Guns and Culture, Madness and Mass Murder

By (O)CT(O)PUS

(Please note: This post is a revised and updated version of an earlier article.)

Since 2006, there have been 232 rampage killings - an average of one incident and five fatalities every two weeks. All too commonplace, mass murder can strike any community without warning and claim any victim at random (source).

Every massacre elicits sensationalized news accounts as reporters, pundits, and competing stakeholders assault our senses with hype, false hypotheses, and self-serving narratives. Every massacre prompts a search for clues to explain the unexplainable and incomprehensible. Perpetrators rarely live to disclose their delusions or their motives in detail; more often they take their secrets to the grave.

Years ago, I was researching delusional thoughts for a paper on mental illness. Where do delusional thoughts come from? Are there patterns or archetypes? Should rampage killings be considered impulsive acts, copycat crimes, or manifestations of hitherto more complex phenomena as yet unidentified?

We find examples of delusional thinking across a range of mental illnesses - dissociation, bipolar disorder, pervasive developmental disability disorders, the personality disorders, and schizophrenia, as examples. Delusions are expressions of inner conflicts, drives, and memories that can take many forms: Actual persons or historical events, personifications of painful emotions or traumatic memories, revenge personae, violence in mass media, or voices in the head – all born of our culture and made manifest in shocking crimes.

My research reveals this: Delusional thoughts are as much a reflection of culture as a descent into madness.  For lack of a better expression, I call these “cultural artifacts” because they rise to the surface - not merely as dark impulses from the subconscious mind - but from the Spirtius Mundi of culture surrounding us.  Simply stated, culture shapes the way disturbed persons perceive and respond to their delusions.

If you accept this finding - this influence of culture on delusional thinking - then perhaps you might approach these murderous rampages from another perspective.

How does social stress correlate with violent crime? How do we quantify and measure privation, depersonalization, and desperation - the kinds of torments that find a path of least resistance in disturbed persons?  Recently, one of our readers 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 all population groups – as constant as background radiation in the Universe. The rate of violent crime in the mentally ill population is no different than the rate of violent crime in the general population. Yet, America has a far higher prevalence rate of violent crime, death by accidental shooting, and suicide by self-inflicted gunshot than any nation in the world (source). Why? The ubiquity of guns in America is a cultural artifact.

Doubtless, easy access to arms correlates with higher incidence rates of violent crime.  Our nation 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 – yet another cultural artifact.

Are rampage killings the only form of violence perpetrated on the American public?  Hardly! Which is worse:

·      A crazed gunman who kills 20 children at a clip?  Or merchants who sell junk food to children and consign them to lives of obesity and diabetes;

·      Or the subliminal influence of violence in games marketed to children and represented as entertainment;

·      Or manufacturers of automatic weapons 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 crash investment markets - leaving millions of people in financial ruin;

·      Or a corporate CEO who orders massive layoffs - casting entire families into panic and debt – who then rewards himself with a multi-million dollar bonus.

Crimes of violence against people committed in the name of easy money, fast money, and free enterprise: These too have become cultural artifacts.

How often have we heard people in the news dismiss an alleged transgression with this claim: “No laws were broken.” How often have we thought to ourselves: The word ‘legal’ is not necessarily synonymous with the word 'ethical.'  Legal acts - all too often considered immoral and reprehensible - have become cultural artifacts.

As parents, we try to teach children the relationship between responsibility and freedom. Parents reward good behavior with confidence and trust and punish misconduct with more supervision and less independence. A reasonable proposition for raising children; yet we do not practice as adults what we preach to our children. Ours has become a society that fails to find balance in this relationship. Every public controversy, and every perceived loss of freedom (whether imagined or real), represents a failure of responsibility.

What preoccupies our thoughts after the nightly news? We hear 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 legislative deadlock and gridlock, and a public abused by political hacks and henchmen. How often has the public interest been held hostage by special interest groups and their lobbyists who hold our elected officials in thrall?  The legalization of what we used to call ‘bribery’ and ‘graft’ have now become 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 – creeping into our lives. Is the ubiquity of guns 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 more firepower is akin to pouring more gasoline on a raging inferno.

