Random Flotsam and Trash

B

rian Fischer has wrongly “contended for years that the First Amendment, as given by the Founders, provides religious liberty protections for Christianity only” in defiance of the plain meaning of the no-establishment clause. He does admit that “[m]ost attorney types … think it covers any and all religions you can name.” It never seems to occur to him that there just might be a reason for this—that maybe he’s a clueless idiot, rather than that everybody else is wrong. I’m not totally unsympathetic; in my experience there are occasions when the consensus opinion is clearly in error. History books record massacres by Native American groups that never happened, for example, or that George Washington added the words “so help me God” to his presidential oath—which likewise never happened. When I was a kid we were taught that the Reconstruction governments in the conquered states after the Civil War were irredeemably corrupt, as ex-slaves, white trash, and carpetbaggers were allowed to vote and were even elected to state and federal office—but fortunately the Redeemers came along to restore the natural balance, sweep all this scum out and purify the political process. In later years I learned that a fellow named Dunning was largely responsible for this bizarre mishmash, and that a lot of his evidence was made up. More stuff that never happened. Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation live to carry on his demented views, however.

So, anyway, I’m not a big fan of present consensus as absolute truth. “What is this absolute truth thing?” the Moon asked in one of Dan O’Neill’s comic strips. “It’s a five-to-four decision by the Supreme Court,” the Sun replied. Exactly. Today’s absolute truth may well be tomorrow’s phlogiston. But still, if the consensus of people who actually know what they’re talking about is against you it at least behooves you to consider whether maybe, just maybe, they have a point. At the very least your evidence ought to be of the rock-solid variety, and not just random flotsam and trash flung from passing vessels picked up in the course of casual beachcombing.

Fischer’s evidence, sad to say, is distinctly on the flotsam side. His strongest item is the (alleged) opinion of the apparently backward school friends of his childhood who thought that “religion” meant “Christianity” in blissful ignorance that such beliefs as Judaism and Islam and Taoism existed. “Superstitions equally false and unknown” Justice James Kent once called them, when explaining why blasphemy laws could not apply to non-Christian religions. I suppose Kent’s snide dismissal of the beliefs of the majority of mankind might add to the weight in the scales on the side of Fischer’s notion, except that Kent was under no delusion that there were no religions but Christianity—he merely felt an unexamined contempt for them, compared to “the religion professed by almost the whole community”. (Not that he had a high opinion of Christianity; in private he is said to have put “vulgar superstition” and “the Christian religion” on the same level.) And he wasn’t writing about the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution, but New York State’s much weaker guarantee of religious freedom in its now-forgotten state constitution of 1777.

Yeah, Kent’s hypocritical embrace of a Christianity he despised may count for something I suppose, but I’m damned if I know what. Evidence of the confusion of people charged with enforcing the law in a novel situation, maybe, one where church and state were no longer united, as Bishop Warburton had proclaimed to be the ideal relationship, but separated. Disestablished, in the jargon of the time. The first congress had voted for disestablishment (at least at the federal level), but there were antidisestablishmentarians about, and they had tradition on their side—a tradition that stretched back to priest-kings of Sumer and the pharaohs of Egypt, who were gods themselves. The emperors of Rome were gods too, and the European kings ruled by divine right, sanctified by the authority of God’s personal representative on earth.

This unholy alliance had deep roots—in fact, religion was simply one aspect of state in Assyria and Babylon, the fraud part of the force and fraud that are the glue that holds society together. “[T]he first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe” as Christopher Marlowe used to say, if the informer who kept tabs on him is to be believed. Exactly. Without a supernatural sanction what on earth was to keep human beings from lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, and engaging in other decidedly uncivil behavior? This was George Washington’s point in his Farewell Address when he asked rhetorically “Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? … Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” In other words, educated men with a natural bent for it might be moral on their own, but the common folk needed “the sense of religious obligation” to keep them in line. A half century later Congressman James Meacham was still playing the same old tune: “Laws will not have permanence or power without the sanction of religious sentiment—without a firm belief that there is a Power above us that will reward our virtues and punish our vices.”

In consequence the whole business of detaching the church from the state was fraught with peril. Justice James Kent was concerned that “actions which go to vilify [the] gospels … are inconsistent with the reverence due to the administration of an oath and … tend to lessen, in the public mind, its religious sanction.” Scottish clergyman Edward Irving found the concept of dividing religion from government idiotic:

They talk like fools, and enemies of their country, who talk as if it were not the duty of the government of a country to intermeddle with religion: I say that the government which will stand neutral between Christ’s Gospel and the Papal Apostacy, or the Mohammedan imposture, or the Unitarian abomination, or other forms of anti-Christian doctrine, is essentially an Atheistical government, which hath cast off allegiance to Christ, “the Prince of the kings of the earth,” and to God who ruleth over the nations, to give them to his Son in full inheritance: and that king or government which affecteth such indifference, much more those which shew a preference to the unbelievers, will soon be cut off in the frown of God, and consumed in the hotness of his wrath.

