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.

American Lawlessness

I can't run no more,
With that lawless crowd.
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud.
They're going to hear from me. Leonard Cohen – Anthem

But they likely won’t hear from enough of us, will they? Usually, in American history, the “thunderclouds” that get summoned are in service of the 1%, the planet killers, the real “baby killers” who do their work in quantity not quality, and outright criminals who belong either behind bars or standing in front of a firing squad convicted of treason. But the United States are no longer united and at least half of the voting public (those allowed to vote) are “that lawless crowd.”

You see their distain for law and order, peace and quiet, the public spaces, and decency practically everywhere you go. You hear them flaunt laws and polite behavior all night long in practically every town in the nation. They do it for both fun and profit and they do it knowing the police are, mostly, on their side. The country is rapidly becoming half-“that lawless crowd.” And they are clearly proud of their ability to repeatedly commit crimes against the “public good” and national security without consequences. How will this play out on both the world stage and locally? Probably, badly.

I’m going to work from the bottom up in describing the symptoms of an empire in rapid decline. At the dead bottom—where local, state, and federal laws are broken and flaunted on a moment-by-moment basis—are vehicle noise laws. Here is one of many places where you can see that rural areas are in a state of far more deterioration than their urban cousins. On mild spring-thru-fall days, you can hear the sounds of blatantly illegal vehicle exhaust systems coming from every direction. While it is clearly and obviously illegal to alter any EPA/DOT-approved vehicle’s intake and exhaust system, local and state cops ignore those criminals because of . . . money. Irrationally powerful special interest groups like the IAPO (International Association of Professional Bar Owners) spent buttloads of cash putting up obstacles to prevent the weak attempts of “law enforcement” from patrolling the obvious sources of a substantial number of vehicle deaths and serious injuries: bar “closing time.” That same pack of gangsters and the amazingly powerful (and totally lame) MIC (Motorcycle Industry Council) put up all sorts of political noise when the noise their customers make destroys the peace and quiet and citizens begin to demand actual law enforcement (instead of minority harassment.).  And cops?  They are both terrified of biker gangs reprisals and too often the gang members. The same goes for the characters with illegal exhaust systems on their pickups, Honda Civics, and other assorted law-breaking vehicles.

That’s one of many examples of lawlessness at the lowest levels of society. At the national level, we had a violent insurrection that attempted to cancel the votes of tens of millions of Americans in an effort to install a egotistic, foolish reality show actor and his 3^rd-tier élite handlers as a permanent dictatorship. Everything works top-down and our culture is infested with lawless 1%ers who imagine themselves to be above the law and, worse, the law itself. When those at the top of society or business consider themselves to be ungoverned by law and order, that attitude showers across the nation with all of the worst people imagining themselves to be “special.” No only are they not special, but they are capable of destroying anything that is special within their reach.

Conservative Consistency

For most of my life I’ve been baffled and annoyed by what I believed was a conservative distain for consistency. Republican responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have cleared up a lifetime of confusion. The Vietnam War was the first place I witnessed, up close, the odd inconsistency my parents’ demonstrated with their professed “pro-life” positions and completely uncritical view of our government’s invasion of a 3rd world country that posed no threat to the United States. Since the 60’s, I’ve watched conservatives form up behind US invasions of Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. We’ve mindlessly and pointlessly bombed cities and civilian populations all over the world, with and mostly without, the support of a few other nations. There was a lot of talk both in the US and the rest of the world that G.W. Bush and his cronies might be prosecuted for war crimes under the conventions established in Geneva and Hague Conventions and such US law as the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and federal assault laws. But Republican and conservative voters and talking heads ignored all of that criminal behavior under the guise of “patriotism.”

Today, most of the country appears to be somewhat upset that Putin has decided to overturn a neighbor’s democratically elected government under the pretense of defending a minority Russian population in that country. The argument ought to be familiar. Eisenhower justified dipping into the Vietnam conflict after extracting the country from another unpopular war in Korea by claiming “the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following… now you are talking really about millions and millions and millions of people. The possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.” “Free” meaning corporate (US corporations, at the time) control of resources, people, and property. As a justification based on the US retreat in Korea, Kennedy said, “Now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” Johnson said, ““I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.” The military mental-midget, General Curtis LeMay, was one of the first to threaten to “bomb them back to the stone ages” and almost no one even winced at that viciousness. And Nixon followed that with the words of an international war criminal, "I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point." —National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger All of that to justify spending as much as the nation has invested in infrastructure in the last forty years.

