Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • Rude Behavior Redux

    What follows is an old post from my original website, back in 2005.  I’m reposting it because of a revisitation.  Yesterday I had a knock on the door and there were a couple of people from some small church, spreading the good news.

    Now, there is irony here, because I’ve just started reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.  I didn’t read it when it first came out because it received so much attention and there was an enormous quantity of posturing, both pro and con, regarding it, that I decided to wait till the furor died down.  Besides, it’s not like I needed convincing on this point.  But I appreciate well-reasoned arguments and in the last couple of years I’ve become acquainted with Bart Ehrman’s work on textual criticism, so last month I spotted both the new paperback edition of The God Delusion as well as Dawkins’ new hardcover on evolution, The Greatest Show On Earth.

    So 150 pages into The God Delusion, my Saturday is briefly interrupted by two well-meaning folks wanting to save my soul.  I did not let them linger.  “I’m an atheist,” I said.  Their faces fell and I smiled.  “Don’t worry, it’s not catching.  Unless you have a functioning brain with more than a smidgen of education.”

    The man frowned, the woman continued to look alarmed.

    “I have one question,” I said.  “I see you have a Bible with you.  Have either of you actually read it?”

    “Of course,” the man said.

    “Really?  The whole thing?  All the way through?”

    “Well…” she waffled.

    “In that case would you please tell me why Jesus has two contradictory genealogies?”

    They both looked baffled.

    “Matthew and Luke,” I said.  “You have read them?  Matthew One has a genealogy and Luke Three has a genealogy, tracing Jesus’ lineage back to David.  They contradict.  I was wondering why.”

    “No, they don’t,” he said, flipping open his Bible.  This was too good to be true.  He found the one in Matthew and skimmed it.  “Okay.  Luke…?”

    “Three.”

    He flipped to that.  Found it.  Read it.  Looked up at me with a puzzled expression.

    “They aren’t the same.  How come?  I mean, if this is supposed to be inerrant—I assume you believe it is?—then how come they don’t match?  Just curious.  And one other thing, while we’re on that point.  If Jesus was supposed to be the son of god, how come both genealogies trace him back through Joseph?  Because Joseph is only his step-dad.  How come they don’t go through Mary?  I’m just curious, I’ve never heard a good answer to that.”

    The man started to look angry, but the woman actually asked, “What do you think that means?”

    “Well,” I said, “it means someone got something wrong.  Either that book is not inerrant like you think it is, or it’s just a bunch of bullshit.  Have a nice day.”

    I shut the door.  Rude?  Perhaps.  But as I explained in the following essay, I feel the rudeness is first manifest on their part.  So without further ado, I will proceed to my thoughts on the occasion of a visit from some Jehovah’s Witnesses back in 2005…

    *******************************************************************
    The other day, two nice ladies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my door.  This was, in fact, their third visit.  On the previous two, they had spoken with Donna, who was polite and nice and somehow left them with the idea that they had a potential convert here.  They had left literature and apparently decided to return.  This time, they got me.

    I don’t like proselytes.  I don’t like telemarketers either.  I see them as essentially of the same species of intrusive “you don’t know what you want because you don’t know what I’ve got to sell you” school of bullying.  I don’t like aggressive salesmen.  If I’m wandering through a store, and someone approaches with a polite “Are you finding everything okay?  My name’s Mike, if you have any questions…”  That’s fine.  If I have questions, I’ll go find Mike or whoever and ask.  If I don’t, and he approaches again, my inclination is to leave.  He’s stepped over the line as far as I’m concerned.  Telemarketing is worse–I’m not even in their showroom–and religious proselytes are from one of the circles of hell.

    Here’s the deal: to knock on your door and present you with salvation, they have to make a basic assumption–that you have no clue about the nature of reality and even if you think you do, you’re wrong, because they know the skinny on god’s plan.  In other words, they have to assume you’re stupid, ignorant, or tacitly in league with evil.

    If I walk into a church to hear the services, maybe some of this assumption has some basis–if I weren’t looking for something, I wouldn’t have walked into the church.  But I’m in my home, minding my own business, and there comes a knock on the door.  They have come to find me, to tell me I should be in church–theirs–and that they have brought with them the Good News.  They have interrupted my time, intruded on my day, and have insulted me besides.

    I realize most people may not feel this way–the insulted part.  For most people, such visits are just an annoyance.  Something about it bothers them, maybe, but it’s an ill-defined unease, and they’d just as soon forget about it after the missionaries leave.  If they had wanted to ponder the ultimate questions, they’d be doing it somewhere else–like a library or, even, a church.

    Proselytes, however, never assume you have done this.  And if you have, and your conclusions are other than what they have to offer, why, then, you have slid into error.  You must be saved.

    When they showed up, I recognized them from their two prior visits.  Donna was napping, so I decided to deal with them.  I really didn’t want them coming back, and neither did Donna, so I decided to take the time to convince them they weren’t going to find receptive minds here–in fact, they would find active minds that had already dismissed their message as more of the same old rubbish.

    Rubbish.  Dare I call it that?  Why be polite?  It’s rubbish.

    In specific, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were founded in 1878 by Congregationalist minister Charles T. Russell announced that Christ had already returned–invisibly, four years earlier–and that the world would end in 1914, when the Final Battle of Armageddon will occur, after which only 144,000 people of all those who have ever lived with reappear in heaven.  (In 1884 he started the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society to spread this message.)  Russell died in 1916.  He might have thought Armageddon was taking a long time to be fought, as Europe had turned into the bloodiest battle ground in memory.  He was succeeded by Joseph Franklin Rutherford, who officially called the movement Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, in 1931, declared in a fit of prophecy that “millions now alive will never die.”

    The original date of Armageddon and the End of the World passed 17 years earlier, but the difficulty of getting the date wrong has never bothered proselytes of apocalyptic faiths.  They just move the date forward, with each new prophet, each new error.

    The whole emphasis of apocalyptic groups is on death and destruction.  Everything is about to go up in flames, come crashing down, blow up, dissolve, melt, disappear, perish with requisite rivers of blood and torment.  All this comes from the Book of Revelation, which is the centerpiece of such movements.  I guess they really like all that metaphysically and symbolically bizarre imagery.  The rest of Scripture seems so tame in comparison.

    So while the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a specific example, in general there are dozens if not hundreds of these little sects, all preaching that the end time is nigh and we’ve got to get right with the lord.  Rubbish?

    Indeed.

