The Power Of The Dog

March 26, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     As Oscar night fast approaches, our chief regional newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, is busy gushing over Hollywood's yearly output.  Full-page ads and special articles abound in the features section, promoting this movie or that, and using superlatives ordinarily reserved for God alone to describe the accomplishments of the director or various of the actors.

     One in particular that has garnered my attention is, as of this writing, in possession of more nominations than any other movie the industry has deigned to consider one if its own this year.  That movie is called The Power of the Dog.  It was directed by Jane Campion, and stars Kirsten Dunst, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Jesse Plemons.

     I have watched this movie, and for the life of me I can't see what's so great about it, or that it's even mildly great, from the standpoint of acting, directing, writing, editing, or cinematography (in all of which categories, and then some, I think it's been nominated).  Gretchen and I watched the first 25 minutes or so and stopped because we were bored with it.  But later, seeing all the hype and thinking that I might have missed something important, I watched the rest of it.  Then I watched it again, just in case.  Nope, it didn't get any better.  Oh sure, there's a plot, but damn, does it take a long time to unfold, and when it does you still don't quite know what's what.

     First, I should say that I don't think a movie needs to grab you right out of the chute, to borrow a rough tough rodeo term.  I am pleased to let the storyteller begin with a few clearings of the throat, so to speak, in advance of starting off in earnest.  And of course I don't expect the entire plot to be revealed immediately.  Nor do I demand that a movie be absolutely unambiguous.  But I do like to see a tiny bit of action, or whatever passes for action, within the first quarter of the movie.  That didn't happen.  Nor did it happen during the second quarter, or even the third.

     SPOILER ALERT here.  If you haven't seen it, I'll tell you how the story begins, and begin to lay out my several grievances against the movie.  It's 1924, and a couple of brothers own a cattle ranch in a vast expanse of what is supposed to be Montana.  I say "supposed to be" because Jane Campion, the director and writer, who is from New Zealand, chose to film it there, and have New Zealand mountains and plains stand in for those of Montana.  Most people who watch the film probably can't tell the difference--mountains are mountains, right?  But having spent a decent amount of time in Montana myself, I could easily tell the difference.  There's something distinctly volcanic and non-Montana-ish about the topography of New Zealand.  So what? you might ask.  Well, here's what: for all the hoopla the film has garnered about its magnificent scenery, there's very little integration of the story into this grand background.  Almost all the action, if you can call it that, takes place indoors or in comparatively confined areas outside.  The majority of the outdoor parts of the movie could have been filmed in front of a blue screen and a second unit could have been sent to the real Montana to shoot some nice backdrop footage, and no one would have been the wiser.  It's all well and good to use New Zealand as the setting for some completely fictional place like Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings movies, or when the actual story takes place in New Zealand, as in Jane Campion's movie The Piano (another snoozer), but not when there's a surfeit of vast wide open expanse in the very location where the movie is set.

     So, on with the story.  These two brothers, one a chubby would-be gentleman rancher and the other a rough and tumble dirty cowboy (but, curiously, Yale-educated), run this ranch.  The chubby one is played by Jesse Plemons, who in general I like, but who, in this case could have been substituted for by the Pillsbury Doughboy or the blow-up copilot from Airplane! for all the drama he brings to the role.  Advocates of the movie will say, well, he's supposed to be dull and unanimated.  Yes, that's true.  But do you want one of the major characters in any movie to be dull and unanimated?  I can get that for free by looking in the mirror.  And speaking of dull and unanimated, the much-touted Kirsten Dunst is almost equally dull, looking like she's just stepped in out of a rainstorm, with a washed out and unkempt 1920s curly permanent that resembles a worn mop and, I swear, never changes.  She develops a penchant for booze and spends a lot of time in bed or drunk, and occasionally expresses her fear of Phil, her menacing cowboy brother-in-law (oh yeah, she marries the Pillsbury Doughboy, offscreen, and comes to live at the ranch).   She even yells a bit here and there, but ultimately she's a timid rag doll, and not at all interesting to watch.  Nor are she and her real-life partner Jesse Plemons given anything interesting to say.  And the host of ranch hand extras who surround the place have virtually no part in the story other than to grunt and occasionally call someone a name.  They're supposed to be slightly menacing, I think, but they're not.  At all.  

     The remaining two main characters, brother Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are a little less dull, but just plain weird.  Peter is the Kirsten Dunst character's young adult son, who's studying to be a doctor but spends some time at the ranch on summer vacation.  Reed-thin, and limper than his mother's dishrag hair, he's as true an oddball as there ever was, twirling around, making paper flowers, dissecting rabbits (for medical purposes), and, I shit you not, swaying his hips with a premodern hula hoop.  All this is supposed to convey, I guess, that he's gay, and a gentle and delicate soul, and he gets called names on account of that, which upsets his mom, but doesn't seem to faze him much.  He seems to be fairly comfortable in his own unique skin, and not nearly as weak as mommy thinks he is.  But I think the writer-director tries a bit too hard to make him into a sort of helpless, pining away, closeted soul, which ends up just making him a bizarre and rather insulting stereotype of a certain effeminate type of person.  Still, his real sexual proclivities remain unknown.  All we know is that he loves his mother (though he's aware of and complains to her that she's overprotective) and likes to wear tennis shoes instead of cowboy boots.

     Phil, on the other hand, is truly closeted.  He's constantly praising his long-departed rough-riding cowboy mentor (and naked sleeping bag buddy), Bronco Henry, the secret love of his life, who apparently molded Phil into a butch man's man, in the Greco-Roman style.  Phil rolls his own cigarettes, castrates bulls, and never takes off his chaps and spurs, even indoors, and his crew lays around shirtless (but in chaps) and swims nude.  Guy stuff.  Wait a minute: Bronco Henry?  Why not Bronco Clarence or Bronco Leslie?  Is Jane Campion just trying to make fun of gay people here, or merely of gay stereotypes, or is she simply, as I suspect, clueless?  It's hard to tell, but if she's not trying to parody something (besides herself), then she's really got her head up her ass.

     Anyway, long into the movie, Phil stops making fun of Peter and starts in earnest to groom him into a hard (or at least harder) cowpoke, apparently the way old Bronco Henry did to the young studious Phil so long ago.  He's going to wean the lad off his mother, and make a real man out of him, because that's the kind of man he's attracted to.  As for Peter, maybe he's flattered by Phil's attention, and maybe he's a little tempted to go along, but there's something too off-putting about Phil.  It could be that he stinks, literally, or that that's not the type of relationship Peter wants.  I'm sure he hates the fact that Phil intimidates his mom so much.  In any event, Peter has other ideas, and a plot to hatch, which he does, but in such a slow moving, improbable way, and so late in the game, that we're left with a movie that ends not with a bang but a whimper, consistent at least with the way it has plodded along throughout.

      Like a decennial groundhog, Jane Campion emerges every so often with a movie of dubious quality.  If this film wins big tomorrow night, it will be for one reason, and that is that Campion is a female director and film writer, and it's important to give a female director and film writer an Oscar.  It certainly is, but at what cost, as far as quality is concerned?  Hollywood is hellbent on making amends for its historical sins of exclusion, but can only seem to do it by naked sporadic tokenism.  Two years ago, under pressure to give awards to movies made by nonwhites and non-Europeans, it gave away the entire store to a quirky Korean movie.  A few years before that, under pressure to recognize not only Black film contributions but gayness, it got a twofer by rewarding a movie called Moonlight, about nothing much more than a kid who grows up in bad surroundings, realizes he's gay, gets a handjob on the beach from another guy (in the moonlight, get it?), then goes on to become a lonely drug dealer.  I mean, really, is there nobody in the Academy with any brains?  I guess not.  

     Proponents of The Power of the Dog, or perhaps those who simply want gayness to figure more prominently in the movies (a laudable goal certainly, if it's not done to ridiculously), have suggested that there's a genre called the "gay western" to which this movie belongs.  Well, that's a pretty short list, as far as I know.  The only other one that comes to mind is Brokeback Mountain, and that was more a love story than anything else, and in addition to love it had drama, tension, sadness, and most importantly realism.  The Power of the Dog isn't possessed of any of those things.  It's just a dog of a movie that seems to have become inordinately powerful to the powers that be.  So its name is the only thing about it that works.

  

And Now For Something Completely Different

March 17, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Nah, just kidding.  This won't be different.

     Politics is the ultimate insoluble problem.  It's just people throwing words around, right?  People hurling ideas and accusations at one another while holding shields to ward off the opposing ideas and accusations, and meanwhile taking bribes and emoluments from the highest bidders.  It's meaningless and a pain in the ass, not to mention something that saps our energy and gets the country nowhere.

     Well, no.  Not really.  Politics is, in fact, idealism.  Without political parties and factions within those parties, there would be no debate on any significant ideas, except informally.  And whether you agree with the politics of either party (because let's face it, there are only two in the United States, like it or not), the actions of its members, taken as a whole, reflect the ideals of that party, although they may be watered down by attempts at consensus.  That's why it's not too difficult to figure out, in this country, which party stands for what, and it's also the reason that people who profess to be undecided between the two parties are, to put it bluntly, idiots.

     By "ideals" and "idealism" I don't mean anything superhuman or celestial, or even necessarily good.  I simply mean the things upon which, if wishes were horses, as the saying goes, any given politicians and their adherents would ride.  They are the cherished beliefs, hidden or otherwise, of those politicians and the folks who vote for them.

