Bah humbug again!

Time for another snarky, Grinchly diatribe against the commercial rape of the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus. Actually, I find that my last (and first) “Bah, humbug!” was three years ago (3 Dec 07). In fact, my illustrious blog, world-famous for its rapier wit and profound insights, has been practically dormant for the last year (one post in February and one in August), as it became evident that, world-famous as it was, nobody ever read it. But that’s another story.

Gosh, there’s so much to bitch and whine about! In ’07 it was about (1) the fact that it’s not Christmas until after the 25th, not before; (2) the mangling of Christmas carols blared from store speakers to make people spend more money; (3) the “war on Christmas” bullshit spouted by that demagogic asshole Bill O’Reilly. I could add “I’m dreaming of a black Kwanzaa” and “It’s the most horrible time of the year” to “Rudolph the purple-assed baboon,” “I saw Mommy blowing Santa Claus,” and “Roadkill roasting on an open fire.” I could note that the spending frenzy encouraged by the stores ultimately supports the economic growth of China and the stranglehold of the financial-services crime syndicate on consumers who are goaded into squandering money they don’t have and never will have. I could make more of an issue of obscenely opulent displays of decorations of such spectacular magnitude that they can be seen from outer space by the disrobed eyeball—displays which must create staggering amounts of greenhouse gases from the hundreds of kilowatt-hours of energy they use.

But this year I will attack Santa Claus—or, more precisely, what Santa Claus has been turned into by the secular-commercial society. Last year I was requested to act the part of Santa Claus in a fund-raising benefit at a local bookstore, and I replied that I’d only do it if I could call attention to the derivation of the present-day Santa Claus from St Nicholas, bishop of Myra (now part of Turkey) in the 4th century. Boy, did that ruffle some feathers among the secularists and atheists! (It didn’t help when a gay friend of mine asked to play the part of Mrs Claus.) Since St Nicholas’s feast day is 6 December, nineteen days before Christmas, it is rather curious how he became associated with the latter feast. According to the Wikipedia article on “Santa Claus,” he is derived from the Dutch figure of Sinterklaas, a “historical, legendary figure” who is said to bring gifts to the homes of good children on Christmas Eve. The legend has a hagiographic basis in the historical St Nicholas because of his generous giving of gifts. Nicholas is still revered as a saint in eastern Christendom, and up until recently was depicted in the regalia of an Orthodox bishop, which in western Christendom was gradually transmogrified into the ridiculous costume associated with Santa Claus today.

Enter Clement Clark Moore, the attributed author, in 1823, of that unspeakable abomination, “’Twas the night before Christmas,” for which I fervently hope he is eternally frying in Hell. It is to him that we owe this asinine business of flying reindeer pulling a sleigh through the sky and this fat fuck climbing up and down chimneys without getting a speck of soot on his absurd costume. I am warmly comforted by the fact that some children are terrified of this hideous apparition when they see him in stores during their parents’ spending orgy, and by the hundreds of jokes and cartoons which depict him as child-molesting old pervert who is often drunk when playing his part—as anyone would have to be to make such a monumental ass of himself in public. Then add that further atrocity Rudolph, who was introduced in a 1939 book before being enshrined in the 1949 song, and the debasement of Kiss-my-ass to a spectacular orgy of obscene prostitution is complete. Mind you, I’m not much more fond of some of the quasi-religious celebrations which focus on a sweet little Baby Jesus who looks distinctly Anglo-Scandinavian, and on immaculately groomed farm animals without a trace of cowshit anywhere in sight. (I still love the possibly apocryphal story of the choir that programmed a concert with “Here betwixt ass and oxen mild” followed by “Whence is this lovely fragrance?”) For my money, the best contemporary take on Christmas is still W. H. Auden’s For the time being, in which Joseph is the subject of town gossip because Mary is pregnant out of wedlock, and Herod is depicted as a liberal who resents being manipulated by God into being a bad guy against his will (i.e., slaughter of the Holy Innocents). I find it hard to beat these lines:

The garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.

Try singing “Santa Claus is coming to town” after reading that.

Happy Feast of the Nativity of Jesus.