    But I wanted to make a larger observation about insult here.  They come to your door and insult you.  You should be insulted.  You should take offence.  Because at base they are flat out telling you that your life has no meaning.  Never did, never will–unless you accept their version of reality.  Even then, everything you’ve done up to that point is irrelevant and error-filled.  Empty.  Devoid of meaning, pointless.

    It’s insulting.

    They asked me if I had ever been a church-goer, and I explained that, yes, one time I was a Lutheran, but that had been dissatisfying, so I went on a search for a different faith.  I went through a short list of all the different religions I’d visited or given a try–Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, Bahai, Krishna, Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal–after which I came away satisfied that they were all incomplete, wrong, or, more fundamentally, based on the same misapprehension of the universe.

    (You might ask, have I not just insulted them by suggesting that what they do is pointless?  No, because I don’t go door to door trying to convince people they’re wrong.  There is more than one reason to practice a religion, more to faith than doctrinal purity, and who am I to judge someone else’s method for coping with the world?  I may write my opinion down and even publish it, but no one is forced to read it.  My conclusion is all mine and if someone asks, I’ll express it.  The insult is in the intrusion.)

    One of the ladies asked “Don’t you think you were searching for something?  Why else would you have gone looking like that?”

    Good question.  And at the time I was searching.  But I don’t believe I failed to find it.  I did find it.  I found an answer.  But the impulse to search is more mundane.  “We’re raised that way,” I said.  “We live in a culture where not to believe in something is unacceptable.  From the time we’re old enough to understand English, we’re told about Jesus and that it’s a good thing to go to church.  Just to fit in, one feels the need to belong to some kind of congregation.”

    I don’t think they expected that answer, because they had no come back.  Besides, it has the virtue of being true.  Most people, I think, attend a religion for social reasons.  They were raised that way, and really, what harm does it do?  You can see this when Big Issues shake up a congregation, like over the question of ministering to gays or something, and the less doctrinaire manage to accommodate the change while the real fire breathers pick up their toys and go somewhere else.

    This is not to say that all those people don’t really believe in god–but you don’t need an organized framework to have faith.  You can believe in all manner of thing without attending a church based on it.  The church part is social.

    We got into the specifics of biblical prophecy.  They showed me passages they thought referred to present days.  Of course, they were so vague they could refer to any period at any time in history.  I pointed this out repeatedly.  I asked why they thought these passages meant now rather than a thousand years ago.  “Today, it is a global civilization.  Then, it was just one small area of the world.”  Well, that was a wrinkle I hadn’t thought of.

    But “The World” is an adaptable phrase, and for each generation has a slightly different meaning.  Back when the bible’s books were being written, “the World” was that local slice.

    The vagueness of the passages did not impress them.  When I told them that the battle of Armageddon had been fought long ago, at a place in the Levant called Megiddo, they didn’t know what I was talking about.  I explained that the infamous battle took place in 609 B.C.E. between King Josiah of Judah and the Egyptian King Necho II.  It was said to have been the bloodiest battle ever fought up to that time.

    (Now, the British under Allenby starting their final offensive in 1918 at Tel Megiddo against elements of a retreating and regrouping Turkish army.  It hardly qualifies as the Last Battle–the British took 36,000 prisoners at a loss of only 853 dead.)

    Armageddon, then, was already a historical event when Revelations was written.  It was in the past, not something yet to come.  Now, King Josiah had been one of the last great reforming kings of Judah–his death at this battle was symbolic of ultimate calamity among the Hebrew.  It is difficult to explain to people who don’t bother to learn about biblical history that Time is fluid in prophetic literature–the past and future easily swap ends, what happened will happen, and just referring to an event that has happened in the past is intended as part and parcel of an æsthetic tradition (rather like quoting an old piece of music in a new composition to underscore a connection, make a point).  What the writer of Revelation was talking about was the fall of Rome, which was at that time very much The Beast, and the calamity to befall Rome was on a scale with the calamity of Josiah’s death.  Of course, this being a Hebrew prophecy, Israel would come out on top–not unscathed, though, as only 144,000 Jews would survive to inhabit what was left.  We can assume the number is so low because of the cabalistic tradition of assigning mystic significance to numbers.  Twelve is such a number.  There are 12 tribes of Israel, 12 X 12,000 = 144,000.  What always seems forgotten by contemporary christian sects like the Witnesses is that this refers to Hebrew survivors, nothing else.  The number is low in real terms, probably as a nasty judgement on the part of John of Patmos that only 144,000 of the Chosen were doctrinally fit to be saved.  In any case, its significance is probably lost to the current politics of the days in which it was written.

    To take Revelations as anything other than the political and mystical polemic of a dissatisfied Hebrew living under Roman rule (specifically under Nero) is to assign it importance all out of bounds with its original intention.

    Neither of these ladies knew or accepted that John the Divine, composer of Revelations, was not John the Apostle, putative brother of Jesus.  Neither of them had the least grasp of biblical scholarship, nor did they care.

    They continued showing me passages.  They asked what I relied on.  “Reason,” I replied.

    “And what does that give you?”

    “It gives me a basis for understanding what I can control and what I can’t.”

    More passages.  I wasn’t giving them answers to which they had set responses.  I dismissed each passage and finally the older of the two asked, “We’ve shown you our proof.  Show us yours.”

    “Certainly.  What kind of proof would you accept?”

    “Nothing you have can possibly contradict the word of god.”

    “Then why should I bring it out?  You’ve already made up your mind.”

    And so it went.

    They finally left, I hope more than a little befuddled.

    They had shown up on my doorstep with the best intentions.  They were going to try to save my soul.

    Why is this insulting?

    Because it makes a whole raft of assumptions about me–or anyone they approach–that they can neither know or have a right to meddle with.  They have to assume that I am ignorant, that my life is empty (or just naggingly incomplete), that I thirst for something I have never tasted before.

    I could turn it around and start discussing physics, or biology, or neuroscience.  I’m quite sure they’ve never brushed up against the more intriguing wonders of nature.  On the contrary, they’ve shut themselves up in a room bounded on all sides by a dogged certainty that nothing outside can possibly be of any relevance or interest.  The certainty of the closed mind.

    When I showed them the contradictory genealogies in Matthew and Luke, that describe completely different lines of descent for Jesus, they dismissed it as a “Jewish thing, tracing from both lines.”  That didn’t make any sense to me.  I pointed out that both genealogies ended at Joseph and that if taken literally, this meant that Joseph had two fathers.  Would they accept a genealogist’s report that suggested they had two different fathers?  That point seemed to shoot right by them.  I didn’t even bother to make the larger point, that if this was the word of god, and literal, then the lineage should have been traced through Mary, not Joseph.  That would indeed have been revolutionary in its day, running counter to tradition, and leaving future generations to ponder the significance of this one instance where a lineage was traced through the woman.