     Republican ideals include American exceptionalism (the belief that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world), white supremacy, hatred of nonwhite immigrants, hatred of taxation, glorification of wealth, suppression of organized labor, and nostalgia for the days when men were men and women were their handmaids.  More recently, the Republican idealists have added abolition of legal abortion and of homosexual marriage, and hatred of gender fluidity, vaccinations, and free elections.

     The ideals of Democrats also start with American exceptionalism, because that's been pounded into our brains from birth, regardless of who we are or which party we favor.  Republicans may think we're the greatest country on earth because of who and what we have been, whereas Democrats may think we're the greatest country on earth more because of who we can be.  But nobody here, unfortunately, can get past the idea that God has blessed this country above all others.  That's a typical nationalistic trait the world over, of course, but we carry it even further than all but a few other western countries. 

     However, Democrats espouse, in addition, the ideals of racial and gender inclusiveness, the equality of men and women, support for organized labor, help for the poor, help for immigrants, belief in the right of women to choose, belief in the benefits of taxation however much we may hate it, belief in science, and most importantly belief in free and open elections, particularly because, unless statistics lie, there are more Democratic votes out there than there are Republican votes, and to believe otherwise as a Democrat would be self-defeating.

     I know I veered off into cynicism with that last comment about Democrats' belief in free and fair elections.  But let's face it, wouldn't any self-respecting Democrat be happier if Republicans just didn't vote at all?  Certainly Republicans feel that way in reverse, which is why they wish to make it harder for nonwhite people, who tend to vote Democratic, to get to the polls.  They're not about to have another election stolen from them by the Black voters who decisively tipped the balance in favor of Joe Biden in 2020, and to whom, be it known by one and all, Joe Biden owes his very political life at this point.  In fact, I imagine that most Republicans would be much happier if Black people were somehow prohibited from voting at all.  They certainly had it that way for a long time, especially in the South (back when the Democratic party was what the Republican party is today).  But, you say, aren't there Black people who vote Republican?  Yes there are, but not those who have any self-respect.  I say this at the risk of being presumptuous about the thinking of an entire race in this country, but come on, is there really any reasonable voting choice for Black people?  I think not.  However imperfect and disappointing the Democratic party may prove to be on progress toward racial equality, it at least professes to be committed to that ideal.  Republicans don't even pretend to be.

     (A word here about foreign policy.  Because both parties are burdened with the myth of American exceptionalism, their foreign policy views do not vary significantly.  This posting is really meant to discuss domestic policy, since elections in this vast country, separated by two oceans from the rest of the world, are seldom won or lost on the basis of foreign policy.  We really care most about, as Bill Clinton famously said, "the economy, stupid."  There are a few slim differences, I guess.  Republicans, because they believe we're better than any other country, tend to be more snooty and isolationist in their approach to the rest of the world, and Democrats, because they believe we're better than any other country, feel it is their responsibility to insert the joy of our magnificent way of life into whatever corner of the world they think might need it, by force, if necessary.  Both parties earnestly believe that if everybody else on earth could just be more like us, governmentally, economically, and socially speaking, the planet would be a happier place.  But in the end, voters care much more about the price of gasoline than they do about whichever country we might be in the process of interfering with.)

     Which brings me back to my earlier characterization of people who are undecided between the two parties as "idiots."  That they are, for sure.  But why?  First, let me say that there are absolute idiots safely within the confines of both parties, the Republican party more so than the Democratic party.  Poor white people who vote Republican invariably do so against their own economic and social interests, since the Republicans don't care about them at all, and are anti-labor and dedicated to keeping their wages as low as possible.  But these idiots cling to the idea that it's better to be poor and white than to be Black, and they resent the idea that Black folks are allowed to make any progress at all (except in sports and music, where it's permissible).  That kind of idiocy is probably most impressively on display in the state of West Virginia, one of poorest and whitest states in the union, where the only decent way to make a living (until recently) was to condemn yourself to a short life mining coal underground, followed by a miserable death from lung disease.  Today, only about 10,000 West Virginians mine coal underground (about one percent of the male working population), and about 2,500 are involved in above-ground strip mining.  The largest legal employers in the state are Walmart and various chemical and pharmaceutical companies, which have never been threatened by the Democrats.  Despite these facts, West Virginia gave the Republican candidate his largest majority of any state in the union in both 2016 and 2020, based on his support of coal mining and white supremacy, in that order.  These are people who would benefit greatly from the ideals of income redistribution espoused by the Democrats, and who would be far better off without the evisceration and poisoning of their land by the strip mining of coal, which provides very little in the way of jobs for them any more, but plenty in the way of water pollution.  So West Virginians are a special bunch of idiots.  But they're white, and proud of it.  And pretty inbred too, which might help to explain things. 

     Democratic idiocy tends to take the form of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."  The more left-leaning members of the party will sometimes refuse to vote for a Democrat because that person isn't as progressive as they would like them to be.  This happened in 2016, contributing directly to the loss of the presidential election by the Democrat Hillary Clinton, and the unleashing of an unprecedented reign of terror by her Republican opponent, because Clinton wasn't as far to the left as Bernie Sanders is.  Enough Democrats threw their votes to the Green Party and another minor party to deliver Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to the more united Republicans, and that made the difference in the electoral vote.  This they did despite Bernie's earnest urgings to vote Democratic anyway, even after he lost the nomination.  That goes hand in glove with another bit of Democratic idiocy, namely, clinging to the belief that there could ever possibly be a viable left-wing third party in this country, or any government run by even a moderate socialist.  The answer to the question of whether that's possible is a resounding NO, borne out solidly by party politics at least since the time of the Civil War.  I confess I used to be this kind of idiot, but ceased to be well before the turn of the century, and in any event my votes for the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, and the Communists didn't make a bit of difference in the outcome of any election.  Since we do not have a parliamentary form of government where parties can form ruling coalitions, third parties do nothing but mess things up for one of the two major parties, and deliver the presidency to the candidate whose party remains more united.   

     So back, once again, to the truly undecided idiots.  I'm puzzled by them, and would be tempted to dismiss them out of hand, except for the fact that virtually all presidential elections, and most congressional ones as well, seem to be run on the basis of both candidates trying to appeal to these undecideds.  I mean, why bother to spend millions just to preach to the choir, right?  They must be people who don't really possess as solid or uniform a set of ideals as do the Democrats or Republicans.  This might be due to the fact that they just don't pay attention, or simply do not possess any moral compass.  Even most "one-issue" voters can easily choose between the parties.  LGBTQ voters will easily choose Democrats.  Cuban exiles will easily choose Republicans.  And so on.  In some ways I respect an avowed right-wing white supremacist gun-toting Republican thug more than I do a person who is so benighted as to be unable to decide between the two parties based on their platforms and their members' performances while in office, particularly as the differences have become starker.  Partly this has to do with the fact that, as I said, they don't pay attention to the issues, only to the individual, as if a presidential election were a large version of American Idol or your high school prom king and queen election, rather than a duel between two different political philosophies.  Fortunately for the country, Joe Biden got elected in 2020 not because he was particularly attractive, but because he was less grotesque than his opponent.

     The undecideds, also, are folks who profess the sentiment presented in the very first paragraph of this posting, namely that all politics is worthless bullshit, and corrupt bullshit at that.  This belief relieves them of having to think and choose.  I really hope people like that don't vote at all, because the Republicans need their votes more than the Democrats do.  A flat-out numerical breakdown of voting in this country reveals that Democrats outnumber Republicans, and have outvoted them in seven of the last eight elections, even when the Republican has won.  But due to our unique form of electoral politics, giving individual states control of the process, the majority does not rule nationwide when it comes to the presidency, or for that matter, the senate.  And it bears mentioning that this system was conceived by a group of guys in wigs who were trying to make a country that could hold together even though half of its states had slavery and the other half didn't, and who had absolutely no intention of ever allowing nonwhites or women or people who didn't own property to vote.

     So, as we enter another hectic round of primaries and congressional elections, I wish to make this plea to all voters who are undecided about which of the two parties' candidates to vote for:  please don't vote.  Watch American Idol instead.

     

Supreme Politics

February 24, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Let's talk about the Supreme Court of the U.S.  I'll dignify that rather flaccid group by capitalizing its name, although it probably doesn't deserve such respect at the moment.   The constitution gives the president the authority to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, but the Senate must agree to allow the appointments to go into effect.  Since no one has much of a sense of the history of the country or of the Supreme Court, and since the news media love nothing more than to sensationalize things and foretell the doom of the nation, today it's sort of assumed that the bunch currently comprising that body is uniquely politicized, just as the country itself is aware of its own increasing political polarization.  There persists a myth, or perhaps more accurately a misunderstanding, regarding the political neutrality of the Supreme Court.  In fact, it is indeed highly political, and has been ever since the inception of the country, but particularly since the beginning of the 1800s, when party politics really began to heat up.  

     Before getting more into that aspect of the Court, let's take a look at its current makeup.  In the days of yore, when George Washington and his early successors were appointing justices, the country was run solidly by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, save for a Catholic or two, usually from Maryland, which before it was a state was a British Catholic colony.  Such was the case with the Supreme Court, which didn't acquire its first Catholic justice, in the person of Roger Taney (from Maryland of course), until 1836.  Taney died in 1864, and another Catholic didn't come along until about thirty years later, but a tradition of sorts then evolved to reserve at least one seat for a Catholic.  Not long after the turn of the century, in 1916, the Court got its first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis, and thereafter for most of the 20th century there have usually been one or more Jews on the Supreme Court.  

