I Get It Now

I get it now. I finally really get it. The "it" in question being why certain intelligent people consider John Kennedy to have been a great man.

I've always considered Kennedy to have been great in some regards, especially concerning his crippling illnesses and injuries which did not dissuade him from assuming awesome responsibilities and assuming great personal risks in service of his country.

From another perspective, he was a lecherous and debauched dilettante, but human beings are complicated like that.

I've written many times before about how the death cult surrounding JFK skews any objective appraisal of him. But it's not his fault he was assassinated; surely he would rather have lived than to ensure his perpetual popularity via martyrdom.

But the things JFK did have control over are what ought to define his legacy. And I've just rediscovered his civil rights speech from June 11, 1963.

And I've just realized how revolutionary it was, how much it meant to people of all types, and how it would be just as righteous had he lived to be 95 years old. In which case he would still be alive.

Kennedy gave this speech with less than 24 hours notice to the TV networks; it was not planned. It was not even written. When Kennedy saw people being killed in broad daylight because a black man tried to enroll in a college, he finally got it.

This was a man who could not possibly relate to blacks, but on this night he showed himself to be a man with a healthy moral limit. He gave this speech in spontaneity and anger. Or perhaps righteous indignation would be a better term.

When I watch this speech, I get it. I get why Nas says, on the Nigger album, "what do niggers do? we just / hang up pictures of Martin, JFK, and Jesus."

I understand now why when, 5 months after this speech, Kennedy had his head blown off of his body while sitting next to his wife in broad daylight in the Confederacy, people naturally assumed it was because of this speech. I get it.

If we can disenthrall ourselves from his murder, and imagine that we are watching this speech live, we can appreciate this man's greatness. This speech lost him millions of votes. He knew this. But he still gave it. I urge you to watch by clicking the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS4Qw4lIckg

The Curse

One of the enduring ironies of the Vietnam War is that the Vietnamese seem to be more "over it" than the Americans, despite having suffered immeasurably more. I had two experiences last week that illustrated yet again to me how deep and destructive and divisive this legacy remains.

In my job as a history teacher, my colleagues and I naturally gather at lunch time to rap about the job, current events, and history. Well, some of us do. Lunch among history teachers is segregated by politics. I eat with the more reactionary crowd, which is due solely to the fact that they're more entertaining than the liberals.

One of the teacher's father is a Vietnam Vet. One of the other teachers (who dines elsewhere) has a poster of Ho Chi Minh on the wall of her classroom. This unfortunate congruence of events is a perfect microcosm of our bipolar Vietnam disorder.

The man whose father fought there is unable to acknowledge that his father was sent on a fool's errand (to be charitable). This is understandable to some extent, for when you have skin in the game it makes it a soul-crushing burden to admit that the game was crooked.

The woman who has a poster of Ho Chi Minh on her wall is unable to acknowledge that Ho was, among other things, a murderous tyrant by any measure. This is less understandable, as it relies on the infantile assumption that every fight is pure good versus pure evil. (The Americans were wrong, therefore Ho must have been supremely virtuous.)

At the very least, we can understand how sensitive an issue this is. What is the virtue of putting Ho's picture on the wall of a classroom? Even though American soldiers should have never been in Vietnam, it is at the very least extremely distasteful to idolize a man with so much American blood on his hands, especially for historically naive teenagers.

Also last week, I went to a bachelor party and spent about an hour talking to a Vietnam vet, "Sarge". In the course of our conversations, Sarge said many things.

He said we killed indiscriminately, but also that we fought with one hand tied behind our backs.

He said that our allies were barbarians, and also that our enemies were barbarians.

He implied that he played a part in murdering an incompetent American officer. "Let's just say 14 of us went into that jungle, and 13 of us came back...."

He said that he was spat on when he came home.

Some of these stories were surely true. Some were surely false or exaggerated. And we cannot assume which was which by virtue of identifying the contradictions, because the entire pathetic and tragic enterprise was a contradiction.

The spitting allegation is especially intriguing and a perfect illustration of our Vietnam psychosis. Human psychology tells us that people are fully capable of "remembering" things that never happened and of believing a lie so deeply that it loses its identity as a lie; a lie is only a lie if the liar believes he is lying.

These stories about how people "spit on us" when vets returned from Vietnam really gained traction in the 1980's. Why did it take so long for vets to "remember" these traumatic events? Well, because most of them surely never happened.

So what made these vets imagine that these things had happened? Rambo. And Born on the 4th of July. These movies featured scenes and/or allusions to vets being spit on and, lo and behold, thousands of vets began "remembering" that they had been spit on when they "got off the plane".

The fact that soldiers returing from the war were flown into military airports is but one indication of how unlikely these "memories" are.

Vietnam is such a deep psychological scar that there is not even an agreed-upon set of facts is at play. The psychosis is so deep that there are millions of Americans who will tell you with a straight face that America won the Vietnam War.

When someone writes a history of America in 100 years, it will be even clearer than it is now that Vietnam was the beginning of the end. Before Vietnam, huge swaths of Americans shared a consensus about certain truths and assumptions. There was a general trend of broadening and deepening material affluence and moral inclusion.

But after Vietnam, America became the country it is today, polarized, distressed, aggressive, a place where people can barely agree on what day of the week it is. And when we trace back the root of this discontent, we find ourselves where we were 40 years ago, walking aimlessly through an impenetrable jungle waiting for our demise.

The Mortality Gap

Conventional wisdom has it that our 3 greatest Presidents are Washington, Lincoln, and FDR.

I have no particular quarrel with Washington (aside from his being an owner and seller of human beings).

My only quarrel with Lincoln is that he has more American blood on his hands than any other President in our history.

And my only quarrel with Roosevelt is that he was elected president twice after he knew he was dying of cancer.

Roosevelt was surely one of the most consequential men of human history. He led the United States through two crises, either one of which alone would have qualified him as a great leader. At the end of these crises, the United States was the most powerful nation in the history of the world by any and all measures.

He did great things and he did stupid and awful things (internment of Japanese-Americans, for example). But the thing that interests me most about Roosevelt is his morality concerning his mortality and his evident belief in his invulnerability.

The conventional wisdom when Roosevelt died was that he had, in the beautiful words of a Senator at the time (in a time when Senators occasionally spoke beautiful words) "literally worked himself to death in the service of the American people." And, as with all myths, there is a healthy does of truth to this.

But there is more. In 1940, Roosevelt had a decision to make. Back then, there were no term limits for presidents. So Roosevelt had to decide if he would be the first president to break the two-term precedent set by Washington.

There were many reasons to say yes. The first crisis (the Great Depression) was still unresolved. The second crisis (World War II) was only a matter of time. But there was a reason to say no as well: Roosevelt had cancer.

Roosevelt was a cripple. He could not walk or stand unaided. The fact that he was such a great man despite this is an amazing testament. But this was only possible because he willfully concealed (lied about) his true physical condition. And he had thousands of aiders and abettors. Perhaps you can defend hiding paralyzed legs from voters. But cancer?