    As I said, closed minds.

    The desperation of the proselyte is sad.  There is so much in this world, so many wonderful things, that to turn one’s back on it all in order to hawk a third-class ticket to an afterlife that is doubtless nothing like anything imagined, if there is one at all (which I very much doubt) is pathetic.  We know we have this life.  Why waste it on pursuing the salvation of those who probably don’t need it?  Why waste it on the pretzel logic of religious interpretations that leave you in no position to grow?

    But I won’t start knocking on doors to ask this question and offer an alternative.  I believe we all have choices and that they should not be coerced.  I believe the salesman should leave you alone until you have a question.  I believe telemarketers should leave you alone in the evenings.  I believe proselytes should stop assuming we’re all idiots.  They should understand that their seeking me out that way is really offensive.  I would never presume.

    But, as they say, this is all preaching to the converted.

    At least I didn’t force anyone to hear the sermon.  I may not believe in god, but I’m polite.

  • Events and Events

    Hard to believe it’s mid-October already.  Last weekend I was in Columbia, MO, for the MCB annual Celebration.  I’ve talked about this before—History and Fiction: Dueling Narratives—and all I’ll add here is that the programming for the day was marvelous.

    Turnout was another matter.  It wasn’t embarrassing low, to be sure, but it wasn’t up where I’d hoped it would be.  We have a lot to learn about proper promotions.  But it was generally successful enough that there is no question about next year, which will be—

    MISSOURI GENRE.

    I sort of grabbed the title out of the air at the last board meeting, just so we could all start thinking about it and working toward it, and to make sure everyone understood that we have a program (even though we don’t, exactly).  I’ve already enlisted three writers to appear.  Katie Estill, who has two novels to her credit, the most recent one, Dahlia’s Gone, is quite a bravura piece of writing.  Not genre, not exactly, although it does involve a murder.  But in a way, mainstream is a genre insofar as it is recognized as distinct from all other “genres” like mystery or romance or science fiction.  John Lutz, a local mystery writer of considerable reputation, who wrote the novel on which the movie Single White Female was based.  And Robin Bailey, talented fantasy author and former president of SFWA.  I figured having them on the bill would be a good, solid foundation on which to construct the rest of the program.

    This will be the last Celebration in which I’m directly involved as a member of the board of the Missouri Center for the Book.  Come April of ’11 I shall be leaving the MCB, per the by-laws.  So I hope this one will nail it up good.

    I really enjoy being on panels and doing presentations.  I can’t claim to be exactly comfortable in front of an audience, but I like it, and occasionally I even do well.  So in future I hope to be doing more of that and less planning.

    Assuming, of course, I also have some new novels to promote.  I’m still waiting to hear.

    I’ve got another month or two of regular unemployment, then there seems to be some kind of extra rigomarole to go through to get the extensions.  I have a prospect that won’t come in till January.  We’ll see how that all works out.

    I must say that all the presenters we had at this last Celebration were excellent.  The talks were first-rate.  We must solve this attendance problem, because people are missing out on some really great stuff.  Tenacity.  I’ve already put some things in place that I have to follow up on next year in terms of radio presence and such.

    Meantime, I have one more major gig for the MCB this year—the book-to-film panel at the St. Louis International Film Festival.  I have obtained a copy of the novel in question—Woe To Live On by Daniel Woodrell, which is out of print—and I need to read it beforehand and make up my list of questions.  We’ll have Scott Phillips on stage to talk about converting novels to screenplays and a Civil War historian, Louis Gerteis, to do a little commentary on the subject of the novel, which is the Civil War in Missouri (which was particularly nasty).  Ought to be a great event.  The film is Ride With The Devil, of which a new director’s cut is being released in a couple of months.  Early Toby MacGuire work.  This will be on November 15th, probably at Washington University.

    Then I will be immersed in my own work for the rest of the winter.

    Oh, boy.

  • Casting Call

    I’m feeling kind of antic this morning, so I thought I’d play a little fantasy game.  Most writers, whether they admit it or not, indulge in a game of imagining who would play what part in films from their books.  This comes almost second nature to me, since from an early age I started reading with a movie playing in my head and I would cast the parts.  (My most successful casting job was Michener’s Hawaii—I got just about every part right but one, that of Rafer Hoxworth.)

    So I thought I’d post my choices for casting in movies from some of my books.  What I’d really like is for people to post their choices in comments.

    To start with, Compass Reach.  The part of Fargo has changed over the years, from a youngish Daniel Craig to Robert Carlyle to  Ioan Gruffud (all Brits, imagine that) to more recently Jamie Bamber (another Brit) to my current choice of Ryan Phillipe (an American for once).  I still think Daniel Craig would be good.  But Fargo is mercurial that way.

    But for Lis, one actress just leapt out at me the moment I saw her and I exclaimed “That is Lis!”  Franke Potente

    Haven’t seen anyone yet who’d do better in the role.

    Stephen, of course, is another mercurial one, but I finally settled on James Marsters (yeah, Spike of Buffy fame).  He’s it, I think, for the stricken telelog.

    Metal of Night is a bit rougher.  For Cira Kalinge I have two actresses in mind.  The first is Indira Varma of Rome fame, but the other would be Nia Long.  I have one actor in mind for the dual role of Alexan and Nicolan Cambion and that is Johnny Depp.  Name dropping perhaps, but there it is.

    But for Merrick…ah, yes, my ongoing spymaster/corporate magnate/mover’n’shaker.  Again, just one actor—Tim Roth.

    Tim Kang as Tory Shirabe, Ralph Fiennes as Maxwell Cambion, and for the berserker part of Venner…Rufus Sewell

    Peace & Memory has a larger cast and more possibilities, but the actress I have in mind for Tamyn Glass…well, bear in mind that I think if this film has a chance in hell of being made, it won’t be for ten years, by which time she’ll have grown into the part.  Eliza Dushku.  Which is a bit of a cheat, because everyone else I have in mind would be cast in a film made, say, tomorrow.  At one time Sigourney Weaver would have been a shoe-in, but in SF she’s too much Ripley, so it would be Ripley playing Tamyn, and that might not be a good fit.  However, as an alternative more in line with what I have in mind, someone like Angela Bassett would be good.  But this is up for grabs, really.  I’ll stick with Eliza as an image.

