BIG DAY ON THE ROAD

Pretty soon, we'll be setting off for Cave City, Kentucky where we'll spend the night before going to Mammoth Cave for a four and a half hour cave tour, called the Grand Avenue tour. We'll eat lunch under the earth. Not too far to the west, heavy rain storms with chances of hailstones are pouring down. They may reach Kentucky by this evening. Fortunately, all the severe tornadoes are touching down even farther west. Mertie won't get the thrill of living through a tornado. She was a bit nervous about them.

Had dinner with my cousin Dan and his wife, Eilene. A wonderful couple, and it was good to see another Thomas. I left Dayton, Ohio because I felt smothered by the whole Dayton scene, and, now, I am far from all the Thomas clan. To see and hear Danny pretty damn good. He's one of the few Thomases left here in this area. I do have a cousin, Richard, but I think we've lost him.

HELLO FROM OHIO

Hey, I'm making this entry at the Regency Inn in Frankfort Ohio, a few miles south of Dayton Ohio. Hello John or Geoff or Harlan and Kay. Don't know if you're tuning in today, but it's Ohio hot and muggy after a rain. We're going to John Bryan State Park this morning and walk in hardwood forests. Narry a pine anywhere.

LONGING FOR ZION

I guess Texas's little pony show down there troubles me enough that I wake up thinking about it. "Troubles" may not be the word I'm looking for. "Intrigues" might be the more apt verb, for that little group of people poses many interesting challenges. Is polygamy necessarily bad for the human animal? Are their women and children actually being dummed down so that they can be controlled? And if the women and children are happy and not being harmed, should any of us care what their men do with them, how they train them and to what Biblical standard they indoctrinate them—as long as they agree to it?

Do they pay their taxes and are they available for military service should a draft come up? That may be all the larger state can expect of them.

I try to think myself into their compound, walk around in it, savor its sights and smells, but such an adventure is hard to imagine. I know their compound looks neat and clean as a whistle. I know one thing for sure—my free nature would rebel against that sort of control over my life. I was a total failure in the military mold. I can imagine the chains of gossip by which they control one another. I can imagine women teaching one another not to be jealous.

I can imagine what it must be like not to be allowed any really independent thinking from the group norm and being ostracized (banished) when one strays too far from the herd mentality. Banished—can you imagine the terror such a punishment would cause in a person who has been cut off from the main body of American culture and then forced to go survive in it? How would the banished one cope, find work, make friends? Being raised, cut off like that, would make it extremely difficult to function in the American body politic.

Of course, straying from the herd in the larger society also causes similar sorts of repercussions. Look at the "gossip" about and condemnation of gay folk and cross-dressers, for examples, in church groups. Look how we try to suppress them and regulate them and hem their behavior in.

And, come to think of it, look at all fundamentalists in their churches, striving with might and main, through non-association and through home schooling, to stay free of contamination by the freedom gene and thirst for new experience that thrives in those of us who have them. It's not an easy thing to be free. Most of the human herd desires to run around in carefully regulated groups because, when the human brain first achieved consciousness, that's the sort of social arrangement it found itself in and the atheist gene complex is fairly new, I suppose, and may not turn out to be the most successful adaptation. And even atheists group together for common protection and warmth of association. None of us are free from the need of companionship.

So there you go. I've just rambled a bit in an unorganized manner, here in the wee hours, because my mind was going a mile a minute, lying there in the dark. Getting up and attending to my consciousness's needs usually gets me back to sleep in short enough time. And I've got to be up at five this morn in order to go catch my plane for Ohio!

I guess the most salient point that emerges when I confront group (herd) mentality like that which controls fundamentalist behavior is how so very close they still are to the people that first made cave drawings. They haven't evolved quite like those of us who understand and accept freedom. The interesting paradox is that our founders' ideas about human freedom protect the very freedom that people longing to return to the herd (and renounce that freedom) are protected by.

So be it—if they are afraid to be as free as those of us in the larger herd choose to be free, let them huddle together in their groups where the male feels free to roam the herd for his sexual release. But, then, when I say that, I'm struck by the fact that the most precious thing our founding fathers gave us was a society in which a freedom to choose is given wide latitude and that women and children, raised in the constraints of Zion, do not quite get the freedom to choose that the rest of us do. Perhaps freedom is the only real reason any of us have to oppose Zions like theirs and fundamentalist churches in general—they don't raise up citizens who truly understand the wide range of behavior they have the freedom to choose among. And people who do not honor freedom above all other values are a threat to the "freedom to choose" itself because they don't want those among them, their women and children, to enjoy that freedom in the same measure they do. Their male freedom of choice is achieved by limiting the freedom of choice of the easily corrupted, because powerless, women and children in their midst. And that is a very scary prospect.

TODAY, HAIKU HOTEL'S THEME WAS MEMORIAL DAY

So these were my attempts for better or worse:

Old standard bearer —
the flag droops lower
as the years go by.

These old soldiers
tramping by — if only
war grew old and died.

These old soldiers
passing in review — their march
has lost the drummer.

The living and the
dead — elms in this graveyard
are deeply rooted.

The scent of lilies
drifts from Mother's to
Memorial Day.

Ravens in the willow
above the quiet stones
crow about their day.

ON SATURDAY

Day after tomorrow my wife and I fly out to Dayton, Ohio, my birthplace, where I spent many years up until I was in my mid-thirties. This does not count the years when my father took us on the road with him to his road jobs, nor the years I spent in the Navy.

