Volume 43

JULY 2007

43. 7: HEY! I JUST REALIZED SOMETHING! 7.30.2007

UrbisMedia

I haven't attended Sunday mass in over four decades. Someday I will tally up what I learned by reading the Sunday papers or a book against the intellectually-wasteful hours of repeating the same tired prayers and listening to the same boring homilies. But where I live I always know when it is Sunday. No, not by the tolling of the cathedral bells, or the faint refrains of hymns bouncing off some frescoed nave, or the tinkle of offertory chimes. No, it's the sound of the chirps of car alarms being armed from the Lexuses (Lexi?) and the Land Rovers as the adherents of the nearby Self-Realization Fellowship Church take up all the parking space in my neighborhood and file off to see if the can realize themselves.

Usually I am whacking away at the major faiths, especially those who aspire to become de facto governments. I would rather leave the contemplative faiths alone to contemplate things like the meaning of life or whether they should get out of the market and into bonds, or even why in hell a traitor like Scooter Libby is walking around on a golf course. But I have been doing a little contemplating myself—about the parking in my neighborhood.

But before I “go there” I think you should know a little bit about the church I am picking on for this piece. Above the entrance to the Self-Realization Fellowship Church is a picture of benign visage of its founder, Paramahansa Yogananda. He was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in 1893, in Gorakhpur, India, into a devout and well-to-do Bengali family. It is said that, “From his earliest years, it was evident to those around him that the depth of his awareness and experience of the spiritual was far beyond the ordinary.” Sound familiar? Yup. They are always a bit sensitive, these guys (have a look at that face again—above). Then he didn't keep his original name; people could have gone around saying “Oh, my Ghosh! And Ghosh darn it!” Oh, well. Anyway, it doesn't end there. The bio also has this: “On March 7, 1952, Paramahansa Yogananda entered mahasamadhi, a God-illumined master's conscious exit from the body at the time of physical death. His passing was marked by an extraordinary phenomenon. A notarized statement signed by the Director of Forest Lawn Memorial-Park testified: No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death. ...This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one. ...Yogananda's body was apparently in a phenomenal state of immutability. Amazing! Almost like, uh, you know, resurrection. This is just the sort of faith that a New Age Baby Boomer with an SUV and a terror of aging needs to get into.

Trouble is, they're into my neighborhood. There is no place for any visitor's to my condo to park for hours while these dim-bulbs are up the block trying to realize who the f*** they are! The oughta ask me!

I have to say that I have a soft spot for the contemplative, inner-focused, faiths. They're usually not very evangelical, and that goes a long way with me. Of course, there is the usual amount of metaphysical BS, but I rather like the re-incarnation notion. But the whole “holy man” guru thing strikes me as some stink stuff you want to scrape off the bottoms of your shoes. These guys always make their bones by spending years wandering from one holy man to another to get those deep answers, then the learn enough to become a holy man themselves, add some little gimmick, like wearing no clothes, or standing on one leg for three weeks, or having sex with a goat, to their act and start their own church or ashram. [1]

I tried this approach to metaphysics one time, traveling to India and visiting one holy man after another. But each one told me that there was one holy man who had the answer to life that would give me self-realization. They told me his unpronounceable name and said that he sat in a little cave at the top of a mountain in the Himilayas. [2] So I set off in search of him I spent years, but finally, one day I found myself, sick, penniless, and exhausted, scratching my way up the slopes of a mountain with an unpronounceable name, cold and bloody-fingered, but nearing the answer.

A the top the was the holy man, bearded, wearing next to nothing, sitting in the shivering air at the mouth of his little cave. “Welcome, my son,” he said. [3]

“Oh, holy man,” I said, “I have finally found you.” There were tears in my eyes. “I need to know the answer to life that will give me self-realization. Please, I beg of you, after all these years of searching and contemplating, can you tell me.

“I will give you that answer, my son, but then I will say no more and you must leave me alone and return to the world below.”

“Good enough, great master,” I said, happily. “Don't make me wait a moment longer.”

The holy man looked deeply into my eyes, or was it my very soul. And then he said: “My son, all the questions of life will become answered for you once you know that a wet bird never flies at night.”

“A wet bird never flies at night?” I repeated interrogatively. “A wet bird never flies at night?!!!”

But he said nothing, just looking off into some nirvana. He would not speak again. I felt like kicking his shriveled ass down the freakin' mountain!

OK, I just kinda made up that little story about the holy man on the mountain (but I had ya there for a while, didn't I?) But you are right to ask me what the hell the point of all this is.

Well, it's about the parking, really. Now that might seem rather petty when there are people out there trying to figure out important stuff like what wet birds not flying at night has to do with their self-realization. So here it is: it's because I pay property taxes to the city. Those taxes go for the maintenance and construction of streets, streets that I would like to be able to park on, or have my friends and family park on. But religious institutions are exempt from paying taxes. They get a free ride—and free parking. So I think I am well with my rights and deserving, as my erstwhile Roman Catholic Church would say—dignum et justum est—to bitch about having to pay for these people to fund their self-realization off of me and my neighbors. I am in effect, through my taxes, tithing to a church that is still trying to figure why a wet bird doesn't fly at night. [4]

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[1] A nice little book on this is Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta (1994)

[2] Ever noticed that all religions seem to involve mountains in one way or another? If you have a flat country you are never (no pun intended) going to get your religion off the ground.

