In Praise Of Inauthenticity

Hey, want to know a little secret?

Here it is: I hate to spend money. Not because I'm cheap or a miser or anything as interesting as that but because there are so few things I'm interested in buying.

The few things I do buy tend to end up severely disappointing me.

One quick example: I recently went out and bought a pair of lounge pants and even though I thought I bought the exact same brand and style and size as the lounge pants I already have and love, it turned out that the company is now making them different and... they just don't feel right. They're not as soft. The pockets don't fit my hands as well. And I can't trust the fabric not to crawl up my butt when I least expect it. I mean, come on - if you can't trust a simple pair of $10 lounge pants to provide you with a few moments of satisfaction, what incentive do you have to spend even $20 on a new car?

Well, despite this extreme reluctance of mine to hand over my cash to a world apparently intent on perpetually disappointing me in ways I can't even begin to imagine, I was recently persuaded to buy an Ion turntable - and I love it!

I now have the magical power to translate my vinyl records into digital files that I can play and manipulate on my computer and burn unto disks (hallowed be their technology). If I had an iPod, I probably could transfer these digitals files to that, too, but I don't. Maybe someday. Which will probably be several years after everyone else has moved on to a new format or gizmo....

But to keep focused on the positive: I've now successfully transferred most of my all-time favorite LPs to my computer.

And by "all-time favorite LPs" I mean my collection of 40-year-old Baja Marimba Band releases.

Yes, seriously.

Want to know a second little secret? I've been unapologetically in love with Muzak for as long as I can remember.

I was certainly in love with it in high school when my peers were in love with Kiss and Led Zeppelin and I brightly come out with "Julius Wechter and the Baja Marimba Band!" whenever I was asked who I might like best.

For some reason, my peers always thought I was joking.

For my part, I could never understand why anyone might prefer "Stairway to Heaven" to Julius's incomparable arrangement of "Do You Know The Way To San Jose?"

Julius was quite a guy. He played on Herb Alpert's first hit, "The Lonely Bull," back when Herb was still recording in a garage, then went on to write one of the Tijuana Brass's all-time biggest hits, "Spanish Flea" (which Julius had mischievously originally entitled "Spanish Fly"). After that, a place for a Julius composition was reserved on virtually every Alpert album. Most were infectiously catchy in a way an Aerosmith or David Bowie tune could only dream of being (though I've always been a fan of "Fame").

Oddly enough, Julius eventually got an advanced degree in psychology and became a marriage counselor. I've also learned in recent years (thanks to the miracle of the Internet) that he had Tourette's Syndrome. Try as I might, I can't stop smiling as I try to imagine which might make the better Monty Python skit, a marimba player with Tourette's or a marriage counselor. My bad.

Sad to say, the Baja Marimba Band - which was never very popular despite many appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" after the plate spinners and before Topo Gigio - fell completely out of favor circa 1970. Part of their shtick was their outfitting themselves as a bunch of dirty, stupid Mexicans. Admittedly, that probably wasn't the best idea anyone ever had - and it probably was an idea made even worse by the fact that Julius and the band members were about as authentically Mexican as bagels and lox, as LA Times music reviewer Charles Chaplin good-naturedly put it in the liner notes he wrote for their humorously entitled "Greatest Hits" LP - but... it worked for me.

Just like Bill Dana's Jose Jimenez character worked for me.

And Frito-Lay's Frito Bandito.

I didn't think these ethnic stereotypes were cruel racist putdowns - I just thought they were funny.

My consciousness has since been raised.

My love of the Baja Marimba Band's music endures.


None of which I had planned to write about today.

Then I sat down, picked up my copy of Time dated November 1, and read a story entitled Ballads For The Bad Guys.

Here are a few brief passages:

In Rialto, on old route 66 just outside Los Angeles, young Mexican Americans in sharp cars and glittery, cowboy-goth clothes are pouring into a hangar-size nightclub to hear El Komander sing. Brawny, buzz-cut and with a midnight pallor, El Komander looks as if a Mexican drug cartel might have sent him on a summer internship with the Russian mob.... His narcocorridos — narco ballads — are about the gunfights and beheadings going on south of the border: the word asesino (murderer) figures heavily in his lyrics. "Trashed with drugs," he croons in a deceptively sweet voice. "Blowing heads off those who cross us."