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 competing ideas of gun ownership versus public safety. Perhaps these controversies, grave as they are, overlook more fundamental questions.

In exploring these relationships between madness and culture, and gun violence versus the prerequisite need of society to secure public safety, I am reminded of the moral dilemmas posed by Stanley Kubrick in his dark and disturbing film, A Clockwork Orange.

It is the story of Alex, a punk, serial rapist, and murderer sentenced to prison.  Given a choice between serving time versus gaining his freedom by taking the 'cure,' Alex opts for the operant conditioning cure that turns him into a ‘clockwork’ man – neutered of all violent impulses, a dehumanized shadow of his former self. Powerless against former victims and fellow punks who savagely beat and torment him, Alex notes with sarcasm: “I was cured alright!” In this ironic turn of the story, we are left asking ourselves: “But can society be cured of its violent undercurrents?”

We practice brinksmanship but not citizenship. We equate freedom with excess and excess with freedom. We facilitate overindulgence without moderation or self-restraint.  We covet freedom but spurn responsibility. With each passing year, we drive all standards of civility, community and accountability further into the wilderness. National conversations turn fractious and fragmented.  The high ideals of secular democracy no longer bind us together. Perhaps the madness in our midst reflects the accelerated grimace of a culture gone mad.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.  How will more guns or less guns keep us safe when we have fostered a culture of ruthless greed, rampant corruption, and remorseless sociopathy? Perhaps these incidents of gun violence are signs and symptoms of a society in crisis.

Columbine, VTech, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, hate crimes against Sikhs and Jews - each massacre adds one more script to our gruesome inventory of cultural artifacts for the next madman to copy.

The time has come to talk about our broken statues and battered books – these cultural artifacts that crash in the mind. Perhaps we should start a national conversation at the very 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.

God, Guns and Hitler

I have certain misgivings about hate crime laws, but we're reminded this morning -- the eve of Pesach or The Passover, and a week before Hitler's birthday, that people who belong to hate-based organizations and creeds, who post virulent hate messages and calls for extermination on-line, need their constitutional right to keep and bear arms infringed.

I feel quite protective of our guaranteed right to free speech and our right to think what we think, but speech that incites to violence, that creates a mortal danger to the public, is something else and that's been established for a long time. Frazier Glenn Miller is a founding member of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party.  That's not a crime, more's the pity, nor is shouting "Heil Hitler" from the back of a police car, but perhaps we ought to consider making it a felony to belong to groups who advocate murder because as far as I know, it's illegal for felons to own firearms.

I know -- penalties and restrictions don't prevent criminals and especially psychopathic criminals from committing crimes, but there's something wrong with Mr. Miller or Mr. Cross as he often calls himself, to own weapons.  There's something wrong if  the targets of hate groups need to arm themselves or to hire armed guards or to go about in fear because we elevate and protect a right to be armed above the right to remain alive.  We shouldn't have to wait for people like that to run amok before we do anything. Threatening violence against groups or individuals should be sufficient to disarm someone. 

Lest one think that being a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant is protection and a reason not to worry, Methodists were shot in this tragedy as well.

The Kraut is out?

I'd hate to sound like I'm supporting or dignifying Charles Krauthammer, but he's right in saying that it's time for the Right Wing Wolves to stop howling about Benghazi. The administration has run out the clock and the public doesn't care, he said on Fox News.  Of course the public has moved on to other ruminations about other obsessive speculations driven by the relentless cable news networks which haven't yet tired of the "we know nothing, we have no facts but here's what could have happened"  approach to a missing airplane.  

Of course the implication is that the White House simply stalled until the furor died down and makes no mention of  the Republicans having cut security for the embassy in Libya.  The clock keeps running of course whether or not the Fox Fables have any truth behind them, and this one had little enough, but heresy is heresy whether or not we can prove the age of the universe or the rising temperature of our planet.  Can Krauthammer redeem himself before those wolves tear him to pieces?

 The Heritage Foundation, was shocked, shocked at his comments. The Malkin's website Hot Air blames him for "throwing in the towel on a fact-finding effort because it’s not politically expedient?" even though numerous investigations turned up nothing to corroberate the accusations.  No, this is right wing politics and just as with Right Wing Religion; even if it's over -- long over, it's not over ever.  The World was created by a deity 6000 years ago,  Bill Clinton ruined the economy and committed nebulous sins, Barack Obama is a Muslim, born in Kenya and a Communist and Joe McCarthy's blank piece of paper really contained a list of Communists in the Administration.

