McCain and His Wars: Just Tell Us the Part Where You're a Hero

A bit of truth slipped out of the mouth of Senator Jay Rockefeller, for which he immediately apologized. "McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet," he said. "He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues." There were cries of foul from the schoolyard. It isn't sporting; it isn't done, to bring up what John McCain was doing in the skies above Vietnam when those nasty torturing "gooks" caught and schooled him in sadism at close range.

There are topics in every culture that cannot be discussed, like a sore tooth that we learn to avoid. Evidently it is now taboo to suggest that acts of war are immoral. We are all supposed to pretend that all American soldiers in every war are either just trying to do their job, answering their "call to service", or hapless dupes in the thrall of wicked politicians, with no moral responsibility of their own.

A senator isn't allowed to talk that way, so I'll say it. I have no trouble with killing someone; this is where Gandhi and I part ways. I can imagine situations in which it may be necessary, even commendable. I do have a problem with signing my conscience over to someone else for the duration. It is moral abdication of the worst sort to let someone else tell you who must live and who must die. There is no guarantee that the person making those decisions will be another Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, or someone as silly as G.W. Bush-- or a war lover like McCain's Teddy Roosevelt, who came to the peace table only after the death of his gentle son Kermit. I am offended by the naivety of anyone who signs up for a war, discovers too late what General Sherman tried to tell them, and then comes back with their feelings hurt, their comrades dead and their balls blown off. (A tear welled up in the President's eye last week as he granted the Medal of Honor to a dead Navy Seal who threw his own body onto a grenade to save his comrades. What did the President think would happen in war? Oh, right, bad things happen to other people. The grieving family should have slapped his face.)

In today's America one cannot say "the war in Iraq was a stupid idea" without adding the qualifier, "but we DID remove Saddam and Uday Hussein and the threat of their nut sack shocker. Saddam Hussein was a BAD man." It's like the invocation in a religious ceremony. Our taboo, the thing that cannot be said in polite society is that we have killed thousands of bystanders in the process of removing a couple of Stalin wannabes. Oops.

Apparently the only part of John McCain's war service open for discussion is the suffering he endured as a torture victim and prisoner of war from October of 1967 to March of 1973. What cannot be discussed-- on television, anyway-- is what he was doing when he was captured by the Vietnamese. He was flying his 23rd combat mission over Vietnam. Not his first, not his second, his twenty-third. The photo, from the Library of Congress , shows McCain being captured by civilians in Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi. What kind of reception was expected on the ground? Oh, right, Geneva Convention, unqualified condemnation of torture... Do we lack the imagination to wonder what it was like to be a non-combatant underneath his silver wings? If John McCain must have "war hero" added to his name, let it be with an asterisk.

I have a tendency to see suffering as redemptive. This might have made John McCain a better, broader-minded man, who came to realize that his war was of a different nature than the anti-imperialist wars his father and grandfather fought. Alas, McCain is preoccupied with not losing the misbegotten war in Iraq to the detriment of all else, and he insists that we join him.

Happy Marmot Appreciation Day; I Mean Imbolc, I Mean Saint Brigid's Day

Ah, syncreticism, without which we might as well all be Protestants. Julius Caesar conflated the triple goddess of the Celts as related to Minerva, which was dandy for religious tolerance but a pain in the butt for for historians because, following the custom of interpretatio romana, he described the Celtic pantheon to the folks back home using their Roman names. The original names are lost to the vagaries of oral tradition. Roman Catholics followed his cue and turned the Irish goddess Bride into the "Mary of the Celts" Saint Bride or Brigit or Bridget, midwife to Mary the Mother of Jesus.
The ewes start lactating, almost ready for the lambs, not that I'm one to be so up close and personal with sheep. Bridget features a cow, "our second mother" in her iconography, and some traditions hold that Brigid herself was wet nurse to the infant god. There's a lot of milk and fecundity and swollen bellies running around this holiday-- the name Ibolc itself means "In the Belly". Psychologically I suppose this is the part of the winter when we're waiting for something to happen, pregnant with change maybe, and waiting for the weather to break.

