Crack That Whip!

I’m usually not a big fan of irrelevant gossip, which means I don’t watch much Fox News or Oprah, but the story that was first reported by the Daily Caller this morning is just too good not to demand my prurient interest. Just for information, the Daily Caller is a website (dailycaller.com) recently founded by Tucker Carlson, he of the bowtie fame, which focuses on Washington related political news. I was not even aware of the Daily Caller’s existence prior to about 5:00 this afternoon, so I don’t really know what they are all about, but Tucker Carlson is not generally known for his liberal sentiments.

Anyway, the Daily Caller published a report about spending by the Republican National Committee (RNC) in the first quarter of this year. Now, the RNC is a private organization which receives their funding from the voluntary contributions of people concerned about things like what language you speak in your grocery store and who you have sex with, and they can spend their money on whatever strikes their fancy as far as I am concerned, but because of their political function they are required to file Federal disclosure reports for contributions and expenses on a quarterly basis. The report obtained by the Daily Caller shows thousands of dollars of Republican contributor’s money being spent on private jets and luxury hotels. The leadership at the RNC has been so successful promoting the Republican brand recently, I can understand why they should be rewarded with up-scale travel and lodging. What the RNC itself says is that they need to present the appropriate image to high-end donors in order to attract their donations. I certainly know that I would be inclined to fork over my hard-earned dough if I knew that the people hassling me for it would spend a lot of it on caviar and masseuses for themselves, but I’m a pretty understanding fellow. $43,000 for a RNC trip to Hawaii (not including airfare) makes complete sense to me, as Hawaii is known to be a Republican stronghold. All in all, the RNC has spent just under $110 million dollars during the tenure of its impressive Chairman, Michael Steele. How much of this was spent on wardrobe is unknown.

However, the most interesting expense reported was $1,946.25 paid out at the Voyeur West Hollywood, a “bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex”. I am hardly in a position to be critical of this type of recreation and I applaud the Republicans for being so open minded. Hopefully none of the simulated lesbians were in any simulated marriages. Actually, the money could have been for milk and cookies for all I know, and the RNC personnel spending it might have been there for Bible study with the Sapphic dominatrixes, but the report doesn’t go into that type of detail. Certainly the staunchly family-values oriented Republicans would not be providing kinky entertainment to naughty potential donors, since they probably wouldn’t want money from people like that.

Who knows what sort of stuff the Democratic National Committee spends its money on, but the Daily Caller isn’t making an issue of it, so I am presuming that, at least for the first quarter of 2010, it wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy. This is really the point that strikes me; the Democratic Party is full of gays and alcoholics and people who have filed bankruptcy and may even have used some sort of illegal drugs at some point; in other words, the Democratic Party is more like a group of actual Americans you might meet at a truck stop off the Interstate in Maryland, and the Republican Party is more like what you might see if the Stepford Wives had 41 seats in the Senate. Actually the whole thing really makes sense; keeping lesbians in bondage is certainly at least part of the Republican fantasy life.

To Infinity, And Beyond

Things just keep getting weirder, and I’m not talking about the healthcare debate or American foreign policy (not this time anyway). As it turns out, there is a team of scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who have apparently not taken to the streets to protest the doom of impending socialism, but who have rather been studying an apparent phenomenon called “Dark Flow” for several years now. Dark Flow was indentified by comparing the distribution of galactic clusters (groups of galaxies) in the Universe relative to the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The scientists found that in certain regions of the Universe, at certain distances from Earth, the distribution of galactic clusters varied in a statistically significant manner from the cosmic microwave background radiation. Since the cosmic microwave background radiation is a physical remnant of the explosive event which gave birth to the Universe, the matter in the Universe should be distributed in approximate conformity with it, but in the case of these certain galactic clusters, it isn’t. These clusters appear to moving relative to the background radiation, rather than in concert with it. The team at the Goddard Space Flight Center speculates that there are only two explanations for the observed phenomenon which are consistent with known physics, and neither of them is consistent with known physics.

The first possibility is that the observed regions of space/time are somehow anomalous and functioning under rules that are not consistent with the balance of the Universe. This explanation is not favored since it would be the first demonstrated such example where universal principles of gravity and probability are violated (other than in a singularity). The other explanation offered is that these galactic clusters are being pulled in an unexpected direction by something outside of the universe, like the gravity of another universe. For those of us who have grown up with the concept that there is nothing outside of the Universe, this sounds like something Deepak Chopra might come up with, but it is actually Alexander (Sasha) Kashlinsky, the Goddard Space Flight Center team leader, who has speculated on the matter (no pun intended). Dr. Kashlinsky, a graduate of Cambridge University, has been studying cosmological issues for over 20 years and is something of an expert on cosmic microwave background radiation and the Universe’s neo-natal issues.