When the US decided to mindlessly dive into the Vietnam War, based on a phony excuse provided by the CIA and the , there were warnings that this was a classic over-reaching-empire miscalculation, “I believe this resolution to be a historic mistake. I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake.”—Senator Wayne Morse (D-OR) Even a Republican voiced as rational a policy as was possible when he advised Johnson to “Declare the United States the winner and begin de-escalation.”—Senator George Aiken (R-VT) And South Dakota’s Senator, George McGovern stated the obvious, “We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it. I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come.”

Conservatives were, predictably, all-in on the Vietnam War and regularly labelled as “traitors and cowards” antiwar protestors, war opposition candidates, draft evaders (including those who went to prison for their beliefs), and anyone who didn’t fall in line behind the military effort and propaganda. Likewise, during the propaganda build-up for invasions of Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest, conservatives were immediately all-in on war. [That is, likely, a big part, or all, of their opposition to what they call “revisionist history,” which is nothing more than an honest look back at the country’s history without the propaganda filters.]

The same characters have followed the “love it or leave it” script for every US foreign invasion from Korea to wherever-the-hell our military, CIA, and NSA are screwing around today. If there is a war or an opportunity to squash democracy anywhere on the planet including the US, they want to be in on it and if there is money to be made doing that, all the better. And there is always money to be made creating misery and destruction.

Today, all of this kind of talk is rampant in Russia’s media both in Russia and Russia’s spokes-characters in the US. “I’ll stand on the side of Russia right now,” Joe Oltmann. Fox News, Tucker Carlson is a regular contributor to the state-owned Russian media as are more than a few other Fox and NewsMax squawking heads. The Q-Nuts and, of course, Putin’s pet, Donny Trump (I and II), and more than a Republican politicians regular Russian cheerleaders. As usual, follow the money. And that propaganda has been at least as effective in Russia as it has been in the US. "58% of Russian people approve of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, while 23% oppose it, according to a poll taken by independent survey research organizations last week. That result is flipped for young people aged 18–24. In that group, 39% oppose the operation, and 29% are for it." I’m not sure “flipped” is the right word, with 29% of the younger group all in on the Russian invasion, but those numbers are pretty typical of the propaganda effect in the US’s history, too. Older people are more gullible and since they are unlikely to be asked to make any real sacrifices in war they are more likely to buck the party line.

  

Disproving Divinity

5/15/2019

I woke up this morning to a dream where someone was asking my why I didn’t believe in their particular god or in human divinity or heaven and hell or any of the usual culprits of human religions. My dream answer was, “For the same reason that I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Greek gods, magic, Star Bores Force/Farce, or even invading aliens from Mars. It’s silly.” Seriously? Doesn't the whole idea of a La La Land "upstairs" for the good, if incredibly simple-minded and often viciously violent, people who populate all of the world's religions and hell "downstairs" for the non-believers (the people who create the tools we use and the technologies that keep us alive (scientists)) seem like some kind of ridiculous story for gullible children?

Oddly, that wasn’t any more popular a response in my dream than it is in real life. It is, however, exactly how I feel about all things supernatural. Nothing I have ever experienced has convinced me that humans are anything more than an incredibly successful species—like dinosaurs, trilobites, and giant mammals—that will overpopulate its environment, crash against a wall of resources or experience a huge die-off from an environmental disaster, and either disappear or become even dumber and insignificant (like humans were 100,000 years ago). We’re just a well-dressed (some of us, anyway) animal with basic instincts and drives. We're not all idiots, but for all we know there were some brilliant dinosaurs who warned the other dinosaurs that building some kind of shelter from asteroid hits and weather-independent sustainable food source might be a good idea?

