Warning! This Could Be the Most Depressing Thing You’ve Ever Read

Readers with suicidal tendencies kept in check by powerful medication may want to stop here. Your meds may not protect you.

Undeterred none-the-less? All right, let us gently proceed.

Mark Twain, in his boundless wisdom, pointed out, “I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me the slightest.”

But before we proceed to discuss what happened before we were born, let’s draw an unavoidably gruesome picture of what will happen to us after we are dead, for that is what seems to worry a sizeable percentage of the population who wish to live forever but don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday.

Let me give it to you straight. After we are dead for a hundred million billion trillion years, we’ll hardly have begun being dead. If you multiply that hundred million billion trillion by a hundred million billion trillion – and keep multiplying it every second for another hundred million billion trillion years – you won’t even reach one percent of the time you will remain dead. For forever is a really long time, indivisible and irreversible. Eternity is one endless wait in God’s Laundromat. It is also a dull and pointless subject from which we can derive neither wisdom nor solace.

So let us return to the time before you were born.

Some time around 3 billion years ago, Mother Nature (with or without God’s help) concocted a soup of nutrients, perhaps aided by lightning, which began to percolate. Molecules bumped into each other, connected and divided and reconnected, again and again until after eons of time random connections remained viable and the spark of life sputtered into being. Molecule connections pulsed and throbbed and generation after generation new connections grew, evolving until units of life began to split in two and simple replication was achieved.

Let us focus on just one of those primal cells. It divided as its ancestors had, and its offspring divided, down to the thousands of millions of generations. Each cell in this chain successfully divided at least once before it was eaten by others or died a natural death. And each succeeding cell did the same. It reproduced before it died. After a million million generations fins and feet were achieved, and crawly things invaded the land to reproduce, generation after generation. Some lines developed wings or horns or poisonous fangs. Some climbed trees in search of fruit. One line developed an opposable thumb. This line could make and hold tools. Fire was tamed and thousands of generations were spent beside bonfires, chipping flint spear points and knives. One line managed to find enough food and to avoid the deadly assaults of rivals and wild animals, surviving infancy and successfully reproducing at least once, each generation managing to produce offspring in spite of hunger, disease, and death during child birth.

Again and again and again in this one line, every link in the chain was somehow miraculously able to provide the next link in the chain, adding a new generation. Some links were noble caring parents and good citizens, some links were rogues and robbers and murders. Many many were rapists, for there was no romance nor marriage a million years ago. Some were prostitutes, male and female. Some were wise, some were kind, some were lazy, some were a pestilence to their communities. But each and every link in this chain were lucky and somehow managed to reproduce the next generation, continuing the unbroken chain, despite floods, famine, plague, slavery, persecution, civil wars or simple competition. Again and again strength and endurance combined with sheer luck, and each link in the chain survived long enough to reproduce itself. Again and again and again and again. Until after 3 billion long years you were born.

You (and your offspring if you have them) are the end product of a three billion year long chain. Not once in three billion years was the chain broken before successful reproduction or you wouldn’t be here. Despite the fact.. and probably because of the fact.. that hundreds if not thousands of your ancestors were murders and rapists and prostitutes in order to survive, you are privileged to be alive today. Rejoice! Each of us who is alive today is alive because we are the products of countless rapes, murders and land-grabs!

But are you grateful.. or as grateful as you ought to be?

So try to show a little class, and a little gratitude for the struggles of the countless generations before you. You may not have been born for a specific purpose. But you were certainly born because a billion ancestors strove to give you the chance not to be a total fuck up.

Sympathy For The Devils

We are often reminded that with an honest understanding of others comes some sympathy and perhaps some small degree of respect.

Good God, I would like to think so.

But some attempts at empathy are fruitless. Others are not fruitless but merely thankless, the rewards being far too meager in comparison with the efforts made to build bridges. An example of a possibly thankless endeavor? Trying to understand the Right, the Conservatives, Republicans, Reactionaries, Neocons, whatever you prefer to call them.

But why try to understand them? To what end? How could we possibly profit from a better understanding of this wild and boisterously complex tribe?

Well, two reasons for making the effort immediately spring to mind. Firstly, the subject of the Right is a fascinating one, historically, psychologically, economically.. and biologically? And a better understanding of the worse excesses of the Right may help us creampuffs to better withstand their eternal attempts to mold the world in their puffed up image.

To begin (..and forgive me for this..) let’s start with a quick sociological history of the United States. America, to a large degree was founded by puritan religious fanatics fleeing deserved persecution in Europe, their greatest wish being to impose their harsh and totalitarian views on others and burn more witches in the New World. Our founding fathers, some two hundred years later, sick of religious squabbling and sobered, attempted to establish a union based on other more humane principals than divine revelation and retribution.

