There Is No Goddamned Frog In The Water.

Want to know if someone’s nuts? Well, I have an absolutely infallible test. It works every time. It is, I guarantee you, 100% accurate.

1. Engage test subject in conversation.
2. Bring up the topic of politics.
3. Listen carefully. If they ever, ever, ever use the words “slippery slope,” “frog in the water,” “thin end of the wedge,” “foot in the door,” or any other phrase describing the concept of gradual desensitization and infiltration by sinister forces, back away slowly and call 911. 

Because the person to whom you are speaking is completely, utterly, probably irredeemably and incurably bug-fucking, stark-raving bonkers. 

The whole concept of the “slippery slope” is one that I wish I could rip out of the collective American psyche, and I wouldn’t be gentle about it, either. I’d carve it out with a scalpel. Or, failing that, a chainsaw. I say “American,” because I genuinely do not believe that any other nationality out there—with the possible exception of the Germans in 1933—is as susceptible to such an asinine concept as we Americans. Frankly, I can’t understand why we are. We’re not stupid. If we were, we wouldn’t be as successful as we are. But for some reason, we’re suckers for the “Frog in the Water” idea. 

The concept, by the way, is utter bullshit. And let me tell you why. Because it implies the existence of a baleful and malevolent conspiracy.

Whenever anyone uses any of the phrases denoting the concept, it implies that there actually is a sinister group of people out there who have a Master Plan. And they’re working in concert to delude the public into quietly going along with this sinister Master Plan, not noticing anything, until BAM... it’s too late and we're all fucked. Gotcha. 

That’s Conspiracy Theory. Plain and simple. And Conspiracy Theory, regardless of who the purported conspirators are*, is insane. As is anyone who believes it. Conspiracy Theory is invariably wrong because it's based on two faulty premises: one, that human beings are smart enough to come up with a Grand Plan. And two, that they have the discipline to stick with it long enough to actually accomplish it.

You show me one successful conspiracy in the history of humankind. Just one. French Revolution? Don’t make me laugh. Russian Revolution? Nazi Revolution? Establishment of the State of Israel? Not one of those was a conspiracy. The conspirators, such as they were, were pretty damn open about what they planned to do. Adolf Hitler published a book detailing precisely what it was he had in mind. So did Theodor Herzl. The Bolsheviks published newspapers. Not just one, a whole bunch of them. So did the Jacobins.

I’d also point out that every one of those undertakings was riven with dissent. Far from being pulled off by a tightly unified band of conspirators, most revolutionary undertakings lurch wildly back and forth, tugged hither and yon by those who hold one opinion and those who hold others, and when the event DOES actually take place, it’s usually by accident.

And when it does happen, it shocks the living shit out of the people who were trying to get it to happen. We’ll never know now, but I bet you dollars to doughnuts that after the Twin Towers were hit, no one was more surprised than Osama. 

Americans, however, buy conspiracy theory hook, line and sinker. I’m truly not sure why this is. I suspect it’s because that, with all the flaws in its execution since 1776 and our tendency toward oligarchy, we were the first actual working democracy since Athens. And deep down, we actually want someone to be running our lives for us.

Whatever the reason, Americans on both sides of the political divide are equally susceptible to the Froggie in the Water Fallacy. And cynical operators on both sides of the political divide shamelessly, and disgustingly, exploit the gullibility of their fellow Americans. Here are three examples.

Boiled Toad One: Gun Control Will Land You in ObamAuschwitz.

The boiled toad here is a pretty simple one. If we let those Comm’nist Faggot Lib’rals exercise one, even jest oooooooooone lil’ ol’ lim’tation on our God-given, Sec’nd ‘Mendment guar’nteed rights to defend ourselves, they’ll take our guns away and force us into FEMA-run concentration camps!

Okay, this is just horseshit that flies directly in the face of common sense. Anyone who’s ever watched “Swamp People” knows how deeply ingrained guns are in American culture. And, at the risk of horrifying my fellow Liberals (and go fuck yourselves anyhow. I’m not a Liberal. I’m a goddamned fire-breathing dyed-in-the-wool full-fledged fire-breathing Radical. I spit on your pansy-assed Liberalism), that’s probably not a bad thing.

