The United States' relationship with the nations to our South has long fascinated me. By using "America" as the universal shorthand name of our nation, we make clear how insignificant we consider the 20 nations to our south, each of which could just as easily be called "America".
America is not a country; it is a hemisphere. The United States is largely a legacy of England. France's legacy in the new world has been relegated to Quebec and isolated parts of Louisiana. Portugal's legacy lies in the rising behemoth of Brazil. But Spain's legacy in the new world dwarfs that of England, France, or Portugal. And it is growing.
It was the king and queen of Spain, after all, who financed and sponsored the European discovery of the New World. And while England founded what would become the dominant nation in the Americas (and eventually, the World), it is Spain's influence which runs deeper and wider.
Spain and England both have obvious linguistic legacies in the Western Hemisphere. Most people on our half of the world speak either Spanish or English (or both). But Spain's legacy runs deeper, and it is uniquely "American".
The tragedy of the "discovery" of the Americas was the near-extinction of Native Americans, which was accomplished by germs far more often than by guns. But in the Spanish sphere of the Americas, unlike in the English sphere, the Native Americans survived in a sense.
Most Spanish speakers in the Americas today are descendants of the offspring of European Spaniards and Native Americans, which is why most of them are not "white". Most English speakers, on the other hand, are "white".
In North America, there was relatively little mixing between Europeans and Native Americans. So when Native Americans died, they disappeared. But in the central and southern parts of the hemisphere, there was mass mixing between the cultures.
So today, in the United States, 70% of the students in my classrooms have the complexion of Native Americans and speak Spanish as a first language. There simply is no equivalent in the English spheres. Most of my Spanish-speaking students are from the Dominican Republic, on the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus landed on Spanish ships in 1492.
500 years on, it appears that the Americas are, linguistically and ethnically, far more Spanish and Native American than they are English. As time passes and demographics inexorably create a "new" reality, the Americas will be dominated by the (diluted) blood of the natives and the language of the original conquerors.
People who have a deep-seeded and passionate feeling against homosexuality will inevitable reference the Bible as the justification for their prejudice. More specifically, they cite the book of Deuteronomy, a book of codes of conduct that makes the reader want to claw his eyes out.
To use Deuteronomy to justify homophobia requires keyhole vision, since the issue of homosexuality is just one of many issues covered in Deuteronomy. Most of the other codes have to do with dietary laws, hygiene, clothing, and so forth.
The ban on homosexuality is always spoken of in isolation, because to put it into the context it was actually written in makes its ridiculousness tangible and palpable. Here are some of the jewels that are also in Deuteronomy:
If a woman enters the home while menstruating, the house must be burnt down. If a person wears clothing made of 2 types of cloth, that person must be put to death. If a person digs a hole on the Sabbath, that person will be put to death. And on and on and on.
The Bill of Rights was passed into law 219 years ago today. And just like the Old Testament, it is subjected to a keyhole vision by fanatics and idiots. The Bill of Rights is infinitely more just, humane, and relevant than the Old Testament, of course, but both are used for similar ends by similar people.
The equivalent to the homosexuality ban in the Bible is the 2nd amendment to the Constitution.
The 2nd amendment guarantees protection for a "well regulated militia". For some people, this means protection for "individuals to own handguns and assault rifles". To suggest that this code was written for a world that no longer exists is a conversation stopper in the circles of power.
If there is ONE issue that is destroying our society, it is guns. All societies have young men. All rich societies have young men with penises, alcohol, and cars. But our society alone insists on allowing guns into this equation of youth, testosterone, and recklessness that is universal among young men.
And because we insist upon our citizens having the "freedom" to buy guns, we murder 20,000 of each other each year, while less "free" countries are not free to kill each other. In this country, we slaughter each other and jealously protect our "freedom" to do so.
How out of context is this insanity? Just like Deuteronomy, context is key. With all the obsession about the 2nd amendment, we would do well to ask ourselves, "what is the 3rd amendment?"
Here it is: "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house". When was the last time this was relevant? Around the same time the 2nd amendment was, I would argue.
When was the last time a "well-regulated militia" protected the United States from foreign invasion or a tyrannical government? When was the last time the government forced citizens to let soldiers live in their houses? When was the last time you burned down a house because a woman menstruated in it?
Nobody talks about repealing the 3rd amendment. Instead, we just did what we should do with the 2nd amendment: let it drift into irrelevance and die an ignored death.
The above photo is of Harry Truman during World War I. 30 years later, Truman was president, due entirely to the fact that FDR seemed to have thought himself immortal. When Truman was thrust into the presidency, he became the most awful and awesome warlord the world had ever seen, ordering cities full of human beings to be annihilated with nuclear weapons.
But when that war was over, Truman did something else. He ordered the American military to end racial segregation in its ranks. Prior to this decision, which was made after World War II but at the height of the Cold War, blacks in the military were cooks. After this decision, they became generals.
Before Truman used the power of the presidency to force integration in the military, he commissioned a study. The (white) army was interviewed, and fully 80% of America's soldiers declared that they would not serve with black Americans. The army that had just crushed Japan and Hitler was polled, and their answer was "no niggers".
Truman's response (and Truman was definately a racist by modern standards) was "too bad". He ordered integration in the face of the prevailing sentiment.
In 1948, black men were integrated into the American military. 60 years later, a black man was elected Commander in Chief. And now that man is confronted with the issue of gays in the military.
Like in Truman's time vis a vis blacks, there was a study of the military's attitude towards integrating gays. Unlike the survey regarding blacks, the survey regarding gays met with far more tolerance from the soldiers polled. This time, the majority of soldiers said they had no problem serving with open homosexuals.
Sixty years ago, the majority of our soldiers declared themselves bigots, and our President told them to get over it. Today, the majority of our soldiers declare themselves tolerant, and our President still hesitates.
Our president would do well to consider where he would be today if his predecessor had not been willing to unapologetically spit in the face of bigots.
It's fair to say that Americans are far more adept at preaching freedom than practicing it. In all manner of ways, Americans routinely surrender freedoms and liberties and expect their fellow citizens to do the same. The tired and moronic refrain is inevitably: "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide".