So between keeping men in awe and averting God’s wrath there was plenty of room for panic. Needless panic, from the vantage of the twenty-first century, but you see—they didn’t know that. There were certain universals in human society—slavery, classes, the subordination of women, religious establishment—and meddling with any of them might well be the path to perdition. It’s what they were used to. It’s what they knew. These were the things that made society as they knew it run. Meddle with them and who knew what would happen—dogs giving birth to mastodons, maybe, or horses slitting the throats of their owners. Unnatural prodigies, anyway, Shakespearean in their proportions. Biblical, even.

And yet, the American Founders somehow managed to move past this. James Meacham, looking back on the progress of religious liberty, was impressed by the rapidity of the change. “[T]here can be no union of church and State,” he wrote. “The sentiment of the whole body of American Christians is against a union with the State. A great change has been wrought in this respect.” According to his somewhat oversimplified version of events up till the time of the Revolution “every colony did sustain religion in some form.” With some hyperbole he asserted, “Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle.” (As nobody was suggesting any sort of “war against Christianity”—the issue was the constitutionality of chaplains—this is a bit over the top.) And as he moved forward in time he asserted:

At the time of the adoption of the constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged—not any one sect. Any attempt to level and discard all religion, would have been viewed with universal indignation. The object was not to substitute Judaism, or Mahomedanism, or infidelity, but to prevent rivalry among sects to the exclusion of others.

Against this he contrasted his own time—the late 1850s—by pointing out that “now there is not a single State that, as a State, supports the gospel.” All denominations of Christians “have had their existence in the voluntary system, and wish it to continue.” Nobody wants to go back to the old days before the separation of church and state; no, “Every tie is sundered; and there is no wish on either side to have the bond renewed.” This was “a very great change to be made in so short a period—greater than, we believe, was ever before made in ecclesiastical affairs in sixty-five years, without a revolution or some great convulsion.”

Now Meacham is making a point, specifically that chaplains are permissible because of the general acceptance “that the ecclesiastical and civil powers have been, and should continue to be, entirely divorced from each other”. There clearly were Americans who did not feel that way; B. F. Morris would soon be producing his untidy compendium The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, and the National Reform Association proposing changes to the Constitution to restrict religious freedom to certain Christians. Meacham’s championing the idea of government-supported chaplains was itself, despite his efforts to show the contrary, a breach in the division between the ecclesiastical and civil powers.

Nor is the idyllic picture Meacham painted of unity at the time the constitution and the bill of rights were enacted well-supported. People who naively quote this passage as evidence never seem to consider how James Meacham, who wasn’t even born at the time, could possibly know that “the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged—not any one sect.” Examination of the debates of the time show a much more complex picture. What was Meacham’s source?

Similarities in wording strongly suggest that his source was Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. Consider these passages:

Probably at the time of the adoption of the constitution, and of the amendment to it, now under consideration, the general, if not the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state, so far as was not incompatible with the private rights of conscience, and the freedom of religious worship. An attempt to level all religions, and to make it a matter of state policy to hold all in utter indifference, would have created universal disapprobation, if not universal indignation.

The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment, which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government. It thus cut off the means of religious persecution, (the vice and pest of former ages,) and of the subversion of the rights of conscience in matters of religion, which had been trampled upon almost from the days of the Apostles to the present age.

The words in bold here are strikingly similar to the Meacham passage.

And Archbigot Fischer does in fact cite Story as evidence for his strange notions. In this rare instance he actually represents a source correctly, observing:

It's hard to get much clearer than that. The word “countenance” means “to accept, support, or approve of (something), to extend approval or toleration to.” So the purpose of the First Amendment was most decidedly NOT to “approve, support, (or) accept” any “religion” other than Christianity, including Islam and Satanism.

According to Joseph Story, anyway. This is not, however, to say that Story was under any delusion that the word “religion” meant Christianity—that’s Fischer’s peculiar construction—rather, he felt that the Constitution left the matter of encouragement of Christianity elsewhere. As far as the Constitution was concerned “the Catholic and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Arminian, the Jew and the Infidel, may sit down at the common table of the national councils, without any inquisition into their faith, or mode of worship.”

But just where did Story get the idea that “the universal, sentiment in America was, that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state”? Not, obviously, from direct observation; he himself was a child at the time he was writing about. I wouldn’t absolutely rule out the possibility that he had some memory of the debates going on among the adults of that time—I mean, I can recall something of the reactions of my parents and friends to the launch of Sputnik—but he could hardly have known much more than the views of a very small circle, rather than the universal sentiment he speaks of.

But Story didn’t base his claim on direct knowledge. No, in the best tradition of true scholarship Story cited his source. And that, as it turns out, is both good and bad. It’s good, in that we can check up on him, see what he had in front of him to conjure with. But it’s bad, really bad, in that his source doesn’t back him up at all. Indeed, it would be hard to get further from a source than Story did.

He gives his source for the first passage as “See 2 Lloyd’s Deb. 195,196.” And for the second we have “2 Lloyd’s Deb. 195.” These arcane hieroglyphs turn out not to be at all tricky to decode: Lloyd’s Deb is nothing more than Thomas Lloyd’s notes on the congressional debates, and we are supposed to pick up volume 2 and turn to pages 195–196. And when we do we find ourselves in the middle of the 15 August 1789 debate over the adoption of what would become the first amendment to the American Constitution.