    Joclen would be well played by Amanda Righetti

    Kevin McKidd for Benajim Cyanus.  We can stick with Tim Roth for the discorporate Sean Merrick.  Then we come to the pivotal role of the prophylactic, Piper Van.  I have a couple of names in mind for that, one simply because I like her—well, I like them all—but she has demonstrated an ability to do the physical side:  Marley Shelton.   Perhaps a bit too “girlie” for Piper, but as I say, I like her.  Katie Sackhoff  which after Battlestar Galactica and her performance as Starbuck might be a bit obvious, but she’s got the presence to carry off the part.  A less obvious choice would be Thandie Newton.  Piper is supposed to be enhanced and, therefore, deceptive.

    Naril Van, Tamyn’s lawyer, would be well played by Mary McDonnell,  but I could also see her played well by Mary Steenburgen.  Don’t know which I’d prefer.

    Fisher, the bad guy, I’d cast Jonny Lee Miller.  Not, perhaps, an obvious choice, but thin about it, he’d do marvelously.

    Which brings us to Ryan Jones, Bool Nooneus, and Elen ap Marik.  Ryan I think should be played by Robert Conrad of Wild Wild West fame.  Or The Black Sheep.  Or a gazillion tv movies.  But take a look at more recent pics and he looks perfect.  Nooneus, just to be antic, would be Stephen Fry.

    Then there is Elen, the woman who falls for Benajim and has such, er, interesting modifications.  She’d have to be someone who could carry it off with one artificial eye.  My choice?   Maybe I’ll leave that one blank for now and see if anyone comes up with someone for the part.

    That’s the Secantis Sequence and certainly not all of the parts.  It would be fun to see what people thought of the secondary and tertiary characters, who would be good to play them, but also the alternatives to my list.  There are several characters I skipped in this, but we can revisit the topic later if it’s fun.

    Ah, fantasy.  Now, who would I get to direct…?

  • Blitzen

    Another very old image. Found this, much to my surprise and pleasure, in a box through which I was searching for something else entirely.

    This is Blitzen, my first dog. As a kid, my only dog. Blitzen was a shepherd-collie mix and we got him as a puppy and I adored this dog. We were very much a standard-issue boy and dog team. I used to sleep on the floor with my head on Blitzen’s chest. Blitzen was a great dog.

    blitzen.jpg

    Well, we got Blitzen when we lived in our own house on Wyoming, which had a big backyard. My dad trained him—I was about five when we got him. Then we moved. For many reasons I still don’t entirely understand, my parents sold the house and we moved into the first floor apartment below my grandparents on Michigan, still in South St. Louis.

    It was not a big apartment. Not that it mattered to me. I was vast and contained multitudes, my imagination was more than enough to make up for cramped quarters.

    And I had Blitzen. We were buddies.

    Until about fifth grade. Maybe fourth. Whatever. I came home from school and Blitzen was gone. Mom told me they had seen Blitzen trying to get outside when I was play wrestling with my friends and they thought if he ever did he’d tear someone apart, because he clearly didn’t understand the difference between playing and real. I wailed. My dog was gone. I was utterly inconsolable.

    Worse—though it didn’t hurt nearly as much—it was a lie. One of the few my parents ever told me. I found out the truth just a few years ago. Basically, Blitzen terrified my grandmother—who was not a particularly nice lady—and she demanded the dog be gotten rid of. Her building, her roof, her rules.

    Dad never said a word about it. Mom told me the story, because she didn’t want me resenting my grandmother. But it made more sense this way. Blitzen was a good dog and obeyed me. But he apparently didn’t like my grandmother. His radar was pretty good.

    Since owning my own house now with Donna we’ve had two dogs—Kory and now Coffey—and I loved ’em both. Coffey especially reminds me a bit of Blitzen, though Kory actually looked like him.

    But you never get over your first dog.

  • On Time and Great Legs

    I’m pretty lucky.  No, I don’t believe in luck, unless it’s the ability to recognize the confluence of circumstances that result in specific outcomes, good or bad (hence bad luck), and thus act upon the result.  Luck is a description of things which occur or accrue to one without (seemingly) doing anything to effect them.  So, by that gauge, yeah, I’m pretty lucky.

    For example, my companion.  This coming spring will mark 30 years for us.  Unbelievable.  I lucked into this.  But I recognized it, acted upon the recognition, and, with the exception of a few periods of absolute boneheadedness on my part, the normal stresses of a long-term relationship, and all that other stuff, these three decades have been wonderful.

    I was going through some old photographs, looking for something to scan and post, and I found this.  It was on the occasion of Donna’s sister’s wedding.  This is about 1990, I think.  I don’t think I need to tell you that I think she is one sexy woman.  I still think so.  No, we don’t quite look like this anymore, but she still has great legs, and as I am, as they say, a Leg Man, that is just fine by me.

    donna-and-me-1990.jpg
    Like I said, I am a lucky man.  And pretty happy, too.

  • More Doors

    (Robin Trower is jamming on the stereo as I write this.  Just sayin’.)

    I feel the urge to write something, but no one topic presents itself with sufficient weight to dominate a whole entry.  What to talk about, that is the question.  That poor guy who got tied to a tree in Kentucky was on my mind last week.

    Census takers have, in certain parts of the country, been lumped in with so-called “revenooers” (to use Snuffy Smith jargon) and generally threatened, shot at, occasionally killed by folks exercising their right to be separate.  So they assume.  Appalachia, the Ozarks, parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, Texas…a lot of pockets, populated by people who have, for many reasons, acquired a sense of identity apart from the mainstream, and who feel imposed upon if the gov’ment so much as notices their existence.  They’d have a point if they truly did maintain a separate existence, but they don’t, and hypocrisy is the least amenable vice to reason.  At one time it was bootlegging, today it’s drugs, either marijuana or meth.  They don’t seem to get it that if they contribute to the erosion of the public weal then they forfeit the “right” to be left alone.  I really believe they don’t understand this simple equation.

    But do I believe that poor man was killed over some disagreement over politic hegemony?  No.  He knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time and asked the wrong question and some good ol’ boys killed him.  Scrawling “Fed” on his chest was probably an afterthought, and means about as much as had they written “Cop” or “Fag” or “Stranger.”  Whoever did it probably thought he was being cute.