     Fast forward.  Today's Supreme Court is a far cry from the bewigged gaggle of WASPs who first inhabited it.  Protestants?  Well, I think there's one, Neil Gorsuch, although it appears that he started life as a Catholic but seems to prefer to be an Episcopalian now.  There are two Jews left after the demise of Ruth Ginsberg--Elena Kagan and Steven Breyer--although the latter is soon to depart from the court.  There is at present one African American justice, Clarence Thomas, who filled the "Black" seat on the Court after the death of Thurgood Marshall.  Soon there will be another African American, a woman, whose religion I don't know at this point.  It appears that of the top three likely candidates for nomination to succeed Breyer, one had a Jewish father but hasn't revealed her own religion, another is married to a Jewish man but might be Protestant herself, and the third is Catholic.  After all that shakes out, the breakdown of the Court will be as follows: six Republicans and three Democrats; five men and four women; seven whites, one Latina, and two African Americans; and seven or eight Christians and one or two Jewish persons, including six or seven Catholics, one or two Protestants, and one or two Jews.  It'll be a complex group demographically, and never before has the Court been quite this far away from its initial WASPishness, which on a stand-alone basis seems like it might be a good thing.

     You might well ask why it matters in the least what the religions of the Supreme Court justices are in a nominally secular nation, and most of the time you'd be right.  Who gives a shit about their religion, or whether they are religious at all?  Roger Taney, the first Catholic (pictured above), was a nasty and vehement racist and slaveholder, who gave us the Dred Scott decision, containing one of the most blatant manifestos of white supremacy ever to emanate from the Court.  In it he declared that a black person had no rights that needed to be respected by any white person.  But most of his fellow justices were slave holders, too, and went along.  The Catholic justices who followed Taney were a mixed bag.  Until very recently, that is.  Most of today's Catholic justices have been carefully chosen by their appointers (the two George Bushes and Donald Trump) not to increase religious diversity, but rather to decrease it, because their conservative Catholicism influences their political thinking in a rightward direction.  This is not to say that Catholics in the U.S. on the whole are Republicans; statistics indicate that they're split pretty evenly between the two parties.  But today's members of the conservative bloc, all Catholics save for the high church semi-Catholic Neil Gorsuch, are meaningful partly because they were selected based not only on the basis of their Republican political conservatism but also on the assumption that since they are Catholics they will oppose abortion rights, will support public spending for conservative parochial schools, will uphold discrimination against gays in the name of freedom of speech, and generally will erode the separation of church and state in as many ways as possible.  All of these things are coming to pass, thanks to that Catholic conservative bloc.  It would have been just about the same if the Bushes and Trump had appointed right-wing evangelical Protestants instead of Catholics, except that evangelicals on the whole aren't as intelligent or well-educated enough to become federal justices.  There is, to be fair, one lonely liberal Catholic on the court too, in the person of Sonia Sotomayor.

     Which brings us back to the inherently political nature of the Supreme Court.  Many people inadvertently confuse the nominally neutral role of judges at the lower levels of state courts with judges who are appointees to the federal bench by the President.  That's understandable.  When you're facing a judge in an ordinary courtroom, you are entitled to expect that judge to at least appear to be fair and impartial (even though many are not), and not to impose their political agenda on you, whether you're a prosecutor, a criminal defendant, or a civil litigant on either side.  The personal politics of the judge should not enter into whether you get a fair trial at that level, and if it does, that judge might be accused of committing some reversible error, the one thing lower court judges fear the most, because it's a sort of a rebuke to their competence and marks them as fair game for appeals from then on, not to mention limiting their chances of upward mobility.

     Now let's look at the federal judiciary, by contrast.  Because federal judges at all levels (district courts, circuit courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court) are appointed by the President or someone working for the president, and approved by the Senate, it is not merely by chance that they are usually of the same political party as the President is, or at least not significantly opposed to that President's politics.  And there are hundreds of federal judges--870 as of now.  Once on the bench, federal judges are there for life, so long as they behave themselves.  Their big boss is the Chief Justice of the United States, but they may be impeached by the Congress, just as a president may be.

     At the district court level federal judges are trial judges, just like their state counterparts.  But at the appellate and Supreme Court levels they do not retry cases on the merits, except for the Supreme Court in very limited circumstances.  Instead, they review lower court decisions and decide whether some federal (and hence constitutional) issue needs to be addressed.  However, they are all thoroughly political, especially the justices of the Supreme Court.  They wouldn't be there if they weren't, because no President with his wits about him would squander the chance to put his imprimatur on the Court by appointing someone who didn't think like he did, at least in broad terms.  Because federal judges are appointed for life, the one thing a President may do that will ensure his or her political legacy long into the future is to appoint federal judges and Supreme Court justices.  Other executive actions can be undone by successors, but the appointment of judges and justices cannot.  Donald Trump's single most nefarious accomplishment while president was getting three extremely conservative justices onto the Supreme Court, and they could well live for another thirty years before the Devil calls them home.  

     Again, this isn't new.  Thomas Jefferson was the first president this country had who would, in today's politics, be considered a Republican, although he was counted as a Democrat until very recently. (The labels hadn't been exactly settled on back then, but there were Federalists, like Washington and the Adamses, and their opponents, the Jeffersonians).  Why would Jefferson be a Republican today?  Well, for starters he was an avowed white supremacist and a profound hypocrite, as most Republicans are.  While eloquently declaring for the basic rights and equality of all persons, he owned hundreds of slaves, and forced one of them to be his concubine when she was about 14 years old, showing her off in Europe as he courted the French.  She soon got pregnant and ultimately gave him six more slaves.  (By the way, the aforementioned woman, Sally Hemings, happened to be Jefferson's late wife's half sister--in other words, Jefferson's father-in-law had sired her with one of his own slaves.)  Even though as president he signed a law banning the U.S. involvement in the international slave trade, at the time of his death he freed only about ten of his own--those with the cherished Jefferson blood coursing through their veins.  Also, he was in favor of the rights of individual states over the federal government (a perennial guise for pro-slavery and white supremacy, and a staple of the Republican party of today).  State's rights eventually led to the Civil War and since then has been the excuse that former slave states have used to perpetuate the suppression of minorities.  He also favored tax reductions, primarily to benefit the already wealthy, like him, another favorite Republican hobby horse.  Jefferson nevertheless gets high marks for his "forward thinking" and for being a brilliant and verbally nimble Renaissance man.  This forward thinking included his purchase of the French claim over the middle third of what is now the United States, enabling the spread of slavery and the forcible removal of east coast Indians to west of the Mississippi.     

     But the bane of Thomas Jefferson's existence during his eight-year presidency was the domination of the Supreme Court by independent and judicially-active Federalists appointed by Washington and John Adams, headed up by Chief Justice John Marshall, who, in 1803, established that the Supreme Court was completely independent from any sitting president and, moreover, was the ultimate authority on what was, and was not, constitutional.  Until then, that hadn't been quite clear, and Jefferson really didn't care for the idea.  While Jefferson did get three of his boys onto the court, he didn't have the majority of Republicans he would have wished for.  It wasn't until thirty years after Jefferson, when Andrew Jackson took office, that the Supreme Court was altered for good and filled with men even more roguish than the self-aggrandizing Jefferson would have chosen.

     Occasionally, nevertheless, the Supreme Court of today surprises even those who favor the politics of its majority.  Donald Trump found out, to his dismay, that he didn't own them, when they turned down, for the most part without comment, his sore-loser claims regarding the 2020 election.  But that was more a matter of repelling Trump's outright idiocy than it was of rejecting his basic Republican political views.  In related areas, such as allowing states to suppress voting rights and abortion rights, the Court will even things out for Trump and his followers in the coming months and years.

     In conclusion, lest anyone think for a moment that the Supreme Court of 2022 is overly politicized, bear in mind that there has never been a time in the history of the country when the politics of that august body has not been overwhelmingly in evidence, from the upholding of slavery and segregation, to the suppression of immigration, to the dismantling of the New Deal, to the enhancement of civil rights and the rights of criminal defendants, to the legalization of abortion and gay marriage, to the restriction of affirmative action, to the upholding of corporate rights, to the tearing down of the wall of separation between church and state.  Those of us who grew up in the days of the Earl Warren court were happy enough with its liberal decisions, even when presidents were not.  Today, barring a quick series of untimely deaths within the conservative majority, we will be living with some unhappy constitutional interpretations for the foreseeable future. 

Is It Warm In Here, Or Is It Just Me?

February 1, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     Let's talk about global warming, shall we?  Or climate change, as they like to call it, since the overall warming of things also causes anomalies in some places that don't make it warmer, and then stupid people are likely to say, "Global warming my ass, look how fucking cold it is out there!" and the point gets lost.  It's about two or three degrees of complexity beyond the thinking capacity of the average knuckleheaded American, at least, to connect the dots having to do with changes in ocean currents and weather patterns and all that.  Only when people in south Florida are up to their ankles in water at the Tiki Bar listening to Jimmy Buffett songs will they really get the point.  And maybe not even then.

    I'm not blogging here for the benefit of anybody who doesn't think global warming is happening.  But I also do not wish to beat a dead (or slowly drowning) horse.  The science is there, and I believe it.  Ice is melting off the glaciers at the poles, and when you add more water to a container of water (the oceans in this case), the water level goes up.  Anybody who's had Scotch on the rocks should know that.  And the carbon dioxide layer that is causing the melting is also holding in more heat everywhere.  So there you go.

     In a book I read recently, the author divided people's reactions to the inevitability of global warming into three categories:  optimism, in which people think that everything's going to be pretty much okay, come what may; pessimism, in which people think the world as we know it is going to be disastrously obliterated; and futurism, in which people are searching for a way to escape the planet and start over again somewhere else.  I'll address the futurists first, to get them out of the way.  They're a bunch of fools and nuts, and also monumentally selfish for thinking they can leave their own shitty mess behind and create another one somewhere else.  