The theory of Dark Flow is, of course, not without its detractors, but most of the criticism has centered on methodological issues in the study of galactic cluster movements as opposed to offering any viable explanation for the phenomenon should it actually be occurring. A recent expansion of the data set used in the analysis to include two additional years of observations has served to confirm the original observations made in 2008, and methodological criticisms have been addressed, at least to the satisfaction of the study team itself. Currently, there is no reason to dispute the legitimacy of the observation that these galactic clusters have engaged in deviant behavior, we just can’t be certain why.

The wonderful thing about science is that it keeps giving us new stuff to talk about with our spouses and significant others. Unlike much political and religious thought and the practiced ignorance of the crypto-Luddites who worship the past, science goes where the facts take it, to the extent that facts can be known, and goes with the humility to admit that certain things are only probably true, not absolutely true. There may be a more prosaic explanation for Dark Flow put forward tomorrow and the research team could repudiate their own findings next week, if reason dictates, but for now, it’s pretty creepy. Whole clusters of galaxies are being drawn like the children of Hamelin towards something that shouldn’t exist and the only reasonable explanations appear to be magic or Star Trek.

I have spent a great deal of time contemplating the unfathomable infinity of time and space and the have spent many sleepless nights and purchased a great deal of Prozac because of it. While many physicists have speculated about the existence of other universes as solutions to problems in both Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, and while the idea that there is more to reality than reality is not completely new, Dr. Kashlinsky has now kindly provided me with the suggestion of empirical evidence that, in addition to the infinity of my own universe, I can now lay awake at night and contemplate the infinity of an infinite number of other universes. Thanks, dude; I appreciate your help.

It's the Battle of Bull, Run!

As the Republican minority in Congress appears increasingly resigned to the prospect of some form of healthcare reform passing, Republicans at the level of the various states are now taking up the cause and threatening to file civil suits against the United States’ government under the provisions of the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34702.html). The 10th Amendment is one of those necessary but problematic elements of the Constitution which somewhat ambiguously reserves powers not expressly granted to the Federal Government to the several States. From a procedural perspective, this makes complete sense, but, unfortunately, the powers of the Federal Government are also somewhat vaguely defined in the same document, and are subject to change by interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. Further, simply because an authority is not granted to the Federal Government, it doesn’t mean that an individual State can exercise it; the power may not be available to any level of government, but you don’t know that until the issue grinds it way through interminable judicial and legislative processes.

Anyway, I am reminded of the situation in the Russian Duma in the Imperial Federation where the Bolsheviks were in the minority but, through some obscure internal party maneuver years previously when they were still part of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, they had acquired the name “Bolshevik”, which means bigger. Their rivals, the Mensheviks, of course, got stuck with the name that meant “smaller” or minority. In 1917, however, the situation was completely reversed, but the Bolsheviks, just like the Republicans, went on acting like they were in charge, and the Mensheviks, just like the Democrats, second-guessed themselves at every turn. We all know how that one turned out. The Bolsheviks were committed to the idea of violent revolution, just like Sarah Palin and numerous other Republican luminaries; although I’m sure Dr. Gingrich probably wouldn’t see the irony in my observation. Ms. Sarah may find, however, that hunting well-armed, genius IQ Liberals is slightly less one-sided than shooting a moose.

So, the greater irony is that the sacred Union which so many Republicans shed their blood to preserve, led by the most iconic of Republicans, Honest Abe himself, is now just a formality to many of the Republisheviks who subscribe to Lucifer’s observation that “it is better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven”. State’s Rights have re-emerged as a serious topic of discussion among some of our more Neolithic citizens, calling into question the entire history of our nation since 1861. If the Republicans cannot prevail at the ballot box, the theory goes; they can abuse the court system to obstruct the evils of socialism, which, with even further irony, is absolutely their constitutional right to do. Alas, we all know we have the right to do things we ought not to do, but we often do them anyway, more often than not, to our regret.

So while Rick Perry, the indescribable Governor of Texas, a truly fine place, begs impotently for the Federal Government to assist him in getting his State border with Mexico under control, he speaks of secession and the glorious liberty of a sovereign nation where you can be executed for crimes that logic dictates you did not commit. As a native of the great State of Georgia, which has lately fallen back into the intellectual abyss of theocracy, unenlightened self-interest and bigotry, I can empathize with the few brave souls in Texas fighting the zombie apocalypse with little more than their idealistic commitment to human progress, and the thought of allowing these fine Americans to be brought under the sway of a despotic regime of moronic cowpokes is the only thing that keeps me from sending the Texas Independence Party a check for $20.00 with my best wishes.