The early years of the United States were marked by a competition of fundamentally different ideas as espoused by Jefferson and Hamilton. Jefferson hated cities, money, political parties - while Hamilton pointed out you couldn’t run a country without banks, stable currency and a bureaucratic infrastructure. That the nation was soon further divided between an industrializing cheap-immigrant-labor-dependent North and an agricultural slave-based Southern economy, further split the country.

The Republican Party, partially founded by Lincoln, had as one of its pillars, the abolition of slavery. Lincoln was their first presidential candidate, but after Lincoln’s murder, the party quickly went astray, bought and corrupted by men made rich during the Civil War. From the 1870’s on the party became a coalition of rapacious big railroad, steel and oil interests in the east, smaller businesses in the Midwest, but pretty much non-existence in the South. Thirty years later Teddy Roosevelt made a valiant attempt to reform the Republicans, to fight brutal monopolies and trusts, to bring pure food and drugs laws, to establish national parks, and he accomplished much but failed at even more. Meanwhile the Democrat Party strength was with whites in the south who were working to keep the now-freed blacks from rising above their station – as well as with recent immigrants in the north-east who were struggling to organize unions.

Thirty more years would go by and Teddy’s distant cousin, Franklin, finally triumphed over the Republicans battered by the Depression. His Democratic party was revitalized by his building of a coalition of urban and rural workers, the unemployed, the poor, immigrants and minorities. His establishment of public work projects to give employment such as the W.P.A. helped get America back on its feet. For the next thirty years the Democrats further changed and strengthened America, with the establishment of Social Security, Medicare and the Federal enforcement of the end to segregation and black voter prevention in the South. Truman, Kennedy and Johnson further worked to purge racism from the Democratic Party.

The Right was out in the cold from 1933 to 1968 when Richard Nixon’s brilliantly cynical tactic, the so-called Southern Strategy, split the votes of the rural poor in the south, appealing as it did to white racists and die-hard segregationists as well as fundamentalist Christians. Thus strengthened, the Right in America was able to gain and hold power for much of the next 40 years.

America is a special country. While in most other industrialized and semi-industrialized countries, the poor and the working class are left-wing, supporting unions and leftists parties and policies. In America, the working class – at least in rural areas – is proudly right-wing. Why? Perhaps the tantalizing hope of the American Dream – You, too may some day be rich – propels the dreaming rural white poor into fearing taxation and government interference? “I may win the lottery some day and I don’t want the government to take it all to pay for my unemployment and health benefits today.” Such is the logic of the poor whites of the Red States. Naïve? Short-sighted… or very long-sighted?

The Right’s comtempt for Washington and politicians in general is easily explained. When you so often and so easily and so cheaply buy and corrupt politicians why should you respect them? Reason enough for the Right to proclaim its distrust of government (..but only when it is out of power.) The Right’s mantra is a scornful mocking of anything to do with Washington except for the military, the intelligence services, the prison system, or local or national police forces. You will never hear the Right criticize these institutions, except for occasional accusations that they may be showing a tendency towards namby pamby leniency when liberals are in office and at the helm. No, the Right is generally all about the gleeful and unashamed show of force. For them the Pentagon is a paragon and prisons are better expenditures than schools, and soldiers and cops better role models than teachers. Uniforms, whether they be football, SWAT team or Green Baret are symbols of unabashed masculine assertiveness.

Why? Why the love of power symbols?

The powerless rural whites have always and will always long for power, long for the symbols of power, toughness and invulnerability. Guns, gas-guzzling muscle cars. The N.R.A. and NASCAR have replaced the KKK. “We don’t whine – we brag, we shoot!”

Now, to be fair, some rural people do need to supplement their diets by hunting. And when you find your home being burgled repeatedly by meth-crazed predators and the nearest police station is 60 miles away, you, too may want to hide a 12 gauge under your bed.

And you may gladly and gratefully vote for Senators and Governors bought and paid for by mining and mineral interests, as these companies are often the sole employers for a hundred miles. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, my home town, the biggest employer and the only one paying a decent wage is Haliburton. No wonder the Right holds power in the rural states. They are often the only ones who actively ignore environmental and health laws in order to dig up the minerals and thus provide jobs. To tell the blue collar workers of the Red States they don’t know which side of their bread is buttered insults and does not convince them.

