Bah, humbug!

Yes, it’s Scrooge talking to you here—Scrooge, the Grinch, any character you can think of who will rain on the orgy which Krismus has become in the last however many years you want to date it back to. Decorations? Right after I bought my mobile home back in October ’89, my friends at church had a house-warming party for me, and as it was then close to Krismus and the house-warming gifts were all supposed to be tacky and tasteless, I got several tacky and tasteless Krismus decorations, the details of which I will not go into. I never took them down. They have been in the same place 365¼ days a year for 18 years now, not only just as tacky and tasteless but now covered with 18 years of dust as well. That’s my Krismus decorations.

No, I won’t go into how the “true spirit of Christmas” has been corrupted and raped by commercialism; that ground has been gone over so many hundreds of time by so many hundreds of people that it’s a dead horse (block that metaphor!). My diatribe is simply that IT IS NOT CHRISTMAS YET! Re-read that carefully: IT IS NOT CHRISTMAS YET!! I have no objection to Christmas being properly celebrated when it is Christmas, but in the liturgical calendar (look it up; I’m not going to explain here what the liturgical calendar is), Christmas starts on the 25th (and runs until 5 January), it does not end then. Up until then, it is Advent: looking forward expectantly to Christmas, preparing for it. For this reason, I refuse to sing or play Christmas carols (or whine and moan if I’m pressured into it) and am, if anything, perhaps more upset by the blasphemous mangling of them which is blared in every store than I am by the commercialism. (And when I use the term “Christmas carols,” I mean Christmas carols, not secular abominations like “Rudolph the purple-assed baboon” and “I’m dreaming of a green cash till” and “I saw Mommy blowing Santa Claus” and “Roadkill roasting on an open fire”—although I am rather fond of “Grandma got run over by a reindeer.” I kind of like to hear the secular songs mangled; it somehow seems appropriate to the spirit of commercialism.) I guess it’s supposed to be a well-intentioned effort to put some kind of half-assed “Christmas spirit” into the spending frenzy, but for me it has the opposite effect of making the spending frenzy a little more obscene.

This confusion of seasons adds an extra dimension of irritation to the continuing circus side-show of that obnoxious, demagogic clown O’Reilly when he keeps yapping about how one symptom of the alleged “war on Christmas” is the fact that salespersons in stores have the temerity to say “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Actually, the first is considerably more appropriate than the second: it is a secular holiday, but it is not Christmas, and it is therefore incorrect to chastise people for failing to say “Merry Christmas.” Of course, one could hardly expect such an ignorant twit as O’Reilly to know this; he probably never heard of Advent or the liturgical calendar. But even though his trumped up war on Christmas is a hoax, I must admit to being slightly saddened that the singing of Christmas carols is no longer allowed in schools.

The city of Boulder (Colorado) has for decades put a large star made of lights (I’m not sure how large, maybe 100 feet end to end?; large enough to be visible from 20 miles away) on the prominent hillside (Flagstaff Mountain) west of town during the holidays, and it’s a tradition dearly loved by almost everyone in the city. Almost. As you might have expected, some obnoxiously militant atheist got up in arms years ago about the display of a Christian symbol on government land (it’s part of the Boulder Parks system)—you know the routine. A friend of mine had an editorial letter published in the local paper, in which he suggested that if it would make this person feel better, we could change the display to a symbol of her faith: a huge zero. We need more sarcasm in daily affairs.

And don’t get me started on outdoor decorations, the most opulent of which can be seen from outer space without magnification. These are people who have obviously never heard of energy conservation. . . .

Joining the rabble

I have a horrible confession to make—a terrible, shameful, humiliating confession of a shocking plunge into depravity and loathsomeness. Sorry, nothing to do with sex; that’s old hat. No, it’s worse than that: I’ve started dieting. Oh, please forgive me! I don’t know what I was thinking of when I did it! Well, yes, actually I know perfectly well what I was thinking of: I was thinking of 195 pounds on 5 feet 7 inches, among many other things. My chagrin regarding this derives from the fact that I’ve always had a sort of supercilious contempt for people who felt they had to indulge in such vain attempts to improve their appearance or health or whatever. Well, I said to myself arrogantly, I’ll never descend to that level. And here I am, down with the rabble.

Spent Halloween with my niece and nephew-in-law and their two kids, who said they had recently started the South Beach diet (a.k.a. the South Park diet to the cynical) because they had felt the need to trim weight off what looked to me like healthily trim bods, and they raved about the results they had seen in only a few weeks. And it was only a few days earlier that I had suffered the shocking reality check mentioned above at a doctor’s visit. (The pain in my leg mentioned in the last post turns out to be superficial phlebitis, which always sounds to me like flea-bites but is actually inflammation of arteries—or, in bad cases, deep veins—in the legs.) So I thought, well what the hell, I have to do something, I might as well try this.

I enrolled for it online instead of buying a book. Online enrollment costs some bucks, but not nearly as much as wine or high-speed internet. And it involves the option of journaling, if you want to keep track of your “progress,” and the chance to browse other journals to see how their authors are doing. It’s supposed to motivational, I guess. Most of the others restrict themselves to a line or two of telegraphic brevity, but yours truly, of course, could not resist the temptation to use a dieting journal as yet another platform for the display of his keen, insightful intellect and deathless, scintillating prose, and turns his journal entries into small essays. And, not very surprisingly, I don’t have any more audience in this medium than I do in this blog. In my browsing journal entries, my own never show up. Once more, my fragrance wasted on the desert air. I was tempted to widen the scope of my oblivion by copying the journal entries into the blog, but they involve too many details of the diet which would be boring and meaningless to anyone not sharing it.

But browsing the other journals has been a bit of an eye-opener and, I hate to say, has rather confirmed my perception of dieters as rabble. A not-surprisingly-large proportion of them are what are called yoyo dieters—people who try again and again and again, often with several different diets (Atkins often being mentioned), and either fail to lose any weight because they keep falling off the wagon, or lose it and then gain it back (I’ve seen a few of my friends do that). And their woeful tales of weakness and despair are full of guilt and remorse, sometimes approaching self-loathing, and they often come across as losers, whether born that way or made. One woman blamed her fall from grace on the fact that she was missing the boyfriend she’d broken up with. And yes, not at all surprisingly, the vast majority are women—hardly any men, from what I can tell. This could be expected on the basis of the numerous obscene cow whales I see in supermarkets, their carts piled to overflowing with junk I can’t even stand to look at, and the general obsession of this nation’s women with their appearance. Only in Boulder do the men seem to be as vain as the women everywhere else.

I’ve been on SBD (as it’s called by its users) only four days, and I’ve already failed to maintain the discipline for two of those, once when a dear friend invited me to dinner, and once during the weekly Sunday brunch of the church choir. And, as I have discussed in detail in the journal, I refuse to feel guilty about it. “The essential issue is, who’s in control, the diet or me? If the diet is in control, I’ll feel guilty about failing to keep it; if I’m in control, I won’t. It would be easy to say that if I were really in control, I wouldn’t break it in the first place, but the point is, I’m in control when I break it.” Yes, the other journalers have indeed motivated me: they’ve motivated me to avoid falling into the guilt trap they’ve fallen into. “The point has been made elsewhere that it’s as easy to become addicted to dieting as it is to suffer the addiction to food that made dieting necessary. Addictive behavior can attach itself to almost anything anyone does: eating, dieting, drinking, exercise, religion, work, you name it. If it’s intrinsically good, it can be turned bad by addiction.” The rabble are diet addicts—dietoholics, to coin yet another loathsome neologism. I am not one of the rabble, and I will not let South Park turn me into a dietoholic.

And I’ll probably never lose much weight. C’est la goddamn vie, as one of my teachers used to say.

Just checking in

Oh, gosh, has it been two months since my last post? Ask me how much I care. Time flies when the world is coming to an end. Has anything important kept me too busy to write during this time? Ask me what I consider important. I was once criticized, by a friend who herself took things entirely too seriously, for my not taking music sufficiently seriously, to which I replied, “Music is entirely too important to take seriously.” It seemed like a clever paradox at the time, and had the desired effect of making her do a mild double-take, but in fact, not even music is that important. Yes it is; why did I say that? Because I’m trying to make a case for not taking seriously even things which deserve to be taken seriously. To quote the motto of the American Nihilist Absurdist Loafers (ANAL) Party: Nothing really matters; and even that doesn’t, really.

I waste hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on the computer. I almost wish I’d never gotten one. I originally got one—a model I can’t even remember the name of, back in the cybernetic Stone Age—for the purpose of processing music. Now, about 5% of my computer time is devoted to music-processing, about 45% to word-processing, and about 50% to web-browsing. I almost never walk any distance of more than 2 miles anymore, and most of that is around the city, not up in the mountains where I ought to be. My dog sits and looks at me wistfully and whines every once in a while. My health is going to hell in a hand-basket. The computer is ruining my life.

But I guess it’s still better than the idiot box. I find it easy to wean myself away from that because I don’t have cable and my reception of the mainstream channels is so lousy that it’s not very enjoyable to watch. So I read. Books. I gather I’m in a vanishing minority in that pastime. And the only one of any importance I’m reading now is Beckett’s Watt.