But, of course, it's not so simple. Roosevelt obviously had a deep conviction that he was the best, perhaps the only, man for the job. And he may have been right.

The republican who ran against Roosevelt in 1940 died before his first term would have been over had he won. So did his running mate. So if Roosevelt had not run, or lost, in 1940, the president at the height of World War II would have been the senior member of the Senate, as the rules called for. That man was 87 years old.

So perhaps it is best that FDR covered up his cancer and served a 3rd term. But in 1944, he had the same decision to make again; would he run for an un-un-precedented 4th term?

Again, there were many reasons to say yes: The first crisis (Depression) was over, largely due to government spending and full employment caused by the second crisis (War). And the second crisis was almost over. No sense changing horses in midstream.

But, again, there were reasons to say no: specifically Roosevelt's cancer had metastasized to his brain. A quick glance at the 2nd photo above this post shows his deterioration. Roosevelt and his doctors knew he could not live another 4 years. He was not an old man (62) but he was a dying man.

Yet, he ran again. Knowing he would die, his choice for vice-president obviously carried monumental import. But he based his consideration entirely on domestic political concerns, picking a centrist senator from Missouri for reasons to boring and arcane to be relevant anymore. This was a decision made by a man who seemed to consider himself immortal.

And in some ways he was, and is, immortal. Any scenario of the 1930's and 40's in the U.S. without Roosevelt would have resulted in a much different, and probably far worse, outcome for us all. Roosevelt was the closest the U.S. has ever come to having a king. Lincoln was more of an Emperor.

And just like Lincoln, Roosevelt enjoys the virtue of martyrdom, which serves to posthumously excuse sin. But imagine if Lincoln had run for reelection in 1864 knowing he would die in 1865? Seems ridiculous.

But what if JFK had run in 1960 knowing he had debilitating illnesses? Or if Reagan had run in 1984 knowing that his mental faculties were abandoning him? Or if George W. Bush had run in 2000 knowing he was clueless? Imagine that.

Where Credit's Due (or, Where Credit Dies)

The two men pictured above have much in common. Until Bush the younger, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were the only 2-term Republican presidents other than Ulysses S. Grant. And the fact that the guy's name was Ulysses indicates how long ago that was.

Other things they had in common: they were, and remain, the two oldest presidents ever elected. They both served in World War II: Eisenhower was a 5-star general, responsible for the American invasion of Nazi-occupied France; Reagan made propaganda films in Hollywood.

As president, each of these men were given credit for certain things. The problem is that they did not deserve that credit. And the larger problem is that by giving them credit, we impale ourselves on our own delusions.

President Eisenhower was largely credited with ending the Korean War. How did he do so? Most American historians insist that he made peace by threatening to use nuclear weapons. The North Koreans and Chinese, sufficiently intimidated, then chose to sign a truce.

How do we know this is absurd? It implies that President Truman, who preceded Eisenhower, never made a similar threat. President Truman, of course, remains the only person in history to actually use nuclear weapons, so it is absurd in the extreme to assert that the North Koreans or Chinese were more intimidated by Eisenhower than they were by Truman.

So why did the Korean War really end? (It would be far more accurate to ask why the Korean War was paused, as it still remains in suspended animation which could break at any moment) The Korean War really ended because Stalin died.

Stalin, as Godfather of the Communist world, was able to use his enormous force of personality to insist that the North Korean and Chinese continue bleeding the Americans. When he died, his force of personality died with him, and his Asian colleagues swiftly called a truce, something Stalin had forbid during his lifetime.

The danger in the misreading described above is the lesson we learn from it. That erroneous lesson reads thusly: if you're trapped in a quagmire, just threaten nuclear annihilation and your enemy will quit. But what if they don't? Ever heard of Vietnam?

As for Ronald Reagan, he is largely credited with ending the Cold War. Mainstream historians tell us he did this by increasingly military spending to a level that the Communists simply could not compete with.

How do we know this is absurd? Because in seeking to bankrupt the Soviet Union, Reagan damn near bankrupted the United States. And when the Soviet Union did collapse, the militaries involved played absolutely no role whatsoever; it was a political process rather than a military one.

So why did the Cold War really end? Two reasons. Firstly, communism didn't work. Secondly, the Communist bloc finally had a ruler (Gorbachev) who allowed people to state the obvious: communism didn't work. As soon as people were given political choice, most of them chose a different political system.

Again, the danger in misreading the lesson describe above is what we "learned" from it. We learned that when we are confronted by an opposing force, we simply spend that force into the ground. But what happens when that opposing force is not even trying to outspend us?

Further, what happens when there always seems to be an opposing force that pops up after the last one was spent into dust? Then we keep spending. And what happens when we keep spending? We end up with a country in debt up to its eyeballs, most of that debt incurred by building weapons we could never use.

The danger with history is that people will use it to justify what they do. So if they misread history, and draw the wrong lessons, they will inherently make the wrong decisions in the present.

When we look back at the foreign policy of this country in the last 60 years, it boils down to two tenets, both of which are based on misreadings of history: threaten to use nukes and build thousands of nukes you could never use. What's the worst that could happen?

The Merits of Kingship

The demise of Moamar Qadaffi reminds us that there are not many kings left on earth. A form of government which was so obviously right as to be unworthy of debate for most of human history is now largely considered to be an anachronistic absurdity.

Qadaffi did not call himself a "king", of course; his hatred for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia dictated that he refuse that title, as did the fact that he gained power at the ripe age of 27 by overthrowing King Idris of Lybia.

But a king he was, of course, made evident by his cult of personality and the planned succession of his sons. Most of the world today sees that model of government as unacceptable. This is a profound revolution in human thought and organization.

Kingship relies on two irreducible assumptions, whatever form it comes in. One assumption is that decisions are best made by one person, as debate tends to dilute and delay any effective action. The second assumption is that when the king dies, the only way to avoid bloodshed and chaos is to have an obvious successor predetermined.

These assumptions actually work sometimes, but when they don't chaos and war is almost assured.

The first assumption is that power is most effectively wielded by one person. And that is true. But the problem is that "power" is a value-neutral thing; it could be good, but it could just as easily be awful.

When one person has unlimited power, we are all at the mercy of that person. If that person has a good idea, we are in luck. But if that person has a bad idea, there is nothing to ward of that idea.

When power is shared, good ideas are watered down and delayed. And that is incredibly frustrating. But more importantly, awful ideas are watered down and delayed as well. And for that, we should all thank God.

The second assumption is that inherited power prevents chaos and war. Again, sometimes this works. But even when it does work, there is absolutely no reason to think that the best person for the job just happened to have been born to the King.

Henry VIII is an interesting example. His obvious heir was his son, who was only 9. The fact that making a 9-year old King was "obvious" is but one example of how absurd this system is, especially when we consider that the 9-year old boy had a 31-year old sister when he became king.

Henry's 9-year old son became the ruler instead of his 31-year old daughter. So in addition to the absurdity of the idea of inherent and divine right and might, we have the absurdity of sexism to the point where we choose a 9-year old instead of a 31-year old solely by virtue of what's in their pants.