    I would point to this and say that anyone who thinks America is free of its terrorists, its fundamentalist jihadists, its unreconstructed semi-literate hate-mongers, its pockets of intolerance where just walking down the street wearing the wrong clothes can get one hurt or killed, then a closer look is necessary.  Like such groups and people in foreign climes, the motivations for these folks are many and varied, from religion and political purity to money or sex or just bitter resentments.  The binding characteristic is that they hate—not with a red-hot, spikey, enraged hate, but with the harsher, tamped-ash, slow-burn deep hatred of constant gauging, you to them, ranking those who belong against those who don’t, an ever-present, seething, low-grade fever of hate that informs every single thought and action.  It’s not so much that something triggers it at the moment, causing an aberrant act of outrage as that they start from a coal-bed of resentment and rejection that they take as “normal.”  That makes them harder to understand for most people.  The default position for these folks is to despise you because you aren’t like them, and may the ‘verse help you if you have any education, erudition, any sense of a larger civic ecology, and grasp that reality is more than the pathetic network of familial connections that hoards sentiment and incubates the drowning phobias of in-group solidarity and guarantees a cyclic affirmation of hopelessness.

    From this, though, I would point out one thing that we tend to forget in America, in the West, that open-mindedness is always based on resources.  There must be enough, more than enough, to make people comfortable.  Apocalyptic fiction is frightening not so much because the physical world crumbles, but because everyone accepts in the absence of Enough that the small bits and pieces, an apple, a loaf of bread, a piece of sheeting to cover your from rain, a drink of water, is always sufficient reason to throw Plato on the fire and give up on solving problems.  People, it suggests, lose morality, even love, when they’re hungry and frightened enough.

    I have a house-full of books.  I just got a few more yesterday.  The pile of unread tomes grows, and it makes me feel rich.

    Many years ago, a cousin of mine had to live upstairs from us, with my grandparents, because his mother and father had moved to a county where this cousin did not meet the local school standards.  He would have entered their high school a grade behind instead of graduating that year.  So he lived upstairs and attended his alma mater so he could graduate.

    I ended up having to look out for him.  He was stupid.  Not in that he lacked intelligence, but he had no concept of how to apply it.  He reacted.  He did things without forethought.  He got in trouble.  Consequently, he got me into some trouble.  I was not stupid, so the degree of trouble for me was minimized, confined to the problem of what to do with this kid.  I quickly reached a point of wanting him out of the house.  Which meant that sometimes I did his homework.

    I hadn’t had much contact with my cousins for years.  There were many reasons for this I won’t go into, but basically they were strangers to me.  They were cousins.  Fine.  Big deal.  So what?  This is perhaps a blindspot with me, but frankly family as a concept doesn’t mean much to me.  I was raised to earn friendship, regardless, and I expected it to be earned in turn.  The conditions are immaterial and vary wildly, but just laying a claim on one’s affections simply because you happen to be related is not an idea I subscribe to.

    So this kid was, while I “knew” him, pretty much a stranger.  One evening we’re conversing about this and that and we got onto the topic of sacrifice.  He proudly declared that he’d risk his life for me.

    “Why?” I asked.

    “You’re my cousin.  You’re family.”

    “So?”  He looked puzzled so I elaborated.  “Okay, say you find out that I’m a drug dealer.  The police get onto me and it looks like I might be arrested or killed by a rival.  You’d fight both for me because we’re family?”

    “Yeah!”

    “You’d stand between me and the police.”

    “Yeah!”

    “You’re an idiot,” I said.

    He looked hurt.  After a couple minutes, he asked,  “You wouldn’t do it for me?”

    “If you were a drug dealer and I found out, I’d turn your ass in.”

    “But I’m family!”

    “And if I’d never met you before?  You grew up on the east coast and you’ve just come here and looked me up for the first time.  We don’t know each other from Adam.”

    “We’d be family.”

    “That’s nuts.  You don’t know me.  I could be the worst person on the planet and you’re telling me you’d risk your life for me.  Would you do it for____?”  I named someone we both knew, unrelated.

    “No.”

    “What if he was the one who’d become the scientist who cured cancer?”

    He shrugged.  This was getting beyond his personal calculus.

    No, I don’t actually think consanguinity is sufficient reason to extend any more consideration than you would to a casual acquaintance, certainly not to someone who has become a close friend.  One of the reasons, I suppose, I have no children.  Blood is probably an evolutionary trait to guarantee the success of a given DNA, but in society it is often turned to abuse, an excuse to overlook all sorts of shortfalls.  I might have felt different had I had brothers and sisters, but I hope not.

    I recently read a novel called Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.  It’s a harsh, unpleasant story of Ozark backwoods familial tyranny.  I understand it’s about to be released as a film.  It portrays the kind of chains family imposes under the most obscene kind of filial blackmail, the way it is used as an excuse to not only forgive but defend criminality, brutality, ignorance, and the perpetuation of a siege mentality that cannot afford to embrace anything genuinely moral.  It is at core an argument against a concept of family that holds sway over so much of the human race.

    But it also shows what I mean when I say all moral behavior rests on resource.  Having enough.  Having, perhaps, more than enough.  The irony, of course, is that the mindset that such entrenched poverty and the oppressive familial code that seems to emerge in its depths pretty much guarantees that those so trapped will never step outside to find a way to cure their condition.  Entropy.  Energy always ebbs in a closed system.  For growth you need outside energy.

    Sometimes the best way to help a situation is to leave it.  Perhaps what the world needs are more doors.  Open.  We have, perhaps, enough rooms.  We need more doors.

  • The Keyboard I Didn’t Buy

    I came within a few synapses of buying a keyboard today.  An old Yamaha, double-manual, polyphonic ensemble—portable, with a stand.  No amplifier.  There was a time I would have fallen all over myself to get one of these for under five hundred bucks.  This one—sitting on the grass in someone’s back yard, part of the swag obtainable at the annual neighborhood yard sale we attend—was going for twenty-five bucks.

    And I passed.

    Couldn’t change my mind, either, a young fellow was right behind us and snatched it up.

    Now, I could say that I passed on it because I never buy a keyboard without trying it out, to see if all the notes and pots work, to see, basically, if it both sounds good and feels right.  Feel is very important in these matters.

    But that would be waffling, really.  I didn’t buy because…well, why?  I’m going to be 55 in a few weeks and my days of gigging are more than thirty years past.  I do not play well enough anymore to justify having more than the one piano I have—an instrument, by the way, the capacities of which I have yet to max out.

    I play at playing music.  Way, way back in the distant past, there was a period of a couple of years when I could sit in with other bands, could do a reasonably good evening of rock-n-roll with some classical stuff thrown in for the oohs and ahhs.  I played every day, usually for three hours, often more.  I wanted to be Keith Emerson.  I could do a couple of the less complex ELP tunes.

    But I did not have all the other requisite drives to make it as a professional musician.  I hate dealing with the business side, for one thing, something I confess to still dislike.   I am not constitutionally equipped to make money.  I wanted to play music.