This plump little figure is from one of Saint Bridget's wells in Ireland. And the plump little fellow peeking out of his burrow represents my favorite part of the holiday, because what other day do we honor my favorite Mammalian order, the Rodentia?



The Celts had a rhyme they recited about a serpent coming out of his hole this day as a predictor of the coming Spring. That custom must have been brought over to America on the same boat as the carved turnip Jack O'Lantern, and mixed in with the animal the Algonquins called weeauchok. There's a paradox involved in the Chuck's prediction that I've never understood-- if the sun shines, and he sees his shadow today, that means more winter, not less?-- but it is the nature of the mystic quest and the way of the groundhog shaman to learn to live with paradox.

The prize for guttsiest groundhogs I know goes to a band of chucks who moved into a Michigan peace officer's back yard. Being a bear of very little brain, he decided to get rid of the woodchucks by setting charges of dynamite in and around their holes, inserting blasting caps and standing back to blast the critters out like Yosemite Sam.

Sad to say, it was an amateur installation-- by the trooper's brother-in-law-- and the dynamite failed to go off when they turned the crank. Didn't go off when they shot at it with pistols, either. Now instead of one groundhog family, there's a colony of woodchucks living in an overgrown mound more than 10 feet across, lined with explosive. The cop is afraid to go anywhere near the dynamite, which only becomes more volatile as its components separate, and he carefully mows around it. The chucks now live in a bramble and grass covered fortress, protected by the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction.

The London Spy by Ned Ward, Or, Italian Paste and the Power of Advertising

The best dollar I ever spent. 'Tis no shame for a book to be remaindered (unless you're a milion dollar celebrity "tell-all", robbing a hundred honest authors of their living), any more than for a cat or a dog to be in the pound. They printed more copies than they could sell, or the book languished on the shelf and never found its true reader, to take it home to cherish it and keep it by their bedside, what the bunny rescuers call a "forever home".

I found my copy of The London Spy on a sale table at the International Medieval Congress here in Kalamazoo, which might explained why it hadn't found a home, being "Ned Ward's classic account of underworld life in eighteenth century London". The book was simply out of its era. Medievalists want things that befell between 500 AD and 1500, except for the Saturday night dance, when they'll love anything. Myself, long a bringer-home of stray cats, dogs, bats and rabbits, when I saw the phrase underworld life in eighteenth century... was on that book like a duck on a junebug.

Friends of the Hogarth coffee-house, Gin Lane, and The Black Adder will want a copy of this book. With language as high-flown as anything in Dr. Johnson, this book is vulgar, scatological, cheerfully racist towards Irishmen and hilarious. Edward "Ned" Ward, author of A Trip to Jamaica (which place he immortalized as "The Dunghill of the Universe") and other works, started wandering around London between 1698 and 1700 and published what he heard, smelt and saw in eighteen parts. I keep mine on the bedside table to open at random when I haven't anything else to read, and fall asleep giggling.

In this passage at a public bath, a "rubber" (masseur) decides to reuse the still-warm bath water used by a high-born lady, to save himself the labor involved in emptying the tub and heating fresh water with wood. Just as he's showing a new customer into the scented bath, he discovers that her Ladyship left a little something in the tub-- but thinking fast, the silver-tongued yeoman turns a turd into gold:

"'At last the gentleman looking about him, saw the remains of her cleanly ladyship in his bath. "What a plague," says he, is this that is swimming amongst the herbs!" "Sir," says the rubber, "it is nothing but Italian paste, which is accounted the most excellent thing to cleanse and make smooth the skin imaginable, and it is what my mistress cannot afford to use but in an extraordinary bath which is paid for above the common rates of the house." "Prithee, friend", says the gentleman, if it be so good for the skin, rub me well with it, but egad," says he, "in my mind it looks as like a sir-reverence as ever I saw anything in my life." "Aye, sir," says the servant, "and so it does, but it is an incomparable thing to wash with, for all that it looks so nastily, and is a compound of the richest gums and best castle-soap boiled up together, that can be bought for money." "Pray," says the beau, "take a little pains with me, and rub me all over with it very well. Who is it that makes it? I'll buy some for my hands." "It is made, sir," says the rubber, "by a gentle-woman in this town, but where she lives I cannot tell. My mistress, were she within, could inform you, but she went into the City to dinner, and is not returned yet."

