Lethal Injection Chamber*

The following list of articles skews toward the anti-death-penalty persuasion, and does not hit every cogent point, pro or con, regarding capital punishment.  How could it?  But the furor over Troy Davis’ execution the other day—as well as some back-and-forth with fellow Sloth Jockey blogger Vinnie Bergl—has the topic fresh in my head.  I don’t know whether Troy Davis was innocent or guilty; I don’t know whether doubt over his innocence or guilt was a false impression given by the media.  For purposes of the following post, and the questions it asks, Troy Davis’ specific case doesn’t really inform the greater question:  is the death penalty ever justified in a civilized society?

I’m against capital punishment for what some might consider a simplistic reason: that, when doling out an absolute punishment, one innocent killed at the hands of the state is one too many.  I’m also sympathetic to skepticism over revenge, and my loose understanding of the greater effectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrent is that it doesn’t work.  To me, the death penalty is a difficult institution to defend, even if I probably wouldn’t lose too much sleep over the execution of a mass murderer or serial killer.

Consider the following:

Why Does the United States Love the Death Penalty?

In this piece for Lapham’s Quarterly Christopher Hitchens considers why the United States is the last country within its so-called peer group to maintain the death penalty:

To be in the company of Iran and China and Sudan as a leader among states conducting execution—and to have pioneered the medicalized or euthanized form of it that is now added to the panoply of gassing, hanging, shooting, and electrocution and known as “lethal injection”—is to have invited the question why. Why is the United States so wedded to the infliction of the death penalty? I have heard a number of suggested answers: two in particular have some superficial plausibility. The first is an old connection between executions and racism, and the second is the relatively short distance in time that separates the modern U.S. from the days of frontier justice.

…

The reason why the United States is alone among comparable countries in its commitment to doing this is that it is the most religious of those countries. (Take away only China, which is run by a very nervous oligarchy, and the remaining death-penalty states in the world will generally be noticeable as theocratic ones.)

There are a couple of good paragraphs omitted from this excerpt in order to tie the thought together.  Later in the article, Hitchens also considers the Nuremberg trials and the hanging of Saddam Hussein—executions that bookended larger cultural/political movements and could not be considered standard application of capital punishment—bringing, as he almost always does, an interesting perspective to the issue, wondering where we might draw the line were we the surviving victims.

Will Wilkinson on Morality and State-Sanctioned Killing

Wilkinson has three posts on this list because capital punishment seems to be an issue about which he feels exceptionally strongly.  Apart from questions about its effectiveness, both in the court system as well as in its place as a deterrent, Wilkinson questions the very root of the revenge impulse that leads to capital punishment, arguing that it has no place in modern society.

“Plush and Unusual Punishment”
This post was written after Anders Breivik went on his sick rampage in Norway.  Many people in America were screaming for his blood, while Norwegians seemed to be coming to grips with the sheer gravity of the event, their Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, civil and calm and reflective in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Some news outlets got wind that Norway’s maximum sentence was only 21 years (though it carries the potential for extension) and were understandably miffed.  Furthermore, we also discovered that Norway’s prisons are not the dungeons that American prisons are, a fact that did not sit well with retributionists.

Wilkinson considers these points, and while I’m not sure I am in total agreement with him on all points, including the following excerpt, I think he is genuinely concerned about humaneness and civility, two traits that are, I think, more important that the capacity for retribution:

Nothing can be done to bring Mr Breivik’s victims back to life. The most compelling, non-mystical case for vengeance is that it offers some consolation to those wracked by desolation and fury at the murder of their loved one. But the point of a criminal justice system in a civilised society is not the mental peace of those collaterally wounded by crime. All evidence supports the proposition that Norway’s criminal justice system is both practically and morally superior to America’s. If America’s abominably cruel and unjust system delivered results even remotely comparable to Norway’s enviable level of civil peace and order, then there might be some reason to take seriously American animadversions against Norway’s short sentences and humane prison. But we don’t. We’re not even close. So Americans should just shut up and watch. It could do us some good to see how a civilised society handles such a horrifying crime.

(Vinnie originally cited this quote, and I remember arguing that I didn’t know why our court system should necessarily ignore the mental peace of the bereaved.  I think my argument ran along that lines that we should consider whose rights we prioritize:  victims’ or perpetrators’.  That supposes we cannot consider both, and I’m not sure I’d defend my original comments all that fervently at this point.)

“The Killing of Troy Davis”
Wilkinson on the difference between justice and revenge:

Now, I don’t know how to convince you that even especially heinous murderers don’t deserve to suffer the same fate they meted out. I suppose I would start by distinguishing justice from vengeance. I would observe that there is no pervasive ethereal moral substance that must be kept in some sort of cosmic balance lest society devolve into chaos. We may feel deeply, in our marrow, in our prickling indignant skin, that the yin of crime calls out for the yang of punishment. But I would warn against putting much trust our retributive instincts. I would suggest that civilization demands setting these feelings aside, that it requires that we ask ourselves in a cool hour the point of criminal justice.

As an atheist I find the moral claim of this statement—essentially that no cosmic balance exists to be righted—persuasive, and I think we do need to be careful when our instincts to exact revenge hew to such lines of thinking.  However, overcoming the sense of violation and, for lack of a better term, evil  that most decent humans feel at the thought of murder is a tall order, especially if we consider that animals, humans included, are likely programmed to retaliate.

Our baser instincts should not govern our policy, and while I’m a bit torn on the absolute question of the death penalty, I think its continued existence mandates that we use it sparingly—that is to say, almost never.  Rationality and civility are bested served when we can prevent certain atavistic impulses, like those Wilkinson deems objectionable in his post, from finding purchase.

“Moral Progress and Arguments Against the Death Penalty” 
I’m including this one for a few interesting graphs that Wilkinson includes which show the decline, over time, of capital punishment in Europe, of execution rates in the United States, and of executions in the United States for crimes other than homicide.

Wilkinson equates these declines, speculatively, as effects of a society that is growing more “moral”. Now, to make this assumption, or to agree with Wilkinson’s suggestion, we have to assume a moral position that supports the notion of killing as wrong, whether it comes at the hands of an individual or the state.  If you don’t subscribe to to this philosophy, you will see a number of problems with the assumptions contained in the article.