My wife has never seen where I misspent my youth. I get quite excited about this trip and have had a hard time getting to sleep, ticking off in my mind the places I'll show her, even hearing the things I might tell her. We will also take my friend, Carl, along on our drives around Dayton. Carl was a junior in high school when I met him the one year I taught at Vandalia-Butler High School on the outskirts of Dayton. I only taught there one year because Mr. Wherry concluded I was too radical to teach high school students. I bet I've put that piece of information into this blog more than once. Sadly, reader (if I have any readers), I've been at this so long and have grown so much older since I commenced blogging that I fear I can no longer remember what I've put in here.

After my divorce from my first wife, I moved in with Carl, who was now working at the Dayton Public Library, and two other of his friends, Gary and Allyn. Those two eventually married and raised a pet mouse. Anyhow, while living with those hippies, I also became a 36 year old hippy. That's how it happened for me. Carl is one of my oldest friends with whom I maintain contact.

Flying gives me the willies. I haven't flown since 9/11, and my vivid imagination has, on far too many occasions, replayed for me what it must have been like on those airplanes doomed to crash into buildings and the earth. I keep imaging what I might do to escape the crash, how I might divert the hijackers by acting crazy and speaking gibberish or by inciting my fellow passengers into action. O, yes, quite an active imagination. I sometimes wonder why I couldn't get my novels published if my imagination is so damn great. But that is an entirely whole 'nother story. Besides plane crashes and hijackings, in my imagination there's not enough parking at the airport (we miss our flight), I'm on a government list and they won't let me fly, they confiscate my toothpaste, our car breaks down on the trip to the airport (again we miss our flight), the cab we decide to take instead of driving to the airport ourselves doesn't get us there on time (we miss our flight). I also see us rushing around just barely getting aboard our flight, Dollar not having our rental unit ready, our flight being delayed in the Detroit switchover and we get there after Dollar is closed, and, of course, no imaginary flight would be complete without it—our luggage is lost in space.

WHAT A MORNING—ATHEISM AND A BETTER THAN RELIGIOUS RAPTURE!

Some of my days in Vancouver since moving from Spokane are as enthralling and uplifting as any evangelical church service with its rolling eyes, trembling limbs and non-sense babbling! But an atheist’s uplift is totally sensible and as understandable psychologically as religious ecstasy would be if ecstasidysiasts (sic—I invented the term just now, using ecdysiast or stripper) understood that religious rapture is only a psychological mechanism, not an actual contact with the spiritual world. Atheists don’t need to explain our ecstasies as being a contact with a god. We understand our ecstasies as resulting from our being in a heightened touch with the natural world and with our fellow beings from which the human species as a whole and we as individuals emerged. Please, readers, come along with me, follow my morning for a few minutes. I’ll explain.

This morning, I awoke to a rather chilly and overcast dawn. But, after seeing my wife off to work, I threw on my togs and set off to one of my most favorite espresso joints, the Mon Ami, owned and operated by a couple of young women named Juliana and Claire. There I ordered my 12 ounce non-fat, sugar free hazelnut latte and dropped into my chair to continue reading my Yukio Mishima novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. While reading, I stopped to make some entries in my journal and wrote a couple of senryu:

Mishima —
wild horses can't drag me
from his novels.

That senryu paradoxically refers to Mishima’s novel, Runaway Horses.

Purple hazed mountains —
they linger in the distance
till darkness claims them.

Sun peeping between
tree leaves over well-mown lawn —
Mizoguchi’s nightmare.

Those senryu come directly from a couple of lines in the Mishima novel I’m currently reading. Mizoguchi is its main character.

But I did not read nor dawdle over haiku poetry for long because I was joined by a young man who I had talked to a month or so ago. Nathan came from the back of the coffee shop and sat on a couch, facing the comfortable chair where I was seated, and we nodded to each other, then picked up our conversation from where he remembered we’d ended it.

An ex-Mormon now atheist, and me, an atheist, atheism was central to our discussion—with such questions as what about “free will” and where do “ethics” come from if we can’t shove them off onto a god. It was fun. I asked him if he felt lonely, being an atheist. He said “no” and told me that most of his friends were atheists, all young like himself. He felt that the numbers of young people who are atheists were growing. He quoted the same sorts of numbers that are based on the most recent census surveys that we know of—16% or so who claim no allegiance to gods. I shared how my own long struggle was fraught with emotional turmoil and loneliness until I finally affirmed my suspicions about gods and goddesses and popped out from that tangled hierarchical and authoritarian nightmare that is Christendom and drew my first really free, fully American and human breath. Many of our founding fathers would understand clearly what I’ve just said.

We discussed the human animal’s situation in the ecosphere, housed in his stick and adobe nests alongside the human game trails that lead to work and play niches where male and female human couples earned their meat, nested and nurtured and gamboled with their children. This forced me to mention I’m still a carnivore while he mentioned that he was a vegetarian, not a vegan. I admitted I was "not there yet" and told him how dizzy I get in the mornings if I don’t get my protein. We discussed sources of protein, named toast and peanut butter breakfasts, oatmeal with raisins and nuts, eggs, yogurt—but Nathan said he didn't like the taste of yogurt.

Most interestingly, I asked him how he came to atheism, and he said “by employing a rigorous skepticism”, questioning one thing after another until he arrived at atheism. Of course, there were those moments when he realized how different his thinking was from those of his Mormon family. Yes, I can imagine. Nathan will soon be off to Seattle University to study Math and (?—I forget, Nathan, the second interest).