An alternative nightmare I've had is that there is a heaven and it is filled with the kind of tripe that passes for believers on earth today. Billions of idiots, all surrounding some giant bearded white man, singing with the kind of awful verve that only arrogant and musically untalented religious people exhibit. A one-stop hell for some and perverse and foolish heaven for others. I see a lot of that sort in rural Minnesota and have been surrounded by them for most of my Midwestern life. When I learned that 54% of my neighbors voted for Trump and 56% for Jason Lewis in 2016, I realized that this place is more than half-stupid. That is not a comforting thought. Stupid people are easily inspired to do stupid things: like buy Trump steaks, enroll in Trump University, buy stock in Trump Hotels and Casinos, and vote for the nation's Biggest Loser when he tells them "I'm gonna make you so rich." When those stupid promises turn to shit, stupid people are always looking for someone else to blame. "Burn the witches!" Imagine eternity filled with billions of that kind of moron. If I'm going to pray for anything, it will be for oblivion after death. I don't need any more stupid. Life on earth, in the middle of in these United States, has given me all of the exposure to stupid I need.

I’m in the early pages of Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet. So far, it is a fascinating look at the two main perspectives on how humans might survive into the future: environmentalists and technologists. But the early pages are also about how shallow that whole argument is, because humans like all successful species are more likely to self-destruct following Gause’s “S-shaped curve” of population growth and collapse than to fumble into a Star Trek utopian future. No matter what happens to us and the rest of the mammals, birds, and reptiles currently living on this sphere, fungi and bacteri will carry on when we are gone until the sun goes nova.

In general, conservatives, and in specific, Republicans and evangelicals are the gods of unintended consequences. From a biological debate position, Alabama's state government is providing a demonstration to disprove any claim humans might have as a divine or special species with their mindless opposition to abortion and birth control. A biologist would argue, "To avoid destroying itself, the human race would have to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth." In banning abortions and fighting birth control, conservatives are behaving like fire ants, zebra mussels, tree snakes in Guam, rabbits in Australia, Burmese pythons in Florida, and bacteria in a Petri dish by breeding until the environment can no longer support the expanding species and causing massive population collapse the old fashioned and natural way. How can you not love that kind of irony? In pretending that their argument has some divine purpose and guidance, these fundamentalists are actually demonstrating how incapable humans are of acting in any extraordinary way to prevent species extinction. In other words, proving that humans are not smart enough to "constrain its own growth."

I, for one, think that is pretty entertaining.

As long as humans, on average and in the majority, insist on behaving like simple animals, I will continue to believe that religions are just silly; at best. At worst, religions are a key part of basic animal instincts that will destroy the species. Being a believer in the idea that many of the things we laugh about would only evoke terrible sorrow otherwise, I’m sticking with laughing at the idea that humans are something special in nature or the universe.I mean how can you not look at illustrations of hell and not be amazed at how gullible, primitive, and ridiculous religious humans can be?

Men’s Lives Matter?

I’m on a mail list with a few local guys. Mostly, the point of the mail list is about motorcycles, but one of the guys is growing some kind of facial hair for the Movember organization. Supposedly, this organization is looking for the magic bullet to slow up the rate of deaths by male suicides (white men are 70% of the 35,000 suicides in the US) and prostate and testicular cancer. I can only say, “Good luck.”

Humorously, the organization claims to "know what works for men" and somehow they expect to reduce male suicides by 25% in 2030. I prowled the organization's website following all of the "how we're going to win the fight" links to the expected proclamations of doing something and I didn't see any evidence that Movember knows more about what they are doing than do the so-called healthcare and mental health "professionals." In fact, as WebMD reports "One doctor commits suicide in the U.S. every day -- the highest suicide rate of any profession. And the number of doctor suicides -- 28 to 40 per 100,000 -- is more than twice that of the general population . . ." And, as you’d expect, for every female doctor who commits suicide there are seven men offing themselves. "Male anesthesiologists are at highest risk," for some reason. If doctors don’t have access to solutions to depression mental healthcare, how will Movember manage to reach everyone else? They won’t. As for Movember, H.L. Menken once said something like “For every complex problem there is a simple solution . . . that won’t work.” I didn’t see anything on the Movember website that looked like they even had a simple solution to propose.

The problem is not just a US-thing, either. Men and doctors and male doctors kill themselves at a higher-than-average rate all over the world. If there isn’t a solution, at least there ought to be some attempt to find the reasons for suicides. One of the most interesting insights I heard recently, when a European psychologist was responding to an American right wing pundit crowing about how societies with the highest quality of life and general satisfaction are also among the countries with the highest suicide rate; again, particularly high among men. The response was that there seems to be some connection to the fact that, in a generally happy society, people who are depressed feel particularly miserable about not being part of all that joy. The distance between the average person living their lives and someone with mental illness may feel exaggerated in a country where the average person is more-than-typically happy.