I’m not saying that we need guns. But we have them, and, properly taught, used, and regulated, I don’t see why we shouldn’t. We have cars. They kill more people than guns do every year, by a very wide margin. And if, God forbid, someone ever pulls the Giant Plug at the North Pole and we lose electricity forever (as I firmly believe will happen), we might very well need to shoot our own food and defend ourselves. Or if the Zombie Apocalypse ever happens (as I firmly believe will happen), we’ll need something besides a baseball bat to kill those undead sons of bitches.

Exhibit A for why we shouldn't (completely) outlaw guns. Besides, you  don't need Teflon-coated cop-killer bullets to kill a zombie. That's just overkill. 

Fact is, no matter how you feel about them, we’re just never, ever going to get rid of them, and I for one don’t think we should.

However.

My brother is a self-described gun nut. He has a Glock 9, a sawed-off shotgun, and an AK-47. He likes to buy produce—watermelons, cantaloupes, muskmelons, anything big enough to draw a bead on, really—and go out in the desert (he lives in Vegas) and shoot them. And he’ll be the first one to tell you that he shouldn’t have them. “I don’t need an assault rifle, JP,” he tells me. “And I definitely shouldn’t be able to waltz right into a gun shop in Vegas, and five minutes later, walk out with one of these things.”

Outlawing Teflon-coated, armor-piercing cop-killer bullets, 50-round magazines, and assault rifles will not, regardless of what those black-hearted fuckers at the NRA tell you, result in Uncle Buddy’s hunting rifle being taken away by the jackbooted Gestapo-thugs of our Kenyan-born president. Nor will having to wait for two weeks while A) you’re sobering up, cooling down, or being forced to actually think for a minute before you do something stupid, and B) a nice thorough background check to determine whether you’re the kind of person who can responsibly handle a gun is conducted.

The Brady Bill wasn’t about taking your guns away. It was about making you wait a bit before you actually got your hands on one. It wasn’t part of a sinister conspiracy, it was common sense. But you’d never guess that judging by the fuss the NRA jackoffs kicked up. And they convinced us that this was, cue the ominous music and the deep, sinister voice, “Just the beginning, muah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!”

And instead of the cooling off period, we got Gabrielle Giffords, her staffer, and a nine year old girl. Dead. Because some fucking conspiracy-crazed nutjob who shouldn’t have been able to buy a screwdriver got his hands on an assault rifle with a magazine big enough to wipe out a small town. 

Boiled Frog Two. Abortion.

I just happen to be pro-life. I’ll explain why, with all the nuances and subtleties of my thoughts on the subject, in a subsequent blog post, God willing and the creek don’t rise. But in spite of the fact that I do consider a fetus to be a person—kind of, sort of—I don’t think that ought to seriously compromise my contention that late-term partial birth abortion is a completely fucking barbaric and disgusting process that ought to be outlawed.

But just try mentioning this in the circles in which I generally move, and you’d think I’d suggested that black people ought to be rounded up and sent back south to pick cotton.

“How dare you!” my fellow Progressives gasp in horror, their glasses of shiraz trembling in their hands. “Why... how DARE you! Take away a woman’s right to choose? Why, you... you Christian!”

Well, I’m not a Christian. Nor am I suggesting that Roe v. Wade be overturned. Nor do I think abortions ought to be outlawed—not for the first trimester, anyhow. I’m all about a woman’s right to choose. But Jesus... come on. Partial-birth abortion is, plain and simple, monstrous. And outlawing it is not, once more for emphasis, NOT, going to result in Roe v. Wade being overturned. Nor is it going to result in women being stripped of their rights to higher education, the vote, and to screw whomever, whenever, and however, they want. Outlawing the messy slaughter of a viable human being by sawing its head off and sucking its brains out—and yes, I’m sorry, that’s precisely what the procedure entails. Call a spade a damned spade—will not result in the end of reproductive freedom. It just isn’t.