Henry's 9-year old son was king for 5 years. Then he died. The daughter then took over for 5 years. She died, known as Bloody Mary. So who came next? Was there a search for educated and empathetic people? Of course not.

Next in line was Elizabeth. Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, had been declared (literally) an incestuous witch and had her head cut off, despite the fact that she was the Queen of England. Yet her daughter became queen and remained queen for half a century.

So the system failed in England. They had a female ruler for a half-century, born to a witch, no less. According to their worldview, that would be like us having a......well, having a 9-year old boy be our president. But their system allowed them no other choice.

There is still great nostalgia and romance associated with kingship. (Our obsession with the recent "royal" wedding in England serves as proof). But we have also witnessed kingship, as an idea, being utterly eviscerated for the past century.

There are very few kings left. Some are not called "king". (Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il) Some are. The good news is that they are few and far between. The bad news is that they are occasionally necessary.

But the impossible part of it is that nobody can identify the necessary conditions for a king except for....a king. And a king always wants to be king.

Slime of the Century

As Americans, we were all raised on a steady diet of white hat-black hat, good guy-bad guy stories. But in real life, of course, morals and motives are always far more mixed than in our preferred fictional templates.

The Clinton scandals are representative of this truth. Yet pro-Clinton and anti-Clinton partisans muddied the water by insisting on a black and white approach. Pro-Clinton people often implied that there was nothing wrong with the President's conduct because it was "personal".

Anti-Clinton people implied that anyone not demanding the President's resignation was endorsing his personal behavior and that all means were justified towards the end of discovering personal sins.

The truth, however, is that there was no shortage of "wrong" on both sides of this fiasco. But the amazing thing is that President Clinton did less "wrong" than his attackers. This messy truth calls into questions many of our perceptions of law, morality, and privacy.

We all know that what Clinton did was wrong. And since it's so short and sweet, we'll stipulate that point first. Clinton engaged in sexual acts with a woman who was 1) not his wife 2) his subordinate in the workplace, and 3) half his age.

That's what Clinton did. What is important to note is that 1) I don't defend any of his behavior, and 2) NONE of the above behavior is illegal.

The President was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors concerning an action that was not a crime. That should give us pause.

Here is what his enemies did wrong:

1) After investigating the Whitewater land investments that the Clintons made in Arkansas, no criminal conduct by the Clintons was ever found. When they realized they could not indict the Clintons in this matter, Clinton's enemies did not end their investigation; Instead, they expanded it into the President's sex life.

2) The excuse for the entree into Clinton's sex life was a sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones against the President. Since nobody ever alleged that the President's affair with Monica Lewinsky was not consensual, this conduct had no relation to the Jones suit other than that they both involved "sex" (even though there was no sexual conduct in the Jones case)

3) In investigating the President's affair with Lewinsky (remember, there was never any allegation that this affair was "illegal"), Clinton's enemies used illegally tape-recorded phone calls between Monica Lewinsky and her "friend", Linda Tripp.

4) In order to extract a confession from Ms. Lewinsky (a "confession" about something that was NOT a crime) the investigators detained her in a hotel room and refused to let her call her lawyers, instead threatening to send her to prison. When this did not sufficiently loosen Ms. Lewinsky's lips, the investigators then threatened to imprison her parents.

5) After determining, through illegal phone recordings and coerced statements from Ms. Lewinsky sans lawyer, that the President had an affair with Lewinsky, the investigators planned to ask the President if he had sexual contact with Lewinsky, hoping to trap him in a lie. They did so during the Paula Jones deposition.

6) While testifying in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, investigators asked Clinton about Lewinsky even though Lewinsky had never alleged sexual harassment, making that line of questioning entirely irrelevant. And when they asked the President about this non-relevant non-crime, he lied.

That is the "crime" that Bill Clinton was impeached for, after being investigated non-stop for 6 years. The issue is not whether we defend Clinton's conduct with Lewinsky, but rather how anyone could justify the conduct of his accusers.

Clinton's pursuers spent $80 million to prove that he committed adultery and setting up a situation in which Clinton would lie about this affair while being deposed about an entirely unrelated issue.

The budget for the 9/11 commission was $5 million.

The persecution of William Jefferson Clinton was not a good vs. evil morality play; it was bad vs. evil. And just how evil does one need to be to make Bill Clinton look like a victim?

Time Cops

While I have enormous moral and ethical and economic arguments against many of the laws of our land, I am proudly a part of the huge majority of people who feel that laws are necessary. The subject of law is as old as civilization itself. The need for law is clear to most people.

But I do not wish to question the need for law. The issue here is not whether laws are needed. Instead, this is an exercise in identifying unasked questions. As soon as these questions are asked, their merit is obvious, and we chastise ourselves for being so foolish as to not raise them earlier.

So here's the question: The question is not "do we need laws?" because the answer to that is obvious. The question, rather, is "who WROTE the laws that we are all beholden to?" Long story short, we largely follow dead mens' laws.

Perhaps our most-quoted (and therefore our most misquoted) founding father was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had an idea that there should be a revolution every generation. The more famous words in this quote have to do with the "tree of liberty being watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants".

But Jefferson was not calling for the perpetual violence that seems implied by the statement. He was not calling for war every 20 years, but rather a revisiting and revision of laws and assumptions, preferably through the democratic process.

A biography of Caesar which I am currently reading does a fantastic job of articulating this shackling to the past. Just as in the United States today, Rome had become dysfunctional due to this blind allegiance to the assumptions of men who had been dead for centuries.

"Their judgment was not necessarily powerful because it was right, but it was right because it was powerful."

In other words, might makes right. This has been a fixture of American domestic and foreign policy for decades.

"From the earliest times Rome had set great store by preserving and handing down the customs of the fathers. And as no one knew or could even imagine that the Roman order as a whole was no longer able to respond to the exigencies of the age, the only possible explanation for the present crises and emergencies was that the old customs were no longer properly practised. It was therefore necessary to be all the more punctilious in observing them"

This idea also increasingly dominates our politics. Since we cannot conceive of any flaw in our system, which we consider to be inherently ideal, the only explanation we can offer for our failures is that we are failing to properly mimic men who died a century before the invention of the automobile.

In other words, we refuse to consider that Jefferson's system may no longer be relevant, so we therefore assume that our problems result in us not properly imitating Jefferson.

"Respect for the old, formerly a rule, now become a binding law. Often it was no longer the rules of the ancestors that were raised to the status of dogma, but what was written about them, as it were, in the history books."

This is an important caveat, because in our desire to imitate the founders, we selectively edit their actual conduct according to our own preconceived biases. So, rather than following the founders (which is irrational enough in its own right) we instead follow our own self-projected and self-serving images of what the founders would do in our shoes.

"The Senate regime was anything but convincing, with its insistence on complaisance and consideration, its time-wasting and obsession with trifles, and above all its utter refusal to countenance anything new.

