Volume 50

May/June 2008

50. 10: CITIES OF THE BOOK 6.30.2008

                                            © 2008, UrbisMedia

“Succor us out of the city.” (2 Samuel 18:3)

I my new novel (to be unabashedly promotional) the protagonist muses that “You can love a city, but don’t expect it to love you back.” All cities in particular have aspects that disappoint us. But the somewhat surprising thing is that since the first Neolithic villages some 12,000 years ago we have inexorably become more urban. Today, more that half the world’s population are city dwellers, and more are on the way to town. That is surprising because there has, historically, been so much distrust and negative feeling about cities.

“The city is full of lies and robbery.” Nahum 3:1

I have always been fascinated with “anti-urbanism” and years ago wrote a monograph and a conference paper about it. In the latter I alleged that children’s literature could be a contributor to negative feelings about cities, but the bigger culprit I felt was “scriptural,” in particular the Bible.

“He that is in he city, famine and pestilence shall devour him.” Ezekiel 7:15

The Bible wasn’t the only ancient document that was hard on cities, but it is the source of much of the Western world’s negative attitudes about cities.

”This city is a cauldron,” Ezekiel 11:3

I have a hypothesis about why the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament, is so down on cities. There is a religious point of view if you recall that it seems every time the Hebrews went to town or even got close to one something went wrong. Early on, Cain, who killed his brother Able, departs for the land of Nod to become a builder of cities (patron saint of real estate developers?). Later on Lot, a son of Abraham finds himself and his family in Sodom (no need to elaborate in what has become of the name of that city), a place of so much sin that the Bible tells us an angel was dispatched by God who said, “Save yourselves with all haste. Look not behind you. Get as fast as you are able to the mountain, unless you be involved in the calamity of the city."

“Thy wife shall be a harlot in the city.” Amos 7:17

That they did, but even after being warned not even to look back on such a sinful place, Lot’s wife did, and was, as we all know, turned into salt (garlic, I think).

“Cursed shalt thou be in the city. Deuteronomy 28.16

Most people know this little story, but they don’t know, or choose not to remember that things were not un-sinful out of town either. Lot left Zoar (where he went after the flight from Sodom) and retired with his two daughters to a cave in an adjacent mountain. Lot's daughters mistakenly believed they were the only people to have survived the devastation (Genesis 19:30-38). They assumed it was their responsibility to bear children and enable the continuation of the human race. According to the plan of the older daughter, they got their father drunk enough to commit incest with him. This is the same sort of thing that produces kids that drool and pull the wings off flies in West Virginia.

“Every city shall be forsaken.” Jeremiah 4.29

Cities were not only bad places for the Hebrews to keep their covenant with their god, Yahweh, but they were sometimes kept captive, as they were in the “Babylonian captivity.” Cities were places that often had their own “city gods.” These gods were local, but the important thing is that they were competition for the “universal” god of the Hebrews. Later, the Romans had the same tradition, even extending it to household gods. Competitive gods would cause problems of allegiance in the city, just as it does between nation states today.

“Men groan from out of the city.” Job 24:12

But, ultimately, in my view, the main reason that the Hebrews had a bad attitude toward cities is that they, local gods aside, cities represented the rise of secular power, a competitive power to that of the patriarchs who ruled life for pastoral nomads and agricultural types like the Hebrews.

“And the spoiler shall come upon every city, and no city shall escape.” Jeremiah 33:5

In Old Testament times, most people did not live in cities, but were farmers, herders and villagers. Large cities were not the norm, but their wealth, military power and high walls posed a threat to the non-urban both materially and culturally.

“The rich man’s wealth is his strong city.” Proverbs 10:15

The culture of the Hebrews and other non-urban people’s was the clan, headed by patriarchs, who were both political and religious leaders. Their Yahweh was not a god of place, but a god that was with them everywhere. Cities threatened that structure when the Hebrews got too close to them, tempting youth the way it did, to gamble away the family’s money they way the ”prodigal son” did. (“How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve seen Jerusalem . . .”).

“Men . . . give wicked counsel in this city.” Ezekiel 11:2

In the culture of the clan tradition ruled, old ways were sacrosanct. But the city represented, then as it does now, change, a quest for more and better. New and different ideas and the development of “civil” law threatened the authority and credibility of the elders of the clans, a circumstance that resonates today in the clashes between Islamic fundamentalists like the Taliban in Afghanistan and secular authorities. Those who claim that the law of the state should be sharia law have predecessors extending past the birth of Islam and well into Old Testament times.

“The city is full of perverseness,” Ezekiel 9:9

The 14th century Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun stressed that, while the urban way of life led to high achievements in human development, urban populaces inevitably degenerated into corruption, self-indulgence, sexual perversions, and the loss of community and personal identity. The nomadic way of life was contrasted favorably with urbanism.

“Cursed shalt thou be in the city.” Deuteronomy 28:16

Deep as they are in the Western tradition, and despite golden ages of cities such as Periclean Athens, Augustan Rome, and the scientific, cultural and aesthetic achievements of many cities since biblical times, the warnings and injunctions persist like a dormant virus. It appears in the American era in many forms. America, too, was a predominantly agricultural society when it started with over nine out of ten people being farmers or small towns folk. American wasn’t intended to be an urban society as indicated by the fact that there weren’t even governmental institutions set up for cities, allowing them to be taken over by “political machines” and bosses.

“I have seen violence and strife in the city” Psalms 55:9

The idea of the city as a place of individual transformation was prominent in the literature of he late 19th and early 20th century. In America, books like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie portrayed big cities as places where women could lose their virtue and guileful characters lurked to take advantage of the country bumpkin. The theme was not dissimilar than that of biblical admonitions about the wicked ways of the city.

But, despite the warnings of Babylon, of Sodom, of Gomorrah, or Jericho, of the evil ways of cities the buildings of The City of Man grew to tower over the spires of churches. The City’s science and technology rivaled the putative miracles of Scripture. The City’s media became a clarion for the accomplishments of man, not God. Despite the ravings from the pulpits, the power of the City over that of the Patriarchs grew.

“And the Patriarchs shall come to the City, and it shall become their Temple.” Falwell 28:14
_________________________________________________________
© 2008, James A. Clapp

50. 9: Hey, Stupid, the Joke is on You! 6.25.2008

                 
                                                                                                             © 2008, UrbisMedia

Recently I received in an un-solicited email one of those nit-wit jokes that goes as follows: Research has led to the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every action with which it comes into contact. . . . . [it goes on, but you get the point]

It simplifies things nicely, especially for simple minds, picking up two sub-themes of the hatred of government themes, “size” and “interference in private affairs.” It amuses me because it is the sort of joke that gets its intended audience to unwittingly laugh at itself. Being an audience intellectually incapable of assessing its own best interests, it falls for the ruse and subsequently responds politically when politicians invoke its key words and phrases.

I am always amused by the political Right’s disaffection for anything with the word government attached to it. It has long been the fashion of conservative politicians to runs “against” the very institution in which they seek positions of power and privilege. Putatively, this is because they want to “make government smaller” and reduce its ability to raise revenue. Then, too, it is to refer to activities of government that they do not approve of, especially regulation of anything that they do approve of. Conservatives have much more reverence for business, which can grow a big as it wishes and raise its “revenue,” profits, as much as it wants. These days, with Libertarians energized by the likes of Ron Paul, anti-government sentiments have added support.

