(Warning: Plentiful Foul Language and Sexual References Ahead. I Mean It!)
I must applaud the Republicans in Congress for once again defending the freedoms of the American people against the Trotskyite Democratic menace. This time they have put aside petty political considerations and their ritual pandering to ignorance and hate and courageously sustained a filibuster in the Senate, effectively preventing a vote to determine the majority stance on the clearly immoral attempt to repeal the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” accommodation with the Devil for Gays serving in the military. God bless these stalwart defenders of truth and virtue. What the fuck is a filibuster anyway? It sounds like it should be a condom brand. “The New Filibuster Magnum XXL, For the Manliest Among You!” That would be the Republicans for sure.
I have to confess that I don’t really understand the Gay thing, but I don’t understand Calculus or covalent bonding either. Anyway, this lack of understanding is principally why I believe sexual orientation is largely genetic, because you can’t have that sort of attraction if you aren’t made that way, but whether it’s choice, chance, or some combination of the two, how can private sexual behavior have any bearing on whether you can serve in the United States military? You can certainly be a backwards-ass motherfucker and serve in the Senate; I don’t see how a little anal intercourse or some occasional all-girl scissoring clitorama action would make you unfit to go to foreign countries and kill people in the name of freedom and justice. This is the kind of crap that keeps me from ever considering voting for a Republican. I am well aware of the intellectual and accounting flaws of the Democratic Party, but I would truly rather live in an economically dysfunctional, bankrupt shithole of a country than labor under the oppressive theocracy of people who don’t understand what getting government out of the private lives of its citizens really means and who attempt to pervert the wisdom of Christianity into some sort of allegory of juvenile male embarrassment at anything that makes them uncomfortable. The ironic fact here is that Mitch McConnell is a way bigger cocksucker than Barney Frank ever considered being. The sick hypocrisy of these “Christian” “patriots” makes me want to puke, really. I’m already heaving.
Ok, so you can’t be Gay and serve in the military. Wait, I’m sorry; I misstated the policy. You can’t be Gay and tell the truth and serve in the military. I suppose it’s ok to be a Gay liar and serve, whatever advantage that may bestow on the nation. What’s next? You can’t admit you’re Gay and vote? If you admit you’re Gay, you can’t be a hairdresser? (Ouch) Where does it stop? You can’t serve if you have a leather fetish? You haven’t had heterosexual contact in the last two years, so you’re out? What is up with this nation’s fascination with who’s doing who? I just don’t get it. We are trying to fight half a dozen wars of world domination in God-forsaken places that no American would visit for 15 minutes without a tour-guide, a tank and air cover, and we are turning away patriotic Gays who weirdly enough want to serve in the military at a time of pointless and seemingly endless war. Who comes up with this nonsense?
Here are the facts as I personally know them. There are Gays in the military right now. I was in the Army in the late 70’s and there were known Gays serving right alongside the rest of us, male and female. Us guys knew there were some girls you shouldn’t waste your vodka on unless you wanted help tuning up your Jeep, and there were guys clearly queerer than Malaysian money cleaning their rifles just like the rest of us. Now that I think about it, it is suspicious that the high command never noticed that those rifles were a bit TOO clean. Anyway, nobody cared, except the usual handful of maladjusted simian homophobes and assorted drowned-in-the-blood-of-Jesus types, and that one guy who pined away for the cute, chubby Mexican-American lesbian girl with the spider tattoo; I felt bad for him. Otherwise, Communism was defeated in short order and nobody was turned any more perverted than they already were to start with.
None of the arguments that anyone makes for preventing Gays from openly serving in the military make any sense, unless you are pursuing the implementation of your religious principles with my tax money, in which case you can go fuck yourself. Let’s just let all the Gays serving keep it on the down low so the homophobes have to suspect that everyone in the shower is eying their Johnson. Let’s accommodate in our soldiers the very irrational fear and illogical hatred that we are fighting to eradicate from the ass ends of the Earth. Let’s think like the Taliban, act like the Taliban and reap the benefits of a Taliban controlled society for ourselves. All John Boehner needs is a turban, four wives in shuttlecock burqas and an eye patch and he can compete in the Mullah Omar be-alike contest. Thomas Jefferson was probably too busy sneaking down the alley with Sally to worry about shit like this, but I don’t think he would be on board, and you now fucking-aye that Ben Franklin would not party with the Republican Party.
We Americans enjoy the hard-won right to express our opinions and participate in our own governance, and the common defense; well, most of us anyway. I am willing to bet that there were some queer sons-of-bitches on the beaches in Normandy, although they probably had to hide who they truly were from just about everybody and perhaps even died there as emotional ciphers. There were probably also some desperately wanting-to-be-flaming faggots on both sides of the line at Chickamauga, where the creeks ran red with blood. With all the help the French gave us, you know there was some of that love that didn’t even know it couldn’t speak its name trailing around with the Continental Army. The fact is, Gay people are just people; people, who have participated in the life of this country since the very beginning and have paid for freedom with their blood, sweat and tears, and their very lives, just like the rest of us. Fuck you Mitch McConnell, and the horse you rode in on.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The Basics of American Electoral Process
I used to think a tea party involved a little girl sitting around a table with dolls and stuffed animals engaging in a fantasy ritual which involved tiny plastic teapots and a childlike suspension of rational understanding in favor of the excitement of the impossible. Turns out I was right all along. Recent primary election results in several of the fine states of this wonderful Union have confirmed that when Mommy and Daddy fight, or a family member is very ill, or a big dog frightens you, a retreat into comfortable fantasy is the most psychologically convenient course of action for people who don’t understand the world and feel weak and helpless in the face of its powerful and mysterious forces.
