Requiem for Saint Louie

My best friend, like me, grew up all over the place—Cleveland, Maine, Detroit, and Fort Wayne. For the last ten years, however, he’s lived in Chicago. And in that time, he’s pretty much turned himself into Mr. Chicago. He’s not from there, but he identifies, body and soul, with the Windy City. 

I totally get this. We who were moved around a lot as kids lack the sense of security and identity that being rooted in one place brings. We do have a more cosmopolitan outlook, and we’re better able to deal with change, but the flip side is that we never really feel like we belong somewhere. Unless we make the conscious choice to do so.

I have a strange relationship with St. Louis, where I live. By all rights, I should feel rooted here. My mother’s family has lived here they left Russian Poland in 1889. I was born here. I’ve lived here since 1997. But I lack the definitive St. Louis experience: I did not go to high school here.

“Where’d you go to high school?” is the first question native St. Louisans ask. The answer allows the questioner to place you in your ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic strata. Depending on where you went to high school, you are instantly identified as Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish; your family is identified as rich, middle-class, or poor; your politics as Democratic or Republican; your ethnicity as German, Irish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Lebanese, or white trash.

Because I didn’t go to high school here, I just don’t feel like a real St. Louisan. But I’ve chosen to identify myself as such. And that’s a little depressing, because I live in a place that used to have a certain indefinable but unique quality about it, and which no longer does.

Back in the day, to be a St. Louisan meant that you had qualities and characteristics that people from other cities didn’t have. We had our own accent. We had our own style. We had our own swagger. We had cachet. Back when we weren’t St. Louis, but Saint Louie--a greasy old French whore sprawled on the swampy banks of the Big Muddy, neither north nor south nor east nor west--the spot where the drifters from all those directions and more ended up to make some fast and easy greenbacks by screwing over Indians, earnest-faced pioneers in coarse homespun on their way west in Conestoga wagons, beat-down Okies on their way north escaping the poverty of the Dust Bowl, and anyone else dumb enough to pass through. 

Being from Saint Louie was, in its own quirky way, special. There was a certain roguishness about being from Saint Louie—a sort of old-timey, savvy, hustlerish, hucksterish, high-rollin’, big city (but unmistakably Midwestern big city) shtick. It was a raffish “don’t’cha even think about fuckin’ with me, buster” attitude explained more eloquently than I ever could by Louis Armstrong’s rendition of “The St. Louis Blues.” Just listen to it—it’ll tell you what we used to have. It was what Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer had in mind when they wrote the musical “St. Louis Woman.” The St. Louis woman they had in mind was known, in the old days, as a tough broad; she liked her diamonds, her liquor, and her menfolks, and she weren’t none too partic’lar about how she got any of ‘em.

It was an attitude exemplified by Joseph Pulitzer’s bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred, “Golly gosh gee whillikers, take a gander at THIS, why don’t’cha!” style of journalism which he developed here (and then took to New York).

It was the kind of place that could spawn a legendary hoodlum like Stagger Lee, whose story has been sung by James Brown, Nick Cave, Taj Mahal, Memphis Slim, Bob Dylan, and about a zillion others. It occupied a unique place in American popular song as the place where bad people go and bad things happen. Tom Waits, that old connoisseur of the grungy and balladeer of the seamy side, mentions it more than any other place. Johnny Cash lost his woman there, as he followed her down the Big River. Tom Petty has been there, too, along with Brooker and Micanopy.  

Culinarily, it took the form of St. Louis-style ribs. Not being much of a meat eater, I had no idea what those actually were until I saw them on the menu of a restaurant in Vegas that described them as the “rich, meaty, center-cut of the rib—the Porterhouse Steak of ribs.” For some reason, I find that hilarious. Ribs are shit meat, but we had the Cadillac of the shittiest meat on the animal.

It was a place that could spawn characters. Characters like Morris Shenker, who was Jimmy Hoffa’s lawyer and the front owner of the Dunes in Vegas, and like Jimmy “Jack White” Licavoli, who became the boss of Cleveland’s mob. Characters like Josephine Baker and Tina Turner. It could generate genius cartoonists like Lee Falk (“The Phantom” and “Mandrake the Magician”) Elzie Segar (“Popeye”) (okay, he was actually from across the river in Illinois, but close enough) and Al Hirschfeld.


But no one bit of pop culture explains that indefinable quality that Saint Louie had better than the Warner Brothers cartoon where Bugs Bunny tells Yosemite Sam, “Hey, Sammy, there’s some lady at the door askin’ for ya. She said to mention Saint Louie.” Sam yells in glee, “Saint Louie? EMMA! YAHOO! HERE’S YOUR SAMMY BOY!” He runs to open the door, which, of course, Bugs has booby-trapped, blows himself up, and, covered in soot, mustaches burnt to a crisp, staggers around mumbling, “Yeah... same ol’ Emma... fulla laughs.”

