“Can’t Pass the Postal Exam”

In 2018 I found myself spending a lot of time in the Rochester Mayo Clinic’s Neurology Department. Eventually, I was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, but back then I was still in the early stages of discovering what was causing my face “to melt” (as Ms. Day described my most visible symptom), in the meantime I was often entertained by conversations in the waiting area. People with neurological disorders seem to be a specially wide spectrum of personalities.

The day I am writing about a pair of Trumpers (old white men) were going on about “all of Trump’s accomplishments” at the borders. A friend of theirs was a Border Patrol agent somewhere at the Canadian border and, supposedly, he had stories of those “terrible people” trying to cross into the US from Canada. While these two nitwits reveled in their friend’s supposed “adventures,” loudly and arrogantly, I remembered a comment someone had made at a campground in Maine when I was coming back from a 2008 motorcycle trip to Nova Scotia, “The Border Patrol cops are just people who failed the Postal Exam.”

I’ve written quite a bit about that long ride on my Geezer blog, but this episode stuck so firmly in my mind that I have sometimes wondered if it were real. At about the 5,000 mile point in this long ride I decided to be lazy and take the CAT High-Speed Car Ferry from Nova Scotia to Maine. The upside to the ferry was that I’d get a 5 hour rest stop instead of a seven hour, 450 miles ride from Nova Scotia to the Maine US border. The downside was that that I’d be going almost straight from the ferry to a US border crossing in Bar Harbor, Maine.

It was a hot August day when Ii arrived in Maine at the hottest time of the day. I was solidly geared up in my ‘Stich Darien suit, road boots, and the usual helmet-gloves-etc setup I always wear on a bike trip. By then, I’d been on the road, “wearing what I’d brung” in my saddlebags, for about two weeks. Some of my clothing was pretty . . . raw, after shower-laundry and multiple reuses. The weather had turned out to be quite a bit warmer than I’d anticipated, too, and I hadn’t brought many lightweight bits of clothing. As she was packing up for her flight back home from Nova Scotia to Minnesota, Ms. Day loaned me one of her clean teeshirts and I was wearing it as I crossed into good ‘ole USA.  If you know me, you’ll likely know that I don’t pay much attention to what I’m wearing. And this is where you might decided that my “situational awareness” needs some work. The shirt was a silkscreen of Ms. Day’s take on a fairly famous pagan character called “The Green Man.” I was pushing my bike along the slow moving trail from the ferry to the US Customs office, since it was hot and we were moving at about 0.1mph, I’d tossed my jacket on to the bike along with my helmet, gloves, and anything I could dump to stay cool.The guy at the border gate took one look at me and sent me into the “security office” to be thoroughly “examined” for contraband because I was so clearly a clear-and-present-hazard to the security of the United States. Remember, this is the stock market, real estate crashing United States of George Bush II’s whackjob 2008. (Almost as bad as the idiocy we have been experiencing since 2017.)

Once inside the security office, which isn’t much more than an overpriced trailer with extra windows, I had to strip down to my teeshirt, Aerostich riding shorts, and socks while the border cops meandered about doing their low-tech job of determining what kind of contraband I was bringing into the country. I must have been quite a sight to the people who came into the office for other business.

To try and expedite the inspection, I offered to help the officers go through my bike storage, but they insisted that i keep my 60-year-old, undressed, dangerous self where they could see me. They didn’t even trust me to open the cases, pop the seat, or even point out where my storage was. I am not, as I have said before, a camera guy and this was one of many times that I wish that wasn’t true. For almost an hour, three to five of the Customs Department’s “finest” wandered around my motorcycle, fumbling with the keys to the cases, and looking like a troupe of monkeys trying to figure out a typewriter and with exactly as much hope of ever writing “Macbeth” on the damn thing. They, finally, managed to get the two large GIVI side-cases open and spread my clothing all over the parking space in the process. The top case totally foiled them as did the tube tool box under the left side-case and the under-seat storage wasn’t even a consideration. One of the Customs goobers managed to unlock the tank and get a good sniff of Canada’s 90 octane mid-grade gas.

After an hour of entertainment, they gave up and booted me out of the containment area. By then, it was late enough that I started looking for a campsite for the evening. Just out of Lubec, Maine I found a terrific privately-owned campground where I rented a super-cool cabin for less money than I’d been spending for a tent-site at most of the campgrounds on the trip. About an hour after I’d unpacked, the young woman who’d checked me into the campground brought a big tray of fried goodies that hadn’t been sold that evening and that solved me dinner problem. While I ate, we talked about where I’d been, what I’d seen, and I mentioned my Border Patrol episode of the day. And that is where I heard, “They’re just a bunch of losers who couldn’t pass the postal exam” explanation for the fools who freaked out by my wife’s artwork.