Full disclosure requires that I admit I have not read the currently proposed healthcare bill in its entirety, or even in a majority of the pages, so I cannot put myself forward as an expert. I also know that the Democrats and their trial-lawyer lobby buddies have virtually ignored the very real issue of tort reform and the outrageous concept that being the victim of an unfortunate, or even negligent, accident entitles you to the status of lottery winner, but that’s another blog entirely. I do know that in a nation of conscience healthcare cannot be just another commodity to be assigned at the whim of the market, and true reform is needed. I would prefer that our dear Republican colleagues acknowledge this and bring forward some brief sketch of how they would propose to address the issue before they attack Fort Sumter.

A Casket for Aunti Em'

At right around one PM, eight-five years ago today, a rotating funnel of air and water vapor dropped from a wall cloud near Ellington, Missouri and set off on a tri-state odyssey of destruction unprecedented in recorded human history. When the storm had run its course 219 miles later, almost seven-hundred people were dead, 2000 more were injured, many seriously mangled, and 15,000 homes were destroyed. Whole towns simply disappeared beneath the 5000 foot wide roaring cyclone, emerging horrifying moments later as scenes of carnage and chaotic piles of rubble. Some never fully recovered from the devastation wrought, even decades later. This tornado was so bad, Dorothy Gale would have kissed Toto’s ass goodbye and headed for the cellar alone.

America in March of 1925 was a nation of almost 110 million citizens earning an average of about $1,300 a year. The economic collapse and Great Depression were still years away and the Twenties roared on with unemployment hovering around a structural five-percent, about the same as the illiteracy rate. Calvin Coolidge had just been elected President in his own right and sworn in, having initially assumed the Presidency when Warren Harding died from bad oysters and a weak heart in August of 1923. Coolidge crushed his Democratic opponent, John W. Davis, a one-term representative from West Virginia, who was nominated at the Democratic Convention in New York on the 103rd ballot. Ty Cobb was getting ready to smash a few more Major League records and Jack Lemon, Hal Holbrook, George Kennedy, Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah had all been born in the preceding four weeks.

March 18 dawned as a pretty normal day in the Midwest, cloudy and cool with a forecast for rain and even cooler temperatures. A cold front was on its way through the nation’s heartland, nothing unusual for the last few days before spring. Unfortunately, at the same time a high pressure system was moving north from the Gulf of Mexico pushing warm, moist air into the path of the cool air moving south. Sometime after noon, they slammed into each other somewhere around Southeastern Missouri. The warm air rose rapidly over the cooler air and as the rising columns of air hit the chilly upper level winds, they dropped their cargo of moisture and began to plunge downward. Roiling, dark clouds formed, hanging low to the ground, and as the falling air was torn between the two opposing fronts, it began to spin. Pushed along the frontal boundary by the Polar Jet Stream, the tornado took off at speeds approaching 70 miles an hour and raced towards Illinois.

In 1925 there was no Doppler radar, no 24-hour weather channel, and no warning. The storm moved so rapidly, and the devastation was so complete, there wasn’t even a chance for anyone to phone the next town over to tell them hell was out their way. The cyclone, with wind speeds approaching 300 miles per hour, overran Annapolis, Missouri destroying 90 percent of all the structures and killing four. Next was Gorham, Illinois, which was completely flattened with a loss of 37 lives. The storm then set its sights on Murphysboro, Illinois, a town of 12,000 souls. It collapsed an elementary school full of children and disintegrated forty percent of the town’s structures leaving 243 people dead. At this point, the storm was so wide that those who saw it coming couldn’t recognize it as a tornado. They stood, mouths agape, as the black wall of death descended upon them.

Next hit was Frankfort, Illinois, a mining town where most of the men were underground mining coal, and were thus perhaps the most unfortunate of all, because while they sat safely in the darkness resulting from the power outage, their wives and children were being shredded by an angry behemoth, and 127 of them died. The storm then roared into Indiana and completely erased the town of Griffin from the face of the Earth, killing 25. Its last stop was the town of Princeton Indiana, which it struck a glancing blow, only flattening twenty-five percent of the town, killing 45 people in the process. It wandered on for a few miles more before evaporating like the morning dew at exactly 4:30 PM. No tornado before or since has traveled farther, stayed on the ground longer or killed more people. If the storm had struck a more populous area, the death toll could have been astronomical. As it was, thousands of stunned survivors were left to dig through the debris that remained of their lives and mourn their beloved dead.