See, that says it all. Saint Louie was that kind of town. It was known far and wide as a place where you got off the train or the riverboat to get shnockered on cheap hooch or on the beer that the Germans brewed here in quantities vast enough to fill the Mississippi, and blow your cash on three card monte, fancy high-falutin' duds, and fast women who would show you one hell of a time and then blow you to smithereens.

Mind you, Saint Louie wasn’t the only town in what’s now Flyover Land that had cachet. Memphis had it. Nashville didn’t. Toledo had it. Indianapolis didn’t. Detroit had it. Minneapolis didn’t. New Orleans had it, Mobile didn’t. Kansas City had it, but Omaha never had a chance. Cincinnati sort of had it, maybe a little, but Des Moines sure as hell didn’t.   

But now none of them has it. Now these great old towns are just a bunch of rotted-out inner cities surrounded by office park-ringed suburbs where everyone wears Polo, plays golf, and drives an SUV--anodyne, generic places based on how we think the American upper class lives, and completely interchangeable with any other suburb in the country. We’ve created, in the suburbs, a sort of meta-community for America’s transient middle-management class where they’ll feel comfortable no matter what city the corporation they work for sends them, because it'll look, and sound, and feel, just like the last place they lived.

And instead of raffish, roguish, raunchy ol’ Saint Louie, we now have teeth-grindingly banal, soulless, lily-white suburbs with vaguely Englishy sounding names (Marlborough. Town and Country. Manchester. Chesterfield. Blech.) where you can shop at the Gap or Borders and eat at the Cheesecake Factory after you buy a  lawnmower for your ridiculously huge yard at Home Depot. And there’s nothing to suggest that you live in the city that once gave the world Stagger Lee, Morris Shenker, or St. Louis-style ribs.

But there might be a glimmer of hope after all! Once again, in 2010, after losing it in 2007, St. Louis has regained the coveted Most Dangerous City in the United States Award from CQ Press. Suck on THAT, Camden, Detroit, Flint, and Oakland!

I'm only being half-facetious here. Maybe Nelly's on to something. Maybe just a hint of the spirit of Stagger Lee remains in the ghost of Saint Louie after all.

Whatever Happens, It's Your Fault, You Stupid Fat-Ass Lazy Americans! Except That's Not Actually True.

I’ve been thinking and reading about thought control quite a bit lately. It’s a fascinating subject, and there’s a lot of good literature out there on the topic, if you’re interested.

Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” is unbelievably illuminating. Ben Bagdikian’s “The [New] Media Monopoly” is a classic, as is Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's “Manufacturing Consent.” 

These thinkers, and many others like them, expose some uncomfortable truths:

• The American media is controlled by a very, very small group of corporations and the individuals who sit on their boards. In 2004, eight corporations—AOL Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, News Corp (which owns Fox News), Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann AG, and General Electric—and now, seemingly, NBC/Comcast—control more than 90% of the world’s mass media. This includes newspapers, television, radio, movies, books, and magazines. With the NBC/Comcast merger a fait accompli, it looks like Internet content will soon go this way as well.
• The people who own these corporations are not your friends. They aren’t necessarily your enemies, but they sure as hell aren’t your friends. They act in their own interests. Not yours. Rarely, if ever, do their interests overlap with yours.
• The corporations which control the media largely control the government as well, through campaign contributions, PACS, and lobbyist groups. And this is only going to get worse. Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision—in which all five Republican appointees voted out corporate limits on campaign spending, and all four Democratic appointees voted to keep them—corporations are only going to strengthen their control over government, media--and you.
• They work very hard to maintain their control over your mind, and have gotten very good at it. 
• Your options for limiting their control over your life are limited to precisely dick. 

Yes, I’m aware that it sounds pretty conspiracy theory-ish, but when you look at the evidence they lay out, it’s really kind of tough to disagree with.

One of the most pernicious elements of corporate thought control is what I call the “blame the public” strategy. We are constantly told, by our media, how much we suck. You don’t really notice it until you begin to look for it. But we, the American public, are subjected to a constant hammering away at our self-esteem. And once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere.

America is fat. America is unhealthy. America is dumb. Americans don’t vote. American kids are fat and unhealthy and being raised by television. American public education doesn’t work. Americans are a bunch of wastrel spendthrifts who run up their credit card debt buying junk they don’t need like boats and designer clothes, and then default on their mortgages, thus crashing the economy. 