I’m not certain that a decline in death penalty rates is necessarily indicative of a society that is making moral progress; I could imagine other reasons for such declines.  Our society, however, does appear to be growing more inclusive, more accepting of moral ambiguity in general (i.e. non-dualistic thinking), and more capable of considering alternatives to current paradigms (I’m not implicitly nodding to any ideological movements here, by the way).

Are these shifts in perspective and others like them indicators of enhanced intelligence and morality?

Our Angels Aren’t Smart Enough

Jason Brennan on Bleeding Heart Libertarians:

Even if we grant for the sake of argument that some people deserve to die, it does not follow that the state may be authorized to kill them. For a state to have the right to kill criminals, it must make decisions about guilt and hear appeals in a fair, competent, and reliable manner. It must have rules that reliably let the innocent–or those whose guilt is reasonably in doubt–go free. The American criminal justice system fails to meet these standards. Perhaps a government of smart angels should be granted the right to kill. We could debate that. But no state in America deserves any such right.

Wilkinson reproduces Brennan’s post in its entirety in “Moral Progress and Arguments Againts the Death Penalty”, and I’ve just done the same thing here because Brennan’s bottom line essentially states my own.

The discussion that follows in the comments is an interesting one that I haven’t been able to read in full just yet.  However, I highly recommend taking a look at the discourse between the commenters and a couple of the BHL writers, a back-and-forth that prods at the notion of irreversibility and compensation for false imprisonment: For instance, is a person’s spending twenty wrongful years in jail any more reversible than killing them?  That twenty years is lost, and they can never be compensated for the time.  (For the record, I don’t think this notion disqualifies the anti-death-penalty position, nor do I think the distinction means we must do away with all punishment, as one commenter seems to; the comparison, however, is something we might want to think about in order to check our presumptions.  But if we can compensate falsely imprisoned people at all, it stands to reason that we have a better chance to do so if they are alive than if they are dead, in which case we could not compensate them at all.)

Much of the grunt work on good blogs is now done in the comments section, by the way, and leafing through differing immediate perspectives can be useful.

The Death Penalty Digest

I just happened across the blog Just Above Sunset while looking for trackbacks to the Brennan piece.

Editor Alan takes the following Gandalf quote as a sort of thesis, or frame, for his article:

Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.

He provides a digest of some recent writings on the death penalty that cover a wider array of opinions than I’ve linked to in this post, and it’s well worth the read, as he touches upon the contemporaneous (to Troy Davis’) execution of a white supremacist whose crimes are sure to spark disgust and an impulse for revenge—all in all, a much different kind of execution than one tinged by the specter of doubt, the perception of the specter of doubt, or any case in which a confirmed innocent was killed.

___

Obviously, we have a lot to think about relating to the death penalty.  To read meaningful discussion and consider differing opinions is, I think, invaluable and utterly necessary, especially when considering challenges to our own humanity.  In my introduction I stated that I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over the execution of a mass murderer or serial killer, and while I still admit to feeling this way, I think the Gandalf quote is a fitting statement of caution in favor of humility and against self-righteousness, and a wise starting point from which to deal with the question of administering death.

I’m interested to hear any thoughts.

* Image courtesy of publik15 (image link) under a CC BY 2.0 license.

Here’s an interesting one:

The present study experimentally manipulated status by seating the same target model (male and female matched for attractiveness) expressing identical facial expressions and posture in either a ‘high status’ (Silver Bentley Continental GT) or a ‘neutral status’ (Red Ford Fiesta ST) motor-car… …Results showed that the male target model was rated as significantly more attractive on a rating scale of 1-10 when presented to female participants in the high compared to the neutral status context. Males were not influenced by status manipulation, as there was no significant difference between attractiveness ratings for the female seated in the high compared to the neutral condition.

On first glance, this doesn’t seem all that surprising.  The evolutionary conjecture probably goes something like this:  Traditionally, males of the species are responsible for wooing their female counterparts by way of impressive feats, activities that showcase the male’s ability to build a home, hunt prey, or exhibit brute strength; females therefore instinctively pick up on these sorts of success queues from men.  Males, on the other hand, choose their female targets based on the perception of fertility, normally showcased by the female via purely physical traits; males are therefore queued into females’ physical characteristics rather than their possessions of status.  So a nice car wouldn’t affect a male’s perception of attractiveness, whereas it would a female’s.

I can’t promise my parsing is correct, mind you.  I’m sure an evolutionary biologist would have a thing or two  to say about it, my assessment of which is based on a non-trivial number of hours spent watching nature documentaries and some fairly light reading on the subject.

Putting 9/11 on the Backburner

Robin Hanson is pulling me in two directions again.

Here’s the part of his recent post entitled “Forget 9/11″ that I agree with:

Yet, to show solidarity with these three thousand victims, we have pissed away three trillion dollars ($1 billion per victim), and trashed long-standing legal principles…

Here’s the part I don’t:

…And now we’ll waste a day remembering them, instead of thinking seriously about how to save billions of others. I would rather we just forgot 9/11.

Do I sound insensitive? If so, good — 9/11 deaths were less than one part in a hundred thousand of deaths since then, and don’t deserve to be sensed much more than that fraction. If your feelings say otherwise, that just shows how full fricking far your mind has gone.

(Click the link in that excerpt, as you might not get the gist of that sentence unless you read Hanson’s previous post on near vs. far thought modes.)

Hanson’s anger regarding the disproportionate weight we put on native deaths is well taken.  That the World Trade Center bombing provided such potent imagery, seared into our brains by nearly constant coverage, does not help us look past all of the impotent memorializing ten years later.  I am still haunted by the image of people throwing themselves from the towers as flames devoured the upper floors, not because these people were Americans but because they were human beings.  Human loss is difficult to swallow, and it’s worse to swallow when we see it close to home.  But we do disproportionately realize these sufferings:  Consider the 12 million people threatened by famine and sickness in Africa right now (4 million in Somalia alone), or the ongoing cholera outbreak in Haiti, or any of the other billions of people who live in  relative poverty, faced with the prospect of dying every single day.

What Hanson doesn’t seem to appreciate in the context of his post, though I doubt the distinction is entirely lost on him, is the potential for 9/11 to remind us of our responsibilities to remember this greater scope of human suffering.  September 11 ended the naive dream many of us were living (my high-school self included) that saw us safe and secure and indefinitely prosperous, that acknowledged specters of violence like those we saw on the news in places like Lebanon and Israel as mere theoretical risks.  To forget the slide the WTC attacks precipitated, however, would be foolish.  Hanson himself mentions the wasted treasure and degradation of legal principles we witnessed; what makes him think forgetting all of this would somehow benefit us, I don’t know.

