Steve Fey's Live From Las Vegas!

I realize that thousands (of small fractions) of people eagerly await my daily posts. Unfortunately, this has been a very busy week at work. I haven't even posted my funny page article for the week, because almost the entire time I've been home I've also been asleep. My three days off from my night job starts in an hour, so I'll try to get caught up.

I just know you all want to read another rant, right?

This is a headline from the Associated Press:

Televangelist Pat Robertson Calls for Assassination of Venezuelan President

The story elaborates with enough detail that I do believe it's a true headline. So, I guess Jesus's words have changed since I was in Sunday School. I remember some stuff about loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, selling your worldly goods and giving the money to the poor, but obviously, if you listen to Pat Robertson and his fellow "glam-vangelists" the thing to do is accumulate wealth, get a chauffeured limousine, and smite thine enemies (and maybe some potential friends) before they might smite thee.

Obviously Jesus meant what he said, because none of those blowhards polluting the airwaves with their distorted religion has, to my knowledge, ever been struck dead in mid sentence. Maybe I don't need patience after all: Jesus seems to have plenty.

For some reason every one I tell about where I live (Southern Nevada) asks me how I tolerate the heat. I considered making a joke about it and putting it on my funny pages, but the I said to myself, "self, just tell 'em." So, here it is.

There's that joke about "yeah, but it's a dry heat." Well, it's not entirely a joke. It takes the average person about two days to acclimate to a hot place, according to something I read recently. Certainly I was fine inside of a week or less. Actually, it's quite livable here at 105 degrees. Here are some reasons:

• Sweat. You won't ever notice it until you come indoors. Indoors it's more humid and the excess perspiration will stick to you until you cool down a bit. Outside you won't get wet at all but you will lose lots of water. The water will be evaporating right off of you and keeping you cool inside where it counts. Yes, for those living in moister climes, your sweat really does keep you cool. Of course this means that you must
• Drink lots of water. Really. If I'm working outside I come in for five minutes every half hour and drink a large glass of water. You think you can't chug down a large glass of water in five minutes? Try it after working outside in a dry heat for half an hour. You can, yes you can. This is a great technique for staying in good condition on a hot day, especially if you
• Stay in the shade. People who have to work in the actual sun need lots of protection from the sun, including long sleeves, long pants, hats, sunscreen, whatever else they can lay hands on. This means that they'll be drinking even more water as between the extra clothing and the heat from the sun they'll be even hotter. Personally I've never liked being in the sun anyway so I don't go there unless I absolutely have to. During May, June and July the sun is truly ferocious. Even now, though, in August, it's just warm. Why is that? Because, believe it or not,
• Southern Nevada is not truly a hot climate. It's hot from sometime in May until sometime in September. The rest of the year it's either warm or nice or in winter actually pretty chilly. It snows almost every year, for instance. This is not the Sahara, although there's a hotel by that name on the strip. If you live in a place with "real winters" where it snows and sleets and stuff like that, you'll appreciate that we have over eight months of perfectly lovely weather to do yard work or whatever, and that if the heat is problematic for you, then knowing that virtually every structure in the Valley is air conditioned should make you feel better. It's sort of like Minneapolis in January only inverted. And you don't have to shovel a hot sidewalk.

Actually some spaces are not air conditioned but are instead cooled evaporatively, by a device known as a swamp cooler, probably because your house will seem like a swamp if you use it wrong. It works just like your sweat, drawing outside air over wet stuff and pumping the resulting cool moist air into your house. One end of our house is not blessed with proper air conditioning so the swamp cooler comes in handy. They run a lot cheaper than AC too. Again, if you live in a moist climate you might find this device difficult to believe, but they work really well in this hot dry place.

So, that's how we tolerate the heat. Most of the year it isn't hot in the first place and even in the hot season it usually isn't so hot that it get really uncomfortable, thanks to our lack of humidity. It's easy.

But how do you guys put up with all that snow and ice?

Here is an excerpt from an article by Jerry Adler from Newsweek's next issue, available today at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9024914/site/newsweek/ . It's called In Search of the Spiritual.

Today, then, the real spiritual quest is not to put another conservative on the Supreme Court, or to get creation science into the schools. If you experience God directly, your faith is not going to hinge on whether natural selection could have produced the flagellum of a bacterium. If you feel God within you, then the important question is settled; the rest is details.

The paragraph doesn't give away the main thrust of the article, which is the rise of non-specific spirituality in America, but it does reinforce one of my prejudices, which is that people of faith really don't seem to have much. I mean people who loudly proclaim their faith, that is, or bother school boards about evolution and otherwise make nuisances of themselves. I mean, if you truly believe that the creator is powerful and good, and that he sent his own son to ensure your salvation, then what in heck are you doing bothering to sweat a detail like whether Himself used evolution or some other miracle to create you? Hells Bells, as my mother said once or twice, who don't you just relax and enjoy life?

