That's A Wrap

The last News-Junkie blog entry goes to press.

What conclusions am I able to draw from the last year of no news?

First off, I AM happier.  I still heard about current events, albeit as a word-of-mouth format, but the lack of minute-to-minute news updates did not detract from my well-being but, rather, added to it.  I feel less constricted by the push and pull of the greater outside world.  My more local world, political or non-political, has become much more important and intimate.

Secondly, I am much more able to laugh at the extreme silliness of the partisan bickering and posturing that goes on all around me.  And, I am much less inclined to either get angry or participate in the meaningless and, ultimately, useless, staking out of positions.

Finally, I have started another blog with the intention of being involved, again, in current events.  This time, however, I am striving for a non-dogmatic and non-partisan approach to achieving a set of specific goals.


Thanks a lot for spending time with me this last year.  It was a great experiment and I learned a lot!  Whether or not I get involved again with the news media will depend a great deal on how I feel if and when I do.  I am pretty fond of this new way to engage and I enjoy the calmer feeling that I am more able to maintain as a result.


Again, thank you for tolerating this blather.  Please check out my new persona, The Reverend Squeaky-Eye as he takes on financial issues in the new blog:  


http://reverend-squeaky-eye.blogspot.com

Day # 311 Booked

Blogging has lapsed.  I admit it.  The new house, moving, paddling and a resurgence of summer albeit a bit late have all conspired to keep me from the keyboard.

Today is the first day blogging in the "300's" and while I still am not doing the news, I have news of my own.  I have booked the flights for my next installment of travel to SE Asia. I am leaving in late January and will be gone for a full month.  So, that saga continues.

Despite the absolutely momentous change the year has wrought, both on a personal and world level, I remain safely inside my no-news bubble.  With less than two months until the end of the experiment I have to say that I do not miss my former day-to-day, hour-to-hour involvement in the goings on of the world.  When the full year rolls around on November 13th, I do not think I will rush out to buy the NY Times.

Day # 296 Critters

Deer are liars.

I know, they are sweet looking and have convincingly large eyes, but make no mistake:  they are treacherous. Last evening I found my same doe and fawn patrolling the estate.  I have had gentle conversations with them about staying away from the blueberries but helping themselves to the apples.  The fawn just stares at me, sneaking peeks at moms to try to figure out the cues.  The doe does her "Yeah, yeah, I know, I know man, you got it..." while looking at me askance.  She does her best charming deer routine and then when I go back in the house they start munching away.

To their credit, they have left my precious blueberries alone.  The furry little bastards did eat my tomatoes.  Who would have thought that deer would pilfer my one cultivated crop when there are apples by the dozen to be had?  Right now the squirrel is going insane harvesting the walnuts behind me.  Do I care?  No I do not.  There are lots of walnuts and the little maniac is welcome to them.  But not my 'maters, dammit!

I trundled the potted tomato into the newly cleared out greenhouse in an attempt to preserve what is truly mine.  Damn furry bandits.  But the damage has been done.  Next year, next year echoes the sorrowful cry.

Arriving home today I had to stop short in the driveway so as not to hurt the lovely little garter snake sunning itself in the early autumn warmth.  Its true, my small slithering friend is sensing the waning of summer and feeling of crisp fall in the night air.  I strung up the hammock today, almost predictably, between an ancient apple tree and a fence post, so I could savor the inching away of summer first hand.

My next task in tending to my tribe of critters is the filling and placing of the many bird-feeders I found whilst clearing out the aforementioned greenhouse.  I have all manner of ways to make my winged friends more comfortable and well-nourished and I intend to do just that.  

Day # 294 Blueberries and Bugs

So it comes down to this.  I know about the big fire in the Olympic National Park.  I did not read or hear about it in the news.  I was, however, looking down on it from the summit of Mt. Jupiter.  Now that I am living the country life, far flung from the urban center, I am closer to the edge.  At least the edge of the Olympics.  Hiking in the Cascades will be supplanted by hiking in the land of many consonants.  The Dosewallips, Hamma Hamma, Humptulips and all of the other east range rivers are going to be my playground now.

Today I paddled new waters, finding the put-in for Blake Island and the sanctuary between the northern Bremerton ferry run and the southern Southworth ferry run.  Not so good being chummed by a ferry boat.  They have the right-of-way tonnage.

Yesterday the coals were fired and the salmon seared, to be consumed al fresco at the gloaming of the day.
Today, apres paddle, the blueberries were harvested once again to adorn this evenings ice cream.

A grasshopper just joined me on the deck, soaking up the last sun of the three-day weekend.

I have things to thing about, an apple harvest to do something with, a fig tree that will hopefully produce fruit and a hammock to hang.  Busy busy Bokononist I am.  Today, exile is not so unpalatable.   

Day # 286 Coda

After months of planning and loading and carting and unloading it comes down to me, sitting on my new deck, smoking a cigar.   Tomorrow is the last load.  My shop space, my precious man-cave of the last five years, is almost empty.  A few bikes to move tomorrow and it will be done.  And not a mark left in the passing, pardon the pun.

It is the same story with my former domicile.  I have disappeared without a trace.  I guess there is something to be said for passing away so swiftly and with such little notice.  There is eternity before one and eternity after one yet we are consumed with the briefest of moments when we strut and fret our hour upon the stage.

Tomorrow maybe I will paddle around Blake Island for the first time.  New waters and all of that, after, of course, I unpack that last load.

Day # 281 Simpler Stuff

As a conversational aside, The Kid asked me when I would "be able to watch the news again".   I asked him if everyone was starting to position themselves for the 2012 elections and he confirmed that this was the case.  I told him that after the year of the experiment was over, I was not at all sure I would resume news consumption.  He said he saw my point, clearly illustrated by the possibility of a year plus of Barbara Bachman.


We had just returned from a refreshing four days outside of the United States, communing with our brothers and sisters to the North.  We spent the week in West Vancouver, "West Van" to the locals, where diversity is the byword and even stodgy bank branches have pride flags displayed in their windows.  It is a neighborhood that is safe and comfortable for gay and lesbian couples to walk hand in hand down the street without a sideways glance from any of the other tourists.  While I am sure not everything is as rosy as it appeared, it was four days without a hater in sight.  Nice, that.  And a good example for The Kid.


In our little suite of rooms, we had an enormous TV with 50 channels of nothing.  One channel of nothing was constantly extolling the virtues of the program "Mad Men", which, as almost everyone but me knows, is about the funny shenanigans of ad men on Madison Avenue in the salad days of the new advertising.  It is the early 1960's and the times, they are a changin', particularly when it comes to how the Mad Men are going to sell things to their fellow Americans.


Recalling my previous blog post, I listed the first of four eras of modern capitalism :

1)  Post World War II  --  The rise of modern Corporations until Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961


A simpler time, the period between the end of The War and the advent of the Mad Men.  Some would argue that this period is more accurately bracketed by the end of Korean Conflict on the earlier end but I vote for WW II.  After the Big One, American industry quickly converted war production to post-war product production.  The Baby Boom was on, Baby, and those that survived the war wanted washing machines, fully electric kitchens and suburban homes to put them in.  Unlike England, with its years of post-war rationing, or Japan and Germany with their flattened metropolises, American was ready and able to flood the markets with new products for consumers.