I’ve written about that particular day’s debate before, as it is interesting to see these early congressmen at work crafting one of the foundation stones of the American republic, but there is nothing in the text to substantiate Story’s claim. Not one of the speakers is reported to have said a word about the government supporting or encouraging Christianity. The closest we get is Benjamin Huntington’s expressed hope that the amendment could be designed “to secure the rights of conscience” for the religious, but still discriminate against “those who professed no religion at all.” As no one else seconded his desire, and no attempt was made to incorporate this discrimination into the proposed amendment, it seems fairly safe to say that this did not represent the sentiment of the body as a whole.

Possibly Story has confused their concern that the amendment “not be hurtful to the cause of religion” with a desire “that Christianity ought to receive encouragement from the state,” although the two concepts are poles apart. There is a huge difference between “not be[ing] hurtful” and “receiv[ing] encouragement;” the first is passive and the second active, for one thing. And, as I’ve pointed out above, “religion’ is not the same thing as “Christianity” and Story is perfectly aware of it. Unlike the Archbigot.

And as for Story’s claim that the “real object of the amendment was … to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment” without tolerating “Mohametanism, or Judaism, or infidelity” the closest thing we get is James Madison’s observation that “the people feared one sect might obtain a pre-eminence, or two combine together, and establish a religion to which they would compel others to conform” and that its purpose was to keep congress from making “laws of such a nature as might infringe the rights of conscience, or establish a national religion”. And nowhere does he mention “Mohametanism,” Judaism, infidelity, or for that matter Christianity. The distinction that Story wants to make is entirely absent from his stated source.

Story’s motive for misrepresenting his source is fairly obvious. Indeed, he’s quite open about it. As a Christian, he is convinced that “it is impossible for those who believe in the truth of Christianity, as a divine revelation, to doubt, that it is the especial duty of government to foster and encourage it among all the citizens and subjects”. He therefore feels obliged to come up with some rationale, however inane, for allowing the government to do what the Constitution has expressly forbidden. Story’s solution, of course—based on his religion, and not his knowledge of jurisprudence—is to conclude that the framers meant for the states to impose Christianity upon their residents. As there’s no way of getting that from the preserved record, Story simply lies about it—and hopes that nobody will check up on him.

That such a transparent fraud will only impose on the gullible probably didn’t concern him. And apparently he was right not to be concerned—as long as there are credulous people like James Meacham and Brian Fischer around.

The Landlord and the Sharecroppers (guest post by Jesus of Nazareth)

A

 man planted a vineyard and put a hedge around it and dug a trough for the wine press and constructed a tower and rented it out to sharecroppers and took off. When the time came to get some of the vineyard’s produce from the sharecroppers he sent a slave out to them. They grabbed him and beat him and sent him off with nothing. Next he sent another slave; they beat him over his head and humiliated him. Then he sent another (they killed that one) and many others, some of whom they beat and some they killed. In addition he had one favorite son; he sent him at last to them saying that “They’ll respect my son.” But those sharecroppers said to each other that “This is the heir; come on, let’s kill him, and the estate will be ours.” So grabbing him they killed him and threw him out of the vineyard.

In Washington F.D for Fun and Profit

[A passage from The Motor Chums at Large, originally written 7 January 1973]

I

t was still early, and the sun was just beginning to touch the spires of the Capitol building with a ray of light. The Motor Chums marveled at the convoluted architecture and the fir-lined streets of America’s first city, where the affairs of entire nations were routinely conducted every day.

“This is something like,” exulted Ned, “We Motor Chums have been in a lot of strange places during our travels, but I never thought we’d come to this: Washington F.D.”

“Founded in 1790 by an accident of Congress,” Harry told them, “the capital city of the Federated States sits astride the mighty Potomac river, not far from Drake Bay. Washington was the first city to be planned expressly to rule a powerful empire, and is one of the glories of the civilized world. Build according to the DeGauss plan—“”

“Shut up and make yourself useful,” snarled Tom. “See if you can find the Smithsonian on this map.” He tossed the map to the aforementioned lad.

“Say, but that hits the spot,” observed Ned, finishing a sandwich, “I wish I had another plateful of ham and eggs, though.”

“I wish you did too,” agreed Tom, “for it would shut you up. Did you find the Smithsonian yet, Harry?”

“Yes, it’s right here, on the Street of Dreams,” point that lad.

“All right, let’s go find it,” said Tom.

“Yes, but where are we?” asked Harry.

“The sign says it’s the Street of Unsatisfied Desire,” Tom informed him.

“All right,” said Harry, “We go down the Street of the Lotus until we come to the Street of the Glorious Resurrection, turn left and keep on till we come to the Street of a Thousand Pleasures.”

“Sounds like the red light district,” murmured Ned.

“No, the Aaron Burr memorial’s located there,” Harry explained. “We turn right and keep on going until we get to the Street of Dreams and we’re there.”