So maybe the illusion of Karma gets a bit more support when a wolf  tries to advise the pack for its own good and they turn on him, yelping and howling BENGHAZI, BENGHAZI!  Whether or not his creepy credibility suffers, I have to think it's funny.

God and the Buzzard

He who foretells the future lies, even if he tells the truth

--Moroccan proverb-

I suggest the same is true of those who quote or speak of God's word. Perhaps that's demonstrated by the inexhaustible supply of such "words" and the necessary logical contradictions of all assumptions and assertions divinely attributed. God says this, wants that, does, doesn't, will or won't, can or can't and all in a flood of language that could bring down the tower of Babel -- and yet with little internal consistency and very much in the way of mutually contradictory theorems.  Perhaps that's why "Bible studies" so often consist of isolated and hermetic universes, never compared to others from the same source.  It's the well founded fear of refutation. We hardly need science to make it all unlikely and make much of it impossible and absurd, but arguing with the convinced is a bit like playing Scrabble with someone who makes up his own dictionary as he goes along and has a hidden box of tiles.  Love thy neighbor, seek justice -- kill everything that breathes and rejoice while you dash their children's brains against the rocks.

And they do speak of God's word: the people who insist science is untrustworthy as a method to ascertain truth and far less dependable than the politically selected words of God chosen to justify or demand or proclaim or delude.   But it's not so much the disparity between the vast Universe Science reveals and  religion talks of that disturbs the people who have their own alternate reality to maintain at an ever increasing cost.  It's the scientific method itself they pretend not to understand and need to deprecate because scientifically derived theories must be subject to testing and refutation. Received wisdom and divine authority cannot, for obvious reasons. God cannot, should not, must not be tested.  Yet we hear them insist that there are 'many scientists' that deny Darwin, many scientists that doubt the age and nature of the universe and the changing nature of our planet from people willingly or mendaciously oblivious to the contradictions.  The Biblical God demands we protect him by lying.

"Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the buzzard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game" 

Said Karl Popper of such people who hide behind Biblical authority and he's right -- by definition. "Scientists" who are cited as not supporting Darwin and doubting the thermometer aren't scientists. The religious opinions  regarding ontology to which we are so commonly forced to listen, usually rely on fallacious common sense axioms like ex nihilo, nehil fit to insist someone must have made everything -- nothing comes from nothing, but the weight of that 'axiom' rests on being ignorant of science since not only is nothing provably something, but things, virtual particles, are repeatedly observed as spontaneously arising and extinguishing without any agency. 

The ontological argument for God is a flimsy fallacy but it satisfies a legion of smug folk-theologians and their flocks. The void has properties not dreamed of in the bronze age and still not known about by most. It has properties that seem strange to people who went to Bible College and didn't study physics, and of course physics and common sense were divorced a long time ago. Should I point out that like all 'proofs' of God,  it would, if valid, support an infinite number of gods equally but not any ascribed attributes?  Indeed it can be used to 'prove' virtually anything.  It's hardly the thing to base a religion on since a religion is based not on the existence of a divine entity, ineffable, inscrutable or otherwise, but on it's attributes and attributes that have nothing but tradition and speculation and conjecture and arbitrary assertion as support.

Of course not all religions and denominations or their leaders are equal.  The Vatican has, under several pontiffs, expressed support for evolution and that the observable universe expanded from an infinitesimal point, but then any Pope has likely read Augustine's warning against "utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements" whereas that's not likely to be true of the kind of  Christians who roll on the floor babbling in gnostic ecstasy or insist that God hates Fags and punishes us with hurricanes.  But there's so much wriggle room in Genesis, after all. What is meant by "the heavens" isn't clear.  Is the author talking about our planet and the visible sky or about a universe unimaginable to the writer?  Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church now has genuine respect for the method it once persecuted as heresy, perhaps it's simply exercising Augustinian caution.