When Nathan left to take a philosophy exam on Heidegger, we acknowledged that we’d probably meet at the Mon Ami from time to time and talk some more. It was great fun and mentally stimulating to have that discussion. Then I decided to take off for my morning walk along the Columbia. As soon as I arrived at the river, I was amazed how swollen the river was by spring runoff. In fact, I decided to go on to Marine Park and walk there. I wanted to see the wetlands.

The sky was still overcast as I set off along the concrete trail, eating my Luna Bar lunch, through the manicured Marine Park. Finally, I thought, the piss stations are open. How often did I wish during my winter walks that their doors were open. Once or twice in the cold, I had to scramble down off the trail and take a piss. The woods below the path to my right were inundated with water now. Where last year, people could walk down off the trail into those woods, this spring, the woods are filled with water, and the water surface is full of driftwood and dead plant matter, not to mention the occasional pop jug and paper cup. But there weren’t too many of those so the scene was wildly delightful to the eye. No scrambling down there today to mingle my water with the river’s.

Swallows darted and dove, eating their fills of insects. Robins hopped about beside me, and one stood atop a fallen trunk of a small tree close by the trail to watch me. He swiveled his head to track me as I passed. “Hello there,” I was thinking. I know—anthropomorphous—that’s nonsense and I know it, but it was fun. In the middle of one woodland water clearing, a duck paddled along, and, then, at a distance, crossing the clearing, the head of a swimming creature appeared from the tree trunks. I watched the animal swim for some time until it dove under a floating mass of plants and branches on the other side of the watery clearing and entered the shadow of trees. I guessed it must be a beaver, but asked myself, “don’t they need streams to damn up in order to survive”. So I was not sure what I’d seen and thought longingly of my binoculars in the glove compartment. Still, I was enthralled as any Wordsworth on an English field trip. Then I remembered a couple of chewed, fallen trees I'd seen in March down from the trail. Of course!

Next I made the right turn at the million dollar condos which headed me straight toward the Columbia. When I emerged from this pleasant, short stretch, with condos on one side and wetlands on my right, the sight of the swollen river amazed me. Shorelines, where people picnicked last year, were completely submerged. The river rushed by very close to my concrete boardwalk. Right then a wonderful misty drizzle began which shaded into a steady but light rain. I opened my umbrella, breathed deeply the marvelous coolness and continued my stroll. I can’t tell you how delightful these walks can be.

After a half mile or so, I came to my turning around place—a long narrow (10 to 20 yards) strip of land that juts into the Columbia about a football field and a half long. The walk to its end slopes upward and then downward to a concrete pad upon which is marked with an arrow the direction, “N”. A lone fisherman stood there in the rain. He was young and I greeted him, “The water’s really up.” “Yes,” he replied. “Catch anything?” “Not yet.”

And the water is truly up! Normally, the land slopes down from the pad quite a few yards all around and the fishermen climb down those slopes to fish for sturgeon and salmon from the rocks at the water’s edge. Right now, the water is touching the pad itself, lapping and splashing over it from time to time, I imagine, when the wind is up.

I stood there for some time, surrounded on three sides by a mighty river, watching the swirls caused by the jetty where the river beats against it upstream and the whorls of water it forces the river to make on its way around the jetty’s tip. Just a little leap, and I could be swimming, though not safely. Farther out, float logs and islands of matter torn loose and set free from the Columbia’s banks farther upstream. On a man-made pole and platform nearer the bank downstream, an osprey has built its nest and the female crouches in it, her head peeking above the edge of plant matter—brooding the eggs? Or is it the male? They are mates for life.

What a vision this river and its banks are! I love it. I breathe it in and find joy in the moment—my ecstasy, a reunion with my evolutionary roots, not some imaginary god hypothesis. Then with a “good luck fishing,” to the solo fisherman, I departed the pad and him to return to my car.

Heading back, the wind shows up—a new element of nature added to my sojourn! It drives the light, misty rain horizontal, so my pant legs begin to darken with wetness. I tilt my umbrella in the direction of the wind and walk a little faster, though I love the rain, the wind, my walk. Soon, I’m back to the short run of walkway between the condos and the wetlands. Now I’m into a narrow passage between tall cottonwood trees, and, then, another element of nature emerges. The rain stops, a break in the clouds opens above me, and the sun bursts out, dappling the ground! And I rejoice with an ecstasy based on my psychological nearness to the nature that birthed me! I can’t express adequately how fun this is, these feelings, this walk, all so different from the artificial religious and forced cleanliness of a modern church where people gang together and create an artificial high between themselves and an imaginary hypothetical superbeing. Here, on my walk, its me in touch with the natural world, my aboriginal home; in there, its them in touch with their hypotheses.

Soon I’m back to my car and driving home. I’m thinking of sharing my morning with my friends who read this blog and those who are members of the Inland Northwest Freethought Society. I’m thinking over the whole morning, my intellectual discussion, topped off with a wonderful whipped cream of nature! Only an atheist can know this sense of enlightened freedom, out from under the fog of Jesus and his killer father and their constant moral harping and shame-based finger pointing. And, look, free of god, I have not, like HIM, resorted to killing, maiming and raping for my fun and revenge. All I’ve done with my ethical freedom is take a walk and have a friendly discussion with an intelligent fellow human animal. Next, I’m off to the hot tub, a good soak and a shower. What an evil atheist I am!

