Tom Robbins and Philip K. Dick Fistfight in an Alternate Reality

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Tom Robbins and Philip K. Dick Fistfight in an Alternate Reality

“. . .spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.” --John Gardner, Grendel

 

“What do you want to do with your life?” he asked.

A hidden question lay concealed in the curiosity: Why are you taking my course in creative writing? Are you dedicated to the art of literature, or are you taking my course because you think that someday, maybe you would like to write--if you get around to it?

“I want to write like Sherman Alexie,” I said.

Judging by the faint smile my comment drew from him, I saw I had satisfied him. So, I laid it on thick. “and tell a story like Stendhal,”

This time I registered a faint frown. He took my remark as an attempt to bullshit him, and I regretted my feeble attempt to impress.

I was speaking with honesty, though; I did want to write and tell stories like the masters. I had been writing in journals for years but got stuck in that Dear-Diary-type of writing that is the mark of the amateur. I wanted more. I wanted Tim O'Brien and Virginia Woolf to pour out of my pen. Tom Robbins and Philip K. Dick inspired me. Why couldn't I write with their kind of easy voice and distinctive style? I needed some education. That need took me to the Richland College in Dallas, Texas, a two-year college situated on a casual and intimate campus in the northeast quadrant of the city.

The Richland courses made me a better writer, but the voices of doubt crept in again and I gave up writing for years but continued to think like a writer--or more on target, like a writer-not-writing. Then, a friend introduced me to some motivational videos on YouTube. There I learned the difference between in-field and out-field thinking *. My hypergraphia transformed from to-do lists and Facebook arguments to writing for publication and the reactivation of a long-dormant blog.

A Facebook bet from a guy steeped in woo and superstitious nonsense bet me—as a challenge to my philosophical materialism—that I couldn’t spend the night in an abandoned prison, a wager leading to the “My Time in Prison” (MTiP) project. Over time, my challenger and I drifted apart, and the project got put on hold while I researched abandoned prisons in Texas and dealt with the busy-ness of the holidays. In a couple of days, the holiday season will fade into history and we will enter a new year; one in which I hope for fewer deaths by pandemic disease, and an end to rapacious capitalism, political incompetence, and ideological drama.

The MTiP project is holding for warmer weather, a suitable prison within driving distance from Dallas, and a project cost estimate. So, for now, I’ll concentrate on reviving this blog that I had all but abandoned. I’m kinda hidden over here in a far corner of the internet, but that’s okay. I’m not looking for fame. I’m looking for an outlet for a severe case of hypergraphia. I was looking for a theme and my betting buddy gave me one: he revived a life-long interest in unreality—deception, propaganda, superstition, religion, woo, Russian bots, fake news, paranormal fantasies, and conspiracy theories; an interest that will take me into some up close and personal knowledge of haunted places and religious “beyond space-time” fog.

It’s going to be fun.

 

* https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moments-matter/201708/locus-control

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A Rude Awakening

 

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A friend recently made a snarky comment to me regarding my atheism. I called her on the remark: I asked her why she would say such a thing.

As an atheist, I am used to sarcasm and contempt from members of the various Christian sects-- that religion, along with its sister, Islam-- are most demanding that its followers work to convert others not of their faith, and unofficially to treat them with ill-disguised loathing if they refuse to convert. Seeing that loathing come from a friend was a wake-up call. I came to see that the hate for the unbeliever is a feature of Christianity; that even friends and family members are not immune to it.

I did not face indoctrination into religion at an early age. When the subject finally did enter my life at aged twelve years, I faced a world of people who came of age steeped in a belief in what appeared to me as the power of wishful thinking; in an invisible person who would come to their aid in times of trouble; and that some undefined element called a “soul” would arise from the body to represent the believer in an infinite utopian existence following his or her death. Reading those responses to my newfound knowledge might give a slight insight into the confusion those followers of faith aroused in me at that tender age. How could otherwise reasonable adults believe such nonsense, I thought. The awareness that they did, in fact, believe those things to be true was a rude awakening.

Even before my introduction into religious thought, I bowed my head as instructed for the school prayer that started each day, just before a geography class taught by a devout teacher who denied the science of meteorology. She taught us that rain was not caused by condensation and air temperature but came as a gift from God. Even at ten years, I knew she was spouting bullshit, though “bullshit” was not in my vocabulary at that time. I knew instinctively of its prevalence in matters of belief.