The astrophysicist Mario Livio observes that:

"instead of acknowledging  an error in judgement, people tend to reformulate their views in a new way that justifies their old opinions." 

 I can only speculate that normative Christianity, particularly of the American type, is trying to preserve what it can without embarrassment and yet will continue to push the old presumptions where it can get away with it. So it's no surprise that the continuing revelations of science will be trimmed and tailored and offered on the altar of God to "prove" biblical accounts of history. Hence we have the usual suspects asserting that the recent detection of gravity waves or ripples in space-time said to  support the theory of inflation in the very early universe also supports the Genesis account:

In the beginning God (the Elohim) created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Sorry The Earth wasn't created until the universe was ten billion years old, nor was the universe made of water that had to be separated by a "firmament"  into the waters above and below the Earth -- nor was it divided into day and night of course, or lights placed on the ceiling for our benefit. 

The Earth, even the larger one we learned of long after the current Biblical account was formulated, is so tiny in comparison to existence itself as to totally defy analogy. What we know about the origins of the universe doesn't allow for the specific and omnipotent actions described in the Bible as we have it today much less the essentially infinite size and great antiquity thereof. Yes, both scenarios suggest an existence prior to ours outside our universe but one relies on evidence and the other relies on the will to believe and to believe in a tiny, simple universe designed for a purpose: for human use. It relies on the importance of Man and his actions and thoughts and that demands an egotism, a desperate search for importance and meaning that is as incomprehensibly large as existence itself. 

Of course the promotion of science as supporting The Bible, as contorted as it is, is desultory and opportunistic. In this case, that it gets as far as it does relies not only on the scientific ignorance of the faithful as it does the Biblical ignorance.  A good reading of Genesis, with it's interleaved stories having different names of God and different accounts patched together like a fool's motley is almost as much at odds with itself as it is with science, with it's assertion that God had all kinds of sons on Earth and that they were a randy and unruly lot resembling satyrs or the assertion that animals have souls.  Perhaps the incoherence itself lends a hand to misrepresenting the contents and dressing them up as support for science, but I'm being foolish myself for pointing out mankind's foolishness and dishonesty and delusion.  Not only can't I get there from here but religion of all kinds is 'writ in water,' and like water, it fills in the interstices in truth, settles in the lowest places and flows from one gap to another. 

But neither Genesis nor Science can do much more at this point than speculate about beginnings. The concept of God as we have him in the West presumes that the beginning wasn't the beginning of everything and the current scientific theories allow for other and perhaps prior universes -- even universes to come.  We don't know much at the extreme level of the infinite and infinitesimal and that we don't know is the beginning of belief itself. There will always be more carrion than the buzzard of science can swallow.  It's left to fools like me to dream that it were otherwise.

YEP, IT'S A DICTATOR

The Face in the Stone

There are many metaphors for the human tendency to assemble an argument from useless or irrelevant fragments. "grasping at straws" comes easily to mind but the desperation of a drowning person isn't a prerequisite to finding order, a coherent narrative and even 'proof' of a conjecture in randomness.  At breakfast every morning I stare at a granite counter top with as yet uncaffeinated eyes and see a myriad of faces and recognizable forms.  Evolution has designed our brains to identify faces in the weeds and  probably to identify other things that are not there. Better after all to flee the tiger that isn't there than to be eaten by the one that is.

Once you see that face, it's hard thereafter to see it as random assemblages of feldspar or mica or other minerals.  The eye hangs on, the way we hang on to other constructs we form out of the randomness of  being.  Once you've had Orion pointed out in the sky, you'll always see those stars as the hunter that isn't there and who never existed -- and apparently, once you decide that some sentient physical entity caused for instance, a particular Uranium nucleus to fission, it's nearly impossible to see it any other way, even though it's so random there's no way to predict the phenomenon. "If it happened, something caused it to happen" is the genesis of  theology and science emphatically does not support that assertion. Something indeed does come out of nothing and "nothingness" itself  is a condition we imagine but does not exist.