THE SINGULARITY IS [VERY] NEAR

Again, it’s time to talk about the future and how fast it’s rushing toward us (or we’re rushing toward it) (or how fast it’s rushing by us as we sit on the bank of Time’s river). Take your pick. Several times now, I’ve brought up Kurzweil’s book. See the title for this entry; subtract the “very” and that’s the title. Following are two excerpts from recent news items. Though these two items show how far humankind has yet to go to reach some of Kurzweil’s predictions about a future time when humans will ditch their bodies and download their consciousnesses into robotic bodies in order to live as long as they choose to live, the articles do show that we are definitely moving in that direction. Remember, technological advances are occuring at an ever-increasing rate. Kurzweil predicts that the time will soon come (within a half-century) when the curve of change will become nearly perpendicular in speed. That’s the “singularity” he predicts. Anyhow—here’s two examples of technological change:

[SNIP]
Robotic suit could usher in super soldier era

May 15, 1:44 PM EDT
By MARK JEWELL
AP Business Writer

Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds - that is, until he steps into an "exoskeleton" of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times.

With the outfit's claw-like metal hand extensions, he gripped a weight set's bar at a recent demonstration and knocked off hundreds of repetitions. Once, he did 500.

"Everyone gets bored much more quickly than I get tired," Jameson said.

(AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)

[PASTE]

[SNIP]
Robot Conducts the Detroit Symphony
By Noah Ovshinsky for NPR’s Morning Edition

ASIMO conducts the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, May 13, 2008.

Morning Edition, May 14, 2008 - The Detroit Symphony Orchestra has played host to some of the biggest names in the conducting world. But Tuesday night, a different kind of celebrity held the baton at Orchestra Hall. This conductor was short both in stature and on words.
(Photo Courtesy Detroit Symphony)

ASIMO is not your typical conductor. It's gender neutral, stands at a little over 4 feet tall and has no pulse. It's a humanoid robot that made its conducting debut last night in Detroit.

It walked onto the stage to thunderous applause worthy of Leonard Bernstein.

"Hello, everyone," it said.

"Hello," the audience responded.

Then, ASIMO gracefully walked to the center of the stage, bowed and began leading the orchestra in a performance of "The Impossible Dream" from the musical Man of La Mancha.

ASIMO, which stands for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, is a robot designed and built by Honda. One of its main goals is to get kids interested in math and science. But Tuesday night, ASIMO took a stab at conducting.
[PASTE]

BUT, SPEAKING OF THE PAST, HERE’S ANOTHER HAIKU
TO STEADY YOUR NERVES WITH

Early Spring squirrel
leaping tree to tree reveals
his Summer secrets.

A SMALL OBSERVATION

First a little senryu:

Modern styles — without
dropping a pound, wife’s dress size
shrinks from 6 to 2.

Lately, because I've been on some shopping trips in Portland with my wife, I've learned a thing or two. I even bought my wife a nice casual summer dress that she likes! Let's hope she does anyway. . . . But, what I've learned is that dress makers, in order to accommodate America's large and growing larger women, have been altering their dress sizes. My wife's weight has remained the same for quite some time now, but when she goes shopping, she finds that whereas she used to shop in the dress size 6 racks, she now finds she must shop in the size 2 racks. So if you hear a woman exclaiming, "I can't believe it. I'm a size six", it probably means she's an 8 or 10 dress size and the dress manufacturers are lying to her to make her feel better. Now you know. . . . but don't let your wives know what you know, gentleman readers.

While speaking of fashion sizes—men who wear pants that require the odd lengths are in for trouble too unless they're willing to employ tailors. I have a damn hard time finding the 31 pants length that I need. Last time I went shopping, I ended up buying a 32 and a 30. Now I've got one new pair of high water pants and another pair, a pair of dungarees, that I must fold up at the bottom just like I did in high school back in the early 50s.

O—and another thing I learned—when you buy your wife a dress that she actually likes, you are going to have to buy her a pair of shoes to match that dress on your next shopping trip with her.

LANGUAGE MATTERS

Awhile back, I read somewhere that within the next two hundred years, the English and the Americans won't be speaking the same language unless, of course, the lingua franca has become Mandarin Chinese or whatever language India speaks. No, the statement had to do with the fact that languages never stand still. That's why Latin is a dead language. No one speaks it anymore as, I'm sure, my intelligent readers know unless they're a member of one of those throw back Roman churches where the priests still use Latin in their services. Of course, the average Catholic didn't understand what the priest was saying anyway, so perhaps this observation doesn't count.

But, thinking about the subject, I was saddened to realize that declining literacy in America can only make matters worse. Whereas I can still read Shakespeare and even Chaucer with the help of a dictionary, I will probably still be able to communicate with a Britisher who is also literary since we can touch our common roots but what about his illiterate fellow citizens? Now, take a modern American who's only steady reading is instructions for video games, Internet chat babble, and the chit chat of his school chums—he's filled with the jargon of the day, as is his counterpart in England (if their literacy rate is declining too) filled with English chit chat. Their languages are drifting apart at an alarming rate. In fact, I'll bet I could go into a English pub right now and have a pretty hard time understanding a young Britisher, if he were illiterate. By illiterate, I mean unread by and large on a daily basis so that his only language contact is with his local idioms.

When I realized that the English and Americans were drifting apart, I was rather saddened. It made America seem isolated in the world, losing an old friend like that. I mean even more isolated than Bush has made us with his and Cheney's constant paranoia, seeing enemies everywhere. Of course, that fracture with the English is several generations away so why am I borrowing trouble? Don't we have enough troubles as it is?

DO YOU FEEL YOUR HEART GROWING?