[3] Ever notice that religious figures always want to be your father?

[4] This is not, of course the only way in which religious institutions are living off your taxes and my taxes. There is George Bush's “faith based initiatives,” which is little more than a front that has funneled billions of our taxes to churches and religious (make that overwhelmingly Christian) institutions. The Supreme Court recently gave Bush ever more power to use our taxes that way, b arring taxpayers from challenging a president's faith-based spending. See, http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-ed-standing26jun26,1,6854060.story?coll=la-news-a_section&ctrack=2&cset=true

43. 6: THE CASE FOR GOVERNMENT 7.26.2007

If Bush and Cheney and their intellectually-challenged supporting cast aren't enough to make you mutinous, then the loyal-to-the-bunker Republican congressman and wimpy Democrats, incompetent bureaucrats, and a Supreme Court with Scalia, Thomas and Alito will turn you anarchistic. One wonders whether we could handle things better without them, without government altogether.

We could join those fringy, true believer socio-political sects that inhabit the simple-minded worlds of Libertarians, Scientologists, Ayn Rand Objectivists and their like. They abhor government, and they can be bi-partisan because they don't need a jerk like Bush and his administration to rationalize their abhorrence, they are categorical about it. They have their so-called philosophical bases for their contempt for government, but basically they don't like people telling them what do (laws) and they don't like having to pay for governmental services (taxes).

These can be rather exasperating people to deal with because they are arguing for nothing, or what they regard as the some fundamental principle, or some narrow-minded notion of what is the essence of human behavior. They are never in power, so there is no historical basis from which to counter their positions, so they sit and throw bottles from the intellectual cheap seats, unshakable in their belief that they are too correct to be accepted. Sometimes their rhetoric is co-opted by the political right, especially with “government should be small as possible and never raised taxes.”

Every so often I would encounter one of these dolts in a class at the university, wondering what the hell they were doing there when they already “had all the answers” because they had a well-thumbed copy of Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, or F.A. Hayek, the only sources they needed. They rarely had an original thoughts and were devoid of critical faculties. That they turned up in a school of government, where I taught, made me wonder about their sanity. Maybe they were like Bible-thumpers in Iraq.

But, in their simple-minded way, they performed a small service. They let us know that there were still people out there like them. Still people who never got the idea that government isn't always (although we have proof that it can be) a cabal like the Bush administration. And they do force us to re-think and rationalize the premises for government from time to time. They basically want the absolute right to do anything, anytime, anywhere; so they are like children who are not potty-trained, something I'll have more to say about a couple of paragraphs below.

They also, particularly, the conservatives, seem to be living in another era, like the 18 th century. Eighteenth century “classical liberalism” was actually the equivalent of what we call conservatism these days. The classical liberals thought there was little need for government other than to provide defense and to enforce contracts, the latter of which they thought sufficed to handle almost all social relationships at the time. Fine, if your society is a bunch of farmers and small villagers. But if you are going to have an urban-industrial society things are going to get a lot more “public” and lot more complicated and you are going to need some people whose job it is to handle some of these complications and manage the “public dimension” of society.

Rational human beings can and must have government if we are to enjoy the benefits if economically-integrated and interdependent societies. There will always be an argument on how much government, but having no government is to opt for a return to hunting and gathering. There will always be people who will say they don't like government and we don't need it. They fall into two categories: Stupid and hypocritical; some people fall into both. The stupid ones just can't figure out that you can't have a society of the type that they often have a heavy reliance upon unless you have government; they prefer their ideology to the reality of their lives. If they live on the tenth floor and there is a fire they can't call on a bucket brigade to bail them out—they need a full-fledged, taxpayer-paid, fire department to get them out. Or they need to have government building codes and inspectors to give them a building that has a fire escape, or alarms or sprinkler—required by law. Of course, if these government functions prevent a fire, they just think they could have done without it. The con man always says that he couldn't be successful if people weren't greedy. There's some truth to that. But some of our con men become large corporations. So should government have no role in protecting little old ladies being fleeced by the Enrons? [1] The anti-government types will carp about interfering bureaucracies and such, until the little old lady is their grandmother.

I used to have a segment in my Planning Theory Seminar where I called on some of the studies communes in the 1960s. Odd to recall that it was hippies and dopers who were anti-government in those days. I used to tell the class that the movement failed because they wanted to run their communes with the "do your own thing" ethos--no rules was to be the rule. Well, doing your own thing meant to some doing nothing, and to others it meant you could (excuse me) poop wherever you wanted to. That wasn't so good for the next person who walked out in bare feet.