These days we have all sorts of technology to identify forming storms and warn those in their paths. We have satellites and planes and radar and disaster-safe communications. We have better buildings and better trauma care and cranes and rescue dogs and legions of brave first responders. We also have a greater disconnection from the arbitrary and capricious nature of life and a greater expectation that we will all die in our sleep after a long healthy life filled with accomplishment and success, but other than being fatter, better educated, more heavily medicated and slightly less racist, we are not much different from the citizens of 1925 Griffin, Indiana who saw their whole world snatched into the heavens by the very wrathful god they had beseeched for mercy at Sunday services just three days earlier. They were completely at the mercy of chance, and despite 85 years of stunning progress, so are we

Happy Birthday

Speaking of birthdays, my mother would have been 74 today had she lived. Before J. Caesar got wacked, March 15 (the Ides of March) in Rome was a day of martial festivals dedicated to the God Mars (is that redundant?). I’m not sure what festivals were held in Warwick, Georgia in 1936 to celebrate the birth of a baby girl to a store owner and his wife, but the Great Depression has even yet never really ended in South Georgia, so I can only imagine what the mood was like then.

My mother would have been nine years old when the Second World War ended. She would have been 13 when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, and she would have been 19 when Albert Einstein died. She would have been almost 29 when the March on Selma demonstrated how truly shallow much of our nation’s commitment to justice and equality was, and she would have been 32 when the Watergate was burglarized by Nixon’s clowns, just months before her death. She was 24 when I was born and I was 12 when she died. She was gone before I was old enough to think to ask her about her life and how she felt the first time she heard “Rock Around the Clock” or if she screamed when she saw “Psycho”.

She died of breast cancer and it took quite some time. She underwent several surgeries, which seemed at the time more like ritual mutilations; perhaps the doctors were Aztecs. Cobalt 60 made her hair fall out and made her tired. The creeping realization of the inevitable made her eyes anxious but her words remained strong and the conflict between the two could not be emotionally reconciled by a 12 year old mind. Towards the end, morphine made her incoherent and after her death I was forced by well-meaning adults to view her lifeless corpse, as if I needed such confirmation after having watched the life slowly leak out of her for over a year. Her grave is on a hill underneath some large oaks which do not contemplate the briefness of their existence.

It is impossible to estimate the true impact of the absence of something, but I know my life is not what it would have been had she not died so young. Perhaps she could have given me some clues about overcoming the foolishness that comprised the greater part of my youth. Perhaps she would have helped me care about things that were really important. Perhaps she would have helped me be less flawed in many ways. No one can say. Some physicists believe that the quantum structure of the universe requires all possible outcomes to be manifest in some amended version of our reality in all the infinite combinations dictated by random probability. While this is not necessarily all good news, since theoretically somewhere Hitler won the war and Disco is still king, it would mean that in some version of reality my mother is around to enjoy her 74th birthday, a privilege denied in this so much less than perfect crapshoot of a world.

Good Vibrations

Albert Einstein was born 131 years ago today in the City of Ulm in what is now the Federal Republic of Germany. In perhaps a mild irony, Ulm is also home to the tallest church in the world, rising a staggering 530 feet towards God’s heavenly seat and encompassing over 6.7 million square feet of volume. I visited Ulm as a young American soldier and have seen this magnificent human achievement dwarfing its surroundings, in much the same way that religion dwarfed science for much of humanity’s existence. I did not visit Einstein’s birthplace, since it was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in December of 1944. Construction of the great church in Ulm was begun in 1377, so it has seen its share of wars, but during the Second World War, the church went largely untouched. I wouldn’t read too much into this though, except perhaps that random chance is a viable, if emotionally unsatisfying, substitute for divine providence.

Albert Einstein’s life has been extensively chronicled by many insightful biographers and I’m sure there’s not much I can add. One of my favorite treatments is “Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain” by Michael Paterniti. It is an unorthodox exploration of Einstein’s human side and is appropriately irreverent to satisfy the contrarian in me, but whether you have ever read anything about Mr. Einstein or not, you are affected every day by the practical consequences of his thinking. While Einstein is best remembered by the average person for his Special Theory of Relativity, or E=MC2, he actually won his Nobel Prize for work on the photoelectric effect and his important contributions to the fields of fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, optics and quantum theory are universally recognized.

Perhaps the most unique thing about Albert Einstein as a physicist was his general aversion to complex mathematics. While many physicists were absorbed with the cliché blackboard full of seemingly interminable equations, Einstein would intuitively fathom the universe’s deepest secrets and leave the drudgery of mathematical proofs to others. Although it would be untrue to suggest that Einstein was a poor mathematician, he did not typically grind deductively through countless iteration of formulae, but rather inductively reasoned complex theories completely in his mind. Like the blind Kung Fu master, there was something almost supernatural about Einstein’s ability to guess what nature was up to simply through observation and contemplation.

