Poor, poor Pammycakes

There are, to be honest, a number of bat-shit insane people in America today, who somehow manage to continue to walk among the normal citizenry as if they were useful, contributing members of society.

But we're talking about one specific drooling lunatic at the moment. And her name is Pamela Geller.

Ms Geller, most famous for blogging in a bikini, is a woman of many talents. She's a raving racist and a willing contributor to any conspiracy theory to come down the pike. She was an early birther, a right-wing blogger, and, two years ago, she was added to the stable of contributors to that Mecca for right-wing conspiracy theories, World Net Daily.

Experience, though, doesn't necessarily lead to wisdom, despite what many people want you to believe. I suspect that she's had full-blown syphilis for so long that she has relatively few brain cells that don't misfire on a regular basis.

As evidence, I present this little essay, entitled The end of America: Why Romney lost.

Most of us are pretty clear on why Romney lost: because Mitt Romney was roughly as electable as Vermin Supreme. But not to the rabid Republicans. To them, Obama won because he was giving out "free stuff." It's their latest idiotic catch-phrase.

It's also the thrust of Pammy's argument here: Obama won because of "free stuff," and America is now being destroyed from within. And then she pulls out some random rabbi, who has the most fascinating non sequitur ever: because Obama was elected, the Jews have to leave America.

And given Obama's relentless hostility to Israel, Pruzansky says, "this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there is an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come." His conclusion for American Jews is stark: "We have about a decade, perhaps 15 years, to leave with dignity and without stress."

See, that's another insane meme that they like to peddle: "Obama hates Israel." Because, you know, ignoring the billions Obama gives Israel in foreign aid and the fact that US-Israeli relations are at an all-time high, Obama must hate Israel! Because... because... because blacks don't like Jews, right?

(At least, not since Sammy Davis, Jr. died...)

In order to get to the conclusion that Obama hates Israel, you have to blatantly, openly ignore reality, but that's what they do best at Whirled Nut Daily. Reality and its left-wing bias have no place in their dark, fetid imaginings.

Which is when Pammycakes decides it must be time to openly break Godwin's Law.

And scarier still is the tenuous status of Jews in America. It’s hard not to draw parallels to persecuted Jews in once-friendly nations and their subsequent persecution, expulsion and slaughter. To think that Poland was once the Israel of Europe. Millions of Jews made Poland their home and had a long history there of over a thousand years. And in three short years … complete annihilation.

German Jews, meanwhile, were so very vested in the motherland they considered themselves Germans before Jews. They were war heroes for Germany in World War I.

How long do Jews have in Obama's America? How long before we can't walk down the street with a kippah or a Star of David? This is already reality for Belgium Jews, Swedish Jews and French Jews. Large portions of Norway are already Judenrein.

Judenrein - "clean of Jews." It's a Nazi term from the Holocaust.

Yes, that's right. Pammy thinks that Obama will be setting up concentration camps now. Because... because... I don't know. I'll be honest: her "logic" broke down so thoroughly that I have no idea how she got from the top of the page to the bottom. Her rambling and gibbering looks a lot like English, but you can almost see the crazed eyes and the drool pooling on her tits.

Let me see if I can help you out a little, though. That last little bit there, where she's talking about the terrible fate of Jews in Belgium, Sweden and France? Yeah, I don't know where she gets that. But that bit about "large portions of Norway are already Judenrein"? Yeah, I tracked that one down: it's from an urban legend that was going around, mostly on email, that there were only 800 Jews left in Norway, and they were preparing to leave because of anti-semitism. No less an authority than the Anti-Defamation League already smacked that one down. But hey, just because it's a lie doesn't mean we shouldn't keep it going, right?

Fortunately for Pammy, the Affordable Care Act that she hates so much will cover psychiatric counseling. Maybe now she can get the help she so desperately needs.

The Vilest Scum in the Universe Are House Republicans

House GOP Lets Violence Against Women Act Die Without a Vote 

House GOP Scraps Hurricane Sandy Relief Package

Thousands Still Without Power 66 Days After Sandy

House GOP Authorizes Funds to Defend DOMA

Tea Party Extremism Behind Fiscal Cliff Fiasco

The Republican Party is the Problem

Push that envelope right out of the box

And think outside the bucket.

