Watch the video.
The cats are you and I. The guy holding the laser is the media. The red dot is the Starbucks coffee cup story.
I’m going to call them Red Dot Stories from now on.
They don’t mean anything. They’re not significant in any way. And yet we still leap excitedly to follow and talk about them. Just like cats, we allow ourselves to be jerked around by that irresistible fascination with the red dot.
I confess to mixed feelings about November 11.
I have a number of fairly conservative friends, and you can count on Veterans Day to kick off a massed booming v0lley of flag-wavery — heartfelt prayers, cheers, and best wishes for the men and women in uniform, those gallant, selfless warriors willing to give their lives for our freedom.
I can never join in with such fervent abandon. I mean, I GET Veterans Day. But still, considering some of the things the U.S. military has done … mixed feelings.
I also have this thing about calling anyone wearing a uniform as a “hero.” My definition of hero is apparently somewhat different from the average American. Here’s a hero:
11-year-old boy pushed sister out of way before being struck, killed by car
La’Darious Wylie was waiting at the school bus stop with his little sister, Sha’Vonta, on Oct. 27 when a car came careening toward them.
That’s when La’Darious pushed his sister out of the way.
She was fine. He died. Here’s this ordinary kid doing something extraordinary. Saving the life of his little sister. Losing his own life in pursuit of it. THAT’s a hero. Not just somebody who wears a uniform. Just my opinion, but …
Cops are not heroes until …
Firemen are not heroes until …
Soldiers are not heroes until …
… Until they DO SOMETHING HEROIC.
I honor the willingness of these people to put themselves in a position of danger. They’re still not automatically heroes.
For many years, I’ve made an effort to interject this point into the flag-waving on Nov. 11: There are plenty of OTHER people responsible for American freedoms and way of life — farmers, mathematicians, suffragettes, civil rights activists, philosophers, writers. Hell, doctors. Plumbers and electricians. Sanitation workers.
[I’ve suggested more than once that a Conscience Memorial would be a perfect addition to the National Mall in Washington DC. As I’ve said elsewhere, there are scores of huge monuments to war and death in Washington, but not one single memorial to conscience or whistle-blowing or principled resistance. We have difficulty even recognizing that conscience and resistance is heroic, or that it can be braver in some ways than following along with the killing and dying.]
I guess when you get right down to it, I consider Veterans Day justified, but … incomplete. I have no problem with Veterans having their special day, or the rest of us celebrating it. (I do sort of wonder why there also has to be Memorial Day, which is essentially the same holiday.) The problem I have is all those others who deserve a day of recognition but don’t get it.
We have Mothers Day, and that’s fine. We have Fathers Day, and that’s fine (despite the legions of twits who leap in and tearfully demand equal time for single mothers, as if honoring fathers for one day out of the year is somehow an attack on poor neglected single mothers).
I’ve had in mind for all the time I’ve been thinking about Beta Culture that there would be special holidays or occasions indigenous to Beta. Of course the final roll of holidays would be crowd-sourced, but I’ve thought of several I’d toss into the hat.
For instance, Memory Day (NOT Memorial Day) could be one of them — a day to remember and honor departed friends, relatives, loved ones, and beloved pets. We’d get together and share stories, show pictures, or just smile and quietly enjoy refreshing our own warm memories.
But another cultural holiday, something of a counterpoint to Veterans Day (and held in a completely different part of the year — how about a half year later, on May 11?), is a day to honor some of those OTHERS who sacrificed and gave and lived and died to lay the foundations of the modern world. I call it SALT Day.
S-cientists
A-rtists
L-ibrarians
T-eachers
‘S’ honors all those who did and do science, not just the cutting-edge research, but everything short of it. Every tiny bit of modern civilization, we owe, on some level, to scientists.
‘A’ takes in visual artists, musicians, movie-makers, sculptors, dancers, novelists — every person in any field of art. They make life worth living and celebrating.
‘L’ is for librarians. I consider books one of the best things ever invented, libraries one of the cheapest and best things civilization has to offer, and those sterling beings who collect and catalog and treasure all those books in all those libraries to be the true shepherds of civilization.
‘T’ is for teachers, and I doubt I could ever say enough good stuff about them. Teaching is one of the noblest professions on Earth, and every one of us save the utterly ignorant owes a massive debt of gratitude to teachers … which never arrives. So why not include them in a cultural holiday?
Of course there are other people who deserve honors. But these, to me, are some of the most profound and worthy.
SALT Day would be a day to honor, to give gifts, to send cards, to call, to visit, to REMEMBER some of the non-military movers and shakers (pun intended) of civilization.
And so the annual “War on Christmas” begins — the viral claptrap that comes out every year like Christmas lights, earlier and earlier. Here’s this year’s volley.
A number of articles from mainstream news sites — New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, New York Daily News — say “some Christians” or “Christian evangelists” take exception to Starbucks’ new plain red cups … but they never actually name the “some Christians” they’re talking about. Is it the Catholic Church in all its might? No. The Southern Baptist Convention? No. It isn’t even Pat Robertson.
Apparently it’s this one guy, Joshua Feuerstein, a “public figure” who does stuff like this to promote his own video rants on Facebook and elsewhere. Obviously Starbucks is getting massive amounts of free publicity, which makes me wonder if Feuerstein is getting paid to play out this song and dance on screen. But mainly, Feuerstein is an instant media celebrity on CNN (CNN MYSTERIOUSLY CUTS AUDIO WHEN FEUERSTEIN SAYS >>THIS<< ABOUT OBAMA!!!) etc., and will probably go on to write books and scam his way into lots and lots of money through the empty fame machine. He’s now famous for … well, for being a loud and insistent ass, with no real point other than artificial — MANUFACTURED — outrage.
We’re all talking about those Starbucks red cups, though. I’m sssooooooo proud of us for, you know, CARING so much about the color of Starbucks cups. We may not have a point, but man, we’re ANGRY. We’re INTERESTED. We have OPINIONS. Bully for us, right?