This refrain, of course, is a surrender to the power of the state, in that it assumes that a) the state has the right to distinguish "wrong" personal behavior, and b) the state would never do "wrong" itself and is therefore the legitimate judge of all that is "right". Two very pre-1776 assumptions.
Drug tests are a perfect case-in-point. Most people support drug testing because they think they would pass the test. Their thought stops at that point. This logic would also allow us to round up Jews, because most of us aren't Jews. But that's beside the point.
The point is that drug tests are a widely-practiced police-state measure that tramples on the 4th and 5th amendments by their very nature.
But first, we must distinguish what drug tests are. Drug tests are, for all intents and purposes, marijuana tests. Since any thinking person will admit that alcohol is by far the most dangerous drug in any and every workplace, the absurdity is obvious.
I used to work in a warehouse with forklifts and tractor-trailers whizzing by all day and all night. The "drug" policy there did not prevent men from coming to work drunk and driving industrial equipment around all night (which some men did), but it DID prevent me from smoking a joint on the weekend.
So, since drug tests focus primarily on the most benign drug in our pharmacopoeia, while completely ignoring a drug whose use could injure or kill workers in any number of ways and in any number of workplaces, the mental decrepitude of the policy is obvious.
Now, for the constitution. The 4th amendment prohibits arbitrary search and seizure. Put simply, nobody can search my person or my property without documented reasoning that I have committed a crime. You can search me if I am fleeing from the direction of a recent armed robbery, but you cannot search me if you simply dislike the way I dress.
But drug tests require no proof, no evidence, no reasoning at all. There is no supposition that the testee has committed any crime, or has ever used a drug in his life, legal or otherwise. No, the only thing that makes a drug testee "suspicious" is that he wants a job.
So, if you want a job in this country, you have to prove that you have not violated the state's (idiotic and ignorant) drug policies. Wanting a job is probable cause. And all of a sudden, citizens have no rights and it is incumbent upon them to prove that they have not done something "wrong" rather than it being incumbent upon the state to prove that they have done something "wrong".
And here is where all the proto-fascists chime in: "well, if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about", and its insidious cousin, "well, if you're under suspicion, you must have done something wrong".
And what of the 5th amendment? The 5th amendment, among other things, tells us that no citizen can be forced to provide evidence against themselves. Drug testing shreds this amendment just as surely as it does the 4th.
Requiring a drug test of a job applicant means that a business is forcing that person to provide evidence against themselves. Even if that person has done nothing "wrong", they are forced to submit to a search and forced to provide evidence proving they have done nothing "wrong".
This is not just a problem for stoners, and not only scumbags have reason to fear it. It is just a piece of the architecture that American government and corporations have erected together, making most workplaces into places where the constitution simply does not apply.
It is all part of an edifice of intimidation that has been erected to deprive the American worker of his dignity and his self-worth. You want a job at Wal-Mart? That's fine, just promise you'll never form a union, you'll work unpaid overtime, you'll skip breaks, and you'll pee into a cup upon our request.
There used to be a time in this country when workers had a sense of their rights and were utterly and entirely unapologetic about telling management to piss off. I'll smoke to that.
Being a substitute teacher in so-called "Level 1" schools is to be on the front lines of a disintegrating society. "Level 1" is shorthand for the worst of the worst. If the name makes no sense, perhaps we can assume it was coined by a product of these very schools.
Even a lifetime of living in "Level 1" neighborhoods and having "Level 1" neighbors cannot prepare a person for the reality of inner-city schools in 2010 America. By this I mean that I have lived and worked next to "Level 1" people my whole life, but even that could not prepare me for what I see every day in our public schools.
To be a 31-year old man returning to urban public schools for the first time since attending them in my youth is to be instantly morphed into an 80-year old Republican. I have been meanly and swiftly reduced to waxing reminiscent and nostalgic about a simpler, more civilized time. By which I mean 1993.
The amazing thing is not that students fight, or swear, or show a lack of innate interest in learning. The amazing thing is that these behaviors have been completely mainstreamed. What used to result in immediate suspension now, in the very same schools, barely registers as a disruption.
It used to be that fighting, for example, or calling a teacher a faggot or a bitch or something far, far worse would result in immediate suspension. Now, in the very same schools, this behavior is simply the cost of doing business, an annoyance rather than a red line.
What has changed? Certainly music and movies have become more coarse and explicit. But that is not the fundamental issue. When I was in these schools, the n-word was just as prevalent in rap music as it is today, but it was not a word that was heard spoken in the hallways. Now, it is a word I hear as often as I hear the word "the".
This word, and others equally vulgar, are common currency now. So are all other types of behavior that simply would not have been tolerated in the good old days, if there ever is such a thing.
The fundamental problem is two-fold. Firstly, adults (parents, guardians, and teachers) have tolerated this behavior. It doesn't take a doctorate in child psychology to know that if there is no consequence to calling an adult a bitch-ass motherfucker, then that behavior will occur far more often than it otherwise would.
Secondly, and most importantly, kids today are entirely incapable of dividing their identities. All of us today live atomized lives and are required to assume several different "identities" in any given day. It is possible to be a father, a son, a husband, a teacher, a shopper, a driver, and a friend in the course of a single day, for example.
What today's children lack is any understanding that different identities require different conduct. People my age understand that the language you use around your friends in a casual setting is very different from the language you would use towards your mother, or during a job interview, or when seated in a restaurant.
Those dividing lines are not acknowledged by youth today. To them, there is no sense that school is a different realm from home with an entirely different set of conduct, communication, and behavior. The sullen and hostile glares from students who are told they may not listen to headphones during class attests to this.
One hypothetical I use to (vainly) attempt to illustrate this for students is Jay-Z. When Jay-Z walked into a boardroom to negotiate the purchase of an NBA franchise, do we think he sagged his pants? Do we think he smoked or drank during the meeting? Do we think he referred to his prospective colleagues as "niggas"?
Two things are clear when I ask students to think about that scenario. Firstly, they are intrigued. Secondly, any serious consideration of the merits of the point I raise lasts about 5 seconds.
"Know thyself" is an old adage. In this day and age, however, that can be crippling, especially if the "self" you define yourself as is the "self" you are with no adults around. The costs of defining yourself that way are crippling. What students need to do today is to be able to incorporate different identities. They need to know thyselves.