I hid my thoughts about religion from others, even pretending to agree with it to avoid strife. Then, sometime after my thirtieth birthday, I came across three books that forever changed my own world view by introducing me to philosophy: Richard Hittleman’s introduction to Hatha and Raja Yoga, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and the works of Alan Watts. Those tomes led me to the entire panoply of philosophical writing, careening through the Greeks to the Enlightenment, the Existentialists, and currently—Alain de Botton. Now, as a novice student of philosophy, I have become more tolerant of religion. I work to understand belief: its causes and effects and the reasoning behind it.

If only believers would extend that same tolerance. 

 

Some Horses are Like Camels

 

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Frank, a gun-toting, Bible thumping, Trump-voting, Jesus humping, flag-waving, libtard-hating friend of a friend says a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a fetus to term is against the will of his god.

“Which god is that?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘which god.’ The true god of the Bible,” he said.

“But doesn’t the Bible condone abortion?”

“What? Hell no! The Bible doesn’t say it’s ok to kill babies.”

But,” I said, “doesn’t Numbers 5:11-31 offer a formula for a woman to terminate an unwanted pregnancy? And doesn’t Exodus 21:22-25 make abortion a crime against property and not against a person?”

His jaw dropped and he looked at me lie I had grown horns and a barbed tail. “You’re taking it out of context,” he snarled.

“Go check it out. The verses are unambiguous.”

I did not hear back from him, but two weeks later I heard from a friend that he had posted an anti-choice screed on his Facebook post. I remembered a frequently-spoken comment from my father: “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”

 

Numbers 5:11-31 KJV

11  And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, 12  Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, If any man's wife go aside, and commit a trespass against him, 13  And a man lie with her carnally, and it be hid from the eyes of her husband, and be kept close, and she be defiled, and there be no witness against her, neither she be taken with the manner; 14  And the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be defiled: or if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be not defiled: 15  Then shall the man bring his wife unto the priest, and he shall bring her offering for her, the tenth part of an ephah of barley meal; he shall pour no oil upon it, nor put frankincense thereon; for it is an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial, bringing iniquity to remembrance. 16  And the priest shall bring her near, and set her before the Lord: 17  And the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel; and of the dust that is in the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and put it into the water: 18  And the priest shall set the woman before the Lord, and uncover the woman's head, and put the offering of memorial in her hands, which is the jealousy offering: and the priest shall have in his hand the bitter water that causeth the curse: 19  And the priest shall charge her by an oath, and say unto the woman, If no man have lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from this bitter water that causeth the curse: 20  But if thou hast gone aside to another instead of thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee beside thine husband: 21  Then the priest shall charge the woman with an oath of cursing, and the priest shall say unto the woman, The Lord make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the Lord doth make thy thigh to rot, [1] and thy belly to swell; 22  And this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, to make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot: And the woman shall say, Amen, amen. 23  And the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out with the bitter water: 24  And he shall cause the woman to drink the bitter water that causeth the curse: and the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter. 25  Then the priest shall take the jealousy offering out of the woman's hand, and shall wave the offering before the Lord, and offer it upon the altar: 26  And the priest shall take an handful of the offering, even the memorial thereof, and burn it upon the altar, and afterward shall cause the woman to drink the water. 27 And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people. 28  And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed. 29  This is the law of jealousies, when a wife goeth aside to another instead of her husband, and is defiled; 30  Or when the spirit of jealousy cometh upon him, and he be jealous over his wife, and shall set the woman before the Lord, and the priest shall execute upon her all this law. 31  Then shall the man be guiltless from iniquity, and this woman shall bear her iniquity.

Exodus 21:22-25

22  If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. 23  And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, 24  Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25  Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

An Effing Blog Post

 

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   Social media (Looking at you, Facebook) has allowed us to practice incivility in ways that were social taboos at an earlier age. A whole lot of people can now toss around insults, freely proselytize our ideologies in ways that would have been offensive to earlier listeners, and practice assholery on unprecedented levels. Chief among the new standards is the use of the F-word.

We not only feel free to use the word now, but we also use it as if it had been dammed up inside us for lifetimes, and Facebook has broken the dam and pent-up vocabularies spill out in a gush, a tidal wave, a tsunami. We roll the word around in our mouths to get the feel of it, to relish it, to savor its newly found freedom.

 The use of the word in a social setting is not without its consequences, though. A few of my real-world friends deal with the trauma of sexual abuse, including rape and pedophilia and at least one Facebook friend suffers from the after-effects of sexual slavery. A casual “Fuck” dropped on social media can trigger the memory and the raw emotions that accompanied the trauma. Out of respect for others, some of us Facebookers now watch our language, not out of any puritanical motive, but out of respect for others.