I don’t care about the color of the cups. I don’t care much about Feuerstein. I do care that so many of us are getting sucked into this as if it’s some critical issue that MUST consume our attention.
I care that there’s a mechanism for putting us in this situation of being interested in nothing.
It’s a little bit like a magic act, where the magician does some vigorous waving with his left hand to distract our attention while he does the magicky stuff with his right. Only in this case, there’s no magicky stuff — it’s just that distracting left hand up there waving.
But hey, Earth People, do your thing.
I’ll just stand over here feeling very alien.
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UPDATE: Oh, good, Donald Trump weighs in. Starbucks has gone presidential!
I’m having this idea. Haven’t worked it out completely, but … here’s the main part.
First, let’s go back to earlier in the year and look at this post: Beta Culture: Seeing the Brackets. (Its illo is just to the right here.)
This is a sister post to that one, and to me clarifies and expands what I was really getting at back then. So:
A great deal of what we humans do in day-to-day living is creating stories to live by.
Some of them might be stories of personal identity – Faithful Believer, Obedient Daughter, Dangerous Rogue, the Funny Kid, Tough Guy, Wild Girl, Smarter Than You, Scary Biker Dude, Poor Little Mistreated Thing, Compassionate Liberal, Staunch Conservative, or so many other roles to define oneself.
Some of them are ways of viewing the world or the people around us – You’re Wrong About Everything, Barack Obama Wants to Take Our Guns, Everything Will Be Okay Because I Have Jesus, The Bilderbergers Run The World, GMOs are Totally Safe and Anybody Who Doesn’t Think So is a Hateful Luddite, All Men Are Just Waiting For Their Chance to Rape and Abuse Women.
It’s this second one, the bit about ways of viewing the world, I kinda want to talk about.
As a writer myself, I know how to write a story and make it interesting. You’ve got these conceptual elements, or this idea, and you turn it into a story. You emphasize certain parts, leave other parts out. You create a narrative, and carve out everything that doesn’t fit. You embellish it, you add tweaks, to make it interesting. Not true, but interesting. More than informing your chosen audience, your goal is to attract and hold their attention. (Ha. Suddenly FOX News comes to mind.)
You fictionalize deliberately in order to capture interest.
In entertainment-type storifying, you do it for that simple reason: to entertain. But other types of storifying have much less innocent aims.
Storifying is yet another of the things that bothers me about religion. Religion is harmful not just because it’s factually false, it’s harmful because it causes you to accept its STORY. Worse, it conditions you to accept not just its own story, but stories themselves.
And here’s the thing: If I tell you certain things and say they are facts, you may or may not accept that those things are facts. You can reject or critique those items. You might be moved to do your own research to find out if they really are facts.
But if I tell you a STORY and get you to accept it, you will thereafter reject or accept additional information ALL BY YOURSELF — depending on whether or not it fits the story. In other words, you yourself become a defender and supporter of that story and all that goes with it.
You can be presented with information which is verifiably factual, and yet reject it because it doesn’t fit the story. You can discover other information which is easily proven false, and yet accept it because it does fit the story. Once you buy into the story, nobody has to argue to convince you of additional parts of the story – you yourself will include and exclude the facts that fit or don’t fit.
You will reject things, ignore things, that fly in the face of the story. You will step totally outside real reality, which is lumpy and uncertain and chock full of facts that don’t fit, and you will cleave to the story.
Jesus wasn’t born in the middle of winter? Doesn’t matter. No way Noah could have gotten two of every species on the ark? Ain’t important. Geology proves the Earth is billions of years old? Says who?
The Bible is not just dangerous because of false facts, it’s dangerous because it turns the entire universe into this story. And such stories are seductive not just because they’re entertaining and, perhaps, internally consistent (which reality may not always appear to be), but because they’re easy to swallow and understand. And once you accept a story, you can feel like you’re there, you understand, you KNOW.
Because I write, because I’m familiar with the storifying process, I’m probably more aware of stories than the general public. But only recently have I started to understand the hazard. This is DANGEROUS, kids, because it turns you into a permanent ally of people who have a vested interest in lying to you, in manipulating you. Once you get caught by their story, you’re an unwitting team member, pretty much forever.
Because anybody can tell you a story. They may not even know they’re making up a story. And you certainly may not realize you’ve accepted it. But if you buy into it, you’re trapped. You have to accept everything presented to you that fits the story, and you have to reject everything presented to you that does not fit the story.
Is Barack Obama a secret Muslim? Oh yeah. Which means he wants to destroy America. Which means EVERYTHING he does must be inspected for its hateful real purpose.
Is Hillary Clinton a manipulative, murderous bitch? Well, of course. That decency and compassion stuff is all just an act, and the part where she looks presidential, it’s a viciously deceitful pose. Every smile and laugh, every expression of calm confidence, is a poisonous trick.
Is there a “liberal media” that’s out to get all the GOP candidates? Absolutely. Which means every question is a sly attack, meant to destroy this panel of good, honest, Christian men who would all make perfect presidents. Have they made Sarah Palin look like an utter fool? That must mean she’s an intelligent, poised statesman, a rich well of wisdom from which every American could benefit.
Is Al Gore a tool of the secret cabal that wants to enslave and disenfranchise us all? Well, sure he is. Therefore global warming has to be an utter hoax.
But also: Are all men vicious rapists, just waiting the chance to brutalize women? Yes, this is known. Therefore, any man who argues with a feminist about any issue whatsoever does it because he’s a mansplaining hater of women who supports Rape Culture and the Patriarchy.
And also: Are all cops malignant racists, and every shooting of a black man is deliberate murder? Totally. Therefore, all black men shot by cops are harmless victims who cannot possibly have done anything wrong. (And don’t you fucking dare accuse me of not knowing about real racism.)
And again also: Are all homeless people simple honest victims of a bad economy? Yep. Therefore ANY attempt by a city to keep homeless people from congregating in city parks, or sleeping in apartment entryways is a hateful attack on the innocent.