"'Thus my comrade that attended him, by the good management of his tongue, briught off the mischance cleverly without discovery. the perfumes and sweet herbs in the bath so overpowered the scent, that the gentleman, though he nosed it, being amongst such a mixture of effluvia, it confounded his smelling, and rendered him incapable of distinguishing a fair-lady's sir-reverence from the excrement of a civet-cat. so he rose out of his bath extremely pleased, and gave him that attended him half a crown for his extraordinary care and trouble, and so marched away with great satisfaction.'"

My copy was edited by Mr. Paul Hylands from the Fourth Edition of 1709, and was published in East Lansing (Michigan State Spartans, no doubt) by Colleagues Press, Box 4007, Michigan 48826. I regret to say that you can find it on Amazon at $99.95 for the hardcover or $69.95 for the paperback. Abebooks doesn't have any copies, and Bibliofind is owned by the monster Amazon anyway, but if you keep your eyes open in the used book stores you won't regret it. Now we know what the wine-sellers buy that's half so dear as the stuff they sell. I cannot but hope, in the name of democracy and conscientization, that Dover books would discover this treasure and bring out one of its five-dollar editions.

Obligatory Exciting Underwear Post

News comes from Israel of a rabbi's tomb adorned with women's underwear. Apparently, women who visit the tomb of Rabbi Yenothan Ben Uziel will meet their true love and marry within a year. Some try to speed up the process by leaving a pair of underwear, which as you might expect, greatly disturbs the dignity and repose of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
A lesser man might have illustrated this story with a sensible pair of granny panties. I'm just happy for any excuse to post another image of eternal dream girl Justine Greiner, Miss February of 1984,sans culottes.

If this be evidence of idolatry and goddess worship, make the most of it. In my religion, there's still room for the Mother, Maiden and Crone alongside the Nymph.

MAD HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

MAD Magazine is the only major voice in American media that tells children to disbelieve what they're being sold. Disney won't do it, the toy companies won't do it, and Lucas and Spielberg (buy the toys! Get the special edition DVD!) didn't know there was a problem. The Simpsons compromised itself long ago with t-shirts and liscensing, and even Matt Groening has apologized for the anti-intellectual backlash that lionized Bart Simpson's sociopathy and helped elect George Bush. Saturday Night Live maintains contempt for its targets while retaining very high regard for itself. The contempt for craft that used to be a running joke at Adult Swim has itself become an ethos.

In print, Mad stands alone-- not that they wouldn't welcome the chance to sell themselves and their grandmothers (Cheap!) Most satire, in whatever format, pretends to share superiority with its audience: "They're stupid, but you and me, we're smarter than that". The "Usual gang of Idiots" that produces Mad have nothing but contempt for themselves, and you? You were dumb enough to buy the magazine. Both John Stewart and Stephen Colbert acknowledge their childhood debt to Mad, and offer birthday tributes to idiots like Al "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" Jaffee.

How important is this sensibility? Ask yourself why Hillary Clinton and John Edwards voted for the war in Iraq, and why Barack Obama didn't buy it. He recognized Bush and Cheney from the magazine. And for all the pontificating about church and state in adult publications, only Mad made a head-to-head comparison between George Bush and Jesus Christ.