The political order was full of absurdities, which only made sense because society still believed in them. Yet what was so maddening was society's increasingly rigid attachment to the past."

All nations reject any other nation's right to occupy their territory or meddle in their politics. But sometimes, we are not occupied by foreign armies; sometimes we are occupied by dead ones.

Why We Lionize Our Lyin' Eyes

Seeing is believing. But, to employ one of my favorite analogies, seeing is like the truth but it is NOT the whole truth. Not even close.

We all know that dogs, for example, can smell and hear things that we humans can not. We are also intelligent enough to accept as fact that whenever a dog smells or hears something that we cannot, that thing does in fact exist. It must exist, or else the dog could not smell it. In this situation we do not take our failure to smell it as evidence of its nonexistence.

Yet when it comes to sight, we stray across this common-sense thresh hold and seem to believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. When we consider how little of the spectrum our eyes can see, we understand the error of that assumption.

By definition, we cannot see the huge majority of what is around us. UV rays, X-rays, microwaves, and sound waves are just a few examples of the universes that are right in front of our face yet utterly invisible.

This is do to the logic of evolution, which has so far dictated that we are most efficient with our current arrangement of senses. And it does seems reasonable that if we could actually see everything that there was to see, it would probably immediately result in a mental breakdown due to sensory overload.

I do not understand biology or evolution nearly well enough to make educated observations of how and why our senses evolved in the ways that they did, but I know history well enough to understand that this naturally-selected blindness does not stop at physical perception; it's the perfect metaphor for how we see and remember our lives, whether individually or collectively.

Have you ever seen film footage from the early 20th century? If you have, you can call to mind the way people move in those films. They are jerky and sporadic in their motions, as if people back then simply hadn't learned yet how to walk gracefully.

This illusion, of course, is not caused by our ancestors lack of grace; it is caused by the film. Back in the day, film had far fewer frames per second than it does now, so the end product actually looked a lot more like what all film actually is: a flipbook of individual photographs shown in quick enough succession to give the human eye the illusion of a continuous motion picture.

And an illusion is all it is, of course. There's no such thing as a "movie", per se; all movies are simply rapid fire photograph shows. But when the film is of sufficient quality to obscure all the blank spaces in between the photographs, we are left with the illusion of motion.

This dynamic serves as a useful metaphor for many things. But it is not only metaphor. The motion picture illusion, which is made possible by the evolutionary limits of the human eye, is actually the illusion that nature employs for all of "reality".

The smallest things we know of used to be atoms. Now the smallest things we know of are subatomic particles, of which several specific types have been identified. These elemental pieces will no doubt be further broken down by science, but they've already been studied sufficiently to learn one amazing thing: the universe itself is an illusion, just like a movie.

Science has learned that the smallest particles, of which everything that exists are by definition made, do not continually exist. Instead, they blink in and out of "existence" hundreds of time per second. This is obviously far too fast to be perceived by the human senses, just like a movie. But the result is the same.

If you ask a scientist where a certain particle was located at a certain moment in time, he or she will tell you that the question cannot be answered because the building blocks of everything are NEVER in one place or fixed in one time. Instead, they flutter in and out, like a movie at thousands of frames per second, creating a perfect illusion for our limited senses.

The most important thing that can be taken from this is that for every image, there must be an equal amount of empty space. If you have 100 frames of images per second in your movie of life, you must also have 100 frames of nothing. Our senses are not developed to perceive this emptyness, or even to understand what it is, but we know it is there.

While emptyness of often associated with loss or death, due mostly to our sensory limits, they need not be seen that way. In fact, since this "emptyness" makes up so much of the invisible universe around us, it is an integral part of our lives.

I suspect that if we could truly see everything around us, we would learn a few truths very quickly. Firstly, we would be able to see previously invisible forms of energy and light and to perceive how connected people are with each other, even by virtue of passing one another on the street.

If we could also slow down our universe so that our eyes could perceive its true nature, that of a light being flicked on and off a million times per second, we would have to being a whole new inquiry: what happens when the lights are off?

Our Favorite Murderer

Dinesh D'Souza recently wrote a book entitled "The Roots of Obama's Rage". It's actually slightly more level-headed and interesting than one might suppose by virtue of the title, but there was one anecdote about Winston Churchill that says some good things about Obama and some awful things about most of the rest of us.

We all know something about the Churchill cult in this culture, which is profoundly repulsive to myself and to anyone else with even a passing knowledge of history. Churchill is praised in this nation under the apparent assumption that he was born on September 1, 1939.

In other words, most of us associate Churchill only with his role in World War II. That role in itself is full of treachery and war crimes as well as inspiration and fortitude. But let's just skip World War II. Let's just assume (falsely) that Churchill was "the good guy".

What D'Souza lambastes Obama for is removing a bust of Churchill from the White House. Gasp! Why does Obama hate England?? For the same reason most of us should hate England: an accurate knowledge of their conduct over the past couple centuries.

Obama's father was a Kenyan, which means that Obama knows full well of Churchill's role in starving and killing his ancestors. I, on the other hand, am German and Irish, which means....oh, wait...I guess it means the same thing.

Churchill was a racist and imperialist of the fullest and crudest sense, clinging to these convictions even as he waged a war for "freedom" against the racist and imperialist Nazis. Indeed, even after that war for "freedom" Churchill refused freedom to Indians, Kenyans, Irishmen, or anyone else.

Every six months or so, I learn something new about Churchill that makes his true identity even more clear, and even more clearly repulsive. I've reached the point by now where I applaud Obama for removing his bust from the White House, just as I would applaud him for removing a bust of Tojo or Hitler.

Here's my latest discovery. World War II can only be accurately understood as a continuation of World War I. The question of how World War II began, therefore, must correctly be phrased "How did World War I begin?"

The story of World War I is overlooked in our culture because it is far harder to spin it into a "good" or "necessary" war.

Churchill was in charge of the English navy at that time, and as such he had 2 responsibilities: blockading Germany and getting America to jump in against Germany.

When one wonders what Germany was so angry about, this should shed a little light on it: Winston Churchill directed his navy to deny an entire nation of food. Germany was intentionally starved. Millions died.

In addition to starving a whole nation, Churchill was occupied with pulling our nation into the war. He did this by seeking to get Americans killed by Germany submarines. He gave orders for civilian ships carrying American passengers to be armed. This, he hoped, would cause Germany to fire on those ships, thereby killing Americans.

He also urged "civilian" ships to carry weapons in their holds, again giving Germany cause to fire on them. The more Americans on these ships, the better (for Churchill). The Lusitania is a case in point. A British passenger ship, Churchill ordered the ship to carry tons of weapons both on and below its decks.

No American passengers were told that the ship had been transformed into a warship. No American passengers were told that Churchill knew of German plans to sink this very ship. No, to Churchill, the death of American civilians was a desired outcome. And he got the outcome he sought.

It's hard to think back to a time when Americans did not reflexively side against the British. But such a time did exist. It began, obviously, with the Revolution. It did not end until World War I. And the person who convinced us that England was our friend was the same person who was intentionally getting American civilians killed so that we would stumble into his war.