So, soon enough some people with (excuse me) poop between their toes had to call a meeting and say: We need to have a designated place where people “do their business.” [2] That was the beginning of city planning, I would say. It was not nearly so auspicious as bringing two stone tablets down from a mountain (but then the people of Moses just wandered around the desert for decades apparently pooping without consequence) [3] . Then they had to say "we'll have to assess everybody one ounce of pot to pay somebody to dig and maintain the latrine, and that was the beginning of taxation. Some people didn't like it, and they were called "Stinkfeet" and had to leave town. When this happens you begin to need people who will take up the responsibility for making rules because you can't have a plebiscite every time you need to make a rule for the community—yikes, this means politicians, the very thing you wanted to get away from by going out into the woods and starting a commune named “Freepoop.” Before you know it you will have people running around with slogans like “It's the Poop, Stupid.” So, only stupid people think you can have a modern society without rules, regulation and politics. [4]

Then there are the hypocrites. First of all I am not talking here about the major hypocrites in American society—the Republicans. You know, the people who are for small government, but have created the biggest debt in history; who are for the little man, but give tax cuts to the rich and fight unions and minimum wage increases, and immigration; who are for “states rights” but have Federal authorities bust legal marijuana clinics in California, and try to overturn death with dignity legislation in Oregon;who support Agribusiness but not small farmers, and on and on. Not those hypocrites—but I couldn't resist bringing them into this.

I'm talking about anyone who uses a tax-supported facility, infrastructure, or service, or who benefits from the work of a government employee, including the military, when it is used properly and appropriately, and then bitches about it. Oh, I know that they will say that anything that government does can be privatized—that the wonders of the marketplace and the “invisible guiding hand of providence” [5] would take care of things just fine. Sure, I can already see private enterprise embarking on years of profitless basic scientific research, building universities, labs and such, with the prospect of coming up with a blockbuster drug (and then regulating themselves); or running electrical lines out to rural areas where the cost exceeds the profits, or Blackwater being willing to take over for the Army—but at the wages the Army is paid. Sure, I'd believe that. In a week they'd be selling stinger missiles to skinheads. And who is going to pay the wages for a privatized, say, Food and Drug Administration—Big Pharma? Big Agribiz? Sure, I'll believe that. And who would pay for the business of controlling polluters, or builders who build your home with faulty electrical systems, or make toys that poison or injure your kids? Where's the big profit in that? I can go on, if you like.

If the Libertarians and the rest of the no-government types want to join in the critique of the way government operates—or more accurately, the way those who get elected operate it—I will be right there with them, but don't ask me to trust them in a society (if that word would even apply) where there are no rules. They seem to think that human self-interest guided by providence will take care of things. I think that people can also be, and often are stupid and hypocritical, among other things. So the no-government types are either too stupid, or too hypocritical for me to trust without any rules, laws and regulations. They are the kind of people who burn down a barn to roast a pig; who throw babies out with bathwater. [6] And, they are they type of people who will sneak out in the middle of the night and take a poop outside the door of my tent..

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[1] Of course, we know the answer to that one from the current administration.

[2] The euphemism comes in handy when you don't want to admit that you should have thought this out well before you though you could start a community.

[3] Anyway, who would have paid any attention to a commandment that said:“Thou shall not poop where others walk.”

[4] If I have to elaborate on this point for you, you are one of them.

[5] One of their favorite 18 th Century bromides

[6] I use the folksy clichés because these sorts of people relate to them

43. 5: FOREIGN DEVILS , by May Holdsworth [BR] 7.22.2007

Even though I recently published a book about how I enjoy being a stranger when I travel abroad (detect a shameless plug for my book here? [1] ), the sentiment is often not requited in foreign lands except for those who profit from tourism. Fletcher Christian aside, for much of the history of encounters between strangers the outlander might end up anything from being shunned to being killed and eaten. [2] This is because much of what can result from such encounters can be negative for the host. Strangers bring strange bacilli and viruses, strange beliefs, and they were often drunken sailors who knocked-up your women.

So the terms for such alien types were and are rarely complimentary. Lo Wai, or foreign devils, is part of a linguistic category that ranges across all countries and cultures. Foreigners might be referred to as palangi in Samoa, haole in Hawaii, gai jin in Japan, gringos in Mexico, farangi in Malaysia or Indonesia, or gweilo in Southern China. None of these terms, and other like them, translate or connote anything nice about the stranger. Some, like gweilo, have softened a bit over time, but in China there remain other endearments, like da bi zi (big nose), that seem rather too personal to me.

The tourist's brief encounter may insulate them from such references, but the expatriate, who takes longer residence and more intensive contact with his or her host society, is more acutely aware of what it is to be among but apart from a foreign culture.

Foreign Devils is actually a chronicle of a rather exceptional intercultural circumstance. Hong Kong was a British Crown Colony from 1841 to 1997. So the Brits at least had their own government and public administration, unlike, say, someone who emigrate to a country where they are different in both culture and nationality. The Brits wrenched their island from the Chinese with gunboat diplomacy and then expanded the territory with the acquisition of Kowloon and the New Territories. Geographically they were expats, but not politically. Still, that was countered by the fact that the vast majority of Hong Kong people were Chinese, as was the culture of the place. The Brits were in charge, but they were a sub-culture.

One wonders about the degree of assimilation that is voluntary. The Brits are notorious for being clubbish and exclusive throughout their erstwhile “empire.” They insist on wearing the woolens in the tropics, having their tiffin and tea at the same times of day, and otherwise doing their damnedest to leave their England and have it, too. Their arch-rivals, the French, were at least a bit more willing to learn local languages and engage in more social relationships with their colonials, even to intermarrying, but for the British that level of fraternization was a career breaker and could place one outside of the circles of comfort zone for the “expat.” [3]

There were legitimate reasons for the Chinese to regard the British as foreign devils. Aside from having their land appropriated it must have rankled them to be consigned to the lower deck of the Star Ferries when crossing the harbor until as late as after WWII [4], to be excluded from building homes on the cooler slopes of The Peak, and suffering other exclusions. [5] Their pretty women could be taken as mistresses and used as “pillow dictionaries” so that Western men might acquire a little bit of Cantonese along with other delights.

