Volume 44

AUGUST 2007

44. 7: THINKING ABOUT THE MUZZIES 8.30.2007

When it comes to religions I always try to be ecumenical—I have contempt for them all, though probably not equally. I find myself being more contemptuous of some, and a little more forgiving of others. But all religions are about believing in things that cannot be sensed or known, so they all deserve to snickered at for their epistemological silliness.

But it cannot be left at that, because religions are not just about believing in the unknowable, they are also about people extrapolating from those spiritual beliefs and screwing up the secular world. And that takes me from passive contempt to rather nasty crusading mode.

I feel differently about taking on the delusions and dogmas of Christian denominations. I was “brought up” (indoctrinated) Roman Catholic. [1] That sort of gives me license to bitch because I have paid enough dues to that organization. So they are sort like “family,” make that “dysfunctional family.”

“The Chosen Ones,” the Jews, are indeed a special case because they choose to be with themselves. The non-evangelism of the Jews is perhaps their greatest blessing (after bagels and pastrami on rye with Russian dressing). One can almost forgive those side curls and silly hats of the Hasids; nobody is going to want to convert if you have to wear those outfits. [2] But I am straying from the faith of the moment—those pesky followers of the Prophet.

It should be said that, in addition to sharing Semitic origins, the Muslims suffer from a similar ethno-religious conflation as do the Jews. Most, but not all, Jews are also of the Judaic faith; and most, but not all, Arabs are Muslims. But Muslims have made it more complicated; many Persians, Indonesians, Malaysians, Pakistanis and other are also Muslims. These days, one finds people using Arab and Muslim interchangeably. This conflation is one of the things that makes how one feels about Muslims rather tricky. We've gone from Arab terrorist, to Muslim terrorist, to Islamo-Fascist terrorist. And so, because the extremists are the ones who get the most attention, we tend to associate Islam with terrorism.

This bothers a lot of moderate Muslims, but it also bothers non-Muslims that there does not seem to be a Muslim-Moderate movement of any audibility, visibility or consequence. We hear of moderate Muslims deploring terrorism, but maybe they are terrorized into not doing much about it. Iraq should be proof enough that there is a more Muslim on Muslim violence than any other kind. Other faiths have their counterparts in this regard, but the Muslims seem like a special case.

The reason that this seems to be the context in which we view Muslims owes something to their bad sense of timing. They come into our political consciousness when the West needs a new bête noire, a new rationale for pumping up those defense appropriations, a new basis for American right-wing politicians to operate the politics of fear. The damn Russians went and declared peace on us, and the Chinese decided to conquer is by owning us. [3] For many in the West (and this certainly includes George Bush) their first consciousness of Islam comes from contemporary events.

There was, of course, that great age of Arab/Muslim culture, when medicine, architecture, poetry and scientific instruments like the astrolabe, were products of a civilization at the time when Europeans were living like barbarians in their “Dark Age.” From the 8th through the 12th centuries, when the people, sometimes called the “Moors,” occupied much of Spain, then called Andalusia, there was considerable harmony among Muslims, Christians and Jews, as long as the area remained under the hegemony of the Muslims. Not that there weren't wars, even among the Muslims. There were plenty, but there was unprecedented religious tolerance as well, especially in cities like Toledo, Seville and Cordoba. The arts flourished, especially architecture, and the Arabesque style produced magnificent Alhambra. The Great Mosque of Cordoba, and the magnificent gardens. Arab doctors were the leaders in medicine. The Arabs even invented the zero in mathematics, so they have a strong case for claiming that they helped invent the computer, or half of it. After all, what is a computer but just a language built of zeros and ones, right? Muslims could claim that they are owed a royalty—50%--for their half of every operating system or application ever created. That's zillions of dollars! I think that the Christians better get at it and claim that they invented the 1; unless the Jews already have beat them to it. But I stray again.

These days it is not uncommon to hear people (those who know of this istory) say “what happened?” How did this great civilization implode into 19 terrorists on airplanes, Osama, and the Taliban? Well, a lot of history, and not all of it fair to the Muslims, has happened. After the Spanish Reconquista, when Ferdinand and Isabella chucked them out of Spain in 1492, things seemed to go downhill for the Muslims in Western Europe. If you don't think that Christians were the meanies at this time, try Googling Spanish Inquisition. A lot of the exiles ended up over in the Ottoman Empire, centered in Istanbul since 1453, but that empire, though rather long, derived and built upon a lot of the Persian and Roman civilizations. But there, too, there was some tolerance for the “people of the Book,” and the Ottomans can be credited with bringing coffee to Europe thanks to their failed siege of Vienna. That empire came to an end in 1922 [4] and the West, primarily the British, played Monopoly with the entire Middle East. [5] The Muslim states of the Middle East have felt aggrieved, threatened and disappointed since and, with wretched and autocratic governments, they have fallen back on their faith with a zealotry and paranoia. All their other social institutions are weak, and subordinate to Islam.

It is said that he first casualty of War is Truth. It might be that the first casualty of Terror is Tolerance. And probably nothing is more necessary for reasonably peaceful coexistence of different religions than Tolerance. Even without Terror tolerance of another man's religion seems to have been a large order for most of human history. Sometimes the debates are over the purely imaginary dimensions of religions—what your god is called, Allah, Yaweh, Jesus, Shiva—of the imaginary characteristics of this or that particular deity.

But, alas, the silliness only begins there. Religious authorities are not content to leave it at that. No, they need sin and sacraments, circumcisions and infibulations, sacrifice, do's and don'ts, halal and haraam. They need rules and regulations, relics, prayer shawls and rugs, churches, synagogues and mosques, their holy books, and a host of dogmatic and liturgical gadgets, gizmos ans gimmicks that bring the authorities, the putative holier than thou, their power, sex and money. And the Muslims, in these times, have some of the worst religious authority.