“Let’s go,” said Tom.

“I think we should—ugh,” observed Harry. The interruption was caused by an abrupt collision with a mis-shapen giant which briefly knocked the wind out of him..

“Why’n’cha look where you’re goin’? demanded the figure.

“Sorry,” replied Fletcher.

“Dick!” exclaimed Ned, “It’s Dick Trefoil!”

“Yeah,” said the giant, who was now revealed as their long-time companion and fellow Motor Chum.

“How did you escape from the Smithsonian?” inquired Harry.

“Huh?” replied Trefoil.

“How’d you get away?” Ned wanted to know.

“Ain’t nobody going to stop me,” said the giant in surprise, “I just busted the cage and left.”

“It’s just like Payworthy to pull a stunt like this,” observed Harry bitterly, “Piling improbability upon improbability. I’ll wager we’ll next find Ashton and his cronies attacking the President on the street below.”

“There they are!” Ned shouted, pointing.

“No,” said Harry, “Not even Payworthy—”

“It’s Clarence Ashton and his cronies all right,” said Tom grimly. “They’re stealing fruit from that poor old lady’s fruit stand,”

“That’s just like the bastards,” put in Ned.

“That makes my blood boil,” cried Tom. “The idea of them following me to Washington. This has to be stopped once and for all. Those miscreants are up to no good, I’ll warrant.”

“Let’s get ’em,” suggested Ned.

“Yeah,” agreed Dick angrily.

At that the chums advanced rapidly down the street, to where the bullies were cruelly tormenting the old lady.

Clarence was holding her off while Alphonse shoveled armloads of fruit from the cart into a large sack. Ben Hangdog looked on, capering delightedly in the street and pouring out torrents of abuse. Passers-by paid scant attention to the little drama, perhaps being too engrossed in their own affairs, or perhaps merely inured to such sights.

Suddenly Ben caught sight of our heroes. His jaw dropped. “Holy shit!” he exclaimed, “It’s the Motor Chums!”

“What’re they doing here?” gasped Clarence, turning green. “Run, you idiots!”

But the warning came too late. The Motor Chums bore down on the evil-doers like avenging furies. “Take that, you toady!” shouted Tom, aiming a well-placed kick at Ben Hangdog.

Clarence Ashton, though a bully, was nothing like a coward. He handed a blow to Harry Fletcher that knocked him flat. Ned avenged this insult by pelting the miscreants impartially with apples.

Alphonse Notochord seemed to have no intention of fighting, but under the steady barrage of fruit he grew impatient. Seizing the lady’s purse, he hurled it straight at short Ned Eliot. Catching it deftly, Ned paused to extract some of the contents, only to be felled by a foul blow from Ben Hangdog.

Dick Trefoil, a powerful though unscientific fighter, was making his presence felt by beating the shit out of Ashton. So intent was he in this task that he failed to see Notochord slip behind him with a cement wedge, which he hurdled with force and accuracy at the giant’s head.

Things were going badly for the Motor Chums. “This won’t do,” decided Tom. From his pocket he extracted his electric knife and advanced quickly on Notochord, who backed off. But unfortunately Ashton, though pummeled and breathless, was still conscious, and succeeded in tripping the young inventor, who fell headlong, nearly impaling himself on the knife.

At that moment, when things looked darkest for the Motor Chums, Dick Trefoil rose to his feet, a towering pillar of strength. With a mighty shove, he thrust the fruit cart straight at Alphonse Notochord. The cart rumbled slowly, picked up speed on the slope, and passed over Ashton’s head, rendering him unconscious. Alphonse, stunned in horror, gazed at the contraption bearing down on him and gave a mighty cry. The cart hit him squarely, bounced over the curb, and carried him into the street, right in front of a moving automobile. The collision was tremendous. Apples and oranges scattered over the entire width of the street.

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Tom, “Let’s get out of here.”

Ned staggered to his feet and picked up the sack of fruit and the old lady’s purse. Dick and Harry were already running down the road adds fast as their legs would carry them. Almost miraculously, it seemed to the fleeing chums, a policeman appeared out of nowhere at the scene of the battle and wrote the old lady a ticket.

The four lads paused to rest beside an embassy building. “Why’d you tell us to run?” demanded Dick.

“Because we Motor Chums have no need of reward for our good deeds,” replied Tom sternly. “It’s the duty of every American to do at least one good deed every day.”

Ned paused in his task of counting the money from the purse. “Say Tom,” he exclaimed, “Look at this! I don’t know if it means anything—” He passed a note to Tom.

“Where’d you get it?” Tom asked him, examining it closely.

“Ben dropped it during the fight.”

Harry snatched it from Tom. “It’s signed Ignatius Baxter!” he exclaimed.

“So?” inquired Ned.

“Ignatius Baxter is the Industrialist Senator from our state!”

“What’s it say?” asked Tom.

Ned read it, with many a strut and grimace, to the delighted Motor Chums. “‘Ben Hangdog: Let me say unofficially that the Industrialist Party greatly appreciates your efforts in our behalf. You have done the Party a great service. However, to be there when the will is to be probated is a mistake. The meeting should be at Jefferson. All ten were there to-night, but those at Cincinnati were Roosevelt’s. If you come, bring help. Ignatius Baxter.’”

