The Rock of St. Pederast

It was revealed last week that the Pope was one of untold dozens of priests who covered up untold thousands of child rapes. Seeing the way the issue is being talked about in our media, one might be forgiven for forgetting that the American Revolution ever happened.

One of the cornerstones of the United States was and is the separation of church and state. This is a very good thing, as we were the first modern nation to totally reject the idea of having political and military power vested in men who explicitly and exclusively claim to be able to talk to God.

But our separation is not as radical or as complete as one might think. The Catholic Church, even in this nation, is treated with kid gloves, treated with a nauseating degree of unearned deference, and allowed a law unto themselves. They pay no taxes to our government, despite being the largest landowner on earth. And, evidently, they get a pass when it comes to raping kids.

A quick semantic point: I call it "child rape" in the interest of being accurate, not of being provocative. To say "child abuse" is to talk of berating or slapping a child. But when a grown man has sex with a child, that's rape. Period.

This is especially disgusting on 2 levels: firstly, it's the most despicable crime in our culture and secondly, it's being carried out by an institution which claims to speak for God, to be "the conscience" of our culture, to be, in fact, infallible.

(The doctrine of infallibility is truly a crime against reason and morality. If a person convinces himself he can do no wrong, apparently he will occasionally do the wrongest thing imaginable, as if mocking the God he claims to speak for just to convince himself of his own perfection.)

First, for the crime. It's generally a myth that there's any such thing as honor amongst thieves. Except that is, when it comes to child rapists. These criminals are invariably held in total and utterly bottomless contempt by every member of society, up to and including murderers (and even rapists who target adults, for that matter, the operative theory there being "rape someone your own size").

A thought exercise: let's imagine you have a friend, someone you've known for years. Your friend calls you and says he needs to talk; he's in trouble with the law and needs some help, some advice, some support. You race to meet with your friend, wondering what's happened, worrying about your friend, hoping you can help.

If the friend says "I got caught with some weed" or "I didn't pay my income taxes" or "I was driving without insurance", your focus would be purely on how to help your friend. Surely, the revelation of any of these "crimes" would not alter your friendship or your opinion of your friend's moral bearings.

Even if your friend says "I killed someone", what would race through your mind? Shock at first, I would imagine, followed by hypothetical rationalizations: Was it an accident? Was it self-defense? After all, you know this person; surely there must be some explanation.

But if that very same friend said to you, "well, I was babysitting for my buddy Kevin last week, watching his 7 year old son and, you know, I hooked up with him, and now I guess he's blathering about it or whatever."

What is your reaction? Even if you don't instinctively physically attack this person, have you not instantly cut him out of the ranks of civilized human beings? Have you not instantly promised yourself that you will never talk to this person again, never mind let him anywhere near your family?

That's what child rape is. It's the worst thing someone can do. A man cannot rape a child and retain his humanity. There's no such thing as "child rape in the 2nd degree".

It is that crime which is plaguing the church. Not corruption. Not drug smuggling. Child rape.

Now, there are some who say "it's only a few people". Well, no, it's not. It dozens upon hundreds of rapists and thousands upon thousands of victims, and we can be very secure it assuming only a small fraction of the rapes were reported. And every time, EVERY time, the bosses got wind that they were employing child rapists, they moved that rapist down the road.

These were men who claimed to speak to God, who claimed to hold the keys to eternal salvation, who claimed to be above sin. They used that power to rape children or to protect those who did and enable further rapes by transferring these predators to new and unsuspecting communities.

For those who say it was only a few bad priests, let's say it was 1 in 10,000. Let's think of another profession where adults are in such proximity to children. Let's think about teachers.

What if it came out tomorrow that out of the 500,000 public school teachers in America, 50 of them were known by their bosses to be guilty of raping dozens of their students.

And each time a principal found out that one of these 50 teachers had raped dozens of children, that principal simply transferred the rapist to another school district. I mean, after all, it's either that or bringing "shame upon the schools".

What would happen? Would the Secretary of Education come out and say, "hey what's a few thousand raped kids when test scores are up 3%?" No.

