The President of the United States, 48 years ago this week, explaining why it's so important to vote in the midterm elections:
"75 percent of Republicans voted against my higher education bill, 84 percent of Republican senators opposed extended unemployment benefits, 81 percent and 95 percent of house Republicans voted against the redevelopment and public housing bills, respectively, and 80 percent of house Republicans resisted increasing the minimum wage."
"On a bill to provide medical care for our older citizens, 7/8 of the Republican senators voted No, just as their fathers before them had voted 90 percent against Social Security in the 1930's."
John F. Kennedy, October, 1962
One blessing the United States has always enjoyed is that of relatively secure and passive neighbors. Neither Mexico nor Canada has ever given us any trouble, which has left us uniquely free to create trouble for ourselves.
Mexico today, however, is probably the most dangerous country in the world. And the drug cartels are the source of the huge majority of that violence, ranging from the usual street-level thuggery to political assassination of politicians and judges, and everything in between.
In this equation, the United States is the customer for most of these drugs and therefore part of the problem. But the problem is not primarily the fault of the Mexican drug lords, but of our own obscenely hypocritical Puritanism.
The Puritans are remembered in our dominant paradigm as intrepid souls who fled the oppression of Europe to come to the New World, where there was religious freedom. And while the Puritans were surely interested in own freedom, as we all are, they were supremely uninterested in anyone else's freedom to disagree with them.
"Freedom" for the Puritans meant "freedom to be a Puritan". They did not take kindly to Jews, for example. Or witches. There is nothing unique about this bigoted self-interest, of course. But the Puritan legacy continues today, and it fuels the drug war more than all the stoners and gangsters in the world.
The Puritans were scandalized by pleasure. Comfortable clothes, for example, were frowned upon, so we can imagine how they felt about sex and drugs. It strikes me that the only reason that marijuana, for example, is illegal is that there is a remnant of Puritanism remaining in our culture.
Prohibition is as close as we can come to a perfect case study. Prohibition actually made far more sense than criminalizing marijuana because alcohol is infinitely more physically and socially destructive than marijuana.
That being said, there are a few truths about our experiment with Prohibition that no rational person can refute.
Firstly, Prohibition prohibited Americans from drinking, but it did not prevent them from doing so. When alcohol was criminalized, Americans didn't stop drinking; they simply became criminals.
Secondly, criminalizing alcohol meant that sellers of alcohol were now criminals. And criminals, regardless of time or place, regulate their trade with violence. And so Prohibition's biggest legacy was not sobriety, but organized crime.
Half of the profits of the Mexican drug cartels are reaped from marijuana. We can therefore assume that roughly half of the violence is carried out in the distribution of marijuana.
So if marijuana were legal, the criminals would lose half of their power overnight. Thousands of lives south of our border would be saved. Americans would save millions of dollars by ending the absurd practice of imprisoning citizens for marijuana "crimes". And we would reap untold millions more by taxing and legally distributing marijuana.
The only thing which prevents this legal, moral, ethical, and economic triumph is Puritanism. One marvels at the schizophrenia of a society that would rather indulge barbaric drug cartels and criminalize millions of its own citizens than to acknowledge and regulate the reality that most Americans are not scandalized by the private pleasure of their neighbors.The final thread that the Puritans in this debate cling to is this argument: "if we legalize marijuana, everyone would start smoking marijuana all day every day".
Alcohol is legal. Do all of us drink all day every day? When Americans decide if they are going to try a drug, the legality of that drug is not part of their decision-making progress. Have you ever met anyone who said to you "I've never smoked marijuana because it's illegal"?
The decision to try or abstain from a drug, or a sexual encounter, or any type of new and potentially risky behavior, consists largely of an inner dialogue within one's self. If I choose not to use cocaine, it is not because the Puritans don't want me too. It's because I know better.
So the only conclusion is this: the Puritans hate free will. They don't trust themselves, and they certainly don't trust anyone else. They feel that the only thing saving us from barbaric hedonism and anarchy is a strict and unbending code of denial. They live out the belief that pleasure corrupts, and that we are helpless in the face of any temptation.
The Puritans don't want to live in a world where they can decide not to smoke marijuana. They want to live in a world where the full and awesome power of the state forbids them to do so.
In the final analysis, the Puritans actually cause the criminality and barbarity they so fear by vainly attempting to enforce their own dim view of mankind onto us all.
As "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" grinds its way slowly to extinction, we can be sure that congressional Republicans will put up one last desperate fight, one last full-throated frenzy to convince us all that civilization itself is doomed if open homosexuals serve in our military. And we can also be sure that many of those very Republicans will be gay.
The gay Republican is a tragic and very common occurrence. There are two types of gay men: there are gay men who are open and confident about their identity, and there are gay men who despise what they are and spend inordinate amounts of energy in attacking the gays that actually embrace their gayness.