That ranted, I did enjoy the article. It is a thesis on the varied ways Americans now and pretty much always have sought out spiritual guidance. Our fine country is the birthplace of what must be a majority of the spiritual snake oil for sale in the world today (that's me talking, not the article) and has been almost since we had a country. Ever had a Witness come to the door? An American invention. Ever seen the Mormon missionary kids? Native born. Noticed Tom Cruise advocating a religious position lately? A faith created in America. We're the most spiritually oriented country on the planet, most likely, even more than the theocracies of the middle east I'd bet. This is, ironically, because we have no official government involvement in religion.

England has an official religion: C of E, to which only a minority of people subscribe. There are also officially Catholic nations, with similar attendance figures. That's why I think that the theocracies are getting a lot of people to pray to Allah each day, but I'll bet that most of the prayer is just rote. One thing about America is that when people pray they probably mean it. Unless they're a politician making a speech, that is, or opening a session of Congress. In America though, where anyone can pursue any sort of spiritual path he or she wishes, no matter how screwy they look to the rest of the world, spirituality is important even to athiests, according to the article, who tend to look to psychiatry or other modern sources for enlightenment. The rate of some sort of sincere religious involvement, at least as it involves spirituality, has to be way past majority status and close to universal, but only here, in the officially secular and godless US of A.

I rather like that.


(An aside answer to an email I received as to why the USPS doesn't deliver Sunday's and Christmas. Well, they do if you pay for it, but I see your question: they don't do routine deliveries on those days. Why is a tax suported institution allowed to observe what are religious holidays? That's easy: it's not. The USPS hasn't taken a nickel of tax money since 1972, and in fact contributes profits to the General Fund every year. Since they are in effect a profit making corporation not using any public money, they can observe or not observe whatever holiday they see fit. I just wish they'd quit misdelivering messages to my street address.)

Here is a quote from a DEA official reported in a current Associate Press story:

"The streets from Bogota to Los Angeles are no longer a free trade zone for the criminals arrested today," DEA Administrator Karen Tandy said in a statement. "Rest assured: The DEA will be relentless in targeting drug traffickers and their illicit money until they no longer have the assets or means to put their poisons into the hands of our children."

In Florence, Colorado is a Federal prison named "Supermax." Ted Kaczynsky is there as well as other notorious Federal convictees. The place is blessed with the finest security our Federal government can offer. There are illegal drugs inside. But we're to believe that the same government that can't keep drugs out of one high security prison is going to keep drugs from being imported into the country along thousands of miles of border and shoreline?

Just watch for the pig droppings falling out of the sky . . .

Labels: Social Commentary

If you’ve never read it, click the link below to read George Carlin’s take on baseball and football and what they say about American culture. I think it says things about changes in our society over the last century and a half.

I can’t reprint his words here, because they’re probably copyrighted. For all I know, the owner of the site you’ll view after you click doesn’t have the rights either, but as I don’t know that for certain, I’m linking over anyway.

So without further ado, here is a link to Carlin on baseball vs football:

http://home.earthlink.net/~sscutchen/baseball/Quotes/baseball_vs_football.htm

Enjoy!

Money Makes the World Go ‘Round; Money: It’s a Crime; Give Me Money, That’s What I Want; Money Can’t Buy Me Love; Silver Threads and Golden Needles Cannot Mend This Heart of Mine; and so on for a long time. Money is near and dear to the hearts of most of us, innit? But what exactly is money? I don’t think that a great many of us actually know. Of course, as I point out on my funny pages from time to time, I do know everything, so I’m going to go on for a bit about the true nature of money.

Money is just good will. That’s it. Good will is abstract in the first place. Like the old “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” barter arrangement you might have read about once or twice. In a small village, maybe three or four families and a bunch of goats, if you did a favor for somebody, they reciprocate somehow. Maybe you patched a roof and they made a pair of boots for you. Whatever, the favors were just interpersonal good will, and nothing else. Can you put a price on good will? Actually, yes you can. Abstract as it is, good will can be abstracted using tangible symbols. Why abstract with symbols, you might ask? Because at a certain point there are just too many people in town for everyone to remember who owes a favor to whom, and how big of a favor, so by passing the symbols around you can actually have somebody else return the favor for you when somebody makes you a pair of boots. You give the boot maker the symbols, and he in turn gives them to the person who fixes his roof. Maybe the roof fixer gives them to you for something, and so for the first time, money actually circulates. To this day, that’s how commerce operates.

Way back in history the symbols were things like bright shiny stuff or clay coins, or in one case, really big coins made out of large stones. As people got more sophisticated there were portraits of the king stamped into the coins, which more and more were made from stamped metal. Then there’s a problem in that there has to be an agreement as to how much good will each symbol is worth. Like our coins, with the cent, the nickel, the dime, the quarter and so on, there has to be a mutually agreed upon value in good will assigned to each symbol. Obviously, in the case of symbols, the symbol becomes less valuable over time. In Europe you can still find old coins with pictures of Roman emperors on them. They’re worth something in good will, but probably not what they were worth when they were made. In fact, their value comes as curiosities, not as actual currency. At one time, though, they were what the common person used to buy bread.