I was immensly cheered by the following poorly spelled exchange between anonymous youths on a discussion board for Mad readers at the DC website. They're discussing whether the humor in MAD is "age appropriate":
***
* I'm only 12 but I understand everything (also cause i'm wierd) but 13 is not too young. It's just middle age. Not really a teen not really a kid
*** Middle-aged at 13??? Wow! Do you get to retire at 21?
* I picked up a copy of MAD at a gaming tent at the state fair when I was ten, and loved it. I am now 13, and have been reading MAD ever since.
*** It's taken you THREE years to read it??? If schools are supposed to be turning out the future of our country, our future looks like it consists of the nickel deposit on a beer bottle.
* you can never be to young to read mad
even if u were 5 and didnt understand it at all you can still admire the awesome freakin pictures
*** Don't say that, you're getting the MAD writer's egos all big and blown up, but when the Nobel Prize list comes out they'll be disappointed again.
*im 12. been reading since I was 10. I get most of the jokes.
*** That's what I said about Hustler, too, but my parents didn't buy into it.
***
For all that Americans profess to care about their children, we really do exploit and indoctrinate the little darlings with a thoroughness that makes the Nazi Youth programs seem slipshod. This survival of the Mad sensibility (What Sort of a Man Reads Mad?) into the next century makes me a little more confident that our posterity might still avoid an American brand of fascism, and Orwellian groupthink, and slavish worship of Mammon. Or not. What, Me Worry?

Little Alberto Gonzales and His Letters of Cachet

I'm not surprised that Congress sold us out--16 Democrats, and the undead Republicans-- and passed an unexamined bill permitting the Attorney General to listen to private conversations without a court order, without oversight, even-- this is what's giving the phone companies the cold sweats-- without any written records at all. All Alberto has to do is pick up the phone. Oaths were made to be broken, and it may be the senators were under some terrible compulsion. Perhaps their families were threatened. Maybe they were tortured, or theirs arms twisted psychologically. Maybe (this is hard to fathom) the Bush administration is smarter than they are, and tricked them into passing the bill like a three card monte dealer suckers you in to looking for the Queen. Maybe they were bribed with allurments of money, or power, or the opportunities for sex that appear when you have enough money or power. No, it was none of those; they handed this kind of power to the least trustworthy president in American history so they could go home on time.

Somebody (Algren?) said once he weren't surprised that Chicago officials could be bought, but he was always amazed at how cheaply they could be bought. Lillian Hellman, whatever her flaws, observed that the people in Hollywood who sold each other out during the Blacklist didn't do it because their families were threatened or they were in any danger themselves; they did it to hold onto their swimming pools and second cars.

So now the Bush administration has been given the power of letters of cachet, something not seen west of the Iron Curtain since the French Revolution. The most notorious lettres de cachet, the ones that inspire stories about the Man in the Iron Mask and fed thousands of innocent prisoners to the Bastille or the guillotine, allowed the government to arrest and sentence any citizen without trial and without an opportunity of defense. The lack of oversight invited abuse. It was how the wealthy, the connected and the ambitious disposed of unwanted individuals. This was the Age of Reason, after all, and they needed something more efficent than accusations of witchcraft.

The lambs with easy consciences all say, let them listen, I've got nothing to hide, let them use torture on people who must already be guilty, let them open secret prisons in Eastern Europe and Guantanamo Bay, nobody I know goes there. I think this might be the definition of "streetwise" and "square": the naif thinks, It Can't Happen to Me, It Can't Happen Here. The hipster knows that all it takes is one wrong turn, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he could be next, that anyone could be next, that the next person who falls into the government's threshing machine might be you.

GET READY FOR "WHO LOST IRAQ?" AND THE NEXT ATTACK ON U.S. SOIL

Who lost Iraq? Why, you did, you cowardly terrorist-loving liberal traitor. We would have won if you'd supported the invasion from the beginning. It's your fault, you and that quisling appeasement Congress, undermining our Commander-in-Chief and deserting our brave men and women in harm's way.

I am expecting another attack on the continental US-- I refuse to use that Nazi phrase, "the Homeland"-- but not for any of the administration's fearmongering reasons. I think it's going to happen because Bush has INCREASED al-Qaeda membership faster than the Marines can kill 'em. As far as I can tell, the only candidates to say these honest but forbidden words are Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. Every politician who accuses war opponents of supporting al-Qaeda should be immediately confronted with the unpleasant facts about just who has been strengthening al-Qaeda for the past five years.