Periodical literature review

As usual, I see no reason to apologize for five months of silence. Nobody reads my rambling drivel anyway, so no amount of silence will even be noticed. Actually, I had in draft in April an article about my recent addiction to Facefuck, but I never got around to publishing it and have now deleted it. I see no reason to make any comments on the continued plunge of the nation and the world into apocalyptic chaos and anarchy, except to opine that it isn’t happening fast enough for my taste. I see no point in making more than passing mention of the BP oil disaster, or Mel Gibson’s self-destruction in a flaming display of terminal assholism, or the media debates over whether Sarah Moosehunter will run for President in 2012, or whatever other non-events are the current fodder for the mass-opiate machine, or what Joe Bageant calls the American holograph. I stay remarkably busy with music gigs of one sort or another, and stay autistically isolated from a reality which I find unpleasant and boring. Life goes on, in spite of every effort to avoid it. It is, as Thomas Hobbes said, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

I remember when the mainstream propaganda made considerable hay of Moosehunter’s failure to respond appropriately to some interviewer’s question of what newspapers and magazines she read. Having less presence of mind than an ordinarily bright turnip, she made the mistake of trying to cover her ass, instead of simply quoting the great line from none other than Jefferson, one of our revered floundering fodders, who said that the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers (but probably not better educated than the man who reads something besides newspapers). Presumably a candidate for high public office is expected to be conversant in the literature of the mainstream propaganda machine. I, however, not being a candidate for any office at all, rather pride myself on being essentially illiterate with regard to the mainstream media. If anyone were to have nothing better to do than ask me such a stupid question, I would reply that the only “news”-papers I read are the satirical Onion (stories you wish were true) and the local leftist Boulder Weekly, and the only magazines I make any effort to look at once in awhile are Mother Jones, The New Yorker, and the U.K.-published Economist. I may give a cursory glance at Time occasionally if there’s nothing else available, but I wouldn’t be caught dead with the Wall-eyed Journal. Mother Jones is to the Wall-eyed Journal as the Communist Manifesto is to Smith’s Wealth of nations.

But sometimes, in browsing through the magazine rack at my favorite coffee shop (which is NOT Starfucks!), I run across some rather interesting alternate realities, in some ways more bizarre than the Onion. The other day I picked up an issue of something called Real Simple, under the fatuous illusion that, judging from the name, it might have something to do with “simple living.” Not hardly. Roughly 200 of the 280 pages were devoted to advertisements, all of which, every one of which, were targeted to women, most of them for feminine health, beauty, and vanity. I subsequently learned from a Wikipedia stub that it is indeed a “women’s interest” magazine, to which I should have been clued in by the fact that the vast majority of customers at the coffee shop are women; I sometimes feel like I’m in a henhouse. There are no copies of Guns & Ammo, or even Sports Illustrated, in the magazine rack. Obviously no men except queers or transvestites are expected to look at it, and as one of the former, I can tell you the royal we were thoroughly disgusted. I can’t imagine how Time Inc., the publisher, came up with the name Real Simple, because the lifestyle it advertises is about as simple as the court of Louis XVI; I wonder if the millions of people on earth who live in grinding poverty, gnawing hunger, and squalid filth, or even the people in the “developed” nations who pursue authentically simple lifestyles, would consider it “simple.” I think Time Inc. should be sued for false labeling.