I am always disturbed when a modern poet still uses the heart as the organ from which love emanates, as a metaphor for love. It shows me that the poet knows nothing about neuroscience and probably wants to remain ignorant of it. All feeling issues from the brain. A long time ago, however, when I was a graduate student in English at Southern Illinois University, I was mightily troubled when some nameless critic pointed out that the arts were in decline because the real area of poetic inspiration was now science, and all genius had gone the way of science, leaving only clods like me, I concluded, to hold up poetry and fiction.

An article in Newsweek this week (May 19, 2008) by Anne Underwood, dips into some interesting medical advancements that tell me that we are drawing ever closer to Ray Kurzweil's world (The Singularity Is Near) when humans may not be humans as we now understand humans. What can we make of the idea that Anthony Atala is growing organs for animals already? Doesn’t that sort of medical project sound like what Kurzweil is talking about in his book? And what about the poor poet in his study? As for myself, the battle between art and science is dead. I’m thoroughly inspired by evolutionary psychology, and when I do try to put together one of my itsy-bitsy haiku or senryu, I do try to remember that nothing goes on in the heart but a lot of pumping of blood. Thus. . . my haiku which I entered into this blog not too many weeks ago:

If someone tells you
I love you with all my heart,
they hold back a lot.

The following are three longish snippets from Anne’s article. Thank you, Anne. My heart goes out to you!

[SNIP]
Dr. Jorg Gerlach at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine is isolating patients' own skin stem cells from a small patch of healthy skin. Then, using a specially, developed skin-cell gun, he sprays them onto the wounded area in a fine mist. Over a period of two to six weeks, the cells grow into functional skin, including dermis, epidermis and blood vessels. There is little scarring, and because Gerlach includes the patient's own pigment cells in the mix, the new skin looks natural. In one pilot study, he treated eight patients in Germany with good results….

To build a nose, they [Robert Langer at MIT and Joseph Vacanti at Harvard] will create a nose-shaped scaffold, made of biocompatible, biodegradable materials, then seed it with the patient's own cells and nurture it in a chamber called a bioreactor that mimics conditions in the body. Weeks later, when cells have multiplied to form tissues, the nose will be surgically implanted; over the ensuing months, the scaffold will dissolve and be resorbed into the body. Using these same basic techniques, Atala [Anthony Atala at Wake Forest University] has created organs, including small kidneys that filter liquid and produce urine in the lab. When implanted in animals, the kidneys grow to full size and continue to work. “We start, and the body takes over,” he says….

Newall Washburn at Carnegie Mellon University is working on special gels to help tamp down inflammation at the site of a deep wound, allowing skin to regenerate without scarring. Dr. Charles Sfeir at the McGowan Institute is developing a powder containing bone proteins, growth factors and biodegradable cement that can be mixed with water in the operating room and molded to the shape of missing bone. Atala has created nerves that conduct impulses—at least in mice….
[PASTE

NEOCONS LIKE NIXON, MCCAIN

Over time, as I've written this blog, I've brought up and pointed out the traumatic early lives of certain Republican operatives, like Carl Rove, for example. These are the kind of men who make fun of "people who see shrinks" because neoconservatives think people who see shrinks get a victim's mentality. Yet, as any sane person can see, neoconservatives are the quickest to see enemies everywhere and to start wars, and other depravities, against their favorite enemies. Instead of working on their issues and realizing that of all their problems, they are the worst of their problems, they project their demented innards out into the world and identify enemies everywhere else. Such is typical neocon behavior.

Along these lines I've just drawn, Evan Thomas informs us in an article for Newsweek Magazine that Richard Nixon told a friend that he would do anything to get where he wanted to go, "anything," he said, "except see a shrink." Thus you see the roots of Watergate and everything that comes after, including the current divisiveness of politics, according to Evan Thomas.

Roger Ailes, for example, is one of the chief makers of devisiveness, the man who put together the Fox News Network, that "fairly unbalanced" network where Billy Boy O'Really! spews his bile each and every weekday. Now there's a man who could use a shrink too. It would be a relief for the rest of us if he could just get a grip on himself and lift his psyche up by its muddy bootstraps and take it into treatment. You'd be surprised how many of those Fundamentalist Christian Neocon Republican dudes use alcohol to treat their ills. Ailes was one of the staffers who helped Richard Nixon assassinate his enemies. I don't suppose that would have anything to do with the Fox Nutwork's (er... Network's) being so out of touch with reality, do you? According to Evan Thomas's article, it was Ailes's idea to find panel members to meet the candidate, Nixon, who were almost frothing at the mouth, on racism for example, so that when Nixon said the same things in politer terms, Nixon would sound more sane. Ailes personally went out on the streets to taxi stands to find a nutty cabby, like the one in Taxi Driver, to contrast with Richard M. Nixon. So Ailes, you see, is just exactly the sort of trustworthy, sober, fair and unbiased man someone like Rupert Mudrock would pick to build his rightwing Network. It's a good thing there are so many lunatic fundamentalist to support that network because most of us sane Americans can see so easily through the whole con job that Fox produces.

TODAY'S HAIKU GOT A PRETTY GOOD RATING AT HAIKU HOTEL

Snow-on-the-mountain
overlooks young women
playing in the spring.

CURRENT READING

I just finished James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me and, also, William Styron's collection of essays, Havanas In Camelot. New bathroom reading will be Aesop's Fables as retold by Blanche Winder in the Airmont Publishing Company's edition.