The danger is when someone so believes in their religion that their present life is entirely governed by their concern for their imaginary afterlife, when the achievement of that end governs— and justifies —all their actions. Such is person is not necessarily, but certainly potentially—given whatever slight or threat, real or imagined—for whom the slitting of throats, ethnic cleansing, purges, crusades and jihads are, in the defense of their faith and the holy cause of their afterlife, right and just. They have become, as I have written elsewhere, theopathic . [6] All, perhaps any, have this potency, and the Muslims happen to be, in these times, the worst of a bad lot.

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[1] I got a good laugh from a Protestant Christian woman I saw on television not long ago I remember her saying that “Catholics are not Christians.” This from an idiot who has not taken her nose out of her King James version long enough to learn there was a Protestant Reformation in the early16 th C. Were it not for the fact that the Roman Catholic Church existed for a millennium and a half before martin Luther nailed his theses on the Cathedral at Wittenburg without she wouldn't even have her own version of the Christian religion. I cannot abide such ignorance.

[2] There have, however, been converts, most famously Elizabeth Taylor and Sammy Davis, Jr. I have an image of Sammy, wearing his tallis and shuckling in his tap shoes at the Western Wall. And Liz would make one heck of yenta ; she's been married what, eight times, already?

I count several Sons of Abraham among my longest, closest and dearest friends, despite the fact that they have not given me access to the international media and financial empires that they control. I have always especially treasured their sense of humor. One of them, now departed, was like a brother to me, as well as a great inspiration. He wasn't religious, but loved joking about religion. He would tell great Pope jokes; the whole idea of the Pope seemed as ridiculous to him as it did to me. When he would tell one I would feign being insulted and bring up some stupid myth about the Jews. Christians use to spread the vicious rumor that Jews used to eat Christian babies. So I would say to him when we were ordering lunch “So how would you like your Christian baby today, sir, medium, or medium rare?” We always made fun of the silly aspects of all religions and save the serious criticisms for our own. The Jews have been through 2000 years of persecution and the Christians, Muslims, and Mel Gibson aren't through with them yet. Their faith will get no more than good-natured ribbing from me, and I welcome any in return. [See, also, Archives 4.7 . . . and they shall be led into the land of the corn, and 15.4, The Passion of the Mel].

[3] There is a whole alternate theory that the problem with the Muslims is that they are blessed with oil, and we couldn't care at all about them if they weren't sitting on top of it.

[4] Kemal Ataturk created a secular government, if not society, out of Turkey (they also chucked out those Orthodox Christian Greeks), but that system seems to be in peril these days.

[5] WWII had proved that you can't run a modern war without oil.

[6] Cf, DCJ Archives, 10. 2: The Theopaths 7.15.2004

44. 6: TERRORIST, by John Updike (2006) BR 8.23.2007

There is a young computer engineer, in his early thirties perhaps, who comes to the café I frequent. He's a stoner, but has managed to get by the drug tests of the Asian-owned company he unhappily works for. I can write about him because he doesn't read my site. He is a handsome, strapping lad, and one might axiomatically think he is fortunate in is looks and education. He looks more like a jock than a guy who stays in a haze of cannabis-induced paranoia. I call him “Boomer.”

Boomer talks enough about the need “to blow up rich people” to disabuse one of he notion that he would actually do it. He smiles when I say, “have a seat Boomer,” or give him a little mock salute of a thumb pushing down on my fist as though it were a detonator. I invite him to sit down because I am curious as to why he is so oppressed by the work and his circumstances. He complains about women, saying he can't find one who isn't “a feminist.” He's very categorical.

Some people might say I should watch out for this guy, that he just might be the type to strap a couple of pounds of C4 and bags of nails and carry out his fantasies. Then again, he might be just a guy who can't handle his world, that does too much grass and reads too much sci-fi, but is harmless to everyone but himself. But what makes me curious about him is that he just might be a boomer, and I want to know what kind a mind it takes to to push that thumb down on a real detonator.

Updike has the same curiosity, and he plunges the reader into the Qu'ran-addled mind of Ahmed Mulloy, a half-Arab-half-Irish-American New Jersey high school track runner and student of a local imam. The time is post 9-11, when America is waiting for the next attack from Al Qaeda. Ahmad is filled with all the Islamic fervor of a kid in the vortex of an absent father, a loving hard-working nurse mother trying to find some love for her self in all the wrong men, a neighborhood full of dissolute minorities, and his pumping testosterone. Ahmad is obsessed with remaining Islamic-ly “clean” in the midst of such corrosive forces. Ahmad is not an angry impoverished ghetto-snipe, but a lower middle-class kid with a chance. [1]

Consistent with Updike's style it is a tight and well-defined dramatis personae: the imam, spouting the most bellicose suras from the Qu-ran; a local Black girl, who puzzles Ahmad with her sexuality and participation in the gospel choir at her Baptist church; a concerned Jewish guidance counselor who ends up bedding Ahmad's mother; a fellow Americanized-Arab who “recruits” the young wannabe truck driver into being a suicide-bomber Timothy McVey.

Updike's is a third-person account, but the perspective is skewed to Ahmad; he is after all the titular role. He is the incipient “boomer” we are most interested in. Updike draws him in details your average Bushie has not been conditioned to consider—handsome, respectful (he's far more respectful of Joryleen, the Black girl than is Tylenol her Black boyfriend who whores her out), and struggling to be a good student. But he is battered by the clash of the rigid dualities of the Muslim faith and the messy contradictions of America's open-ended consumerism, tenuous adherence to its principles and ideals, its fat, self-indulgent, and worst of all, in Muslim terms, infidel godlessness. Updike draws from the holy book to demonstrate how Ahmad's mind (not thought processes) is being shaped. Mohammad is Allah's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another.” [2]

The reader suspects early that Ahmad's rejection of going to college and his interest in becoming a truck driver are plot-laying for what kind of boomer he is destined to become. But we are kept page-turning by the where and when. Updike's economy assures us that he will pay off most everything that he sets up, so that Counselor Levy and Ahmad's mother not only serve as an erotic sidebar, but also as icons for non-practitioners of Judaism and Catholicism, and Levy and his porky wife even figure into the denouement.

