Abandon Mythology

Michelle’s husband has been in office for over a year, so as far as I’m concerned, he’s fair game. I’m still a little hesitant to take my shots at him because he’s been getting pummeled from every direction for months now, but deservedly so.

This man campaigned brilliantly and eloquently, energizing millions of young people and motivating liberals of every stripe with his message of changing the way Washington works. That message, along with the fact that his nitwit predecessor presided over the destruction of our economy, our international reputation and our constitution, got him elected preznit.

But a year later, he still hasn’t shown up for work. In spite of all the screeching from the right-wing noise machine about socialism and communism and liberalism and Marxism and every other “ism” they can throw at him, he hasn’t really done anything leftist.

He has, in fact, been infinitely and oh so frustratingly patient, deliberate and cautious in the face of this constant barrage of nonsense and lies. His supporters on the left have been lulled to sleep by pragmatism, bipartisanship and compromise and they are not likely to wake up unless the preznit decides to man up.

Health care reform, the one liberal social issue that Michelle’s husband purportedly supported, was handed over to the Democrats in Congress, who jawboned it for most of a year, butchering it along the way, yet were still incapable of passing even the severely weakened legislation. Talk about getting your ass handed to you.

And while it is deplorable that the richest nation on earth does not provide universal health coverage to it’s citizenry, despite spending 3 to 4 times what all the other civilized nations do on health care, what I find truly despicable is that the politicians who stood in the way of this legislation will be able to sell it as a victory for the American people.

When the economy picks up this summer, as it inevitably will given the cyclical nature of our economic system, the right-wing will take credit for it, claiming it to be a result of their defeat of health care reform. And our preznit will let them get away with it.

I’ve been having trouble writing, and for once it’s not due to a lack of effort. The problem is, lately, when I sit down to blog — which I still do frequently, despite the lack of published posts — I write these long, rambling pieces that start with one subject, end with another completely unrelated subject, and travel everywhere (and nowhere) in between.

When I first started this site, I labeled my efforts here rhetorical masturbation and the metaphor is now even more appropriate. Like masturbation, blogging is not as much fun if you can’t finish.

My current wordy period and my previous policy of saving unfinished pieces for later revision have combined to produce a remarkable — albeit mostly digital — pile of bullshit that’s become too daunting to wade into, so I’ve spent the morning doing a purge, clearing out most of the stale ideas.

It is my intention, and hope, that I’ll now magically be able to write about any new ideas quickly and concisely. Perhaps not surprisingly, my mind, like my blog, is littered with the shards of past resolutions of just this sort.

Hopefully I’ll soon be posting more frequently again. For anyone interested, I’ve discovered that the RSS feed all the way at the bottom of the page actually works. So, rather than come here to see for yourself how lazy I am, it’s possible to subscribe and have any new posts show up in your e-mail just like spam advertisements for dick-bigger pills and Nigerian money laundering opportunities.

For many years I have carried around in my head an allegory of human time on earth. I can’t be arsed to look through my boxes and find it, but I’m pretty sure it comes from one of Carl Sagan’s books. In it, the age of the earth is represented by a hypothetical stack of sheets of paper from the earth to the moon, and the sum total of humanity is then represented by a single sheet of that paper.

It is a good, humbling image. Even more so when extrapolated down to the individual. A single human life is far less than a blink in time, yet as we study our own past we think of ourselves as ancient.

A long time ago — at least to us — back when all humans were still dark-skinned, mankind discovered farming and animal husbandry. The combination of those two discoveries allowed us to gradually take control of our own food cycle. All of modern civilization arises from the spare time created when we learned how to feed ourselves.

With our existence no longer simply a quest to stay alive, we were able to stop wandering and establish our own permanence. We created cities in which to live, languages with which to communicate and learn. We brought ourselves in from the wilderness.

Unfortunately, we brought with us the violence native to our existence in that wilderness. As we were building civilization, we were also building armies and weapons of war. In northeastern Syria, at a place called Tell Brak, archeologists have spent years excavating one of the oldest and largest cities ever discovered. From Discover magazine:

Close examination reveals the settlement extending over an astonishing 136 acres in the period of 4200 to 3900 B.C., larger than other settlements of the time, with the sole exception of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia.

The site is rife with information about early urban civilization, and many discoveries are yet to be made. One of their latest finds is evidence of a mass slaughter, hundreds of bodies dumped into pits, nearly 6000 years ago.

The Sumerians seem benevolent in many of the images that they left behind, which depict feathered skirts, round faces, and shaved heads. Some artifacts had hinted at violence, but the new evidence from Brak shows that the conflict at the time of urbanization was at times appallingly brutal. When forensic scientists pieced together what took place during that bloody event, it was gruesome by any standard. The corpses of the losers in this conflict were left for weeks to rot in the sun, then dragged and shoved into shallow pits. The winners carved pointed sticks out of some of their enemies’ bones, slaughtered prize cows, feasted on roast beef, and tossed the scraps and plates on top of the decaying bodies.

Our concept of time is limited individually by our short lifespan and cumulatively by our brief total time of existence, so it is impossible to fix our own position (or course) on the evolutionary scale. There can be no sense of direction, but that’s never been a bar to speculation.

As for me, I take some small comfort in the fact that we have always been as bloodthirsty and incapable of compromise as we are now. Knowing full well that from within the confines of a single sheet of paper in a stack reaching to the moon, “always” is meaningless.