals are more likely, like Hamlets, to think without acting. Sadly, our polarizing genetic make ups decree us to be at each others throats in the larger pack of animals we roam in, even though we have nothing to be proud of, therefore, nothing to fight about.

Of course, conservative "thinkers" do exist, but they’re more likely to be fact amassers, like a George Will, while the liberal thinker’s more likely to understand the human condition by instinct and by blazing insight, like Shakespeare. It’s outside observers versus inside knowers. It’s psychological knowledge versus history buffers, to reverse the order.

Of course, as a liberal myself, I can’t help noting that liberals know and admit more about themselves and their human weaknesses than most conservatives are capable of knowing and admitting. Conservatives are all outward bluster and bluff, fact spouting and surface seeing while the liberal’s all inward reflecting and deep. Conservatives have their Hestons, no real actor, and we our Clifts. They their Arnold Ss, and we our blazing Penns.

By genes and by choice, a liberal could no more be conservative than could a horse nor one of them a liberal than a moose. I say, leave it to the middle to set us straight. See us for the fools we are and for what our foolishness adds to the choice. Stand in the middle, man in middle, and neither look before you leap nor leap before you look.


"I stand by all the misstatements I have made.: —George Bush

Hear this George Bush, Pat Robertson, Jerry Wellfallen, etcetera: "When we talk to god we're praying. When god talks to us, we're schizophrenic." —Moses (just kidding) —Lily Tomlin

SPOKANE QUEASY WITH BIG EASY

In my small town town, we’ve got a lively place called Big Easy where music finds its nightclub mate. It’s a jive place. For one, Ani DeFranco played there last month.

Now the CONSERVATIVE TOWN FATHERS have got their drooping eyelids on the place because people drink at the club, and, of course, people get drunk when they drink, and drunks, naturally, get into fights from time to time and even urinate wild in the street. Now that makes the TOWN FATHERS pee their pants, this pissing in the street, and they just gotta get down on the quick Easy with a slow conservative policeman’s beat.

What those slow stodgies don’t know’s that for a city to be live, upbeat, vibrant and youthful, you gotta break a few yeggs on the way from down to up. Talented, youthful people crave creative juices, excitement and adventure. They know you can’t boom without some busted chops. As long as I’m not down there getting my own chops busted (it’s my choice), I don’t care if someone pisses in the gutter or up against a building as long as Spokane sheds its stodgy image and goes boom, not bust. You gotta make a choice: become a place where youthful, talented people want to be or rot away like an old dingy wallowing in a backwater.

Boom towns have always been places where trouble happens along with the economic leap. I remember pulling into Gillette, Wyoming back in the early 70’s. Dust and bustle everywhere, streets being widened and buildings leaping skyward. I was passing through, but I was thirsty from blowing through all that desert, so I stopped at a package store to get me a six pack and coming out the door as I pulled in was a steel toed miracle of manhood, with eyes blackened and stitches in his cheeks and lips puffy from a certain fight.

“Yahoo,” I thought, “this be the place!” But I had another opportunity bursting wide in Cheney, W and A, or I’da sure as hell stopped to squat where IT was blooming.

I say let Spokane boom, let piss run wild in the streets. Let fist fights erupt and blood run down the cheeks. Let lips get puffy and young dudes puff huffy. Town fathers, wake up and live! Get on or get off the ball, but just get out of the way and let youth have its day.

For safety, one thing I’d do is light that city up like a Mardi Gras float, put lights in every alley, from every building hang them, and if the minions of the law in this police state city don’t like it, I’d tell ‘em to go down to New Orleans and learn how to run a party city, learn how to let people have juice without slowing down the progress. (If you don’t understand the words “police state” ask yourself who in Spokane town decides these things about who parties where and when and how.) And I’m serious about asking New Orleans how it does what it does without shutting down the party.

Ten-four, Spokane town.


EDWARDS HO!