Beckett is well known to the cognac-scented, pardon me, cognoscenti, and perhaps to a large number who are not, or may arguably be, among the cognoscenti, as probably the greatest Irish writer since James Joyce, and was in fact himself deeply influenced by Joyce, as well as being considered, generally but perhaps arguably, an existentialist, and certainly and unarguably an absurdist, and in fact, one of the founders, so to speak, of the theatre of the absurd, as in Waiting for Godot, famous for the savage humor with which he portrays not simply the absurdity but, according to some, the pessimism of the human condition, although others argue that he is really not pessimistic, since, for all its absurdity, life, in his vision, has a certain grim nobility, this vision being expressed in a style which is noted, particularly in Watt, for sentences of labyrinthine and at times almost incomprehensible complexity, running on for pages on end, although still, at that, more easily comprehensible than, say, The unnamable, in which the text runs on for page after page without the slightest comforting landmark of any punctuation or any other sort of break whatsoever, reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s free-association soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, to refer back to Beckett’s indebtedness to Joyce, and reminding one, in the case of Watt, in terms of bewildering sentence structure, of some of the more distinctive idiosyncrasies of German, a language whose tendency to turgidity is perhaps most famously exemplified in the critical works of Kant, and which is notorious for its use of separable-prefix verbs such as, say, zurückhalten, to hold back, in which the prefix zurück may be separated from the root halten by twenty lines of text, so that, by the time one gets to the prefix, one may very well have forgotten what root it was attached to, although this does not, of course, occur in English, so that one of Beckett’s distinctive trademarks is the stringing together of subordinate clauses that have their own subordinate clauses, and subordinate clauses to the subordinate clauses of the subordinate clauses, and subordinate clauses to the subordinate clauses of those subordinate clauses, creating the same effect of losing track of whatever verb started all this, as well as running through all the permutations and combinations of a series of items, such as a series of people, or a series of physical attributes, or a series of dogs, such combinations, again, running on for line after line after line, and adding to both the humor and the absurdity, since it is, after all, both humorous and absurd to mention that a followed b and b followed c on Monday, but a preceded b and b preceded c on Tuesday, and both a and c followed b on Wednesday, and both a and c preceded b on Thursday, and so on, thus giving the impression that life is so pointless that one is reduced to such desperate devices to try to give it some meaning.

I don’t do it as well as Beckett, obviously. Imitation is the easiest form of laziness.

Time for a drink. My leg hurts. I’m probably suffering from some terminal condition—besides life, I mean. I’ll probably die soon. If you don’t hear from me for another two months, assume the worst. It’ll be Christmas then, which is an appropriate time for catastrophes to happen. A friend of mine actually told me she worried about me when I didn’t return her phone calls because she wondered whether I’d died or not. How touching.

Save the Planet: Kill Yourself

Remember when I wrote (11 Feb) about Homokaasu’s “Kill Everyone Project”? Not surprisingly, they finished virtually killing everyone months ago, so that’s kind of obsolete by now. But now the stakes have been upped from the weirdly bizarre to the disgustingly sick, from killing the entire world population to killing yourself. As an example of the strange connections one can find in Internet links, I was linked to this from the Wikipedia page on “Sacred geometry,” of all things, to which I had been led in researching the “music of the spheres.” On the “Sacred geometry” page, there was this note: “Chris Korda, an infamous software engineer and leader of the Church of Euthanasia, designed an open-source software — ”

Wait a minute. The Church of Euthanasia? Is this for real? Yes, kiddies, it’s for real: its website is www.churchofeuthanasia.org, and they even have their own Wikipedia page, which quotes CoE’s own FAQ page, where we learn: “The Church of Euthanasia is a non-profit educational foundation devoted to restoring balance between Humans and the remaining species on Earth. We believe this can only be accomplished by a massive voluntary population reduction. … The Church has only one commandment, and it is ‘Thou Shalt Not Procreate.’ In addition, we have four ‘pillars’ or principles, which are Suicide, Abortion, Cannibalism and Sodomy.” (They explain that cannibalism refers to consuming the already dead—as if it didn’t by definition—and sodomy refers to any sexual act that doesn’t lead to procreation. Also, “voluntary” is emphasized in order to eliminate any impression that they’re advocating killing others. Glad they cleared that up.) Their quarterly publication is called Snuff it, and their usual slogan is the title of this post: “Save the Planet: Kill Yourself”—and that’s a relatively innocuous one. They go downhill from there, with such gems as “Eat people, not animals” and “Eat a queer fetus for Jesus.” Of course, population reduction is a worthy cause to support, but their tactics may not be the best way to support it. The “Family album” shows photos of their actions at various demonstrations intended to promote their cause, but many of the actions depicted and signs displayed (such as a 15-foot inflatable penis and “Sperm-free cunts for the Earth”) are so deliberately offensive and provocative that I can’t imagine them winning very many sympathizers. I think they consider it a form of Dadaism, but it’s Dadaism with an attitude (which is okay, since the original Dadaism certainly had an attitude). Some of their stuff is sick enough to push even my envelope, and I have a pretty liberal tolerance for sick humor; I will spare you the details on these. If you have a really strong stomach, you can research the site yourself, but be forewarned.

It gets worse

I wish I’d known this when I wrote the previous post. Only hours later, I hear on the 10:00 news that biology professors at the University of Colorado at Boulder are receiving threatening e-mails, including death threats, for teaching evolution at the university. Whether or not the perps are college students has not been determined, but it’s fairly clear that they are, like the maniacs who murder abortion doctors, confessed followers of the God of peace and love. One group “protects life” by killing others who they think don’t “respect” it, the other protects doctrinal purity by threatening to kill people who teach heresy at a state university. These monsters cannot and should not call themselves “Christian”; they should be locked up in mental institutions. We worry about Islamo-fascist terrorists and yet seem to accept with little question the growing number of Christo-fascist terrorists in our midst. Can we blame this on the climate of intolerance and paranoia fostered by the high crimes and misdemeanors of the pack of vicious thugs who are destroying this nation from their positions in the national government? Will we ever recover from the damage those psychopaths have done and will continue to do for the next nineteen months? Stay tuned for breaking developments, as the simpering androids who do newsertainment cheerfully tell us.

Another alternate reality

Well, no one should be particularly surprised at my silence here lately, since I said on 2 June (“Have a nice day”) that I was running out of anything worth saying. However, in my wanderings around the blogo-
sphere, or just in my casual encounters with what claims to be the real world (filtered through such windows as The Funny Times and the Onion newspaper), I frequently run across little items that strike me as so insane that they seem to deserve some comment, although I rarely get around to making any. But this one can hardly go by unnoticed.

As usual, I ran across this in a long and complicated sequence of following one Internet link after another—a sort of Internet free-association—and eventually ended up in a blog called “Dadahead”, where a post on 29 March 06 (“Galileo was wrong”) mentions the work of Robert Sungenis and his argument that Earth really is the center of the universe and does not rotate, and the Sun rotates around Earth. This is, of course, simply another instance of the same sort of lunacy as Creationism/Intelligent Design, and although one would think that “geocentrism” would be somewhat more difficult to sell, it turns out that Sungenis, while probably the best known proponent, is by no means the only one; there are several other such fruit-loops. And the kicker is that Sungenis is not, like most proponents of Intelligent Design, an evangelical fundamentalist, but a Roman Catholic—president of “Catholic Apologetics International.” And it turns out that, even though both beliefs are based on biblical literalism, the Creationists don’t always support the Geocentrists. Even among the literalists, there is disagreement about which parts of the Bible are more literal than others. I once asked a literalist how she reconciled the belief that Creation was supposed to have occurred in six “days” with the fact that a day is biblically defined as the rotation of the Sun around Earth and the Sun wasn’t created until the fourth “day.” Or, for that matter, where the “light” on the first “day” came from before the Sun was created. She looked vaguely uncomfortable and lamely muttered that it was a matter of “faith.”

What is there about religion that brings out the worst in people?—the worst stupidity, the worst cruelty, the worst fanaticism, the worst hatred and intolerance. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; it was supposed to bring out the best in people—and occasionally still does, although apparently to an extent that seems to be diminishing daily. Those whose religion inclines them to love and peace and justice and acceptance are rapidly losing ground to the growing number of those who use their perversions of religion to justify ignorance and hatred and intolerance and war and murder, and of atheists who dismiss all religion because of the evils perpetrated by the fanatics and theo-fascists.

Several years ago, the Onion ran a story about a new movement among fundamentalists to replace the (Newtonian) theory of gravity with the theory of Intelligent Pushing: objects do not fall to Earth because they are “pulled” by gravity but because they are pushed by God. Someone once said that a satirist is always faced with the problem of dreaming up a story so manifestly absurd that it won’t eventually become a fact in the real world.

Monty Python’s The meaning of life features a song in which the last line is: “Pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space, ’cause there’s bugger-all down here on Earth.”

Reality imitates psychosis

Back in 11 February, in “The Kill Everyone Project,” I wrote about a Finnish group called “The Sect of Homokaasu,” or just plain “Homokaasu,” a Finnish word which means “gay gas.” The source of the name “involves a long, breathtakingly paranoid rant by some guy who claims the Roman Catholic church was pumping poison gas into his room to make him a homosexual.”