The predictions of Einstein’s various theories continue to be verified all these years later. Most recently, astronomers have observed galaxies clustering in the manner predicted by General Relativity and General Relativity has also been utilized to confirm the mass, and therefore the existence, of Dark Matter surrounding the visible elements of galaxies. It turns out that Dark Matter may well be the predominate component of the universe, despites it elusive nature. I have my own theory that Dark Matter is comprised principally of all the missing socks and random chess pieces which have seemingly vanished into thin air throughout the years, although there is currently no empirical data to support this. The presence of wormholes, by the way, is just one of the many bizarre realities predicted by General Relativity, along with time travel and relativistic time dilation, so, as a Wormhole Repairman, I have a significant debt of gratitude to Mr. Einstein.

Einstein was something of a player and an intermittent workaholic, so his domestic relationships were sometimes less than satisfactory and many have observed that he could have been a more attentive father, so apparently, like all the rest of us, Einstein had his faults. What is interesting is that while in many ways he was so unlike most of us, he was after all just a brilliant, but flawed human. Einstein said, among other insightful things, that “the hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax”, which proves his genius for understanding both the mundane and the sublime. He enjoyed a cold beer, a shapely female form and speculating about quantized atomic vibrations, and we all know two out of three ain’t bad. Happy birthday dead genius dude, and thanks.

Kinder Spiel

I just read a brief article at Newsweek.com entitled, "Harvard Poll of Young Voters Should Worry Democrats". The gist of it is that the enthusiasm of the tide of young voters (18-29 year-olds) that propelled President Obama to his petite landslide in 2008, and the Democrats to large majorities in both houses of Congress, is waning. Recent elections in New Jersey and Virginia are suggested to be indicative of this, and the author speculates that failure to arrest this decline in youthful zest for the Democrats will spell disaster in November of this year. I suppose if "disaster" means the Democrats taking their semi-decennial electoral ass-whooping, then it's all probably true.

While I am generally somewhere to the left of Rupaul politically (not to be confused with Ron Paul), I too am losing my reverential zeal for many Democrats, and I have intermittently IN THIS VERY BLOG commented upon my reasons, which are essentially disillusion with their disorganization, cowardice, greed and lack of true principle. This is as contrasted with my disillusion with Republicans due to their arrogance, ignorance, greed and lack of true principle. It seems to me that the two major political parties in this wonderful democracy of ours have degenerated into anti-parties which are defined primarily by what they stand against rather than for. Both of the major parties in recent years, when they have expanded, have expanded almost exclusively through recruiting adherents who are frustrated with their opposition, and this is routinely accomplished through the use of legions of scientific propagandists who torture the facts into unrecognizably surreal parodies of truth, often overlooking the real practical failures of their opponents. Now, I'm not saying that we have reached the Weimar Republic level of political dysfunction in America in 2010, but we can't afford to slip much farther and have any hope of addressing the very real and very dangerous chickens that are, at this very moment, on their way home to roost.

But that's not what's grinding my gears right now. So, 18 to 29 year-olds are losing their enthusiasm for the Democrats?! Well gosh, Obama has had all of about 15 minutes to try and repair the damage of 28 years of Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush with the political equivalent of a rabid howler monkey hanging on his back, and God knows the considerably less competent Congress never gets finished wiping off the sweat of election night anxiety. How could anybody expect anything to be getting done? The Democrats are afraid of the shadow of their own farts and now the hip youngsters are going to frighten them into catatonia by getting distracted by something shiny and wandering off. This is what X-Box and I-Phone have done to this country; if you can't fix it, beat it, find it or understand it in 10 seconds, go on to something else. Having been an 18 to 29 year old myself at one point, I retain a certain visceral understanding of the fierce urgency of now, but now that I am a semi-centenarian I can also appreciate that patience truly is a virtue, and whether you are a totalitarian or an anarchist, you pretty much have to admit that implementing any program of sustainable change requires persistence. Clichés are, well, clichés, but Rome was NOT built in a day, and we didn't get into this mess overnight and we will not get out of it overnight.

The political analysis is not that younger voters are flocking to the Republican banner; in fact, the Republican Party remains about as popular as anal fissures with anyone with an IQ over 65, but because the basic Republican supporter tends to be more obsessive/compulsive than the average Democrat, they are far more likely to consistently vote, and vote consistently. So the Democratic Party has to attempt to continually fan the flames of liberal outrage to hang on to power, while all the Republicans have to do is hunker down and chant their nonsensical mantras while waiting for the Democrats to collapse under the weight of their big tent. Soulless geniuses like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove have understood this for decades now, but somehow the Democratic leadership still can't find their ass with two flashlights, GPS and a bloodhound. The emergent phenomenon of the "independent" voter confirms this, but voter independence is generally just another expression of voter shame; I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, but I am so ashamed of the lack of courageous and principled leadership in the party that now I'm an Independent. I'm sure that there are many Independents who are also simply Republicans who are ashamed of the illiteracy, bigotry and poor dental hygiene of their party leadership.