Funny that one of the children left behind, Bush, should trumpet John Edwards’ lack of experience to be in the White House when Bush himself has been four years in that office and’s still as stupid and inexperienced as the day he got there.



"A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers." —Albert Camus (But even this was before the advent of Fox Bush News TV and talk "without thinking" radio. And then there's George Bush. Story is that his library was recently burned up—both volumes. Bush was inconsolable. He hadn't finished coloring the second one.)

CHURCH’S KIDS TARGET OF MOLESTERS

I’ve been at peace, and it was the Fourth of July weekend. Anyhow, here goes....

More than once in this blog, I’ve pointed out that sexual abuse in churches is not limited to the Catholic faith. It’s widespread among religious people, probably more frequent than most men and women of faith want to think about. In Freethought Today’s regular feature which exposes church wrongdoing, protestant and Catholic church officials regularly run dead heats to see which can pile up the most sex crimes.

In a publication (Sexual Abuse in Your Church, 1993 edition) dedicated to making churches safer from sexual predators, I came across the following bits of information: “One insurance company executive has described as ‘an epidemic’ the number of church lawsuits as a result of sexual molestation” and “... churches have become targets of child molesters because they provide immediate and direct access to children in a trusting and often unsupervised environment.” (p.42) To make church people feel a bit safer, we must also note that 70% of all molestation occurs in the home and only 30% occurs “in day care, sporting, educational and religious programs,” (p.87) but notice how wholesome the activities listed above are always considered to be by average Americans.

More surprising to the uneducated is the following: “When... abuses do occur in church, a respected member will most likely be the molester.... While it’s uncomfortable even to consider this, the most likely assailants include Sunday School teachers, religious educators, nursery or preschool workers, teachers in church-operated schools, camp counselors, scout leaders, ‘concerned’ adults who volunteer to transport children to church, and clergy.” To repeat, “Most of the time, the abuser is someone known and trusted by the victim.” (p.17) When it comes to church—if you were child molester where would you look for a fresh supply of victims?

From my own experience, quite frequently the churched abuser will have “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” frequently in his (rarely her) mouth. He’ll be the most trusted and inconceivable member of the church with years of service to the church and to the youth of the church. When my uncle was hauled out of a nursing home, tried, convicted and jailed for a lifetime of abuse which included his adopted children, his grandchildren, plus neighbor children everywhere he had lived, I was truly surprised. He had always seemed pious to a fault, and I couldn’t imagine it of him, and I am very much aware of these abuse issues. More scary—my uncle worked the last 20 years of his working years as the Director of the YMCA in a major southern California city. I can’t imagine how many young people he damaged there.

Finally, mean-spirited and prejudicial as this may seem, I blame religion-taught intolerance of the natural world and rejection of the evolutionary facts about the human animal for the large pool of molesters in our culture. Ignorance creates and fosters the spread of sexual abuse. To morally condemn and tongue cluck without understanding the facts is to allow the abuse to continue unabated and to actually contribute to the problem. What are we going to do, for instance, if it’s discovered that incest has a genetic basis and a social bias toward the behavior that goes back to the beginning of history? Knowledge, unbiased and undistorted by religious fears, is the only way to get a grip on any problem. The very oppressive nature of most strict moral law creates the shame-based personalities who are most likely to perpetrate sex crimes. That’s why so many murderers discover Jesus on death row. They were never far from their repressive religious psychology at any time in their lives. Therefore, of course I think going to church and supporting religious views of reality is the worst thing one can do towards changing society for the better.


"Do television evangelists do more than lay people?" —Stanley Ralph Ross

BACKSLIDING WITH BUSH

Tennessee’s plan to cut Medicaid benefits for the poor (Front page of USA TODAY, July 6, 2004.) to the point of actually causing them harm signifies ever more success for the Republican/conservative plan to return America to 19th Century economic inequality. Since the days of Reagan, the Republicans have been wringing dollars out of the social programs created by Roosevelt which prop up the floor for the poor and moving those dollars back into the pockets of the rich and into their favorite Southern, war industries like Halliburton and Brown and Root.