I wish the the neocons and the terrorists were better shots, and would only kill each other, leaving the world a better place, but a lot of innocent people are going to die again, both here and in the poorly aimed retaliation overseas.

Most infuriating of all, Bush and company won't take the blame for enabling the next attack-- they'll blame you and me, the opponents of the war, for emboldening the terrorists. It's Michael Moore's fault that we lost in Iraq, for not supporting the invasion from the get go; it's Cindy Sheehan's fault for undermining our troops. It's Congress' fault for not spending another 3,000 lives.

Al-Qaeda, in the meantime, are as happy as pigs in shit with the war in Iraq. An attack on U.S. soil will inspire more repression, which will provoke resentment, which will incite rebellion, which will lead to more repression, which will... It's working for them in Pakistan, it works in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, they've opened new training facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan-- five bucks says somewhere in Osama's secret lair, there's a sign posted over the desk that says LET GEORGE DO IT.

They Won't Quit. They CAN'T Quit.

So the Senate's going to pull an all nighter; it seems the least they can do, considering the sleepless nights imposed on Iraquis and the untenable position of our troops. The Democrats proposed a pull out starting in 120 days. The Republicans threatened a filibuster. The Democrats, in a bit of jiu jitu, said, fine,let’s sit up all night and talk about it.

The Texans think this is silly, a "slumber party": aid and comfort to the enemy, support our troops, wait until September, you know the drill. Does anyone else feel that the Arabs and the Texans truly deserve each other? The odious Lieberman, standing tall with Mitch McConnell and McCain, thinks this is a terrible idea, all this fussin', 'sides, all this commotion might upset Marse' George. At least one of the soldiers thinks the members of Congress ought to serve a rotation: "they don't have to do anything, they just come hang out with me and go home at the times I go home, and come stay here 15 months with me." Update: The timetable didn't get the 60 votes needed to pass, but it did win 52 votes, up from 39 votes a non-binding withdrawl resolution got last year.

John Mc Cain, bless his heart, keeps talkin’ ‘bout the "chaos": “Failure will lead to chaos, withdrawal will lead to chaos.... I believe that a withdrawal, or a date for withdrawal, will lead to chaos in the region.” The chaos is already here, John. They've already followed us home: George Bush's invasion of Iraq was a recruiting bonanza for al-Qaeda. Sigh... always the last to know.

Carl Levin, one of our senators from Michigan since forever, just wants this open-ended commitment to end: "What we have is a glass called Iraq that has a hole in the bottom, and whatever we put into Iraq, goes right through that hole." I've been puzzled by the dead enders like William Kristol or the mad monk Norman Podhoretz . I'm infuriated by the administration's willingness to keep throwing good lives after bad.

But they will not, they cannot, stop the war in Iraq. All the twenty-years olds in the world will not be enough to feed that maw. To quit would be to admit that everything they've done, and the dollars and the lives they spent, were a waste. We will be in this war until the grownups take the wheel away from the crazies, and then for the next thirty years, Bush and Kristol and the rest will blame the grownups for "losing" Iraq, because we weren't willing to spend a thousand lives more.

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

"And people altered, at their pleasure, the customary significance of words to suit their deeds: irrational daring came to be considered the "manly courage of one loyal to his party"; prudent delay was thought a fair-seeming cowardice; a moderate attitude was deemed a mere shield for lack of virility, and a reasoned understanding with regard to all sides of an issue meant that one was indolent and of no use for anything. Rash enthusiasm for one's cause was deemed the part of a true man; to attempt to employ reason in plotting a safe course of action, a specious excuse for desertion."

Thucydides on the Peloponessean War, 431 BC- 404 BC
(thanks to I Cite for noticing this first)

As a Dog Returneth to Its Vomit, Part... I've Lost Count

Ah, there's nothing like vaudeville. Every time I think the Bush vaudevillians can no longer astonish me, when I think they've run out of tricks, one of them makes my jaw drop in delight and astonishment yet again.