There is a very interesting psychological dynamic at work here. Why are some of the most virulent gay haters gay themselves? What causes such sadomasochism? In these men, we witness the true danger of self-loathing.
Here's the thing about self-loathing gays: they deny that they are gay. They have sex with men, of course, but they deny that this makes them gay. To straight men and to gay men who are open and confident, it is obvious that a man who is attracted to and has sex with other men is gay. This is obvious to everybody except for the self-loathing gay.
Here is what the self-loathing gays seem to think: they seem to think that all men, ALL men, are naturally tempted to have sex with other men. So when these self-loathing gays give in to their natural temptation and have sex with a man, that doesn't mean they're gay; it just means that they slipped up and indulged their temptation.
Again, everybody except for self-loathing gays understands how ridiculous that is. We all have our temptations, of course. Married men, for example, may be tempted to cheat on their wives. But, assuming these men are straight, they are tempted by other women.
The self-loathing gay, however, is so gay, and so delusional, that he actually believes that all men secretly wish they could have male lovers, that it is the natural state of men, and that the only reason we're not ALL gay is that most of us don't give in to this universal temptation.
To the self-loathing gay, the only way a person can truly be "gay" is if they live openly as a gay. But if they just indulge in furtive and secretive sexual encounters, while pretending to the world to be straight, then that's different. But it's not. It's just self-destructive. And dangerous.
The self-loathing gay hates open gays so much because open gays are free. They don't lie to themselves and deny their own identity. The reason this is so dangerous is that it leaves to sadomasochism, which is incredibly destructive in political movements.
Self-loathing gays are sadists, because they revel in the oppression, abuse, and subjugation of other people. And they are masochists, because what they're really trying to destroy is part of themselves.
We have seen this psychological time bomb at play in many historical movements (e.g. Hitler, who physically resembled the people he exterminated far more than those he exalted).
The biggest threat to the gay rights movement in this nation right now is not straight people. Most people who are confident in their sexuality are not threatened by the sexuality of others. The biggest threat are those who deny themselves and seek to destroy the part of themselves that they perceive in others.
It is relatively accurate to say that the United States has Christian roots. It would be far more accurate, although not necessarily true, to say that the United States has Protestant roots. In other words, we are Christian, but we are not Catholic; ergo we are Protestants.
And Protestantism started with Luther. Thankfully, it didn't end with him.
Luther did indeed do mankind an inestimable service in pointing out that the papacy is not the Bible, and that the practice of priests literally selling tickets to heaven to rich folks wasn't exactly in keeping with the word of the Nazarene.
Luther was, it can be said, one of the 10 most influential thinkers and doers of Western civilization. But that doesn't necessarily mean he had a uniformly, or even mostly, positive influence. Influence is morally neutral; Hitler's higher on the list than Luther.
Here is what the dominant historical paradigm tells us about Martin Luther: he essentially invented freedom of religion by rejecting the premise that the Catholic Church was the "one true church". He encouraged people to think for themselves and to reject blind obedience to other mortals.
Luther, the paradigm tells us, invented Protestantism by encouraging people to think for themselves and the use their own God-given minds to make sense of the world. After Luther, Catholic nations such as Spain stagnated while newly Protestant nations such as England expanded and excelled.
There is, of course, much truth to this paradigm. But this paradigm, like many others, has less to do with what the man did while alive than it has to do with what subsequent writers think he stood for. And a look at what Luther actually did and said renders him much less sympathetic.
Firstly, for his theology. Luther was a Catholic, just as Christ was a Jew. He rightly pointed out grievous abuses and corruption condoned and carried out by his church. But where did he disagree with the Church's theology?
Luther's biggest sticking point was free will. He DID NOT believe it existed. That's right; Martin Luther did not believe that we have free will. It would be hard to think of a belief more anathema to American culture than that. Yet the inventor of Protestantism believed it.
So we instantly know that the dominant paradigm has a hole in it big enough to drive a cathedral through. The second major Protestant figure of this time was John Calvin. Calvin, like Luther, did not believe in free will. He believed in predestination. Some of us are "the elect", and the others.....well...they're not.
And what of the practical application of Luther's theology, which we look back on as so enlightened and empowering? Well, after Luther rose to prominence, there occurred the biggest popular uprising in the history of Europe, before or since.
One of Luther's better ideas was to print the Bible in languages that average people could actually read and speak. And poor folks, having had a chance for the first time in a thousand years to actually read the Bible, decided they weren't being treated very biblically by their betters. So they revolted.
And where did Luther come down? On the side of the kings. He excoriated the peasants in the strongest possible terms from his pulpit and advised the princes and kings to slaughter them en masse, which they did. Apparently, for Luther, the pope was an illegitimate authority, but the king was just fine.
3 days before Luther died, he wrote that all the Jews should be expelled from Germany. Good thing that idea never caught on.... In this, as well, Luther was ahead of his time.
Luther, we now know, was not the revolution. He did not believe in free will and he did not believe in the inherent quality of people, or even of Christians. What he did do, and what he do owe him for, is to crack open the door toward real reformation and liberation.