Then a few weeks ago I ran across a post on “Only in America” (“Democracy at the end of a barrel, gayness at the end of a bomb,”
4 June), based on a BBC News article of 15 January 05, that says the geniuses of military strategy and guardians of American morality whose work our tax dollars pay for really were thinking, in 1994, of “building a ‘gay bomb’, which would make enemy soldiers ‘sexually irresistible’ to each other. . . . The plan for a so-called ‘love bomb’ envisaged an aphrodisiac chemical that would provoke widespread homosexual behavior among troops, causing what the military called a ‘distasteful but completely non-lethal’ blow to morale.” Of course it never occurred to the rocket scientists behind this idea that in certain historic cultures (like Greece during the Trojan War; see Achilles and Patroclus), gay attachments among the troops were an important factor in strengthening morale, although it would have the desired effect among Muslims who, like fundamentalist christo-fascists, are rabidly homophobic. (However, the terrorists do not “fight” in troop formation, so it really wouldn’t work after all.) Fortunately (or unfortunately?), the plans “were never pursued.” The same BBC story also says that “researchers pondered a ‘Who? Me?’ bomb, which would simulate flatulence in enemy ranks.” I like that idea even better. Turn our enemies into farting gay-boys. (“Well, I’d really love to kiss you, if you’d only stop that horrible farting!” “Who, me? It’s you that’s polluting the air!”) Is this a great country or what? How often are the Roman Catholic Church (in Finland) and the U.S. Department of Defense on the same page?

Have a nice day

Let’s face it, that half-assed piece of shit about “Martyrdom and Hate” which I was talking about working on all the way back in March has suffered a well-deserved abortion. Yup, vacuumed all the little bloody pieces out of the, no wait, that’s something else, I mean it’s been on the back burner for so long that it’s simply burned or boiled away. And good riddance; it was me at my most insufferably pompous and bombastic. Besides, I’m not only running out of anything I consider worth saying, I’m running out of any motivation for saying it if there were any such thing. In fact, I’ve become rather more depressed than usual at the rapidly mounting piles of shit which seem to be smothering the world. Joe Bageant, whom I mentioned with such praise back in 24 March (“Life without blogging”), is such a mercilessly acute critic of the present descent of Babylon into chaos and madness that reading him can quickly become something of a bummer. Basically, he seems to destroy any reason for anyone to hope that anything can get any better. His scorn and contempt for the Dummy-crats is, if anything, more savage than that for the Republicans, because the former have treacherously betrayed all the principles for which they are supposed to stand, whereas the latter have steadfastly upheld all those for which they stand. And his loathing for the Dummy-crats extends to all liberals generally, whom the party is supposed to represent. Even before the entire Congress recently begged the Mad Emperor for the privilege of standing in line to suck his cock by writing him a blank fucking check for his evil war, Bageant was warning that any appearance of the “liberals” attaining victory because of pissed-off conservatives leaving the ranks was an illusion because their defection was only a temporary aberration and they would come flocking back to the True Faith when the chips were down. Bageant grew up in the belly of the Beast and speaks from first-hand experience when he says that these people—his people—basically welcome any kind of catastrophic shit which they think will hasten the Second Coming of their sick, vicious, heretical version of kick-ass, meaner-’n-shit Jesus à la that Left Behind vomit—and that includes continuing and even worsening conflict in the Middle East, where the occurrence of Armageddon is an important part of their vision of the future.

Regarding the recent Congressional gang-bang of the Mad Emperor, the satirical White House has a cheerful and typically sarcastic take in “Iraq Funding Approved: President lauds Democrats’ courage to stay true to their spineless jellyfish convictions”: “[A]fter all their chest-pounding and tough talk about pulling the plug on my pet abortion of a war, [they] done went and tucked their packages between their legs. … Hot diggety, I love the smell of political cowardice in the morning.” So much for the so-called Democratic “victory” in November; I was by no means the only one who suspected all along that it was a hollow, fraudulent scam.

Yes, a faithful reading of Bageant has made me lose all hope of anything getting any better, at least in my lifetime, which, at the age of 70, I don’t expect to be much longer—or hope it isn’t. I really don’t want to be here when the shit seriously hits the fan and civilization collapses in anarchy. And when you factor in the accelerating pace of global deterioration from warming, now seen to be happening at a much faster pace than previously thought, it’s not gonna be just here in the Divided States that it’ll happen. We will be in the unenviable position of having been primarily responsible for the collapse of the entire fucking planet.

One of my crazier friends (a lot of them are more or less off), who died about two years ago, had a small arsenal in his home in suburban Lyons CO (have I told this already? do I repeat myself?)—at least twenty weapons with ammo, most of which I can’t even remember the names of, several of them illegal to own—which he said he was prepared to use when the above scenario occurred and marauding hordes of savages came pouring over the top of the canyon ridge across from his house, which he expected to happen in his own lifetime. He also expected to live more or less indefinitely by having all his failing body systems replaced by artificial ones, making him a kind of bionic man. Fortunately, neither of his expectations came to pass. But if I live longer than I want to, or if the shit-storm occurs as quickly as some of the gloomier prophets predict, I might yet see it. And so might you—almost certainly.

So, have a nice day.

Flappy-bedded toes

Yes, I hate to admit that I’m going to be yet another of the hundreds of people weighing in with an opinion on the pious sacrifice of Don Imus to the vengeful gods of Political Correctness. In a brief survey of the Internet, I have found, for starters, only the Rude Pundit and Kinky Friedman (though there may be more) coming to his defense, as distinguished from the dozens who have disemboweled him and fed his entrails to the jackals. It naturally stands to reason that the Rude Pundit would defend him, since he himself actually brags about a level of political incorrectness which exceeds that of Imus by orders of magnitude. Friedman not only passionately protests Imus’s sacrificial slaughter but goes on to praise him for his charitable work and to compare his martyrdom with those of “Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Joan of Arc, [and] Mozart.” (Excuse me? Mozart?) I, on the other hand, tend to agree with Pundit, who maintains that Imus was an insufferably obnoxious asshole (and who should know better than Pundit?). But that’s the whole point of freedom of speech. As I have vigorously argued for years, freedom of speech means absolutely nothing if it does not mean the freedom to be an obnoxious asshole. Evidently none of Imus’s executioners ever heard, or if they heard, ever took to heart, the maxim attributed to Voltaire about disagreeing with what someone says but defending to the death his right to say it. And to call it hate speech? Come on, pussies! There wasn’t a trace of hatred in Imus. Recklessness and imprudence perhaps, but nothing approaching hatred. Anybody who could not recognize to begin with that it was just another of his many thoughtlessly crude attempts to be funny, or who could not accept his apologies which tried to point this out to the humor-impaired, just needs to stop taking themselves so fucking seriously and get a goddamn life! If I were anywhere near that pathologically sensitive to being called a fag or a homo, I’d be a worse basket case than I already am. He apologized, fer crissakes, but this does not satisfy the tar-and-feather mob. They want blood, not contrition.

No, this is just another sorry spectacle of what we get when we let the Political Correctness fascists run rampant and unchecked, as they have been doing for decades, to the grievous detriment of any open and honest communication in the pitiful pack of sniveling losers and self-declared victims that this sick fucking society has become. When I get further depressed by reading Joe Bageant, I lose all hope of ever seeing this tragically failed nation of ours get its shit together and pull back from the brink. A growing number of recent cartoons depicts us as lemmings happily running over a cliff. (“Well, if everyone’s doing it, it must be all right.”) A sadly apt metaphor, I fear.

Life imitates comedy

Way back in 16 December, in my post on “Books I’m reading,” I referred to a passage in Lenny Bruce’s How to talk dirty and influence people (1965) in which he uses a humor skit, presented as a hypothetical argument between Bruce and a night club owner, to discuss the hypocrisy of the latter refusing to put “Tits and Asses” on his marquee because they are dirty, vulgar words.

“Titties are dirty and vulgar?”

No, … it’s not the titties, it’s the words, it’s the way you relate them. You can’t have those words where kids can see them.

“Didn’t your kid ever see a titty?”

I’m telling you, it’s the words.

“I don’t believe you. I believe, to you, it’s the titty that’s dirty, because I’ll change the words to ‘Tuchuses and Nay-nays Nightly!’ ”

That’s a little better.

“Well, that’s interesting. You’re not anti-[Yiddish] idiomatic, you’re anti-Anglo-Saxon idiomatic. Then why don’t we get really austere? Latin: Gluteus maximus and Pectorales majores Nightly!’ ”

Now, that’s clean.

“To you, schmuck—but it’s dirty to the Latins!”

Now, to show how little progress has been made since Lenny died for our sins, this just in from a recent “News of the Weird” column. “The Atlantic Theater in the Jacksonville FL suburb of Atlantic Beach planned to stage several dramas this winter, including Eve Ensler’s ‘The Vagina Monologues,’ but following an undisclosed number of complaints from parents who said they were uncomfortable seeing that title, management changed its marquee to ‘The Hoohaa Monologues.’ (The change lasted one day, until management realized it was barred by contract from calling the play by another name.)” A Google on “hoohaa” hits a story from News4Jax.com, which was probably the source for the “N-o-t-W” piece, and which reveals, as I suspected, that the complaint(s) came from just one woman. Makes you wonder what kind of problems the poor lady had. (“Well, just seeing it up there in public made me feel funny in my, uh – hoohaa. And I didn’t like the feeling!”)