In the US, mental “healthcare” is pretty much getting a drug prescription for anxiety, depression, or “tiredness” from your doctor. All of the available health insurance plans pay more for pills than for therapy; if they pay for therapy at all. For starters, there is a severe shortage of mental health professionals in the US. The reason is that insurance companies don’t cover that kind of “healthcare.” For example, in my home area, Goodhue County, Minnesota, there is one psychiatrist for every 15,000 residents. Since estimates of the country’s mental health assume about 7% of US citizens have suffered depression at some time and 3-4% suffer long term depression and another 18% suffer from some form of anxiety, that leaves a lot of people out in the cold; even if they were inclined to put themselves on a decades-long waiting list to see a mental health professional. So, the answer is “take a pill” and call me in a year or two if you aren’t feeling better about yourself; if you are still alive.”

Men and boys are in heavy denial, insisting that the problem with us isn't from the outside. Wrong. It's us and our cultural training. There is a video on YouTube from a trans-guy who commented on how he hadn't realized how inhumane male culture is until he became one. There wasn’t much information in his speech, but the comments were informative. There was a crowd of guys pretending “inhumane” means “inhuman” and lots of nitwits imagining that being a macho bully has a place in normal, rational society. My takeaway from the comments was that the people who comment on YouTube videos are not very insightful.  

40 years ago, a friend and I were swimming out to scuba dive on San Clemente reef on a stormy day with 8' waves and 2' visibility and he wondered what we'd be doing with our lives; since we'd clearly outlived our design parameters. His thought was that guys like us were evolved to die with an axe in our skulls or a sword in our guts at about 22. At that moment, we were both in our early 30’s. Since we’d failed in our evolutionary purpose, his question was “What the hell are we supposed to do with the 30-50 years evolution has unprepared us for?” Obviously suicide is the answer about 30,000 US men pick. It is pretty obvious that there is an oversupply of men on the planet and war just isn't doing the job it used to do with rectifying that imbalance. The overwhelming majority of terrrorists and suicide bombers are men and they are just following nature’s coding to try to take themselves out of the gene pool.

Society provides plenty of cues, too. There wouldn't be OSHA labor laws if those rules were only intended to protect men from work injury and death. The whole concept began when women ended up in factories during WWII. As part of researching noise-induced hearing damage for material in one of my Acoustics classes, I found more information about how quickly work noise rule enforcement vanished once women were back out of the munitions factories. The whining from companies about OSHA's rarely-enforced or obeyed hearing protection rules is pretty hilarious when you learn that those guidelines came from 1944 and they are so obsolete (useless when it comes to protecting your hearing for a lifetime) that the rest of the industrialized world (outside of China) has a whole different set of standards and objectives. Again, if the point is in protecting men, it’s pointless to worry about it.

Likewise, a big reason men die from prostate cancer is men don't see doctors nearly as often as women. When we do we just want to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. I know I do. Many men (and women ) live those lives of "quiet desperation" and just want to get it over with as soon as possible.

As for men and mental health, forget about it. This country decided long ago that the wealth of a few is far more important than the health and quality of life of the many. It's one of the many awful things we adopted from the UK. I don't see that ever changing. It was something Alexis de Tocqueville commented on in "Democracy in America" in 1835. The rich will have all the healthcare they can choke down and everyone else will be victims of our "wealth extraction" healthcare practical joke. All of that adds up to the obvious fact that we don’t care about any of this, as a nation. The only time mental health gets into the national conversation is after some idiot has shot up a school, church, restaurant, or some other public place. Then, it's just to distract us from wondering why gun manufacturers are so well-insulated from product liability. And we are one really easily distracted public. The NRA and their gangster-owned politicians and pundits quickly go into a “don’t regulate guns, regulate crazy people” song-and-dance that is increasingly ineffective at distracting the majority of Americans. So far, it’s working well enough, though. It will always be true that “you can fool some of the people all of the time.”

The Face of Racism

Pick any one of these guys, they all appear to be the same privileged, spoiled, hate filled racist assholes. Have you wondered who they are, where did they come from, and how they ended up being such despicable semi-human beings? Some of these faces have become well-known, at least in their hometowns, thanks to the internet. The rest of us are left wondering if these people are our neighbors and that is the question we should be asking. Charlottesville, Virginia, to many of us, is the kind of place where we’d expect racism, fascism, and ignorance. It’s the South, isn’t it? To people who know the place, it’s more subtle than that.