Jokes like the above are typically circulated to lists of like-minded simpletons to re-enforce their preconceptions. They are likely to be those who enthusiastically voted for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who are exemplars of the “anti-government” politician. They are also unlikely to recognize that government grew “larger” during the reigns of these government “reducers” than at any time before them, that government debt grew to enormous proportions under them, Bush’s the largest ever by far. In each case, growth of the military—the most wasteful of all governmental expenditures—was the largest, although the political Right seems not to regard the military as “government.” I personally know a couple of guys who served in the military for 20 years, never saw a minute of combat and emerged completely healthy, who take their military pensions, use the VA health care and other benefits, and bitch about people on welfare because “those people are getting money from the government.

They are like the people who will put up with a phone bill that has a page of charges that the client cannot understand, that have been put into it as a subterfuge to bilk them. Like Enron screwing he public and its own employees and shareholders, like pharmaceutical companies that use government sponsored research to make produce that cost pennies to produce, but become ridiculously-expensive medicines, like oil companies enjoying huge windfall profits and their executives making more in an hour than their workers do in a year.

They will bitch about welfare recipients (most of who are children and aged and infirm), but not complain when the savings and loans were bailed out by government, or Chrysler in the early 1980s, or the airlines got $18 billion of their taxes after 9-11, or Bear-Stearns getting government aid after hundreds of thousands of people like themselves have gotten screwed by private financial institutions that their wonderful politicians have de-regulated.

They will go on about labor unions, often the very ones their parents got a decent economic foothold from, but which have been systematically reduced in size and influence, but accept jobs that have no protection or benefits, or that are outsourced by their sainted “business leaders.” The American South, to which many industries relocated to avoid unions, is now losing jobs many of its textile and automotive assembly and other jobs to Asia. Unions are not government, but they are associated with the political Left, and hence are “government-like.” Ironically, the American worker now has nowhere to turn for assistance than the government.

Those who laugh at the joke will not see the hypocrisy about governmental regulation. They will bitch about “too much government interference” but they will be easily maneuvered by fear to support the Patriot Act’s unprecedented intrusions into privacy. They will say that government shouldn’t regulate a man’s right to carry a gun, but should force a woman to go through with an un-wanted pregnancy, even if she is raped. They will not see the inconsistency because they have been well conditioned by nit-wit jokes.
They will think the joke is clever because it makes fun of “science.” But they will vote for politicians who are against science that is in their interest—stem cell research, global warming research, or regulates the purity of the drugs they take, and he food they eat—preferring their children get heir education in schools that teach “intelligent design” and “creation science.” They will run into their churches as hey did after 9-11, preferring to pray and not become outraged when their colleagues on the Religious-Right say America is being punished by God for its iniquities.
They will not see that the joke is on them when they support a war against a country that had no WMD and never attacked us, that will cost a trillion dollars, much of which goes right into the pockets of war profiteers, thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. They will bitch about “government waste” but somehow that doesn’t seem to include the “unaccounted for” (according to a British government research report) $23 billion that went to Iraq and “disappeared.”
They will be so stupid that they still will believe, more than 50 percent of them that there were Iraqis flying those planes 9-11, when George Bush, who can be seen walking hand in hand with Saudi royalty, implies that it is the truth. They will not wonder if the ineptitude displayed by his government when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans will not be repeated if it is their community in peril one day. They will believe his hype about democracy when he has done more to damage it in practice and reputation than any other politician.

There’s more, much more, but it should also be added that they can’t even see that it’s their government, and they couldn’t function, perhaps exist without it. Government doesn’t always do things we approve of. There will be people who think we should hate taxes, but not torture. There will be those who will think that the enormous debt that is being financed by government bonds is something we will not eventually have to pay for, and pay more for than if we were willing to accept the necessity of some taxation. They don’t see that being taught to hate government is only a way of deluding and manipulating them. They will laugh along with their fellow government-haters and their politicians, but they don’t get joke at all—the joke is on them.

Hey, how about this one: A guy walks into a bar with a chimp on his shoulder. The bartender says, “Having the usual, Mr. Cheney?” and then to the chimp . . .”
_______________________________________________________
© 2008, James A. Clapp

50. 8:  WHAT ABOUT TODD?    6.15.2008

                             
                                                                               ©2008, Urbis Media

When I was in my Jesuit high school were taught to put then letters AMDG on the top of our papers and tests. The letters were for the Latin motto of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus in the 1530s, the Jesuits. The motto, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, means “for the greater glory of God.” According to Loyola, we were supposed to try to do the things we do in a manner that gave glory to God.

Even as a young boy the thought crossed my mind that this was, TF, or Tauri Feculentia. [The stuff that falls out of the back ends of bulls, if you have forgotten your Latin.]  Why, my small, but questioning mind, would ask, does God need any more glory? He’s got everything—all the power, knowledge, time, probably the latest iPhone. What the heck does he need from my algebra quiz to glorify Him? Putting AMDG on the top of the page didn’t seem to do much for my lack of Math ability. But why should it even matter to Him; he already knows all the answers.

Well, that’s Iggie Loyola for you. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and, for a time, lived an Augustinian life of dissolution before finding God to glorify. I always preferred Francis Xavier’s motto, Ignem Mittere in Terram, to send fire to the earth, in other words, “do something,” “make your mark.” But then his associate, Iggie, would probably say, “OK, but make sure it glorifies God.” [No, not as a pyromaniac.]

This illustrates the main problem with God, not as glory-hungry deity, but as a concept. He is hard to deal with, although people like Karen Armstrong manage to write entire books about Him. She is the author of The History of God, a well-received and quite interesting book. But it’s not a history of God—it’s a history of what people think about God. One learns a lot about that, but in the last paragraph she writes: “Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation . . . if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings.” [New York:Knopf, 1994, P. 399]  Sort of back to square one, we might say. Sort of “invent the kind of god you need for the times.” Maybe the god of Abraham, or Mohammad, or St. Paul, or any of them, aren’t quite up to he task, because God did not create us—we created Him—and it doesn’t look we are up to the task.

So if it’s about creating God as one sees fit, I have a few things that have been rattling around in my mind for about a half-century. First, everybody like parables, so let me start with one. I called it “The Tisdale Parable."

Many who have read the Bible—having seen the movie doesn't count—must wonder just how literally one can take the world's most published and quoted book. Consider the fact that the Bible has gone through a lot of translation over the years. First its stories were transmitted through a Hebrew oral tradition, then written in ancient Hebrew, later translated into Greek, then Latin, then King James English (with the thees and thous), and finally into a more contemporary English. Even the people who are quoted in the Bible spoke a variety of languages. For example, Christ spoke Aramaic, a dialect different from Hebrew. We all know that a lot can get lost, misinterpreted, and embellished over time and in translations between languages. Oy Vey!

Not long ago I was innocently washing my car when I was pounced upon by one of those roving evangelicals who wanted to give me a copy of the Bible if I would give her a chance to save my soul.

I tried to fend off my zealous evangelist's annoying recitations of chapters and verses by posing several questions about the accuracy of scripture. "Even the alphabet of ancient Hebrew could have made a great difference," I suggested as I soaped down the roof of my car. "What, for example, if the "t" sound in ancient Hebrew was represented by a letter that looked like our letter "g." This would means that God's name isn't really God, but Todd, and we should be saying 'Todd bless you', 'For Todd's sake', and 'Oh my Todd!'."