What would happen would be that every single teacher who had raped a kid would get sent to prison and murdered there. And every single administrator who concealed evidence of child rape and transferred rapists to new districts would suffer the same fate.

Yet, when it comes to the church, it is basically treated as an internal matter. "Should the bishops have dealt more harshly with child rapists?" "Should the Pope apologize?".

Again, imagine this is someone else. Imagine a day care center knowingly employed serial child rapists. The question then wouldn't be "should they apologize?". The question then would be "should they be executed?"

So even though we have technically shunned the idea that the church is a law unto itself, that is how our law enforcement is behaving in this case. What the Church should do about this matter is irrelevant. When someone who works for Wal-Mart commits murder, nobody asks Wal-Mart when they think should be done.

Any person who protects child rapists has broken the law of the United States as well as, if you'll forgive me my arrogance, the law of God. Such a person is more guilty and more deserving of punishment than at least 95% of the people who we imprison.

Yet these men get away with it. Why? How? Because they wear funny hats and claim to speak for God. What year is this, again?

Year Zero

Have you ever had the experience of someone else explaining to you how and why you were wrong in doing something?

You may have not appreciated the gravity of your actions when you took them, but you are brought around to seeing it from the other party's perspective. And even if you don't hate yourself for doing it, you give yourself a thorough self-assessment and vow to amend your behavior, to think more about how your actions could be interpreted, how your actions will affect people you don't even know, people who haven't even been born yet.

If you have never run this gauntlet, I can guarantee that you are unfit to be a citizen, a spouse, or a parent. Hiroshima is the ultimate example of this dynamic. We as Americans still take far too casually the decision that was made by our government 65 years ago. Year Zero.

"Year Zero" was a phrase proposed by a physicist whose name escapes me at the moment. The premise is more important than the name. The premise is as follows:

If the birth of a Palestinian pauper who claimed to be the king of the Jews before being executed by the Romans was reason enough to start time over (i.e. this is only 2010 because Jesus Christ, aka Yeshua Ha-Nostri, was born 201o years ago) then surely man's harnessing and unleashing of the very power of the sun was a more compelling reason to start time over.

That's how big a deal this was. We as Americans have not grappled with this. We look at it as just another bomb used to end just another war. And that it was. But it was more.

The atomic bombs that America dropped on Japan were toys compared with what was to come. Within 5 years of Hiroshima, America had bombs that were 10,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, which was powerful enough to kill 100,000 people instantly.

The United States is the only country that has used nuclear weapons on people, and on civilians for that matter. This is a huge load-bearing beam in the architecture of America-haters and of ignorant Americans.

We nuked people. Civilians. On purpose. Our president called it a "service of God". We did that. Everyone else knows that. We forget. So the question is, was it justified?

Yes.

That's the worst thing about us as human beings. Japanese and Russian and American human beings created a situation where it was actually better and safer to drop nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians in 1945 than to entertain the alternative. Yes, the alternative was worse.

Let's think about the alternative. We don't use nukes. We continue bombing Japan with conventional bombs, which kill just as many people as nuclear weapons, until they surrender.

So, we have nukes, but we don't use them. So nobody knows exactly how deadly they are. The Soviets proceed to get nukes, as they would have regardless since they had spies deep within the American nuke program.

So imagine a Cold War standoff in a world where Hiroshima never happened, where people had never been confronted to what the use of these weapons would mean.

The world has avoided nuclear war. A nuclear war, like all wars, would involve at least 2 combatants. The only time nuclear weapons were used, there was only one nuclear combatant. When we nuked Japan, nobody had any nukes to hit us with, so it was a demonstration rather than a war.

Without that demonstration, human nature being what it is, the first use of nuclear weapons would have happened eventually, and it would have happened in a world with more than one nuclear power. And the only thing worse than a nuclear attack is the retaliation to a nuclear attack.

We don't invent weapons that we don't use. Nukes were going to be used. Thankfully, they were used in a vacuum. They were used without possibility of escalation, and they were pathetically weak prototypes. That's the good news.