Fear is one of the most potent of human motivators, competing for primacy with hope, love and the possibility of gain. In 2008, the majority of citizens who bothered to vote were principally motivated by hope, the hope that there could really be a change in the slow decline of America’s economic and moral significance and change to the selfishly poisonous political processes which make addressing the nation’s real problems impossible. We took a chance on a charismatic but completely untested young fellow from Illinois and gave him majorities in both Houses of Congress with which to implement the desired change. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama turned out to be a much more charismatic and decisive campaigner than chief executive and his allies in congress consistently played one of the main roles from “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken”, and it wasn’t “The Ghost”. The net result is that, despite some significant positive legislative accomplishments, the changes that American Progressives (i.e. Liberals, hippies and Buddhists) were hoping for, have not materialized and are, in fact, not even on the horizon.
I’m not going to take the time to go down the extensive list of the things I thought President Obama was going to try to do which he hasn’t. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and not call them promises, but nonetheless we are still at war, still spying on our own citizens, still denying all those unfathomably gay people out there an equal right to participate as full citizens of this great nation, still not focusing on investments in education and research, and we still haven’t freed the Federal Government from the stranglehold of corporate lobbyists and the corrosive impact of corporate cash in the electoral process. I suppose Mr. Obama can’t really resolve all these issues by himself, but I don’t hear him even talking about them anymore. He seems to have lost the fire. I’m still mad as hell, and he isn’t.
So back to the fear thing. The question we are currently faced with is how to conduct a comprehensive search for a hero while we are busy circling the drain. I have come to understand the anger and frustration that a lot of Americans are feeling, and displaying, including our fine Tea Party affiliated citizens. I suppose many people who support “Tea Party” candidates are decent, honest and hardworking Americans who have simply lost faith in the standard political choices, although I remain unfortunately convinced that the majority are just born again racists or failed artists, but there can be no doubt that there is a genuine sense of fear among most Americans about what the future holds, and rightly so. We are facing a list of ills that rival the Great Unpleasantness of 1861 or the Nippon Nastiness of 1941, but we now have the additional bonus of the least competent national leadership of any stripe in 10 generations and the whiniest and most self-absorbed populace of any nation since France became a country.
I like Mr. Obama’s analogy of the Republicans being the ones who drove the car into the ditch. Indeed they drove it through the ditch, out the other side and into the forest striking several trees and ejecting all the passengers before plunging into the abandoned quarry and sinking 186 feet into the murky, chartreuse water. No way I want those freaks driving again, but the Democrats are like the group of strapping, able-bodied eco-tourists who witnessed the whole thing and are just standing around plaintively whining “please, won’t someone please do something!?” Obama, being the leader, just paces back and forth mumbling to himself and you can only catch snatches of “hope”, “change”, “new paradigm” and “shit” as he meanders around. The Tea Partiers, my favorite analogy villains, are the inbred country cousins who are slowly shambling out of the woods to sodomize and eat the corpses. Lacking a fully developed forebrain, they claim to be Republicans, but they actually eat flesh instead of just sucking blood. This ain’t no way to run a superpower.
So here comes Election 2010, the year of fear. Christine O’Donnell is courting the anti-masturbation vote, which I would never previously have considered to be much of a strategy, but maybe there is something about Delaware that I don’t know. In Nevada, Sharon Angle has done everything but put out a contract on Harry Reid’s life, worthless toad though he may be, and across the nation money flows into the Republican coffers in anticipation of a return to Lady Liberty getting molested and the rich getting richer. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and probably again until I can come up with a new idea; we are so very fucked.
If there were 535 Democrats in the Congress, they couldn’t pass gas. The only glue that holds the Democrats together is their fear of the Republicans. Democrats have the organizational skills of a rabid howler monkey and the foresight of a horny teenager. Democrats cannot save themselves, let alone the country. The good news is that we have the Republicans. The Republicans are a foul cesspool of self-serving hypocrisy, messianic delusion and good, old fashioned Southern dumbassedness. You might as well drop your children off at a halfway house for convicted pedophiles as to put the Republicans in charge of anything. There is the so called “Tea Party”, I guess, which is really just the armed militia of the Republican Party, but they have the added advantage of humorously sanctimonious “Constitutionalism” and no sense of shame. I’m pretty sure Ben Franklin would eat his wig before he would debate topiary with Sarah Palin, but Ben had an eye for the ladies and would probably have stove-piped her ass until she spoke Latin. I love this country. I can’t wait for November.
Fear is one of the most potent of human motivators, competing for primacy with hope, love and the possibility of gain. In 2008, the majority of citizens who bothered to vote were principally motivated by hope, the hope that there could really be a change in the slow decline of America’s economic and moral significance and change to the selfishly poisonous political processes which make addressing the nation’s real problems impossible. We took a chance on a charismatic but completely untested young fellow from Illinois and gave him majorities in both Houses of Congress with which to implement the desired change. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama turned out to be a much more charismatic and decisive campaigner than chief executive and his allies in congress consistently played one of the main roles from “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken”, and it wasn’t “The Ghost”. The net result is that, despite some significant positive legislative accomplishments, the changes that American Progressives (i.e. Liberals, hippies and Buddhists) were hoping for, have not materialized and are, in fact, not even on the horizon.
I’m not going to take the time to go down the extensive list of the things I thought President Obama was going to try to do which he hasn’t. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and not call them promises, but nonetheless we are still at war, still spying on our own citizens, still denying all those unfathomably gay people out there an equal right to participate as full citizens of this great nation, still not focusing on investments in education and research, and we still haven’t freed the Federal Government from the stranglehold of corporate lobbyists and the corrosive impact of corporate cash in the electoral process. I suppose Mr. Obama can’t really resolve all these issues by himself, but I don’t hear him even talking about them anymore. He seems to have lost the fire. I’m still mad as hell, and he isn’t.