 I would never have heard of Lake Superior State University were it not for their annual list of objectionably worn out words or Cliché tropes that need to die -- right now.  I  have to admit that their track record of publishing this somewhat facetious list has  impactified  their reputation in an awesome  way; enough so that I go looking for it every year.

Of course my lifelong effort to avoid pop culture makes some of these things new to me although they may be sufficiently old to you and malodorous enough to the list makers at LSSU to warrant the Big Ban.  I do agree with most of their choices of course.  Guru for instance has not only gone  gangrenous and flyblown and worse, it's also a bit insulting to actual gurus, but  YOLO, you only live once, was a total surprise to me, and hearing it once was more than enough.  YODO, to you dude -- You Only Die Once and if I had my way it would be slow and painful.

 Trending  was a bit of a surprise until I read that it's being used in a novel way by journalists: those irrepressible word creators  -- used not in the sense that a trend line in a graph of literacy rates, for example, is trending downward, ( and I think it is) but in the odd sense that something  trending  is being more frequently noticed and talked about by those same journo-babblers.  Becoming trendy, as it were. 

Trend that one right into the trash, please. The same dank dumpster that  efforting  as a pretentious journo-twit replacement for 'trying' was tossed into a few years back. Yes, I agree with the UP gurus (damn)  that  bucket list  should kick its own bucket and those Randites using  job creators to describe wealthy people should be stuffed into that bucket before kicking it under the bus.  I also agree that it's time to push  fiscal cliff  over the fecal cliff,  ( along with the hack it rode in on) but all in all,  the annual list includes only 12 entries and is really meant to amuse.
 

"There's a slightly serious side to this, but mostly we're trying to have fun with it."

said  university PR director Tom Pink, but I'm a bit more serious than that. I mean I'd like to carry a Cricket bat with IMPACT written on it so as to create a serious impact with people who can't get through 12 words without uttering some maggoty metaphorical use of that word. No, I don't want to  kick ass  because that's another item on my own personal enemies list. It's a long list too, including anything one is likely to say in a Starbucks to persuade them to condescend to charge  you 8 bucks for a cup of coffee.

 Venti  you see, isn't going to die of its own accord, nor even barista.   Certain words need to be whacked, a still viable term,  and anyone venturing to order an  Americano  from Flo at a Georgia Waffle House or any Dunkin' Donuts in America runs the risk of  blunt instrument impact trauma if not an occasion to sleep with the fishes.  (Oops, that's on the list too) Somebody has to enforce these things and if you don't watch yourself, if you  jump the shark,  drink the kool-aid, then welcome to the Cliché Cafe, where the obnoxious neologisms  check in but they don't check out  (dammit!  that's also on the list)  But you know what I mean.  Some things are just too important to leave to nature and entropy.  When some comet wipes us out 100,000 years from now, some idiot is going to say AWSOME! if we don't stop Cliché Cancer in its tracks, nip it in the bud.  (Oh hell. . .)

So it may feel all trendy to talk about alternative medicine and natural medicine, but it doesn't dignify superstition and irresponsible marketing thereof. Words like that: words like pre-owned and mobile estates  are used as industrial lubricants, coined to avoid having to call things snake oil or used car lots or trailer parks -- to charge more for a damned coffee, for instance. That's what I'm talkin' about (ouch) Don't go there, don't buy that and for Pete's sake if you do haff to go there, don't tell us you bought the T-shirt. Keep your dignity in-tact.

What? OK, ok, it's hard to avoid all these solecisms. True, if you use death nail for death knell, mute point for moot point; if you haff to do something irregardless of the consequences, you're beyond help -- and you're in danger.  Either shut up or look carefully for that man with the bat. He's looking for you.   If you hear or read something that's just so cute you haff to work it into the very next thing you say, it's time to be mute even if your points aren't. Somebody else has long since worn it out. Git 'er done and not so much aren't funny any more and portmanteau balbations like  ginormous  are a bit like fish and visiting relatives.  3 days and they begin to smell bad. Be advised.