As people get richer, the sheer volume of symbols needed to represent the good will they’ve amassed gets entirely out of hand. For a long time this meant converting the symbols to some more dense symbol, like bars of gold or something. But somebody in China came up with the brilliant idea of printing symbols on paper. Maybe that’s because they had paper when the rest of the world didn’t. When Marco Polo brought some of this “paper money” back with him it was laughed at. It took a few centuries, but as Europe started piling up symbolic good will (largely owing to Marco Polo’s treks) eventually the idea caught on. A few decades ago that was the common symbolism, and we all still use it probably ever day. Now we call those symbols just plain old money. Paper money is an abstraction of coinage, because coins are what they are and can be easily counted and accounted for, whereas paper is just numbers written in ink. The coins are an advanced form of symbolic representation of good will. That’s a double abstraction away from an abstract concept, but I’m afraid it doesn’t stop there.

Paper money still takes up a lot of space when you pile up a lot of it, and it’s not really specific, because whoever holds the paper has the good will, legitimately or not. Banks help a lot with this problem. During the crusades there was an organization called the Knights Templar which was specifically organized to aid crusaders. To avoid the tragedy of being robbed en route, they allowed someone to deposit his money in one place and withdraw it in another. This is quite a concept, because the certificate of deposit they gave the customer was only good if used by the customer. They invented international banking, thus enabling the world commerce we have today. Their deposited funds, or rather their customers’ deposited funds, represent another level of abstraction, known today as, well, funds on deposit. This is the kind of money that allows you to head out for a night on the town knowing you can afford whatever you’re about to indulge in. It is an abstraction of the paper money that’s an abstraction of the coins that are an abstraction of simple good will. Consider that you could and can sign over your interest in your deposited funds to another person if you wish. Shazaam! Instant money. How do you do that? You write a check, silly.

But, that’s not all! You also get credit! Credit is called credit because the lender is crediting you with being a good enough person to return the symbolic favors he’s doing you in kind. Usually, of course, plus a few extra symbolic favors called “interest”, probably because agreeing to do that generates the lenders interest in making the deal. Credit has been around for quite a while, of course. It’s essential to international trade because of the differences in currency (basic symbols of good will) between nations and regions. The way it works is that somebody will pay for your shipping and other up front costs to get a shipment of whatever goods you wish delivered to where you can sell them for more symbolic favors than it cost him to pay for the enterprise. Then after you sell the lender takes his symbolic favors back, plus interest, and you get the rest. The thing is, this system works really really well in most cases. So credit is another form of good will, abstracted from bank deposits which are abstracted from paper money which are abstracted from coinage and valuable items, which are abstractions for good will. Not surprising that a lot of people don’t understand what money is, is it? It’s all so, well, abstract.

Philosophers like Karl Marx have noticed this abstract quality about money and suggested that maybe we could all just contribute what we could and take what we needed and then we’d all be happy. Heck, why not? (Insert long list of dismal reasons here.) That isn’t going to happen soon, but it is true that whatever people believe to be valuable really is valuable, or worth a lot of good will. At one point people have lavished their good will on pet rocks, fuzzy dolls from Sesame Street, little bitty stuffed animals from Tyco, all sorts of odd things with no real practical value. Why people do such things is a topic for a different day (that will probably never dawn.) The phenomenon does illustrate the fact that the value of our symbols (money) changes frequently with our common perception of what things are worth.

But a much more important point is that, abstract as it is, money is good will, and good will is useless unless you apply it to other people. That is, money is worthless unless you use it for something, you know, spend some. When people stop spending depressions happen. When people spend too much they end up scaring themselves, stopping, and depressions happen. So, don’t be an idiot about it, but spend your money while you can. The thing about good will is that it is renewable indefinitely. Remember that things get good when money, good will that is, circulates, not when we all hoard what we’ve got. That’s why it’s better to invest in an IRA than stuff bills into a mattress. As in investment that good will is out circulating, not molding under your pillow. By the same token, the plaint of tax protestors that government is taking “our” money is entirely counter productive. There are thousands of people right near where I live getting paid well to construct a new interchange between two Interstate highways. That’s tax money, now circulating freely through the community. Given the nature of money, I’d say it, and we, are better off for having been taxed.

An abstraction like money is essentially an act of faith in the first place, so why not go ahead and keep the faith and spend some? Pay your taxes even. That, after all, is what money is for.

First, don't tell me about the price you're paying for gasoline, unless you live in California or Hawaii. I'll admit that outstate (the rest of) Nevada pays more than here in the Valley of Meadows, but we're still higher than anyone else except those two states. I'm hearing three basic reactions to the price of motor fuel, which are, in order, "I have to have gas, so I'm paying. I don't like it but whattareyagonna do?" (For once I'm with the majority on this point.) Then there's "It's all Bush's fault!" (I'm actually surprised that the Conservatives haven't found a way to pin it on Clinton.) Finally, there's a small bunch of idiots who say "Lower the price of Gas by not taxing it!" Right. These benighted folk also think that highways spring from someone's butt, rather than having to be paid for with billions of tax dollars. Ah, well. Where I live, the people will fund about anything but schools, so highways are not a problem, but the high price of gasoline is. And, more and more, those in group one are sliding over to the position of group two and blaming it all on Bush.