The Brits not only ran the government, they controlled the economy. That started with the tai pans, the supreme bosses who made their initial fortunes selling opium to the Chinese for silver and using the silver to buy tea to ship back to the British Isles. This was, without exaggeration, the equivalent of giving a Columbian cocaine cartel a hall pass to your local high school. In another book reviewed in these pages it was reported that, in the 1880s the British put plague-ridden Chinese on derelict ships in the harbor to die rather than risk contamination. The wonder is that they weren't called worse than foreign devils. [6]

Sure, there was a lot of outright racism at work here, and in both directions, since the Chinese often thought they had a far superior culture to the smelly Westerners who forced them to conceded their lands. And, as with almost all peoples, they could be just as unjust and brutal with one another as the foreign devils were with them. Moreover, it must be conceded that that British, as did other colonials, did bring some things with them that might be considered blessings—better medicine, technology, industrial processes, etc. that were not without benefit and have since been adopted and sometimes improved by the host society.

This book is most interesting in showing how to societies try to maintain some integrity when circumstances and geography throw them together, but it is from the perspective primarily of the British that we see how one of them imports their customs, mores, quirks and prejudices to make themselves feel more at home away from home. Although the term “expats” is used throughout the British really are not until after the handover, when Hong Kong's political hegemony is no longer theirs. The British population has reportedly declined by 30%, and maybe more will leave, not caring for genuine expat life. One of the major founding hongs, Jardines moved its headquarters out of Hong Kong before the handover, the other, Swire, stayed.

Hong Kong is back in the hands of the Chinese. But there will always be a more than a little whiff of British brimstone about the place.

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[1] Yes, they are still available—best price from Amazon.com—and they make great gifts for birthdays, bar mitzvahs, and the holiday season . . .God, stop me, I'm making myself sick !

[2] These days, with the reputation the Bush administration has built for Americans we are likely to be shunned to summarily beheaded, unless we are worth kidnapping for some ransom.

[3] It also was not well-regarded by the Chinese who had a pejorative—zazhong—that meant crossbreed, or carried the same connotation as “bastard” or “son of a bitch.”

[4] Of course, lest we forget, it took even longer for Rosa Parks to get a seat on the bus in the American South.

[5] It has always been interesting that in Shanghai, another Chinese city that was forced open to Western trading interests, there is an area—to this day—called “Chinatown.” That is because much of the city had been given over to “concessions” to the British, French, Americans and other western powers. Signs at the concession areas reputedly announced that “Dogs and Chinese were Not Allowed.”

[6] They probably were, but when you don't bother to learn their language you wouldn't know that.

43. 4: THE LOST WAR 7.18.2007

On cable's Military Channel, a scarcely-disguised promo-propaganda organ for the Pentagon and defense industry I am watching a former Navy Seal, handsome, fit and head shaved, like Vin Deisel in some silly action flick so that the kids out there will want to be “just like him.” He's hosting a show on the latest in high tech weapons, and I must confess I am intrigued the way I used to be when I read Popular Mechanics as a kid.

I watch as he demos a gun that shoots around corners so that the shooter can use a camera rather than expose himself. Another sniper weapon will pick off an enemy hundreds of yards away. And then there are predator vehicles, pilot-less planes that spy in the sky and fire missiles at unsuspecting enemies, directed by our “pilots” sitting in front of monitors back in the good old US of A. “We don't even have to risk a pilot anymore,” he says. Wow, I am genuinely impressed. o wonder we are the “most powerful military nation on the face of the earth.”

So why are we losing another war?

Well, If you are George Bush and arranging your own self-delusion by firing any general who might give you a negative opinion, who finds the glass half-full when it has already been drained, who likes to play “mission accomplished,” then you already know the answer—we're just making the enemy use up all their explosives by blowing the limbs off our soldiers. When they run out we will have “won.” That's the first step in why we are losing another war—thinking that you can shoot the truth.

Thinking that you can win wars with just superior technology, is another. Mind you, you can win battles with superior technology. It has been proven throughout history, from the longbow to the H-Bomb, but a whole war is another matter, particularly an ill-defined one like “the war of terror.” George's father won the battle to liberate Kuwait with superior technology, but he didn't try to conquer Iraq and turn it into a democracy. And he actually had the right enemy.

That's another reason we're losing another war—wrong enemy. It's still news to people in Red States, but we weren't attacked by Iraq and there were no Al Qaeda in Iraq before we lured them there. (Psssst, but they have oil!). So the world figures out quickly that you're motivations aren't so noble and you squander all the good will that you received after 9-11. Never mind, just bribe a few countries to join the laughable “Coalition of the Willing.” Meanwhile, Afghanistan, which already helped bring down the Soviet Union [1] gets short-changed and returns to the Taliban and Osama gets a free ride from our “ally,” Pakistan, and the real culprits in George's “war on terror” get stronger by going to Iraq to practice on American troops. [2]

Which leads to another reason we are losing. Gen. Giap once said about American forces in Vietnam that he knew from the beginning America would lose. Why? Because it was a temporary job for our forces. Giap said (something like this). “The Americans come over for one year. The first four months they are ineffective because they are so new at it; the second four months they fight well; and the third four months they become cautious and ineffective because they are counting the days to go home.” In Iraq Americans are fighting in a country they couldn't even find on a map—and it doesn't do any good to count the days because they'll probably be re-deployed. Not only that, they are already fighting a defensive war the day they arrive, looking over their shoulder at every trash can, box, car, or even person, that might conceal a bomb. The enemy is willing, maybe even eager, to die, and we are doing everything we can to stay alive. We will lose.