“What the fuck is that supposed to be about?” exclaimed Tom. “It sounds like gibberish.”

Ned examined the paper closely. “No, it’s in English,” he chuckled. “What beats me is what it means.”

“There was something in those messages we decoded about a senator dying,” recalled Tom, “Do you suppose that could be the will referred to?”

“Yeah, but what about the meeting? And the ten? And those at Cincinnati? It doesn’t make sense,” objected Ned.

“Well, one thing’s plain at least,” asserted Tom, “Ben Hangdog’s involved in some dark scheme of the Senator against the President. Besides that, it’s a deep mystery.”

“The hell it is,” observed Harry, “The note contains one of the most asshole ideas I’ve ever heard of. It’s in cipher, if so simple an artifice deserves the name. Even you should be able to figure it out.”

The three chums studied the manuscript earnestly for a time, and then Tom hurled it away in disgust.

“Well, I give it up,” he exclaimed, “It’s too hard a riddle for me. What did you make of it, Ned?”

“I’m as puzzled as you, Tom,” said the lad addressed. “Come on, Harry, give us the clew.”

“All right,” said Harry, “Try taking every third word.”

“I never thought of that!” laughed Tom. But exuberance gave way to puzzlement. “Let unofficially Industrialists appreciates in,” he read. “That’s some secret message. It stays secret even when you decipher it.”

“What about ‘Say the greatly efforts behalf’?” suggested Ned. “That seems to make a sort of sense.”

Harry controlled himself. “Start after ‘however’,” he put in.

“There will be a meeting at ten to-night at Roosevelt’s come Ignatius,” read Tom. “Harry, I believe you’ve hit it!”

“That explains everything!” exclaimed Ned. “Ben’s tied up with those conspirators and Orville Risley somehow. And we’ve got to prove it.”

“We came to Washington to warn the President,” observed Harry, “No doubt our information will prove of value in assisting the authorities to defeat the plot.”

“It wouldn’t be right to hog all the glory,” agreed Tom, “I vote we take the clews to Mr. Ingram, whom we did a good turn back in The Motor Chums’ Aerial Search, or Lost in the Everglades for Nine Weeks.”

“Let’s go,” insisted Dick. 

Overhead, unnoticed by the Motor Chums, there flew an aeroplane whose wing bore the emblem of a double-headed vulture. It circled three times and vanished into the smoke.

Witness to History Gone (another repost)

[Originally posted 6 January 2010]

T

sutomu Yamaguchi passed away on 4 January 2010 at the age of 93. You’ve probably never heard of him. In all the world’s population there are very few people who have survived an atomic bomb attack; fewer yet survived two of them. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was one of them.

On 6 August 1945 he went on a business trip to Hiroshima. The timing was particularly unfortunate; that was the day the Enola Gay dropped the first of the two atomic bombs used against Japan in the closing days of World War II. Over one hundred thousand people lost their lives in that single blast; Tsutomu Yamaguchi was only two miles from the center, and yet survived, though badly burned. After spending a night in an air raid shelter, he went back home to his wife and infant son. They lived in Nagasaki.

Nagasaki may not be as famous as Hiroshima, but it was the site of the second atomic bomb drop, on 9 August 1945. Tsutomu Yamaguchi must have just been settling in when it happened. Seventy thousand people died, but his family was spared.

Apparently 165 people are known to have survived both blasts. It’s an odd distinction, both unlucky and lucky at the same time. Unlucky enough to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time twice over, and lucky enough to have survived the horrors. Twice over.

It is probably due to the existence of people like Tsutomu Yamaguchi—living witnesses to the catastrophe of an atomic bomb attack—that any of us are alive today. Fire-breathing patriots on both sides of the Iron Curtain were all too ready to drop the big one and see what happened during the Cold War; if there had been no witnesses to tell of the consequences, might they not have prevailed? Hiroshima and Nagasaki stood in the way; they were monuments to what the rest of the world could all too easily become. Those who had witnessed the—what? Tragedy? Horror? The words are too feeble. These are the kinds of reactions that belong inside stars, not on the surface of our green and fragile planet. These witnesses had seen what none of us should ever have to experience, and maybe from them we learned enough to hold off on the consequences of an unlimited nuclear war. When I was a child I never expected to see 2010; that the great atomic war never happened may well be due in part to those who kept the unthinkable memories alive.

Like on Sunday (a Quasi-Repost)

[from my proto-weblog, 5 January 1998]

W

ell, I missed another day in reality, but it's still the fifth, and I’m still able to make this thing sort of work. I feel like garbage, and that St. Johns Wort stuff doesn’t seem to be doing anything for me. I need to get out of this somehow.

Let’s see … last night I was thinking of doing a piece about Like-On-Sunday—that bleak feeling I get when everything good seems to be shutting down and all looks hopeless. I had that again last night, and it really was Sunday night—or early Monday morning, which is the same thing as far as this feeling is con­cerned.