The bad news is that human nature demands we incinerate 200,000 people in an instant before we reconsider our behavior just a little bit.

What It All Means

One of the most fundamental tactics of teaching is the use of examples and non-examples. If you want someone to understand something, give them an example and a non-example that relates to their own experience.

For example, if you were trying to explain an orange to someone, you might being by explaining that an orange is a fruit. Another example of a fruit is an apple. A non-example of a fruit is a cheeseburger.

So what is this new health care reform? Here's what it is: it's a government regulation of private industry. Here's what it's not: it's not a government takeover of a private industry.

Health care reform is like when the government tells private bottling plants that they may not sell drinking water that contains arsenic or pig shit.

Health care reform is not like the government taking over all the private bottling plants and sending people to death camps if they are caught buying and drinking non-government water, which would surely be called H2Obama.

Again, this law tells companies that they may not abuse and/or kill consumers. And, to listen to most people, you'd think it was a law that infringes on our liberties. The "liberty" we've lost, presumably, is the "liberty" to be uninsured, or the "liberty" to be deprived of health care from our insurance companies in the event that we become....unhealthy.

This law does not tell individuals what they can or cannot do with their money; rather, it tells huge conglomerates of faceless capital (corporations) what they can not do to individuals. It tells the corporations that if they continue to abuse individuals then the only corporation owned by the American people (the federal government) will lay the smack down.

It's like the Bill of Rights: it doesn't tell the powerless what they can do; it tells the powerful when they can't do. "Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech". Now we have "Blue Cross shall not take away a person's insurance if they get sick".

Let's be clear: we don't have a health care system in this country. We have a health insurance system. Unfortunately, that has not changed even with this reform. Health insurance is NOT health care. Health insurers only make money when they DON'T provide health care.

If health insurance companies had it their way, they would 1) only insure very healthy people and 2) do everything possible to avoiding paying for someone's care when they get sick. And, lo and behold, that is exactly how those companies have acted. Until now.

There is something fundamental that "free market" worshipers can never adequately account for. "Free markets" can only exist if the actors are equal.

So while I, Conor Clinker, may be equal to any other individual competing with me for a certain job, for example, only an intellectual infant could maintain that I, Conor Clinker, am equal to Blue Cross when we are "negotiating" the terms of my health insurance.

When individuals work for, or buy necessities from, massive corporations, as Americans have done for at least 100 years, those individuals can never hope to be treated fairly by those huge corporations unless those individuals form huge groups of their own.

That's what labor unions are for. And that's what government is for.

It is a profoundly distressing spectacle to see masses of poor and nearly-poor people getting so angry about this. Of all things. This. And it is with no small amount of disgust that I have born witness to "the loyal opposition" offered by Republicans.

Throughout this process, the republicans have insisted that they want people to have health care too, but that they have principled objections to Obama's plan which are rooted in rational differences rather than hatred, envy, greed, take your pick, there are 4 left.

Their main argument is twofold: it's too much money, and it infringes upon the liberty of individuals. They're full of shit. Here's how.

Firstly, here's how we know Republicans have no interest in passing their own version of health care reform: They controlled every lever of government for the majority of the last decade and did absolutely nothing to further the cause they supposedly care so much about.

Now, the for the cost argument. The Budget Office projected that Obama's health care bill will reduce the deficit by 130 billion in its first decade. The Republicans say this costs too much. It decreases the deficit, but it still costs too much. Let's examine how deeply the Republicans cling to that principle.

In 2001, George Bush's first tax cut was projected by the same Budget Office to increase the deficit by 1 trillion dollars in ten years. Every Republican voted for it. So health care saves us 130 billion? Too expensive. Tax cuts for the rich costs 10 times as much as health care saves, but that's just fine.

The Iraq War has cost 2 trillion dollars. Another Republican favorite. Bush's second round of tax cuts for the rich costs another trillion. That's 4 trillion in Republican debt so far for wars of aggression and tax cuts for millionaires. But health care is too expensive. Even though it decreases the deficit. An interesting calculus, no?