Which leads to another factor in the losing formula—not knowing thine enemy . State department types were unceremoniously dumped from Bush's team, their intel dismissed. They tried to tell George that he was getting into something far more complex than his substance-compromised brain could comprehend. George didn't know a Sunni from a Shia, or a Peshmurga from a Peach Melba, and what's more, he didn't care. And this guy thought he could make a democracy out of Iraq whose intended president (remember Ahmed Chalabi?) would sell us oil in exchange for our solid waste.

Which leads to another reason we are going to lose this war—the kill ‘em all and let God sort it out mentality (Notice I did not say Allah; I said God.) Hey, if you can't tell one sect from another, or their soldiers from their civilians, just round ‘em all up toss ‘em in Ahu Ghraib or Guantanamo, have some fun torturing them. It's good work for some of the dimwits and skinheads you now have to scrape up for recruits for your volunteer Armed forces, which used to be respected.

Some will say—again—we will lose because the pols want to, use the Bush spin, “micromanage” the war. Others' will say because we don't use our heavy-duty weapons, the nukes, to level whole countries. So-called “surges” won't work because the enemy has learned to employ the “rope a dope” technique of fading and retreating from the pressure, relocated to where we are not, and then returning to fight another day. It's not hard to outsmart a dope.

There are other explanations, closer to the truth of it. If we were really fighting in our own streets—the way these people are—then we would fight to the last and as long as it takes and we might even try some suicide bombing. But only dimwitted Republican committeewomen in Red States believe that they might be forced to wear burkas to the Wal Mart. They don't know that we are fighting for oil and to make out defense contractors and mercenaries richer. But Bush—and hence America—will come away from this war with virtually nothing. He hangs on in hopes of the oil contracts for his energy friends, but the Shiites are unlikely to give him anything. We will only have indebted our own future generations.

But perhaps worst of all Bush will have trashed the reputation of the US Military as “the world's more powerful.” We will have gone from a nation to be respected and feared, to one which is reviled and seen as able to smash other nations with our superior military technology, but cannot win wars against people who are willing to fight us down and dirty in the streets. Now they all know now that the way to beat us is to use the military tactic of the “rope a dope.” And what better dope to have exposed that weakness than the one who stole the White House.

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[1] You mean it wasn't Ronald Reagan?

[2] The recent NIS report has stated that AQ rather than being diminished, as the Bushies say, has actually been strengthened and reconsitituted in Pakistan, a supposed alley of the USA that has received ten billion dollars from us—another colossal failure of the Bush administration. The Taliban, supposedly defeated by the US is back in Afghanistan is such force and with such control that Kabul is the equivalent of the Green Zone in Baghdad.

43. 3: MR. GERSON'S CREDO 7.13.2007

Since the recent arrival and “bestseller” status of several books by Atheists (no doubt employed by the credulous as proof that the Antichrist has invaded the publishing business) there has not been much in the way of intelligent rebuttal—by that I mean rebuttal that is willing to take on these Atheists on the neutral ground of scientific proof and/or logic. One recent attempt was in a piece in the Washington Post by Michael Gerson. It is on an aspect of the general subject of belief in God(s) that has been on-going in these pages that relates to the putative relationship between belief and morality. This is, of course, the longstanding nonsense that, if you are a person who proclaims to “love God,” you must be a person who will love your fellow man and all God's creation.

One need only take a look at the degree of belief in America and the mess we are in to see just what nonsense this is. But the Theists like to use the same old canard that Bush uses to justify his on-going fiasco in Iraq [1] : that we would be even worse servants of God if there were more Atheists. Here is Gerson on this concern. He first agrees with Harris, for example, that: There is something innate about morality that is distinct from theological conviction. This instinct may result from evolutionary biology, early childhood socialization or the chemistry of the brain, but human nature is somehow constructed for sympathy and cooperative purpose.

But then he states that: “. . . there is a problem. Human nature, in other circumstances, is also clearly constructed for cruel exploitation, uncontrollable rage, icy selfishness and a range of other less desirable traits.

So how do we use to chose between good and evil if we get rid of God, he worries? He claims that Atheism does not have an answer for this. Of course he over simplifies with his dualities. What about non-cruel “exploitation”? Isn't capitalism, much favored by the credulous, exploitation of people and natural resources? Are the economic activities that lead to the de facto indenture of humans or global warming, cruel or not? And “rage”; what is war but (sometimes) “controlled rage. I guess “controlled rage” is morally acceptable (You can beat your wife, but keep it under control). There has been a lot of controlled rage used to shove religions down peoples' throats so that they could subsequently be un-cruelly exploited.