Driven by a tuba, an accordion, drums and a guitar, narcocorridos sound like polka pumped up on meth. By turns frenetic and mournful, the songs celebrate the violent lives — and grisly deaths — of Mexican drug lords. The genre's popularity has spread quickly from Mexico, and dozens of singers now routinely tour the U.S., finding huge audiences that are not limited to the nation's 47 million Hispanic....

The music's appeal is tied to its association with danger. In that sense, the narcocorrido has something in common with 1990s gangsta rap, complete with the fast and ferocious lifestyles of its performers. Many balladeers receive money from drug lords to write paeans about their exploits; some are paid to perform at gangs' private parties in secret hideouts. But being one gangster's favorite singer can make you a target for his rivals: nearly a dozen musicians have been killed since 2006....

The music has also given rise to a film genre. According to Baja Films Internacional director and producer Oscar Lopez, every month big-box stores sell tens of thousands of DVDs of gory Tijuana-made direct-to-video movies whose scripts are based on the latest narcocorrido hits....

In the last four years, some 26,000 people have been killed in the drug wars in Mexico. Stories about the latest slaughter down there that's worse than the infamous Valentine's Day Massacre in 1920s Chicago now appear almost every day in my newspaper. The situation, as one story I recently saw put it, is significantly worse than the much better reported war in Afghanistan.

And bands are now singing songs dedicated to the perpetrators of all this violence?

And listeners are eating it up??

Wow.... I'm beyond stunned.

You know, if Bill Dana tried to revive his Jose character on national TV, I'm sure the outrage would be deafening. And maybe it should be.

But... a whole industry has popped up in celebration of regular mass beheadings and mutilations as Mexico descends into a narco-civil war and there's *no* outrage?

Indeed, if Time is to be believed, the narcocorrido craze is actually being exploited by the likes of Subway and the Ford Motor Company as a way to appeal to Hispanic youth.

Dear Julius! Please wake me up from this post-apocalyptic nightmare and help me understand why *I* ever should have had to be the one required to defend his taste in music....


[EDIT: A guy by the name of Harvey Perr actually wrote the liner notes to the Baja Marimba Band's "Greatest Hits" LP. Perr was affiliated with something called FM & The Fine Arts. His actual words: "Best of all, it turns out that they're damned fine musicians who really play and so what if they're as Mexican as bagels and lox? Or lasagna? They are beautiful." The LA Times's Charles CHAMPLIN wrote the liner notes to Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass's "Greatest Hits" LP at a time when Herb's A&M Records company was based in the former film studio of Charlie Chaplin at 1416 North La Brea in Hollywood, California. I'm sorry for the confusion - and even sorrier about an aging process that scrambles memories the way a blender can scramble eggs and ants.]

May I Monopolize Your Time For A Bit?

So I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, for a while now.

The other day I read the chapter about Appalachian feuds. The Hatfields and McCoys feud may be the most famous, but it turns out that it was hardly unique. In fact, Gladwell comes close to making the case that feuding is a natural way of life for those poor goat herding types who came to this country from poor areas of the UK and ended up in similarly poor areas here. His claim is that when you have little and it tends to roam away from you, you have to aggressively defend every little bit that you have. What's more, you have to project a menacing air and respond to even minor slights lest others detect weakness and take advantage of you. (If the residents of Malibu or the Hamptons engage in feuds, I guess they're of a very different type, maybe involving fake nails at 50 paces, I dunno. Do you?)

Anyway, the core of Gladwell's thesis got me wondering about my own "sore loser" behavior as a young child growing up poor in the inner city with no one I could really trust. I didn't have a single goat to my name, so instead I vigorously defended my "right" to win at games like croquet and Monopoly. Since I seem to have been just about the youngest kid around, this "right" wasn't recognized very often. If it had been, I'm sure I wouldn't have resorted to attempting to defend my sense of self-worth by mistaking my winning opponent's head for a croquet ball and trying to send it into the bushes with a single, well-placed stroke.

Like the ornery Kentuckians described by Gladwell, I eventually found better ways of expressing myself and deriving satisfaction from life even though I still don't have a goat.