"Blasphemy!" she barked, and cited a verse that implied that God (or Todd) would punish me for such an utterance. "Every word in the Bible is true!" she insisted.

"Come one," I said, resisting an impulse to let the hose spray over in her direction, "do you really believe that Methuselah lived 900 years? Maybe he just felt awful one morning after a night of heavy drinking and said, 'Boy, I feel 900 years old today', and just like that it gets into the Bible that he lived three centuries. Just bad reporting."

"So I take it that you don't believe in miracles either." she snapped.

"I'd believe it was a miracle if my car could get through a couple of days without being used as a toilet for half the bird's in this city," I replied, scraping a guano deposit off the hood.

"I mean biblical miracles," she said.

"You mean like the healing of the lepers?" I suggested.

"Yes, how about that one," she said.

"That one is a good example of mistranslation," I replied. "Obviously, you are unfamiliar with Prof. Norman Tisdale's work."

"Never heard of him," she scoffed.

"Well, Tisdale, the great scholar of ancient languages, says that 'leper' is actually a misinterpretation of the ancient Hebrew for a 'leaper'. He says that the 'leapers' of Biblical times were actually irksome evangelists who hid behind trees and temple columns and leaped out at passersby to startle demons out of them. Since they often waited so long for their victims to appear that they were neglectful in their personal habits, they were called, as the Bible says, 'unclean'.

"That's ridiculous," she snapped. "The Bible says that the 'leapers', I mean lepers, were healed, so they must have been ill."

"Tisdale explains that as well," I replied. "He says that the word spelled h-e-a-l should properly be translated as h-e-e-l. According to him the 'leaper' problem was finally solved in the first century A.D. when a holy man went about teaching people to bend over quickly at the waist when they were about to be pounced upon by a 'leaper', at the same time thrusting out one of their legs straight behind them to strike the leaper in the groin with the back of the foot. This karate-like movement was referred to as 'heeling a leaper'. Over time, and because of mistranslation, it was fashioned into the story of a miracle."

"I've never heard anything so absurd in my life!" she growled.

"I'm certain that you have," I replied, scrubbing more guano off the bumper.

"I suppose your Prof. Tisdale has his own version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes."

"You mean the miracle of the lox and bagels," I corrected. "Want to hear about it?

"No thank you, I'd rather take a moment of silence to pray for your sick mind and your imperiled soul."

"I'm for that," I said, wringing out my chamois, "I might even do a little praying myself."

She was probably praying that those two gulls circling over my car had diarrhea. When she finished she looked at her watch and exclaimed: "My Lord! I've got to go or I'll miss the Padres game," and disappeared as quickly as she had arrived.

"Thank Todd," I murmured, "my prayer has been answered."

OK, so it’s not a real parable. Does that mean I’m going to Hell?

AMTG
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

50. 7: CONFRONTING BRUTOCRACY 6.10.2008

                                                  ©2008, UrbisMedia

I have an old friend who speaks of the United Nations with derision and fear. He is not quite of the “UN black helicopter” fearing ilk, but expresses the oft-cited nonsense about “world government” and what that would mean to that vague notion called “the American way of life.” I’m never sure what he means by the “American way of life.” When I return from abroad, land at LAX, and am almost immediately confronted by our epidemic of gross obesity. Is the American way of life “super-sized” people stuffing themselves into their over-sized automobiles purchased on outsized debt, I wonder?

My friend likes things the way they are—the USA, fat, militarily and economically, chanting “No. 1 in the world” even as our precious dollar shrinks in value and we fall behind in other measures. The UN, as he falsely sees it, is a threat to that. He feels the same way about the World Court, probably because it would, or should, indict his “hero,” George W. Bush, for war crimes. It doesn’t matter to him that the UN brings humanitarian aid to places in distress, or the World Court tries to bring some justice to bear on those who commit crimes against humanity. At one and the same time he fears them and jokes that they are ineffectual—the UN in terms of the level of agreement required from its members, and the court from its lack of power for apprehension of indicted criminals.

For my old friend, a good strong America is the best answer to the world’s ills, and exemplar of success, and a stern disciplinarian to those who don’t see things in our good Capitalistic-Christian way. It therefore probably needs not to be stated that he heartily approves of the Bush foreign policy and military adventures. He would approve of the third-stage rationale of the Bush administration that the purpose of the invasion and occupation of Iraq was to free its people of the tyranny of its brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein. Of course I think he is a right-wing whack job who believes that foreign policy should have names like Desert Storm and Shock and Awe. Torture at Guantanamo and incidents like Abu Ghraib don’t bother him all that much.

But lately, I have been distressed to find myself thinking a little bit like him. It seems more and more evident to me that somewhere between arguable war criminals like George W. Bush and the ineffectual UN and limited apprehension powers of the World Court there is need for an international power to deal with what I choose to call “brutocracy.”

It is increasingly distressing that in several places in the world civilizes nation states have stood by and done virtually nothing while brutal dictators have committed the most appalling atrocities upon their own peoples. Nothing was ever done about Idi Amin in Uganda, and the world watched with morbid fascination and Hutus hacked the limbs off Tutus as though it were some sick reality television show. Currently, Robert Mugabe is starving his own people in plain sight and the genocide in Somalia continues despite the feeble protestations of the so-called champions of human rights. Most recently, the military junta of Burma refused humanitarian aid from many countries, among them the USA, while its cyclone victims starved and succumbed to injury and disease. Elsewhere, and in the past, there have been numerous examples of “brutocracies” in South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Their dictatorial governments maintain armies—often with the weapons supplied by “good” governments—for the purpose of conducting war on their own people. Such is the purpose of Burma’s junta.

Of course, many of these regimes get a free pass on human atrocities because we are well aware that business and other economic interests, or the dictum that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” supersede humanitarian principles. Indeed, there are enough circumstances in which their rise to or maintenance with the aid and complicity of the “good governments of the world.

But, when we must see our own government sit idly and impotently by—a government that clearly and recently has imposed its will upon Afghanistan and Iraq—and watch as these brutocracies starve, torture and murder their own people, some of us might wonder whether force is justified to “take out” these brutacracies, including the extermination of their leaders. Instead, the military might of America stood off shore in the Andaman Sea waiting for “permission” to bring aid to the cyclone victims. It was “discussed” that they might simply bring the aid to them without permission of the junta, but that was rejected. Permission would have been forthcoming had some of the residences of the junta in its private “capitol city” been surgically taken out with cruise missiles or predators. But then that was just my fantasy.

My old friend might well say that that such was the express purpose his “hero” justified the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But such a brief does not hold true. Iraq was initially justified on the purported presence of “weapons of mass destruction” which were, even if they did exist, not of imminent threat or in use (the gassing of the Kurdish village was the use of a weapon that is heinous, but not really a weapon of mass destruction). In actuality, the invasion of occupation of Iraq has resulted in more Iraqi deaths than occurred in the decades long reign of Saddam Hussein. And conveniently “forgotten” is that Hussein was an “ally” of America and, as is well-know to people with functioning brains, the invasion of Iraq was based on a foundation of lies and deceit, for interests that seem far more economic than humanitarian.