     Now let's take a look at optimism and pessimism about the effects of global warming.  First, let me say that I don't fall squarely within either of these two camps.  I would call my own view one of guarded optimism.  I don't think everything's going to be great, by any means.  Lots of people will have to move because they live too close to shore.  And there will be large populations that can't move because they're too poor, and so they will fall victim to typhoons and floods and tidal waves.  Everyone won't be as affluently tidy and industrious and foresighted as, say, the Dutch.  Besides that, as it gets warmer, the distribution of fresh water will change, too, and agriculture will surely change as a result, maybe for the better and maybe for the worse, but change it will.  And that will be that.

     But there's this, also.  We're heading for hell in a fairly slow-moving handbasket.  That gives us time to come up with solutions, which is something we have a tendency to do when we are forced to.  By "we" I mean our species.  Other species will, for the most part, have to fend for themselves, unless they are ones we particularly care about and depend on for our own survival, like livestock and pets.  Whether or not that's a good thing is not going to be the subject of this posting.  But the fact remains that the only reason we care whether certain species become extinct is because it affects us in some way--morally, aesthetically, or materially.

     Back to the warmth.  It's a done deal, for sure, but the real question is what it will do to the resources we depend on for survival.  Our survival is paramount to us, just as, I assume, the survival of other animals is paramount to them.  Everything we've seen about human progress indicates that as time has gone by, there have been more of us and fewer of other species.  Maybe some day it'll just be humans and corn and a handful of pollinating birds and insects.  And that'll do it.  

     Here's a funny thing about global warming.  These days, absolutely every damned thing that happens, weatherwise and climatewise, gets blamed on global warming.  If there's a hurricane in New Orleans, well, that's global warming.  If it's a colder winter than usual in Iowa, that's global warming.  If it snows in Istanbul, well, you know what to blame that on, right?  This warming trend gets the blame for it all, whether it's at the root of it or not.  And in any event there's not a goddamned thing we can do about it, really.  Iacta alea est, as Caesar said.  The die is cast.  We can certainly slow the progression of warming a tiny bit, or speed it up, but we can't change the fact that it's going to keep happening for the foreseeable future.

     So I say, relax.  But by relax, I don't mean do nothing, only just quit wringing your hands, or gnashing your teeth, or doing any of those other things that start with a silent letter (knocking on wood? psyching yourself out?).  Worrying is going to do absolutely no good, and will divert us from our goals.  Instead, get to work, mankind.  Already we've seen what can be done in this country when the government even modestly encourages (under the current administration), rather than vigorously discourages (as was done under the previous administration) the transition to energy sources and usages that spew less carbon into the air, or at least slow that process down.  Windmills, which I personally hate and consider a blight on the landscape, are proliferating, and getting bigger and more efficient.  So I'll put up with the ugliness, at least until they come up with something better.  Solar panels are another good way to create electricity, and we seem to be creating more solar areas in the deserts and on rooftops, and most importantly, the collection technology is improving.  And those are just the two that come to mind.  Electric vehicles are a foregone conclusion and going full tilt now, too, though the source of the electricity for their recharging needs to be cleaner, too.  

     However, despite all our best efforts, even if we were to somehow magically unite worldwide on the issue of carbon emission and dedicate ourselves to putting the brakes on it, nothing will reverse its inevitable course.  There are too many people using too much stuff for that to happen, and the rest of human progress has done nothing but create conditions for the population to increase, rather than decrease.  And even as we try to become more affluent and spread a higher standard of living throughout the world, we create more of what has put us in this global warming mess in the first place--cars, appliances, and the need for more carbon-emitting energy.  So should we throw up our hands and say, in effect, forget about it, because it's only going to get worse?   Should we somehow, magically, revert to some prehistoric manner of living?  That would be the thinking of the pessimists on the issue.  And it is going to get worse, or warmer, anyway.

     Coming to grips with global warming is a little like suddenly facing up to the fact that you're getting older.  Your first impulse is to deny it, as many people are denying climate change, or ascribing it to natural fluctuations in the earth's temperature that have happened historically over millions of years, and doing nothing except to ensure immediate comfort.  Then after that, with respect to aging, your impulse is to panic, and to ascribe every little thing to the aging process.  Oh my god, I have an ache or pain that I didn't have yesterday--I must be getting older.  Shit!  Then after that, for some folks at least, the next step is to get busy changing lifestyles in order to stave off the effects of aging--changing diet, getting more exercise, taking medication to improve cardiovascular health, all the while cheating a little here and there.  That's the stage where we are now vis a vis global warming, at least among the Paris Climate Accord nations.  But as with aging, while that may buy us some time, it's not going to reverse the process.  It's going to progress.

     But here my analogy breaks down.  Because with individual human aging the inevitable outcome is, simply, death.  On the other hand, with climate change we don't know the outcome yet.  It might be the death of homo sapiens, but I really doubt that.  Nor will it be some sort of accelerated evolution in a specific direction, like Kevin Costner with his gills in that silly movie Waterworld.  Rather, I predict that we'll muddle along for a long long time, just getting warmer and dealing with it.  And who knows whether this will come about, since it will happen over centuries and this blog will disappear or become as incomprehensible as the languages on the Rosetta stone once were.

     So fuck it, and don't worry.

    

In The Year

January 19, 2022

Cathedral City, California

     I woke up on the morning of New Year's Day with an old song from the late 60s in my head, "In the Year 2525," by Zager and Evans, a couple of one-hit wonders from Nebraska, of all places, who had a band called The Eccentrics.  Although statistically speaking, some famous and semi-famous people are bound to be from Nebraska (Johnny Carson and Henry Fonda come to mind immediately), I've always had trouble imagining anyone returning to and staying in Nebraska after fame has touched them, however briefly.  But this is just what Denny Zager, one-half of that duo did.  Now in his late 70s, he lives and builds custom guitars somewhere in the Cornhusker State.  The other half, Rick Evans, died in 2018 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

     I don't have much more to say about Zager and Evans, the guys, because that's all I cared to find out from Google.  And it's enough about them.  Unless they sold and signed away their royalty rights to the song (a distinct possibility, given the shady nature of the record business), this tune must have generated a nice modest income for them, having sold millions of copies over the years and having been played on oldies stations for decades to come.

     The song, as its name states, is about the future, and how things will be dramatically different.  And like any such song, or story, or movie of the sort, it was wrought from the uneasy feeling that was generated (pre-social media, mind you), by the 1960s news of the fast-changing nature of things, scientific, political, and otherwise.  The song was written earlier in the decade, but it came out in 1969, around the time the first men walked on the moon.  And it even has a subtitle.  The complete name of the song is "In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)."  The latter two Latin words mean beginning and end, although really the song isn't about the beginning of anything in particular, just about the possible end of things, or maybe the beginning of the end, I don't know.  I think it was an affectation put in there to give it a bit of an intellectual flavor.

     The song is basically silly and self-parodying, but I think it's meant to be taken seriously.  It fancifully predicts various changes in human conditions over thousands of years.  Here I might as well set out at least some of the lyrics, in case you weren't around when it came out, or have forgotten, or were living in a country where it didn't get any airplay:                                                                            

        In the year 2525, if man is still alive

        If woman can survive, they may find

        In the year 3535

        Ain't gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie

        Everything you think, do and say

        Is in the pill you took today.

        In the year 4545

        You ain't gonna need your teeth, won't need your eyes

        You won't find a thing to chew

        Nobody's gonna look at you ....

                                                                                                             

And it goes on from there, at intervals of a thousand years or so, with humans needing less and less of our physical faculties, due to technology, and being able to choose test-tube babies, then ending with some expectation that God might come back and put an end to it all, because, of course, we've fucked everything up--we haven't taken care of the earth.  This was a sort of amalgamation of Christian orthodoxy and the then-current thinking of disaster mongers like Paul Ehrlich (zero population growth), and a general uneasiness about technology that persists to this day.

     The idea of a dystopian future based on technology gone awry wasn't new to Zager and Evans, of course.  There was Orwell's 1984, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and that granddaddy of time travel books, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, which came out over 125 years ago.  Really, when you think about it, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein sort of got that ball rolling back in 1818.  But let's not forget that granddaddy of dystopian fantasies, the book of Revelation at the end of the Christian bible.  At any rate, from the very birth of television and cinema we've been churning out stories by the truckload about the future gone off the rails, because they sell like hotcakes.  Hotcakes gone horribly awry.  The Hotcake that Ate Cincinnati.

     The thing that practically all science fiction has in common, regardless of its media form, whether it's a lightweight pop song like "In the Year 2525," or a serious tome like Fahrenheit 451, or a series like the "Planet of the Apes" movies, is that it's not really about the future at all.  Nor it is about the past.  It's about the present, and the things in the present that scare us, whether they be pollution, or nuclear warfare, or runaway technology of some sort, or the evolution of species.  And it's never about how much better things will be in the future, but rather about how messed up they've become.  Which brings me to my main point.

     Fear rules us.  It is the motivator of all hatred, distrust, search for meaning, religious mumbo jumbo, you name it.  The conglomeration of media machines that perpetuate fear are our main sources of information, and the touchstones of all our anxieties.  Back before there was much in the way of mass media, fearmongering was almost exclusively in the adept hands of religious practitioners--the clergy, whether you called them priests or prophets or soothsayers.  Keeping people in fear of danger on earth and eternal damnation has been the business of Christianity throughout its history, and a hell of a lot of money has been made by helping people to think they are staving off that damnation.  And before Christianity, going back thousands more years, even farther than Zager and Evans went in the other direction into the future, fear of the unknown kept us as a species guessing and wondering what would happen next--famine, fire, eclipses, floods, injuries, attacks by predators, you name it.  All fear, naturally, is based on our fear of the one thing over which we have no control whatever, namely, the fact that sooner or later we are all going to die. 

