Abandon Mythology

In Physics, ryk’s Law states that when two different religions are placed in close proximity, they repel one another and hate is generated. (Okay, maybe it’s not a Law, but it should be.) From my atheist viewpoint — as an outsider to all belief systems — the basic divisiveness of religion is always readily apparent, but the craziness and mass hysteria surrounding plans to build a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan a couple of blocks from where the World Trade Center towers once stood has highlighted our distinctly American intolerance for all the world to see.

Predictably, the Fox News Outrage Channel is stoking the fires of hatred, and the most odious individuals the right-wing has to offer have lined up to bask in the light and compete for most loathsome; there’s Sarah and Newt and Karl and Rush and Glenn and… well, you get the picture. But why? As the Roman philosopher and Stoic, Seneca the Younger wrote:

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

It’s an election year and the Republican party, lacking any viable policies to run on, has hitched it’s wagon to the bugshit crazy far right, hoping to ride a wave of ignorant anger back into power. And it looks to be working, at least for now. Sigh.

I am, however, feeling cautiously optimistic. Perhaps it is because I just finished the best, most logical deconstruction of irrational belief and superstition that I have ever read; Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. It should be required reading for every American high school student.

Or perhaps my optimism comes from the feeling that the American religious right has finally, mercifully jumped the shark. When they attack the legitimacy of Islam, they undermine the legitimacy of religion in general. To question the beliefs of others is to shine a harsh light on their own dogma. I’m not expecting a national epidemic of agnosticism, but I am hopeful that most Americans will turn away from the hateful rhetoric, if only to protect their own invisible cloud-daddy.

If I’m right, the horse of religious hatred the Republicans are flogging so hard right now is about to fall over dead. If I’m wrong, in a few election cycles we’ll have a government full of teabagging fucktards who want to single out Muslims for special attention and discriminate against them solely on the basis of their religion. And then we fight the war al Qaida wanted all along.

Life is, from the beginning, a precarious competition for resources. Over the millenia, natural selection has written that competition into the genetic code of every creature on the planet via the ”fight-or-flight” response. In modern humans, this instinct presents itself as a penchant for violence and a primal fear of the other.

Civilization, however, is first and foremost about putting aside our inherent cowardice and mistrust, and instead choosing to share resources. But even within that social structure, we remain divisive and afraid of the other. We create nations, borders, armies, religions and gods all in the name of security, to ease those fears, but we just can’t seem to get past them.

In fact, it would appear that those fears are getting worse for Americans. Events like the passing of Arizona’s “papers please” immigration law, various teabagger protests against the building of mosques, and legislators mumbling about doing away with birthright citizenship all indicate a worrisome increase in xenophobia throughout the country.

The vast majority of Americans know very little about the rest of the world and don’t care to learn more. The problem is simply that we’ve had it too easy for too long here. Our privileged way of life has rendered critical thinking skills so unnecessary that any real grasp of world affairs is now considered elitist.

For over half a century most Americans have been able to get a decent job, buy a house and two cars, raise a family and retire in security without ever having to pay attention to what the economic oligarchy was doing. It is this protracted period of intellectual laziness that will ultimately be our downfall.

Even as Americans wake up to the sorry, over-mortgaged, overdrawn, overextended state of their lives, and realize the good jobs with the good benefits are largely gone, the right-wing noise-machine is right there ready to provide them someone to blame. It’s too easy to just turn on the teevee, let the brain kick into neutral, and the eyes glaze over with a film of ignorant hate for a nameless and powerless brown other.

Denialism is defined as choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid an uncomfortable truth. America is in denial about its own demographics and waning exceptionalism. While it’s true that in the not too distant future we will no longer be a majority white country, the looming unsustainabilty of the comfy middle class existence so many of us enjoy was not caused by the people sneaking across our borders to clean our toilets and pick our lettuce.

The richest, most powerful empire ever to exist is in decline, and angry and afraid of the rest of the world. Nothing good can come of that.