It is entirely possible that the Two-Party System which served America so well for so many years is now simply not up to the task of meeting the demands of a rapidly-changing and chaotically complex nation. In the zero-sum, politically bi-polar world of the American electoral Cold War, there is no room for heterodoxy or compromise, which means there is no room for intellectual independence, apolitical innovation or, apparently, simple courtesy. Richard Nixon's silent majority, while not the people he thought they were, really do exist, and they are the great force of moderation which has kept the two parties within the narrow confines of the parallel wagon-wheel ruts in the trail to America's manifest destiny, but we are passing out of the age of two-dimensional political topology and our nation's future course can no longer be adequately defined by terms like "liberal" and "conservative". Those constructs were reactions to a world that no longer exists and can never be reclaimed. A principled life remains the pinnacle human ideal, but dogma is a fatal liability; we are down the rabbit-hole and shit will be getting increasingly freaky from here on.

A wise man once said that the great thing about getting old is that you have less time to suffer the consequences of your mistakes. This ironically implies that caution should be a characteristic of the young, which a visit to any school, shopping mall or jail will demonstrate not to be the case. America's youth, as they toss sleeplessly in fear of diminishing job security and burgeoning national debt, must understand that political frustration cannot be addressed in the same manner they change cellular services or sexual partners; the political process cannot be abandoned or ignored; it must be reformed and refined through consistent and determined participation. There is no freedom without responsibility and there is no success without effort; these inconvenient facts have eventually beaten a modicum of wisdom into even the most hardened cranium throughout our history. So my advice to the whiny, fickle children who aspire to rule the world is quit crying and dedicate yourself to upholding the principles of our republic and drag this damn country kicking and screaming towards the promise of your birthright; otherwise, in 25 years you will be like me and so many of my contemporaries, surveying the smoldering ruin of youthful dreams and wondering what the fuck happened.

The Infield Gadfly Rule

Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game against the New York Mets on June 21, 1964. He struck out Jim Hickman, the leadoff batter, three times. Hickman, a lifetime .252 hitter, was the first Met to hit for the cycle, and later had a few good years with the Cubs, but on that June day in 1964, he was a picture of futility. Jim Bunning, it should be noted, went on to amass a total of 2,855 strikeouts and a career ERA of 3.27. He is one of only five pitchers to throw no-hitters in both leagues and he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1996. So far, so good.

After retirement from baseball, Bunning pursued a second career in politics and was elected to serve as the Representative from Kentucky's 4^th District in 1986. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1998 at the age of 67. At 67, if they can afford it, most people are thinking about slowing down and enjoying the years they have left without the pressure of deadlines or shirts with collars. By 77, many people cannot remember who played in the Super Bowl last year and a statistically significant percentage cannot remember why they are standing in the backyard at 3:00 in the morning in their underwear holding a turkey baster and a Bible. Senator Bunning is now 78 years old, which by itself does not disqualify him as an intelligent, rational person, but there is a reason that the DMV makes people over 70 come in for an actual driving test.

So recently, Senator Bunning came to the attention of the national media by virtue of his opposition to a $10 billion spending bill which would have, among other things, granted further extension of unemployment benefits to those Americans whose payments were about to expire. Senator Bunning filibustered the bill, ostensibly because it would have to be funded through borrowing. Senator Bunning has nine children (which, for purposes of full disclosure, I must confess I believe to be a criminal act of disregard for the biosphere) and 40 grandchildren, and he doesn't want them to be burdened with paying the mountain of national debt we are continually accumulating, which doesn't sound terribly monstrous as far as reasons for filibusters go. The filibuster, by the way, an interestingly idiosyncratic feature of the U.S. Senate, is apparently intended to allow a significant minority to prevent a modest majority from doing anything. Given the legislation the Senate tends to pass, this is probably not as ridiculous as it might at first seem, but what is interesting about Senator Bunning's use of the filibuster in this instance is, as Sherlock Holmes puts it, "the dog that didn't bark".