Well, I'll say one thing, if, as was alleged by his critics, Bush started this war in defense of cheap oil, then he really is a dismal failure, isn't he? I'm not even sure he's done such a great job of avenging his daddy, as has been suggested, although he did get Hussein a fair trial followed by almost certain execution. That is if the Iraquis have the bullets to spare from the ongoing civil war of course. What I'm going toward is the idea that Mr. Bush's popularity would seem to be in the toilet. Mind you, when Clinton was under indictment by the House his popularity rode at sixty-five percent or better. Now people in solidly "red" states are saying that Mr. Bush is a lying sumbitch loser. Some people are emboldened in their insistence that we bring the troops home now. Bush's Social Security proposal looks a lot like the Edsel. Interesting as a historic piece, that is, but not really of any practical use. His nominee to the Supreme Court, who seems to me like a balanced and qualified person, is assailed by the left on general principles, and by the Christian Right because he just might not toe the line on their positions. There is dissention in the ranks of the Republican party. And it's been too hot this summer, and I've actually heard people accuse Bush of being at fault for that (due to global warming.) In short, the man's public image could stand some work.

I might be happy about this development, after all the Bush clan isn't my favorite bunch (especially Neil) but for the fact that the alternatives are more or less non-existent, or worse, obtuse and without humor. Nonetheless, I do take satisfaction in parts of the situation. For instance, I've been seeing op-ed pieces and even comic strips about how Bush has abandoned what the Republican party stands for. Well (and you can check the archives of my funny pages for corroboration on this point) it appears to me that he is returning to what the Republican party has always stood for. Lincoln, their poster boy, was not exactly a small government states' rights kind of guy. They've always favored big business. Nothing wrong with those positions if they weren't being lied about, so I don't fault Bush for simply being true to his party. I do continue to fault the lying sumbitches in the religious right who think nothing of lying, Elmer Gantry like, about whatever they have to to consolidate their power base. If you're a long time Republican who doesn't like what you're seeing, blame them. (That doesn't mean I'd vote for Mr. Bush, just that I don't blame him for what's going on.)

As for the war in Iraq, yeah, that was dumb. If there's a harder and more expensive way to do what it's supposed to be doing I can't think of it. Come to think of it, letting the UN guys finish their inspections first would have been easy enough and only take another few months. Taking a page from Machiavelli and being Saddam's secret "best friend" nudge nudge wink wink would have been cheaper as well. But no, we had to do it in such a way that the mother of a soldier killed in the line of duty garners all sorts of support from diverse groups as she camps on the President's neighbor's lawn. As if what? We should just let the place go now that we ripped it to shreds? Still, he could drop her a note or something, but then that would require subtlety, which is not an apparent Bush trait.

As for Social Security, a little fear mongering almost upset that apple cart, but what was really going on, to judge by subsequent events, was to distract from the massive new entitlements from the Medicaid expansion, one of Mr. Bush's projects. Under Mr. Bush the government has grown rapidly, expenditures and entitlements have expanded at a brisk pace, and military expenditures have gone wild. Whoopie! Meantime, though the miracle of trickle down economics, we'll be seeing inflation going wild, too, within a year or two, maybe a lot quicker thanks to the boost to prices offered by high fuel costs. Blessed is George, for the unaware shall always be of good cheer. Does all this matter in the long term? Heck, maybe not, because inflated or not the nature of money doesn't change. (I think I'll write an essay on money, just for grins. Stay tuned.) And there are other sources of fuel. Even here in Vegas you can get 85 percent ethanol to fuel your vehicle (assuming it will take it) for quite a bit less than gasoline. Economics has finally caught up with alternative fuels, and the ethanol is made from corn, and one thing we can do in this country and really well is grow corn. But that doesn't matter nearly as much as public perception, which has definitely turned against the optimists.

G.W. Bush has never really ticked me off. His most vocal supporters are another story. Luckily that movement seems to be suffering from its own success and schisms are developing, as is always the case with idealistic demagoguery. So I'm glad about that, too. It reminds me of the liner notes for one of Bob Dylan's albums, where he suggested that the key was faith, no the key was froth, but finally, actually the key was Frank. It was never revealed just who Frank is, but I'm sure he's still the key. Although come to think of it, I also don't know to what. It should be an interesting midterm election next year, though, shouldn't it?

I just read a news item about a Federal judge in DC blocking implementation of new Homeland Security labor rules because they failed to respect the workers' right to bargain collectively. This seems a sign of sanity to me, and I'm not defending unions or Federal employees either. Also the TSA is considering revising the rules for airline travel, even to the extent of not making everyone take off shoes on the way to the gate. These items both point to a sort of backing off from operating out of a position of fear, which if true is a good thing.