Speaking of my own experience, I’ve had countless run-ins with people who are so caught up in the story of GMOs that they’re willing to say that nobody should be allowed to even know if a food contains genetically modified ingredients, that consumers MUST NOT be given the choice, because otherwise children elsewhere in the world will starve and go blind. And these are people who consider themselves staunch advocates of science and reason. Yes, I know there’s more to the subject. But this STORY keeps them from being able to admit there are rational views on the subject that might simultaneously be critical of GMOs, or pro-labeling, and yet not be coming from hateful screaming-insane luddites.
Every movement that storifies is guilty of trafficking in the same sort of dangerous socio-cultural acts as religion. Hell, we probably learned it from religion.
I know there’s a great deal more that could be said here. I sense that there’s a major field of study that someone smarter than me has already discovered and examined at length. But the idea that stories can be dangerous is new to me. And because of that, damned scary.
Because the real world is not a story. It isn’t even a collection of stories. It’s facts. Real-world phenomena. Data. All mixed up in a confusing, ultra-complex mess that can be bewilderingly deep, scarily unpredictable.
Surfing reality’s swirling patterns is a job for a rational being, not a consumer of stories. For every story you buy into, you become that much less capable of understanding the world around you, that much less able to be a free and independent thinker.
For every story you reject, you become that much more able to see the array of facts hidden behind them, that much more able to reach trustworthy, accurate conclusions about how things really work.
I would want this to be one of the most basic teachings of Beta Culture – that stories exist, that they’re dangerous, and that you have to constantly work to recognize and steer clear of them in order to be a rational being.
Pug dogs are an abomination. There, I said it. Someone had to.
But seriously …
A few years back, I was taking pictures of people’s dogs for the fun (and sometimes money) of it, and a lady called me asking if I would take pics of her little black pug. We met to discuss the project, exactly what she wanted and expected, and I got to meet her little dog.
The entire time we talked, the dog in her arms made a growling noise. I baby-talked to him “Yes, you’re scaring me! You’re scaring me bad, you dangerous animal!” The lady said “Oh, he’s not growling. That’s just how he breathes.”
Whoa. Here’s this dog that’s been bred to have a face that’s so compressed, with nasal passages so deviated, that the poor little guy has to struggle for every breath! I’m instantly both disgusted and horrified at that, but I keep it to myself and, a few days later, take the pictures.
With vivid memories in my head of seeing my own big healthy dogs run, play, swim, dig, chase rabbits, fetch tennis balls, roll in the grass, trot happily along mountain trails, I compare this pudgy little cripple and I feel distinctly sorry for him, for the entire breed.
I’m also angry at the people who create them. Nowhere along the way can you find anyone (breeders? owners? dog clubs?) to really BLAME for bringing about this physical form that tragically limits the individual animal and sometimes even promotes suffering, but in my view it is nevertheless a moral crime.
I’ve expressed this opinion more than once in public, and the typical response is “Oh, but they’re really happy little dogs! There’s nothing wrong with them!” I can never seem to get across to those people that breeding a perfectly healthy creature down to where it is defenseless and even debilitated — for reasons of human amusement or style — is wrong.
The kicker of the story is that the lady called me only a month or so later, asking if I’d take pictures of her new dog. The first one had died mysteriously in its sleep. (Yeah, wonder why?)
I went to meet her. She’d gotten another black pug.
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All of this is an intro to a single idea — the Healthy Dog Registry.
Because I’ve seen too much of that same sort of thing. Dogs with bad hips, eye conditions, cancer, so, so much more. All of it the result of DELIBERATE human action, actions — and results — which the breed registries and show dog supporters fiercely defend.
I wish there was such a thing as the HDR (and I wish it had started in 1820), an organization that followed dog lineages for many generations, with the aim of building health, longevity and intelligence into the dogs, FOR THE DOGS, but also to guarantee lasting companionship for the dog owners. Rather than breeding for, say, “cuteness” or good looks for dog shows. If it resulted in a single muttsky-looking breed called the Big Healthy Dog, I could certainly live with that.
A group of people who had the will to carry out such a project over generations — oh, call them Beta Culture — a project of reason and compassion to fix a problem that results from short-term focus on features profitable but unhealthy for the beautiful victims, I’d definitely want to be a part of that.
The following article appears in the September 2015 issue of American Atheist Magazine.
American Atheist is sold at Barnes & Noble, and a digital version is available via iTunes. Of course you can also SUBSCRIBE to it (hint, hint).
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by Hank Fox
Sooner rather than later, every fledgling Atheist gets swept up in the definitional debate. Atheism is this, Atheism is that, agnosticism is the other thing, and one disturbingly insistent assertion pops up in every iteration: “You can’t prove a negative! It’s impossible!”
I always joke that I CAN prove a negative — that gods don’t exist — but the proof only works with someone who’s already open-minded. In my book, “Red Neck, Blue Collar Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods & Faith”, I undertake to prove one particular negative: that Batman doesn’t exist. Given the definition of Batman — a guy who lives in Gotham City on Earth, who has a butler named Alfred and a protege named Dick Grayson, a man who is himself billionaire industrialist Bruce Wayne and who swings around the streets of the city night after night after criminals — he doesn’t and can’t exist. Since the very definition of Batman provides that he lives in Gotham City, a city which doesn’t exist on Earth (DON’T give me crap about that. Batman originated in 1939; all that “infinite Earths” stuff came up only in the 1980s.), Batman — the Batman, not just some “bat man” you might make up in your own head — does not and cannot possibly exist anywhere in the universe.
All the evidence points to Batman’s non-existence. In the case of the fictional character Batman, we know the name of the man who created him: Bob Kane. We know the names of the many actors — Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, etc. — who have portrayed him in movies and animated features. If you asked any of those people if Batman is real, they might joke about it, but I doubt any of them would take the question seriously because they know they were portraying a man who is non-existent.