And that's my real point. Maybe a sense of smell has more to do with good English than a bunch of rules and lists. Maybe we need to develop a track record of waking up and smelling the coffee Maybe striving to be hip is self defeating. Maybe. Maybe it's better to say it hurts than negatively impacts on.  A big wooden bat upside your head hurts too.  Make your choice.  Avoid Clichés like the plague.

 

Facebook games

When I first got on Facebook, I played some of their games. Gave up after a while, but not before I had a buttload of "friends" who I've never met. I suppose I could go through and delete them, but I don't care enough to do that, and some of them have actually been interesting.

But the other night, I was finishing my drink before I started the dishes, and, for lack of anything else to do, thumbing through Facebook. And I came across this message.

K: Kade is complaining of hear pain and can't sleep does anyone know what I could do even if I took him to the ER Walgreens is closed

Huh. Teenaged mother, hoping for help. I took another drink, and noticed the top three comments.

A: Try olive oil with garlic. Take cotton balls and put them in his ears. The warmth will help him feel better.

K: I'll try that thank u

C: peel and cut an onion in half. place the sliced part of the onion over his ear and have him hold it there until there is relief. The onlion will draw out the toxins that are causing him pain. Works for me everytime. When ur done, look at the onion. The proof is in the rings.

I nearly swallowed an ice cube. Really? Predatory peddlers of woo? Hell, for all I know, they're all from the same town in [click] Wisconsin, apparently.

What the hell: give me a second to change into my superhero costume, and I'm...

Unfortunately, my Captain Obvious underpants were in the wash, and all I had left in the back of the closet was an old Dazzler costume from the 70s, when I... well, let's just skip it, OK? It's a long story.

I'll just have to go in as me.

Me: Oh, god. A little onion juice in the ear could make an infection worse. Same with garlic. Jesus, people, this isn't the 14th century - magic doesn't work. Homeopathy doesn't work. The ER could give him medicine that could help - it might be a cold, it might be infection.

Was that harsh? There are some who might say it was a little harsh.

The ladies, however, weren't done.

A: Garlic actually does work. But I prefer my 14th century methods as opposed to running out and getting tons of medicine before trying a home remedy.

C: excuse me? dr's even tell u to use onion capsules. This works jsut like it did in the "14th century"

Me: Yeah. Really helped with the Black Plague, didn't it?

C: sure, do u see the plague now?

Me: Yeah. I live in New Mexico. Look it up.

You know something? Some of those people may be right. Apparently, I can be a dick.

Me: Let's go over it one more time. If it says "alternative medicine," it's crap. if it works, it's called "medicine."

I'm also not above stealing jokes from Tim Minchin, either.

C: i dont see "alternative medicine" written on an onion, do you? hmmmm that why most pills and medicine contain garlic and onion.

Me: Because sympathetic magic is crap. Because an onion doesn't "suck out toxins." That's called "crap"

A: That's why there's MRSA. And tons of drug overdoes from taking medicine as prescribed. In the morning she can go to the doctor, but for tonight if this provides relief let her do it. Calm down, your jizzing all over your medical magazines.

Me: Yup. Overuse of Methicillin has led to MRSA. Meanwhile, underuse of it leads to situations you can find in third world countries. It's a fine line, but waving your wands isn't going to drive the spirits away.

Has anybody noted that I didn't mention their miserable spelling? Or the fascinating claim that onions and garlic are in most pills?

Me: Heat can help with inflammation, if that's the problem. If it's an infection, those darned antibiotics that Andrea hates can knock it out pretty quick. Aspirin has very few side effects (and comes from willow bark - oooh... natural!). Medicine helps, magic doesn't. Raised 3 healthy kids. Saw a lot of bad advice. Good luck, Ms K.

Oh, one last note The next morning, her status read as follows:

K: Well didn't want it to happen but I had to take Kade to the ER he has a bad ear infection but I won't complain it's only his third ever

See, that's the thing. You can be a dick, and still be right.

George Bush, Treason and the NRA

 ". . . and forgetting long-passed mischiefs, we mercifully preserve their bones and piss not on their ashes."