The airport security is supposed to make us safer, but there have been reports of real evidence that it hasn't really helped at all. Not that I don't feel safer in the air these days. I feel safer because I believe that anyone trying to hijack a plane with mostly Americans on it, particularly American men, will find the job more than a little difficult. If I were on that plane, I'd figure the hijackers meant to do us in anyway, and plan to take them out first if at all possible. Since the hijackers on 9/11 were outnumbered by about eighty to one, an effort with that attitude would most likely have thwarted their scheme, particularly when coupled with tougher cockpit doors and other onboard measures that have been implemented. They still might succeed, but it's a lot less likely than it used to be, and with or without the increased checks at the gate I think we're safer when we fly than we were prior to 9/11.

Which brings me back to fear. The hijackers on that day got away with a lot by playing to fear and by assuaging fears by saying that if everyone cooperated no one would be hurt. They were lying (fanatics' gods seem to condone all sorts of questionable behavior) but the ruse worked because people were afraid to die. Now, believing that to be inevitable, most people don't see anything to fear any more and actually decrease their chances of getting killed by not worrying about it. Bad for the terrorists, good for us.

The resort hotel and casino where I work has seven thousand (7,000) security cameras. Everyone knows, or should, that there are eyes everywhere in an operation like this. Nevada law demands top security for one thing, and for another you'd have to be pretty stupid not to protect the millions you collect every week. We have a bit over nine thousand employees working three shifts, so there is no way to monitor all those cameras all of the time. If you're in the casino, you're likely being watched, but if you're not on the gaming floor or near an entrance the odds are that no one is watching you. If you commit a crime or cause a disturbance, though, you can count on being identified when the recording of the area is reviewed. I mention all this because it seems to me that the only way to use security in a free society is in this "after the fact" manner. We don't have the will or the manpower to do a "big brother" type surveillance, so unless you're in a casino or in one of those cities where you can get a ticket from a tape of your car running a red light you can probably count on the fact that nobody is watching you, even though potentially someone could be.

Our security actually comes from those of us who are basically good people being alert for anything that doesn't feel right, and for keeping our perspective and not letting fear decide our course of action. After all this is a dangerous world and the only way out of here involves becoming dead, so in reality there's not a lot to be afraid of. That would be, and is when we manage to do those things, much more effective than relying on "authorities" or "security" to keep us safe.

Sometimes I amaze myself. I managed to figure out how to get the archives back. (There's a big hint in the Blogger help file when it says they're probably not really gone.) It was something about the path I entered for ftp (that's File Transfer Protocol for the ungeeky) for archiving. Next, maybe I'll cure cancer or something.

First, from a dictionary:

who's:
Contraction of who is.
Contraction of who has.

whose:
adj.
The possessive form of who.
The possessive form of which.

Just thought I'd clear that up before proceeding.

I've been lax this week about posting, mainly because it's been busier than usual, and I've been tired enough that when I wasn't putting out some fire or other I just didn't have the juice to write blog stuff. Which is sort of odd because I've written two new articles for the funny pages, meaning that my next two weeks are already taken care of, including this week which I just remembered I forgot to post yesterday, so tune in tomorrow and it'll be there. Whew!

The other reason is that I'm just not especially upset with anything at the moment. There have been some funny things in the news, like the Democratic party celebrating a loss in Pennsylvania. That's sort of like an accident victim saying it's great because "I could have died six seconds sooner." Okay then. Then there's poor President Bush, who's (heh heh) (the heh heh is for the 'who's') having to deal with all sorts of criticism, including some who are suggesting that this war in Iraq is a lot like the war in Vietnam. That, of course, is ridiculous, because we were invited into Vietnam by the South Vietnamese. No one from Vietnam ever invited us into Iraq.

Egad! Humor on the blog. This may be getting serious. Or not. Something. But, this is a diary, right? So, then the weather has been humid and cool for Las Vegas. The other day we had the record low high temperature for the day, at 86 degrees. It actually felt chilly in the morning, when it was only about seventy or so. At the same time we've had about an inch of rain at our house in the past week, bringing the total for the past twelve months to just a tad over the average annual rainfall for Denver, and bringing allergy attacks like I haven't had since I left Ohio many a moon ago. Some day I intend to try living in a dry climate.

Also I've been painting the house inside, yellow or brick red depending on the wall involved, including texturizing with sand. With the humidity it's taking a while for the paint to dry, but it does look a heck of a lot better than the death white I'm painting over. By the time we sell the place it will be too nice to leave.

Well, I'll try to get huffy over something and post later, or tomorrow at the latest. So, until then, so long from la Valle de las Vegas.

Erich Fromm was a Jewish German intellectual who was sensible enough to emigrate to New York City in 1934. He had studied Freud and Marx and their deterministic theories, and added his own third and most important element: freedom. Unlike a Raccoon, which never needs career counseling (it's going to be a raccoon), humans have the freedom to choose, for example.