Plus, you know, fictional character.
So, in fact, you can prove a negative, under certain conditions. This type of proof is argumentatively ineffective against god because “god” is never defined in any concrete way. The concept of god probably even evolved toward a non-concrete definition so as to stave off questions about its provability.
Still, this business about the impossibility of proving a negative crops up in every discussion, over and over, with debaters slinging it out in perfect confidence at every opportunity. “If you don’t search the entire universe, you can’t prove that something doesn’t exist! It’s logically impossible! Therefore, you can’t be 100-percent Atheist!”
I often come across online postings of the Dawkins Scale, which asks the question, “Where do you stand?” I’m one of the few who answers that I’m a 100-percent, Level 7, “Strong Atheist.” Inevitably, the stated reservation of many others is that you can’t prove a negative because you can’t KNOW with 100-percent certainty that a thing doesn’t exist. There’s always that 0.000000000000001-percent possibility that the thing might exist out there somewhere. Therefore, it’s logically offensive to state that you’re a Level 7 Atheist.
But given the argued one-trillionth-of-a-percent possibility, you’re not talking about a God of the Gaps. This is a god diluted to homeopathic levels — a long, long way from the full-strength supposed Creator of the Universe. Just as homeopathy is ignorable, so is such an iffy god.
Yet, the persistence of the argument that you have to KNOW there’s no God or gods to call yourself an Atheist, and you can’t, so you shouldn’t — as well as the confidence of those stating it — is a source of perpetual annoyance. It is especially so, given the fact that the concept of gods was fairly obviously — to a non-religious person, anyway — made up by humans. You can sometimes observe the process in real time if you get into an argument about the nature of god with a religious person who usually has to make up fresh assertions on the spot.
There’s a way out of the problem, it seems to me, by side-stepping the seemingly reasonable argument and redefining “Atheism” to mean something slightly different. Something not just defensible, but inarguable and, fortunately, something it already means, but just below the level of notice.
Germane to this discussion, there’s this thing we humans started doing not too many hundreds of years ago. We call it “science.” And rather than something that needed to be logically “proved,” science was a philosophy, an outlook, a way of viewing the world around us.
Distinguishing itself from earlier ways of thinking — which included gods, devils, heaven and hell, supernatural powers, and personages — science isn’t a logical argument; it’s a thought-experiment. Up until that time, we’d had the definitive assertion of all these supernatural powers. Then we had this other idea, not so much the definite statement that those supernatural thingies didn’t exist, but the attempt to see what things might be like IF THEY DIDN’T.
Science is the thought-experiment that asks, “What if there are no supernatural forces at all? What if the world and the universe around us operates solely by real-world, natural forces?”
What would geology look like if there were no all-powerful god to set it all up just so? What would physics or astronomy be like if there were no supernatural will involved? What would weather look like without evil and benign spirits (or, according to some sources, gay marriage) affecting it? How does biology work in the absence of a capricious, unknowable creator? All too obviously, science became an especially fruitful way of seeing things. Modern civilization, and pretty much everything in it, is the result. Instead of taking up the argument regarding the non-existence of gods, science just goes about exploring, experimenting, examining, AS IF there were no supernatural forces at work.
Atheism, if we want to see it like this, is that same endeavor. Scaled down to personal-philosophy size, it is the thought-experiment of seeing the world, of conducting our lives in it, as if there were no such things as gods.
WHAT IF there is no heaven and hell, no holy telepath glaring down into our thoughts and actions to see which fate we deserve? How do we understand generosity, charity, decency, moral rightness?
WHAT IF the churchly billions are mistaken about all this god business? How do we know how to celebrate holidays or which holidays to celebrate? How do we educate our kids? How do we welcome newborns or mourn the departed?
WHAT IF there is no holy-book guide to all of life? How do we figure out what to do, how to live, how to treat each other, what sorts of things we’re allowed to eat or touch, whether we can perform work on Saturday or not?
Atheism can be precisely that. Not so much the assertion that God or gods don’t exist, but the ongoing thought-experiment of asking, “What if they don’t?”
In that case, we don’t have to waffle and nitpick about minuscule possibilities. We don’t have to argue about remotely-conceivable personages hiding out in a vast universe. We don’t have to prove or verify anything. We just have to say, “I’m choosing to try this thought-experiment. For the rest of my life, I will assume there are no supernatural super-beings anywhere in the universe and see what there is to gain from that.”
If you understand Atheism as a thought-experiment, you can confidently call yourself an enthusiastic, fully-engaged, 100-percent Atheist. Every one of us can be a 7 on the Dawkins Scale.
The powerfully positive outcome of the thought-experiment of science compared to the millennia-long, pre-science era when we tried that other mode of thought, religion and superstition — which is transparently also a thought-experiment — suggests there’s a great deal to gain, both as individuals and as a worldwide society, by simply choosing to be full Atheists and following through in every part of life.
Would you believe me if I told you “government” doesn’t really exist? That when we talk about government, there’s nothing really there? It’s as fictional as religion?
So where do I think all those government buildings come from? What’s all that business you see in Washington DC — Congress and the White House, the Supreme Court and all those museums and monuments and stuff? What’s the deal with all the cop cars, and the uniformed people driving them? What do I think the IRS is, or the U.S. Army? What exactly is the local fire department, the school district, the Water Board, the city and county office buildings? What about all that sheer government POWER??
It’s just this: People pretending — or agreeing — government exists.
Oh, the buildings are there, sure enough, but they’re really no different from other buildings. They’re things people build for some purpose. But the something-or-other inside them, that’s just a bunch of people playing an elaborate game of make-believe. The game of “Let’s Pretend Government Exists.” And the power?
Let me see if I can explain it.
Say John Smith wants Bob Jones to do something for him. There’s a range of persuasions that can be called into play to make this happen. At one end is the generosity and goodwill of Bob toward his friend John, and all John has to do is suggest he needs the thing done, and Bob will jump to do it. At the other end, John holds a gun to Bob’s head and orders him to do it.