The real find, however—and, characteristically, I can’t remember where I found it—was a magazine called Kush: Colorado’s premier cannabis lifestyle magazine. Now, this is interesting on so many levels that it’s difficult to know where to begin. But let’s start with:
(1) The fact that a magazine devoted to “Colorado’s … cannabis lifestyle” is published in Calabasas CA, an exceedingly affluent, yuppie suburb west of LA, and there’s no indication that anyone on the editorial staff has anything to do with Colorado.
(2) The fact that the name “kush” refers to a strain of cannabis which is particularly popular with the medical pot community, and which is named for its origins in the Hindu Kush Mountains, in the region of Pakistan and Afghanistan—which will come as a great surprise to anyone who knows diddly-squat about the geopolitics of weed.
(3) The fact that the issue I picked up had an issue date of “June 15, 2010 – Volume 2, issue 6,” which may or may not indicate, depending upon what upscale publishers trying to sound like stoners mean by such terms as “volume” and “issue,” that the mag has been around for a year and a half, and I’m just now seeing it. I move in the wrong circles—obviously.
(4) Most basically, the fact that there even exists a magazine—a large, very glossy, rather pretentious magazine—devoted to “Colorado’s cannabis lifestyle”—or, more accurately, devoted to hundreds of ads for the doctors and dispensaries that the new industry has spawned. We’ve come a long way since the days when we had to furtively toke up in friends’ houses, paranoiacally looking over our shoulders for narcs lurking in the shadows; and frankly, I pine rather nostalgically for the good old days. (Who remembers the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers?) Now you have to go to all the hassle of getting some charlatan quack doctor to write a phony prescription for you. And you can buy (or pick up free, as I did) your own glossy yuppie mag to show how hip you are in your use of something that thousands of people are spending their lives rotting in prison for because of possession of miniscule amounts. There are, of course, still many knuckle-dragging troglodytes, lots of them in positions of political or “law enforcement” power, who would like to continue locking people up for seeking relief from chronic pain. These miserable cretins, who are lamenting the passage of all the bills legalizing the use of cannabis as presaging the downfall of civilization, are still stuck in the 1938 mentality of that monumental piece of cinematic propaganda bullshit, Reefer madness. There’s a special place in Hell for these creatures.

Well, till next time, as Red Green says, keep your stick on the ice. (I don’t think he’s referring to a hockey stick.)

Brief political inquiry

Could someone please tell me why the Republicans are enjoying such a huge resurgence of popularity among the masses when they’re the ones keeping the Administration from doing anything constructive, automatically and mindlessly saying “No no no no no” to anything Congress or O-bomb-a tries to do? The “Tea Party” phenomenon has been shown, by numerous commentators, to be basically a crock of stupid shit embraced by political imbeciles and moral cretins, who are led around like mindless puppets by raving psychopaths whose rhetorical techniques seem to include crying like a baby, lying like Pinocchio, and fomenting as much fear and hatred as possible. And yet the “Tea-baggers” seem to be growing in strength, which presumably argues for an increasing number of political imbeciles and moral cretins deciding the movement expresses their feelings (I hesitate to credit them with thoughts or ideas). Granted, they have a lot of ammunition in the catastrophic debacle which this Administration has turned out to be, but they themselves are part of the reason for this, another part being the total spinelessness and treachery of the Dummy-crats.

Well, I said this would be brief, and I’ll keep my promise, uncharacteristic as it is for me to be brief. Just thought I’d throw that out and see if anybody would shoot it.

Minimizing environmental impact

Well, now that it’s a foregone conclusion that the entire global ecosystem is going to crash and burn and destroy most life on the planet within about a decade, my liberal instincts are making me feel a little more guilty (groan, beat chest, heap ashes on head) about my environmental footprint. Having just taken an “ecological footprint quiz” at Redefining Progress (www.myfootprint.org/), I am vaguely comforted to learn that my footprint is roughly 63% of the national average, but considering that the national average is scandalous and a crime against humanity, that’s cold comfort. I eat most of my meals out, which is supposed to be a horrendous drain on resources (but supports local labor); I refuse to freeze my ass during winter or fry my ass during summer, which entails horrific energy expenditures. But I do walk reasonable distances to places most other people drive to, and I use a lot less water than most people because of personal hygiene standards which some would consider less than optimal. And a lot of my deficiencies are simply due to the fact that it requires more or less money to correct them by various sorts of technological fixes, and I can’t afford to. I mean, let’s face it, strict environmental conscientiousness is a luxury of the moderately well-off because it costs money. This is, of course, one of the major sticking points at all the international conferences on climate change where profligate wastrels in the developed world tell the poorer nations what they should do to reduce global warming and the poorer nations politely tell them to take a flying fuck at the moon. And if one becomes overly scrupulous and a little paranoid, one can start self-flagellating over such things as using a computer, which some sources say consumes vast amounts of both energy and resources; or eating tofu because of the horrible waste of resources involved in raising food animals, only to find that growing soy beans has its own environmental impact; or even farting too much because of the contribution of methane to global warming. It is, in fact, ultimately impossible to be totally pure environmentally. Living as simply as possible has its own unavoidable impact.