And yet, once again, the alarmniks exploit Americans’ tendency toward conspiracy theory by boiling toads and summoning up the bogeyman of the Patriarchy and its gruesome attendants from Al Qaeda country—Honor Killings, Clitorectomies, and Forced Child Marriage.

Again, can we take off the tinfoil hat, exercise a little common sense, and admit that there’s no slippery slope in the offing?

Boiled Toad Three: The Sticky Icky Icky Will Reduce Your Life to a Bit Part in “Spun.”

For Christ’s sake, let’s legalize dope already. Go Green. Free Mary Jane. Smoke Up. Embrace Buddah-ism. Admit the Need for Weed. Pack the pipe, fire up the bong, spark the bowl, flame on fattie, anoint the joint, admit Cheech and Chong Ain’t Wrong, and let’s... just... legalize... dope.

And to any nitwits—and yes, that’s what you are—on the other side who oppose it, the facts are in.

1. Marijuana has not been linked to any health hazards. It’s not a neurotoxin, like alcohol (which is legal). It doesn’t contain carcinogens, like tobacco (which is legal).
2. No one has ever overdosed on marijuana. Because it’s not possible.
3. There is no evidence—none whatsoever—that marijuana is, in any way, a gateway drug.
4. Marijuana is really, really good for you if you have cancer. Or glaucoma. Or any of a number of other horrific diseases.

Face facts, folks. MJ is good stuff. It’s a hell of a lot better for you than liquor, for example. It’s better for society. When’s the last time you ever heard of anyone getting elevated and going home to beat their wife and kids? When’s the last time you heard of a broken-bottle fight breaking out at a Phil Lesh and Friends concert? When’s the last time you heard of a carful of teenagers wrapping itself around a telephone pole because the driver’d been toking?

It simply doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t.

Our asinine drug policy is what keeps our prisons full, putting zillions of your tax dollars into the hands of private corporations (who hire lobbyists to keep MJ illegal so that they can KEEP the prisons full, and thus charge your elected representatives more of your money. Sorry if that sounded conspiracy-theoryish. But it’s true).

It’s what finances the drug lords who sell the actual bad stuff, like heroin, crack, and crystal meth.

It drains our local, state, and federal governments of much-needed money that’s used to fight a “drug war,” and deprives them of a potential fuckload of tax revenue.

It actually makes it easier for kids to get it, not harder. I’m serious about that. Every high school kid in America knows a dealer. Hell, at the age of 40, I know three of them. Every kid in America, regardless of whatever school he or she attends, can get his or her hands on a dimebag in a New York minute. Alcohol, on the other hand, is a hell of a lot tougher to get. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have such timeless comedies as “Superbad” and “Teen Wolf.” Alcohol is tougher to get for one simple reason: it’s legal. And, thus, regulated. Which means that, instead of visiting my Uncle Louie of blessed memory, olov hasholem, him being the guy who knew how to brew his own beer, make his own wine, and triple-distill his own slivovitz, Michael J. Fox and McLovin had to go to a liquor store. Where they got carded. And cinematic hilarity and hi-jinks ensued.

But just let any elected official except Ron Paul say, “Oh, fuck it, let’s just legalize it already,” and here come the Toad Boilers in full force, shrieking that said elected official is probably Pablo Escobar’s bitch, and that legalizing dope is the First Step toward Hooking Our Kids On Hard Drugs and the Dissolution of Traditional Society and Probably The End of Civilization, and that From Legalizing Dope, It’s Only About Three Inches Down the Slippery Slope Toward Armageddon!

God Almighty. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if we could shake off our collective psychosis, take off our collective tinfoil hat, and say, “You know what, there really isn’t a Slippery Slope behind Door #3. We have common sense. We have the ability to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and lunatics without hacking the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights. We have the ability to legalize, regulate, and control a completely non-toxic substance without putting a crack pipe in the mouth of every toddler in America. And we have the ability to stop a truly horrifying process without chaining every woman to a stove while her husband beats the shit out of her, don’t we? Really? Don’t we?”