So here we are, between the proverbial rock and hard place, needing to rely upon governments with the power to eliminate and deter brutocracies, but not the will to do so unless in it in their interest to do so. Somalia, Zimbabwe and Burma apparently do not have the fossil fuels to justify such interventions. The hard place is any reliance—if the recent visit of General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon is indicative—of organizations such as the UN to affect much of a remedy. Somewhere between impotence and selfish omnipotence many innocent people are dying.

Yet, if we can fly a “detainee” to a remote place of torture in the middle of the night, and take another out with a predator on a road in Yemen we can certainly eliminate a “human weapon of mass destruction” with a surgical strike and save the lives of millions of innocent people. Unless, it seems, that weapon is named Osama bin Laden.
_______________________________________________________
© 2008, James A. Clapp

50. 6: THE GODS OF EFFICIENCY 6.8.2008

                

                                                                              ©2008 UrbisMedia

I just finished an online “chat” with Ethan, of my bank’s tech support. We posted our sentences back and forth until, mirabile dictu, my problem was solved and I could access my account. This was my bank’s latest gimmick in what has been a long process of what I consider lowering their “human costs.” I used to employ the trick—actually told to me by a bank employee that I spoke with at the bank itself—of, when calling and answering questions for a taped voice, just remaining silent until the tape says, “Please hold and I will connect you with a [living] customer service agent.” She also told me you could just say something nonsensical or even obscene to force the system to give you a live agent. I have fun suggesting some really kinky stuff to the tape (only the female voices); it helps pass the time. Anybody with a phone or a computer knows this experience, listening to menus, or visiting on-line tech support forums—the lonely business of trying to nudge some assistance for you machines by interacting with machines.

By contrast, the experience reminds me of the days, many years ago, when I lived in London and used to travel the London Underground (subway system). I used to buy a ticket from one of the persons behind the little ticket windows, telling them where I wanted to go. I would then take the ticket to an entrance to the system where there was another person, in uniform, who checked the ticket and let me through. When I arrived at my destination station I would have to hand my ticket to another uniformed ticket taker person who would check that I had not rode further than for the fare I had paid (I was never sure how they calculated this; they must have had it all memorized) and, if I had, I would be sent to another person behind a window to pay them the excess fare. Economists would call this a “labor-intensive” system.

Capitalism doesn’t really like labor all that much, and it is doing its best to get rid of as much of it as it can. People are a bother: they get sick, or pregnant, or injured (then they want health benefits), they steal, they goof-off, they unionize and go on strike, they sue, they vandalize, they are a pain to management and ownership. And they cost money, especially if their employers don’t get an opportunity to steal from their pension plans. Ironically, corporate health care and pension plans have produced a lingering financial time bomb that threatens corporations like General Motors.  By giving people health pans, which helps them live longer, pensions must be paid for many more years to retirees.  If you can replace them with a machine (with “capital”), even though that might have considerable initial costs, machines don’t go into the storage room, have sex, and then want the company to pay the costs of maternity leave, and they "retire" to the scrap heap. There is, of course, another solution to the “high cost of labor” problem—take your production to where there are vast numbers of workers eager to work for low wages at long hours, with dangerous materials from which you won’t be obliged to pay for injuries and health problems. Even tech support can be supplied from low cost labor, which is why so many seem to have Indian accents these days. (I never got to hear Ethan’s accent, or to discern where he was Bangalore.)

These days I don’t just buy my subway ticket from and machine, I buy my bus and airlines tickets from machines as well. They verify my air ticket, print my boarding pass, even check in my baggage. The only reason there are real people around is to assist the technologically-challenged in their fumbling interactions with machines. At my bank in Hong Kong they still have tellers; but they also have greeters who ask what kind of banking you are doing and will steer you toward the bank of ATMs for most transactions. They will also remind you that many transactions can be done from home with your computer (just don’t forget your mother’s maiden name.) So, ironically, the job of the remaining people in the process of transactions is to get you to use machines instead of people. This is reminiscent of the 19th Century phenomenon of the farm boy who leaves he farm looking for “city work” and ends up working in a factory that makes tractors or combines that will replace more farm boys.

Some science-fiction writers have imagined tat that time f the carbon-based bio-forms that we are will be replaced someday by silicon-based (computor) “life” forms that will work better and live longer. In some sense we are already well n the way to tat substitution process. As with most technological changes there are pluses and minuses. Maybe those London Underground ticket takers were bored out of the skulls doing that repetitive task day in and out. And, if an ATM machine, or an online reservation process, can be frustrating until you get it figured out, it might be better than some frustrated and arrogant twit you used to have to deal with—but then again, nowhere near as pleasurable experience as running into the truly nice customer service person that really does want to help you out. These days you sometimes have a choice.

The problem is that the choices will be dictated, as they always are, by the stern laws of capital economics, especially those that seek efficiencies that will lower costs and enhance profits. That means that there will be less and less of the menial, boring, ticket-taker jobs and factory assembly-line jobs that people used to get some sort of an economic foothold. People still find cracks where the demons of efficiency have not yet invaded. There still is some work for those willing to do field work in the countryside, or leaf-blower and hedge-trimmer wok in the city, or remain a step ahead of those little robot vacuum cleaners (that must scare the crap out of pets) to run the old Hoover. There are still check-out people at the supermarket, even though here are now self-service automated check out lanes (and I can also order online if I wish and have my groceries delivered).

But the gods of efficiency do not rest. Outside my window as I write this the garbage truck has pulled up in the next street. Those trucks used to have three personnel, the driver and two guys in the rear, tossing the contents of noisy garbage cans in the back. Now the truck pulls up beside black, plastic garbage bins that have been rolled t the street on their attacked plastic wheels by the residents. The driver, the only person left, operates a “claw” that descends and grasps each bin, lifts it, and dumps the contents into the top of the truck. He never gets out, never gets his hands soiled with some fish guts. How long before he trucks are linked to GPS and computers and they robotically roam the neighborhoods collecting the trash. Only the gods of efficiency know the answer to that one. Just hope that the robot trash truck is able to distinguish the difference between a trash bin and your kid waiting for the robotic school bus.
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©2008, James A. Clapp

50. 5: WILL THE BOAT SINK THE WATER?, by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao (2006) Book Review, 5.31.2008

                           

China’s astounding emergence onto the world stage economically has been largely portrayed through images and accounts of its great cities. It has some 120 cities that are over a million in population and the giants, like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou are approaching 20 million. The “one-child” policy may still be in force, but there are estimated to be some 150 million Chinese migrating towards the cities and the economic opportunities they offer. In those cities are Chinese driving expensive late model automobiles from Germany, Japan and the U.S., soaring commercial buildings and luxurious apartments and condominiums, and fellow citizens wearing clothing worth more that a year’s income of “countryside” people.

This is the image of the “new” China, the China that will host he 2008 Olympics, the China that official China wants the world to see, admire and respect. This is the China that took Deng Xiao-ping’s permission to embrace capitalism and “get rich,” whose leaders have exchanged those clunky Mao suits for Armani. This is the China that has been admitted to the WTO and has joined the global economy and produces much of its consumer goods

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But the greater part of China, come 900 million Chinese peasants will not be part of this picture. The “average” Chinese is not a BMW-driver talking on a cell phone to his plant manager or broker; he/she is a peasant farmer heading out into the fields to scrape out a subsistence living. And rather than having party cadres a willing partners in their enterprises, they are most likely to have them as the burdensome exploiters who will forever keep them destitute.