So, I have finally reached the only logical conclusion. You may remember (of course you do) a post on this blog back in 22 August 07 entitled “Save the planet: Kill yourself,” which was about a satirical (we hope) cult called the Church of Euthanasia which recommended just that. Its defining principle was population reduction, but the same logic applies to reduction of environmental impact. The only way to have zero impact is to kill yourself. Unfortunately, your one last impact will be the air pollution involved in cremation, but after that, you can congratulate yourself on having made the ultimate sacrifice to save the planet. Not that it will work, but at least you can feel smug and self-righteous about it up in Heaven while looking down and watching Earth continue to collapse in apocalyptic cataclysm, as well as feeling immensely relieved at having gotten out of it in time.

The end of the world

Some of the readers of this blog may find a welcome respite from the rather tawdry spectacle of political war and general social collapse, in the news that the world is coming to an end on December 21, 2012. Not only is this a peculiarly specific date, but I have even seen one page time it with even more peculiar specificity to 11:11 GMT. It happens to be my 76th birthday, and I can’t think of a better birthday celebration than the end of the world—if I live that long. This peculiarly specific date has been derived from a Mayan calendar called the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, the first appearance of which dates back to 36 BCE. There are various scenarios for the end of the world, including a collision with some rogue planet called Nibiru (predicted by someone in psychic contact with extra-terrestrials), or an alignment between the Sun and the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Naturally there are the inevitable party-poopers who point out that the Mayan calendar actually doesn’t say anything about the end of the world on that date, but simply the end of one cyclical period and the beginning of another, and that if Nibiru were close enough to Earth to collide on that date, it would already be visible to the naked eye. But of course, true believers are never bothered by facts, as you can tell from two minutes’ conversation with any advocate of Intelligent Design.

I’ve long been fascinated by apocalyptic predictions. And by “apocalyptic,” I do not include predictions of such relatively minor events as the end of civilization as we know it. I’m rather of the opinion that the end of civilization as we know it would be a welcome relief, since civilization as we know it sucks. (Mahatma Gandhi is supposed to have said, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, “I think it would be a good idea.”) Even severe eco-catastrophe probably wouldn’t count as the end of the world, if it did nothing more than rid the planet of that pestilent killer ape species and maybe half the other species on earth. After all, the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago simply got rid of dinosaurs (and an estimated 17% of all families) and paved the way for domesticated primates, and the present extinction event will get rid of them (all right, us) and clear the way for something else, maybe a civilization of dolphins. (Read Olaf Stapledon’s Last and first men [1930], one of the most profound science-fiction works ever written, of which Wikipedia says: “it describes the history of humanity from the present onwards across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first and most primitive.” This species, 100,000 years hence, reduces their population to 35 people by a global catastrophe that sounds eerily like a nuclear holocaust, written 15 years before such a thing was imaginable, and these 35 survivors are the progenitors of the Second Men. As visionary as Stapledon was, the idea of eco-catastrophe within a century could not have occurred to him at that time.)

No, the kind of apocalyptic predictions I’m thinking of are those that are characteristic of the various pseudo-Christian millennialist cults, and it is hardly surprising that such ideology is found in the present 2012 movement, although the secular and New Age elements in it may be stronger. Perhaps the basis of the movement in a pagan calendar helps explain the relative weakness of Christian apocalypticism in it. Christians are obviously not the only ones obsessed with the end of the world, but they have formulated what are probably the most elaborate and bizarre theories about it. Most of these doctrines are based on the Revelation of St John, to which have been attributed hundreds of ridiculously asinine ideas which never crossed John’s mind. In fact, the Book of Revelation is often called the Apocalypse of St John. The Book of Daniel also makes its contributions to eschatology because Daniel’s weird dreams were supposed to predict the end of the world.