In this simpler time, cigarettes did not kill you, modern life was going to get better and better, and the things you could buy were going to help that process along.  All of those modern appliances were going to make life easier, cleaner and more elegant.  Manufacturers hired ad men to sell their new products to the new consumers and the way they did that was to tout the benefits of the gizmo they were selling.  


This was the era of the Brand "X" comparative ads.  There was the happy housewife using the better product.  Unlike modern ads which sell lifestyles, sex and health, almost without a product in sight, the advertisements of the 1950's pitched the thing itself.  No proper house would use a Brand "X" gas range for cooking when the new Westinghouse electric range was so much better.  The gleaming new whats-it was prominently featured with the smiling missus standing near by, eyes shining with wonder at the beauty of the new time-saver.  





This was the era of the pitch, the idea that you should buy our stuff because its better stuff than the other stuff.  Image was not the primary selling tool.  While there is no doubt that the housewives using the good stuff were happier and prettier that the drudges stuck with the Brand "X" crap. the focus of the ad was still the product itself.  The idea of selling an image or a lifestyle in and of itself, with product to follow, had not come to the fore yet.  


The idea of image in sales was there.  W. R. Hearst spoke the truth when he said "Show me a magazine cover with a pretty girl, a baby and a dog and I'll show you a magazine that sells," but fully incorporating that concept into selling a lifestyle would come later.  It would be the advent of Madison Avenue in the early 1960's, coupled with a deeper understanding of the psychology of consumers, that would bring about the next era of advertising and capitalism, at least in the theory according to Crash.


Next:  The deployment of Madison Avenue

Day # 272 Balance and Checks

In the Film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club, Tyler Durden addresses the assembled members of the fight club, thusly:


"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." 


I am starting to look at my next topic in the manner of the beginning of Fight Club.  The movie is one long flash-back, leaping backwards from the penultimate scene in the high rise windows.  In the continuing saga of movie education for my giant Kid, we watched Fight Club last night.  Once again, I watched the twin themes of the disease of consumerism, the 'Ikea Nesting" virus, and the masculine poverty of generations of men raised by women, intertwine and stagger to a cathartic end.  


So, we begin at the present for the briefest of moments.  Are corporations, lost in their own greed and insular culture, eating themselves from the inside?  Cracks open in the gleaming chrome facades of the corporate culture as giant but inoffensive modernist sculptures are trucked away from recently locked doors at the headquarters of failed behemoths of business.  Washington Mutual Bank, Enron, Lehman Brothers and General Motors are just a few of the houses of cards that have tumbled recently.  Is the structure of Capitalism rotting from within?  


As I turn this over in my head I keep coming up with distinct corporate "eras" for lack of a better term.  While the periods of time I am going to list could be broken down many ways or subdivided ever smaller, compartmentalizing some of the last fifty years is helping me to develop a different perspective on capitalism as I experience it today.


Mark's most certainly flawed list of the epochs of modern Capitalism goes like this:
     1)  Post World War II  --  The rise of modern Corporations until Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961
     2)  Corporations deploy Madison Avenue -- While advertising was certainly a force prior to the the early1960's, this, to me is the beginning of the paradigm shift from selling a product to selling a life-style that requires a product to be complete
    3)  Omnipotence --  During the 1960's and 1970's corporations become more and more monolithic and omnipotent, the guiding hand behind the scenes.  Howard Beale rants and rails against the modern  corporation in the 1976 film "Network" and is killed for his trouble.  The nightmare vision of of a world  controlled by a cabal of corporations rather than individual governments comes to the fore.
     4)  Interior Decay -- Somewhere along the way, US Corporations stop building products and the US economy  shifts to a service economy.  Manufacturing jobs begin to disappear and Wall Street becomes a place where money is moved for the sake of moving money in ever increasing spirals of greed.  This is our time.


Looking back at each of these periods is going to be the current work.  While the US credit rating falters and talking head pundits scream at each other, I think that my time will be better spent trying to understand the context.  Could the work of the self-grasping and greedy corporate and Wall Street magnates bring down that which all of the demonstrations and boycotts of the last forty years could not?  Stay tuned.

Day # 271 Cannibalism

It seems to me that the combination of greed and a lack of leadership will end up doing the job that generations of revolutionaries and gadflies could not do, namely, un-make capitalism.

I have to ponder this a bit, but if I am not mistaken, the modern financial structure as I know it is eating itself from the inside out.  It appears to be completely unsustainable and as such should collapse on itself.

The thought has been lurking around in my mind as I move both household and shop to the hinterlands across the water.  Yeah, I've been busy and the blog has suffered.  There will be much more to write about in the coming days.

Day # 263 Grow your revolution.....

While we are about the business of knocking over the last upright bricks in the foundation of post-modern capitalism, another method of striking a blow occurs to me.  How would you like to have some American Gothic sort of fun, maybe meet the neighbors, and in the process strike another blow?  Easey-peasy.

Grow your own.

Well, you can do that too, and it will be striking a blow of a different sort. but what I actually meant was growing your own food.  That's right, grow some food.  Reclaim a little land, Sisters and Brothers, even if you dwell in the confines of the apartment block or the condo.  Bring a bit of the earth back into cultivation. After all, its even an exhortation in the bible somewhere.  Get some pots, fill 'em with dirt and grow some maters on your deck or balcony.  If you want to get crazy, check the web for window gardens and grow some greens in recycled pop bottles.  Dig up a section of that planter strip and grow squash, not grass.

Whatever way you choose to make with the free edibles, you are taking back a little control, even if its one pot at a time.  First, each plant you grow throws a little precious oxygen back into the atmosphere for the collective to breathe.  Second, with any luck you will get a few mouthfuls of real food out of the deal, something that did not come out of a food factory.  And speaking of food factories, growing a bit of your own consumables means that you are consuming  just a bit less of the pre-packaged processed pap that masquerades as modern delectable yumminess these days.

So in a soft and earth-mother sort of way, strike a blow against the food industry and grow a green thing or two.  Make the rooftops sag a bit with fecundity and give the corporate farm owners a few bad dreams.

You can add a back-hand blow as well.  If you can't quite find enough arable to feed the whole family, try to buy as much of your veg from your local farmer's market as you can.  These are the folks that are selling the funny looking maters that aren't all the same and don't come in plastic wrap.

Hey, today it was a one-two punch of green-thumb-fu!!  Rock the green world Boys and Girls.

Day # 262 Knowing

One of the blessings about not soaking up news via the radio or television is that in that silence, there is a merciful reprieve from the frenzy to sell me something.

I believe it is imperative to know, truly, as one know's one's own meaty bits, why broadcasting exists.  Every single time a broadcasting device is turned on, its reason for being is to sell you something.  Soup, soap, hope or an agenda, be assured that the people behind that broadcast are very clearly and methodically trying to sell you a bill of goods.

Examine the very word "broadcast".  One way to interpret this word is to break it down into its component parts: "to cast" and "broadly".  It is a broad net, indeed, that the media empires are casting.  They are hoping that through sensationalism, drama or the undeniable appeal of "Fat People Crying", you will be so compelled to sit, riveted,  to the small screen, that they will be able to insert their message into your brain.  It is that message, for whatever product they are shilling, that is the real exchange.