The master manipulators of the Right play the rural poor as if they are playing an organ. Emotionalism is the framework, combining blind high school football rah rah my-country-right-or-wrong patriotism, primitive religiosity, racism, fear, envy, anger, resentment. Into the awful blend is the incessant mocking of the weak, women, gays, minorities, in order to feel more manly, powerful and safe.

That there is also emotionalism on the Left is also true – and also something that evidences itself in primitive outbursts and frozen prejudices. But as the Leftist loyalists noted forlornly after losing to the Right-wing Franco in the Spanish Civil War, “They may have won but we had the best songs.”

There is more in this sad aside than otherwise might be realized. The proof that the Right is a twisted and stunted thing, a force for no good, is evidenced by the glaring fact that there is no such thing as great Right Wing music, art, literature, humor.. or anything celebrating humanity. The Left may stumble and occasionally do evil things, but the motivation comes from a good place, the desire for universal kindness, sharing and freedom. But when the Right does good, an exceedingly rare occurrence, it is usually for the wrong reasons and immediately regretted by them. “Do good? We don’t want to start looking like pussies now!”

Fear is a motivator and a unifier for the Right, just as it is for the Left. But while the Left fears environmental disaster, poverty, overpopulation, depleted resources, racism, sexism, xenophobia, war – the Right laughs at them. Instead the Right fears emasculation, taxes, bureaucracy, big (non-military) government, foreigners, and as H.L. Mencken once said of the Puritans, “They harbor the fear that someone somewhere may be happy..” if that someone is not of their own gated community.

The racism and xenophobia of the Right is a multifaceted thing. For example although the Right may fear blacks who are also poor, one can see an odd phenomenon in action. An African dictator, black as coal, who has robbed his nation blind, may well be welcomed with open arms by rich white racists in Palm Springs – for he is a thundering success, a self-made man.. and even better… he succeeded by massive cheating. A man to be truly admired!

For an honest understanding of the Right it helps to recognize the legitimacy of their fears, exaggerated or not. Right wing death squads throughout Latin America exist for a reason, the real fear and possibility that the landless poor will overwhelm the rich property owners, seize their lands and murder them in their beds – something Robert Mugabe has urged his poor black followers to do to the white ranchers of Zimbabwe. That the property-owning Right fears the poor is natural and understandable. But that they also despise the poor is less so. Perhaps in order not to weaken, to show sympathy, it’s necessary for the Right to also mock and scorn the poor. Sympathy is weakness – and weakness is a cardinal sin on the Right.

In many ways the followers of the Right are a more honest group, motivated by the most basic primative instincts. To fear the foreign, the different, is the same instinct that prevents us from putting unknown substances in our mouths. We distrust to survive. But to move on, to progress, takes exploration and an honest measurement of results. The Right fears change because they cannot control and rule it beforehand. Instead they seek only to consolidate their own gains.

Those on the Left who believe in kindness, sharing, progress, and envision a better future for mankind, operate out of hope. Those on the Right have no naïve optimism. They see all too much evidence (in themselves) that people are self-serving, treacherous and need to be herded and ruled with an iron hand. Alpha males must win and decide for the greater good of the herd. Sympathy is equated with vulnerability. Efforts to protect the environment, to improve health care, to ensure the basic human rights of minorities, women and homosexuals are all regarded as “Evil Liberal attempts to destroy America.”

Having recognized all this what can us so-called Progressives do to try to diminish the numbers of souls foolish enough to fall into the hands of the Right?

Very little, I imagine, as the rural poor white population need jobs, educational opportunities – and something other than the meager choice between the church, the saloon and the high school football game as gathering and unifying places.

The same with the black population of inner-city ghettos. As long as there are no jobs and the only gathering places are churches, bars and crack houses, poverty and crime will continue to rule.

But the sad fact is, when the Right looks at black ghetto life and the high proportion of crime, it smiles, confirmed in its belief that it is somehow more moral, clever, destined to rule, that blacks and other minorities are designed by the hand of a white God to be inferior.

And when we Lefties look at the worst excesses of the poor rural whites, the KKK supporters, the gun nuts, the snake handlers and the xenophobes, we are smugly confirmed in our beliefs that these are inferior souls, to be rightly despised and dismissed.

Until we can instead do something to change the reality of poor rural whites, the Right will continue to use them as voter fodder, canon fodder and general dupes. And as long as the military will take anyone, the rural poor will continue to praise it.

M-M-Good?