The American picture the author paints is not appealing, a country that has become inward-looking, xenophobic, and largely concerned with the garbage of its own consumption. The ironically-named town of New Prospect, is a grotty mess of derelict strip malls, one of those innumerable marginal places in the American quasi-urban wasteland that are being surrendered to cheap, reflexive, addictive consumerism—urban Wal Marts. It disgusts Ahmad, but he only has his literal and mindless suras as a guide, and they only lead him toward suicide bombing, an istishhadi, as his ticket to some dorky notion of paradise.

Updike skills as a writer of dense, by apprehensible prose seem undiminished. As an observer of American urbanism at its edges, especially in the northeast, he has long and laudable credentials. In this book as in others, he tends to depress this reader. But one also feels “informed”; Ahmad is not just some crazed raghead who “hates America's freedom.” He's actually a rather likeable, if closed off sort. Seeing America through his (Updike's) field of vision, one begins to wonder if it is Americans who hate America's freedom. There is a sense of drowning in his American stories. He lets you come up for a desperate breath at the end, but you are still just floating.

I'm thinking of recommending this book to Boomer next time he goes off about “killing all the rich people.”

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[1] Socio-economically, he is, of course, much like the 9-11 perpetrators. Mohammad Atta had a degree in Architecture from Cairo and was registered as a student of (yikes!) urban planning at a university in Germany.

[2] This was obviously written before the Sunni-Shia Schism. Muslims do a pretty good ruthless job on one another when the appropriate succession to the Prophet is up for grabs.

44. 5: LIFE EXPLICABLE: A PIANO FALLS ON JIM'S HEAD 8.18.2007

Many years ago I was wandering in the streets of Amsterdam—no I was not stoned on some hash that they sell right of the streets there. But I happened to not be paying much attention when a Dutchman yelled to me to watch where I was walking. There, above my head about three stories up, was a grand piano that was being winched up to a window in the upper floor, the only way such a large object can be installed in those narrow Dutch houses along the canals.

For some reason, all that day I imagined what it would be like if that piano had cut loose and fallen on my head. I remembered it for many days, and I still remember it. I think of it every time I see a big black grand piano. [1] (No! I told you, I was not narc'ed out on ganja!). I wonder what would have happened of that winch gave way and that piano fell on my head. Well, for one thing, you wouldn't be suffering through another of my pieces.

It's about how we account for things that happen in our lives. How we interpret and even assign purpose and meaning to things that happen to us. It's about how we try to make sense, or nonsense, of things that happen to us, not just some dumb explicative expletive like “s**t happens,” but something that addresses the “why” of things.

So, I was walking down a street in Amsterdam and a piano falls on my head. In that split second before my teeth are replaced by a new set of ivories and I become one with (what actually is) my favorite musical instrument my last thought considers the great imponderable of life— why is this happening to me? To some people there is one, single explanation, but which one is it, because there are several explanations as to why a piano might fall on your—OK, let's make that Jim's—head. In no particular order of importance or validity are, it was . . .

Foreordained. Yes, that piano and I were destined to meet up on a street in Amsterdam well before either me nor the piano knew about it. Indeed, the entire trajectory of my life was pointed to that rendezvous with that nine-foot grand piano. It was meant to be. In some way, a way that I'll never be able to comprehend, that piano smashing me to the sidewalk with some great resounding, cacophonous chord echoing off the surrounding buildings plays its part in some great symphony, some plan in which that piano and I play a part. Nothing could have stopped me from being there that day at that time and place; it was appointed. No matter what the Dutch newspapers were going to run a headline the following day: “Millions Mourn After One of World's Greatest Professors Killed by Falling Boesendorfer.” [2] Regrettably, reporters made some oblique references to hashish that was pure speculation. Some people just said: “It was meant to be.”

The Las Vegas Line. This is the actuarial explanation. Las Vegas bookies will give you odds on just about anything, even the odds of a piano falling on Jim's head in a street in Amsterdam. The odds are that, if pianos are installed in some places by lifting them into upper story windows, that people walk along those streets, and some of them don't pay much attention to where they are walking, and ropes or winches sometimes fail, etc. etc. that eventually, at some odds, a piano will fall on somebody's head. And so, Jim was just not one of those who was fulfilling the actuarial odds of being on the Titanic, eating a bad piece of sashimi, driving by an IED on a Baghdad street, or any other circumstance on which there are also betting odds. [3]

The Le Carré. This explanation for why a piano falls on Jim's head is favored by people who have read too many John Le Carré novels. To them there just has to be an explanation that is part of an extremely complicated intrigue in which dark and secret contending forces of men from MI-6, and CIA and KGB battle with weaponry like 9mm Glocks, Uzis, the stiletto, Plutonium tea, and may even include the lethal 3-metre Boesendorfer grand piano. [4] Jim must have been covertly involved in some espionage that was kept even from his closest friends and many beautiful women lovers. [5] The “piano drop” must have been the best approach his adversaries took to removing Jim without arousing much suspicion that he was a casualty of a dark and sinister cold war. Of course there is always the chance that Jim was not involved in any such Le Carré type adventures, in which case he might have been what has come to be called “collateral damage.” That leads to an alternative explanation . . .

Bad Luck. Jim was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, S**T Happens. Tough luck, Jim. Hard cheese, old boy, and all that.