It becomes increasingly obvious that what we call the "Big Bang" occurred nearly 14 billion years ago and what we now see as the Universe expanded from a singularity at an incomprehensibly high rate: so much faster in the first instant that it's current limits are far beyond the distance we will ever be able to see. A discovery announced Monday of ripples in space-time or gravity waves are said to be evidence for that brief time of rapid inflation in the nanoseconds after "the beginning" which seems to be another piece of evidence that Einsteins predictions were right and "inflation" occurred. It's said to fit in with models including multiple universes.  It's a profound moment for cosmology and for the prevailing model of how the universe we perceive began.

But wouldn't you know it, the faithful see it otherwise -- as proof of the idea that a sentient entity who looks like us is behind it all.  It's proof, says Leslie A. Wickman, special to CNN.com of the Biblical Genesis story.  It's nothing of the sort, of course, but in a construct some will not recognize as a decoy, Wickman asserts that the results of this new development offers "strong support for biblical beliefs." and that "it adds scientific support to the idea that the universe was caused – or created – by something or someone outside it and not dependent on it."

If in fact some argue that universes arise from some  random fluctuations in other universes, inflating into themselves as they separate forever from the host universe, it hardly fits the assumption of a God of any description. No condition that created all we see can persist as an entity today any more than we can travel to another universe. It's more than a stretch to say that the observations of polarized light through an Antarctic telescope have anything to do with a god, anthropomorphic, Biblical or not. But such is the parasitic nature of  religion, changing our eyes to see prescribed patterns in randomness, to see proof of God -- of a certain God in yet another piece of evidence that there is nothing even vaguely like that in this universe or elsewhere, nor is such an entity necessary or even useful to describe it's origins.  The implication that we can somehow attach all the ancient baggage we are liable to find in the Bible to a fallacious fabrication erroneously based on intentionally misunderstood scientific observation gives, I think, "strong support" to the idea of  our precious and often beautiful theology as hokum riding on conjecture born of blind ignorance.

The notion that the increasingly substantiated model of  the Big Bang answers any kind of ontological question like "who caused it," stems from the  assertion that for something to happen, something or someone must cause it, is the kind of common sense notion prevents us from seeing beyond our tiny frame of reference. Just as I see faces, usually human faces in the stone, we see in nature what isn't there and what we see is a reflection of us. In fact the stone contains nothing, and we are not able to see in it what we can't recognize elsewhere.

If it's indeed possible that some human may be able to create a new universe that immediately detaches from ours and inflates into itself like ours, it doesn't suggest that he who flips the switch is God or that she has any further influence on the course of history contained in that new place forever inaccessible to us.  Even less does the possibility that this is a natural and universal condition with universes budding off into some unimaginable hyperverse argue for "Biblical Beliefs."  It argues for some staggering sense of awe inherent in the infinite not in how we reduce the infinite to fit our biological limits.  If there is some universe of universe that may even be a mote itself in other universes -- if there is a reality in the infinitely small where nothing is true and everything is permitted, it hardly argues for anything whatever in our religions.  It argues instead that what we see has mostly to do with what we want to see. We want to see our significance and the significance of what we do and think and what we are.

So is there a God?   Is that in fact a question or an attempt to package a vast number of conjectures as an answer?  Maybe the answer is in the question: "what do you mean by God?" After all, the very word God is a concept smaller than the limitlessness of reality. Do atheists believe in nothing at all?  As Frank Moraes says so pithily: "So we have our gods, they just aren't anything that would be recognized by theists."   Perhaps reality itself isn't recognizable by Theists or the the faces in the stone aren't faces or in the stone.

The Liar's Crusade

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

--Saint Augustine:  De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim --

______________________

Well you knew it was going to happen.  When it comes to a vessel big enough to contain the egos of the illiterate Biblical literalists, the world is not enough and if anything can expand, can inflate faster than the early universe, it's those very egos who insist we consider their idiotic, superstitious, fatuous and fact-free delusions to be reasonable alternatives to demonstrated and proven physical law.

Too bad that moronic mob of pretenders to received authority know as little about Christianity and its foundations as they know about nature as revealed in science and mathematics. Anything once rational and functional in early Christianity seems to have shed those attributes as vestigial organs, like the hip bones in a whale as an example of just how evolution works in all things.