The Living “Lost Cause”

I just finished reading Michael Harriot’s generally painful, but brutally honest, Black AF History · The Un-Whitewashed Story of America and I’ve been struggling my way through Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past for the past several weeks. Princeton’s History Department website summarizes Myth America with “Replacing myths with research and reality, Myth America is essential reading amid today's heated debates about our nation's past.” There weren’t a lot of surprises in Myth America, at least for me, but there were 20 chapters of constant disappointment. Black AF History was a different collection of stories, filled with many names and incidents that had not been part of my history education. Harriot is as tough on white people as white people have been on people of color and that is a tough pill to take, as a white person. The chapter I am currently wading through in Myth America is “Confederate Monuments” by Karen Cox. And my point in this essay/rant came from that chapter, plus the combined background from Black AF History.

The fascination and perverse pleasure some Americans get from Israel’s racism and apartheid and, not many years earlier, South Africa’s similar internal terrorism is almost identical to the things white southerners were saying to themselves after the brief period of Reconstruction. For example, at the unveiling of an Augusta Confederate monument in 1878, Charles Colcock Jones Jr, ex Confederate lieutenant colonel, reassured white southerners that they  “have no apologies to offer, no excuses to render, no regrets to utter, save that we failed in our high endeavor. . . We were overborne by superior numbers and weightier munitions . . . [and] nothing has been absolutely determined except the question of comparative strength.” He continued by ranting about the need to program white children to “be taught to emulate the example of their Confederate ancestors.” The point here is that that damned “Lost Cause” is being emulated in Israel in exactly the way white southerners and other racists would behave if they weren’t “overborne by superior numbers” today.

Israel is one more historic example of Lord Acton’s 1887 rule, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” (1887) and the more depressing corollary attributed to so many authors I have long given up looking for its origin, “Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become them.” For the past 76 years, any mirror an Israeli might chose to look into would reflect back an image that even someone as brutal and amoral as Benjamin Netanyahu would try to reject. Try as they might, the image will stick for as long as human history is recorded. Just like the American South and its history of slavery and repression and violence, once you’ve put that flag into the ground, that property is marked for all of human history.

The current crop of MAGA Republicans and the historic supporters of Israel from both parties are either proudly seeing their racist dreams come true in Israel or becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the reflection of their position in the world. When lifetime supporters like Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs of California are being whipped at both ends, it’s obvious that no middle-ground position is safe, “In San Diego, I’ve been protested by people who think that I’m not sufficiently calling for a ceasefire and those who think I’m not doing enough for Israel — some of whom I’ve known my entire life. It’s really turned into two separate camps. The more you try and carve out a middle, the more neither camp really feels like home.” As usual, the people who know the least about the situation are convinced their insights are “fresh” and valuable. Anyone who is convinced they have the answer to this war is deluded, at best, and arrogantly foolish most likely.

Progressive Democrats are under attack for their realistic positions on Israel and that is being used to Republican advantage in the coming election. Liberal Democrat Jamie Raskin was stuck between a rock and hard place having to defend Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s words condemning Israel, “If I can’t stand up for somebody’s right to just express themselves in Congress without being censured, then I have lost my way constitutionally.” Republicans had no such qualms and even less respect for the Constitution and gleefully voted overwhelming to censor Tliab. Everything about Israel and Gaza and most of the Mideast is a lose-lose proposition for anyone in the US; politicians, businesses, and individuals. Normally, when that is the case the best option is to step away and see what develops.

The Upside of Being An Outsider

Scientific American magazine published an article titled, “In Atheists We Distrust.” The article opened with, “Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to.” The gist of the article is that all of those people with imaginary friends “distrust” atheists. Weirdly, this article claims that a research found “People identifying themselves as having no religious affiliation held similar opinions. Gervais and his colleagues discovered that people distrust atheists because of the belief that people behave better when they think that God is watching over them.” Of course, “no religious affiliation” just describes people who spend Sunday at a bar watching football and praying for some god to help their team beat the snot out of some other team, so that isn’t particularly interesting information.