Why forget and pretend that 9/11 was a blip on the radar?  Why not simply remember it as the complex story of pain, strength, political malfeasance, paranoia, and cultural shift that it is?  I can’t imagine that Hanson fathoms death as the only salient metric by which to judge history.

The caveat, of course, is that 9/11 should not be used as an excuse to stagnate; unfortunately, these events, and the dead, have been used as political capital by pretty much everyone in Washington.  So, in that sense, we are not remembering 9/11 correctly or constructively; I’ll give Hanson that, wholeheartedly.

Screening for Breast Cancer

The NEJM has an interesting piece on clinical guidelines for breast-cancer screening.  You may remember that the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recently changed the mammography recommendations for women in their forties, supporting a reduction in the number of scans, even while finding that regular scans reduced mortality in this demographic by 15%.

The author of the NEJM piece, Dr. Ellen Warner, has this to say:

How should one approach the question of screening mammography in a patient in her 40s, such as the woman described in the vignette? The decision should be individualized, with the recognition that the probability of a benefit is greater for women at higher risk. This patient has no major risk factors, such as a family history of breast cancer or a history of a premalignant lesion on biopsy, that would put her at even moderately increased risk. Her chance of having invasive breast cancer over the next 8 years is about 1 in 80, and her chance of dying from it is about 1 in 400. Mammographic screening every 2 years will detect two out of three cancers in women her age and will reduce her risk of death from breast cancer by 15%. However, there is about a 40% chance that she will be called back for further imaging tests and a 3% chance that she will undergo biopsy, with a benign finding. Lifestyle modifications (e.g., weight control and avoidance of excessive alcohol consumption) that might lower her risk should also be discussed.

Read the whole article for a discussion on the evidence regarding breast-cancer screening; it’s a complex issue, and considering the backlash in response to the new recommendations, it’s worth reading about the sorts of observations and evidence that go into producing clinical guidelines.

Oxford Comma Blues

I’m going to tell you this once:  use the Oxford comma.

Why?  Well, imagine we have a list of things which includes:

• Merle Haggard’s ex-wives
• Kris Kristofferson
• Robert Duvall

That list is taken from a newspaper article the linked-to Language Log blog cites as having incorrectly, or ambiguously, punctuated the listed items in a picture caption showing Merle Haggard.  In the context of that caption, the sentence can be written one of two ways, depending on which theory of serial commas you prefer:

• Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.
• Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson, and Robert Duvall.

Which do you think is correct?  If you guessed the second sentence, congratulations!  The first sentence clearly reads as if “Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall” is an appositive renaming “ex-wives”, when clearly those two are separate items in the list.  The only way to punctuate this sentence without ambiguity is to include this final serial comma, the Oxford comma.

Some publications traditionally omit the final serial comma, and while most lists don’t lend themselves to the sort of ambiguity seen above, there will be instances in which an Oxford comma is necessary to preserve the writer’s intended meaning.  But because publishers like to be consistent, and because consistency, to a publisher with low regard for this type of punctuation, will mean including a list with the serial comma omitted, editors will likely ask for a rewrite and end up wasting a bit of time. The simple answer:  just use Oxford commas all the time.  You will never be wrong, and if you ever need to equate the final two items in a series for any reason—omitting the comma also insinuates that the final two items are more closely related  to one another than they are to the other items—you can always leave it out.  Stylistically, you’ll have more leeway.

Click through to the Language Log post for another funny and improperly punctuated list.  I’ll give you two of three items from that one:  ”Nelson Mandela” and “dildo collector”.

Being a little late for work this morning, I was fortunate enough to hear the BBC’s coverage of Mubarak’s resignation as it was happening.  Tahrir Square was a cacophony of cheers.  I can’t recall ever hearing such mass jubilation as I did on the radio today. The joy in that crowd was irrepressible; it was incredible and uplifting to hear in real time.

The road ahead won’t be easy, and it will be interesting to watch how the political landscape in Egypt takes shape over the next few months and years as they begin to grapple with their government.  The United States will surely be watching in hopes that the Muslim Brotherhood is somehow marginalized and kept out of executive power; I hope, though, that America doesn’t do too much meddling.  Egypt is not Iran, nor is this revolution going to turn out like Iran’s did, I don’t think.  The best thing for the Middle East right now is to have a country like Egypt organically embrace and forge a strong secular democracy, which seems likely for the moment.

President Obama was worried, in the beginning, that Mubarak would retain power and that any show of support from the United States to the protesters could potentially sacrifice political ties with Egypt.  Now, he is openly embracing the revolution, a sentiment I suspect his administration probably harbored privately all along, but wouldn’t it have been nice if he had spoken up two weeks ago?

He was worried about being on the wrong side of history, of course.  But the wrong side of history was the one Mubarak was on, no matter who would have won this showdown.

It’s a good day to be an Egyptian.

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eurleif/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

There are too many stimuli and no way to unhook from the Delivery System.  Every thirty seconds or so, TweetDeck chirps and notifies me that some Twitter entity or another has posted something to the web.  Facebook is running and constantly updating itself with video, status updates, and one friend who is rebuking me for becoming part of the background noise.  He doesn’t know that I’ve downloaded the Twitter plug-in that updates my Facebook status whenever I write a tweet, nor does he know that Brief, my Firefox RSS reader, keeps flashing feed updates at me for no good reason.  If I am constantly disseminating information, it is, perhaps, only as a form of purgation lest I suffer neuronal overload and slip into a vegetative state.

I can’t help it.  Neither can most of us who’ve fallen victim.  That we will suffer enlarged prostates and blood clots in the leg brought on by our increasingly sedentary lives is of no concern.  The needle must stay in the vein at all times.

If you asked me to trace this hideous addiction, to run all the algorithms and interpolations, I probably wouldn’t be able to find the seed.  I remember the old DOS games like Castle and Mosaic that I used to play as a kid, and I have a faint recollection of being comfortable with nothing more than a command line in front of me, but that was a long time ago, and all the years of wandering around in the GUI has effectively dulled those familiarities entirely. Even if I did have a better memory of the spark that lit this obsession, I can’t be sure anything worthwhile would come of the knowledge.  The age of Web 2.0 has so proven so immersive that it has inevitably catapulted us into the age of Human 2.0.  Take a lesson from Lot’s wife, and don’t look back.