Hang on people! When it comes to Bush and southern style “compassionate conservatism”, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The goal is to create a two class system, the rich and the poor. I’d say, as we see the best paying, middle class jobs going overseas, we’re well on our way in that direction too. Bush doesn’t care if money goes global. He and those who prop him up have global interests in Iraq and elsewhere. An American working stiff can't win with globalism. Bush and cronies wins no matter how many American working stiffs die without good health care.

Yeah! Bush wins and he doesn't even understand his place in the world or in the solar system:
"It's time for the human race to entered the Solar system." —George Bush and
"We have a firm commitment to NATO. We are part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe." —George Bush
Do you think George Bush was one of the children left behind?


THE DUMB, DUMBER AND DUMBEST SOUTHERNER

Does anyone remember the days when we actually worried about the shrinking middle-class? I do. Remember when Reagan called for sacrifice from all Americans but what he meant was sacrifice by the poor and the middle class? He set the ball rolling and it’s still rolling today. Middle class America is disappearing right on the Republican schedule, and, sadly, it’s the uneducated white male who stands to lose the most who is in support of this Republican scheme. Many of those poor dumb bastards are Southerners, and they still don’t know how to be winners. They never understood unionism. Maybe they just have trouble with the word, Union, against which they fought. The Civil War which created the semi-modern Southern male is still eating all of America alive.


"And that's the world in a nutshell—an appropriate receptacle." —Stan Dunn

TAKE NOTES: A MOVIE THAT GETS IT ALL WRONG

I want to nominate the film, “The Notebook”, for the creative work which most advances the illness of codependency this year. If ever there were an enabler, this film is the one. Not only does the film bore an astute watcher to tears because its characters are unbearably and unwaveringly sickly sweet (i.e. unreal), but it advances an unhealthy and unattainable view of the marriage relationship. I feel so certain in my judgment of the film that I tell friends they should see the film. If they like the film, they are probably codependent or have a codependent’s outlook on life and love. If they hate it, they are probably pretty good relationship material.

First, note the principles who put the film together and acknowledge the overarching influence of a dead man on their creation. Think John Cassavetes, the brilliant but troubled director and actor whose directorial roots trace back to the beatnik films of the 50s. In 1960 he directed the experimental film, “Shadows”. Cassavetes lived and died the life of the alcoholic.

John’s son, Nick Cassavetes directed “The Notebook”. John and Gena Rowlands created Nick. Gena also stars in “The Notebook”. With two members of the same alcoholic’s family in key rolls, you gotta think, “codependent tendencies”. Not only that, James Woods and James Garner costarred in a film whose name escapes me which was an autobiography of the two founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson and Bob Smith, so I gotta think that Garner is in that same bottle somewhere. I couldn’t find their film in the “2002 Videohound’s Golden Movie Retriever”. I think that’s because the film was not a paid endeavor by the two men, and they didn’t want to get any personal gain out of it.

Why is “The Notebook” the story of a codependent relationship? Let me count the ways. The film opens with a couple who are residents of a nursing home. The woman (Gena) suffers from old age dementia. She can’t recall who her children are nor her husband. Her husband, of course, is James Garner, but we aren’t told this right away, though it’s obvious immediately. Every day Garner reads to Gena from a notebook which contains a story about young lovers; he’s obsessed with calling her back to him from her dementia. Eventually, she does remember that their story is the story in the book. Then they both die. Their tear-jerking death is artistic manipulation to the max—which is another characteristic of the addicted personalities who made the film.