It all started, I suppose, with school. The weekly rhythm that is going to rule the rest of our lives first manifests it­self as the school week. At least that’s how it was for me. It may run even deeper than that for many people. If your parents work a Monday-to-Friday schedule then even before school Friday nights may be kind of special, and Saturdays and Sundays are more likely to be times for family excursions than say Tuesdays or Thursdays.

But it’s school that really makes this bastard rhythm per­sonal, that brings it home to you. There’s the grim moment when classes start on a Monday and you know damn good and well that there will be no respite, no peace at all, for five whole days. There’s that horrible feeling that goes with Wednesdays, when you have lost what little energy and enthusiasm you carried over from the weekend, and yet the end is still all too far off. And then finally, when all seems lost, there comes Friday afternoon with all its joy and bliss, when the weekend stretches out ahead of you in all its glory and time hangs suspended for a moment.

But for me—I always anticipate I guess—the most dismal part of the entire week came with sunset on Sunday. The weekend is over, all that is left is homework and getting ready for school, and then comes the final insult. The radio stations go off the air one by one, leaving me to the mercy of Christian broadcasting or random static. There is no moment so bleak as a decaying Sunday evening, when silence settles on the airwaves.

It’s a horrible end-of-everything feeling; there’s no reason to go on, no hope of a better future, nothing but empty babbling and static. Oh, there’s sleep—that’s the best thing about it—but even so, at the end of sleep come, yes, that’s right, Monday morning.

The actual arrival of Monday was never as bad as the antici­pation of Sunday night, in that at least you could keep busy and zip around without getting lost in contemplation. And once it came, you were actually counting down the hours to another week­end, however far off it seemed. Progress was happening. Of a sort. But it was progress.

But there was nothing to be said for Sunday night. Nothing positive at all. It was the pit of doom, the depths of nothing­ness, the end of time. And sometimes, now, that feeling comes back to haunt me, not on Sunday night necessarily, but whenever. In my journals years ago used to refer to it as LoS; an acronym for “Like on Sunday”.

About Cocoanuts (A Quasi-Repost)

[A note dated 4 January 1980]

I

 just finished watching Cocoanuts, an early Marx Brothers movie based on the musical of the same name by Kaufman and Ryskind with music by Irving Berlin and so forth. I’d like to look at I’ll Say She Is or whatever the earlier movies were—this is getting very close to the genuine Marx Brothers—that is, what they were like in vaudeville. Like a lot of their stuff this is an unhappy marriage between a conventional romantic melodrama and their own surrealistic brand of comedy. From what I’ve read in their various “autobiographies” and life-stories—of dubious reliability—I suspect their own stuff was looser and more free-form, a set of gags revolving around a situation with sudden incongruous shifts, than the material we see in many of their movies. The trouble with the combination is that they don’t work well together. Viewed as humor, the serious scenes (and songs) are places where the movie goes dead, as enjoyable as commercials; viewed as melodrama the humorous bits are impediments to the plot and irritating distractions. This probably resulted from the assembly-line approach of the time, with various specialists doing their thing largely without regard to the rest of the team.

The Moistness of Life

[Excerpt from my journal, 2/3 January 1997, written twenty years ago.]

H

orrific day. Got up fairly late, maybe two or three in the afternoon, and did various routine chores. Checked in on my father, who was much concerned over my suicide. I wanted to get his attention on the bill-mailing question, but couldn’t seem to get him to understand. He was arguing with his mother over the question of whether she was dead or not; she was apparently maintaining the contrary, and he appealed to me for my judgment on the question. Somewhere in there I ducked out to go to the bank, where I deposited my father’s Social Security check and his payment from OPB and took out two hundred dollars for household expenses, a process which involved activating my father’s Power of Attorney to me, then mailed the checks to PGE, PERS, and our former landlord, then came back. My father was now concerned about whether I had collected the insurance for his death.

Somewhere in here I narrated what I had done, telling him that I had mailed the checks from the mailbox on the corner, the one with the initials T-R-A-S-H on it, and that seemed to him just fine. He was concerned that I had not collected the insurance on his death, however. I was becoming increasingly worried; whatev­er this strange episode was, he didn’t seem to be coming out of it. He was convinced that he was dead, or that I had had him declared legally dead, or that he was in a state called “drying out, where the moistness of life is leached away.” (That last is probably true, but didn’t seem to concern him as much as one might think.) Once briefly in the evening he seemed to have a sane episode (during which time I retold the events of the day with the mailbox labeled T-R-A-S-H, which this time he got) while my brother was here, and he and I (with input from the night advice nurse and family members in various phone calls) decided to get my to a doctor the next day.

Well, I turned in around midnight or so, but of course couldn’t sleep. My father seemed to be getting worse if anything. I couldn’t get him to drink or eat anything, and at one point he observed that this was a rather strange conversation to be hav­ing, now that he had died. (It was at this point that the bit about the “moistness of life” came into it.) When my brother got here he called the advice nurse and we were advised to take him to the emergency room at Providence (we had a choice of hospitals and picked that one, actually).