Our transition into the next world is going to be rough.  The transcendence of the next wave of technologies will be hindered by shifting climate systems, political opposition, and religious fervor, and while that might only sound sane to someone who believes it, there is little doubt it will prove true.  Success is not guaranteed.  In truth, the next one hundred years could — and depending upon whom you ask, probably will — end badly for us and with the heinous, collective whimper of wasted opportunities.  While the Green Movement is busy plotting our next generation of energy technologies, Washington and the rest of the world are moving slowly to curb emissions and create initiatives to house our future infrastructure, opting instead to plaster their cars with the right bumper stickers and their websites with the right banner ads.  But the religious zealots and climate change naysayers will win because time is on their side.  We have a couple of decades (optimistically) to stop this runaway train, and nothing short of total commitment will do the trick.

And now that I’ve been using Twitter regularly for a few months, and Facebook for years, I know what I’ve gained by the expediency of information.  In some cases, it has been very valuable.  I grab web design tutorials and typography blogs from users who post them to Twitter, and I’ve got enough stored up to last me a month.  I have absorbed a tremendous amount of knowledge in a very short span of time thanks to the informational paradigms under which we operate.  I get my fun fast and the news even faster, and there is always something to read, so much, in fact, that it is difficult to concentrate on any one thing for an extended period of time.  Certainly, our attention spans have suffered en masse and to a great degree.  Information will be our downfall just as it became our apex.

Evolution has  a pretty good track record for creating efficient, sustainable organisms, but hidden in that long history, of course, are all the failures and extinctions, fossilized remains of beasts that couldn’t keep pace with the paradigm shifts of our planet.  When humans finally evolved, when that ultra-logical tweak entered the primate brain, the game changed entirely.  All of a sudden, brute strength didn’t hold the same currency in some circles and the increased efficiency of abstract thought put homo sapiens at the top of the heap, maybe for good.

That’s not to say that animals don’t possess similar abilities in some instances.  I’ve long thought that we as humans have been unduly deferential to the intelligence of our fellow denizens, and yes, I’ll even go as far as to at least partially agree with the theory Howard Bloom espouses in Global Brain: The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century that organisms exhibit a certain level of altruism.  I think this is especially true in more advanced mammals, but as Bloom argues, one can perhaps find echoes of this inherent empathy in single-celled organisms as well. [We won't get into this now.]  While we are the most advanced species on the planet and do possess certain brain powers unparalleled by other animals, the Biblical idea that provides us dominion over other creatures is both narrow-minded and selfish, not to mention fatally short-sighted.

But maybe we’ve gotten too smart for our own good.  Maybe we’ve overloaded our own brains with our technology, and yes, maybe we will eventually prove to be one of nature’s mistakes — an overzealous attempt at a super-organism that went badly awry, that outgrew the planet’s ability to sustain it.  Humans are nature’s most astonishingly efficient virus.  We are resistant as a whole to most of it’s control measures save for massive impact and our own forward progress, and after all, as our own numbers increase, so does the imminence of our demise.  The first sign of species collapse barring disease in any given ecosystem is usually overpopulation, and we might reach that point soon enough.

Until then, as the constant flow of information continues to clog our synapses, corporations and governments will continue to operate more or less nefariously, confident that their dealings will be sufficiently drowned out by the din.  They’ll be right, of course, and they’ll remain in charge until there is a mass extinction or another bottleneck in the human race, until the cards are reshuffled, if you’ll pardon the phrase, and we’ll keep running to the computer every time it chirps marveling all the while with masturbatory ecstasy at how far our technology has come since the bone knife.

If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll even eventually learn to use our advancements constructively and separate the notions of progress and excess from one another.  Then we can remember Human 2.0 as an upgrade instead of a fatal error.

I’m not one of those people that plays golf often as I find it is best enjoyed sparingly and only after adhering to a months-long regimen of intense meditation, masturbation, and dieting.  Anything less might allow for my violent competitiveness to creep in and ruin the day for everyone.  Indeed.  No one who competes against me in anything, be it darts, pool, basketball, or jacks (etc.) will end up enjoying himself very much.  If I perform well, I normally win by a large enough margin to make the game seem pointless, and if I am losing, I will fall into petulance and throw a conniption fit with little regard for the embarrassment caused by my actions. It’s a bad scene and one from which I recommend abstinence at all costs.  There is nothing like seeing a grown, half-bearded man in a straw hat and brightly-colored Hawaiian shirt stomping on the green and digging large ruts into the fairway with his 9-iron as happened today.  By the sixth hole (of nine) I was putting with a severely bent Diamondback putter that became so when I took aim at my golf bag with an old 9-wood and made what essentially proved to be my only solid contact of the day.

That was my Father’s Day gift to my dad.  How proud he must be of his 25-year-old son.

For now, it might be feasible to blame last night’s thunderstorms for flooding the course and forcing me to decide against wearing my red canvas Converse One-Stars.  Whereas the bane of my golf swing since time immemorial has been a more or less consistent and wicked slice, I kept hitting the ball off the heal of my club and putting a nasty draw on it.  Somehow, my monster drives were stolen and replaced with low-flying line drives that seemed almost magnetically attracted to the tree lines.

But it does seem shortsighted to bitch and moan about a golf game, let alone my first of the year, no matter how badly it went awry.

After all, Tehran continues to reel in the turmoil of Ahmadinejad v. Mousavi.  I have no doubt the election was fixed, but without international press allowed into Iran to report on the situation, it is difficult to know exactly what is what.  Mousavi was the former prime minister of Iran and has ties to Khomeini that are badly covered or glossed over in the Western press, facts that don’t require access to the country and should be well-publicized.  In perusing the blogosphere, I saw one comment on Anonymous Iran that went like this: “Agreed, Mousavi was more of an excuse than anything. And the spark led to a fire that is by no means about him anymore.”  So it sounds to me like Mousavi is not the reformist/outsider he was cracked up to be, and it stands to reason the the comment from Anonymous Iran might not be far from the truth.