From my Midwestern perspective, I’ve mostly decided that superstitious people have such a tenuous hold on their “beliefs” that any sort of challenge to the existence of their particular “god in the mirror” is too much to stand. The “individual quality” of the gods those people worship is also suspiciously mirror-like. And, with even minimal knowledge of modern astronomy, physics, and neurology, it takes a shitload of “confidence” (i.e. “ego”) to believe there is anything special in this universe about an individual human. As a lifetime outsider to the whole mystical experience and an introverted observer of human weirdness, I’ve seen this behavior from every “god-fearing:” character in my life; from my father and family to co-workers and acquaintances to public figures. (Especially black collar public figures whose outrage and general intolerant behavior I’ve always written off as financially motivated. After all, if enough people were atheists, nobody would get to pretend to speak for the gods.)   

In the past few decades, I’ve somewhat modified my opinion to something more like, “Nobody believes this shit, based on their behavior.” You can make a pretty rational argument that everyone is statistically atheist because of the currently existing approximately 4,200+ religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, or otherwise supernatural beliefs, few of us believe more than one of the pack. 1/4200^th is 2.380952380952381e-4 or approximately 0.024% away from no faith in the supernatural at all. In all of human history, there have been at least 10,000 religions. A 1/10,000^th belief is close enough to zero for reasonable and practical purposes. Either of those options demonstrate hardly a significant difference between the faithful and atheists. Other than arrogance and tradition, picking a god to believe in is about as random a choice as possible. So, you might as well invent one as take on an existing god. It’s obvious from behavior and conversations away from peers that a substantial number of “the faithful” pretend to be so for social, financial, and other cultish reasons. In those situations, I’ve had a number of ministers admit to me that their own personal faith is considerable less magically-based than the one they project to their parishioners/minions. Back in the Sam Kinison days, it was almost popular for fundamentalist ministers to tryout different career options, admitting they’d been in the religion thing for the money. At least in the US, we’ve regressed a long ways since then and the majority of Americans are back pretending they believe the same shit as everyone else. Cult behavior, in other words.

Again, in my experience and observation, it is fascinating how much even a supposed single god, like the Jewish Jehovah Yahweh, Elohim, the Lord, God, and his/her/its other pseudonyms has at least as many personality traits as believers. And, on a personal basis, those gods more accurately reflect the personality, habits, interests, prejudices, and other traits of the believer than any description on the various holy books. Which is why I call those various deities “the God in the mirror.” It’s pretty obvious that “God created man in his own image” is the reverse of the objective facts. Men and women create their gods in almost exactly their own image; or the image they have of themselves.

For the nearly-70-years I have been an atheist, it seems to me that I have saved a ton of time, money, and energy for useful activities by missing out on the whole magical world thing. I not only don’t have to tithe to some self-proclaimed Speaker-to-God, I don’t have to knock on wood, worry about stepping on sidewalk cracks, carry a rabbit’s foot, wear offensive and uncomfortable jewelry, or worry about what kind of life I’ll have to suffer after death.

And suffering it would be if the after-life my family and neighbors describe is anything like the real thing their heaven would be. I first got a hint of what that would be like as a little kid in my father’s Dodge City Methodist Church. Those “joyful voices” our minister kept calling for were clearly pitch and rhythmically impaired and the polar opposite of anything that could be described as “:heavenly.” Demonic, maybe. Heavenly, definitely not. Crows make happier and more musical noises as do cats.

When my mother died at 34, the “comfort” my family was given from the church and its members amounted to “God works in mysterious ways.” Clearly, not a satisfying answer for anyone smarter than a brick. I was rapidly falling into the group of “people who reject religion because they find a god either insufficiently loving or insufficiently credible.” When my father and I argued about his church attendance requirement, he responded with “Live in my house, go to my church.” A few weeks later, I’d rented a tiny trailer with a friend and I moved out on my own the summer I turned 16 and lived there until I graduated high school and was “finished” with my first year of college (I dropped out.). When my father and step-mother were old, disabled, and no longer in a financial position to pour money and energy into their church, that church vanished from their lives.

Living in the Midwest for most of my life, I’ve been exposed to every variety of what passes for “Christianity” this country has to offer. A few, like Unitarian Universalists have enough other positives to outweigh the occasional mythical and superstitious fantasies, but most are based on cult-like conformity and fear of the impossible unknown (a vengeful god or his bad-tempered fiery sibling). I do not see any advantage, other than not being “different,” to pretending to believe in this silliness and at my age I care even less than before what people think of me for not playing make-believe religious games.