God's Plan. This is sort of the Chaos Theory version, that we all have our place in God's Plan (whatever the hell that is) for the universe. The amazing thing is that religious authorities can even presume that there is such a thing as God's Plan (which, of course, they like to imply to their adherents that they have a good idea what that plan is). The God's Plan explanation for why a piano falls on Jim's head has all sorts of wonderful little cosmological tricks built into it. Not the least of these is the “God works his wonders in mysterious ways” trick. This is when religious authorities can't seem to come up with a godly reason why Jim should be dispatched by a 3,200 caliber pianoforte. So they say it's one of “God's wonders” [6] and we should just accept that God had a part in His plan that involved the necessity for Jim to be clobbered on an Amsterdam street by the musical instrument he loved most—God likes a bit of irony in his Plan. So by some twisted logic you should be made to feel good, not bad, that Jim is reduced to a mess of protoplasm because he has played his part in the great mysterious plan God has for the universe. Weird, huh? Until you remember that this is the God who had a Son born of a Virgin and then had the Son crucified so that the sins of people who haven't even been born yet would eat his body and drink his blood and have their sins forgiven and live forever on some clouds. But I digress a bit. So I save the best for last.

Wages of Sin. Yup, there will be people that will shake their heads and say “Jim must have done something terribly wrong to deserve going out this way.” Some of them will even get poetic about it: “The way Jim played piano, he deserved to go out this way.” But whatever, most people see life as some kind of accounting process in which good and evil need to be balanced out. Life is full of what appear to be logical cause and effect circumstances—drink too much and you die by the bottle; drive to fast and you might die in a crash; live by the sword, die by the sword, etc. [7] Maybe even Jim, in that nano-second of last consciousness, will think, “I had this coming to me; I wasn't a good boy all the time.” [8] Then again, if he gets another nano, he might think “I would rather have gone out like Nelson Rockefeller or John Garfield. [9]

So there are many ways of explicating and giving meaning to that piano falling on Jim's head in Amsterdam. Of course we could ponder what it meant that the piano didn't fall on Jim's head. Nah. It was more fun for you this way, wasn't it?

OK, but I'm not finished with you just yet. There is something you can do to make sure that, in fact, a piano does not fall on Jim's head.

• Copy this essay

• Paste the essay into emails of ten of your friends and family

• Ask them to keep the chain going because, if they don't, Jim is really going to get clobbered by that piano. [10]

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[1] I think it was a Boesendorfer, but it might have been a Erard or Pleyel, but I'm certain it was a nine foot concert grand. I figured that you would be interested in these details.

[2] OK, so it wasn't quite millions, but it was somewhere between 37 people and four million. You know these estimates are never accurate.

[3] The odds of a piano falling on Jim's head on a street in Amsterdam are, according to Sammy the Book, of Las Vegas, 1,000,000,000,000,000 to one. They are even greater if you want to add that Jim was whistling “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady just before the piano hit.

[4] Some agents prefer the 2-metre Steinway upright, which is more compact and easier to conceal. Other CIA operatives have been known to employ the Baldwin spinet, but others contend that spinets just don't have the “knock down” power of a grand.

[5] No, I am not going to name them! Would you have me to put them in jeopardy. There are a lot of grand pianos teetering from upper story window ledges and I am not going to be a Scooter Libby and endanger these many, beautiful and passionate women who have shared intimacies with me that I usually only boast about when I am very drunk and trying to out impress some guys in bars. Alright, alright, I'll give you this much: one of them has a first name that is spelled the same as Angelina.

[6] Maybe for God it is, but for Jim it sucks.

[7] On the other hand you are cautioned against trying to make this sort of divine accounting work in explaining why a couple of hundred school kids are killed by an earthquake or tsunami.

[8] Yes, like millions of guys do every day I have said “I did not have sex with that woman” (but was not impeached for it.)

[9] And you can guess what they were doing when things came to an end for them.

[10] If they prefer to break the chain they may send $100 to the “Ship What's Left of Jim's Body Back from Amsterdam in a Tupper Ware Container Fund.” Dragon City Journal accepts all currencies.

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44. 4: FRIENDSHIP AND POLITICS 8.14.2007

I phoned an old friend a few days ago, one I had no spoken to in many years. He was a guy I had played basketball with, and I stumbled on his phone number in the alumni section of the website of one of my alma maters. We chatted about people we knew in common and, as is often the case, he remembered incidents and anecdotes that were like old photographs that you discover in the bottom of a drawer that remind you of the person that you one were, because that's how he remembered me.

All the talk was reminiscence talk, about this or that so-and-so, that professor, who were the best-looking girls, and of course, who is no longer with us. But I got the sense that Tom (not his real name) was still much closer to those days than I am. He had worked for a big American corporation for his entire career, raised a family, and stayed within an orbit of a few hundred miles of where he was born. He was retired and had recently become widowed. Tom said that he didn't have a computer and didn't want one or an email address—so there is little chance he will encounter this essay.

It was interesting to me that he remembered me as “a liberal, always wanting to talk about “philosophical stuff nobody could come to agreement about,” who was not as influenced by a conservative professor we had taken in common. I don't remember myself so much to the political left, at least not until I got into graduate school, away from Catholics. I needed that “separation” to have really open-minded philosophical encounters that showed me that I had been living in an intellectually-confined world—what I like to call a “back-patting society” where everyone conspires to maintain group solidarity and amity by conflict avoidance and emphasizing areas of agreement.

That's why when Tom mentioned the “L word” I decided it was time to start looking for the conversational exit strategy. I surmised that I had yet another old friend from my school days who had remained philosophically within that old conservative Catholic orbit, much as they had with their geography and there was little sense or profit in “going there,” going into the state of contemporary affairs when the arcs of our lives had been so different. Tom wondered, he said, why I had moved to California, a place about which he retained some stereotypes of it being a “land of fruits and nuts” (he didn't use those words), or what I liked about living in France, or England, or China, as though I had been exiled to some undesirable assignments.