The film is death obsessed. Most of the film is flashbacks to the old couple’s youthful love. Not only does the film end in their tear-producing joint death, but on one of their first dates, the young man lies down in the street at two in the morning and dares his date to do likewise, teasing death. In order to force the young woman to go out on a date with him, the young man hangs from a ferris wheel, interrupting her in the middle of her date with another, and threatens to let himself drop to his death if she won’t go out with him. This stunt climaxed weeks of hounding her for a date. Also in the film, almost as an aside, WWII is dragged in, during which the young man’s best friend dies in combat. Then, he’s forgotten. That death is gratis.

Another sign of codependency is the way the young man fixates on the girl the first time he lays eyes on her. He can’t get her out of his mind, and he won’t leave her alone. He harasses her. Definite signs of a budding codependent relationship are love at first sight and compulsive pursuit of the love object.

The most glaring sign of the young man’s alcoholic, codependent nature is a line he gives the girl early on. “Tell me what you want me to be. I’ll be anything you want.” A core sign of a sick relationship is that one or both will give up themselves, their lives and ambitions and their very personalities in order to please the other.

In another compulsive act, the young man, after the war and after losing his girl due to parental interference, rebuilds an antebellum southern mansion that he visited with the girl when they were first dating. They nearly had sex there. Almost as an afterthought, the girl tells him she’d like a porch to go all around that relic of slave days. (Now isn’t that interesting—slave days and codependency and the still sick, southern culture which influences George, dry drunk, Bush!) The young veteran puts her porch around his old mansion even though the girl is out of his life and, in a city far away, planning a wedding to another young and unbearably sweet dude.

Strip away all the story line, its cutesy schmaltz, that John’s son, Nick, covers the empty characters with, and you get the picture of a desperate, lonely, willing to do anything to be loved, young man, an alcoholic looking for an enabler to put his life together for him. The characters are as empty of love as the lives of real codependents are. I can almost imagine Gena having a lot to do with putting the film together, hoping to prove to herself at last that John, the now deceased drunk, really did love her by reinterpreting their life together in this insane and obnoxious film which makes no sense to anyone with the least bit of wits about them. Any sane person will tell you that an obsessed man like the young man in the film, and the old man too, is more likely to desperately stalk you, harass and kill you when you try to leave him than to be in love with you. If this film does too well at the box office, I see one more sign that the sick Fifties are back.


"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country." —George Bush
(Thanks, George. We didn't know that.)

CONSERVATIVE PLAN TO INCREASE POVERTY STYMIED IN CONGRESS

From an AP report in the Spokesman Review, July 1, 2004: “Conservatives say cutting taxes will force lawmakers to make government smaller.”

That’s the plan, folks (as I’ve pointed out four or five times in this blog), from Reagan onward with his smaller military adventures to the current Bush with his huge one. When Republicans mean small government, they mean large military but smaller social programs. After they’ve destroyed Roosevelt’s democracy and increased poverty to the point that it puts downward pressure on wages, then they’ll cut back on military spending.

Thank goodness the Republicans can’t pass a budget plan. It remains their purpose to return America to the days of the late Nineteenth Century when economic inequality was rampant. Their best hope of course is to make Bush’s tax cuts for the rich permanent while they fritter away money on military adventures. That will definitely shrink the money being redistributed for social parity.

In the town of Spokane in eastern Washington their plan is bearing some fruit. In that small town of about 200,000 psyches, 8000 are homeless and 22 percent of the population lives beneath the national poverty level. The Republicans hope to duplicate that success nation wide, if not increase those numbers in the long run.


From this week’s Inlander comes, “If the world’s richest economy can’t give people adequate time for their lives, I have to ask, ‘What’s an economy for?’” —John De Graaf, founder of Take Back Your Time


DEATH WISH SWELLING IN AMERICAN PSYCHE

Evel Kneivel (spelling?) is returning to the American consciousness. We can expect a movie, based on his exploits, out this month on TNT. And no wonder. We have a huge increase in the numbers of mindless men who want to go watch roaring machines run in circles until they crash, so that they can talk for days about, “Hey, man, did you see that wreck?” Evil was said to have a death wish. When we became a more peaceful nation during the hippy daze, of course, death wishes went out of favor for awhile.