    But I also wanted to play the music I wanted to play and the fact is that as in everything else one does to make a living, you don’t really often get to do what you want to do—you have to please the customer.  And I lost patience with the pathetic musical taste of my so-called audience back then.  I—and the guys playing with me—would break our backs learning some really cool piece of choice music (something by Genesis, say, or Yes or, one time I remember, something by Premiata Forneria Marconi—and if you do not know who they were, go check them out, for your musical education is lacking) and put it out there at a gig and receive lukewarm response and a request for something from the Doobie Brothers.  Not that I dislike the Doobies, mind you, but it just wasn’t up there, in my opinion.  Actually the audience just wasn’t up there.

    So I walked away.  I sold all my equipment and said to hell with it.  Didn’t play for several years.

    We bought a piano in 1989.  The last gig I’d done was about 1977 or 78.  I had forgotten damn near everything.

    But I hadn’t bought the thing to relive glory days or revisit tunes I could enjoy easily on the stereo—I’d bought it to do what I wanted to do.  So I wrote a few pieces, played in the mornings just to reset my mood for the day, jammed, really.  Over the years, I have occasionally picked up a piece of sheet music and worked at it, but basically I play a kind of pretend music.  In my mind it is.  It’s kind of like Keith Jarrett, who improvises everything he does.  Of course, Jarrett is marvelously skilled and educated so his improvisations are fascinating, intricate.  Mine are a bit redundant.  I’ve developed a suite of a couple dozen motifs that I can mix and match and then just sit down and rip on them.

    People listening, when I’m in a groove, think it’s amazing, and the structure is such that most of them think I’m playing something they just can’t quite recognize.  But it’s a rudimentary form of jazz freeform.  Middle-level musicians enjoy what I’m doing but know it’s more or less fake.

    Oddly enough, the few really good musicians I know love listening, because to them it’s just spontaneous composition and they’ve worked very hard to get to a point where they can do the same thing.  As long as I don’t play too long, they’re actually impressed.

    About once a month, if I’m not doing anything else, I play at a small church open mic from January to August.  The audience is small, they never have requests, and they think I’m pretty good.  At least, they clearly enjoy themselves when I play.

    And that’s enough.  I’m playing.  I’m playing from the heart.  I’m playing what I want.  I don’t really need much more, though sometimes I’d like more.

    So why did I pass on the yard sale keyboard?  Because two keyboards means more discipline.  It means I’m getting serious about doing music that I no longer do.  It means—to me, from inside my skull—that I have to knuckle down and practice and prove I deserve to be playing.  It means pressure.

    There might come a time I decide, because I really want to, that I need to get my chops back in a serious way.  But not now.  I’m concentrating on my writing.  That’s the work that needs the lion’s share of my attention.  If I start playing music three or four hours a day again, I’ll short-change the important stuff.  So I passed.  I don’t need it.  I’m okay with where I’m at with what I do with the music I make.

    Besides…where the hell would I put it?

  • Some Art

    Time for a little art.

    Once upon a time, in the distant past, I had ambitions to become a comic book artist.  I wrote and drew my own.  My models…well, I am very much a fan of extreme realism, so some of the less mimetic, more representational comic art leaves me unimpressed.  My idol when I was a kid, trying to do this, was Russ Manning.  He was the ne plus ultra of comics technicians, and not only because of his superb style, but for the substance of the comics he did.  Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. was just about everything I ever wanted in a comic book, along with its spin-off, The Aliens, which did not last very many issues.

    There were others I liked.  Dan Spiegle,  who did Lost In Space (before the lamebrained television series and long after it) among other things.  And of course the wonderful Alex Raymond of Flash Gordon fame.

    There was a time, when I was drawing every day, that I got fairly good.  But then photography came along, then I went back to writing, and the rest, as they say….

    But I still do art occasionally.  Now I think that rather than doing comics, if I’d stuck with it, I’d do illustrations.  That leads to a whole other pantheon of greats.  In the last couple decades, I sit down to doodle or sketch when I need a break.  It’s fun and relaxing and I feel no pressure to accomplish anything beyond satisfying my desire to create something cool.

    Below you’ll find a new drawing.  You may be able to tell from the technique that I’m a Virgil Finlay fan, though nowhere near his legendary abilities. Below the main, finished, illustration are thumbnails of the work-in-progress.  I posted these as they were done on my Facebook page, but I thought I’d put them all up here.  (Click on the thumbnail and you can get a larger view.)

    I’m going to hang several pieces this year in the Archon art show.  I don’t have room to keep everything, but I’ve scanned the pieces into the computer and I can print them out later if I want.

    Anyway, enjoy.

    stage-5-final.bmp

    Thumbnails of the process below.
    stage-4.jpgstage-3.jpgstage-2.jpgstage-1.jpg

  • Poor Misunderstood Right Wing Nut Job

    Some people seem to dissolve into their worst attributes over time.  There is a seige mentality that develops, it seems, and from within the bastions and barricades the fever dreams of the misunderstood and disillusioned take root and grow into horrible, twisted things.

    I don’t care much for people who are constantly running around trying to scare the rest of us with apocalyptic prognostications.  The sky is falling, yes it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it.  Who can hold up the sky or keep the stars from falling?  Not me and it would appear a waste of what life might be left to spend my time fretting over it and ruining other people’s day telling them to not enjoy themselves because the impending catastrophe is of such significance that to ignore it in any way is to cheapen all human history.  Having a good time in the face of Doom is being, somehow, rude to the awesome relevance of said Doom.

    Everyone needs a hobby.

    Conspiracy theorists have found the X-Box of their desires within the serpentine confines of a world delimited by the constant back-stabbing one-up-manship of imagined black ops, coups, assassinations, and creeping ideological subversion.  I wish them good times playing with their toys.

    But occasionally they decide to rewrite history to justify their paranoia and depending on what it is they’re trying to sell by doing so, I get a bit less tolerant.

    A grand master of New Spin is Pat Buchanan.  He’s been misinterpreting reality since before his failed bid for the presidency.  In retrospect he is the ideal speech writer for Richard Nixon, for he must have shared Nixon’s conviction that the game is rigged and the Lefties are out to get us all from the beginning.  Do right by all those bleeding heart liberals and all they do is spit on you.  Open up China, establish the EPA, expand health care, and what do you get for all your efforts?  They pillory you for a little wire tap and the construction of a shadow government that could do end runs around Congress.  Ingrates!