There are certain islands of American life and culture into which black folks were accepted even while most walks of life were closed to them.
The first, cynically enough, was the military. There is, I think, something cynical about a nation that would pride itself on "allowing" black folks to die for the flag well before those very folks were allowed to vote.
Around the the time the military was fully integrated in 1946, two more realms of our culture were opened gradually to blacks: music and sports. Music and sports, however gradually they were opened to black participation on equal terms, remain the twin loci of ghetto youth to this day.
Again, this can be said to be a bit cynical, since the dynamic remains that the best a poor black child can hope to do is to one day amuse and entertain everyone else. However, a bit of this angst is surely assuaged by the fact that young black men can now make tens of millions of dollars for doing nothing more than entertain white people.
Another realm which was opened up to blacks relatively early was TV and movies, but at first it was only a specific genre that welcomed blacks. In the 40', 50's, 60's, and onwards, blacks were rarely featured in any remotely empowering roles in TV or movies. The exception was science fiction.
Blacks, and minorities in general, were feature far more often and far more prominently in science fiction movies and TV shows far before more mainstream and more "realistic"fare.
Watch any old sci-fi movie or TV show, from Star Trek to Star Wars, from Planet of the Apes to Alien, and you will see black astronauts, female generals, and everything in between. They literally jump off the screen when compared to other mainstream movies and shows of the same eras, which are dominated exclusively by white men.
While I have never been interested in Star Trek per se, I can't help but notice that a black woman and a (gay) Asian man were officers on the spaceship when the show premiered in 1966. Vintage sci-fi has endless examples of empowered minorities of all stripes in a time when all other genres conspicuously lacked melanin and estrogen.
This speaks to the reason that sci-fi appeals to so many people. Sci-fi is about the future, so the authors can project aspirations that don't seem "realistic" to the audience. Flying cars. Talking computers. Black presidents. 2 out of 3 ain't bad.
By planting the seed in the audience's consciousness, could sci-fi material have played a part in the growing tolerance and inclusiveness in our culture? Perhaps. Or I suppose it could have been done simply for shock value. But I'm inclined to feel that it was indicative of an open-mindedness that was ahead of its time.
I recall the first time I ever saw a movie with a black president. It was Deep Impact, about an asteroid headed to destroy the earth. Morgan Freeman was the president. The most interesting thing about the film was that the asteroid actually hit earth and killed most people on the planet. No bottom-of-the-ninth Bruce Willis heroics to be found.
What was also interesting was that the president was black. This film was made at a time when the idea of a black president had been made at least plausible by recent speculation that Colin Powell would run in 1996.
In retrospect, it was a master-stroke by the writers; it appealed to liberals by portraying a black president as entirely realistic. And it appealed to everyone else by making it clear that the first black president would be the last, and hey, at least it was Morgan Freeman.
I have been convinced that tolerance for diversity is not inevitable; it takes pushing. It takes confrontation. These confrontations need not be overt, however. Sometimes they are accomplished passively, artfully, by the kids who got picked on in high school. Sometimes it takes a Trekkie.
The President of the United States, 48 years ago this week, explaining why it's so important to vote in the midterm elections:
"75 percent of Republicans voted against my higher education bill, 84 percent of Republican senators opposed extended unemployment benefits, 81 percent and 95 percent of house Republicans voted against the redevelopment and public housing bills, respectively, and 80 percent of house Republicans resisted increasing the minimum wage."
"On a bill to provide medical care for our older citizens, 7/8 of the Republican senators voted No, just as their fathers before them had voted 90 percent against Social Security in the 1930's."
John F. Kennedy, October, 1962
One blessing the United States has always enjoyed is that of relatively secure and passive neighbors. Neither Mexico nor Canada has ever given us any trouble, which has left us uniquely free to create trouble for ourselves.
Mexico today, however, is probably the most dangerous country in the world. And the drug cartels are the source of the huge majority of that violence, ranging from the usual street-level thuggery to political assassination of politicians and judges, and everything in between.
In this equation, the United States is the customer for most of these drugs and therefore part of the problem. But the problem is not primarily the fault of the Mexican drug lords, but of our own obscenely hypocritical Puritanism.
The Puritans are remembered in our dominant paradigm as intrepid souls who fled the oppression of Europe to come to the New World, where there was religious freedom. And while the Puritans were surely interested in own freedom, as we all are, they were supremely uninterested in anyone else's freedom to disagree with them.
"Freedom" for the Puritans meant "freedom to be a Puritan". They did not take kindly to Jews, for example. Or witches. There is nothing unique about this bigoted self-interest, of course. But the Puritan legacy continues today, and it fuels the drug war more than all the stoners and gangsters in the world.
The Puritans were scandalized by pleasure. Comfortable clothes, for example, were frowned upon, so we can imagine how they felt about sex and drugs. It strikes me that the only reason that marijuana, for example, is illegal is that there is a remnant of Puritanism remaining in our culture.
Prohibition is as close as we can come to a perfect case study. Prohibition actually made far more sense than criminalizing marijuana because alcohol is infinitely more physically and socially destructive than marijuana.
That being said, there are a few truths about our experiment with Prohibition that no rational person can refute.
Firstly, Prohibition prohibited Americans from drinking, but it did not prevent them from doing so. When alcohol was criminalized, Americans didn't stop drinking; they simply became criminals.
Secondly, criminalizing alcohol meant that sellers of alcohol were now criminals. And criminals, regardless of time or place, regulate their trade with violence. And so Prohibition's biggest legacy was not sobriety, but organized crime.
Half of the profits of the Mexican drug cartels are reaped from marijuana. We can therefore assume that roughly half of the violence is carried out in the distribution of marijuana.
So if marijuana were legal, the criminals would lose half of their power overnight. Thousands of lives south of our border would be saved. Americans would save millions of dollars by ending the absurd practice of imprisoning citizens for marijuana "crimes". And we would reap untold millions more by taxing and legally distributing marijuana.
The only thing which prevents this legal, moral, ethical, and economic triumph is Puritanism. One marvels at the schizophrenia of a society that would rather indulge barbaric drug cartels and criminalize millions of its own citizens than to acknowledge and regulate the reality that most Americans are not scandalized by the private pleasure of their neighbors.The final thread that the Puritans in this debate cling to is this argument: "if we legalize marijuana, everyone would start smoking marijuana all day every day".