Both these phenomena are accelerated by the Christian resurgence. Christian people have a strong death wish or a death hope. They pray for the second coming constantly. Many of them want to get out of this world they consider so evil and bad. Who could live at peace with a psyche out of which all creative imagination had been crushed in youth by fear that the devil lives there, waiting to snatch up the souls of the carelessly and sensually happy? When Christianity swells up like a boil in humanity’s skin so does the death wish well up in its psyche. Like skin pustules indicated the Black Plague.

YOU GET WEALTH BY CREATING POVERTY

You don't think so? Hear a good argument for what's happening in America under Republican domination. I just happened, myself, to tune into a radio presentation by Michael Parenti from 1995 as saved by Alternative Radio. Where to order!


HALLIBURTON MISSION CREEP CREEPS OUT CREEP CHENEY

Time Magazine, June 7, 2004, page 38: Orr who is an adviser to the Iraqi Business Center in a talk with a group of Iraqi businessmen "gave few answers for what a growing number of disaffected Iraqis say is a system designed to shut them out of their own country's economic recovery."

No wonder Dick Cheney is getting mad enough to curse. The noose around his neck tying him to the Halliburton no bid contract draws ever tighter. Do you imagine those dudes watching Fox are even getting wind of this stuff? Do you imagine that Rush Dimbulb tells his audience about this stuff? In this new world of lying conservative newsmen, how do the duped get out of the trap to get to the truth? Pretty serious stuff.

Same Time, different page. Page 41: Representative Henry Waxman, a senior Democratic member of the House Government Reform Committee says, "This [no bid contracts] is a great deal for Halliburton and Bechtel, but it's an absolutely horrendous arrangement for the taxpayer."

Find more at: Time Magazine, June 7, 2004 But it'll cost you. These guys at Time must think we're all made of money and can just cough up five to ten dollars every day to make links to our blogs.


LITTLE BIG MAN

I want to thank the Spokesman for its Tuesday, June 29th, 2004 "Our View" support for the Constitution and the Supreme Court's ruling on combat detainees. Though not all I would like, the Surpreme Court did not back their appointee to the presidency. Thumbs up, Supremes! I believe this war will go on for at least 100 years. The real question was "can prisoners of war be detained for a lifetime?"

But in the same paper you allow a commentary in a news article on the front page. In a purported "news" story by Kevin Taylor about the Idaho National Guard Unit, preparing to go to Iraq, Kevin writes, "These were the men—and they were all men...." Do I hear a commentary about the "manhood" of our troops in this line? Even if Kevin only meant to indicate that all the troops preparing to leave were men (no women) still I want to comment a little about our young troopers.

I speak from a long life of reading, observation and thought about all the matters which confront the human animal on his way from birth to death. And I speak from a deep felt grief for young men, worldwide, who are continually asked to do unspeakable things to their fellow animals and to suffer unbelievable fears for world leaders' transient causes. If we continue this way, does anyone actually believe we'll have a war which truly will end all war? The only way to end war is to not have a war.

Inside each strutting young trooper, I see the manchild, playing soldier in a field or jungle or pushing a truck through a sandbox. I also know that young men are more vulnerable to having their agressions channeled toward those who are not the "us" in an "us versus them" confrontation. It's in their animal, evolutionary nature to act that way. I was that way as a youth when I swallowed everything that black and white war movies told me about Japs and Huns being bad guys.

Speaking of the manipulation of young men—we can't forget that Eisenhower made sure that most of the troopers who landed on the beaches of Normandy had little or no combat experience. The thinking was that the troops without knowledge of beach landings and combat would more easily leap off those landing craft onto the beaches and advance. Now, isn't that cold calculation by the forces which lead?

Anyhow, I grieve for young men like those Idahoans, and I abhore old men like Bush who have lived their lives and learned nothing. Was it the cocaine or the scotch that did your brain in, George?