We had a hell of a time getting him up and dressed and down­stairs and to the car, but we finally did. At the other end things were much less difficult; my father had settled down and was now very passive and acquiescent. He seemed a little vague and confused, and when the admission nurse asked him the year he said fairly confidently 1995, and then that the president was Carter. This seemed fairly ordinary to me; he says Carter for Clinton when he’s in his right mind. But to the next question, if he knew where it was his sons had brought him, he replied that it was a bomb shelter, which as far as I was concerned was completely out of the blue. He did better the next time, when they took him to the receiving room or whatever it was. He couldn’t come up with the exact day, but had the day of the week right, remembered that we were just past New Years, and correctly identified me (though only after a bit of prompting; he first said I was some relative he thought. I recognized from his manner that he was making a sort of joke, and said something like, “Aw, come on,” and he correctly identified me by name as his first-born son with the air of somebody reciting a well-worn lesson by rote).

Well, anyway, time dragged on with various flurries of ac­tivity for tests and then long pauses, and my brother and I ducked out for lunch at a not-too-far-off Subway. When we got back we heard from a doctor, who basically said that my father’s tests were fairly normal—which would be great if only he were fairly normal, which he’s not. They decided to admit him at least overnight for observation and for rehydration so to speak. So up he went to room 5R15 (I think) where my niece successfully tracked us down with a phone call. I tried to fill her in while my brother tried to fill in a form about my father’s home situation, and so it went. We talked to his nurse and his doctor, and so on. My father seemed to come up a bit in the evening, asking fairly in­telligible questions (which occasionally required decoding), one of which, however, was “Was there any shooting or bombing in the city?” We told him there wasn’t, which seemed to make him happy, though I heard from my niece afterwards that when she called him he was still on that subject, thinking that she had moved back in with her parents because she had been bombed out of her home.

Anyway, I went home, and I called my mother and step-father and filled them in, and then talked to my niece and then dropped out of consciousness in my own bed. Slept five hours or so.

Four Things that Make Me Want to Go and Read Something Else (Besides Reposts)

[This piece appeared here exactly two years ago and is reposted now because I am really out of words.]

I

’ve been amusing myself with various random idea generators for creating blog content. One of them seems to like posts with numbers in the titles, like Seven Ideas for Making Your Business Cards Stand Out, or Ten Simple Things You Can Do to Save the World. So I thought I’d give it a try, what with being desperate for content and everything.

So here is my list of four things that make me want to go and read something else altogether.

First (1) is, well, mean-spirited garbage about people in the public eye. Silent-film star now living on roadkill. Twelve beautiful celebrities who’ve had ugly children. There are legitimate stories about celebrities being serial rapists, or chronic users of performance-enhancing drugs, or whatever, without stooping to this sort of thing.

Second (2), stuff that shows an idiotic misunderstanding of basic science. There can’t be a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus because human beings aren’t putting carbon dioxide into its atmosphere. The second law of thermodynamics rules out evolution. Use of the metric system causes planes to crash. We only use ten percent of our brains. Nobody knows what electricity is. For Allah's sake, seventh-graders know better than this.

Third (3), oddball stuff that shows the writer knows nothing of equally basic history. The words “separation of church and state” do not appear in the US Constitution (but then, neither do the words “freedom of religion”). The Norse are said to have settled in North America before Columbus (no, there is evidence that the Norse settled in North America). The true authorship of Shakespeare's plays is a matter of controversy. FDR let the attack on Pearl Harbor happen to bring the US into the war. Rachel Carson urged a ban on DDT that caused millions of deaths from malaria. Israelite slaves built the Egyptian pyramids. The American Civil War was fought over conflicting interpretations of the Constitution vis-à-vis state's rights. There are legitimate areas of dispute in history without throwing out fringe notions as fact.

And finally, fourth (4), entries taking the form of idiotic lists. Like this one.

Anthrax IV

[Written and posted here eleven years ago, and reposted for no good reason.]

I

 was up last night late–late for me anyway, on my current schedule–to try to see the new year in. The new year, 2006. I didn’t make it, of course, but the explosions and shouting outside woke me up, as did my dog. I don’t think she liked the sounds; they worried her somehow. We staggered off homeward, she hiding under parked cars and making random bolts for obscure alcoves, and I pitching a little as the sidewalk tilted abruptly under my feet. It wasn’t actually raining at the moment, so we made it back relatively unscathed, and I collapsed safe and sound in my own bed.

The trouble is, when I awoke this morning and sprang to my computer to throw a few words at the word mangler here, the rest of the world had vanished. There was no blogger.com, no yahoo, no google. There was only one explanation, of course–during the night, while I was sleeping, a mysterious display of red meteors had turned most of the population into dust and reduced the rest to brain-eating zombies. I didn’t really feel prepared for that, so going back to bed began to seem more and more attractive.

I suddenly recalled the message I had received in my sleep a night or two ago. It had seemed vitally important, and I had made a point of trying to remember it until I could wake up. I had been standing in an ocean of water that came up to my ankles, a shallow ocean with no shores at all as far as I could tell. The water teemed with arthropods of all sorts, none more than ten inches long or so, and most much smaller. Brine shrimp size–sea monkeys, for those of you who may have wondered just what sea monkeys are. At that moment I heard a doom-laden voice make an announcement of such surpassing importance that I knew I needed to remember it until I woke up. I felt quite certain that when I woke up I could do something about it, but not till then. I fixed the words in my memory and dreamed on.