Get the picture? Over and over and over, our news media hammer home the point that we’re a bunch of shmucks.

And just in case you missed the point when the news media made it, think about what we’re shown by “reality” TV. Think about the parade of horrific, subhuman imbeciles, whining jerkoffs, lowlifes, self-interested socialites, venal bitches, and certifiable lunatics who appear on “Jersey Shore,” “Hoarders,” “Wife Swap,” “The Real World,” “The Real Housewives of Atlanta/Orange County/Miami/New York,” "Intervention," "The Apprentice," or any of a billion other “reality” shows out there—or what are called reality shows in spite of the fact that they're about as far removed from actual reality as Never Never Land.

Reality TV is anything but. I don’t know anyone like the people on those shows. I’ll bet you don’t, either. But by calling it reality TV, our media tell us that what they’re showing us is the real America--and the real America is a shithole chock full of fat, self-indulgent, lazy, materialistic, and deluded asshats. It just hammers home the point that the news media already made.

The implication of this constant assault upon our collective self-esteem is, simply, this: the public is too stupid to govern itself. We need elites to do it for us. Because, you see, it’s all our fault. Whatever we suffer, it’s our fault. Whatever goes wrong, it’s our fault. Whatever ills America as a nation experiences, it’s our fault—the fault of the great unwashed bunch of stupid, fat, uneducated hillbillies that make up America. Not our friends, the corporations, who forced us into the messes we’re in now, oh God, no, not them. No, it’s our fault. Whatever happens, it’s the public who takes the blame for it.

Well, as my father rather pungently put it when I tried to make excuses for a lousy score on an algebra test, “Ah, fuck that noise.”

It’s about time to stop letting those cynical, mercenary, conscienceless pricks beat up on us. Let’s start turning over the rocks and looking at what REALLY lies beneath. Let’s look at what I’ve identified as the Big Four of Big Fucking Corporate Lies.

·                     BFCL #1:  The American public is a bunch of spendthrifts running up their credit card bills on shit they didn’t need and houses they couldn’t afford because they’re a bunch of materialistic asses, and in doing so brought on the Great Recession.

Oh, horseshit. That’s not the case at all. The single biggest cause of personal bankruptcies in this country isn’t because Dad bought a boat or because Mom bought an Ab Roller. The number one cause of personal bankruptcies in America is the cost of healthcare. Medical expenses. 

Our corporate media would have you believe that we’re a bunch of profligate Jones-keeper-uppers blowing everything on luxury items we don’t need. Don’t you believe it. We’re not buying boats. We're trying to keep up with the increased cost of living, the rising costs of healthcare and education, and all the skeevy stuff they put in the fine print of our mortgage agreements. And we're trying to do this on our pathetically puny salaries, because real wages have remained stagnant since the 1980’s, so we’re using our credit cards to do it. At 20-30% interest rates.

The sheer blatancy of the lie is infuriating. We’re not buying stuff we don't need. Most of us are lucky to be able to afford FOOD. Which brings me to...

·                     BFCL #2: Americans are fat and unhealthy because we’re lazy and sit around on the couch.

Again, horseshit. We’re the hardest-working people in the world. Americans put in more time at work than anyone else in the industrialized world, according to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization. And we’re not doing it because we’re workaholics. We’re doing it because we need to, just to afford the staples. We’re working harder than anyone else on the planet, and most of us are just scraping by. You tell me how much time or energy that leaves us for exercising.

Our eating habits do suck, I will give you that. But have you shopped for healthy, organic food lately? Been to Whole Foods in a while? Do you have any idea what it costs to buy food that isn’t genetically modified, packed with growth hormones, stuffed with carcinogenic preservatives, loaded with sodium, dripping with high-fructose corn syrup (or, as it used to be called, sugar), artificially flavored and colored, dyed, waxed, and otherwise stripped of any nutritional content except empty calories? 

The economy of scale of food production makes Twinkies and hot dogs cheaper than organic milk. Basically, the food producers save money by marketing garbage in vast quantities, with horrific effects, like child obesity and juvenile diabetes.

Kids in poverty are more likely to be obese than affluent kids. This is because food that’s bad for you is cheaper than food that’s good for you. Poor parents—who are likely working three jobs just to make ends meet, and who thus have no time to play with their kids, so they leave them at home in front of the television—spend their meager paychecks stocking up on cheap, calorie-filled food that will stave off hunger.

·                     BFCL #3: Greedy, mobster-infested unions ran good honest capitalist businesses into the ground, sending what used to be American jobs overseas.