This is not, friends and neighbors, limited to attempts to get you to purchase a boxy car driven by hamsters, a car that will make you so terminally hip that you will wonder how you lived without it.  No, it is not just products that are poised in the chute, waiting for the next opening in your consumer queue.  There are agendas to be marketed, outlooks and beliefs to be consumed.  Even the esteemed purveyors of culture at PBS and NPR, no matter how much I love them, are in the selling game.  Faux News and CNN are selling the fear.  NPR and PBS are selling the antidote.  But make no mistake, they are both selling.

This frenzy of commerce does not end with products or prevailing attitudes.  Particularly during the newscasts, where the perceived viewing audience is of a certain age, the emphasis is on selling health and robust sex at later and later stages of life.  This medication makes you micturate long and well while that pill will enable you to sit next to a gorgeous partner, each of you in your separate bathtubs.  It is my guess separate bathtubs overlooking a beautiful lake are a powerful sexual allusion but I have to admit the significance of the thing plumb evades me.

When the switch is flipped or the dial is turned, the media springs forth to soothe, to entertain, to enlighten and inform.  Smoke and mirrors, behind which are the inevitable sellers, probing, searching for an opening.  They are fabricating the approach, the con that will bring you to open your wallet or pocketbook without even knowing that you are doing it.  Later you will notice that you simply must have this or that because without it your life is a sere desert.

And flaccid as well.

Day # 257 Strike

I was sitting in one of the two lounge chairs on the tiny patio of my favorite coffee spot when a woman and her daughter stepped up, looking for seats.  The utilitarian thing to do was offer them my seat, along with the empty one, and move to the tables, squeezing in with some other folks.  So that is what I did.  I settled in with my coffee compatriots and began soaking up the caffeine and the conversation.  And the conversation was revolution. 

The first coffee house appeared in London in the 1650’s, as coffee made its way from Turkey northwards across the continent, carried by traders and commerce.  Coffee shops soon became the gathering point for merchants seeking a buzz and news of business, and the citizenry seeking news of the English revolution or the restoration of the monarchy.  Coffee, Cromwell and conversation.  Coffee houses became the engine of revolution, a tradition that continues to this day.

Back at our table, coffees in our hands, I was the oldest of the gathered by a good two decades.  The talk was earnest, driven, and from youthful mouths.  Topics ranged from conspiracies of corporations to the evils of Monsanto. 

When the conversation came around to the financial world and its control of citizens lives, I had to pop in my tuppence worth.  I asked my fellow imbibers if they really wanted to strike a blow against capitalism.  Heads turned and since I had now opened my big yapper I plunged on.

Paraphrased from my feeble memory, my harangue went something like this…..

“I don’t think revolutions are started or won by grand sweeping gestures.  They may have been at one time, but the old model of taking to the streets or barricades to march or picket is just not getting it done.  It worked for awhile in the 1960’s, probably because it took the established powers by surprise.  When they recovered, they learned to co-opt the forces of change and use those forces to sell products.  That is what they have been doing ever since.”

“If you want to strike a blow against capitalism, if you really want to send a spasm down the place that their spines would be if they had them, eliminate all of your debt.  Pay off all of your credit cards.  Drive a car that is paid for.  Better yet, pay cash for it.  Buy serviceable, used, things instead of new crap.  There is an immense power in the hand, or the pocketbook, of the American consumer.  Corporations court us and seduce us.  They depend on us for their livelihoods and their existence.  Banking institutions thrive on public indebtedness.  Strike a blow directly at their control.  Pay off you debt.  Not only does it free you, it gives you control over them, instead of the other way around.”

“Eliminating your consumer debt strikes a blow and frees you at the same time.  Convincing some of your friends and neighbors to do the same strikes a sharper blow and makes your neighborhood a richer place.  Convince a segment of the population to eliminate their consumer debt and you start to unravel the system.  Modern capitalism is based on consumer spending and debt and the dream of an ever increasing cycle of both of these things.  It is impossible to sustain.  So go ahead, pay off your debt, free yourself.  In the process you will also be raining blows on the ill-conceived props that are holding up this house of cards.”

Day # 256 Possessed

One night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store,
picked up a couple of Mickey's Big Mouth’s.
Drank 'em in the car on his way to the
Shell station; he got a gallon of gas in a can.

Drove home, doused everything in
the house, torched it.
Parked across the street laughing,
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red.                    Tom Waits  “Frank’s Wild Years”

If I, like Frank in “Frank’s Wild Years,” have that final break with consumer reality and domestic life and set the whole thing ablaze, there are very few things that I would, following a sudden pang of regret, brave the flames to save.  I would not put the guitars on the pyre to begin with and I can fit them all in my truck, more or less.  Barring that, really, what else is there?

There is one thing that would cause me to risk a good singeing, and that is my pocket knife.  I was given this knife from the hand of Leslie E., my first true love.  (Wherever you are MS E., I still love you!)  The little Old Timer had been her grandfather’s.  It is a small two-blade folding knife with a stag handle and is of the variety known as a gentleman’s pen knife.  I received this petite implement in 1980 and it was at least twenty years old at that time.  I have had it ever since.

While unimpressive as an object, the power stored in this little tool is amazing.  The knife is endowed with the impish spirit of some long-passed Buddhist master.  Why the spirit of some long-departed lama would hang around in my pocket knife is just as much a mystery to me as anyone else, yet this is nonetheless the case.  I know this to be true because the damn thing likes to teach me lessons on the nature of attachment and suffering.

As we are all clear from our Comp-Religion classes, some of the most basic principles of Buddhism are that “Life is suffering” and that “Suffering is caused by attachment (desire).”  Like any other distillation of complex ideas, this one is fraught with simplistic peril, but hey, it’s a blog not a treatise.  Still, the simple idea is that when one becomes attached to something or someone, one is bound to suffer when that thing or person is no longer there.  Because all things are transitory, all things will eventually cease to be and when that happens one’s attachment to that object will cause pain in the object’s absence.

I know, I know, “Thank you Mr. World Religion…the knife?”  Yes, well…

My knife has the most annoying habit of disappearing.  It knows exactly how attached I am to it.  It knows that I prize this one object above all others in my possession.  No other physical object has the emotional power for me that this bit of steel and bone and brass has.  From time to time, whenever the knife feels like I am getting too attached, or to un-mindful or maybe just out of a capricious pursuit of mischief, the knife disappears.  It will stay gone for days, or weeks, or months.  The only way the knife will reappear is when I have given up hope, passed through regret and fruitless searching, and released myself from the attachment.  Suddenly, with an imagined smirk, the knife will appear in a place previously searched a thousand times or in the most unlikely of places that defied even the thought of search.

The most recent example of this has just ended with the joyous reuniting and the renewal of my attachment, which, of course, will only lead to another disappearance.  I never learn.  The knife had been carefully placed in the fob pocket of my leather moto pants, where it lives when I am riding.  When I arrived at the temporary illusion of home, the knife was gone.  Despite patting and searching and rummaging, there was not a sign.  It had, I concluded, fallen out of my pocket on the road and was now gone forever.  Eventually, after walking some of my route searching the gutters, I gave up and purchased a new knife, a beautiful little Bear Brothers made in Jacksonville, Alabama. 