Long before the election and the subsequent Iranian protests, the conventional wisdom stated that most Iranians did not possess the combative, ultra-conservative bent of the clinically insane Ahmadinejad.  The kids listen to Western music, wear Western clothes, and more or less, adhere to Western ideals while behind closed doors.  Sure, the view from the street was much different, but the society operated on a society-wide version of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.  Now, they’ve got a figurehead and a rallying point, and for their sake, I hope they win.  I don’t think they will, but anything that serves to dislodge or destabilize the theocratic element in their government — and, by that, I mean the Ayatollah and his clerics and, while they’re at it, Ahmadinejad — is a movement I’m likely to support.

Don’t get me wrong.  During the Bush years and before, I get the sense that the United States dealt with Iran very crassly and without nuance, and to some extent, Obama might not have sufficiently changed that tune yet.  There has been eerie but understandable silence from the White House on this matter, and any commentary that they have proffered has been tepid and unsure.  Unable to offer blunt support for the protesters, they’ve opted to criticize the Iranian government for little more than the obvious, the deaths of innocent civilians.

Until everything boils over, though, we might as well add a supportive green tint to our Twitter avatars since that’s the level at which political action operates these days.

Alas, I don’t think I have a leftist, pinko Commie diatribe in me tonight.  I have yet to respond to American Patriot’s comments on my Patton article, which are well-received regardless of whether or not I share a political hair with him/her.  I appreciate a little scrutiny now and again (maybe even always), and if there’s one thing my half-assed, lazy commentary can use, it’s some point-by-point analysis.

Two things I will address now, however.  The first is that the Marijuana Question should not be a point of contention or debate any longer.  Legalization is the only sensible route, and this concept will only be confirmed in the next ten or twenty years.  The government does not have the right to tell people not to use drugs (recreationally or for medicinal purposes) and wastes resources prosecuting and apprehending “criminals” who pose no threat to society at large.  Coupled with other drug-related efforts such as needle exchange programs, there should be a shift toward a sensible drug policy, one that does not uphold prohibitive law.  American Patriot seems to harbor an additional moralistic attitude to drug use and general inebriation, which I would discourage at all costs.  Lifestyle morality has no place being legislated by governing bodies as long as a person’s activities are non-violent, and to answer American Patriot’s question, yes, I do think there are more important things on America’s plate right now than the legalization of drugs.  Our current policy, however, reflects a troublesome national mindset that is constantly bothered by petty things like marijuana and tits on television and ignores issues like unsustainable housing bubbles and corrupt credit markets (until the shit hits the fan, of course).  Think where we might be now if our resources had been allocated toward useful endeavors in the first place.

I should stress that while I had my college days like most other people, I am sober almost one-hundred percent of the time these days, and by that, I do not mean to insinuate that I am recovering from any lingering addictions or recreational drug habits save for nicotine.  The comment American Patriot made: “I have never heard of a ‘social’ pot smoker — a person who has a joint here or there just because they like to smoke or like the flavor of marijuana. No, they do it to get stupid and get high, just like alcoholics drink to excess and act irresponsibly. Legalize pot and you’ll see a lot more drunk driving occurring in this country,” makes so little sense that I feel odd even addressing the remarks suffice it to say that A.P. clearly has not spent much more than superficial time with pot smokers or has solely been exposed to “stoners”.  Personally, stoners don’t bother me, but I can understand how the stereotype of the lazy, listless pothead might hold water with someone unacquainted to that scene or its denizens.

But that’s all well and good, and I’d prefer not to go on.  The legalization debate is much like the religious one.  No one wins.  No minds are changed.  The entire debacle proves to be one monumental waste of time, and we must hope only that time will eventually allow logic and tolerance to gain a foothold in this most illogical and intolerant world.  It is to my detriment that I either initiate or get dragged into many of these debates, and I suppose I am the instigator in this case.

The second issue to which A.P. made reference that I’d like to address is my insistence on bashing conservatives.  For the most part, I mean the Republicans and roughly half of each libertarian.  To say the Republican Party is braindead is to put it most delicately.  To say that the GOP is bat-shit crazy might be a dangerous underestimation.

However, I will admit to speaking generally, and I do not mean to make the blanket statements that all conservatives are uneducated hillbillies with little care for the rest of the world.  As it seems to me that American Patriot — while grossly misguided on certain issues in my own estimation — is not one such person, I hereby tender any necessary apologies.  I must also express my disappointment that the word “patriotism” has been hijacked and made to mean nothing more than blind, flag-bleeding obedience to nationalism and principles of Manifest Destiny.  If there is a seed of suspicion in me about the wiles of our good A.P., it comes only due to the choice of moniker.  One cannot be sure that people mean words as they were originally intended or as their [the words'] current bastardizations imply.

And what the hell.  Here’s the final answer regarding your critique of my Patton post, American Patriot.  You’re right that I meander and fall off track.  I’ll be the first one to admit as much, but as for my criticism of the speech itself, I did not necessarily mean to belittle it wholesale.  I disagree fervently, and I realize that it was made under duress, as you said, like a football coach might try to pump his team up before a big game (though the stakes were obviously much higher in Patton’s case).  I suppose reading Patton’s words on that day reminded me too much of the Dick Cheney and Glenn Beck camp, and while Cheney is a sociopath and Beck is a witless boob, you cannot deny their influence on people, which is why I bring them up in the first place.

Trust me, it’s my considered opinion that the likes of FoxNews conservative pundits bear no weight whatsoever on the actual political dialogue, but that opinion, as much as I might like to believe it, probably isn’t accurate.  Yellow journalism is the running intellectual currency these days, A.P., and if I speak too generally about conservatives, it is only because most of those I know (again, not quite all) or speak with spout the same deranged horseshit I hear coming from the O’Reilly people and the Hannity people and any others you want to put in the same boat.

I will say that O’Reilly was right about one thing — and, Jesus, how it pains me to write those words.  We are in a culture war right now, and much of it boils down to whether I’m on the side that wants America to be a citizen of the world or on the side that wants to see the rise of the American Empire.  The other conversations you and I might have if we were sitting in a room together are only peripheral subjects compared to this central conflict.

That scares me and — to put it bluntly — pisses me off.

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” Gen. George S. Patton

I was stumbling around the internet when I happened across the full text of Gen. George Patton’s famous speech to the Third Army.  My memory is a bit fuzzy, but up until about fifteen minutes ago, my only knowledge of this oratory marvel came from anecdotes and the film Patton starring George C. Scott.