-Thomas Browne-

 _______________

I have to admit that there was a time I considered joining the NRA -- a couple of times actually.  The first was when I heard that Michael Moore belonged to it and I thought that membership would mean that my frequent maledictions might find their way to someones desk,  and the second was when I found that the one local rifle range that allowed black powder muzzle-loaders like my flintlock Kentucky long rifle required NRA membership.  In both instances my better senses took over and I decided it wasn't worth it.

I understand that following Wayne LaPierre's comments after the Sandy Hook massacre there has been a rash of resignations from the rank and file membership and a recent Snopes e-mail and a number of blog articles have reminded me of  the 1995 resignation from the NRA of George H.W. Bush. The President wrote an open letter to the NRA  after the group's refusal to disassociate itself from the then NRA spokesman LaPierre who gloated over the deaths of  the "Nazi's" as he called the federal officials slaughtered in Oklahoma City.

TREASON: the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or to kill or personally injure the sovereign or the sovereign's family.

I didn't vote for Bush.  I've condemned him vehemently for his positions and offensive statements.  Although to compare GHWB to his 'George-without-the-H' scion is to make the old man look like George Washington in retrospect, I was enraged when he told us that he couldn't see how an atheist could be a citizen, and when he vetoed the Brady Bill, I wrote him an unpleasant letter.

These days, I have no faith that the Brady three day waiting period measure had any salubrious effect, and although I'm still not a real fan,   I have to give him credit for some things -- amongst which is his resignation letter.  Responding to Mr. LaPierre's vicious characterization of some of the murdered Federal Officers he had know personally as:

"jack booted thugs . . . wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms” wanting to “attack law abiding citizens,”  the former president and life member of the NRA condemned LaPierre's words  as a "vicious slander on good people."

And slander  it was, a thundering manifesto of obvious disregard for the 19 children murdered by a mad bomber or bombers  and of utter and vicious contempt for the lawful government of the United States of America and a tacit approval of armed insurrection.  Now what is the definition of treason again?  Does anyone still see that loathsome miscreant as the defender of  the Constitution or the advocate for lawful and peaceful gun owners?  I don't even want to know the answer. 

Bush,  "a gun owner and an avid hunter."  wrote :

"Over the years I have agreed with most of N.R.A.’s objectives, particularly your educational and training efforts, and your fundamental stance in favor of owning guns. However, your broadside against Federal agents deeply offends my own sense of decency and honor; and it offends my concept of service to country. It indirectly slanders a wide array of government law enforcement officials, who are out there, day and night, laying their lives on the line for all of us."

For an organization heavily funded by those seeking to make the government the tool of  plutocrats, an organization  willing to ignore the murders of 168 people in it's quest to de-legitimize the legitimate government and its institutions and interfere with enforcement of its laws to claim to be upholding anything but  violence and lawlessness is foul and disgusting and worthy of the same kind of contempt as the Klan or the Aryan Nation. They are not a gun owner's lobby, they are a Hate Group, an enemy of  freedom promoting the use of arms to oppose and defy a democratically elected government. 

George H. W. Bush is an old man in failing health I've never really liked, but for that one act I choose to remember him.  And to Mr. Lapierre: I tell thee churlish beast:  A ministering angel
shall he be when thou liest howling.

Blow me, Pink.

I really hate to be the arbiter of morality.

Anybody who's ever met me knows that I don't have any significant objections to what my grandmother used to call "strong language." Anybody who's read my stuff, or walked near me, or sat next to me in church...

A very wise man once said "sometimes, you just have to say 'what the fuck'," and I've always tried to live by those words.

That being said, Pink's latest hit bothers me just a little.



There's a difference between "some inappropriate language," and the carefully calculated insertion of cuss-words, specifically to make your song appeal to 13 year olds (when the radio-edits are specifically built in to the phrasing, that can often be a giveaway).

I'm not the biggest Pink fan, but I like her well enough. And several of her previous hits had a "bitch" here or a "damn" there, and I had no problem with that. But with this, it's like she decided that part of her popularity was due to the prurient value of her language.

(That's your new vocabulary word of the day, folks.)

I don't know anybody who says "I had a shit day." Maybe that's local slang from someplace; as an adjective, the word should be "shitty." But then she goes and conjugates it (or, you know, would have, if first-person, second-person and plural had different forms in English).