Alcohol is legal. Do all of us drink all day every day? When Americans decide if they are going to try a drug, the legality of that drug is not part of their decision-making progress. Have you ever met anyone who said to you "I've never smoked marijuana because it's illegal"?
The decision to try or abstain from a drug, or a sexual encounter, or any type of new and potentially risky behavior, consists largely of an inner dialogue within one's self. If I choose not to use cocaine, it is not because the Puritans don't want me too. It's because I know better.
So the only conclusion is this: the Puritans hate free will. They don't trust themselves, and they certainly don't trust anyone else. They feel that the only thing saving us from barbaric hedonism and anarchy is a strict and unbending code of denial. They live out the belief that pleasure corrupts, and that we are helpless in the face of any temptation.
The Puritans don't want to live in a world where they can decide not to smoke marijuana. They want to live in a world where the full and awesome power of the state forbids them to do so.
In the final analysis, the Puritans actually cause the criminality and barbarity they so fear by vainly attempting to enforce their own dim view of mankind onto us all.
As "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" grinds its way slowly to extinction, we can be sure that congressional Republicans will put up one last desperate fight, one last full-throated frenzy to convince us all that civilization itself is doomed if open homosexuals serve in our military. And we can also be sure that many of those very Republicans will be gay.
The gay Republican is a tragic and very common occurrence. There are two types of gay men: there are gay men who are open and confident about their identity, and there are gay men who despise what they are and spend inordinate amounts of energy in attacking the gays that actually embrace their gayness.
There is a very interesting psychological dynamic at work here. Why are some of the most virulent gay haters gay themselves? What causes such sadomasochism? In these men, we witness the true danger of self-loathing.
Here's the thing about self-loathing gays: they deny that they are gay. They have sex with men, of course, but they deny that this makes them gay. To straight men and to gay men who are open and confident, it is obvious that a man who is attracted to and has sex with other men is gay. This is obvious to everybody except for the self-loathing gay.
Here is what the self-loathing gays seem to think: they seem to think that all men, ALL men, are naturally tempted to have sex with other men. So when these self-loathing gays give in to their natural temptation and have sex with a man, that doesn't mean they're gay; it just means that they slipped up and indulged their temptation.
Again, everybody except for self-loathing gays understands how ridiculous that is. We all have our temptations, of course. Married men, for example, may be tempted to cheat on their wives. But, assuming these men are straight, they are tempted by other women.
The self-loathing gay, however, is so gay, and so delusional, that he actually believes that all men secretly wish they could have male lovers, that it is the natural state of men, and that the only reason we're not ALL gay is that most of us don't give in to this universal temptation.
To the self-loathing gay, the only way a person can truly be "gay" is if they live openly as a gay. But if they just indulge in furtive and secretive sexual encounters, while pretending to the world to be straight, then that's different. But it's not. It's just self-destructive. And dangerous.
The self-loathing gay hates open gays so much because open gays are free. They don't lie to themselves and deny their own identity. The reason this is so dangerous is that it leaves to sadomasochism, which is incredibly destructive in political movements.
Self-loathing gays are sadists, because they revel in the oppression, abuse, and subjugation of other people. And they are masochists, because what they're really trying to destroy is part of themselves.
We have seen this psychological time bomb at play in many historical movements (e.g. Hitler, who physically resembled the people he exterminated far more than those he exalted).
The biggest threat to the gay rights movement in this nation right now is not straight people. Most people who are confident in their sexuality are not threatened by the sexuality of others. The biggest threat are those who deny themselves and seek to destroy the part of themselves that they perceive in others.
It is relatively accurate to say that the United States has Christian roots. It would be far more accurate, although not necessarily true, to say that the United States has Protestant roots. In other words, we are Christian, but we are not Catholic; ergo we are Protestants.
And Protestantism started with Luther. Thankfully, it didn't end with him.
Luther did indeed do mankind an inestimable service in pointing out that the papacy is not the Bible, and that the practice of priests literally selling tickets to heaven to rich folks wasn't exactly in keeping with the word of the Nazarene.
Luther was, it can be said, one of the 10 most influential thinkers and doers of Western civilization. But that doesn't necessarily mean he had a uniformly, or even mostly, positive influence. Influence is morally neutral; Hitler's higher on the list than Luther.
Here is what the dominant historical paradigm tells us about Martin Luther: he essentially invented freedom of religion by rejecting the premise that the Catholic Church was the "one true church". He encouraged people to think for themselves and to reject blind obedience to other mortals.
Luther, the paradigm tells us, invented Protestantism by encouraging people to think for themselves and the use their own God-given minds to make sense of the world. After Luther, Catholic nations such as Spain stagnated while newly Protestant nations such as England expanded and excelled.
There is, of course, much truth to this paradigm. But this paradigm, like many others, has less to do with what the man did while alive than it has to do with what subsequent writers think he stood for. And a look at what Luther actually did and said renders him much less sympathetic.
Firstly, for his theology. Luther was a Catholic, just as Christ was a Jew. He rightly pointed out grievous abuses and corruption condoned and carried out by his church. But where did he disagree with the Church's theology?
Luther's biggest sticking point was free will. He DID NOT believe it existed. That's right; Martin Luther did not believe that we have free will. It would be hard to think of a belief more anathema to American culture than that. Yet the inventor of Protestantism believed it.
So we instantly know that the dominant paradigm has a hole in it big enough to drive a cathedral through. The second major Protestant figure of this time was John Calvin. Calvin, like Luther, did not believe in free will. He believed in predestination. Some of us are "the elect", and the others.....well...they're not.
And what of the practical application of Luther's theology, which we look back on as so enlightened and empowering? Well, after Luther rose to prominence, there occurred the biggest popular uprising in the history of Europe, before or since.
One of Luther's better ideas was to print the Bible in languages that average people could actually read and speak. And poor folks, having had a chance for the first time in a thousand years to actually read the Bible, decided they weren't being treated very biblically by their betters. So they revolted.