So back to the fear thing. The question we are currently faced with is how to conduct a comprehensive search for a hero while we are busy circling the drain. I have come to understand the anger and frustration that a lot of Americans are feeling, and displaying, including our fine Tea Party affiliated citizens. I suppose many people who support “Tea Party” candidates are decent, honest and hardworking Americans who have simply lost faith in the standard political choices, although I remain unfortunately convinced that the majority are just born again racists or failed artists, but there can be no doubt that there is a genuine sense of fear among most Americans about what the future holds, and rightly so. We are facing a list of ills that rival the Great Unpleasantness of 1861 or the Nippon Nastiness of 1941, but we now have the additional bonus of the least competent national leadership of any stripe in 10 generations and the whiniest and most self-absorbed populace of any nation since France became a country.
I like Mr. Obama’s analogy of the Republicans being the ones who drove the car into the ditch. Indeed they drove it through the ditch, out the other side and into the forest striking several trees and ejecting all the passengers before plunging into the abandoned quarry and sinking 186 feet into the murky, chartreuse water. No way I want those freaks driving again, but the Democrats are like the group of strapping, able-bodied eco-tourists who witnessed the whole thing and are just standing around plaintively whining “please, won’t someone please do something!?” Obama, being the leader, just paces back and forth mumbling to himself and you can only catch snatches of “hope”, “change”, “new paradigm” and “shit” as he meanders around. The Tea Partiers, my favorite analogy villains, are the inbred country cousins who are slowly shambling out of the woods to sodomize and eat the corpses. Lacking a fully developed forebrain, they claim to be Republicans, but they actually eat flesh instead of just sucking blood. This ain’t no way to run a superpower.
So here comes Election 2010, the year of fear. Christine O’Donnell is courting the anti-masturbation vote, which I would never previously have considered to be much of a strategy, but maybe there is something about Delaware that I don’t know. In Nevada, Sharon Angle has done everything but put out a contract on Harry Reid’s life, worthless toad though he may be, and across the nation money flows into the Republican coffers in anticipation of a return to Lady Liberty getting molested and the rich getting richer. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and probably again until I can come up with a new idea; we are so very fucked.
If there were 535 Democrats in the Congress, they couldn’t pass gas. The only glue that holds the Democrats together is their fear of the Republicans. Democrats have the organizational skills of a rabid howler monkey and the foresight of a horny teenager. Democrats cannot save themselves, let alone the country. The good news is that we have the Republicans. The Republicans are a foul cesspool of self-serving hypocrisy, messianic delusion and good, old fashioned Southern dumbassedness. You might as well drop your children off at a halfway house for convicted pedophiles as to put the Republicans in charge of anything. There is the so called “Tea Party”, I guess, which is really just the armed militia of the Republican Party, but they have the added advantage of humorously sanctimonious “Constitutionalism” and no sense of shame. I’m pretty sure Ben Franklin would eat his wig before he would debate topiary with Sarah Palin, but Ben had an eye for the ladies and would probably have stove-piped her ass until she spoke Latin. I love this country. I can’t wait for November.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
The Book of Fire, Chapter One; Verse One
The Reverend Terry Jones ironically shares a name with another modern surrealist, the Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, the man who directed “Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life”, a movie the Reverend Terry Jones could clearly benefit from viewing. I point this out simply to avoid any confusion on the part of readers who may appreciate the absurdist humor in the self-indulgent clown show of Burn-a-Koran Day being brought to us by the good people at the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. The right Reverend Jones, a man with a history of Messianic delusions, wants some attention and clearly knows how to get it, and the world, including this humble Wormhole Repairman, has certainly consented to indulge him.
I have sometimes been accused of being a cynic, principally I think, because of my predilection for pointing out the logical inconsistencies and contradictions that are so prevalent in human actions. In all fairness, I can appreciate the irony in much of my own behavior, so I don’t think it would be too hypocritical to suggest that the good Reverend is a douchebag, hayseed, barleycorn punk with a bad Doc Holiday mustache. I’m not going to suggest this though, because name calling is immature and counter-productive and beneath the dignity of substantive debate on issues of importance. Suffice it to say that I have significant disagreements with the implied positions of Reverend Jones with respect to the role of religion in human affairs and the public priorities of decent and thoughtful people.
Here at the Love World Outrage Center in Clearwater, Florida, we have done some checking on facts and stuff and have concluded that an irony alert should be issued. Reverend Jones has stated that his justification for creating all this uproar is to defend the “truth” of Christianity against anti-Christian theologies such as Islam; apparently Islam does not recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ and is therefore a dirty lie. The Reverend will have to be a busy man, since two-thirds of the population of the world does not share his beliefs and Christianity is actually down a percentage point or two over the past 110 years. The irony, however, is that you will not see a Burn-a-Bible Day in Saudi Arabia anytime soon, because Islam prohibits disrespect to the Holy texts of Christianity and Judaism. In the Islamic view of things, Jesus is a Holy Prophet born of a virgin and the Bible is the divinely revealed wisdom of God, albeit slightly adulterated by the impure hands of man. When the Prophet Mohammad took his famous night trip to Jerusalem on the flying donkey and ascended briefly into heaven, the last dude he encountered before coming into the presence of God Almighty was Jesus, indicating a special place of honor for the Christ. Isa, the Arabic transliteration of Jesus, is a relatively common boy’s name in the Islamic world. Why, then, Reverend Jones chooses to insult his theological cousins when there are all sorts of real pagans out there is a mystery to me.
Anyway, book burning, like witch burning, is an old trick which is useful precisely because of the smoke it produces. Motives and facts are obscured by a gaseous cloud and demons are conjured from the everyday diversity of human thought. The Nazis burned books in huge ceremonies, metaphorically cleansing the national soul of impure ideas. As it turns out, the books burned were apparently mostly copies of “The History of the Napoleonic Wars”, leaving Mr. Hitler with a decided lack of strategic understanding. This is what book burning does; it makes us dumber. There are a lot of books that one might consider useless, or even dangerous, but knowledge of the useless and the dangerous is also knowledge that may be useful and beneficial. We cannot erase, deny or destroy any significant element of the history of the world by burning anything; even the ashes will tell a tale worth hearing. Reverend Jones and his followers have apparently not learned that truth cannot be created out of destruction any more than I can renovate my house by burning my neighbor’s house down.