There is nothing about the origin of species in the Fox TV series Cosmos that is without massive evidential support or that hasn't been thoroughly and repeatedly demonstrated in the fossil record and in the laboratory. The truth is that DNA based life forms not only can and do but must evolve over long periods of time into quite different life forms because of the mechanisms involved.  To argue otherwise is either dishonest or stupid or pathological.  Face it, only if one is staggeringly uninformed about basic physics and chemistry, geology and paleontology or mentally impaired and basically dishonest, is there any need to treat the fundamentals of science and mathematics as "opinions" that can honestly and reasonably be held by honest and reasonable people.

Few people would take the argument that because one can't come up with a final figure for Pi all numbers are so equally probable that I can't be mocked for saying it's 4 or worse. Would anyone honestly assert that I must be allowed in every classroom to insist that it's 4 because there's an old paleolithic legend I choose to delude myself with?  But it seems that there are more than a few who will, for many sinister and stupid reasons, tell you that facts are irrelevant and demand the right to interrupt your evening's entertainment and your offspring's education to demand respect for stupidity.

Danny Falkner, of Answers In Genesis showed up on the "Christ Centered" Janet Mefford Show  yesterday to accuse the Fox television series and its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, of "marginalizing" those marginally rational and totally dishonest delusionals with "dissenting"  views on accepted scientific truths, reports Right Wing Watch. They say it's only fair to be allowed to refute the irrefutable -- and because they "believe" and belief is all they need to shut you up.

“Boy, but when you have so many scientists who simply do not accept Darwinian evolution, it seems to me that that might be something to throw in there, you know, the old, ‘some scientists say this, others disagree and think this,’ but that’s not even allowed,” 

Said Mefford, and presumably there were nodding heads all over the halls of idiocy and  cesspits of mendacity.   It's frightening to think someone can think of getting away with asserting that we have "so many scientists" and can't see the inherent contradiction.  (If you prefer unsupportable tradition over science, you're not a scientist)

So perhaps we have so many football fans who think the Seahawks lost the Superbowl, that the Sun orbits the flat Earth and Methusala lived 900 years. I have the right to interrupt anyone to assert this and for free.  May I demand the right to show up in any church on any Sunday to insist that there is no Yahweh, no El or Elohim, no trinity, no creation and never could have been?  That Jesus was nothing but another of many, failed anti-Roman zealots, that there is no heaven, no hell, no sin, no forgiveness, no resurrection -- no spirits, demons, angels and no souls?  Do I have the right to set up an altar to Zog in every Church, synagogue, Temple, Mosque and public school?

And why the hell not? 

Because it's not about fairness. It's not about honesty, it's certainly not about freedom of speech or of belief .  As Salmon Rushdie said of Fundamentalism: it's about power. It's about bringing untold trouble and sorrow, it's the idiot's crusade.

The extraordinary deeds of ordinary men

I won't comment on the proposition that the men who were honored with the Congressional Medal of Honor yesterday had been overlooked because they had been identified with some less favored ethnic group. It takes away from their individual stories and suggests that by honoring them we're doing them some sort of favor by elevating them to the level of  "regular" Americans. 

Having listened yesterday to the long recitation of the deeds of these belated medal recipients, I don't doubt that they all earned the long delayed distinction in full.  In fact I felt that although I had only turned on the TV for a quick check of the stock market, I was duty bound as an American to watch the entire ceremony -- and I did.  None of these men seem to have borne a grudge for having been overlooked and that's more to their credit and speaks more to their character, but no one who endured such risk or paid such a price should ever be forgotten even by those like me who may not have approved of the actions that put them in harm's way and cost so many of them their lives.

We're a nation that loves to say "support the troops" instead of supporting their interests while they serve and afterwards.  There's far more to support than pestering anyone in uniform with applause while voting for politicians who constantly attack their benefits.  Applause is cheap, medals are inexpensive. Remembering what happens when we go to war; remembering what apparently ordinary men have done and can do when something needs to be done and despite the danger or the personal consequences, is a part of the obligation they place on us and the least we can do in return. 

Of all the things we are urged never to forget by people who foment wars, such men, such deeds are the most often and soon forgotten.  I would remember them individually if I could, but not so much as heroes but as another reminder of the value of human life; of how much an ordinary man can do, of how far beyond common experience he can rise and of how little his value has to do with the petty ways we measure our fellow Americans.