Gerson worries that there will be noting to control the non-believer's tendency to selfishness if we get rid of God. Excuse me, but what planet is this guy from? You mean that in the credulous world there is some control on selfishness? Take a look around, dude. Just take a look at one of those blow-dried prayboys on the Evangelist television shows and their mansions and Bentley's and the rest, not to mention that you have a nine out of ten chance that some greedy CEO who screws his workers probably will say he is a good Christian. Take a look around and you'll be praying for The Rapture to hurry up.

So Gerson goes soldiers on for his God: By exercising the will to power, they are maximizing one element of their human nature. In a purely material universe, what possible moral basis could exist to condemn them? Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not. The “will to power” thing sounds like some of that crap phraseology you get from evangelist preachers. But does the second sentence means we have to wait until somebody comes up with a moral basis for condemning greed and misuse of power? Jesus, this guy's been in an intellectual coma. Ever heard of political revolution, dude; ever heard of the Constitution, dude, ever heard of the Law? What does he mean by “no objective way” to judge behavior. What is religion but the most subjective way of doing it. Does he mean we have to settle the question ”what would Jesus do?” before we have a basis for action. How about what the Pharisees would decide about what's moral, or the Pope, or the mullahs, or swamis and gurus? So we should not have a law that you can't molest children that does not have a religious basis? Mr. Gerson needs a wake-up call. He molests my kid and he will end up as a soprano in his church choir, and I will not have asked an Evangelist preacher, a catholic priest, or a mullah about the moral propriety of my Gerson-gelding because those hypocritical bastards are probably too busy molesting children!

In short, Mr. Gerson, there are ways for society's to put bounds on behavior that we can call “moral” that do not need the blessing of some Bishop or Ayotallah or prayboy. In fact, I would argue that it is a better course [2] for societies to sit down and work out some secular rules for their communities that transcend those of the various religions that might exist in that community. This is the whole idea behind the separation of church and state , the very notion that almost every religion is trying to obliterate! It is religio—OK, maybe overly religious people—who are the scourge of most societies, who threaten freedom, choice, and the rights of women and children, and of free thought. Been to the Creation Museum in Tennessee, Gerson?

So Mr. Gerson tries to haul out some big guns to bully us: America's Founders embraced public neutrality on matters of religion, but they were not indifferent to the existence of religious faith. George Washington warned against the "supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." That George was a helluva lot better president than the current Gdeorge—but he had slaves, you dork! So the founders were often religious men themselves and were not anti-religious, but they knew enough to want to separate church and state. They understood the dark side of credulity.

But Gerson really loses it with his closer: Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

You gotta love it when they do this. We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them is just stuck in there like it was the second law of thermodynamics, or two plus two equals four. He claims that Atheists can't prove a basis for morality without God, but Mr. Gerson claims to know the intentions of the Creator. Wow, that's gonads for ya! [3] Where the hell does he get off stating this as though it was a proven fact? It is something that Mr. Gerson believes, and he is entitled to his belief as long as he doesn't try to shove it down my agnostic throat or make it my form of government, or send my kid off to war in the name of his God.

And what is this about a “cruel joke of nature”. If you believe that everything was created by a Creator. Mr. Gerson, then who the hell created Nature, you logical cripple. In your cosmology it was God who set things up so that that the lioness would rip the throat out of the cute baby gazelle. Nature can be cruel, and don't get me going on where all the “evil” in the world must come from.

And I suppose that “destined for disappointment” means that if Athiests don't believe in God then they won't get to end up with Him, but willo end up in (if that's possible) “oblivion.” [4]

Oh, I forgot, the evil would come from the Devil. Why don't we all get together for coffee one of these days, Mr. Gerson: you, me, God, and the Devil. I'll even let you bring up to three Guardian Angels. [5]

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[1] You know, that there would be chaos and civil war if we left. So what do you call what's going on while we are there in Iraq—and what we engendered ?

[2] This is a cue for Gerson to call out the old “godless Communists” canard, but I am not referring to the instances in which political ideologies have been elevated to the status, or replacement, of religion.

[3] Oh, I forgot, Mr. Gerson lost those in a previous paragraph.

[4] I think Agnostics like me have to go to Purgatory and watch endless re-runs of The 700 Club.

[5] You're gonna need ‘em.

43. 2: THE PIG IN THE PARLOR 7.10.2007

Previously, in these pages [No. 42.3] we considered that urban planning might be regarded as a process of getting things (land uses) in the proper places, like getting one's socks in their sock drawer and underwear in their underwear drawer. We are nothing if not facile at metaphorizing, so we now consider what might be called “the pig in the parlor” and the subject of the proper organization and administration of our cites by likening them to rooms in out houses. [1]

Alas, I can take no pride of authorship in this fine (swine?) turn of phrase, since it comes from a seminal Supreme Court case of yesteryear—1926, which is quite yester. But is was important because it was the first case to establish the constitutionality of what we call land use zoning. Zoning is a little bit like the sock drawer metaphor, but with the force of law, if not the force of intuition behind it.