Reverend Jones would do well to look to America’s past to understand his failure as both a sentient being and a man of God. Many of our forefathers knew what it was like to be persecuted for their religious beliefs and they abandoned the nations of their birth by the thousands to come to a new land and find a new hope. What we must all understand is that they didn’t come seeking a land of theological diversity and religious tolerance, they came seeking a vacant wasteland where through faith and determination they could carve out an island of religious purity that met their theological preferences. This observation is not at all un-American slander, but rather essential American pragmatism; everybody knows that you cannot compromise eternal truth and the only way people with different views on truth can peacefully coexist is if theology is kept out of the public dialog and everybody minds their own damned business. It is our social contract that we grant the functional equivalent of tolerance and respect to the beliefs of others only and solely in exchange for the same consideration. We are not obligated to try to understand or empathize with anyone’s beliefs, although we may if we choose; we are simply bound to be at least reasonably indifferent when we meet on the street.
This poorly understood fact is ironically one of America’s great strengths; by allowing us to be inflexible and uncompromising within the context of a flexible compromise, we are able to sustain both religious dogmatism and secular pluralism in a single national framework. This allows people of all religions to engage in commerce, recreation and even have sex with each other without having to feel like we have abandoned our primitive and irrational divinely revealed truths. Some might waggishly observe that this amounts to gross self-deception, but in the context of human imperfection, a certain amount of self-deception is necessary for moral progress to be made; one of the fundamental aims of monotheism is to convince us that we are not animals so that we will quit acting like animals. The great religious teachers, Zoroaster, Mohammad, Jesus and the Buddha, to name a few, all hypnotized their followers with astounding acts of character and regaled them with tales of the miraculous in order to instill a belief that there are human possibilities beyond the socio-biological imperatives of survival-unto-procreation and that the wretched, morally ambiguous practice of daily life was not the only course a soul might follow. The fact that application of these religious principles has generally proven to be as flawed and contradictory as people themselves should be of no surprise to anyone.
So the fact is that Reverend Jones is fucking up our sweet deal with his idiotic anti-Islam crusade. Religion is the atomic bomb of social conflict and there is no cure for this on even the distant horizon and all crap like Koran burning does is stir up trouble for decent people of all beliefs. Reverend Jones may think Islam is a tool of the Devil, but good and evil can only be discerned to the extent that we are willing to look honestly and objectively at our own moral failures; without this perspective such terms are meaningless and the flames of a billion Korans will not illuminate the selfish conceit of the absolute certainty of a small, fearful mind. Religion is often a trap for the ignorant and sometimes a luxury for the wise, but I am sure that the Holy Koran is equally as holy as anything else in this world, even if that is the supreme example of damning with faint praise. I, for one, welcome my Muslim brothers to the great debate, the Gordian knot which is freedom, and ask only that they hate and ridicule in private, like the rest of us patriotic Americans are sworn to do; otherwise we will ultimately have to invite the good Reverend to pull up a chunk of rubble, have a seat and throw another Koran on the fire, because the nuclear winter of the human soul is bound to be lengthy and harsh.
I have sometimes been accused of being a cynic, principally I think, because of my predilection for pointing out the logical inconsistencies and contradictions that are so prevalent in human actions. In all fairness, I can appreciate the irony in much of my own behavior, so I don’t think it would be too hypocritical to suggest that the good Reverend is a douchebag, hayseed, barleycorn punk with a bad Doc Holiday mustache. I’m not going to suggest this though, because name calling is immature and counter-productive and beneath the dignity of substantive debate on issues of importance. Suffice it to say that I have significant disagreements with the implied positions of Reverend Jones with respect to the role of religion in human affairs and the public priorities of decent and thoughtful people.
Here at the Love World Outrage Center in Clearwater, Florida, we have done some checking on facts and stuff and have concluded that an irony alert should be issued. Reverend Jones has stated that his justification for creating all this uproar is to defend the “truth” of Christianity against anti-Christian theologies such as Islam; apparently Islam does not recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ and is therefore a dirty lie. The Reverend will have to be a busy man, since two-thirds of the population of the world does not share his beliefs and Christianity is actually down a percentage point or two over the past 110 years. The irony, however, is that you will not see a Burn-a-Bible Day in Saudi Arabia anytime soon, because Islam prohibits disrespect to the Holy texts of Christianity and Judaism. In the Islamic view of things, Jesus is a Holy Prophet born of a virgin and the Bible is the divinely revealed wisdom of God, albeit slightly adulterated by the impure hands of man. When the Prophet Mohammad took his famous night trip to Jerusalem on the flying donkey and ascended briefly into heaven, the last dude he encountered before coming into the presence of God Almighty was Jesus, indicating a special place of honor for the Christ. Isa, the Arabic transliteration of Jesus, is a relatively common boy’s name in the Islamic world. Why, then, Reverend Jones chooses to insult his theological cousins when there are all sorts of real pagans out there is a mystery to me.
Anyway, book burning, like witch burning, is an old trick which is useful precisely because of the smoke it produces. Motives and facts are obscured by a gaseous cloud and demons are conjured from the everyday diversity of human thought. The Nazis burned books in huge ceremonies, metaphorically cleansing the national soul of impure ideas. As it turns out, the books burned were apparently mostly copies of “The History of the Napoleonic Wars”, leaving Mr. Hitler with a decided lack of strategic understanding. This is what book burning does; it makes us dumber. There are a lot of books that one might consider useless, or even dangerous, but knowledge of the useless and the dangerous is also knowledge that may be useful and beneficial. We cannot erase, deny or destroy any significant element of the history of the world by burning anything; even the ashes will tell a tale worth hearing. Reverend Jones and his followers have apparently not learned that truth cannot be created out of destruction any more than I can renovate my house by burning my neighbor’s house down.