It has been a wet summer here so I have not worn my leathers since that day.  This morning I slipped on my pants and then my boots and felt a lump in the boot.  After checking the boot and finding nothing I checked my pants leg for a bad zipper and felt the tell-tale shape of my little pen knife hiding in the lining of my leather pants.  It had fallen (or burrowed) through a hole in my fob pocket and dropped away into the depths of the lining.  Once hung up in the closet, it had fallen to the hem of the leg and waited there, chuckling to itself, whilst I searched in vain.

O frabjous day!  Callooh! Callay!  Jabberwocks and other creatures that need slaying ought to be aware that I am once more united with my precious vorpal blade and unless they want their heads departed from their shoulders, they had best be on their best behavior.  (My apologies to the late Mr. Carroll)

And I will never be parted from that which possesses me again.  Never, never ever.  

Day # 255 Leaks

What news stories transcend the delivery by media outlets and become word-of-mouth stories?  In recent days, during the immolation of all other things personal, I have had a few interesting leaks to ponder.

The death of the singer Amy Winehouse immediately became, literally, a public discussion.  Within an hour of the discovery of her tragic death, the tweet world had alerted the waiter where I was eating and I quickly overheard the conversations regarding her untimely passing.

Our celebration of the cult of celebrity has led to a fascination with all aspects of the lives of the famous or infamous.  Add to that the terrible irony of some of MS Winehouse's song titles and her frequent public binges and there is certainly something for the paparazzi to sink their bloody teeth into.  Yet without a hungry audience, the paparazzi would drift off into their deserved ignominy.  Our collective hunger for a window on fame creates an engine for information that quickly bypasses the mainstream media.

Even with a complete news blackout, I cannot help but hear about the complete lack of leadership (my interpretation) in Washington, DC, that has led to yet another budget "crisis."  I have to question whether this even qualifies as a news story, for as ineptitude and what Mencken would call "boobery" have become the status quo in the US Capitol, why would it be news?  Partisan brinkmanship and threats to shut down the government's finances have become a routine so devoid of content as to become a definition of demagoguery.

The last and most serious news story that quickly became the talk on the street was the massacre in Norway, an almost unbelievable act of barbarity.  I heard of this within hours of it happening and details continued to be discussed around me, the most telling being America's amazement at the sentencing structure of the Norwegian judicial system.

These were three news stories, as distinct from one another as could be imagined, that could be heard from mouths of the citizenry in the last few days.  I am not sure what conclusions to draw from this so I will just present this in the form of observations.

The list of rants to come, under the loose heading of "Strike a Blow" will start tomorrow.  In the midst of moving and schlepping and "watching it burn, all Halloween orange and chimney red", 
I have let writing and music slip to the wayside.  But no more, no more chants he.    

Day # 240 Exile

While it is not exactly Elba, or Ile du Diable or the Siberian Gulag, the town of Southworth, Washington is not exactly the Great White Way either.  Yet as I begin to sort and pack what will hopefully be the smallest possible amount of personal possessions, I realize that this is where I'm bound.  I will be miles and a ferry boat ride from any major metropolitan area.  Can a good urban creature such as myself survive this ignominious banishment?

I have spent the vast majority of my life, at least the portion that I had control over, living in the midst of several of America's cities.  To be sure, I have dwelt in far-flung hamlets, some even without benefit of traffic lights, but this was mostly in the course of my employment and always on a temporary basis.  I love the forests and mountains and often retreat there, but my heart always answers the smelly call of the city.

I like big cities.  I like the excitement and the smell and the noise and the culture and the bustle of a good city.  I seek out and treasure run-down bookstores, corner cafes, eclectic coffee houses and neighborhoods with foods from all parts of the globe.  I love hearing languages other than my own spoken on the streets of my home city.

When I travel, I often wander the countryside, but it is the cities that I remember.  The frenetic energy of Bangkok, the grit and electricity of punk-era London, the awe-inspiring scope of Mexico City or the foodie nirvana of San Francisco; all of these places pull me back.  I heed the urban call.

Soon I will be living on land that was once an orchard on the wrong side of Puget Sound.  I will be able to walk for miles, literally, in any direction and arrive at:  nothing.  Trees, to be sure and lots of houses here and there, set back from the little roads on their two or five acres or clustered tightly along the shores of Puget Sound wherever the cliffs aren't too steep.  Nothing else.  No cafes, no stores, no coffee kiosks and most certainly no damn noodle shops.

There are things to add to the credit side of the ledger, to be sure.  There are new places to paddle, circumnavigating Blake Island or getting epic and paddling across the shipping lanes to West Seattle.  Yes, that's it!  I can plan my escape by sea, slipping into the waters of the Sound and paddling my sorry ass all the way to the beaches of Lincoln Park.  How I will enjoy the blessings of urbanity while toting my board around I do not know.  At least I'll be close enough to smell it.

Day # 235 Lazy

I have strayed so far from caring about the news of the day, or even commenting on it, that I suppose I should start another blog, something to do with my rants, and let this one lapse.  I am, however, lazy by nature.  Therefore you will just have to deal with this lack of continuity as I bumble along.  There is, of course, always the chance that I will slip up, like the good addict that I am, and suddenly relapse into news gathering.  If I do, feel free to "nyner-nyner" me.

Since I have added "College Student" to my list of roles, I have to write a paper now and again.  As we have established, I am a lazy sod, so I chose King Charles the First, and his lack of head at the end of his life, as my subject.  It may not sound like the lazy man's true path, but I have studied this period of history pretty extensively so the research is mostly walking over to the bookshelf and pulling this or that tome down.

What piques my interest, as I venture back into this time period, is how soft and lazy many of us have become. The Reformation struggled on in blood and fits and starts for 130 odd years depending on how you count it.  During that time, one had to choose a religious belief and then hold it so closely to the heart that when faced with a bloody or fiery death one could derive comfort from the brand of dogma one had chosen to live with and die for.  This was not a rhetorical or theoretical possibility.  Good citizens all across Northern Europe and England, both prominent and common, went to the scaffold or the pyre with regularity.  They were escorted to their end by other good citizens who believed just as fervently that they were doing the right thing as did those about to bleed, hang, choke or burn.

During the Reformation, Religion was a serious business.  More accurately, for this discussion, Christianity was a serious business. There were no other options for most of the populace unless one moved very far south and embraced Islam.  Way south My Brother.

Today, I can be as blasé as I wish with regard to my religious beliefs and no one is going to tie me to the pyre and set me alight while ooo-ing and ah-ing as I scream my pathetic life away.  I have never been set alight, but I think I can rightfully assure you that if I were, religious pleading would not be the first horrible sounds issuing from my big fat mouth.  But I digress.  The point, if there is one, is that I can be whatever I claim to be, going so far as to invent my own sect or creed and I probably won't die for it.  I am not required to have the fierce conviction of old that I would hold to my end.  In fact, today I am free to change dogmata at a whim while still avoiding the flames, at least of this world.  I can be a Bokononist today and a Buddhist tomorrow and suffer not the slightest singe, even to my conscience.

Rest assured, there are still vestiges of the pyre-builders at work in the world.  While most sects and creeds have adopted an almost universal "no-burning of other people" policy, there are those that would like nothing better than a big infidel bonfire.  Before you rush to the conclusion that I am pointing my heretical finger at my Islamic brothers, I would tell you that I believe there are just as many closet pyre-builders amongst the so-called Christian Right in America as there are amongst Jihadists elsewhere.