Unfortunately, I had to get over my encounter with Monopoly first.

Of all the games ever invented by the mind of the human being, I suspect that Monopoly is the one least likely to instill a sense of self-worth or a love of others in those who play it. The reflective frame of mind that Gladwell put me in recently had me reflecting upon this again for the first time in years. The more I reflected, the more I wondered if Monopoly (or some local variation thereof) might not somehow be behind the endless conflicts of the Balkans and/or the Middle East.

Just think: Monopoly is a game that's full of attractive elements - a pretty board, and colorful money, and cute little tokens and houses. It's all quite irresistible. It sucks you in. And then it proceeds to slowly but steadily grind down and destroy most of the people who play it. It's winner take all as someone does indeed end up with a Monopoly of money and property and fun and self-worth and everyone else ends up with squat, diddly, dada, nothing.

In fact, it's even worse than that - most players actually end up with less than nothing because they've lost several hours of their lives and leave the table with whatever hopes they brought to the table dashed. The best most players can hope for is to be driven into bankruptcy early on, at which point they're free to go off and lick their wounds while the slow grinding down of others proceeds... and proceeds... and proceeds....

The fact that Monopoly basically boils down to luck rather than skill means that you can have all the skill in the world and not be able to bounce back once the dice have decisively turned against you. Knowing the capital of Mongolia, or being able to play a musical instrument, or having a cute smile is of no use at all when you land on Boardwalk and are required to pay a rent you simply can't afford. There is no Plan B - either you're lucky or you're not.

This makes Monopoly at its heart about as sophisticated a game as the tossing of a coin, but losing a coin toss doesn't feel nearly as bad. Why not? Because coins are common and ugly, and the toss is over quickly, and the next toss can be just a few seconds away. We don't generally invest much emotional energy in a coin toss, so it's much easier to ignore or move on to the next one. Monopoly, in contrast, is an extremely pretty coin toss that gives the illusion of being a game of skill, engages far more of our time and energy, and - due to its extraordinary length - doesn't allow for quick or easy rematches. It's a coin toss that seems calculated to bring down the majority of players who participate and keep them there....

By the time I was a teenager, I had more than a rudimentary understanding of these dynamics and sought to fundamentally change them by changing the rules. Players with more money and income, for example, would be required to pay taxes for the good of society (i.e., the other players). Those who couldn't pay their rent would be given help from an understanding tax collector. The aim was to create a sustainable environment in which even the least lucky might survive and enjoy the pleasure of moving a tiny little battleship around and around a board on which a former jail was now a rehabilitation center for the chronically misunderstood and everyone just naturally chipped in whenever a player was unjustly singled out by Chance for sewer repairs.

I have a vague recollection of my peers thinking I was nuts. I'm not sure why, but - adopting Gladwell's approach - I'll now attempt to blame their cultural and environment. You know - a highly competitive capitalistic system in which rugged individualism is constantly praised and all those teams that come in second are simplistically lumped together as Losers. You can sketch in the details.

Having spent the last 10 years on a diary focusing on theism and such, I find it rather more interesting at this point to compare Monopoly with organized religion. There's the same surface prettiness (cathedrals seem at least as attractive to most people as tiny plastic hotels, and little metal dogs are no match for a pope in full regalia); there's the same Good vs. Evil, winner-take-all mentality; there's the strong tendency of those with the power and the money to get more and more of both; and there's the same extreme unwillingness of most people to question the rules, let alone try to rewrite them no matter how bad they may make us feel.

And of course there's the way luck (what comes up on the dice, the religious culture we just happen to have been born into) trumps knowledge and skill. Sure, atheists may have logic and evidence on their side, but just see how far that gets you when your $1500 rent comes due on the Day of Judgement!

Ahem.

Anyway, all I really wanted to say is that I'm glad I wasn't born in Appalachia - but if I had been, I probably would now be engaged in an endless blood feud with Parker Brothers.

Instead, I'm able to sit and watch "Pawn Stars" on Monday nights without having to worry about angry men firing shots through my window.

That may not sound like much to you, but it's more than I ever expected to achieve when I first dropped that head-splitting croquet mallet as a kid and started running like hell.