Stopped by the Vancouver Library and picked up the Yukio Mishima novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, translated by Ivan Morris, and I'm on the last chapter of Light Verse From the Floating World (a collection of senryu from Japan). It was stored in the library's basement because librarians know how important Mishima's work is, but the general public doesn't. Nobody checks him out, literally. I have read several of Mishima's novels in the past and am fascinated by his work. I think I've mentioned him on this blog. His life is full of interesting contradictions, not the least of which is his open homosexuality even though he married a woman and also required her to wear western clothing. My first ever encounter with Mishima's work was seeing the movie, "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea", starring Sarah Miles and Kris Kristofferson. I think this is one of the best movies that Kristofferson was ever in. His personality somehow fitted the character's type. Then I took to reading Mishima's fiction. The bright clarity of his images which have a startling and freezing impact on the senses are a highlight of his work. I once did a study of his novels for my now defunct microzine, George and Mertie's Place. His consciousness is, I think, a wonderful example of the brittle authoritarian personality in a creative mask.


WHY I HAVE THREE DIVORCES

[SNIP]
Aside from the moral issue about whether or not trying to control someone else's behavior is right or wrong, the practical problem with trying to control others is that whenever you blame, bribe, complain, criticize, punish, or threaten anyone, they'll resist, says Dr. Glasser. They'll argue. They'll fight. In fact, they'll cajole, ignore, cheat, sneak around behind your back, or do any one of a zillion things they can think of to get you to back off.

It's simply human nature. You're genetically wired to resist being coerced into doing something you don't want to do, Dr. Glasser points out. It may be more pronounced in one person than another, but unless you recognize what you're doing and learn how to get what you need in a relationship without trying to control other people, every relationship you have will disintegrate into a power struggle that will make everyone just plain miserable.
[PASTE]

So says Ellen Michaud in an article I found on Huffpo. She was extracting her information from the work of psychiatrist William Glasser, MD, president of the William Glasser Institute in Chatsworth, CA, and author of Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom (HarperCollins, 1999).

I consider myself to have followed just such a controlling and manipulative path as a young to middle-aged husband. I will attest to the fact that it just don't work, specially when you also will not allow yourself to let anyone love you or be close to you even though you spent a lot of effort to win them to your side. Fortunately, my third marriage hurt me so badly when it ended that I decided I "never want to feel this badly again"! And after several years, back when, of personal counseling and one on one work, plus lots of weekend workshops, and a two year stint in a big old rambling farmhouse, much like a monastery, where I spent my mornings (I worked evenings) reading spiritual and inspirational literature (I even read my way through the Psalms, underlining and hi-lighting as I went) I worked my way to the ability to have a solid fourth marriage. I'm serious. If you really want it, you can work your way to it, no matter how old you are. By the way, I wouldn't make this claim if I didn't know that my wife will attest to it.

OKAY—I GOT THIS IN AN EMAIL. SO KILL ME ALREADY!
LET’S GET AN ANSWER TO THE HEARSE, CARPOOL LANE QUESTION.

Subject: QUESTIONS THAT HAUNT ME!

If you could drive your car at the speed of light and you turned on your headlights would anything happen?

If you have sex with a prostitute against her will is it considered rape or shoplifting?

How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?

Why do you have to 'put your two cents in'... but it's only a 'penny for your thoughts'? Where's that extra penny going to?

Once you're in heaven, do you get stuck wearing the clothes you were buried in for eternity?

How is it that we put man on the moon before we figured out it would be a good idea to put wheels on luggage?

Why is it that people say they 'slept like a baby' when babies wake up like every two hours?

If a deaf person has to go to court, is it still called a hearing?

Why are you in a movie, but you're on TV? [Did you ever try to climb up on top of a movie screen at a drive-in theater?]

Why do doctors leave the room while you undress?

Why is 'bra' singular and 'panties' plural?

If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a stupid song about him?

Can a hearse carrying a corpse drive in the carpool lane ?

If the professor on Gilligan's Island can make a radio out of a coconut, why can't he fix a hole in a boat?

Why does Goofy stand erect while Pluto remains on all fours?

If Wile E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that ACME crap, why didn't he just buy dinner?

If corn oil is made from corn, and vegetable oil is made from vegetables, what is baby oil made from?

If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?

Do the Alphabet song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star have the same tune?

Why did you just try singing the two songs above?
Why do they call it an asteroid when it's outside the hemisphere, but call it a hemorrhoid when it's in your butt?

Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog's face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him for a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?

WILLIAM STYRON (1925-2006) on TERRY SOUTHERN

"I had met a lot of Texans in the marines, most of whom lived up to their advance reputation for being yahoos and blowhards, and I never thought I'd encounter a Texan who was a novelist. Or a Texan who was rather shy and boastful."

I added that quote for a not so obvious reason. You see... I'm not the only one down on Texans. While I'm at it, here's some more from William Styron (author of two great novels I've read—Sophie's Choice and Confessions of Nat Turner):

“I thought of Terry [Southern] recently when I read, in an interview, the words of a British punk-rock star, plainly a young jerk, nasty and callow but able to express a tart intuitive insight: ‘You Americans still believe in God and all that shit, don't you? The whole fucking lot of you fraught with the fear of death.’

