C-Notes

 

Photo by Lucas Vasques on Unsplash

I won’t dwell here on the scatological details that sent me in an ambulance to the Presbyterian Hospital except to say that the drive was preceded by a loss of blood, a lot of blood, and a couple of episodes of abject misery in which I didn’t only think I was dying, I wanted to.

While hospitalized, a CT scan found a benign growth in my colon and a malignant one in my lung.

“It’s in the upper part of your right lung,” the doctor said. “Because of its location and your COPD, the mass is inoperable.”

That meant chemo and radiation treatments.

I surprised myself with the lack of anxiety I felt on hearing the news. I had thought that getting a cancer diagnosis was a death warrant. Though a blood transfusion or two and some hospital-strength drugs had reduced the misery to a shadow of itself, I remained yet alert to the meaning of the doctor’s words. Instead of foreseeing the gloom of financial issues, side effects, the commitment of large blocks of time, I saw myself writing about the experience. For some time, my blog had seen an occasional post about whatever interested me at the moment, but it carried no consistency and no theme. Every post was a writing experiment, and every post followed a long period of staring at the blank page. I occasionally submitted work to online content mills and literary magazines, but the blog remained a place for sporadic and too-often unrelated material.

Now, I thought, it has a purpose. Finally.

Now I can write here with a theme, a plan, and a service to those 1,700,000 who might follow me to the radiation and chemo labs over the next twelve months.

A visit to an oncologist laid out the early stages of a plan. First, an intravenous dose of iron to beat back the anemia that resulted from blood loss and from cancer, then, a class to educate me on the procedures I will undergo, and finally, the radiologist. There will be more, so much more, but that is the plan at this moment.

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Ernie the Magic Elf

 

Photo by Brigitta Schneiter on Unsplash

The rise in the number of religious “Nones” and its opposite—the decline in the number of people professing Christianity as their religion—has resulted in an angry backlash from a vocal minority: the Christo fascists. That angry minority includes celebrities, influencers, and power brokers like Clarence Thomas, Jordan Peterson, and huckster cum Bible salesman Donald Trump.

The Christo fascist intends to force his version of a god on the skeptic, the unbeliever, and the secular humanist. It is of paramount importance to the theist that an entire population appear to follow the dictates of his ideology and that they be forbidden from the appearance of straying from the faith. Witness the Muslim world, where any deviation from the norm can result in deadly consequences. That world is a template for the society dreamed of by the Christian evangelical right. My God is the one true God, they tell us. And you must accept my God or have him crammed up your… er, down your throat.

There is an obvious problem with that assertion, or any claim of supernatural entities, be they gods, unicorns, elves, vampires, etc., etc.: The problem: we can safely stake the claim that gods and other mythological and supernatural beings do not exist.

There is no God. One can say that with the same confidence that I might say there is no Ernie the Magic Elf. Both claims express absolutes and the absolute, like Ernie, does not exist. Of course, we might at any time, we might find a Magic Elf hiding in someone’s garden, just as, at any time, one of the thousands of gods posited by humans might step forward to cut out the middleman and make himself/herself/itself known to the world. God might decide that he/she/it can no longer depend on imperfect humans to deliver a perfect message (assuming he/she/it has a message to share), and who could dispute the need for his/her/its change in his/her/its method of dealing with people. After all, the roughly six-millennia method of his/her/its reliance on fallible and often malevolent humans to deliver his/her/its message has left us with wars, crusades, hucksters, priests, religious doctrine, and Kent Hovind.

To believe, or even opine, that a magic being exists to watch my every act and thought with the intention of punishment or reward fills me with a sense of incredulity. The idea is ludicrous. But, that is an argument from incredulity and the argument from incredulity is a logical fallacy, no different than arguing from emotion. Arguing a point based on one’s emotional attachment and emotional repulsion to it is to concede the point.

When Ernie the Magic Elf is revealed, my a-elfism will undergo a significant reappraisal. When a god reveals himself/herself/itself to the world, my atheism will have received its death blow.  At that time, I will believe.