This has been a Marvelous Month. First Iran faced a Mutiny when MahMoud AhMedinejad contested Mir Hossien Moussavi for the presidency. Then poor broke and broken Ed McMahon was perManently evicted from Beverly. Then Governor Mark Stanford snuck off to do the horizontal Mambo in Argentina only to do a Mea culpa when caught. Then Michael Jackson hung up his penny loafers, followed by actor Karl Malden, war criMinal Robert McNaMara, Murdered football star Steve McNair, info PitchMan Billy May and Gale StorM, TV's My Little Margie.

Marilyn Manson and EMineM.. lock your doors!

If You're Missing Her Already

..view


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npwT7EW3fA0

Who Killed More People?

Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun?
Or Colonel Harlan Sanders?

I'm just asking..

The Organizational Advantages of Stupidity

Let’s face it; stupidity is not only relative but it’s a dangerous subject to discuss.

Political correctness dictates that pointing out the intellectual deficiencies of others is not cool but arrogant – and yes, discussing stupidly is usually a self-defeating stupidity in itself. But I assume I may avoid some condemnation and hostility if I quickly include myself in the category of the spineless and the intellectually lazy and dimwitted. So let me emphasize I speak here not from arrogance but from chagrin.

May we proceed?

All systems, religions and mass movements depend to a great deal on the stupidity of those who are to be organized and led. Naturally one element of this repeated focus on the unreflective, is motivated by the organizers’ joyful contempt for the intellectually lazy. But this understandable contempt is in no way the sole or even major reason for the eager concentration on the manipulation of the intellectually lazy. In fact, the “stupid” are a boon to organizers for several reasons, the primary of them being the cattle-like herd mentality of a major part of the population. The dumb or the ignorant are more easily manipulated, and often times they can be more quickly protected by benevolent organizers who scare and/or lie to them. After all, people who are set to march in lock step, rarely step on each others’ toes - while the more intellectually curious and independent members of society usually move stubbornly and suspiciously in different directions, usually at cross purposes, and often to little positive effect.

Religions in particular deliberately rely on the most illogical of superstitions, the underlying idea being that everyone can understand a dumb idea or be enchanted by a colorful fairy story – but only the intelligent minority can fathom an intelligent idea. Indeed many will point out that America’s great economic and lasting political success is a result of two simple and truly democratic factors: advertisers and the mass media’s skill at dumbing down and reaching the lowest common denominator – as well as religion’s show business-like appeal to the naive citizenry. For example, if our organizers can convince us to (pretend to?) believe in a superman who walked on water, turned water into wine, raised the dead and so on, our organizers are assured they can convince us of anything.

The dissemination of ludicrous beliefs serves many purposes for organizers. For example, should the brave individual ignore peer pressure and stand up and say, “Nope, sorry. This Adam & Eve, Jonah & the Whale, Jesus escaping from the tomb are no more true than the tooth fairy,” the individual will be quickly spotted and weeded out – and in America such a self-exposed unbeliever would never be able to win a major public office. Mike Huckabee’s denial of evolution was no disqualifier for the highest office in the land, but my disbelief in virgin birth or that the earth is a mere 5,000 years old makes me immediately disqualified! Astoundingly we modern Americans still require our leaders take part in our general primitive superstition-based belief system and they are further required by us to debase themselves in our common self-humiliation. Our leaders must resemble us even in our idiocy.

America, of course, is not the only country or society ruled by the iron hand of lock-step superstition. The entire Moslem world adheres to a doctrine whose very name mean submission. But submission to what? Of course the Koran contains elements of sin-not-and-love-your-brother, as do all other religions. But Islam, like all other religions, contains anti-logical and often hateful dogmas that humiliate instead of merely humble anyone who professes to believe in them. One need not dwell on the martyr’s reward of 72 virgins nor the entré into heaven on a flying horse to further prove the point.

However, one thing to always keep in mind when examining Islam, Christianity or even Communism, is to try to determine what daily life was like in these places before these religions and philosophies were developed. Generally speaking there is plenty of evidence that daily life was even worse. Much worse. The degree of murder, human sacrifice and brutal exploitation was so much greater before these ameliorating religions and political systems were invented. Sacrificing goats instead of people fortunately came to be regarded as a great step up the evolving spiritual ladder. There is method in our madness. Why do many Moslem countries continue to cut off the right hand of thieves? Because for thousands of years there was no effective capitalism and bureaucracy that could raise taxes to build and maintain enough prisons. Penalties for crime had to be swift and cheap – and free food and lodging for miscreants was not an option. Nor were mug shots of thieves on post office walls possible, so the missing hand was the kindly authorities’ warning to citizens to beware the transgressor.