About the only time I listen to commercial radio any more is for Cardinals baseball games, so I was blissfully unaware that there is a new ”Conservative Christian Talk Radio Station” right here in my little corner of Misery, broadcasting under the unintentionally ironic banner “Truth Talk 630 AM.” It was only brought to my attention by this story over at Fired Up! Missouri.

While being interviewed on the station, Ed Martin, a teabagger Republican candidate for Congress made the remarkable claim that his opponent for Misery’s 3rd Congressional district is working in cahoots with our preznit to take away your jeebus. Check it:

MARTIN: One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of our genetics. We’re great because we created a place and space where people can be free. And they can choose Christ, they can choose to be faithful.  They can worship, and they find their way to the Lord. And — or some of them don’t. We sure want them all to, but some of them don’t.

And part of that freedom — when you take a government and you impose, and take away all your choices. One of the choices you take away is to find the Lord.  And find your savior.

And that’s one of the things that’s most destructive about the growth of government. It’s this taking away that freedom. The freedom — the ultimate freedom, to find your salvation, to get your salvation. And to find Christ, for me and you.

And I think that’s one of the things that we have to be very, very aware of that the Obama Administration and Congressman Carnahan are doing to us.

And of course the interviewer, one Dr. Gina Loudon, whose website — which I will not link to — proclaims her to have two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D., immediately followed up with questions for Martin about specific administration policies and/or plans that he deems threatening to the invisible cloud-daddy, right? Not so much.

LOUDON: Very well said.

I’m not surprised. Unquestioning belief is, after all, what religion is all about. Truth be told, I can rarely even summon the indignation necessary to ridicule the same tired, old rationalizations and primitive beliefs. Maybe I’m getting old. Or perhaps I’ve learned it is impossible to reason someone out of a position that they did not arrive at through reason.

What continues to amaze me, though, is how the right-wing noise-machine has so thoroughly hijacked the paranoia and anger of the religious mindset  and applied it to politics. A large portion of our nation’s media — from the mother ship Fox News Outrage Channel down to the umpteen thousand talk radio stations like “Truth Talk” — is engaged in a systematic (and sustained) rejection of empirical reality.

I’ve always felt Nietzche was wrong in his observation that “Only he who peddles fear can lead others,” because, for me, true leadership should inspire fearlessness, but it appears that modern conservatism truly does mean never having to admit you’re wrong or say you’re sorry.

In January of 2006, during his State of the Union speech, our most recent former preznit demonstrated his remarkable ability to (poorly) state the obvious when he declared “Amurka is addicted to oil.” He went on to announce increased research spending on oxymorons like “clean coal” and “safe nucular energy.” He did not, however, mention conservation.

Almost four and a half years later, dubya’s platitudes about switch grass ethanol and hydrogen powered cars ring even more hollow than they did then. Our addiction to oil is as strong as ever, our rate of consumption abated only by a nasty and lingering recession.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and subsequent efforts to contain it have – temporarily – raised public awareness about the true costs of oil. (At least the environmental and ecological costs. Most Americans remain blissfully unaware that a defense budget spent maintaining “stability” in the Middle East is a de facto subsidy for oil industry security.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been lurking in the comments section at The Oil Drum for weeks now, reading lots of stuff about Peak Oil and its inherent consequences to the American economy and our lifestyle. I often think about this dark future while driving, as, on any given Saturday, I may log upwards of 200 miles just participating in my kids’ baseball games, piano recitals and assorted other extracurricular activities.

Common sense would indicate that any economic system that does not account for finite resources is a sham and doomed to fail, but that is exactly the world in which we live. An economist named Kenneth Boulding once famously stated:

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Boulding wasn’t joking. The one flaw shared by virtually all schools of economic thought, from Keynesian to Austrian, is an assumption of infinite growth and unlimited resources.

Our consumer-driven economy, this distinctly American form of capitalism, is constructed around growth; the conversion of ever-decreasing resources into an ever-increasing supply of marketable commodities, products and services. And the whole thing relies on the ability to move goods (everything from the food we eat to the cheap Chinese plastic crap we clutter our homes with) about the country – indeed, about the world – cheaply and efficiently. Access to cheap oil isn’t merely vital to our economy, it is our economy.