Taking a Side

 

Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash

Several friends and acquaintances have applied varying degrees of pressure on me to state an opinion about the Israeli-Gaza conflict raging in the Middle East. I have steadfastly refused to do so. You see, my Visa bill is due, and the religious, Israeli, Zionist, Hamas, Palestinian, Muslim, and  Judaic conflict over there pales in comparison to the immediate consequences of my missing a credit card payment.

Then, too, there is the pesky issue of the sacred texts ordering both sides to kill me. Me. The Bible followed by Judaism (as well as Christianity) demands in the book of Chronicles ¹ that I be put to death, along with my male and female, young and old fellow unbelievers.

While both religions (and their Christian counterpart) are religions built on hate, the Quran makes Islam a hazardous belief system to me and mine. Believers there are instructed if they encounter me in a fight they are to kill me or take me captive and ransom me. ² Of course, the fight the surah speaks of is to be taken to me from the believer. I do not start those kinds of finds. What if I were killed? What would my Visa card provider say about my credit rating then? Sorry, you faithful, That will be your fight, not mine.

I have long argued that when the WWII allies took a large swath of land away from the Palestinians to give it to the Jews as a form of reparations for the Holocaust and to fulfill the promise of the colonial British Balfour Declaration, they could have given Wyoming to them. Or, what the hell, New Jersey? I am not without empathy for the plight of people who have lost their homelands. Regardless of my sympathy for the Palestinians, I cannot back a side in a conflict when all sides seek my extermination.

Unless one side wishes to help with my Visa bill….

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¹ 2 Chronicles 15:12-13

² Surah 47:4

Leaving Social Media

 

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled."

--Mark Twain 

Michael was still smarting from falling for a scam involving an email claiming excessive activity on his credit card when he told me that Facebook had locked his account for a short time due to his violation of Facebook’s Community Standards.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. They don’t tell you the offense is, only that it violated community standards.”

Wait. Drug dealers, loan sharks, and bookies have better respect for their customers than that. That is the kind of institutional arrogance a prison guard has over his inmate, not the attitude we would expect from a business toward its customers. Facebook pages make a tremendous amount of money from the data gleaned there. To treat those members like minions beholden to you demonstrates a hubris that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the already corrupt business world.

But the story isn’t about Facebook’s failure at human decency. The issue goes deeper. Much deeper.

You see, a large but unknown number of people whose access to their Facebook feed has faced restrictions, will live out the limit to access and continue as before. Facebook faces no consequences for its algorithmic arrogance.

On my friend’s recounting of his Facebook offense, I thought If Facebook ever restricted my account over a non-specific charge, that would mark the end of my relationship with Zuckerberg & Co.

Well, it did happen to me.

Several months ago, I had two Facebook accounts: one, a tame mini blog for keeping in touch with friends and family, and another, a firebrand in-your-face political partisan rag. Over time, I tired of the partisan wrangle. I was arguing with people who appeared to have struggled to complete their eighth-grade education. Winning was not fulfilling. I closed that account and turned the keeping-up-with-family page into a display of literary memes and links to bookish articles.

I committed the Community Standards sin in those displays of the love of books and was locked out of usual activity for 24 hours. I was told I could find the nature of my offense by following an arcane regimen of nested menus, but they didn’t work. They called for me to navigate to something called “Account Quality” which, guided by my limited computer tech skills, I found does not exist. So, I closed the Facebook account.

I’m only one of millions of Facebook users, so my little protest won’t make a blip on the consumer trend to obsequious fealty to the mega-corporate model, but I can only hope that, over time, others will follow in ever-growing numbers.

Michael’s gullibility will, I’m sure, lead him into another scam. Social media has conditioned him into the victim mindset.

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Illiteracy in the Marble Halls

 

Photo by Spencer Davis on Unsplash

“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” ― Eugene Victor Debs

 

In defiance of the U.S. Constitution, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Lauren Boebert, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano[1], and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have declared their support for a state religion based on Christian nationalist and Christian dominion dogma[2].

The First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Read that first part again. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”

Lauren Boebert, among others of the far-right authoritarian political spectrum didn’t read that part. I can only wonder if they have read the rest of the Constitution.

