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.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Thursday, January 18, 2007
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. . . .
Or maybe they have, and they’re not telling us. . . .
Sunday, January 14, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
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.
“ … 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.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, January 8, 2007
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.”
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.”
Monday, January 1, 2007
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.
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.
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