Well, of course that ocean and its clawed inhabitants dissolved into the dream-stuff of which it had been made, and new images surfaced. A sort of informal conference assembled in an outdoor campus-like setting to discuss the matter, and I told my story. There was a subdued discussion, and a man with an oversized top-hat assured me that the message indeed sounded important, and that my plan of remembering it until I woke up was a sound one. A girl suggested that I should make a point of repeating it to the people I encountered in subsequent dream-sequences so that I would not forget it. I was somewhat concerned about it becoming garbled in transmission, because the dream environment was not a good one for ensuring accuracy of the text. Keep repeating it, was the advice I received, and hope for the best.

And so I did. Later on I repeated it to members of my family as we stood in a dark-paneled room with an absurdly high ceiling. A brother–not a real brother, a dream-person who was labeled as my brother for the purpose of the sequence–a brother laughed, and said that it didn’t sound all that important to him. I agreed that it seemed sort of humorous now, but suggested that might be an effect of the dream-environment that we were in. My dream-brother said it wouldn’t do any harm to remember it, but it didn’t matter if I forgot it either.

And I repeated it again at some sort of party to a group of guests who were strangers to me, and they merely looked puzzled, and wished me good luck in my quest.

And I repeated it to myself while riding on a public-transportation device that resembled a raft on rails. I wasn’t sure now if it made any sense or not, but I figured that I had got the message this far, so I could get it all the way to awakening-time. I didn’t think it would be much longer now.

And it wasn’t. Not long after that (as far as I can tell) I woke up, my small dog barking at some imagined menace. I found my glasses and started to get out of bed, when abruptly the message came back to me. No, it was rather that I remembered there was a message. It took me a moment longer to remember the actual text.

The doom-laden voice was that of President Bush. The president had said, “Our forces have defeated the crustaceans of Anthrax IV. Our surviving army has surrendered.”

High time, I said to myself, to go out and face those brain-eating zombies. Or maybe fix a triffid salad.

That's All, Folks

 

W

hile I don’t expect the Electoral College to be anything but the rubber-stamp it’s always been—one of the lamest dodges the framers came up with in their desperate attempt to reach some compromise between democracy and autocracy—this would be a good year for it to actually do the goddamn job it was supposed to do and deliberate on just who would be the most competent captain of our Ship of State. The United States is now at the point of crossing the Rubicon, of reaching its rendezvous with destiny, of leaving the Republic behind and charting its course to Empire. The Groper is no Julius Caesar, but then, that isn’t a requirement. He doesn’t have a pretty face or a pompadour either, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to be the next teen idol.

The guy that the Electoral College is about to put in charge of the most powerful military force on earth is Osama Bin Laden’s wet-dream. Ever wonder why the jihadists of the so-called Islamic State are cheering? They’ve been fighting a losing battle against a fragile coalition that is destroying them—and now the linchpin of that coalition is about to field a clown against them, a naïve bumbler whose blithering bombast directed against all Muslims will bring in hordes of recruits to their idiotic cause. Saved by the bell indeed.

Who owns this blowhard? Where does his money come from? We don’t know. Is it the Russians? They certainly worked overtime to get this empty-headed buffoon into a position of power. Whose interests is this bozo going to be working on? There’s no way to tell, though his appointments of ignorant incompetents to key positions suggests it won’t be on behalf of the American people. Seriously, his picks are minnows being set loose in a sea of sharks. It may of course be good for the world to have an America on the ropes, but there’s no way it can be good for America.

Bluntly his cabinet (and other) picks show that Donald J. Trump is either a blithering incompetent who should be removed from office before somebody gets hurt, or a damned traitor who should face whatever penalty that brings in these benighted times. (I favor trial by a jury of sane people followed by a prompt execution by firing squad, but that’s so nineteenth century.) In either case the simplest thing by far would be to keep him out of the office he is so obviously unqualified for before he can screw us all over and take the country down the drain to oblivion.

But, as I said, I am quite confident that the Electoral College will do as its predecessors did and rubber-stamp the election. It is a sad ending to a once-glorious nation, and even sadder if he manages to take the rest of humanity along for the ride. Will we go quickly, via nuclear holocaust? Or slowly roast to death as the temperatures rise? But with barbarians running things, people like Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, even pipsqueaks such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Bashar Hafez al-Assad, what better fate should we expect? It’s over, folks. Humankind had its shot and we blew it. The looters, torturers, and rapists are in charge, and not just in backwaters like Syria and Michigan. There is no future, so we all might as well go down in a blaze of inglorious debauchery. I won’t be with you—but I’ve always been out of step with the times.

God, It's a Barren Featureless Wasteland

He had bought a large map representing the sea,

Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,

Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?” 

So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply

“They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank: 

(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best—

A perfect and absolute blank!”

The Groper's Plan for America