For example, the Trump-spawn asshole front-and-center of this now-famous picture is a University of Nevada scumbag named Peter Cvjetanovic, who is now whining “I’m not a racist,” in spite of overwhelming evidence. Even when this guy speaks in self-defense and with some preparation time, he comes off no differently than his now-famous picture, “As a white nationalist, I care for all people. We all deserve a future for our children and for our culture. White nationalists aren’t all hateful; we just want to preserve what we have.” I assume he means his white privilege is the “what we have” he wants to preserve. Equally unsurprising, the University of Nevada is sticking by their Nazi student and employee. University of Nevada, Reno President Marc Johnson said, “There have been numerous inquiries about Peter Cvjetanovic, a student at our University who participated in the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Based on discussion and investigation with law enforcement, our attorneys and our Office of Student Conduct, there is no constitutional or legal reason to expel him from our University or to terminate his employment.” Moral values are, clearly, not part of the student code of conduct in Nevada, since that would typically give the university plenty of leeway for firing a neo-Nazi if they cared about that sort of thing.

A little more surprising is the story of Cole White, who lost his job at Top Dog, a Berkeley, California “libertarian hot dog restaurant.” Top Dog, a downtown Berkeley restaurant, posted a sign on its door saying, “Effective Saturday 12th August, Cole White no longer works at Top Dog. The actions of those in Charlottesville are not supported by Top Dog. We believe in individual freedom and voluntary association for everyone.” Supposedly, White “voluntarily resigned” his weenie job with his weenie employer who went the extra mile to let the world know they did not fire their neo-Nazi employee. The last thing libertarians want is for anyone to think they have ethics. Just ask Paul Ryan how Ayn Rand would feel about that. I have to wonder what kind of idiot would buy a hot dog from someone who doesn’t believe the state has the right to ensure the safety of food?

Mostly, the faces from Charlottesville are unsurprising. They are the the bad guy in every Karate Kid movie. They are the spoiled, upper-middle class kids whose parents foot every bill and enable every moment of their miserable, useless lives. Unfortunately, I think calling out every neo-Nazi, every homicidal militia Klan’er, every future abusive middle-manager or cop in that crowd is going to be a thankless task. The country has been breeding for this class of creep for 250 years.

By the way, both of you know you are going to be bald by 40, right? Enjoy that pre-skinhead look while you can.

Is There Only One Reason the NFL Is Losing Fans?

Lots of people, including fans, are wondering what is going on with the NFL’s lost fan base. According to the folks who care about this stuff, the NFL’s television ratings are down 7.5% for the beginning of this season. So far, there hasn’t been a change in the bottom line for the NFL’s primary financial source, overall advertising revenue, but it seems unlikely that will last. Papa John's founder and CEO and head-douchebag John Schnatter claims that the NFL players’ protests are keeping people away from the crap Papa John’s scrapes onto a pizza pan, while Greg Creed, Pizza Hut’s CEO said, "We're not seeing impact on any of that on our business." I can’t help think lots of failing mismanagers will start to blame their companies’ poor performance NFL players, since nobody wants to blame overpaid, under-talented and generally incompetent CEOs for much of anything. We elect Presidents, governors, and fill Congress with that kind of resume.

So, politics, as usual, gets the blame; although most of the people citing politics as their reason for giving up pro football aren’t bright enough to realize that the whole issue of the national anthem at the beginning of pro games was a political statement. Before 2009, nobody knew what NFL players thought about anything political because they stayed in their locker rooms until after the anthem was played. The Department of Defense spent $6.8 million between 2012 and 2015 on "paid patriotism," to try to pump up recruitment at all sorts of professional sports events. American flag displays, military honors events, reenlistment ceremonies, and a long list of military promotions became part of the NFL’s income stream. The players getting sucked into the opening ceremony was a political statement intended to inspire young people to imitate their heroes in uniforms. Some of the players involved in today’s protests are old enough to have been on the field when their voices wouldn’t have been heard about any political issue. So, one kind of pro-war and military/industrial complex politics is acceptable, but bringing attention to the discrepancy between how police handle people of color vs. white people is unacceptable? I guess you could say that protesting during the military’s taxpayer-funded recruiting pitch is protesting the military, but if that’s your argument we’ve got a lot bigger problems than most of us hoped.