Reverend Jones would do well to look to America’s past to understand his failure as both a sentient being and a man of God. Many of our forefathers knew what it was like to be persecuted for their religious beliefs and they abandoned the nations of their birth by the thousands to come to a new land and find a new hope. What we must all understand is that they didn’t come seeking a land of theological diversity and religious tolerance, they came seeking a vacant wasteland where through faith and determination they could carve out an island of religious purity that met their theological preferences. This observation is not at all un-American slander, but rather essential American pragmatism; everybody knows that you cannot compromise eternal truth and the only way people with different views on truth can peacefully coexist is if theology is kept out of the public dialog and everybody minds their own damned business. It is our social contract that we grant the functional equivalent of tolerance and respect to the beliefs of others only and solely in exchange for the same consideration. We are not obligated to try to understand or empathize with anyone’s beliefs, although we may if we choose; we are simply bound to be at least reasonably indifferent when we meet on the street.
This poorly understood fact is ironically one of America’s great strengths; by allowing us to be inflexible and uncompromising within the context of a flexible compromise, we are able to sustain both religious dogmatism and secular pluralism in a single national framework. This allows people of all religions to engage in commerce, recreation and even have sex with each other without having to feel like we have abandoned our primitive and irrational divinely revealed truths. Some might waggishly observe that this amounts to gross self-deception, but in the context of human imperfection, a certain amount of self-deception is necessary for moral progress to be made; one of the fundamental aims of monotheism is to convince us that we are not animals so that we will quit acting like animals. The great religious teachers, Zoroaster, Mohammad, Jesus and the Buddha, to name a few, all hypnotized their followers with astounding acts of character and regaled them with tales of the miraculous in order to instill a belief that there are human possibilities beyond the socio-biological imperatives of survival-unto-procreation and that the wretched, morally ambiguous practice of daily life was not the only course a soul might follow. The fact that application of these religious principles has generally proven to be as flawed and contradictory as people themselves should be of no surprise to anyone.
So the fact is that Reverend Jones is fucking up our sweet deal with his idiotic anti-Islam crusade. Religion is the atomic bomb of social conflict and there is no cure for this on even the distant horizon and all crap like Koran burning does is stir up trouble for decent people of all beliefs. Reverend Jones may think Islam is a tool of the Devil, but good and evil can only be discerned to the extent that we are willing to look honestly and objectively at our own moral failures; without this perspective such terms are meaningless and the flames of a billion Korans will not illuminate the selfish conceit of the absolute certainty of a small, fearful mind. Religion is often a trap for the ignorant and sometimes a luxury for the wise, but I am sure that the Holy Koran is equally as holy as anything else in this world, even if that is the supreme example of damning with faint praise. I, for one, welcome my Muslim brothers to the great debate, the Gordian knot which is freedom, and ask only that they hate and ridicule in private, like the rest of us patriotic Americans are sworn to do; otherwise we will ultimately have to invite the good Reverend to pull up a chunk of rubble, have a seat and throw another Koran on the fire, because the nuclear winter of the human soul is bound to be lengthy and harsh.
The Book of Fire, Chapter One; Verse One
The Reverend Terry Jones ironically shares a name with another modern surrealist, the Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, the man who directed “Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life”, a movie the Reverend Terry Jones could clearly benefit from viewing. I point this out simply to avoid any confusion on the part of readers who may appreciate the absurdist humor in the self-indulgent clown show of Burn-a-Koran Day being brought to us by the good people at the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. The right Reverend Jones, a man with a history of Messianic delusions, wants some attention and clearly knows how to get it, and the world, including this humble Wormhole Repairman, has certainly consented to indulge him.
I have sometimes been accused of being a cynic, principally I think, because of my predilection for pointing out the logical inconsistencies and contradictions that are so prevalent in human actions. In all fairness, I can appreciate the irony in much of my own behavior, so I don’t think it would be too hypocritical to suggest that the good Reverend is a douchebag, hayseed, barleycorn punk with a bad Doc Holiday mustache. I’m not going to suggest this though, because name calling is immature and counter-productive and beneath the dignity of substantive debate on issues of importance. Suffice it to say that I have significant disagreements with the implied positions of Reverend Jones with respect to the role of religion in human affairs and the public priorities of decent and thoughtful people.
Here at the Love World Outrage Center in Clearwater, Florida, we have done some checking on facts and stuff and have concluded that an irony alert should be issued. Reverend Jones has stated that his justification for creating all this uproar is to defend the “truth” of Christianity against anti-Christian theologies such as Islam; apparently Islam does not recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ and is therefore a dirty lie. The Reverend will have to be a busy man, since two-thirds of the population of the world does not share his beliefs and Christianity is actually down a percentage point or two over the past 110 years. The irony, however, is that you will not see a Burn-a-Bible Day in Saudi Arabia anytime soon, because Islam prohibits disrespect to the Holy texts of Christianity and Judaism. In the Islamic view of things, Jesus is a Holy Prophet born of a virgin and the Bible is the divinely revealed wisdom of God, albeit slightly adulterated by the impure hands of man. When the Prophet Mohammad took his famous night trip to Jerusalem on the flying donkey and ascended briefly into heaven, the last dude he encountered before coming into the presence of God Almighty was Jesus, indicating a special place of honor for the Christ. Isa, the Arabic transliteration of Jesus, is a relatively common boy’s name in the Islamic world. Why, then, Reverend Jones chooses to insult his theological cousins when there are all sorts of real pagans out there is a mystery to me.