But let us not confuse this man; Martin Luther was no Martin Luther King.
The Catholic Church, or The One True Church as believers would have it, is many things. Like all human institutions, it has its faults, and the Catholic Church has had more time than any other institution in our culture to accumulate those faults.
But I must confess (pun intended) that I have not adequately appreciated the Church's role in the history of our civilization. For starters, it is the oldest continual institution in Western Civilization, so we can safely assume that the Church must be doing something right.
When we assess the role of the church, we have to remind ourselves that for the overwhelming majority of its history, the church was dominant over the state. Henry VIII was the one who really got the ball rolling in the other direction, and the process of establishing the state's dominance over the church was halting and slow in most places.
The question here is not whether the state should be more powerful than the church. The question is what role the church played before the state was dominant. That role was mixed, of course, with a little humanity here and a little barbarism there, but it's an issue worth considering.
Until very, very recently, the church was the only institution in Western civilization that did anything at all for the poor, for example. There was no welfare, no social security programs, nothing but blood and iron coming from the state. Mercy and charity came only from the church.
It was the church that fed the poor, maintained the libraries, offered safe-haven to fugitives, and so on. The state did none of these things.
The church was also the first truly international institution, which claimed at least in theory that all Christians were equal in some sense. When we consider what havoc was wreaked by state-sponsored nationalism in the 20th century, the church-sponsored internationalism that preceded it clearly has its merits.
For every reactionary priest that burned a scientist at the stake, there were 10 priests who safe-guarded human knowledge accumulated by ancient civilizations during the Dark Ages. For every pedophile rapist that preyed on orphans, there were ten holy men who taught and fed those very same orphans.
Politicians today tell us not to compare them to the Almighty, but to compare them to the alternative. The church's problem is that it asks us to compare it to the Almighty, which makes its predictable human failings all the more grating on our collective conscience, but that should not obscure its good works.
The church today has a role much different than that which it played throughout most of its history. It is no longer involved in governance. And although this is a good thing, we should reflect on the fact that for centuries, it was the only institution in our culture that dispensed mercy, however imperfect, and the only institution which curbed the powerlust of kings.For all its failings, it is a dark prospect indeed to imagine the past without the Catholic Church.
The "six degrees of separation" principle in my mind is sort of like the "principle" of gravity, or God, or the greatness of Bob Dylan; all these things take huge leaps in pretension and anti-socialism to deny. In other words, they are all manifestly true, and only obnoxious people are invested in denying them.
The funny (or American) thing about the six degrees theory is that is started out as a latter-day parlor game centered around the actor Kevin Bacon, and was restricted to the realms of movie actors.
Example: Kevin Bacon was in "JFK" with John Candy, who was in "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" with Steve Martin, who was in "The Pink Panther" with Beyonce. Hence, there are only 3 degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and Beyonce.
Many a stoned teenager has been amazed by this truth. But it's not just a parlor game. It doesn't just apply to famous people, and it doesn't just apply to movies. It applies to every single human being alive.
There are well over six billion of us, but there are no more than six degrees of separation between any 2 of us. It is this truth which shatters the "illusion of separateness", as I've heard it called.
Here is but one example. My sister married an Israeli citizen in 1993. In 1994 they went to Israel to visit my brother in law's aging parents. On the months-long trip, my sister met and spoke with Yasser Arafat.
She spoke with him, sat with him, had a conversation with him. The six degrees theory does not apply to strangers who you brush elbows with on the street; this is about actual connections, where you are introduced to someone, talk to them, inquire about their families, remember them.
So my sister met Yasser Arafat. That makes me 2 degrees removed from Arafat. Who has Arafat met? It would take forever to flesh this out, but one example would be Saddam Hussein. That makes me 3 degrees removed from Saddam Hussein.
And keep in mind, the "game" allows for SIX degrees of separation.
It is difficult to articulate what this proves, because it is not a minor point; it cuts straight to the heart of how we look at the universe. It gives pause to those of us who insist on treating ourselves as separate little universes, and it delivers the proper weight to the words "brother" and "sister".
"One good thing about music / when it hits, you feel no pain" --Bob Marley
By the time you get to be my age, your preferences take on a certain air of consistency. Anyone you count as a close friend at this point in your life will most likely remain a close friend, for example.
Taste in art and taste in friends say alot about a person. Below is a list of my dirty dozen musical artists. These are the 12 musical artists with the most songs in my library, after their discographies have suffered my obnoxiously pretentious editing process.
Two parenthetical notes are in order.
Firstly, Bob Dylan is on the list, but he is not of the list. He is in an order all his own.
Secondly, many of my favorites are not on this list because they lack the quantity of recorded music that modern recording artists enjoy. Sam Cooke and Credence Clearwater Revival jump to mind.
That being said, just as I'm set on my friends, I'm set on this music:
