Applying Tariffs Properly, (Not Trumpically)

THE GOOD NEWS that SCOTUS had rear ended POTUS, had struck down El Trumpo's idiotic, precipitously and capriciously applied, unwisely conceived and implemented tariffs, filled me with great joy, as it must certainly have many others. All tariff policy should be carefully thought out, with constant and copious advice and guidance from experts, implemeted only with the greatest due considertaion, and targeted, very specifically, at specific industries and countries, for very real, expedient purposes, for economically beneficial reasons. They should not be implemented at the delusional whim of a mad petty tyrant throwing darts at a styrofoam target while admiring his orange hairpiece and thumbing through "Playboy". For some idiotic reason, contemporary American conservatism has taken up with the extremist, insane notion that there is no such thing as experts or expertise, that one citizen's answers are as good as any other conservative citizen's. Intellectual populism. Education level means nothing, and in fact only gets in the way of good, clear, conservative thinking by cluttering up the mind with a bunch of pseudo intellectul elitest nonsense. This attitude is a sort of warped, twisted, misguided understanding of what, precisely, "Populism" actually is. Populism, in a nutshell, is nothing other than the sacred principle that everybody has a right to participate in the public, town square conversation, to have and freely share his or her own thoughts, ideas, and imput, and to be listened to respectfully, if nothing else, if not with actual agreement. Populism is democracy from the ground up, not from the top down. We the people, the teeming masses of the land of economic exploitation of everything, are given, by our own insistence, the awesome responsibility of governing ourselves. Populism is no more intended as a declaration that all ideals and beliefs are created equal than deomocracy is meant to imply that all citizens, regardless of personal character or talent, are equally qualified to participate in popular goverment or to assume positions of political leadership. Herr Trump, with the full approval of SCOTUS, Congressional Republicans, and about half of the American people, has packed like sardines the U.S. Supreme Court with three hard right wing extremist conservatives, for the intended purpose of remaking the American legal in the image of far right wing conservative extremist ideologues. A pure neoliberal capitalist economic system, excluding all governent regulation. Christian nationalism. Mass deportations of the working dark colored working class. Unspoken but glaring, obviously implied: an American society which reverts to traditional but currently fading white Christian supremacy. Packing the high (on drugs?) Court, as well as the entire federal jusiciary, with flaming far right ideologues fashioned in the image of Rush Limbaugh's ghost, is a very real conspiracy, (see: Newt Gingrich, David Brock) dating back to the horror, shock, and outrage of Republicans when Obama was elected, an event which precipitated a secret gathering of the political right leadership in 2009. What they came up with was a strategy of fierce, unrelenting aggression. Obams's ascension scared American conservatism straight into the arms of the John Birch society, within whose comforting grasp it yet remains. Maybe sometime soon the Democrats will figure out that Ali beat Foreman not by rope-a-doping the entire fight, but rather, by coming out and fighting just about the time when Foreman, exhausted from his on savage attacks, was beginning to wear down.

Turning Up the Pressure On Trump

SOMEWHERE I SAW, or somebody told me, that Trump's approval rating had fallen to twenty seven percent. I hope that's true, but am skeptical. It seems certain thaqt it has indeed declined from its traditional forty two perent or so, which is the number, possibly inflate, that has most often been given during his two disaster fests. Beyond doubt, this is the time to tur opposition to Trump up to a fever pitch, to get over the hump, to hammer teh nails into the coffin of his political career, the MAGA movement, this current strain of fudamentalist evaangelical Christianity married to and making strange bedfellows with far right wing political conservatism.Like Barry Goldwater and Billy Graham both emphatically said, we don't want a strong powerful right wing Republican party married to asssociated with dominated or influenced by evangelical fudamentalist Protestant Christianity. No only do the atheistic far left wing lunatic scum not want this, neither do all good Christian conservative Americans, whether they know it or not, if they are patriotic, truly love their country, and want what's best for America. You sure as hell don't want the Christian religion to formally, legally be made teh official state religion of these United States. Period. Trump's recent, recycled proclaamation of his Christian faith rings more hilariously hypocritical than ever. The thing to do is to mockingly laugh, sneer at, and ridicule it, sarcastically, as viciously as possible, in public, on social media, everywhere. This is precisely what the Prevaricaotor - Chief deserves, and really, needs, other than lifetiem incarceration. What I am telling my fellow anti-Trumpers is that now is the time to swoop in like eagles for the kill and vultures for bone picking, then maggots for final consumation. To merely present such widespread popular, media and political-legislative oppostion to trump, including the Democrats winning the midterms, decisively, is the corrrect formula, just what the doctor ordered for he preservation of democracy in America. It can be surmised that every anti-Trumper, bearing in mind that sixty percent of the American are in that category, not only opposes Trump, but does so vehemently, vociferously, strongly, not merely causually. The anti-Trump movement has a lot of substance and strength, and is formidable, which is the reason why Trump is already resorting to desperate measures, attempting to cling to his shrinking base of support, and indeed, the presidency. With each day it look slike pressure is growing to release the complete Epstein files, fully, compleely, unabridged, unredacted. The ANTIFA movement, which is another name for the anti-Trump movement, is strengthening sufficiently to shut down the Trump agenda, in its entirety. When you consider that the judicial system has essentially already shut it down, our duty is to fully support the judiacary as fundamental to any patriotic American, even as it uses sound legal reasoning to point out the unconstitutionality of all the Trump tyranical insanity by decree that it has alredy relgated to the garbage sack. My ultimate dream, that the Trump administration will become aware of me personally, and will consider me a sufficient threat to its poer and existence that it starts trying to and maybe kills me or tries to discredit me somehow still seems far away, probably unachievable, beyond my grasp, an impossible dream. But, you never know. A journey of a thousand miles, etc. Whatever you're doing to oppose or even get rid of Trump, keep doing it, and do more of it.

Damning With Faint Praise

DONALD TRUMP"S remarks about Jesse Jackson were, unsurprisingly, a perfect example of "damning with faint praise". He knew that for the sake of appearances alone he had to say something, anything free of his usual acidic vitriole and rampant, but subtle implicit racism. He almost made it seem as if the two of them drank beer together,palled around a bit, shared a golf cart.Two peas in a perfecty harmonious pod, Donnie and Jesse. Two galant crusaders for racial and economic justice. A firm, enduring frienship based on mutual respect and admiration."Quite a character. Quite a character, that Jesse. A good guy." Gotta give Trump credit. I was certain that he would remain silent, would have nothing to say. I was wrong. How and why I would expect Trump to remain on the sidelines and out of the spotlight by missing such a golden opportunity to redirct the spotlight towards himself is beyond my comprehension. A momentary lapse of good judegment is my excuse. And, as always, it probably would have been better had he had the good sense to say nothing, but that,of course, is far beyond his capabilities. Donnie always has to weigh in, always has to find a way to make something which has nothing to do with him about, and only about, his glorious, shining, stinking self. Drawing atention to himself at every opportunity is a narcissist's stock in trade, and its what makes Trump Trump. "He shines and stinks like dead mackeral by moonlight", as one founding father said of another, and as I can't seem to stop quoting. The quote is just too good to let lie. But in the midst of his usual self aggrandizement, he found a way to mention Jesse Jackson, and I'll give him that.And he didn't utter a single syllable about shit hole counries in Africa, didn't use the "N" word, at least not unless it was "redacted", as we say these days, edited out. You can never be too sure. In private conservation, Trump never fails to refer to African-Americans as "niggers". That, according to everyone who has ever written a book about him using primary source material. I never in amillion years would have know precisely how close the two menwere, and how much Trumpofa boost Donald gave to Jackson's career. What, the civil rights leader spent a night of two in Trump Tower,and in the Lincoln bedroom, correct? Probably included room service. Trump's obsession with being on the winning team at all costs impels him inmany instances to dwell among his emenies,and to break bread with them. The next step is the announcement of the itinerary for Jackson's funeral,time, place, guest list, and so forth. You can bet your bottom dollar that Donald Trump will be seated in the front row, amidst a sea of black faces the sort of which he has long held in abject contempt, looking all pious, deep in mourning. He's not half bad at feigning emotion, like any good politician. And so I surrrender, with feigned dignity but very real revulsion and disgust, to the inevitable reality that, after all, everything in the currrent incarnation of this parallel political universe is all about and only about Donald J.Trump. Like John Adams said to his wife when Thomas Jefferson stole the election of 1800 and the presidency from her husband "My darling, if he wants it that badly, let him have it." I repeat that story ad nauseum too. i just can't seem to let it go. So let Trump have his moment of vainglorious stolen glory in the sunshine of his own refleced light. We are free to turn away in disgust. Jesse Jackson shall live forever, in our hearts and minds. Trump will sink beneath the cess pool of his own igmoinous, perfidious making, relegated to history's hall of scum and shame. Jesse Jackson will shine on forever as a beacon of social, economic, and racial justice, far from the dark but mercifully short shadow cast by Donald Trump's rotting, stinking dead indecency.

Speaking Trumpese

DONALD TRUMP was explicit, to the degree that he ever can be.No bones about it. He is the greatest current president in American history. This, objectively, is beyond dispute. Unmentioned is that he is also the worst current president in American history, and perhaps most fortunate of all, the only current president in American history. That's just the way he talks. When George H.W. Bush proudly proclaimed the United States of America the greatest nation in the entire country, we scratched our heads, read between the lines, consulted our dictionairies of modern American Bushisms, and finally, perhaps somewhat miraculously, got his point.That's what we are forced into doing with our modern Republican presidents. The eloquence of the self educated Abraham Lincoln is a relic of bygone days. People in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had good penmanship, they spelled correctly, andwhen they wrote and spoke, they made some semblance of good sense.That's what happens when paper is dearly expensive,andinorderto put pen to paper it isnecessary to dip pen in ink,over and over again.You make the msot of what you have. We seem to have reached the point, in all our affluent surplus, where we can afford to make the least. Donald Trump would be eligible for membership in the Yogi Berra association of butchered verbal expression, were it not for the fact that Yogi was a genuinely good guy, irresistably loveable,and of the highest moral quality, the precise opposite of the reprobate who dares think of himself, laughably, as a great leader.When you repeat Yogi-isms, you smile with love and admiration. When you look to Bush - either one will do - you roll your eyes, and wonder why and what if. When you think about Ronald Reagan, another master at the art of English language butchery, you cntempate his mental decline in his second term, much like that of Joe Biden during his first. But there is something far more sinister and lesss endaring about the way Trump's makes a mockery of coherent self expression. It aint over till its over, it gets late early at Yankee Stadium. Nobody ever eats at that restaurant because its always crowded. These are the stuff of beloved,lengendary linguistic abusers. Both Bushes had their sometimes charming style of spoken idiocy. Trump's word salads are of a different order and magnitude altogether. For one thing, they seem to go on endlessly, like a minor league outfielder kicking the ball all over the left center field gap while runners circle the bases in droves. They go on, and on, extended beyond mere phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. Like a fumble that nobody seems to want to recover, or a loose basketball rolling in slow motion, going out of bounds while ten tall people scramble and dive like gophers into holes, canceling each other out in abject futility. Trump does more than merely innocently, humorously torching good grammer and usage. He garbles volumes. You can, and it has been done,put a Bush quote of the day on a tear off calander, and help people to a mmorning giggle over coffee and donuts. With Trump the temptations tends more toward a head shake and sigh of resignation.True, his gaffs are humorous. All the basics are there. But when you sort out the substance,what there is of it, from the flotsam and jetsome, you go away feeling hollow, somehow cheated. We sole conolation is remindful of what my sister says about her cooking: "It aint good,but there's a lot of it". And, one might assume, a lot more to come.

Jesse Jackson, Making Me Better

I SAW JESSE JACKSON speak on a college campus in 1991, where I was teaching. My girlfriend and I attended together, and, I confess, I was much more excited about my date than about Jesse Jackson. Go figure, as we say. In an arena seating about nine thousand people, there were probably half that many people in attendance, and my date and I were among the very few "white" people there, sprinkled throughout the sea of black faces. I recall being a bit nervous, hoping we would be accepted, not regarded as posers, wearing some feigned, prominently displayed racial equality on our sleeves for appearances only. In retrospect, I needn't have worried. I must assume that when Jackson appeared on campuses up north, the crackers came out in much greater numbers. But in the deep south, whitie boy stayed home, probably sulking. Only the radical liberals dared venture forth to listen to an uppity N word griping about some imaginary racial inequality. My mother, who was born in 1920, was raised around racists, and hated racism passionately. She had more influence over me than my overtly racist father, thank heaven, who was brilliant, but should have known better, and knew better. When Jesse walked through the door and into the basketball arena, he was flanked by no fewer than a dozen very large, young, athletic looking African-American men, all wearing suits and ties. Jesse wasn't going to take any chances, play any games, or cater to anyone's misplaced sensitivities. He meant business, which was immediately evident. The most handsome group of men I had or still have ever seen, except perhaps when Elvis Presley or Neil Diamond appeared on stage alone. Jackson lost no time getting to the point. The theme of his speech was, and its title should have been and maybe was "they work every day." By this time the reverend had long since abandoned his attacks on racism only, and had expanded his repertoire to the working class, all pigmentations included. He had come to realize that the root problem is more comprehensive than mere racism, that it exrended to the entire working class, the exploited, largely forgotten part of the American people who do the actual work. Paraphrased, he said: "Tonight, when we finish here, we will all go back to our comfortable homes, our comfortable, well paying jobs, and we will carry on with our comfortable, privileged lives". He well good and well that he was speaking about a class of Americans to which a select, chosen few people of color had been admitted, by reason of some talent, some ability to entertain, or by sheer chance of birth or marriage. He knew his audience, the sons and daughters of the upper midddle class of white privilege. The well educated class. Nobdoy there was dressed in the clothing of the working class. No thread bare coveralls, no brown uniforms. "That's when they, the workers, will take our place here in this arena, which will need a good cleaning. And they will clean up our mess, and noody will know or care about what they did. We won't even bother to imagine what this beautiful building would look like, what it would become, without their deovted, crucial assistance. They alone make our presence here possible." He said more than this, but he needn't have. He had made his point, and we, the privileged few, got the point. We left the arena that night changed,somehow. I for one have never been the same. That was the end of my date. My date and I had done enough, heard enough.. I grew that night, in ways that even the reverend Jackson would never fully know or understand. I became a better person because of what he said to me, what he did for me. As Goethe said; "Confronted with great merit, the only resistance is love". The night I listened to Jesse jackson, I became a better person, and for that, I shall always be grateful.

Doing Something

"FASHION IS A THING I CARE mighty little about, except when it happens to run just exactly according to my own notion, and I was mighty nigh sending out my book without any preface at all, until a notion struck me, that perhaps it was necessary to explain a litle why and wherefore I had written it. Most of authors seek fame, but I seek for justice."... When writer's block, which is a very real affliction, afflicts one, one recourse is to quote the first sentence in the autobiography of David Crockett, American hero. The historian who wrote the introduction to this quaint classic American treasure pointed out that heroes are made, they are not born. Quite correct. At the Unitarian church I attend, the pre service disussion group, which always chooses something interesting to discuss, centered around "heroes"; what one is, what characterizes one, etc. When the topic turned to female heroes, I nominated Abagail Adams, a personal hero of mine, who among other acts of heroism wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson after he in effect stole the presidency from her husband, in which she said: "I still love you, but once upon a time I respected you."...You go, girl. I left the discussion exhilarated, proud of myself for having, for the fist time, contributed something. I try to write and publish at least one page of nonfiction prose on this website daily. Sometimes I fail. When that happens I feel useless, idiotically guilty (guilt, I believe, like jealousy, is bullshit). I write and publish an essay, (a good essay I hope) nearly every day for more than fourteen years,six thousand essays, I miss one day in a blue moon, and I feel guilty?! As we say: "gimme a break!"...Forgiving one's self can be the most difficult and is the most important form of forgiving of all. So stop with the emotioal garbage nonsense, I exhort myself. There comse a time when you simply have to get your ass up off the couch, and go get some exercise. Just do it, as Nike tells us. Blame nobody, expect nothing, do something. Get up, get out, get better. Goethe, my main man as anybody who knows me knows, said: "There is no better way to blunt a resolution than to keep talking about it." Thus this essay becomes an exercise in stream of consciousness, guilt free. The page is filling up with words, and I am, I was the one who put them there. Well, and then, so be it. If nothing else,I will have done something, will have broken the chains of my self inflicted paralysis of mind and soul, and can at least say: "I did something, I produced something" In my favorite televsion ad, Michael Jordan is walking sullenly into the locker room, all black leather, carrying a gym bag. He is talking to himself. He says: "During my lifetime I have lost three hundred basketball games. I have missed more than nine thousand shots. Seventy five times my teammates have relied on me to make the game winning shot, and twenty five times I missed the shot. During my lifetime, I have failed, over, and over, and over again. And that is why I succeed....And so this page is filling up with words. Only a few minutes ago I thought I had "writer's block",and indeed I did, but only because I thought I did. I have no idea whether these words will benefit anyone, other thanas a sort of mental laxative for myself. I'm gald I contributed something, however meager, to the discussion group at church. And I am gladder that I wrote this essay, inadequate though it likely is. Verbal garbage though it may be, a lost game, a missed shot, I took the shot, and can do nothing more than that.

Trump, Solving Problems

WITH EVIDENT PRIDE AND JOY, President Trump announced that with the rising stock market the 401Ks of American military personnel were appreciating quite well. This, despite the inconvenient fact that the American military does not offer 401Ks to service members. Oops. Faux pas. Not to worry. There is nothing at all unusual about this. Our president is an old pro at this game,in which he says something idiotic, then either denies having said it, or claims that somebody else did. The self absorbed addlepated chief executive routinely fabricates a seperate, alternative reality, for whatever demented reason, usually one in which he escapes laughable ignominy only to emerge as the heroic protagonist, in his own mind if nowhere else. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that he sincerely if mistakenly believes that he authored, sponsored, and skillfully maneuvered through Congress and signed into law a provision extending 401K benefits to all members of the military. Or that he knows he did no such thing, but likes to think he did, or prefers to pretend that he did. Sort of like one of his election fantasy things with which we are all so painfully familiar. Its anyone's guess, as always. Whatever the sordid case may be, five'll get you ten that his cult followers, no less delusional than he, duly impressed by his "achievement", imaginary or not, will tout it as undeniable proof that the Donald deserves a third term, all constitutional considerations aside, the founding document be damned. He may or may not be seriously mentally ill, but you can bet your bottom dollar that He is utterly corrupt, capable of anything, as is well known. He shines and stinks like dead mackerel by moonlight, as one founding father said of another. Our luminous president's precarious perspicacity is demonstrably not limited to merely imaginary pension programs. His expertise, we now learn, extends to geology. This reminds me of a friend of mine, who has a degree in marketing, who swore that cliamte change is a hoax, and said that he knows this becasue he is a geologist. I still haven't made that connection.I hope and assume I never shall. But, I digress...You'll recall Mr. Trump's optimistically assesing rising sea levels as nature's way of providing new opportunities for developing ocean front property. (as always, you can't make this stuff up). He now proposes that what with hundreds of active volcanoes distributed all over God's green Earth, it would be expedient to dump tons of cement straight down into their hollow cones, filling them with hardening concrete, plugging them up,thereby trapping all future lava while the molten mess has a chance to cool down, and reconsider doing damage to people and property. Don the Con's impressive resume' of problem solving includes his forthcoming cure for windmill cancer, Covid 19 treatments and cures which include drinking bleach and using ultraviolent radiation in a suppository,and his greatest prescription of all; simply letting the virus spread without medical resistance, culling the weak from the stong while the flu like symptoms run their course. If only all this were no more than a dystopian science fiction novel, and perhaps it should be, but it isn't. Bear in mind that we have nearly three more years of solutions by Trump. Einstein allegedly said that there are two things that are infinite, human stupidity and the universe, but that he wasn't sure about the universe. We know for certain that Friedrich Schiller said that against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain. True enough, and our silver lining is that this reality takes the heat off of us for our pathetic inability to do a damned thing about it ourselves.

Denying Science, At Great Peril

IN HIS SEMINAL book "The Demon Haunted World", published just before his death in 1995, the late Carl Sagan provides a compelling examination of the modern preoccupation with pseudo science. In our increasingly well educated era, a not insignificant segment of the population,is apparently unable or unwilling to understand and come to terms with the revealed, verified realities of the world and the universe. Sagan points out that there is no shortage of intelligence among the masses. There is, however, a shortage of scientifically well educated students. In this regard our education system has failed us. We have turned out more than a mere few generations of poorly educated citizens. When a charismatic leader openly proclaims his love of the poorly educated, sycophantic cult like followers eagerly assemble at his throne of willful, lazy ignorance, their choice to eschew education in favor of cheap entertainment fully reinforced and vindicated. Maybe science classes, particularly chemistry and physices, should be required courses, not elective. Maybe pseudo science is perceived, albeit incorrecly, as being more fun, more exciting. It is of course neither, but it is simplistic, easy to comprehend and digest, and embrace. The poorly educated, who have become a celebrated demographic in the United States of Avoicance, take the lazy way, the easy way out. Its cool to be dumb. Simply spout a few conspiracy theories laced with pseudo science and you have the making of a best seller or rapt audience on the A.M radio stations which market, under the cover of night, this garbage like they market far right wing dispensers of hatred and lies by day. The money hungry media, which relies on the steady income of abloated,over priced advertising industry, happily spoon feeds a credulous, gullible public the precise intellectual opiate it so desperately craves: pseudo science fiction and fantasy, attractively packaged and presented as credible information. Certainly it is far easier and more immediately emotionally fulfilling to immerse a lay mind in the salve of escape entertainment rather than slogging our way through the hours of lectures, textbooks, and examinations necesary to put one's self on a firm footing with the ostensibly enormously complex universe as it really is. Imagine the shattering experience of conversing, or trying to have an intelligent conversation with a climate change denier, as he moves the downward facing open palm of his hand in an undulating roller coaster motion in front of your face, signifying that climate change is cyclical, and that the cycles recycle according to their own natural causes, without any human intervention or influence. The message is tragically clear,the product of an opaque mentality. Imagination him telling you, with a condescending smirk, in all seriuosness, without a trace of doubt, that teh Earth'sclimate is alwasy changeing, and has always changed, and alwasys will, regardless of human activity. One trillion tons of carbon, injected into the atmosphere by humans, thus becomes irrelevant, even imaginary, or worse, a hoax, a conspiracy among the world's radical liberals, a pretext to take control of government,destroy all economic freedom, and to sustain the enormous corporate profits generated by the fossil fuel industry. Ironically, it is the conservative capitalists, not the socialistic tree hugging liberals who seek to sustain forever their sacred corporate money making machine. No, the Earth is not so huge, and we humans are not so weak and small as to make any impact by us on the world's ecosystem impossible. we burn down huge forests, turn rivers into lakes, and our cities can be seen from outer space. There shall remain of our cities but the wind that blew through them. Astray within their hollow cement shells,our descendants will marvel at the stupidity of their ancestors, for truly, against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.

Cleaning Up

THE GANGES RIVER, which arises high in the Himalayas and flows for hundreds of miles along the border separating India and Pakistan, is among the world's largest, longest, and most polluted waterways. Garbage and sewage is cast into the waters upstream, where swimming is possible but inadvisable, partly due to strong, unpredictable currents, deep parts, and whirlpools. As the river makes its way to its ultimate destination it become ever more polluted, as the millions of people crowded into filthy cities lining its shores almost casually toss their waste material into its sacred waters. You could almost walk across it, without a bridge. (Those of a certain age might remember when Lake Eerie caught fire.) China's Yangtze river suffers a similar afflication. It is debatable as to which nation on Earth is most guilty of failing to protect the delicate ecosystem of planet Earth, and which layer of it has been and is being the most abused by humans; Earth, air, or water. Any bet placed on any of the above would beat the odds in Vega. The United States is certainly a front running candidate. As to which of the world's great rivers endures teh msot mistreatment, again, your pick is as good a anyone's, although generally much progress has been made in cleaning up rivers, lakes, and oceans,but not nearly enough. We shouldn't have to be doing the cleaning up. We the people of planet Earth hould have had the common sense to never have defecated where we dine, so to speak. We have plenty of places and opportunities to properly dispose of our wretched refuse on the planet where harm done would either be ameliorated or eliminated altogether, but we have only one planet to pollute. Even nuclear waste can be buried deep beneath the surface of the Earth, where its deadly harm can at least be mitigated or ignored if we prefer. Long before we were fully aware of atmospheric carbon pollution and resulting climate change we were well aware of the, harm being done by plastic grocery sacks, toxic waste dumps, inadequae sweage systems. Amazing, the amount of damage to our planetary nesting place we do by producing more than eight billion of us, with many more to come, and by giving ourselves a blank check to do with our thrown away materials whatever our whimsical nature impels us to do. We have known better all along. Whatever is most convenient. We know that we are threatening to bring about the extinction of the human species, and that we are already causing the extincion of thousands of other species of aninals. We have until recently been relatively unconcered with the mess we have made and continue to make. Our recently enhanced awareness of our own folly is an encouraging sign, a sign of our dawning awareness of the absolute necessity keeping the kitchen and the latrine separated. (Even George Washington had to be taught this.) High schol "ecology clubs" used to pick up garbage in public places on weekends for extra credit. Now, they and the rest of us must do much more. Hysterical warnings about our behavior and the future of the planet are, of course, a dime a dozen, but are worth every penny, and then some. We can never give ourselves sufficient warnings, take too many proactive measures to protect the environment, or write too many books and essays on this subject. Like Issac Asimov and Frederick Pohl warned in their 1991 book "Our Angry Earth", the alarms are sounding, the red warning lights are flashing. And yes, time is running out, and no matter how many times we repeat this redundantly, it becomes more urgently true by the day. All the damage we have done can be undone. High school environmental protection clubs are a good start. The end game will consist of our decision to begin treating the Earth like a home, rather than a waste dump.

Losing our Religion; The Twilight of the Gods

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, said Goethe, began as an abortive political revolution which turned moral. The uprising was against Roman power and suppression. It failed for the usual reasons; lack of organization, weapons, and suficient political will. All turned out well for the faith, in that it spread around the world and to this day illuminates the lives of more than two billion people. Its actual origins are deeper in history than that, dating back, in fact, to the dawn of history itself. All religions, approximately four thousand of them, have the same genesis; in the human imagination and ability to reimagine an incomprehensible universe in anthrophmorphic, all too human terms, in the image of humanity. God becomes a superhuman entity, and we his chosen children of the light. All religions begin with their votaries calling their invented beliefs "the light", or "the truth". The sun is the center, the focal point of all religion. God has many names. This is illustrated by a science fiction short story by Arther C. Clarke "The Nine Billion Names of God". When the last, final name of the last god is spoken, the universe, satisfied that it now knows itself, willingly, mercifullly dies. There is almost always a "messiah". Our ancient ancestors correctly perceived their own fragility, and the fragile, makeshift nature of human existence. The anthropomorphic deities were nonetheless somewhat emotionally fragile themselves, taking after their inventors, and required their own nourishment of the soul, in the form of human formalized adoration, worship, an exprssion of which isinherit in every ceremony ever held by every society which ever feared and failed to understand the essential harmony of nature, and in most cases harmlessness of thunder and lightening. We invent superior beings and set them atop Mount Olympus where we can relegate them to the status of observers who once upon a time intervened directly and constantly in human affairs, but gradually withdrew from our daily lives as our understanding of them grew and perhaps made them fearful that their fraudulant nature would be exposed, and their power over us, purely psychological, would dissipate and vanish altogether. Religion inspires and comforts people, the only real reasons for its existence. We are now in the twilight of our gods. Having largely outgrown them, we simply do not need them anymore. Though many people still cling to traditional religious beliefs, the sweeping growth of science, with our attendant advance in our knowledge of the universe, is inexorably reducing our pantheon of gods, for they have become relics of a benighted past, and we simply do not need them anymore. We should celebrate and not lament the passing of our ancient omnipotent, omnipresent heavenly benefactors. Thomas Jefferson,two hundred years ago, called relgious belief "our modern superstition". He understood that humanity's capacity to understand the world through our own faculties was freeing us from the need to assuage our fears and ignorance-based beliefs about the world, by replacing them with explanations for phenomena which are coherent, observable, verifiable, and ultimately far more comforting and satisfying than our previous reliance on fabricated narratives. As a species we are growing up, outgrowing our need for the comforting crutches of religious superstition. We are entering the twilight of the gods, and giving birth to a newand better way of understanding our world and ourselves. Childhood's end. We are yet unsure precisely how to adopt to and evolve with our new found freedom from the mental bondage of our inferior prior beliefs. For better or for worse, we will think of something.

Choosing, Or Not Choosing, Our Faith & Fate

THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, much like the Methodist church, is a product of the Scottish reformation. A quick glance at a list of the essential tenets of this sub faith revealed little to me, other than it embraces all the fundamental beliefs of all or most Protestant sects. Salvation by grace, not by good works. (The various denominations often differ on that.) Salvation by prior decision, known as "predestination". No matter what you do, no matter how noble, sublime, or heinous one's behavior is or had even been during one's temporal existance, enttrance into the kingdom of heaven is determined not by the good or bad actions of the individual, but by the will of God, in advance. This one in particular seems a bit murky, questionable. How could the decision whether to achieve eternal salvation in heaven with God the Father not at least be somewhat influenced by one's behavior during one's lifetime? In other Protestant denominations it indeed is. All the rest is standard Protestant Christian stuff. Martin Luther, a stern, sullen, taciturn priest, signed his name to the ninety five complaints he listed and posted on the door of his local Catholic parish, much to his credit, courage, and conviction. Then he went into hiding, expediently, allowing him to live to the ripe old age of fifty three. His primary aim appears to have been the decentralization of the flock, to loosen the ties the ubiquitous Bishop of Rome held tightly over all Christiandom. The hereditary nobility throughout the various Germanic kingdoms had grown weary of having their treasuries drained by the requirement that no less than one tenth of their wealth be offered as tithe to the Pope. As the centuries passed, the Bishop of Rome had lived progressively more opulently and corruptly, almost as lavishly as European princes and Turkish sultans. Unrepentant priests were indulging in the dubious practice of selling "indulgances", one way tickets into heaven, for profit. The forms of ecclesiastical corruption were so many and varied that the pure spirited Luther could tolerate no more. Resistance to established authority is inherent in human nature, especially when enduring perceived exploitation. The extant to which we as individuals actually choose our outcomes in this lifetime is a valid subject for analysis and discussion. The extent to which our behavior while here determines our ultimate disposition of our eternal souls is much less knowable. Since nobody has ever been able to identify anything in a human being which even remotely qualifies as a "soul", any attempt determine its ultimate destiny is dubious at best, impossible at worst. Lacking facts, we choose to live by faith. It has been pointed out that our modern science isatbottomnothing other than a form of faith,faith in our own ability to observe and understan the universe. Anancient scripture says "Man is a creature who lives by faith, and whatsoever is tha faith, also is the man." This concept is worth repeating in more than a single essay or religious tract. Of the more than fifteen hundred Protestant denominations, those which espouse the doctrine of "predestination" do the most harm to the human belief, our abiding belief in our ability to know the universe,and to live more harmoniously within the apparent limitations it prescribes for us. Since nature is itself supremely, surpassingly sublime and seemingly unknowable, why should our conception of its presumed "creator" be any different, any more or less knowable, or sublime? And why shouldn't we, creatures gifted as Einstein said with only weak and transitory understanding , refrain from inventing and reinventing our various wholly inadquate means of comprehending it? Like Goethe said: "When I realized that everyone invents his own religion, I decided to invent mine."

Conspiring, In Theory

CONSPIRACY THEORIES, which I generally don't like, are of little interest to me. Maybe I'm burned out. My first bad experience with them was the assassination of President Kennedy. The shock of this for an eight and a half year old third greader was traumatic. I had never before in my short life even remotely considered the possibility that the Preisdent of the United States could be murdered. as I recall I still knew nothing about Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Precocious and ambitious, I began a project of cutting out every article in our local newspaper which had anything at all to do, directly or indirectly, with th awfule vents of November 22, 1963. It happened on a Friday. Saturday's edition ran the huge ink stained headline, Sunday's paper was more of the same, and by Monday and beyond the sad funeral and transition to LBJ grabbed the nation's attention. And the conspiracy theories began to flow as freely as a pure mountain stream, clogged with the murky mud of suspicion. How, after all, could a nondescript litle nobody like twenty four year old Lee Harvey Oswold have possibly carried out such an audacious act? By the time the dust had cleared, and it really never has entirely cleared, not only were the CIA, FBI, and Vice President priime suspects as acconplices, but fingers were being pointed at the Russians and Cubans, Khruschev and Castro, our old communist enemies. Both of these accused seemted to tacitly imply that they would indeed have been quite willing if not outwardly pleased to have been the assailant, but, alas, had not been. By 1966 I had read every book in the library, not an inconsiderable number were already availale in our medium sized town library, and was beginning to lose my patience and become a bit suspicious as to whether the whole thing had been the product of group pre planning, or wasin fact the random action of a lone gunman, maybe one who hated Kennedy. Only, Oswald didn't hate Kennedy. I tried to figure it all out, but couldn't. Neither, it seemed, could anybody else. I walked out of the Oliver Stone movie in 1990 as a thrity five year old whose curiosity has been renewed, inflamed by Stone's masterful way of implicating, using circumstantial evidence, seemingly everything and everybody who gets out of bed in the morning. My credulity recovered, my innate skepticism and critical thinking skills having become better honed by the time I graduated from the sixth grade. No, not all conspiracy theories are inherently invalid, told a friend of mine who swears by them. But neither are they all true, nor even most of them. True, people conspire. Whenever two or more are gathered together, and so forth. Isn't the Christian religion the product of a conspiracy theory which can never be proven nor disproven? My friend asked me whether I always believe what I hear on the news, and do I really believe the "bombing" of the World Trade Center was the act of a single demented mind? I reflexively answered "yes" to the question about the news, and "probably yes" to the one about the twin towers. Another friend of mine, a solid scientific skeptic, seemed to lean towards the notion that the WTC was brought down with the "help" of several powerful explosives positioned up and down the buildings, set to detonate, which they did, the moment the airplanes impacted. And, by golly, he showed me a film which seemed to confirm this. Was the video authentic, or fabricated or doctored, one of those AI Facebook jobs? I still don't know for sure about JFK, or about the WTC, and evidently neither does anybody else. Nor for that matter do I know whether Hillary Clinton was running a whore house out of a Pizza joint in Virginia. I have my doubts. Unless, of course, the government is concealing proof from us, to spare our poor little sensitive selves more post traumatic agony, agony over Hillary's alleged prostitution ring, or of extraterrestrials floating in formaldehide, staring bug eyed like insects with big brains, perhaps forever frozen in their wonderment that we benighted humans could ever have had the naivete to doubt their existence and presence among us in the first place.

Changing, and Keeping the Faith

IN HIS SEMINAL dystopian science fiction novel "A Time of Changes" Robert Silverberg writes about a planet colonized by humans where, in accordance with its founding covenant, the culture is predicated upon a single ideal; self abnegation, the denial of the self. Founded as a colony where people might live in a world free from violence, the normal, hateful human passions are held in check by The Covenant, according to which all citizens are required by law to direct all energies towards society as a whole, to the complete and total denial of individual concerns and emotions. The pronouns "I" and "me" and "myself" are forbidden, and are considered to be the most egregious, epresssions of outlawed individuality. All outward emotional expression is prohibited. The inevitable accumulated stress and anxiety, emotional garbage, is dissipated by a "drainer", a sort of psychologist-priest who, for a fee, listens wuietly as pent up, unexpressed emotions come pouring out of each individual, everyone, each one. Everyone by law and custom in speaking refers to himself or herself as "one", speaking, referring to one's self only in the third person. One is hungry. One is in need of the servies of a drainer. One has a need to express one's feelings. The penitant soul is therefore cleansed of borken thoughts and dreams, revewed as an empty emtional vessel, free, destined to once again accumulate more of the same mental debris, manure of the mind, piled higher and deeper. A world of stifled human beings, trapped within the confining prisons of their unresolved conflicts of the mind. A prince of the realm, the bottled up planet "Borthan", Kinnal Darival, has an epiphany. In his sudden, new dound awareness, he realized the nonsensical, self destructive nature and consequences of this needless self restraint, and breaks the odious spell. He begins the book with the forbidden word "I". He screams it on the page and out into the emotional vacuum world, repeatedly. I I I I I. At first he is met with shock, and outrage, like some criminal guilty of the most heinous of crimes, an unrepentant sinner against a sacred ideal. The seed thus planted, a new culture of self recognition and expression begins to bloom, as others gradually preceive not only the benefits of the new way of thinking and acting, but the expedient necessity of recreating a culture or renewed humanity, unfettered by the constraints of isolation. Would we in today's violent strife torn world be better off to follow this fictional example? Would it better serve our purposes, among them survival, to so constrain ourselves, to deny ourselves a fundamental component of who we truly are and have always been, by "evolving" to a "higher level" of self awarness and self denial, to become a global culture of millions of Mr. Spocks? It may be that in some future human society, artificial intelligence, unable to replicate true human emotion, has made motionaless, robotic beings of us all. A world free of self destructive, hateful, violent passions of the heart. A cat without claws. In the Dhammapada it is written: "Man is a creature who lives by faith, and whatsoever is the faith, also is the man." Ultimately our greatest act of faith must be our faith in ourselves. Our creator requires it, by giving us the ability to obtain it. Our only true faith is our faith to become more tomorrow than are are today, or were yesterday "Noble be man, compassionate, and good" said Goethe. It is necessary only to maintain the faith that there will come a time when we truly actualize the hopeful, wishful faith which Goethe had in us all.

Turning Off, Tuning Out

MANY YEARS AGO an abrasive lady on "America Online" (remember that?) said that she was done. Done watching the news, done paying attention to current events. Without saying so to her, I wondered how she intended to be well or even poorly informed, and why she would want to be that way. If she is still so inclined, by now she has missed a quarter century of modern history,and is arguably better off, and arguably not. The country certainly isn't. A pervasively uniformed citizenry is vulnerable to corrupt, self serving leadership. As Jefferson said: "If the people become inattentive to the affairs of government, the legislators and magistrates shall divide society into two classes, wolves, and sheep." No matter how redundantly often I make this point, no matter how often I quote Jefferson, it adheres. In a supposedly self governing democracy, it is our responsibility to govern. And then yeserday, as we await the impending release of the so called "Epstein files", another formerly attentive citizen,the director of our senior center, told me that she had had enough, enough vicarious misery,and was opting out. I told her that I understand completely, which I do. Things have gotten so bad, politically, morally, economically, and in all manner of other ways, that escape has become a viable alternative. My sister, a retired government employee who served as a personell manager at the Pentagon, takes same approach. Ignrance and apathy. She doesn't know, and she doesn't care. Considering that when the airplane crashed into her side of the Pentagon in 2001, you can almost give her a free pass. When I finally managed to reach her by telephone two days after the horrible event, and ask her how she was holding up, she told me that she was doing well enough, but that she wished that people would stop tring to kill her. Perfectly reasonable, I thought.She just wanted to get the hell out of there, and not look back, which she never has. And yet, her obligation, (and indeed it is an obligation), to particiapte in her own self governance remains, unabridged. I asked her who she intends to help govern on her behalf, in her stead, and she said that she didn't know and didn't care. And I'm "fine" with that, as we say. I'll pick up the slack, and keep it in the family. She is not a Trump supporter, and that's good enough for me. She used to drive an hour a day after work commuting from Washington D.C to Fredricksburg, Virginia, and upon arriving feed her cats (as all cat caregivers know, that must come first), and then proceed to catch up on "Days of Our Lives" I think it was, which her pre set VCR (remember those?) had waiting for her. Each day she erased the previous day's episode, and set the device to record anew.I found hope in the fact that she didn't preserve for eternity and posterity each day's episode; if nothing else, she was willing to move on, content to allow teh previous day's adventures and drama of fLuke and Laura fade into memory. As far as I know, those two are still mainstays, with Susan Lucci. Or maybe I've fallen behind. Luke and Laura must be in assisted living by now, probably melodramatic as ever. Sis and I are now both in our seventies, and we both hope to avoid assisted living. Its hard to imagine how, other than dying.My childhood sopa opera choice was "Love Is A Many Splendored Thing". Our father, a disabled retired attorney, kept a daily journal of all the "action", which he read to us after school every day, except on weekends. Maybe I should offer the same service to our senior center director. After all,somebody has to keep the uninformed informed.Somebody has to govern he country, the grandest soap opera of all. It might as well be me.

Keeping and Losing Cats

EVERY STRAY CAT who enters my large yard is fed, and offered a home. Some accept my offer, othere do not. There seems to be anemerging movement in America to provide better care for stray cats. Feral cats, without any prior association with human beings, are lesslikely to approach a human, and must be lured into accepting assitance. Or,so I have noticed. The very moment I begin to think that I have done all I can to help them, somebody else has done even more. Such people make good role models for me, and, I might presume, for others. Shortly before I typed these word, while riding a stationary bicycle, I saw alarge cat, possibly a neighbor's, chasing one of mine,as small female, down the street. I should have immediately interrupted my work out to step outside and do what I could, but didn't. My exercise was too important, and, in any event, the chase scene had already transpired, and there was nothing I could do to remedy the situation. I hope I don't pay dearly for my negligent mistake. Every cat I have ever adopted and cared for was a stra, including Mandi, my indoor only angel more than thirteen years old. She entered my yard in 2012, ahowed no inclination to ever leave,returning to the same spot every day for a week. Our relationshp began in earnest when I lost patience, and finally lured her onto my lap by appearing on my front porch with a big, juicy tuna fish sandwich. She jumped up, took a quick bite, and jumped right back down, not wanting to press her luck. It got easier after that. Then came Jake, whom I named after a charachter in a John Grisham novel (I almost named him "Grisham", but decided not to), a striped orange tabby whose full name became "Jake the Yellow Kitten". (I call all cats "kittens" affectionately). Thena Siamese male showed, and I noticed him, who at first I thought was a her, snuggling in a pile of October leaves in my yard. Whereas Jake had actually tried to claw his way through a window screen to gain admission, Shylow's tactic ws to sit in my driveway on a frigid January night and cry for help. First Jake, and then Shylow had evidently seen Mandi come and go at will in my house, and wanted the same treatment. They got it. When Jake and Shylow died much too soon, I decided not to allow any more cats indoors as long as Mandi is alive. My best guess is that she wouldn't tkae kindly to indoor feline company at her advanced age, and although I may be wrong, I'm afraid to try. The only outddor kittnes I have now are Remmi and Pseudo, female offspring of mothers long dead and buried in my yard whose remaining litter mates lgrew up and left home long ago. My assuption is that they all found good homes, otherwise, they surely would have come back. Destiny, Remmi's sister, got mad at me for having her spaded, and sought a new life elsewhere. Riley, a yellow tabby, reache full growth, sized up the situation in which he was destined to spend his life in my garage and yard with a group of females, decided to seek his fortune elsewhere as well. My sense is that he sas a future in which he would compete for food with a bevy of females, and wanted out. I am given to understand that males do not like hanging with a group of females. One can hardly blame them. I mourn all the kittens who have graced then left my life. I alwasy shall. I mourn in advance those that will ultimately do likewise. I hope Remmi comes back. If she doesn't, I'm in for more mourning.