In a Sunday, June 28th, 2023, speech at the Cornerstone Christian Center in Basalt, Colo., Lauren Boebert argued, “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church,” Boebert told the crowd, which applauded. “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia hard-liner, adding her support to the idea of a Christian Nationalist government declared: “We need to be the party of nationalism and I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian Nationalists.”

Reflecting the views of Boebert’s and Green’s soulmate Michele Bachmann who once said, “If you want take away my religious liberties,” she once said in a radio interview with Lars Larson, “you can advocate for that but you do it through the constitutional process and you don’t intimidate and no politician should give away my religious liberties or yours.” Somehow, in that muddled brain, she equated the call for gay rights as a move to take away her religious rights, and then assures us that her religious rights are ensconced in the Constitution; that human rights are a violation of her interpretation of the Constitution. Can she perceive why the term “batshittery” was invented to describe her incoherent ramblings?

The more conservative elements within the Christian religion have translated Bible verses in any manner that they feel promotes their views. It doesn’t matter what the scripture in question says, it only matters how it can be twisted, spun, bent, and mangled. That same thinking drives those Christians into reinterpreting the Constitution, our history, the words of the Founders, and the pronouncements of political figures. Anything can mean anything to the semi-literate.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, among a legion of others — thrive on fear and hate, the two-sided coin that drives the reactionary right.

A wise man once told me, “Do not ever- ever — make a crucial decision when you are in the throes of fear or hate. Nothing good can come of it. Wait until your senses return, and then decide.”

It’s unfortunate for our country that many of our politicians have not had a wise man or woman in their lives.

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[1] Mastriano came to national prominence by leading protests against COVID protocols, and became one of the leading voices in attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He literally brought bus-loads of supporters to the Jan. 6 insurrection and appeared to cross police barricades during the riot. He has spread Islamophobic conspiracy theories and tweeted out QAnon content. He pals around with white militias and prays to God to protect Confederate monuments. He once said women who have abortions should be charged with murder.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/doug-mastriano-christian-nationalism-dominionism-nar.html

[2] Connecting Christian Nationalism and Dominion Theology
https://mindshiftpodcast.medium.com/connecting-christian-nationalism-and-dominion-theology-93deb8c60237

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Dress Code

 

Photo by Elin Tabitha on Unsplash

 

I wasn’t expecting entertainment with my burger, but an argument at the next table left me with a sense of hope for American humanity that the hamburgers do not provide. A couple began a conversation in which the man offered a scathing comment on women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and on the requirement in Afghanistan that women wear the mobile tent known as the burqa.

“Forget the Burqa, Chris. To hell with women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and Iran.” The woman said. “The way you think of women rights here in your own country is a difference only of degree. You are little different than some insane imam in some backwater fundamentalist country. We send our military to Afghanistan to fight against Islamic Terrorism and the Islamic need to force their beliefs on others, while we Christians do the same thing in our own country.”

“Debra, I can give you a dozen reasons just off the top of my head for keeping our military in those so-called ‘backwaters,” Chris said. “January sixth was a wake-up call. We can fight terrorism on their turf, or on ours. I prefer to see them on the defensive. We must give the women of Islam the rights due any human.”

Debra was an attractive blond that commanded my attention when I entered the restaurant. She, and Chris were dressed in business attire, and what man doesn’t love a woman in a pencil skirt?

“We, and they, use any opportunity- all opportunities- to keep women subservient, docile, and submissive,” Debra said. “There is a pill called Plan B that takes care of unwanted pregnancy. Do you know what the major objections to the pill in this country were before its FDA approval?”

“It’s abortion and it’s pro-choice, both currently out of favor among the misogynist element, which seems to mean a LOT of our politicians.”

“That, too, but I was thinking in terms of the pill’s history. Before it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, the largest body of complaints received by the FDA was that the availability of the drug would promote promiscuity. The self-righteous are not concerned about the health and welfare of women who use the pill, of its side effects, or even of moral issues surrounding abortion and pregnancy prevention. No, the freaks are concerned about behavior. A woman who can make decisions about pregnancy without a man is out of the man’s control, and that cannot be tolerated in this culture.”