In truth, it was nothing I didn’t expect.  Patton crammed enough violent imagery and profanity into that address as humanly possible and spoke with the hyperbolic sense of patriotism one expects from a general in the United States Army.  Don’t misconstrue my words, please.  There isn’t anything wrong with patriotism, and indeed, it is to be commended when applied rationally, but patriotic sentiment was monopolized long ago by a contingent of people who seem unable to grasp loving one’s country without full-blown militaristic zeal.  To this demographic, patriotism is synonymous with imperialism and typified by the very hubris that has become a de facto substitute for foreign policy.  The practice was, by no means, instituted by George W. Bush as many would have us believe (though he did proliferate it with glee), and despite Barack Obama’s ascension to power, one can only hope that he will keep his sensibilities logical and refrain from applying the mask of entitlement under which many Americans appear to operate.  In general, presidents tend to receive a great deal of undue glory from their respective constituencies, and the last one who really deserved any such accolades was Franklin D. Roosevelt.

We’ll see if Obama’s pragmatism manages to overcome knee-jerk reactions.  His disingenuous handling of marijuana-related questions at last month’s internet town hall meeting not only risked alienating a large swath of his supporters but exemplified the power of stagnation over progress in American political culture and reinforced the notion that even he — our supposed beacon of change — is not immune to caving in to the pressures of the Game.  The only thing to be said in his defense is that (at least in that clip) he never says he is closed to the notion of decriminalizing marijuana, simply that it would not be a strategy that would benefit our struggling economy.  I don’t personally agree with his views, but I will say that those watching this broadcast deserved more than a dismissive remark delivered through a smirk.

But I was talking about Patton, wasn’t I?  I seem to remember something about that, but who can remember anything for more than a few seconds in the Age of Twitter?

For those of you who didn’t click the first link to read Patton’s speech in it’s entirety, here are a few of my favorite tidbits from it:

“Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American.”

“Each man must not think only of himself, but also of his buddy fighting beside him. We don’t want yellow cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats. If not, they will go home after this war and breed more cowards.”

We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun cock suckers by the bushel-fucking-basket.”

And then comes the striking and admittedly brilliant crescendo:

You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you WON’T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, ‘Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.’ No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, ‘Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a- Goddamned-Bitch named Georgie Patton!’

These words were given to the Third Army in secret somewhere in England on June 5, 1944, and I should think they would have to be delivered in a much similar way today to avoid a publicity crisis.  No comparable display of machismo and American arrogance could publicly survive the media blitz that would be sure to follow, and rightly so.  In 1944, this type of rhetoric might have been acceptable, and not to say that foreign affairs and policy matters weren’t nuanced back then, but politics in the 21st century will require a great deal more grace.

Granted, Gen. Patton was speaking to a group of soldiers and not to a room full of reporters or politicians, but perhaps it is for this reason that his speech is even more worrying.  This type of patriotism is the norm among conservatives these days, and as hard as it is to swallow the blaring and dangerous political rhetoric coming from the likes of Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, most of us would probably cringe to hear what they say behind closed doors (assuming they believe their own horseshit).

This is not, of course, to place the blame solely on conservatives for relying on flagbleeding euphamisms.  It is only fair to blame much of the liberal movement’s willingness to pander to the lowest common denominator — the ilk that see the American Flag not so much as a symbol of freedom, liberty, or virtue but as an approval stamp, a ringing endorsement of whatever policies those who invoke it support.  Such willingness to rally behind a symbol rather than an ideal or a set of ideals, no matter with which members of the punditry you align, is what makes true discourse in the political sphere so rare, and it all filters back to the inherent machismo we associate with being American.  We’re the biggest, strongest, most powerful nation on the planet.  We will be, anyway, until China pushes through to the other end of their industrial revolution and the United States comes down with a bad case of what can only be described as international penis envy.

Most of us are not rooted in or befallen by the pathological Superiority Complex that Patton exhibits in his speech.  Brilliant general though he was, Patton was also wonky enough to believe he was a reincarnated Carthaginian who had once fought against the Roman Army.  So we should take his comments with a grain of salt.  His speech is not the ravings of a mad man.  It’s much worse than that.  Patton’s speech is a word-for-word translation into military terms of what many Americans likely believe today.  They might not express it in the blood-and-guts tradition like our good general, but the reptilian world view that stresses the oversimplified dynamics of Good vs. Evil and Us vs. Them is both prevalent and well-defined. Like Patton, there are those out there whose idea of a Great American is the apish infantry grunt, spiteful of the enemy and willing to charge into a cloud of bullets without asking why, instead thinking only that it is what a brave man would do.  Just peruse the comment board under Patton’s speech at Free Republic.

Gen. George Patton is who qualifies as a Great American, and perhaps he was in the most brutish sense.  He was, no doubt, a brilliant military man and an adept tactician.  The United States would not have enjoyed some of the victories it did during World War II if it weren’t for Patton, and yes, maybe I’ll even concede that he was the man for that time and place.  He was the kind of man he glorified in such fervid prose to the men of the Third Army that night in England.

And the ideal here is that we should be working toward a situation in which the glorification of blind patriotism is overruled by the sensible desire for mutuality and peace between countries and not push for a system that maintains American superiority.  The challenges we will face in the very near future demand that we not draw alliances based on such arbitrary things as geographic boundaries.  We must attempt to see eye-to-eye with the rest of the world — holding our ground, of course, when necessary — and compromise with instead of impose upon them our own set of core values.  We need to protect ourselves.  Naturally, this is true, and only a woefully naive person would say otherwise, but the best thing we can do is ditch our Old World mentalities.  The real ideal here is that we move forward into a world that will never need another Gen. George Patton.

I am, on this day, reminded of the fervid retellings of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into Heaven that rattled down the hallways of my Catholic high school and how odd it was to be an atheist tucked in among the pious masses.  The rub is, of course, that piety is almost uniformly non-existent among teenagers.  Even the classmates of mine renowned for their adherence to the Church defied the constraints of Catholicism’s unrealistic dogma, most likely by engaging in rigorous hormone-fueled masturbation on a daily basis, which is a crime according to every Pope since Peter.  If Catholics were truly serious about upholding the Old Testament virtues upon which their faith is founded, I and everyone I knew back in those days would’ve been publicly flogged, humiliated, and then summarily executed.  Our decapitated heads would have lined the front walkway, tongues out askew and eyes frozen in the wide, blank expression characteristic of traumatic shock to the Central Nervous System.