He wrote a book, Escape From Freedom, that all entering freshmen were required to read at BGSU in 1967. I suppose that five percent of us did, and being the little wimp that I was I was one of that minority. The discussion group on the book was a waste of time, but the book was fascinating. Fromm points out how in five-hundred years we went from a completely deterministic society (dad's a serf, so I'm a serf, the Church knows all, etc.) to one where we were held responsible for our own destinies. He postulates that the deterministic society is much easier for most people because there's nothing to decide and you aren't at fault if your life goes to hell in a handbasket. This leads people, especially in stressful times, to seek to escape from their freedom into a more structured, deterministic existence. And how do they do this? Glad you asked, because per Fromm this quest for structure (escape from freedom) takes three basic forms.

Authoritarianism, where we try to fuse ourselves with others, so that the "movement" becomes the thing that guides your life, or in some cases by becoming the authority and therefore having all of your followers validating your decisions, which is another way of escaping the consequences of the need for personal responsibility. The insistence that criticizing the government means that you're not patriotic seems to me to sort of ooze this attitude.

Destructiveness, where one attempts to destroy the world in order to prevent the world from hurting oneself. If you can't destroy the world you turn it on yourself, not only through suicide but through alcoholism, addictions, even being a couch potato. You may know or know of someone on each of these paths, I'll bet.

Automaton Authority, or just blind followership, but not necessarily following a particular party or individual or political platform. Consider (says Fromm) the decisions to be made in the morning about what to wear, what to eat, what entertainments to indulge in, and many more. In order to escape from all those decisions it's only necessary to check the latest fashion and follow it to wherever it leads, be it shaved bodies, underwear on the outside, pierced eyelids, or any other thing. You can't even pretend to tell me you don't know someone who blindly follows fashion.

In fact I remember a housemate in college who insisted that he would never wear Dockers and penny loafers (that's a type of pants and shoes in case you're one of those free dweeb types) because the Greek society men wore that outfit. Another housemate and I were unable to get him to see that he was in fact still a slave to the fraternity brothers' fashion, as they were dictating to him what he must wear just as surely as if he were pledging a house. He is an artist, very creative and not prone to avoiding freedom, but still the urge was there.

Fromm says a lot more about how freedom is the "true nature" of humanity and thus these attempts to escape freedom are counter to our inner nature. Okay, but that's not where I'm going. I'd suggest you check out the book though. It's still in print, and available as I write this from Amazon.com for as little as $3.84 plus shipping. The title again is Escape from Freedom.

What I want to say now that I've said all that about Erich Fromm and his ideas is that I see this phenomenon at work ever day here in the "land of the free." In fact, "freedom" seems to mean, if you believe some of the escapees, that we're the home team and home team means freedom. Well, we're a lot freer than the people in most of the Middle East for sure. But if people aren't trying to avoid being free (and personal responsibility) then why is it that so many respond to the assertion that criticism of the President is unpatriotic? Can't you love the country and respect the office and still think that the incumbent is deficient? So far they've all been merely human, after all. And why do people use drugs and alcohol to excess? I can tell you from experience that being drunk feels bad, quite bad in fact, but is that feeling better than the fear of messing up when you decide what to do when you grow up? (Don't you wish you were a raccoon?)And what of guys like Osama Bin Laden and his quest to destroy anything that doesn't reflect his image of the ideal world? That sounds pretty unfree to me. And slaves to fashion? If you don't see any around where you live (yeah, I'm sure you don't) come and visit Las Vegas. If you can't find a slave to fashion here (or rather a few hundred thousand all in a three mile stretch of one street in one night) you'll never recognize one when you see it. Look at people who aren't conformist and consider how we as a society regard them. They're geeks, dweebs, nerds, weirdos, oddballs, kind of scary, probably can't be trusted, might say bad things about the Secretary of State to their friends, you can't be too careful. Am I right? You know I am.

But just this once I'm not being judgmental about people's escapist attitudes. After all, when I write a film script I'm hoping it provides enough escapist entertainment that every man woman and child on the planet will be willing to plop down ten bucks to see it. I like to think I'm not a conformist, but I work a normal job and pay normal bills and wonder at the weirdos just like everyone else does. But, when I pay attention to what I'm doing, I always try to embrace freedom rather than run from it. After all, a certain amount of conformity just plain makes life easier to live, so why not? So long as you know what you're doing, it's probably harmless. But I am concerned at the percentage of my countrymen who seem hell bent on being anything but free.

Freedom doesn't mean, as many seem to think, that you can do whatever you want and nobody can register a complaint about it. Freedom means that you've got to figure out how to best contribute to the world you live in and then make your contribution in the best way possible. You really can do whatever you want, but you have to plan to pay for the consequences of whatever you do. Not because of a law passed by a bunch of old white guys, but because everything you do affects things that affect other things that affect other things and so on more or less forever. At a certain point your specific influence is pretty well diluted by all those intervening steps, but the immediate consequences of our actions are all yours. If you get drunk and drive down a crowded sidewalk at noon some people are probably going to die as a direct result of your actions. So, if you want to get drunk and drive down a crowded sidewalk at noon, just what do you intend to do about those people you kill? What will you tell their loved ones? Driving like that is hardly self-defense or anything else excusable, so how are you planning to think well of yourself ever again? And all that is separate from any legal consequences.