Again, horseshit. American jobs went overseas because the capitalist sons of bitches who run them took them there in order to “remain competitive”, which is business-ese for "save a few zillion bucks for themselves." And again, this is an example of “blame the public." Because time was when a majority of American workers were union members—so the implication, pretty clearly, is, “It’s your fault, Americans. Your union membership resulted in your job loss.”

Unions didn't destroy American manufacturing. They built the American middle class. The right to collective bargaining is what gave us the eight hour workday, benefits, and enough money in our pockets that we COULD buy luxury goods, thus pouring a ton of money into the economy. You think it’s coincidence that the decline in Americans’ real wages and the decline in union membership began at the same time?

No one is saying that there weren’t abuses. No one is saying that occasionally unsavory characters didn’t find themselves in positions of union governance, and no one is saying that unions couldn't have used more effective and honest internal policing. But the facts are on my side—unions were good for the American people.

And finally...

·                     BFCL #4: Americans don’t vote, so we deserve what we get.

Well, okay, this one is actually true. American voter turnout is the lowest in the industrialized world—even in the presidential election of 2008 (which had the highest percentage of voter turnout ever), only 56% of registered voters actually did so.

But that begs the question, unasked in the mainstream media, of WHY Americans don’t vote.

Policy almost never reflects the wishes of the American public. Gay marriage is a good example. 67% of Americans favor it, but it's illegal in most states, and the federal government doesn’t recognize it. Marijuana legalization is another good example. Over 78% of Americans favor allowing doctors to legally prescribe dope, but federal laws still prohibit it. And healthcare reform? In poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly supported universal coverage and single-payer healthcare insurance... but look at what we ended up with.

Americans don’t vote because we know it doesn’t make one goddam bit of difference. First, we don't have political options. We can choose the slightly more moderate pro-business party, or we can choose the crazy-assed right-wing pro-business party. And secondly, whichever party we choose, we know policy will not reflect our national wishes. Policy will reflect the agenda of the corporations who control our elected officials and our media.

Tragically, without armed revolution, there’s probably no way to overturn the unholy threeway circle-jerk collusion between the paid hacks and shills in our media, the whores in our government, and the corporations who control them both. But at least we don’t have to keep believing the lies they tell us about ourselves.

Deconstructing the Atheists

When we are casting about for reasons to believe in something--anything--it's a natural inclination to find what people who are smarter than we are believe and go with that. 

This is totally natural. Homo Sapiens is a social animal. This is what social animals do. The strongest lead the herd, or the pack, or the flock. It also makes pretty good sense. We do this on a daily basis, and we do it for good reasons. When we're in trouble with the law, we go to a lawyer, because lawyers know more about the law than we do. When we're sick, we go to doctors, because they know more about our bodies than we do. When we're doing our taxes, we go to accountants, because they live, eat and breathe that stuff. 

Thus, it's only natural that, when we start grappling with what Bill Maher, one of my heroes, calls the Big Questions, we should seek out the opinions of people who are smarter than we are. And since lots of really, really smart people--Oxford biologists, neuroscientists, brilliant polemicists, etc.--are atheists, lots of people jump on that bandwagon. 

But way too few of us think about the atheists themselves. Many people don't really consider their arguments seriously, or think about why they're atheists, or even if they're atheists at all. 

My own personal Really Smart Herd Leader is Noam Chomsky. He's someone whose towering intellect and moral authority captivates me. If we need a Herd Leader to follow, he strikes me as a pretty good one. I probably like Noam Chomsky better than a straight man ought to love any other dude. 

Chomsky appears on the Celebrity Atheist lists a lot, and there's no doubt he's one of the leading lights of secular humanism. Certainly nothing that he's ever said would lead anyone to think he's religious in the least, or believes in God (which are two different things altogether, as I've argued in a previous post). 

But Chomsky is a linguist. The greatest one who ever lived. And he is, thus, more attuned to the subtleties and nuances of language than probably anyone before or since. And he is very, very cagey about whether or not he's actually an atheist. When asked, his stock answer is, "I don't even know what an atheist is. Can't answer the question, I'm afraid. What is it that I'm not supposed to believe in? Until you can answer that question, I can't tell you whether I'm an atheist, and the question doesn't arise." 

Furthermore, Chomsky, as a recent profile in the New Yorker pointed out, is "ambivalent about evolution. He is enough of a conventional scientist to acknowledge its power as an explanation for most biological phenomena, but he resists applying it to language." 

Which is not to say that he believes in the six days of Creation. But it may indicate that he allows for more possibilities than the godless, random, unguided process that atheists think evolution is. And Chomsky, who possesses one of the most incisive brains ever to grow in a human skull, is no fan of what's called, "The New Atheism", the flurry of books and articles by Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, et. al. 