Paul Wolfowitz, a principal architect of our success in Iraq, has for the past two years been serving as president of the World Bank. He might have retired from the public eye, lying doggo in the bushes, as it were, but Lo!

It seems that Mr. Wolfowitz's lady friend, Shaha Riza, herself a former communications advisor at the World Bank, has, in the words of The Washington Post, "done exceptionally well in terms of salary in the last 18 months." Miss Riza left her $132,660 job at the bank about six months after Mr. Wolfowitz became her boss, in order to avoid any hint of impropriety or conflict of interest. In September 2005, she went to work for Karen Hughes at the State Department.

All well and good-- until it was revealed that she's still getting a six-figure paycheck from the World Bank... AND she was promoted to a managerial-level just before she left... AND instead of a $20,000 raise for the promotion, she somehow received a $47,340 raise...

So THIS year-- still working at State, not the World Bank-- Riza ANOTHER raise of $13,500, bringing her up to $193,590, which is $7,000 more, net, than the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes gross.

How does he do it? How does the man consistently make a shambles of everything he touches? How does this fifth column saboteur disguise his depredations as mere incompetence? What audacity! What arrogance! What a body count!

I hear the drums speak! They signal one another in the jungle night... they say the elephants are restless... they say that the other employees at the World Bank are very angry... the drums say the career employees are already unhappy with the one known as "Wolfie"... they fear his vengence will be terrible... they are sharpening their knives...

The poor schlub. And to think, he only went into this career for the chicks.

UPDATE: Mr, Wolfowitz says he's terribly sorry, and that it won't happen again.The White House says they still love him. His staff still doesn't like him. The State Department says Miss Riza has been working at Foundation for Freedom since September (but Foundation for Freedom still gets its money from State.) Me, I'd be much more sympathetic towards such a "painful personal dilemma" if it had occured on a shoestring budget.

Killer Apes and Mental Illness: the Sons of Abel Versus the Sons of Cain

There are millions of people kept in prison because their behavior is seen as threatening to social order and safety-- and yet the primates that threaten the most lives, even show blatant disregard for innnocent bystanders, are not only free to roam the streets, but lionized by their peers. Because Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ayman al-Zawahiri are seen as enacting the wishes of a group, they surround themselves with armed guards and issue orders that will murder or maim thousands of people who never voted for them, never met them, and wouldn't like them if they did.

Like it or not, we have to share a planet with these gangsters and have to find a way to remove them from power without turning into one of them. If human's outer appearance matched their internal demons, the problem would take care of itself in a few generations: no sane person would want to have sex with them, and the species would die out. But the killer chimps among us are breeding as rapidly as the peaceful bonobos, and the chimps don't mind cooking the books by killing a few thousand bonobos to make the world safer for their bloodthirsty kind. It may be time to talk about the genetic elephant in the room: why are some of us Abel, happy in our own garden, and too many of us worshippers of Cain?

If we can agree that the brain and the nervous system are electro-chemical, that our perception of reality-- and our response to it-- depends on a certain balance of dopamine, serotonin and all their building blocks... And within a given population, there are bound to be variations of that chemical balance in individuals, making (to borrow the ancient personality types) this one choleric, that one sanguine, this one melancholic and occasionally choleric. And just as variations in the pancreas or the thyroid gland can cause life-threatening illness, imbalance outside the normal range in brain chemistry can bring on mania, depression, delusions and hallucinations of the five senses. We've known since at least World War One that not just physical trauma, but repeated emotional trauma can carve channels in the mind that induce post traumatic stress disorder, multiple personalities, and many other illnesses. It may be that the tragedies of schizophrenia and autism might be traced back to a virus.

If all this is so, might there be an unpleasant secret hidden in plain sight: that within a given population, there will be highly organized indiduals who seek power over others and then use that power to wage war on neighboring tribes? That just as humanity wars tribe against tribe, there is an undeclared war in every community between the sons of Cain and the children of Abel?