In between is John the cop flashing his lights at Bob the driver, John the distant tax collection official and Bob the annual tax-return-filer, John the teacher announcing a pop quiz to Bob the student, John the storekeeper telling Bob the shopper the total will be $27.16, John the preacher telling Bob the parishioner to say ten Hail Marys.
But in each case, and all the cases between those two extremes, there’s a hidden agreement. Bob agrees that John has the power over him. He PERMITS it.
The agreement is “You pretend you’re a teacher, I’ll pretend you’re a teacher, and we’ll proceed as if that’s something real.” For human social reasons, it’s real. But in any other way, it’s a pretense.
Even if John is President of the United States, or a four-star general, he’s just one guy, right? And so is Bob. Discount for a second the fact that one of them might be physically stronger than the other, and you have one unit of human power facing one unit of human power. EVERYTHING ELSE is that agreement. Bob agrees that John has the right to tell him what to do. Bob agrees to do it.
He doesn’t have to. He can say no. You might say “Well, John might kill him for it,” and yes, that’s true. But how many civilized situations really involve the imminent threat of death? Very few.
But in reality, John has one unit of human power, and only one … until Bob AGREES that he will lend John his power by doing what John wants.
Toss some other people into the mix. Say John is a four-star general. Surround him with a thousand obedient soldiers. In addition to his own single unit of human power, now John has the power of a thousand soldiers, plus the power of Bob. But only so long as the thousand-and-one people AGREE they will obey John. Only as long as they willingly PERMIT the general to have that power over them.
Fame is a sort of power. So is wealth. Every aspect of human social and political power is this same sort of thing. Put a billionaire — or a rock star, the leader of a country, a military dictator, any sort of powerful person you might imagine — into a huge empty stadium by himself, and he will again have only one unit of human power. This is why “powerful” people MUST be constantly surrounded by legions of sycophants — servants, toadies, secretaries, guards, henchmen, flower girls and all the rest.
Power in the human sphere comes only by the agreement of the people in the sociopolitical structure within which the power displays.
The democratic model of government is fairly open about this. In nations where political office depends on voters, there’s a recognition that “the people” are the ultimate deciders as to who has power and who doesn’t.
Every “rise to power” — think political campaigns, but also the rise of Hitler — occurs along a lengthy road on which the people being powered-over become gradually convinced, one by one, that they’re willing to cede their own power to the leader. They PERMIT the leader to become powerful by agreeing that he is powerful, and by acting, or refraining from acting, according to the leader’s wishes.
A totalitarian government works no differently as far as the source of power, but it conceals from the underlings any suggestion that their leader — or tyrant — is anything but massively more powerful than them. Yet his power comes only through consent of the henchmen and carriers-out-of-orders, and the fearful-but-willing acquiescence of the populace. You can scare people into fearful obedience, and it works for exactly as long as you can keep them scared.
No one enjoys being afraid, though. It’s why we came up with the democratic social model in which leaders are chosen by the people, each with his one vote which says “Yes, I’ll pretend you have the right to tell me what to do, and I’ll allow you to pretend to lead me.”
But in this social model, just how much “right to tell me what to do” do we give away? To answer that, we first have to realize that in the democratic model, the “leader” position exists not for the purpose of ruling over people, but for doing certain larger social work the individual knows needs to be done, but is unable to do, or chooses not to do, himself. The “ruling over” part of it exists ONLY in the pursuit of that larger work.
So here I am, John Q. Public, and I’m lending out some power to a police officer. How much do I lend him? Exactly the amount needed to do the job of keeping the peace and enforcing the necessary regulations. No more.
If you picture power as gasoline, and imagine a cop needs 13 gallons to do his job each day, we-the-public would provide him 13 gallons, possibly a touch more for unforeseen circumstances. But no more. We wouldn’t give him 38 gallons, or 70 gallons.
So a police officer does NOT have any extra power outside the bounds of his job. And even in his job, there are limits.
We don’t give him permission to beat his wife, for instance, to intimidate his kid’s schoolteacher into giving all A’s, or to beat down some guy he takes a dislike to in an after-hours bar disagreement. All of those are clearly abuses of power, and we cut it off as soon as we find out about it. If the driver in a traffic stop gives him lip, we don’t agree that he can shoot the guy 36 times, killing him.
There’s some inevitable slop. You and I don’t have free rein to drive 90 miles per hour on the highway, but we somewhat grudgingly allow cops to do it. Not to race to get donuts, or to pick up his laundry before the cleaners closes, but to attend to NECESSARY duties which we assume he’s doing. As we don’t know what he’s doing, though, he’s free to skate over the line at least a little bit for his own purposes.
It’s this “skating over the line” I really want to talk about, though.
The job of policing, tax collecting, being a Congressman, operating a toll booth, all require a certain amount of lent power to accomplish the official duties. We lend exactly the amount necessary, and not one jot more.
A police car is a bit of borrowed power. We might agree that a police officer could need to take his patrol car home with him, but we’d end his power to drive it after he gets home. If he leaves home for a shopping trip, or to take his daughter to a Little League game, we’d expect him to take his own car. Taking his patrol car would be a clear abuse of his borrowed power.
One of the consequences of such actions, if we assume power lent to do a job comes in limited amounts, is that every bit of power diverted to private goals makes the person less able to do his job. There just isn’t enough power.
There are two main points here.
One is that borrowed power has limits, the limit in each case being the boundary of permission of those lending the power. We all of us lend out our power for officials to do their jobs, but we lend out EXACTLY the amount of power to do the job, and no more.
So every official who uses the power of his position to accomplish his own private goals or feather his own nest is not only abusing the power of his office, he is also making himself less able to do his job. Just as if he used 5 gallons of provided gasoline to run his own private errands, he’d be 5 gallons down on the amount needed to perform his duties.