Reading Chen and Wu’s book will have you wondering why the whole 900 million of them don’t pack a bag and head for one of those prosperous metropoles in the “special economic zones.” That might be the reason that their book was both banned in China and selected as the winner of the 2004 Lettre Ulysses Prize for the Art of Reportage.

Chen and Wu concentrate on the fate of peasant farmers in Anhui province, along the eastern stretches of the Yangtse. Nearly 65 million people live there, at about 1,200 to the square mile. Their style of reporting is narrative. They are the poignant stories no peasant farmers and villagers who are exploited by low-level government officials ad party members in ways that might make the detested “landlords” that dominated the peasants prior to the revolution seem like kindly benefactors.

Anyone who has seen The Good Earth, or read Pearl Buck's book, knows that aagriculture has long been a difficult profession in China, subject to such disasters as floods, droughts and plagues of locusts, as well as the exactions of rapacious landlords.   But agriculture has also been one of the great disasters of the Chinese centrally controlled economy. Collectivization resulted in enormous declines in productivity from its very beginning in 1956. It was forced upon the peasants and many revolted and were labeled “rightists. By 1958 the Great leap Forward was underway that consolidated the collectives into communes and the peasants lost all their property and belongings. This communization gave everything to the state. It was a disaster and, starving millions. In 1966 began the decade long Cultural Revolution, during which a peasant could be accused of taking the “capitalist road” if his household kept two chickens or panted a few vegetables for the market. Productivity dropped so low that the a value of ne day’s agricultural labor averaged a mere 11 cents—the equivalent value of a day’s labor in the Han Dynasty, two thousand years ago.

Flailing around for something that would both produce food and revenue for the government the commune system was converted in the 1980sn into sixty-thousand administrative “townships” invested with the power to impose and collect taxes. While productivity increased the new system served to create a huge bureaucracy of party operatives at the township level that not only siphons off any “profit” many of the peasants might realize, but which also has to be paid for by the peasants. The bureaucracy acts like a plague of locusts.

The principal mechanisms are the taxes, fees and exactions that would drive an American anti-taxer to distraction. Township authorities may impose “fund-raising” taxes for building township office buildings, schools, clinics, broadcasting stations, theaters, and several vague enterprises. The peasants must also pay up for village cadre’s allowances and business trips, the Party Youth League, and Townships People’s Congresses, salaries for Village personnel from the Party Secretary to the plumber, all school expenses, all birth-control programs, and a large number of social programs. While some of these can be considered legitimate expenses for operating a government, the bureaus don’t stop there. For example, Chen and Wu came across the following situation for getting married in one township. “The happy couple has to pay for the marriage certificate. [But] Then there are fees for the letter of authorization (provided by the work unit or the village committee, certifying the identity band age of the applicants); the notary; the prenuptial physical (presumably checking for infectious disease), and a fee for a comprehensive physical for the bride. After these preliminaries, there is a deposit for commitment to the one-child policy, a deposit for commitment to family planning, a deposit for commitment to deferred pregnancy. After the birth-control part is taken care of, there is a deposit for commitment to ‘mutual devotion,’ and a deposit for a ‘golden wedding.’ Apart from these deposits, there is a tax for the wedding banquet, a tax for pig killing, a ‘green’ tax for banquet-related environmental hazards, and finally a donation to the Happy Children’s Center.’

A lot of these funds end up in the pockets of local cadres ads evidenced by the cars they drive and the homes in which they live. They get away with a lot of these “extortions” because the can operate like a local MAFIA in the way they enforce their “collections.” Thugs are often brought in, or the complicity of the local cops, to rough people up and, if they can’t or won’t pay up, take their crops, livestock, even personal possessions from their homes such as furniture and appliances. The reporters document cases of peasants being crippled and even killed. Complaining to other local authorities can result in a visit from the thugs, beatings, or a stay in jail. The journalists report on the fates of some peasants who went to Beijing to complain and ended up tortured and imprisoned when they got back.

Not all local officials are this corrupt, but the system seems an ideal matrix for this sort of taxing the peasants to a point where they remain at not much more than a subsistence level. While the growth rate of then cities and the industrial economy has grown by leaps and bounds, the agricultural sector lags far behind. The central government is not unaware of the monster they have created, but one that also kicks a lot of cash into its coffers. There have been arrests and demotions of local officials, protest by the peasants (although not much of this makes the news.) But the culture of corruption runs deep in not just the agricultural sector of China, deep enough that if, someday, the boat does indeed “sink the water,” the bottom is going to turn out to be a long way down.
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©2008, James A. Clapp

50. 4:   O ISRAEL! O ISRAEL!      5.26.2008

                

                                                                                    ©2008, UrbisMedia

“In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1) “. . . and soon there more words” (Jim 3:23) “. . . and most of these words were bullshit.” (Sebastian 6:19).

I have long had it with people who think they know what (their) God wants to do with the world. They are arrogant, stupid, and dangerous and, if there is a god, they are at best his bad joke, and at worst his instrument for ending creation like some Rambo movie. The latest of these Armagiddiots is Rev. John Hagee, a tub of blathering evangelical guts who claims to know how that ending is written. And his instrument, his “chosen people” are the Jews.

So what else is new, you say. The Jews called themselves “the chosen people.” They did. That’s OK. It’s when other people start choosing you when the trouble begins: the Babylonians chose them, the Egyptians chose them, the Romans chose to splatter them all over the diaspora so that Russians and Germans and Poles could choose them, . . . well you get the idea. [This, by the way, has nothing to do with Matthew 22:14 “Many are called, but few are chosen,” which is a mis-reading of “Many are cold, but few are frozen.” Frigidians 5:28]

Hagee would argue that the Jews had it coming. Like the Holocaust. He claims that Hitler was foretold in a verse in Jeremiah and that Hitler and the Holocaust were part of God’s plan to force the Jewish people back to Israel, not Florida. [This matter of just where the Jews belong is much mooted. [See DCJ Archives, 4:7, “The Cornhusker Solution”]. Hagee, you will recognize, is the guy who endorsed John McCain (“And he shall cast aside his first wife, and take unto him a bimbo with much manna.” (Revelations of the Hanoi Hilton 27:17). McCain liked that; it was a “two-fer,” Jews and Evangelicals in one swoop. But the holocaust thing soon caused McCain to recant, he having calculated that Rev. Tub-of-Guts would cost him some votes.

This left McCain almost without metaphysical counsel except for the endorsement of another ranting evangelical, Rev. Rod Parsley, who wants to wipe Muslims off the face of the earth because Islam is an “anti-Christ religion that intends through violence to conquer the world." (Parsley, like Hagee, is a man of peace.) This proved to McCain that one should never choose a garnish for and baked potato with sour cream as “my spiritual guide.”

Senator McCain received a “free pass” on most of this stuff because his opponent, Senator McAble(?) was having a helluva time because his “pastor,” Rev. Wright, a whacked-out fire-and-brimstoner, couldn’t get over the exposure one of his congregation was giving his church. Channeling some spirit that was like Martin Luther King on meth and steroids, he did his best to tank Obama’s candidacy by trying to frighten the honkies into getting their pointy white hoods out of he closet.