As I summoned my reservoir of conversation closers from years of boring cocktail parties I realized that my old friend was very much a stranger and, that if I met him sitting on a plane next to me I would probably strap on my headphones and leave this rather rigid, socially and politically conservative person to that whole cohort in our nation that people like myself make the decision to either confront or avoid. I usually end up saying to myself, well, I'll cancel your vote with my vote, and hope there's a few more of our kind than there is of yours. There is also a disturbing, and deeper, feeling that you don't want to entertain, even in thought, that at this cellular level of social interaction—friendship—there exists a germ of what we have comes to see in the very dissolution of entire societies; Tom and I might not be too many degrees of separation from being mortal enemies. All the elements are present, if held in some way, and perhaps more tenuously than we allow ourselves to believe, from a flashpoint by little more than shared memories of “good old times.” It may seem to us that that the lethality of the Shia and Sunni Muslim sects, or Serbs and Kosovars, have no potential counterpart in the American context, that our “system” is invulnerable to such vicious and irreconcilable rifts, but our own history cautions against such comforting delusions.

In some sense I see this as what has happened to our entire country. Certainly there is an aspect of this that is part of life in general; it precedes and is transcendent to, out current political climate, and even precedes George W. Bush. It was the 1960s and the Vietnam War that elevated the fact that life can be a life-changing experience, to a wedge that opened changes that crystallized around around major institutional factors—faith, political philosophy, patriotism, social values—what we came to call world views, cosmologies, and weltanshaung. It may have been more imagination than reality that there was much solidarity to the American culture; it may just have been that a couple of key elements had not come together—a triggering political event, and a medium that could draw together and permute its divisive characteristics to a flashpoint. We might have come close in events like the Kent State killings.

Media and other social institutions have since chosen sides; we have Red States and Blue states, Left and right, Christians and non-Christians, and modes of cheap and immediate communication that allow for a form of those “back-patting” societies to quickly coalesce the non-introspective and non-critical “tribal” components of a self-sundering society. We have citizens that mean it when they say to their fellow citizens: “I am an American, and you are not.”

I have a more recent right-wing acquaintance to whom I regularly put the question: “What do you admire about George Bush?” He refuses to answer, claiming that I am only looking for a point of leverage to jump all over his right-wing politics. But I am serious about wanting to know the answer. I am curious if he wonders what I wonder, which is how the hell anybody could find anything to admire about a man who, like a bad dream, and who speaks an Orwellian language in which he wishes us to believe that he is “a uniter, not a divider,” has any admirable qualities. But my acquaintance reacts just like his leader—that the question itself is just politics—he invokes a sort of “executive privilege” that answers the question by “taking the 5th.”

I have long believed that it is possible to maintain a civil society if its citizens agree on discursive process, even if they disagree on the substance and outcome of that process. Process, or rules of resolution of differences, at least have the element of fairness. Maybe we have never had an ideal level of adherence to a fair application of process, but we have seen that broken, brazenly and egregiously in recent years, and most especially since the election 2000. That election ushered in a new, Rovian, political ethos, one committed to winning, holding, and applying political power at all costs, one in which, as has been said many times in these pages, the ends justify the means.

But in a civil society the end—the commonweal— is the process. Substance is the product of the means. The very schools that taught my conservative former classmates and myself taught that you cannot have a just end by unjust means. We cannot, for example, have a free America by abridging our own Constitution and freedoms by doing so. That is the logic that leads to having to “destroy the village to save it.” Americans no longer trust that the process is fair because politics has become the activity not so much of persuasion as of rigging the process —of rigged elections, executive privilege, congressmen owned by lobbyists, and justices appointed for their tendency to see justice through ideological lenses.

Friendship is the most complex and difficult social relationship, more complex even than marriage (we all know enough marriages where the partners are not friends). But friendships are essentially formed on the basis of commonality of values. Therefore, they are, in some sense, political systems in microcosm. Sometimes it seems impossible to maintain them in the increasingly divisive universe of macrocosmic politics. But this much I know: any friend who won't tell you what he admires about George W. Bush, is a friend in question.

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44. 3: KIM CHEE EVANGELISTS 8.10.2007

Poster from Christian website

The heavy-set Korean guy who crammed himself into the seat next to me on a commuter flight from San Diego to LAX had a ring on his pudgy finger that looked like one of those NFL Super Bowl rings—big, gaudy with diamonds, and ostentatious. Starched cuffs protruded from the polyester sport jacket. He also wore a glossy tie and topped things off with a ridiculously high pompadour. He looked like some third-rate appliance salesman trying to look second rate. It took him about three sentences—breath clouded with kim chee —to inform me that he was on his way to his “ministry” in Seoul, sister church to three ministries in the Wisconsin. He makes videos of his sermons that he sells to support his ministries.

I am always amazed when I meet someone who goes a stereotype one better, and this guy did. He reeked of all that evangelistic arrogant pietism that I detest. The money they manage to all but extort from thjeir credulous flocks confirms to them that the Lord does indeed favor their “ministries.” In Asia, Christianity gets a boost from its association with financial success; Asia is a place where the gods are often supplicated for “good fortune.” In didn't ask my seatmate if he was a Moonie, the whacko Christian sect that has made its founder filthy rich, and who owns The Washington Times. It didn't matter, I already knew that S. Korea was awash in evangelistic Christian kim chee .

That was a while ago. But it was freshened in my memory, when I saw on the news that a group of S. Koreans have been kidnapped in Afghanistan by those bad-ass Taliban Islamic extremists. Still, I am not very sympathetic to their plight. One of them has already been executed by their captors, and the threat is that the same fate might await the rest, almost all of them Christian nurses. The Taliban want to trade them for some of their own who have been captured by the Americans. But the Americans say “no deal,” they do not want to appease the Taliban with such ransom. So, the Christian Americans don't mind offering up the Christian Koreans—ah, what the heck, they'll all meet up after the Rapture and have a good laugh over a few beers and some kim chee over all of this.