Senator Bunning has voted to approve a veritable cornucopia of spending bills in his career in the House and the Senate, although, in fairness, he has probably voted against a few as well, but I am not familiar with him being a consistent crusader against the Federal Government borrowing money. He has supported borrowing fantastical amounts of money to fund wars and things to be used in wars and he has never filibustered a bill reducing taxes because there was no associated reduction in government spending, so a reasonable person could conjecture as to why this particular bill was the one upon which Senator Bunning chose to take a stand. Senator Bunning is known to say things publically which a lot of people find offensive, often including members of his own party. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, there tends to be a relatively consistent theme of nativism and xenophobia to much of the Senator's public musing and one gets the impression he was much more comfortable with the America that existed back in his glory days with the Phillies. Maybe Senator Bunning agrees with his fellow traveler and intellectual luminary Tom Delay (currently awaiting trial on money laundering charges in Texas) that unemployment benefits just make people enjoy being unemployed, or perhaps the Senator has just never been unemployed and doesn't have a frame of reference for the issue, or maybe he thinks it is not the province of government to protect citizens from destitution during times of economic peril; who knows.

Anyway, whether you support or oppose Senator Bunning's position on the recent spending bill, the issue of our nation's profligate spending and incomprehensibly gargantuan debt is real and critical. We currently are in the position of contemplating a lit fuse while sitting astride an explosive heap of financial liability that will surely blast America back to 1929, if not a few thousand years farther, and our elected representatives do nothing but bicker incessantly over changes that only modestly address a small percentage of the real problems. Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neal are the principle architects of this idiotic system, may they both languish in hell, as they forged a pact with the Devil to fund an unprecedented projection of American military power throughout the world at the same time they expanded the social safety net to encompass broader and broader segments of society and gave tax breaks to everyone who could possibly influence a minimum of 76 votes in any election. They did succeed in frightening the Soviet Union so badly that it peed its pants and had to quit the game, and they did spend America out of what was at the time the most severe recession since the 1930's, but they established the pattern of denying the day of reckoning and making it easy on the voters by relieving them of the responsibility of choosing between conflicting priorities, thereby guaranteeing future failures, like the fine kettle of fish we are in now.

Of course, as always, the fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our dead heroes, but in ourselves. We are in charge now, and Senator Bunning's non sequitur filibuster ad hoc assault on the unemployed victims of failed government regulation and Wall Street's orgy of greed is not the answer. Neither is endless war, tax cuts for the super rich, welfare for the banks, nor the vague, unarticulated sense that government is supposed to protect us from all ill fortune from the cradle to the grave. Personally, I would prefer my tax dollars go to feeding poor children, repairing national infrastructure, educating citizens of all ages, basic scientific research, space exploration and environmental preservation, but I am willing to consider supporting any reasonable compromise that allows America to have a continued positive role in world affairs, preserves the dignity of human life in our country and ensures that my toilet keeps flushing. I will work with the Tea Party Party, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, party apparatchiks and even that disgusting bastard Joe Lieberman to find a solution, but hypocrisy and delusion have to be off the table. We are not going to hate and blame our way out of the consequences of our own selfishness and irresponsibility. Senator Bunning can huff and puff all he wants, but intermittently tilting at unassailable windmills is not a coherent program; we need some adults in charge in the nation's Capitol.

Thomas Jefferson was a complex fellow, although admittedly he didn't live in the same world we inhabit now, but I surmise he was a pretty bright dude, and perhaps, of all the Founding Fathers, he was the closest to the voice of modern America that emerges when we allow ourselves a moment of quiet reflection with the TV turned off. Jefferson said that "the public revenues are a portion that each subject gives of his property in order to secure or enjoy the remainder. To fix their revenues in a proper manner, regard should be had both to the necessities of the state and to those of the subject. The real wants of the people ought never to give way to the imaginary wants of the state". I don't think that the real wants of the people have been addressed in this nation for quite some time, perhaps because we have allowed ourselves to lose focus, to be ruled by temporary emotion, or maybe because we are cynical or apathetic, or both, but I don't think this country wants war, racism, high infant mortality, and crappy sewer lines. We do want people to mind their own damn business, we want a sense of security for ourselves and optimism for the prospects of our children, clean drinking water and polite public discourse, and yes, extended unemployment benefits, because we care about our friends, families and fellow citizens. We also want to get out of hock to the Chinese and have a few dollars put away for a rainy day, and I think we are willing to drive smaller cars, open a savings account (at the credit union), recycle, tear up the charge cards and eat more meals at home while listening to our families drone on and on around the dinner table if that's what it takes to set things right. We just have to find some way to choose new leadership without legitimizing extremism and inviting recrimination, and I'll wager there will be a lot of hurt feelings before it's over. The people of Kentucky can certainly start by sending Senator Bunning to the showers and bringing in a closer. The self-righteous hypocrite pitch is often ineffective in these late innings.