Which brings up an extension of what Fromm says: I think that some people duck into authoritianism or other escapes in order to avoid thinking too much about what they've already done. That seems like a bad idea to me, but it also seems to be a popular life stance.

Given all that, I can see how people would want to be anything but free. Freedom requires entirely too much thinking, especially about your own contribution to your situation and to the world. Since I'm committed to real freedom, though, I try to keep myself focused on my own actions and how they're affecting me and the people around me. Those trials at the end of World War Two were quite correct: following orders does not excuse doing the wrong thing. And, worse, the right thing isn't always what's been written down. However, there are some things you can do to keep close to doing the right thing, and without resorting to the words of a long dead white guy either.

You can be honest. I don't mean you have to always tell the truth, but you have to always know the truth, and that requires you to be honest. Do what you say you're going to do, when you're going to do it, and don't lie just to cover your butt or to defraud people. I hold with Mark Twain that it's okay to lie in order to spare others distress. You can read his works for more on that topic. If you start lying all the time for no good reason you'll soon be unable to remember what really happened. It's pretty hard to make good choices when you have bad data, which is why I advocate honesty in all of your dealings.

You can remember that you're trying to make a contribution to the world. It doesn't have to be big or glamorous. I'm truly grateful to the guys who remove my trash twice a week, for example. Not a job to make E! or Inside Edition, but a damned important job just the same. They're contributing by helping the rest of us. That's what you need to do: help other people. And choosing how is easier than you'd think. Here's the secret: do what you like to do because you can make a living doing absolutely anything. (Dave Letterman has a woman on every week who makes a living hula-hooping, and another who makes her living by grinding on her metal breastplate with a hand-held grinding wheel. If they can do that, just think what you could make your living doing.) And that's really it: be honest, and make a contribution doing what you can. Rocket science? Only if you love rockets. That, and treat people the way you want to be treated. What? You think Hilel and Jesus of Nazareth pulled that out of their ears?

This has gotten long enough. Maybe too long, eh? But I'd take it as a personal favor if you, gentle reader, would commit to being free, and also do what you can to limit the damage cause by those who would escape. Come on now, you can do it!

I finished a script yesterday. No title yet. It's about a hapless woman who gets entangled with a group of people whose* job it is to interfere with the free flow of traffic. It's based on a short story I wrote a while back called "Greasing the Wheels." The tricky part was developing an actual plot to go along with the hook, but I think I've got one. You'll just have to go see the movie to find out exactly how it goes, but I will say that she gets her guy in the end, her friend loses her man, and the group is still in business when the lights come up.

Well, must go. Warren Zevon is singing Werewolves of London on the Internet radio.

*corrected 8/13/2005

Every culture has at least one story of how we all came to be. Some cultures have several. In Hinduism, there are as many creation stories as there Hindus, or so it seems. For a very very quick introduction to Hindu creationism, click this link. The Hopi and Navajo both have some interesting stories about our origins. Since I'm a bit familiar with both, I like to recommend them to anyone interested in creationism. For a glimpse of Hopi creation stories, click this Hopi link. For a quick introduction to the basics of Navajo creation stories, click this Navajo link.
The astute observer will notice a few similarities between the Navajo and Hopi stories. All I have to say about that is that the Hopi were there first, but that both peoples live in more or less the same place on the Colorado Plateau. They call the land "beautiful" and they're certainly right.

Another culture with multiple creation stories is the Judeo-Christian tradition, with one story in the first chapter of Genesis and another story in the second chapter of the same book. Not only two different stories, but right next to each other where they're easy to spot.

The point of this is to lend my endorsement of teaching creationism in public schools. Not only should we include the Hindu, Hopi, Navajo, and Jewish traditions, we should go further and include all of the creation stories we can find. I'll bet that if we taught our children to analyze the similarities and differences between the various versions of how it all came to be, they'd learn to appreciate each other and maybe see some of the common threads that tie us even to our enemies.

That has to be what the advocates of teaching creationism in school have in mind, isn't it?

I just discovered that there are no pages under the archives links any more. No doube some idiot whose name rhymes with "Steve" did something wrong. (This blog is housed on my usual server so I can do that if I'm not careful.) Sad as it is to think of all that wisdom lost, I'd have to say that I wouldn't check any archives earlier than August 2005 ever again. Sniff sniff.

I read the results of a survey today indicating that a majority of Americans don't think that Bush is honest. Hmmm. Also they believe that he did the wrong thing in leading us into the Iraq conflict, and that he failed to plan for the consequences. Hmmm.

I mention that because I think it illustrates a point for those of us who live in what are called the "Red States" that voted Republican last time. That is that the people in the "Blue States" are not always wrong, and perhaps on occasion even those living in (gasp!) California may have some idea of what they're talking about. Just as it's not fair when the dreaded "liberals" categorize Midwesterners as out of touch hicks, it's also not fair to categorize those on either coast as out of touch with American values. In fact, since every one of them is American, that's pretty much of a ridiculous thing to say.