     But just a brief look back into human history ought to infuse any sensible person less with fear than with hope, at least in terms of what we're capable of doing technologically to postpone our inevitable demise.  Yeah, sure, we've killed lots of people with wars.  I'm not forgetting that.  But as far as what we've been able to accomplish for the overall success and longevity of our species, we've really kicked ass.  Let's go back just a hundred years, a mere twinkle in the eye of the Almighty, if we're disposed to think in such terms.  In 1918, when the influenza pandemic was sweeping the world, we had no penicillin to fight off the secondary bacterial pneumonia that was one of the main reasons the flu killed so many people rather than just making them sick and miserable.  Smallpox was deadly everywhere because medical science hadn't yet perfected mass inoculation against it.  Diabetics routinely died because insulin injections hadn't been developed.  Tuberculosis was something to fear, as well as diphtheria and whooping cough and yellow fever and cholera and a host of other illnesses or conditions.  In fact, a century ago infectious diseases of all kinds were the leading cause of death, period.  But besides that, people clogged their arteries simply as a byproduct of their normal diets, and high blood pressure was considered inevitable, so heart attacks and strokes just happened once you got to a certain age.  Cancer was considered pretty much unpreventable.  Those things all happen now, too, but a hundred years ago human life expectancy was at least twenty years less than it is today.  And that's just the medical side of things.  

     A century ago most people didn't have telephones or television.  Cars went 30 or 40 miles per hour tops, and the roads they bumped along on weren't much good.  Air travel was barely in existence.  Computers hadn't been invented.  Human sanitation still mostly consisted of outhouses and pumps on the back porch and ditches filled with sewage that ran indiscriminately into the nearest river or ocean.  Women were even more restricted in their opportunities and independence than they are today.  It was against the law to be anything other than hetero in your sexual practices.  And as for being nonwhite, well, forget about it--you just had to hunker down and take whatever shit the white man felt like dishing out.  I could go on and on.  And true enough, many of those things aren't even close to being fully corrected yet.  But incrementally, we're getting better, not worse, than we were then.  And still, we tend to be pessimistic in our predictions for the future.  Bad news sells.  Optimism doesn't.  Humans seem to be born to be fearful, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  Fear, I suppose, was wired into us at an early stage in our development, and hasn't left, only found new outlets.   

     Now, a thing like Covid has to give one pause, since it's not really a good piece of news for the human species, and shows how vulnerable we can be.  But consider the fact that science and governments, in just two years, have fostered and created vaccines and boosters that effectively mitigate Covid's worst symptoms (so far at least), and have made these vaccines readily available, for the most part, to those who choose to get them, and also, come to think of it, to the stupid assholes who refuse to get them.  The virus, which only wants to live, like we do, has, thanks to those unvaccinated people, stayed alive and well, but also has mutated into a form that is much more alive and well than its original version, if less deadly at present.  Viruses don't want to kill off their hosts, they just want to be able to pass successfully from one host to another.  But here's the good news.  Even an unscientific guy like me knows all that, thanks to the diligence of the scientific community.  And the scientific community, in two years, knows more about this virus than it learned about smallpox or cholera or the plague over hundreds or even thousands of years.  So that's a bit of a silver lining in the dark cloud that hangs over us currently.

     Nevertheless, we'll continue to be bombarded by worst-case scenarios, both in the news media and in the science fiction extensions of our current fears.  And the lines between the two will continue to blur.  I don't know how many people actually believe in zombies and vampires and the probability of a meteor hitting the earth soon, but I'll bet it's a significant percentage of the population.  And an even larger percentage don't believe that medical science can assist us in managing things like Covid, if we would only listen.  Now that's scary. 

So Far

December 31, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     Fast away the old year passes, as they say.  Amid all the news about the omicron COVID variant, there is still a little something to talk about other than the pandemic.  If it doesn't kill us all before it runs its course, there will be something going on in the country afterwards.  (Hell, even if it does kill us all there will still be plenty of things going on, except that we won't know or care about them, because we'll be dead.  Such is life--and death.)

     What I'm thinking about is how Joseph R. Biden, the duly elected president of the U.S., is doing after almost a year in office.  Opinion polls are far too fickle in this regard, because when people feel generally good about things, their opinions of their leaders go up, and when they're bummed out (as most people are now, although that's largely their own fault), those opinion numbers go down.  So President Biden's numbers are, predictably, and according to the newspapers at least, down, as if he can help the fact that the virus continues to mutate and people continue to ignore his advice to get vaccinated and wear masks in public.  Actually in that regard he's done quite a bit, forcing the military to get vaccinated, mandating vaccinations for federal employees, and also mandating vaccinations for most employees in the private sector.  That latter mandates have still to be given the final go-ahead by the Supreme Court, and I think that's due to be heard by them in early January.

     Here I must interject that it's surprising yet encouraging to me that this stiff-necked ultraconservative Supreme Court continues to uphold vaccine mandates, but they do, at least those imposed by  governments on government employees.  This is for the most part based, I think, on a long line of Supreme Court decisions in connection with the executive's emergency powers, going back to past epidemics, wars, and various other national disasters.  It's a solid chunk of jurisprudence that is pretty much unassailable, even by the troglodytes who anchor the right wing of the court to the shallow end of human compassion in most other regards.  Also, I imagine that the fact that most Supreme Court members are pretty old, and probably fairly concerned with their own health, outweighs their urge to side with the idiot demagogues who put them on the bench in the first place.  It goes to show you, anyway, that when it comes to the Supreme Court, nothing is an absolute given, regardless of the overall political leanings of the court at any particular time.  It doesn't hurt that the Supreme Court sits atop a vast pyramid of federal judges and court systems throughout the country, and as the leaders of their own co-equal branch of the government, they're inclined, as would the heads of either of the other two branches of government, to cozy up to the idea that heads of governmental units (local, state, and federal) get to do what they feel like doing.

     But back to Joe Biden, and how he's done in his first year.  It's been an eventful year, to be sure, and I say that he's done a pretty damned good job, especially for someone without strong backing in Congress, and very little at the Supreme Court.  He's had to put up with a bare majority in the Senate that really isn't a majority at all, but a pretend majority containing a ringer from the other side, in the person of Joe Manchin, or the Insidious Doctor Fu Man-chin, as I like to call him.  (He really is a doctor of sorts, having received at least one honorary doctorate that I know of, from West Virginia State University.  I know this because my brother, who was in the administration of that institution, used to brag about having placed the doctoral hood over Manchin's shoulders at the ceremony wherein he got that degree.  Lately my brother hasn't been bragging about that so much, since Manchin has turned out to be such a fly in the Democratic ointment.  He really should have put the hood over his head and fastened it with a zip tie.)

     But in spite of the Insidious Doctor, the President has managed to get a pretty big chunk of change to the American people, and is working hard on getting even more out there.  This is money the stingy bastards in the Republican Party would have begrudged the nation, and continue to begrudge us, especially the poorest among us.  They'd rather give it to the rich and assume that it will somehow trickle down to everybody else.  Or not.  They really don't care.  Why the citizens of West Virginia don't realize how much damage their own senator is doing to them personally, poor as they are, only speaks to how thoroughly brain-dead they are, on the whole.  Okay, enough about the Insidious Doctor and the benighted hillbillies of West Virginia, whose state song was co-written by a guy from out west who barely even visited there.  Jesus what a bunch of blockheads, and what a God-forsaken place they live in.  Okay okay, I've beaten that dead horse enough. 

     What with Congress not being his best friend and all that, Biden has had to do most of his good stuff the same way his predecessor did most of his bad stuff, by exercising his inherent executive powers.  And he's done a lot of that.  He's reversed a number of environmentally damaging decisions regarding federal land use that the last guy put in place, for instance.  Also, he's diversified his cabinet in refreshing ways, and appointed a large number of women and nonwhites to the federal bench.  His FBI, under the ultimate authority of Merrick Garland, a guy who should be on the Supreme Court right now, has rounded up and is in the process of prosecuting over 700 of the seditious turds who stormed the Capitol last January 6.  The FBI is also on the hunt for right-wing extremist organizations.  Biden's departments and agencies have given the go-ahead to the building of vast solar farms and have tried to promote other alternative forms of energy and carbon-reducing measures.  He's rejoined the Paris climate accord, tried to reassure NATO and the EU that we're not their enemy, and has quit kissing Russia's ass.

     In August Biden ended the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, which was a very good thing.  Yeah, the Afghanis are getting the shits put to them by a bunch of Islamic crazies, but that's not exactly a new thing for them, and no matter how many more years we might have stayed there it wouldn't have changed the situation, except to have kept a bunch of feckless crooks in charge of a government that only we were propping up.  Were we protecting ourselves?  Hell, no.  Were we protecting Afghanistan's neighbors?  Well, considering that its neighbors are Iran, Pakistan, and a couple of the lesser Stans, hell, no to that as well.  Were we maintaining some sort of delicate strategic balance in the region?  Shit, no, because there is no such balance.  Anyway, now the Taliban is in charge and it's going to have to start acting like the leader of a nation instead of a perpetual guerilla force.  This will either bring them down from within or push their neighbors to do something to keep them in check, instead of having the country bankrolled by the U.S. and European colonial powers.  So Biden finished ripping off the band-aid that Trump, in perhaps his only decent foreign policy move, had begun to peel off a couple of years earlier. 