Countereffective christo-fascism

Having left “Martyrdom and hate” on the back burner for so long that it’s now stone cold, all I can come up with in the meantime is an observation that just occurred to me the other day, which seems so obvious that I wonder why it took so long. (Well, actually I have a pretty good idea why: my brain is slowly rotting away.) Having just now put together, on the one hand, the growing volume of atheistic writings I’m seeing that attack Christianity in particular and religion in general, and on the other hand, the increasingly fanatical and psychotic crusade of the christo-fascist evangelicals to make the U.S. a “Christian nation,” I’ve finally come to the realization that the former is a direct result of the latter—i.e., the fanatical, psychotic christo-fascists are turning the U.S. into a nation, not of more right-wing evangelicals but of more atheists. It would be nice if they could figure this out for themselves, so that they could stop pissing everybody off with their efforts, but the whole nature of fanaticism and psychosis is to be willfully blind to all the evidence of reality. I even think I’ve begun to detect (though it may be little more than wishful thinking) the beginnings of a movement of disillusioned evangelicals away from the lunatic fringe and a little bit more to the center—not to atheism, of course, but simply to a more reasonable form of Christianity. (Yes, guys, there is such a thing.) But the monster is still powerful enough politically to wreak havoc throughout the land and make our dearly beloved nation an object of ridicule and contempt to most of the civilized world.

Life without blogging

In case anybody noticed or cared that I’ve been absent from the Blogosphere for the last month and a half, it’s because I’ve been incredibly busy with music gigs—like “collapsing in exhaustion in the windows between gigs” kind of busy. I’ve also been working on another one of my typically long-winded, pompous rants, on “Martyrdom and hate,” which is taking more time and difficulty than usual because I’m kind of ambivalent and unclear as to what I think about it, and stuff I wrote a week ago looks like bullshit the next week. However, I still manage to waste untold hours surfing in cyberspace, and recently ran across a gem so precious that I feel I have to share it. He’s Joe Bageant, a not-quite-old (i.e., 10 years younger than me) curmudgeon in Winchester, Virginia, of all places (until recently fleeing to Belize), who writes with more rage and less humor and scatography than The Rude Pundit but with some very good ideas, very articulately stated. His particular shtick seems to be “class warfare,” between most of humanity and the incredibly small minority of blood-sucking parasites in the corporate plutocracy who control all the world’s wealth and governments, and for whom war is so profitable that it becomes their top priority to have as many as possible being fought on a constant basis. His observations on the witless sheep which the American people have let themselves be turned into are truly blistering. And his essays are even longer than mine, as well as angrier and more articulate. Check him out while you’re waiting for me to get back on line.

The Kill Everyone Project

I appear to have alienated a significant portion of my reader audience—essentially all of it, so far as I’m aware—and the only comment I can think of from my last post that might have done this was my statement that my sole platform as presidential candidate on the American Nihilist Absurdist Loafers ticket was to kill everybody who isn’t nice. I would have thought the total absurdity of such a statement, particularly coming from a self-declared nihilist absurdist, would have been obvious enough so that nobody could take it seriously enough to be offended by it. Dave Barry was perhaps more prudent in not publicizing any platform at all.

However, I was led to wonder whether anybody else had been so imprudent as to declare any such thing even in jest, so I Googled on “kill everybody who isn’t nice” (in quotes) and got precisely one hit—my own blog. So I tried it without quotes, which gets all sites which mention any of those words in any context, and got 2.16 million hits. As we all know, the vast majority of these are totally irrelevant to the idea stated in its entirety and consist of two or three of those words used in completely different contexts. But one site on the first page caught my attention, and when I opened it, it was a real whopper.

“The Sect of Homokaasu – The Kill Everyone Project – Bowling for Columbine Since 2001.” Catchy name, huh? So far as I can tell, it has absolutely nothing to do with the Michael Moore movie “Bowling for Columbine” except as a reference to insane violence; but “The Kill Everyone Project” really is a page devoted to killing the entire world population by mouse-clicking: every time the user clicks in a given box, someone is virtually killed. The Info page states: “The world is overpopulated. The people that overpopulate it are stupid. They should be killed.” Not just the ones who aren’t nice, not just enough to reduce the population to manageable proportions—all of them. Since 2001, they claim, more than 76,000 users have killed more than 6.411 billion people, or 98.46% of the world population; every country in the world has been extinguished except China, of which only about 92.62% of the population has been killed. If you register, you can play it as a game, competing with other killers for the greatest number of people killed—great fun! It will come as no surprise that Homokaasu, the host of this eminently sick, depraved page, has a number of other delightful goodies, such as a Global Stupidity page with a Global Stupidity Advisory System (yet another parody of the infamously silly Terrorist Threat Advisory System), and an “XXX Grandma’s Birthday Party – Obscene action! – Non-stop Pastry Fornication!” (available to members only).

So, to whom are we indebted for the fun-filled game of global genocide? Who or what is Homokaasu? The FAQ page calls it a “site for sillies containing creative and weird stuff,” the authors of which are anonymous. And it comes from Finland. And homokaasu is Finnish for “gay gas.” The story of where the name comes from is one of the most bizarre aspects of the site, and involves a long, breathtakingly paranoid rant by some guy who claims the Roman Catholic church was pumping poison gas into his room to make him a homosexual. (I am not making this up, as Dave Barry would say.) Finland sounds like a very interesting place.

Oh, you ask how many of the remaining Chinese I killed? Only two. I told you I dislike violence, even virtual violence, and 76,000 other people are doing the job far more efficiently.

Maybe I’ll have to think of a better platform for the ANAL Party.

You know he’s NOT INSANE!

Yes, fervent patriots, it’s that time of the quadrennium when our beloved Land of the Freak and Home of the Depraved goes from being almost universally despised to being more nearly universally ridiculed, when every deluded moron, every scumbag egomaniac, every pompous twit, every cretinous sociopath, every incompetent, lying, contemptible scoundrel who can still manage to crawl out from under his rock or wade out of his swamp, “throws his hat in the ring” and declares himself (or herself or itself) a candidate for the coveted and deeply respected office of President of the United States. Let us bow our heads in shame.

Those of you who are old enough may remember the title above as the campaign slogan of George Papoon, the invention of Firesign Theatre who, with his running mate George Tirebiter, ran for President on the Natural Surrealist ticket against Richard Nixon in 1972. Now, even more than then, this country needs a president who is NOT INSANE! So it is encouraging to find that Papoon still has an active web page (on which he shows the Florida ballot on which he appeared in 2000), and is evidently still trying to save our beloved country from those who are insane. How many humanoid organisms can you name who have that kind of tenacity? Who will not give up in spite of years of mounting evidence that they’re insane. Okay, unfortunately we do know of one notorious example of that, so forget I asked.

A recent post from my guru concerns a recent column in the Denver Post by Dave Barry in which, in the course of a discussion of the unique charms of Miami as a host for the then upcoming Super Bowl, he skewers Tom Tancredo (R-CO), who had previously and very stupidly insulted Miami by calling it a third-world country. In a Denver Post article about Barry’s column, passing reference is made to Tancredo “recently open[ing] a presidential exploratory committee,” and Barry is quoted as saying that “thanks to Rep. Tancredo, my candidacy looks less like a joke than it used to.” In my fair and balanced opinion, the idea of anyone running for President is a joke, and the only question is one of relative ridiculousness. I suspect I’m not the only person who would far rather have Barry as president than Tancredo, and I’ve always taken Barry’s candidacy far more seriously than those of most of the lame-brained fuck-tards who think they should be taken seriously. Over the years, I have fantasized all sorts of presidential tickets I’d like to see, like Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, or Molly Ivins and Whoopi Goldberg (tragically mooted by Molly’s recent untimely death). I’ve even thought of running for president myself. I have my own party: the American Nihilist Absurdist Loafers Party. Slogan: Better ANAL than Banal. Very simple platform: kill everybody who isn’t nice. It’d solve a lot of problems: it would get rid of almost all crime (there are, however, many alleged criminals who are actually nice people but are guilty of violating stupid laws), and would considerably alleviate most of the problems associated with overpopulation, like pollution, by eliminating about 40% of the people. Naturally it would be up to me to decide who is or is not nice, although I’d rather not be the one who has to kill them; I detest bloodshed. The idea of getting rid of all stupid people, although appealing, is, of course, out of the question, as that would eliminate about 80% of the population. One has to be reasonable.

Well, my hat is in the ring—and if you’ve ever seen my hat, you’ll want to stay far away from the ring. I think I can fairly claim that I’m not insane, although there may be some disagreement about that in some circles, ellipses, oblate spheroids, or truncated polyhedrons. Please leave campaign contributions in a brown paper bag inside my screen door. And disregard the sign in the window that says “FORGET THE DOG — BEWARE OF THE HUMAN.”