    Pat has become more strident and marginalized since Reagan took office.  The tough American school of foreign diplomacy combined with the Minute Man ideal of self-sufficiency and rugged independence came to the fore, nurtured by an age that declared that all victims were just whiners and the only difference between a rich man and a poor man is plain hard work.  Pat blossomed.

    What fruit has this mutant liberty tree borne?  Well, he’s now ready to revisit Hitler and tell us how Adolph was just misunderstood after all, that he didn’t want world conquest (which is possible—he mainly wanted Europe and Russia) but peace and a strong Germany.  He makes his argument here.

    It is one of those things which one reads with  awe at the sheer balls of the premise. Clearly, Pat has taken Mein Kampf to heart as the heart-warming, desperate revelation of a tortured peacemaker who has been maligned and misunderstood by any and all.

    He claims in this article that Hitler sued for peace with Britain two years before the first trains rolled toward the concentration camps.  This is a deceptive claim.  But the specifics are less important than the overall argument.  Pat claims Germany invaded Poland in a dispute over Danzig.  One must then ask why one of the first acts after Poland fell was the construction of the camps.

    But the actual problem here is a complete and utterly ridiculous misreading of Hitler himself.  Hitler made it clear in many speeches, and in Mein Kampf, that his aims were for a militantly ascendent Germany.  The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935.  People were already leaving the country because they understood what Hitler was.  Berlin in 1936 had to be “made over” for the Olympics—antisemitic posters taken down, the presence of brown shirts and their ilk removed, and the camps placed off-limits for even official visits.  Oh, yes, there were camps them, around the major cities, but they had not quite yet become the exclusive depository of Jews—gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs of various ethnic backgrounds, and certainly politically questionable types filled them in stinking, horrid conditions that only foretold of what was to come.

    Hitler’s Reich in fact violated every single treaty it signed but one: its treaty with Japan that demanded it declare war on the United States in the event of war between the U.S. and Japan.

    I don’t follow the logic behind Buchanan’s reinterpretation.  I don’t know what he’s doing here unless there’s a latent holocaust denier lurking beneath all the other reactionary dross he’s acquired over the years.

    There is, however, an interesting point brought out in some of the comments appended to Buchanan’s post—that of Stalin’s somewhat “lighter” treatment at the hands of posterity.  As if by claiming that we don’t hold Stalin to the same standard of denunciation of revulsion, that somehow the opprobrium heaped upon Herr Hitler is, well, unfair.

    Well.  Stalin was as big a monster, perhaps bigger, than Hitler.  The only thing that makes them different is their nationalist aims.  Stalin seemed content to remain within the borders of the Soviet Union.  He slaughtered his own people, and he played no favorites in that regard—he was an equal opportunity murderer.  He did not invade Poland.  He did not start a world war.  Considering the wall of silence placed around his regime, without that war we might still not know what was going on inside the Soviet Union.  Stalin’s sociopathology was constrained, methodical, even in some sense rational insofar as he recognized limits.  Hitler was different.  Hitler was more than just a sociopath and as the war progressed it became more obvious.  It is appropriate that Hitler’s favorite composer was Wagner, for what do most of Wagner’s operas end with?  Gotterdammerung!  The end of everything.

    We’re catching up with regards to Uncle Joe, as Truman called him.  We’re finding out.  His atrocities were on such a scale, though, as to almost dwarf what the Nazis did.  But that’s a deceptive way to look at it as well.  What difference the numbers?  Eleven or eleven million?

    Even so, I don’t quite grasp the point of trying to rehabilitate Hitler.  Is Buchanan trying to lay blame on the Brits for jumping the gun?  Is he trying to point out the flaws in systems and networks of treaties that seem to draw us into disaster time and again?  Is he practicing moral relativism?  That would be a first for him.

    Whatever is going on, I think it behooves us to pay attention to the Nut Jobbery going on in our midst.

    We do live in interesting times.

  • Hating the Government: An American Tradition.

    G.O.P. Chairman Michael Steele made a few remarkably in-your-face comments recently about the health care debate.  Here, in his own words, is pretty much where he thinks the nation is going, why it shouldn’t go there, and what the Republican Party stands for.

    This morning on NPR  he tangled with Steve Inskeep, in particular over this.

    One quote in particular caught my eye:  ” Simply put, we believe that health-care reform must be centered on patients, not government.”

    When you listen to the NPR interview it’s clear that we’re hearing another in the now decades-long tirades against the government which has become the hallmark of Right Wing politics in this country.

    In this country, in theory, the government is supposed to be us, the people.  We elect our representatives, we tell them how we want them to vote, we change our minds, we are supposed to be in charge.  In theory.  Obviously, the reality is far from that.  For one, we are not a full-fledged democracy, we are a republic, and while we elect those who operate the machinery of the republic on our behalf, we do not have a direct say in the running.  Nor could we, really.  it is simply too complex.  We send our representatives to the various points of departure—state capitols, Washington D.C., county seats, city halls—to do that for us because it is a big, complex, often indecipherable melange of conflicting goals, viewpoints, and problems.  We do not have the time to pay the necessary attention to do that work ourselves, so we pay people to do it for us.

    So why do we distrust it so much?

    Well, because we distrust each other.

    No, really, let’s be honest for a few minutes here.  We make certain assumptions going into a polling booth that the results will lead to some kind of cohesive approach to the enterprise we view as Our Country.  It’s rather surprising how often that turns out to be the case, but it’s not at all what we may actually intend.  This country is a collection of competing factions, down to the faction of the individual in confrontation with everyone else, and up to the factions of whole states in conflict with other states.  We vote for people who will represent our desire to be safe from our next door neighbor.

    If that’s stating it too strongly, consider the reality.  Zoning laws are in place to prevent our next door neighbor from building something we don’t want next to us, be a bar, an art studio, a bordello, or just an odd-looking house.  I know, it’s supposed to regulate the conflict between residential and business, but in practice it’s a way to keep people out of our neighborhoods.  Used to be it applied directly to people, but that was determined to be unConstitutional.  Nevertheless, there are ways of manipulating housing costs, taxes, and other things to more or less accomplish the same thing—if we can’t keep people of different ethnic varieties out, at least we can make sure they have money, right?

    Of course, it’s a contest, and these ordinances are challenged all the time—it’s a see-saw, or a tug-of-rope.  My point is, the basis of it is the very American value of being free from your neighbor’s values.

    Go on up the ladder of issues.  The entire edifice of American self-image is based on the notion that a true American can—and must—fend for himself and that, in order to do so, he must be free from encumbrances wherever possible.  If you carry this idea to its extreme, you begin to see why there is such profound distrust of government, especially since the Sixties.