Now, if you no longer think there is a good case for the separation of church and state I would like to “smite thee with the jawbone of a ass” or “hang a millstone about thy neck and cast thee into the sea” or “set upon thy seed plagues of locusts, and endless speeches of George W. Bush” . . . well you get he idea. The sheer officiousness of religion in secular affairs clouds, confounds and complicates reasoned discourse.

Interestingly, it appears that Hagee’s support for the State of Israel puts some American Jews in a bit of a bind. They welcome any support for the perpetually beleaguered state; he raises a lot of money, but am not sure that they do no realize he only seems to want the Jews around is to fulfill some prophecy about how they will get a chance to convert to Christianity at the “end times.” But, since his mystical machinations also involve a considerable amount of intolerance of other religions to go along with his weird notions about Hitler being an agent of God’s plans for the Jews, he violates Jewish repulsion for such prejudices. So writes Rabbi David Sapperstein in the Washington Post (5.25.08).

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/david_saperstein/2008/05/hagees_jewish_endorsers.html

As if international relations aren’t complicated enough with the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” being the principal operative policy and resulting in relationships that look like three-dimensional chess being played by Condi Rice and Kim Il Jung in a dark room. Much of that darkness comes from the way in which religion, the great trumper of reason inn so much of he world through history, obscures facts and frustrates rationality. It is both insidious and remarkably resilient.

Christopher Hitchens wrote recently in Free Inquiry April/May 2008, Vol. 28, No.3) about how religion has made a comeback, in its manifestation in the Russian Orthodox church, in a sort of concordat with the also resilient tendency of the Russians toward autocracy. Those stove-pipe-hatted bozos had it great under the Czars, blessing an aristocracy that kept almost everyone else in serfdom. How can we forget Rasputin. And let’s not forget the Fiddler on the Roof. Then under Stalin, who also enjoyed persecuting the people and the Jews, they laid low under the radar of the putatively “godless communism.” Putin, too, has a use for them, and they for him.

The Hagee-Parsley business is further proof that religion, that insidious stateless state of permanent fear, remains, ironically, both the cause of so much of the evil doings in the world, and its ostensible cure. Perhaps when you are a tiny state with a religious symbol on your flag, a history with much sadness, and enemies that are legion, you might be tempted to gather to you allies of opportunity. But Hagee and his ilk are as dangerous politically as they are theopathically insane [See, DCJ Archives, 10. 2: “The Theopaths”]. Look what they have put two presidential candidates through. O Israel, O Israel, in the beginning was the word, and the word was beware, with enemies like you already have, you don't need friends like this!
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

50. 3: IT’S STUPID’S ECONOMY 5.21.2008

The campaign mantra of the Clinton administration back in the 1990’s is now part of American political lore. “It’s the economy, stupid.” By the end of his presidency there was a nearly $300 Billion surplus—that’s surplus!—in the Federal coffers. That’s not a stupid way to leave a public economy.

But then the economy became George W. Bush’s economy and, in nearly a flash the surplus was gone, siphoned off into the pockets of the richest Americans thanks to the Bush tax cuts. Of a sudden, we were on our way to where the Republicans, those mealy-mouthers of conservative fiscal frugality, but masters of the largest budget deficits in the history of the country, have brought us. So audacious has their plunder of the national treasure become that Dick Cheney could publicly say with a straight face that “deficits no longer matter,” that Ronald Reagan had proved that. Huh? Proved what? He only proved that it’s possible to be successful politically by shifting tax burden to the people who can least afford it, as he did in California when he shifted about 15% of the educational burden from the state to localities to make himself look like a frugal governor. He also left the biggest government up to his administration.

But even Reagan pales compared to George W. Bush, a man who surely believes that the purpose of holding political power is to make your friends rich. Nothing was able to stop him; it had become “stupid’s economy.” Republicans like to allege that the economy has an impetus of its own, that it is cycles a have little to do with the more circadian political behavior. This is the argument when things are going bad economically. But then, we will hear them claim that the way to fix things—this is their favorite—is to move more of the nation’s wealth to the rich. They know how to invest it, they will say, and when they do, jobs will be created, and some of that wealth will trickle back down to the less well-off. Taxing the rich would be the worst economic policy, they scream.

The so-called “war on terror” makes this work even better for Bush and his friends. At $9 Billion per month, a lot ends up in the sand, but a lot also ends up in the pockets of the war profiteers, the Haliburtons and KBRs and Bechtels and the defense contractors and energy companies. Meanwhile, Bush not only does the unthinkable (at which he excels) of retaining tax cuts during wartime, he pushes to make the tax cuts for the rich “permanent.”

Bush had discovered what most people already knew about—the credit card. As individuals, people can “tax” themselves, putting money into savings, foregoing some expenditures and such for rainy days, sending the kids to college, having something to fall back on in old age. Or, they can whip out the plastic and get that SUV and head off to Vegas, having fun now and worrying about paying for it later. American private debt is actually bigger than public debt. But when the roof comes down on an individual—even though the public has to pick up some of the pieces—it is different than when the nation has done the same thing. So when you have a president who has never run a business successfully, and been bailed out by his father or father’s friends when he failed, who never had to own up to anything, you are in danger of having a Mr. Stupid’s Economy. Even Reagan recognized that. In his Reagan Diaries he wrote: "A moment I've been dreading. George [H.W.Bush] brought his n'er-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one [Jeb] who lives in Florida; the one [George W. Bush] who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job.”

What is truly astonishing has been watching this country sit by and allow this immature, callous, S.O.B. (and I mean that literally) tear the country apart. The Republicans, mostly too-stupid or smart enough to know when they were getting their pockets filled, were like parents abiding the antics of a cognitively-challenged child. The ineffectual Democrats were like neighbors who thought it was not their place to say anything when the little monster tore up their flower-beds. The former surplus was laughed off, and it didn’t seem to matter at all when projections of what the tax cuts—tax cuts that Stupid’s economy wanted to make “permanent,” as though the world might never change in a way that we might have to cough up something to pay for our public services and profligate ways—would render in shifting the country’s wealth inexorably into the pockets of those who least need it.

Up to the very end we will hear George Bush say that the economy is growing under him—it is, although verrrrry slowly these days—but he is only referring to productivity and the creation of wealth. He is not referring to the distribution of that wealth. Nobody has dome more than Bush to realign that distribution in favor of the corporations, stockholders, and the rich. Under Bush the number of lobbyists in Washington more than doubled. The likes of Jack Abramoff had all the access to the decision-makers that they needed. We already know that the salaries and other compensation of American CEO’s averages 300 times that of the average worker in their companies (the European CEO rations, for comparative purposes is 60 to 1.) Just because an economy is growing in productivity, and profit, doesn’t mean that the growth in wealth of the worker is growing commensurately. Even growth in the number of jobs can be a misleading statistic, especially when there has been a substitution of well-paying and well-benefitted jobs for what are not inappropriately called “burger-flipping” jobs. Moreover, may corporations have increased their productivity and profits by moving their production offshore.