"I'm not impressed with it, frankly," he says. "And I don't think they address the concerns, feelings and commitments of seriously religious people. Yes, they do address the concerns of people who think the world was created ten thousand years ago, but they're not going to listen to these arguments -- not in the arrogant form in which they are presented. I don't join the New Atheists. So, for example, I wouldn't have the arrogance to lecture some mother who hopes to see her dying child in heaven -- that's none of my business ultimately. I won't lecture her on the philosophy of science."

Now, this may have something to do with the long and rather nasty feud between Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens, one of the arch-apostles of the New Atheism. But upon parsing his statements, it appears that Chomsky isn't completely sold on a purely materialistic universe--or at least not on that idea's leading proponents. 

Having found a really smart Intellectual Herd Leader who, regardless of whatever his carefully-guarded true feelings on the subject are, has given us a little room to doubt the True Believers of the New Atheism, let's look at the atheists themselves just a little more closely. 

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and it's evolution that he says led him to dismiss the idea of the existence of God altogether. See, Darwinism explains the process. It removes the need for God as an explanation for life. God, as an explanation, is obsolete. Thus, Darwinism, according to Dawkins, is a sort of gateway drug to full-blown atheism. Which is kind of a dumb argument, in my mind, because knowing how a thing works doesn't make the fact that it does work any less cool. Or fascinating. Or miraculous. As a matter of fact, the more I read about evolutionary biology, the more convinced I am that there might just be something behind the process, guiding the process, or at least having put the right processes into play for the process to take place. 

Why do I believe this? Odds and math, mostly. The basic tenet of Darwinian evolution is that random mutations occur. Every so often, those random mutations result in something good, something that better adapts the creature to its environment. That creature, thanks to the random mutation that made it just that much better than its siblings, lives longer and breeds more often. Its descendants, thus, outperform the competition. 

Okay, that's fine. But life on earth, cosmically, hasn't been around for very long. And most mutations aren't particularly helpful. They don't help the creature survive. Think of Down Syndrome. Or albinism. So the odds are against random evolution from the start. 

Even if a creature is born with a helpful, rather than a harmful, mutation, the odds are still pretty slim that it'll survive. Imagine if a baby snake is born with, oh, I don't know, x-ray vision. Yes, that x-ray vision might help it survive longer than its siblings. But a hawk could still swoop down on supersnake from behind, thus eating that helpful mutation before it's had a chance to outbreed its brothers and sisters. And just think about how many useful mutations, which occurred against the odds, never really helped their owners. 

So. For life on earth to have experienced so very many helpful mutations as to account for the mindboggling complexity we see around us every day in such a very, very short time seems, well, pretty far-fetched. 

If you don't believe me, ask Robert Bakker, paleontologist, author of the Dinosaur Heresies, and the first guy who thought up the idea that dinosaurs might have been warm-blooded, and that they're still around--they're just called birds today. Brilliant evolutionary scientist, and an ordained pastor, too. 

Explaining evolution doesn't necessarily get rid of God. As Lawrence Krauss, the only physicist to have won the top awards from all three major U.S. physics societies, says, "Evolution, as a scientific theory, says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God. It doesn't yet address the origin of life, either, but instead deals with the mechanics of how the present diversity of species on earth evolved." 

Essentially, for Richard Dawkins to say that he's an atheist because the Garden of Eden never existed is a little like saying that if George Washington never chopped down the cherry tree, he never existed either. It's a cute, but flawed, argument. Just because we get rid of some childish misconceptions about stuff doesn't mean that the stuff doesn't exist. Well, so much for Dawkins. On to Hitchens. 

Christopher Hitchens is certainly a bright guy, and I hope he recovers from his esophageal cancer. He's a truly amazing polemicist, he can argue like nobody's business, and I have the greatest respect for both the breadth of his knowledge and his ability to articulate it and argue it. His book "God Is Not Great," is one of those ziggurats of the New Atheism, right up there with Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Harris's "Letter to a Christian Nation." But the subtitle is revealing: "How Religion Poisons Everything." 

Hitchens' major argument for being an atheist is that religion sucks. I won't argue with him that it sucks. It needs to go away, and the sooner the better. But the fact that religion sucks really doesn't address the question of whether God exists or not. That's a little like saying that because tobacco company executives are evil sons of bitches that deserve to be put up against a wall and shot, there's no such thing as tobacco. Tobacco, in the wild, is a nice plant that serves its purpose in the ecosystem very well. It's only how it's used that makes it evil. 