Second is that the power can be taken back. We can do it through the voting process, by removing the person from that office. Or we can do it ourselves by refusing to recognize the power of that one PERSON to order or rule us.
So what does all this have to do with day-to-day living? Not much, admittedly, under normal conditions.
I still think it’s important to keep in mind the situation, though, the origins and limits of power, in case you (we!) ever decide to make other choices about how much and to whom you’re lending it.
Power is purely a belief. There are no powerful people, except those we pretend are powerful.
“The right to swing your fists ends where your neighbor’s nose begins.”
I first heard that saying something like 50 years ago, and it made immediate sense. Obviously, you have no “right” to be hitting other people in the nose, accidentally or deliberately. Besides the fact that Fist vs. Nose is a fight nose always loses – meaning you hurt this other person – it also sparks Other Fist into action, putting your own nose in danger. Other people can be drawn in, starting a melee. Property can be damaged. Police and ambulances can become involved, expensive medical bills can be incurred, jail time can be levied.
But the saying – or the thought behind it, anyway – applies in a much broader sense than that of mere physical violence. In my view, it applies to almost every aspect of life. The thought behind it is fairness itself. Fairness to the people around you. Living your life within a space that doesn’t lap over onto others.
For instance: When I was a kid, I peed in the pool. I don’t mean I did it occasionally, I did it EVERY time I was in a pool.
Nobody ever said not to, and it felt natural to do it. When I was around the sound of flowing water, or immersed myself in water, the signal came down, “Now! Now! Do it now! Ahhhh.”
Considering that it IS sort-of natural for us humans to pee when we get in water, you’d think there would be signs in every municipal pool admonishing people about it. DON’T PEE IN THE POOL. But we’ve always been squeamish about open discussion of natural functions. (Hell, today we’d probably have an instant screaming pro-pee lobby: “Oh my god, you’re pee-shaming! Peeing is perfectly natural! I just don’t know why people are so hateful, trying to stop innocent children from natural functions!”)
I had to figure it out on my own, embarrassingly late in childhood, that this was something you never, ever did. It wasn’t a matter of getting caught or not getting caught, it was a matter of respect for others. If I had a pool, would I want other people peeing in it? Did I like the idea of swimming in other people’s pee? No, and no. Therefore, I should never do it to others.
There’s another saying that applies to the broader idea of fairness to the people around you, something you probably heard from your mom a thousand times: Pick up after yourself.
Don’t leave your clothes lying around the house. Don’t leave your dishes on the table. Don’t leave your toys in the driveway.
The unwritten second half of “Pick up after yourself” is “… so other people don’t have to.” Don’t leave your clothes lying around the house so I don’t have to deal with them. Don’t leave your dishes on the table so others have to clear and wash them. Don’t leave your toys in the driveway so someone else has to pick them up.
Taken together, the two sayings express this more general idea: Live your life in such a way, minute to minute, and for a lifetime, that others aren’t unnecessarily inconvenienced, impacted or injured.
Some of this stuff is personal-scale petty:
Back to the subject of pee again – when I go into a public men’s room and find that person or persons before me have peed on the toilet seat, rather than, say, lifting the fucking seat out of the way before urinating, it strikes me as self-involved. Not just ignorant self-involved, but self-involved to the point of aggression against others. If the next guy comes in to use the toilet, but has to first wipe up your piss, you might as well have slapped him.
When I’m shopping with one of those little carry-baskets at the supermarket, and I get to the register and empty it out, then go to drop it on the stack of other baskets, I find about half the time that the last person dropped their basket so that one of the wire handles flopped across. I have to move that wire handle so I can drop-stack my basket. I’d bet most of us feel the same way.
The point isn’t that it’s a lot of extra trouble, the point is that it’s something you shouldn’t have to do. You’re picking up after that guy that came before you. If YOU are the guy who came before, it’s not like the world will end if you don’t do the right thing, but again, other people shouldn’t have to come behind you and fix things, or pick up things. You don’t have the right to live your life so blithely that it adds the “weight” of your life onto theirs.
For me the rule extends even into those areas where people are paid to pick up after you. You don’t leave your garbage on the table in a fast food restaurant. You don’t drive away and leave your shopping cart loose in the parking lot. And sure, your city probably has street sweepers and sanitation workers, but you still don’t drop trash or cigarette butts on the streets or sidewalks.
A lot of this stuff is so basic, so noticeable by others when you fail to observe the rule, that it should go without saying. But … it has to continue to be said, for the sake of all those others – of whatever age – still growing into adulthood. You don’t play your music so loud it annoys people. You don’t waft your cigarette smoke in their direction. You stay in your lane, you drive at the speed of traffic, you signal your lane changes and turns.
The rule scales up to the decidedly non-petty: Industry dumping toxic wastes in rivers, or pumping it into the ground where it can contaminate drinking water, in both cases, this is so obviously wrong it should never even come up as a question. Wall Street bankers wrecking the national economy for their own amusement or profit is a no-no of massive proportions.
When you think about it, the underlying regard for the rights of others is the foundation for ALL our big social rules and laws. Don’t Steal. Don’t Cheat. Don’t Kill.
The rule extends even beyond human rights and concerns. The business about not poisoning fish in rivers with toxic wastes isn’t just about injuring fishermen who might want to eat what they catch. It’s about the fish too. It’s about eagles and elephants, mantas and manatees, raccoons and redwoods.
Because we have to live in society with others, because we have to live on this planet, and because we’ve gone long past the point where natural forces will clean up our messes, conscious self-contained living is not simply an admirable social ideal, it’s pretty much a planetary necessity.
Live your life in such a way, minute to minute, and for a lifetime, that others aren’t unnecessarily inconvenienced, impacted or injured.
Just sent in my application to the United Nations for the Pig Latin interpreter post.
I think my chances are good. I’ve been speaking it since the third grade.
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One bad shower can scar you for life.