Any casual student of history can see that reliance on growth has created one economic bubble after another, each with an accompanying burst and recovery defined by still more growth. Peak Oil is by definition a collapse from which our current system cannot recover. Growth as we know it becomes impossible in an environment of declining energy availability.

We’ve known for decades that the era of cheap oil must end, yet our corporatist government has steadfastly refused to prepare for the inevitable. At a time when we should be radically changing our economy to some new model that does not measure our worth as a country by profit growth and GDP, we are socially, politically and militarily committed to maintaining the status quo until change is forced upon us. It is a recipe for disaster. The back side of the Hubbert curve is steep and treacherous.

I contemplate the massive infrastructure upgrades we are not making to accommodate the millions of wind turbines and solar panels we are not building as I cruise our crumbling interstate system, snacking on African chocolate and South American fruits and nuts. Sigh.

In March of 2008, the prestigious financial investment firm Bear Stearns imploded, signaling the collapse of the house of cards our nations financial system had become. Within a few months IndyMac, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Washington Mutual and Wachovia were all either gone or on taxpayer funded life support.

More than two years later, the US and world economies are still convulsing in the vacuum created by the disappearance of immense “wealth” that never truly existed; wealth created out of thin air via complex financial products called “derivatives.”

The financial sector purportedly exists to serve the greater economy and the country by providing capital to — i.e. investing in — companies, industries, technologies etc., but over a few decades, through the use of these derivatives, a large portion of investor’s capital was not invested in businesses that develop ideas and build things and create jobs. It was instead invested in the financial “industry” itself. The entire financial sector became largely a vehicle for personal enrichment of the privileged class that controls it, with the only productive “work” from invested money being the creation of more wealth for the already ridiculously wealthy.

Last night the Senate passed a financial reform bill aimed at reining in some of the abuses that caused the meltdown. And guess what? The people who brought the world of finance to it’s knees with fantasy investment schemes centered around their own personal gain are against changing the rules to prevent them causing another, future crisis at our expense. I’m shocked. How badly would they like to maintain the status quo?

Since January 2009, financial services firms have spent nearly $600 million and hired hundreds of lobbyists to influence the debate, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Let’s see… doing the math, 435 members of the House plus 100 Senators, that’s 535, divided into $600 million, that’s $1.12 million per legislator in just the last 15 months. Wow. The wizards of Wall Street reeeeally don’t want any light shined on their derivatives, do they?

Frankly, with that much money being thrown around, I’m surprised this bill ever saw the light of day. But that’s the problem with politicians; they just won’t stay bought. Especially in an election year.

For the most part, our national news media has been using the same stenographical methods to cover the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that they use to cover our politicians. Basically, stick a microphone under the chin of whichever designated talking head is made available to read the latest intentionally vague prepared statement and then ask a couple of vapid, equally non-informative questions requiring no critical thought on the part of the interviewee, the “journalist,” or their audience, all the while standing ready to cut away at a moment’s notice if Brittany gets caught not wearing underwear again.

I’ve been reading everything I can find on the intertoobz, and, as usual, for knowledgeable discussions about energy, The Oil Drum is the place to be. The comments section there is full of people who work in the “oil patch,” so there’s lots of good nuts and bolts information about what is actually happening on the ocean floor. A lot of the discussion is over my head, but my overall impression is that the only definitive solution to the leak lies in the two relief or “kill” wells being prepared for drilling. Everything else being done is merely window dressing and temporary fixes designed to slow the leaking and minimize environmental, political and economic damage.

If that’s true, this mess is going to continue for at least a couple of months until one of those wells can be drilled way down past the muck, well into rock, and then intersect the leaking well. (Yeah, they can do that.) I’m still not sure what happens after that, but whatever it is, the oil patch folks all consider it a known fix.

Another possible fix I’ve seen mentioned in several places involves setting off a nuclear bomb to just melt the damn thing closed. It is rumored that the former Soviet Union used this method several times with some success, but not 100%. Fueling this discussion is the fact that two of the scientists from the team that our preznit sent down to assist BP in their efforts are nuclear weapons experts.