One has to wonder why America, the “free-est” nation in the world has by far the highest number of citizens in prison in proportion to the population. No other country comes close, not poverty ravaged countries or environmentally devastated lands. And when it comes to murder and violent crimes America again leads the world. Why? Because our very freedom lends itself to greater abuse? Perhaps. But even the most biased patriot would have to admit that most nations in Europe and other parts of the world such as Australia and New Zealand, Costa Rica, Japan and more – all have great degrees of personal and political freedom that nearly equal or even surpass that of Americans. Yet their societies see only a miniscule fraction of violent crime. Why the difference? Perhaps as is often pointed out, America is still a young exuberant country. We’re all teenagers at heart, puerile youths who refuse to grow up, juvenile delinquents who excel at throwing destructive temper tantrums? Sure we’re generally good-hearted teenagers. We love gadgets and toys, monster trucks and Macey parade floats. But too many of us are poisoned by the macho gun totting John Wayne myths of the old west and back when a man was a man. For example, conflicts in movies rarely end in reconciliation and we seem only to be satisfied by gunplay or fisticuffs (..fisticuffs! Isn’t that such a delightfully old-fashioned word? Like doilies or spats!) Sadly today it’s not uncommon to see a TV fight end in decapitation or disembowelment! And you will have noticed that villains in movies are never carted off to long years of incarceration much less rehabilitation. Nay, the bad guys are always killed in the most painful and gruesome way possible. Our civilized sense of justice demands it. How privileged we are. Each of us has an electronic Roman Coliseum in our living room with gladiators entertaining us with their deaths each evening!

Fortunately officially sanctioned political violence ebbs and flows somewhat. The last fifty years of American foreign policy have seen fluctuating popular opinion. Usually 15 or so years after a disastrous American intervention such as the Viet Nam war, a new generation of young and ignorant lunkheads, believing war to be much like the joyous antics of rival high school football teams, allows itself to be riled up and energized by propaganda and distortion, by unctuous praise of how brave and noble it is, and it finds itself shipped off to sacrifice life and limb until sobering reality sets in, and we wait 15 or 20 more years for revulsion and memory to wear off and our fearless leaders can begin again to find a new horror to involve us in.

Some might cynically suggest that the only way to delay, minimize or prevent wars or mass murder is to combat the stupidity with counter stupidity. Ronald Reagan once famously remarked that if the nations of the earth suddenly were confronted by a hostile invasion from space we would all quickly unite for once. One can almost picture his imagining of how big and elaborate the sets would have to be in order to fool the public into believing such a uniting invasion has begun!
Yes, a common uniting idea would be welcome. And a uniting idea based on logic and grown-up maturity would be even better. But it doesn’t look like any such ideas are gaining favor. Al Gore may have gained a great deal of temporary attention pointing to our disastrous environmental habits, but no one is going to give up consumerism until there is nothing left to consume. Certainly not China and India. And Americans behave sensibly? Pull the other one.

Everyone needs to belong to some group, some family, some gathering where one feels welcome and appreciated. And if one can find no other welcoming group, one can always find a church of snake handlers, a coven of white robed racists, an underground cell of bomb-building martyrs, or a gated community of the heartless and scornful rich that will welcome one to the group as a loyal member. The lonely, the homely, the intellectually anemic can always find a home, for there will always be organizers ready and willing to exploit our longing for respect and for a safe haven. And these good shepherds, whether they be Tony Robbins, Dr. Phil, Osama Bin Laden, Donald Rumsfeld, Jerry Falwell or Jerry Springer, will always concoct new and endlessly entertaining fantasies for us to numb our fears with so that we can bask in our common self-sacrificing humiliation.

Does it take an apostle of doom to predict that in about 30 years the world will see roaming bands of vigilantes, avenging gangs burning, looting and murdering in their search for scapegoats, for the guilty to blame for our growing economic chaos and environmental ragnarok? Who will be blamed next time? The Jews, the capitalists, the environmentalists, the intellectuals, the Liberals, the Moslems, or us Atheists?
Better have your gun cocked and ready. And consider joining a group. There are plenty of them who want you.

Music Maker Faces the Music

Phil Spector has always struck me and others as the ultimate spoiled brat - rich, famous, manipulative and vengeful from his teens.

But I have a private theory. I think his fondness for threatening hundreds of people with guns comes from the fact that as a child he may have desired one of those gag guns that a flag pops out of saying BANG!

If only his parents had bought him such a harmless toy none of the following would have happened. The poor guy has just always longed to see the same expression on people’s faces they would have exhibited if the BANG flag was suddenly produced by the jolly producer. Sadly real guns are easier to get hold of than ancient gag guns.