The Republicans, who supposedly are conservative with the people's money, more than doubled entire debt of this nation under 1 president. Well over half of the entire debt that this nation has incurred in 230 years was under Reagan and Bush. So when you hear them talk about health care reform being too expensive, ask them for your 4 trillion dollars back. That'll buy alot of penicillin.

As for liberty, the Republicans will put a man in jail for smoking pot, they'll execute a retarded teenager, they'll spy on American citizens, they'll set up secret prisons around the world, but this is where they take their stand? They now claim to protect my "liberty" to either buy Blue Cross or to....not buy Blue Cross and keep my fingers Crossed.

So what does this all mean? Put simply, this is the most radical legislation passed in this nation in my lifetime. That is at once both inspiring and depressing.

It is inspiring because Barack Obama, in the face of an unprecedented torrent of ignorant, venom-filled bile and hatred, was able to do something for real people.

It is depressing because it is still so limited compared to what we deserve, and to what citizens of all other "free" or "advanced" nations can claim as a birthright. We still don't have truly universal care, and we still insist on being the only nation where health is for sale. But at least there's a leash on the tiger now.

But mostly it is depressing to witness the hatred that this man, and his actions, have engendered from Americans. This man aims to protect and defend the weakest among us and he is earnestly and repeatedly compared to Hitler, to Stalin, to Mao.

And that is what is so very sad. Poor people attacking a man for helping them, having been convinced by more venal men that this man aims to take away their freedom by ensuring their dignity.

People who have lost their homes, their jobs, their savings, their dignity, because of decades of governmental neglect have been convinced that the government is the enemy, rather than the corporations that Republican governments have allowed to run wild.

For all those people who yearn to return to a time before "progressivism", a time when "liberty" and the "free market" were exalted above all....well, I ain't mad at cha....I just hope you don't mind a little pig shit in your drinking water.

And if that water makes you sick, I pray that no government program infringes on your freedom by helping you pay for your doctor's bills.

Banks for Nothin'

Two of the most important things for responsible citizens to understand and act upon are that the government does not have its own money and that the banks do not have their own money, either. So many of our perceptions and our society's dominant paradigms and narratives ignore these twin truths.

All of the wealth in the United States belongs to the people. You and me. The government and the banks do not have their own money. Every single cent they spend and invest is on our behalf; it's our money. But so many of their actions depend on people being fundamentally ignorant to this fact.

The way the government spends society's money is grounds for endless debate and analysis. In fact, nearly every political debate revolves around this point to some extent. The important thing to remember is that this is no abstraction; the "government's" money is the people's money.

The government, of course, has every motive to obscure this fact, the most ingenuous instrument of that obfuscation being the federal withholding tax, which gives citizens the illusion of tax "refunds" at the end of the year.

Imagine if, instead of having your income tax withheld, you had to pay it every week. So on friday afternoons, after cashing your check for, say, 500 bucks, your next stop before the liquor store or Best Buy or the grocery or whatever else would be the tax office. And at that tax office, every payday, you would physically hand over 20% of the check you just cashed.

One can imagine that under such a scenario, citizens would be much more in tune with the true nature of the relationship.

Banks operate in a similar way. Banks, like the government, seem to have trillions of dollars at their disposal. But, like the government, this is an illusion. If you and I didn't go to the bank every friday and deposit our pay checks, the banks wouldn't have a dime.

Here's how banks work. They hold your money for you. How then do banks make money of their own? Well, if you deposit 100 bucks, the bank will instantly lend 90 of your 100 bucks to someone else. It will charge that other person interest. When that other person pays the bank back (gives your money back to the bank) the bank keeps the interest as profit.

That's all banks do. They profit by lending your money to someone else. That's it. They create no wealth of their own. They simply operate a shell game, the most fundamental assumption of which is that no more than 10% of the people at any given time will come to the bank and demand all their money.

Here's the difference between banks and governments: banks are private, for profit businesses. The government is not. Banks serve their shareholders. The government serves the people.