But that would entail actually using that common sense. And really, it’s just so much easier—and let’s admit it, more fun and profitable—to believe that the Bad Guys are secretly in control, pulling the puppet strings. Just ask that certifiable nutcase and conspiracy theorist Mel Gibson. He actually got a pretty good movie out of believing in Conspiracy Theory.

    

---

* Some of the more popular include the Jews, the Freemasons, the Jesuits, the Rosicrucians, the Liberals, the atheists, Bolsheviks, Evangelicals, homosexuals, the Gnomes of Zurich, Al Qaeda, Zionists, the CIA, the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Bavarian Illuminati, aliens... there are simply too many to count. And they’re all baloney. Except for the Oil Lobby. Now that’s a REAL conspiracy. 

Incontrovertible Proof That Sarah Palin Is A Slightly More Bangable Version of Genghis Khan.

For some strange reason that I still, twenty years later, do not fully understand, I, after college, went to graduate school to study Russian Literature. This was perhaps the stupidest decision ever made. It turned me into the least salable person on the planet.

            Nonetheless, incorrigible optimist that I am, I don’t (entirely) regret it. Studying Russian stuff at least got me to Russia for a year (where, praise be, I finally had sex. I was, am, and forever shall be a massive geek, but in the Land of Geeks—which Russia was at that time—the least geeky is the biggest stud out there), which was a good time (for many reasons, not necessarily only the one mntioned in the first set of parentheses in this sentence). And it actually taught me a bunch of things that, while they have never, ever, ever once come in useful or had any practical application ever, are still cool things that are worth knowing.

            Here’s one of them.

            A good pal of mine teaches political science in Illinois, and asked me to come and deliver a four-hour lecture on Russian history to his class last March. It sounded like a good time (I may have mentioned that I was, am, and forever shall be a huge geek) so I busted out some old grad school books, and started putting this lecture together. And in doing so, I ran across a book I hadn’t thought of in years.  

            The book was Professor Stuart Legg’s “The Barbarians of Asia.” I recommend it. It’s a lot of fun and packed chock-full with a bunch of fun facts, like...  

Genghis (Chingiz) Khan, who turned heartland tensions to his own advantage in the 12th century,. 

• The Mongols made a drink called kumiss out of horse blood, horse urine, and fermented mare’s milk.
• The Mongols invented stirrups, which gave them a distinct strategic advantage over everyone else.
• The Mongols wore silk underwear. I know, it sounds a little—um—gosh, how shall I put this delicately—queer. But it was actually smart. Since silk doesn’t tear, and since arrows spin in mid-air, the arrow just bunched up the silk around it, but it didn’t puncture the skin. Cool, no? Who knew wearing ladies’ underwear protects you from arrow wounds?

      Okay, so most of the fun facts are about the Mongols. But they’re still fun facts.

            Anyhow, fun facts aside, Legg posits a very, very interesting theory of human history.

            He divides all humanity into those who dwell in the heartland, and those who dwell in the coastal regions, or what he calls the littorals.

            Now, the people in the littorals generally do okay. Ships sail into their harbors from all over the planet, bearing new ideas, new technologies, new foods, goods, and all kinds of stuff that enriches the lives of the inhabitants. And the littorals are rich. All the goods and products of the heartland flow to the littorals so that they can be bought and sold. This generates a lot of wealth for the littoral regions. Basically, all the wealth of the country flows toward the coasts.

            Now, in the heartlands, things stagnate. All the wealth flows out—very little flows back in. The people there aren’t exposed to new things very often, if ever. And over time, economic and psychological pressures, resentments, etc., etc., build up, until finally, the heartlanders have had enough. They hop on their horses and head toward the coasts with blood in their eyes and heads full of hell.

            They wreak havoc for a while, but eventually, they get absorbed into littoral population. And the cycle starts all over again.

            Now, it sounds a little cockamamie, I grant you that. Human history as a cycle of conflicts between inland hillbillies and coastal city slickers is... well, it’s tough to swallow.

But if you know anything about Russian history, it’s a little hard to argue with. The parade of peoples who have washed over Russia for four thousand years—Scyths, Huns, Sarmatians, Avars, Khazars, Bulgars, Magyars, Jurchets, Keraits, Cumans, Petchenegs, Mongols, and Turks—all add credence to Professor Legg’s theory.