So the Koreans were using the old canard—heal the body, snatch the soul. They are, in a sense, kidnappers themselves. [1] They claim not to be “missionaries,” but that is about as credible as if they said they don't like kim chee. Are these people so stupid that their subtraction from the human gene pool may be the only salutary residue of their shoving their noises into other people's metaphysical business? That sounds harsh; but these are people so convinced of their righteousness that they do not understand that this soulsnatching game is being played with 12 th Century rules? And under 12 th Century rules, evangelism and war are pretty much the same thing.

Most of us start out having our innocence robbed of us at tender age; we are made credulous, and what we believe we adopt not by some God-instilled impulse to faith, but out of fear and indoctrination. We get our faith and sect from nurture, not nature. Depending upon where we are when we get our nurturing in religion, we end up in one faith or another. Let's face it, if these Koreans had been born in Afghanistan they would be Muslims. Their culture would be entirely different.

I think it is the underlying implied attitude of superiority in evangelists to which I owe my paradoxical contempt and fascination. That someone can deign to judge the soul of another as unworthy of paradise, save for the Hitlers, Stalins, Pol Pots and Bushes, and their ilk, and to judge people's need for “saving,” is an arrogant and bigoted enterprise. When evangelists insinuate themselves into my life I view it as a declaration of war—not bang-bang shooting war, but a metaphysical free-fire war, where their faith, their beliefs, their gods, are targets. But the Taliban, of course, do not make this distinction.

I have my own point of view of the roots of evangelism, which I believe to lie deep in the soil of creation myths and the cosmologies of early religions. As it seems to always have been religion and warfare share some of the same social purposes. To demonize an enemy, to portray them as an evil force intent upon taking your land and your women, makes conquest, subjugation, or extermination of them a sacred duty as much as a social necessity. Prayer and sacrifice before battle go back to the earliest accounts and can be seen today as American troops prepare for their missions in Iraq.

If you can't make an enemy fear your weapons you might be able to make them fear your gods. General Boykin wasn't the first general to publicly claim that his (Christian) god could whip the ass of the enemy's god. [2] Since many people are inclined to “go with a winner” they can be persuaded to switch their deities as a means of survival. Either way, religion comes in handy as a means of making enemies tremble or, once subdued, making them conform to customs and mores of their new masters. Those that don't can be offered a martyr's death.

It's all designed to work out rather neatly and efficiently. In the dualistic world of the contending forces of good and evil, both physical and metaphysical, the world is a place of endless battle between those forces, and victory on the earthly fields of Armageddon, is seen as a guarantee of heavenly reward because, as everybody know, God loves a winner.

The two big monotheisms currently in contention clearly see things through this dualistic cosmology. Their faiths are on a collision course. There may be those who see some form of eventual syncretism, or accommodation between the two—after all God and Allah are just two different names for the same entity, right? Yeah, right, but Mr. Mohammad sees Mr. Christian's wife as some underdressed feminist slut and Mr. Christian sees Mrs. Mohammad as an illiterate, repressed bag of laundry—and that's where “the rubber meets the road” in differential theology. Forget accommodation, even tolerance, which is a delicate and rare spatial balancing act, because convert, or die, is the rallying cry.

This is because another dimension of the cosmology is—for all of its seeming contradiction with conventional fundamental Christian thought—Darwinian. One need not listen too carefully to hear Christians bemoaning abortion because, in addition to being “murder” in their terms, it deprives their side of a potential warrior. Those Muslims, more than one Christian preacher has warned from his pulpit, “are out-breeding us.” Yup, that whole serial impregnation of multiple wives thing can be seen as a lot more effective than the U.S. Army having to pay enlisting bonuses and college tuition to et their warriors. Demographics seem to be bearing this out. France is already concerned that its Muslim population will be a legitimate political force in not many years because of its rate of reproduction. [3] Thus, religion becomes a form of “survival of the most-est,” of arithmetic hegemony over ecological niches, over which faith supercedes the other numerically, a war over social policies, customs, mores—culture. In this form of Darwinian struggle even the great Western secular faith of “democracy” can even become a weapon against itself!

I wonder if it was some pastor like that fat-fingered Korean evangelist who dispatched those missionary “nurses” into the vortex of such a momentous Armageddon.

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[1] Readers of these pages already know this writers contempt for evangelism. DCJ Archives, No. 3.9; 37.7; see also “Invasions of the Soul Snatchers”; Chapter 17 of my book, This Urban Life. There is also an insurgency of evangelistic Christian into the armed services of this country, cf, DCJArchives No. 41.1, and check out this link: Armageddon

[2] He wasn't demoted or discharged by his Commander-in-Chief, as he should have been according to military rules about evangelizing in uniform, he was rewarded.

[3] A Burmese tour guide expressed the same concern to me in his country, where the Muslims outbreed Buddhists as well.

44. 2: SEX IN THE OVAL OFFICE 8.6.2007

[Editorial Note: Dear Reader, The author of this piece has provocatively titled it in a manner to appeal to base values and prurient interests. The Office of Morals and Values of Dragon City Journal does not approve of such journalistic chicanery and cautions the reader accordingly. The piece should not be read by children under the age of 18,who are easily bored, or anyone older than 65, without the assistance of magnification lenses. Thank you and our apologies for any offence that might result. Ba Feng Gu, Associate Editor]

Before leaving for their Summer recess the Democrat-semi-controlled Congress passed an energy bill that reversed some of the tax breaks and drilling rights for energy companies put in place by the Republicans, in favor of measures to reduce energy consumption and to favor exploration and development of alternative energy technologies. They also failed to have enough get enough votes to deny George Bush permission to wiretap Americans without FISA oversight since the fear of the very appearance of being soft on the so-called “war on terror” still plays too well in the home districts. However, they also managed to pass an Ethics bill that might have some teeth in it that are not biting into a filet mignon that has been paid for by a lobbyist. While our national legislators pause, we can reflect on what values their partisan politics reflect.