Unfortunately, we obliged him. But we should not fool ourselves. The only reason we value Churchill's role in World War II is that he was our ally. But so was Stalin. And there is no bust of Stalin in the White House.

In fact, if you asked the average American whether it was Churchill or Stalin who intentionally let American innocents be killed in order to force the country into an unwanted war, we all know what the answer would be. And now we know that answer would be wrong.

The Deepest Cut

Assassination is a subject that fascinates us for any number of reasons. The sudden disruption of seemingly great men and institutions. The seductive power of a person willing to give his own life for something he believes in, regardless of how absurd those beliefs may be. But there is a tendency to lump all assassinations together in a way that obscures profound differences between them.

Assassinations should be categorized into two groups: those with a rational political motive and those with notoriety as the primary obsession of the assassin. To take the 4 presidential assassinations in American history as case-studies, we quickly see that the former are far outweighed by the latter; the most common motive of the American assassin is narcissism or mental illness.

The assassins of Presidents Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy were motivated by a non-descript and historically unsatisfying mix of boredom, frustration, and chance opportunity. Garfield was shot by a disgruntled job-seeker (and was killed more by his doctors than his assassin). McKinley was shot by an unemployed, deranged anarchist who seemed to have no specific quarrel with McKinley or any of his policies.

And President Kennedy, whose death has been transfigured into so many different absurd renditions that it has lost nearly all meaning, was shot by, quite simply, a loser. Oswald had no motive. Weeks before killing the President, he had fired that very same rifle in a failed attempt to kill a certain General Walker, a rabid right-winger. This alone proves that Oswald was far more concerned with killing than with motive.

In an interesting aside, one of my students proved that Oswald was the shooter after viewing the film of the assassination for the first time. This teenager with absolutely no prior knowledge of the event viewed it once and saw things that conspiracy theorists are blind to no matter how often they rewatch the gruesome spectacle.

Whenever I show the Zapruder film to students for the first time, I ask them "where did the shots come from?" They inevitably say "the front", which is the reaction of most people. But this time, one student said, "from behind". I was very intrigued by this, so I informed that student that he was correct and asked him to explain his reasoning.

"That nigga in front of him got shot, too", he casually observed. And there it was. The person in front of the President (Governor Conally) could only have been hit if the shooter was behind them. Case closed. The case was already closed for me, of course, but I was very impressed by this clarity of observation.

The sad truth is that John F. Kennedy was killed for no reason at all. His slaying has been elevated for some absurd reason to take its place next to the crucifixion of Christ or the stabbing of Caesar. But there is one American assassination that was a "real" assassination as classically understood. The killing of Abraham Lincoln.

This one has it all. The assassin with an actual motive. The American Brutus, John Wilkes Booth who, like the original Brutus, felt that his target was a tyrant worthy of tyrannicide. Whether one agrees with Booth's critique of Lincoln, it is manifest that the man had a genuine and comprehensible motive.

Booth aimed to slay the warlord who had laid waste to his homeland. And this Lincoln had indeed done. Again, we can argue with the justice of the Civil War, but not with its reality. The South was invaded, burned, and looted for the sin of an attempted peaceful disunion.

Booth wanted revenge. This is a motive which all people can comprehend. He also felt that Lincoln had become a tyrant, another charge to which there is no small amount of truth. Booth also had to assume that the cost for his crime would be his life, yet he willingly carried it out, a sacrifice which the original Brutus sought to avoid.

Lincoln's assassination was so "real" because friend and foe alike saw it for what it was: a rational act carried out by a disciplined if criminal mind, the intention of which was to undo certain concrete political and military realities. And friend and foe alike understood that the assassination had succeeded in undoing (or at least derailing) the great undertaking of its victim.

Despite what I consider Lincoln's crimes, his assassination was truly a tragedy for this nation and probably for the Confederacy as well. None of our other slain Presidents were irreplaceable, despite what people may have thought at the time. But Lincoln was. This, then, was assassination in its purest and worst form.

And it was the only true presidential "assassination" that this country has ever experienced. The other assassinations were simply murders. To paraphrase Chris Rock, the other presidents didn't get assassinated; they just got shot. But as Lil' Wayne points out, "when you're great, it's not shot, it's assassinate".

And therein lies the contradiction. Assassination can not be all about the victim. The motive of the killer must matter as well. If we take this more precise and more mature definition, we find only one true presidential assassination in our history. The other sordid acts say far more of far less interest about the criminals than they do about their victims.

The Theory of Relativity

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 (and the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor) approach I remain genuinely confused by the tendency of our culture to refer to 9/11 as the worst attack on America "since Pearl Harbor". This error is truly bizarre for two reasons.

Firstly, it is bizarre because we would think that 9/11 would be remembered as far worse than Pearl Harbor even if it wasn't because it is so much closer in time and memory to all of us, even those few of us who remember Pearl Harbor.

Secondly, and more confusingly, it is bizzare because by every conceivable measure 9/11 was objectively far worse an attack than Pearl Harbor, making it even more perplexing that we would exalt the former attack over the latter.

First, for the targets. The target of Pearl Harbor was an American military installation on Hawaii. Two facts are important to consider. Firstly, this attack was not an "attack on America" at all; Hawaii was not a state at the time and would not be for another two decades.

Secondly, the target was purely military and by any reading of international law, this was an entirely "legal" act of war. Uniformed Japanese soldiers in marked Japanese warplanes attacked uniformed American sailors in marked American warships. All Western moral and military law holds that this was a legitimate target; it was not terrorism.

The targets on 9/11, on the other hand were in the United States and almost exclusively and intentionally targeted civilians. This is properly understood as an illegal or illegitimate target; this was terrorism.

We can see this distinction within the 9/11 attacks themselves. While "9/11" is usually shorthand for "the World Trade Center attacks", there were 4 hijacked airplanes that day. The Pentagon attack was similar to Pearl Harbor in the sense that the target was unarguably military, thereby making it "legitimate" under the laws of war.

What made the Pentagon strike illegitimate, however, was the fact that the "weapon" used by the attackers was an airplane full of civilians, making it terrorism. So while the Pentagon was a legitimate target, the method of attack of entirely illegitimate.

The final and most straightforward measurement by which 9/11 was worse than Pearl Harbor was the number of dead. Even if we abjure all notions of "legitimate" targets and methods, even if we adopt the idea that "war is war" and "dead is dead", 9/11 was worse simply because more Americans were killed on 9/11 than were killed at Pearl Harbor. Simple as that.

Pearl Harbor killed approximately 2,400 Americans. 9/11 killed approximately 3,000. That's a full 25% more. The fact that they were civilians makes it worse, but even if they weren't civilians, it would have been a worse attack than Pearl Harbor.

So what accounts for this? If anything, we could be forgiven for exaggerating 9/11's magnitude and calling it "worse than Pearl Harbor" simply because people attach great self-importance to things they witness. But we don't need to do this. Instead, we're doing the opposite; we're downplaying the severity of 9/11 and exalting Pearl Harbor above its place.