And where did Luther come down? On the side of the kings. He excoriated the peasants in the strongest possible terms from his pulpit and advised the princes and kings to slaughter them en masse, which they did. Apparently, for Luther, the pope was an illegitimate authority, but the king was just fine.
3 days before Luther died, he wrote that all the Jews should be expelled from Germany. Good thing that idea never caught on.... In this, as well, Luther was ahead of his time.
Luther, we now know, was not the revolution. He did not believe in free will and he did not believe in the inherent quality of people, or even of Christians. What he did do, and what he do owe him for, is to crack open the door toward real reformation and liberation.
But let us not confuse this man; Martin Luther was no Martin Luther King.
The Catholic Church, or The One True Church as believers would have it, is many things. Like all human institutions, it has its faults, and the Catholic Church has had more time than any other institution in our culture to accumulate those faults.
But I must confess (pun intended) that I have not adequately appreciated the Church's role in the history of our civilization. For starters, it is the oldest continual institution in Western Civilization, so we can safely assume that the Church must be doing something right.
When we assess the role of the church, we have to remind ourselves that for the overwhelming majority of its history, the church was dominant over the state. Henry VIII was the one who really got the ball rolling in the other direction, and the process of establishing the state's dominance over the church was halting and slow in most places.
The question here is not whether the state should be more powerful than the church. The question is what role the church played before the state was dominant. That role was mixed, of course, with a little humanity here and a little barbarism there, but it's an issue worth considering.
Until very, very recently, the church was the only institution in Western civilization that did anything at all for the poor, for example. There was no welfare, no social security programs, nothing but blood and iron coming from the state. Mercy and charity came only from the church.
It was the church that fed the poor, maintained the libraries, offered safe-haven to fugitives, and so on. The state did none of these things.
The church was also the first truly international institution, which claimed at least in theory that all Christians were equal in some sense. When we consider what havoc was wreaked by state-sponsored nationalism in the 20th century, the church-sponsored internationalism that preceded it clearly has its merits.
For every reactionary priest that burned a scientist at the stake, there were 10 priests who safe-guarded human knowledge accumulated by ancient civilizations during the Dark Ages. For every pedophile rapist that preyed on orphans, there were ten holy men who taught and fed those very same orphans.
Politicians today tell us not to compare them to the Almighty, but to compare them to the alternative. The church's problem is that it asks us to compare it to the Almighty, which makes its predictable human failings all the more grating on our collective conscience, but that should not obscure its good works.
The church today has a role much different than that which it played throughout most of its history. It is no longer involved in governance. And although this is a good thing, we should reflect on the fact that for centuries, it was the only institution in our culture that dispensed mercy, however imperfect, and the only institution which curbed the powerlust of kings.For all its failings, it is a dark prospect indeed to imagine the past without the Catholic Church.
The "six degrees of separation" principle in my mind is sort of like the "principle" of gravity, or God, or the greatness of Bob Dylan; all these things take huge leaps in pretension and anti-socialism to deny. In other words, they are all manifestly true, and only obnoxious people are invested in denying them.
The funny (or American) thing about the six degrees theory is that is started out as a latter-day parlor game centered around the actor Kevin Bacon, and was restricted to the realms of movie actors.
Example: Kevin Bacon was in "JFK" with John Candy, who was in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" with Steve Martin, who was in "The Pink Panther" with Beyonce. Hence, there are only 3 degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and Beyonce.
Many a stoned teenager has been amazed by this truth. But it's not just a parlor game. It doesn't just apply to famous people, and it doesn't just apply to movies. It applies to every single human being alive.
There are well over six billion of us, but there are no more than six degrees of separation between any 2 of us. It is this truth which shatters the "illusion of separateness", as I've heard it called.
Here is but one example. My sister married an Israeli citizen in 1993. In 1994 they went to Israel to visit my brother in law's aging parents. On the months-long trip, my sister met and spoke with Yasser Arafat.
She spoke with him, sat with him, had a conversation with him. The six degrees theory does not apply to strangers who you brush elbows with on the street; this is about actual connections, where you are introduced to someone, talk to them, inquire about their families, remember them.
So my sister met Yasser Arafat. That makes me 2 degrees removed from Arafat. Who has Arafat met? It would take forever to flesh this out, but one example would be Saddam Hussein. That makes me 3 degrees removed from Saddam Hussein.
And keep in mind, the "game" allows for SIX degrees of separation.
It is difficult to articulate what this proves, because it is not a minor point; it cuts straight to the heart of how we look at the universe. It gives pause to those of us who insist on treating ourselves as separate little universes, and it delivers the proper weight to the words "brother" and "sister".
"One good thing about music / when it hits, you feel no pain" --Bob Marley
By the time you get to be my age, your preferences take on a certain air of consistency. Anyone you count as a close friend at this point in your life will most likely remain a close friend, for example.
Taste in art and taste in friends say alot about a person. Below is a list of my dirty dozen musical artists. These are the 12 musical artists with the most songs in my library, after their discographies have suffered my obnoxiously pretentious editing process.
Two parenthetical notes are in order.
Firstly, Bob Dylan is on the list, but he is not of the list. He is in an order all his own.
Secondly, many of my favorites are not on this list because they lack the quantity of recorded music that modern recording artists enjoy. Sam Cooke and Credence Clearwater Revival jump to mind.
That being said, just as I'm set on my friends, I'm set on this music:
It's a sad commentary on the pedantic propaganda that passes for our media that I should begin by pointing out that the "Ground Zero Mosque" is not at ground zero and is not a mosque. Sort of like how the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman.
Most people who are opposed to the building of this community center a few blocks away from Ground Zero acknowledge that Muslims have every right to build the center; they simply feel that the Muslims should not actually invoke this right.
Such a crystallization of ignorance about the nature of rights presents us with a teachable moment. True rights, true freedom, does not take a back seat to peoples' feelings. True freedom is not something which is practiced only when nobody else is offended by its exercise.
If that were the measure of freedom, then North Korea is a free country. Citizens of North Korea are perfectly free to do or say anything they like, as long as it does not offend the government. Christians and Jews in Iran are free to do whatever they like, as long as it does not offend the Muslim clerics.
We all know that North Korea and Iran are not "free" countries, so it is (or should be) clear to us that real freedom is that which is protected even if others are offended by its exercise.