Even with these deluded fanatical manics lurking about here and there in closets and governmental positions and behind pulpits, I have become soft and lazy.  The odds that a group of these ignorant nutcases will actually take the time to find me, drag me into the park across the street and try to immolate me with damp Northwest firewood are so small that it allows me to continue to live a life of lazy impunity with regard to dogmatic choices.

And so I remain a lazy man.  Perhaps not as lazy as Jefferey Lebowski, quite possibly the laziest man in Los Angeles county, but lazy enough in my amateur standing.  I do not fondly remember, or long for the days, when one's creed was one's ticket to the fire or eternal salvation, or both.  I will take the course of Taoist water, around the rock, or whatever colour my water chooses to be today.  When I am standing in it, I can chant my simple mantra:  "Water good, Fire Bad"

Day # 234 Certainty

Charles the First, King of England, was beheaded in 1649.  By the time he went to trial before the High Court of Justice, he knew what the outcome would be.  Charles had alienated almost everyone who was in power and his cause was lost.  The Roundheads were pissed and they wanted vengeance.

Maybe Charles held out some hope that Parliament would not actually lope off the head of the King of England.  Kings had been killed in the past, but usually in battle or at the hands of powerful conspirators.  No Parliament had actually passed a death sentence on a sitting king and then brought it about.

Charles refused to answer the charges brought against him, perhaps knowing that he was a dead man.  My question for His Majesty, if I could talk to him, would be "Your Highness, was it a relief to hear the sentence."

Sometimes the train of the inevitable slowly chugs our way, the iceberg inches closer, and finally the process takes so long to unfold that the natural fear of the conclusion turns to relief.  Ray Charles (not the King) could have seen that one coming from a mile away, finally!  That's what I'm wondering today.

At least the scaffold has clarity.

Day # 227 Fiddling About

The tale of some Roman historians is that Nero fiddled while the great fire of 69 AD consumed large tracts of Roman real estate.   There are other Roman historians, perhaps with less of an ax to grind, who say that Nero actually rushed to help his fellow Romans, distributing aid from his own coffers.  Regardless of the facts, we are left with the image of Nero fiddling (lyre-ing actually) whilst the conflagration raged around him.

In my more mundane way, I also have to find some pastime while the flames dance about.  It is not all of Rome that is burning, but what is consumed was once of significance to me.  No matter, the flames still flicker, allegorical or not, and to ignore them one must do something.  Hence all of the fiddling.

I recently purchased a fiddle but that is neither here nor there.  Its a metaphor we are torturing here, not innocent violin strings.

Despite my now seven month long boycott of the news media, I am occupying my time around the personal campfire with a collection of news stories written by one of the most curmudgeonly of reporters:  H. L. Mencken.   The past evening I read another of his editorials, which deserves to be noted and quoted.

"Of late every reflective American reader must have noticed the inaccuracy and imbecility of most of the special correspondence issuing from Washington.  In it all the frauds, high and low, who flourish in that town are treated with the utmost gravity, and their cheapest and most venal maneuvers are depicted as masterpieces of statecraft.   Is this bilge ordered by Wall Street?  I doubt it.  Is it demanded by the customers of the papers that print it?  Again I have a doubt.  Far easier and more plausible is the explanation that the Washington correspondents write it willingly and in good faith -- that they are too stupid to penetrate the fraudulencies by which they are surrounded."  

Mencken wrote this for the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1927.  While he bristled his brows and smoked his cigar, he had no idea just how bad the state of American journalism could actually get.  What would he have thought of the talking heads spewing vitriol at one another, so busy scrabbling for the perceived high ground of their agenda that the objective reporting of the news has long since all but vanished?

Mencken was no saint, and he certainly was not without opinions which he delivered with aplomb and a sharp wit.  He also knew that news consisted of the facts, collected and recorded by a diligent reporter and delivered as such to the reader.  Opinions were meant for the editorial page where he reveled in their composition.

So my own Rome burns whilst I read the pithy essays of a great journalist long dead.  I am aware of the irony that at the same time I am boycotting the news of the day.  I feel like I am getting the better end of the bargain, consuming news that is almost eighty-odd years old and still pertinent.    

Day # 225 Mores ( not smores )

Like many people, I come from the Midwest region of the United States.  While this region produces a diverse group of people, a certain percentage of which flee quickly to other parts of the country, there are certain traits that identify a Midwesterner.

When life turns to wrack and ruin, casting away all that was once a comfortable certainty, some people will turn to drink.  Not a bad option, that, unless you've already done that route and the toll booth is closed.  Other people, facing that which cannot be imagined, will turn to dope.  Again, not a bad option in the short term unless you have the same prior routing and toll booth issues as drink.

While those of Midwestern stock can and do turn to drink or dope, we also have a genetic fall back coping mechanism:  we work.  When I am out on the sidewalk in front of my building, digging weeds out of the sidewalk cracks with an intensity that compares to a Zen monk scrubbing temple floors, most of the passersby will give me a wide berth and keep walking.  A few pedestrians will offer a polite comment about a job well done.

Then there are the others, those of the same stock; those that know.  While I am head down, scraping and digging and prying out weeds and grasses which hold tenaciously to their purchase in the sidewalk, desperately clinging to life, an older person will pass me and stop.  They will catch my eye and nod with grim approval.  They have seen right through the petty desire for a clean sidewalk, swept aside the simple yen for neatness acquired through hard work.  They know.   Behind the fierce manual labor they behold an effort to eradicate, at least for the moment, a life in shambles which can only be set right by work, work and more work.  No labouring over spreadsheets or namby-pamby office drudgery will suffice.  The Midwestern ethic calls for physical labour, preferably something that requires primitive hand tools and a stooped posture.  Scything hay, shoveling manure, or, lacking a farm, pulling weeds from a hundred feet of sidewalk cracks; these are the tasks that cleanse and purge.

I meet their eyes.  There is an understanding that passes, however briefly, between us.  They walk on and I bend to the next section, intent on leaving no root behind.

Day # 217 Nothing

I, like many Mid-Westerners of my generation, was raised with most of the standard platitudes, including "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."  I am here to tell you that, at least for today, I am not adhering to that principle.

From my perspective as of today, Sartre was spot on in the pessimistic sense of his line "Hell is other people".  If hell is having one's own shortcomings brilliantly illuminated by others, then hell is indeed where I am.  In the last week I have spent many long hours labouring over a mechanical demon of my own making, becoming a slave to its creation.  What do I have to show for it?  I have very pretty little machine that does not run, with flaws that mar its beauty which only I can see and the frustration of missing yet another race week-end because I have nothing to race with.  Additionally, I have ignored the needs of others and in the process have had the mirror of scrutiny held up before me, showing me to be obsessed rather than dedicated, inept rather than creative and uncaring rather than focused.

Bummer.   Pesky others.

As attractive as the image of the little race moto on fire is, only made more so by my desire to dance naked around its flames, I suspect that I will instead succumb to its plaintive little siren call.  I will devote more hours to its creation, this time discovering why it does not seem to have a clutch when all of the clutchy bits are there and they are moving around in a clutchy sort of fashion.