Somewhere along the line, the Church grew wise to the fact that their dogma would prove unsustainable in the long run.  For all I know, Christ was the first to harbor this realization and, for this reason, birthed the paradigm shift toward forgiveness in what proved to be a brilliant PR move and one altogether more appealing to the masses than the strict, violent laws of Judaism.  There is little difference between secularist Christians and Jews these days — we’ll veer away from fundamentalists of both stripes — but Christ set up the base for a pure numbers victory by teaching the Good News and organizing the missionary system with which we are all familiar.

These thoughts and others were a hallmark of my entrenchment among Catholics in high school, and to some extent, my days among the Lutherans in middle school as well.  I remember two things especially from middle school.  The first is having been marched up in front of the class to recite The Lord’s Prayer as well as what amounted to a Lutheran Pledge of Allegiance (not the Apostle’s or Nicene Creed…that came later for all of us) because the teacher had noticed on the first day of school that I knew neither, and the second is the lesson in Religion Class when I first heard of the Christian belief that the world is but 6,000 years old.  Granted, the reason for being forced to recite excerpts of Lutheran mythology were understood.  I was on their turf, and if I expected to make it through school, I would have to comply, at least scholastically, with their demands.  Such were the consequences of proving too skittish for the droves of students packed into the public school.  However, teaching such a blatant lie as to suggest that humans and dinosaurs once shared the Earth (en masse, anyway) was something I viewed as nothing less than sadly hilarious.

Here I sat among children that didn’t know any better due to no fault of their own listening to an adult devoted wholeheartedly to silly fairy tales.  If any of us wonder what ills have befallen the education of the American Youth, we need look not only at our failing public schools but at the scientific follies preached in the parochial system.  The odd thing was that the scientific curriculum at my middle school was strangely excellent if you ignore their take on evolutionary theory.  I sleepwalked throught most of the science classes — aside from AP Physics and Chemistry, the beasts — due in no small part to the extensive primers I received on the periodic table of elements, various chemical compositions, molecular structures, biological processes, and principles of electricity and motion.  By the end of eighth grade, I had dissected a frog, a fetal pig, an eyeball, and a sheep’s heart, and as far as I’ve heard from friends, that was more than they had done in their respective public schools.

Everything I dissected during high school proved to be review save for a cat, the only notable difference of which was the opportunity to skin the thing like an orange.

I’ve gotten off the topic here, though.  I was talking about Easter and, in an indirect way, the Sabbath, which has proven a rough day of the week for me since my days among the Lutherans.  Every Monday, the teacher would read down the list of students and ask if they’d been to church on Sunday.  This tally would factor into the final quarterly religion grade for each student.

I knew for a fact that some of my classmates lied about attending services, and the funny thing was that I, an avowed atheist even at the time (save for a bit of dabbling in sixth grade when peer pressure proved a bit daunting), felt bad about lying, so I made my Dad take me to church on Sundays in order to avoid this “sin”.  I didn’t partake in the Eucharist, though I would sometimes walk up to be blessed for reasons that now escape me.  I have a memory of attending an Easter service at Peace Lutheran Church in Cincinnati while on a family visit and holding my hand up to refuse the wine offered by the pastor.  He looked taken aback and confused that I should refuse the Blood of Jesus Christ, though I should mention one marked theological difference between Catholics and Lutherans that causes some strife and bickering is the divergence of belief in Communion.  Lutherans hold the wafers and wine as symbols of the Body and Blood Jesus gave unto his disciples at the Last Supper while Catholics believe that once the food is blessed by a priest it physically becomes Jesus’ actual Body and Blood.

This is the only case in which I found a Catholic belief more frightening than a Lutheran one.  For all the shit Catholics get for instilling guilt into their faithful, I have found in my experience that Lutherans are much more severe in this regard.  One should remember that Lutheranism and Protestantism in general bear as much similarity with Puritanism as they do with Catholicism.  After all, Arthur Dimmesdale could never have dreamed of being a Catholic even after he fucked Hester Prynne.  The anguish and punishment would have been grossly insufficient to assuage the burden of his transgression.

Still, I’ve always found it strange that the atheists and agnostics I’ve met along the way adhere stronger to Christian virtues than many of the Christians I’ve known, and perhaps it is the freedom from the yoke of religion that enables many of the to act more charitably.  I tend to trust genuine acts of kindness and unselfishness over those performed due to fear of condemnation in the afterlife.  One must be at least a mite suspicious of someone who behaves only because they are under the constant watch of an omnipotent eye.  Consequently, one must wonder what said person would do were they to think that, for a moment, that surveillance was diverted or preoccupied.

Holding people up to unrealistic and inhuman expectations not only harms the individual but carries with it an element of collateral damage that should not be overlooked.  Just ask the those who’ve been molested by a Catholic priest or children who’ve been born and abandoned, forced to bear the heinous weight of irresponsibility because spilling seed upon fallow ground is viewed as a mortal sin.

This goes for all religions, which are inherently founded upon non-existent logic, fantasy, and, in olden times, were an ingenious  method of socio-political control.  I pick on Christianity only because of my proximity to it, but religion, at its base, is base because it squelches pragmatism and the ability of the human mind to act according to its potential in instances that present a conflict with the fabricated moral codes of the devout.

An Iraqi court handed down a sentence today for Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who became instantly famous worldwide for throwing his shoes at then-President George W. Bush back in January. Three years in prison. Three years to sit with his pejorative from that day ringing in his ears: “This is your farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq.” Al-Zeidi can sit in his cell for all that time knowing that his actions were not lost on his fellow Iraqis nor on the millions of Americans who only wish they’d received a similar opportunity.

It’s been less than two months since Barack Obama took the Oath of Office and formally ended Bush’s eight-year reign of shock and terror. It seems like a distant nightmare now — or it would if we weren’t still quaking from the aftershocks of an administration predicated almost solely upon failure, war, and deceit. Bush’s tenure in office may conceivably have set us back twenty years, and if this truth had come at the hands of honest policy mistakes or overly hostile partisanship perhaps he could be forgiven. But it didn’t, and he can’t.