     Biden and his government also have continued to stand up for the right of women to have abortions on demand, even though that might not work out so well in the coming months.  This he has done in spite of being a Catholic himself, which makes him a better Catholic than some of the nasty shits on the Supreme Court who seem poised to take the U.S. backwards into the middle of the last century on the abortion issue.  It's always struck me as interesting that a country like Ireland, held for centuries under the brutal and abusive thumb of a rigid Catholicism, could legalize abortion almost overnight, whereas the good old U.S. of A., technically religiously neutral, could give in to the most conservative elements of both the Protestant and Catholic branches of Christianity, thus balkanizing the country on the abortion issue.  What a farce.  Biden also opposes the death penalty, which is in keeping with his religious beliefs, but also shows that he has some guts and common sense and humanitarian leanings when it comes to the administration of justice.

    All right, on immigration Biden hasn't been doing so well.  In part he's been hampered by the federal courts, but he seems to be interested in reversing some of Trump's harsher policies.  And all in all he's more liberal on immigration than the President under whom he served as Veep for eight years.    

     That brings up a final point, before I end this rather turgid posting.  Joe Biden, despite his flip-flopping moderate past in the Senate, is today the most domestically liberal president this country has had since Lyndon Johnson.  Seriously.  No wonder conservatives hate him.  Sure, he has a lot more to do, and it's bound to get tougher to do after the midterm elections.  And yes, he's reversed his old positions on a number of issues, but in the right direction, not the wrong one.  That shows maturity and growth and a willingness to listen to others, not hypocrisy.  And he has not, since he was sworn in, taken a single position that I'm aware of that isn't fundamentally in line with the liberal ideals of his party.  If you can name one, then let me know.

     I shouldn't have to say this, but I will.  For a President, being liberal is a good thing.  It's not a panacea for the nation's ills, by any means, but it's better by far than being moderate or conservative.  This is a time for realpolitik, not whiny idealism, yet Biden remains an idealist, just not of the whiny sort.  He's a plodder, plodding in the correct direction, and he's surrounded himself with similar folks.  No, he's not a socialist, and we might wish him to be, but if he were he'd have an even tougher row to hoe than he does now.  

     And one last thing: charismatic he's not, no doubt about it.  But he's taken this country, in less than a year, from a presidency based on a disgusting cult of putrid personality, where every day saw a new headline about a new atrocity of presidential abuse or incompetence or dishonesty, to one where the President doesn't want or need to grab headlines on an hourly, or even a daily, basis.  Biden is a normal human being, with an abnormal amount of humility for someone in his position.  For that I give him a lot of credit, and wish him well. 

     

A More Perfect Union

December 28, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     People will tell you the country is deeply divided, politically and culturally.  I won't dispute this.  Probably at no time since the Civil War has one political party in the United States been so unalterably opposed to the views and values of the other as today.  In fact, I'm not sure the Democrats and Republicans at the beginning of the Civil War were as predictably divided as they are now.  After all, there were Northern Democrats who, while not condoning slavery in their own states, and believing in the preservation of the Union, still supported the right of the Southerners (Democrats one and all) to have slaves if they wanted to.  Today the ideological viewpoints of the two parties have pretty much flipped, but the dividing lines are even brighter and less capable of being crossed than they were then.  

     The modern Republican Party comprises two basic types of people.  The first are wealthy folks who don't wish to pay taxes and who wish to be able to conduct businesses of all kinds without having the government interfere in any way with how they treat their workers, but do expect the government to help them get richer.  They also wish to be able to pollute the earth at will and ignore the current and coming changes to the world's climate.  The second are poorer, more ignorant folks, who suffer under a huge variety of delusions.  They imagine that being wealthy is an inherent virtue, and many of them think they'll be wealthy some day, so they don't want the government to interfere with the wealthy.  They profess to respect unbridled capitalism, yet they complain when they don't get enough money from the government.  They want welfare for themselves, but begrudge it to anyone who doesn't look like they do.  Both the rich and the poor folks are, predominately, white, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, excessively patriotic and religious, and backward-looking.  Most of all they are fearful.  They feel threatened by everyone and everything that isn't exactly like they are, or that portends change.  This harkening back to a nonexistent time when things were better is the real allure of the Republican Party, and the antidote to their fear.  Oh, and the stupid ones also believe that Trump had the election stolen from him in 2020 and that it's not necessary to take any precautions against the spread of COVID, or else they doubt that there is such thing as COVID, and even if COVID exists, they're afraid of the vaccine.  Fear, fear, fear.

     The modern Democratic Party comprises people in all income brackets who believe, more or less, in sharing wealth with the less fortunate, welcoming newcomers, paying their fair share of taxes, conserving our natural resources, curbing pollution, trying (however vainly) to combat climate change, and extending more rights and privileges to people who don't carry with them the automatic privilege of being white, male, heterosexual, and affluent.   If they're religious they tend to belong to religions that teach tolerance, forgiveness, and inclusiveness rather than vengeance, condemnation, and punishment.  And they believe that Joe Biden won the election fair and square, and they try to curb the spread of COVID through vaccinations and the wearing of masks.  Courage and caution, but no fear.  

     Republicans and Democrats are scattered all over the place, it's true, but in terms of which states are reliably "red" and which are reliably "blue," there's really no dispute.  There are a small handful of states that might be termed "purple" swing states in an election, too, and whose electoral votes are sufficient in number to make a difference.  These states are fiercely fought over by the two parties.  During the most recent presidential election, these swing states included Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and, surprisingly, Arizona and Georgia.  In 2016 all those states went for Trump, whereas in 2020 they all went for Biden.  But beware of assuming where they'll go in 2024.

     Okay, everybody who might be reading this already knows all this, so what's my point?  Well, I have a modest proposal.  Because the blue states and the red states differ so greatly in their political, social, philosophical, and moral perspectives, and because these differences are unlikely ever to resolve themselves, why not have another civil war between the states?  Nah, just kidding.  Anyway, that would be a waste of time, energy, and lives, and besides, the blue states would win because they're smarter, more technologically advanced, and mostly because they outnumber the red states in population, which were pretty much all the reasons why the North beat the South the last time.  Assuming the two sides don't nuke one another, it would be just a matter of time before the war would be over and the outcome would be the same as it was after the other Civil War--victory for the good guys and perpetual refusal to accept loss by the bad guys.  I mean, hell, if the Trumpers couldn't accept that Biden beat him by 74 electoral votes and seven million popular votes, how could you expect them to acknowledge having lost a civil war?  

     So let's just skip the bloodletting and simply divide into two countries.  Back when the Civil War was being fought the North had a lot to lose by letting the South become a different country.  Most of the lucrative agriculture in the country was located in the South, and England and France and other wealthy countries were poised to back the Confederacy if it would guarantee a supply of cheap cotton, and the U.S. wasn't the world power that it is today.  Take away the South, and we were basically Canada under a different flag.  I'm not forgetting the most important issue, slavery, which lots of Northerners opposed, and not just in their own back yards, but in general.

     Everybody talks about how great it was that the North won and got the South back into the Union.  But look how much the North was able to accomplish during and immediately after the secession of the South from the country!  They got the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments passed, abolishing slavery, granting citizenship to Blacks, guaranteeing the Bill of Rights to all citizens at the state level, and giving Blacks (well, Black men at least) the right to vote.  These major accomplishments happened either during the Civil War or immediately afterwards, when the South was being run by occupation Reconstruction governments.  Had the country stayed together, none of those amendments would have been passed, because the Southern senators, and the Southern state legislatures, wouldn't have allowed it.  These three amendments--the most important ones of the 19th century--were accomplished when the white South was either a different country or a disenfranchised bunch of losers, and while their original congressional members and senators were prohibited from participating in the governmental process in Washington.  That's my point, and the one I'm leading up to in this posting: good things got done when the South was not part of the U.S., but once the country got reunited and the Northern occupation of the South ended, the Southerners did their best to ignore those three amendments, rather successfully, for the next hundred or more years.  And they got their political power back in Congress, where they were able to obstruct progress for many years to come--all the way to the present day, in fact.  Most insulting of all was the fact that, after freedom and citizenship were granted to formerly-enslaved Black people, the South got even more power than it previously had in the House of Representatives, because it was able to count all the former slaves for purposes of how many congressional seats it was entitled to, instead of the three-fifths it had previously been allowed, while still keeping those former slaves from exercising their legal right to vote and, basically, while continuing to treat them like slaves, only without having to feed, clothe, and house them.

     So let's cut the bullshit and divide into the Liberal States of America and the Conservative States of America, or whatever we might wish to name ourselves.  The red states, after all, don't really want to be part of the liberal U.S., nor do the blue states want to be lumped in with the backwater likes of Alabama and South Carolina.  I mean, it's downright embarrassing to be in a country that contains states like Texas, and West Virginia, and, for Christ's sake, Idaho.  Embarrassing and costly, since we have to carry their weight when natural disasters strike or COVID overwhelms them, because they're mostly too stupid to take the necessary precautions. 

     Now, doing this would make for a physically divided country, especially the blue part.  When you look at the blue-red map, what you see is three reliably blue states along the west coast, plus Hawaii, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico.  Then, heading east, a vast amount of solid red, in the middle and throughout the south all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, with a little cluster of blue in the upper Midwest (Minnesota, Illinois, and maybe Wisconsin and Michigan), and then another area of solid blue in New England, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.  Pennsylvania, well, who knows?  The chopped up blue country would be reminiscent of East and West Pakistan after the partition of the Indian subcontinent when the Brits pulled out.  But hey, today such geographic divisions aren't as serious as they once were, due to better air and sea travel.    