Anyway, book burning, like witch burning, is an old trick which is useful precisely because of the smoke it produces. Motives and facts are obscured by a gaseous cloud and demons are conjured from the everyday diversity of human thought. The Nazis burned books in huge ceremonies, metaphorically cleansing the national soul of impure ideas. As it turns out, the books burned were apparently mostly copies of “The History of the Napoleonic Wars”, leaving Mr. Hitler with a decided lack of strategic understanding. This is what book burning does; it makes us dumber. There are a lot of books that one might consider useless, or even dangerous, but knowledge of the useless and the dangerous is also knowledge that may be useful and beneficial. We cannot erase, deny or destroy any significant element of the history of the world by burning anything; even the ashes will tell a tale worth hearing. Reverend Jones and his followers have apparently not learned that truth cannot be created out of destruction any more than I can renovate my house by burning my neighbor’s house down.
Reverend Jones would do well to look to America’s past to understand his failure as both a sentient being and a man of God. Many of our forefathers knew what it was like to be persecuted for their religious beliefs and they abandoned the nations of their birth by the thousands to come to a new land and find a new hope. What we must all understand is that they didn’t come seeking a land of theological diversity and religious tolerance, they came seeking a vacant wasteland where through faith and determination they could carve out an island of religious purity that met their theological preferences. This observation is not at all un-American slander, but rather essential American pragmatism; everybody knows that you cannot compromise eternal truth and the only way people with different views on truth can peacefully coexist is if theology is kept out of the public dialog and everybody minds their own damned business. It is our social contract that we grant the functional equivalent of tolerance and respect to the beliefs of others only and solely in exchange for the same consideration. We are not obligated to try to understand or empathize with anyone’s beliefs, although we may if we choose; we are simply bound to be at least reasonably indifferent when we meet on the street.
This poorly understood fact is ironically one of America’s great strengths; by allowing us to be inflexible and uncompromising within the context of a flexible compromise, we are able to sustain both religious dogmatism and secular pluralism in a single national framework. This allows people of all religions to engage in commerce, recreation and even have sex with each other without having to feel like we have abandoned our primitive and irrational divinely revealed truths. Some might waggishly observe that this amounts to gross self-deception, but in the context of human imperfection, a certain amount of self-deception is necessary for moral progress to be made; one of the fundamental aims of monotheism is to convince us that we are not animals so that we will quit acting like animals. The great religious teachers, Zoroaster, Mohammad, Jesus and the Buddha, to name a few, all hypnotized their followers with astounding acts of character and regaled them with tales of the miraculous in order to instill a belief that there are human possibilities beyond the socio-biological imperatives of survival-unto-procreation and that the wretched, morally ambiguous practice of daily life was not the only course a soul might follow. The fact that application of these religious principles has generally proven to be as flawed and contradictory as people themselves should be of no surprise to anyone.
So the fact is that Reverend Jones is fucking up our sweet deal with his idiotic anti-Islam crusade. Religion is the atomic bomb of social conflict and there is no cure for this on even the distant horizon and all crap like Koran burning does is stir up trouble for decent people of all beliefs. Reverend Jones may think Islam is a tool of the Devil, but good and evil can only be discerned to the extent that we are willing to look honestly and objectively at our own moral failures; without this perspective such terms are meaningless and the flames of a billion Korans will not illuminate the selfish conceit of the absolute certainty of a small, fearful mind. Religion is often a trap for the ignorant and sometimes a luxury for the wise, but I am sure that the Holy Koran is equally as holy as anything else in this world, even if that is the supreme example of damning with faint praise. I, for one, welcome my Muslim brothers to the great debate, the Gordian knot which is freedom, and ask only that they hate and ridicule in private, like the rest of us patriotic Americans are sworn to do; otherwise we will ultimately have to invite the good Reverend to pull up a chunk of rubble, have a seat and throw another Koran on the fire, because the nuclear winter of the human soul is bound to be lengthy and harsh.
I have sometimes been accused of being a cynic, principally I think, because of my predilection for pointing out the logical inconsistencies and contradictions that are so prevalent in human actions. In all fairness, I can appreciate the irony in much of my own behavior, so I don’t think it would be too hypocritical to suggest that the good Reverend is a douchebag, hayseed, barleycorn punk with a bad Doc Holiday mustache. I’m not going to suggest this though, because name calling is immature and counter-productive and beneath the dignity of substantive debate on issues of importance. Suffice it to say that I have significant disagreements with the implied positions of Reverend Jones with respect to the role of religion in human affairs and the public priorities of decent and thoughtful people.
Here at the Love World Outrage Center in Clearwater, Florida, we have done some checking on facts and stuff and have concluded that an irony alert should be issued. Reverend Jones has stated that his justification for creating all this uproar is to defend the “truth” of Christianity against anti-Christian theologies such as Islam; apparently Islam does not recognize the divinity of Jesus Christ and is therefore a dirty lie. The Reverend will have to be a busy man, since two-thirds of the population of the world does not share his beliefs and Christianity is actually down a percentage point or two over the past 110 years. The irony, however, is that you will not see a Burn-a-Bible Day in Saudi Arabia anytime soon, because Islam prohibits disrespect to the Holy texts of Christianity and Judaism. In the Islamic view of things, Jesus is a Holy Prophet born of a virgin and the Bible is the divinely revealed wisdom of God, albeit slightly adulterated by the impure hands of man. When the Prophet Mohammad took his famous night trip to Jerusalem on the flying donkey and ascended briefly into heaven, the last dude he encountered before coming into the presence of God Almighty was Jesus, indicating a special place of honor for the Christ. Isa, the Arabic transliteration of Jesus, is a relatively common boy’s name in the Islamic world. Why, then, Reverend Jones chooses to insult his theological cousins when there are all sorts of real pagans out there is a mystery to me.
Anyway, book burning, like witch burning, is an old trick which is useful precisely because of the smoke it produces. Motives and facts are obscured by a gaseous cloud and demons are conjured from the everyday diversity of human thought. The Nazis burned books in huge ceremonies, metaphorically cleansing the national soul of impure ideas. As it turns out, the books burned were apparently mostly copies of “The History of the Napoleonic Wars”, leaving Mr. Hitler with a decided lack of strategic understanding. This is what book burning does; it makes us dumber. There are a lot of books that one might consider useless, or even dangerous, but knowledge of the useless and the dangerous is also knowledge that may be useful and beneficial. We cannot erase, deny or destroy any significant element of the history of the world by burning anything; even the ashes will tell a tale worth hearing. Reverend Jones and his followers have apparently not learned that truth cannot be created out of destruction any more than I can renovate my house by burning my neighbor’s house down.