I'm not likely to clutch my pearls and swoon about this being Hollywood having an agenda and trying to destroy civilization as we know it. This isn't some Satanic influence over a singer, this is just a musician trying to make money with some carefully-inserted controversy.

But that's kind of fucked.

You can't Handle the Truth

What a revolting development! We all thought we had until at least late January to do something about the debt ceiling. Guess what. Eliminate the deficit? All it takes is to eliminate deficit spending. It's time to hit the vested interests that are killing our fair democracy where it hurts. Debt ceiling? Why do you think we have one? We are going to hit it. No problem. What do you think caused this crisis in the first place? Let's start by selling some weapons, planes and tanks. As many as we possibly can to friendly nations. (Are there any other kind?) We can build and design them faster than anyone. No nation will challenge us in battle. To do so would be economic suicide. Let's follow through. And I'm not bullshitting this time. No more nuclear weapons. Ever. Who the hell is in charge of this mess anyhow? Tell me we're not still building nuclear weapons. Not one more dollar to new nukes! Le'ts save up our money for decommissioning nukes and safely storing the requisite wastes. The rich can bite their tax increase. Live in the Cayman Islands if you feel that strongly. The rest of us will get temporary tax cuts. Republicans will be unable to oppose tax cuts to the middle class. Half of their base are wage slaves. We will extend unemployment benefits. But not forever. We are going to get this machine working again. We're not going to take people hurt by the depression and throw them to the winds. But we are also going to help those who do not currently receive unemployment benefits. That's right. We are going to help poor people who haven't had jobs for years or decades or ever. How will we do this without austerity? Without cutting "entitlements?" We will do this by eliminating luxury perqs and selling off the assets of the U.S. military and other bloated departments. No more travel. No more restaurants. No more hotels. Hillary already trotted the entire globe on our behalf. Nobody else needs to go anywhere at all. Let them be honored guests of the countries that they are engaging. Let's give the Tea Party their due. No more new taxes to the middle class.

POST-MORTUMS

By (O)CT(O)PUS

Buffalo Bill's
defunct
              who used to ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                              stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                        Jesus
he was a handsome man
                                                and what i want to
know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

(E. E. Cummings)

Years ago, I was researching delusional thoughts for a study on psychotic disorders. Where do delusional thoughts come from? What drives them? Are there patterns or archetypes? Should all killing rampages be considered copycat crimes?  Or something else?

We find examples of delusional thinking across a range of psychological disorders – in dissociative disorders (multiple personality), in bipolar disorder (hypermania), in schizophrenia, in a subset of personality disorders, as examples. Delusions are often expressions of inner conflicts, drives, memories, and feelings. For lack of a better expression, I call these “cultural artifacts” because they rise to the surface from the Spirtius Mundi of culture and infuse the mind.  Delusional thoughts take many forms: Astral entities, historical persons, personifications of painful emotions or traumatic memories, revenge personae, spirit guides, voices in the head, beings from an another universe – born of our culture and made manifest in shocking crimes.

Every massacre demands an explanation. Law enforcement will gather evidence and assign motives to explain the unexplainable; the public wants answers; and parents seek reassurance.  Every night on cable news, talking-head gasbags will assault our senses as competing stakeholders weave false hypotheses and self-serving narratives. Perpetrators rarely live to disclose their delusions in detail; they take their secrets to the grave.

If you accept this concept of delusions as cultural artifacts, then perhaps you might approach, from a different perspective, the murderous rampages that confound and mystify us.

Let there be no doubt. Easy access to arms correlates with higher incidence rates of violent crime, and America leads the world.  The U.S. has 50% of all guns in circulation worldwide and 30 times the murder rate compared with other industrialized nations. Undeniably, gun culture is the vestigial relic of a frontier mentality deeply imbedded in the American mythos. Cowboys and guns are cultural artifacts.