Therefore, like with all for-profit ventures, the governments job is to regulate that venture in the interest of all the people. For example, it would be cheaper for McDonald's to sell beef that has not been inspected, but aren't we all rather glad that we have socialist meat inspectors out there somewhere, infringing on McDonald's freedom to sell spoiled beef?

The Great Depression was caused largely by a lack of such regulations. The banks, being out for profit, were reckless with the people's money. The government failed to defend the peoples' interest, allowing banks and investment firms to gamble away millions of peoples' savings.

One of the reactions to this catastrophe was the implementation of government regulations of banks. And lo and behold, there was no national banking crisis between the Great Depression and Ronald Reagan. And the came Reagan, who did away with decades of regulation, calling it nothing but red tape and liberty squashing.

And we have seen the results. Without regulations, greed flowed freely. Greed is like running water; it will invariably find the path of least resistance. Even if no such path is apparent, running water can ultimately destroy mountains. Reagan gave the banks loopholes wide enough to drive trucks through.

Here's one example of something the banks were once again able to do thanks to deregulation: make loans that they know wouldn't be paid back. Why would a bank do that? Why would it lend a poor person a million bucks? Because without rules, these types of things make sense.

Here's how: I'm a bank. I loan a homeless guy a million bucks. I have a piece of paper saying Mr. X owes me a million bucks. But I know he can't pay me back. What do I do? I go to another bank and I say, "hey, would you like to buy this debt? This guy owes me a million bucks, but I'll give it to you for 500 grand".

Now this other banker says, "why not? If the guy pays me, I'll clear half a mill. If he doesn't, I'll just sell this debt to someone else, hidden in a pile of more secure loans".

So I have just made 500,000 dollars by selling a promissory note for 1,000,000 to a third party. This can be, and was, done over and over and over and over.

That was illegal until Reagan. Until Reagan, if a bank lent a crackhead a million bucks, that bank had to hold that debt. This was intended to prevent banks from doing the sort of thing explained above. And this is but one example of the schemes that were carried out writ large across our economy after Reagan and Bush's deregulations.

So the banks betrayed us, but we can hardly be angry at them. We should rather be angry at our government for deregulating the banks. Being mad at the banks misses the point. It's like after the show tiger attacked the guy in Vegas and everyone talked about how the tiger went crazy. Quoth Chris Rock: "That tiger didn't go crazy...that tiger went tiger!"

Banks are tigers. Government is the leash. Take of the leash....what do you expect?

The ultimate scandal, of course, is the reaction. The government simply gave the banks more of our money to replace the money of ours they had already stolen. Stolen? Yes, stolen. If you, as a banker, take a man's pension and trade it for a bundle of mortgages taken out by unemployed felons in a state you've never visited, that amounts to stealing.

And how is this stealing punished? By cutting checks to the robbers. As usual, Bob Dylan said it best. "They say patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings. Steal a little and they'll throw you in jail. Steal a lot and they'll make you king".

The Secret About Secrecy

There are quite a few things that we as Americans are subjected to which we take little or no notice of since we don't know life without these things. For example, we all take televisions and cars for granted, even though they are brand new in the historical sense; we simply can't remember a time before them, so as far as we're concerned they were here at the creation.

Our government has changed so radically in the last 60 years that anyone under 80 years old can be forgiven for having no concept of what has happened to our system of government. Put another way: nobody in this nation under the age of 80 can remember a time in which this nation was not on a war footing.

This may seem like a bit of a shock, so I'll repeat it: this country has been at war or in a state of war preparation for 70 years. Only people who can remember life in 1940 have any direct connection to an America without an imperial government, without the Bomb, without a "Commander in Chief", without an "aggressive totalitarian foe".

After World War II, unlike each of its previous wars, the United States did not demobilize. It did not return to a republican form of government. Instead, it became a permanent national security state, complete with secret armies scattered across the earth.

This shift, or rather this earthquake, required a whole series of new things that we simply assume are perfectly natural (intelligence agencies who do not inform the people what it does in their name and with their money, promoting military expenditures above all other social responsibilities, granting the president warmaking powers in direct violation of the Constitution, blah, blah, blah)

The point here is that the American republic was put on life-support in 1941, as it always is during war. But in 1945, instead of being revived from its self-induced and self-protecting coma, the republic was killed in its bed by the emerging imperialists.