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When you think about it, The Joker is the ultimate example of motivational success. He’s upbeat, cheerful, he has high self-esteem, he’s willing to try anything, and he recognizes no limits. He’s like the perfect corporate CEO.
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It just seems so odd that some Earth animals grow faucets on their bodies for the young ones to drink nutrient fluid from. That can’t be the most efficient way to do it. On my planet, we take the young ones out into the Solar Forest and plug them in for a few months. After that, they eat rocks like the rest of us.
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In Moscow, there’s a museum of Russian-made sex toys. They can’t actually demonstrate them because the room fills up with diesel smoke, but you can look at them.
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Movie Idea: A renegade environmentalist releases a deadly virus into the New York City airport, knowing it will spread worldwide in a matter of days. The virus kills and zombifies all it infects.
The catch is that it only works on Chihuahuas. Bands of surviving humans all over the world hurry to install screen doors, don ankle-high boots and arm themselves with brooms.
But victims continue to die, and international panic ensues. Finally, Autumn arrives, and the zombie Chihuahuas succumb to the 60 degree temperatures.
The final scene is a New Zealand farmer going out to check on his sheep. He slides open the barn door, and there is a sudden flash of bulging eyes and sharp, white teeth.
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Now I’m wondering if the term “hand job” — which seems like it would be fairly recent — might actually be tens of thousands of years old (in whatever language they spoke at the time, of course).
“Gronk give Oona big fish, Oona give Gronk googawonga?”
Hey, someone has to think about these things
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I’m clearing and organizing some of the piles of paper in my office. One note I came across, just something jotted down on a scrap of paper, said: “I want to be a member of the last insane generation.”
Fat chance.
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Vaping. There are some new dumb ideas out there that people think are smart ideas simply because they’re different from the old dumb ideas.
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When they know nobody can overhear them, the superheroes who can fly make fun of those who can’t.
FLIGHT-SHAMING. It’s the ugly little secret of the superhero business.
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I’m wondering if all the people against spanking are also all against genital mutilation. Because I see a LOT of ardent posts against “brutalizing your child,” but very few against circumcision.
But hey, that’s NORMAL. Besides, it’s mainly about health, right? It’s for their own good.
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In an adjacent universe, on Just Slightly Magic World, there are real fairies who come to deserving people’s houses and leave gifts. For instance, there’s an Apple Pie Fairy which comes at midnight and leaves a generous slice of warm, delicious apple pie for every member of the family.
This is not as good as it sounds, however. Owing to the fact that fairies aren’t human and don’t actually understand humans, the Apple Pie Fairy leaves those slices of apple pie in unexpected places — for instance, on the pillow of each family member, or artistically arranged on the toilet seat.
Worse, the Apple Pie Fairy is hypersensitive and prone to fits of vengeful rage, so nobody dares say anything.
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When an octopus finds a dark hole on the ocean floor, it doesn’t stop to wonder what horrible thing might be lurking in there, it moves in and BECOMES the horrible thing lurking in there.
This is basically the same reason Donald Trump is running for president.
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From the days of Jesus’ healing miracles, SECRET THOUGHTS OF THE HEALED BLIND MAN!
This morning there is some sort of very large object in the sky emitting light so bright it hurts to look at it. Surely that can’t be natural.
It came up over the horizon and has slowly climbed into the sky, moving east to west, almost as if it’s orbiting the planet. It doesn’t look really big, but if it is in orbit, it must be huge.
There’s nobody on the streets looking at it. I wonder if anybody has even noticed it up there. It’s like they’re all taking it for granted or something.
What if I ask my neighbor and it turns out it’s something everybody else sees every day, and they laugh at me? I don’t want to look stupid. But damn, that thing worries me.
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I’ll bet snakes have to slither into someplace dark in order to sleep. Stupid reptiles — the rest of us evolved eyelids. (Doesn’t mean we sleep but, you know, we COULD.)
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Idea Book: Novel: “Worst Contact”
A previously undiscovered tribe is located by aerial surveys of the Amazon. Anthropologists make plans to carefully contact them. But a Madison Avenue PR firm decides to jump in and contact them first, taking bids from companies for which products to introduce them to, and to film their reactions to.
The first two products are Milky Way candy bars and Budweiser beer. The civilized world is captivated by the Amazonians’ filmed astonishment at the irresistibly sweet taste of the candy, and the hilarious effects of the beer. Sales skyrocket, and more companies vie for product placement opportunities. The Amazonians are quickly introduced to such foods as Ranch Style Beans, Armour Vienna Sausage, to Wrigley’s Hubba Bubba bubble gum, and even Marlboro cigarettes.
Soon a reality TV show features an extended Amazonian family, showing family members experimenting with clothes, shoes, modern firearms, fast food. Christian missionaries arrive from the Vatican, and episodes feature the reaction of the Stone Age primitives to the revelations of God and Heaven. iPhones are handed out, and the men of the tribe are directed to first person shooter games, and YouTube videos of twerking. A staffer on the film crew begins distributing heroin to tribal friends, and they begin sneaking off to shoot up, all captured on hidden cameras.
But I think it would all have a happy ending. Probably include a lesson on the Indomitable Spirit of Man or some shit like that.
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Figures of speech not to use: Like a chihuahua in a blender. Salty as whale’s piss. Pathetic as Sarah Palin’s brain, spread out on a dissecting table. Lame as that handicapped beggar I just ran over. Exciting as a power surge during a brain scan. As unsexy as furries at a veterinarian’s convention. Hungry as a Muslim at a Pork Festival. Like a honey badger with hemorrhoids. Ugly as a fat man’s back pimples. Scary as fireworks outside a Gulf War vet’s house. Like taking a dozen Xanax and listening to Wayne Newton. Creepy as Karl Rove in ass-less chaps.
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Years in acting school, and finally one day you get The Call. You’re invited to star in an upcoming movie. You excitedly accept, thinking >>This Is It<< — your big break, the day you will look back on from your future as a rich, internationally famous movie star, and think “That’s where it all started.”