Can Atheism Be Proven Wrong?

That's the title of an essay by Greta Christina.

It's one of the most intelligent essays I've encountered online in a very long time.

If you have the time, I strongly encourage you to go read it before reading another word here.

I've been impressed by Greta before (as noted in an entry I posted almost a year ago now). It's because of thoughtful, well-spoken atheists like Greta that I feel much less compelled to write about theism and religion than was the case 10 years ago when it very much felt like you and me against the world (and I still had my doubts about you).

As thoughtful and well-spoken as atheists like Greta are, however, I sometimes sense that they're missing or overlooking something.

Or maybe I'm the one missing or overlooking something.

Either way, the end result is that Greta and I seem to have come up with very different answers to the question she's raised (or, to be more precise, borrowed from the broader online atheist community which I haven't been paying much attention to lately).

Her answer is yes (and she gives some of the details of what would convince her that gOd is real here).

My answer is a pretty firm no. I can't think of any evidence that would prove that a gOd exists for the simple reason that IF an omnipotent being like gOd exists, the nature of evidence as we commonly understand it would be so completely transformed as to become meaningless.

This is not an answer I've ever seen given elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, it is also not an answer that I've ever seen anyone ever refute. Feel free to be the first!

But first... allow me to elaborate a bit in the hope of avoiding any misunderstanding.

Suppose a magician were to suddenly appear before me now and claim to have omnipotent powers. Suppose that in an attempt to convince me of the truth of this claim, the magician successfully performed virtually every act I requested of him. Not only was he able to do such relatively mundane tasks as walk on water and turn water into wine, he was able to raise the dead, make the sun set in the east, be in two places at once, predict the future, read my mind, take me back in time, and even present me with a four-sided triangle AND an invisible pink unicorn. Would all that prove that he really had omnipotent powers or would it only prove that he had the power to make me *think* he had omnipotent powers? How might we ever be able to tell the difference? I don't know. But unless we can tell the difference, however, we will never be able to disprove atheism.

In fact, it seems that once we grant another being the power to control our minds, we lose the ability to prove or disprove anything at all. The very real possibility exists that whatever we feel, perceive, think, believe, or conclude is merely an illusion created by that being.

And the power to control our minds falls far short of omnipotence. It's a necessary part of omnipotence - but not sufficient proof of it. Once it's granted as existing, however, it's Game Over. We're simply no longer in any position to judge the existence or non-existence of attributes above and beyond that one.

Or to use an analogy.... Our eyes can detect only so much brightness before they burn out and we go blind. Our ears can only hear sounds so loud before our eardrums are blown and we can hear nothing at all. Asking a human being to look at a light and decide whether it's infinitely bright is absurd. If looking at a 50,000 watt bulb instantly burns out our retinas, we're simply no longer in any position to determine if such a thing as a 50,001 watt bulb exists, let alone a hypothetical light of infinite wattage.

The magician is a kind of 50,000 watt being who has burned out our minds.

Now let's put the magician aside. Let's simply assume that, yes, at least one being with omnipotence does indeed exist. Omnipotence seems to be a necessary attribute of gOd - but it's not the only one. According to common Christian theology, for example, gOd is also all-knowing and all-good and all-present. BUT once we grant a being omnipotence, it's impossible for us to prove anything more. Omnipotence, after all, necessarily includes the power to deceive others into believing *anything* at all. Ergo, any proof we might come up with is necessarily suspect. Once we've granted (or proved) the existence of omnipotence, it's Game Over and all bets are off. An impenetrable veil has come down between us and objective reality (whatever that reality may be).

Or to put it yet another way: It is only in a natural, materialistic universe that the concept of proof makes any sense. Once we've assumed (or proved) the existence of a different kind of universe, epistemological chaos reigns supreme and it becomes virtually impossible to prove *anything* at all.

Or to put it still another way... it seems to me that to falsify atheism, one must falsify reason and empiricism as we know them; but once one has falsified reason and empiricism as we know them, it simply doesn't make any sense to use either to support any conclusion. We are truly lost at sea without a rudder. If there is in fact a gOd beneath that sea, how would we ever know it? Best to remain silent and not think anything at all. Or maybe scream, if you like. The only thing that definitely seems inappropriate is to continue yammering on about proof and disproof as if the language we've developed to deal with this world applies equally well to a world gone mad.