None of the survivors became millionaire industrialists or could afford to purchase political favors. Perhaps some could be described by the 'Patriots' on the Right as takers looking for handouts from the government at our expense. Can we ignore the lesson that the measure of a man is not money, nor knowledge, nor industry?  Can we remember that the man who mows your lawn, fixes your BMW or drives a school bus -- even the man who has never been able to hold a job may be, in such a staggering way, a better man than we are, that I am?

Talkin' with Dad

I always respected my Dad as an educated man, but at some point, he turned into one of those cranky Republicans completely blinded by an abject hatred of the Kenyan-in-Chief. I don't know when that was (most likely, around 2008), but there it is.

He likes to forward random emails and the like, and often includes me in his mailing list, just because it tickles his sense of humor. And I tend to respond in good grace.

So the other day, when I saw an email from him entitled "usma1959-forum: Fw: Saul David Alinsky," I knew we were in for a bumpy ride. And I was right.

As far as I could tell, he just sent this to me and a bunch of his West Point buddies (that's in the title: US Military Academy forum, and his graduating class of 1959), and he started it with "Scary, isn't it?"

After that, it was standard boilerplate propaganda, only unique in that it was in green Comic Sans with red "titles" for each bullet point. But the weird part is, aside from the random formatting, it was familiar. Somebody had taken an old Obama/Alinsky email, added a line to the beginning about Hillary Clinton writing her senior thesis on Alinsky, and we were off to the races.

Now, like I said, I love my Dad, even when he's being an idiot. So I didn't hit "reply all." I replied just to him, and wrote:

You know, you could look these things up for yourself, instead of falling for any old chunk of BS that rolls down the line.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/alinsky.asp

(If you really need to read it now, feel free to follow the link. But I go over the high points later, and didn't think I should repeat it more than once. Your choice.)

I figured that my reply to his email would be the end of it. And in a reasonable world, it would be. But no. (I had to get my stubborn streak somewhere, right?)

Agreed. Except that while the Alinsky connections are not only suspect, they are downright false. the eight points are a rewrite of the "Communist Rules" (See the Snopes article that you quoted. And regardless of the accuracy of the thing, we are headed down a slippery slope because all of the eight points in the original e-mail are being pushed by the Obongo administration, and I fear for the country if we keep on.

Love you – Dad

Yes, that's right. "Obongo." As he's gotten older, he's become less and less reticent about his racism. (In his defense, he's never sent me a picture of Obama photoshopped to look like a witchdoctor - I can't guarantee that he didn't send one to other people, of course.)

I'd tried to be nice. I really had. But if he was going to push it...

Yup, Gonna have to look closer at 'em, aren't we?

First, yes, those "8 points" are a rewrite of the "Communist rules for revolution." Which are also mythical. You didn't go deep enough: those "8 points" date back to either the end of WWII or the McCarthy era, and are idiot counterfeits - propaganda from your father's era, which somebody dug up, dusted off, and recycled (apparently successfully, based on your reaction).

http://www.snopes.com/history/document/communistrules.asp

But, hey, let's go farther, shall we? Let's look at this dreadful list that has you so fearful for the future of America.

1) Healthcare– Control healthcare and you control the people
Well, there's an obvious flaw right there. Obama doesn't "control healthcare." The insurance companies are still at work making a profit. It's a capitalist solution to a healthcare crisis - there is no "socialized medicine." There's just suddenly some regulation on an industry that's been stealing from the American people for far too long. And they hate that.

(In your defense, there is one example of "socialized medicine" in America. It's called the Veteran's Administration - I'm sure you're familiar with them.)

2) Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
I'm sure you've heard the phrase "income inequality" - yeah, that's the thing that Obama is trying to fight, not increase. And incidentally, despite what Fox "News" want you to believe, the median household income in the United States has been increasing since midway through Obama's first term - you know, following the slide he inherited from the previous administration.

https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/2011/H09AR_2011.xls

3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
Again, you really should avoid listening to Fox "News." U.S. GDP is up. Unemployment is down to 6.7 percent in February, and despite the current sag, the stock market has has been setting new records each quarter. Oh, and those terrible tax increases? Have you noticed that they didn't happen?