There is not much science in the discipline of Political Science. There is the stuff on voting behavior that applies statistical analysis, maybe a bit of borrowing from social psych in that “focus group” stuff, a larger debt to History (a lot of people I knew were History/PoliSci majors), some Philosophy (but not nearly enough) and then a balance of Rhetoric. But there is nothing in that so-called “science” that exposes in a systematic and scientific way, its quiddity, that what politics is it's “what-ness.”

Politics is about many things, but, in its content, it is nothing if not about values. It is the axiology of public discourse. If that phrase is perhaps a bit abstract and off-putting, it is also about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky having a frolic in the Oval Office. There, that keeps us from drifting too far from the supermarket tabloids. But hold on a bit for the salacious stuff.

To return to being didactic, politics is about what is claimed to be good, or proper, or right, or just, all value-laden terms. Values are not, despite how often people erroneously conflate them, facts. There are a lot of ways of elucidating the distinction but suffice for the moment to say that facts are about what is right or wrong (i.e. correct or incorrect), and values are about what is (considered to be) good or bad. Facts are like nouns (“that is a Muslim”); values are more adjectival (“that is a Terrorist”). Values cannot be validated by recourse to facts, and facts exist independent of opinion. If one has a problem grasping that I can send you a ticket to the new Creation Museum in Tennessee. There you can see humans cavorting with dinosaurs, a silly attempt to validate Genesis by simply presenting something that has no basis in fact (or to please people who loved The Flintstones) as though it were fact. Hey, what's a few hundred million years this is way or that.

So Values and Facts go together like man and woman. I won't venture which is which. Facts can exist independently of values, but values need facts to “cleave to” (hey, that's pretty Biblical); they are meaningless unless they have something factual to modify. But I'm sensing that this metaphor can only get me in a lot of trouble, so I'm going to drop it and head to where I don't mind causing trouble—Republicans.

Anyone who has been awake since the 1980s knows how the political value pendulum of American politics has swung far to the Right, and into Righteousness. Yes, much of this movement has be spurred by what the righteous have worried over as a decline in morality in America. These are people who do not include lying by their political representatives as an index of that decline in morality. No, it's about what it usually is by religious hypocrites—sex. Morality equates with sex, and the rest, the lying and cheating and greed, well sometimes that's what you have to do to get to punish people who are having sex, especially Democrats who are having sex. This tells you something about Republican values.

Republicans evince the baser values (they would say “fundamental”) because they believe that they know who and what we are (good or evil, hardworking CEOs or welfare queens, patriots or terrorist appeasers, etc) and so they know what has to be done. They are not one much for distinctions—NB: distinctions are very bad for winning at politics). Republicans like to say crud like they value “the American way of life,” so that everybody can fill in that blank the way they want to. They like equally vague appeals to fear, like “they hate our freedom.” “They” is the vaguely-defined terrorists/insurgents, of course, who probably hate the freedom we have arrogated to ourselves to meddle with and invade their countries, which we wouldn't give a rat's ass about if they didn't have oil. They like to keep repeating implications they know to be un-true—that there were Iraqis flying the 911 planes; that Saddam was in alliance with Al Qaeda. Their prime value, it turns out, is that the end justifies the means.

Democrats are more about higher values (they might say “potential”) because they believe that we are in process, becoming, not cast in stone by our birth, gender and color, that politics is a means by which we can realize the ways we are all alike (like needing a living wage and health care and stuff like that), you know, liberal values. To Liberals, who see things as process--and hopefully, progress) means are not so distinct from ends, and so not any means—burning the village to save it, or rounding up all suspects and denying them due process, etc.—are justified by ends, especially ends of syntactic vagueness as a “war on terror.”

Probably all politicians lie and dissemble; it goes with the job to some extent. So it's what a politician lies about that should become the means of necessary lies from the really bad ones. There is no doubt about it—and the facts support it for anybody who wants to argue about it—the Republican have become the biggest bunch of prevaricators in the history of American politics. They weren't always this bad, but Nixon saying “I am not a crook” and lying about what tapes have subsequently disclosed is not nearly so bad to them as Clinton's “I did not have sex with that woman.” Reagan, who knew damn well that he had made a deal with the (enemy) Iranians to give them weapons—in contravention to the Constitution—in the Iran-Contra deal, was lying, but not as seriously to Republicans as “I did not have sex with that woman.” And sure as no human ever had a T-Rex as a pet, what George Bush lied about to get us into a preemptive war with a country that never threatened us and has resulted in thousands of American and Iraqi deaths, doesn't even belong in the same sentence with “I did not have sex with that woman.”

Ironically, the Republicans came into power in 2000 saying they would restore honesty and morality to politics. After the theft of the election they proceeded to: consort with Jack Abramoff; bowdlerize governmental reports on the environment and energy (with the VP consorting secretly with energy companies); pass bills in the middle of the night; start a war based on information they knew to be untrue; have lied about the injuries and deaths of soldiers (Lynch and Tillman); about Abu Ghraib; lied about how eight Federal prosecutors were fired (one of them for convicting a lying congressman who took bribes); then installing an Attorney General who lies for hours before a congressional committee; like to say that torture isn't torture . . . It is possible to go on for pages but I'm about ready to puke. What have these lying bastards done to my country?!