I can't give up.  Its not in me nature, Mr. Froggy.  And when that mirror is held up again, I think I'll just duck.  I try to be like Taoist (and Dudeist) water, moving around the rock instead of against it.  I do try.  But sometimes, sometimes I just have to plant my feet, pick that big fucker up out of the stream bed and run naked and splashing through the water with grim determination.

No matter that through illness, family commitments or the perversions of the mechanical deities, I have missed three out of three race weekends.  Any chance of a podium finish for the season is gone before I start the first engine of the season.  Bah!  Nothing good to say at all.  Nothing at all.

Day # 213 This is what I'm missing?

Even in the midst of the news blackout, the most absurd stuff from the American main-stream media seeps into my little world.

Today, on my main e-mail list, one of my good friends posted several CNN banners he had noted:

"Boehner Pokes Fun At Weiner"

"Pressure On Weiner Begins To Swell"


Really, this is news?  Holy cripes, I guess I'm not missing much.  I suppose that the only thing different about this "scandal" is that it involves a male conservative and a female.  It's almost refreshing.

So, credit where credit is due, another person on the afore-mentioned e-mail list took the headlines a step further with a fictional banner that might read:

"Boehner introducing Weiner to Bush" 


Hah!  Sometimes this stuff just writes itself.  Oh well.  Maybe a year of no news is not quite enough.  I'm thinking maybe a decade.  What would it be like to miss two more election cycles.  I think it would be almost as big a change as a conservative sex scandal that doesn't involve two people of the same sex.

I suppose it's nice that Weiner is bringing the Right back into line with the good old family values of hetero-affairs.

Day # 210 Bokononists

Live by the foma that makes you brave and healthy and happy.

Building race bikes makes me happy.  I don't know about healthy and brave.
(busy, busy, busy)

Learning from my son, The Kid, The Genetic Envelope, makes me brave.  I don't know about healthy and happy.
(busy, busy, busy)

Eating Ba Mee Hang that is redolent with Thai chilies makes me healthy.  I don't know about brave and happy.
(busy, busy, busy)

Tonight, almost anything and anyone else can just go dangle on The Hook (which only exists in their mind).

Day # 205 Nothing could be finer....

Question:  What could be better than neglecting one's blog, and everything else, to take a week long road trip with one's teenage son?

Answer:  Not much.

Day # 196 And the wrap...

I meant to wrap up my long digressions on the nature of good and evil, really I did.  I was momentarily side tracked by the impending doom of the human race, but since that danger seems to have passed for the moment I will carry on.

In the aftermath of Nietzsche and, with it, the death of God, one must turn to other sources to deal with the nature of evil in the world.  Short of abandoning everything to the Existentialists, one could look to meta-physics.

(This is the guy.  You can blame him, although he would tell you that we all did it.)



Without a creationist view of the cosmos, one has to turn away from a dualism based on deities.  What then is the nature of evil?  How does it relate to good?  An oft-cited meta-physical view of the nature of good and evil is that evil exists only in the lack of good.  Evil exists, but it has no essence.  Evil is the destruction of good rather that the opposite of good.  If human beings stop creating evil, it ceases to exist.  Thus, evil depends upon good to exist, but the reverse is not true.  Good has essence.  This view is based on the premise that humans know what good is and, in the actions we value, in our mores and our social systems, we strive to advance good in the world.

I have to say that I derive a certain degree of comfort from this philosophical outlook.  Stripped of the trappings of good gods and bad gods, of light and darkness, it is a blessing to think that we, all of us scurrying little insects, have the essence of good blended into our beings.  It is only when we go against our essence that we are capable of evil.

Whether or not this is true, it is a lovely idea.

Day # 196 Breaking News

Despite my news boycott, I find that stories of a certain enormous import quickly make their way into my consciousness   Today one such story broke through into my little world with the clarity of a cut diamond.

I have to buy a Blu-Ray player.  I never wanted a Blu-Ray player.  My high definition television rocked my little visual world to a level I did not think possible.  Despite the incredible detail imparted to the faces of the young and the restless, my current level of technology falls short in the face of all this new shit that's come to light, man.

"The Big Lebowski", the source of all things Dude-istic, is coming out on Blu-Ray.  As if that were not enough, there is a special 28-page book to accompany the disc, which, of course, makes it more of a Must Have.  Must have, must have, must have!!  I mean really, like, why else do I have a job if not to consume things?  What do you think I'm going to spend my money on?  Certainly not the Eagles Greatest Hits.

Day # 193 Filters

What gives a news story enough impetus to bypass news media altogether and travel by word of mouth?

It hadn't been a day before I heard about the Governator's marital infidelities with the babysitter.  The aftermath of the earthquake in Japan has apparently disappeared from the public discussion altogether but who Schwarzenegger is having sex with is able to transcend media delivery and make its way into my life by word of mouth.

The royal wedding was distilled down to the single important question of how Kate got into that dress.

Oh, and the end of the world.  That seems to have some serious legs.  Although no one was actually taken up, its seems that a few people volunteered to go.  Poor bastards.  They missed the announcement that the day has been pushed back to October 21st.

I am informed by sources extremely close to home, in fact at home, that all of the news issues out there pale in comparison to the last Oprah show.  In fact The Kid and I were exiled out into the rain whilst the last show aired.  It was that or suffer through the vale of tears that my living room became.

I couldn't tell you if Newt is in the race or out of the race but neither can anyone at Fox or CNN so I guess that isn't news either way.

The wander ways of the Terminator's tool, Judgement day, Kate's butt, Oprah's finale and Newt's follies.  I guess I'm really not missing that much.

Day # 191 Stuff

I have stuff.  George Carlin has my number.  I love my stuff.  There are two types of stuff that I love the most:  Motorcycles and Guitars.

Now that I am a geezer I realize that I have more than a few of both types of stuff. At the same time that I have gathered about me motos and axes aplenty,  I am actively developing strategies that will allow me to live and work abroad.  It is obvious to me that these two pursuits, acquiring and travelling, are not compatible with each other.  Something, it seems, has to give.

The other day I made a list; a list of my guitars and my motos.  I love making lists.  Checklists get me through complicated projects.  I cannot, for instance, say to myself "I'm going to build a new race bike" and then set about to do it.  I can, however, make a list of all of the things I need to buy, build or scavenge that will amount to a race bike.  Once I have the a list, I can start down a path of checking off this item or that item until, surprise, there is a new race moto sitting in my shop.

As I said, the other day I made a list, a list of things, the stuff, that I love the most.  In the last column of the list was where the action item lived.  There where three choices:  Sell It, Keep It or Undecided.  Seeing the choices in written down was a revelation.  Is it possible that I could actually part with either a moto or a musical instrument?  For proof I needed to look no further than the Craigslist ad that I placed last week in which I offered up for sale my 1979 Fender Vibrolux amp.  It is true, I swear it!

Have I since sold all of my stuff and renounced the allure of worldly goods?  No, I have not.  I have, however, relaxed, ever so slightly, my death grip on some of my most important things.  I guess there is some real hope that I can let slip the shackles of possession.  The truth is that the only way I part with my stuff is for the reward of further and lighter travel.

College Classes?  Selling off guitars?  The lure of living and working abroad is strong indeed.  