The case, Euclid vs the Ambler Realty Company (272 US 365) dealt with a city's legal right to regulate land use by establishing separate zones for different uses—residential, commercial, industrial, etc. I won't go into unnecessary detail here except to say that the case was about whether apartments should be allowed in single-family residential zones. The answer the court gave (6 – 3) was “No.” [2]

The majority opinion was written by Justice George Sutherland, who stated that allowing a land use in the wrong location was like allowing “a pig in a parlor.” [3]

Now why dredge up all this old legal history? [4] Because like a lot of public affairs this one has a lot of contemporary relevance. Seems that a lot of people have forgotten why we have these laws and what they are based upon. For example, today in San Diego there are three land use issues that are illustrative of the continuing debate over the regulation of urban space.

Briefly:

• A developer erected a building in the flight path of a private airport. The building is three stories above what the FAA considers a safe height. The developers insists that the City gave him permission to build that high, but it is the City now that has enjoined him to lop off the top three floors.

• The City of San Diego created an ordinance that would prohibit big box stored like Wal Mart from building their store with the city limits. The ordinance was passed by the City Council, but vetoed by the Mayor. As things stand I might be looking out my window at a Wal Mart tomorrow.

• In the adjacent, and redundant, City of National City (actually, it is completely surrounded by the City of San Diego), the City is attempting to use the power of eminent domain to compulsorily acquire the property of a Mexican-American boxing club for boys. The land would subsequently be sold to private developers.

What we have here are some issues that can be used to illustrate what everyone should know about their local land use control if they don't want a Wal Mart next door. There are two fundamental and related concepts, themselves intimately related to the concept of a civil democracy, that must be appreciated to grasp the purposes of land use regulation. These are the Police Powers, and the Public Interest. [5]

The Police Powers are those powers conferred by state constitutions or statutes that allow municipal corporations (cities) to regulate the use of private property. They are power that are there to “protect and enhance the general public health, safety and general welfare.” [6] So, the city can say that you cannot put an adult bookstore within a thousand feet of a residential zone because it might entice children in naughty behavior. They might not say that you can't put one anywhere, just not close to where kids are busy surfing porn sites (just joking). So it's to protect their welfare. It is important that the City be able to establish a connection between adult bookstores and welfare if this ordinance is to survive a legal suit.

So we can see that there is a good reason to make that builder lop off the top three floors of his building in the flight path—it's a hazard to pilots. But what about prohibiting those Wal Marts within the city limits? Not so easy a case to be made there. Where is the obvious protection of the public health, safety and general welfare in prohibiting Wal Marts in the city? Well, there's the visual blight, but the courts have been loathe to stretch the police powers to aesthetics. Protecting small business from the monster business? Well, that would fly in the face of competition, an essential feature of the religion of capitalism. The anti-Wal Mart ordinance probably would have lost in the courts even if the mayor hadn't vetoed it. Zoning can regulate the way a land use behaves, but it can only prohibit with zones that are designated for other land uses.

The boxing club in The City of National City is another matter. The power that is being applied in that case is not zoning, but eminent domain , which is the power of the state to take property for a public purpose or use. Without it we would not be able to build freeways, acquire easements, parks and school sites, stuff from which the whole public benefits and are built and maintained by a public entity.

But along came those anti-regulation types in the Reagan years, who want to privatize anything that might be squeezed for profit. The De-Reg people think it is a good idea to use the power of the state to grab whatever property they would like to develop. There was precedent for the use of eminent domain to acquire land for some private development under the urban renewal programs, but it was necessary for the integrity of overall projects and the property had to be blighted.[7] It should be said that “fair compensation” has to be paid for “condemned” property. But the National City case does not appear to meet the requirements. Indeed, a counter case might be made that the boxing club serves a public purpose by keeping boys off the streets. If it goes to court the law should not permit this egregious misuse of municipal authority and eminent domain for private and greedy purpose.

Society needs laws to regulate and even acquire private land for there to be orderly and healthy land use and land for public use. But there will always be those who will oppose any “intrusion” of government into the rights they feel are absolute in their ownership of property. And there will be those who will twist and suborn those laws for their own purposes. The law is something like a hammer with which we try to anneal a just and orderly society; but it depends on who is holding the hammer. That means that one should regularly check who, or what, is in the parlor.

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[1] OK you want to call parlors living rooms if you have to be so damn 20th century about it.

[2] Conservatives, who usually detest zoning as some liberal or commie plot, should take note that the Chief Justice of the court was William Howard Taft, who ruled with the majority. So there! And, if you want more detail on this case you might write to contemporary Justice Clarence Thomas. He will probably respond by telling you his inflated opinion of his own genitalia, which is the only opinion he will ever be remembered for.

[3] I already said you could call it a living room! And, yes, there was pig discrimination in those days, too. Pigs just can't seem to get a break.

[4] No, I am not lonely and will talk to anybody about anything. Anyway, it was a rhetorical question.

[5] All you Anarchists, Objectivists and Libertarians may now go off in a corner and slit you own throats.

[6] Sometimes we will even find ”morals” added to this list, something that is totally ridiculous in Red States.

[7] It should be noted that liberal legal minds can become conflicted on this matter. In the much-debated New London case of eminent domain in 2005 it was mostly the liberal justices who were in the majority (5 - 4) in ruling that the City had the right to condemn a row of homes which were not blightede but stood in the way of a project that would add economic development and contribute more to the city's tax coffers. The conservative Justices, plus Sandra O'Connor, dissented on the basis that this was an inappropriate "taking" by government. By allowing a questional interpretation of "public use" the liberal justices might have set a trap for themselves once the term becomes whatever the most powerful political or economic entity says defines it to be.