That is why true freedom of the media, for example, is not gauged by whether or not the media praises the powerful, but by whether or not the media challenges the powerful and holds them accountable.
Religious freedom in this country should be held to the same standard. This raises the secondary issue at play here, which is why exactly building a Muslim community center in Manhattan is so controversial in the first place.
Clearly, for those who oppose the project, there is a direct connection between the 9/11 massacres and Islam as a whole. That much is evident. These people hold that Islam, as a faith, should not be anywhere near Ground Zero. But what if we were to apply that logic to other faiths or institutions?
If all murderous acts carried out by people using a certain faith or ideology as justification resulted in that faith or ideology being banned from the scene of the crime, what would the world look like?
Well, first of all, there would be exceedingly few churches or mosques anywhere on the face of the earth. Also, there would be no American embassy in Japan, no German embassies anywhere in Europe, and on and on and on.
Collective guilt and true freedom do not mix. If the only ones among us who are truly free are those of us whose faith or ideas have never been abused by wicked men for vile purposes, who among us is free? I sure know I wouldn't be.
When I got to the gym this morning, my preferred elliptical machine was occupied, so instead of spending the first hour of my day with ESPN, I spent it with Fox News. The topic of discussion this morning was President Obama's impending address on the end of the American "combat mission" in Iraq.
Specifically, the anchors and their guests were discussing whether or not President Obama would "give credit where credit is due". The "credit" in this case, according to Fox News, is "due" to George W. Bush.
Since George W. Bush endorsed the strategy of the "surge" in Iraq in 2007 and since then-Senator Obama opposed said strategy, now-President Obama should focus his speech tonight on giving credit to George W. Bush and, presumably, asking all citizens for their forgiveness for his own lack of appreciation for the strategic genius of his predecessor.
To say that George W. Bush is due any credit vis a vis Iraq is to say that an arsonist deserves credit for pissing on a fire he has set.
It is also to fundamentally misunderstand what the Surge was and what it accomplished. The Surge was intended to mitigate the raging Sunni insurgency against American soldiers as well as the incipient civil war between Sunni and Shia.
The Surge did, indeed, halt the worst levels of violence in Iraq. But it did not do so by military victory or by changing hearts and minds. It did so by distributing pallets of shrink-wrapped 100 dollar bills to the people who had been killing American soldiers for 4 years.
The Surge was about buying loyalty from the enemy, simply bribing the enemy to behave a bit better. This is nothing new in the history of warfare, and in my mind its infinitely preferable to killing. But genius it ain't.
Mr. Bush does not deserve credit for ordering the surge, because the surge was simply a last-ditch effort to salvage the train wreck that Mr. Bush had unleashed. Again, if an arsonist pisses on his own fire in an attempt to put it out after it has already killed a few thousand people, that doesn't make him a hero.
If anyone deserves credit it is Mr. Obama, because he spoke out forcefully about the folly of the original invasion. But even Mr. Obama does not deserve much credit. Because he still won't speak the truth about Iraq.
We all know that at some point during his speech tonight our president will say something along these lines: "regardless of how we felt about the wisdom of invading Iraq, all Americans can agree that we owe a great debt to our military for protecting our freedoms".
And therein lies the lie. Our military certainly made enormous sacrifices. But none of us were made more free because of them. That is the ultimate tragedy. And until we can be honest about that, we haven't learned a thing.
When the Nazis' bombing blitz of London began to ease during the middle of World War II, Winston Churchill took to the airwaves and told his people that "this is not the end. Nor is it the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
The end of the beginning in the Iraq War came just 3 weeks after the invasion, when Saddam's statue was pulled down in what was a profoundly radical and inspiring moment, regardless of how one may feel about the war itself.
Many at that time said that the pulling down of the statue was the end, but it quickly became evident that it was simply the end of the beginning. What followed were years of insurgency and civil war which claimed the lives of 4,500 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
This week we witnessed the beginning of the end. The last combat troops left Iraq this week under cover of darkness, but also under the protection of the Iraqi Army. What the actual end will look like is anyone's guess. My personal guess is that it will never come, at least not in any guise distinguishable to our western eyes.
But what came in the 7 years in between the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end is the real story of the Iraq War. Many of the combat soldiers who left Iraq this week had not reached puberty when we invaded that country. So much time has elapsed that it is easy to forget the beginning.
And in the beginning was deception. The midwife of America's war in Iraq was all manner of lies and propaganda, followed by new lies to cover the old, the entire insidious architecture supported by torture, willful blindness, and credit cards.
Unfortunately, the war in Iraq was not unique to American history. Perhaps the most unique thing about it was George W. Bush.
In all previous American wars, there was a war party. The presidents who led America into its previous wars were not indispensable to the project. To give a few examples, the Civil War did not happen because of Lincoln; the Spanish-American War did not happen because of McKinley; the Korean War did not happen because of Truman.
It is easy to imagine other presidents making the same decisions that Lincoln, McKinley, and Truman made. But the Iraq War was different. No American president, historical or theoretical, would have invaded Iraq in 2003. Only George W. Bush would have done it.
This war was uniquely personal, uniquely non-democratic, bizarrely conceived, and shamefully executed. It was inseparable from the person and mind of George W. Bush; nobody else could have come up with it.
Bush, of course, acknowledged this dimension repeatedly, although perhaps subconsciously. "After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad". Remember that one?
The assassination plot against Bush's dad was purely mythical, invented by the vengeful and venal government of Kuwait after the first Iraq War. But we all know that this fact, even if Mr. Bush had it explained and proven to him, would have had precisely zero impact on him.
Perhaps this is why the war seemed to die and fall from orbit due to its own oppressive gravity as soon as Bush vacated the presidency. Mr. Bush was the alpha and omega of that war; without him the fire was deprived of all oxygen or, to be more precise, of all hot air.
The tragedy of this war is that the only person alive who could tell us why it happened is George W. Bush. But even he could never explain it. He was held hostage by his fantasies, neuroses, and delusions, and he still is. And so are we all.
A better writer than myself wrote of Bismarck: "the great leader, like the great artist, is the most inspired fantasist: he sees the object not only as it is, but as it can be, and persuades others to submit to his hallucination".