Day # 190 Still here...

The morning has broken and aside from the normal attrition, the world is not lighter by even one fanatic.  It is a lovely dampish Sunday morning, a fine day for playing pooh-sticks. Regardless, I feel a twinge of disappointment that the rapture did not occur and suck the faithful up into the air like so many dust bunnies attacked by a sturdy Hoover.

Well, the world abides and the whole durn human race along with it.  Until we don't, I reckon.

Day # 187 So Far

I suppose this is a progress report of sorts, a look at the shadows cast on the wall of the things I haven't seen.

The avoidance of the daily news continues as does life.  Most of my friends and neighbors have gotten into the swing of things.  They will start a query with.... "Did you read about the thing is Tribecistan?" until they remember and say, "Oh, right, the news thing" and then we move on to something else.

From my perspective in the cave looking at the mere shadows of the news events, it is interesting to see what becomes word of mouth news, which eventually I end up hearing.  The tragic events in Japan were, of course, quickly discussed on a person to person level and so I heard a good bit about those sad happenings.  Interestingly, the recent royal wedding in Old Blighty had even greater word-of-mouth buzz than the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.  I have heard as much on the street about Kate's diet to fit into her dress as I have about radiation from the Japanese nuclear reactor.

Since the end is coming this weekend, it doesn't really matter, but I have not risen from my bed irradiated nor have I lain awake at night and wondered just how Kate did manage to slither into that gown.  In the context of my experiment as to whether the not listening to the news will make me happier, I would have to assert that in this case, yes it has.

Some news is unavoidable, such as the laborious and inexorable countdown to Oprah's last show.  I have to flee the house to miss out on that.

An obvious blessing derived from avoiding the news is the absence in my life of the pre-pre-election shenanigans for the 2012 presidential race.  Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich?  Seriously?  I would have to say that given the choice between living amongst a populace that would elect either of these buffoons or joining up with Harold Camping and company for the final departure on Saturday, I would have to settle for option two.

Wait a minute.  If the hard core believers are vanishing on May 21st, won't that greatly alter the balance of voters in America?  Hey, maybe I should stick around.

Day # 183 No Blues

Today, friend and neighbors, I do not have the Blues.  No I do not.  Can I get a witness?

Although it is a Sunday morning of drenching, persistent and seemingly endless rain, I do not have the Blues.

And why is this so?  How can I be dodging that sure-footed lowdown-ness that ought to accompany a morning such as this?  You might ask yourself, Sisters and Brothers, and rightly so  "How can a man look out his window on a Sunday, his day off from the labours of the week, see a vision that looks frightfully similar to what Noah saw a day or so before his ark actually floated off, and not have the Blues?"  How indeed!

The answer to this conundrum is:  The Rapture.  That's right, the day cometh and not on little cat's feet.  A mere week from today, May 21st, the fanatics are going to Rapture right on off of the planet  O! Blessed day!  So instead of getting all down at the heels about the dampness of my day off, I wrote a little song to cheer myself up.

I'm a-shinin' my shoes ...
Gonna straighten my tie.
Ain't having no blues.... No Sir!
As I waves them goodbye.

Goodbye fanatics...
And you hate mongers too.
Get gone you dogmatics....
Please, please, please don't come back
Whatever you do


Think a sort of hill country blues in the key of E and you've got it.

Day # 177 Calvin and Hobbes

No, not the tiger and the cute kid.  That Calvin and Hobbes did not have any huge issues with good and evil. Their value system was based on what was fun.

Speaking of fun, the other Calvin, John Calvin the Reformation preacher and the founder of Calvinism, was not.  He was, by most accounts, less fun than Martin Luther and that is no small feat.  John Calvin most assuredly viewed human beings as inherently evil and headed for damnation, each and every one.

But what about non-religious thinkers, if such could be found in Europe during the heady days of Reformation and Counter-Reformation.  What had they to say about good and evil?

Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, believed that human beings were weak natured and capable of great mischief if left to their own devices.  As such, Hobbes believed the populi needed the benefit of a strong government to keep them out of trouble; an absolute sovereign being best for the welfare of the common man.  Out of fear for our base nature, we humans enter into a social contract to avoid the "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" aspects that life takes on when people are left to their own whims without a strong central government.  Hobbes may have been fun, but he was not remembered as such.  Conservative, yes, fun, not so much.

I'll grant you that Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived and wrote after the spasms of the Reformation had mostly run their course, but he is still worth the trouble to remember.  Rousseau, being of the period know as the "Enlightenment", has a lighter view of the basic nature of humans.  Rousseau thought that men and women were basically good at heart and when left to themselves would choose the right course.  Jean-Jacques wrote of a different sort of social contract than Hobbes.  In Rousseau's view "Man is weak when he is dependent, and is his own master when he comes to be strong.."  Although briefly a Calvinist in his youth and then a Catholic, Rousseau is generally regarded as having been much more fun than Hobbes.

So, a strange dichotomy of sorts takes shape.  On the one hand, you have Hobbes, the conservative, who advocates a strong and controlling social contract for the role of government.  On the other, we have Mssr. Rousseau, of the liberal view, advocating a social contract that empowers the individual.

This is quite a stretch from todays political dogma in the USA where the "Conservatives" want the teeniest little government possible, save for an enormous standing Army, Navy and Airforce. The other side of the dogmatic coin has the "Liberals" who want the biggest and most expensive government possible especially if it can spend everybody else's money.

The only thing that remains the same is that the Conservatives still aren't as fun.

Day # 176 The Good, the Bad and...

Sorry, no Lee Van Cleef or Eli Wallach in this blog entry although one could probably come up with some dandy allegorical references on the nature of good and evil using the famous Sergio Leone movie as a vehicle.

Human beings have been trying to explain good and evil for a very long time.  The biggest struggle, of course, is justifying the existence of evil.  As different tribes and then societies invented their creation myths and religions they understood that the two forces of good and evil had to somehow be reconciled.

Evil has always been the stickier wicket.  Human beings understand goodness.  If a group of humans conceive of a deity, he or she is generally believed to have the best interests of the worshipers at heart.  Good is to be expected.  Where, then, does evil come from if the gods are good?  How do the priests or shamans explain to the people the cause or source of sorrow, pain and catastrophe?

The early pantheists had an easier time dealing with evil.  There were gods or spirits for everything.  If the fertility god was properly attended to, healthy children were born.  If not, the people were barren.  Likewise, the harvest gods had to be kept happy or the people went hungry.  There was no need for a single explanation of where evil sprang from, evil came about if the people let the deity down.  If the sacrifices or offerings or rituals appeased the god or gods, the crops got better, the people got happier and the shaman kept his job.

In an interesting twist on pantheism, the Greeks gave their pantheon of gods and goddesses completely human emotions, only amplified to god-like dimensions.  The Greek gods were jealous, petty, lustful, proud, vengeful and deceitful to an almost childish degree.  The problem, for humans, was that the gods had the super-powers that are a side benefit of deification.  When evil came into a Greek's life, it was generally one of the gods directly giving him or her grief.

The Dualists had a different take on how to reconcile the obvious forces of good and evil in world.  Starting with Zoroaster, the Dualists posited various systems of belief in which there was a god of light and a god of darkness or a lessor god and a greater god.  One of these gods or forces represented the good in the world and the other the evil.  The tension between these two forces explained the waxing and waning of evil times in the lives of the people.  The Dualists tended to value free will and the benefit of morally positive individual action.