George W. Bush was, first and foremost, a criminal. Forget the DUI charges from his younger days and his curious absences from the Texas National Guard. These things make no difference any longer. They are footnotes of footnotes from the unrepentantly savage introduction he wrote to begin twenty-first century. The massive burn he ran on the world during his eight years in office should [and will] go down in history as one of the most destructive in this country’s history in which he helped destabilize the national economy if not the global one¹, trampled on Geneva Conventions by illegally invading a country and torturing political prisoners as well as prisoners of “war”, and refused any sort of accountability for his actions ranging from his administration’s failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks to major intelligence errors throughout both of his terms in office. The handling of his own illegal war brought even further unnecessary strife to a people who, honestly, were probably more secure under the watch of Saddam Hussein than they were running around in an American-sponsored war zone. When one does the math, it is difficult to say that Bush won’t have to wash the blood of a hundred thousand people off his hands…maybe more.

In truth, the list of his transgressions is far too long to include in this article, and what would be the point? Anyone that hasn’t accepted the massive failure of the Bush Administration and the danger which it has brought upon us likely never will. And besides, all the bitching has worn on the subject. He will never be brought up on the charges he would face in a just world standing before an international court. But Muntadhar al-Zeidi will have to face punishment for the lofting of two shoes at the same man that perpetrated such inconceivable horror.

Let’s not simply stop at an argument of comparisons, though. It wouldn’t be fair to jail a serial killer and let a rapist off the hook, but we’re not dealing with a crime of peril in the case of al-Zeidi. We’re dealing with an extremely minor assault made even milder when considering the cultural implications of his actions. (And let’s not forget al-Zeidi himself was beaten very harshly directly following the incident, something not mentioned loudly considering simple detainment would have sufficed.)

Throwing a shoe in Iraqi society is an insult. It was never Al-Zeidi’s intent to do anything more than levy his sentiment of disgust toward George W. Bush, who himself said he believed in the gesture as a form of expression that should be available to the people of Iraq. Whether or not Bush truly believed this — after all, one can argue he did not welcome the same sort of expression from his critics in the United States — not even he seemed put off after having dodged the attack. Bush met the incident with the condescending half-smirk that became a hallmark of his press conferences as well as his universal response to criticism.

The fact that al-Zeidi will be serving any time at all is nothing more than an attempt on the part of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to present an image of control, and one must think the court’s decision had to have been in some way informed by al-Maliki’s own wishes. Three years for throwing shoes? Granted, the full penalty could’ve been closer to the maximum sentence of fifteen years, but there is a reason al-Zeidi has become a folk hero in his own country. We saw a similar thing happen when Cindy Sheehan essentially became the voice of the American anti-war movement. By publicly denouncing Bush’s policies in the Middle East as the mother of a slain soldier, she provided a face and a disposition that was relatively rare up to that point. Her dogged attempts to meet with the President face-to-face — once by camping outside his ranch — not only garnered a great deal of sympathy for her cause but it made Bush seem that much more removed from the public will when he repeatedly rebuffed her efforts.

For the face of dissent in Iraq to have come from an educated, well-established journalist instead of a sectarian militant had a galvanizing effect among the swaths of Iraqis looking for a voice, so much so that the next day, people emerged in droves and marched through the streets of Baghdad professing their support for al-Zeidi and levying demands for his immediate release. The act was seen as a courageous challenge to the Leader of the Free World, a strident message that Iraqis of all stripes would not abide their being ground into the dirt by a bully with an army.

Al-Zeidi isn’t just some nut who decided to disrupt a press conference. He isn’t a shock jock who was just trying to make waves. He is a citizen of Iraq who had spent much of his time covering the war and national politics on the ground with a great deal of reason and insight, and when he found himself in the same room with George W. Bush, perhaps he simply acted in the only way he thought the American President might understand.

After all, nothing else had worked up to that point.

_______________________________________________________
¹Granted, the reasons for the current recession go far deeper than blaming the whole thing on Bush, but it’s fair to call him and his policies major catalysts in the run-up to this whole sordid affair.

The week begins tomorrow. Back to the office and the choked highways. In spite of the suffocating monotony of the Chicago suburbs and my tortuous daily commute, it’s too minuscule to care in light of recent events, personal and political alike. I’ll steer clear of the personal aspects to spare you the boredom suffice it to say I am wracked with a plethora of insecurities. It might be time to sell my genitals for scrap if I can find a good price.

But let’s take one bright spot to heart since there are few in which to bask. Sarah Palin was booed today (mostly) while dropping the ceremonial puck at a Philadelphia Flyers hockey game, and it’s a wonder she managed to keep that disingenuous, pasted-on smirk of hers in tact. What else would you expect from someone who suffers from rabid ambition? Someone who will win at any price? All else be damned. Her candidacy itself is a malignancy upon American politics that rivals only George W. Bush’s own cancerous contribution to the political landscape in this country. It is a contribution marked by an anti-intellectual fervor designed to elevate the role of folksy ignorance in national policy since it is, after all, folksy ignorance from constituents of both major parties that has largely allowed for the current state of affairs.

It allowed the federal government to sell us a war, an economic crisis, and the psychotic notion that re-instituting the good ol’ American concept of Manifest Destiny was a good idea. And make no mistake, we are in a power grab. America, China, and Russia are competing for control of the 21st century, and whichever nation comes out on top will likely inherit a worldwide catastrophe that will tax the global power structures in place. If climate change doesn’t do the trick then overpopulation will. If not overpopulation, a temporary dimming of the Sun. We are pushing the boundaries of sustainability at this point, ecologically, economically, and hell, probably even spiritually if the current trend toward unblinking individualism is any indication.

Ideas such as those outlined above have traditionally been passed off as irresponsible fringe insanity, and I won’t sit here and deny my own propensity toward excitability, but we are missing something big. That much should be obvious. The warning signs are everywhere that continuing at our current exponentially increasing levels of consumption and apathy will mean a dirt nap for the human race. Perhaps in the next one hundred years or perhaps in the next five hundred. We simply don’t have the necessary statistics to predict something of this magnitude, so it should come as no surprise if the End of Things comes as…well…a surprise. That is, if you haven’t been paying attention.

I suppose that’s just me on my high horse, and the point of this post, in all honesty, doesn’t stray too far from the point of my last one. If you want Change, the real kind, you have to vote for it. Just keep that Mussolini quote in mind the next time you cast a ballot for one of the two major parties because what we’ve been living under is the corporate system of fascism. This fascism has a different face than the one we’re probably used to in that it has been instilled under the auspices and knee-jerk invocation of democracy, but it is fascism nonetheless albeit with a few tweaks.

Gosh darn it.