I’m not convinced that the player protests are the NFL’s biggest economic problem. Pro and collegiate sports are all seeing a drop in interest, but football has probably come close to running out its string. Younger people are, on average, less interested in spectator sports. The grandstands at many stadiums resemble Fox News’ base: 50-and-over. At this rate, the decline in the NFL’s fortunes may depend on the league finding other countries to sell their product. Outside of the US, “football” means something completely different.

It’s pretty obvious from the latest medical evidence that any parent willing to subject a kid to the hazards of football is a long ways from a responsible parent. It’s not just pro players who have discovered football is a dangerous sport, college players are almost as badly damaged by the sport. It should be obvious that high school and Pop Warner football is just as risky, or more, because the “care’ provided by football coaches doesn’t become more cautious as you work your way down the sport’s ladder. This issue cuts the sport (and others) two ways: a declining pool of players willing to risk their lives for money and spectators becoming unwilling to be a part of a gladiator spectacle where they might witness one of their favorite players receive a fatal injury on the field.

Finally, there is the other side of the fans’ perspective on the protests. The NFL walks both sides of the road; supporting the players and berating them. Those of us who agree with the purpose and intent of the players’ protest are quickly losing interest in a sport owned by men and women who are more inclined to support Donald Trump and his band of angry racists. I have never been someone the NFL could count on for income from any direction, but I did watch a half-dozen or so games on television (at my local sports bar), including the Super Bowl, for a lot of years. Last year, I didn’t see a game including the Super Bowl. So far this year, I’ve sort of kept track of Colin Kaepernick’s employment status and as long as he can’t find a team with the moral courage to hire a man who is willing to sacrifice his fame and fortune for a cause, I don’t need the NFL.

#127 All Terrorists are . . . (2004)

All Rights Reserved © 2004 Thomas W. Day

Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid, the Editor-in-Chief of the Arab Press Review, recently wrote an editorial titled, The Sad Truth Is That All Terrorists Are Muslim.  While it is brave of an editor in his position to take that stance, he's letting an awful lot of True Believers off of the hook.  The real sad truth is that all terrorists are True Believers.  From Osama bin Laden to the Unabomber, Jeffrey Dahlmer, Adolf Hitler, George W. Bush, Attila the Hun, Rush Limbaugh, Timothy McVeigh, neocons, neo-Christers, eco-terrorists, corporate raiders, and the rest of history's long, painful list of viciously scary folks, every one of these nuts is a True Believer in something.  Usually something that seems completely idiotic to the rest of us. 

If we want to make the world safe from terrorists, we need to spend serious money disproving the fantasies of the world's True Believers.  Now that would make a terrific campaign for a Presidential campaign, wouldn't it?  "Help stomp out irrational faith, vote for The Brain!"  Or, maybe, Pinky would be a more credible candidate behind that platform?  Or some completely suicidal politician who has a brain tumor and absolutely nothing to lose?

The fact is, most humans are some whacked out True Believer.  At the dawn on this country, a few humans labored under the fantasy that humanity was at the beginning of a new age, the Age of Reason.  Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, and George Washington created a country that would be free of religious interference and irrational fantasies, largely against the prevailing winds of the time.  The nasty fact is that only a few of the country's founding fathers were affected by the Age of Reason. 

The overwhelming majority of their fellow citizens were just as superstitious as cavemen, or more so because they had been infected by the past 1,000 years of Catholic and Protestant weirdness.  You'd think that European expatriates would be a tich nervous about religion in general, after the Inquisition, the witch trials, and the various whacky religious persecution of various whacky religious groups.  They supposedly immigrated to the "New World" to get away from all that, but they really came here to turn the tables.  Almost every religious colony established its particular fantasy as the delusion of choice.  Very few of the refuges provided a lick of tolerance to people of differing faith. 

As for different cultures or races, intolerance was the philosophy of choice.  The majority of the country's founders were so committed to slavery that Jefferson and Adams had to write limited tolerance for the "institution" into the Constitution to keep the country from breaking into dozens of mini-states even before the United States were united.  By the time the Constitution was written, Manifest Destiny was the nutty fantasy of the age.  Neo-Americans were dispossessing, shooting, strangling, chasing away, and poisoning with disease Native Americans as if killing the existing residents were a god's law.  More True Believers doing more serious damage.