Of course 2012 is certainly not, by a long stretch, the first apocalyptic prediction in history; depending on how they’re defined, there have been dozens of others. Rather surprisingly, the year 2000 caused more concern about computers crashing than it did about apocalyptic millennialism, even though the date was by definition millennial (in the Christian calendar, at least). Perhaps one of the more famous examples is the event in the history of the Millerite movement (predecessor of the Seventh-Day Adventists) called the Great Disappointment, when William Miller, the founder of the movement, predicted that Jesus would return to earth on 22 October 1844, and convinced thousands of followers to sell all their possessions and wait to be taken up to Heaven. The theological somersaults that the leaders of the movement went through to try to explain why this didn’t happen are good for laughs. And there are other cults and denominations that believe in apocalypses and Second Comings without trying to date them precisely. Jehovah’s Witlesses (as I like to call them) evidently expect to see the Second Coming within the lifetime of any individual believer, even though generations of adherents have been disappointed.

Christian apocalyptic millennialism focuses on such ideas as Armageddon and Anti-Christs and the Second Coming, but it also serves, perhaps primarily for many people, as a quasi-religious explanation for all the shit happening in the world, which is all seen as leading up to the End Times. In general, a movement predicting a certain date for an apocalypse is simply a crystallization of the firm conviction of the social misfits of every generation that the world is so fucked up that it simply can’t, or shouldn’t, go on much longer; and, assuming that it can’t be made any better, the only solution is to wipe things clean and start over. At least there’s something to be said for expecting this to be brought about by more or less natural means or historical events, rather than trying to precipitate it yourself by armed warfare and revolution. But the fact that all past predictions of future dates have been proved wrong by the simple fact that we’re still here and still fucking up, does not stop idiots and fanatics from continuing to predict more future dates. So, stock up your survival supplies for December 2012. Don’t ask me how you’re supposed to survive the end of the world; ask the survivalists. And ask them why they want to. Christian millennialists, of course, don’t expect or want to survive here on Earth because they expect to be taken up to Heaven. Let’s not get into the Rapture, beyond noting the bumper-sticker popular a few years ago which said, “In case of Rapture, this vehicle will be unoccupied.” There are times when I’m so humiliated by the appalling stupidity—not to mention the sheer evil—of some people who call themselves Christians that I’m tempted to become a pagan.

It’s gonna be an exciting, fun-filled three years.

Why am I eating this?

Several people have told me recently that I absolutely must see the new movie Food, Inc., which tells about all the horrible stuff we eat as a result of the food chain having been taken over by the evil food industry and its corporations. Well, as an old failed chemist, I’m already far more aware than I want to be of the shit the evil food corporations want to feed me, and I try to avoid it to a great extent (though I’m not purist enough to avoid it entirely) by not eating their more egregiously disgusting products. In my naïve innocence, I thought I might achieve this in part by buying salads from the deli of the local supermarket—which is, of course, part of the evil conspiracy. And I often read the labels they put on the salad containers, which contain the list of ingredients of these innocuous-looking salads. But I recently paid slightly closer attention than usual to this label and its list for a “cashew chicken salad.” It was quite a revelation.

Blogger won’t let me do formatting, and I have formatted the list by tab-indenting for each of several nested levels, in which the ingredients of sub-components are listed under the components. But you can’t see this, which is a pain in the ass, and a major fault of Blogger, in my opinion. To try to describe it without formatting: the first ingredient is chicken, which is a good start. Then under this is a solution (in which I suppose the chicken is soaked) which has a seasoning with seventeen ingredients. Next major heading is a “rub” with nine ingredients, then a “creamy dressing” with mayonnaise and sour cream, each of which has its list of sub-ingredients, of which the mayonnaise has eight.