Perhaps there are other artifacts less visible to us. How does social stress correlate with violent crime? How do we quantify and measure social alienation and depersonalization - the kinds of torments that find a path of least resistance in delusional minds?  Recently, one of our readers named democommie commented:

Poverty does not cause crime; it breeds despair. Mental illness does not cause crime; it removes inhibitions and the ability to control dark impulses. Guns do not cause crime; they enable people who despair … to attain, if only for a moment, a feeling of control, of superiority over others. That the feelings of control and superiority often result in the taking of other's property, dignity, safety and, far too often, their lives is not the result that they dreamed of. It is the stuff of nightmares.

The incidence of mental illness is constant across various population groups – almost as constant as background radiation in the Universe. The rate of violent crime in the mentally ill population equals the rate of violent crime in the general population. Yet America has a far higher prevalence rate of violent crime across all population groups compared with other nations.  Why?  Gun makers and their merchants offer easier access to arms. Simulated violence in games and entertainment provide scripts for madmen to follow. Desperation drives motive. These are cultural artifacts.

Reductio ad absurdum. After a weeklong silence following the Sandy Hook massacre, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA responded with this prescription: Fight fire with more firepower; place armed guards in every school; arm the good guys to neutralize the bad guys.  More guns!  Turn America into an armed fortress with self-appointed militias and vigilantes in every city and town.

LaPierre offers not an imaginary dystopia but a real one – like a bad Mad Max movie – threatening our lives. Is this an acceptable vision for our children and future generations? If you understand the pervasive impact of “cultural artifacts” on people, then LaPierre’s prescription for fighting fire with firepower is akin to pouring gasoline on a raging inferno.

During my parenthood years, I tried to teach my children the relationship between responsibility and freedom. Responsibility earns parental trust and confidence; misconduct results in forfeitures of freedom and independence. A reasonable proposition for raising children - yet ours is a society that fails to understand this relationship.  Every public controversy, every perceived loss of freedom, whether imagined or real, represents a failure of responsibility.

Which is worse: A crazed gunman who kills 20 children at a clip?  Or junk food merchants that consign  a generation of children to lives of obesity and diabetes? Or designers of video games that teach violence to children and consider it entertainment? Or arms dealers selling weapons of mass murder that appeal, not to legitimate sports enthusiasts, but to adult children reared on action toys, who project their self-image of manhood through the barrel of a gun? Or reckless speculators who wreck the world economy and leave millions of lives in financial ruin? Or corporate CEOs who order massive layoffs - casting entire families into panic and debt - then reward themselves with multi-million dollar bonuses. Atrocities committed in the name of easy money, fast money, and free enterprise - these have become cultural artifacts.

How often have we heard people in the news disclaim or dismiss a public controversy with: “No laws were broken.” And how often have we thought: The word ‘legal’ is not necessarily synonymous with the word 'ethical.' Legal acts, all too often considered unethical and reprehensible, have become cultural artifacts.

What preoccupies our thoughts in this forum? We write about chicanery and corruption, inequality and injustice, abuse of our public institutions, the lies and deceptions of persons who aspire to positions of power and authority over us; of town hall hooligans, legislative gridlock and deadlock, and a public held hostage by hacks and henchmen.  How often have we felt bullied and abused!  These too are cultural artifacts.

We may talk about the dangers of easy access to automatic weapons; about loopholes in our system of background checks and bullet holes in our mental health establishment; about the subliminal influence of violence as entertainment; about competing ideas of gun ownership versus public safety. These controversies, grave as they are, overlook other urgent questions:

How will more guns or less guns serve us when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold?” Have we fostered a culture of remorseless and ruthless sociopathy?  Are incidents of gun violence signs and symptoms of a culture in crisis?

We value freedom but not responsibility. We enable excess without restraint. We practice brinksmanship but not citizenship. With each passing year, we push all standards of civility, community and accountability further into the wilderness. National conversations turn fractious and fragmented; not even the high ideals of secular democracy hold us together. Perhaps the worst monsters of society mirror the accelerated grimace of a culture grown monstrous.

Let’s talk about the cultural artifacts that crash in the mind. Perhaps we should start this debate at the beginning by reaffirming those values of a democratic republic whose mission and purpose is to secure “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of civilization is never cheap. We demand the rights and privileges of full membership, but refuse to pay our dues.