My first thoughts on this “solution” were memories of how environmentally friendly the Soviet Union wasn’t. Even if it worked, there’s just no telling what the long term damage could be. And what if it didn’t work? Question: What’s worse than a hole in the ocean floor spewing oil? Answer: A radioactive hole in the ocean floor spewing oil. Holy fuck, please don’t try this!

I haven’t been able to blog lately because my bunker time has been very limited for a number of reasons. First, we are in the throes of Spring in Misery, and Butch, the head groundskeeper here on the estate, has multiple projects underway. I’ve been mustering for one working party after another for weeks now with no end in sight. I am weary and a little sore, but I’ve been sleeping like a baby.

My other hobbies have been getting in the way too; I’ve been motorcycling, beer drinking, playing disc golf, watching baseball, woodworking and sometimes just staring off into space. I’m still working on my second guitar. I experienced quite a disappointing setback when I screwed up the fret slotting and had to scrap the finger board and make a new one. Many hours of work wasted.

I’ve also — of course — been reading a lot. Nothing unusual there, except I’ve been doing that reading on my new iPad. (Butch bought it for me as a bonus upon my promotion to deputy chief laborer for the assistant head groundskeeper.) So far I am very happy with it. I’ve always found the idea of a portable library fascinating and had been thinking about getting an e-reader for some time. Apple’s version adds the capability to listen to my iTunes library, surf the intertoobz and check my e-mail.

I don’t consider myself an Apple fanboy, but it’s hard not to love this thing. It seems to be designed specifically for my needs; it’s not a toy, it’s a tool. The only drawback I’ve found so far is it exacerbates my own tendency to read too many books at once. I can now carry the stack of books I am currently reading that usually sits on my nightstand around with me wherever I go, plus hundreds, even thousands, more.

And many of them — in particular the old classics I haven’t read since high school — are free of charge. Most of the newer books cost about as much as their corresponding paperback version would, but the iPad screen is about the size of a hardback book page and the text size is adjustable for comfortable reading.

The first book I’ve actually finished reading in this new format (I have 5 going, plus the aforementioned nightstand stack.) is Say You’re One Of Them by African Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan. It is a profoundly saddening collection of short stories detailing the abject poverty, tribal genocide and religious insanity of “modern” Africa, all told from the uniquely powerless perspective of African children.

The Afterword to the book is written by one of Akpan’s fellow mythologists. Bishop Camillus Etokudoh states that Say You’re One Of Them is “a bold attempt to enlighten readers about children in Africa, fueled by a passionate desire to create a safer place for children all over the world,” but there is a hopelessness in this book that I found draining. Every American should read it just for the reality check it provides. A homeless person living under an overpass here in the US leads a happier, healthier and safer life than many Africans can ever dream of.

As a writer blogger, I try to avoid repetition because fresh material always seems so… uh… fresh, but there is one subject that my mind keeps circling back around to, and that is the question of why people believe things that aren’t true. Unfounded beliefs are what led me to create this website in the first place, however in this case I’m not referring to my disdain for religion. It’s the right-wing noise-machine that has my attention today.

How is it that ”entertainers” like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck can make 2 or 3 million dollars a month cultivating hate? And of course, it’s not just those two. There are a dozen more like them on the national stage and hundreds more at the local radio level all over the country. How did we get here? How did hate become an industry?

Limbaugh and Beck would insist that they are only giving their listeners what they want, but the truth is, they are reaping the rewards of a divisiveness that has been nurtured by political conservatives for decades. This divisiveness has so bled over into everyday life that rabid partisanship has supplanted rational discourse.

Right-wing America now embodies Nietzsche’s assertion that “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” I said this post wasn’t about religion, but I can’t help seeing similarities in their unblinking willingness to believe virtually anything about their liberal enemies. The Republican party, characterized by a complete lack of respect — or even understanding — of the simplest democratic principles now appears to exist only to oppose government.