But indulge me one bit further on this subject of lying. Bush is the most dangerous kind of political liar. He not only lies about the facts, but he lies (self-deludes) to himself. George Bush is a flop, and has been with everything he has tried. He is where he is by a series of handouts and favors he would not have received were in not for who his daddy was. And he knows that, deep down inside, underneath the self-delusion, he knows that. Some of the political monsters who have wreaked havoc have been that same sort of self-deluding person. They are most dangerous because the lie is not just a tactic, it becomes their raison d'etre. They leave a big mess and a lot of dead people in their wake.

OK, I promised that I would get to the subject indicated by the title of this piece. Yes, I happen to think that a little sex in the Oval Office (renamed the Oral Office by one of my friends) is a good thing, especially if it keeps certain hands off a certain red telephone. And I think. in paraphrase of Robin Williams, playing Adrian Kronhauer in Good Morning Vietnam , that “if ever a white man needed a b*** j** . . . ,” George Bush needs one. Alas, there do not seem to be any takers of this momentous responsibility—not Ms Hughes, not Ms Meiers, not Ms Rice, so far as we know. So it is time for Ann Coulter to “step up,” so to speak, and do her duty for the country.

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43. 1: JUICE ‘EM UP 8.3.2007

UrbisMedia

Remember the Press sisters of the old USSR (make that the CCCP) Olympic track and field team? They wiped out the competition in the shot put and discuss in the Cold War Olympics of the 1960s. But they also had enough facial hair to do razor commercials and were pumping more testosterone than a frat house on Spring Break. Their shoulder widths were only matched by the swimmers on the East German “women's” swim team that also wiped out their competition. No question about it, the East Block was way out ahead in the Steroid race. But those were the days when paper cups were for more than peeing in.

These days it seems that half the professional and amateur athletes in the world are juiced with steroids, growth hormone, or blood doped, or running on something a little extra. There's too much money in sports these days to bother with that old fair play Baron de Coupertin crap. It's about winning, dude, and if I have to have some surgical tubing running out of my shorts connected to some lab in the suburbs, so be it.

In not too many days baseball player Barry Bonds, who looks like the incredible hulk, will break Hank Aaron's record for most career home runs. There's a lot of angst about it and divided opinion among baseball fans. Bonds, despite his evasive replies, is very likely a “juicer.” That is, he regularly, and surreptitiously has a syringe is his butt full of hopped up juice that make him add muscle like he had a fire hose up there. Bonds is a chemistry set. Does he deserve the record, or one with an asterisk for “pharmacologically-assisted” next to it. I think so. A bunch of contestants for the 2007 Tour de France have been DQ'd for blood doping already, some whole teams. And they are still arguing over Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis's blood.

Increasingly, as chemists figure out new drugs to build strength and add endurance, athletes are going to take that extra chance in going for the gold. Some sports, like those of the Olympics will and the Tour de France will probably stick to their principles and throw out any cheaters they can find. Hey may end up giving the venerable “yellow jersey” to a baguette delivery boy on his one-speed bike. Baseball on the other hand is rather a joke, hardly seeming to care how juiced up their players are because they may have already determined than most of the fans are more interested in records, or records set by the players of their era rather than some guys they never say play. Watching the baseball players who demolished hitting records in recent years as they lied and dissembled in front of a congressional committee (don't these people get enough lying with the like of Alberto Gonzales?) is evidence that these players have not respect for their sport or for their fans. But what hypocrisy: would anybody care if some ballplayer broke a record by being drunk when he did it?

What does this signify, if anything? Well, it's all about the money these days. Maybe it always was to some extent, but there wasn't enough money in sports to set up your own private methtosterone lab. Will kids start shooting up, so they can make the junior varsity? Why not, the other kids are shooting up, sniffing or inhaling behind the bleachers. So part of it is that we have become more of a pharmacologically-assisted society. So should we be wringing our hands and forming more congressional committees to look into the crisis of drugs in sports? Well, you can if you want to, but this is just a manifestation of the further, and hypocritical, convergence of several “businesses”—drugs, and it's profitable opposite number, drug enforcement, its legal big brother, the pharmaceutical industry, and now, the big business of sport.

Who cares! Frankly my dear I don't give a damn. People have forgotten what sport is about any way. They think it's about celebrity, who makes the most money, championships rings, and records—to hell with how you get them. So I say take down all the barriers. Let's stop all the bitching and peeing in cups and let athletes become all they can be. So what if they start growing antlers and sprouting feathers in a few years, lets see what they can really do with full-on chemical assistance. Let's see if we can get to a 4-second hundred meters, a one-hour and five-minute marathon, a shot put that takes out somebody in section 34E, and long jump that is really long. Swimmers will look like they have outboards attached. And, of course, baseball players will hit hundreds of home runs each year.

Why? You ask, Why take such a cynical attitude? Because we haven't even seen what the mapping of the human genome can do for sport. Just think about it: swimmers with flippers for feet (next year maybe gills); high-jumpers who have had a gene from fleas spliced into their DNA; bike racers with two hearts and four lungs; 17-foot basketball players; golfers cloned from Tiger Woods; boxers with exo-skeletons; the guy who wins the 100 meter dash will have a parachute that deploys to keep him from smashing into the stadium wall; and let's marvel at the figure skater who lands a perfect quadruple-triple-double axel with six and half twists and a double Lutz—all tens every time. Olympic teams will have their own pharmacists and “gene coaches.” Think what it can do for my favorite Olympic sport.

When I was a kid we just loved to go out to the street, or the alley or the park and play a game of pick-up baseball, or football or basketball. It was the innocent age of sport, when just the love of the game mattered, nothing else. Just participating, not winning was the essential thing. No money (OK, maybe an occasional little side bet) was involved, no records. OK, I played hard and like to win, and I remembered how many times I won and hit a home run or scored a touchdown. So what if I didn't tell the other guys that when I chewed some of the leaves from that bush by third base that, oh man, I had the reflexes of a housefly and the foot-speed of a cockroach. What's wrong with “just that little extra edge.”

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