I also noticed that people still feel Bush is a good leader and likeable. Okay, I'll grant you the likeable because that's taste, but what sort of good leader makes those sorts of mistakes and refuses to own up to them? Oh, well, huh? On the other hand, he gets a lot of people to follow him off of his latest cliff, so maybe he is a good leader at that. If he was a good leader with a brain, that would be better, but I guess we'll take what we can get.

When I was a little kid I heard that I was a "baby boom" baby. There's a demographic "baby boom" that started just after World War II and went on through about nineteen sixty-five. Just ask anyone born after nineteen sixty if they're a "boomer" though and be prepared for an energetic denial. I think, and this isn't my original idea, that if you feel like you belong to a generation, then you do. The cultural "boomers" actually started getting born in the early 1940's and the last of them began breathing the air in 1960. This is based on a cyclical theory of history as put forth most succinctly by a couple of Boomers named Strauss and Howe in a book titled Generations. There's my credit, now back to my rant, I mean thesis.
There are a couple of large groups of Boomers loose in the world. The first group, to which I belong, is less pathological than the younger and larger group that followed us. Unfortunately, the whole world seems to judge my generation by that second group. As an example, when I attended my high school reunion a while back, the disk jockey played tons of seventies music. Boomer stuff, right? Well, no. We graduated in nineteen sixty-seven. There was a lot of music around in the sixties, most of it nothing like what people think of as sixties music. There were dozens of "British Invasion" bands, for instance, besides the Beatles and Stones. There was folk music, Dean Martin, Tennessee Ernie Ford, just all sorts of stuff that the larger Boomer group, who can be identified by their actually liking seventies music, has no idea ever existed. If you'd like an accurate look at the sixties, check out the Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do. It was so accurate I thought maybe he'd invented a time machine and actually filmed the thing in nineteen sixty-five.
So, about those younger Boomers. Every generation starts out relatively benign and gets more pathological as it goes along (in birth order I mean.) This is the theory, and my generation seems to bear it out. For example, several years after I graduated the campus demonstration business was booming (no pun intended.) One such demonstration was held in Bowling Green Ohio when a gang of students decided to protest something or other, eventually breaking the glass on a door at the Administration Building. A friend of mine asked the group, after they'd congregated in front of his house, which was across from the courthouse, where the organizer was. The reply was that he couldn't be here because he might get busted. (?!?) Ghandi went out and tried to get arrested, as did the freedom marchers, and quite a few antiwar demonstrators in the earlier days of the movement. These guys, these younger boomers, were playing at a demonstration. Heck, you wouldn't want to get arrested: that might mess with your scheduled toga party.
Now, I wondered at first how our current Administration got away with selling the apparently unnecessary invasion of Iraq. Well, the answer is simple: most of his base of support is within those same younger boomers, who leapt at the chance to play at fighting a war. Well, goody for them, except of course they're no more fighting this war than they did Vietnam (only two percent of my generation ever saw the place, and most of them were in my older group.) These, not to put too fine a point on it, idiots who disrespected the very idea of public action for social reform were more than happy to put their weight behind this wonderful new thing! Boy, you just gotta love 'em, dontcha, because otherwise you'd have to try to kill them all, and there are just too many of them for you to pull it off.
That seventies music I mentioned? With notable exceptions, it tends to be derivative and not terribly creative. Boomer politics? Pretty much the same thing. In the words of a popular figure from the sixties, "Wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful!"

Bill Frist has shaken up his conservative friends by endorsing liberalizing stem cell research. I'm tempted to just say "bully for Bill Frist" and let it go at that, but I think his doing so may point to a broader blossoming of what has seemed anathema to so many: the fine art of compromising.
I don't know if Mr. Frist is willing to go so far as to compromise on a lot of things, but the fact that he "compromised" his principles on this one point at least lets us know that he's not the rigid ideologue that some of his (possibly former) supporters seem to be. I've been reading some stories in the news in the past few days (my three day weekend) to the effect that the administration is getting its agenda passed by involving Democrats in the process, and that the result, while not entirely what anyone wanted, nevertheless seems to be a move in the direction sought in the first place.
My, there's a concept: everyone gives a little, everyone gets a little. That's how the government in this country has always worked, and I've been eagerly awaiting a return to the normal ways of congress. (I'm going to refrain from quoting John Adams just this once.) The problem has been that people of several political persuasions have been so unyielding in their positions that no such compromise has been possible. I wondered all through the first Bush Jr. Administration where this "uniter" we'd been promised was hiding. Well, I don't know, maybe he's finally waking up. Maybe being a four-year lame duck has let Junior realize that he can do his own thing for a change instead of kowtowing to the special interests. Maybe we're just lucky and congress got tired of the fight. Whatever, it's better to have some compromise than world war three on Capitol Hill. I think. (In some ways a government that can't do anything is sort of nice, you know?)
My point is that we seem to be moving toward a more normal (for the USA) form of legislative action, one where nobody gets what they want, but everybody agrees in the end that it's what needed to be done.
Maybe even boomers can learn after a time, unlikely as that seems.
(See my next rant, er, post for more on them.)