It is hard for me to understand why anyone - theists included - would take the least bit of comfort in believing that such a world is synonymous with the one we actually live in....

India: Land of 300 Million Gods - and No Toilets

Ok, so things aren't quite that bad in the country that's about 8000 miles to my east - but I think you'll agree they're bad enough if you happen to have read the same recent news story that I did.

Remember? It's the story that opened by informing its readers that there's a slum in Mumbai that doesn't have a single toilet or latrine for its 10,000 residents.

Apparently far more people over there have cell phones than have access to a urinal or commode.

Here are a few choice passages - just in case you're having trouble visualizing exactly what this means:

There were more than 670 million cell phone connections in India by the end of August, a number that has been growing by close to 20 million a month, according to government figures.

Yet U.N. figures show that only 366 million Indians have access to a private toilet or latrine, leaving 665 million to defecate in the open.

NOTE: There are about 307 million living in the US today.

Try to picture them all.

Now imagine if the US had more than twice as many people and a complete absence of bathrooms was prompting all of them to shit in our famous amber waves of grain instead of singing about them.

Scary, eh?

(If you shouted out "COOL!" instead as you read the above scenario, you're excused. Please go stand out in the hallway until your fever breaks.)

The story goes on to provide readers with some of the details of what all this means for the daily life of the average resident of India. If you're in the mood to read about children splashing in sewage or drinking from rain barrels spiced with little white worms, I encourage you to click on the link I provided above and do so.

As for me... I think I'll just sit here and continue to sadly shake my head as I think about how the Catholic Church continues to condemn birth control as a sin.

And about how so many Americans condemn government (with its "tyrannical" EPA and its "outrageous" public works projects) as evil.

And if I have any time left over, I'll probably be sadly shaking my head over these passages, too:

Businessman Mukesh Ambani, the world's fourth-richest person, is just finishing off a new $1 billion skyscraper-house in Mumbai with 27 floors and three helipads, touted as the most expensive home on earth. Yet farmers still live in shacks of mud and cow dung....

[A]s many as 800 million Indians still live on less than $2 a day, even as Mumbai's stock exchange sits near record highs....

It's amazing what a society can achieve when taxes are low, regulations are few, and government just gets out of the way, isn't it?

Maybe someday we'll have a Democratic Party with the balls to run a few campaign ads that highlight these stunning achievements.

In the meantime, I think I'll try to cure the insomnia this story has inspired in me by pondering yet again how Bill Gates could be using his fortune to buy himself a Senate seat or a governorship but instead has opted to adopt a global perspective and is using his fortune to combat malaria (among many other Very Bad Things).

After weeks of watching allegedly adult Americans trashing each other in an endless series of 30-second ads, it's mighty refreshing to know that there really are people out there who realize that the average mosquito net can do more to improve the lives of people than the greatest sound bite or stump speech ever written....

A Few More Points....

I was a bit rushed yesterday when I wrote my last entry.

Here, as briefly as possible (but no briefer!), are a few of the points that got left out:

----- I don't understand why so many people who claim to hate politics and government are rushing to become politicians and be part of that government. It's even harder for me to understand how long-time politicians and government officials can spend so much of their time ragging on politicians and the very government that they've been part of for many years. It's perhaps hardest of all for me to understand how so many people can embrace these long-time politicians and repeatedly return them to office. Hey, if you hate government so much and think the business world is so great, why the hell don't you go get a job in the business world?

----- The constant conservative attacks on government and praise for the business world would be easier to take seriously if conservatives didn't keep ardently backing obvious incompetent fuck-ups like Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell. If you're going to run on a platform of competency, you simply can't keep putting forth candidates whose public and private lives resemble an unending series of train wrecks. If your candidate doesn't even know that Africa is a continent or what the First Amendment says, how can you even raise the issue of competency with a straight face?