“Terry would have given his little cackle of approval at the remark, for it went to the core of his perception of American culture. Like me, Terry was an apostate southern Protestant, and I think that one of the reasons we hit it off well together was that we both viewed the Christian religion—at least insofar as we had experienced its puritanical rigors as a conspiracy to deny its adherents their fulfillment as human beings. It magnified not the glories of life but the consciousness of death, exploiting humanity's innate terror of the timeless void. High among its prohibitions was sexual pleasure. In contemplating Americans stretched on the rack of their hypocrisy as they tried to reconcile their furtive adulteries with their churchgoing pieties, Terry laid the groundwork for some of his most biting and funniest satire. Christianity bugged him, even getting into his titles—think of The Magic Christian. Nor was it by chance that the surname of the endearing heroine of Candy was—what else?—Christian. His finest comic efforts often come from his juxtaposing a sweetly religious soul—or at least a bourgeois-conventional one—with a figure of depravity or corruption. Candy was surely the first novel in which the frenzied sexual congress between a well-bred, exquisitely proportioned young American girl and an elderly, insane hunchback could elicit nothing but helpless laughter. (‘Give me your hump!’ she squeals at the moment of climax, in a jeu de mots so obvious it compounds the hilarity.) One clear memory I have is of Terry in the lounge car, musing over his Old Grand-Dad as he considered the imminent demise of the Super Chief and, with it, a venerable tradition. His voice grew elegiac speaking of the number of ‘darling Baptist virgins aspiring to be starlets’ who, at the hands of ‘panting Jewish agents with their swollen members,’ had been ever so satisfactorily deflowered on these plush, softly undulating banquettes.”

From William Styron’s Havanas In Camelot, pp.116-118

WHERE FALWELL GOT HIS WELL-FALLEN IDEA FOR BLAME FROM

“. . . the Diet of Worms, the same assembly that condemned Martin Luther for heresy, issued a mandate declaring that the ‘evil pocks’ [syphilis] was a scourge visited upon mankind for the sin of blasphemy.” —Styron also, from the same book as above

FINDINGS

“Findings” is a feature on the last page of Harper’s Magazine. It’s a long list of facts and figures gleaned from the multitudinous worlds of science. I selected but a few. One disturbing thing about the format is that, after reading so many closely spaced facts, piled atop one another, I felt that the substance, brought in from such a wide range of topics, takes on a comical air. Do ya s’pose they meant to do that? By the way, I made a few observations of my own.

[CUT]
A team of scientists at Newcastle University created human embryos by combining the genetic material of one man and two women [called a genage a trois], another team of scientists at Newcastle University discovered how to create sperm from the bone-marrow cells of women, and Brazilian scientists created egg cells from the embryonic stem cells of male mice. American scientists artificially reproduced the DNA of a venereal-disease bacterium and expected to use the technique to create artificial life within ten years. [Look out gods!]

Female yellow baboons with supportive fathers were observed to reach menarche earlier, to begin having children earlier, and to have more children than female baboons whose fathers were not involved in their lives. [They also were found be most sympatico with Blackwater employees].

It was determined that lonely people are more likely to anthropomorphize animals [and suck their thumbs]. Italian doctors found high testosterone levels in lovestruck women and low testosterone levels in lovestruck men… [and that they tended to make pets of each other].

Two studies concluded that biofuels are worse for global warming than conventional petroleum fuels; one of the studies calculated that harvesting grain for fuel creates 93 times more carbon emissions than are saved by the production of cleaner fuel.

Researchers found that physical scientists are less likely to believe in God than social scientists, that traditional religious beliefs make people more likely to forgive [everyone but atheists], and that temporary, self-absorbed sadness makes people spend money extravagantly [and masturbate in front of mirrors].

People who volunteer to take part in psychology experiments were found to be more mentally stable than those who do not volunteer. Young mice separated from their mothers and fed junk food experience less stress than orphan mice who are fed healthy food. [They also gain weight faster then thumb suckers.] Also engineers were said to be at greater risk of becoming terrorists [than field mice]. A survey determined that children universally dislike clown wallpaper and find it "frightening" and "unknowable." [Bush is their most frightening clown.] Scientists hoped to vibrate viruses to death [and get a little thrill of their own, rubbing against the vibrating machines].
[PASTE]

A LINKED HAIKU FOR THE VETS
WHO TELL THE TRUTH

If we do not speak...
others will surely
rewrite the script.

Each...body bag...
all the mass graves
will be reopened...

their contents
abracadabraed into
a noble cause!

These linked haiku have been paraphrased, gently, from a statement by George Swiers, Vietnam Veteran, found on page 232 of Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. His original source was America In Vietnam.

Photo is famous one of girl who had torn off her napalmed burning clothing and was running from the burning village of her family.


“HOW DO YOU ASK A MAN
to be the last man to die for a mistake?” —John Kerry

Man alive! Four-thousand and counting again have died for Bush’s mistake. How many more will the Neocon Fundamentalist Christian Republican Party let die for their mistake?

Below is more information taken from that marvelous book, Lies My Teacher Told Me.

[CUT]
[The] entire civilian population was treated as the enemy. Such a strategy inevitably led to war crimes. Thus My Lai was not a minor event, unworthy of inclusion in a nation's history, but was important precisely because it was emblematic of much of what went wrong with the entire war in Vietnam. My Lai was the most famous instance of what John Kerry, formerly of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, now a U.S. senator, called “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry said, "Over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia." He went on to retell how American troops "had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam." All this was in addition to the normal ravage of war." Any photograph of an American soldier setting fire to a Vietnamese hootch (house), a common sight during the war, would get this point across, but no textbook uses any photograph of any wrongdoing by an American. Indeed, no [high school history] book includes any photograph of any destruction, even of legitimate targets, caused by our side. Only Discovering American History, an inquiry textbook, treats the My Lai massacre as anything but an isolated incident. In addition to leaving students ignorant of the history of the war, the silence of other textbooks on this matter also makes the antiwar movement incomprehensible. (pp.239-40 in Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen)
[PASTE]

And how has our nation rewarded a man for telling the truth, for merely listing the facts? Other soldiers, rather than admitting to what they witnessed or did in Vietnam, reviled him for exposing American troop actions in country. And they helped deny him the Presidency of America. So much for being an honest and upright man in America. And, O, by the way, though I am a veteran myself who did not have to go to that war, I had and have many friends who were there and who wrote letters to me or shared with me in person to many of the details which Senator Kerry revealed in his testimony. So Kerry was telling the truth. Those who smeared him were a pack of lying cowards whether or not they served, and many of them did not.