 In part, I learned English from a great-grandfather who emigrated from Germany and learned English in his migratory trail from New York to Pennsylvania and down the Ohio River where river rats and hillbillies taught him an English that mastered the art of the expletive. The man had a vocabulary that could make a sailor blush.

When my mother visited him and his wife- my step-great-grandmother- he grew bored with the women’s talk and invited me to tour his basement workshop where, out of the earshot of the women, he was free to tell me about his brass-work machinery in the broken and guttural English of the immigrant- an English peppered with every word in two languages that were considered inappropriate in polite conversation. I was a teenager before I learned that a lathe is a lathe and not a fucking lathe. On my mid-life return to college, I took every English course offered, but continue to use the F-word as a common adjective. Seriously, how would one address a bigot without reference to “fucking bigot” or a racist without the use of "fucking Nazi"?

So, on Facebook posts, I restrain myself from using a language that comes as naturally as walking. But comments in other people’s posts, I’ll use whatever language is appropriate to the fucking OP.

Analysis: Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”

     Garrett Hardin’s 1974 Psychology Today essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” plays fast and loose with the facts he presents to back up his argument, and comes across as a petulant diatribe against the poor rather than a coherent discussion. In short, Hardin is just another whack job who enjoys the public attention he gets from his proposal to starve the poor out of existence so that the rest of us can enjoy our luxuries.

     From the first paragraph, Hardin set out to define the terms of his case against the poor. It’s his essay, he can define terms any way he wants, he seemed to say. He took very seriously his metaphor of the lifeboat as the refuge of the wealthy, with hungry swimmers—his metaphor for the poor—trying to usurp his privileged place on the boat. Fortunately for his argument, he did not push the lifeboat image to its logical conclusion: the lifeboat passengers will deplete the boats resources and people will have to go overboard—the order of plank walkers would depend, of course, on the most able and not the wealthiest. Or Hardin will hope to be saved by a passing yacht, at which time he proves himself no better than the miserable swimmers for whom he expresses such contempt.

     Some of his arguments were just silly. He provided his own definition of “safety factor,” one that grants him the greatest amount of space for him and his dinner-party buddies. In fact, safety factors are built into engineered products. If his boat is designed to hold sixty people, any more would violate that margin for safety. But that’s nitpicking, and there are too many major errors in his thesis to dwell on the minor ones.

     He wrote that guilt is the motivating factor behind the urge to aid the poor. I can’t argue that, because I don’t have the statistics on the subject (and he doesn’t provide any). Those people I know who are willing to help, however, operate from an enthusiasm for life that they wish to extend to others, and consider themselves spread proportionately across the self-family-group-nation-humanity spectrum, and not stuck in the “it’s all about me” mode. Sorry, Garrett; we haven’t even turned the page yet, and you’ve been wrong on each point made. Let’s move on.

     On the disparity of population growth between rich and poor countries, he falls back on a Marxist quote: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” From that, he extrapolated the absurd idea that helping the poor amounts to a misinterpretation of the socialist ideal of economic equality. He confused “share” and “help” with “surrender,” as in his assumption that those who do not agree with him want him to give up all his worldly goods to the starving masses. He has not been asked to surrender all his worldly goods to the poor. St. Francis, we are not. A check to a relief agency does not amount to voluntary poverty.

     He introduced an equally ridiculous argument that he called “the tragedy of the commons,” a highly simplistic theory that the poor will ravage the world’s resources if allowed to reproduce at will. To that, I will introduce the “tragedy of the landed gentry.” In pre-Industrial Revolution England, the nobility often owned vast wooded estates. True to the “tragedy of the commons,” the English poor had all but denuded the countryside of woodlands in search of game and fuel, and were forced to poach the enclosed woods owned by the wealthy (and undeserving) nobility. For poaching, the hungry poor faced public torture, imprisonment, or hanging. The world had not run out of resources, but the wealthy and powerful had locked them up for their own use. Picnics in large groups, lavish outdoor parties, and game hunts were popular pastimes among the landed elite.

    Hardin abandons any pretense at reason in his “Tragedy of the Commons.” In those situations in which the “commons” face abuse, they are first abused by the privileged class for commodity resources. In that, the rich and the poor form a symbiotic relationship: the wealthy strip the land to provide products and services to the poor and middle class, who in turn form the source of wealth. Without labor and markets, there is no wealth.

     He confused the depletion of oceanic fisheries with an exhaustion of the commons by the poor, when in fact, the ocean is being over-fished by multi-national corporations owned and operated by… the wealthy elite.

     There’s more.