Reverend Jones would do well to look to America’s past to understand his failure as both a sentient being and a man of God. Many of our forefathers knew what it was like to be persecuted for their religious beliefs and they abandoned the nations of their birth by the thousands to come to a new land and find a new hope. What we must all understand is that they didn’t come seeking a land of theological diversity and religious tolerance, they came seeking a vacant wasteland where through faith and determination they could carve out an island of religious purity that met their theological preferences. This observation is not at all un-American slander, but rather essential American pragmatism; everybody knows that you cannot compromise eternal truth and the only way people with different views on truth can peacefully coexist is if theology is kept out of the public dialog and everybody minds their own damned business. It is our social contract that we grant the functional equivalent of tolerance and respect to the beliefs of others only and solely in exchange for the same consideration. We are not obligated to try to understand or empathize with anyone’s beliefs, although we may if we choose; we are simply bound to be at least reasonably indifferent when we meet on the street.
This poorly understood fact is ironically one of America’s great strengths; by allowing us to be inflexible and uncompromising within the context of a flexible compromise, we are able to sustain both religious dogmatism and secular pluralism in a single national framework. This allows people of all religions to engage in commerce, recreation and even have sex with each other without having to feel like we have abandoned our primitive and irrational divinely revealed truths. Some might waggishly observe that this amounts to gross self-deception, but in the context of human imperfection, a certain amount of self-deception is necessary for moral progress to be made; one of the fundamental aims of monotheism is to convince us that we are not animals so that we will quit acting like animals. The great religious teachers, Zoroaster, Mohammad, Jesus and the Buddha, to name a few, all hypnotized their followers with astounding acts of character and regaled them with tales of the miraculous in order to instill a belief that there are human possibilities beyond the socio-biological imperatives of survival-unto-procreation and that the wretched, morally ambiguous practice of daily life was not the only course a soul might follow. The fact that application of these religious principles has generally proven to be as flawed and contradictory as people themselves should be of no surprise to anyone.
So the fact is that Reverend Jones is fucking up our sweet deal with his idiotic anti-Islam crusade. Religion is the atomic bomb of social conflict and there is no cure for this on even the distant horizon and all crap like Koran burning does is stir up trouble for decent people of all beliefs. Reverend Jones may think Islam is a tool of the Devil, but good and evil can only be discerned to the extent that we are willing to look honestly and objectively at our own moral failures; without this perspective such terms are meaningless and the flames of a billion Korans will not illuminate the selfish conceit of the absolute certainty of a small, fearful mind. Religion is often a trap for the ignorant and sometimes a luxury for the wise, but I am sure that the Holy Koran is equally as holy as anything else in this world, even if that is the supreme example of damning with faint praise. I, for one, welcome my Muslim brothers to the great debate, the Gordian knot which is freedom, and ask only that they hate and ridicule in private, like the rest of us patriotic Americans are sworn to do; otherwise we will ultimately have to invite the good Reverend to pull up a chunk of rubble, have a seat and throw another Koran on the fire, because the nuclear winter of the human soul is bound to be lengthy and harsh.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Diamonds are Definitely Not a Girl’s Best Friend
I recently had an encounter with a venomous serpent that chose to challenge me for supremacy over the swimming pool. Given the nearly toxic levels of chlorine necessary to prevent the proliferation of scum during the sultry Florida summer, the snake probably found the environment less than hospitable and was exiting the chemical warfare facility when observed by my wife, who promptly informed me that there was a “huge” snake in the pool. The intruder proved to be a 24-inch long Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake who had somehow evaded the complex security to enter the critter exclusion zone in pursuit of whatever self-actualization is available to reptiles. My years of allegedly “useless” television viewing paid off in spades when I was quickly able to identify the triangular head as belonging to a deadly pit viper, not a creature to be incautiously addressed, even at only 24-inches.
With the aid of the pool skimmer and its eight foot aluminum handle, I was able to subdue the beast without incident or apparent harm to the creature itself, although it did strike at the plastic frame of the net numerous times during the encounter. The young lad vigorously shook its tail throughout, although, due to its immaturity, it didn’t do much better than mustering a barely audible buzz. Once perched upon the skimmer net the bemused snake was transported to the back yard where it was unceremoniously dumped over the fence with an admonition not to return, especially not to return when it was fully grown. The snake played it cool, slithering away into the brush without any hint of appreciation of the indignity of having been bested by the superior Homo sapiens.
A mature Eastern Diamondback can be as long as seven feet in length and packs some serious venom, which has both hemotoxin and neurotoxin components. It is estimated that untreated adult bites have a human fatality rate of approximately thirty-percent, so it probably makes sense not to antagonize a grownup Crotalus adamanteus. While the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake is apparently very common throughout its range, I have spent most of my life in Georgia and Florida, quite a bit of it in the woods, and had never seen one in the wild prior to this adventure, if a swimming pool counts as “the wild”. I can only assume that they don’t much like human company, although they are particularly fond of rats and rabbits, but not as Facebook friends.
My wild encounter with this lethal reptilian assassin got me to thinking about snakes and stuff. Everything in nature, it seems, has a place, an identifiable function, except us. In a balanced system, the snakes keep the rabbit population under control, thus the rabbits don’t denude their environment of vegetation, avoiding both rabbit famine and snake starvation. In turn, the snakes don’t eat too many rabbits because they only need to feed once every few weeks. This particular predator/prey relationship is just one of probably hundreds of thousands which make up the very complex web of interactions that sustain our planet’s ecosystem and, by extension, our lives. However, with the possible exception of Ted Nugent, the human race exists largely beyond, and often in contradiction to, this system, primarily by choice.