It's always the end of something

We in the Western world with its apocalyptic traditions, are divided into three parts.  Those who genuinely believe the End Times will see them flying up to some paradise if they're prepared, while all others will perish -- those who look forward to a world in which they,  prepared in their bunkers with their food and weapons and skills,  are a remnant few.   And then there's me and maybe you who think they're nuts.

Like some of you, I was raised in the age of the Bomb, and I fully believed in the likelihood, the probability of a nuclear holocaust.  As a child I would take area maps and draw circles around Chicago of blast effects at different distances, of  probability of  impact points given the inaccuracy of those big Soviet warheads.  It never looked good for someone only 20 miles away from probable ground zeroes, but I pressured my parents for a fallout shelter and they let me have an area in the basement to store food and water.  I built low power radios with coils for all kinds of frequencies. I built an unlicensed transmitter.  I built an air filter. I bought survival brochures from the Government Printing Office.  I wondered what we would do if desperate neighbors decided to attack, because we had no weapons in the house. I used to dream of a house in some remote place that wouldn't be a target.  To this day I have disaster plans and equipment and when the Hurricanes of '05 and '04 came howling through, some Boy Scout part of my mind smiled and whispered:  you see? I wasn't crazy at all -- I was prepared.

I'm no longer worried about a hard Plutonium rain, nor even biological warfare.  I don't want to be the Road Warrior in some poisoned landscape and I'm too old to survive it,  but sophisticated shelters built by "preppers" are proliferating. Shelters with blast-proof doors and booby traps out of  an Indiana Jones movie set.  Training camps for survivalists and shelter designers take in a lot of money and weapons selection and training for doomsday survival is big business.  I don't think it's going to slow down even though 2012 doesn't seem to have been the end of anything. We always have and always will be provided with something to fear and yet secretly look forward to and for so many it's that devastated world where we're not subject to civilization and its laws. The last man in the world or the last few with the most guns is the king after all.

But way beyond the apocalypse believers, worried about pandemics and economic collapse and a rogue government rounding up the last free men; way beyond the people who watch those cheesy post-apocalyptic fantasies full of mutants and zombies and a helpless public, where the cities are prisons full of raging, tattooed minorities with bizarre haircuts: way beyond and everywhere are the "normal" people and their feelings of being humiliated, emasculated and rendered harmless by a society that's obsessed with safety and preserves only a possibility of  more than fake adventure or romance for the very rich.  Get your manhood back, buy a Hummer.  We may have a racist Kenyan Communist in the white house, but I can have a pretend assault rifle. I'll be the king after you Liberals ruin everything and the raging urban hordes steal your food.  

Our legendary American romance with automobiles gave way to Hummer H1's and H2's some years ago as our fears of nuclear disaster and international Communist aggression faded.  Our movies our culture became exponentially violent as we cracked down on such dangers as nail clippers and knitting needles in schools and on airplanes. In a time when it's unspeakable to give a 12 year old a pocket knife, our mothers don army boots, tattoo their hides and pierce and scar and stretch their bodies like the pictures we used to see only in National Geographic. And we put bicycle helmets on toddlers on trikes while we began to buy more guns and join militias and dream of Rambo, Revolution and a white man's America. But those one in a million odds?  Not good enough.  Safety first and air bags in the baby carriage and no risk is acceptable. Not even Africa has a greater rift.

 Field and Stream advertisements with pictures of  men in lumberjack shirts and green canvas Old Town canoes; pictures of duck hunters and trap shooters with Remington shotguns, the Boy's Life and Open Road magazines with their ads for single shot Ithaca .22 rifles, have faded into nostalgia collections and the reveries of old men.