[CUT]
Sadly, textbook authors also leave out all the memorable quotations of the era. Martin Luther King, Jr., the first major leader to come out against the war, opposed it in his trademark cadences: "We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops…. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men." No textbook quotes King. (p.241 in Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen)
[PASTE]

So, if all such information has been kept from our children and grandchildren about this war is it any wonder that modern neocons (i.e. chickenhawks), again afoot in our land and making a terror of war, were able at first to stampede so many younger Americans into supporting Bush’s illegal invasion of a sovereign nation?

AMERICAN NAIVETÉ AND AMERICAN TERRORISM
by James Loewen (Photo credit to Sally McCay)

The deeper I get into this textbook, Lies My Teacher Told Me, the more agog I am. I have certainly been naïve when it comes to American history, and I am certainly guilty of having had, in my past, a too unrealistic view of American foreign policy and the domestic aims of its leaders. Chapter after chapter this book thrills me. I have the 1995 edition. There is now a revised 2007 edition. Can the following be true, that the neocons are following George Kennan’s view of the world? What kind of ideal America do they represent to the rest of the world in our name?

[SNIPPET]

… the realpolitik view. George Kennan, who for almost half a century has been an architect of and commentator on U.S. foreign policy, provided a succinct statement of this approach in 1948, As head of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, Kennan wrote in a now famous memorandum:

• We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population, In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real test in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.

Under this view, the historian or political scientist proceeds by identifying American national interests as articulated by policymakers in the past as well as by historians today. Then s/he analyzes our acts and policies to assess the degree to which they furthered these interests.

High school American history textbooks do not, of course, adopt or even hint at the American colossus view.... they omit the realpolitik approach. (p.210)

[PASTE IT]

Looking at Kennan’s statement above, we can now see why we have been doing what we’ve been doing in the world. The next passage shows how this policy might have been applied to Iraq. In fact, Loewen’s comments about the Nixon past are so prescient about the Bush Jr. fiasco, I can hardly believe it.

[SNIP]

Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, "the problem will not go away with the departure of Richard Nixon," because it is structural, stemming from the vastly increased power of the federal executive bureaucracy. Indeed, in some ways the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush administrations, a web of secret legal and illegal acts involving the president, vice-president, cabinet members, special operatives such as Oliver North, and government officials in Israel, Iran, Brunei, and elsewhere, shows an executive branch more out of control than Nixon's. Textbooks' failure to put Watergate into this perspective is part of their authors' apparent program to whitewash the federal government so that schoolchildren will respect it. Since the structural problem in the government has not gone away, it is likely that students will again, in their adult lives, face an out-of-control federal executive pursuing criminal foreign and domestic policies. To the extent that their understanding of the government comes from their American history courses, students will be shocked by these events and unprepared to think about them.

"Our country may she always be in the right," toasted Stephen Decatur in 1816, "but our country, right or wrong!" Educators and textbook authors seem to want to inculcate the next generation into blind allegiance to our country. Going a step beyond Decatur, textbook analyses fail to assess our actions abroad according to either a standard of right and wrong or realpolitik. Instead, textbooks merely assume that the government tried to do the right thing. Citizens who embrace the textbook view would presumably support any intervention, armed or otherwise, and any policy, protective of our legitimate national interests or not, because they would be persuaded that all our policies and interventions are on behalf of humanitarian aims. They could never credit our enemies with equal humanity. (p.223)

[PASTE]

And going further, Marine Corp General S.D. Butler shows that this has been America’s aim, to dominate the world for the exclusive benefit of our national corporations, since at least 1900.

[SNIP]

[Here’s] … a shot of the realism supplied by former Marine Corps Gen. Smedley D. Butler, whose 1931 statement has become famous:

• I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. (p.214)

[PASTE]

Finally, with following list of specific American wrong doings in the world community, an honest American can at least understand why the Reverend Jeremiah Wright could claim that American neocons' acts of terrorism in the world might be coming home to roost for average, more decent Americas. In short, the attack on America’s twin towers are the direct result of George Kennan’s policy, acted on through and by American neocons, though they were not always called by that name. We must not blame the average American for the neocon atrocities, but we can blame ourselves for our ignorance and naiveté. Perhaps we can even blame our textbooks for misleading us in so many areas. Remember, these are acts of terror as defined by our own government as to what constitutes a terrorist government.

[SNIP]

1. our assistance to the shah's faction in Iran in deposing Prime Minister Mussadegh and returning the shah to the throne in 1953;
2. our role in bringing down the elected government of Guatemala in 1954;
3. our rigging of the 1957 election in Lebanon, which entrenched the Christians on top and led to the Muslim revolt and civil war the next year; [why do they hate us?]
4. our involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Zaire in 1961;
5. our repeated attempts to murder Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba and bring down his government by terror and sabotage; and
6. our role in bringing down the elected government of Chile in 1973. [Also killing a young American.] (p.215)

[PASTE]