     Of course the blue states have more industrial, educational, and technological strength by far than do the red states.  And as for natural resources and agriculture, I think we could hold our own.  We'd have Minnesota and Illinois in the corn belt, and California, Oregon, and Washington for just about every kind of crop you can think of.  As for petrochemicals, California and Nevada are net producers of oil and gas, not to mention the capacity for lots of solar and wind power, and Illinois has a bunch of coal, should it come to that.  Minnesota mines iron, Colorado and Nevada mine silver, and California still has gold.  And the Pacific northwest has most of the harvestable lumber.  Besides, the blues will be much wealthier and could buy what they don't have from overseas, or for that matter, from the reds, if we deign to do so.

     This is what they call a win-win situation.  Neither side can stand the other anyway.  Mississippians would be tickled pink not to have to be part of what they see as the mongrelized Yankee/Jewish conspiracy to deprive us of our freedoms.  And Californians and New Yorkers and New Englanders could continue to ignore the existence of all those inbred red-state hicks.  Sure, there would be issues to work out, like a time line, and a moment of decision by the purple states.  Maybe we could have a two-year decision window, wherein each state votes by referendum as to whether it wishes to be part of the Liberal States of America or the Conservative States of America.  That way the dumb fucks in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, who don't seem to know what's good for them, could make up their minds.  And after those boundaries are set, we could give folks another two years to migrate to or from whichever country they do or don't want to live in, before the two become absolutely separate.  I'd hate to leave the nonwhite people of the deep south stuck where they know damn well they'll be even less enfranchised than they are now.  And should states like Michigan vote to go blue, the hillbillies in those states (of whom there are many) could hightail it for Indiana or Ohio or West Virginia.  Fuck 'em.  

     During the transition period, the two future countries could decide whether they'll allow travel to and from (and over) one another.  Each country would develop its own constitution and decide on its own immigration policies.  The blues could decide not to have a Second Amendment, for example, or to ban capital punishment, or to make abortion on demand fully legal.  Both countries would have the advantage of having lived under a constitution that, despite its shortcomings, could be a model for its future governance.

     Naturally there will be many, many other issues to work through, such as the minting of money, the distribution of nukes (presently located, I believe, in both blue and red states in sufficient quantities to assure mutual destruction), the maintenance of armies, and the two countries' places on the world stage.  We can learn a few things from the successes and mistakes resulting from the breakup of the Soviet Union.  My guess is that most countries will want to cozy up to the blues, since our more progressive political philosophy would mesh better with those of the advanced nations of the western world, who today remain mystified by the strange behaviors of the red states.  And the other large, nonwestern countries would wish to trade with us, too, because we will have more money.  Canada will favor the blues.  Mexico, which is fundamentally undemocratic and corrupt, will probably take a more neutral wait and see posture.  The reds, because of their historically low wages and anti-union beliefs, might even become a place where more advanced nations will wish to have things manufactured, and might by that token become a net exporter of comparatively cheap goods and natural resources, sort of a redneck version of China, minus China's innate efficiency.  And if the reds reflect the attitude of their most cherished recent leader, they will probably wish to remain politically isolated from the rest of the world, which they will consider to be distinctly inferior, but they'll suck up to Russia just in case. 

     The biggest payoff to the blue nation will be an opportunity to fulfill some of the cherished dreams of the Democratic party--cheaper higher education, more government medical care, gun control, pollution control, racial justice, and justice for the native peoples, to name just a few.  The red nation never did care much for higher education, except as a backdrop for college football, and its medical care has always been rudimentary, at best.  If the nonwhites are able to get out of the red nation while the getting's good, the reds will have fulfilled another of their cherished dreams--pure, unadulterated, Jesus-loving whiteness.  Who they'll get to wait on them, slaughter their animals, cook their food, and shovel their shit will be anybody's guess.  Probably they'll let more Mexicans in.

     And so, onward toward a More Perfect Union.  Bind up the nation's wounds?  Sorry Abe, but hell, no.  This time we amputate!      

 

Bacon, Revisited

December 22, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     Reading the previous posting again, and making a few minor changes, as I often do, it struck me that I might have been a little hard on Judaism, and by implication, the Jewish people.  After all, for the last couple of thousand years, they've been mostly victims.  There's the diaspora (an incredibly complicated series of occupations and migrations), the expulsions from various countries, the Inquisition, the pogroms of the Cossacks, the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviets, and of course, God, who we have to assume, based on the very beliefs of the Jewish people, put all that in motion.  Then, when the State of Israel came into existence in 1948, the Israelis had to fight against all the neighboring Arab countries that were arrayed against them, which they did several times, with great alacrity and well-armed efficiency, like Popeye devouring can after can of spinach.  But as things stand now, they finally have someone weaker than themselves to pick on within their own borders, and in the semi-autonomous ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, namely, the Palestinians.  

     The Palestinians, as we know, are the Arabs who were sort of pushed aside to make way for the Jews who got the area we now call Israel in 1948. The Zionist Jews had begun to go back there in earnest at least fifty years before that, while it was part of yet another couple of empires, those of the Turks and then of the British.  Today, to fast forward a bit, the Palestinians have, by dint of a relentless guerilla war that has killed many people and gotten many of them killed (rather akin to the same kind of stuff the IRA was doing in Northern Ireland), finally obtained, on a semi-autonomous basis, a couple of little pieces of land at the outskirts of Israel, from which they are sometimes allowed to come and go in order to function as the permanent underclass that serves the more affluent Europeanized citizenry of Israel.  (I'm leaving out the Palestinians who live in Israel proper, and are citizens of that country.)  Not that the Palestinians really own their little bits of land, or owned pre-Israeli Palestine, for that matter.  That's the thing.  The Palestinians were living there, but they were no more owners of the land than the Jews ever were, except for a few thousand years ago, off and on, and also of course on and after 1948.  The history of the region is so complicated and so replete with occupations by foreign powers going back millennia, that it would take (and indeed has taken) volumes to discourse over it.  The bottom line is that right now, for a comparatively tiny sliver of time--just over 70 years--the Israeli Jews have been in charge of the area, for the umpteenth time, and the Palestinians are not in charge, also for the umpteenth time.  

     The saying goes that possession is nine-tenths of the law.  Actually, the saying originally was that possession is nine points of the law, which I'm pretty sure means about the same thing.  And what it means is that if you possess land now, and haven't blatantly stolen it, and even if you have stolen it you've exercised control and care over it for some period of time, that reality gives you a bit of a leg up on anyone who claims the land should belong to them.  I think it comes from the English common law, which I'll admit doesn't cut much ice with displaced populations, especially those that don't adhere to the English common law.  (But even those that do, including for example the Welsh and the Scots and the Irish, don't care much for the idea that coming in and taking over a place confers certain proprietary rights, even though the Celtic ancestors of the Welsh, Scots, and Irish did pretty much the same to the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain way back when.)  But what's indisputable is that the Palestinians and the Israelis each are utterly and unalterably convinced that they, and not the other ones, are the rightful owners and possessors of what we call Israel.  There's very little wiggle room on that issue on either side.  God gave each of them the land, they believe, and God is mighty and always right, and that's the end of it.  So Fuck You.

     I won't say much more about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict here, though.  I don't think it's an easy issue on which to take sides, unless you're one of the interested parties.  And I am not.  I can afford to be more or less neutral.  I don't want to see either side have to leave, but I would like to see the Palestinians treated with more compassion by the Israelis, considering especially that the Israelis should know better than to act like such dicks, considering how shabbily the Israelis were treated throughout European history.  In exchange for being compassionate and accepting of the Palestinians, the Palestinians should accept that Israel is pretty much fully in charge, on the basis of that possession thing I mentioned in the previous paragraph, and also on the basis of another saying, namely, that Might Makes Right.  It's sort of the way of the world, and unless you have your head pretty far up your ass, you shouldn't be thinking that Israel will suddenly pull up stakes, or that the Palestinians are going elsewhere either.

     As I said at the beginning, I gave Judaism as a religion a bit of an unfair shake when I tarred it with the same brush as I did Islam and Christianity.  Judaism doesn't want to try to make you convert.  In fact, Judaism doesn't really want you at all, unless you're a Jew by birth.  They'll take you, if you sincerely want to join them, but all in all they'd just as soon you didn't want to.  Judaism, as far as I know, has never put anyone to the sword or the gun simply for refusing to join the Jewish religion.  You can't say the same of Christianity or Islam.  So there's that.  

     The Israelis who run the country of Israel, on the other hand, can be real pricks, and treat their Palestinian co-inhabitants like shit.  Much of this goes back to the Jews' own bad treatment at the hands of practically everybody for a long time, which, bless their hearts, they migrated to Israel to get away from.  But now they somehow can't avoid internalizing all that mistreatment.  So they're as ruthlessly efficient and exclusionary as their own tormentors, and as disdainful of the Arabs as the Europeans were (and pretty much still are) of them.  And it also dovetails neatly with the religious principles of Judaism, which seem to hold both past and future generations responsible for each others' actions.  It's like there's no real passage of time within Judaism.  They live in an eddy of repeated history--a constant state of travail, punishments, momentary victories, long-term losses, and above all, lots and lots of rules, with very little qualitative progress.  It's as if they're caught in an episode of the Twilight Zone, where they wake up to the same thing every day, perpetually under threat from outside, bound by their own neurotic obsession for order, and lorded over by a nasty Father-God who won't give them a break.