A word from the opposition

If I were that sort of believer, I might suspect that “God is testing my faith” (notice that I put that in quotes) after all that quasi-religious ranting a few days ago. A path of several links (which is how I learn most things these days) started with my guru (not on his blog but through an e-mail) linking me to “Only in America: Secular Scribblings of a Grumpy Old Man”. This particular page was a quiz on how many of the targets of the Rude Pundit’s rude insults the reader could recognize, but earlier posts of the “Grumpy Old Man” (actually a grumpy old British atheist) in turn linked me to two YouTube clips.

I cannot now find the path that linked me from Grumpy to the first YouTube clip, a 2-part post done by another atheistic Brit (the Church of England is not very alive and well), Nick Gisburne. I thought (wrongly) it was linked from “Driving lessons, child abuse, etc.”, because Jesus Camp is certainly related to that subject. (Many bloggers simply give you a link with no further comment and expect you to open it and reach your own conclusions. I use links as an excuse for my own ranting commentary, hoping you will find it dull and boring.) Gisburne has evidently taken clips (interspersed with his own commentary) from a larger documentary, which seems to be what’s available, without Gisburne’s commentary, at FluNIGGS A nation down the drain. The second is a fuller depiction of one of the most vile, psychotic atrocities of lunatic evangelicalism I’ve ever seen: a camp (in rural North Dakota, of all places!) where demonic adults basically brainwash and terrorize a bunch of helpless, vulnerable kids with a crash course of their sick, vicious garbage, reducing many of them (9 or 10 years old!) to tears for their “sinfulness” during the “Spirit-filled” orgies that pass for worship. It’s really quite sickening for anyone who loves and respects children to watch.

The second one (which was linked from “Driving lessons, child abuse, etc.”) was Part 3 of The virus of faith, a 5-part documentary (actually a 50-minute program chopped up into five 10-minute segments) which was probably run on BBC, done by Richard Dawkins. The name should be recognizable to most atheists, as Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist (called “Darwin’s Rottweiler” by someone), is probably the most well-known, articulate, and (I hate to admit) convincing of all contemporary apologists for atheism—or, viewed from the other side, critics of Christianity. Since Grumpy linked me directly to Part 3, I didn’t see the first two parts, but this one was devoted to more examples of moronic, insane, vicious heresy among the evangelicals—and of course it wasn’t at all difficult for Dawkins to find lots of them, like sadistic maniacs further scaring the shit out of kids with “Hell Houses” during Halloween, and an interview with an apologist for a guy who murdered an abortion doctor (actually, that’s in Part 4). Well, I’d heard and seen it all before, though never done as skillfully as Dawkins did it—tarring all Christians with a brush dipped in the most hideously evil perversions the critics can find—which strikes me as less than entirely fair to what is considered the mainstream faith. It’s like vilifying all Americans on the basis of the criminal thugs and psychotic halfwits in the government. Later in the same part, Dawkins discusses what a nasty asshole Yahweh is (“the most unpleasant character in all fiction—jealous, petty, vindictive, racist”) and the appallingly barbaric, “poisonous” tribal morality of the ancient Hebrews who called themselves “his people.” Okay, again I’ve heard all that dozens of times and agree with most of it, as I suggested in my last post. But things get better in the New Testament, don’t they?

In Part 4, Dawkins says, No, not much. He calls Paul’s “tortuously nasty, sadomasochistic doctrine” of Atonement, which is a fundamental Christian belief, “barking mad” (nice Briticism there); and indeed, quite a few people have claimed that the message of the gospels, for whatever worth you want to grant it, was totally fucked up by St Paul, who was, by the massive evidence of his writings and his own admission in his letters, a thoroughly loathsome creature. (In fact, he bragged about what a nasty shit he used to be because it showed how loving Jesus was in forgiving him, but it didn’t stop him from still being a nasty shit after being forgiven.) In an attempt to give the moderates a voice, Dawkins interviews the liberal Anglican Bishop of Oxford, who, typically for a liberal, says that modern believers are quite entitled to reinterpret Scripture to meet our “evolved” understanding of the nature of, specifically, homosexuality, according to which is not sinful, and to emphasize biblical passages which reinforce this interpretation. But, says Dawkins, if you can just “cherry-pick” which parts of the Bible to believe and decide on the basis of secular input how to interpret them (which he calls “fence-sitting”), then why bother with the Bible or Christianity at all? As a sanction for a code of morality? But, he says (and, as I think I alluded in an earlier post, John Stuart Mill says), a good moral code doesn’t need religion to sanction it; it finds sufficient support in common sense and human decency.

And, Dawkins goes on to say in Part 5, in evolution. Morality is based on “altruistic genes” which we share with (we DO NOT “inherit from”!!!) chimpanzees. Well, that’s as may be, Richard, after all the evidence you present to show how sweetly altruistic chimps are, but Bonzo has a darker side, which we also share with him. The altruistic genes only work in their own small kinship group; outside that, in relations with other groups, the chimps show an eerily human propensity for conflict and murder, and I can remember when Jane Goodall was traumatized by witnessing cannibalism among them; there are, in fact, what could be called sociopathic chimpanzees. Even their motives for such behavior are uncannily similar to those of humans, when the veneer of “civilization” is stripped away: sex and territory. Even religious wars are fundamentally about ideological territory, and about power over others, which is a form of lust related to sex. So the argument that “altruistic genes” are a sufficient basis for a moral code is, in my opinion, his weakest point.

But aside from that I found Dawkins, as I said earlier, convincing, and I must admit that, after the dual attack of his persuasive arguments for atheism on the one hand, and on the other hand the humiliating spectacle of all the evil insanity perpetrated by some of the sick assholes who call themselves Christians, my faith has been slightly shaken. But only slightly. Faith is beyond reason, although not necessarily against it. Whether reason is used to support faith in philosophical theology or to attack it in atheistic controversy, neither one has any effect on faith when the chips are in. To quote Pascal’s famous line, the heart has its reasons which reason cannot know. I know that sounds pitifully lame, and it’s probably a piss-poor answer to Dawkins, but it’s the best I can do—and the best I feel I need to do. Remember, I’m a lousy apologist.

You shall have no other gods.

In “Yes, Virginia, there ARE liberal Christians” (29 Dec 06), I made an admittedly lame-ass and rather incoherent attempt to defend liberal Christianity against the great majority of bloggers I was reading who were not only “secular progressives” but often militantly atheistic progressives, sometimes rather harshly critical of Christianity in particular and religion in general. I admitted at that time that I was a rather poor apologist, but not because my faith is, again admittedly, rather tepid. It is mixed (although not, I think, weakened) by a healthy dose of skepticism (my birthday saint is Thomas the Apostle, the “yeah, sure, show me” saint) and a strong and irreverent sense of humor and irony concerning religion. No, I’m a weak apologist simply because I don’t like to argue. I really don’t much give a shit whether people agree with me or not; it’s their prerogative to disagree and I see no need to try to change their minds.

Besides, there are some fairly articulate atheists out there—who are not, however, any more likely to change my mind, since most of them aren’t trying any harder than I am to do so. One of the most articulate, to whom my guru recently called my attention, is Stuart Savory (“Stu Savory’s Blog”), who describes himself as “an overeducated, grumpy, blatantly opinionated, multilingual ex-pat Scot” living in Germany. (One of his recent posts is actually in Scots—an interesting read for the linguistically curious.) In “A Sunday sermon” (7 Jan 07), he says, “A handful of my readers (4 Christians, 1 Jew) objected to my demand for Equal Rites for all the gods on Xmas day. Vituperativeness aside, they all basically wrote ‘there is only one god,’ whereas correctly stated, it should have read that they believe there is only one god. . . . There are, in fact (?), somewhere between 2 and 3,000 gods.” He then gives a link to Godchecker.com, “Your guide to the gods,” which combines a whimsical irreverence with some impressive scholarship in their listing of “currently … over 2,850 deities” in the pantheons of the world, broken down into categories: African, Australian, Aztec, Caribbean, Celtic, Chinese, etc. The vast majority are from antiquity and are now no more than historical curiosities, and it’s not exactly complete even at 2,850. A search on Hindu gods gives the message, “The Indian mythology section is currently being updated. … 20 August 05.” A year and a half ago is “current”? Also noticeably absent are the gods of the three great monotheistic religions, and in answer to an FAQ about this, they reply:

“Unfortunately there's some confusion over who the One True God actually is. Christians believe one thing, Muslims another, and the Jewish faith is different yet again. It seems to us humble Godcheckers that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and Seventh-Day Jehovah's Mormons all devoutly worship the same Supreme Being. But the devil is in the details and, apart from confessing their devotion to the One True God, they can't agree on anything else. Which is very sad, as this has caused a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering. . . . Monotheism seems to bring out the worst in some people.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself; that’s why I quoted it. I find it interesting and significant that the three monotheistic religions are also called Abrahamic because they all trace their roots back to the quasi-mythical patriarch Abraham, whom some chronologists date to the twenty-first century BC. And the Abrahamic history, as told in Genesis and as roughly confirmed by biblical archaeology, took place in that godforsaken corner of the Middle East now called, with a massive irony which nobody seems to appreciate, the “Holy Land.” The irony, of course, is that the so-called Holy Land (or the Middle East generally) is and always has been the site of some of the most wickedly unholy and bloody atrocities in the history of mankind, waged by the adherents of the monotheistic religions against each other in the name of and for the sake of Guess Who. (Not to mention the internecine battles within these religions—Protestants against Catholics, Shi’a against Sunni, etc.) Current attention is focused on the Islamic terrorists who ostensibly justify their wanton slaughter with something in the Koran about killing infidels, but some of their animosity toward Christians probably dates back to the Crusades of the Middle Ages, when the sword was in the other hand and the Christians felt justified in wasting Muslims in their attempt to “reclaim” Jerusalem and the “Holy Land.” The present-day evangelical Christians, for their part, are content to get their jollies off on that disgustingly perverted Left behind trash promulgated by LaHaye and Jenkins, in which it is left up to “Jesus” and his angels, at the Second Coming, to make a worldwide bloodbath of all unbelievers so the Christians won’t have to get their own hands dirty.