Bubble, Bubble Toil and Trouble

It was an age of ignorance and superstition, and misfortunes and occurrences that people didn’t understand were attributed to demons and spirits. Political and religious leaders pandered to these irrational fears and other equally cynical and manipulative people took advantage of the widespread ignorance by inciting hysteria and denouncing their personal enemies. The weak, the foolish and those who were simply “different” were victims of emotional and physical abuse, and even murder at the hands of the authorities. When, you ask? Where, you inquire? I know your first guess would be Texas in 2009, but actually I am referring to Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692. The future bastion of American Liberalism was going on a witch hunt.

On March 1st, exactly 318 years ago today, Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, an Indian slave from Barbados, were charged with practicing witchcraft. Not surprisingly, accounts from the time indicate Sarah Goode was more or less homeless and supported herself by begging, an unpopular career choice amongst the Puritans. Sarah Osborne was a single woman who didn’t go to church and had an “inappropriate” relationship with her indentured servant and Tibuta was, well, Tibuta. If a bunch of stuffy white folks are going to find fault with somebody, and your name is Tibuta, you are at the top of the list. Tibuta was an Indian slave from Barbados, so she probably didn’t find the witchcraft hysteria too strange.

Ultimately, almost 150 people were brought before the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which are apparently 17th Century terms for kangaroo, and some other equally competent courts. Testimony consisted principally of “bewitched” adolescent females appearing before the court and recounting having fits and hallucinations, or actually having fits and hallucinations, which is pretty convenient as far as eye-witness testimony goes. During these episodes the “victims” claim to have seen images of those that had afflicted them; this was termed “spectral evidence”. If you are black in America, you may be familiar with this legal concept. Fortunately, clear-headed people were involved in the process and so there was much important debate as to whether the Devil might actually try to trick someone (heaven forbid!) by showing them the wrong person during their afflicted state. Eventually the astute legal minds concluded that using one’s image without permission would be some sort of copyright infringement, and the Devil certainly wouldn’t stoop to that. Other key evidence included the accused being blindfolded and brought into contact with a group of alleged victims. If any of the victims reacted hysterically when touched, then the accused was certainly guilty. There was also the “witch cake”, which made as much sense as Deepak Chopra does now, and therefore will not be discussed. Needless to say, some pretty high evidentiary standards were used, which is certainly reasonable given that these were capital crimes.

On June 10, 1692, Bridget Bishop, a sixty-something widow, was hanged, the first of the 19 people to lose their lives for their various evil activities. While Bridget Bishop’s life is not well documented, her indignant attitude during her trial was, and this counted heavily against her, since it wasn’t proper for women to be indignant. Also, she bewitched John Bly’s pig following an altercation, so I guess she deserved what she got. Five more women were hanged on June 19, and on August 19, five more persons were hanged, four of them male. Most of the males were primarily guilty of defending the honor of their wives, daughters or other relatives and were, therefore, in league with the witches. All in all, fourteen women and five men were executed, 18 by hanging and one by being crushed with rocks. In October of 1682, the Governor of the Massachusetts Colony dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer and replaced it with a court that actually utilized something reminiscent of proper legal process. There were no further executions and all of the accused still in custody were either pardoned or released without trial.

Having been bewitched myself a few times, I can empathize with my distant cousins in Salem Village. Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be any reason for stuff, and somebody’s got to be responsible, right? There are a number of theories about how the train got off the tracks in Salem, including poisoning by the ergot fungus, which is a fungus that infests grains and may turn up in bread. The ergot fungus has elements with a similar chemical composition to LSD, which will surely make you see bewitched pigs, among other assorted peculiar animals, but most analysts blame the debilitating mix of colonial hardship, extreme religious dogma and sexual repression in the Puritan social order for adolescent female hysteria, adult male frustration and a generally crappy attitude on the part of the majority of the community. Sounds reasonable to me.

Anyway, we have made some progress since 1692. For the most part, women are no longer expected to be subservient to men, although true gender equity still eludes us to some extent. The sexual nature of the human female is by most no longer seen as a thing to fear (although frankly some other aspects of the female character still frighten the shit out me). Religious extremism is no longer nearly as popular as it used to be and even demons and spirits have largely been reduced to marginality, except perhaps in Texas. The court system, as over-burdened and dysfunctional as it can be, at least tries to implement some standard rational process and protect the rights of the accused and religious authorities no longer participate directly in the justice system. So, I’m not sure to what extent we can indentify valid parallels between the society that made the Salem witch trials possible and our own, but I can’t help but feel that, as Bridget Bishop stood exhausted and terrified on the gallows and looked out over the crowd assembled to be entertained by her violent dangling, she saw the same faces, blank or enraged, spiteful or ashamed, curious or excited that we might see in any crowd on any street in America today.