The only thing worse about Pearl Harbor was that it led to the deaths of 400,000 Americans in World War II. But 9/11, it would seem, has led to the death of simple mathematics.

Opposites Attract

Take a good look at this picture. Even if the acronyms "ANP" and "NOI" mean nothing to you, you can surely tell that there is something strange at work here. The 3 white men in the foreground are Nazis, specifically members of the American Nazi Party. The far more numerous black men behind them are members of the Nation of Islam.

The obvious question is why Nazis (white separatists) and the Nation of Islam (black separatists) would be attending the same function without killing each other. And the answer has to do with the nature of extremes. If we understand the political spectrum as a circle rather than a line, we see that extremes are actually neighbors.

Just as Nazis and Communists were nearly identical while they fixated on destroying each other, the ANP and NOI were nearly identical as well. And while the Nazis and Communists would ally with each other to destroy their common enemy of liberal democracy, the ANP and NOI would ally with each other to destroy their common enemy.

And who was the common enemy of the NOI and the ANP? Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights Movement in general. And here we see how "opposites" attract.

Deep down, the Muslims and the Nazis wanted the same thing. They wanted separation. Despite the fact that each group was racially monolithic and explicitly preached the inferiority of the other race, they were able to identify a common enemy in people who favored integration. So while these groups may have warred with each other if they were forced into close proximity, their entire ideologies were geared at preventing any sort of proximity.

Ironically enough, the NOI and the ANP were able to forge an alliance based on their hatred for one another. Their hatred for one another ran so deep that the only thing worse than the other was any person or group who would propose mixing the races. Therefore these hate groups hated integrationists more than they hated each other.

Martin Luther King was a threat to the Nazis for obvious reasons. He wanted black integration into the white-dominated civil society. Martin Luther King was a threat to the NOI for reasons that may seem counter intuitive but which are no less obvious than the former. King was a threat to the NOI for the same reason; he advocated black access to white institutions. To the NOI, who preached that all whites were "the devil", the threat is clear.

What is much less know, however, is who brought these groups together. Because no matter how logical their common interest may have been on paper, we should remember that these groups explicitly hated each other with a profound bloodlust. Nazis killed black folks and the NOI was exclusively black. Quite a bump in the road. So who bridged this bump?

Malcolm X. It wasn't in the movie, of course, but Malcolm X personally arranged this alliance and invited Nazis to NOI rallies and speeches. He forged a similar alliance with the KKK. Anyone who knows the contours of Malcolm's life knows that he considered King to be naive in the extreme and that black folks' salvation lay in separation and self-reliance.

But most people do not know how far he took that logic. And he took it far indeed, to the point where he was meeting with and making tactical alliances with groups who were murdering black people. Even if Malcolm and the NOI thought those black people were misguided, they were still "their" people, being brutalized and murdered by "the devil".

Politics makes strange bedfellows, but this one may take the cake. The closest analogy I can think of offhand would be an alliance between al Qaeda and the Christian Coalition, founded on the common conviction that American society was decadent and sinful. Quite a few inconvenient truths would have to be ignored to forge such a bond, but this should illuminate the bizarre gravity of the NOI-ANP alliance.

This part of Malcolm's life, and it was only a small part, is ignored by nearly all Americans today, and especially black Americans. But ignoring is not the same as erasing. The marginal nature of both groups should remind us that movements based on exclusion ultimately fail and that "the devil" is always in the details.

The Better Bad Guys, pt. II

It is said that the victors write history. This is manifest, since in history the losers earn their title by being killed by the victors. And dead men tell no tales. Very often this truth means that the losers are assigned not just the title of "loser", but also that of "the bad guys". And while the losers are often in fact bad guys, so are the winners.

The winner's version of World War II was that the losers started it. Specifically, the losers (Germany) started the war on September 1, 1939 by invading Poland. There are several problems with this version.

Firstly, September 1, 1939 was not Germany's first aggressive action. It was, depending how we count, at least the 4th. And Germany committed NO aggression against the eventual winners on September 1. England and France declared war on Germany after Germany attacked Poland. So while Germany was certainly guilty of starting a war against Poland, it was not guilty of starting a World War.

The winners, rather, declared that World War was necessary after the invasion of Poland. But here's the problem: Germany was not alone in invading Poland. While it invaded from the west, the Soviet Union invaded from the east, fulfilling a previously agreed upon course of action. The Nazis and the Soviets were allies, and they both invaded Poland.

Yet the winners only declared war on Germany, despite that fact that the Soviets were guilty of the very same crime. Why does this not matter to us now? Because when the guns fell silent, the Soviets were one of the winners. So the fact that they cooperated with Hitler in his aggression which triggered a World War was deemed irrelevant.

The Nazis never sought war with Western Europe; they sought war with Eastern Europe. Hitler's goal was to subjugate the lands to the east of Germany. The eventual winners decreed that this was unacceptable and accepted World War as the acceptable price to pay to prevent German subjugation of Eastern Europe.

But when the war ended, one of the winners subjugated Eastern Europe just as the losers had aimed to do. The Soviet Union joined Hitler in his aggression against Eastern Europe in the beginning of the war and, at the end of the war, accomplished exactly what Hitler failed to achieve.

The World went to war to prevent Germany from conquering Eastern Europe. When the war was over, Eastern Europe had simply traded one conqueror (Hitler) for another (Stalin). And Stalin was given his prize, because he was a winner.

Hitler's evil or Germany's guilt is not at issue; what is at issue is why Stalin's evil and the Soviet Union's guilt was ignored. This is inevitable, though, because the truth lays bare an awful fact: the entire objective of the war from the point of view of England, France, and the United States failed utterly; Eastern Europe remained subjugated.

The winner, by virtue of allying themselves with Stalin, simply traded one tyranny for another, while 50 million people died in the process. As Churchill privately admitted after the War, "we killed the wrong pig".

In my opinion, Hitler was not the wrong pig, but neither was he the only pig. One pig was traded for another. And despite the mantle of "winner", and the ridiculous charade of Stalin's henchmen putting Hitler's henchmen on trial, a pig is still a pig, no matter how much lipstick one applies.

The Better Bad Guys

The American author Thomas Wolfe coined the phrase "radical chic". There are many examples of this tendency to commodify (or make chic) images and ideas that reject the very premise of commodification (because they are too radical).

The best example of radical chic is the cottage capitalist industry of selling commodifications of the image of Che Guevara. One wonders what Guevara might have thought of the specter of American college students wearing his face as a consumer product totally divorced from the man's actual ideas.

The t-shirt shown above is another example of this trend. But there's something deeper and more insidious about the hammer-and-sickle t-shirt. Ask yourself this: what would your reaction be if the t-shirt above showed the swastika? The shirt would transform from a piece of kitsch to a symbol of hatred.

But why should this be? The idea represented on the t-shirt shown above led by any measure to far more death and deprivation than the Nazis caused, yet it is not considered scandalous or even distasteful to wear this symbol.