----- Conservatives are fond of saying that the government can't create jobs - only business creates jobs. In fact, they've said it so often for so long without being challenged that everyone seems to think that it's true. Of course it isn't. According to the online sources I've just checked, the US Federal Government is just about the biggest employer in the country! Its total number of non-postal civilian employees alone is about equal to the number of people employed by the largest private employer, Wal-Mart (1.8 million). The Post Office employs about another 600,000 people. The military has about 1.5 million people on active duty and well over another million in the reserves. State and local governments employ another 8.3 million workers! Although conservatives might claim that these aren't "real" jobs, I'd like to hear them tell that to inner city high school teachers, or members of the Border Patrol, or the sailors in the Coast Guard who have just rescued a fisherman in trouble, or the nurses and doctors at a VA hospital, or researchers at the Centers for Disease Control, or any of the millions of others I could name. And I won't even try to list all the Pentagon suppliers or construction companies or transportation workers whose income depends heavily on government contracts. And then there's all the private sector jobs that depend on government workers providing safe water and usable roads and a tightly regulated radio spectrum (among many other things). The more you think about it, the more this constant attack on government seems like a body's immune system going crazy and attacking the very heart that keeps everything else going!

(SIDE NOTE: The craziness has come into sharp focus for me in recent years as cutbacks in the state of Ohio have resulted in the loss of thousands of government jobs. Last I heard, our current governor - a Democrat - has actually trimmed the state payroll by some 90,000 positions in the last 4 years. Have conservatives given him any credit for this? No! They insist he hasn't put enough people in the unemployment line even though his cuts have closed prisons and halfway houses and in many, many ways made life much worse for Ohio's poorest and most vulnerable citizens. Yet if Young Johnny Entrepreneur invents a new caramel candy popcorn that rots our teeth and adds to the obesity problem and results in a million popcorn bags littering the countryside conservatives will praise him to high heaven if he hires another hundred people to help him corrupt our eating habits and mar the countryside even faster. Their ideological blinders make it impossible for them to see that not every government job is a bad one and not every private sector job is a good one. They're like the churchmen who refused to look at the moons of Jupiter through Galileo's telescope because they already knew the "truth" about the perfection of the heavens and were confident that anything they might see to the contrary was merely an illusion created by Satan to deceive them.)

----- Our ancestors lived through all these arguments about government before. In the process, they learned just how wrong, impractical, and counter-productive the conservative approach can be. After throwing off the shackles of British rule, they tried a loose confederation. When that didn't work, they embraced a stronger central government. After the horrors of monarchy, many states tried giving their legislators most of the power and the governors very little. When that didn't work, they gave the governors more power again. After the South seceded from a "tyrannical" federal government, it lost the Civil War - partly because the South had fewer resources but also because the South's ideological opposition to strong government left its various states unwilling to cooperate with each other on even the simplest and most crucial things, such as taxes and military command. It's no coincidence that those areas of the world with very weak or non-existent central governments (i.e., Somalia) are generally referred to as failed states rather than paradises. And it's sadly ironic that just as Europe has finally overcome centuries of internal power struggles and wars and forged an increasingly effective European Union, the US is fragmenting into factions, at least one of which revels in endless attacks on centralized power....


Yes, I'll be the first to admit that government power *can* be abused and that too much authority *can* be placed in too few hands. I'm old enough to recall the injustices perpetuated by an FBI run by an unassailable J. Edgar Hoover, a CIA that improper oversight allowed to evolve into a kind of international Murder, Inc., and a series of administrations that sent conscripted young people halfway around the world to napalm millions of peasants attempting to forge a new, post-Colonial society. And I'm well-educated enough to know that government has been used to conduct witch hunts, perpetuate discrimination, massacre Indians, crush the early promoters of the labor movement, and snuff out victimless crimes (among numerous other bad things). There's a big difference, however, between criticizing the obvious misuses of government and demonizing government itself. It's a difference all too many conservatives seem utterly ignorant of.

It's an ignorance that shades into absurd hypocrisy when these conservatives reveal themselves to be more likely to defend rather than condemn the past misuses of government power that I just listed....

When Did Government Become The Enemy?

As most readers of this blog probably already know, I'm best known online as an atheist who thinks the world would be a much better place without any theism or religion in it.

That's merely a small part of who I am, however.