Many sins came with this, but the one I'm focusing on here is secrecy. Secrecy violates the most fundamental element of a free nation: an informed citizenry. Voting is nice, but when officeholders don't tell the people what they're doing, voting is pointless.

Of all the insidious institutions and practices ushered in by the national security state, government secrecy is perhaps the most damaging. The government began classifying mountains and reservoirs of information, something it had never before done. The power elite of the new national security state (White House, CIA, Pentagon) began to classify nearly everything they did as top secret.

So we have lived our entire lives in a nation where the leaders of the government simply feel no need to inform citizens what they are doing on our behalf. The reason our leaders give, of course, is that we must keep secrets from our enemies, but if you really think about it, they're much more concerned with keeping secrets from US.

That's the secret about secrecy: the government is above all concerned with keeping its actions secret from us, not from our enemies. A couple examples may clarify my point.

Kennedy and Cuba Let's compare what Kennedy was telling the American people with what he was doing: he was telling the American people we had no intent of invading Cuba while privately doing exactly what he said he wasn't. He was lying. Very clear cut.

But here's the thing: since all of his actions were "top secret", he could tell the American people whatever he wanted. He was ordering all sorts of unwise, illegal, and dangerous actions without telling the citizens, the people who he served and who paid for his adventures with their tax dollars.

So let's think about this: Why did Kennedy keep his Cuba activities secret? His answer would be "to keep it secret from our enemies". Okay. Let's flesh out that reasoning. The enemy in this case would be Cuba. Does anyone think that Cubans did not realize that their ships were being blown up, that their sugar cane was being burned? Of course they knew. They lived there.

So Kennedy's excuse is pathetically easy to eviscerate. The enemy knew what we were doing in Cuba because....well, because we were doing it to them. So it was no "secret" to the Cuban people that the American president was at war with them. It was only a secret to the American people.

The only faction in this sordid equation that did NOT know what was going on in Cuba was the American people. The American president knew. The enemy knew. We didn't. Our enemies knew more about our actions than we did. The president's conduct was kept "top secret" because he didn't want us to know about it.

So when Castro's Soviet friends put missiles into Cuba, they rightly called them defensive. Kennedy went on TV and assured the American people that there was absolutely no reason for Cuba to fear the U.S. and that therefore the missiles were clearly offensive. He risked Armageddon to protect that lie. Again, Kennedy knew the truth. Cuba knew the truth. The Soviet Union knew the truth. The American people did not.

Nixon and Cambodia

During the Vietnam war, President Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country. It was, of course, top secret. Why? To keep it secret from our enemies, we were predictably told.

To accept that, you must believe that the Cambodians didn't know that their own country was getting the shit bombed out of it. Again, the "secret bombings" were secret to absolutely nobody except the American people.

This is what the government does: it classifies nearly everything. Most of what it classifies has absolutely nothing to do with national security. There are two main intentions in this mass secrecy.

The first is simply to be free to do things the American people would never tolerate. The second is to cover up evidence of your own sins and crimes.

So, an example of the first might be the decision to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954 at the behest of the United Fruit Company, which had employed the CIA director at the time. In general, Americans might not like the idea of paying its government to use violence to overthrow a democratically elected government of a small and poor state on the orders of American banana planters. So, it had to be secret.

The Guatemalans knew all about it of course; they couldn't help but notice the death squads that replaced their democratic government. But the American people didn't know a thing.

An example of the second might be the Iraq War. Relying on "top secret" information, we were told that there was "no doubt" that Iraq had WMD, but that to show this doubt-smashing evidence would be too dangerous. So we had a war instead. And there were no WMD, top secret information aside.

So now the question is, what was in those "top secret" documents which led us to war? Think we'll ever find out? No, because for the American people to find out what the hell happened would be a threat to national security. It's one thing for everyone else in the world to know this sins and crimes of our government, but for the American people to know this is the greatest threat to the secret keepers.