Perhaps the most poisonous legacy of the Iraq War was that Mr. Bush did not need to persuade others to submit to his hallucination; he needed only to convince himself. And the rest of us were just along for the ride.
The recent statements by several politicians (the founders would have been horrified to learn that "politician" is a job description) about the ambition-killing evils of unemployment insurance reminds me how ignorant most people are about what said insurance actually is.
What it is is insurance. It's right there in the name. Unemployment insurance. Certain politicians are claiming that the unemployed would rather collect benefits than find a job. They term these benefits "welfare". They paint a picture of people who would rather have other people pay for their upkeep than work for themselves.
Insurance, of course, is not welfare. Insurance is.....well, its insurance. You pay IN. And if the worst happens, the insurance company pays OUT.
With car insurance, you pay in. If your car crashes, the insurance company pays out. When an insured motorist has their car fixed after an accident, does anyone term that "welfare"?
With health insurance, you pay in. If your health crashes, the insurance company (in theory) pays out. When an insured mother gets to stay in the hospital for 2 days after giving birth, does anyone term that "welfare"?
With unemployment insurance, you pay in. If your job crashes, the insurance pays out. By what logic would anyone term that "welfare"?
This is not an argument against welfare; it's simply a statement of fact: unemployment insurance is NOT welfare. It's insurance. If you've never paid IN, you do not collect. Every person currently collecting unemployment is only doing so because they have already paid IN.
What is the logical conclusion of those who call unemployment insurance "welfare"? It is this: people should pay into the unemployment insurance pool, but they should never draw insurance payments FROM that pool.
So people should pay their car insurance, but when they're in an accident, they should pay for the damages from their own pocket. And presumably, they should keep paying into the pool as well.
To argue that people collecting unemployment are on welfare and have no incentive to work is like saying that people who have their car crashes covered by insurance are on welfare and have an incentive to keep getting in car accidents.
It is also equivalent to saying that health insurance is an incentive for people to get cancer. If health insurance pays out when people get sick, then presumably people will WANT to be sick. Does anyone believe that? Yes. Politicians.
It's bad enough that the United States has a shredded welfare system. It's bad enough that we force ourselves to pay protection money to private companies to guard against car crashes, diseases, or lost jobs.
What makes it even worse is when politicians castigate us for having the audacity to actually demand protection when the worst happens to us. They tell us that paying protection money is an incentive for us to crash our cars, break our bones, and lose our jobs.
By this logic, any person who buys life insurance is given an incentive to kill themselves....if that's the case, I can only hope that these venal politicians have life insurance.
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In a reminder that the past is never truly past, several U.S. senators this week debated the merits of re-evaluating the 14th amendment to our Constitution. In addition, a federal judge also revisited the 14th amendment for entirely different purposes.
The intention of the 14th amendment (before corporate lawyers sunk their claws into it) was to replace the law of blood with the law of the land.
Before the Civil War, the law of blood trumped the law of the land. The law of blood was dominant for far longer in other countries (Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc). The law of blood basically holds that regardless of how long you have lived on the land, your liberties are based on your blood.
After the 14th amendment, the Constitution was (in theory) the law of the land. The 14th amendment aimed to destroy the law of blood by stating that any person born in the United States was inherently born with a non-negotiable array of rights, protections, and liberties, regardless of what genes did or did not flow through their blood.
Now, certain of our "leaders" are proposing that we remove this protection. Their intent is to deprive the American-born children of "illegals" of American citizenship. So, in other words, the law of blood would once again be paramount. The law of the land would not apply to people unless they passed the law of blood.
The 14th ammendment also came into play this week regarding gay marriage. A federal judge ruled that it was unconstitutional for the voters of California to vote to deprive gay people the right to marry.
This judge reminded us that democracy does mean majority rule, but it does NOT mean that the majority can vote to deprive any minority of equal protection under the law. When people vote to deprive gay people the same rights as heterosexuals, that is not democracy; that is mob rule.
Those who oppose giving citizenship to the native-born children of immigrants and those who oppose equal rights for gays are wrong twice-over.
Firstly, they are wrong morally. And secondly, they are wrong logically.
If we are to create whole classes of people who were born in the United States but who are not protected by the law of the land by virtue of having failed the law of blood, we are then creating whole classes of people who are non-citizens.
And if we are to create whole classes of non-citizens, why would we expect them to follow the laws of a land whose laws do not protect them? It cuts both ways; our government protects certain rights and in return demands certain loyalties.
If we do not extend protection and citizenship to certain people, what moral or legal or logical right do we have to demand their loyalty to the laws and government which exclude them?
Such bigotry does not make any of us more secure. It merely divides us against each other, castigating millions of us into a purgatorical limbo in which the government does not grant us its protection and does not deserve our loyalty.
Perhaps Jay-Z put it best. "This ain't black vs. white, my people, we off that / Please tell Bill O'Reilly to fall back / Tell Rush Limbaugh to get off my balls / This is 2010, not 1864."
People who know me know (hopefully) that I try not to be a pretentious person, and that I have no time for material or monetary measures of a person's worth. My car, my clothes, and my diet attest to this. But there is one area in which I am something of a snob.
I'm a snob when it comes to writing, in the sense that I use big and rare words to convey my thoughts rather than the far more conventional recourse to monosyllabic tripe and CAPITAL letters (if you didn't understand me the first time, LET ME YELL!)
I have been and remain inspired to appreciate language because of George Orwell, among others of course. I consider Orwell to have been the greatest English-language writer of the 20th century. His best writings, I have found, are not "1984" or "Animal Farm", but rather his nonfiction and journalism.
At any rate, I ran across this quote by Orwell today that sums up my attitude in this regard far more succinctly than I ever could. And keep in mind that this was written in 1946:
"A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
The man pictured above is David St. Germain, who I and most others knew only as Doc. Doc killed himself last week by jumping from the top of the parking garage at Providence Place Mall. He was 43.
Doc had Thanksgiving with my family last year, and I had the pleasure of meeting him on a few other occasions. I last spoke to him one week before his suicide.
Doc was a big man, with a big mouth and a big heart. He spent his time trying as best he could to be a voice for the voiceless. He was led to that calling by his own personal tragedies. Doc's story is not only tragic, but it is tragically American. And it got me to thinking about The System.