With managed herds of genetically controlled livestock, much of our need for protein is met outside of the normal predator/prey relationship, which has allowed our populations to swell dangerously. In cases where we still exploit the natural system, we often foolishly over-use resources, resulting in the long-term loss of sustainability. Of course, everybody knows these things, yet we still resist acknowledging our own responsibility on a personal level. We are in the awkward position of being both in the audience and in the movie at the same time; we are so disconnected from nature by both process and philosophy that most of us really don’t know where we fit in the scheme of things. We are just somewhere between the animals and the angels, an assessment which provides little guidance in global ecological responsibility.
Ironically, one thing that is probably true about us is that, of all nature’s creatures, we are the only ones capable of appreciating nature, and ourselves, in the abstract. It is very unlikely that the Cape Buffalo marvels at the stealth and speed of the Nile Crocodile or appreciates the evolutionary refinement which provides such tremendous power with such a conservative metabolism. The Cape Buffalo probably just thinks “oh shit”, if it really thinks at all. We, on the other hand, can marvel at the intricate electrical sensing apparatus of the Tiger Shark and the perfected design of its aquadynamics, even as it circles in curiosity. Of course, if it turns towards us with an opened mouth, we will probably be thinking much the same as the buffalo.
Perhaps then this is what the role of humanity is in the big picture; we are entrusted with the knowledge of the beauty and wonder and mystery of nature. We are assigned the task of seeking to understand that which all other creatures are simply programmed to accept. Entrusted by whom, you may ask? Who knows; divine writ, random chance, Greenpeace? I just know that in my epic battle with the deadly serpent, I felt more like the babysitter than like St. George, and I didn’t see the snake as the embodiment of evil, but as a test of whether I would submit to the evil of fear and unreasoning prejudice and destroy something beautiful and wonderful and hissing just because of the hissing thing. For my next act, I will reduce my weekly visits to McDonald’s by fifty-percent. Cockroaches are, on the other hand, the disciples of Voland and shall be shown no mercy.
With the aid of the pool skimmer and its eight foot aluminum handle, I was able to subdue the beast without incident or apparent harm to the creature itself, although it did strike at the plastic frame of the net numerous times during the encounter. The young lad vigorously shook its tail throughout, although, due to its immaturity, it didn’t do much better than mustering a barely audible buzz. Once perched upon the skimmer net the bemused snake was transported to the back yard where it was unceremoniously dumped over the fence with an admonition not to return, especially not to return when it was fully grown. The snake played it cool, slithering away into the brush without any hint of appreciation of the indignity of having been bested by the superior Homo sapiens.
A mature Eastern Diamondback can be as long as seven feet in length and packs some serious venom, which has both hemotoxin and neurotoxin components. It is estimated that untreated adult bites have a human fatality rate of approximately thirty-percent, so it probably makes sense not to antagonize a grownup Crotalus adamanteus. While the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake is apparently very common throughout its range, I have spent most of my life in Georgia and Florida, quite a bit of it in the woods, and had never seen one in the wild prior to this adventure, if a swimming pool counts as “the wild”. I can only assume that they don’t much like human company, although they are particularly fond of rats and rabbits, but not as Facebook friends.
My wild encounter with this lethal reptilian assassin got me to thinking about snakes and stuff. Everything in nature, it seems, has a place, an identifiable function, except us. In a balanced system, the snakes keep the rabbit population under control, thus the rabbits don’t denude their environment of vegetation, avoiding both rabbit famine and snake starvation. In turn, the snakes don’t eat too many rabbits because they only need to feed once every few weeks. This particular predator/prey relationship is just one of probably hundreds of thousands which make up the very complex web of interactions that sustain our planet’s ecosystem and, by extension, our lives. However, with the possible exception of Ted Nugent, the human race exists largely beyond, and often in contradiction to, this system, primarily by choice.
With managed herds of genetically controlled livestock, much of our need for protein is met outside of the normal predator/prey relationship, which has allowed our populations to swell dangerously. In cases where we still exploit the natural system, we often foolishly over-use resources, resulting in the long-term loss of sustainability. Of course, everybody knows these things, yet we still resist acknowledging our own responsibility on a personal level. We are in the awkward position of being both in the audience and in the movie at the same time; we are so disconnected from nature by both process and philosophy that most of us really don’t know where we fit in the scheme of things. We are just somewhere between the animals and the angels, an assessment which provides little guidance in global ecological responsibility.
Ironically, one thing that is probably true about us is that, of all nature’s creatures, we are the only ones capable of appreciating nature, and ourselves, in the abstract. It is very unlikely that the Cape Buffalo marvels at the stealth and speed of the Nile Crocodile or appreciates the evolutionary refinement which provides such tremendous power with such a conservative metabolism. The Cape Buffalo probably just thinks “oh shit”, if it really thinks at all. We, on the other hand, can marvel at the intricate electrical sensing apparatus of the Tiger Shark and the perfected design of its aquadynamics, even as it circles in curiosity. Of course, if it turns towards us with an opened mouth, we will probably be thinking much the same as the buffalo.
Perhaps then this is what the role of humanity is in the big picture; we are entrusted with the knowledge of the beauty and wonder and mystery of nature. We are assigned the task of seeking to understand that which all other creatures are simply programmed to accept. Entrusted by whom, you may ask? Who knows; divine writ, random chance, Greenpeace? I just know that in my epic battle with the deadly serpent, I felt more like the babysitter than like St. George, and I didn’t see the snake as the embodiment of evil, but as a test of whether I would submit to the evil of fear and unreasoning prejudice and destroy something beautiful and wonderful and hissing just because of the hissing thing. For my next act, I will reduce my weekly visits to McDonald’s by fifty-percent. Cockroaches are, on the other hand, the disciples of Voland and shall be shown no mercy.
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