    To put it as bluntly as possible, the fear of Socialism is a hatred of being forced to be responsible for your next door neighbor.  The anger fueling the antipathy for most single-payer or universal health care programs in this country comes from a sense that these ideas by-pass self-sufficiency and limit the individual’s ability to be separate from people he or she dislikes.

    Now, I hasten to add that Americans do show a tremendous capacity for generosity.  We are sociable, we more often than not will turn out to help people in need, we have a history of spontaneous charity and rescue work.  The money we spend yearly on aid and relief through various nongovernmental agencies and even as individuals is enormous and makes my previous statement seem paradoxical.

    It is not a paradox.  It has to do with what we perceive as choice.  See, if I decide to help the family down the street, who have fallen on hard times, I will do so.  I may even corral a number of my friends and neighbors into pitching in.  And if we succeed in helping them out of a tough spot and they get back on their feet, we—at least I—won’t even self-administer a back-pat of congratulations.  Success is its own reward.

    But if it turns out, in whatever estimation you care to use, that the family we’re helping is beyond help for whatever reason, that perhaps dad is an alcoholic or they have a different problem that cannot be met or any of a thousand circumstances that make it appear they will never get out of their tough spot, I—and my neighbors—have the option to drop them as a cause.

    If we are administering that aid via the government, we can’t do that.

    We now must all remember the chorus of welfare stereotypes we have heard all our lives.

    Perhaps a little more telling, we must bear in mind the misapplication of the public weal in exactly those circumstances which have resulted in people doing worse.  Many a state welfare agency—it varies—had, at one time or another, qualifications for aid that did often leave people in worse condition.  In New York throughout the Seventies and much of the Eighties, to qualify for assistance, you had to have lost everything.  There was no assistance for someone who just need a little help to keep them in their house or their decent apartment until they could find a job.  No, you come back when you’ve been foreclosed on or the sheriff has dumped all your belongings on the curb, then we’ll give you assistance.

    This didn’t happen with Federal aid, but state.  Other things, usually the minority of instances where a bureaucratic glitch ended up costing a citizen dearly, that grew in the telling until it was a horror story.

    But it wouldn’t matter.  Because we have a fundamental problem with being responsible for people for whom we have no affection, to whom we feel we owe nothing, we fight against public programs that even remotely seem like Socialism.

    We have also been fed a steady diet since Vietnam of governments that run black ops on their own citizens.  The government is the enemy.  We can’t walk away or opt out.  It’s the government, what can you do?

    And sometimes it’s true.  I lived through a period during which our phones were tapped and I was followed home from school for a time by FBI agents, all because it was 1969 and my dad owned a gun shop.  Nothing ever came of it, everything my dad did was legal and above board, but the presence of the government was palpable.

    Americans want none of that.  We’re independent, self-sufficient, we don’t need your damn help or your damn interference.

    Look at the difficulties with education.  Parents resent state requirements to teach subjects of which they disapprove.  Never mind that it might be for the longterm best interest of everyone that their kids know something about real history, real science, or even just about their own bodies, “we don’t want the government teaching our kids things we don’t like.”

    But if the government moves against people we don’t like, we’re all for it.  We want the government to do something about drug dealers, pornographers, Ponzi schemers, toxic waste dumpers…

    Unless that happens to be our business that’s involved in the investigation and the new requirements…

    But basically we just don’t want the government telling us we have to pay for people we don’t like.  And never mind the reality.  never mind that our perception of certain people is skewed.  Fine, if that’s true, then eventually we’ll figure it out and fix it, but we’ll do the figuring out, thank you, and we’ll do the fixing.

    Never mind that it doesn’t usually work that way—if left to collective individual sentiment, we might still have slavery, the vote still wouldn’t be universal, segregation would still be legal, and you still wouldn’t be able to buy certain books in a book store.

    The danger here is that in arguing against a mindset that is in many ways systemically pathological, we overlook genuine concerns and embrace an all or nothing posture that will as readily dismiss workable solutions because they seem to appease a point of view we find ridiculous.  As in many such issues, the rational may be abandoned by both sides in the heat of ideological confrontations.  There is no question that many major institutions, erected at various times to meet problems that seemed about to overwhelm us, might have been done differently, more even-handedly, more sensibly if only the confrontation with the solution’s critics had not taken on an all-or-nothing extremism.

    Somehow, along the spectrum of The People to The Government, a disconnect has happened that will not yield to simple common sense.  Yet the same skepticism doesn’t seem to apply to corporations.  People hate individual corporations, cast them as evil, but somehow fail to see the corporate system as a problem.  The idea seems to be that if only XYZ Corporation were run more ethically everything would be all right—we never quite make the leap to seeing that the way corporations are is at the heart of the problem and that XYZ Corporation can’t run any differently by the very nature of its make-up.  Yet that is the suspicion we carry bone-deep about the government—that it doesn’t matter who is in office now, the government by its very make-up is evil.

    The result ends up being an abandonment of rational problem solving.  We’re presented with a false choice—a government solution or freedom.

    Back in the Sixties, Ronald Reagan made his political bones running for governor of California, and he took on a proposed national health care bill then being debated.  He called it Socialism and that if we allowed it then “one day you’ll be telling your grandchildren about the time when we were free.”

    The only thing you would lose, it seems to me, by using government as pathway to addressing certain social problems, is the freedom to turn your back on someone just because he or she doesn’t appeal to you.  You won’t be able to walk away from your neighbor.

    But then, your neighbor won’t be able to turn his back on you.

    Yeah, I’m idealizing.  But isn’t that what the G.O.P. is doing?  Stating cases that by their extreme ideological tone are caricatures of reality?

    I’ll leave you with this thought:  it may be perfectly natural to want to separate yourself and your family from poverty, even if that means pretending it’s not your problem.  Maybe it’s not, directly.  But we don’t live in a world where we have the luxury of letting the poor remain unaddressed.  Poverty and disease are linked.  Tuberculosis is making a comeback, and it’s the poor neighborhoods where it’s taking hold first, and some strains are now drug resistent.  TB itself recognizes no class.  Money won’t stop it.  Withold services from them and the kids in rich counties are increasingly liable to come into contact with it.  Poverty is an incubator.

    I don’t want universal health care because I’m such a great humanitarian.  I want it to protect myself and my family and friends from the epidemics history shows us germinate through the poor first.  Untreated diseases don’t just go away because they live in bad neighborhoods and effect people we don’t hang with.  Let that get started, then we’ll all find out just how self-sufficient we really are.