     And on top of all that, they can't eat bacon.    

     

             

Bacon

November 30, 2021

Cathedral City, California

     It's hard to know where to start.  So many things are going on, in the world and in my head.

     As I write this my hand is on the bible.  Funny place for it to be, but I'll explain.  When we moved into this condo last February, it was furnished--not merely with furniture, but with a number of items of, shall we say, "home decor." For instance, there were at least a dozen large clocks (some working, some not) scattered throughout the place.  The previous owners also were quite fond of faux French stuff--wall hangings, serving trays, pictures, etc.  Gay Paree, by way of Pier One.  There were many artificial flowers, as well as containers for them, including all sizes of baskets, vases, and ceramic pots.  And a few books as well, which they evidently didn't think enough of to take with them.  We got rid of most of the aforementioned stuff, managing to sell quite a bit of it out of the garage via Craigslist (it's amazing how much artificial plants cost at retail, and how much people are willing to pay for them after the fact).  Some things we simply had to chuck because they were too hideous for anyone, and some things we kept--a few of the better clocks, baskets, pots, etc.  One thing that didn't sell for some reason was the bible, and I couldn't quite bring myself to shitcan it.  Probably a superstitious holdover from my childhood as a preacher's kid.  

     Well, it turns out that my computer mouse doesn't work well on the glass-topped work desk where I'm seated as I write this, so I decided to use the bible as a mouse pad.  A couple of days ago my wife and I happened to be listening to an episode of "This American Life" on public radio.  It was the first-person story of a man raised in an orthodox Jewish family headed by an abusive alcoholic father.  The narrator attended a yeshiva rather than a regular school, where he had to learn all about the innumerable arcane rules of behavior surrounding the Sabbath, as well as everyday life, for orthodox Jews.  Among them was the puzzling array of blessings to be given, depending on what type of food was being blessed. Separate blessings for dairy, meat, things made of wheat, etc.  All kinds of blessings.  At school the kid was in a sort of "blessing bee" when he was asked to give the blessing for an ice cream cone.  He knew the blessing for dairy, but didn't know what a cone was made of, so he was stumped, as I recall, and decided to wing it, with bad results.  And for him, overshadowing all these bizarre rules, and exceptions to rules, imposed by Hashem and taught at school, was the terrible drunken behavior of his father, often ending with beatings.  A poignant story.

     After having listened to this, I was back at the computer, and it occurred to me that I hadn't opened the bible at all during the time I've been using it as a mouse pad.  I keep it face down, with only the black paper back showing.  The print is tiny, and well, I spent so much of my youth reading from the damn thing, and the content is meaningless as it ever was.  But on a whim I decided to open it to the crazy Hebrew part (as differentiated from the crazy Jesus part, which takes up only about a quarter of the whole bible).  I flipped to the book of Deuteronomy, which is a veritable mine field of rules for the poor Israelite shmucks who had to follow them, and in some cases still feel compelled to do.  At random I read a single chapter, and man, talk about rules.  What to do if your wife isn't a virgin when you marry her, and what to do if she was a virgin but got raped on her way to the wedding, and how many shekels need to be paid for various infractions, and when someone needs to be stoned to death.  Also (and I can't overemphasize this) do NOT wear clothing made of both wool and linen, do not yoke an ox and an ass together, and whatever you do, don't have sex with your father's wife.  And all this in the same chapter!  A quick scan of the previous and subsequent chapters indicates that there is much, much more of the same.

     I personally can't imagine being an adherent of a religion with so many rules--and not, mind you, rules about how to behave kindly and generously and justly to your fellow human beings, Golden Rule type stuff, but about things like where to tie up your farm animals and which ones to eat and which ones to burn as offerings and where to do so.  There are some people some who just get a bang out of not only following the rules, but of quibbling about what the rules mean, for their entire lifetimes.  To sort of paraphrase Al Pacino's Satan in The Devil's Advocate, the God of the Jews definitely comes across as a cosmic prankster, keeping his people jumping from one foot to the other.

     Not to pick on Jews only, to be sure.  Muslims basically follow that whole megillah of Old Testament rules, too, and in addition are heavily into putting the message forth with the blade of a sword or the barrel of a machine gun.  And Christianity, even though it was ostensibly based on the teachings of a Jewish guy who in essence said, "Fuck all these rules, just be good to each other" and paid for saying so with his life, has incorporated all this Mosaic nonsense into its bible, the King James Version of which sits, face down, under my mouse.  And it's those crazy, intolerant, misogynistic laws, not to mention the silly creation myths that begin the Old Testament, that get used the most by fundamentalist Christians as a bludgeon wherewith to pummel the nonbeliever, and one another, for that matter.  For Christians, if you want to be generous and tolerant, you cite certain portions of the New Testament, but if you want to be stingy and nasty and intolerant, you cite portions of the Old Testament.  Except that some of the intolerance of the Old Testament got included in the New Testament, mostly because of St. Paul, a Jew who converted to Christianity, who wrote a big fat chunk of it.  It's quite a versatile religion, when you come to think about it.  

     All of which has me scratching my head, as I often do when I contemplate our sacred western traditions.  Not being a Muslim, I can't explain the allure of a religion that wants you to bow down in a specific direction and pray five times a day; to make a pilgrimage to a sandy no-man's-land run by a bunch of sword-wielding medieval chieftains, where you walk counterclockwise around a massive cube; and to spend the rest of your time, if you're lucky enough to be a male, hanging out with other hairy men who act the same way.  And on top of all that, you can't eat bacon.  Not being Jewish, I can't really explain the allure of a religion that has no meaning outside of adherence to a lot of anal regulations and ceremonies imposed by a perpetually pissed-off God who claims he loves you, but when he's not having you sold into slavery or massacred by goyim, is inventing little tricky pitfalls to make you disobey him so he can punish you all over again, and who doesn't even bother to tease you with offers of paradise or threats of hell in the afterlife.  Just, I guess, a chance to rest up for eternity from having to remember all those fucking rules.  And on top of all that, you can't eat bacon. 

     However, I was raised a Christian, and the son of a clergyman, so I suppose I should be able to explain that religion, but for the life of me I can't.  First, as noted, there is Christianity's brutal underpinnings--the sort of preamble to the religion--laid out ad nauseam in the Hebrew scriptures, with all their laws and kings and judges and prophets and people smiting one another and getting smitten by others.  The last words of the Old Testament, in fact, are in the Book of Malachi, with God warning the Jews to behave, "lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."  And really, that pretty much sums up the overall thrust of that section of the bible--God saying, Be good (which I know you won't) or I will put the shits to you (once again).  I mean, really, why is this stuff even in the Christian scriptures?  But it is, and shame on Christianity for including it.

     The New Testament, on the other hand, offers a whole different kind of craziness.  Here we are given to believe that Jesus was a direct descendant of old Abraham himself, as the very first chapter of the very first book tells us.  Except not really, because his father Joseph wasn't really his father.  Instead, his mother was miraculously made pregnant by the Holy Spirit and Joseph didn't have anything to do with it.  Then, as things proceeded, Jesus became, first, a boy wonder, teaching his elders, then after that wandered around gathering disciples and performing miracles until finally the Jewish ecclesiastical authorities in Roman-occupied Judea (this occupation being another hurt put on the beleaguered Jews by their God for fucking up in some way) had had enough of his blatant disdain for their nitpicking rules and his claims that he was God's son, and had him executed for blasphemy against the Jewish religion.  And that was a task the Romans were happy to perform, especially if it made the place easier to govern.  Let's face it, if you're an empire and one of your otherwise fairly compliant imperial provinces is having internal problems, you do what you can to smooth things over.  Okay, fine so far, and nothing particularly unusual.  The Romans loved to crucify people.  They really seemed to enjoy it, as much as the Jews enjoyed stoning people to death.  It was just good fun.

     If all this wasn't enough, however, Jesus appeared to rise from the dead after about a day and a half (or on the "third day," as Christians like to say, which counts the first half day, the whole middle day, and a tiny bit of the morning of the third day--the math here always puzzles me).  Now, rising from the dead was not a bad trick, nor a particularly difficult one, considering that crucifixion was a deliberately slow form of suffocation by means of gravity and exhaustion, and wasn't meant to kill anybody right away.  In fact, the average strong man could last for days up there on a cross, and sometimes died of starvation and thirst unless he was used for target practice by soldiers with spears or birds pecked at him too much.  But Jesus played possum and was taken down after only a few hours and laid to rest.  Small wonder that he recovered and got the hell out of the tomb, albeit with sore hands and feet and maybe a cut in his side.  But really, only a wimp would die that quickly, and he seemed to be a pretty regular guy, physically.  I mean, the son of God ought to be able to take a little physical punishment without croaking, don't you think?  He carried that cross through town while being whipped, for crying out loud.

     But that whole rising from the dead deal, along with Jesus's conception and birth that apparently had nothing to do with his father, are celebrated as the two Big Events of Christianity.  Pretty thin stuff, if you ask me, and really no basis for a whole religion, which I guess is the reason we borrowed all the Hebrew stuff, to sort of fill in the gaps, and also made up a big city in the sky where the good people go and a lake of fire where the bad people go.  If nothing else, heaven and hell have made for some good New Yorker cartoons over the years.  

     Then, we Christians had our turn at imposing our ostensibly forgiving and redemptive religion on everybody else on pain of death, just like our Muslim brethren have done and continue to do.  Stupid doesn't even begin to cover it.  But at least we get to eat bacon.