Even science has True Believers who may need a massive dose of veracity.  From the global warming advocates and opponents to alternative and conservative energy promoters to evolution vs. "intelligent design" proponents, science is overfull of folks who believe so strongly in their pet fantasies that the unbending rules of science never come into play during their arguments.  It's past time for a New Age of Reason.  In fact, if humanity wants to survive into the 22^nd Century, it's possible that True Believers may have to cash in their weird fantasies for a tenuous grip on reality.

Why Do They Hate Us?

"Why do they hate us?" I heard this question a year ago from a young man who had just dropped out of a state university engineering program because it was "too hard" and was pursuing one of the most remedial and disgraceful programs offered by any educational facility: criminal justice (talk about an oxymoron!), police science or law enforcement. Pick a program name, they are all the same and they are all equally simple.

My response was lame, at best. "You're kidding?"

The kid was, of course, excelling at the idiot program because he is of normal intelligence and moderately conscious. If you are unable to pull an "A" in classes like:

• CPS 103 Particular Forms of Crime - Analysis of conventional property crime, criminal markets, criminal organizations, white collar crimes, and corporate crimes. Consensual and non-consensual delinquency, and "victimless" crimes. Factors that can be used to differentiate several dimensions of forms of crimes. (4 credits)
• CPS 105 Deviance and Social Control - Competing theories of deviance, deterrence and control, relations between deviant actors and reacting audiences, and how deviant individuals explain or justify their behavior. 
• CPS 170 Domestic Violence - Comparative approach to power and violence in family systems including detailed and in-depth analysis of the devaluation of family relations. 
• CPS 171 The Criminal Mind - Psychological aspects of criminal behavior, personality of criminals, the psychological processes affecting behavior, and the violence that is often associated with criminal behavior. Dealing with fear and anger, offering and counter-offering, and negotiating in high-risk situations.
• CPS 172 Comparative Police Systems - Selected police systems in the United States compared with a variety of police systems in other countries. 

Honestly, I can't go on. The titles of these classes sound like exactly the kind sociology program titles that would study the anti-social behavior of police officers around the world.

This goofy kid appeared to be completely clueless about why ordinary citizens hate the police. Even in St. Paul, where the local police and country sheriff's deputies went 1968 Chicago-style on local and visiting protesters during the 2008 RNC debacle, it appears that a police candidate can remain ignorant of the history of the occupation he desperately wants to join. He asked me, repeatedly, to cite reasons why so many citizens "hate cops." As you might expect, he had excuses for every abuse and every anti-social police act committed in modern history. As I should have expected from someone so disconnected from human history, he imagined none of this violence applied to his possible future.

It's hard to imagine this level of avoidance, but it's critical if what's left of our society expects to create "order" from the chaos of corporate socialism and pusedo-capitalism. The fact is, fear is not respect. Fear is a close emotional relation to hate and as far from respect as love is to hate. While there are cops who deserve respect for trying to do the right job in a system designed to repress human dignity and freedom, most are exactly the vicious characters pictured in these video links and the photos on this page. For example, any animal capable of intentionally smearing pepper spray in the eyes of environmental or political protesters is unfit for socialization. Any society decadent enough to instruct its stormtroopers to commit such a crime is undeserving of history's charity. Cops have been used to break up legal protests, as strikebreakers, as an armed force dispossessing citizens of their legal property, and as a protection force for corporate criminals and other organized crime figures since the middle of the 1800's.

The fact is, most of us don't hate cops. We do fear them, however. They represent us in our national decay and "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Cops serve the worst of our society and repress the best. Regardless of the deranged fairy tails Hollywood and television create of hard-working, dedicated, clever police protecting society from terrible criminals and solving complicated crimes, many cops are nothing more than lazy, cowardly, tenured, over-armed, arrogant, brownshirt terrorists who repress any attempt of the public to regain control of their nation. (Not just true in the US, but in many corporately controlled nations.) What kind of person wouldn't fear that kind of police force? When some citizens get past fear and hate, and act accordingly, we call that "revolution." Remember that when you finally get your corporate welfare job and are asked to remove your badge and any other form of identification before committing a psychopathic act of brutality. Being ignorant of your own motivations and the history of your chosen occupation is no defense. When you are the fist of repression and the weapon of fear, you will have to get used to being the object of fear and hate.