Now, as we count the days in the last months of the moron’s administration some chickens have come home to roost. At this writing oil is at $133/barrel and showing no signs of slowing despite Bush’s regular trips to walk holding hands with his royal Saudi friends. The dollar has plummeted against other currencies to where the Euro is worth more than a buck and a half; console yourself with a continental breakfast in Paris these days in which a café au lait and a croissant will cost you over ten of those once noble greenbacks. Back home the country reels under the results of deregulation of securities that allowed sub-prime rates to bring down huge financial institutions and thrown hundreds of thousands out of their homes. Bush trivializes these matters with statements that “the country is experiencing some economic difficulties,” as though he has not been a major (not exclusive) party to their emergence, and as though they are temporary. The economic effects of his so-called ‘war on terror’ and its on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will be felt for years, if not decades. The American people will suffer Mr. Stupid’s mis-guided policies long after he has retired to his ranch to collected speaker’s fees, board memberships and enjoy the beneficence of the rich people he grew up with. He will have gone full-circle without a single economic success, personal or presidential.
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©2008, James A. Clapp

50. 2: SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP!* 5.17.2008

          *Just until after the election. [I have previously had much to say about this issue in these pages. See Archives nos. 2.2, 5.12, 21.2 (which is about the 2004 election), 29.1, 30.2, 32.5, and 38.8]

          
                                 ©2008 UrbisMedia

GAYS. What’s wrong with them?! It’s not that they are gays and lesbians and trans-gender or trans-fatty-acid people. They are humans and citizens and that’s all that matters on that score. They should be allowed to marry, like anybody else. It’s not that they are stupid. They are probably of higher intelligence than average Americans and are smarter than everybody in a state like West Virginia that has a cumulative IQ lower than its area code, all share the same DNA, and have an average of six teeth per mouth. It’s not that they are immoral; you have to be a born-again religious idiot zealot to believe that. It’s not that they are going to ruin heterosexual marriages, half of which end in divorce very well by themselves, which is not always the half that should. It’s not that they are “homocrats,” trying to overtake the political system; they just want their Constitutional rights.

But I am not sure that they are acting like democrats, or at least Democrats. It’s that they are either A. not politically savvy, or B. impatient, self-indulgent jerks. Even these hypotheses are quite open to question. But: are they doing it again? Giving the Religious Right another poke in their cheeks so they will come out in droves again, like they did to elect George Bush in 2004 and, this time, get John McCain elected? COULDN’T THEY F*****G WAIT ANOTHER SIX MONTHS, UNTIL AFTER THE ELECTION TO DANCE IN THE STREETS? JESUS CHRIST! THEY HAD THEIR LAST ‘MARRIAGE’ CELEBRATIONS A FEW MONTHS BEFORE THE LAST ELECTION AND, ARGUABLY, HELPED ELECT A GUY WHO REPRESENTS PEOPLE WHO WOULD LIKE TO BURN THEM AT THE STAKE! CAN’T THEY WAIT? ARE THAY THAT POLITICALLY STUPID, OR ARE THEY THAT SELF-INDULGENT AND COUNTERINTUITIVE? [OK, now there are gays who call themselves “Log Cabin Republicans.” I know, it’s almost impossible to imagine gays who would want to be Republicans, a politicval party that pretty much hates their gay guts, but there you have it. They even chose the name Log Cabin Republicans, using "log," the very object the homosexuals were called when tossed on the fires in autos da fe, called“faggots,” that has come down through the ugly ages as a epithet.]

I am all for the cause of gays and lesbians and trans-gender people getting their marriage licenses and full rights. They have been denied these for a long time. But they are partly responsible for a lot of people who got killed a tortured because George Bush remained in power. And they are going to be partly responsible again because they are acting, politically, like selfish jerks.  Once was enough; now to hell with being politically-correct or sympathetic. They stakes are higher than a couple of months before you can play the wedding march, or some Streisand tunes at your wedding banquets.

Now maybe gays would like to counter with the argument that this was a decision by the California Supreme Court, and therefore the judicial calendar should be blamed for this. I wouldn’t buy that claim. In fact, maybe those Log Cabin Republicans are really a 5th column operation who pressed for getting this decision to come out at such are Right-Wingedly propitious time. Also, it could be that the six members of the Cal Supreme Court who were appointed by the Republicans, saw this as a good time to come down with the decision. One vote could have swung it other way. OK, maybe that’s a bit too conspiracy theory. You get to believe in Machiavellian politics in the Bushian world.

Like many oppressed groups, gays tend to become self-deprecating in a self-protecting manner (“I can make better fun of myself than you can”), but there’s always a point where you begin to wonder about it. I like the joke about the four gay guys who attacked a woman; three of them held her down while the fourth guy did her hair. But there is always the cultural danger where emphasizing the differences emphasizes the difference to some people. When it gets to four gay guys marching like the Mod Squad down the street and grabbing some dorky straight guy and re-doing his wardrobe and apartment, I start moving away. No, it's not the homo-terrorism that religious zealots make it out to be; but for them perception is reality and they vote their perceptions.  Maybe it brings on some tolerance, but when people are in the voting booth they don’t have to be tolerant.  Admittedly, life can be cute and fun, but it can also get pretty serious.  This is serious time.  And marriage can be important to people who really care about one another; so keep it from being a political statement in addition to personal vows. Victory can be sweet, but this one isn't sealed yet.

This is a “cutlure war,” a war in which gays are as surely targeted for the pink triangle badge and the death camp as they ever were. There is more at stake than some “I do’s” and some dancing and kissing in the streets. In politics timing can be everything. There is the next four years of this badly damaged and divided country at stake.

I write this partly for my gay friends, none of whom I know are contemplating matrimony. But I wish them to tell those who are that they just might cool it until we get some people in power who will be a lot more tolerant than the people their enemies. They may find that their judicial victory is pyrrhic after they have had their public celebration; they may have to have more allegiance to their political “party” than to party. If they want to get married they can wait a few months—I don’t think there are any “shotgun” necessitated marriages in the offing. I’ll even check out what patterns they have registered for their dinnerware or drapes. I wouldn’t dare to attempt a tasteful selection on my own. But if McCain gets in because you have helped bring out the Religious Right I am going to be pissed, REALLY PISSED. And I am going to show up at next year’s Gay Pride Parade with a sign. It won’t be anti-gay—but you are not going to like it.

I'm probably going to catch some flak for this piece.  But it isn't going t hurt anything like having to learn how to say "President McCain."
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© 2008, James A. Clapp

50. 1: DIRTY, ROTTEN, HUMAN, BASTARDS! 5.13.2008

                             Apologies to P-P Rubens, UrbisMedia

Recently arrived in my email was an emotional message with many photos of the victims of the Holocaust (the one in which some 6 million Jews were victim). It had been prompted by the following allegation: “This week, the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offended' the Muslim population which claims it never occurred.” This didn’t seem quite right to me and it didn’t take much Internet searching to determine that this was a gross exaggeration. [Google: Holocaust Education UK].

But behind it is a real concern about how, especially in multi-ethnic countries, do you teach the ugly parts of history without offending or alienating students who are from some of the offending cohorts. We may not want to coddle students with white-washed (oops, offended some people already) history, but the problem of being “fair and balanced” is always present. If you are going to wash some ethnicities’, nations’ or society’s dirty linen, maybe you should shove them all into the pedagogical Maytag. Maybe there should be a mandatory history course in all schools the world over called “The History of Dirty, Rotten Human Bastards,” or DRHB 101, for short. Forget that so-called “Western Civ” course, or “World Civ.” What wee need is a nice, forthright, course on the dark side that doesn’t give anybody a pass. (I can see this is going to be a rather misanthropic piece.)