It all boils down to the fundamental tenet of all monotheism, that if my god is the One True God, then anyone who worships any other god is worshiping a false god (even if they call theirs the One True God as well), and I’m entitled, nay obligated, to convert them to my One True God or kill them if they refuse to convert. (No wonder the atheists think we’re fucking insane; so do I, when it comes to that.) Well, that’s not entirely accurate. Christians and Muslins are guilty of that; at least some Christians would like to be able to do it rather than waiting for the Second Coming, although some of the more deranged members of the “American Taliban” advocate doing it right now. The Israelis, on the other hand, are guilty not of murdering others because they’re heathens but of stealing their land and murdering them because they want it back. Lest I be accused of being anti-Semitic, note that I accuse the Israelis, not the Jews. The distinction is of paramount importance to me because I consider the Israelis as members of a state to be the absolutely worst representatives of the Jews as members of a religion, and I think a lot of what is being criticized by Jews here lately as anti-Semitism is actually anti-Israelism, which is an entirely different matter. But in fact, the Jews even as a religion were just as guilty in the past. Clear back in Abrahamic history, Yahweh told the ancestors of the Hebrews to invade Canaan and slaughter all the native inhabitants, and when they did what Yahweh told them to do, they then displayed the most touchingly naïve surprise when the people they’d driven out of their land weren’t warmly fond of them. (“Oh, they just hate us because they’re jealous of our One True God who enables us to kick their asses.”) And when Old Testament history repeated itself in 1948 with the formation of the State of Israel, which again required the displacement of the Palestinians who had been living there for centuries, the Israelis once more justified their piracy by claiming that they were just fulfilling their mandate from Yahweh, and they still can’t quite seem to understand why the Palestinians hate them so much. Welcome to the “Holy Land.”

Well, I didn’t want to digress into an anti-Israeli tirade; that’s not quite the point, although it is related. The point, to re-quote Godchecker, is that monotheism seems to bring out the worst in some people—not in all people, but in enough to give religion generally a very bad reputation. Another irony is the fact that religion is supposed to bring out the best in people; and it does, in most people. All the monotheistic religions have a central message of peace and justice and brotherhood as well as admonitions to deal with heathens and infidels in various unpleasant ways, but for some reason deeply seated in fundamentally corrupt human nature, there are always those who choose to ignore the former message and obsess on the latter. It is also worth noting that, so far as I know, this pathology is unique to the monotheistic faiths; I am not aware of it in any of the polytheistic faiths. Hindu-Muslim relations are less than warm, but guess whose fault that is. (Hindu-Sikh relations are also a bit chilly because the Sikhs are a splinter sect that rejected Hinduism, but let’s not get too involved here.) In fact, it stands to reason that if a polytheistic believer has ten or twenty gods of his own, he would have no problem accepting the fact that someone else has another ten or twenty gods. More irony: the Roman empire in the first few centuries after the birth of the church was perfectly willing to accept the Christians as just another cult among many; it was the Christians who refused to compromise with Roman polytheism. The Romans ended up persecuting them because they were frankly obnoxious, trouble-making pests. (See Gibbon’s History of the decline and fall.)

Ending (“none too soon,” I hear you mumble) on a lighter note: I find a perverse delight in the number of parody and joke religions, and even some of the bizarre cults, which have arisen from the general disenchantment with institutional Christianity. Among the first group, perhaps the most familiar are the Church of the SubGenius, which has as its avatar J. R. “Bob” Dobbs; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which “worships” just that and is actually a spoof of Intelligent Design; and the Landover Baptist Church, a parody of the worst aspects of evangelical Christianity. (A friend of mine years ago, a student of philosophy and mathematics, invented the Church of the Holy Nullity, based on the single doctrine that God was the mathematical Null Set. The idea did not catch on.) The bizarre cults that take themselves seriously—many of them based on some form of reverence for some charismatic but often more or less batty leader or avatar or god-incarnation or what have you—are too numerous to list, and the task would be rather depressing anyway. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so delighted by them because they give credence to the idea that all religion is the refuge of crackpots, but I kind of like the idea of people being able to dream up any hare-brained excuse they want to start a religion and expecting to be taken seriously.

LATE NEWS FLASH from Chuck Shepherd’s “News of the Weird”! (Well, not really very late; 24 December, actually. My brother gives these to me secondhand and I sometimes take weeks to look at them.) How to start your own church. (I’ve always wanted to. Hasn’t everybody? Well, maybe not those who have no use for churches.) A group of nine college guys who wanted to live together in one house got around the zoning regulations against this by filing papers declaring themselves a church, which gets past the zoning restriction. I get the impression they don’t have to do anything “churchy” to justify this, they just say “look, these papers say we’re a church, that’s all we need.” Reminds me of the Universal Life Church, the group who ordain as clergy anyone who asks for it, free of charge, no credentials needed. See, you atheists, we’re not all bad. All crazy, maybe, but not all bad.

Two wrongs might make a right

Hey, guys, the latest cheerful news I’ve found tells us that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in Chicago “have added climate change to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind,” which they have expressed graphically and dramatically by setting their “Doomsday Clock” two minutes closer to midnight. However, a related article suggests that one of the effects of widespread nuclear bombing—besides killing millions of people and generally fucking everything up—might be a global cooling, or “nuclear winter.” So I just had a great idea—the sort of thing our glorious and brilliant national leaders might dream up. Why not deliberately start a nuclear war that will involve exploding lots of bombs that will then reverse global warming by bringing about global cooling? Isn’t that a neat solution? I’m surprised the Mad Emperor’s advisors haven’t thought of it themselves. It’s just the sort of thing that would appeal to them.

Or maybe they have, and they’re not telling us. . . .

What rough beast

I might mention, as an addendum to my tirade about the weather in Colorado here lately (“The blizzard of Ought-six,” 8 Jan 07), that with the Denver-Boulder area slogging and slipping around in so much snow and ice (and, later, pools of slush and melt-water that couldn’t drain anywhere because they were blocked by ice dams) that it will be at least a month before any significant dent is made in it, cherry trees are blooming three months early in Washington DC, and the New England ski industry is going down the tubes because of lack of snow. But be ye comforted: the venal, pseudo-scientific lackeys of the Mad Emperor continue to assure us that global warming has still not yet been sufficiently proven to their satisfaction, and if they refuse to admit it exists, it doesn’t. The news that there may be no snow at the North Pole in 35 years, that glaciers around the world are rapidly disappearing, and that chunks of ice the size of small U.S. states are breaking off from the Ross Ice Shelf, are just scare stories dreamed up by liberal scientists and nothing to worry about. If your friend tells you your splitting headaches are stress-related and you should pay no attention to your neurologist’s diagnosis of brain tumor, you can rest perfectly happy and secure in this belief until your head explodes.

Of course this is simply a symptom of the same mentality which enables our glorious leaders to tell us that our efforts to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq are going just marvelously and military victory is just within our reach, when the death toll keeps rising exponentially and everybody with half the brain of a sea slug keeps yelling at the administration that military victory is totally impossible and the longer we stay there, the worse we make the situation. The problem is, guys, we are trying to communicate with manifest psychopaths. In spite of my earlier cynical rant that we could expect nothing from the new Democratic leadership, they must be given credit for trying their damnedest to really turn things around in the gang of thugs and boneheads who are still in the driver’s seat. But these cretins aren’t listening to critical debate because they are incapable of listening. In fact, the Mad Emperor is not only incapable of listening, he’d be incapable of understanding what he heard if he did listen. He’s not only half-witted, he’s psychotic. His actions are determined by what he is told by voices he hears in his head, which he thinks are from God; that’s psychotic. He is incapable of distinguishing between the fantasy world he has built for himself and consensus reality and is, by his own veiled admission, not even very aware of consensus reality; that’s psychotic. He is enabled in his psychosis by the vicious circle of shit-nosed sycophants who protectively surround him like muskoxen encircling their vulnerable, helpless young to protect them from predators. They are very careful to insulate him from any intrusions of reality that might upset the delicate balance of this deer-in-the-headlights between the happy dream-world of his psychosis and the danger that he might go completely berserk if too much reality seeped through his defenses. So, as much as I admire the hopeful Democrats who are trying to change things by rational discourse, they’re talking to a brick wall. They aren’t getting through, and never will, and never can. The Mad Emperor, now not just a lame duck but a cooked goose, couldn’t give a shit less if his poll numbers are the lowest of any president since polling started and most of the world either pities him or despises him. The voices in his head tell him history will vindicate him even if the present world loathes him, and Pelosi, leading the House, seems to have refused to consider impeachment, which is the only thing that might possibly make an impression on the Mad Emperor. So, barring that, the Dems continue talking, gamely but futilely, to a psychotic halfwit, and the world continues to plunge into more blood and chaos and anarchy.