Sorta like God, really. 

But looking at Hitchens a little more closely might reveal something not about whether God exists or not, but about why Hitchens is so obsessed with this topic. 

Christopher Hitchens came to maturity as part of the Sixties Generation. He was an extremely passionate leftist, a Marxist of the Trotskyite persuasion, and he, like so many others of his generation, had a very strong sense of mission. The world is screwed, and we're going to fix it by any means necessary. I'm sure he was an atheist in those days, but it was part and parcel of his Marxism, secondary to the social struggle, and he wasn't really all that out there about it. 

And then came the shift. Christopher Hitchens broke with the Left. In 2001, he said that he could no longer call himself a socialist. He got into very public scraps with Gore Vidal, the Labour Party, and Noam Chomsky, among others. He threw his support behind George W. Bush and the War in Iraq. Essentially, he took a major lurch to the right. It is with the death of Hitchens the political radical that Hitchens the Professional Atheist emerges. 

I don't think Christopher Hitchens ditched the left out of selfish motives. I think he did it out of conviction. I disagree with him, and as a radical Leftist, I'm sorry to see him go, but I'm not about to question the integrity of his motives for doing so. 

But his life-defining purpose was gone, thus leaving him kind of hollow. I can sympathize with him. When I left grad school after getting my M.A. in Russian Lit, having realized that I was not going to go for a Ph.D, it really threw me into a tailspin resulting in a pretty serious depression. So much of my identity had been tied up in my academic life that when I no longer had it, it really pulled the rug out from under me. I think the same thing happened to Christopher Hitchens. With no more sacred calling--no more mission--I think he fixated on the one remaining aspect of his Marxism that he still believed in--its atheism--and decided to make that his new cause. 

I'm not advocating for religion. I'm not defending it. I like Dawkins and Hitchens both a lot. I've read their stuff and will continue to do it, and I hope more people take their words to heart. Not necessarily because we need more atheists, although it couldn't hurt, but because we need more doubt. Doubt is good stuff. And while I don't agree with their atheism, I do support their work, because we need them. Humanity in general, and America specifically, needs people who will cast doubt on what we believe, whatever it is.

What To Say to Opponents of Universal Healthcare.

I don't have television. When the rest of the world went digital, my family decided not to. We still have a set, but all it really does is play my daughter's Dora videos and my son's Dinosaur Train DVDs. It's been good for us, but I will admit, there are times I miss TV. And for those times, God, in Her Infinite Wisdom, has given us... YouTube. 

That's where I catch up on RealTime with Bill Maher. Who is rapidly becoming one of my personal heroes. 

One of his recent topics was Vermont's single-payer healthcare plan. You can watch it here. Of course, the comparison to Europe's "socialized medicine" national healthcare plans came up, and one of his guests, Doug Heye, former Communications Director for the Republican National Committee, responded by saying, "Yeah, but when Europeans need surgery, they come over here." 

As they always do. As they always, always, ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS do. 

Every time the word "healthcare" is mentioned around a Republican/Conservative/Teabagger or whatever the hell they want to call themselves this week--every single time, without fail--they ALWAYS respond by saying, "Yeah, but every time a Canadian/European/[insert inhabitant of a civilized country here] needs surgery, they come here." Every time someone mentions Euro-style universal healthcare, their answer is, "Yeah, but they come here to have surgery." You could set your watch by it. 

And liberals never, ever, ever, ever, EVER have the right answer. Even Bernie Sanders, socialist Senator from Vermont, who was one of Maher's guests that night (and who is also a personal hero of mine), dropped the ball and flubbed the answer. "You're right," Bernie said, "they do. If they're rich." 

Which is the wrong answer. 

The right answer is, "So goddam what? Precisely what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? What the hell difference does that make? What's your point?" 

What the Republicans do better than anything else is blow smoke and confuse the issue. That's what they do. They are masters of the art of sleight of hand, bait and switch, the strawman, and conflating the real issues. You mention tax breaks for the wealthy, they throw up abortion. You mention healthcare, they throw up gay marriage. And the Democrats, and the American people, always fall for it. We always fall for the red herring. 

The truth is that the answer, "Yeah, but the Euros always come here for surgery," bears as much relevance to the debate as would saying, "Yes, but fish live under water!" to my contention that the sky is blue. The fact that Europeans come here for surgery is completely irrelevant to the debate over whether we should have universal healthcare. 

The right answer is that yes, the United States DOES have the most advanced medical technology in the world. That is absolutely beyond debate. Assuredly we do. There are two very good reasons for this. 

1. We're the richest country in the world. Or we used to be. And, having lots of money and being terrified of death, we've thrown tons of money behind medical research. 