At this point, they ran out of space on the label, and they hadn’t even gotten around to the cashews yet! (Makes you wonder what kind of processing they submitted the cashews to.) Or a warning label that says, “This food has been processed in a facility that employs Moslems.” The reason for this is that the nested levels require them to list sub-ingredients present in microscopic quantities before they list macro-level ingredients like cashews and celery. And an old failed chemist has to wonder about some of the ingredients present even in microscopic quantities. Disodium inosinate (in the rub)? What the fuck is that? An old failed chemist might assume it’s a sodium salt of inosinic acid, which I never heard of back when I was flunking Chem 201; but there really is such a thing as inosinic acid—C10H13N4O8P (Blogger doesn't do subscript numbers either—piece of shit), a “nucleotide of hypoxanthine.” Similarly, disodium guanylate (also in the rub) is a sodium salt of guanylic acid, C10H14N5O8P. Calcium disodium EDTA (in the mayonnaise)? Salt of ethylene-diamine-tetra-acetic acid, a chelating agent “capable of producing toxic effects which can be fatal”; so what the fuck is it doing in food? (Are you getting all this? You’ll be tested tomorrow. And I already know it without even seeing the movie.) And there is corn in four different forms—hydrolyzed corn protein and corn syrup solids in the soaking solution, corn starch in the rub, and the ubiquitous corn syrup in the mayonnaise. Corn is everywhere in the industrial food chain and is now regarded as the new villain, for economic as well as dietary reasons. High fructose corn syrup is increasingly replacing sugar as the omnipresent sweetener, since white sugar has long been regarded as another toxin (although it's a major component of the rub anyway), but corn syrup isn’t much better.

Further, a Google on disodium inosinate reveals that the inosinate-guanylate combination is now a standard flavor enhancer comparable to monosodium glutamate (MSG), which has gotten decades of bad press for the allergic reactions it causes, and which the inosinate-guanylate combination is evidently intended to supplant. I’m skeptical enough to take a rather cynical view of some of the more hysterical claims of the food fanatics that MSG and, by association, inosinate-guanylate are deadly toxins, but the fact remains, they are additives that shouldn’t need to be added. Back in the old days, foods had enough flavor on their own so they didn’t need enhancing, but we’re talking about Food, Inc. here. The flavor would not need to be enhanced if it hadn’t already been destroyed by production and processing.

Fortunately, east Boulder County (including Lafayette and Longmont), has a number of “health food” stores where one can shop to avoid the toxic assaults of Food, Inc. By way of contrast to the above, perhaps erring on the side of brevity, an egg salad sandwich made locally and sold at the local Vitamin Cottage lists the following ingredients: “Egg salad (eggs, mayonnaise, mustard, onion, herbs, spices, salt), bread, lettuce (contains eggs & wheat)”. What dark secrets lie hidden in those simple words “mayonnaise” and “bread”? Hopefully not calcium disodium EDTA. The warning that egg salad contains eggs is, of course, consistent with the warning that peanut butter contains peanuts, or that items just removed from the oven may be hot. Anyone selling anything in this degenerate society these days has to assume that everyone is halfwitted, in order to avoid being sued for not telling them the glaringly obvious; unfortunately, the assumption is correct depressingly often. However, rumor has it that the sinister fiends of Food, Inc. are now infiltrating and taking over the “health food” market and passing off their vile poisons under false pretenses. Which naturally (sic!) leads to the boom in farmer’s markets and home gardens. We are gradually learning not to trust any food store—the latest member of the long list of institutions we can’t trust. They’re all out to get us.

So, why do I keep eating this shit? Because it’s cheap and I’m lazy. That’s how they entrap everybody, isn’t it?

Stupid Americans

It’s been a long time since I have seriously considered leaving this country because I can’t stand to watch it go down the tubes. The last time, I think, was when Emperor Ray-gun was elected a second time and churches started offering performances of the Greek Orthodox hymn “O Lord, save thy people.” That was twenty-five years ago, and being 25 years older now, I’m far less resilient for such a major upheaval. On the other hand, now that I have a meager retirement income and don’t have to look for work in Canada, all I have to do is figure out if I can live below the poverty level there. More likely, they’ll use that as a reason for not letting me in in the first place.

I should hardly need to explain what has brought me to this depth of despair. Even the Reign of Terror under Emperor Dubya did not reduce me to such hopelessness because I thought things would get better when he was dethroned. Well, he’s been dethroned by the Great Brown Hope, and all Obama’s attempts to start doing things right are being blocked and thwarted by the lunatic far-right. When I first thought of writing a post on how stupid Americans are, I googled “stupid Americans,” and was so depressed and horrified by what I found that I almost gave up trying to deal with it (although, as you see, it didn’t stop me from trying anyway). I’m beginning to think a growing proportion of the populace is not just stupid, but psychotic as well. Bill Maher has been quoted as saying that the Democrats are moving to the right and the Republicans are moving to an insane asylum. The spectacle of armed maniacs screaming and ranting at public meetings is not something to give one the warmest confidence in where this country is heading. Behavior which in some places and at some times would have gotten its perpetrators put before a firing squad for treason and sedition, is now smiled upon and encouraged, not only by the molders of public opinion but by the molders of public policy.