Long before I decided to focus on religion, I was a rationalist who thought that the world would be a much better place without any meanness or stupidity in it. It wasn't until fairly recent times that I decided to focus on theism and religion in the belief that they act as the most potent conveyors and intensifiers of meanness and stupidity that I know of.

As I attempt to broaden my focus with this blog, it seems both natural and right that I address some of the other potent conveyors and intensifiers of meanness and stupidity that I've been neglecting in the recent past.

And of all the things here that I've been neglecting, perhaps the worst is politics.

Specifically, conservative politics.

The absurdities and hypocrisy and greed associated with conservative politics seems to often rival that of almost any religion one may care to name.

Is it a coincidence that conservative politics and religion often overlap? I don't think so.

And one of the big problems with both is that they don't merely hurt the people who embrace them but society as a whole.

I became acutely aware of the poisonous nature of religion when I started encountering people who were attempting to force their religious views on me in wildly inappropriate areas of life. I'd walk into an optician's office and the person on duty would start talking to me about Jesus. Or I'd go to the dentist and find Biblical quotes posted in places I couldn't avoid looking at while the dentist had me trapped in his chair. Or I'd be going down the road and a "Christian Plumbers" truck would pull up beside me. Madness was spreading, and virtually no one was objecting, let alone attempting to cure the afflicted.

The same sort of thing has been happening in recent years with conservative politics.

When my central air conditioning went bad about two years ago and had to be replaced, the companies I asked to come out and give me a quote almost all warned me how expensive it was going to be because of The Damned Government's demand that old style Freon be phased out.

When I've recently been out shopping for carpet, a new patio door, and other things, the clerks have warned me repeatedly about a new EPA requirement that all homes built before 1978 must have their paint checked for lead before any work is done. There's a $20 fee - oh horrors! Can you believe it?

When I've recently thought about replacing a garage door and asked a clerk about my options, the clerk snidely asked if the old door already had an electric eye as mandated by our nanny government. "Oh how did we ever get along before?!" (Insert Clerk Smirk here.)

When I recently had to consult my lawyer about an issue, he gratuitously said that the government almost never passes good laws - that it only mucks things up. He named one exception - which was something that allowed the rich to keep more of their riches.

At some point a tipping point was reached and I realized that I was dealing with a quasi-religious set of opinions that simply assumed everyone agreed and no one felt had to be proved.

The Government was the enemy, just like Satan was the enemy. To disagree was to risk being cast out as a heretic - or possibly as a demon.

At some point recently, all this went from being being amusing to being frightening....


First of all, The Government isn't some bloodless, mindless robot invader from Planet 9 and it isn't something that's been imposed on us by some invading army. WE are The Government. It is run by people who have been elected by us, and it is staffed by our neighbors and our relatives and our friends.

Second, these elected officials and staffers aren't evil beings out to make our lives as difficult as possible. The policies that are being formulated and put into practice are there for good reasons. Freon is bad for the environment. Old-style garage doors had a nasty tendency to crush children. Lead paint is bad and should be dealt with before another kid ends up with permanent brain damage just because we were too lazy or cheap to deal with it. If you think a society of laws is bad, try living in a society without laws!

Third, many of those who are now habitually attacking The Government day after day after day seem oddly selective and near-sighted in their attacks. They were oddly silent when Bush trashed Clinton's well-thought-out anti-terrorism plans and left us more vulnerable to a 9/11-style attack. They were oddly silent when Bush mismanaged two wars, leaving thousands dead and many more permanently disabled. They were oddly silent when Bush & Co. allowed Iraq's museums full of priceless ancient artifacts to be looted. And they were oddly silent when Bush cut taxes for the wealthy during wartime and the deficit exploded. (And of course they were oddly silent when just 5 members of the Supreme Court awarded Bush the presidency even though a clear majority of voters had preferred his opponent.)

Fourth, so much of conservative politics obviously revolves around selfishness and self-centeredness. The Government is Bad! But don't cut my Social Security check. The Government is Bad! But my son in the military needs to be paid more by it. The Government is Bad! But it ought to have the power to ban what I don't like, and listen in on the private conversations of those I fear, and prevent Those People from marrying, and deport those nasty foreigners. I could go on and on.