2. We have the most extensive university system in the world--thanks to the land-grant university program in the 19th century, which was, by the way, a government initiative--and thus we have built up a critical mass of research institutions. 

Pretty simple. Lots of money, government-built and -funded universities. It should be patently obvious why we have the most advanced medical technology in the world. 

But the fact that we have the most advanced medical technology in the world says absolutely NOTHING about the method of delivery. It's apples and oranges. The real question to throw at a conservative, the next time he or she makes this totally spurious argument, is, "Precisely how would enacting universal healthcare or going with a single-payer option jeopardize medical research? How would that make any difference?" 

The simple answer is that it wouldn't. Has nothing to do with it. 

We, in America, could have had the best of both worlds. We could have had the world's most advanced medical technology, and we could have given it away for free to everyone who needs it. Instead, we let corporate greed and corporate control of our political process--as well as our own inability to address illogic with logic--ruin it for all of us. 

Pathetic.

Why Religion Has To Go Away.

I've mentioned it before, but my mother is a born-again Christian. She wasn't raised particularly religious. And she didn't get religion until she'd had seven late-term miscarriages, and one son who swallowed merconium--or however you spell it--and died two days later. 

I think I ended up with his name. My father wanted a junior, as I am, and my older brother is buried under a name that no one in our family had. His name, as it says on the gravestone, is John. We never had a John. We had Josephs, Louises, Alexanders, Edwards, Chaims, Richards, Wolfs, Georges, and Oscars on one side. We had Jameses, Willards, Franks, and Howards on the other side. But no Johns. So I think after he died, they changed the name so that my dad could pass on his name to a kid that might actually live. 

For someone who only lived two days, Dead Kid--as I came to think of him, since his name in all likelihood wasn't John, and I'm too creeped out to call him by his real name, which is mine--exerted a hell of a presence in our family. My mother, understandably, was extremely overprotective, and when my (surviving) brother and I bucked against this, she'd bark, "I've already lost one son. Think I want to lose another?" 

I thought about Dead Kid a lot and wondered what it would have been like if I'd had a big brother, which, at some point in our lives, we all want. God knows I did. 

Every year, we'd go to visit the gravestone. It's a kind of communal gravestone. My grandparents, great-grandparents, two maiden aunts, and Dead Kid are all under it, so we'd take rocks to put on the gravestone, and flowers (so that presumably the dead people could enjoy them). My mother would talk to her dead relatives, which spanned three generations, and we'd all pray or sing a hymn or two, and then she'd touch Dead Kid's engraved name and say, in a choked voice, "I'll see you again someday, honey. I'll see you again." 

Which was kind of touching and really disturbing at the same time. 

After I had my own kid, I understood a little better. My kid also swallowed intrauterine shit during the birth process, but thirty-four years later, it wasn't really a big deal. She made it just fine. But it was still scary as hell, and when the doctor said, "Looks like she swallowed a little," I shrieked from somewhere deep in my childhood, "My God, that's what killed my brother!" 

Losing eight kids probably pushed my mother into the arms of Jesus. She's not a strong woman. She's notorious for not dealing with stuff. She just pushes what she doesn't like out of her mind and pretends that it doesn't exist. Turning to a belief system that told her that Dead Kid was still out there somewhere and that she'd be reunited with him some day was understandable. And it undoubtedly helped her deal with a trauma that otherwise could have sent her into the nuthouse. 

So I get religious faith. I understand wanting to have it. I understand the need that it fills, and the comfort that it brings. Trust me, I get it. 

But we shouldn't have it, any more than an alcoholic should have a shot of Jack or a diabetic should have a Pixie Stick. It may bring comfort, but it's dangerous, and, ultimately, harmful. For two reasons. 

The first reason is that it requires you to stop thinking. 

Yes, yes, yes, before the masses of nonexistent readers of this blog protest, I know there are plenty of intellectual religious believers. And I know that massive amounts of brainpower have been spent in apologetics--trying to explain and rationalize religious faith, and make it okay to have it. The Talmud is nothing if not a massive exercise in apologetics, and it takes a hell of a lot of thought and brainpower to get through it. Augustine, Maimonides, Calvin, Rashi, the Rashbam, the Vilner Gaon, and in our own time, C.S. Lewis, John Lennox, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Adin Steinsaltz--these people are no intellectual slouches. I admit that. 

But I stand my my original point. Regardless of all the brainpower that's gone into making religion both intellectually palatable and respectable, at the most basic and fundamental level, having religious faith requires you to stop thinking. It requires you to stop using what makes you human. It requires you to stop using your reason. Your rationality. Your goddamned basic common sense. It requires you to turn off that thing in your head that would tell you I was nuts if I told you I had a pet unicorn. 