Sarah Palin, who turned Heartland tensions to her own advantage slightly more recently. 

                                                                                                                                                                   

            Anyone who’s spent more than four minutes in my presence since November of 2010 is aware that I’m goddamned well sick and tired of living in the Midwest. I hate it.

I shouldn’t. I was born here. I’ve lived here all my life in the Midwest. I should be used to it by now. Hell, until last year, I made a half-assed attempt to try and turn myself into a Midwestern patriot.

“Screw the coasts!” I said. “Up California’s ass, and New York can suck it, too. Go Cards! GO CARRRRRDS!!! Pass the corn on the cob!”

But then something happened. Maybe it was the six-month long Winter of ’10-’11 and the perfectly shitty spring that followed. Maybe it was the tornadoes that tore apart Joplin and Lambert International Airport. Or maybe it was a combination of a lot of factors. But at any rate, something in my head shifted.

“Hell with it,” I figured. “Why do I live here? I’m not a farmer. I hate the cold. What the hell keeps me in this goddamn backwater?”

I gave it my best shot. I really did. But the thing is, I’ve just never really felt like a Midwesterner.

When Bob Dylan rasps, “I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so I’m on my way home, you know?” I get it. I really do. Me too, Bob. I’m on my way somewhere else too. I think that place is Florida. I just want to live somewhere warm and close to water.

And as I was driving from St. Louis to Peoria to lecture my pal’s students—the blood-soaked saga of Russian history churning in my brain as I stared out the window onto a big chunk of America’s heartland, a vast, flat, and desolate swath of disappearing jobs, isolation, despair, and boredom—it hit me.

Dr. Legg is spot on the money. He’s dead right about human history.

The Tea Party is the next bunch of barbarians coming out of Asia.

Don’t argue with me on this. I’ve given it a lot of thought and I genuinely think I’m right.

Think about it. The Tea Party are a pissed-off bunch of Heartland-dwellers, just brimming with resentment—some of it justified, honestly—who, for generations, have watched all the wealth of the country flowing away from them and toward the coasts.

Some people call them racists. I don’t really think they are. I know a bunch of them. They’re the nicest people in the world. They would as soon burn a cross on someone’s front lawn as they would admit to wearing silk underwear (you know, like the Mongols), and they would be absolutely horrified at the thought of lynching anyone. They might be slightly uncomfortable at the thought of their daughter having sex with a black guy, but once the grandchildren come along, they generally shrug their shoulders and figure, “Ah, fuck it. Kids are kids.”

Their politics really don’t make a lot of sense. They vote for the party of the corporations that send their jobs overseas, raise their insurance premiums, and foreclose on their houses. They’re generally poor, and yet they vote for politicians who take away social services. Their enemies are, depending on the day, “fascists” or “communists” or “socialists.”

Essentially, these people—God love ‘em, these solid salt of the earth Midwesterners, bless their lil’ cotton socks—have no coherent ideology except—EXCEPT—that they hate the Coasts.

They hate New York and they hate Hollywood. They aren’t entirely sure why. They have a vague idea that Hollywood is a drug-addled pervert-filled moral cesspit, and New York is full of rapacious bankers out to steal every last dime they own. They’re convinced, without a whole lot to go on, that everyone who ISN’T from the Heartland is a homosexual atheist abortion-having drug-sucking Communist. The people on the coasts, in the minds of Midwesterners, are a sort of vague amalgamation of everything they fear.

There isn’t any rhyme, reason, or coherence to their fears, but that shouldn’t surprise us when we realize what’s really going on. It’s just the latest manifestation of the zillion year old Heartland/Littoral tension—a conflict as old as humanity.

I was really proud of this epiphany of mine until I was out with a couple of pals and shared my theory.

One of them, who’s an attorney and who was educated by Jesuits, thought hard for a moment, took a long drag on his cigarette, and then said in his deadpan voice, “Okay, explain Texas. Has a coast—filled with hillbilly douchebags.”

            Back to the drawing board, I guess.

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.