“You’re out of touch,” Chris answered. “We’re trying to advance women’s rights, not deny them.”

“If this were a culture promoting women’s rights, the term ‘glass ceiling’ would be a quaint, archaic idea that passed through the culture for a week and was then forgotten. That phrase was coined in 1978 and it is still relevant almost half-a century later. Your alleged desire to advance women’s rights seems to be a tedious process. For all the lip service you pay, you are nevertheless threatened by assertive and independent women. All the holier-than-thou religious jargon you wrap around the abortion issue is nothing more than your constant reminder to women that if you can’t control your women, your society and your laws can. It always comes back to control.”

Debra glared at her partner, who sat in apparent stunned silence. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. She picked up her purse, laid some currency on the table, and walked out. Chris followed her.

I enjoyed a brief fantasy involving Debra in that form-fitting skirt: together, we fought for bodily autonomy and destroyed the glass ceiling. She was my romantic partner and my crusading associate. I imagined our sex life and our shared experiences. I pictured her in jeans, shorts, and negligee. I saw us dining at our intimate, candle-lit table.

And the fantasy crashed. With my luck, she can’t cook.

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Celebrating Slaughter

 

Photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/docmonstereyes/
Photo originally posted at https://www.flickr.com/photos/72538882@N00/5507547759
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AR-15_Build_IMG_9439_(5507547759).jpg

Facebook, Twitter (!?) and social media in general, do not offer a forum for robust debate on contentious subjects, making it necessary to keep discussions focused narrowly on select topics. Nowhere is that more evident than in arguments over “Gun Rights” vs. “Gun Control.” In those discussions, pro-gun advocates (and gun control people) have learned to derail arguments with questions and statements unrelated to the opening argument or comment. In a recent example, a statement saying that states with strict gun laws experience more gun violence was met with acounterclaim: immediately, a response claimed that the counterclaim did not explain Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit.

Notice that the response did not affirm nor deny the accuracy of the comment that a correlation exists between looser gun laws and higher gun violence, but instead chose to change and expand the subject by bringing in an exception to the rule, by raising questions of gun trafficking and gang violence, and thereby increasing the complexity of the discussion and veering it away from a debunked comment while simultaneously forcing that complexity into the narrow confines of social media.

We see the same tactics used by Congress, such as the July 2022 response to the Uvalde, Texas massacre: Missouri Representative Billy Long blamed the mass murders of school children on Roe v. Wade- a non-sequitur. Abortion and the slaughter of children in schoolrooms are two entirely different topics, necessarily addressed by different laws and social standards. One addresses bodily autonomy and religion, the other concerns the protection of viable life.

Again, in June 2022 a Fox News host Jesse Waters blamed the Buffalo NY slaughter at a supermarket on the wearing of medical face masks. Really, Jesse? Ten blacks murdered by a white supremacist and you want me to believe he did it because he wore a mask? How do these circus performers and carnival barkers get voted into high office and well-paid roles as journalists?

Remember when the title, “World’s Dumbest Congressperson” passed from Louie Gohmert to conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene when, in May 2028 and prior to her election a Georgia’s representative, she claimed the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was actually a “false flag” planned event?

And then there is the propaganda device known as The Big Lie. Texas Senator John Cornyn got educated by California Governor Gavin Newsom when Cornyn claimed that California gun laws do not stop gun crimes, Newsom offered statistics showing that Cornyn’s Texas had a higher rate of gun offences than California. Why don’t our government officials check the facts before they make their fallacious claims? Could it be because we are led by dim-witted anti-intellectualists?

Gun control advocates sometimes use the same tactic, but from my experience, generally when they show a lack of firm grasp of the facts.

In early February 2023, members of Congress began celebrating mass shootings by wearing AR-15 pins, further encouraging strident militia types and wannabees to engage in Gish galloping non-sequiturs against those who seek a solution to the slaughter.

Could it be that those who seek to distract and derail a debate are those that know they have lost the debate, but rather than withdraw, try to force the thread into an endless pursuit of ever-changing topics?

Give up? The answer is “Yes.”

Welcome to ‘Murika, y’all.”

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