Fifth, there's a terrible blindness about the dangers of less government. Have people really forgotten what things were like when unelected robber barons had unchallenged power? When the meat plants were never inspected? When Dow Chemical could dump whatever it felt like dumping in the rivers and lakes we all drink from? When the quality of your retirement essentially depended on how wealthy your children turned out to be? Does anyone really want the insurance companies to decide the treatment we receive in the emergency room or the doctor's office? Does anyone really want to trust their lives to the accountants at Ford? Does anyone truly believe that Wall Street operates best when it self-regulates?

Sixth, so many of the spouters of harsh conservative anti-government rhetoric seem to have no realization that they're being played for fools by The Powers That Be - that their "grass roots" campaigns are being secretly funded by some of the richest people and corporations in the country for their own selfish reasons. These people and corporations do NOT have the best interests of society in mind when they pump millions into the campaigns of those who promise to slash their taxes and then look the other way while they further abuse their customers and others.

Bah!

I have sometimes tried to imagine the discomfort the most devout evangelicals would experience were they to actually come face-to-face with the Jesus they say they believe in.

I hope I live long enough to witness the discomfort of those poor Tea Party conservatives when they finally have to live under the type of government they insist is the best.

Boo!

And now for something completely different...

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday.

Over the years I've thought long and hard about why this might be the case. Here are some of the reasons I've come up with:

----- Most other holidays are either religious or national in character. As such, they're rather provincial and exclusionary. Halloween transcends limits rather than imposes them.

----- Most other holidays seem to impose themselves on me. There's little room for personal creativity. Halloween, in contrast, allows us to be as creative with our costumes and our decorations as we want to be.

----- Most other holidays insist that we be Christian or American or seriously thankful for our food or at least halfway appreciative of hard-drinking Irish buffoons - whatever. Halloween is the one holiday that frees us from ourselves. We get to choose to be whoever - or whatever - we want.

----- Halloween empowers us to go out into the often off-limits night in the mask of our choice and interact with strangers, whatever their class or race or religion or ethnic origins. In some ways, it seems to be the holiday that most closely links neighbors together and creates the illusion - if only for a few brief hours - that we're all in this together.

All of which is after-the-fact analysis, of course. One of the best things about Halloween is that it's about dressing up and getting treats and having fun - not anything weighty. If Halloween conveys any message at all, it seems to be little more than "Don't get caught by the psycho with the chainsaw!"

In fact, Halloween is so unserious, it even allows us to make fun of the most serious subjects of all - insanity, dismemberment, and death.

My only quarrel with the way we celebrate it is this: Some towns refuse to treat it with the respect it deserves and shift trick-or-treat hours from Oct 31 to more "convenient" times.

My own town - like many in central Ohio - told the treaters to make their rounds last night. Why? Well, because Friday this time of year is all about high school football, and Sunday is of course The Lord's Day, and Saturday night - well, I guess Saturday night belongs to the drunk drivers. The bottom line is that Halloween was officially observed days earlier than it should have been, and, well... that's just wrong.

Or maybe I should say that's just WRONG for all those people who believe in absolute morality.

I mean, really - would any town council declare December 28 to be New Year's Day? Would any community in all of Ohio take it upon itself to declare July 1 the best day to celebrate American independence because of a conflict with a golf tournament? Would Christians start celebrating Christmas on December 22 if their city leaders told them that was for the best? I doubt it. Why are we lovers of Halloween expected to just grin and bear it? Is it because people who dress up as clowns appear to be pushovers? Is it because little girls in princess outfits have yet to be granted the right to vote? You'd think things might be different in Chicago, where the dead have been known to vote early and often, but no - the cops there want us to limit our doorbell ringings and front porch beggings to daylight hours!

Ok, well, we are talking about Chicago. Maybe that's not such a bad idea. Still....

The sad fact is that it's only October 29 here and Halloween has already officially come and gone. *Sigh*

Maybe if I'd had more than ONE solitary treater come to my door last night, I'd feel differently. As it is, I already can't wait for next October. And the October after that! Heck, given the way Halloween went last night, I think I have enough candy for the next 100 or so Halloweens!

What do you think? Were my pumpkins too scary? Is that what kept the kids away?

Maybe next year I should carve a watermelon instead?