The two most prodigious destroyers of human beings in history were both communists. Stalin and Mao. They accounted for far more death than Hitler, yet they and their ideas are not the intellectual and moral outcasts that the Nazis are.

How can we account for this? How is it that these bad guys (the Communists) are better than the ultimate bad guys (the Nazis) to the point where it is fashionable to literally wear their symbol on one's sleeve?

One direct answer would be that the Communist Soviet Union destroyed the Nazis. While they were helped in this task by capitalist countries, the USSR paid the huge majority of the blood debt to history in the crushing of Naziism.

And, since history is written by the victors, the Communists clearly benefit from this service to mankind. The Soviets' crushing of the Nazis has obscured two facts. First, that the Communists were quantitatively far more murderous than even that Nazis. Second, that the Nazis were only able to conquer so much of Europe because of their alliance with the Communists in the early years of the war.

But there is more than just that. The other reason that Communism is seen with less contempt than Naziism is that, for all its crimes, its ideology was still morally superior to that of the Nazis. Communism was at least rhetorically based on a more inclusive and constructive worldview than Naziism.

Nazi ideology was dominated by what it was against; it was primarily destructive. Communist ideology was dominated by Utopian images of progress and inclusion. Naziism explicitly could not be relevant to the huge majority of the world's people, while Communism implicitly claimed to be all inclusive.

Naziism was entirely based on racism; Communism could only work if racism were utterly rejected. Naziism rejected the premise that there was any such thing as equality, whereas Communism was based on the premise that the equality of all people was obvious.

This difference, as important as it is, still does not complete the explanation of the dynamic. What is needed to complete the picture is people. We know now that Communism failed to fulfill its promises, but this is obviously a hindsight that the people of the time did not have.

Therefore, we must ask ourselves this: what kind of person would be attracted to each ideology in, say, the 1930's, before they knew how each ideology would actually be manifested?

It strikes me that any person who ever became a Nazi must have, by definition, been a racist. People that became Communist, however, could have been guided by the better angels of our nature, even if we cast them as naive in retrospect.

Put simply, there could never have been any "good" Nazis, while there could have been literally millions of "good" communists, people who were motivated by love rather than hate. Nazism was an evil ideology which did evil; Communism was a good ideology that did evil.

Put another way, Naziism was evil because it succeeded in being exactly what it claimed to be. Communism, in contrast, was evil because it failed to be what it claimed. And perhaps being changed into a consumer commodity is the best evidence of all of Communism's failure.

We are left to wonder, then, how much better the world would be if the tables were turned. What if Communism had been true to its word and Naziism had not been? The world would be a much better place.

Communism failed because people failed to implement such an ambitious agenda without crushing all dissent. Naziism succeeded because, evidently and unfortunately, it spoke more directly to what people are, rather than to what they wish they could be.

The Snitch Test

After The War, one of Hitler's generals said of the dictator that his decisions "ceased to have anything in common with the principles of strategy and operations as they have been recognized for generations past. They were the product of a violent nature following its momentary impulses, which recognized no limits to possibility and which made its wishdreams the father of its acts."

This is simply a well-worded iteration of a common flaw; we become so invested in our own intelligence that we stop testing ourselves, we stop asking for advice, and we drift further and further from reality on the tide of our own ego.

When we cease to dissect our decisions and our motives, we fall into this trap.

Ask any student in my school what they think of snitches, and the answer is invariably the same. They are the lowest form of life, snitches get stitches, etc, etc. Such deeply held beliefs may lead us to think that the issue has been thought about widely and deeply, but of course it has not.

Ask the very same students the definition of a snitch, and you'll get looks that betray an anger at this metaphysical nonsense. It's obvious what a snitch is, these looks tell you. Except it's not obvious what a snitch is, especially to people who devote so much energy to hating them.

Just as Hitler became so delusional that he invaded the Soviet Union and declared war on the United States within months of each other, many urban youths today blindly sweat loyalty to the premise that snitches deserve death that they no longer commit the only act necessary to those who claim to hold this belief: define snitches.

These people are so busy hating snitches that they don't even bother to define the word. Just as Hitler grew too self-righteous to pay attention to the proper definitions of "economics" or "justice" or "logic" or "history" or anything else, for that matter.

So what is a snitch? A snitch is someone who cooperates with the police. That's the truth, but it's not the whole truth. And the truth without the whole truth is often worse than a lie. For example, Hitler would have define "Jews" as "against the German people". And that was the truth.

But the whole truth was that the Jews were against the German people because the German people were exterminating them from the face of the earth. Quite a bit of daylight between the truth and the whole truth, no?

The whole truth about snitches is that they cooperate with the police AND they benefit from that cooperation.

Some examples: Let's say I witness a man shoot an 80 year old woman in the face. If I cooperate with the police in getting this man off the street, am I a snitch? No. Here's why.

I did not sell my "cooperation". I did not benefit from it. I was not forgiven for any crime I may have committed, and I received no money. If anything, I willingly put myself in danger from the idiots who ignore this distinction and who would target me for death for the sin of "snitching".

Another example: Let's say I sell cocaine. I get caught. The police tell me I have two choices: 10 years in prison or I can cooperate with the police in locking up my business partners. Am I a snitch? Yes. Here's why.

I sold my cooperation. I benefit from it by escaping the consequences of my own crimes. There is an enormous moral chasm between these two scenarios.

Even further down the moral plane are people who get paid either in money or reduced sentences by fabricating information or planting evidence. These tactics have been used by our own government against civil rights and anti-war groups.

There is no virtue in profiting by the incarceration of another person. Whether you are paid in time, coin, or paper, the corruption is the same. A free society is not possible when criminals can be forgiven of their crimes by spying on and betraying others, innocent or not.

A free society is also not possible when it is taboo to condemn the animals among us and to help the police imprison them. That is the whole truth. It doesn't fit on a t-shirt or a bumper sticker, but it is what civilization is based on. So help me God.

The Truth Theory

The criminal justice system in America is, like many American institutions, viewed with an ignorant arrogance by many Americans and condescension or contempt by much of the rest of the world.

Our system has many flaws. Despite its professed blindness, for example, the system moves swifter and more forgivingly for those with money. Despite our professed "freedom", for another example, so many things are illegal in this country that our courts are correspondingly clogged. We're all criminals; it's just a matter of whether we're caught.

But the biggest flaws are these: our system is institutionally founded on two absurd premises. The first is that evidence of guilt is irrelevant in convictions. The second is that evidence of innocence is irrelevant in overturning convictions.

How can evidence of guilt be irrelevant when a jury decides whether to convict? The O.J. Simpson murder trial was the perfect example. The system is tasked with judging whether or not the state proves guilt. That makes sense. But the verdict is based not on whether guilt was proved, but rather on whether all of the proper forms, rules, and etiquettes were followed perfectly.

Because of this loophole (or black hole), which is the expensive expertise on sale from high-priced defense attorneys, O.J. Simpson walked free. Instead of explaining how a glove with the victims' blood was found at Simpson's house, for example, the defense instead concerned itself with establishing that the detective who found the glove had used the word "nigger" in the preceding decade.