Now it's men in camouflage with tactical shotguns and military looking, short barreled weapons, driving military looking vehicles and raging about liberals and urban minorities rising up and taking over, about big spending and entitlements bringing us back to an age of hunter-gatherers and independent mountain men. We take courses learning to be urban assault specialists, we arm ourselves to defend against our neighbors and the threat of being disarmed. We arm ourselves in preparation for the end of civilization while we secretly yearn for it. Nature and the love of  pioneer traditions have less to do with our traditional outdoor enterprises and more to do with fear.  Nature for the armed American  is too often a place you churn into muck with your ATV's and monster trucks and where you build bunkers to defend against the  Welfare State. Nature too, for some people is a place where animals live in peace and safety and plenty and where there are no red-toothed predators but only nasty hunters who shoot Bambi with their scary rifles. The deer are starving and we're seeing coyote, wolves and boar in the city.  There's a rift

 Does this have anything to do with demented people shooting up schools and theaters and  sniping at firefighters and policemen?  Are these crimes on the increase or are we just having our national nose rubbed in it; being shown a handful of dusty fear by big news corporations getting fat from fear? Is this fear engineered and built to split the country into warring camps so someone can profiteer? How real is our fear?

I can give you my memories from the 1960s and following decades when police, ambulance and fire services couldn't go into parts of  many cities because of snipers; of times almost a lifetime ago when violent crime was really increasing, when huge riots raged in burning cities -- and I can argue that it was worse in my grandfathers' time as well -- and for their fathers, it was the Civil War and Reconstruction and wholesale domestic violence on a scale we haven't had since.  But memory and desire and fear get mixed and change with time and it's hard to sell the idea that our times are safer than they've ever been, when we're bound and determined and taught that the apocalypse is coming, that everything is getting worse and more dangerous; that our food is poison and our water dangerous and the Democrats want to make us helpless and the NRA wants to kill our kids and the Liberals want to make them gay and give our money to the bums. It's hard to sell, but I think it's true.  I think we're taught to be afraid for someone's profit and will to power and I think the ratings game and the 24 hour news give people ideas about how to be a headline for a day and how to stop whimpering and end their lives with a glorious bang as much as any mad Mullah in Yemen.


But one thing I am sure of is that you can't go back -- and that if one thing was better back in the day, another thing was worse.  Another thing I'm sure of is that fear sells and fear is profitable for business and that businesses control government.  Yep, I've got that very Ithaca 49 Saddlegun I bought for 18 bucks at the hardware store in Hamilton, New York over 50 years ago. The single shot .22 that I used to spend hours with shooting cans in the rock quarry -- and I still have dad's Remington  20 gauge I've only fired once in 30 years and I don't think the Obaminator is coming for them, or my  civil war guns or my flintlock either, but I don't trust that we'll either do or be willing or able to do anything that will ensure that no one will blow up a Federal Building or crash an airplane or shoot up a post office or school or night club, but we'll keep howling and demanding, soaking our brains in propaganda -- and failing.

And yet.  And yet most of the people I know here in Florida have a gun or two and not one resembles the people I'm talking about. I'm willing to bet that not one of them  ever "goes postal" or shoots their family or robs a bank.  I'm willing to bet that holds true for the country at large, even with that chasm that separates Urbanite from swamp dweller, north from south, East from West and that fact, given the angry centrifugal rhetoric, is driving the center to the edge where nobody can talk and everybody is full of suspicion and fear and someone else can get rich and powerful because of it..

Those dreamy Autumn afternoons on the hillsides and river bottoms of  my family farm in  Illinois, or camping on my acres of virgin  forest in Northern Michigan with an old rifle are gone with the smoke from Blackfoot and Ojibwe campfires and with my best years. I don't have the 1930's JC Higgins .22 I brought with me on those long Wisconsin canoe trips either.   I have only the memories  and with every year, there will be fewer people who understand or share them: fewer people raised on Stuart Edward White and Hemingway and Baden Powell or the smell of bacon and wood smoke, fewer who will smile at the mention of  Deep River Jim and the Campfire King, the hiss of rain on the Flambeau on a June morning, how loud an eagle's wings over a wide and empty lake are, beating for altitude with a bass in its talons -- and there will be more who will only think of bloody murder and slaughter and danger and fear -- who will tremble and shudder and shrink like sheep at the sight of the knife or the crack of the rifle. If that's our brave new world, I'm not brave enough to face it and I want to go home.

Happy Solstice

Season's Greetings from Lake Tahoe

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Just in case any of you old-timers were getting nostalgic for the 1970s. After all, it was only about forty years ago that Cadillac wheels and newly designed trucks revolutionized skateboarding. See you next year! Here's hoping it's the best year yet for everyone.