4) Gun Control– Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state
Oy. OK, name a gun law that Obama has pushed through. Just one. The NRA is reduced to chanting "you know he's going to do it!" over and over. And the suckers fall for it. Gun sales are up, Dad. Sorry.

5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)
Again, oy. This is the ignorant nonsense that social conservatives and rich entitled douchebags have been peddling since time immemorial. You don't believe me? In 1912, Hilaire Belloc argued that, while capitalism was harsh, any attempts to amend its defects through could only lead to the rise of what he calls the "Servile State". According to Belloc, this servile state resembles ancient slavery, in its reliance on the government solving problems instead of the force of society taking care of issues on their own.

Sound familiar? Despite that, and despite the fact that 20 years later, the Federal government started up this dreaded "welfare state," the American people still managed to win WWII. In fact, your generation, and mine, both grew from this evil abuse of taxpayer's money, which prevents people from dying of starvation in the middle of what your boy Hannity calls "the single greatest nation that God ever gave man on this earth."

6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.
So, now you're talking about "No Child Left Behind"? Wrong president there, Pops.

Please tell me where Obama has taken control of Fox "News." And then explain why this doesn't invalidate your argument.

7) Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools
Tell me one single thing that Obama has done to "remove God from government and schools," that wouldn't be done under any president, because it's the way the Constitution reads. (Treaty of Tripoli, 1797 - "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.")

Incidentally, if you're looking for examples of how wonderful life is under a religious government, look no farther than the Taliban.

8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.
It wasn't Obama that gave all the money to the upper 1%. Again, that was Bush (look up "real estate bubble" - remember? That whole "Wall Street collapse" thing?). And the whole "class warfare" meme is getting pushed, once again, not by the White House, but by Fox News. Obama is trying to rebuild the middle class, not tear down society. It's the rich, self-important pricks with the multi-million dollar homes and and an elevator for their cars who are trying to turn it into a war.

You have really got to find a new source for your news, Dad. When you allow Rupert Murdoch to brainwash you, it doesn't lead to a good place.

Love you,
Bill

In case you're curious, those parts up above in boldface? Yeah, I just cut-and-pasted from the original. So, yes, green Comic Sans, with the first word in red. I just took pity on your eyes and didn't recreate it here.

The saddest part, though? Dad will take it in reasonably good grace. His wife, though, already doesn't like me. And this isn't going to do anything to improve that relationship.

They don't want you to know

I'm probably repeating myself by warning you that a sales pitch insisting that the item or idea or information you're selling is something someone doesn't want you to have or to learn about is a marker for hokum and perhaps outright fraud.  Similar marketing techniques include warnings that you must get this or read that or go to the website "before they ban it" or that scientists, or historians or doctors or liberals are hiding the real truth from you about things like magic beans or  some dietary trick that will block the effects of eating ten thousand calories a day -- or that some common ingredient is making you sick or pumping you full of  obscure 'toxins'  you can only get rid of if you buy my book.

Such marketing, if you can call it that, is so pervasive that it might seem as though the truth about most things has been hermetically

encapsulated in an impenetrable shell of propaganda: websites, infomercials and advertisements designed to misinform and mislead for profit.  We recognize some of it, tolerate much of it as just hyperbole and humor, but sometimes too much flim flam will send you to the slam.

Kevin Trudeau, whose Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About is a prime example of health and nutrition hokum, just found out the hard truth the hard way and will have ten years in Federal prison to meditate on life.

Do booksellers who feature and promote such books bear some responsibility for misleading millions into harming or at least neglecting their health?  As far as I know there have been few cases like it. It seems to be a rarity and there are no end of fraudulent sales pitches for water "with a different, non-toxic hydrogen bond angle,"  bracelets and pendants "tuned to natural frequencies" and books that assure you it's only the gluten-containing bun on that triple bacon chili cheese megaburger with cheese fries making you sick and giving you "grain brain."  Caveat Emptor after all, is part of the Tea Party Utopian dream where allowing anyone to cheat anyone else leads to liberty and justice for all -- and of course enforcing any kind of truth in advertising law would run up the debt and cost jobs and place an unnecessary regulatory burden on business.