43. 1: THE PATRIOTIC DISCONNECT 7.4.2007

I used to spend a lot of July 4ths abroad, several of them in Britain when I was leading travel-study groups of students. I enjoyed bringing over with me a bag of those little American flags on toothpicks that they stick in canapés and sandwiches, so that we could good-naturedly tweak the Brits by sticking them in our food at breakfast. Most of them didn't know or care that it was a celebration of the day we won our independence from them. That was a different time, when America had some goodwill to spend abroad. I wouldn't even think of that today, not even in England, which Bush lapdog Tony Blair (who will forever be so known) dragged into Bush's Iraq War (as it will ever be known) and caused his people to call for his resignation. Most everywhere else in the world our flag is an invitation for everything from being ignored to sneers and snide remarks, to possible harm.

I won't even be flying or displaying a flag again today, at home. It doesn't mean that I don't love my country, but it just doesn't feel like my country anymore. Not the one I remember at least, even in what used to be its worst of days under the likes of Nixon and Reagan. I just can't do anything that will seem—if only to me—to be playing along with the charade of patriotism that will be managed for political effect by the Bush administration. Not after, literally like a thief in the night, he once again waited until Congress was recessed and Americans were busily engaged in a long holiday weekend, to announce very un-publicly, his commutation of Traitor Scooter Libby's sentence of 30 months—30 months for treason! Although the sentence was passed down by a judge appointed by his administration, after a prosecution by a prosecutors appointed by his administration, after his (obviously disingenuous) statements that he wanted the perpetrators of the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame found and punished, that the sentence (well within the Federal sentencing guidelines) was, he said, “too harsh” was for little Scooter, and so he would let him walk. Once again the law means nothing to Bush, as it is similarly regarded by his VP and Attorney General.

In fact, the flaunting of the law this time probably owes to his need to protect himself and those guys from indictment. Libby's commutation puts him in a legal position where he can invoke the 5 th amendment if necessary. So it was a likely strategic payoff for Scooter to keep his mouth shut—it was his obstruction of justice that got him in court in the first place—in return for a commutation and, probably eventually, a pardon. A more corrupt bunch of liars, thieves and traitors would never make it as fiction. As reality it is more than this country should bear. But alas, we do not have Britain's parliamentary system, where a bad vote of confidence can be a course correction. We can't even get enough congressional votes to assess confidence in Attorney General Gonzales, who sat and lied and dissembled day after day before them. Talk of impeachment fares no better, since there apparently has been no adulterous act between consenting adults. [1] Bush's approval ratings are the lowest in history, but he is virtually untouchable, and he and is strategists know it. Cheney can give Congress the finger (he has) and even say that he is not “part of the Executive Branch”) to avoid surrendering information they have a right to request. [2] He is one of the architects of preemptive war, torture of POWs, rendition, and spying on the American people, and he is all but inviolate.

For a long time we have regarded our political system as “self-correcting,” like a pendulum that would swing from right to left and back again, gyroscopically keeping us on course to our self-annointed destination as “the greatest country the world has ever known” and other bullshit. Well these guys have proven different. First they proved they could steal a national election, and they proved that the politics of fear is the greatest politics. Hitler and Stalin proved it; we just had to find an American version of it. Well, Al Qaeda pointed the way. Maybe those guys weren't as smart as we think, but they sure found the chinks in more than our civil air defense. They lit the candle and Bush intends to burn it all the way to the bottom. He is still sending them American troops to blow apart (averaging about 5/day), Afghanistan is slowly being re-taken by the Taliban, thanks to American troops knocking off large numbers of civilians. Even growing numbers of dumb Republicans recognize that this war is lost as more and more generals admit it. [3] AQ found the perfect political storm of cowards who would never put themselves in the way of the harm they so easily send others into and the Evangelical Christian zealots who would put them in office. They found the greedy bastards whose first allegiance is to the corporation, not the Constitution. They gave them the power to destroy a great country.

Maybe America will correct itself. It will likely let George Bush go back to Crawford unscathed, and Cheney to wherever the hell he goes to enjoy his Halliburton dividends, and the rest will hope the country is still to busy trying to extract itself from Iraq, and too weary of the polarization, to bother much going after all the sleazy minions of this most corrupt, sleazy and un-American administrations, to do much about what justice demands.

So I'm not playing along. I'm ashamed to be an American these days and I'll be damned if I'll join in the Bush PR campaign and show the flag. I will quietly thank those who have served this country— rather than their own lust for power and their economic greed —for their service and their true patriotism. Until this nightmare is over I'm a crypto-American.

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[1] Ironically, the Libby commutation has shaken the hive of the Clinton haters—which is the now classic smokescreen response to Bush's crimes. They have been out in force in the media talking about how Clinton “was convicted”(?) –they conflate impeachment, which is merely an indictment, with conviction. Mind you, these people are addled and most of them have intelligence quotients like hat sizes. But they love to hate Bill.

[2] Earlier in this administration he refused them by invoking “Executive Privilege”.

[3] Although Colin Powell hasn't said much. He still trying to figure out how those aluminum tubes can be used to make weapons of mass destruction.