But when you get the script, you find out it’s something called CopEye, a crappy police-themed ripoff of the movie Popeye. It’s not even shitty Popeye, it’s a shitty tearaway of Popeye. And there are utterly unnecessary nude scenes.
Kids, that’s what real life is like.
No, just kidding. Your big break will be a remake of Lawrence of Arabia, and Peter O’Toole will look like a second-rate ham compared to you. Your whole life will be like that.
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All you people afraid of clowns — coulrophobics — think of this:
When clowns take off their red noses, makeup and clown clothes, they look just like normal people. They walk around in public and nobody knows what they really are.
They are HIDDEN clowns, SECRET clowns, SURREPTITIOUS clowns. They might even brush past on a city street and TOUCH you. They might even do it DELIBERATELY.
You think you’re safe from clowns, never knowing they’re touching you ALL THE TIME.
You can’t escape from clowns, because they are hidden among the people around you. Watching you. Walking up behind you without you knowing. Thinking about touching you.
Clowns. Everywhere.
Everywhere.
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The Bible is a lot more stirring and dramatic when you read it in the original Klingon.
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Dick Cheney has had five heart attacks and a heart transplant. The way I figure it, he has one Horcrux left, and then he becomes mortal.
Anyone in his neighborhood, look for the large snake he always keeps close to him.
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It seems to me that one of the inevitable consequences of advanced civilization would be immortality. Why, if you could beat every disease, including aging and eventually death, would you NOT choose that?
In any society that had the technology to extend life, those who chose it would live on and on, those who didn’t would be self-selected out, until eventually there would a community made up mostly of immortals.
I suggest one of the reasons we haven’t been contacted, if it’s at all possible, is because we’re so ephemeral to them that they consider us more beastly than civilized.
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I was thinking today that we usually imagine a single dividing line between Conservative and Liberal, but there are actually THREE major dividers along the socio-political spectrum.
There’s that middle conservative-liberal divider (which is a broad line rather than a thin one), but there’s another line between Conservative and Conservative-Crazy, and a third line between Liberal and Liberal-Asshole.
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If we’d evolved from dogs, Hump Day would have a whole different meaning.
“And stop licking yourself at work, Spotty! Nobody believes you dropped something under your desk!”
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The Swedish Chef is a horrible insult to Swedish people! I say this as someone who may or may not have Swedish ancestry, and may or may not actually know some Swedish people.
But I’m offended anyway, just in case.
Wait … is he the Swedish Chef, or the Swiss Chef? I mean, whatever, right? But either way, it’s an insult.
Also: Shout out to all my Swedish/Swiss peeps! Gehoorty verdoor de chicky stew!
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Just ordered an Earth-food item called a “peetsah.” It comes with a leathery base made from a type of crushed grass seeds, a paste made from a fruiting body of a terrestrial plant, a congealed material prepared from the white fluid squeezed out of the nether paps of certain herbivorous mammals, a variety of sliced and chopped dirt-grown plants, and the shredded muscle tissue of a large bird. The whole thing is thrown into a heating chamber and singed for 20 minutes or so. It sounds revolting, but when my people return for me, I’m going to suggest we take the recipe and the ingredients back with us. That business about consuming pure energy does get boring at times.
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If a product is “tainted,” does that mean it has actually come into contact with someone’s taint?
Because I can see why you wouldn’t want something like that.
There was this feral cat, a big gray fellow, skulking around the farmhouse where I lived a few years back, stalking the birds and squirrels at the feeders. I saw him out there for two years running, hot summers and snowy winters, and started putting out food.
He’d slip up and bolt down the food, then scurry off to wherever he stayed most of the day. I put a chair outside, about 20 feet from the food dish, and started sitting there reading every day at feeding time.
The first day, he came around the corner and saw me, sat there thinking about it, but eventually slinked near and wolfed down the food, while I carefully looked away. In the following days, he got used to me being there, and I started inching the chair closer and closer to the dish.
Eventually, I was right next to it, and one day I reached out as he was eating and touched the top of his head. The look he gave me was … astonished. “Are you insane? I’m a feral cat! You don’t touch cats like me!”
The next day I reached out again, gently scritched the back of his head with one finger. He tolerated it, kept on eating. In days after, he slowly started reacting to the scratching, coming to visibly enjoy it. The slinky behavior went away, and he started hanging around on the back deck.
Turned out “he” was a “she,” and I named her KittyBit. She’d been someone’s pet, I figured. How she ended out in the wilds, I had no idea, but as I had lots of elderly neighbors, I wondered if one of them might have died and her beloved cat fled the scary strangers who came in to deal with things.
She missed being touched! The first few months, she would go bonelessly limp and even drool when she was being stroked. One day I left open the back door and she came in and explored. She made herself at home.
I moved into an apartment, and she came along. I made sure she had windows to look out of, but she avoided them. She’d had her fill of living wild, and was now a pampered Indoor Cat. Good food, places to lounge and luxuriate, hands and laps to enjoy. She no longer drooled, but she would press into any hand. She was a square mile of desert, and every human touch was the pattering of spring rain.
Another move gave her a window to look out on a yard with bird feeders, and she took to lying in the window watching the living scenery. She developed a cute, weird behavior – she would lurk outside the bathroom when I showered, then rush in as soon as the door opened, leap into the shower and commence licking the water off the walls.
In all, five years went by. She wasn’t young when I got her, but she really started showing signs of age. Bones jutted out at hips and shoulders, legs bowed, fur snarled into ungroomed tangles.
Five days ago, she stopped eating. Started vomiting up yellow bile. The machinery of catness was running down, breaking, coming to an end.
Purring in her last hour under a stroking hand, she had a peaceful, painless ending at the vet’s.
The deal I made with her – a guy deal – was that I would save her, but wouldn’t necessarily love her. She was just a roommate. But the silence in the house, the hole that used to be filled with bright eyes and purring laply presence, brings me to unexpected tears.
So long, KittyBit.