The tradition of Dualism, as we know it in the historical written record, begins about 600 BCE with the writings of Zoroaster (also know as Zarathustra) and continued down through the Gnostics, Manicheans and the Cathars.  The nature of Dualism was changed and debated amongst these different religions and there were differing sects in each of these broader groups, but the tension between some force of light and darkness or good and evil remained a central tenet.  The deity that personified darkness or evil was independent of the good deity which effectively absolved the good deity from responsibility for the evil deity.  The advantage of Dualism is that it allows the good deity to remain untarnished of the responsibility for creating evil in the first place.

As a side note, Dualism was a major threat to what would become the dominant European religion, Christianity.  The Zoroastrians were virtually wiped out during the Islamic invasions of Persia in the 7th century CE and was also geographically isolated from the West and as such it was only an idealogical threat.  Many scholars believe that Isaiah 45:7, for example, is a direct reference and refutation of the ideas of Zoroastrian Dualism (see the verse for yourself or previous blog entries).

The Manicheans and Cathars were not so lucky.  Even though as great a pillar of the early Roman Church as Saint Augustine was himself a young Dualist, the Church developed a particularly intolerant attitude towards Dualist sects.  This intolerance would evolve into a holy war.

Monotheism, as the name suggests, posits a single deity that is over-arching in the cosmos.  The three large monotheistic religions in the world are Judaism, Islam and Christianity.  As an aside, it is interesting to note the similarities between all three of these religions and Zoroastrianism, which preceded them.

The Christian religion teaches the doctrine of Original Sin.  Based on this doctrine, all human beings are destined for hell unless he or she does something to alter that inevitable course.  The concept is that the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden caused all of the humans that came after them to be inherently sinful as well.   The only action that will save humans from automatic damnation is to accept the divinity of the Christian God.

The difficulty for a monotheistic deity is that if humans create an omnipotent cosmic force it follows that all things in the world spring from that one source.  Good things come from one's god and so do bad things.  Bounty and peace come from the same source as famine and war.  This philosophical dichotomy troubled the early Christian church and is still a source of theological debate to this day.  Biblical scholars from antiquity to the present cite various bible verses to explain how god is always good, incapable of evil.  This calls for other verses to show that the serpent, Satan, the fall of humans, the tempting of Job and the other troubles that befall humans are somehow linked to forces other than god.  The question then becomes, if the deity is omnipotent, what forces could be outside its control?

The Church fathers, seeing the threat that Dualism posed, declared anathema on the the concept of Dualism.  Further, the Church would declare Gnostics, Manicheans and other Dualistic followers to be Heretics in the eyes of the church.  Persecution of the heretics followed, but all of the trouble that fell on the earlier Dualists paled in comparison to the ferocity with which the Church reacted to the Cathars, also know as the Albigensians.

The Cathars were a Christian sect in Languedoc, which is now Southern France.  In 1208 Pope Innocent III preached a crusade against the Cathars and in an amazing display of barbarity, fellow Christians answered the call for the crusade.   Driven by the lust for free lands and the call of the Pope, the Christian neighbors of the Cathars fell upon them and slaughtered them.  Estimates of the dead from this crusade range as high as 500,000 over two generations, although the actual death toll may be closer to 200,000.  The most famous incident was at the siege of Beziers.  When the besieged town finally fell, the victorious crusader leaders asked Abbot Arnaud-Amaury, their spiritual commander, how to tell the true Catholics inside the walls from the heretical Cathars.  His reply has been recorded as "Caedite eos.  Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."  The translation is "Kill them all.  God will know his own."  Following his comments, between 5,000 and 20,000 (medieval records vary widely) of the former inhabitants of the town of Beziers were slaughtered.

The Albigensian Crusade is certainly not an isolated incident of wholesale persecution in the name of a monotheistic deity, nor was this type of behavior attributable solely to the Christians.  The tribes of Israel warred across Palestine and Islam spread out of Mecca by means of the sword.  Countless heads have been removed from countless shoulders in the name of religion.

Spreading death and destruction in the name of this or that god only adds to the difficulty of a rational explanation of the nature of good, the nature of evil and the relationship between the two.  The struggle to clarify these explanations would continue on into modern philosophy long after the Medieval bloodshed ceased and the bloodshed of the Reformation began.

Day # 175 A lot of ins and outs....

It is another rainy, breezy morning in the GreyNorWet.  But, Hey Man, its like, Saturday.

Today I intend to strive to abide.  If someone micturates on my rug, I am not going to let go of my inner-dude.  Whatever issues the rug pissers have its just, like, their opinion, man.

Yesterday I completed my Admissions Assessment Exam for starting college classes.  What a hoot, my quinquagenarian ass attending college classes.

Well, its all part of the plan.  And a swiss watch of a plan it is.  Ingenious if I understand it correctly.

Gotta get back.  Take 'er easy, Man.

Day # 173 Opposites

I don't really mean to be picking on the Christians, but no discussion of the nature of Good and Evil can  be carried on in the West without at least a bit of a Judeo-Christian backdrop.  Until we move completely into meta-ethics there will remain a smackerel of religion lying about.

Yesterday I was on about where did the serpent come from and why a tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  If God created all things, surely he created the serpent.  This path is well trodden.

Call me a literalist but something just doesn't add up for me:

James 1:13   Let no one say when he is tempted "I am tempted by God" for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He himself tempt anyone.    This passage in the Bible is often cited to show that God cannot be a part of evil.  Further in James 1:14 & 15 we are told that it is our desires that draw us away and in which lie the seed of our sin.  Desire as the cause of suffering.  That sounds familiar.

Isaiah 45:7  I form the light and create the darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the Lord, do all these things.   There are arguments that this passage is referring to and refuting the teachings of Zarathustra which would have been known at the time of Isaiah.  Other biblical scholars comment that this passage can only be interpreted in the context of God's comments to Cyrus and that Cyrus' success or failure in battle is a direct result of God and no other.  Regardless of the opposites contrasted, Isaiah pretty much has God saying that everything, even calamity, is his bailiwick 

Job 1:12  So the Lord said to Satan, "Behold, all that he has is in your power: only do not lay a hand on his person"  Then Satan went out from the presence of the Lord.   God clearly gives Satan free rein to test Job's faith as long as he does not kill him or lay his had on Job's person.

Christianity certainly did not concoct the idea of Good and Evil.  The existence of Christian dogma, however has certainly coloured the debate.  I list the passages above to at least illustrate some of the contradictions in the biblical teachings of Christianity, the teachings I was raised with.

God does not tempt anyone.  Thus it is written.  God created everything.  Everything.  Thus it is written.  The serpent, the tempter of Adam and Eve, was created by God.  God created everything.  Job was tempted by Satan with God's permission.  God created Satan.  God created everything.

If the origins of the debate began with Christianity, this would be even harder to explain, but the first known organized teachings that attempt to explain good and evil come some 600 years before the birth of Christ.

I have picked on the Christians enough.  We have to go a little further back in time to find out what pre-existing belief systems the writers of even the Old Testament were trying to synthesize when they wrote the works we now call the bible.