“Surely the Second Coming is at hand” wrote William Butler Yeats (in 1921!), with savage irony, in that great gem, “The Second Coming.” Remember the lust of the lunatic fundamentalists to bring about Armageddon so their sick, vicious idea of Jesus will come again? The one Yeats seems to imagine is terrifyingly similar to what the loony fundies seem to want, even though he predicted it as a vision of horror and the Jesus-is-gonna-kick-everybody’s-ass-but-ours crowd look forward to it with glee. You should read the whole poem if you can find it (and it shouldn’t be hard to find), but I will close with Yeats’s widely quoted last two lines, which you can recite every time you see or hear things getting worse. (A lot of other lines are widely quoted, like “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”)

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

What rough beast indeed! The loony fundies might be surprised to find out what the event they’re trying so hard to bring about might turn out to be. No, you secular-atheist progressives, I’m not saying I believe that particular brand of pseudo-religious poppycock any more than you do (or any more than I think Yeats did). But the fact remains, history is being inexorably driven, by those who do believe it, in the direction of trying to deliberately precipitate it, and you might be as surprised as they to see some rough beast slouching toward Washington.

On J. S. Mill’s literary style

I’ve been reading John Stuart Mill’s “On the utility of religion” here lately, and it is frankly something of a chore. Although his ideas are good, he states them in the most godawful convoluted Victorian tangle of verbiage I’ve ever seen outside Dickens or Melville. His sentences remind me of the nuclei of trans-uranium elements, which are so gargantuan that they spontaneously fall apart and decay. (Okay, so do a lot of sub-uranium isotopes, not because they’re gargantuan but for other reasons of instability. No matter.) And as I suggested in an earlier post, I tend to fall into the same snare, evidently being influenced by him more than I should be. But if you can wade through Mill’s stylistic sludge, there are some real nuggets in the mess. Here’s one from that essay—one of the less tortuous sentences, believe it or not, and one which I editorially cleaned up a little:

“ … there is a very real evil consequent on ascribing a supernatural origin to the received maxims of morality. That origin consecrates the whole of them, and protects them from being discussed or criticized; so that if, among the moral doctrines received as a part of religion, there be any which are imperfect—which were either erroneous from the first or not properly limited and guarded in their expression, or which, unexceptionable once, are no longer suited to the changes that have taken place in human relations (and it is my firm belief that instances of all these kinds are to be found in so-called Christian morality)—these doctrines are considered equally binding on the conscience with the noblest, most permanent, and most universal precepts of Christ."

Sounds like me at my worst, doesn’t it? To condense that into slightly more accessible and vernacular terms: the gay-bashing fundamentalists are full of shit. At least that’s my take on it. Doubtless many other applications could be found for it, but that’s the first one that struck me. Let me know if you think of any others yourselves.

We are all victims.

One of the services, I guess you could call it, of my blog supporter (called, oddly enough, “Blogger”) is a “Next Blog” button up in the whaddayacallit bar, which, when clicked, gives you a random selection of other blogs. The great majority of these are, if I may say so, dull dull boring dull—a remarkable number of women writing sensitive New Age poetry or just witless blathering about life or relationships or nature-worship, or talking about their kids (a few blogs consisting of nothing but pictures of their kids), lots of travelogues with lots of pictures, one woman going into great detail about her weight-loss diet—plus blogs in Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Bulgarian, Turkish, Chinese, God knows what. It’s a remarkable, even if very tiny, window into what the Blogosphere has become. But every once in a while, maybe once every 20 or so, I hit pay dirt. The latest such is a guy in Virginia who calls himself Crankster and his site “Cranky Old Bastard”—the sort of names that would appeal to me, of course. He is mildly cranky, in a very articulate way which is refreshingly free from foul language (I obviously have nothing against colorful language, but it’s nice once in a while to read someone who can express himself without it), although not, at 35, what I would consider old. And one of his recent posts (3 Jan 07) pushed one of my buttons: “Gotta love the kiddies”.

He starts by citing a column in The Telegraph by British Conservative MP Boris Johnson in which he tells of being seated on a British Airlines plane next to two “bratty” kids (Crankster’s term, not Johnson’s), and just as he was resigning himself to a miserable flight in their proximity, a stewardess asked him to move. Imagining that he was being moved to a better seat out of respect for his office, he was told that it was instead because BA has “very strict rules” against men sitting next to unrelated children. The reason, of course, is that all men are assumed to be, at least potentially, child molesters and pedophiles. In the Telegraph article, Johnson goes on at some length about the totally ridiculous nature of such an assumption, bewailing the terrible effect it has on British society in general and British schools in particular; and of the dozens of comments on his article, the vast majority agree with him and warmly thank him for telling it like it is. A fair number of the commentators tell of knowing men whose lives and careers have been ruined by the fanatically zealous application of laws based on this assumption, often against men who haven’t the slightest inclination to pedophilia but have been falsely accused; and of incidents where someone has, out of human compassion, tried to help a child who has fallen and hurt him/herself, only to have the mother descend on him like a harpy, screaming that he’s molesting her kid.

Well, all that is about the implications of a British incident for British society, but it doesn’t take much stretching for Crankster to apply it to American society as well, in which very similar attitudes lead to very similar incidents. As he puts it: “The fact that society increasingly seems to view men as presumptive sexual predators, without any corroborating evidence, is terrifying.” He goes on to apply the same principle to women falsely accusing men of rape, illustrating it with a story from his own experience of a woman who accused a guy (a friend of his) of raping her simply because she didn’t want to admit it was consensual sex. In the same vein, one of the comments to Johnson’s article suggests that kids can use the same weapon vindictively against teachers who give them bad grades; all they have to do is accuse the teacher of looking at them funny or patting them on the shoulder and the teacher is gone, no questions asked. A situation in my own experience involved the rector of the church I was working at being accused of “sexual harassment” by two fruitloop-paranoid bitches because he told them an off-color joke—didn’t even touch them, just told them a naughty joke. The resulting witch hunt was so stressful that he had a heart attack that ruined his health, and his career along with it, since even if he was exonerated, he was too damaged to continue working.

Yes, all this is terrifying, as is also the widespread occurrence of it. What is perhaps most terrifying is that it points to a mentality of near-psychotic paranoia that has gripped the entire nation, so that no one can do the most innocent and innocuous thing without having to consider what raving crackpot will accuse him of some crime that never entered his mind. The accusation will always lead to a conviction because of the closely related and equally widespread social pathology that assumes, without trial or evidence, that if someone is accused of something, he is automatically guilty of it; I have even heard it said, in all seriousness, that such people must be guilty or they wouldn’t have been accused. And the strychnine-flavored icing on this shit-filled cake is that everybody is looking for the flimsiest half-assed excuse to accuse somebody of offending or hurting them because everybody is a victim: it’s the culture of victimization. In the course of the witch hunt against the rector mentioned above, some woman who claimed to be a counselor to victims came to speak to the congregation to help us “work through” the terrible damage done to us by the rector’s misbehavior—not a word about the damage done to the rector, since he was obviously guilty and deserved no consideration. In a presentation notable for its appalling asininity, she actually said, “Everyone here is or has at one time been a victim”; and when I and a few others had the temerity to challenge this bizarre assertion, she calmly replied that anyone who denied being a victim was “repressing” whatever experience had victimized them.

Connected to all this on several levels is the episode in my own life when I was bullied into attending a therapy group for alcoholics because I was accused of being one and was, according to the above logic, undeniably guilty. In the course of these sessions, one of the “therapists,” perhaps in an attempt to make us feel better about being alcoholics, made the insane claim (similar to the one above about victims) that everyone is an addictive personality. I was not kindly received when I pointed out that this essentially removed any rationalization for treating alcoholics as special if they were simply displaying the same behavioral trait that everyone else had, but I was polite enough not to mention further that this banal statement served the useful purpose of extending his client base to the entire population.

So we have here the following principles for relationships in today’s society:
1. Everyone is a victim of someone else; all one has to do is find someone they think is victimizing them and accuse them of it.
2. Anyone accused of any sort of misbehavior by anyone else, no matter how manifestly batty or lying, is automatically assumed to be guilty.
3. People who aren’t even accused of anything may be assumed to be potential, if not probable, offenders and therefore guilty of being a member of a suspect class.

Under rules like these, is it any surprise that our society is a hopeless shambles of emotionally crippled, scarred basket-cases trying to compete in accusing each other of thoroughly phony and specious pseudo-offenses, totally incapable of trusting anyone enough to enjoy any kind of sensible relationship, always on the lookout for some excuse to blame someone else for their own failures, always trying to screw the other guy before he screws them. . . A common idea among us social misfits (a quote for which I can’t find now) is that the people locked up in nut-houses are far more sane than the people outside who decided they were crazy. The entire society is an unwalled loony-bin, with no sane attendants.