See, the basic premise of Christianity is something I once saw on a postcard or a tee shirt or somewhere and liked it so much I memorized it: 

"Christianity is the belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you telepathically tell him that you want him to be your master, so that he can remove a dark force from your soul that's been present in humanity ever since a talking snake with legs told a woman who used to be part of someone else's skeleton and who lived in a magical garden where lions and crocodiles were vegetarians to eat a piece of fruit from a magical tree." 

Now, you can parse that. Explain that. Talk about how it's only meant to be an allegory (although plenty of people take it literally). Or spend a lot of money to build a Creation Museum in Cincinnati that proves that this is actually the way it happened. Or spend a lot of money to fund pseudoscientists like Duane Gish so that they can (unconvincingly) cast doubt on what real scientists tell us. Sure, you can do all of that. 

But the fact remains that the basic premise is bug-fucking batshit crazy. And Islam and Orthodox Judaism are no better (Reform Judaism at least acknowledges the crazy part, and deals with it by excising it from the faith).

Essentially, having and maintaining religious faith requires you to believe in something that is bug-fucking batshit crazy, and to believe in it for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You just gotta take it on faith, brother. 

And, see, that's dangerous. Because once you've made that leap--once you're willing to suspend your common sense enough to believe that nonsense--then it becomes a lot easier to believe a lot of other insane stuff. 

Like, for example, that Jews kill Christian children to make bread out of their blood. Or that a black person's life is worth inherently less than a white person's life. Or that, contrary to overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, the Earth's climate is not changing, and that even if it is, we humans have nothing to do with it. Or that massive amounts of petroleum-based pollutants have nothing to do with the epidemics of autism and cancer now devastating the population. Or that someone who cannot name a single Supreme Court case might actually be qualified to be President of the United States of America. 

Now, contrary to what the douchebag right-wing corporate flunkies out there--the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Palins, the Savages, the Levins, the Coulters, the Bachmanns, the O'Donnells, all the rest of the whores--say, and contrary to the effete and sissified liberal commentators out there who say, "Everyone's viewpoint deserves a fair hearing, and everything's relative," these are not matters of opinion. They aren't even matters of politics. Reasonable people can disagree on politics. These are matters of life and death. They are matters of survival. Because when some people are willing to believe crazy stuff for no reason at all, other people get hurt and other people die. 

You think it's any coincidence that McCain and Palin had overwhelming support from evangelical Christians? Nope. See, they'd already put calluses on their critical thinking faculties by accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior. After that, accepting Sarah Palin as a viable possible occupant of the most powerful office in human history was a cakewalk. 

The second reason why religious faith is dangerous is because it absolves us of any responsibility for either our own actions or for the future. 

It'd be nice to believe that someday, Jesus is coming back to throw all the bad guys into a lake of fire and turn the whole world into a paradise where cigarettes grow on trees and we can all eat marshmallow frappe all day long without having to worry about tooth decay or diabetes and where my mother will get to see Dead Kid again. It's a lovely story. Who wouldn't want to believe it? 

But it's insidious as hell. What believing that tells you is that we don't need to take care of our planet, because, after all, Jesus is coming back to make it all better. We don't need to learn how to get along with each other and get rid of our nukes because, after all, that's not how Jesus is going to end the old planet so he can bring in the new one. We don't need to invest in science or free medicine from its dependence upon corporate funding because, after all, Jesus gonna make it all better. 

And besides, even if we DO die, we'll just go to heaven anyhow and get to paradise a little sooner than the rest of you. Like Dead Kid. Lucky little fucker. He gets to party with the angels, and I'm stuck here having to make a living. Some people get all the breaks. 

Well, if you believe that, I can't prove you're wrong. You might even be right. If that's how it all works out, I'll be the first to admit that I was wrong (and maybe if I kiss enough ass, Jesus won't be too mad about all the mean things I said about him). But it's a hell of a gamble, isn't it? Essentially, you're playing Russian roulette with all the known life in the universe. 

And there is no indication--none--in human history--or in the history of life itself--that you're right. 

The fact of the matter is that we're on our own. We, not an imaginary friend in the sky, are responsible for our own destiny. It's on our shoulders, not Jesus's, whether we live or die. Whether our species continues or whether we go out in a blaze of atomic smoke or choke to death on our own poison or drown in the runoff of the polar icecaps that we melted because we just couldn't give up cheap oil. 

I'm not an atheist, but it's a hell of a lot safer and saner to live like one.