People of my parents' generation and political leanings have a certain view of The System that I don't entirely share. In their view, the system is essentially a conspiracy, a vast apparatus of privilege and power that actively deprives their fellow citizens of their due liberty and happiness.
That view of the system never entirely made sense to me. Actively oppressive systems have of coursed existed (Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, etc.). But it always seemed to me that the system in this country is not one of oppression, but of neglect. That is the system to which Doc fell victim.
The System in America does not exert its might in actively oppressing people; it simply ignores them. The system here is not vast; it is very small. It is an exclusive club. And if you're not in the system, you're ignored by it. The system in America today does not crush people. To crush someone, you have to give a shit. No, the system here simply ignores people.
Doc was an EMT driver. He was in an accident. He broke his back and his foot was severed and re-attached. Now, you might think that an ambulance driver was an integral enough part of the system that he would be protected by it. And you'd be wrong.
Doc's medical trauma and the bills resulting from it cost him his job and his home. This was a good, intelligent, skilled and employed man who lost everything because of an accident. Something that could happen to me or you at any moment.
We all know that someone with access to the system would not go bankrupt and homeless because of a car crash. These privileged few would simply concentrate on their physical recovery. But neither Doc, nor me, nor you are in that system. And because we're not, we're all one accident away.
The accident left Doc in constant physical anguish. His injuries were the very things for which painkillers were invented. But since Doc was not a member of the system, he had to beg the system for physical relief from his suffering. And the system helped him for a time.
The system gave Doc a "pain contract". Needless to say, members of the system do not have pain contracts imposed on them. Doc violated his "pain contract" when he lost part of a prescription and went for a refill earlier than scheduled.
Because of this violation, the system labeled Doc a drug abuser. And the system was thereafter entirely closed to him. No individual member of the system could legally do anything to ease this man's physical anguish because the system itself had decided that he was an addict looking to leach from the system.
So, in the system's eyes, Doc had committed two mortal sins. He was in an accident. And then he misplaced something. And that was all it took for the system to write him off. In the system's eyes, Doc had nothing to contribute and he had proven himself unworthy of any help because of his sins.
Doc worked, followed the law, served in the medical field, voted, organized, paid his taxes. He was a full-bodied citizen. But that wasn't enough. It wasn't enough to grant him access to the system.
When the system cost Doc his life, it didn't do it with a firing squad. It did it by simply looking the other way. What would it have taken to give Doc the painkillers he needed? A man with so many causes and so many friends would surely not have chosen death if his chronic physical torment had been alleviated. What would it have cost the system to save Doc? Too much, evidently.
Often in the face of tragedy people are driven to exaggerate, to conflate, to romanticize. So let me make these things clear: I did not know Doc very well. I do not pretend to have been a confidante of his or to have had any deep knowledge of his heart or mind. But what I do know down to the marrow of my bones is that what happened to him could happen to any of us.
So what sort of System do we have? It is not a vast apparatus of oppression. It is an exclusive gated community that brutalizes us not by physical force, but by simply locking the gate.
Every one of us, no matter how low, spends money. When we spend money, we pay taxes. When we pay taxes, we are paying into the system. But we are paying to polish the gates, not to have them opened for us.
Please look to the post below to play the music to accompany these lyrics
Some of the smartest dummies
Can't read the language of Egyptian mummies
Plant a flag on the moon
And can't find food for the starving tummies
Pay no mind to the youths
'Cause it's not like the future depends on it
Save the animals in the zoo
'Cause them chimpanzees, them-a make big money
This is how the media pillages:
On the TV the picture is
Savages in villages
And the scientists still can't explain the pyramids, huh
Evangelists making a living on the videos of ribs of the little kids
Stereotyping the image of the images
And this is what the image is:
You buy-a khaki pants
All of a sudden you'sa Indiana Jones
And a-thief out gold and a-thief out scrolls and even the buried bones
Some of the worst paparazzis I have seen and have ever known
Put the worst on display so the world can see
And that's all that we're ever shown
So the ones in the west will never move east
And feel dem could be at home
Dem get tricked by the beast
But where a-dem goin' flee when the monster is fully grown?
Solomonic lineage what dem still can't defeat and dem could never clone
My spiritual DNA that print in my soul and I will forever own
Lord
Huh, we born not knowing, or are we born knowing all?
We growing wiser, or are we just growing tall?
Can you read thoughts? Can you read palms?
Huh, can you predict the future? Can you see storrrrrrrrrrrms coming?
The Earth was flat, if you went too far you would fall off
Now the Earth is round, if the shape change again, everybody gonna start laugh
The average man can't prove of most of the things that he chooses to speak of
And still won't research and find out the root of the truth that you seek of
Scholars teach in universities and claim that they're smart and cunning
Tell dem find a cure when we sneeze and that's when their nose starts running
And the rich get stitched up when we get cut
Betta heal dem broken bones in the bush with the wet mud
Can you read signs? Can you read stars?
Can you make peace? Can you fight war?
Can you milk cows even though you drive cars, huh?
Can you survive against all odds now?
NAS:
Who wrote the Bible? Who wrote the Koran?
And was it a lightning storm that gave birth to the Earth?
And then dinosaurs were born.....damn
Who made up words? Who made up numbers?
And what kind of spell is mankind under?
Everything on the planet
We preserve it and can it
Microwave it and try it
No matter what we'll survive it
What's hu? What's man? What's human?
Anything along the land, we consumin', eatin', deletin', ruin
Tryin' to get paper, gotta have land, gotta have acres
So I sit back like Jack Nicholson, watch niggas play the game like the Lakers
In a world of 52 fakers, gypsies, seances, mystical prayers
You superstitious?
Throw salt over your shoulder, make a wish for the day 'cause
Like somebody got a doll of me
Stickin' needles in my arteries
But I can't feel it
Sometimes it's like "pardon me, but I got a real big spirit"
I feel this...I'm fearless
Don't you try to grab a hold of my soul
It's like a military soldier, since 7 years old
I held real dead bodies in my arms
Felt their bodies turn cold
Why we born in the first place if this is how we gotta go?
Damn
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