Even worse than the millionaire pundits and craven politicians are those for whom no political or profit motive is necessary. There really are people out there whose only sense of accomplishment in life comes from getting other people to hate one another; examples include originators of chain e-mails full of easily, (but never) debunked lies, organizers of the Angry and Stupid Party Tea Party, and evil assholes who ratchet up the crazy just for the fun of it.

But the worst and scariest are bottom feeders like the Oath Keepers, which promotes treason and armed insurrection to disgruntled active duty and former military and police personnel. These groups prey on the delusional and paranoid and armed among us, providing future Timothy McVeighs a sense of belonging and a target for their hatred. The problem is, you can’t keep stoking that hatred and expect to control the outcome. If you continually tell unstable individuals that the government is out to get them, sooner or later that prophecy will become self-fulfilling.

So.  Having finished reading about Australia, I visited my library in search of something equally horizon-expanding. (Or failing that, I could at least pick up a trashy novel.)

I wasn’t there 5 minutes, because just a few steps inside the door, on the little new arrivals rack, was the latest edition of The Norton Anthology Of Poetry. Perfect. I paid my inevitable, recurrent fine (only a buck fifty, I got off light this time) and hastened home with my latest treasure.

Where to begin? Hundreds and hundreds of bite-sized nuggets of blogging inspiration right at my fingertips. Should I read them in chronological order as the editors assembled them or just crack open the book and sample at random? I settled for the latter, and almost immediately found Philip Larkin.

I first read his collection High Windows over 30 years ago. This anthology contains, among several others, my two favorites from that work. They are both short, so I’ll hunt and peck them out here. First is The Trees.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

 Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

That one has all the traits I prefer in a poem; short, simple, and elegant. The little black dress of poetry. The other poem is Larkin’s most famous, This Be The Verse. 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

As a youth, this poem really struck a chord for me, it rang with truths of  seemingly great depth. The final verse in particular, carried wisdom to live one’s life by. I didn’t, but that’s a long, boring story about growing up that pretty much any middle-aged person could tell.

It’s still a good poem, just not as good as it was when my long since lost copy of High Windows was serving as a coaster for a butterfly-bedecked glass bong.

I first read Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore when it was originally published way back in 1986. At the time, as young men often do, I fancied the idea of adventures in faraway lands. It was, in fact, my dreams of “someday” exploring the outback that led me to borrow Hughes’ history of Australia’s founding from my future mother-in-law.

Sadly, both those dreams and my mother-in-law are gone now, but memories of both came flooding back to me when I spotted a copy of The Fatal Shore among the piles of remaindered books at my local bookstore a few weeks ago. For 7 bucks, I couldn’t pass it up.

I enjoyed this book immensely both times I read it, but the interesting thing is, I found it fascinating for two different reasons. My two readings, separated by 24 years of life and learning, highlighted the difference between my young and old(er) self. Where once I read for plot, I now read for theme.

The story that I so vividly remembered — Hughes’ detailed rendering of Australia’s arduous beginnings as a penal colony for the British Empire — has now been surpassed by his excellent analysis of Britain’s failed experiment in penal philosophy, an experiment based on the still-common theory that a certain ”criminal class” exists and crime can therefore be decreased via the removal of this class from society:

It was  social amputation. What was the cause of crime? Criminals, who manufactured or, rather, secreted it from their inner nature, as snakes their venom or eels their slime. Get rid of criminals and you would get rid of, or at least greatly reduce, crime in Great Britain. Transportation had to fail in this, because the causes of crime lay further back in the social system: in poverty, inequality, unemployment and want,…

Great Britain transported almost 150,000 criminals to Australia over some 80 years and produced no drop in crime rate. It is a lesson that America has still not learned. We have more people incarcerated in this country than any other nation, more than 2 million, and we can’t seem to build penitentiaries fast enough to meet the demand. In truth, we can no longer afford to maintain the ones we have.

Crime is largely a product of social environment. The proof of this lies in Australia’s history. For while transportation did nothing for Great Britain’s crime problems, this transported “criminal class” ultimately constructed a productive and thriving country from a largely empty (sorry aboriginals) continent. Why? Because the convicts were given something they never had in Great Britain, something not provided by penitentiaries. Opportunity.