There are horrible ironies in this relationship. A peace-loving but curious primate named Einstein followed a line of inquiry that made it possible for a desperate, threatened group of his peers to deliver a terrible weapon into the hands of the killer apes. Archimedes of Syracus was killed by a Roman soldier while lost in thought over a problem he had drawn in the sand. Marcellus, the Roman general in charge of the expedition, had given direct orders that Archimedes was not to be harmed-- but as many a commander has learned since then, you can't turn a thousand soldiers loose in a foreign country without a few bad apples and some collateral damage.

The peaceful ape can be provoked to violence, just as any animal can. Many a Cincinnatus has been called from his plow to fight savagely for hearth and home, but then-- the reason the name Cinncinatus is immortal-- when the threat is over, the peace-lover returns to his plow and turns his back on any temptation to power. But the goodwill of a thousand citizen soldiers can be undone in a second by a few rapists, torturers and murderers and the commanders who enable them.

How does a peace-loving soul contain-- or, terribly, eradicate-- his violent brother and his friends? If we were still a small band living in the trees, it would be evident that the violent mobs are scratching each other to death, and endangering our peace-loving children. The political question of the 20th century will look to Mandela and Havel and other martyrs who survived to wield power themselves. We must rescue hostages to fortune, take the dangerous toys away from the violent boys, and discourage our daughters from joining in and breeding with them.

DA MOON RULEZ

6/6/6

Cross your fingers that no lonely soul in a clock tower does anything stupid today, or we're never going to hear the end of it.

I'm not talking about reasoned discussions of evil by Malachi Martin, or the demon-as-metaphor found in my own fiction, or the 68% of 2,201 adults surveyed online who told the Harris Poll they believe in a devil. I'm not even talking about the objective evidence before our eyes of demonic possesion: three minutes of gibbering from the Bizarro President, for example, or the Vice President barking and growling on Sunday morning TV with his hands clenched together to appear reasonable while barely suppressing the urge to tear his questioner's head from her shoulders, or almost anything that comes out of the mouth of John Gibson or Anne Coulter.

I'm complaining about people who ascribe significance to the number "666", waiting for mischief to occur on June 6th, 2006. Some of them read a book once, or stood next a book while someone else told them what it said.

Evidently, no one ever told them that the Gregorian calendar, rolling around to 6/6/6, is not the same calendar used in "biblical" times. I wonder how they count to 700? Do they skip a floor, like people avoiding the Thirteenth floor in a hotel? What happens if their purchases at Wal-Mart total up to $6.66?

Remember when everyone had to sit and nod and be polite about the most appalling nonsense, from Erhard Seminar Training to your stoner roommate droning on for hours about the dangers of mucus in the diet, or what your horoscope meant?

I remember my friend Dan Daniels trying to defend Truth from a superstitious crowd in a bar in Grand Rapids: "So if what we believe to be "true" is a bead on a wire, and "objective reality" is a spot at the center of that wire, and we can never quite balance the bead exactly at the center because of our own imperfections-- still, isn't it true that the bead can either be closer to the center or farther away, so that if I say, 'We're sitting in a bar in Grand Rapids', and you say 'This is an illusion, and our physical bodies are really spirit messages being beamed to us from Angels on Mars'-- well, isn't one of us going to be a little closer to describing reality than the other?"

"Oh, no," answered the woman he was questioning, "both interpretations of reality are valid and true."

That generation of tolerance for every opinion, being so open minded that our brains fell out, helped give us the dream world of Karl Rove and the Bizarro President, where "we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

We now have a culture so full of credulity and manipulation that actual events, real conspiracies, real massacres, real evil is disguised behind a hundred distractions and superstitions. Today the Bizarro President evaded his prom date with reality by proposing a constitutional amendment to protect us all from gay marriage, and everyone in the chattering class felt compelled to stop what they were doing and pretend this was important enough to talk about. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you a vital issue of Manufactured Importance.

That's something that drug addicts, and alcoholics, and persons possessed by minor devils do so well-- change the subject away from themselves, whenever the conversation gets too "real".