Whenever a conviction is overturned on a "technicality", this same dynamic is at work. The issue is not the truth, but rather the protocol. If any part of that protocol is violated, the guilty walk free.

Ask yourself this: what if Mark Fuhrman, the racist detective, had planted that glove? What should the result have been? Should O.J. have walked free? Most people would say yes. The justice system certainly would. But believers in "The Truth Theory", as its called in legal circles. would say no.

Believers in this theory, and I am certainly one, would say that attempting to frame a guilty man should NOT result in that guilty man going free. The corrupt detective in question should be fined, fired, perhaps imprisoned. But the guilty should not go free. Verdicts should be about truth, not about human corruptibility.

In many cases, however, the flaws, mistakes, and corruption of police are paid for by society as a whole and by victims' families in particular. The Simpson murder case was only the most extreme and absurd example of this rejection of truth in favor of form.

As for the second major flaw, how can evidence of innocence not be relevant to securing release from wrongful imprisonment? For the same reason that the first flaw exists; the system is directed to prize form over truth.

If, for example, a DNA test proves that a convicted murderer was actually innocent, most rational people would swing the doors open and dig into the general coffers to atone for this monstrous mistake. The system does not. Ironclad evidence of innocence means nothing; Again, only form is relevant to the system.

Therefore, to overturn a conviction, the system requires proof not of innocence, but rather proof that the original trial was unfair. Again, most of us simpletons would say that whenever an innocent person is convicted of a crime, the trial was unfair by definition. But lady justice would dissent.

To the system, a person is not guaranteed an accurate verdict; they are guaranteed a fair trial. So even if a trial results in a wrong verdict, that is irrelevant as long as the trial was fair.

For example, if a defendant's lawyer was later found to not have a law licence, or to have slept through large portions of the trial, or to have been drunk, then the trial may be considered unfair. But if these things did not happen, then the conviction stands, regardless of ironclad evidence of innocence.

An old adage has it that "innocence is the best defense". In most walks of life, those are wise words to live by. If you are in a situation where you pre-emptively ask yourself "how will I defend myself if someone finds out about this?", that is your conscience telling you not to do it, so that if anyone ever confronts you about it you can simply and authoritatively say "I didn't do it".

But in the "justice" system, innocence is no defense at all. And that's indefensible.

Civil Disoweedience

In a country that reflexively and self-righteously describes itself as "free" (and not just "free", but the freest, indeed the leader of the "free world") Americans have a depressingly juvenile understanding of the word. Simply put, most Americans wouldn't recognize freedom if it bit them in the ass.

In order for people to be free, they must enjoy certain rights. We can all agree on this. If I have no inalienable "rights", then I am not "free". Simple enough. But what is less simple is the task of defining what those rights are.

The source of Americans' ignorance of how un-free they really are comes from their ignorance of what the different types of rights are and what their sources are. Broadly speaking, there are two types of rights. There are natural rights and there are civil rights. Every drug law in the United States, or in any single state therein, is a clear violation of both natural and civil rights.

First, for natural rights. Natural rights predate all governments. They existed before states, before nations, before cities, before all trappings of civilization. Natural rights are given by God or, if one prefers, by nature. Whether one is religious or not is beside the point. The point is that we ALL have rights that we enjoy by the simple virtue of being alive.

Since these are natural rights (Thomas Jefferson termed them inalienable rights), and their source is nature itself, no earthly authority can deprive us of these rights. For example, every person has the right to live. Governments, of course, kill people the way most people throw out used coffee filters. But that sad truth does not change the fact that every person has the natural right to their own life, as often violated as that rights sadly is.

We also have the natural rights to own and promote our own ideas, beliefs, and consumptions. Put much more simply, every single person owns his or her own body, mind, and soul. Unless that person violates the body, mind, or soul of another person, it is entirely illegitimate for any government to exercise any control over one's body, mind, or soul.

For example, I can believe in whatever I want to believe unless or until my beliefs deprive others of their natural rights. The most well-known example of this premise is that I can say whatever I want, no matter how hateful or vulgar, but I can NOT shout "fire!" in a crowded theater.

According to natural law, I own my body and I have the right to use it as I see fit. Ask yourself, if someone does not have freedom over their own body, do they have any freedom at all? The question answers itself.

Any law, therefore, that restricts or regulates what I put into my body is a clear violation of my natural rights. Unless my consumption deprives others of their rights, no limitations can be put on what I choose to put into my own body. The best example of this caveat is that I have the natural right to drink alcohol, but I do NOT have the natural right to drive drunk because that behavior may deprive others of their natural right to life.

The most insulting ignorance that Americans show about rights is evident in our drug laws. Most Americans think drugs should be illegal. I do not. Most Americans would think that I am advocating drug use. I am not. I am advocating freedom.

If heroin were legalized tomorrow, how many of us would start using heroin? If this questions seems absurd, that only betrays the absurdity of our drug laws. I do not need the government to forbid me to use heroin; I need my own common sense to do that.

Drug laws are based upon this premise: the government needs to "take care" of people by restricting their freedoms because if people were truly free they would degenerate into heroin addicts. This concept of benevolent tyranny is so antithetical to what the American Revolution was supposed to be about that we may as well have never had a revolution.

All of the wrangling between the federal government and the states over medical marijuana laws, for example, are a charade and a distraction from the true matter at hand here, which is that no government has any right to regulate what plants we eat, drink, or smoke. Any restriction on our personal use of our own body violates natural law.

For the people who think that government does have the right to outlaw certain drugs, our drug laws are still a deep violation of the American system.

The federal government supposedly only has the powers specifically enumerated to it in the Constitution. Of course, the history of American government is largely the history of the federal government inventing all sorts of new authorities for itself. It has tyrannically insinuated itself so far into our lives that is lies lodged somewhere in between our lips and our lungs.

The Constitution does not say "We, the people, in order to prevent people from getting high....". That's not in there. Trust me. Nowhere in that document is the government given the authority to regulate any food, drug, medicine, etc. That doesn't stop them, of course.

What the Constitution says (in the 10th amendment, the most ignored element of the Bill of Rights) is that any power not explicitly granted to the federal government goes to the states or the people. The federal government can legally do very little. Most powers (in theory, if not in practice) go to the states or the people.

So when Rhode Island passed a medical marijuana law, two things should have been clear. Firstly, that law violated our natural rights to our own body, as explained above. Secondly, if we accept the premise that the government can regulate what we ingest (which I do NOT) then that power should rightly go to the states. The federal government has no role in this issue whichever way you slice it.

Now Rhode Islanders are being doubly tyrannized. We are tyrannized by our state, which violates our natural rights by telling us what, when, and how we can use our own bodies. We are also tyrannized by the federal government, which tels our state that it has no right to even partially lessen or rationalize these tyrannical infringements.

What is left to us when every level of government fails us by insisting it has the right to take our rights in the interest of "protecting" us against ourselves? All that is left to us is where this whole issue should have ended in the first place. With We. The People.