One last observation: Note that the guy who started all this is a British Conservative MP. Maybe conservatives over there simply have more sense than ours here, but I think another factor is that what we are dealing with here is closely related to Political Correctness, which has been the demon curse of the Left for decades and the source of almost all the witlessly silly ideas and policies they’ve endorsed. Almost everything that is called Politically Correct is rationally moronic, and the sooner the Left disowns this blithering nonsense, the healthier and stronger they’ll be.

The blizzard of Ought-six

Having talked about politics and religion, I will now talk about the subject that people are supposed to talk about to avoid talking about politics and religion. For the benefit and entertainment of those of my thousands of readers who live in such tropical climes as Australia, South America, Africa, and India, I will now indulge in a whiney diatribe about the weather in Colorado during the last three weeks. As such, it will be rather short on snide and insulting social criticism. Sorry, guys.

It all started—and, by rights, should have ended—with the event which even those in tropical climes may have heard about on the news: the blizzard which was usually referred to as the “holiday blizzard” because it occurred right at the beginning of the “holiday season,” thus affecting transportation and commerce even in far-flung lands. The area of specific concern to me is the north-Denver-Boulder area of Colorado, but it affected most of the state. It started early on Wed 20 Dec and continued until about noon Thurs 21. Well, you might say, a day and a half of snow doesn’t sound all that bad, particularly for Colorado; and ordinarily it might not be. But, by definition of a blizzard, this included, in addition to over 2 feet of snow, high winds which drifted it all over the place. And it closed down Denver International Airport (DIA), due to zero visibility and impassable runways, at precisely the time when thousands of travelers were trying to fly home for Christmas, which meant that they were stuck at DIA for several days. Hundreds were sleeping on the floors of the terminal. Emergency services had to supply food for all these people. As someone obsessed with shit, I can’t imagine what the impact on the sanitation system must have been. DIA eventually began re-opening air traffic some time Friday, but very slowly, and stranded fliers were still sleeping there Friday night. All roads were closed, not only during the blizzard but for some time afterwards. Colorado Dept. of Transportation (CDOT), which is used to dealing with snow, had plows, of course, but not nearly enough for something like this, and plowing didn’t do much good anyway because the high winds would just drift the snow back onto the roads minutes after the plows went through. Hundreds of vehicles were stuck and stranded on the Interstates, and the passengers, most of whom spent Wednesday night in their vehicles, had to be rescued by copter because emergency vehicles couldn’t get through. As a result of the roads not being plowed, the vehicles which did manage to get through simply packed two feet of snow down into several inches of ice, making the job more difficult for the plows when they finally got there. Plowing of residential side streets was a lost cause, and most of them simply had ruts made in the snow by 4-wheelers with high carriage. Digging cars out from their curbside parking spaces, and digging out driveways, were nightmares that people simply accepted with more or less stoicism. Actually, the event, like many less-than-catastrophic setbacks such as electrical blackouts, brought out a heartwarming camaraderie in people, and on the state highway in front of my home, roaming groups of citizens went up and down the street with shovels, helping to dig or push people out. People who had never before been outside their cars for any longer than it took to get back and forth between them and destination buildings, were suddenly seen walking through this shit for several blocks, sometimes as much as a mile, to the store—and talking to each other en route. In spite of all the inconvenience, this was one of the bright sides.

So okay, Colorado has seen blizzards before, so what’s the big deal, aside from the impact on DIA? The big deal is that it didn’t stop there. Usually after a blizzard, there’s a period of warming that gets rid of most of the snow, and eventually the ice. But this was followed about a week later, while most of the snow and ice was still there, by another snow on top of it; and then about a week after that, a third snow on top of the other two. The second one (I think), even after it had left Denver, continued to blast the eastern and southeastern plains, and the TV news (in one of its rare moments of showing something newsworthy) showed hay being dropped from copters to cattle stranded in the midst of all this; many cattle have been lost, in an area with a strongly cattle-based economy. Even when the snow wasn’t falling, it was being drifted by high winds, creating ground blizzards which reduced road visibility to zero, causing more road closures and some catastrophic multi-vehicle pile-ups and again stranding cars on remote stretches of the Interstates. I’ve almost lost track of the number of storms—I think it’s three now (they often occur on or around weekends)—and a fourth is forecasted on its way. Enough already! Many parking lots as well as streets will not see all the ice gone for weeks, and I’m forced to walk around with a walking-stick in mincing little old-man steps—for weeks. I am not happy. (Well, to be honest, this is just one more reason for my more or less constitutional grumpiness.) One of my friends, who grew up in Minnesota, says she loves all this because it reminds her of her childhood. Different strokes for different folks.

As a sign of my resourcefulness at finding things to complain about, I actually complained to someone that this weather sort of took the wind out of my standard moan about global warming, and he said no, not necessarily, because global warming can disrupt climate patterns in any number of ways, even including this. What a comfort (literally a cold comfort) to know that I’m right in being pessimistic. (You all know the definition of an optimist as one who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist as one who’s afraid the optimist is right.) One of my favorite lines in cinema is from Jurassic Park. The mathematician (played by Jeff Goldblum) predicts, on the basis of catastrophe theory, that something will go seriously wrong on the island, and of course nobody believes him, so when the shit is finally hitting the fan and everybody’s life is in danger, Goldblum observes wryly, “I hate it when I’m right.” Al Gore may be quoting that line in a few decades. Prophets really don’t like being in the position of having to say, “I told you so.”

Bread and circuses

Turns out it was the Roman satirist Juvenal who coined the expression panem et circenses to describe the imperial Roman policy of keeping the rabble mollified and placated by keeping them well fed and well entertained. As evidence that the American rabble are well fed, one need look no further than (even if one cannot see around) the multitude of disgustingly lard-assed hippos waddling around the supermarket aisles. More and more public seating which used to be built for human beings now has to be redesigned for these hideous monstrosities, and we all know that morbid obesity has now become a major health problem. Mind you, I’m not a swim-suit model myself, carrying about 190 lbs (85.5 kg) on a 5'7" (167 cm) frame, but God help me if I ever get as revoltingly blubbery as these specimens. And there’s certainly enough evidence that the American rabble are well entertained, too, now that even the “newsertainment” on television is delivered by nitwits who have learned to laugh and joke while telling us about the collapse of civilization; and an increasing proportion of the “news” itself is devoted to the shabbily vulgar, stupid shenanigans of imbecilic mannequins who get lavish, breathless coverage for something like showing their snatch while getting out a car.

But every once in a while, usually on major holidays, the level of “celebration” has to be elevated to that of mass hysteria, to make sure that no illusions can be harbored about how civilized the rabble can be expected to behave under mob dynamics. Due to an unusual set of circumstances, I suffered the (for me) rare ordeal of watching New Year’s Eve at Times Rectangle NYC, and I still haven’t gotten over the depression it caused. As circuses go, an estimated million primates crammed into this and adjacent spaces was a pretty scary spectacle, which we were given many views of from circling copters. But more frequent, and more scary, were the close-ups of the revelers, among whom the dominant emotional tone was hysterical ecstasy—hundreds of faces aglow with the unbearable thrill of being part of this just absolutely glorious event, so exciting, just look at these people, so much energy here, blah blah blah. I found it scary and depressing because it reminded me of footage of brainwashed cult members, or movies of smiling zombies—no discernible individual consciousness or intelligence, everyone just melded into the mob mind, the anthill collective. And so far as I know, there were no mind-altering substances, legal or illegal, involved (although I’m willing to accept the possibility that some were involved without my knowledge); it was all mob dynamics and adrenaline. Once or twice I tried to imagine a million people chanting “No more war! – Out of Iraq! – Bring our troops home! – Impeach Bush! – Save Social Security! – Reduce global warming! – Affordable health care for all! – ” etc. etc. But the image didn’t compute, mainly because such an event would have required at least a minimum of individual consciousness on the part of the primates. No, nothing here but mindless yelling and screaming—tens of thousands of people hysterically screaming. Eerie sound. Direct throwback to the Roman Coliseum.

Ironically, perhaps the most heartening part of the circus was Dick Clark. Knowing nothing about him, I kept thinking while watching him, “He’s talking funny; I wonder if he’s all right.” Then I Wikied him (“Wiki” doesn’t make as good a verb as “Google,” does it?) and found out he’s 77 years old and has been hosting “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” since 1972; also that he had a stroke in 2004, and after missing only the 2004 show, made a quasi-miraculous comeback in 2005, but with his speech affected. As cynical as I am, I have to admit a certain respect for something like that. (In the same vein, one of my few cultural heroes is Stephen Hawking.)

It seems like every year here recently, people add, after wishing you a happy new year, that they hope this one will be better than the last. And each one is worse than the last. And we know they’re going to keep getting worse until at least 2009. Does anyone have any realistic hopes that they’ll ever get any better even after that? I don’t. I don’t even have any realistic expectations that we’ll last that long. So it is in this light that I refuse to wish you a happy new year. In fact, I’ll do everything I can in this blog to help make it even more miserable.