The google on “stupid Americans” linked to such things as YouTube clips of a journalist interviewing supposedly representative people on the street who can’t name a country beginning with the letter U (like their own), or who think a triangle has one side, or who don’t know what religion Buddhist monks are; and to YouTube clips of Bill Maher’s now infamous (and, frankly, overly glib) rant on 27 July about stupid Americans, which (perhaps justly) won him a lot of flak. (Jay Leno, in his “Jay-walking” segments, used to make fun of the staggeringly moronic answers of people on the street to questions a bright fourth-grader could answer correctly, but I often wondered if people deliberately gave moronic answers so they could be shown on the Tonight Show.) In a 7 August rejoinder to his critics, Maher defended himself by quoting poll statistics showing that “a majority of Americans cannot explain what the Bill of Rights is; 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War; more than two-thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade”; etc. etc.

But there are also, mostly among the comments to these clips, a few who point out that, horrifying as this ignorance of simple facts is, it is not the only, or even the worst, manifestation of stupidity. What might be considered worse than this is the propensity of stupid Americans to believe preposterous nonsense, such as that dinosaurs and humans occupied the earth at the same time, or that the sun revolves around the earth. Worse yet is their total inability to critically recognize bullshit when they hear it, and their mind-numbing gullibility to the demonically vicious lies fed to them by the far-right demagogues, such as that Obama is a Muslim or was born in Kenya. In fact, the impetus for Maher’s diatribe was the spectacle of the so-called “town hall meetings” on health care being reduced to chaotic free-for-alls by the above-mentioned armed maniacs, many of them thugs paid by the corrupt rackets who profit from the status quo, who were yelling the lies they had been told by those racketeers and by the far-right demagogues, the most patently absurd, and therefore the most cited, being the idea that government death squads will euthanize grandma. There are some radicals who believe that democracy is not supposed to work like this. One of the revolutionary (the small r is deliberate) fathers said something to the effect that democracy could not work unless the citizenry were sufficiently educated to know what they were doing as citizens, and that certainly cannot be said of the majority of people these days; ergo, democracy cannot work, and is not working in this country at the present time and in its present form.

I have often referred to the “Divided States.” A google (I use that a lot, don’t I?) on “Divided States of America” shows that the idea is rather widespread, with a number of scenarios, ranging from the interesting to the bizarre, being put forth as to how our great nation might fragment into separate, autonomous sub-republics in the near or far future. One of the more reasonable divisions suggested for such a fracture is, not surprisingly, based on religion. Michelle Haimoff, commenting (11 Sept 08) in the Huffington Post, says: “It’s time for the two separate countries residing in the United States of America to part ways in peace. There exists an ideological schism so extreme that it no longer makes sense for us to stick together as a nation. Perhaps it’s time to abandon the union that the Civil War maintained. The schism has become increasingly pronounced with each presidential election and it was unmistakable at the recent Democratic and Republican conventions. The rift begins and ends with the political parties’ conception of God.” Grieve for poor Lincoln; there goes the Gettysburg Address down the drain. I may be accused of some regional (and religious) bias for suggesting that such a fracture, which would essentially let the Deep South (along with Texas) re-secede, would very handily separate the great majority of terminally stupid people from the rest of us, although other scenarios suggest isolating Utah and Idaho as an autonomous Mormon republic, or selling Alaska back to Russia (which has nothing to do with religion but makes perfect sense geographically, and would have the additional benefit of getting rid of the moose-shooting beauty queen). However, some scenarios lump Colorado in company I’d rather not keep, but let’s not go there.

So, will the appalling stupidity of the American people lead to the dissolution of the United States? Almost certainly not; but in my dourer moments, one of which is right now, I almost wish it would. Barring that, Canada is beginning to look more and more tempting. Too bad they won’t accept me.