It is somewhat ironic that the sensitivities of Muslims is the alleged reason for the concern about teaching the Holocaust in English schools. Last time I looked, the Muslims were sort of the number one candidate for DRHBs pretty much everywhere in the West. It wasn’t Laplanders that brought down the World Trade Center buildings. Anyway, it seems that the Muslims had little to do with Hitler’s holocaust; they just want to obliterate the Jews themselves, and they certainly do not want the Zionists to have any case for a return to their “homeland.” The Nazis probably didn’t have much affection for the non-Aryan Muslims either, except that they were in league with the Ottoman Turks, who were mostly Muslims. Since WWII the Germans have gastarbeit-ed a lot of Turks to supplement their industrial manpower, which raises some interesting speculations on the substitution they have made. And are such questions brought up in German schools these days, I wonder? It gets complicated, doesn’t it? Do German teachers treat the rather sordid history of the Turks, who have their own Armenian holocaust they officially deny, and then there was that business back in the early 1920s when they ran a lot of Greeks right into the sea at Smyrna (Izmir). The Turks qualify for the DRHB roster as well.

If one is going to be serious about the syllabus for DRHBs 101, one has to do their historical digging both wide and deep. The ugly little secret of human social development is that our species has always tended not only to dislike and distrust differences—the folks from the other side of the [tracks, road, hill, etc]—after all, they (might) have different gods and germs—so we usually selected genocidal tactics for them. This nasty DRHB gene is probably down deep in the DNA, and species wide.

I know, I know, you’re saying, “Oh my God, he’s so pessimistic, so misanthropic, so [fill in the blank]. See, you say, “Oh my God . . .”. You believe that we were made in the image of God and were taught to believe that he resembled Charlton Heston (who will finally meet him). So how could we be fundamentally bad. But that’s part of the reason we divide ourselves up into cultures, so we can justify what we regard as our inherent superiority to others, the way we have elevated ourselves about Nature in general.

So, for example, the Japanese in WWII regarded the Chinese as “sub human.” Imagine that. The Japanese would probably have had to come up with a written language on their own were it not for the Chinese, but they actually referred to Chinese prisoners, on whom they performed the most heinous crimes, as “logs,” so they could perform vivisections on them without regarding them as human at all. Or, when they slaughtered 300,000 Chinese in Nanking and raped and murdered 20,000 Chinese women. So, do the Japanese make the DRHB list? You betcha! But you won’t find it taught in their schools.

Maybe a case could be made that we should not tar entire cultures or peoples because some dirty, rotten political leaders and tyrants, like Tojo or Emperor Hirohito, have led them astray, or made them do bad things. That might be true here and there. But it might also be that these people become leaders and are able to take power because the represent the feelings of their people. Hitler didn’t invent anti-Semitism, and Milosivic didn’t invent the idea of exterminating villages of Muslim Kosovars and Albanians, although maybe Americans came up with the idea of wiping out the Indians, or Australians of exterminating aboriginals, on their own.

What about Africa. We hear a lot (deserved) blame being leveled at Europeans screwing up their societies with colonialism when Hutus are hacking up Tutsis, but these same Africans were also delivering their ethnic rivals to the slave ships not all that long ago. And don’t get me going on the Spanish and Portugese in Central and South America.

The very same Chinese who were regarded as “sub human” by the Japanese have often behaved rather badly towards their own. Mao managed to starve about 30 million of his own people and then unleash the Cultural Revolution on the remainder. It took more than one callous DRHB to pull that off. Even today, in the great economic ascendency of China, the exploitation of the four-fifths of the people who inhabit the countryside by cadres who overtax them and steal their produce is class warfare that is as dirty and rotten as what the “landlords” of the old order did to the peasantry. Cute pandas, pingpong and the Olympics are not enough to keep China off the list.

Not that the big boys don’t have competition for nastiness. How about Burma, a country that has an army whose primary purpose is to make war on its own people. If front of the entire world its political leadership would rather watch its people dies of disease, in jury and starvation, than accept international aid that might expose its meanness and incompetence. When they are not busy doing that they can practice genocide on indigenous tribes in the north of the country.

The Burmese junta also allows us to consider the religious factor in all of this. We already know of the bellicosity of the big Western religions. Their practitioners are adept at announcing they are faiths of peace and harmony—while they are forcing a cold knife though your vital organs. The Roman Catholic Inquisition probably taught modern authoritarian regimes most of their best torture techniques. Protestantism didn’t d much to change things for the better. And, well I don’t want to say anything about those over-sensitive Muslims for fear they’ll be “offended.” We wouldn’t want them to ah . . . blow up at us now, would we. The Jews are too few, and too much on the defensive to be in the same group with the biggies. But if you go back into the Old Testament you can see they were capable of some nasty doings, like sacking cities in which they left “no stone upon stone,” and wiping out the entire idolatrous population of goyim. The Burmese junta and its army is proof that Buddhism hasn’t made all of its adherents pacific seekers of enlightenment.

You probably have to go back a ways with some other peoples. Take those Scandinavians; they have been pretty well-behaved for some time. But there was a time when nobody wanted to see those longships coming over the horizon. These guys could rape and pillage with the best of them.

I am of Italian descent and I don’t like reminding myself that Italy was part of the Axis for (most of) World War II and, going back a bit further, was the place that was the origin of the word, “ghetto” because of a place in Venice where Jews were sequestered nearly 300 years, and that the so-called Pax Romana of even further back was achieved by Roman armies rolling over a lot of innocent people and by the widespread use of slavery. Then there’s the MAFIA. Geez, just leave us out of the history books, or maybe just mention Michelangelo and Marconi and get right on to those other DRHB’s, the . . . a . . . a, French. Yeah, the French, especially those Nazi-collaborators, the Vichy French who hunted down French Jews and sent them to Drancy. Yeah, lets offend some Froggy school kids today. “Hey Jean-Pierre, your grandfather might not have been in the Resistance after all. Deal with it.”

Pretty much every racial and ethnic group belongs on the DRHB list. Why? Because they’re human, that’s why. Rummage around in any group’s history and you’ll probably find some skeletons, usually of other people they didn’t like or felt superior to.

Oh, so you think the Swiss don’t belong on the DRHB list? Why would anybody want to get on the case of people who make coo-coo clocks, chocolate, cheese with holes and keep the gold that Nazis stole from the Jews secreted in their bank vaults (right beside the cash that drug dealers and other scum keep in their numbered accounts). Oh, but you say they haven’t attacked anybody in a long time. Right, they have learned to play the “Hey, were neutral” game better than anybody else. They’re like the guy in a bar that says he’ll hold the coats of two other guys who are about to fight. While they are fighting the Swiss guy goes through their pockets. Are the guys betting on a cockfight or a dogfight any less guilty? Wasn’t it Edmund Burke who said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Put’em on the list.

Now, I hope that any races or ethnic groups I might have left off because this could go on at some length. If you are, then please send me an email tat you are offended in some way and I’ll give you a piece of my mind. This diatribe has made me feel a little better, but some DRHB is out there right now doing something dirty and rotten and then getting offended if we try to tech the next generation that it’s possible to be people who deserve to put a “e” on the end of “human.”
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© 2000, James A. Clapp