     His claim that Public Law 480, “Food for Peace” program, benefitted only wealthy U.S. business amounts to an argument against himself. Did he denounce the wealthy and well-fed along with the hungry poor? Maybe his complaint came from his statement that the U.S. taxpayer paid the cost of PL480. Not true. The middle-class taxpayer—not the wealthy elite—picked up the initial cost, but that cost was recovered in subsequent negotiations called for in the agreements with hungry nations and affluent partners. We gave away our surplus grain, he said. Not true. We entered into financial and foreign relations agreements in which we were to share a portion of our surplus in return for future markets. Tons of wheat sold to the former Soviet Union to help with an approaching famine, added to the tons shipped to markets and to starving masses around the world, still left us with enough surpluses that we risked the danger of spoilage. He wrote that “…international charity frequently inspires distrust and antagonism rather than gratitude….” Not true. Distrust and antagonism directed toward the U.S. comes from Washington’s insistence in propping up friendly foreign governments that are hostile to their own people. Food for Peace occasionally ended up in the hands of tyrants and their cronies who marketed it at pure profits. When it goes to the hungry citizens, it is almost always received with gratitude. I say “almost,” because of a famous incident in Africa, starving stick-figures broke down the barriers to a shipment to break open bags of wheat to consume them on the spot. The wheat needed processing but the people there had been reduced to desperation. The U.S. received a mild rebuke for sending unprocessed food to living skeletons.  We had seriously underestimated the severity of the problem.

     In his harangue against immigration, he blames some of the problem on the wealthy elite’s need for cheap labor; a position that, again, seems to argue against itself. Beyond that, his proposal to hermetically seal the borders amount to the same tired clichéd sloganeering that has haunted the immigration problem since the first European stepped ashore half-a-millennia ago. He craves a static America in which the status quo can be guaranteed. Is that even possible in an ethnically and politically diverse country? Or would Hardin deport all liberals and non-whites along with immigrants?

     I got the impression in reading his essay that Hardin would like for all nine billion of us to just get the hell out of his way so that he can have it all, the only survivor on the boat. “Lifeboat Ethics” is not a serious discussion about ethics, but a mere selfish, petulant, and ego-centered rant, and reads well as such.

Summary: David Cole, "Five Myths About Immigration"

     

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David Cole, a Georgetown University professor asserts in his essay, “Five Myths about Immigration,” (The Nation, October 17, 1994) that five of the most commonly held and disseminated beliefs about immigration have no basis in fact. He writes that the “Know Nothings” of the mid-nineteenth century blamed every problem in American society on immigrants. The strongest anti-German, anti-Irish, and anti-Catholic hysteria centered in New York and Massachusetts, where most of the immigrants arrived into the country.
    Fortunately, the Know-Nothing movement died within fifteen years, but anti-immigrant fever is revived whenever the American public feels in need of a scapegoat for their social ills. The German and Irish immigrants--who were the focus of the Know-Nothings--have become “us”; and “they” are now the new wave of immigrants, this time from Latin America and Haiti.
The Five myths that fuel the current distortion regarding immigration:
    America is being overrun with immigrants. Cole argues that we are a nation of immigrants, and, in a sense, have thus always been overrun with immigrants. He offers statistics to demonstrate that first-generation immigrants constitute a lower percentage of the population now than during the German-Irish wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further statistics and assertions indicate that undocumented immigrants make up a low percentage of the total alien population, and of the total American population.

    Immigrants take jobs from U.S. citizens. He dispels this myth with a reliance on a 1994 ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project report that states that immigrants create more jobs than they fill.

    Immigrants are a drain on society’s resources. Most studies have found that immigrants actually benefit the economy. Cole suggests that studies purporting to prove the truth of the third myth focus on taxes and services at the local level and fail when applied to the national level. The short-term costs of immigrants is offset and exceeded by the long-term benefits. Calls to deny public services to illegal immigrants are useless, because those immigrants already have no rights to services beyond basic education and health and safety services.

    Aliens refuse to assimilate, and are depriving us of our cultural and political unity. This accusation was made to exclude Chinese immigrants, and similar claims have been made about almost all immigrant groups.
     
The anti-assimilation “myth” in untrue in most instances, Cole says.
    Noncitizen immigrants are not entitled to constitutional rights. The Constitution’s Bill of Rights extends protection to everyone, with the exception that only citizens can run vote and run for public office.
    An 1893 executive branch defense of a statute that required the testimony of “at least one white witness” resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that the law was constitutional “because it was reasonable for Congress to presume that nonwhite witnesses could not be trusted.” Not much has changed: at the time of the writing of Cole’s essay, the executive office had sought to deny First Amendment rights to permanent resident aliens.
    Today’s generation of “them” might be the future generation of “us,” and they will not view our treatment of immigrants kindly.

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